One Bad Apple Read Online Free Page A

again, her mother hadn’t seen the place in decades. When she had inherited the house and land from those aged aunts, she’d considered selling the place, but the real estate market had been soft back in the 1980s, so her mother had simply rented it out to a series of tenants with the help of a local Realtor, and more or less forgotten about it except as a tax write-off. And since she hadn’t needed the money, and owned the house free and clear, she had been content just to collect the rent, which easily offset the tax bills. Maybe Meg’s mother had inherited a Yankee thrift gene and couldn’t let go of a property easily. Or, Meg reflected, maybe it was just a case of “out of sight, out of mind.”
    But the last tenants had moved on a couple of months earlier, and nobody else had expressed an interest in a decrepit house in the middle of nowhere, so it had sat empty until Meg’s mother had had her little brainstorm. And as she had pointed out, Meg could job hunt from just about anywhere, couldn’t she, in this Internet era?
    But now Meg wished she had been a bit more specific about who was footing the bills for this renovation. Of course, part of that had been her own stupidity: She had had no idea what this “little” project was going to cost, or how long it was going to take. She had blithely assumed that she could dip into her severance pay, slap a coat of paint on the place, and put it on the market. She had learned quickly how wrong she had been. But now she was reluctant to go back to her mother and ask for assistance. Meg was the banker, wasn’t she? And she was supposed to be smart about money, wasn’t she? Maybe the events of the last few months had hit her harder than she had realized and muddied her thinking. So here she was, stuck—and spending money left and right.
    But if she was honest with herself, Meg had been ready—no, eager—for a change of scene, so she hadn’t looked too hard at what she was getting herself into. Being downsized out of a job was the last straw in a not-so-good year. A few months before she’d lost her job, she’d also been unceremoniously dumped by her so-called boyfriend, Chandler Hale. Being somewhere else for a while had appealed to her. And she wanted to do something that would wear her out enough to sleep at night without wonderingwhy she had apparently repelled both a lover and an employer in the space of a few months. Mom’s plan had offered the ideal opportunity, and Meg had conveniently ignored the fact that she barely knew which end of a hammer to hold. She had taken herself to Granford with high hopes—which had lasted until this afternoon’s visit with Frances. Three weeks of blissful ignorance had just come crashing down around her head.
    Meg had a dim memory of visiting the Aunties with her mother once, many years earlier, but she had no memory of the house. What she remembered best about the visit was being bored. The ladies were unimaginably old to her five-year-old mind. Worse, they were cranky and unaccustomed to children. They had offered tea in brittle china cups and dry store-bought cookies, and then had shooed Meg out to explore the yard while they chatted with her mother. Meg, dressed in her finest for this ceremonial visit, had had little interest in exploring the drafty barn or the muddy fields, and instead had spent most of the time kicking at clods of dirt and feeling much put upon. Meg’s mother had finally given up: her duty done, she had made quick farewells to Lula and Nettie, then collected Meg and scooted her off to the nearest ice cream place.
    Even fortified with a substantial sundae, Meg remembered whining, “Why did we have to come? I’m missing Andrea’s birthday party.”
    Her mother had sighed. “I know it’s been dull for you, sweetie, but they’re our relatives. And they’re old and alone. The house is lovely, though, isn’t it?”
    “I dunno.” Meg had poked at her melting ice cream, and her mother had dropped