I’d submitted to her enthusiastic tour of all seven thousand square feet of glass, wood, and stone. I’d oohed and aahed over the high ceilings pierced by skylights, the ten fireplaces, the twelve bedrooms. With her photo and Christmas card collections, her Save the Rainforest work (another oddity for someone who’d been living in Qatar), and her many weaving, jewelry-making, and craft projects, Holly had filled up the place with … well, with stuff. Lots of stuff.
Later, Marla had told me that Holly had inherited enormous parcels of land in Nebraska and Colorado. For decades, her parents had owned a chain of feed-and-farm-equipment stores. With the profits, they’d quietly bought up defunct farms in both states, and held on to them. When they’d died two years ago, the sale of the land had ne
