Maggy's Child Read Free Page A

between herself and Tipton, or any of Lyle’s hangers-on, she would come out the loser. Lyle would see to that.
    Sarah and Buffy, though, were blessedly oblivious of the undercurrents swirling around them as they piled into the soft-leather interior. Maggy, without so much as another glance at Tipton, slid in behind them, fastening her seat belt as Tipton gently shut the door.
    “So tell us about your friend,” Buffy said when they were settled. The car had swung about in a wide circle and was just nosing onto the six-lane bridge that spanned the dark waters of the Ohio River. Glancing forward at Tipton—though there was a partition between the front and back sections of the car, and he appeared deaf, dumb, and blind to everything but the road, she had learned that it was impossible to be too cautious—Maggy silently cursed Buffy as she fought to keep her face and voice serene.
    “There really isn’t much to tell.”
    “Oh, that’s obvious. Especially since you’re just now starting to get some color back in your face. You were white as a ghost while you were talking to him, and when he left you couldn’t drag your eyes away. So what gives? Is he an old flame? You can tell us. We won’t tell Lyle.”
    Fat chance. Buffy was an incorrigible gossip, Maggy knew. She might not tell Lyle herself, but she would tellenough people so that word would eventually reach his ears. She had to face it: there was no hope of keeping Nick’s presence in Louisville a secret. Lyle undoubtedly already knew that Nick was in town anyway. Nick said he had stopped by the house and somehow seen David. Nothing happened at Windermere that Lyle did not know about, not even an unweeded flower garden nor a too-high grocery bill. Certainly the advent of someone like Nick would be reported to Lyle with all speed. But Nick’s mere presence, though it would anger and displease Lyle enormously, was not enough to precipitate a crisis. Not the crisis, the one Maggy had lived in terror of for years.
    With a sinking feeling Maggy realized that too many people—two too many, to be precise—knew about her encounter with Nick at the Little Brown Cow for her to be able to keep it from Lyle. Her best course of action was to tell him about running into Nick herself, in a very casual, by-the-way style, before he heard of it through other channels.
    The prospect made her palms sweat.
    “Maggy!” Buffy was impatient.
    Maggy took a deep, silent breath. “He’s a face out of the past, is all.”
    “That’s right, you grew up in the projects yourself, didn’t you? I remember Sarah telling me about it, years ago. Was there ever a lot of gossip about Lyle marrying someone from that kind of background! Not that anyone could tell it, now, of course,” Buffy tacked on hastily.
    “That’s rude, Buff,” Sarah chided her. Her voice was resigned. Outspokenness was one of Buffy’s inherent characteristics, and her friends had long since decided that it was incurable.
    “It is not rude. I said no one could tell now, didn’t I? Just like no one could tell that that hunk came from the projects.”
    “Maybe that’s because you have a few preconceptionsabout the projects that aren’t necessarily true.” Maggy’s rebuke was mild. She would by far rather talk about the projects than Nick.
    “So I’m a snob, right?” Buffy said with the refreshingly honest grin that was the reason people put up with her. “I can’t help it, I’m the product of my environment. Anyway, tell me about the hunk.”
    Maggy repressed an inward groan. Buffy was like a bulldog. There was no dragging her away from a subject once she got started on it. “There’s really nothing to tell. We used to know each other, when we were kids. But that was a long time ago.”
    “Used to know each other? Is that all you’re going to say? When he calls you Magdalena in that sexy way?”
    “It’s my legal name,” Maggy replied with a brittle edge to her voice that she immediately strove to