LITMIR.BIZ

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sister’s hesitancy was shock that she’d just up and leave work so early in the day.

      “So can I come now?”

      “Now? Of course you can come now. I’m here with a tablet of paper and a pencil to work on my wish list. You can give your sisterly advice.” The excitement in Christina’s tone almost inspired Delainey to be optimistic about the Three Sisters.

      “You’d be doing me a favor if I could butt in for a while,” she said, already getting up from her desk.

      “Okay, I’m going to make you explain that when you get here. Come, I’ll give you that ‘before’ tour you’ve been almost coming to take for six months now.”

      Delainey hadn’t wanted to encourage what she thought of as Christina’s scary adventure, so she hadn’t been inside the houses. Now she felt a little ashamed of not being supportive.

      She grabbed her coat and flew down the back stairway.

      When she stuck her head into the reception area and called out, “Patty, I’m leaving for a while. Call if you can’t live without me,” Patty looked shocked, but it could not be helped.

      As she yanked her long blond hair from inside her collar, she ran out the door before anyone could call her back. For six solid years after Brianna was born and she became a single mom, she had been the responsible one, the one who was always where she was supposed to be, doing what she was supposed to be doing and more. If she was to be fair, she had been responsible her whole life except for two short days, and maybe right this minute as she left work shortly after she’d arrived.

      The cold February wind rushed inside her open coat and she wrapped the warm quilted fabric around herself. In less than twenty-four hours, she had gone from elated and on her way to the moon to troubled and tumbling out of control. The idea made her muscles twitchy and her head begin to ache.

      Yesterday had started like most Tuesdays. Get up. Exercise. Get Brianna up, ready and off to school. The day had changed completely when she came home and ripped open the letter from the university as soon as she got inside her back door. When she shouted, “Yes! Yes!” Brianna had come running to her side.

      “Did we win something?” her daughter had asked.

      “Yes, sweetie, I did, we did. Mommy gets to go be a lawyer.”

      Yesterday’s triumph now seemed so far in the past.

      In her car again, Delainey pulled out onto Church Street. Morrison and Morrison’s redbrick building, with a stately facade and dark rich wood on the interior, sat on this main road on the south edge of the “old downtown” of Bailey’s Cove. Across Church Street was the town’s mall. Eight stores, a dry cleaner’s, a real-estate company and the Taco Loco, and the rest, alas, empty. The view out the front windows of Morrison and Morrison wasn’t much better than out the back, Delainey had to concede, just brighter.

      Farther south, past Morrison and Morrison, in the “newer” section of town, were the police station, the clinic, a great diner, the new Sacred Heart Church and a small motel. Even farther south and west were several housing developments, most built in the fifties and sixties, including the more upscale homes and one new condo complex built by a hopeful out-of-town contractor.

      Church Street spread the town out along the coastline for several miles, four miles, according to the traditional town limits—which most residents used—but six and a half by the new standards set in the 1950s. Delainey drove north until she turned off onto Treacher Avenue. A few blocks down the hill and toward the docks sat Christina’s passions, Dora, Cora and Rose.

      Delainey parked facing the harbor, got out and leaned on the open door to take in the subtle beauty of the misty gray morning. Next to her adorable daughter’s face, her favorite sight in the world was this small harbor, home to fishing boats, pleasure boats and one lone yacht. Though right now there were only a few fishing boats and the yacht out there in the fog that obscured the outer islands and even those boats were indistinct images, almost dreams.

      She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. The smell of the sea filled her with a sense of being home, of knowing what was good in her life. She would miss all of this if she ever had to live inland.

      “Hey, that was quick.”

      Christina waved from Cora’s porch and charged down the steps of the old Victorian home. Her blond hair and her long legs flew. The two of them might look very much alike, but Christina had more energy than Delainey could even imagine.

      She threw her arms around Delainey and squeezed hard. “You came. I can’t believe you left work. Won’t they fall apart without you?”

      Delainey hugged back. “They might, but today I’m visiting my sister’s brand new acquisition. Congratulations.”

      “Your leaving work for anything besides Brianna is so out of character for you. You’re scaring me—you know that, don’t you?”

      “I told you I’d come.”

      “So what happened?”

      She grinned at her sister. “I got into law school.”

      “Congratulations, sis!” Christina squeezed her in another hug. “Does anyone besides you know?”

      Delainey snorted. “Brianna knows. I was going to tell them at work this morning but something else came up.”

      “Some big new case, I suppose.”

      They both laughed at Christina’s words. There were no big cases, only a few hundred small ones in varying stages of resolution or decay.

      “So do we get to go inside?” Delainey asked, closing the door to her car.

      “Oh, yes. Let’s start with Cora. She’s my star.”

      Christina jiggled the handle of the double-door entryway and let them inside.

      Delainey was surprised by what she saw. “Christina, there’s a fireplace in your, um— This is much more than a foyer. What do you call it?” The wide hall swept all the way to the back of the house, with the fireplace on the left side and two small alcoves and four doors, two on either side, leading to the parlor and kitchen and whatever other rooms Victorian homes had on the first floor.

      “It’s a reception hall, and that—” she pointed to wires dangling from the ceiling high above them “—is the chandelier.”

      Delainey laughed. When they were growing up, the home of her sister’s dreams would have seven chandeliers. “How many are there?”

      “This house has six and the others each have four.”

      “Twice as nice. Cool.”

      Delainey sucked up the misgivings she felt about her sister’s ability to deal with one house, let alone three, and followed her on a tour. Without a doubt, these houses were three of the town’s valuable historical assets, and also without a doubt, no one had been able to give proper attention to them for decades, maybe a half century. And the prospect of fixing them up excited her sister so much Delainey caught some of the fervor.

      The tour did net the fourteen chandeliers. Some were dangling light fixtures, old but not antique. Some were capped or, as in Cora’s reception hall, dangling wires. The fireplaces numbered only nine, as some of them had been removed or covered over, and they were, at least, better than the chandeliers, as they were probably original with stone or wooden surrounds, most with cast-iron inserts.

      Before the tour finished, Delainey almost started seeing women in long dresses and men in waistcoats moving through rooms lit by flames and filled with the joy of a quieter life.

      “Come on, let’s go back to Cora,” Christina said when they had finished in Dora. They ended up in one of the rooms at the front of the house, off the reception hall. Christina had lit a fire in the...living room? Parlor? Delainey wasn’t sure of the technical term for the room where a warm fire burned brightly in the fireplace. The fireplace’s gray marble surround

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