No Offense: A Novel (Little Bridge Island Book 2)

News of the baby abandoned at the library spread across the island quicker than word of a tasty new taco truck. By the time Molly left work that day, everyone seemed to know about it, even the tourists staying at the bed-and-breakfast where she was living (and working part-time) until she could find an apartment that was semi-affordable.

“Is it true?” one of the guests asked from a chaise lounge as Molly passed the pool on her way to the kitchen, where she was headed to help Mrs. Larson assemble the hors d’oeuvres for happy hour. “Did the mother really leave the baby in a toilet?”

Molly nearly dropped the tote bag of groceries she was carrying from Frank’s Food Emporium.

“No, that’s not true,” she said. “She was on a toilet in an empty box.”

The tourist—Mrs. Filmore, a regular who’d been coming to the inn the same week for years—gave her husband a triumphant look. “I told you! That’s why they’re calling him Baby Boy Sacks—as in garbage sacks. It was an empty box of trash bags.”

Molly was appalled but bit back a retort. The guest was always right—even guests like Mrs. Filmore, who used the white washcloths in her room to wipe off her copious layers of makeup instead of the black washcloths and hypoallergenic makeup-removing towelettes that the Larsons provided for this purpose. Molly knew, because she found Mrs. Filmore’s bright red lipstick and black mascara-stained washcloths in the laundry every morning. They reminded her of the scary clown from Stephen King’s It (a problematic but still highly popular, if slightly dated, read. She had to remember to show it to Elijah. It might appeal to him, since it was both humorous and gory, but also featured young people finding their true calling through helping others).

“Moses,” boomed Mr. Filmore, from the other end of the pool.

Molly had been heading back toward the kitchen, but now she paused. Mr. Filmore rarely spoke, perhaps because it was easier to allow his gossipy wife to do all the talking for him. So when he did open his mouth to say anything, it was usually worth listening to.

“I beg your pardon?” Molly said.

“Moses.” Mr. Filmore brought his frozen drink to his lips—Molly couldn’t tell what it was, exactly, but it had a festive umbrella and also a slice of lime clinging to the side, so possibly a margarita. “They oughta call the baby Moses, on account of him being found on the water.”

“Oh, Mel.” Mrs. Filmore playfully splashed a spray of pool water at him. “Didn’t you hear? He was found on a toilet, not on the water.”

“Don’t toilets have water in ’em? Oughta call ’im Moses. Better’n Baby Boy Sacks. Sacks ain’t even a proper name.”

Mrs. Filmore shook her head, clearly disgusted by her husband’s joke. But as Molly made her way back into the kitchen, where Joanne was busily assembling canapés, she wondered if Mr. Filmore’s joke didn’t have a ring of truth to it. Except, of course, the baby was a girl, not a boy.

“Oh, thank goodness you’re here.” Joanne was an elfin woman in a hot-pink beach cover-up and matching leggings who had spent enough time tanning in the sun to make her age indeterminable. She could be anywhere from forty to seventy, though her cigarette-roughened voice and leathery-looking chest suggested the latter. “Did you get them?”

“I did.” Molly swung her grocery tote onto the counter where Joanne had already laid out several trays of tantalizing-looking cheeses and crudité. “But do you even need them? Surely what you have there is enough.”

Joanne snorted. “Are you kidding me? When that group that was on the sunset sail comes in from being out on the water, they’re going to be famished. Not to mention the Walters family. They went out on a deep-sea fishing charter.”

Molly drew one of the cucumbers she’d bought for Mrs. Larson from the tote. “But they all have dinner reservations. I know—I helped some of them make them last night.”

“Of course, but we don’t want to send them to dinner hangry. I like to keep them well-fed and happy so they’ll behave themselves when they go out into town. That way I won’t get any complaints from my fellow business owners that I haven’t been taking care of my guests.”

“That makes sense.” Molly had been at the Lazy Parrot—whose owners were far from lazy—long enough to know how to pitch in when needed. She threw on an apron over her work clothes and began peeling one of the cucumbers—on which dabs of homemade fish dip would later be spread—as Joanne opened the oven to check on a tray of goat cheese tarts. “So I guess you’ve probably heard what happened at the library today.”

Molly didn’t really want to talk about it, but then again, she was dying to talk about it—especially with someone who might understand how disturbed the incident had left her. If she’d been back in Denver, she’d have processed the incident over drinks with her colleagues at her old job. They’d have gone to the Cruise Room in LoDo and gotten nicely toasted.

But she wasn’t in Denver anymore.

And though both Henry and Phyllis Robinette (bless her!) had asked if she was all right, and invited her to go to Uva, the nearby wine bar they often frequented after work, Molly had said no, not only because she had to get back to the inn to help the Larsons, but also because she had a walk-through in the morning at the new library with both the architect and the donor who was making the new library possible, Mrs. Dorothy Tifton herself (as well as her miniature poodle, Daisy, who followed her owner everywhere). Molly wanted a drink, but she also wanted to stay in and prepare herself for this important meeting.

As if she’d known what Molly was thinking, Joanne whipped around, pulled a bottle of red from the wine fridge, and expertly cracked it open.

“Poor dear,” she said, pouring two generous glasses before sliding one toward Molly. “I completely forgot. What a terrible thing. Here, drink up. Was he really found in a trash bag?”

