Tangled Secrets: A Gabi Espinosa Mystery
Chapter One
Central Florida Panhandle
Nothing of any consequence ever happened in Turner’s Crossroads.
The fact that my tire blew out that morning on isolated Landfill Road didn’t count. It only served to startle me.
Shaken, alone on the two-lane, I forced the steering wheel to the right and brought the car to a jarring stop on the weed-covered embankment, just a few feet from an impenetrable thicket of palmetto.
“Gracias a Dios, Meche,” I muttered. Stress made me slip into Spanish.
And the nickname? No one had called me Meche since my parents died. At age thirty-five, I was known as Gabi, or Miss Gabi, depending on who spoke to me. My late husband, Bobby, sometimes used the full Gabriela.
He once tried to teach me how to change a tire. It hadn’t gone well. He’d laughed and told me to call him or our road service company.
I’d failed to buy road service and had made it a point not to think about Bobby. I wasn’t going to begin while stranded near the long-abandoned landfill.
Taking the shortcut to town had been a mistake. But after dropping off my fifteen-year-old for her school-sanctioned volunteer work in nearby Port Beatrice, I had to rush back for work. I couldn’t afford to be late opening the library. On Thursdays, I had to arrive a good half hour earlier than normal because of my always punctual, generally-a-problem, patron. That extra half hour gave me the strength and patience to deal with Ryker Fordham.
Eight twenty-three, according to the dashboard clock, meant there would be no extra half hour. No way to get to work by nine a.m.
With the engine still running, I grabbed my cellphone to call the local auto shop.
Pointless. I couldn’t pick up a signal this far from town.
Over the past six years, I’d figured out how to do a lot. I could figure out how to change a tire.
But as silly as it was, I resisted getting out of my car.
Because Landfill Road was supposedly haunted. As an impressionable eleven-year-old, recently arrived from Peru to live with my grandmother after my parents’ deaths, my English schoolroom-perfect, I’d taken the darkest of the scary tales to heart.
The one about the ghosts had bothered me the most. Soldiers killed in a battle during the Second Seminole War. Missing arms, their ghoulish faces set in desperate masks of pain, they forced drivers off the road. Several wrecks were cited as proof, never mind the lack of historical evidence verifying even a skirmish near town. Then there were the eerie popping sounds, muskets many claimed, which hadn’t been heard in my lifetime, but lived on in legend—as if a town as inconsequential as Turner’s Crossroads could aspire to legends.
I didn’t believe in ghosts. No ghost would dare crawl out of the tangle of palmetto on such a bright sunny morning. As I reached forward to turn off the engine, the shadow of a man bending beside my closed window startled a gasp from me.
But rather than a ghoulish soldier, the cleanly shaven face of Ryker Fordham—or as he preferred, Brother Fordham—loomed beside me. He wasn’t a minister, so contrarian that I could sometimes be, I’d always called him Mr. Fordham. My response to his formality of calling me Mrs. Espinosa, unlike everyone else in town.
I rolled down the window enough to hear him, not that I needed to. Mr. Fordham’s voice boomed as if he’d used a megaphone.
“Mrs. Espinosa, you have a flat front tire. Do you have a spare?”
“Yes. I’m going to change—”
“I’ll change it for you.”
“You don’t…” Have to.
But he’d already headed for the trunk of my car. His battered black pickup sat a few yards behind my Taurus.
As I pushed open the door, the wind kicked up, gusting across the narrow county road. It plastered Mr. Fordham’s thick salt-and-pepper hair to his head and billowed his button-up shirt around his thin body. I’d never seen him without his threadbare but tidy suit jacket. He’d probably taken it off to keep from getting it dirty. Also missing was the trademark bow tie.
I used the key fob to open the trunk, and he bent to look inside.
“You will be late for work,” he said when I joined him.
Of course. He was focused on the library. An obsession made known every single Thursday.
