then there’s only one explanation for what happened. Sarah.” Jack seemed to lose a little of his color.
“So the school wants to talk to us about her on Thursday afternoon?” He made a note on his calendar.
“Not about what happened this morning,” Rose said quickly. “Although I should imagine that will come up too. My God, Jack, they all would have been killed. Not one of them would have had a chance.”
“And you really think Sarah might have released the brake?”
“I don’t know what to think,” Rose said uncertainly. “I suppose I’m trying not to think at all until we talk to the school.”
“I could take the rest of the day off,” Jack offered. “We could play a round of golf.”
Rose smiled, but shook her head. “If you want to, go ahead. But not me. I have an appointment that I’m almost late for, and I think it’s going to be a good one. I’m going to try to sell the Barnes place. If I can pull that off, it will do a lot more for me than a game of golf.” She stood up. “For some reason, work seems to relax me.”
“I wish it did the same for me,” Jack replied. He didn’t get up, and Rose felt a surge of anger that he wouldn’t play the game with her. “Send Sylvia in as you leave, will you?”
Rose started to make a reply, then changed her mind. Silently, she left the office, forcing her face into a cheerful expression for Sylvia Bannister’s benefit.
“He is a bear,” she said to Sylvia. “And he wants you in his den. Got to run.” Without waiting for the secretary to speak, Rose left the building and hurried across the square. By the time she had reached her own office, she had put her personal life back into its compartment, and was ready to greet her clients.
“So that’s about it,” Rose said a couple of hours later. “As far as I can tell, these are the only three houses in Port Arbello that come anywhere close to what you’re looking for. I could show you more, but I’d only be wasting your time. Why don’t we start with these two, and save this one for last.” She picked up the listing for the Barnes property, tucked it beneath the other two, and stood up.
“Can we all fit in your car, or shall we follow you?” Carl Stevens asked.
“Let’s take mine. That way I can give you a running commentary on the town. If you want all the dirt, you’ll have to talk to my husband. I’ve only been here twenty years, and the people don’t really trust me yet.”
Barbara Stevens grinned at her. “That’s why I love towns like this. If you weren’t born here, people leave you alone. And you can’t paint if people won’t leave you alone.”
They left the office, and Rose followed through on her promise. It wasn’t true that she didn’t have the dirt; every time she sold a house, its owners gave her a complete history of the house in question and the immediate vicinity. Rose knew who had slept with whom, who had gone crazy, and who had done “odd things” in every part of Port Arbello for the past fifty years. But she never passed the information on to clients. Instead, she stuck to her business. Where other real-estate people pointed out the house where they’d found old Mr. Crockett hanging in the attic, Rose pointed out the fact that the school was only two blocks from the property she was showing. Consequently, she got the sales.
She ushered the Stevenses quickly through the first two houses on her list. They were noncommittal, and she didn’t push the properties. Then she turned onto the Conger’s Point Road.
“Any relation?” Carl Stevens asked as he read the sign.
“We are the last of the Congers,” Rose said, doing her best not to sound pretentious, and succeeding. “Unless I manage to produce a son, there soon won’t be any Congers at all on Conger’s Point Road.”
“I think it would be wonderful to live on a road that was named after you,” Barbara said.
Rose nodded. “I have to say I sort of get a kick out of it. From what I can gather, this road used to be practically the family driveway. My husband’s family used to own practically everything between the town and the Point. But that was a hundred years ago. It’s been built up for years. We still live on