Katie was right behind them with their coffees.
“Thanks, Katie.” He waited for her to leave. “Okay, shoot,” he said when they were alone.
“I don’t even know where to start.” She lifted her gaze from her coffee to him. “UFOs? Really? And Marsville, I thought it was just a name with no meaning behind it. It’s not, is it?”
“No, it’s not. The town used to be called Foothills because obviously, we’re in the foothills of the mountains.” To the west of them were the Blue Ridge Mountains. He’d much rather live in Foothills than Marsville.
“And it changed to Marsville when and why?”
“Okay, here’s the story. Some fifty or so years ago Mavis Mackel, Mabel’s seventeen-year-old twin sister, disappeared. Mabel swore a UFO had landed in the field behind their house, and an alien snatched Mavis away.”
“People believed her?”
“You have to remember that everyone knew about Roswell, that the government supposedly had a UFO. There were also numerous UFO sightings during those years. It helped that Jim Bob Ketchen, dead some years now, claimed to have seen a UFO a few weeks prior to Mavis disappearing. That’s probably what gave the twins the idea. Also, the Mackel family pretty much owned the town, so yeah, people believed her. If they wanted to keep their jobs, they did.”
“What really happened to Mavis?”
He sat back in the booth and grinned. “Not a believer, yeah?”
“If you tell me you are, I’m walking right out of here.”
“No need for that. The story was as phony as they come. Two years later, Mavis showed up with a baby boy in tow, and they gave him their last name. The two of them claimed, and Miss Mabel still does to this day, that the baby was half alien, which means as his son, Luther is what? One fourth alien?” He outright laughed when she spewed her coffee. “True story.”
After wiping her chin clean, she looked at him with laughter still lighting up her eyes. “Well, that explains a lot.”
He chuckled. “Never thought about it that way.”
“The girls’ parents had to know that was a bunch of malarkey.”
“Hard to say.” He tapped his head. “The family was a little off. Still are.”
“No kidding. So, what’s the real story?”
“Mavis ran away with the town’s baddest bad boy. Typical rich girl falls in love with the forbidden bad boy from the other side of the tracks. Since that version was mortifying to the family, they were more than willing to go with Mabel’s story, which she came up with to keep her parents from blaming her for helping Mavis steal away with her lover. Too bad it didn’t last. The dude abandoned her as soon as she got pregnant.”
“What happened to her?”
“That’s the saddest part of the story. About a week after she came home, she turned her son over to her twin, then went out to the lake and swam until her arms and legs didn’t work anymore. They found her body the next day.”
“Oh, that really is sad. How do you know all this? The real story?”
“Much of it I’ve heard from various people over the years. Also, my aunt loved to gossip, and I’d sometimes hear her tell her friends things.” This was the most Skye was talking to him since their unforgettable night, and he didn’t want it to end.
“Okay, that answers a lot of my questions, but what’s in the museum?”
“To answer that, I’ll have to show you.” And that was going to be fun.
“I’ve lived here a year, and I don’t even know where this museum is.”
“It’s been right in front of your face the entire time. What are you doing tonight?”
Chapter Four
Tristan had told her that they’d be sneaking into the museum and to wear dark-colored clothes. Skye thought he was being ridiculous since they were the top two law enforcement officers in the county, and if they wanted to check out a museum, what of it? She’d been tempted to wear white jeans and a bright yellow shirt, but all black it was. All she needed was a black cowboy hat, and she’d look like the villain in a Western.
Why hadn’t she insisted on meeting him wherever this UFO museum was? Being in a car with him, especially at night, was a bad idea. It was too intimate. She’d have to talk to him, something she avoided as much as possible because she enjoyed it too much. And in a closed car, she’d smell him, and he smelled entirely too good. But the only way he’d agreed to show her the museum was if she rode with him, and she was too curious to see it to refuse.
She snorted. UFOs? A UFO museum? Really? It was strange that she hadn’t heard a word about it or the story behind it in the year she’d been here. She supposed it was what Tristan had said, that the incident was an embarrassment to the town, a story best put behind them.