He hefted the spare tire out and laid it on the ground. With economical movements, possibly well practiced given the state of his ancient pickup, he jacked up the car, pulled off the flat and put on the spare.
Meanwhile, the wind, which could have cooled the building morning heat, had died. By the time he finished, Mr. Fordham’s shirt clung to his body.
“You’ll need a new tire, Mrs. Espinosa.” He lifted the flat into the trunk and closed it.
“Thank you for doing this for me.”
With his face set in stern lines and his steel-blue eyes focused on me, he said, “It’s the least I can do for Tom’s daughter.”
Despite the heat of the morning, a chill prickled along my scalp. There were no ghosts on Landfill Road, no ghoulish specters, only an old man willing to help me as a favor to the father I barely remembered.
But his words, and our encounter, would haunt me when the humdrum existence of Turner’s Crossroads flipped on its axis.
Chapter Two
I opened the library fifteen minutes late, a first in the six years since I’d moved back to town. Mr. Fordham wasn’t there, also a first. While he usually stood outside waiting even before the nine a.m. opening, that morning he’d made a U-turn and driven away. I guessed he’d gone home to change clothes.
But there was no time to think about Mr. Fordham, or his first-ever mention of my late father. I had opening procedures to complete.
By the time Dorothy Stevens, the full-time library clerk, came in at ten, I had moved on to my to-do list. At that moment, it involved climbing a ladder to change a lightbulb. She greeted me with her customary glum “hello,” then looked around for our usual Thursday morning patron. Her gray brows pinched when she didn’t see Mr. Fordham. She loved to gossip. He generally gave her enough fodder for an entire week.
As the morning wore on and patrons wandered in, we grew increasingly busy. Several people needed books neither my library nor our multi-county-wide library system owned. We had a patron-accessible site for those requests, but our older patrons didn’t have the tech skills to handle it. Dorothy hated that system even more than she hated all other library technology.
By lunch time, I’d decided Mr. Fordham would miss his Thursday visit. Had he hurt himself changing my tire? Guilt assailed me as I remembered how frail he looked without his jacket. But he’d changed the tire as if it were nothing.
Then, just before three p.m., he came in and headed straight for the magazines. Within ten minutes, my hope that his morning’s helpfulness would carry over to his next visit proved a pipe-dream.
“Mrs. Espinosa!” Agitation colored his voice. He’d changed, but looked disheveled. The jacket, different from the usual one, hung to one side as if misshapen. The bow tie, always straight, lay angled to the left.
“Coming, Mr. Fordham.” I really hoped it wouldn’t become one of those Thursdays.
I still hadn’t figured out why this sixty-something man obsessed about our library. It wasn’t like I ordered radical materials for the residents of our small forgotten Florida Panhandle town. Yet I could always count on him to find something to complain about other than our worn carpet and tight quarters.
“Mrs. Espinosa!”
My name is Mercedes Gabriela Carmichael Romero Espinosa. Since moving from Peru to Turner’s Crossroads at eleven, Romero, my late mother’s maiden name, has been ignored. I’m half Peruvian, but the last name that tags me as Latina is my husband’s. That name came to Bobby from so far back no one knew where the Espinosas originated.
Mr. Fordham seemed to think using Mrs. made his constant dissatisfaction more palatable. At least there were few patrons to hear him that late in the afternoon.
A thorn in my side since I took over the county branch library in Turner’s Crossroads, Mr. Fordham’s relentless quest to check on library materials had complicated my work life. From all accounts, he’d never bothered the former manager when she was the head of the library.
I didn’t think it was personal. Besides changing my tire, he’d also fixed my windshield wipers once—during a rain storm—and pushed a loaded book cart up the handicap ramp when I’d returned with books from the nursing home. Maybe those, like the tire change, had been favors because of his friendship with my father—something I’d never known. I’d learned to accept him rather than try to understand his idiosyncrasies.
