Michael Malone - Weebly

Hayes knew that that was the end of the
information. Abernathy (who was the person closest in
the town to what the southerner thought of as a friend)
was not a person to share other people's news.
But Abernathy was no more reticent than most
Dingleyans, who gossiped only within family fences or
those made of historic social links. As an atheist, Hayes
had no access to the one font of egalitarian gossip ever
flowing from the lips of Father Sloan Highwick. For
reasons of personal taste he could not join Limus
Barnum, social voyeur and community spy, at his
sweaty peephole. No, sighed the editor of the Dingley
Day, as he looked in the broken window of his office
and wondered how it might have happened, nobody
ever tells me anything.
chapter 49
Otto Scaper stomped across the front hall into the
law office and winked at Luke Packer's sister, Susan,
who appeared to be behind her desk but was really on
a honeymoon in Martinique. For she was clandestinely
reading a novel in which a beautiful, lonely, orphaned