Betting on the Cowboy

“No problem,” Gray said, matching the tone of fake courtesy. “I’m in no hurry.”

“Ah. The luxury of time to kill.” His grandfather smiled coldly, putting both palms over the head of the cane and leaning subtly forward. “Still not gainfully employed, then? Or...what is the euphemism these days? Between jobs?”

A pulse started to hammer at Gray’s temple, and he took a consciously deep breath. That was cheap bait, a quick piece of dirty chum his grandfather probably tossed out by habit. He wasn’t eighteen anymore, and he didn’t have to rise to it.

“Exactly,” he agreed placidly. “Between jobs.”

The older man frowned. He shifted his weight, repositioning the cane. Clearly, his injury, arthritis, gout...whatever necessitated the cane...was bothering him. And yet he equally clearly didn’t want to be the first to acknowledge the need to sit.

For one ruthless second, Gray told himself he was glad. It served the old man right. Gray would happily stand here all night, if that meant his grandfather might know even a fraction of the pain he’d caused other people. People like Gray’s father and mother.

But the thought died instantly. In the end, it was beneath Gray to torture an old man—it was not his way, in spite of what his grandfather had modeled for him through the years.

So he took the nearest chair. Immediately after, his grandfather settled on the edge of the silk divan stiffly, as if his hip didn’t bend correctly anymore. He didn’t allow himself a sigh of relief, but the lines in his face eased slightly.

“So.” He massaged his palm into the head of the cane, eyeing Gray over it. “What brings you back to Silverdell?”

Just like that. No small talk. No “How are you?” or “Did you marry, have children, stay healthy, make money, buy a house...did you ever forgive me?”

Simply go straight to the point. Fine. Again, two could play that game.

“You bring me back,” Gray answered matter-of-factly.

“Is that so?” His grandfather raised his shaggy white eyebrows. “Not intentionally, I assure you.”

Gray shook his head a fraction of an inch. The mean old buzzard hadn’t softened a bit, had he? Well, that was probably for the best. His arrogance and unyielding antagonism made Gray’s job so much easier. As he’d journeyed back to Colorado from California, he’d wondered what he would do if the old man had grown weak, or senile, or sentimental. He’d wondered what he would say if his grandfather welcomed him home with open arms.

This was much cleaner. Now he could just speak his piece without wasting time trying to be diplomatic. And he could get out of this house before the past swallowed him up and broke his heart all over again.

“Nonetheless, it’s true.” He gazed at the old man, whose face was tinted a deceptively youthful pink by reflected sunset. “You really are the reason I’ve returned.”

His grandfather frowned, as if he had a sudden gas pain. “Why? Had you heard I was sick or something? Did you hope you could breeze in at the stroke of midnight, butter up a dying man and get yourself written back into my will?”

Gray laughed. “Nope. Hadn’t heard a thing. Believe it or not, no one out in California talks about you, your health or your money. Why, are you sick?”

“No.” More rubbing his palm into the head of the cane, more scowling from under those unruly eyebrows. “I’m old, and my hip isn’t what it used to be. But if you’re here for a deathbed vigil, you’ll have a long time to wait.”

“I’m not.”

“Well, what, then?” The old man grunted, a deeply skeptical sound. “You don’t really expect me to believe the money has nothing to do with it.”

Gray leaned back in his chair, smiling. “Oh, the money has everything to do with it.”

His grandfather’s eyes narrowed, but he didn’t speak. He simply waited. He obviously refused to give Gray the satisfaction of asking for details.

No problem. Gray had rehearsed this part often enough that he didn’t need prompting. He’d been rehearsing it for seventeen years, in fact. Since he was thirteen and filled with impotent fury at being so young, so helpless, so dependent on this tyrant. At being unable to summon the courage to say what ought to be said.

By now, Gray could have delivered this news in his sleep.

“It’s one hundred percent about the money,” he repeated. “But not your money. Mine.”

The expressive eyebrows lifted high. “Yours?”

“Yes. You see, I’ve decided that it’s time you returned my inheritance. I’ve come to tell you that, unless you voluntarily sign over every single penny you took from my father seventeen years ago, I intend to sue you for it.”

In the silence that followed, the mantel clock ticked like a time bomb. Gray could hear someone, probably the plump housekeeper, running water in the kitchen, though that part of the house was at least fifty yards away.