“Mrs. Espinosa!” Mr. Fordham bellowed, even though I stood only five feet away. For a smallish man, he had the voice of a drill instructor when agitated. “I told you this… thing—” he waved what appeared to be the latest issue of Men’s Journal “—is smut.”
I mentally kicked myself for overlooking the title when I organized the newer back issues of magazines the main library sent over. “Why don’t I show you our new arrivals?” AKA the cart I arranged to keep his attention off such titles as Cosmopolitan, Rolling Stone and the Harry Potter series. The Fifty Shades incident and the ensuing chaotic publicity it generated were best forgotten.
Before leaving him to peruse the carefully selected books and magazines, I thanked him again for helping me. His head tilted up, but he didn’t make eye contact before going back to rifling through the items on the cart.
I walked to my desk at the front of the library, the one I called the reference desk, and breathed a sigh of relief. So far, he had not complained about the way Flora Mae Martin, my part-time clerk, dressed. I’d tried to moderate her clothing choices and had succeeded to a certain extent. Gone were the fishnet stockings, but she wouldn’t relent on the three-inch heels nor the short dresses. That sort of advice coming from a widowed librarian seemed to fall on deaf ears.
“Excuse me, Miz Gabi?” Flora Mae said in her feathery whisper. Flora Mae was a fascinating contradiction. While her clothes screamed look at me, her manner more closely matched her old-fashioned name. Barely twenty, slim, with gorgeous green eyes, she was one of the sweetest people I’d ever met. If I hadn’t known better, I would have said her older sister influenced her dress choices, but Rhonda, a good friend and the unrepentant wild-child of town, said she’d told Flora Mae to wear slacks and flats to work.
“Yes, Flora Mae?”
“Mr. Fordham was talking dirty to me again.” She cast a cautious glance toward him.
Ryker Fordham didn’t talk dirty. He quoted scripture. Flora Mae didn’t know the difference because Mr. Fordham had a knack for picking his scripture—then altering it to suit the occasion.
“I’ll talk to him,” I said. “Why don’t you pull those new paperbacks off the processing room shelf and put them on a cart? There’s an empty one over by Dorothy’s desk.”
Dorothy stood ramrod straight behind the checkout desk. Thin lips pursed, her short gray hair neat and as tidy as her floral blouse and black slacks, she waited for Mr. Fordham to do something outlandish so she could reach out and tell all of Turner’s Crossroads the latest about our most eccentric citizen.
“Yes, ma’am,” Flora Mae replied.
“Let me know before you wheel out the cart.” Mr. Fordham didn’t need to know I’d bought more of what he called disgusting trash novels—romance novels to the rest of the world.
Then, too, with Flora Mae in the back room, I wouldn’t risk what happened the Thursday before. During that visit, Mr. Fordham said something I didn’t hear to Flora Mae’s sister. Rhonda told him to fuck off, shocking me because I’d never heard her use her remarkable repertoire of curse words in anger. He’d stared at her but said nothing.
Rhonda left before I could speak with her. Flora Mae said she didn’t hear the exchange, and that Rhonda refused to tell her what caused the outburst. I’d called Rhonda a few times since, texted, had even stopped by the beauty shop she owned with her mother, but we hadn’t connected.
“Is this the cart, Miz Gabi?” Flora Mae pushed the one with the sign that read Loose Handle.
“Yes, that’s it. Why don’t you alphabetize the books by author before you put them out?” Mr. Fordham could browse while I took the time to come up with exactly what to say to him.
“Yes, ma’am.” And off she went, wobbling on her heels, leaving me pleased I’d handled things so well.
My foolhardy self-satisfaction proved a mistake.
Before I could speak with Mr. Fordham about whatever he said to Flora Mae, the glass door opened and there stood Mark Stone, Davenport County’s new deputy. Tall, blond and handsome. Just as I’d heard. Better looking than I’d imagined. Meeting him was not on my top-ten list, not when he and I were the objects of the latest matchmaking efforts of way too many people. Especially not when those efforts reminded me of what took me away from Turner’s Crossroads seventeen years ago. Or rather, who took me away from Turner’s Crossroads.
