Tangled Thing Called Love (22 page)

Channing frowned as though taking Mazie’s comment seriously. “We don’t have any pancakes. But I’ll go tell my mom you need more time.”

“No,” Mazie said, “Forget it. Just cancel me.”

“Well, if you’re sure that’s what you want.” Channing turned to go.

“She is
not
canceling,” Holly said fiercely. “Quick—improvise something, Mazie! What else can you do?”

“Hot-wire a car. Use a credit card to jimmy open a door. Fish change out of a sewer with gum on a string.”

“You can sing, a cappella—you’ve got a nice voice.”

Mazie shook her head. “I need music or I go flat.”

“Okay, let me think. Poetry. Recite something. What poems do you know?”

“The one with the little cat feet. ‘The fog comes in on little cat feet’—”

Holly snapped her fingers. “Do ‘Alley Cat’! Remember that tap number we did in Junior Chorus? The steps are supereasy—”

“That was umpteen million years ago!”

“Your feet retain a body memory of dance steps years later. I read that on the Internet, so it must be true. We find the music on YouTube and you tap it. Right foot, right foot, left foot, left foot—”

“No. Way.” Mazie crossed her arms across her chest.

“What’s up, you guys?” called Darlene Krumke from the opposite side of the stage, where she was wrestling her ventriloquist dummy into its costume for her act. She sniffed.

“What smells like waffles?”

“Someone sabotaged Mazie’s keyboard,” Holly said.

“Are you serious? Who?”

“Well, if you happen to see Tabitha Tritt with a bottle of Aunt Jemima …”

Darlene rolled her eyes. “That really blows. Want me to go beat the truth out of her? I’ll make her clean off the syrup with her tongue.”

“Nobody is beating anybody,” Mazie said firmly. “I’m going home.”

“Darlene, make her do ‘Alley Cat,’ ” Holly pleaded.

“ ‘Alley Cat’?” Darlene grinned. “Mrs. Weiss, right? She had every class do that dumb tap number. Come on, Maze, any idiot can do it. Right foot, right foot—”

“I’m wearing a long skirt. I’ll trip and kill myself.”

“You need leggings,” Darlene said. “Sophie Olson has leggings. I’ll go twist her arm until she hands ’em over.”

“No!” Mazie said. “No arm twisting. No leggings.”

“Ears!” Holly said. “A tail. Remember those cute tails we had in Chorus, Mazie?”

Mazie didn’t remember the tails being cute. She remembered the boys making pussy jokes.

“Shoes!” Darlene said, and they both raced off. Good. While they were gone she could slink away. Mazie began snatching up her things. Purse. Water bottle. Makeup pouch. Sheet music …

She stopped, suddenly thinking of Fawn. The mean girls had punked her, too—in fact they’d done much worse. Mazie was a lot older than Fawn had been when she’d faced down those snots—plus she had prison under her belt. Didn’t she have the guts of a scared seventeen-year-old kid? Somehow the opening plinks of “Alley Cat” earwormed into Mazie’s brain. Her treacherous feet began tapping out the steps.
Right step, right heel, left step, left heel, right kick, left kick, step, ball, change
.

The beauty queens from Planet Estrogen were back, ripping off her skirt, forcing her into leggings, safety-pinning a yard-long strip of fabric to her butt. The tail was a draft snake, a fuzzy tube of zebra-striped polyester fleece designed to go beneath doors.

“Ears, ears!” Holly chanted. “Hurry up with the ears, Darlene.”

“I’m stapling as fast as I can. Okay—here!”

The ears were white typing paper triangles stapled to a plastic headband.

“Why are my ears white when my body is black?” Mazie asked.

“You’re a mixed breed,” Holly explained.

Gretchen Wuntz wandered over. “What are you doing?” she demanded, scanning Mazie’s costume. “You’re not switching your number, are you? That’s not allowed.”

“Oh, go curdle some milk,” Darlene snapped at her.

Holly drew a pink cat nose on the tip of Mazie’s nose with lipstick and used eyeliner to sketch on whiskers while Darlene frenziedly forced fuzzy white acrylic gloves, probably dug out of the school’s lost-and-found, onto Mazie’s hands.

“Ladies and gentlemen, our next contestant is Miss Quail Hollow 2002,”
Bodelle announced.

“I can’t do this,” Mazie moaned. “I don’t remember the steps.”

“Wing it,” Darlene said grimly. “Here—put on your hind paws.”

