Small Town Secrets. Sharon Mignerey
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any good gossip. Who’ve you arrested lately?” Frank shoved the tin of cookies in Foley’s direction.
“Now, you know I can’t talk about that.” He took a cookie and bit into it. “But you watch the news later, you’ll hear about a guy who was found dead on the bus from Denver this afternoon.”
“Was he murdered?” Frank asked.
“Oh, my,” Alice said. “That would be just like that episode of Murder She Wrote where Jessica—Angela Lansbury—had all sorts of trouble on a bus.”
“Might,” Foley said.
“Not everything is like television,” Frank said. “Do you know who he was?”
Gram tapped Léa’s hand and nodded toward the open door of the dining room. “Room.”
“Sure, Gram.” Understanding her grandmother’s wish to return to her room, Léa stood, pulled her grandmother’s walker to within reach, then held it steady while Gram rose to her feet.
“Good night,” Gram said, over-emphasizing the ends of the words in her effort to enunciate clearly.
“’Night,” Foley said. “I’ll see you later, baby.”
Not if I see you first, she thought. “Good night,” she said as mildly as she could as she walked alongside her grandmother.
Foley had called Zach trouble. Since the man was once again at the forefront of her thoughts, he surely was. Even so, Foley’s territorial claim annoyed her just as much as his highhanded visit to Dottie.
After she and Foley had separated, she hadn’t seen him for months, except for the mornings when he dropped by the café for breakfast. Over the last several weeks though, he had started coming around nearly every day and had completely shocked her when he asked her out on a date. The idea of dating him after the way he had treated her during their marriage was repugnant. She didn’t understand…or like…his renewed interest.
He always had a way of shading the truth that he expected to make perfect sense, like the time she found a trash barrel in the barn filled with empty bottles. He had insisted that he was collecting them for target practice. Or all the times he had disappeared for hours, returning home red-eyed and disheveled, incredulous that she hadn’t seen him in the barn or yard doing some chore or another. He was trouble, and she’d had enough of him. No way was she going there again. Not with Foley, and not with anyone else.
The memory of the day they had separated came to the front of her thoughts, sticking like eggs on an unseasoned pan.
“Marriage to you has been nothing but a trap,” he had said within five minutes of coming into the house.
Foley had been ragging on her since they’d left the hospital, and she had done her best to tune him out. All she had wanted to do was climb into bed and stay there until the consuming grief of losing her baby somehow went away. With effort, she had repeated, “Marriage is a trap.” No real surprise there. This wasn’t the first time he’d told her so.
“Glad to know you’re paying attention,” he said.
Wishing that he would offer even a single word of comfort, Léa had filled a glass with tap water from the kitchen sink. When she had turned around to face her husband, she was trembling. Odd that he didn’t seem to notice.
His sandy hair was slicked back the way he liked to wear it when he was on his way somewhere. Stupid that she had hoped he might want to hold her for a while. He hadn’t touched her in weeks, and truth be told, since she’d found proof he had been unfaithful, she hadn’t wanted him to. Just now, though, she would have given anything simply to be comforted.
“Now that you’re not pregnant anymore, there’s no reason why you can’t go out with me,” he said. He glanced at his watch. “Let’s go over to O’Malleys, kick back.” He winked. “I might even let you beat me at a game of pool.”
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