Chapter 3

Wade Pruitt set one coffee on the corner of Ross's desk, near my elbow, exactly where he'd been setting things all night. Then he took the chair across from me like a man settling in for a long, kind talk.

"You went through the file," he said. "That's all right. I'd have done the same."

"Explain the account."

"Gladly." He leaned back. "Eula-May called me in the spring of '98. She was in a state. She told me Ruthie was leaving, that she'd gotten herself into something, and she couldn't be seen helping her. Not in this town. Not with the way people talk."

"So you opened an account at a flower shop."

"I opened an account so a girl who had nothing could pay her rent." He said it gently. "I put it under the store because the store already had a line of credit. One white rose and an envelope on the first of the month, every month, and I never once asked for a thank-you."

"Twenty-six years."

"Twenty-six years." He looked at me with those laugh lines that stopped just short of his eyes. "I've paid for your mother's rent since before you were born, Hattie. Think about that a minute before you decide what kind of man I am."

That was the part that got into me. Not the anger. The gentleness. He was making it sound true while he said it.

"Then why the code on the card?" I asked.

"Because she was ninety-one," he said, "and she didn't know what she was writing."

Ross Cade cleared his throat, and Wade looked at him, and Ross looked down at his folder.

"Mr. Cade," I said. "Write down what he just said. Date and time. He's telling me a ninety-one-year-old woman planned a delivery eight years in advance and then forgot how to write."

Wade smiled, and it was a real smile, and that was worse.

Ross walked me out into the hall a few minutes later. He kept his voice low. He held his leather folder closed in both hands, the way he'd held it all night.

"Miss Vance. I want to say something to you as a practical matter." He glanced at the receiving room. "There's a closing Monday morning. Thirty-eight acres, fourteen million dollars. The heirs have signed. If you contest this, you'll be in court for three years and you'll run out of money in four months. I can arrange a settlement tonight. Fifty thousand, cash, and a signed release. You'd have a down payment on a house."

I looked at him.

"You think I want a house," I said.

"I think you want to not be ruined," he said. "That's not the same thing as wanting."

Behind him, the hall lamp hummed. At the far end, by the coffee urn, Della Pruitt Ashby was standing with a paper plate she'd forgotten she was holding. She was Wade's sister. She'd been at the casket all night, arranging Eula-May's hands.

She wasn't looking at Ross. She was looking at me.

"Ross," Della said, down the hall, in a voice that carried further than she meant it to. "That's Ruthie's girl, isn't it. Look at her face. I told Eula-May this day would come."

Ross turned.

Della set the plate down on the folding table. She looked at me for a long second, and then past me, at the door Ross had just closed.

"Ask him about the paper," she said. "Ask him what Ruthie signed."