Generations of students had loved her as a teacher and were aware of no vice, yet Mrs. Peace claimed that she wasn’t entirely wholesome. She had a checkered past, she liked to say, though she had at last remained faithful to the memory of Emmaline’s father, Billy Peace. It was reverently said that she had tried to throw herself into his grave. He had actually been cremated, but no one remembered. Billy Peace was also Nola’s father. Nobody really knew how many wives had married Billy, or what had gone on in that cultish compound of his decades ago. Billy’s children and now grandchildren kept
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