Bobby Espinosa. My daughter’s father.
Like Mark Stone, Bobby had been a cop, only federal, for the Drug Enforcement Administration.
“Are you Gabi Espinosa?” the new deputy asked, standing in front of my desk.
My Peruvian self sighed a silent, Ay. What could I say? His voice matched his body. He sounded and looked spectacularly male.
The women in Turner’s Crossroads were one hundred percent right. This man could even make spinsters fall at his feet. Thank God I was no spinster.
“Yes?” I hoped the single word didn’t sound like a croak.
“I’m Mark Stone, from the sheriff’s department,” he said, as if I didn’t at least suspect from the uniform. With his blue eyes shuttered and the set of his lips grim, he looked a little too serious for the hot, sexy-newcomer gossip he’d inspired. “I’m looking for Flora Mae Martin. Sheriff Parker says she works here.”
I stood, tipping my chair in my haste to stand. So much for not falling at his feet. “She’s in the back. I’ll get her for you.”
“If you don’t mind—” Mark Stone said, his voice deep and somber “—I’d like to speak to her somewhere private.”
I forgot the good looks. I knew that tone. Something was horribly wrong. When Bobby’s supervisor told me--
“Is there a problem?” I asked.
“You might want to stay close.”
Those old feelings, the ones that burned along the edges of my thoughts, the ones I thought I’d buried, washed over me. I blinked back tears. I hadn’t cried in so long.
“Her parents?”
He tilted his head slightly, as if surprised at my assumption. “Her sister.”
“Rhonda?” Her name tumbled from my mouth as I fell back into my chair. I struggled for the next words. “Is she...?”
My unspoken question hung between us for an instant.
He said nothing. And that said it all.
My heart skipped a beat, but I stood again, refusing to think, to ask questions. I didn’t want to know. I couldn’t bear to know. “I’ll take you to Flora Mae.”
When I came to the States as a lonely, out-of-place sixth grader, Rhonda was the first of my classmates to accept me. Even then, she was vivacious and funny. She was the one who christened me “Gabi,” saving me from being called mur-SAY-deez, which sounded so wrong to my Spanish-speaking self. I longed for the softer, familiar sound of mer-SEH-des, or meh-cheh. I considered myself lucky because later, when Rhonda developed the most incredible knack for cursing, I could have been nicknamed anything.
She was one of a handful of friends who stuck with me over the years. After I left town, we stayed in touch with phone calls and texts, many of which contained hilarious, satirical, often-risqué memes. She’d been there through the haze after Bobby’s death. The following week, she’d taken turns holding my hand with my other close friend, Pepper Godwin. When I came back to Turner’s Crossroads, we often met for lunch at the local diner. Her advice, written in bold block letters on a paper napkin, suddenly seemed prophetic.
Live your life.
How could she be gone?
I led Deputy Stone across the small library, in front of the book stacks, opened the workroom door and stepped into the musty processing room. “Flora Mae?”
“Yes, Miz Gabi?”
“Deputy Stone would like to speak with you.”
Flora Mae popped up from behind an overflowing book cart. She took one look at the new deputy and her green eyes widened.
Short minutes later, her eye make-up had run down her cheeks, and she clung weakly to me.
“I’ll take her home, Deputy.” I steadied Flora Mae, looked past the girl at him, and asked, “Do her parents know?”
“Sheriff’s out there now.”
I jerked my thoughts away from Frank and Val Martin, mourning Rhonda.
Mourning their child.
I sucked in a deep breath.
Mark Stone stood in our path, turning his uniform hat in his hands. Before leaving, he said, “I’m sorry for your loss, Miss Martin.”
How I hated that phrase. That, and “he was a good man,” especially when the words came from anyone in law enforcement.
But this wasn’t about Bobby. It was about Rhonda. And while Rhonda had been good to me, very few people in Turner’s Crossroads would say Rhonda was good.
