Framed!. Robin Caroll

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СКАЧАТЬ you need to stop listening to gossip.”

      “That’s not gossip, that’s fact. It was on the local news.” Charla stroked Rhett’s head. “I always knew that girl was trouble. Oh, my, yes. From the first day I met her.”

      “Stop it. That’s just being snobby.”

      Charla huffed. “Well, it’s true. I don’t know why your brother ever hired her.”

      Ava lifted her cup and took a sip of coffee, cooled long ago. “Maybe because she was a qualified secretary with good recommendations?” She let her gaze flit around Bitsy’s Diner again. Tucking the heart medallion and chain inside her blouse, she focused on her mother’s wrinkle-lined face. Ava would never comment on that particular observation aloud. Charla Renault paid good money to look ten years younger than her birth certificate stated.

      “Not hardly. That girl was nothing but trash.”

      “Enough, Mother.” She set the cup on the edge of the table and lifted her pen. She didn’t have time for Charla’s rants right now—she needed to get her out of this diner before Max showed up and the real fireworks began.

      But if she brushed Charla off too quickly, the antennae would come up and she’d never leave Ava alone. “Did the news give any other information?”

      “Just that there are no leads, and Sheriff Reed is calling in the FBI.” Charla moved her wheelchair closer to Ava and lowered her voice despite the practically empty diner. “But people are saying she may have killed her poor husband and now has run off.”

      “And just left her daughter here with her brother? I doubt that.” Ava couldn’t imagine leaving her child behind. If she had a child. She stared at her mother, the old bitterness returning. She’d once had a chance at love and happiness, a husband and children, but her mother had made sure that didn’t happen.

      Now she waited on that particular man to waltz into the diner and put her mother in a tizzy at seeing them together. Even if they were just working together on the Mother of the Year pageant.

      Weren’t they?

      “I told you, the girl is trash. She’d run off and leave her child if it meant saving herself.” Charla spun her chair around and rolled toward the door. Bosworth, Charla’s butler and driver, opened the door, then assisted her from the wheelchair into the backseat of her waiting limo.

      Ava let her mother leave without another word. What was the point? She’d learned long ago that arguing with Charla Renault was like trying to remove all the Spanish moss off the cypress trees in the bayou—useless.

      Inside the diner, wait staff milled about. Dishes clanked from the kitchen. Ava stared absentmindedly out the window.

      She let out a long sigh. What would make Leah Farley just up and leave Loomis? Ava snickered. Dumb question. Smart people left Loomis and never came back. Why hadn’t she?

      Guilt. Duty. Family. Mainly because her father had died in the same auto accident that left her mother paralyzed from the waist down. Her family had needed her then. Charla needed her for a verbal punching bag when her recovery and physical therapy frustrated her. Plus, Dylan, her brother, needed her to take care of Charla so his social calendar wouldn’t be disrupted. Maybe Ava should’ve left when she could. But, no, she’d started her wedding planning business, I Dream of Weddings, and settled into being a business owner in Loomis, even though the majority of the weddings she planned took place in Covington or New Orleans. She continued to pray the Lord would show her His purpose for keeping her in Loomis. So far, He’d been pretty quiet on the subject.

      Ava fidgeted with her papers as Lenore Pershing, Max’s mother, waltzed into the place. Ava couldn’t help slouching in the chair. Again, why had she agreed to meet Max here? She absentmindedly ran her finger along her neckline, finding the necklace outlined under her shirt. She cut her gaze from Lenore and stared at the notepad in front of her. Good thing Charla had left before Lenore arrived. With the old family feud alive and well between the two families’ matriarchs, that would’ve been a scene to end all scenes.

      The notes she’d jotted didn’t make sense. Her mind kept going back to Leah Farley’s disappearance. On the heels of Earl’s alleged suicide…Ava shivered against the ominous cold finger trailing down her spine. Was something—or someone—evil lurking in Loomis?

      ONE

      It was too beautiful a day to bury Dylan Renault.

      Nothing but blue skies hung overhead with the sun blazing down on Loomis Cemetery. Odd for a February in south Louisiana. Where were the bolts of lightning and rolling thunder? Shouldn’t the weather reflect the gloominess of the townsfolk? Not even a fog or mist to mar the beautiful Monday morning.

      Ava stared at her brother’s polished coffin, trying to concentrate on the Scripture being read by Reverend Harmon. She fought back the burning tears and swallowed past the lump caught in her throat.

      Dylan lay in that cold, lifeless box in front of her. He would never again tug her hair or shoot her his lopsided grin. Ava’s stomach roiled.

      Whispers rose from the row behind her.

      “Some say Earl wasn’t really Sarah’s father, and Dylan knew who was. And whoever he is, he’s the one who shot Dylan. Probably because he knew the truth.”

      A different woman’s voice responded. “No, I think Dylan’s really that girl’s father. He and Leah had a torrid love affair that went bad and she got pregnant. That’s why she up and quit working for him. That’s probably why she ran off three weeks ago, too.”

      Bile searing the back of her throat, Ava stiffened her spine and turned her head slightly to see who’d said such an outlandish thing—at the funeral of all places, too. Who’d do something so tacky?

      Micheline Pershing, rumor queen of St. Tammany parish, stared back at Ava with a snooty air.

      She didn’t even have the decency to blush and look away when Ava stabbed her with a vicious glare. No, she met the glare head-on, even having the nerve to give Ava a curt nod in response.

      Disgust inched up Ava’s spine as she jerked to face the casket again and choked back more tears. Micheline was despicable. Dylan wasn’t even in the ground yet, and the woman already spread lies. Not that the whole town wasn’t rumbling with rumors and speculation.

      Ava sighed. Who could blame them, really? Dylan had been shot in the back and left for dead in the overgrown backyard of Renault Hall, the abandoned mansion of Ava and Dylan’s grandfather. Her brother’s last words were what fed the gossipmongers…

      “Sarah’s father.”

      What could he mean? The only Sarah in Loomis was little Sarah Farley, daughter of the missing Leah Farley and deceased Earl Farley. What had Dylan been trying to relay? Nothing made sense, but it was hard to deny the little girl had haunting, green almond-shaped eyes, a trademark of the Renault family. Ava had racked her brain trying to figure out what her brother’s dying words meant. She was as clueless as everyone else in town. The difference was she wouldn’t give in to conjecture.

      “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust…” Reverend Harmon’s words were drowned out by Charla Renault’s sobbing.

      Ava patted her mother’s shoulder, but her mind continued СКАЧАТЬ