Free The Confidence Woman by Judith Van Gieson

stood up. “Can you stay for lunch?”
    â€œI should get going. It’s a long drive, and I have to be at work tomorrow.”
    ******
    Driving up I-17 to Flagstaff, at the point where the road began to gain elevation just north of Black Canyon City, Claire got stuck behind an oversized load with flags on the tail end. It appeared to be a prefabricated house. On its own plot of land, it would be a very small house, but on the road it was an insurmountable obstacle that symbolized the way Claire was beginning to feel about the death of Evelyn Martin. She hadn’t intended to be doing Amaral’s job when she visited her former classmates in Arizona. She wasn’t an investigator. All she’d planned to do was share a bad experience with others who’d had the same experience. But now she had learned something that Amaral probably didn’t know, and the question of what to do about it nagged her. Miranda had left school shortly after the theft. Claire had never seen her again except for the TV appearances and commercials that Lynn told her about. All she knew about Miranda now was what she had witnessed on the screen, heard from Lynn and could surmise from meeting Erwin. But Miranda had a motive the other sisters did not. The rest of the women had been wounded and inconvenienced by the thefts, but Miranda had been forced to drop out of school. There must have been a time when she felt embittered by the experience. Although Claire didn’t know her anymore, she was reluctant to point the finger at anyone, even if it meant pointing the finger of suspicion away from herself.
    As she poked along behind the house, she thought about New River, where Miranda and Erwin lived. In some ways it resembled Cave Creek, but it was farther from Phoenix and less developed. It was tempting to turn around to get out from behind the house. By now there was a half mile of impatient vehicles behind her and she felt squeezed between them and the hard place of the prefab house. But Erwin was playing golf with Steve and Miranda was on location in Mexico. There was no one to visit in New River, and she remained stuck behind the house until it turned west at Flagstaff.
    Claire made good time the rest of the way. There was an hour of daylight left when she got home, time to tend her roses. Nemesis was so glad to be let out of the house that he darted out the door without even acknowledging her return. She checked the messages and found one from her daughter asking about the funeral. Hoping to take advantage of the daylight, she planned to call Robin later. She put on gardening gloves, grabbed a pair of shears and went into her yard. There were ten large rosebushes along the east-facing wall planted by the previous owner of the house. Claire loved the roses, but she wouldn’t have planted them herself; they required too much attention and too much water. She felt guilty about pouring so much water on a plant. But since the roses were already there, she was obliged to tend them. They rewarded her in spring with a wall of color. There were three different types of roses on her wall. The Don Juans were a deep, dark red. The Saint Joseph’s started out yellow then turned orange and red as they opened. The Sweethearts were almost magenta in color. There were places where the branches of one type of rose crisscrossed the branches of another, continually forming new and rich color combinations and reminding Claire that colors in nature never clashed.
    She had a drip irrigation system that allowed her to go away in the summer. It was enough to keep the roses alive, but not enough to keep them blooming. The roots required deep and regular watering, which she accomplished by moving a hose from plant to plant and letting it run slowly until the ground was saturated. While she waited for the roses to drink, she cut off spent blossoms, a process known as deadheading.
    Claire considered concentrating on the task and the beauty of the