Lighthouse Road (Cedar Cove #1)(12)

Emotionally, she wasn’t feeling any better. After thirty-five years of marriage, she knew her husband as well as she did herself. Something was troubling Dan, but when she’d gently asked him about it, he’d bristled and they’d had an argument. He’d hurt her feelings and Grace had rushed away without resolving the issue.

For most of their marriage, Dan had been employed as a logger. When hard times fell on the industry, he’d taken a job with a local tree-trimming service. The work wasn’t as steady as either of them would have liked, but with her income and some inventive budgeting, they managed. There wasn’t any extra for small extravagances, but those had never mattered to Grace. She had her husband, her children, her friends and a decent roof over her head.

She watched Olivia’s dark-blue sedan pull into the parking lot and saw her climb out, gym bag in hand.

Grace slid out of her vehicle. “So, how does it feel to be a celebrity?”

“Not you, too?” Olivia complained as they walked toward the building. She held open the door for Grace. “I’ve had nothing but grief over that stupid article.”

Grace smiled as color instantly flooded her friend’s cheeks.

“I let him have a piece of my mind,” Olivia muttered, as they marched past a group of youngsters headed for the swimming pool. Once inside the locker room, they placed their bags on the bench, stripped out of their sweats and changed their shoes.

One foot braced on the side of the bench, Grace tied her running shoe. “You met Griffin? When?”

“Saturday.”

Grace raised both eyebrows. She found it interesting that Olivia was skimping on the details. “Where?”

“In town.”

“Hey, what’s up?”

“Up? Not one thing,” her friend said. “I just happened to run into Jack at the Safeway and we…chatted a bit.”

“Why do I have the feeling you’re not telling me something?”

Olivia slipped the sweatband around her forehead. “There’s nothing to tell, trust me.”

“Trust you?” Grace echoed, following her out of the locker room and into the aerobics area of the gym. Children and adults milled about, and Grace and Olivia had to stop several times to allow others to pass by. “Have you ever noticed that the only time people ask you to trust them is when they probably shouldn’t be trusted?”

Olivia paused, then started a few warm-up exercises on her own. “I hadn’t, but you’re right.” She propped her leg on the ballet bar and bent her forehead to her knee.

Grace leaned against the bar, envying her friend’s suppleness. Her own body was far less flexible. “Did you know people have been talking about the article all week?”

“Great.”

Disregarding her sarcasm, Grace continued, her voice deceptively mild. “Actually a lot of the talk has to do with Jack Griffin.”

Olivia raised her head. “Anything interesting?”

Grace shrugged and adjusted the waistband of her spandex shorts. “Oh, a few things.”

“Such as?”

Grace was determined not to make this easy. Olivia had never, to her recollection, shown this much interest in any man since her divorce. Grace had felt for some time that her friend should “get back into circulation,” as people called it. Appropriate comment for a librarian, she always thought. “You really want to know?”

The question seemed to require a great deal of thought. “No—forget it.” Then in the next breath, Olivia changed her mind. “All right, I’m curious. What have you heard?”

“He moved to Cedar Cove three months ago.”

“Old news,” Olivia muttered. “If that’s all you have…”

“From the Spokane area.”

This appeared to be something Olivia didn’t know. “Newspaper background, obviously?”

“Yes, from a paper with ten times the circulation of The Chronicle.” Grace wasn’t a gossip by nature, but she’d been wondering about Jack Griffin since she’d read his first Saturday column. She’d liked what he’d had to say, and it was apparent he approved of Olivia. She’d met him briefly at a Chamber of Commerce meeting shortly after he’d come to Cedar Cove but hadn’t formed an impression one way or the other.

“Why does a man give up working for a prestigious newspaper and move across the state to a town the size of Cedar Cove?” she asked Olivia.

Her friend shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. Perhaps he wanted to be closer to his son.”

“He has a son?” No one Grace had spoken to knew that.

“Eric. He lives in Seattle.”

That was interesting. But before she could comment further, their instructor, Shannon Devlin, entered the room, clapping her hands to gather her students around her.

“Trust me. There’s more to this career change than meets the eye.”

“Trust you!”

“Yeah, trust me,” Grace joked.

Olivia grinned and placed her hands on her hips as she rotated her waist, making deep bends as Shannon led the class in warm-ups. “You’ve been hanging around the mystery section of the library too long,” she whispered as they took their places in front of the floor-to-ceiling mirror.

Shannon was twenty, if that. A pretty girl with pliant limbs and a body devoid of fat. Grace’s own figure had once been that slim and perfect, she reminded herself—before two children and the onset of menopause.