Molly accepted the glass gratefully. “She. And it was a box. A trash-bag box. Where is everyone hearing that it was a trash bag?”

“Facebook community page,” Joanne said, simply.

Of course. Molly nodded, then took a sip of wine before turning her attention back to her cucumbers. She knew all about this page. It was supposed to be private, run by the former mayor’s wife and restricted to residents of Little Bridge only, but anyone could get on it. It tended, like most of social media, to be a little more gossipy than Molly thought healthy. This was why she both hated and loved it, though she’d managed to cut down the amount of time she spent visiting the page, just as she’d managed to cut down the amount of time she spent cyber-stalking her ex and his new fiancée.

Except that she hated to call it stalking. The people on those true crime shows she liked did actual stalking. All she had was a healthy curiosity about the motives behind her ex’s very sudden engagement to this woman he’d met only two months ago, who probably had no idea what she was getting herself into.

“Well,” Molly said, giving her cucumber skin a particularly vicious swipe, “you shouldn’t believe everything you read.”

“No.” Joanne was enjoying her own deep swigs of wine. “Of course not. Ah! Now, that hits the spot. I knew that wine rep wouldn’t do me wrong.”

Molly nodded toward the bottle. “It’s very good.”

Joanne grinned. “That’s why I save it for myself—and the staff, of course. I wouldn’t waste it on guests, unless of course they asked for it, which none of them ever do. All they ever want is margaritas and rum and Cokes. Which, I don’t blame ’em, being on vacation. Anyway, I heard you met the sheriff. What’d you think of him?”

“Excuse me?” The sudden change of subject had Molly blinking.

“Our new sheriff. What’d you think of him? Well, now that I think of it, I guess he’s not that new. But he’s very young, and a lot better than Sheriff Wagner, the last fella we had. He turned out to have a whole other secret family living up in Tallahassee.”

“What?” This was so much like something that could have been on one of the crime shows she liked to watch that Molly accidentally dropped the scraper.

“Oh, yes. It turns out Wagner was siphoning department funds to support ’em. County asked John Hartwell to leave his fancy detective job up in Miami and run as sheriff just because everyone here had lost faith in the old sheriff’s entire department. John grew up here. He’s only been in the job a couple of years, but I have to say I think he’s doing all right. That’s why I was wondering what you thought of him when you met him today.”

Molly couldn’t help scowling at the memory of the too tall, too full-of-himself man she’d encountered. “Do you want my honest opinion?” she asked, as she ran the scraper under the faucet.

“Well, of course I do. I wouldn’t’ve asked if I didn’t, would I?”

Molly didn’t hold back. With her mother’s old friend, she didn’t have to. “I don’t think too much of him. He seems pretty arrogant.”

“Really?” Joanne sounded surprised. “I’ve met him several times, and he’s always seemed real nice.”

Molly snorted. Although she’d been shy around the Larsons at first, as she didn’t know them that well—Joanne had grown up living next door to Molly’s mother, then moved away after college and had been out to Denver only a handful of times to visit since—in the few months she’d lived with them in Little Bridge, she’d quickly grown to think of them as family.

“Do you know he thinks that baby’s mother, whoever she was, abandoned it there in that bathroom?”

Joanne took a sip of her wine before answering, her gaze not meeting Molly’s. “Well, he’s probably right. I read that, before the safe haven law, there was something like ten thousand babies abandoned a year up in New York—”

“But that’s New York! I’m sure no one in Little Bridge would do something like that.”

Joanne quickly began stacking Molly’s canapés onto the tray with the rest of them. “Oh, honey, I know you’re new here and so you have kind of an idealized view of the place. That’s normal. Everyone falls in love with Little Bridge when they first get here. But let me tell you, crime happens here same as it does every place else. They’re just a bit—odder kinds of crimes. You’ve heard about this thief we’ve got over by the old high school—now the new library—who just waltzes into people’s houses and helps himself to whatever he likes? Which, shame on us, we’ve all got to learn to lock our doors. This isn’t Mayberry. And of course we’re fortunate that he’s never hurt anyone—no one’s ever even seen him, since he only seems to strike in the middle of the night while everyone is asleep. But what about our own former sheriff having a whole second family, and trying to pay for it out of our tax dollars!”

“But that’s different,” Molly said. “There are always going to be thieves, and men—and women—in power who try to take advantage of the system. All I’m saying is that it’s hard to believe anyone would deliberately endanger a child if there wasn’t some mitigating reason—”

“Listen to you.” Joanne chuckled as she lifted the tray of canapés. “Mitigating reasons. You really are Patty’s daughter, all right. She was always spouting off big words like that when we were kids. I’m real glad to have you here, Molly. It’s like having Patty living next door again. I feel about fifty years younger. Now be a doll and grab those cocktail napkins over there, and let’s go get these people’s drink orders.”

“Sure, Jo.” Molly obediently seized a pile of the Lazy Parrot’s signature cocktail napkins, each depicting a brightly colored parrot snoozing on a perch in a palm tree, large letter Zs coming out of its beak.

“And don’t you worry about that baby” were Joanne’s parting words to her as she backed her way through the swinging door from the kitchen out toward the pool. “If anyone can find the mama, it’s John Hartwell.”

Molly was glad her mother’s friend couldn’t see her grimace as she followed, muttering, “That’s what I’m worried about.”