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Gran eyed her, stern. “What needs be done, needs be done.”

“Right.”

Kiera didn’t look convinced, but if life wasn’t moving a hundred and seventy miles an hour, her world tilted askew. Curled up in a chair for however long it took to sort out a seventy-two-year-old life would be torture for her.

But not nearly as tortuous as it would be for Cress,
so Kiera could just suck it up.

“
We’ll see how much we can get done today,” Gran decided. “Then come back to it tomorrow.”

“
Perfect.” Kiera didn’t mask the cryptic note in her voice.

Gran turned her way, scolding
. “Goods don’t matter like people matter. Their hopes. Their dreams. This chest is filled with more than old things. Your Great-grandpa’s in here. Your uncles. My ma and pa. It’s our history.”

“And yet it looks so small.”  Kiera flashed a less-than-innocent smile Gran’s way. “Okay,
Gran. Your show.”

Her words darkened Gran’s demeanor. Kiera stuttered, then backtracked, not too successfully. Hard to be discreet when you’ve just dissed a potentially dying person. “I mean
—”

Gran
bent and lifted the first item from this chest, a hand-crocheted baby gown, ivory-white, thin, delicate yarn giving the garment a look of old world lace. Beautiful. Seamless. Amazing.

“This was my christening gown,” Gran explained, extending her hands. Cress reached up and ran a reverent finger across the nubbed fabric as if touching something holy, beyond special. “My grandmother made it before I was born
. We all used it, Sylvie, me, my brothers. And then your mother wore it and used it for you girls.”

“
Three generations.” The respect in Audra’s tone reflected Cress’s emotion. Unlike Audra, she was the queen of toss this and throw that, refusing links to anything for too long. But something like this, the feather-soft cotton yarn warm and smooth—

“So far.” Gran didn’t make eye contact, but this was Gran. She didn’t need to. “It might get used again. Who’s to say?”

“It’s lovely.” Cress opened her hands. “May I?”

Gran handed it over
. Nimble, Cress unfolded the minute gown. Small things tumbled from the folds, landing in her lap. “What’s this?” She smiled as she shifted her look back to Gran.

“Booties.” Audra laughed as she reached across, extricating the petite foot warmers. “And a bonnet.”

“You put boys in bonnets?” Kiera again, not making points. Probably not caring. Typical.

“Everyone did.” Gran’s gaze stayed locked on the intricate gown, her eyes softened in remembrance of tiny feet, holy water and scented oils. “They were just babes. Why, in my day, boys actually wore little dresses until they walked.”

“Please tell me you’re kidding.”

“That’s how it was,” Gran
protested, frowning. “They were babies.”

“So, Gran.” Audra brought the booties to her face, inhaling deeply. “I love that smell,” she intoned, sounding like she really meant it.
Cress hated the odor, a smell of old times and days gone by.
Blech
. “Cedar. Fresh wood. Amazing how it holds its scent.”

Traitor.

“I’ve got christening gown down,” she went on, looking up. “Who would you like to have this? It’s quite beautiful.”

Gran snorted. “Whoever has the first grandchild, of course.”

“And the race is on,” Kiera muttered, shifting. The chair creaked, even under her anorexically thin backside, but Gran didn’t hear either. Or ignored both. More likely.

“Sooooo……” Audra paused,
pen aloft. “I’ll write: ‘open for possibilities’.”

“And we ca
n always share it as need arises,” Cress piped up.

Grandma looked at her hard. “That would require dating. In my day a girl let a man court her. Take her places. Try the waters.”

“I think Cress has tried her share of water.”

Cress shot Kiera a ‘strangle you later’ look.

Gran shrugged. “There’s water and then there’s water. Them that swim with the weak fish never quite make it upstream.”

How did an old lady who lived nearly two hours away know so much about her life?

“Nice analogy.” Audra nodded, flashing Cress a grin. “I can just picture our Cress, heading to the spawning pool. She’d make a great trout, especially with that old gymnast’s arc.”

