Free Blessing in Disguise by Eileen Goudge Page B

managed until the day he died—then down a flight of stairs that led to a brass-fitted plate-glass door onto Main Street. Her heart was still beating too quickly, and the thudding in her breast had spread up into her temples, but she was almost certain no one passing by would notice. All anyone would see was a slim, middle-aged woman in a cream-colored linen suit and matching hat, walking briskly toward the meter in front of Thompson’s Drugs where her silver Town Car was parked.
    Driving along the Interstate, the dwindling cow pastures and peach orchards of her childhood giving way to the strip malls that clustered like horseflies about the grander Mulberry Acres shopping complex she was now approaching, Cordelia remembered the unpleasant duty that lay ahead—the whole reason she’d invited Sissy to lunch in the first place.
    She had to find some way of gently letting Sissy know what half the town of Blessing would soon be privy to, if they weren’t already: that Beech was cheating on her.
    The crust of that man! He no doubt believed that Sissy was too devoted to suspect ... and that even if she did catch wind of it she would just shovel it under the rug. But there was one thing Beech, with his jacked-up ego, hadn’t counted on—that Sissy, if she didn’t love herself enough to do something about this, fortunately had a mother who cared enough about her for both of them.
    Her daughter would not take the news well, she knew. Sissy might even accuse her of meddling, of trying to break up her marriage, which admittedly Cordelia had been opposed to from the start.
    But was a mother who loved her daughter supposed to keep quiet while her double-talking son-in-law made a fool of the girl? It wasn’t, after all, as if she’d had to go sniffing around to ferret out Beech’s slimy peccadillo. Emily Bowles down at Whipple’s Bakery said she’d seen the two of them holding hands in broad daylight. And just last week Cordelia herself had accidentally picked up the phone and heard him cooing over the bedroom extension. It was only a matter of time before Sissy caught on, or one of her busybody friends put a bug in her ear. Wouldn’t it be better for her to hear it from someone who had only her best interests at heart? Didn’t Sissy have a right to know, so she could either put a stop to it or, better yet, divorce the loudmouthed piece of trash?
    On the other hand, Cordelia reflected, look at the wedge that had been driven between her and Grace when she’d interfered with Grace’s marital problems. ...
    By the time she’d parked her car behind the restaurant, a brand-new brick affair with white collonades that overlooked the manicured green of the Mulberry Acres golf course, Cordelia was having second thoughts about breaking the bad news to Sissy.
    How strange! she thought. Usually she couldn’t bear dithering. Any course of action, in her opinion, was better than none. Hadn’t it been her suggestion, all those years ago, that Gene call in his old friend Pat Mulhaney at the FBI to handle the Emory mess as discreetly as possible?
    Darling Gene, I helped save you from scandal then ... and I’ll do everything I can to save you now.
    As she spotted her daughter at a table by the window, Cordelia’s thoughts abruptly returned to the business at hand. If she didn’t look after Sissy’s best interests, who would? Even before Gene died—with Grace a precocious fourteen, and Sissy still a baby at ten—the burden of raising her daughters had fallen mainly on her shoulders. Those early years, with Gene away in Washington or traipsing over the countryside raising funds and drumming up votes, she had been mostly alone with the girls. It was merely owing to the strange and wonderful spell Gene had cast over her, she decided, that she had somehow never felt alone. No matter where he was, he called her every day, and flew home most weekends, his pockets full of little gifts for them—paper dolls and tin frog noisemakers from the