Island Blues Read Free

rental cottage when she couldn’t pay the property taxes anymore. But Gale hasn’t been able to find anyone to stay at the house and she was getting desperate. Sabrina hooked up the tourist and Gale, and the tourist was so happy she didn’t even mind paying Gale for the rest of the week, even though she’d already paid for the other place. And Gale, now, she’s plain ecstatic to have some money coming in. Wasn’t that just peaches of Sabrina?”
    â€œJust peaches.” Sabrina Victoria Dunsweeney was a colossal pain in Mary’s backside. Some people thought the woman was as adorable as a bag of kittens, but Mary knew her for what she was: a buttinsky of the highest order who tried too hard to make people like her. “What’s she doing running around helping people when she should be out looking for a job? Why does she keep quitting them anyway?”
    â€œShe’s just trying to find her place here on Comico Island. She only moved here six months ago, you know. After her mother dying like that, and that spot of women’s trouble she had, Sabrina is just going through a—what do you call it?—an adjustment period.”
    Lima’s loyalty to the newcomer was sandpaper on Mary’s nerves. “Maybe she should go on back to Cincinnati, if she’s having so much trouble adjusting here.”
    â€œMary Tubbs, you don’t need to stick your nose into every living soul’s business. And by the way, what’s with your hair? You look like you dipped your head in a bucket of red paint.”
    Mary put her hand to her hair while she considered belting Lima one in the head with her purse. “The hair stylist over on the mainland swore this was the color I picked. I told her if I planned to look like a clown I’d have asked her to put in some purple and yellow as well, but she plain refused to change it without me paying her again. And of course I wasn’t going to do that.” Mary was still so angry about the whole thing she could spit nails. But darned if she was going to pay any more money to that lying, pert-bosomed stylist.
    â€œYou should have called the corporate office and seen if they had one of them um-bus-men. I was watching CNN the other night, and they said all the big companies have them now. They’re having so many complaints about stuff, they have these um-bus-men to kind of negotiate between the customers and the company.”
    â€œLima, you very well may be the most ignorant man I ever met.” Mary said the words without heat, however, because an idea was forming. It could be the answer to all their problems.
    She saw Hill emerging from the bathroom, looking pale and well-scrubbed. Mary made a beeline for him, leaving Lima sputtering in her wake, and she plain enjoyed the look of fright on Hill’s face as she approached. He looked around for a hiding place, but she was coming too fast.
    â€œSomething needs to be done, Hill,” she called when she was still fifteen feet away. “After that horrible article, and all these complaints we’ve been getting from the tourists, something has
got
to be done. And if you’re not man enough to figure out a solution, I am. That is to say—well, never mind that. Did you hear what Sabrina Dunsweeney did this morning?”
    Hill looked like he wished he could escape back into the restroom, perhaps hang out by the soap dispenser for the rest of the afternoon.
    â€œNo? Well, I’ll tell you about it later. What’s important is that Sabrina needs a job, right? And if the woman is good at anything, it’s sticking her nose in other people’s business. I think we should make her—”

Chapter Three
    â€œIsland Ombudsman?” Sabrina was pretty sure she must have heard wrong, so she repeated the phrase with a different inflection to see if a word was hidden in the midst of the unintelligible syllables. She still remembered Chris Robinson in the