She held out white sweat socks that were probably obtained from the boys’ locker room and were none too fragrant.

“Go!” Holly yelled. “Wait—your shoes!”

Mazie crammed her feet into the French-heeled black pumps she’d planned to wear for her piano solo. The shoes had not been designed to be worn with sweat socks, and her feet felt as though they’d been jammed into pencil sharpeners.

“…  
Mazie Maguire, who will perform”
—Bodelle squinted at the program because
she was too vain to wear glasses onstage—
“Für Elise.”

Channing, who was running the sound, gave Mazie a thumbs-up. The cat-on-piano opening notes of “Alley Cat” sounded, which confused the audience, who’d been expecting Beethoven. Different kind of fur, folks. Darlene shoved Mazie out onto the stage. The audience stirred, suddenly attentive, turning on their cameras. Good, bad, or mediocre, Mazie Maguire, famous felon, was Quail Hollow’s closest thing to a celebrity.

Three minutes
, she thought, gluing on a big smile, feeling as graceful and catlike as a refrigerator that had for some reason decided to galumph around the kitchen. The lights were hot and she could feel sweat prickling all over her body. What if she ripped open Sophie’s leggings? Sophie had thighs like soda straws and a perky little butt that had never heard of gravity. Her leggings weren’t designed for a person whose ass was storing Butterfingers in the event of a future famine.

But Holly had been right about the body memory. Quite impossibly, Mazie’s legs were recalling the steps.
Right foot, right heel, left foot, left heel, kick right, kick left, step, ball, twirl!
The tail twirl was done with a hip boomp that was supposed to look sassy without being outright sexually provocative.

Mazie boomped and twirled the tail. She boomped too hard. The tail snapped its pin, slid out of her sweaty grip, and sailed like a zebra-striped flying snake into the audience.

Shocked squeals, then a roar of laughter. Tears sprang to Mazie’s eyes. She fought against panic, resisting the urge to run off the stage. Couldn’t they see she was doing her best here? Suddenly the audience began to applaud. They must have thought the tail malfunction was part of the act. Maybe she should just go with the flow? Fixing her smile in place, Mazie plunged into the second part of the routine. Two more minutes to get through …

Step ball change, shuffle, shuffle, shuffle right, kick—

Her right shoe popped off like a cork shooting out of a bottle, skittered toward the edge of the stage, and fell into an elderly man’s lap. The man shot to his feet, brandishing the shoe like a home run souvenir, and everyone laughed again. Tiny red camera eyes glowed all over the auditorium. Every wretched second was being recorded. Oh, God—wouldn’t the damn song ever be over?

Step ball change—shuffle, shuffle, shuffle left
—shuffling was almost impossible when your feet were on two precariously different levels, but Mazie did her best. When it came to the kick, Mazie deliberately kicked off the other shoe, sending it sailing into the audience. Two teenage girls grabbed for it at the same time and wrestled over possession. Sock-footed now, she shuffled back toward center stage, stripped off first one glove, then the other, and flung them into the audience. The music sped up for the big finish.

Da da, ta da da, da da da dah, dee dee dum!

Ripping off the cat ear headband, she Frisbeed it into the audience, wondering how many points the judges were going to deduct from her score for what had been, in a way, the first-ever Miss Quail Hollow Pageant striptease.

Chapter Twenty-six

A horn honked as Mazie was putting on lipstick, making her hand jump so that she scribbled Fuchsia Frolic across her front teeth. Muttering a curse, she flung open her bedroom window and bellowed down at the twins, who were waiting in the truck and tapping out what sounded like Morse code on the horn. “Knock it off!”

They stopped for about two seconds, then started with the beeping again. She gritted her teeth. She had to take the boys along tonight because Social Services would frown on their being locked in the cellar. Scully was with Emily and the baby at the hospital, and Gran was helping set up for tomorrow’s rummage sale at her church. Mazie had rushed home from the pageant, flung off the “Alley Cat” outfit, and pulled on the reenactment gown without taking time to shower or eat. She was hungry, sweaty, and grumpy and she had cat whiskers on her cheeks.

She tried to do her hair the way Fawn had worn it the night of the pageant, twisting it into a chignon and skewering it in place with bobby pins, but it wasn’t quite long enough. This was going to require a ton of hair spray. She reached for her Aqua Net.

Gone, baby, gone. It didn’t require the deductive skills of the
CSI
forensics team to figure out who’d taken it.

