Free Hard Truth by Mariah Stewart Page A

noticed you have an alarm system, though.”
    “After my younger brother and sister left home, Mom lived here with my grandmother until Gran died, about six years ago. Mom had the alarm installed then.”
    “You don’t use it?”
    “I know the code to disarm it, but not the one to set it.”
    “Isn’t it the same code?”
    “Oh. Maybe.” She frowned. “I guess I could call the alarm company. I just figured with the locks on the doors, I should be all right.”
    “Still, if you’re paying for the service, you should look into it.”
    “I don’t know if it will be worth it, frankly, since I’m not sure how long I’ll be here.”
    They walked past the barn, and a few of the feral cats poked out tentatively to watch. Lorna noted the water bowl she’d left for them was empty, as was the bowl of dry food.
    “I wonder if they’re eating that,” she muttered.
    “What?”
    “The barn cats. I was just wondering if they were eating the dry cat food I left for them, or if it was being eaten by raccoons or field mice or whatever.”
    “I doubt the mice would stand a chance. I counted four cats in the doorway. How many more are there?”
    “I don’t know. They’ve been out there in the barn for as long as I can remember. A few years ago my mother rounded up the kittens and took them to the vet down the street to neuter them so they’d stop multiplying, but who knows if there aren’t others? Gran liked them because they kept the mice population down, and she never had to resort to traps or chemicals to get rid of them.” Lorna smiled. “Gran called the cats ‘nature’s mousetraps.’ ”
    At the edge of the field, T.J. stopped and took in the vista.
    “How much is yours?” he asked.
    “All of it, except for the back section, where the body was found. We sold off thirty acres a year and a half ago to pay for my mother’s radiation and chemo.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “Thank you.” Lorna pointed off to the right. “There’s a pond behind that wooded section, and a small orchard. There’s also a small family burial ground.” She turned toward the left and said, “Down there is an old vineyard my great-uncle started back in the 1940s. It was pretty much ignored after he died.”
    “I thought I smelled grapes.”
    “That wouldn’t have been from Uncle Will’s vineyard, I doubt there’s much going on down there after all these years. The grapes you smelled were from the arbor in the backyard. My gran’s jam grapes. An altogether different kind of fruit.”
    “Can’t you make wine from jam grapes, and jam from wine grapes?”
    She laughed. “All I know is that the grapes on Gran’s arbor are big and dark purple. I only saw the other ones—the wine grapes—when I was little, before the weeds and the trees started taking over the vineyard and it got too spooky to play in.”
    “Spooky?” He cracked a smile. “Did your young imagination convince you that it was haunted?”
    “Oh, sure. I went through a stage where I saw ghosts and haunts everywhere. I think it started after I found out that there really were bodies buried in the family cemetery. Then when Uncle Will started acting up, it made a believer out of me.”
    “Uncle Will acts up?”
    “He died in the late forties, and he’s never really left.” When T.J. chuckled, she shrugged and said, “Hey, you can believe it or not, but I’ve heard him and seen him. Once you’ve met a ghost head-on in your upstairs hall, it isn’t much of a stretch to believe that those weird sounds coming from the vineyard are caused by demons. The older kids in the neighborhood used to tell me that, and I believed them.”
    “I noticed that up along the main road there were a bunch of houses that had really large properties in the rear. Makes it more of a real neighborhood, I suppose, than a typical farm community.”
    “Right.” Lorna pushed a long strand of hair from her face. She wished she’d grabbed one of the straw hats hanging near the back