“And you’d make a nice corpse. Shut up.”

“Of course there’s always local offerings if you’ve used up the wealth of possibilities in the Twin Cities,” Kiera tossed in, her tart look perfect from every camera angle. Reason enough to smack her right there. “And Chippewa Falls has its very own man-brand. Brawny. Bold. Quite Midwestern. ”

Note to self: buy untraceable poison and apply liberally to sisters’ iced tea.
Cress angled a look her way. “And sample your leftovers? No thanks. Can we get off the subject of me and get back to work here? My leg’s getting cramped.”

When all else fails, throw the sympathy card. Audra clucked, but Kiera just elevated both brows in a look that wasn’t even close to borderline sympathetic.

Audra took the gown from Cress’s hands, set it on the bed, and returned to her seat. “Next.”

A pint-sized hat and coat followed in brown, black and blue plaid, the hat done in aviator cap style, ear flaps and all. The look was all boy, to
tal antique, yet timeless, something an English lad would don to scuff through stone streets on his way to some fancy prep academy. “How sweet.”

Cress uttered the words too quick. Matters of reproduction were never lauded. Doing so opened a can of worms best left congealing.
Gran had made her feelings on this clear for years: a houseful of unmarried thirtyish-somethings wasn’t in the plan.

“For your first boy,” Gran decided, based on reaction time alone
. She handed Cress the little coat. “Uncle Lars wore that when he was little. I can still see him in it, so sweet.”

“Then shouldn’t Aunt Sylvie
have it?”

Gran’s expression soured. “Grandma gave it to me because she knew I’d take care of it.
Sylvie don’t care for anything that isn’t brand new, fresh from the package and she’d have never used this for her boys. No, this stays here until you’ve need for it, Cress. Someday.”

Audra and Kiera hadn’t said a word. Maybe that was how it worked. If you ooed and aahed first, you got the goods. Simple concept, except when the last thing she wanted to do was start thinking about biological clocks and passin
g seasons. But the feel of the short coat in her hands felt good. Warm. Safe. Like a cozy blanket on a winter’s night, or steaming hot chocolate after weaving Grandpa’s wood-slatted toboggan through tree-dotted, snow-covered hillsides.

Cress blinked. Last night’s cooling temperatures must have gotten to her. Cozy blankets? Sledding? Little boy clothes?

Detective Crescent Dietrich didn’t get moony-eyed, much less over something small, vintage and beyond the realm of current reality. “Here.” She handed the coat to Audra. “Set this on the bed. I need to grab my pain meds.”

She felt their combined stare as she pushed to her feet, then wobbled a second before feeling terra firma beneath the right leg. Ignoring whatever looks they might exchange, she moved toward the door. “I’ll be back. Whatever you do, don’t stop on my account.”
  Maybe she’d be lucky and they’d have the chest done before she made it back.

Doubtful.

Right now she needed air. She’d left the small-town claustrophobic antics of Watkins Ridge purposely as a teen. She’d made her way up the ladder of criminal justice with the same rigor.

Old feuds, cast aspersions, town gossip...

The combo stirred up too much. Watkins Ridge was a Miranda Lambert lament, a town where everyone dies famous. She’d headed to bigger and better, wanting anonymity. Needing it.

Now?

She was here for the duration, shelving her own secrets, weighing choices, facing a crossroads of her own doing.

The ping of a soft bell drew her attention as she filled a
half-pint jelly jar with water. The melodious sound grew, a chant of tones marking the hour, old-time charm filling the moment. The soft chorus soothed in simple note cadence, sweet and wholesome.

She’d
lost both qualities while gone. She wasn’t a bit sweet and she’d given up wholesome years before, but something in the bell’s notes said she could start over, begin anew.

Shep padded onto the porch. She swallowed the pain pill and walked through the door to join
him. She settled onto the step, staring at nothing. That was all the invitation the dog needed. He curled beside her, not bothering with a three-circle spin. She stroked his fur as the music wound down, the final notes a longing of
pling... pling... plong.

