Tangled Thing Called Love (12 page)

Mazie stepped out of the hallway. “Hey, Gil—how’s it going?”

He jumped as though he’d been goosed with a cattle prod.

“Oh—sorry—didn’t mean to startle you. Just stopped by to do some light-meter measuring.” Mazie had no idea what light-meter measuring was, but she’d heard Ben use the term. “For the film. We decided the trailer lighting isn’t bright enough—we’re going to have to install lights.”

His eyes narrowed. “How’d you git in?”

“The door was open.” Mazie did the batted-lashes, sparkly-smile thing. “You said to come back anytime, so I just thought I’d nip in and get the job done. That’s not a problem, is it?”

“Hell yeah, it’s a problem.” With his large gray eyes and concave Kevin Bacon jawline, Gil might have been good-looking if it hadn’t been for his stumpy, stained teeth and lank, unwashed hair. He wore a sleeveless black T-shirt over stringy biceps that would have looked better covered up. “I always lock that door. Don’t want my sister’s meth freak boyfriend sneaking in. One time I come home and find him cookin’ up a batch of yellow bam right there on my stove. The sorry son of a bitch used up all my drain cleaner, too. So how’d you get in? Probably the window—yeah, that’s how you did it, a skinny little thing like you.”

Gil surveyed Mazie’s body, and his gaze felt like lizards with tiny suction cup feet crawling along her skin. “Got some nice, juicy meat on those bones, though.” He reached over and pinched Mazie’s ass.

“Hey!” She leaped backward, out of range of his hands.

Wearing a crooked smile, he shuffled toward her. “That light-meter stuff is so much
bullcrap, isn’t it? You come here hopin’ for a taste of the Gil-man, didn’t you? Hot to trot, girlie? That muscleman boyfriend of yours don’t look like he’s any fun at all.”

“I’m not really up for fun right now,” Mazie said, spidering one hand backward on the kitchen counter, groping for a weapon. “I don’t even
like
fun.”

His hand snaked out and closed around her left wrist, yanking her toward him until she could smell his sour breath. “Did you bring a camera, sweetbuns? Tell you what—me and you’ll make a home video. You got a bangin’ bod, girl—you ever do porn flicks?”

Mazie’s groping hand closed around something stiff and wiry. Snatching it up—it was a flyswatter—she slammed it down on Gil’s hand as hard as she could.

“Son of a bitch!” He let go of her wrist and stared at his hand, imprinted with the swatter’s grid pattern. She tried to dart around him, but he was fast, backpedaling to block her access to the door.

“Gahhdamn, girl—that stung!” Gil rubbed his wrist, his eyes bright, his tongue waggling in one corner of his mouth. “But you done right to whack the Gil-man. The Gil-man was naughty. The Gil-man deserved it.” He giggled. “The Gil-man needs a spankin’ real bad.”

He unzipped his jeans, hauled them down, hooked his thumbs into his boxers and wiggled them down his bony hips, then turned around and leaned his upper body over the counter. “You spank the Gil-man good now, honey. You give him what-for. Oh, man, this is going to sting.” Squeezing his eyes shut in anticipation, he set his jaw. “Don’t hold back, now—you let Gil have it!”

Dropping the swatter, Mazie bolted for the door. She was nearly to the road before Gil hobbled out of his trailer, pants around his ankles. “Hold up,” he hollered. “You can use a wooden spoon instead. Or a whisk. I got a good-quality whisk. Or a metal pancake turner—that’s got a real whang to it.”

Holly’s van whipped around the curve. Gravel sprayed as she jammed on the brakes. Mazie flung herself into the van and hammered down the lock.

Holly’s eyes went wide. “My God—did he—”

“Just go!”

Holly stepped on the gas. It was probably the first time the mommy-van had seen ninety. Muffin jumped up into Mazie’s lap, barking loudly, excited by the speed.

“Did he try to—”

“No,” Mazie said. “But that was just down the road.”

“We’re going straight to the police.”

“No! No police.” Mazie’s motto was:
Don’t bother the law and the law won’t bother you
. “He just wanted me to smack his butt with a flyswatter.”

“Flyswatter?” Holly sputtered.

“It still had flecks of fly guts on it.”

“Blech! Fifty shades of gore! I think I’m going to blow my lunch.”

“He would have settled for a wooden spoon.”

Holly snorted.

“Or a whisk. He seemed to be proud of owning a whisk.”

