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