What The Water Took: A Laurel Gap Cozy Mystery: 4

A dead person does not watch you work. That is the whole difference, and it took Delia Tolliver ten years to understand what it was worth.Vada Pruitt is eighty-one and moving to two rooms in Asheville, and she has already made a list.Sixty-one years of a house on the Sugar Cove road, reduced to thirty-one objects and four hundred and ten square feet. She is funny, she is unsentimental, and she is certain about exactly nine things - a quilt, a crock, a wash pot with a rose in it, and a mantel clock her mother carried out of Cane Creek in a pillowcase in 1947.Cane Creek has been under a hundred and forty feet of water since the autumn her mother walked out of it. Forty-one households, a school, two churches, and a cemetery moved in a single week.Nine days after the truck pulls away, Vada is dead on her own kitchen floor in Asheville, of a fall from a step stool she had owned for forty years.And Delia Tolliver is the last person alive who went through everything that woman owned.The county rules it an accident, correctly. A nephew in Charlotte says a ring is missing. And a detective in a different county - fair, patient, and entirely unimpressed by anything Ashcombe County thinks of itself - wants to know why a woman who cleans out houses has four hundred photographs of a dead woman's bedroom.Clearing herself sends Delia back through her own record. Which is where she finds a clock that cannot be what everybody says it is, and a hundred-year-old inventory of a drowned valley that nobody has read since 1953, and a name that is not on it.A warm, wry Blue Ridge mystery with no gore, no swearing, and a solve you can catch if you're paying attention.Book Four of The Laurel Gap Mysteries. Each book is a complete mystery - no cliffhangers.