Three-Day Town - By Margaret Maron Page 0,2

A long-bed Chevy pickup is nothing like a pumpkin coach, but I really did feel like Cinderella on her way to a ball.

Best of all, my happily-ever-after Prince Charming was driving the horses.

The Amtrak station lies on the south side of Raleigh and it was crowded with passengers waiting for the Silver Star. Although today would be my very first train trip, I had already decided it was better than flying.

Dwight found a space for the truck just a few steps from the station door. No parking decks or fees. No security lines, no taking off our shoes, no X-raying of luggage, although I wouldn’t have minded seeing what was inside the small package we were taking to New York for Jane Lattimore, one of Kate’s elderly connections.

She had handed it to me at Kate and Rob’s Christmas dinner party and asked me to carry it up to her daughter in New York. No hint as to what it could be and too securely wrapped in heavy brown paper and tied with carpenter’s string for me to sneak a look. Longer than it was wide and surprisingly heavy, the package could have held a tall can of beer or a jar of the white lightning my daddy used to make, except that it didn’t gurgle.

Or rattle either, for that matter.

Okay, yeah, I did shake it. Hey, if they’re strip-searching little old ladies at the airports, who’s not to say a strong-willed old lady couldn’t be sending a bomb north?

Mrs. Lattimore is rather wealthy and had once been a very large fish in our small-pond end of the county. She and my Stephenson grandfather were second or third cousins, once removed—a kinship so tenuous as to be meaningless anywhere except in the South. My mother had used that kinship to get Mrs. Lattimore’s support for enriched school programs, but there was no social interaction. The Lattimores were connected by wealth and marriage to some of the leading families in the mid-Atlantic states, while Mother had forfeited any Junior League aspirations when she married the area’s biggest bootlegger. Growing up, she may have known the three Lattimore daughters, but they had scattered as soon as they reached college age and began impressive careers in other states. Some of the grandchildren used to come for a week or two in the summer, but they kept to themselves behind the iron railings that surrounded the large Queen Anne–style house.

I had briefly met the daughter I was supposed to give the package to. Anne Lattimore Harald is a Pulitzer Prize–winning photojournalist, and the museum in Raleigh exhibited her work a few years ago. Kate introduced me at the opening reception, but there’s no way she would have remembered me among so many that night.

Kate’s first husband had been more closely related to the Lattimores than my weak link, and Kate kept a sort of a watching brief on Mrs. Lattimore, a thankless task since the elderly autocrat had sworn her to secrecy as her physical condition deteriorated. “She knows her daughters would try to bully her into more chemotherapy,” Kate said, when I told her that I’d been commissioned to take something to New York because Dwight is a deputy sheriff.

“Aunt Jane’s been sorting through the house and labeling everything so that they will know who’s to get what when the time comes. Even her jewelry and her silver and her antique furniture. What could be so valuable that she’d risk letting Anne know how sick she is just so she could be sure it got to her safely?”

That Christmas dinner was the first time I’d seen Mrs. Lattimore in months and I’d been shocked by her fragility.

According to Kate, Mrs. Lattimore was convinced that chemo would only give her a few extra months. Miserable months at that. With no desire to prolong the inevitable, she intended to wait until it was clearly too late before telling her children.

“She doesn’t want to spend the last year of her life bald and wretched,” said Kate, “and the older I get, the more I think she has a right to make that decision for herself.”

Chemotherapy has probably advanced tremendously in the twenty-one years since Mother died, but remembering how nauseated, weak, and physically depleted she was by the end of that summer, I could understand Mrs. Lattimore’s reasoning. All the same, difficult as it had been for me to watch Mother struggle and suffer, the memory of that summer is precious to me, and I thought it