1 Jocelyn glanced at herself in the hotel mirror for the last time. This is it, she thought. This is the moment. Her instinct was to put her nightgown back on and climb back into bed. Wonder what was on HBO during the day? Did this hotel have HBO? Maybe she should look for a hotel that did. She took a deep breath, looked back at the mirror, and straightened her shoulders. What would Miss Edi say if she saw her slumping like this? At the thought of Miss Edi, tears again came to her eyes, but she blinked them away. It had been four months since the funeral, but she still missed her friend so much she sometimes didn''t know how to function. Every day she wanted to call Miss Edi and tell her something that had happened, but each day she discovered afresh that she was gone. "I can do this," Joce said as she looked in the mirror. "I really and truly can do this." She was dressed conservatively, in a skirt and an ironed, white cotton blouse, just the way Miss Edi had taught her. Her shoulder- length, dark blonde hair was pulled back with a headband, and she had on very little makeup. All she knew about the town of Edilean, Virginia, was that Miss Edi had grown up there, so Jocelyn didn''t want to arrive in jeans and a tube top and shock the locals. She picked up her car keys, grabbed the handle of her big black suitcase, and rolled it to the door. Tonight she''d be sleeping in her own house. It was a house she''d never seen, never even heard about until a lawyer told Joce she''d inh