LITMIR.BIZ

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of a suspicious-looking dented gold Cadillac heading toward Tyler, Wisconsin. “No adult around here drives a car that sounds like…like…” Brick shook his head, his mind unable to seize upon any suitable phrase.

      “Like the end of the world,” Reverend Sarah Baron said decisively a few minutes later, looking up from her desk in the Tyler Fellowship Sanctuary. Vaguely, Sarah wondered if the car would wind up stopping in town and if the passenger was feeling friendless and lonely or might someday become a member of her parish, then she said, “Maybe Michael can do something about that awful-sounding muffler.” Yes, if the driver couldn’t afford a mechanic, surely Sarah’s husband would offer to look at the car free of charge, though by the sound of it, even an act of God wouldn’t fix it. “Oh ye of little faith,” Sarah sighed after a few moments, still chiding herself as, some distance away, Martha Bauer gaped through the window of a stately brick Victorian known as Worthington House, then at the ladies seated around a quilting frame.

      “Look at that woman’s hair!” exclaimed Martha with a gasp.

      Pausing, needles raised in midair, the other women, mostly elderly, stared curiously through the window into the twilight, scrutinizing the Cadillac sedan idling at the new stop sign on the corner. The driver had short, spiky dark brown hair, streaked with red. “Her hairstyle’s certainly inventive,” Lydia Perry remarked, knowing nothing less could have drawn her mind from the date she’d shared last night with Elias Spencer.

      “And is that a wedding dress bunched in the passenger seat?” asked Martha, squinting.

      “Sure looks like it,” said Bea Ferguson, determined to speak before anyone initiated another argument about whether or not the new stop sign was really necessary. “And look. She’s got a baby in the back. I see a car seat.”

      “A baby?” Lydia leaned forward, wondering where the woman was headed and whether there was a man in the picture. “Do you all think that poor woman’s running from some kind of trouble?”

      “Who knows?” sighed Bea. “But if she stops in town for the night, she’ll probably head for the Kelsey Boarding House or the Timberlake Lodge, which means we’ll hear the gossip if there is any.”

      “Or she’ll go to Granny Rose’s,” Martha added, referring to Tyler’s bed-and-breakfast. “It’s just a good thing she didn’t park in front of Worthington House. That car looks like something bequeathed by Elvis, don’t you think?” she continued as she bent her head over the quilting frame and surveyed the fabric with sharp eyes that belied her eighty-seven years. “I’d rather walk a mile in orthopedic shoes than be caught dead in a car as awful as that.”

      “Martha, not everybody can afford a late-model car,” Kaitlin Rodier reminded gently. The newest group member glanced up from the patchwork quilt. “Besides,” she chided, “with hair like that, she’s got to be from a city, and let’s face it, Tyler can always use some new blood, even if she’s just passing through.”

      “City people,” grunted Tillie Phelps grumpily, cocking her head and taking in the quilt’s royal blue border. “I figure we’ve got enough excitement with Quinn Spencer stopping by to chat with us all the time, and with that woman, Caroline Benning, coming to town.”

      Everyone fell silent, considering the new waitress at Marge’s Diner. The young woman’s stay at the Kelsey Boarding House had been uneventful, but just last week she’d been found tangled in the rose bushes outside Elias Spencer’s house. She’d sworn she was chasing a stray cat she wanted to take to a vet, but no cat was ever found and now most people figured she’d been spying on the Spencers.

      “Well,” Bea finally said as she continued stitching one of the group’s sought-after quilts that were so popular around Tyler, “in addition to Caroline Benning’s being here, all the Spencer boys have come home. Caroline was probably trying to peek at Quinn through the window of Elias’s place, don’t you think?”

      “Probably,” Martha agreed. “Quinn is awfully cute.”

      “All those Spencer boys are good looking,” Emma Finklebaum mused, nodding as the Cadillac lurched past the stop sign, into the intersection. “Hey, what if that woman knows the Spencers? She does look like she’s from a city, and the Spencers came from New York, remember?”

      “Who could forget?” murmured Martha, and for a moment the quilting circle fell respectfully silent again since no one intended to discuss the scandal that had followed the Spencer family to Tyler twenty-three years ago.

      “Poor boys,” Lydia finally said, thinking of how her new beau, Elias, had brought his New York society family here to start a life years ago—only to have his wife run off with her New York lover. Lydia and Elias had only been on a few dates, but Lydia liked him and was beginning to fear he wouldn’t learn to love again, no more than his sons probably would.

      “Tragic, what Violet Spencer’s leaving Tyler did to those boys,” Emma continued in a hushed, sympathetic tone. “Seth was the oldest, but he was only fourteen at the time. Of course they’re not boys anymore, they’re full-grown men, but you can bet none of them will ever trust a woman.”

      “Much less marry one,” Martha agreed with a sad sigh as the gold Cadillac vanished from sight, pulling into Tyler proper and around the town square, prompting a worried Cooper Night Hawk to stare from inside the police station, instinctively double-checking for his gun and badge.

      “Ten to one, there’s no current inspection on a vehicle that sounds as bad as that,” Cooper muttered in disgust. At least the driver was a woman, which meant she wasn’t the armed male felon Cooper had just heard about on the dispatch radio. Cooper continued staring through the window, running a hand through his long dark hair, his dark eyes narrowing. Even without seeing the license plate, he now recognized the Cadillac as registered to the rent-a-wreck business at the Madison airport. Whoever the stranger was, she’d flown into Wisconsin.

      Sighing, Cooper watched the car continue around the town square. It was dark outside, the gunmetal gray, late October sky both windy and carrying the first whipping sting of winter. As the car passed under a streetlamp, the interior was illuminated and Cooper’s hawklike eyes made out the driver’s delicate features. Striking, he decided. She had a birdlike face with a thin, straight nose and sculpted cheekbones; the artfully cut, jagged ends of her jaw-length hair spiked against a creamy jaw, then feathered down, sweeping her neck. She was a volcano, he decided. Secretly seething and possibly volatile, at least according to his sixth sense. “But what’s a woman who looks like that doing here?” Tyler was hardly a hub. And she wasn’t alone, either. She had a baby in the back seat.

      Whatever the case, she and the baby weren’t posing any threat to Tyler’s peace, so the lawman finally turned toward his desk, just as Nora Gates Forrester glanced through the windows of her department store. She’d been rearranging a Halloween display, and as she gawked at the out-of-place gold Cadillac, her well-manicured hand continued fluffing the green wig atop a mannequin dressed as a witch. “I bet that’s a friend of those Spencer boys,” Nora murmured on a premonition as the car rounded the tree-filled square, passing the town hall, dry cleaners and drug store. “Or maybe not,” Nora amended, frowning when the sedan didn’t stop at the corner, or in front of the Spencer-owned bank, the Tyler Savings & Loan, but instead continued toward The Hair Affair, where Marge Phelps, owner of Tyler’s favorite eatery, Marge’s Diner, popped her head out from under a hair dryer. “Now there’s a hairstyle,” she declared, peering through the window at the passing car. “Get a gander, everybody.”

      “Your daughter’s acting on Broadway in New York,” chided Sandy Stirling who’d come in for a trim after leaving her job at the town’s most successful homegrown business, Yes! Yogurt. “And you go to New York all the time, Marge. You, of all people, should be used to seeing weird hair.”

      “Maybe, but there’s a wedding dress and a baby in the back seat of that car,” countered Marge.

      “A baby? Oh, good! For a minute, I was worried,” confessed Molly Blake who, despite the expense, had run in to get her nails done. “I thought it might

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