You've Got Male novel · Chapter 9 of 24

Chapter 9: The Other Wife

The first wife sat at the hatch-cover table with both hands around a chipped mug.

She was fifty-four, with a gray braid, a fisherman's sweater, and a face that had learned to stay quiet.

She had driven in from Beaufort at dawn because Colleen asked her to.

She had not taken her coat off.

"I won't tell you my name," she said. "I'll tell you everything else."

"That's fine," I said.

"He called himself Gavin Kemp then. Seven years ago. A boat broker, kind, a little shy."

She looked at the mug.

"My husband had died the winter before," she said. "I had a cottage on the Beaufort River and some savings, and I was very lonely."

Kellen put a plate of Colleen's biscuits in front of her.

She didn't touch them.

"The mother was called Francine too. She never changed that," the woman said.

"She told me I was the daughter she never had. She brought me a casserole the day after the wedding."

Her mouth twisted. "I kept the dish for a year."

"What did they take?"

"The cottage, first. They wanted it in both our names, for protection."

"Then a power of attorney, because I had a bad hip," she said. She said it like a recipe.

"They emptied my savings in two weeks. Three hundred and forty thousand dollars."

"Then the cottage went to a company I had never heard of, and he was gone."

"Did you go to the police?"

"I did. A very nice man told me I'd signed it all myself."

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