Matchpoint (21 page)

I couldn’t imagine Belinda running wild like
Lord of the Flies
. I imagined her pretty domesticated, actually. Nevertheless, Grandma’s point was well taken. Sometimes clients went off and matched themselves. I would have to get on the stick and get her matched off before she did it herself.

“So, you’re busy all day?” Holden asked me.

“Why, you’re not?” It was an honest question. He had been occupied most days, unable to be with me so much that I had counted him out altogether.

“No, but that’s all right. But how about tonight after my meeting?”

Holden offered me a late dinner at ten that night after
he met with Mr. Steve. With the dinner was the unspoken promise to finally finish what we had started. I accepted and after breakfast walked him to the door.

He was wearing worn jeans and a white T-shirt, which outlined his muscular chest and arms. He must have worked out a lot, but I had never seen him out jogging like so many in town did. He embraced me and gave me a chaste kiss, one eye watching Grandma watch us, standing nearby.

“He hikes, dolly. That’s what he does,” she announced.

“That’s true,” he said, surprised. “I like the outdoors.” He lowered his voice and whispered into my ear. “Don’t come out to the lake. Stay away from the cult, especially Mr. Steve. I like when you’re nosy, but now is not the time. Stay away from them. Do you understand?”

No, I didn’t understand a damned thing. I didn’t like being warned by Holden, no matter how sexy he was. “Yes, I understand,” I said.

WITH HOLDEN gone, Spencer ran downstairs and ate some breakfast before Grandma’s Forget Me Not class showed up. He was a little ornery after having to hide under my bed while I made out with Holden.

After some badgering, Spencer said he didn’t have any updates on the murder or the scarecrow.

“Why did the killer come here? Why did he leave the face here?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Spencer said.

“Is he trying to send a message?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who’s he sending a message to? Me? Grandma? Does he know you’re here?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe it’s Rosalie! Maybe she found out you’re here.”

Spencer poured himself another cup of coffee. “If Rosalie knew I was here, she would find another way to send me a message, and she wouldn’t be quiet about it.”

He had a point. Rosalie wasn’t much for stealth.

“What were you trying to get out of Holden?” Spencer asked me, squinting as if he was trying to see the truth. “I mean, besides the obvious. What were you trying to learn?”

“None of your business. That’s between us.”

He scrunched his forehead, making thick lines appear between his eyes. “Us,” he repeated.

Grandma stood, went to the refrigerator, and studied its contents.

“Us,” I repeated. “Us, us, us. I don’t care if you don’t believe it. Us.”

Spencer stood up and threw his hands up into the air. “You don’t even know what he does for a living!”

“He hikes,” I said.

“He hikes for a living?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “But he likes to hike, and he likes using organic shampoo.”

Spencer stared down at me as if he was watching corn grow out of my ears. “You are a nutcase,” he said finally. “Pathological.”

“Hey, your last girlfriend is running around town carrying a cleaver. Maybe you need to consider your own taste in soul mates.”

“Maybe I should,” he said, never taking his eyes off me.

“I don’t have time for your crap,” I told Spencer. “I have a match.”

“Listen, Pinkie. You should stay close to the house for a while. Let me keep an eye on you. Keep you safe.”

“Funny, Spencer. I’m staying far away from you. You
have work to do. You have to solve this case. I have work to do, too.”

I looked for my cell in order to pay my bill and finally be able to use it. I was pretty proud of myself for my focus on matchmaking. It had taken me a long time to commit to something, and it looked like I was finally getting the hang of my new job and career. Maybe I would become a good matchmaker. Maybe I had the gift, like Grandma said I had.

I looked all over for my cellphone but couldn’t find it. Grandma didn’t know where it was, either. I turned over every cushion in the house and looked under my bed. Nothing. I would have to go over to Belinda’s to find out why she’d been trying to get in touch with me the night before.

Just as I was about to leave, the house phone rang. Holly the hygienist was on the line. “Gladie Burger, I need to talk to you,” she said.

“What is it?” I asked, not too patiently. The woman rubbed me the wrong way. I really didn’t like her.

“I have to talk to you. Don’t get all pissy with me.”

“I don’t have a lot of time today, Holly. I have work.”

“This is more important than work. Listen, I don’t have a lot of time, either. But I need to talk to you.”

“About what?”

“Politics, religion, what do you think? I have to talk to you about the murder. I need to tell you what really happened that night.”

“IS THIS some kind of joke?” I asked Holly.

“Does it sound like some kind of joke?” she sneered.

“Yeah, it does.”

“Gladie, I’m not exactly the yuk-yuk kind of person. This is not a joke.”

“Holly, I don’t have time for this. I know what happened that night. I was there, remember?”

“I remember, but you were out cold, under the gas.
Maybe you forgot. You were only awake for the last part of the evening.”

For the life of me, I couldn’t take her seriously. I more than disliked her. I had disdain for her. I couldn’t respect her in any way.

“Meet me tonight,” she ordered. “I’m going to the cult meeting at the lake at seven.”

“I can’t go to the lake,” I said.

Holden didn’t want me to go to the lake. I didn’t want to go to the lake. I didn’t want to see the cult members or aliens, and most of all I didn’t want to see Holly. I no longer had to prove Belinda’s innocence. In fact, with a killer coming as close to me as he did last night, my goal was to stay far away from the suspects.

