Tangled Thing Called Love (11 page)

“Well, we were rehearsing for the beauty pageant—” Holly began.

“
Achievement
pageant,” Mazie corrected. “Most people don’t realize you have to be a member of Mensa before they even let you in.”

Big grin from Johnny. “Is that why the contestants have to wear swimsuits—to show off their big IQs?”

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” Holly said. “Because Bodelle wouldn’t let Mazie be in the pageant, and I quit in protest.”

“She won’t let you?” Johnny’s eyebrows rose. “Yesterday she was guilt-tripping you into it.”

“No convicts need apply,” Mazie explained. “Bodelle’s new rule.”

Johnny shook his head, then pulled his cop face back on and asked her about the
scaffolding accident.

“I was walking underneath, and someone was just above me—”

“She could have been killed,” Holly interrupted. “I saw the whole thing. That tar bucket missed Mazie by a hair. It must have weighed fifty or sixty pounds. The blowback just knocked her flat.”

Johnny frowned. “You said someone was up on the scaffolding. Did you get a look at him?”

Mazie shook her head. “No. I just glimpsed a person—a man.”

“Did you get the impression that he had the bucket in his hands and it slipped, or that he deliberately dropped it?”

“It seemed to be deliberate—but maybe I’m just being paranoid.”

Johnny fixed his blue-gray eyes on her, the cop part of him more intense now. “You’ve been back home one day, Mazie. You’ve been run off the road, bounced from the pageant, and nearly killed by a tar bucket. Who did you piss off?”

Mazie’s phone rang. Ben, she saw from the caller ID, feeling a pang of guilt. She was supposed to be helping with the Fawn investigation and here she was sitting in a bar instead.

“Where are you?” he said. “I’m at the library and nobody knows what happened to you.”

“Emergency,” Mazie said. “The twins sneaked Muffin to school and I had to go and rescue him. Then I ran into an old school friend—”

“It wasn’t Hoolihan, was it?” Ben growled.

Mazie swiveled on her bar stool and hunched over the phone, hoping the sound wasn’t leaking out. “No. Her name is Holly Greenberg. She’s—”

Holly grabbed the phone away from Mazie. “Hello, there, Ben Labeck—I’m Holly. Mazie has been telling me all about you.”

Mazie tried to snatch the phone back. A tussel ensued, and Holly won. “She told me you’re a living god, Ben—I can’t wait to meet you.”

Mazie didn’t need her ear plastered to the phone to hear Ben’s laugh. He knew he was being outrageously flattered, but seemed to be eating it up.

Holly’s eyes sparkled evilly. “Would you let me borrow Mazie for about two hours
this afternoon, Ben? I’m going to help with the Fawn thing. You know, two heads are better than one, four boobs are better than—”

“Give that here!” Face flaming, Mazie seized the phone back. She gave Ben directions for picking up her and the twins at Holly’s house later.

“I’ll find the place,” Ben assured her. “And Mazie …”

“What?”

“Try to stay out of trouble?”

Chapter Thirteen

Mazie drove. After twenty-nine nonalcoholic months, even a single drink had gone to Holly’s head and she was flying in the pain-free zone. Gil Fanchon’s trailer was about five miles outside town in a clearing so close to the edge of the swamp he must have had to sandbag his lawn during the spring floods. They drove past the trailer at about forty-five miles an hour, not wanting to risk going too slow because if Gil was home he might notice them.

“I don’t see any sign of him,” Holly reported. “He must be at work.”

“What time does the birdseed plant get out?” Mazie asked.

“Three thirty. We’ve got tons of time.”

“I’m not sure I want to do this.”

“Don’t chicken out now,” Holly said. “This was your idea.”

“What are you talking about? It was
your
idea.”

Mazie turned around in the next driveway and drove back the way they’d come. A couple of hundred feet along, she spotted a grassy track leading into a hay field.

“There,” Holly said. “You can park beneath those trees. They’ll screen the van from anyone passing on the road.”

Mazie turned in and parked. “We can’t stay too long,” she said. “The van might get too hot for Muffin.”

“Right. Ten minutes, tops.”

Mazie cracked the windows just enough so that not even Muffin, whose body had the flexibility of Silly Putty, could squeeze through. Cutting across a field, they approached Gil’s trailer.

“He doesn’t have a pit bull, does he?” Holly asked nervously as they tiptoed across the weed-choked lawn. “He’s the kind of guy who
would
have a pit bull.”

