Page 105 of Brewbies
Exotic Dancer with Mob Ties Drags Former First Lady, Receives Fuck-ton of Jail Time.
“Could you maybe text it to me?” Darby suggested.
“This is the kind of information I’d only feel comfortable disclosing in person, if you catch my drift,” Roy said.
“Speaking of catching—”
“Of course,” Caryn interrupted. “Please, go ahead, Roy, so we can get Miss Dunwell on her way.” She squeezed his forearm encouragingly.
Crinkles appeared at the corners of Roy’s gray-blue eyes. “As you know, I’ve been a devoted amateur historian for some time.”
“Why yes,” Caryn said. “The historical society has relied on your expertise on several occasions.”
Roy’s clean-shaven cheeks glowed with the compliment. “In my research on the Townsend family, I’ve discovered something rather, rather shocking.”
Darby’s knuckles whitened on the well-worn leather of her steering wheel.
Caryn’s eyes widened. “Shocking?”
Roy nodded. “You see, before the Townsend family founded Townsend Harbor, they were p-puh—” He paused, emitting an embarrassed chuckle.
Only on two occasions had Darby heard him struggle with a slight stutter, and both times, in the wake of a verbal confrontation.
Odd.
“Prostitutes?” Darby suggested, trying desperately to hurry him along. “Priests? Plumbers?”
That the last in this series earned her a sharp look from Caryn, Darby found more than a little amusing.
A gull wheeled overhead, its harsh cry seeming to echo Darby’s frustration.
“They were p-p-puh-puhpirates.”
Caryn gasped, her eyes widening to the size of saucers as her hand flew up to her neck to clutch at the string of very real pearls. “No.”
“Yes!” Roy said in a harsh whisper. “Sailed with C-Captain C-Cook himself.”
“There, there.” And damned if Roy’s hand didn’t cover Caryn’son the damn door.
Darby’s right foot twitched.
The headline quickly rewrote itself.
Exotic Dancer Traumatizes Elderly Veteran, Is Sentenced to Hell.
“I’m sorry to have to tell you like this,” Roy said gently.
“As fascinating as this has been, I really, really—”
Another gasp from Caryn sent Darby’s heart into borderline atrial fibrillation. “Does Ethan know?”
The name reverberated through Darby’s head like an echo, exposing the cavernous volume of the space the sheriff had occupied. A liminal space between who she had been, and who she would be in the aftermath of her heartbreak.
A thousand times she’d been tempted to text him.
A thousand times she’d slapped the phone out of her own hand.
She was not, refused to be,thatgirl.
