Secrets in the Sand - Carolyn Brown Page 0,5

a flourish and retire. The girls enjoyed performing, but they needed their weekends these days. Allie was married and her husband, Tyler, complained that he never saw her on weekends. Susan lived with her boyfriend, Richie, and they needed more quality time together.

Bonnie was engaged and planning an October wedding, and Mindy was in the middle of a divorce. Besides, none of them were getting any younger. Angel sighed, thinking about how she could catch up on all the work at the farm when she stopped touring, and she had this oil business to run as well.

She thought about Tishomingo again. Main Street had changed a little in the past ten years. The courthouse was new, and the café where she and her grandmother had an occasional burger had a different name these days, and there was a new chiropractor’s office on the corner of Main and Broadway. Blake Shelton’s businesses were where a clothing store and a drugstore used to stand. She’d looked upstream at Pennington Creek when they’d crossed the bridge over it into town and noticed that it hadn’t changed at all. The same trees still shaded the sandbar below the dam, and the memories of what had happened night after night on a blanket in the privacy of those trees were so real, she could almost smell Clancy’s aftershave.

Angel picked up the newsletter and began to read. Each page had a classmate’s name at the top and a summary of their accomplishments in the past ten years. Apparently, almost everyone had sent in the questionnaire no matter whether they could attend the alumni banquet and the dance. She found her own bio and reread it. I’m not enclosing a bio, but my band and I—Angel and the Honky Tonk Band—will play for the dance free of charge if you would like. Let me know at the following address. Angela Conrad. She’d added a box number in Denison, Texas. But no one knew that she had rented the box for one month just for the return answer to her letter.

She scanned down the letter to what Clancy had written. Since leaving high school, he’d graduated from the University of Oklahoma with a bachelor’s degree in geology and chemistry and a minor in education. Then he’d enlisted in the air force and had been stationed in Virginia for most of his four-year career and had gone to graduate school for a master’s in education. Just recently he’d come back to Oklahoma and started teaching in an Oklahoma City high school. Under Marital Status, he had marked an X beside Divorced.

So, he probably had married Melissa after all. But what had happened? By small-town society’s rules, Mr. and Mrs. Clancy Morgan were supposed to be living happily ever after. Suddenly, Angel wished she had subscribed to the Tishomingo weekly newspaper. Then at least she would have known who’d married whom, who had children, and so forth.

When her granny had driven their old green pickup truck out of Tishomingo that long-ago fall day, Angel hadn’t even looked back in the rearview mirror for one last glimpse of the place where she’d lived since she was three years old. She hadn’t left anything behind but heartaches, and she didn’t need to look back at the fading lights of town to recapture them. They would be with her forever.

She looked through the newsletter to see what Billy Joe Summers was doing these days. She hadn’t seen him at the dance even though she’d scanned the ballroom several times to see if there was a six-foot, five-inch gangly man standing shyly on the sidelines. Billy Joe had always been nice to her, and that awful night on the sandbar when she’d sat with her feet in the warm water, it had been Billy Joe’s name that Clancy had mentioned so scornfully.

“Hello again, Mr. Henry.” Angel picked up a worn teddy bear sitting on top of her filing cabinet and held him, just for old times’ sakes. Mr. Henry had listened sympathetically to all her tales of woe in the years since she’d been given him for her fifth birthday…and here she was, still feeling sorry for herself.

She wondered how her memories of Tishomingo could still be so vivid. After all, she hadn’t ever wanted to go back, even though she and her granny had lived there for fifteen years, since the day she’d turned three years old. Angel had spent her babyhood in nearby Kemp, and although they visited her great-grandpa at the