“
Now
you think of that? If he had a pit bull, we’d already be kibble.”

The trailer was white aluminum with blue trim, filled in here and there with plywood panels and resting on a concrete slab. Gil had made a few feeble attempts to spiff
up the place—a rubber tire was filled with scraggly geraniums, a couple of bird feeders hung from trees, and the skirting was freshly painted, but cosmetics couldn’t disguise the fact that this was a rusting forty-year-old trailer. Two steps covered in ragged green carpet led up to the only door. Holly tried it. Locked.

“Maybe there’s an open window,” she said.

They crept around the side of the trailer.

“There,” Holly whispered, pointing to a window about five feet above the ground, the kind of window that swivels outward on a fulcrum. It was open about six inches.

“Too high,” Mazie said.

“We need to find something to climb on.”

“Like what?”

Holly pointed. “Like one of those trash cans.”

Three garbage cans were lined up against a utility shed next to the trailer. One of them was empty, Mazie discovered upon further investigation. It was made of army green rubber and looked as though it’d been in a knock-down-drag-out fight with a raccoon. Its slime-crusted sides were providing an all-you-can-eat buffet lunch for a few trillion flies.

Making a mental note to boil her hands when she got home, Mazie, trailed by a posse of buzzing flies, dragged the garbage can back to the trailer, upended it, and thumped it beneath the window.

“Be my guest,” she told Holly.

Still wearing the red polka dot skirt she’d had on at the rehearsal, Holly climbed onto the can, teetered, then steadied herself by clutching Mazie’s head.

“Ouch.”

“Sorry.”

Mazie shooed away flies as Holly fiddled with the window crank, but the garbage can, not built to withstand anything heavier than coffee grounds and potato skins, buckled inward.

“Hurry up,” Mazie hissed.

Holly gave a final crank, and the window gap widened. “Okay—you should be able to squeeze in there.”

“
Me
? I thought
you
were going to do it!”

“If I try to get through that window I’ll be wearing this trailer like a tutu.”

Holly knocked the can over as she jumped off, and a tornado of flies swarmed out, carrying enough septic bacteria on their feet to infect the entire planet. Setting the can upright again, Mazie climbed up, steadying herself against Holly for balance. She stuck her head through the window, checking for signs of pit bull infestation—femurs strewn about, human spleen chew toys—and when the coast appeared to be clear, hoisted herself up and wormed through the opening. There was a bad moment when her bottom got stuck like Winnie the Pooh in the rabbit hole, but Holly shoved until Mazie squirted out the other side and dropped onto a bed.

Judging from the wrestling posters taped to the walls, this must have been Fawn’s brothers’ room. Cautiously emerging from the bedroom, Mazie tiptoed down the hall to the kitchen, unlocked the door, and opened it. Breathing rapidly, Holly scuttled inside. “I haven’t been this scared since I was seventeen and Richie’s mom caught us having sex on her patio furniture.”

“You told me you were a virgin when you got married.”

“Well, yeah—virtually. Sex doesn’t count if you don’t have an orgasm, and Richie’s technique wasn’t too good in those days.”

Mazie’s heart was beating at a million thumps a minute, and it belatedly occurred to her that opening the door might have tripped a silent alarm that was even now alerting a squad of security goons.
Oh, terrific strategic planning, Maguire
. “Fawn’s room is at the end,” she told Holly.

“Wait,” Holly said. “Shouldn’t we search Gil’s room too?” Holly pushed open the door of a room that, judging by the funky smell, must be Gil’s.

“Make it fast.” The idea of touching Gil’s stuff gave Mazie the heebie-jeebies.

“Why are we whispering?” Holly asked.

“I don’t know. I just feel we need to.”

“We should be wearing gloves.”

“Well, gosh darn it! I left my rubber gloves back in the crime scene van.”

Most of Gil’s bedroom space was taken up by a wall-length dresser holding a wide-screen TV and a king-sized bed covered with a hideous maroon velvet spread. Gil had tacky taste in home décor, but the room was barracks-neat, the wastebaskets were
empty, the furniture was polished, and the space under the bed was dust-bunny-free. A narrow closet held a few shirts and pants on wire hangers.

“What are we looking for?” Mazie asked.

“I don’t know. Photos? A stash of diamonds? A signed confession?”

