Tangled Thing Called Love (3 page)

Chapter Four

“Bonaparte,” Gran said. “That’s an unusual name. French, isn’t it? Are you descended from Napoleon?”

“Nothing that exciting,” Ben said. “Bonaparte is my mother’s family name.”

“And you’re from Canada?” Gran asked.

“Quebec Province. A town called St. Amelie near the United States border.”

“You sound like an American,” Scully observed.

“That’s because I’ve been living in the States since I was eighteen,” explained Ben, who was enduring the third degree with remarkably good grace.

They were eating supper in the dining room because Gran believed that the kitchen table was okay for lunch and breakfast, but decent lace curtain Irish like the Maguires ate their suppers in the dining room.

Ben ate ravenously, remarking on how delicious everything was and outrageously flattering Gran, who seemed to enjoy the compliments. There were fresh greens from the garden served with homemade buttermilk dressing, pork roast and gravy, mashed potatoes, sugar snap peas, four kinds of rolls, and three kinds of cheese. Muffin, who’d sussed out Sam and Joey as pushovers, crouched beneath the boys’ chairs waiting for them to smuggle him tidbits.

“Muffin isn’t supposed to eat table scraps,” Mazie told the boys. “You aren’t feeding him under the table, are you?”

Sam and Joey looked her straight in the eye, and then, in true Maguire fashion, told a bald-faced lie. “Nuh-uh,” they chorused, eyes wide and innocent.

Labeck stifled a laugh. Mazie looked over at him from directly across the table. It felt strange having Ben Labeck here in the house where she’d grown up, almost as strange as
not
seeing her parents and her brother Jimmy here. Mazie’s parents lived in Florida, near a clinic that could treat her dad’s condition. Mike Maguire had been severely injured in a farm accident several years ago, suffering a head injury that had left him in a coma. He’d survived, but his internal circuit breakers were scrambled. The doctors said it was transient
global amnesia—short-term memory loss similar to dementia in some ways, but not as debilitating. Scully had taken over the farm, while Jimmy, uninterested in farming, had moved to Minneapolis and worked as a building contractor.

Gran directed an expectant gaze at Ben. “Now, how was it that you and Mazie met?”

Ben halted in the middle of shoveling in a forkful of mashed potatoes, shooting Mazie a desperate look.

You’re on your own there
, she telegraphed back to him.

“Well,” Ben said, obviously floundering, “when Mazie … umm … had the opportunity to leave her … umm, place of residence—”

“Broke out of prison, you mean,” Joey supplied.

“Every kid in our class was jealous of us,” Sam said.

“Right.” Ben grinned. “So your aunt broke out of prison, terrorized six counties, and outwitted a federal marshal. And I sort of helped her.”

The Maguires’ eyes swiveled to Mazie as though this was a verbal Ping-Pong game. She took a deep breath, then said, “Ben hid me in his apartment. He should have turned me in, because he could have been charged with obstructing justice and gone to jail himself. Instead he helped me find the person responsible for my husband’s murder—”

“You had a husband?” Sam asked, frowning.

Mazie nodded.

“But he got killed, right?” This was Joey.

“Yes. Everyone thought I’d done it, and that’s why I had to go to prison.”

Sam started to ask another question, but Katie Maguire apparently thought they were getting into dangerous waters and decided to change the subject. “What do you do for a living, Bonaparte?”

“Make it Ben, okay? I’m a camera technician for a TV station.”

“In Los Angeles,” Mazie said.

“No,” Ben corrected. “I quit there. I asked for my old job back, at WPAK in Milwaukee. I’ll be starting back there next week.”

“Cameraman,” Gran said. “That must be exciting.”

Ben shrugged. “Sometimes it is. Most of the time it’s just pileups on the highway,
blizzards, house fires—that kind of thing.”

“We had a house fire near here just yesterday,” Gran said. “The neighbors down the road, the Carnahans—their house burned to the ground.”

This got even the twins’ attention.

“Everyone got out alive, thank God,” Gran went on. “Their barn didn’t catch fire so they’ve still got their livestock, but the house is completely destroyed. Four kids and the parents, all of them without a stitch of clothing or a stick of furniture, poor souls.”

Gran turned to Mazie. “You know Teresa Carnahan, don’t you? She was Teresa Hinz before she got married, a few years ahead of you in school. She was one of the queens. Nothing but bad luck for those queens. It’s the Miss Quail Hollow Curse.”

Katie Maguire was the most down-to-earth, commonsense person Mazie knew, but an undercurrent of Irish superstition ran through her, impervious to reason. When Gran went to bed her rosary had to be placed just so on her bedside table. When her St. Christopher statue fell off her dashboard and broke, she took it as a warning and refused to drive until a new statue was installed. She was careful not to step on sidewalk cracks, walk under ladders, or open umbrellas in the house. Pray to the Lord, but throw salt over your shoulder—just in case: that was her philosophy.

“Gran,” Mazie said gently, “there is no Miss Quail Hollow Curse.”

“Then how do you explain how three of those queens are dead, and none of them forty years old yet? What are the odds? Look at that Annie Shottenstein, killed in a car crash only two years after she won the title.”

“That wasn’t a curse. That was stupidity.” It apparently had never occurred to Annie Shottenstein, whose talent number ought to have been “If I Only Had a Brain,” that driving ninety miles an hour on a curve was a bad idea.

“What about Janelle Weiss, then?” Gran said. “Brains out the wazoo, attended Stanford on a scholarship, and she died when her car drove off a cliff. She wasn’t speeding and the weather was sunny and clear.”

Mazie shrugged. “It was in San Jose. Weird stuff happens in California.” A lot of Wisconsinites shared that view. Cults, earthquakes, mudslides—you were just asking for trouble if you moved to California.

