Dana Marton - Broslin Creek 05 - Broslin Bride Read Online Free Page B

birthday. She glanced at the clock. She had to pick them up from Jen in an hour. In spite of the pounding in her head and the rolling in her stomach, she forced herself to sit.  
    “I thought you might not have heard yet,” Jackie rushed to say. “Earl’s dead.”
    “What?” Luanne’s hand froze in the middle of rubbing her forehead.
    “The police found his body in the alley behind Finnegan’s. A car ran him over. He was covered in garbage.”
    The alley. Earl. Car. Piles of garbage. Fuzzy images swirled in Luanne’s mind, making her dizzy. Her stomach rolled.  
    “Luanne?” Jackie asked, but then kept talking even when she didn’t receive a response. “The police are here at the motel. They want to talk to all the employees. Can you come in?”
    Luanne cleared her throat. A long moment passed before she could line her thoughts up straight. She could probably ask Jen to keep the twins for another hour or so. “Sure.”
    She hung up, fell back into the bed with a groan, but after a pain-filled moment got up again, all the way to her feet this time. She cleaned herself up, then she called Jen.
    “Oh my God. What do you know? I just heard,” Jen tore into her before Luanne could say a single word.
    Why was everybody shouting today? “I need to go to the motel. The police want to talk to the employees. Could you please keep the twins a little longer?”
    “Of course. They’re no trouble. Call me the second you find out anything. I can’t believe this is happening. Let me know what the police say.”
    Luanne promised, her mind struggling to catch up to full speed as she made coffee, only half hearing as Jen said, “You sound terrible. What time did you get in?”
    Luanne tried to think back. “Not sure.”
    “Date went that well?”
    “Brett never showed.” But she couldn’t think about Brett. Last night was a fuzzy mess in her head. Her thoughts circled around Earl.
    She hung up with Jen and caffeinated, hanging on to the hope that some java would untangle her brain. Her mind was a disjointed, foggy mess, the mother of all hangovers using her head for a punching bag.
    Her dollar-store coffee was as dark and thick as tar, and just as tasty, but it did the trick. She felt half-human by the time she walked to her front door, ready to leave, dark premonitions circling in her semicoherent brain.
    Think.
    But she couldn’t remember anything past meeting Gregory.
    Prior to that, she could remember being mad at the trucker, Brett, Earl. She could clearly recall thinking about Earl in the alley, her hands gripping the steering wheel.
    She walked through the door, squinting against the morning sun, biting her bottom lip against the pain.
    Earl. Dead. She had a very bad feeling about this.  
    She tried not to panic. She might have fantasized about fighting back, but so had the other maids—a harmless way to blow off steam. She would never have acted that fantasy out, could never cross over to actual violence. Could she?
    “No.” She said the word out loud to settle her brain.
    Earl was an equal-opportunity jackass. He harassed every woman he came across, stiffed every employee he’d ever had. There had to be at least two dozen people in town pissed enough to want to kill him.
    But how many of them had a dented grill?
    OhGodohGodohGod.
    She came to a staggering stop in the middle of her lawn to stare at her Mustang parked by the curb, the same color red as the fire hydrant ten feet or so in front of it. Both the car’s bumper and the grill were crushed in the middle. Clearly, at one point last night, she’d run into something.
    She wished and hoped she’d just bumped the fire hydrant, but that didn’t show any damage. She couldn’t bear thinking of the alternative.
    She almost threw up, prevented only by the fact that her stomach was empty. Shit. Had she… She swallowed hard, her head spinning.  
    Gone and done it, run him over. The 1989 Mustang had come from the used-car lot with its share of nicks