Finally his grandfather spoke. “Who told you I took money from him? I’ll guarantee your father never said that.”

“Not to me. He told other people, who told me. I don’t have any proof, of course. But I will get it, if you force me to. And the world will know you stole from your own son.”

Finally the old man rose, slowly. Gray watched how he relied on the cane, and wondered whether, without it, his grandfather would be able to stand at all. In spite of everything, pity stirred, and his words suddenly sounded cruel, too harsh for this fragile old man to take.

Gray shut his eyes, annoyed by his own vacillating. This was why he hadn’t come back to Silverdell for ten long years. It was just too damn emotionally confusing to feel intense love and intense hatred at the same time, for the same person.

His grandfather didn’t seem tormented by any similar ambivalence. He stared at Gray coldly.

“I seem to remember that the last time I saw you I warned you never to mention your father in my presence again.”

Gray nodded. “Yes. You did.”

“Still you dare to come here and...” The old lips thinned. “You dare to defy me.”

Gray shrugged. “Yes.” He glanced through the window, where an olive-green gloaming was overtaking the sunset. “I dare. And yet, as you can see, no lightning bolts have struck me down. The earth still turns.”

His grandfather’s face darkened. “You always were an impertinent boy, Gray. Too clever by half. I blame your mother for that. Hannah foolishly encouraged you to think—”

But Gray, too, was out of his chair now. “Leave my mother out of this.” He took one hard step closer. “You don’t have the right to speak her name.”

“Perhaps not.” Undaunted, his grandfather cocked a sardonic glance toward the window. “And yet...the earth still turns.”

For a minute, all Gray’s hard-won indifference, his emotional independence and rational perspective, melted away, and he was afraid he might hit the old man. Somehow he held himself in check, though the blood throbbed in his head, and his right hand seemed to have frozen in a tightly muscled fist.

God, this had been a mistake. Just being in this house again scrambled his brain. He had overestimated the distance a few years could put between him and the past. Suddenly, the onslaught of memories was just too much... He saw again, as if it were real, that last night...his father standing there, right there by the fireplace, drinking too much, taking offense at everything old Grayson said...

And his mother quietly weeping, her hand on his father’s arm, trying to keep him from finishing the last Scotch. The cold rain sheeting across the windows, the shadows of the elms fighting with the shadows of the fire.

Then the slamming doors, the parting threats and the rain-drenched, curving mountain road...

Damn it. Gray’s left elbow began to ache, where the bones had knitted but remained sensitive. It might as well have been days since the accident, not years. He couldn’t think straight in this room...this house. Maybe not even in this town.

Why on earth had he imagined that he owed his grandfather a warning? Had he really dreamed the old man might have grown a conscience and would meekly agree to admit his error and make restitution?

Fat chance of that. Old Grayson Harper had never been wrong in his life.

Besides, what constituted restitution, anyhow? Had Gray really thought that getting back his father’s money could begin to restore his losses? Grayson had killed Gray’s parents, as surely as if he’d put a gun to their heads. He could fill the Harper Marble Quarry with hundred-dollar bills, and it wouldn’t begin to make up for what he’d really stolen from that terrified thirteen-year-old boy.

The boy who had awakened in the hospital the next morning, his arms and legs and ribs broken, his head bandaged and his family dead.

With effort, Gray peeled his fingers away from his palm and pumped them to force sensation to return. He had been a fool to come. Warning? Ha. He should have just hired a lawyer, filed the suit and let the fur fly.

“Go ahead,” his grandfather said quietly, glancing pointedly at Gray’s tense hand. “Do it.”

Gray shook his head slowly. “I don’t hit people.”

“No.” The scoffing noise his grandfather emitted was eloquent. “And that’s the problem in a nutshell, isn’t it? You don’t do anything. You’re just like your father. You drift, charming and completely useless in your expensive suits, trying to get by on your clever one-liners and your smarter-than-thou attitude.”

He shook his head, as if to shake away the internal image. “You want money? Try earning some! If I’d ever seen you do a lick of real work, hard work, I’d leave it all to you. Every goddamn penny. Hell, if I could see you hold a real job for even one month, just four lousy weeks, I’d write you a check for the whole kit and caboodle!”

