Tangled Thing Called Love (20 page)

And then she was unzipping him, freeing him, touching him, teasing him—

Something beeped.

Growling, Ben yanked his cell phone out of his pocket, looked at the display, and swore.

“Who is it?”

“The station. Screw ’em.”

He pressed a button and disconnected.

Beep
.

He grabbed the phone. “What?” he barked.

Mazie sat up. Her eyes had adjusted to the dark now, and she could see Ben’s face. He was scowling. “I dunno. I guess. I’ll get there as soon as I can.” He hung up and turned back to her.

“Who was that?” she asked.

“Nobody.”

“Who?”

“My station manager. There was a cave-in at some old lead mine around here. Schoolberg or something.”

“Shullsburg.”

“Two kids are trapped in there.”

“They want you to go film it?”

He spoke with his lips against her throat. “Yeah.”

Mazie grasped the situation immediately. Ben’s Milwaukee station must have known he was here, with equipment, only about ten miles from Shullsburg and in a position to beat even the Madison TV crews to the site of the cave-in. She pulled her panties up. “Ben, you need to go.”

Ben pulled her panties back down. “No. No no no no no. They have police and firemen. They don’t need me to personally dig out those kids.”

“Your mind is not going to be on doing this.”

“Trust me, honey—my mind is always on doing this.”

“If I know you’ve got to go, I can’t come.”

“Yes you can, Mazie. You’re almost there. I can feel it. Just another few seconds.”

He kissed her, trying to rekindle the blaze, but the fire was sputtering. Was there some malicious god who threw puking kids and collapsing mines in the path of romance?

“Go do the filming,” Mazie said. “When you come back we can—”

Ben sat up abruptly. He bonked his head against the low ceiling and said
fuck
about ten million times. “No, we can’t. Because when I come back your nephews will be sleepwalking or your granny will decide to do a bed check or some other damn thing will happen and it’s impossible to find one minute alone with you in this loony bin. You should have come with me to Madison today. Instead of this damn tree house we could have found a nice, comfortable motel.”

“Nice? Comfortable?” Mazie flared. “This from the man who’s had sex in airplane toilets?”

“Airplane toilets aren’t as cramped as this shack.”

“You told me you thought my tree house was great.” A mosquito bit her on the boob and she smacked it dead, leaving a splat of blood just above her nipple.

“I only said I liked it because I thought it was turning you on, living out a childhood fantasy or something.” He hauled on his shirt.

“You think I fantasized about having sex when I was nine years old?” Furious, Mazie stood up, and hit her head on a beam. “Ouch. Shit!”

“I don’t know what you fantasized about then, but I know what it is now—reliving some teenage beauty queen fantasy.”

“The pageant? You’ve got a problem with my being in that pageant?” Mazie yanked down her bra, which was up around her collarbone. A minute ago she’d been feeling sexy and beautiful, but now she was acutely aware of all her shortcomings: not big enough; not small enough; not hot enough.

“First you say pageants are stupid and sexist,” Ben said, buttoning his shirt wrong. “Then suddenly you’re so gung ho into it you forget about helping with the documentary.”

“Oh, right, your precious documentary! You care more about Fawn Fanchon than you do about me.”

Okay, it was a dumb thing to say, Mazie thought, but she was on a
dumb
roll here.

“Maybe I should hit my head again,” Ben snapped. “Maybe then what you just said would make sense. Since you started with that pageant thing you’ve lost fifty points off your IQ.”

“Really? I’m not the one who just zipped his shirttail into his fly.”

Mazie yanked her own shirt on, not caring that it was inside out. “I suppose you think I’m too mentally challenged to figure out what’s going on here?”

“Oh? What’s that?” Ben ripped his shirt out of his zipper.

“You
want
to go chasing off to the mine disaster—the dashing young hero photojournalist—but you wanted a quickie with me first. It’s L.A. all over again.”

“Oh, right—throw that at me.” Ben’s voice rose. “I’m never going to hear the end of that, am I? I came back to you, didn’t I?”

“Lucky me. You checked out the big pond and found out you’d rather be a big fish in a small pond.”

“That’s completely—I take back the fifty-points thing. Make it a hundred points!” Ben bashed out the door, ignored the rungs on the tree trunk, and vaulted off the platform, landing lightly on his feet below. “Another thing,” he flung over his shoulder as he stalked off. “Your tree house is off-kilter. You should have used a plumb bob.”

