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What Nobody Claimed: A Laurel Gap Cozy Mystery
Paperback
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Publisher: Independently Published
Pages: 230
Weight: 0.62
Height: 0.58 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Every job in this trade has somebody in it who wants you there. Except one.
There is a house four doors up from Delia Tolliver's mother with a padlock on the front and plywood on two windows, and it has had them since 1988.
Forty-three years. Nobody in that family has lived in it, sold it, entered it or spoken about it since Delia was seven years old. Everybody in Ashcombe County has a version of why. Her mother has never given her hers.
Then a servicer in Charlotte rings about a foreclosure clean-out, and Delia stands in that yard for the first time - and the thing that stops her is not the padlock.
The roof is sound.
A shut house in these mountains dies from the top. Fifteen years to the first hole, twenty-five to the sag, thirty-five and the ridgeline is a smile. Forty-three years and a straight ridgeline is not a house with nobody in it.
Somebody has been keeping that house dry. Somebody has been paying the taxes in cash, at a window, four times a year, since 1988 - on a property they do not own and have never been inside.
You do not maintain a house to preserve it. You maintain it to stop it being condemned.
And in a sealed house, everything was worn by one date and then nothing happened. Every tread, every latch, every threshold carries 1988 and forty-three years of nothing on top - which makes it the most precisely readable building Delia has ever been handed.
Nine days into the job, a farmer from across the road is dead at the bottom of the cellar steps.
The county rules it a fall, correctly. And on the first morning, before anybody touched anything, Delia photographed forty-one wear points in that house.
Frame forty-one is the cellar steps.
A warm, wry Blue Ridge mystery with no gore, no swearing, and a solve you can catch if you're paying attention.
Book Five of The Laurel Gap Mysteries. Each book is a complete mystery - no cliffhangers.
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