My own office looked sorely neglected after seeing Juliet Sanders’s space. It smelled it, too—one of the drawbacks of an old converted house with no central heating and cooling in Tallahassee’s humid climate. It gets funky fast when I’m not there to air it out.
I left the front door open as I carried my mail to my desk. But first, my voicemail. I had messages from my exterminator (time to nuke the palmetto bugs again), a political fundraiser doing a cold call, and the Spencers’ friend Faith Halliway. I crossed my fingers and gave her a call back.
She answered on the second ring and asked me to wait a minute. It took her about that long to return to the phone.
“Sorry,” she said, voice low, “I didn’t want the busybodies in the teacher’s lounge listening in. Deborah ended up in the hospita