Dismissive old coot! Gray’s shoulders twitched, and he felt his legs burn slightly from the urge to stride out the door. The judgmental bastard was so clueless. He hadn’t understood his own son, not for a day of his life. Horrified at Gray’s father’s desire to be a musician, Grayson had forbidden it entirely, and steered him into a dozen “real” careers, each more ill suited than the one before.

And because, in the end, Grayson couldn’t make a successful pig farmer out of a poet, he decided the poet was a slacker and a fool.

Gray hesitated, fighting the urge to lash out and give the old man as good as he had dished. But if he let himself stalk off in a huff, what would he have accomplished? He calmed his pulse and considered what his grandfather had said. If Gray could hold a job, he’d return the money. Surely that was almost as good as an admission of guilt.

Could this be the opening he’d hoped for?

For several seconds, fury warred with common sense. Finally, common sense won.

He didn’t really want to bring a lawsuit. It would take forever, and it would cost a fortune on its own. He had no interest in humiliating his grandfather publicly. He wanted only the personal, private admission that the old man had wronged Gray’s father—and, in doing so, Gray himself.

He eyed his grandfather narrowly. “Will you put that deal in writing? If I do what you ask...if I hold a ‘real’ job for four weeks straight without bolting, you’ll write a check for every penny my father ever gave you to invest for him?”

The old man squinted at him in return as if he suspected a trick. “Not just any job. A hard job. A dirty job. The kind you turned your nose up at all your life.”

Gray wanted to ask him, “What do you know of my life?” The last time they’d seen each other, Gray had been nineteen, reckless, defiant and mixed up as hell. Because he’d refused to come back to Silverdell over his college summer breaks and dig marble in the family quarry, the old man had decided Gray was afraid of real work. Just like his father.

How could old Grayson have been so stupid as to miss the truth? Gray wasn’t afraid of work. He was afraid of Silverdell and what madness the memories might create in his heart. He was afraid of what living in this house another summer might make him do to his grandfather.

“Of course,” Gray said with feigned calm. “I’ll accept a job as dirty and demeaning as you want it to be. The only thing I won’t do is take a job at the quarry, or anywhere I would report to you.”

The old man worked his lips, clearly thinking fast and hard. “It would have to be here. In Silverdell, I mean. So that I could check on you. So that I could be sure it’s not a scam.”

“Of course.” Gray’s smile felt twisted. “I wouldn’t dream of asking you to trust me.”

If old Grayson recognized the sarcasm, he didn’t deign to acknowledge it. He scanned his grandson’s face so thoroughly it felt like a scouring.

“Then yes,” he said, finally. “If you can hold a real, Joe Lunchbucket job here in Silverdell, one with physical labor and no fancy title, and you can keep it for four weeks straight without bolting, or complaining, or getting yourself fired, I’ll write a check for any amount you ask.”

CHAPTER TWO

IT WAS TWO in the morning, and though Bree and Penny had been talking for hours, the conversation showed no signs of sputtering out.

They were ensconced in Penny’s suite in Aunt Ruth’s beautiful old San Francisco Victorian town house. The sitting area was close enough to Ruth’s sickroom to hear her if she called out, but private enough to let them chat in peace. They both still wore their day clothes because getting into pajamas seemed too much of an admission that the night might end.

Bree had been visiting her little sister for three whole days—a true luxury, since ordinarily the entire breadth of the country, and their respective obligations, lay between them.

When the sisters had been split up after their father went to jail, sixty-five-year-old Aunt Ruth had taken Rowena and Penny into her home. But she’d declared herself unequal to mothering all three sisters. After a tense period in which the state seemed likely to get involved, their mother’s college roommate had stepped up. Kitty Afton, a Boston divorcée with no children, had always been fond of Bree, and was glad to offer the teenager a home.

Bree had lived in Boston ever since. She told herself she loved it. And yet, three days in a new place, with a fresh perspective and her little sister’s calming presence, had done her a world of good. After the mess with Charlie...

She looked at Penny, suddenly wishing she could scoop her up and take her along when she returned to Boston. Without Charlie, without Breelie’s, her “perfect” life in the city seemed hollow. Even the trendy Brighton-area condo she’d snagged a year ago—but never had time to decorate—felt lonely and sterile, and she could hardly bring herself to set foot in it again.

But Penny would never agree to leave San Francisco. Ruth, now in her early eighties, had congestive heart failure and needed full-time care. She really ought to be in a nursing facility, Bree thought, but Penny would never abandon the old lady who had put a roof over her head when everything else in their world had exploded.

