Circumstantial Marriage by Kerry Connor

but trash, just like her folks. She wanted to get out of here just like Timmy, and she figured he was her ticket to do it. At least until she found a surer thing.” He raised his beer can in acknowledgment. “Well, she pulled it off, I’ll give her that much.”
    “I’m sorry, Mr. Raymer,” Jason said. “I don’t follow.”
    The man took a long swallow from his can, studying them over the rim. “Huh,” he said finally, lowering the can. “Guess you really don’t know.” He smacked his lips and smiled smugly. “Julie Ann changed her name. Calls herself Julia now. Fancy, huh? Julia Bridges. She’s good ol’ Rich Bridges’s wife.”
    Stunned, Audrey could only stare at the man. “Your nephew’s girlfriend later married Richard Bridges?” Jason asked, and she could tell from his tone he was just as surprised as she was. “Did you know she was seeing him at the time?”
    “Not then, no. I only figured it out like most people, when he came back the next year and married her.”
    “Isn’t it possible they didn’t get together until that next summer?” she suggested.
    “No. They got married too fast. Little Richie Bridges had barely come back to town when he and Julie Ann ran off and eloped. I heard old Dick was pissed. Hard to blame him. Can’t imagine trash like her was what he had in mind for his golden boy. Ain’t no way they knew each other long enough to want to get married. They must have been going out the summer before. I just should have put it together sooner. Rumor had it little Richie Bridges was seeing a local girl the summer Tim died. He was seen parking with some girl one time, but no one could see who she was. And Julie Ann used to go out to the farm—to ‘visit’ Tim, they said.” He snorted. “More like to get her hooks in the Bridges kid.”
    “And then Tim died,” Audrey concluded.
    “Nice and easylike for Julie Ann, huh? She didn’t even have to break up with him. Richie left town right after that. I figure Dick sent him packing to keep her away from him. Didn’t work out the way he wanted, now did it?”
    Was this the reason for Rich Bridges’s sudden departure for Europe? Could it have been nothing more than Dick’s attempt to break up a teenage romance? If so, then Raymer was right. It hadn’t turned out as Dick had intended.
    Clint shook his head slowly. “Don’t say much for Richie Bridges now, does it? Fooling around with another fella’s girl? Everybody thinks he’s so damn perfect, but he ain’t. Just another rich bastard taking what he wants. Not that Julie Ann made it all that hard for him, I bet.”
    “Are you sure Rich even knew she and Tim were dating?” Jason asked.
    “He had to. You think she could go out there to the farm, where both of them were, and get away with one of them not knowing she was seeing the other?”
    Audrey considered the man’s words. If this was true, it did make the way Rich and Julia Bridges first met seem a little tawdry. It might be a little embarrassing for them, but she couldn’t imagine Hal thinking it was enough to base his book on.
    An honorable man…
    Hal’s title implied that Richard Bridges was anything but. Even so, a teenage love triangle was hardly the stuff of major scandals. Few people would hold something like that against Bridges, or even care. It might even make him seem more human, not the perfect person he often came across as. If anything, it might tarnish Julia Bridges’s reputation more than her husband’s.
    Unless there was more to it, she thought, turning the facts over in her head.
    Two young men, both involved with one young woman. One of the young men dies suddenly in a tragic accident, the other abruptly leaves the country, abandoning his established plans to attend college in the fall.
    Unless, Audrey thought with a growing sense of foreboding, what seemed to be a tragic accident was something else altogether.

Chapter Seven
    Howard Foley stared at the milk carton he’d just pulled out of