It's Never too Late - By Tara Taylor Quinn Page 0,54
employee roster. Flipping quickly between documents, she confirmed that Phyllis Sheffield, formerly Phyllis Langford, was a psychology professor at Montford. And she remembered something else, too.
The file she needed was somewhere...on the right-hand corner of the table. Tory Evans Sanders’s file. The woman who’d impersonated her older sister and taught English for a semester before confessing what she’d done—the woman who’d never been charged—had lived with Phyllis Langford when she’d first come to town. Phyllis and Tory’s older sister, Christine, had been close friends. Phyllis had been responsible for Christine getting the job at Montford—all according to the newspaper article Will Parsons had written for the campus newspaper the semester following Tory’s tenure there. A follow-up to the original article published when Tory’s duplicity was first discovered.
None of which meant anything...
Phyllis Sheffield and Becca Parsons were friends—another fact she’d learned through numerous local articles regarding social functions involving the town’s mayor.
Sheffield’s file was sealed for a reason. On a hunch she called up criminal records. Three Matt Sheffields came up in response to her search. The first was eliminated by age and race. The second by age and location. The Matt Sheffield she was looking for wasn’t twenty-seven and living in Alaska.
The third listing fit.
Addy’s heart sank.
* * *
INTENDING TO STAY home from work Monday afternoon if he needed to, Mark pulled into the driveway right after his last class. Nonnie was in the living room sitting at the computer.
“What’re you doing home?” she asked.
“I live here.” Her color was good. And she was wearing one of her favorite dresses—a tie-dyed cotton thing. She and a couple of her friends had gone through a tie-dye faze about ten years ago. She’d made some T-shirts for Mark, too. They went straight into his drawer, and more recently into storage in Bierly.
“You’re supposed to be at work.”
“My shift doesn’t start for an hour.” He paused. “Will you be okay here by yourself?”
He bent to kiss her cheek. She lifted her face and then said, “Don’t worry so much. And don’t be bothering me right now. This is the first time I’ve had all week to play and I’m up two tokens.”
“What do you want for dinner?”
“The leftover chicken salad that’s in the refrigerator.”
“Chicken salad?”
“Addy brought it over. We had it for lunch.”
Addy. His body got a little hard just hearing her name. And he was standing in his kitchen talking to his grandmother.
Would he see her tonight?
“And if I didn’t want the chicken salad twice in a row, which I do, I’d have some of the goulash that Veronica dropped off this morning. Or the vegetable soup Becca Parsons left,” Nonnie was saying, without any signs of breathlessness.
“Becca Parsons?” He tried to focus on the conversation at hand, not the one going on in his brain. “Why do I know that name?”
“She’s the mayor of Shelter Valley. Can you beat that? The town mayor bringing soup to an old barmaid like me?” Nonnie chuckled. “I called Bertie and told her. She cackled so loud she ’bout burst my eardrum.”
Bertrude Green had been one of Nonnie’s best friends for as long as Mark could remember. And he didn’t share his grandmother’s humor. “Why shouldn’t the mayor serve you, you old bat? You’re royalty. And as far as I’ve seen, Shelter Valley doesn’t have any railroad tracks for you to get on the wrong side of so I suggest you don’t try.” But if she did try, he’d be right there, cleaning up the mess. Nonnie’s fire was a part of her.
“Nah, we’re starting a new life, boy. I told you that. In Shelter Valley, the Hebers are respectable folks.”
“They’re respectable in Bierly, too.” To anyone who mattered.
She turned from the computer. “You worked your ass off to make it so, Markie-boy, but it’s not right. You having to try so hard to prove what most people just take for granted—that you’re an honorable man.”
“I don’t work harder than anyone in Bierly. Times are difficult.”
“You did and you know it. Just to prove you was good enough. And you was better than all of ’em.”
Inside he cringed. On the outside, he smiled and helped himself to a glass of chocolate milk.
“Like I said, Nonnie, you’re royalty.”
“Good thing you ain’t as dumb as you are blind,” his grandmother snorted. “Now get off to work and leave me be for a bit. A girl can’t get any peace around here.”
“You’re sure you’re okay?”
“Do I look okay?”
“Yeah. But that doesn’t mean anything other than you’re a great