It was too much for Holly. She broke into cackles of laughter. When she could finally talk, she said, “Too bad he didn’t have a nutcracker lying around.”

Chapter Fourteen

“We’ve got to report that man,” Holly said.

“We can’t. We were
trespassing
,” Mazie said. “We broke and entered. We stole property. What if he decides to call the police and report
us
?”

“Gil Fanchon is not going to call the police. He’s got a criminal record—nobody’s going to believe anything he says.” But Holly sounded a little shaky on that.

“It just seems weird,” Mazie said. “Gil coming home an hour ahead of time. He came tearing into the trailer like he knew someone was inside.”

“Maybe a neighbor noticed us snooping around and phoned him.”

Mazie tried to recall the layout of the Fanchon property. Now that they were miles away, approaching the Quail Hollow town limits, her heart rate had returned to normal. “I don’t think his trailer is in any of his neighbors’ sight lines. Did you mention our plans to anyone?”

“No.” Holly frowned. “But someone in the bar might have heard us.”

Oscar, the bartender, had been hovering nearby when she and Holly had hatched their crime-sniffing plans, Mazie thought. “What do you know about Oscar?”

“Oscar Woods? I dunno. He’s an okay guy, I guess. He’s popular around here—he sponsors a Little League team and donates to local charities. I think he’s been married and divorced a couple times.”

“Is Gil one of Oscar’s regulars?”

“You’re asking a woman whose only contact with bars for the past ten years has been crib bars? I have no idea.”

They pulled up in front of Holly’s house, a Victorian painted lady done in shades of lavender, cream, and coral and surrounded by thriving masses of lilac hydrangeas. It was exactly the kind of house Mazie wanted to live in someday—as long as it came with a guarantee of a bat-free attic.

The minute Holly walked in her front door she morphed from crime-sniffing gumshoe to bossy mommy. Her kids came spilling out to greet her: Eric, nine, a husky boy
who looked like his dad and was already playing junior football; Camille, a cutie of seven with a mouthful of gappy teeth; four-year-old Charlie; and the baby, Mallory, a twenty-month-old miniature replica of her mother, down to the chocolate eyes and dark, glossy hair. Sam and Joey Maguire were there too, and to Mazie’s relief hadn’t demolished anything. The babysitter, a middle-aged woman, left, looking frazzled, and Holly took over, handing out peanut butter crackers and juice boxes and sending all of them except for Mallory to eat outside on the patio.

As soon as the kids were outside Holly and Mazie scurried to Holly’s computer and thrust in Fawn’s flash drive. The computer took forever to warm up, long enough for Mazie to change Mallory’s diaper—might as well get her diaper-changing game on before the new Maguire baby came home—but at last the file came up. There was only one document listed on the flash drive. Luckily, it wasn’t encrypted or password-protected. Holding her breath, Mazie clicked it open.

It started with a date that would have fallen during Fawn’s senior year of high school.

Thursday, September 14

I don’t know where Uncle Ted got hold of the laptop—he said it fell off a truck, which means he probably stole it from OfficeMax—but I’m too happy to worry about whether it’s hot or not. Don’t ask, don’t tell—the Fanchon family motto. I need a laptop to type up papers and stuff. Every kid in my class has got one and I can’t keep up if I don’t have a computer. Soon as I can buy one, I’ll download my diary to a flash drive, because the monkeys—that’s what I call my little brothers—snoop into everything and this stuff is PRIVATE. No one EVER gets to read this. My thoughts are the only thing I have because when you live in a trailer with four other people and one bathroom you never have any privacy.

Holly looked at Mazie. “Do you feel as guilty about reading this as I do?”

“Yeah. But not guilty enough to stop.”

They skimmed through the diary rapidly, deciding to go back later to read more carefully. Sometimes Fawn wrote several pages at a time; sometimes a week would go by before she wrote. The earliest entries were about Fawn’s best friends, boys she had crushes on, school, gossip, worries over her hair and complexion, singers she liked, favorite teachers. She wrote about feeling resentful because she was always expected to babysit her siblings but didn’t get paid for it.

Monday, October 2

All our family is on free lunch. My homeroom teacher reads off the free lunchers’ names so all the other kids know who you are and it’s so-o embarrassing! We get food stamps too, but sometimes Pop trades them off for booze or cigarettes. If you get caught doing that, the government cuts you off from the food stamp program, but I don’t think Pop cares—it’s like he’s playing Russian roulette with our stomachs. Pop hardly eats anything himself—his smoking dulls his appetite—so I guess he’s forgotten what it’s like to feel hungry. When I tell him there’s no food in the house he looks at me like “Why are you bothering me with this stuff?” Sometimes I think we’d all be better off if we were orphans. People would feel sorry for us. Probably we’d get put in a group home but at least they’d feed us regularly.

