Social Graces. Dixie Browning

in his study with Forbes and the Wall Street Journal.

      For her birthday she had deliberately arranged to have dinner at home with only her dad instead of the usual bash at the club. She had planned to mellow him with the champagne and find out exactly what had been eating at him. But early on the morning of her thirtieth birthday a pair of strangers who turned out to be police officers had shown up at the door and invited her father to accompany them downtown.

      She’d seen the whole thing from the top of the stairs. Barefoot and wearing only a robe and nightgown, she had hurried downstairs, demanding to know what was happening.

      The spokesman for the pair had been stiffly polite. “Just a few questions, miss, that’s all.” But obviously that hadn’t been all. Her father had been ashen. Alarmed, she’d called first his physician, then his lawyer.

      The next few hours had swept past like a kaleidoscope. She didn’t recall having gotten dressed—she certainly hadn’t taken time to shower, much less to arrange her hair before racing outside. Belinda had called after her and told her to take her father’s medicine to the police station, so she’d dashed back and snatched the pill bottle from the housekeeper’s hand.

      They’d had only brief minutes to speak privately when the officer in the room with him had gone to get him a cup of water. Speaking quietly, as if he were afraid of being overheard, Frank Bonnard had instructed her to remove all unlabeled paper files from the file cabinet in his study and store them in her bedroom.

      Confused and frightened, she had wanted to ask more, but just then the officer had returned. Her father had nodded, swallowed his pills and said, “Go home. I’ll be there as soon as I get through here.”

      That was the last time she’d seen him alive. Before he could even be bonded out, he’d suffered a fatal coronary.

      Now, peeling a paper towel from the roll on the old oak dresser, Val blew her nose, mopped her eyes and sighed. She’d been doing entirely too much of that lately. Great, gasping sighs, as if she were starved for oxygen.

      What she was starved for were answers. Now that it was too late, she wondered if it had been a mistake to leave Greenwich. She could have rented a room, possibly even an apartment. If there were any answers to be found, they would hardly be found halfway down the East Coast in a tiny village her father had visited only once in his entire life.

      On the other hand, the auditors, the men from the Financial Crimes Unit, plus those from all the various government agencies involved, were convinced they already had their man—their scapegoat—even though they’d made another token arrest. And even if she were to unravel the mess and prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that her father was innocent, it was too late to bring him back. The best she could hope to do was to restore his reputation.

      Light from the setting sun, filtered by ancient, moss-draped live oaks, turned the dusty windows opaque. So many things on the island had changed since she’d last seen this old house, she would never have found it without the real estate agent’s explicit instruction.

      Just over a week ago she had called the agency that managed the property she’d inherited from her great-grandmother, Achsah Dozier. A few hours ago, following the agent’s instructions, she had located Seaview Realty. While the office was scarcely larger than a walk-in closet, the woman seated behind a desk cluttered with brochures, boxes of Girl Scout cookies and what appeared to be tax forms, seemed friendly, if somewhat harried.

      “Marian Kuvarky.” The woman nodded toward the nameplate on her desk. “Glad you made it before I had to close up,” she said, handing over a set of keys. “I’d better warn you, though—I still haven’t found anyone to give the place a good going-over since the people who were renting it moved out. You might want to check into a motel for a few days.”

      Val had come too far to be put off another moment. Besides, she couldn’t afford a motel. Even in the dead of winter, beach prices would seriously erode her dwindling funds. “I can take care of a little dirt, just tell me how to find my house.” She was hardly helpless. She had looked after a three-room apartment with only a weekly maid before she’d moved back home to Connecticut.

      Ms. Kuvarky, a youngish blonde with tired eyes and an engaging smile said, “Okay, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. Take a left once you leave here and turn off onto the Back Road.”

      “What’s the name of it?”

      “Of what?”

      “The road.”

      “Back Road. It’s named that. I had the power turned on after you called. I forgot if I told you or not, but the last renters left owing for two months. I would have had it ready to rent out again once I found somebody to do a few minor repairs, but like I said over the phone, my cleaner’s out on maternity leave. She says she’ll be back, but you know how that goes. I’m sort of coasting for now, trying to get through the slack season. I cleaned two places myself last weekend.”

      Val had been too tired to involve herself in the agent’s problems. Her stomach hadn’t stood the trip well, as she’d nibbled constantly on junk food, more from nerves than from hunger. “I brought linens. You said the house was furnished,” she reminded Ms. Kuvarky.

      The agent had nodded. “Pretty much all you’ll need, I guess, but it’s sort of a mishmash. I wrote to your father about the repairs—those are extra—but I never heard back. Anyway, there’s so much construction going on these days, even between seasons, it’s hard to find dependable help.”

      Ms. Kuvarky had promised to call around. Val remembered thinking that if the place had a roof and a bed, everything else could wait.

      Now she wasn’t quite so sure.

      The last thing the rental agent had said as Val had stood in the doorway, trying to get her bearings in a village that had nothing even faintly resembling city blocks or even village squares, was “By the way, if you happen to be looking for work and know one end of a broom from the other, you’re hired.”

      She’d been joking, of course. It might even come to that, Val told herself now, but at the moment she had other priorities. Starting with getting rid of her resident mouse.

      The power was on, that was the good part. The bad part was that there was no phone. Or maybe that was the good part, too. A few crank calls had even managed to get through call-blocking before she’d left Greenwich, but they could hardly follow her to a place where she didn’t have a working phone.

      There was no central heat, only an oil heater in the living room and an assortment of small space heaters scattered in the other rooms. She’d managed to turn the oil heater on. The thing hadn’t exploded, so she assumed she’d pushed the right button.

      The water heater was another matter. She let the hot water faucet run for five minutes, but luke was as warm as it got. That’s when she’d discovered that her cell phone didn’t work. She’d tried to call Ms. Kuvarky, and the darned thing blanked out on her. No signal.

      All right, so she would think of herself as a pioneer woman. At least she had a bed to sleep in instead of a covered wagon somewhere in the middle of the wilderness. She was thirty years old, with a degree from an excellent college—and although she was somewhat out of her element at the moment, she’d never been accused of being a slow learner. However, repairing major household appliances just might stretch her capability close to the breaking point. Sooner or later—probably sooner—she would have to look for a paying job in order to hire someone to do the things she couldn’t figure out how to do herself.

      One thing she definitely could do was clean her house. That accomplished, she could start going through her father’s files, looking for whatever he’d wanted her to find that would enable his lawyer to reopen his case posthumously and clear his name.

      There had to be something there. Otherwise, why had he made that strange, hurried request? He could’ve had no way of knowing that he’d be dead within hours of being arrested.

      Bitter? Yes, she was bitter. But grief and bitterness weren’t going to