Chris was stunned. “Oh my God! I don’t know what to say.”
“We’re getting ready to go view the property, and we think you and Ellen should go with us. If you don’t like the house, then we won’t buy it. But if you do, it will become your new home. Oh…and it comes fully furnished… If you are okay with the furnishings in it.”
Chris took off his hat and looked away.
Sonny knew he’d just made a grown man cry. “You go home and put on a pair of boots without horse poop on them, and load up your pretty little wife. The house is on Bluebell Street. It will be the only one with a For Sale sign in the yard. We’ll go in together, okay?”
Chris turned. His chin was up. His eyes were shining from unshed tears.
“Yes sir, boss. On the way,” he said, and headed for his truck. He was out of the driveway and already on the blacktop before Sonny got back in the house.
Maggie was holding her breath. “Did he just quit from being insulted by the offer, or is he going to get his wife?”
Sonny laughed. “He’s going to get Ellen. We need to hustle, or he’ll beat us there.”
Maggie blew him a kiss and ran to get her purse and coat.
Sonny picked up the keys to his truck, and as soon as Maggie returned, they were out the door and gone.
* * *
When Chris came running into the house, Ellen thought something was wrong.
“Chris, honey! What happened? Are you alright?”
Chris picked her up and swung her around in the middle of the living room floor, kissed her soundly, then began pulling off his dirty boots.
“We’re going to look at a house that’s for sale. Sonny and Maggie said they’ll buy it for us if we like it, then we can pay them back on a rent-to-own basis, interest free. The house comes furnished. They want us to go with them. If we don’t like it, they don’t buy it.”
Ellen gasped. “You’re kidding. Nobody does stuff like that.”
“Sonny and Magnolia Bluejacket aren’t nobodies. They’re somebodies.”
“I can’t go looking like this,” she said.
“Then change your clothes, and make it quick. We’re meeting them at the property, and they were right behind me.”
* * *
The Kingstons had been alerted to Bill Eldrege’s message and immediately formed two plans of action. If the Brandts came back, they would either come in from the bar, or in from the back. But since the bar was closed, any vehicle parked in the lot now would be suspect. And since no one was home, hiding their car in the back, and coming in through that door seemed the most logical, although attributing logic to Everett and Freddie Brandt seemed a bit of a stretch.
The trash truck had emptied the dumpster at the bar.The only light in the bar was one nightlight. And, once it got dark, there would be no lights turned on in the house. Asher had even turned off the back porch light to give the thieves an illusion of security.
The Kingstons were in the living room with the TV on mute, using the closed-captioning to read what was going on. They were as ready as they could be without knowing when or if the thieves would even show.
“Gunner, what did Dad say when you called?” Dylan asked.
Gunner shrugged. “Very little about what was happening here. He just said that we knew what we were doing, and not to get ourselves killed.”
Asher was kicked back in the recliner, watching his brothers’ banter and thinking how alike they looked and how different they were. They all had their dad’s black hair and blue eyes. They all had varying degrees of his facial features. They were all angles and planes, along with the stubborn jut of Jacob’s jaw. Brenda had left no visible evidence of her DNA with any of them. And after her exit from their lives, the only thing she’d left behind was a reputation they had to live down.
For Asher, it was Nora’s entrance into his world that turned everything around when he was young, and their reunion had turned him upside down. Instead of being able to celebrate the fact, he was after killers, and she was still going through all the sad, bad days on her own. He knew she understood. He knew she was okay with the status quo at this moment, but he wasn’t.
He just wanted this mess to be over.
* * *
Nora was sitting in a chair by the fireplace, which gave her adirect sight line to the street in front of her house. Between the warmth from the fire, and the silence of the house, she was fighting the urge to sleep when she saw two trucks pulling up in front of her house, and then two couples getting out.