“Did you know any of this?” Holly asked, frowning.

Mazie shook her head. “You were fifteen; I was sixteen—we were so wrapped up in our own lives we didn’t pay attention. The grown-ups were supposed to take care of neglected kids.”

“Only they didn’t.”

“Apparently not.”

They returned to the diary.

Funny, but our outlaw relatives are more help than all our respectable, churchgoing neighbors. Aunt Lilian is always running over to our place with a couple dozen ears of corn on the cob or a big pot of chili or twenty boxes of that cheap mac and cheese with the orange powder that goes over the noodles. And Uncle Buster, who gets high school kids hooked on bath salts, sometimes slips me a hundred bucks to use toward groceries.

There was a sharp knock at the front door.

Holly raced to the window and peered out through a gap in the curtain. “There’s a police car out there,” she hissed, going pale.

“Oh, jeez—Gil must have reported us for breaking in!”

“If I go to jail, will you bail me out?”

“
Bail?
Hell, Holly—I’ll be in the next cell.”

“Stay calm,” Holly instructed. “Deny, deny, deny. Oh. God, if I go to jail Richie will divorce me and get the kids and marry his slut secretary.”

“Quick—hide the diary!”

Holly yanked the flash drive out of the computer. “I’ll put it down the back of Mallory’s diaper—that’s what they always do in the movies.”

But then she seemed to forget what she’d been about to do. Clutching the pendant in her hand, Ms. Stay Calm lurched toward the door and whipped it open.

Johnny Hoolihan stood there. They stared at him for about five full heartbeats. He stared back.

“You guys been smoking dope?” Johnny finally asked. “You look kind of stoned.”

“Are you here to arrest us?” Holly asked in a faint voice.

“Why? Do you want me to?”

He put his hands on his hips and gave them a slow, sexy smile. Mazie had a sudden vivid image of being frisked by those hands, and the thought made her head spin. What if Johnny had to handcuff her, and she was completely in his power? What if the only way he was allowed to interrogate women prisoners was by French kissing and when she refused to talk he had to—

Get a grip, woman!
Mazie thought, giving herself a mental ice water hosedown.

“I just stopped by to let you know I talked to the foreman at the high school construction site,” Johnny said. “He claimed that no building supplies were supposed to be stored on that scaffold, that the only way that bucket could have gotten there was if someone hauled it there. The foreman isn’t too happy with me right now. I sicced the county on him and his whole operation is now swarming with safety inspectors.”

Sam Maguire ran around the side of the house, shrieking, clutching a water pistol in his hands. He stopped abruptly when he saw the police officer and eyed him thoughtfully. Johnny folded his arms and shot him a don’t-even-think-about-it look. Sam hesitated, then ran off.

“Okay, so then I grilled every guy on that crew,” Johnny said, using his sleeve to wipe sweat off his forehead. Sweat looked good on him, Mazie thought. “None of ’em admitted anything, but there are a couple of punks there I’m going to be looking at more closely.”

“What kind of punks?” Holly asked. “Like the kind of punks who spray-paint buildings, or the kind of punks with a grudge against Mazie?”

“Every shade of punk,” Johnny said. “And I ought to know punks, right?”

“Didn’t someone on the crew spot the tar bucket guy?” Mazie asked.

“If anyone did, he’s not admitting it,” Johnny said. “The crew was all over the place, some of them laying shingle, some doing carpentry, so they weren’t in sight of each other the whole time. You could have planted a bomb without being spotted.”

“It was nice of you to take the time to fill us in on this,” Holly said. “Would you like to come in for coffee?” Behind her back, Holly was crossing her fingers, hoping he’d say no.

“Sorry,” Johnny said. “Maybe some other time. Got to get back to work—I mean my vacation.”

Holly and Mazie waved as Johnny went down the steps, their eyes locked on his broad shoulders and manly ass. Mazie still wasn’t 100 percent sure Johnny was actually the police chief. Maybe Johnny and Holly were playing an elaborate prank and when she was out of the room they high-fived and snorted, “I can’t believe she fell for it! Next time let’s pretend you’re a lion tamer!”