Holly wasn’t the big figure that Nathan described the night of the murder, but she was the embezzler and she looked spry, like she could outrun Spencer with no problem. I didn’t want any more dead faces in my life, not Dr. Dulur’s, not Holly’s. I didn’t want Rosalie chasing me with her cleaver, and I didn’t want anything to do with the wackadoo cultists. The alien worshippers were not all crystal-carrying, incense-burning love children. They hooked up a donkey to a parachute and made it fly over town. Things were heating up in Cannes, and I wanted to stay clear.

Those were my reasons for staying away from Holly and the lake. But that was my brain talking, and I’ve always had a hard time listening to my brain. Just ask my high school teachers.

Holly’s offer to tell me what had happened while I was under the gas had me tempted. I had been out for hours that night, completely helpless while a killer was on the loose. Even if I didn’t believe she had information about the murder, I couldn’t say no to the chance of finding out what had happened to
me
.

“Fine, I’ll meet you at seven at the lake,” I said.

“Good. See you there. Be careful, Gladie. Trust no one.”

OUTSIDE, IT was a beautiful September day. Not a cloud in the sky, but chilly. I wore a turtleneck, jeans, and comfortable sneakers, but I had to cross my arms to brace against a cold wind. It looked like fall was going to come early to Cannes and our summer days had ended mid-September. I regretted not bringing a jacket and then remembered my winter clothes were still in storage in Grandma’s shed with the rest of the things I had accumulated in my years of traveling from one job to another.

Luckily, it was only a short walk to Belinda’s place. She lived over the pharmacy in a two-bedroom apartment with a view of Main Street. I could smell it before she opened the door, like a tropical paradise.

“It smells like tutti-frutti ice cream exploded,” I commented as she welcomed me in. At the thought of ice cream, my stomach growled with hunger, even though I had just eaten two breakfasts.

My eating had gotten completely out of whack since I had moved in with my grandmother. If I couldn’t get my jiggle under control, I would have to move to get away from her junk food habit, perhaps back to Wisconsin, where I had worked for a month on an alfalfa sprouts farm. My butt was really firm back then.

“Thanks!” gushed Belinda. “This is my little slice of paradise. Don’t you think a man would love to share this with me?”

Belinda had picked orange for the day: orange stretchy pants, an orange terrycloth sweatshirt with a giant orange blossom bedazzled on her chest, and orange Keds with little white socks folded over at the ankles.

“Any man would love to share this with you,” I said.
It
was
a slice of paradise. Flowers bloomed from every corner and surface. It looked like a high-end flower shop with cheap furniture and rust-colored shag carpeting, but I had been in close contact with two men lately, and neither seemed to have any interest in flowers.

“Hey, Belinda, I just came by because I heard you wanted to speak to me, and my cellphone is dead.”

“Oh, that explains it,” she said. “I called you about fifteen times yesterday when I was with the mayor.” She looked up at the ceiling and sighed, lifting and dropping her shoulders with the effort.

“Did he talk about Barbra Streisand?” I asked with sympathy.

“Huh? No, it was weirder than that.”

I was racked with guilt. Grandma was right to tsk me. I shouldn’t have let Belinda go off with Wayne Robinson. I should have found her a good match instead of the idiot mayor.

“I need a latte,” I moaned.

“You should try tea. I lost another pound,” Belinda announced. “The Chinese tea is better than Jenny Craig!”

“I tried the diet tea last night. It didn’t do a thing. I ate two breakfasts this morning.”

“Did you steep it for three minutes?”

“Steep?” I asked.

BELINDA INSISTED that we go to Tea Time, where Ruth had a special teapot that did something magical to the diet tea, helping it to melt the fat right off a body. I had my doubts that it could do anything more than a latte, but I owed it to Belinda to follow her to Tea Time after leaving her with Wayne Robinson for a day.

The tea shop was almost back to normal. Gone were the naked people and the backpacks, but there was still
a group of hairy people at one table and clean-cut Dockers-wearers at another, all sitting, sipping tea. As we entered, I heard quiet murmurs of “
The energies of tomorrow …
” and “
The Arrival …
”

Belinda was oblivious, clutching her box of diet tea to her chest. We sat at a center table and waited for Ruth to show up and take our order. I looked longingly at the espresso machine on the counter.

“That man was a little weird,” Belinda confided.

“The mayor? Was he?” I asked.

“He’s very attached to his donkey,” she explained, like that said it all. “He’s obsessed with it. He’s angry that the cult hurt the only one who understands him.”

“Oy,” I said.

“He made me talk to it,” she continued. “I had to say … things.”

“I wonder where Ruth is,” I said, looking around. I didn’t want to know what things Belinda had to say to the donkey. I felt miserable I had let her down. I should have matched her with someone good, or at least sane.

Ruth finally appeared out of the back room and marched up to our table. She looked old, older than she was, which was saying something. She was disheveled from head to toe. Half her shirt was untucked and wrinkled, her pants soiled. One shoe was untied, and her hair was greasy. She looked utterly exhausted.

“What the hell do you want?” she demanded.

“Could you brew us a special pot?” Belinda asked, holding out the box of diet tea.

“Are you drinking this nonsense, too?” Ruth asked me. I shrugged my shoulders. “Not an ounce of fat anywhere on you,” she sneered.

“There’s some fat,” I said, delighted she didn’t think so.

Ruth grabbed the tea. “Not any fat that shouldn’t be there.”

She shuffled back to the counter to make the magical tea. “I’m so sorry about the mayor, Belinda,” I said.

“Do you have anybody else, Gladie?”