Three Wishes Read Free

“With John’s child? How?”
    Bree smiled dryly as she joined them. “The normal way, I’d think. Only the baby isn’t John’s. It’s Davey Hillard’s.”
    Dotty looked wounded. “Who told you that?”
    â€œAbby,” Bree said. She, Abby, and Jane had been friends since grade school.
    â€œThen why’d she spend the night with John?” LeeAnn asked.
    â€œShe didn’t,” Jane said.
    â€œWere you there?” Dotty asked archly.
    â€œAbby just went to talk,” Bree said to divert Dotty’s attention from Jane. “She and John are still friends. She wanted to break the news to him herself.”
    â€œThat’s not what Emma says,” Dotty argued. Emma was her sister and her major source of gossip. “Know what else she says? Julia Dean got a postcard.”
    â€œMother,” Jane pleaded.
    â€œWell, it’s fact,” Dotty argued. “Earl saw the postcard and told Eliot, since he’s the one has to keep peace here and family being upset can cause trouble. Julia’s family is not thrilled that she’s here. The postcard was from her daughter in Des Moines, who said that it was a shame that Julia was isolating herself, and that she understood how upset she had been by Daddy’s death, that they all were, but three years of mourning should be enough, so when was she coming home?”
    â€œAll that on a postcard?” Bree asked. She didn’t know much more about Julia than that she had opened a small flower store three years before and twice weekly arranged sprigs in the diner’s vases. She came by for an occasional meal but kept to herself. She struck Bree as shy but sweet, certainly not the type to deserve being the butt of gossip.
    â€œJulia’s family doesn’t know about Earl,” Jane muttered.
    â€œReally.” Bree glanced toward the window when a bright light swelled there, another eighteen-wheeler pulling into the parking lot.
    â€œAnd then,” Dotty said, with a glance of her own at that light, “there’s Verity. She claims she saw another UFO. Eliot says the lights were from a truck, but she insists there’s a mark on the back of her car where that mother ship tailed her.”
    LeeAnn leaned closer. “Did she see the baby ships again, the squiggly little pods?”
    â€œI didn’t ask.” Dotty shuddered. “That woman’s odd.”
    Bree had always found Verity more amusing than odd and would have said as much now if Flash hadn’t called. “Twenty-two’s up, LeeAnn.”
    Bree stayed LeeAnn with a touch. “I’ll get it.”
    She topped off Dotty’s coffee and returned the carafes to their heaters. Scooping up the chicken piccata with angel hair that was ready and waiting, she headed down the counter toward the booths. Twenty-two was the last in the row, tucked in the corner by the jukebox. A lone man sat there, just as he had from time to time in the last seven months. He never said much, never invited much to be said. Most often, like now, he was reading a book.
    His name was Tom Gates. He had bought the Hubbard place, a shingle-sided bungalow on West Elm that hadn’t seen a stitch of improvement in all the years that the Hubbards’ health had been in decline. Since Tom Gates had taken possession, missing shingles had been replaced, shutters had been straightened, the porch had been painted, the lawn cut. What had happened inside was more murky. Skipper Boone had rewired the place, and the Wrights had installed a new furnace, but beyond that, no one knew. And Bree had asked. She had always loved the Hubbard place. Though smaller than her Victorian, it had ten times the charm. She might have bought it herself if she’d had the nerve, but she had inherited her own house from her father, who had inherited it from his. Millers had lived on South Forest for too many years to count and too many to move. So she