What the hell was a plumb bob? Mazie had no idea, but if she’d had one in her hands at the moment she would have chucked it at Ben Labeck’s big, fat, swollen head.

Chapter Twenty-three

Rain.

Great.

On top of a sleepless night.

And today was Emily’s C-section.

And there was no summer school on Fridays.

And Ben’s bed hadn’t been slept in and he might not come back.

What else could go wrong? Don’t ask, Mazie thought, or it would happen.

She padded downstairs to the living room and turned on the television. The Shullsburg cave-in was the top story on the local ABC channel. The two kids had been pulled out of the collapsed pit around four that morning, filthy but unharmed. Mazie could see Ben’s handiwork in the film work—the distinctive angles, the close-ups, the expert way the shots were framed; he was a master craftsman when it came to photography.

She didn’t want to think about Ben because she’d thought about him all last night, beating herself up over the nasty things she’d said and the way she’d lost her temper.

Scully came in from doing the chores as the boys were sitting down to their plates of syrup topped with waffles. He looked pale and tense, too nervous about Emily’s impending surgery to eat, although he managed a cup of coffee. He showered and changed and came back downstairs again just as Emily’s brother Burt arrived to pick him up. Scully hadn’t trusted himself to drive to the hospital this morning.

Mazie hugged him as he headed out the door. “Tell Emily I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed for her.”

“Yeah.” Scully hugged her back, and she was surprised to feel him shaking. Gran had already gone to the hospital and now Mazie felt sort of stranded, left with the breakfast dishes and the twins and no one for backup. It was raining too hard for the boys to go outside; they spent the morning playing noisy indoor games that involved a lot of yelling and thundering up and down the stairs.

Where was Ben? Was he so angry he’d gone to a motel? Or back to Milwaukee?

Mazie threw the breakfast things in the dishwasher, ran the vacuum, and set up the ironing board. She needed to iron the white blouse she planned to wear for her talent number later today—a piano solo she hadn’t had time to practice for.

She plugged in the iron. Maybe she ought to just forget the pageant. Maybe Ben was right and she was just entering it to indulge herself, relive her youthful moment of glory. Except it hadn’t been glorious at all. People didn’t realize how much work went into pageants, how much pressure there was to be perfectly dressed and groomed all the time, to behave in a ladylike but perky and upbeat manner, until you just wanted to rip your clothes off and run around chugging beer and cursing.

Distantly, a cat let out a squall. It sounded as though it had come from inside the house, but cats weren’t allowed inside; they stayed in the barn. Setting down the iron, Mazie walked through the kitchen, ears cocked. The sound came again, louder this time, the yowl of an angry cat.

“Bombs away!” Sam bellowed from the basement.

This was not good.

She flung open the basement door and pelted down the steps. Sam was hunched at the base of the laundry chute that ran between the second-floor bathroom and the basement. Something plummeted down the chute, mewling and scrabbling at the chute’s tin sides. A tiger-striped tomcat exploded out of the chute and into a mound of dirty laundry. Before the cat could gather his wits, Sam moved with lightning speed, mummying it in a thick towel.

“What are you
doing
?” Mazie shrieked.

“Seeing what happens when you drop a cat down the laundry chute.”

“Stop it—that’s cruelty to animals!”

“No it’s not!” Joey yelled from the top of the chute. “Sweetie Pie
likes
it!”

She wrestled Sweetie Pie away from Sam. The big tomcat lashed out, his claws raking across Mazie’s wrist. She lost her grip and the cat leaped to the floor and streaked away.

“Damn it!” She lifted her bleeding wrist to her mouth.

“Aunt Mazie swore!” the boys gleefully chanted.

“Shut up!”

“I’m telling!” Sam yelled. “You’re a bad example. You told us to shut up and you
said the d-word. You ought to get a time-out.”

“Oh, don’t tempt me!”

The cat had gone to ground under the water heater, spitting and hissing, his ears back, his fur bristling, his mouth open to expose razor-sharp fangs, the demon cat from feline Hades. What if he accidentally jostled the heating element? Did the heater have a pilot light? And if it did, was it more likely to:

A. Go out, thus causing gas to slowly leak out, build up, and finally explode in a giant fireball, or

B. Set the poor creature’s fur on fire, causing him to race madly around the basement, setting fire to everything in his path, thus burning down the house?