Central Florida Panhandle
Nothing of any consequence ever happened in Turner’s Crossroads.
The fact that my tire blew out that morning on isolated Landfill Road didn’t count. It only served to startle me.
Shaken, alone on the two-lane, I forced the steering wheel to the right and brought the car to a jarring stop on the weed-covered embankment, just a few feet from an impenetrable thicket of palmetto.
“Gracias a Dios, Meche,” I muttered. Stress made me slip into Spanish.
And the nickname? No one had called me Meche since my parents died. At age thirty-five, I was known as Gabi, or Miss Gabi, depending on who spoke to me. My late husband, Bobby, sometimes used the full Gabriela.
He once tried to teach me how to change a tire. It hadn’t gone well. He’d laughed and told me to call him or our road service company.
I’d failed to buy road service and had made it a point not to think about Bobby. I wasn’t going to begin while stranded near the long-abandoned landfill.
Taking the shortcut to town had been a mistake. But after dropping off my fifteen-year-old for her school-sanctioned volunteer work in nearby Port Beatrice, I had to rush back for work. I couldn’t afford to be late opening the library. On Thursdays, I had to arrive a good half hour earlier than normal because of my always punctual, generally-a-problem, patron. That extra half hour gave me the strength and patience to deal with Ryker Fordham.
Eight twenty-three, according to the dashboard clock, meant there would be no extra half hour. No way to get to work by nine a.m.
With the engine still running, I grabbed my cellphone to call the local auto shop.
Pointless. I couldn’t pick up a signal this far from town.
Over the past six years, I’d figured out how to do a lot. I could figure out how to change a tire.
But as silly as it was, I resisted getting out of my car.
Because Landfill Road was supposedly haunted. As an impressionable eleven-year-old, recently arrived from Peru to live with my grandmother after my parents’ deaths, my English schoolroom-perfect, I’d taken the darkest of the scary tales to heart.
The one about the ghosts had bothered me the most. Soldiers killed in a battle during the Second Seminole War. Missing arms, their ghoulish faces set in desperate masks of pain, they forced drivers off the road. Several wrecks were cited as proof, never mind the lack of historical evidence verifying even a skirmish near town. Then there were the eerie popping sounds, muskets many claimed, which hadn’t been heard in my lifetime, but lived on in legend—as if a town as inconsequential as Turner’s Crossroads could aspire to legends.
I didn’t believe in ghosts. No ghost would dare crawl out of the tangle of palmetto on such a bright sunny morning. As I reached forward to turn off the engine, the shadow of a man bending beside my closed window startled a gasp from me.
But rather than a ghoulish soldier, the cleanly shaven face of Ryker Fordham—or as he preferred, Brother Fordham—loomed beside me. He wasn’t a minister, so contrarian that I could sometimes be, I’d always called him Mr. Fordham. My response to his formality of calling me Mrs. Espinosa, unlike everyone else in town.
I rolled down the window enough to hear him, not that I needed to. Mr. Fordham’s voice boomed as if he’d used a megaphone.
“Mrs. Espinosa, you have a flat front tire. Do you have a spare?”
“Yes. I’m going to change—”
“I’ll change it for you.”
“You don’t…” Have to.
But he’d already headed for the trunk of my car. His battered black pickup sat a few yards behind my Taurus.
As I pushed open the door, the wind kicked up, gusting across the narrow county road. It plastered Mr. Fordham’s thick salt-and-pepper hair to his head and billowed his button-up shirt around his thin body. I’d never seen him without his threadbare but tidy suit jacket. He’d probably taken it off to keep from getting it dirty. Also missing was the trademark bow tie.
I used the key fob to open the trunk, and he bent to look inside.
“You will be late for work,” he said when I joined him.
Of course. He was focused on the library. An obsession made known every single Thursday.
He hefted the spare tire out and laid it on the ground. With economical movements, possibly well practiced given the state of his ancient pickup, he jacked up the car, pulled off the flat and put on the spare.
