Chapter 9. You Don't Get That Yet

Josie's POV

It took me three days of peeling potatoes to get Ida Odom to say the word Kincaid.

Ida was eighty-one. She'd come to Ashford Court as a scullery girl at fourteen and never left, and she sat on a high stool by the vegetable sink with a paring knife, peeling faster than Paolo could carry the pots away. She had three teeth and an opinion about everyone, and for two days her opinion of me was that I asked too many questions.

"West line," she said on the first day, when I asked what lay past the Cedar Run border. "Nobody goes out there."

"Why not?"

"Ask the queen why she wore black that fall." And that was all I got.

On the second day I brought her coffee the way she liked it, with too much sugar, and she told me about her late husband