“Cress, that you?” The neighbor’
s voice ended her short seconds of peace on Earth, good will toward men. “I heard you’d come back to help your Grandma! You girls are just what she needs, a sight for sore eyes, and just look at you!” Ginny Dumerese climbed the back steps with an ease Cress envied. “How’s Norma? How are things? I meant to get over the past few days, but your grandma ain’t one to want a lot of attention, now is she? And isn’t this just the way, how it takes tragedy to bring folks back together? At least it’s not a funeral, though, that’s what I said to Harold before I left the house, so that’s good!”

She beamed as if her words brought balm, but Cress understood the scolding behind the smile.
Still, Ginny wasn’t a bad sort. She just knew too much, like so many, and unafraid to speak her piece. No wonder she and Gran got along. “Families need to stick together. Did you want to go see Gran? She’s upstairs sorting things, but I bet they could all use a break.”

Ginny
considered, then nodded. “Well, I know your Grandma and she’d go all day and night if need be, but I bet you girls could use a minute to breathe something other than mothballs and cedar.”

She’d nailed Cress’s sentiments with enviable acuity
.

“
I’m not a keeper,” she continued as she crossed the porch. “I toss things I probably should save, but it spared me what you folks are up against right now. Sorting decades of maybes and if-onlys. Yes, I’ll go bother her a bit, it’ll be good for all of us, and it will save her facing Sylvie to plan the fall festival. Sylvie’s got it in her head that Norma shouldn’t be allowed on the committee. As if I’d stand by and let such a thing happen. Everyone knows when it comes to the hot dish table, your grandma beats all.”

“She what?” Hairs rose along the nape of Cress’s neck. The Scandinavian Fall Festival was a local tradition that involved all branches of her family
, and Aunt Sylvie had headed the Swedish food volunteers for as long as Cress could remember. “She said that?”

“Oh, you know Sylvie. She’s a pill. I told her to never mind her bossy ways, that as long as your grandma and I could handle a stove or a fry pan, we were on board. But Sylvie’s got a bee in her bonnet over losing this farmland to development and I think she’s anxious to show her big sister the error of her ways.
She had the nerve to tell Merle Langley that her bars were the last thing folks bought off the sweets table because Merle’s mighty stingy with the good stuff, if you know what I mean.”

“I don’t, actually.”

“The nuts and chips and goodies everyone and their brother expects in a good bar. And while Sylvie might be right, she was wrong, too, because no one works harder than Merle to get things done, make things right. Sylvie’s always had a mind of her own, and she’s far too inclined to speak it. She’s gotten to be a real pain in the neck these days, and it won’t do Norma a bit of good to hear of it. Mum’s the word.”

It was one thing for Cress to be upset with the loss of the farmland. She’d linked all that was good and holy from her childhood
to the rolling meadowland now covered with fancy homes. But Aunt Sylvie had no right to interfere. Or get upset. Or say anything at all. Gran had obviously stepped on family toes by selling for development. The Ekstrom elders had strict rules concerning land sales. Family first, farming second, and development ranked dead last. Gran broke the rules, which meant more family fall-out. As if her father’s drinking problem hadn’t caused enough furor back in the day. She drew a breath, let Ginny precede her and decided she’d check things more closely before flying off the handle. Audra would have the insider’s edge on both sides of the issue. When you were nice, people talked to you.

Around Cress?

They clammed up tight, and that was all right. Their reticence saved her no small amount of annoyance. Except now she’d be in the thick of the aggravation, entering the last act of an elongated play. But if it helped Gran? She’d do whatever proved necessary.

*

“You mind that scrubber, Charlie. I don’t got money to be buyin’ new scrubbers because you’re too good-for-nothin’ to put some elbow grease behind the job. Ya gotta push down, push hard.” Her hand covered his over the semi-rotted wooden picnic table, showing him what she wanted, and when she did a sliver of the old table lodged in the soft palm of his right hand.