Free Bleeding Kansas by Sara Paretsky

pipes will burst. Do you want me to light the pilot?”
    â€œLara!” Susan was embarrassed in her turn. “She doesn’t need you telling her how to run the house.”
    â€œMaybe I do,” Gina said. “I’ve never lived in a palace before. The furnace is on, but I can’t afford to heat a palace. I put space heaters in the rooms I use. The rest of the place stays a nice fifty-five degrees, perfect for the spiders and the mice.”
    Lara looked at her, baffled. It was impossible to tell what Gina meant, because, despite the sarcastic words, she sounded enthusiastic, as if she wanted to make the house attractive to vermin. Lara decided it was safer not to say anything else. Besides, she couldn’t believe Gina didn’t have any money: not only did her clothes look as though they cost a fortune, she had a big cappuccino machine on the counter; one not even that fancy was for sale at Z’s Espresso Bar, and it cost twelve hundred dollars.
    Gina glanced at Lara’s troubled face and smiled, a genuine-looking smile, and said with genuine-sounding warmth, “I’m sorry, I’m a little distracted this morning. I know your house, because your father pointed it out to me when he drove out with me last weekend to open up this place. Who lives behind me? Do they own all those cows?”
    â€œThe cows belong to the Schapens,” Lara said. “You can’t see their house from here. Really, you can’t see it from anywhere, not even our hayloft, because their farm is built so far back from the road. The Ropeses live behind you.”
    Lara pointed at the gray clapboard house across the field, where her best friend Kimberly had grown up. Kimberly and her parents lived in town now, but Kimberly’s grandfather still farmed the land. She and Lara had gone to Kaw Valley Eagle together, before Kimberly’s dad gave up on farming and took a job in the maintenance department at the university. Now Lara and Kimberly were in ninth grade together in town. They played basketball on the junior varsity team.
    â€œYour husband told me you were an expert on the house,” Gina said to Susan, still in the same warmer-sounding voice.
    It was all the encouragement Susan needed. She launched into the story of Abigail’s journey west, how the Fremantles and Schapens had helped her when Etienne Grellier was too busy thinking great Transcendentalist thoughts to work the fields, how Abigail’s oldest son married Una Fremantle’s daughter and that’s how the Grelliers ended up with all the papers about the house.
    Lara watched Gina’s face. She was blinking under the avalanche of Susan’s information, but she continued to listen. Her face didn’t have that blank look people get when they are really thinking about lunch or their date to the game instead of what you are talking about.
    Susan showed Gina the flour bin where Una Fremantle had hidden her husband during Quantrill’s raid, a waist-high receptacle that pulled out of the wall at an angle. When Lara was a child, she used to beg Mrs. Fremantle to let her climb into it, so she could pretend to be hiding out from Quantrill.
    â€œQuantrill burned down my husband’s family’s shanty and the Fremantles’ first house—this is the one Judge Fremantle built after the Civil War. The Fremantle kitchen survived Quantrill, fortunately, or the judge would have been murdered. Una Fremantle was always obsessed with fire after that. Have you seen the study? Once, Jim and I took a trip to Boston so I could see where the Grelliers and the Fremantles had started their pilgrimage, and I got to tour the house that Horace Fremantle grew up in. This room here is an almost exact replica of his father’s office. I fixed it up so you can work in here, if you want.”
    Susan ushered a dazed Gina across the small foyer at the bottom of the back stairs, through a bathroom next to it, and into Horace