Mazie tossed everything she thought she might need into a bag and took the stairs two at a time, anxious to get to the truck before the imps figured out how to hot-wire the ignition. Muffin trotted across the living room with her, assuming he was invited along wherever she was going, but she gently shut the front door before he could scoot outside. Outraged, he barked loudly as she made her escape.

“Sorry, baby,” she called back. Punhoqua Swamp was no place for small aggressive dogs whose egos were bigger than their brains.

She was borrowing Scully’s farm truck, a Ford pickup with a rectangular grille like gritted teeth and a bench seat that could, in a pinch, squeeze in four people and a heifer. The truck bed rattled with posthole diggers, crowbars, shovels, baling twine, block salt, spare tractor parts … Jimmy Hoffa might’ve been back there beneath a sack of sprouting
alfalfa for all anyone knew. Mazie had thought the boys would raise a stink about being dragged along to the swamp, but they seemed thrilled, probably at the prospect of collecting enough frogs to booby-trap every bed in the house.

“Why’re you dressed like that?” Sam asked, eying Mazie as she tossed her shopping bag onto the seat and shoved him over. “It makes your boobies stick out.”

She’d dug her old pageant dress out of the depths of her closet, where it had been moldering away between the pashmina shawls and parachute pants of her teen years. It was hot-pink silk with a low-cut, rhinestone-studded neckline. Fawn’s dress had been pale pink, but Ben claimed it didn’t really matter; they just wanted an
impression
of seventeen-year-old Fawn, not an exact replica. “I’m wearing this outfit because my superhero costume is in the wash,” Mazie told Sam.

“You’ve got lipstick on your teeth,” Joey informed her.

“Really? Well,
your
hair is sticking up.” She reached across the seat and tousled his hair. “Speaking of hair, I want my Aqua Net back.”

“What’s Aqua Net?”

“You know very well what it is. The accelerant for your gun. You didn’t bring that gun along, did you?”

“Nuh-uh,” they proclaimed their innocence in unison.

“Pants on fire.”

“Go ahead, search us, Aunt Mazie, but we don’t have it.”

Probably they’d hid it in the back, Mazie thought, but she didn’t have time to hunt it down just now. She ground the truck into gear and they rolled out. Light was seeping out of the sky and Ben would not be happy. The “right light” was to photographers what copper-bottomed skillets were to chefs.

Punhoqua Coulee was spooky even in daylight, but it was positively eerie at twilight when the cooling air created a ground mist. Mazie turned onto Skifstead Road. The truck drove like a carnival bumper car on the rutted road. They zipped over a narrow humpbacked bridge too fast and suddenly went airborne, everyone giggling madly as their stomachs floated miles above their bodies.

Then a thudding return to earth. The road curved, and just ahead was the turnaround, where Ben’s Jetta was parked. Mazie pulled up alongside and they climbed
out. She’d pictured Ben pacing, keeping an anxious eye on the fading light, but the clearing was empty.

“I gotta go,” announced Joey.

“Me too,” said Sam.

“You should have taken care of that before we left.” Mazie stared into the woods, wishing Ben would appear. She always felt safe when he was around.

“Ben?” she called.

No answer.

Behind her, there was a trickling noise. Sam and Joey, concealed behind the truck to preserve their modesty, were competing to see whose streams could arch farther. The pissing contests started so early with guys, Mazie mused.

Cupping her hands, Mazie yelled Ben’s name so loud she startled a flock of sleepy crows in a dead tree. She checked his car to make sure he wasn’t asleep inside. His backseat was jammed with expensive cameras, light meters, battery-operated spotlights, spare lenses, even a borrowed laptop. He should know better than to leave his equipment out in plain view, she thought. The swamp might appear to be deserted, but these back roads were well known to the locals, who used them as sites for drug transactions, underage drinking parties, and other unsavory activities. Locking your car did not guarantee its security. If someone wanted to get in he’d just break a window and help himself. No cops to worry about out here in the boonies.

Probably Ben was down by the creek, too absorbed in shooting video to hear her, Mazie tried to reassure herself, but the hairs on the back of her neck were prickling and her gut was warning her that something was wrong.

“Boys,” she said. “Get in the truck.” She kicked off the high-heeled sandals she’d been wearing, found her tennies, and put them on. The dress was going to look all wrong with tennies, but tough shit.

She cut the boy’s whining short with a barked
“Now!”