Shoeboxes lined the top shelf of the closet. As Mazie attempted to haul down the first box, it flew from her shaking hands and its contents—videos with lurid jackets—spilled out.

Holly picked one up.
“Throbbin Hood?”

Mazie picked up another.
“Edward Penishands?”

They were gross, they were hard-core porn, and they were fascinating in a repulsive sort of way. Every single one had to be checked in case it might be a vital clue.
Saturday Night Beaver. White Men Can’t Hump. Spankenstein. Rambone
.

“I feel sticky all over,” Holly said.

“I want to shower in Lysol.”

“These are disgusting. Do you think Gil would miss one?”

“Holly!”

“Well, sometimes Richie needs a little starch in the old macaroni—”

“Put it back. We’re done here.”

They repacked the boxes, shoved them back onto the shelf, and moved on to Fawn’s room. Mazie focused on the stack of notebooks crammed into Fawn’s nightstand while Holly went through her wardrobe, feeling the undersides of shelves, checking for loose boards that might conceal hiding places. The police had probably gone over every inch of the room years ago, but there was always a chance they’d missed something.

“Look—bloodstains,” Holly suddenly hissed, clutching a hand to her chest.

Mazie set down Fawn’s senior-year schedule to check out the faint brownish blotch on the linoleum beneath an edge of carpet. Mazie knew that police investigators had special equipment capable of revealing blood even if it had been bleached or painted over, but lacking sophisticated blood detection gear, she employed the finger-lick method, wetting her index finger, squidging it around in the stain, and flicking it over her tongue.

“Grape juice.”

“Darn.” Holly sounded disappointed.

“Well, we don’t
want
Fawn to be dead, right?”

“Right.” Holly started rooting through the jewelry box atop Fawn’s dresser. “Hey—pacifiers! Remember pacies?”

“Of course I remember pacies. You weren’t dressed in the nineties if you didn’t have half a dozen pastel baby binkies looped around your neck.”

“Check out this pendant.” Holly held up a rectangular pendant, about two inches long, with gold metallic flowers splayed across a blue enamel background. It wasn’t exactly hideous, but it didn’t really seem like Fawn, who’d compensated for her limited budget with an amazing eye for color and design.

“Holly? I think we need to go.
Now
.” The hair on the back of Mazie’s neck lifted and her stomach jittered. She’d learned to trust that gut feeling. Jamming Fawn’s notebooks back into the nightstand, she hastily stood, dusting her hands on her shorts.

“Check it out, Mazie!” Holding up the pendant, Holly clicked something. “Ta-dah!” The pendant split into two pieces: a jewelry top and a bottom with a rectangular metal tongue. “It’s a flash drive,” Holly said triumphantly. “About four gigabytes, I’d say.”

“We can’t take it,” Mazie said, trying to look stern. “That’d be stealing.”

“And stealing is wrong. I always tell my kids that.” Holly put the chain around her neck, tucking the pendant into her shirt. “Luckily, I’m more of a do-as-I
-say
mom.”

Mazie’s get-out-of-here-now feeling was intensifying. Quickly they tidied things up, and seconds later they were slamming out the trailer’s door. They were halfway across the lawn when Mazie halted in her tracks.

“We forgot to lock the door!” Mazie said. “Gil will know someone’s been here. Go on to the van—I’ll catch up with you.”

They hadn’t closed the window either, Mazie remembered when she was inside the trailer. Dashing to the boys’ bedroom, she wrestled with the crank handle. It was jammed open. Gritting her teeth, she yanked on it until it finally gave and she was able to manhandle it back to its original position.

She hurried back to the kitchen. Just as she set her hand on the door handle, she heard the sound of an engine outside. Her stomach plunged. Looking out the window, she saw a large SUV careening into the driveway, Ted Nugent pounding from the speakers. The vehicle jerked to a halt, the door flew open, and Gil Fanchon jumped out of the
passenger side. As the SUV pulled away, Gil jogged toward the trailer.

There was only this single door; he’d see her if she left now. Maybe she could squeeze back out the bedroom window? But what if her butt got stuck again? Mazie looked around wildly for a hiding place, but in a house trailer the options were limited. Gil was already at the front door, rattling the handle, discovering it was unlocked.

Inspired by terror, the Mazie Maguire juke ’n’ jive show kicked into gear. She moved out of sight, into the hallway. Gil came in, and she heard his heavy steps, crossing the kitchen, stopping in the middle of the floor.