Meanwhile, the wind, which could have cooled the building morning heat, had died. By the time he finished, Mr. Fordham’s shirt clung to his body.
“You’ll need a new tire, Mrs. Espinosa.” He lifted the flat into the trunk and closed it.
“Thank you for doing this for me.”
With his face set in stern lines and his steel-blue eyes focused on me, he said, “It’s the least I can do for Tom’s daughter.”
Despite the heat of the morning, a chill prickled along my scalp. There were no ghosts on Landfill Road, no ghoulish specters, only an old man willing to help me as a favor to the father I barely remembered.
But his words, and our encounter, would haunt me when the humdrum existence of Turner’s Crossroads flipped on its axis.
Chapter Two
I opened the library fifteen minutes late, a first in the six years since I’d moved back to town. Mr. Fordham wasn’t there, also a first. While he usually stood outside waiting even before the nine a.m. opening, that morning he’d made a U-turn and driven away. I guessed he’d gone home to change clothes.
But there was no time to think about Mr. Fordham, or his first-ever mention of my late father. I had opening procedures to complete.
By the time Dorothy Stevens, the full-time library clerk, came in at ten, I had moved on to my to-do list. At that moment, it involved climbing a ladder to change a lightbulb. She greeted me with her customary glum “hello,” then looked around for our usual Thursday morning patron. Her gray brows pinched when she didn’t see Mr. Fordham. She loved to gossip. He generally gave her enough fodder for an entire week.
As the morning wore on and patrons wandered in, we grew increasingly busy. Several people needed books neither my library nor our multi-county-wide library system owned. We had a patron-accessible site for those requests, but our older patrons didn’t have the tech skills to handle it. Dorothy hated that system even more than she hated all other library technology.
By lunch time, I’d decided Mr. Fordham would miss his Thursday visit. Had he hurt himself changing my tire? Guilt assailed me as I remembered how frail he looked without his jacket. But he’d changed the tire as if it were nothing.
Then, just before three p.m., he came in and headed straight for the magazines. Within ten minutes, my hope that his morning’s helpfulness would carry over to his next visit proved a pipe-dream.
“Mrs. Espinosa!” Agitation colored his voice. He’d changed, but looked disheveled. The jacket, different from the usual one, hung to one side as if misshapen. The bow tie, always straight, lay angled to the left.
“Coming, Mr. Fordham.” I really hoped it wouldn’t become one of those Thursdays.
I still hadn’t figured out why this sixty-something man obsessed about our library. It wasn’t like I ordered radical materials for the residents of our small forgotten Florida Panhandle town. Yet I could always count on him to find something to complain about other than our worn carpet and tight quarters.
“Mrs. Espinosa!”
My name is Mercedes Gabriela Carmichael Romero Espinosa. Since moving from Peru to Turner’s Crossroads at eleven, Romero, my late mother’s maiden name, has been ignored. I’m half Peruvian, but the last name that tags me as Latina is my husband’s. That name came to Bobby from so far back no one knew where the Espinosas originated.
Mr. Fordham seemed to think using Mrs. made his constant dissatisfaction more palatable. At least there were few patrons to hear him that late in the afternoon.
A thorn in my side since I took over the county branch library in Turner’s Crossroads, Mr. Fordham’s relentless quest to check on library materials had complicated my work life. From all accounts, he’d never bothered the former manager when she was the head of the library.
I didn’t think it was personal. Besides changing my tire, he’d also fixed my windshield wipers once—during a rain storm—and pushed a loaded book cart up the handicap ramp when I’d returned with books from the nursing home. Maybe those, like the tire change, had been favors because of his friendship with my father—something I’d never known. I’d learned to accept him rather than try to understand his idiosyncrasies.
“Mrs. Espinosa!” Mr. Fordham bellowed, even though I stood only five feet away. For a smallish man, he had the voice of a drill instructor when agitated. “I told you this… thing—” he waved what appeared to be the latest issue of Men’s Journal “—is smut.”