“Here, kitty, kitty,” Mazie coaxed, trying for a calm, cat-friendly voice, levering herself onto the dirty, damp floor to eyeball the cat, whose own eyes were set in a fierce yellow glare. “It’s okay, Sweetie Pie—you can come out.”

He swiped out with a powerful paw, raking her cheek, nearly taking out an eye.

“Fine,” Mazie yelled, her cheek smarting like mad. The cut had gone deep, and blood was seeping out. If Sweetie Pie had recently killed a rat—and he looked as though he killed a dozen rats before breakfast just to keep his claws trim—rodent germs were even now multiplying in her bloodstream, probably mutating into the hantavirus. “You’re on your own, buster,” she snarled at the cat. “Don’t expect me to stick around with the fire extinguisher.”

“Tuna!” Sam said. “He’ll come out if we get him a can of tuna.”

“No!” Mazie said. “No tuna!”

But Sam was already racing up the basement steps. He reached the top of the stairs at the exact moment that Muffin, sniffing out
cat
, was dashing downstairs. Sam tripped over Muffin and fell, banging his chin against the top step.

Muffin shot across the basement floor, using his inborn cat-locating radar to home in on the badly named Sweetie Pie. He frantically circled the water heater, trying to get at the cat while evading Mazie’s grasp, exchanging bloodcurdling curses with the cat. Sweetie Pie’s fur was so spiked out Mazie was afraid he’d lift the water heater off the ground.

She was torn between the need to check on Sam and the need to snatch Muffin away before Sweetie Pie turned him into shih-tzu McNuggets.

“Sam?” Mazie called up the stairs. “Are you hurt?”

“Nah. I just popped a tooth and split open my chin.”

Heaving himself to his feet, Sam ran up to the kitchen. In that instant Sweetie Pie wriggled out from beneath the heater. He feinted a blow at Muffin, flashed across the floor, jumped onto the washing machine, leaped to a cracked-open window, and squeezed through it to freedom.

Mazie left Muffin in the basement, where he prowled about hoping to discover more cats, and galloped upstairs to tend to Sam. In the kitchen, the twins were using a beer punch to open a can of StarKist. Joey tried wrenching the top of the can off while the job was half-finished and the jagged edge sliced into his thumb. Blood welled from the cut. He stuck the thumb in his mouth, sucked on it, then resumed pulling the lid off.

Mazie took the can away from Joey. The boys looked up at her, one bleeding from the mouth, the other from the thumb, both of them dribbling blood all over the kitchen.

“Wash,” she hissed, trying hard not to shriek.

They scrubbed and dried, using an entire forest’s worth of paper towels. Mazie took ice cubes from the freezer, crammed them into a plastic bag, and ordered Sam to ice his swollen lip. His chin had suffered only a small gash and probably didn’t need stitches. But one of his lower molars was hanging from his mouth by a stringy stalk of pulp. Before she could stop him, Sam twisted the tooth free.

Her stomach lurched. She thrust the bag of ice at him. A kid who could wrench out his own teeth didn’t need much coddling, but Mazie herself was feeling in need of strong spirits. She eyed the cupboards. Scully, who knew his sons well, kept the liquor under lock and key, but there might be some cooking sherry up there.

“I smell something burning,” Joey said.

She hurried to the living room, where the iron had fallen over and was scorching a wedge-shaped hole in her blouse. She snatched up the iron. Scraps of curled fabric stuck to it. The burn marks and hole were on the right breast, just beneath the armpit. Maybe if she kept her right arm clamped to her side, and played one-handed, the hole wouldn’t show.

“Mama says you should always unplug the iron before you go in another room,”
Joey sanctimoniously instructed her.

Mazie gave him her death glare, unplugged the iron, and stomped back into the kitchen, wishing life had an instant rewind button and you could stop it where you wanted.

“I want tuna sandwiches for lunch,” Sam said.

Mazie picked up the blood-drizzled can of tuna. “Oh, sure, why the heck not? Joey, you don’t have hepatitis, do you?”

“Huh?”

The phone rang. It was a landline phone dating from the seventies, and actually had a rotary dial. Mazie yanked it off the wall, beating Joey to it by a nanosecond. “Hello?”