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extent, Mrs. Beabots. Indian Lake was a place where people cared about each other. Sometimes, that caring morphed into being a busybody, but such extravagances of eccentricity were forgiven by the locals. Outsiders or those new to the area didn’t understand. They never would, either. That was why they remained outsiders. It took heart to be a part of Indian Lake, and a great deal of courage, determination and persistence. Sarah knew her mother was Indian Lake at its best.
    * * *
    S ARAH PARKED HER car in her assigned space, gathered her portfolio and purse and exited the car. She went around to the front of the building and entered through the double glass doors.
    Just walking into the reception area of Environ-Tech Design still gave her chills of pride after almost two years. Charmaine Chalmers had carefully laid out the space with the expertise of one of the most illustrious Black Hat Feng Shui Masters in Chicago. The serenity and peace that clients felt walking in the doors was planned, purposeful and dramatic. It was a breath of urban class in a small town, and Sarah loved it. The walls were painted a burned taupe with glistening white crown molding and trim. The floor was bamboo hardwood covered with ancient Persian rugs in muted browns, reds and golds that looked as if they had been dragged through the Sahara to gain their patina. Tall African jars held white bird-of-paradise stalks that Sarah knew attracted aphids like crazy, but Charmaine spritzed the leaves with soapy water and wiped them down one by one on Saturday nights when she had nowhere else to go.
    The conversation area was centered with an ink-black mahogany coffee table that glistened like glass and had never once been allowed to display the first fingerprint or speck of dust. The front-desk receptionist, Lou Ann Hamilton, made certain that Charmaine’s specially manufactured and painstakingly imported Samoan table was pristine at all times.
    The Asian-inspired seating was actually Italian in design and constructed south of Milan, but no one in the office was allowed to give out the name of Charmaine’s highly talented, grossly underpaid furniture designer. Charles Vesa was fifty years old, divorced, and other than when he wandered into the Environ-Tech offices unannounced with rolls of design paper under his arm, few people ever saw the man. When Charles showed up, Charmaine always dropped everything she was doing, sat in her conference room and studied his drawings as if they were bits of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
    Sarah went into her cubby-hole-size office, which was only slightly larger than the other offices up and down the hallway. The building, built before the First World War, still had interior doors with walnut bottoms and frosted, “pebbled” glass on the upper half of the door. No one could see in or out. It seemed rather odd to Sarah that, despite Charmaine’s intense desire to create a Feng Shui atmosphere in the front of the office and the conference room, the rest of the building felt like the back rooms of an old county recorder’s office. The offices were certainly not conducive to creative thought.
    Sarah went to her frosted, double-hung window and lifted the sash. A warm, fresh breeze with a hint of lilacs drifted past the sill. She inhaled deeply and sighed.
    Just then, her phone rang. She looked at the blinking light. It was Lou Ann at the front desk.
    “This is Sarah.”
    “Charmaine wants to see you in the conference room. Do you want some coffee?” Lou Ann asked sweetly, with a hint of the Southern accent she’d brought with her when she and her husband moved here from Tennessee.
    “Sounds lovely,” Sarah replied. “I’ll be there.”
    Sarah hung up, looked down at her portfolio and crossed her fingers for luck. Mom, I know you’re up there pulling for me. You, too, Daddy. If this goes right today, I could finally get a promotion.
    She looked around her office and grimaced. Okay. That’s not likely. But, she thought,