I mentally kicked myself for overlooking the title when I organized the newer back issues of magazines the main library sent over. “Why don’t I show you our new arrivals?” AKA the cart I arranged to keep his attention off such titles as Cosmopolitan, Rolling Stone and the Harry Potter series. The Fifty Shades incident and the ensuing chaotic publicity it generated were best forgotten.
Before leaving him to peruse the carefully selected books and magazines, I thanked him again for helping me. His head tilted up, but he didn’t make eye contact before going back to rifling through the items on the cart.
I walked to my desk at the front of the library, the one I called the reference desk, and breathed a sigh of relief. So far, he had not complained about the way Flora Mae Martin, my part-time clerk, dressed. I’d tried to moderate her clothing choices and had succeeded to a certain extent. Gone were the fishnet stockings, but she wouldn’t relent on the three-inch heels nor the short dresses. That sort of advice coming from a widowed librarian seemed to fall on deaf ears.
“Excuse me, Miz Gabi?” Flora Mae said in her feathery whisper. Flora Mae was a fascinating contradiction. While her clothes screamed look at me, her manner more closely matched her old-fashioned name. Barely twenty, slim, with gorgeous green eyes, she was one of the sweetest people I’d ever met. If I hadn’t known better, I would have said her older sister influenced her dress choices, but Rhonda, a good friend and the unrepentant wild-child of town, said she’d told Flora Mae to wear slacks and flats to work.
“Yes, Flora Mae?”
“Mr. Fordham was talking dirty to me again.” She cast a cautious glance toward him.
Ryker Fordham didn’t talk dirty. He quoted scripture. Flora Mae didn’t know the difference because Mr. Fordham had a knack for picking his scripture—then altering it to suit the occasion.
“I’ll talk to him,” I said. “Why don’t you pull those new paperbacks off the processing room shelf and put them on a cart? There’s an empty one over by Dorothy’s desk.”
Dorothy stood ramrod straight behind the checkout desk. Thin lips pursed, her short gray hair neat and as tidy as her floral blouse and black slacks, she waited for Mr. Fordham to do something outlandish so she could reach out and tell all of Turner’s Crossroads the latest about our most eccentric citizen.
“Yes, ma’am,” Flora Mae replied.
“Let me know before you wheel out the cart.” Mr. Fordham didn’t need to know I’d bought more of what he called disgusting trash novels—romance novels to the rest of the world.
Then, too, with Flora Mae in the back room, I wouldn’t risk what happened the Thursday before. During that visit, Mr. Fordham said something I didn’t hear to Flora Mae’s sister. Rhonda told him to fuck off, shocking me because I’d never heard her use her remarkable repertoire of curse words in anger. He’d stared at her but said nothing.
Rhonda left before I could speak with her. Flora Mae said she didn’t hear the exchange, and that Rhonda refused to tell her what caused the outburst. I’d called Rhonda a few times since, texted, had even stopped by the beauty shop she owned with her mother, but we hadn’t connected.
“Is this the cart, Miz Gabi?” Flora Mae pushed the one with the sign that read Loose Handle.
“Yes, that’s it. Why don’t you alphabetize the books by author before you put them out?” Mr. Fordham could browse while I took the time to come up with exactly what to say to him.
“Yes, ma’am.” And off she went, wobbling on her heels, leaving me pleased I’d handled things so well.
My foolhardy self-satisfaction proved a mistake.
Before I could speak with Mr. Fordham about whatever he said to Flora Mae, the glass door opened and there stood Mark Stone, Davenport County’s new deputy. Tall, blond and handsome. Just as I’d heard. Better looking than I’d imagined. Meeting him was not on my top-ten list, not when he and I were the objects of the latest matchmaking efforts of way too many people. Especially not when those efforts reminded me of what took me away from Turner’s Crossroads seventeen years ago. Or rather, who took me away from Turner’s Crossroads.
