Читать книгу Framed! - Robin Caroll - Страница 11

Why couldn’t she have had the foresight to ask Max to meet her in a less conspicuous place?

Ava Renault worried the necklace she wore as she stared out the front windows of Bitsy’s Diner. Her mother drove her wheelchair right toward the door. If Max arrived while Charla was still there…

What was her mother doing here anyway? She normally didn’t deign herself to be seen in the common diner.

Charla wasted no time rolling right to Ava’s table. “Leah Farley’s gone missing.”

Ava covered her Mother of the Year pageant committee notes and stared at her mother. The buzz of conversation from the waitstaff in the diner must have made her hear Charla incorrectly. “What?”

“Leah Farley. You know, your brother’s previous secretary. She’s gone missing.”

What was this? More of her mother’s dramatics? Charla was nothing if not theatrical. “How, exactly, does one go missing in Loomis, Louisiana?”

“According to the news, she dropped her daughter off at her brother’s house yesterday, claiming she had an appointment, and hasn’t been heard from since.” Charla settled her Jack Russell terrier, Rhett, in her lap and guided her electric wheelchair around the small dinette chair. “And just days after her husband was found dead. Isn’t that curious?”

“Mother, you need to stop listening to gossip.”

“That’s not gossip, that’s fact. It was on the local news.” Charla stroked Rhett’s head. “I always knew that girl was trouble. Oh, my, yes. From the first day I met her.”

“Stop it. That’s just being snobby.”

Charla huffed. “Well, it’s true. I don’t know why your brother ever hired her.”

Ava lifted her cup and took a sip of coffee, cooled long ago. “Maybe because she was a qualified secretary with good recommendations?” She let her gaze flit around Bitsy’s Diner again. Tucking the heart medallion and chain inside her blouse, she focused on her mother’s wrinkle-lined face. Ava would never comment on that particular observation aloud. Charla Renault paid good money to look ten years younger than her birth certificate stated.

“Not hardly. That girl was nothing but trash.”

“Enough, Mother.” She set the cup on the edge of the table and lifted her pen. She didn’t have time for Charla’s rants right now—she needed to get her out of this diner before Max showed up and the real fireworks began.

But if she brushed Charla off too quickly, the antennae would come up and she’d never leave Ava alone. “Did the news give any other information?”

“Just that there are no leads, and Sheriff Reed is calling in the FBI.” Charla moved her wheelchair closer to Ava and lowered her voice despite the practically empty diner. “But people are saying she may have killed her poor husband and now has run off.”

“And just left her daughter here with her brother? I doubt that.” Ava couldn’t imagine leaving her child behind. If she had a child. She stared at her mother, the old bitterness returning. She’d once had a chance at love and happiness, a husband and children, but her mother had made sure that didn’t happen.

Now she waited on that particular man to waltz into the diner and put her mother in a tizzy at seeing them together. Even if they were just working together on the Mother of the Year pageant.

Weren’t they?

“I told you, the girl is trash. She’d run off and leave her child if it meant saving herself.” Charla spun her chair around and rolled toward the door. Bosworth, Charla’s butler and driver, opened the door, then assisted her from the wheelchair into the backseat of her waiting limo.

Ava let her mother leave without another word. What was the point? She’d learned long ago that arguing with Charla Renault was like trying to remove all the Spanish moss off the cypress trees in the bayou—useless.

Inside the diner, wait staff milled about. Dishes clanked from the kitchen. Ava stared absentmindedly out the window.

She let out a long sigh. What would make Leah Farley just up and leave Loomis? Ava snickered. Dumb question. Smart people left Loomis and never came back. Why hadn’t she?

Guilt. Duty. Family. Mainly because her father had died in the same auto accident that left her mother paralyzed from the waist down. Her family had needed her then. Charla needed her for a verbal punching bag when her recovery and physical therapy frustrated her. Plus, Dylan, her brother, needed her to take care of Charla so his social calendar wouldn’t be disrupted. Maybe Ava should’ve left when she could. But, no, she’d started her wedding planning business, I Dream of Weddings, and settled into being a business owner in Loomis, even though the majority of the weddings she planned took place in Covington or New Orleans. She continued to pray the Lord would show her His purpose for keeping her in Loomis. So far, He’d been pretty quiet on the subject.

Ava fidgeted with her papers as Lenore Pershing, Max’s mother, waltzed into the place. Ava couldn’t help slouching in the chair. Again, why had she agreed to meet Max here? She absentmindedly ran her finger along her neckline, finding the necklace outlined under her shirt. She cut her gaze from Lenore and stared at the notepad in front of her. Good thing Charla had left before Lenore arrived. With the old family feud alive and well between the two families’ matriarchs, that would’ve been a scene to end all scenes.

The notes she’d jotted didn’t make sense. Her mind kept going back to Leah Farley’s disappearance. On the heels of Earl’s alleged suicide…Ava shivered against the ominous cold finger trailing down her spine. Was something—or someone—evil lurking in Loomis?