Forbidden Guest House novel · Chapter 25 of 32

Chapter 25: Fireworks

Marlys didn't look at her son.

She looked at the crowd, and she smiled.

"He's exhausted," she said into the dead air. "It's the heat. He doesn't know what he's saying."

"I know exactly what I'm saying," Erik said. "I've been practicing her handwriting since May."

Nobody laughed.

Marlys picked up her purse from the bandstand rail.

"This is not the place," she said, the way she'd said it to me in her lobby.

She turned and went for the back steps.

She got three steps down.

At the bottom stood the old man in the plaid sport coat.

Beside him, the old woman from table six, leaning on her cane.

Beside her, both church ladies and the couple from the lake road.

None of them said anything.

They just didn't move.

Marlys stopped on the second step, one hand on the rail, her pearls swinging.

The sheriff came across the green from the fire truck, where he'd been standing all evening to keep the kids off the hoses.

He climbed the bandstand steps behind her.

"Marlys," he said. "I'm going to need you to come with me."

"On what grounds?"

"Theft. Fraud. Mail tampering, if the feds want it, and they're going to want it."

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