Bobby Espinosa. My daughter’s father.
Like Mark Stone, Bobby had been a cop, only federal, for the Drug Enforcement Administration.
“Are you Gabi Espinosa?” the new deputy asked, standing in front of my desk.
My Peruvian self sighed a silent, Ay. What could I say? His voice matched his body. He sounded and looked spectacularly male.
The women in Turner’s Crossroads were one hundred percent right. This man could even make spinsters fall at his feet. Thank God I was no spinster.
“Yes?” I hoped the single word didn’t sound like a croak.
“I’m Mark Stone, from the sheriff’s department,” he said, as if I didn’t at least suspect from the uniform. With his blue eyes shuttered and the set of his lips grim, he looked a little too serious for the hot, sexy-newcomer gossip he’d inspired. “I’m looking for Flora Mae Martin. Sheriff Parker says she works here.”
I stood, tipping my chair in my haste to stand. So much for not falling at his feet. “She’s in the back. I’ll get her for you.”
“If you don’t mind—” Mark Stone said, his voice deep and somber “—I’d like to speak to her somewhere private.”
I forgot the good looks. I knew that tone. Something was horribly wrong. When Bobby’s supervisor told me--
“Is there a problem?” I asked.
“You might want to stay close.”
Those old feelings, the ones that burned along the edges of my thoughts, the ones I thought I’d buried, washed over me. I blinked back tears. I hadn’t cried in so long.
“Her parents?”
He tilted his head slightly, as if surprised at my assumption. “Her sister.”
“Rhonda?” Her name tumbled from my mouth as I fell back into my chair. I struggled for the next words. “Is she...?”
My unspoken question hung between us for an instant.
He said nothing. And that said it all.
My heart skipped a beat, but I stood again, refusing to think, to ask questions. I didn’t want to know. I couldn’t bear to know. “I’ll take you to Flora Mae.”
When I came to the States as a lonely, out-of-place sixth grader, Rhonda was the first of my classmates to accept me. Even then, she was vivacious and funny. She was the one who christened me “Gabi,” saving me from being called mur-SAY-deez, which sounded so wrong to my Spanish-speaking self. I longed for the softer, familiar sound of mer-SEH-des, or meh-cheh. I considered myself lucky because later, when Rhonda developed the most incredible knack for cursing, I could have been nicknamed anything.
She was one of a handful of friends who stuck with me over the years. After I left town, we stayed in touch with phone calls and texts, many of which contained hilarious, satirical, often-risqué memes. She’d been there through the haze after Bobby’s death. The following week, she’d taken turns holding my hand with my other close friend, Pepper Godwin. When I came back to Turner’s Crossroads, we often met for lunch at the local diner. Her advice, written in bold block letters on a paper napkin, suddenly seemed prophetic.
Live your life.
How could she be gone?
I led Deputy Stone across the small library, in front of the book stacks, opened the workroom door and stepped into the musty processing room. “Flora Mae?”
“Yes, Miz Gabi?”
“Deputy Stone would like to speak with you.”
Flora Mae popped up from behind an overflowing book cart. She took one look at the new deputy and her green eyes widened.
Short minutes later, her eye make-up had run down her cheeks, and she clung weakly to me.
“I’ll take her home, Deputy.” I steadied Flora Mae, looked past the girl at him, and asked, “Do her parents know?”
“Sheriff’s out there now.”
I jerked my thoughts away from Frank and Val Martin, mourning Rhonda.
Mourning their child.
I sucked in a deep breath.
Mark Stone stood in our path, turning his uniform hat in his hands. Before leaving, he said, “I’m sorry for your loss, Miss Martin.”
How I hated that phrase. That, and “he was a good man,” especially when the words came from anyone in law enforcement.
But this wasn’t about Bobby. It was about Rhonda. And while Rhonda had been good to me, very few people in Turner’s Crossroads would say Rhonda was good.