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“Thank you.”
“Oh, you bet.” She patted the yellow-and-blue plaid cloth tote bag at her feet. “I keep scrapbooking materials and my favorite stamps in mine. You never know when inspiration will strike.”
Phil pushed away from the table and stood. “Ladies, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go out in the hall for a smoke. I'll see you later.”
“Darn, I was hoping you could help me carry a box from the business office to the convention hall.” Sarah Jane paused for a moment. “But I'm sure you don't have time for that.”
“I can help.”
“Aren't you the sweetest, Beth, but it's a big box and really I need a man's help. Don't you two worry, I'm sure I can pay a bellboy to haul it for me.”
A strained smile tugged at Ph
il's cheeks. “We can't have that. I'd be happy to help.”
“Wonderful.” She stood. “Let's be off. We'll see you later at the reception, Beth.”
“Yes, ma'am.”
Watching the two of them walk off, it struck Beth that she'd known Sarah Jane for most of her life, but the niggling feeling in her gut telling her she had missed something had grown into an ache.
She had to have turned into a paranoid mess to even imagine Sarah Jane as a criminal mastermind. She was a senior citizen scrapbooking fanatic, for God’s sake.
She pulled out a legal pad and the Haverstan file from her briefcase, uncapped a black pen and drew a vertical line down the center of a page from the pad. In an organized fashion, she listed what she knew about Haverstan on one side of the paper. The list was regrettably short. On the other side, she wrote a much longer list of questions she still needed to answer, most notably, who was behind Haverstan and were they the ones who had drugged her last night. At that, her pen stilled. Until she got back home, there wasn't much she could do. Unless…
Digging her phone out of her briefcase, she ignored the unease swirling around in her stomach and punched in the number she'd first memorized in sixth grade. This would not be a comfortable conversation, but there were only a handful of people in Dry Creek, Nebraska, who knew where most, if not all, the bodies were buried.
“Layton residence.”
“Hi, Mrs. Layton, it's Beth.”
“So Hank tells me you're not my daughter-in-law,” Hank's mother said without preamble. “What kind of foolishness have you two been up to? Imagine if the Junior Leaguers got ahold of this information. It would be all of town in an hour flat.”
Yep. This was going as expected, but if she'd learned anything growing up as Claire's best friend, it was the best way to deal with Glenda Layton was to be blunt. “Nothing. It was just a mix-up. No wedding. No divorce. No nothing.”
“Mmm-hmmm.” Translation: You're full of it.
“Speaking of gossip—”
“Gossip? I've never gossiped a day in my life.”
Beth shook her head. Glenda could easily operate a clandestine intelligence-gathering operation in her sleep. “You're right, I misspoke. I'm trying to get some information about a company called Haverstan, they've been buying up the land around my grandparents’ place.”
“Interesting. I haven't heard that name in forever and a day.”
“You've heard of them?”
“Sure.” Her strong voice turned wistful. “When I was growing up, there were Haverstans all over Dry Creek County. Cecil Haverstan, he was the cute one, died in Vietnam. Two of the cousins died of fever when we were in grammar school. Most everybody else scattered to the four winds in the seventies.”
“So no one's left?” So much for old-school intel.
“Let me think…Cecil's cousin, Robert Reynolds, died a few years back, so that leaves only Sarah Jane Hunihan.”
Beth straightened and glanced up at the door Sarah Jane had walked out of minutes ago. “What?”
“Oh yeah, she's a Haverstan on her grandmother's side. You'd never know it to look at her now, but that one was a hellion in her younger days. Had boys from six counties mooning after her, but she ignored them all. That girl had her eyes on a bigger prize than a bunch of cowhicks.”
“What was that?”
