Sanctuary

him.”
    Jo looked at the hand covering hers. It shouldn’t have surprised her, she realized, to find it there, to find it firm and warm. “I should have told both of you before. I should have told all of you before. I wanted to handle it myself.”
    “Now there’s news,” Lexy said lightly. “Cousin Kate, Jo says she wanted to handle something herself. Can you imagine that, the original ‘Get out of my way I’ll do it myself’ girl wanted to handle something on her own.”
    “Very clever,” Jo muttered. “I didn’t give you enough credit either, for being willing to be there.”
    “More news, Kate.” Lexy kept her eyes on Jo’s. “Why, the bulletins just keep pouring in. Jo didn’t give me enough credit for being an intelligent human being with a little compassion. Not that she or anyone else ever has, but that’s the latest flash coming off the wire.”
    “I’d forgotten how good you are at sarcasm—and since I probably deserved both those withering remarks, I won’t ruin it by proving I’m better at sarcasm than you can ever hope to be.”
    Before Lexy could speak, Jo turned her hand over and linked her fingers with Lexy’s. “I was ashamed. Almost as much as I was scared, I was ashamed that I’d had a breakdown. The last people I wanted to know about that were my family.”
    Sympathy flooded Lexy. Still, she kept a smirk on her face and in her voice. “Why, that’s just foolish, Jo Ellen. We’re southerners. We admire little else more than we admire our family lunatics. Hiding crazy relations in the attic’s a Yankee trait. Isn’t that so, Cousin Kate?”
    Amused, and bursting with pride in her youngest chick, Kate glanced back over her shoulder. “It is indeed, Lexy. A good southern family props up its crazies and puts them on display in the front parlor along with the best china.”
    Her own quick laugh made Jo Ellen blink in surprise. “I’m not a lunatic.”
    “Not yet.” Lexy gave her hand a friendly squeeze. “But if you keep going you could be right on up there with Great-granny Lida. She’s the one, as I recollect, wore the spangled evening dress day and night and claimed Fred Astaire was coming by to take her dancing. Put a little effort into it, you could aspire to that.”
    Jo laughed again, and this time it was long and rich. “Maybe we’ll go shopping after all, and I’ll see if I can find a spangled evening dress, just in case.”
    “Blue’s your color.” And because she knew it was easier for her than for Jo, Lexy wrapped her arms around her sister and hugged hard. “I forgot to tell you something, Jo Ellen.”
    “What’s that?”
    “Welcome home.”
     
     
    IT was after six before they got back to Sanctuary. They’d gone shopping after all and were loaded down with the bags and boxes to prove it. Kate was still asking herself how she’d let Lexy talk her into that frantic ninety-minute shopping spree. But she already knew the answer.
    After the hour spent in the police station, they’d all needed to do something foolish.
    When they came in through the kitchen, she was already prepared for Brian’s tirade. He took one look at them, the evidence of their betrayal heaped in their arms, and snarled.
    “Well, that’s just dandy, isn’t it? That’s just fine. I’ve got six tables already filled in the dining room, I’m up to my elbows in cooking, and the three of you go off shopping. I had to drag Sissy Brodie in here to wait tables, and she hasn’t got any more than a spoonful of sense. Daddy’s mixing drinks—which we’re giving them the hell away to make up for the poor service—and I just burned two orders of chicken because I had to go in there and mop up after that pea-brained Sissy dumped a plate of shrimp fettuccine Alfredo on Becky Fitzsimmons’s lap.”
    “Becky Fitzsimmons is in there, and you got Sissy waiting on her?” Tickled down to her toes, Lexy set her bags aside. “Don’t you know anything, Brian Hathaway? Sissy and Becky are desperate enemies since they tangled over Jesse Pendleton, who was sleeping with them both nearly at the same time for six months. Then Sissy found out and she marched right up to Becky outside church after Easter services and called her a no-good toad-faced whore. Took three strong men to pull them apart.”
    Reliving the scene with gusto, Lexy pulled the scarf loose and shook her hair free. “Why, a plate of shrimp fettuccine’s nothing. You’re lucky Sissy didn’t take up one of your