Page 27 of Chosen Path
Bodhi considered the question for a moment, then he shook his head. “No, I’m afraid I don’t.”
“Your doctor friend thinks she’s doing the right thing, but all she’s really doing is riling people up. She’s not making any friends. In a small town, a person has to learn to go along to get along,” Booth spelled it out.
“Or what?”
“What’d you mean?”
“What if she doesn’t go along with how things have always been done? What happens?”
Booth shrugged. “Probably gets chased out of town like the last guy that didn’t play ball.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Not tarred and feathered and tied to a post, I hope.”
The police officer lowered her chin and gave him a steady look. “Nothing so dramatic. But I grew up in a small town a lot like this one, and I’ll tell you this much—I’d rather get chased out of town than get slowly frozen out by being shunned. These people can make her life miserable. A low-level, pervasive misery that’ll follow her around like a shadow.”
She delivered the message like a woman who spoke from experience.
CHAPTERTHIRTEEN
Rockman’s Hardware
Main Street, Scandia Bluff
Burke Deerfield rapped his knuckles on the counter. “Yoo-hoo, you in there?”
Greg jolted and jerked his attention back to the impatient customer standing in front of him. “Sorry, Burke. You caught me daydreaming. Can I help you with something?” He flashed Burke an apologetic smile.
Burke plunked a light switch down on the counter. “Need to get your expert opinion on something.”
“Shoot.” It never failed to amaze Greg that his customers believed he knew everything there was to know about every type of home repair. They’d ask him questions about plumbing, wiring, insulation, ventilation, you name it—and then, even more amazingly, they’d blindly follow his advice.
When he’d inherited the business from his mother’s brother, he’d known diddly squat about any of it. But he’d found his uncle’s musty set of old home repair encyclopedias in the store’s basement and had set about to read them straight through. When he’d finished the entire set, he’d started over with the first one. He reread the series annually, so by this point, thirty-odd years later, he could rattle offhowto do pretty much all of it, though he couldn’t actuallydoany of it himself.
“The light in the dining room’s, whatdayacallit, double switched? You know what I mean—you can turn it on from the switch in the hallway and from the switch in the room itself.”
“Ah-yup.”
Ah-yupwas something else he’d borrowed from Uncle Lou. To Greg, it sounded like the sort of thing a handy Vermonter said. Most likely because he had fuzzy boyhood memories of Uncle Lou fixing a leaky faucet or caulking a doorframe andah-yuppingto himself.
“Well, the switch in the hallway doesn’t work. You can flick it off, on, off, on and nothing happens. At first, Tammy thought the bulb burned out, but I dragged out the stepladder and changed it, and don’t you know, it still didn’t work. But then I turned it on from that wall switch in the dining room and it worked just fine.”
“Sure sounds like you have a bad switch,” Greg agreed. He glanced down at the switch. “Replacing it will fix that, no problem.”
Instead of being pleased, Burke grew more sour. “That’s what I thought, but I bought this last week. That new kid you hired sold it to me.”
“Josh?” The ‘new kid’ was pushing thirty and had been working at the store part-time for close to a decade, but sure.
“Yeah, Josh. He told me this is what I needed. So I bought it. Tammy pulled up one of those videos on the computer and we watched this fellow install one. I did everything he did, but the switch still won’t work. It turns the light off now, but it won’t turn it on. I need a refund.” He slapped his hand down on the counter.
Greg wrinkled his brow. He appeared to be studying the part, but in reality he was recalling the rewiring chapter ofThe Complete Guide to Home Repair(Volume 10). After a minute, he nodded and looked up at Burke.
“See, I’ll bet your wires are reversed.” Before Burke could open his mouth to argue, Greg continued, “I know, you followed the DIY guy’s instructions to a tee, I’m not saying you didn’t. But older homes, in particular, have their own quirks. Here’s what I’d do if I were you. Make sure you turn the power off at the box, first. Then, take apart theotherlight switch.”
“The one that works?”
“Right. Get Tammy to take a picture of the inside so you can see where the wires go. Screw the plate back on then take this and wire the hall connection up just like it is in your picture.” He pushed the package with the switch back across the counter toward Burke.
Burke gave him a doubtful look. “And it’ll work?”