So Penny couldn’t leave, and Bree couldn’t stay...not that she’d been invited. Reluctant or not, she had to get back to Boston and see if she could possibly piece her career back together.

Her plane left from San Fran International first thing in the morning.

So they lingered here, not ready to sleep in spite of the late hour. Bree had stretched out on top of Penny’s small sofa, her head propped on the heel of her hand, and Penny had curled up in the adjacent armchair, sketching her sister as they talked.

“So what’s our plan for Charlie?” Penny’s face was still bent over her sketch, but her lips curved upward, and her smile could be heard in her words. “Shall we boil him in oil? Or can you think of something more creative?”

Bree laughed. Only Penny could say things like that and still look and sound positively angelic. She was undoubtedly the sweetest person Bree had ever met, but that didn’t mean she was saccharine or dull. In her gentle, Alice in Wonderland face, sugar and spice coexisted in complete harmony.

“Boiling in oil sounds fine to me.” But Bree yawned as she said it, which showed that, thank goodness, she’d finally lost her bloodthirsty enthusiasm for revenge.

The first day here, she’d spent hours detailing Charlie’s sins—which, it turned out, had only begun with Iliana Townsend, not ended there. He had also been cooking Breelie’s books for God knew how long, draining the savings to keep himself in cool suits and hot women. When news got out that he’d been sacked, vendors all over Boston practically set Bree’s phone on fire, calling to complain they hadn’t been paid in months.

It had taken Bree weeks to straighten it all out—and every penny of her personal savings, too. She’d stayed in Boston long enough to finish the last event already contracted...but, as she’d predicted, no one had called to hire her company for anything new.

She had one appointment still on the books, a golden wedding anniversary consult that had been set long before the Townsend fiasco and, miraculously, hadn’t yet been canceled. She tried to be optimistic. Maybe, from that small job, she could begin to rebuild the business.

But she’d had a few days of rare freedom, and, so ravaged by resentment and self pity she couldn’t stand her own company a minute longer, she’d impulsively booked a plane ticket to visit Penny.

Her little sister was probably the only person on earth Bree could have been completely honest with about how much Charlie’s betrayal had hurt. Though she was four years younger than Bree, and five years younger than Rowena, Penny was without question the kindest of the three Wright girls, and the wisest. She was a good listener, and a true empath, with no trace of the schadenfreude most people—especially Rowena—might feel on hearing of Bree’s misfortune.

Bree had always thought Penny possessed a touch of magic, though it sounded primitive and superstitious to say so. Maybe she should just say that, in less mystical terms, Penny was a...a born healer. And sure enough, over the days in Penny’s company, most of the poison and pain had been drained out of the topic of Charlie, leaving Bree tranquil for the first time in more than a month.

“Yeah, deep-fried Charlie sounds just fine.” She let her eyes drift shut. “You know, Pea, maybe you should have been a psychiatrist.”

It was a musing, slightly slurred non sequitur that probably proved she had moved beyond tired all the way to incoherent. A thought struck her. She hadn’t meant to discount Penny’s art. “And an artist, too. I mean instead of being just an artist. Obviously you had to be an artist.”

Penny chuckled. “You won’t think so when you see this picture.”

Bree opened her eyes, though she knew nothing in the sketch could change her mind about her sister’s talent. Whatever Penny turned her hand to, whether it was oils, pen-and-ink sketches, photography or interior decorating, she ended up creating beauty.

Take this simple, cream-colored room, for instance. The rest of Ruth’s house was crowded, lacy, oppressively Victorian. But up here, Penny had designed a cool, clean haven from all that. Without any cliché Western decor—no antlered light fixtures, no river-rock mantels, no bucking-horse sculptures—she managed to capture the essence of their beautiful childhood Colorado home, Bell River Ranch.

How did she do it? More magic, really. The one gorgeous piece of peach-and-turquoise pottery that always made Bree think of a spring sunset. One painting, a sunlit stand of birch trees that could have been trite, but instead was pure poetry. A love seat upholstered in muted silvers, blues and pinks, like the shimmering pebbles in the shallows of Bell River.

