Run Wild With Me Read Online Free PDF

ought not …” Buck said in exasperation. “Cookies? My daughter gave my chocolate-chip cookies, with nuts, to that stranger?”
    Andrea was having a hard time holding back a smile at Buck’s overplayed reaction. “Yes, but somehow I expect that there’ll be more. Buck, did you know Miss Mamie’s daughter?”
    “Everybody knew Millie. She was the prettiest girl in the county when she was sixteen, and theapple of her daddy’s eye until she met that fellow over at the army base.”
    “Sam’s father?”
    “Who knows? The man she ran off with wasn’t named Farley. Don’t know what happened after she left here. Jed Hines was a hard man, Andy. When he said he no longer had a daughter, he meant it. Never let her name be mentioned again. I always thought Mamie would have found some way to keep in touch with her.”
    As Andrea drove Buck into town, she thought about Sam’s mother and what she must have gone through, having a parent disown her. Andrea rarely thought about it anymore, but her own mother had been an outsider, too, and she’d run away from Arcadia and her child. Buck had explained that her mother had felt closed-in and suppressed.
    Andrea had learned long ago to stop wondering what had caused her mother to desert them. She had spent her childhood blaming herself—and Arcadia—for somehow not being good enough to hold her mother’s affection. She’d learned as she grew older that there was no blame. Just as there had been no blaming David.
    David, the state patrolman with snapping black eyes and an air of wicked excitement, had come into her life when she was twenty. She’d fallen in love without a thought that he’d ever leave her. But he had. Like her mother, he’d marched to the beat of a different drummer. Neither had belonged in a small southern town. Maybe her mother, David, and Sam Farley had something in common. Sam would leave, too, sooner or later.
    Andrea dropped Buck at the Arcadia Café for his usual breakfast with his cronies and continued to city hall. Even before they’d left home that morning, the phone had begun to ring. Otis Parker reported that a Sam Farley had hitchhiked into town with him. He didn’t know about any wallet, but he’d look and get back to Buck.
    At city hall, Andrea turned on the office lights, switched on the ceiling fan, and checked in with Agnes at the local phone company. “I’m at the police station, Agnes, and Buck’s at the café if anybody needs either of us.”
    “How about Mamie’s grandson? Is he really some dirty, wild-looking hippie?”
    “No, Agnes. He is not some wild hippie.” Andrea retorted with a sigh. “He’s somewhere between thirty and thirty-five, and he seems nice. But he’s not here to stay. You might as well let everybody in town know that he’s just passing through. He wanted to see his grandmother’s house before it was sold.”
    “Excuse me,” Agnes replied coolly. “I was just curious.” Agnes’s police-department service was unofficial and self-appointed, but if anyone needed help, she was always there—she or one of the other Varner sisters. The telephone company had belonged to her family for nearly fifty years. During the daytime hours she was a one-woman operator. Her younger sister took over at night, and the older one filled in on weekends. All anybody in town who wanted to know what was happening, where anybody was, or the time of day had to do was pick up the telephone, and one of the Varners had the answer.
    Now Agnes was miffed with the new chief of police, and everybody would know it. Andrea sighed. Staying on the good side of the citizens in a small town was akin to walking on hot coals without getting burned. There were some things about her town she’d like to change.
    Andrea deliberately forced any reference to their temporary guest from her mind. The less she dwelled on him, the better. But he was like the forbidden apple in her own private Garden of Eden, sliding into her thoughts like a snake.