The Lover. BEVERLY BARTON

not bad looking, despite being a bit of a nerd. He owned the local hardware store and could provide handsomely for a wife. Luckily, he had divorced that hussy wife of his before they’d had children. And it didn’t hurt that Raymond’s mother, Helen, had been one of Brenda’s best friends for ages. The other Sunday guests would include the new minister, Matthew Donaldson. Matthew was young, handsome, charismatic, and best of all, he was single.

      “Are you staying for lunch, Brenda?” Abby Miller asked.

      “I wouldn’t miss it.” Brenda smiled warmly at Abby, although she didn’t especially like the woman. Abby wore too much makeup, dyed her hair that phony blue-black and wore clothes that screamed trailer trash. And there was a rumor going around town that Abby was secretly seeing another man while her poor husband was off in the Middle East serving his country.

      The others staying for lunch began making a circle in the middle of the exercise room floor. Brenda glanced around to ascertain just who was still here so she could decide who she wanted to sit by. One by one, she ruled out the women she did not want to talk to for the half-hour lunch session. Definitely not Abby Miller. She crossed Renee Michaels off her list immediately. That woman didn’t have a brain in her silly head. Besides, it was a known fact Renee was a slut. Deputy Holly Burcham was another no-no, but only because she was sitting beside Renee, as was Amber Claunch, whom Brenda liked.

      “Hmm …” Brenda spotted Bernie’s secretary, Lisa Wiley, and started in her direction, but stopped the minute she saw Cathy Downs sit beside Lisa. Cathy was a sweet person, but she would bore you to tears with her incessant chatter. The woman never stopped talking—about her children, her husband Lieutenant John Downs and her latest diet. The plump chatterbox tried every new diet craze that came along and did her best to convince everyone else that this one was the miracle cure for overweight women.

      As her gaze traveled the completely formed circle, she suddenly saw her perfect spot, right between Amy Simms and Thomasina Hardy. Brenda hurried across the room, then paused and looked from Amy to Thomasina.

      “Would y’all mind making room for me?” Before either could reply, Brenda squeezed in between them, forcing them to separate enough to make room for her.

      Amy smiled pleasantly at Brenda. “Yes, please, join us.”

      “We were just talking about what happened to that poor girl, Stephanie Preston, from over in Scottsboro,” Thomasina said.

      “It’s the world we live in.” Brenda shook her head sadly. “When I was a girl, you never heard of anything like that happening around here. Northeast Alabama was one of the safest places on earth to live. Why, my folks never locked the doors and we slept with the windows open and never worried about somebody breaking into the house.”

      “All the article in this morning’s Daily Reporter said was that she’d been murdered.” Amy looked right at Brenda. “You don’t know anything else, do you? Something you could share with us?”

      Brenda smiled, hoping her expression conveyed to these ladies that she did, indeed, know something very important about the murder case. Although she knew no more than they did, being the sheriff’s mother, as she had once been the sheriff’s wife, afforded her the privilege of pretending to be in possession of top-secret information.

      “I’m afraid there’s nothing I’m at liberty to share with y’all,” Brenda said. “There are many things that can’t be shared with the public or it might jeopardize the case. I learned years ago, as R.B.’s wife, to keep my mouth shut.”

      “Oh, Brenda, come on,” Amy cajoled. “Isn’t there some little something? You know we’d never tell a soul.”

      Brenda shook her head, then leaned over and whispered to Amy, “Well … No, no, I can’t. Sorry.”

      “We understand,” Thomasina said. “Besides, I’m not sure I want to know the details. Rumors are that she was naked when they found her, and you know what that usually means—it means she was probably raped. Poor girl.”

      “Wonder if they think her husband killed her?” Amy said. “I tried to pry something out of Jerry Dale last night, but he wasn’t talking. I told him, what good is it for me to be the DA’s wife if the DA never tells me anything.”

      All three women laughed.

      “Did somebody tell a good joke?” Robyn asked as she pulled the serving cart behind herself.

      “Not really,” Brenda replied. “It was just nervous laughter.”

      “We were talking about that poor Stephanie Preston,” Thomasina said.

      Robyn retrieved two salads in plastic containers from the serving cart, then handed one to Thomasina and the other to her mother. “You know, when she came up missing and all those searches didn’t turn up anything, I had a feeling she was dead. It gives me cold chills to think about what happened to her.” Robyn handed Amy a salad.

      “We were trying to dig information out of your mother, but she won’t tell us anything,” Amy said.

      Robyn eyed her mother speculatively, the corners of her wide, full mouth turning up ever so slightly. Brenda knew that expression only too well. It was Robyn’s shame-on-you-Mama look.

      “Being members of the sheriff’s family doesn’t necessarily mean we’re in possession of any more information than the average citizen,” Robyn said, then winked at her mother.

      Brenda let out a mental sigh of relief that her daughter hadn’t given her away. But then Robyn had been Brenda’s coconspirator all her life, backing her up, keeping her secrets, sharing in her love for gossip. Bernie had been the tattletale, always telling R.B. everything. Her elder daughter had never learned the art of telling socially acceptable little white lies. Like R.B., she could be too in-your-face blunt and brutally honest. That detrimental trait wasn’t very appealing to most men and was probably one of the reasons Bernie couldn’t find a husband. That and the fact that Bernie needed to lose twenty pounds.

      * * *

      Since the Preston home was in Jackson County, Sheriff Mays accompanied Bernie, Jim and Charlie Patterson when they met Kyle Preston and Stephanie’s parents at the white vinyl-sided house the newlywed couple had rented near Hollywood. Bernie asked the parents and husband to come outside with her and sit on the porch to talk to her and Ed Mays while Charlie Patterson and Jim Norton searched the house.

      The parents sat side by side in the porch swing. The husband sat in one of the two white rocking chairs, while Ed Mays took the other. Bernie remained standing.

      “I can only imagine how difficult this is for y’all.” Bernie looked at each of them individually. “And I’m truly sorry that we have to question y’all again.”

      “Ed explained,” Jay Floyd, Stephanie’s father, said. “We want to do whatever we can to help y’all catch whoever killed our little girl.” Tears welled up in the middle-aged man’s faded brown eyes.

      “We appreciate your cooperation.” Bernie glanced at Emmy Floyd, Stephanie’s mother, who sat quietly, tears streaming down her cheeks and a glazed expression on her face. She held her hands in her lap and kept twisting her gold wedding band around and around. Dear God, how horrible this must be for her. To lose a child would be bad enough, but to know that child had suffered repeated brutality for nearly two weeks would be something no mother could ever come to terms with.

      Bernie turned to Kyle Preston, and she could tell by the glassy look in his eyes that he was still medicated. “Mr. Preston … Kyle … thank you for allowing us to search your house. I promise that Agent Patterson and Captain Norton will not tear things apart in the search.”

      “I don’t know what they think they’ll find,” Kyle said. “If I’m not a suspect …” His voice cracked. He swallowed hard.

      “You’re not a suspect, Kyle. Your in-laws verify the fact that you were at their house the evening Stephanie came up missing, that you two had eaten supper