“I love this room,” she said, another non sequitur. She laughed at herself, realizing she sounded a little drunk, although they’d been sipping nothing but almond-honey tea all night. She climbed up on her knees and peered over the arm of the sofa. “Okay, let me see the picture. If it’s awful, though, it’s not your fault. Too bad I don’t have Ro’s problem and get skinny when I’m upset. I bet from that angle my rear end looks huge.”

Penny held out the crisp, thick paper with a smile. “Lucky for you I never got to the rear-end part. I spent the whole time trying to get your face right.”

Bree was curious now—and maybe, if she was honest, a little embarrassed. She knew she didn’t look her best. She might not have Rowena’s problem, but when she wasn’t happy her face could look very drawn and hard. She felt hard, since Charlie, and she dreaded seeing that reflected through Penny’s eyes.

But when she summoned the courage to look at the paper, the face she saw there didn’t look tough at all. In fact, Penny’s version of Bree oozed vulnerability. Her blond hair was tousled, and her T-shirt had slid down one shoulder. Her cheekbones were pronounced and graceful, but shadows underscored her abnormally large blue eyes.

She looked wounded, and slightly bewildered, as if she were a child who couldn’t understand why anyone would have wanted to hurt her.

She let her hand lower the sketch to her hip. She stared at her sister, frowning. “Is that how I really look?”

Penny raised one shoulder. “Well, you’re more beautiful than that,” she said. “I’m not good enough to do you justice.”

Bree shook her head. “Don’t be silly, Pea.”

Compliments like that made Bree feel like some kind of criminal fraud. Penny always saw the world through the prism of her own inner sweetness—which was a great beautifier. But right now...

If Bree had really been such a beauty, would her fiancé have been so eager to sleep with a forty-five-year-old married woman made almost entirely of nips and tucks?

Bree held out the sketch so that Penny could see it again. “I mean, do I look this...weak?”

Penny bent forward and studied her drawing with a small frown of concentration. Bree appreciated that she didn’t pretend to misunderstand.

“You look very sad,” Penny said finally. She glanced up, her brown eyes warm, and smiled to soften the pronouncement. “Which is why we really must toss the bum in boiling oil, first chance we get.”

Bree had a horrifying sensation of stinging heat just under her eyelids, and she knew that, if she weren’t very, very careful, she could actually end up crying.

Which was unacceptable. “Smile, Brianna,” Kitty’s voice in her head repeated, as always. “No one likes a sad sack.”

“What if it isn’t actually Charlie’s fault?” She forced herself to meet Penny’s eyes. “He says...he says I drove him to it. He says I’m always so critical, so hard to please. He says if I had ever really been the kind of fiancée who helped and supported his decisions—”

Penny snorted delicately. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Bree. Listen to yourself! You’re going to believe that lying scumbag? That’s the classic technique for abusive boyfriends, you know. Shifting the blame to you, hoping you’ll think it’s all somehow your fault.”

Penny was right, of course. It was the abuser’s easy out...you made me do it. But Charlie hadn’t just been trying to weasel free of the blame. He didn’t say those things until he knew the relationship was truly over and he couldn’t ever win her back. Problem was, she could hear in his voice, and see in his face, that he meant it. Really meant it.

It was hard to even think back on the contempt in Charlie’s voice as he’d hurled those accusations at her. Harder still, because, deep down inside, she had heard the ring of truth.

“I am critical, Pea. You know it’s true. I don’t know why, but I always seem to be pointing out everyone’s mistakes. Especially Charlie’s.”

Penny was shaking her head. “I don’t care if you whipped him with his own belt, mocked his manhood and made him sleep in the root cellar. You still didn’t make him cheat. You didn’t make him steal. You didn’t make him destroy Breelie’s. Someone ought to introduce Charlie Newmark to the idea of personal responsibility.”

Bree was grateful for the vehemence in Penny’s voice, and the loyalty that caused it. But she didn’t want to sweep this under the carpet. If she didn’t acknowledge her failings, how was she ever going to change anything? If she couldn’t get better, she would never be able to put together a relationship that would last.

She didn’t want to be alone forever.

“But it’s not just Charlie, is it? Every boyfriend I’ve ever had has said something similar.” She flushed as an old, half-forgotten memory came flooding miserably back. The day the sexiest rebel in her ninth-grade class, the boy she’d secretly had a crush on for months, had humiliated her in front of everyone. Wild Gray Harper...he had thought she was cold, prissy and boring...even way back then.

