Death by Marriage by Blair Bancroft Read Free Book Online Page A

football team with Chad Yarnell. And, yes, they’d been involved in some incidents I’d overheard my parents discussing in whispers. (Okay, I was eavesdropping for all I was worth.) But they’d both gone off to college, graduated, and dutifully plunged into the grown-up world. My brother Scott had managed a couple of years at the local community college, but at twenty-seven the grown-up world still eluded him. A status unchanged, and perhaps unchangeable. I sighed.
    I decided to start at one end of the mall and work my way to the other. The sun had chased away the clouds, but I was in no danger of suffering sunstroke while I walked the mall’s length, maybe a quarter of a mile, as a roof covered the sidewalk in front of the stores. Partly because Florida suffers from an excess of sun interspersed with torrential rain in the summer, and partly because everyone wants to protect their primary source of income, the ubiquitous snowbirds who actually think our winter sun is hot, not to mention that heaven forbid rain should deter their urge to shop.
    I paused in front of the Discount Auto Parts store at the south end of the mall. Every year Bryan Bell and his son Jack filled their entire front window with a nineteenth century Christmas village, complete with a train circling through a tunnel and chugging its way past homes, churches, the railroad station, a restaurant, town hall, a park and a skating pond. There was even a tiny ski lift going up the side of the mountain above the tunnel. At night there were lights in all the miniature buildings and tiny street lights along the roads, making the display even more dramatic. Parents brought their children to Bell’s Auto Discount Parts during the holiday, and a lot of adults came without the excuse of a child companion.
    I followed the progress of the little blue engine until the train disappeared into the tunnel, and then with a sudden blink of nostalgia for a world that, at least in retrospect, seemed so much calmer and cleaner, I opened the door and went inside.
    When I caught the appreciative surveys of both father and son, I glanced down at what I was wearing. A swirly half-circle skirt that flirted with my legs at mid-calf—a flower print in cherry and white on a black background, topped by a long-sleeved black knit wrap top, whose ties hung low, gently swishing as I walked. I’m a designer, after all, and I try to dress the part. No jeans and baggy sweaters for Gwyn Halliday. But no four-inch heels either. There’s a broad streak of pragmatism lurking beneath my creativity.
    I complimented the Bells on the Christmas display. Both men grinned. But sorry, no, they’d watched the parade from the industrial area on the far side of the canal, nearer the Circus Bridge than the Center. They hadn’t seen anything but distant flashing lights and the boats settling down to wait out the search.
    I thanked them and went out, pausing to peer in the front door of the pool hall next door. Inside in the gloom, I thought a saw a shadow moving. I wrapped on the glass. Stan Kaminsky, holding a push broom, came to the door, peered back at me, and turned the dead bolt. Stan is medium height, with the well-muscled shoulders and arms of a man who’s ridden a Harley all his life. But he couldn’t hold a candle to his companion—or maybe his wife—no one knew or wanted to ask. One look at Terry Branson and two words sprang to mind: Biker Babe. She was an inch taller than Stan, maybe twenty pounds heavier, and was never seen in anything but leather, even though they’d long since settled to running a pool hall in a squeaky clean, conservative town like Golden Beach. Probably they figured the community needed something a little on the wild side to keep us from tumbling off the edge of stultifying into downright moribund.
    And, as a business, it seemed to work. The pool hall was open from three p.m. to two a.m. every day but Monday. And it was almost always jammed with that Florida rarity,