Penny looked at her oddly, and if Bree didn’t want to explain that sad old story, she had to recover quickly. “And Rowena,” she added. “Charlie might have taken the words right out of her mouth. And Kitty, too—though she sugar-coated it most of the time.”

“Kitty was a cross between Pollyanna and a Stepford wife.” Penny laughed again, but more softly, as if out of respect for Bree’s obvious distress. “She thought it was a sin for a lady to frown, or express a single authentic feeling, or do anything but coddle and flatter the men in her life. I don’t know how you stood it all those years.”

“She did her best,” Bree said loyally. “She wasn’t even related to us, you know. She didn’t have to take me in.”

“I know.” Penny’s laughter faded away. “That was a dumb thing to say. I’m sorry.”

They were silent a moment, remembering, though it was like remembering a nightmare they’d inexplicably all dreamed at exactly the same time. Such horrors couldn’t exist in the real world, surely. Their beautiful mother, lying broken and bleeding at the foot of the staircase. Sweet little Penny, so pitiful and bewildered. Penny, who had turned eleven that day, and was unaware that her birthday dress trailed through the blood as she knelt beside the silent body, begging her mother to wake up.

Their father, hauled off to jail for deliberately pushing his unfaithful wife over the railing. A phantasmagoric trial, in which their pathetic, shameful family secrets were trotted out, naked, for all the world to gawk at.

Johnny Wright...rotting in jail for years, so intractably angry. Rejecting the few overtures the sisters could bring themselves to make. Finally dying there of a brain tumor that may well have caused his irrational behavior from the start.

But worst of all was the ripping apart of the sisters, all of them just children, really, as well-meaning social workers, remote family connections and dutiful family friends stepped up, one by one, to offer them a place to live.

Bree shook the memories away. She couldn’t let herself drown in them, not after all these years.

She smiled at Penny to show she wasn’t angry. They both felt the same grateful loyalty to their respective saviors. Ruth and Kitty weren’t perfect, but they’d voluntarily offered the drowning girls harbors in the storm. Ruth had provided stability and an almost cloistered quiet, which Penny’s personality had needed. And Kitty, the compulsively smiling divorcée, had, in her own weird, Stepford way, shown Bree how to snap herself out of the trance of shock and grief.

“The point is that they’re all saying the same thing,” Bree went on. “It’s as if they’re reading from the same script. They say I am self-righteous, judgmental. I think I know better than everyone else. I’m never willing to trust other people to do things right on their own.”

She tucked her hair behind her ear and looked away, over toward Penny’s soothing painting of birch trunks. “They can’t all be wrong. There must be some truth in it.”

Penny didn’t respond right away. She tapped her pencil against the sketch pad and ran her lower lip through her teeth softly.

“Well, even if there is...even if you do find it difficult to trust other people...is that so strange, given what happened to us? Why shouldn’t you be afraid that people will let you down? Who, in the end, didn’t let us down?”

And that, too, had the ring of truth. For a minute, Bree couldn’t respond. All she had to do was think back, and she could see that the troubles had begun long before the murder. A mother who had always been emotionally absent...a father who couldn’t control his jealous rages. Three little girls who practically raised themselves.

There’d been a whole year—Bree realized now that her mother must have taken a new lover—when a ten-year-old Bree had scavenged in the kitchen almost every night, trying to find something to feed Penny. Rowena, as usual, simply hadn’t eaten.

One night Bree turned dinner into a hunt for pirate treasure, filling the bread box with carrot “coins” and radish “rubies.” She’d felt such triumph, because Penny, only six at the time, had been enchanted. She had never guessed that she feasted on pirate carrots because there wasn’t anything else to eat.

“It did something to all of us,” Penny went on softly. “Think about Rowena. She was always so angry. She wouldn’t get close to anyone for years. At least you try.”

Suddenly, in the midst of her stupid self-absorption, Bree realized that Penny’s face had grown sad, too. If she’d had any artistic talent, she could have sketched a portrait of Penny that was every bit as melancholy as the one of herself she held in her hand right now.

“What about you, sweetpea?” She lowered her voice, just in case Ruth was awake. “What did it do to you?”

Penny smiled vaguely. For a minute, Bree thought her sister might not even answer. But after several seconds, Penny held out a hand and swept it from left to right, as if to encompass the whole town house.