“All right, Miss Smarty Pants—what about Jeanette Arpell—died from a drug
overdose. And Hannah Lensmeier? In and out of rehab for her drinking problem. That Gonzales girl—what’shername—”

“Kayla?”

“Right. Got hooked on meth and lost all her teeth.”

“Who wants dessert?” Mazie held up the lemon Bundt cake, still warm from the oven, hoping to divert Gran. Everyone was quiet for a few minutes, happily digging into the cake, which Mazie had baked herself. It had a lemon curd center and a vanilla glaze and—even if she said so herself—was delicious.

But as a diversion, it was short-lived.

“Then of course there’s Miss Quail Hollow 2002,” Gran said, eying Mazie meaningfully. “Convicted of murdering her husband, sentenced to life in prison—what is that if not the Curse at work?”

Bang!

Everyone turned to look at Ben Labeck, who’d slammed down his coffee mug and appeared to be choking on his cake. The twins jumped out of their chairs and pounded him on the back.

“Mazie,” he wheezed between coughs, “was in a
beauty pageant
?”

Chapter Five

“It was an
achievement
pageant,” Mazie snapped.

Scully guffawed. “Mazie didn’t tell you, Ben? Well, lordalmighty, sis—why so modest? You, Mr. Labeck, have the honor of dating a genuine vintage beauty queen, slightly tattered around the edges, but still—”

“It was years ago.” Mazie shot Scully her shut-up-now glare. “Nobody cares about that stuff anymore.”

“Not care—what are you talking about, Mazie?
I
care.” Ben’s eyes glinted evilly. “I definitely want to hear about this. Did you have to parade around in bikinis and heels?”

“The whole ball o’ wax,” Gran told him, grinning. “Mazie kicked those other girls’ butts. Prettiest Miss Quail Hollow ever, let me tell you.”

“You don’t have to. I can see it for myself,” Ben said.

Mazie’s face went the color of the beet relish.

Gran patted Mazie’s knee. “Oh, come on, honey. It’s nothing to be embarrassed about.”

“Yes, it is! It branded me for life as a shallow, empty-headed twit.”

“Oh, hell, Mazie—you didn’t have to enter a pageant to prove that,” Scully said.

Mazie chucked a dinner roll at him. “I only entered the pageant for the scholarship. Why is it that a guy whose only skill is dribbling a ball gets a full ride through college while a girl has to parade around half-naked to get a measly one-semester scholarship?”

“Don’t pay any attention to Scully,” Gran said. “He bragged his head off when you won the pageant. We were all proud of you, Mazie, but I have to admit I was a tad nervous about it too, your being queen only a year after that poor little Fanchon girl.”

“Canwebeexcused?” the twins interrupted. Without waiting for an answer, they bolted from the table and ran outside, Muffin at their heels, yapping excitedly.

“Who’s this girl you’re talking about?” Ben asked, looking interested.

“Her name was Fawn Fanchon,” Scully said. “She disappeared the same night she was crowned Miss Quail Hollow. She walked into the parking lot, got in her truck, and
then—
poof
! Vanished. Her truck was found at the end of a dirt road over in the coulee and her shoes were found on the banks of a creek.”

“She drowned?” Labeck asked.

“Well, that’s a good question,” Gran said. “Nobody really knows what happened. Fawn’s body was never found. They dragged the creek and went over the coulee with a fine-tooth comb, but nothing except her shoes and her bouquet ever turned up.”

“Didn’t the police investigate her disappearance?” Ben’s right hand twitched, as though he was itching to pick up a camera.

“Oh, yeah,” Scully said. “They were all over it. Locals, statewide, even the FBI, in case it was a kidnapping. They put out an Amber Alert around the nation, since Fawn was only seventeen, technically still a kid.”

Gran went around refilling coffee cups. “It’s all people talked about for weeks. Everyone had their own theory. UFOs, alien abductions, feral hogs—”

“Wasn’t she in some kind of trouble?” Mazie asked. “Theft or shoplifting …”

Scully nodded. “Accused of stealing from the place where she worked. Some people claimed Fawn cut and ran because she was scared of going to jail.”

“If you want to know what
I
think”—Gran lowered her voice, operating on the little-pitchers-only-hear-stuff-they’re-not-supposed-to theory—“it was some sex maniac. He watched Fawn up there onstage and followed her when she left, forced her off the road, raped and killed her, buried her body in the swamp—”

“Might have been someone she knew,” Scully said. “Probably a relative. The Fanchons aren’t exactly upstanding citizens. There’s a whole warren of ’em south of town. Always in jail for assault or brawling or whatnot.”

Ben sipped his coffee, leaning back in his chair, relaxed but totally attentive, his newshound senses on red alert. “Did she have a boyfriend?” he asked.

“Not anyone steady,” Scully said. “Of course, she might have had a boyfriend she kept mum about. Maybe a married guy.”

“She might have been in the family way by this married man,” Gran said. “Maybe she arranged to meet him in that spot in the swamp and then threatened to spill the beans to his wife, so he killed her.”

“But what if he didn’t?” Mazie put in. “He could have driven Fawn to a bus station,
handed her a wad of money, and sent her off to start a new life.”

Scully nodded. “Possible. People are always seeing her. Two years ago Bert Krueger saw a woman he swears was Fawn in a Las Vegas casino.”

Mazie hooted. “Oh, that’s a great source. Wasn’t Bert Krueger the one who swore he was taken up in an alien spaceship and given a rectal probe?”

“My friend Mildred swears she saw a girl who looked exactly like Fawn at the Mall of America,” Gran said. “She was—”

Wham!
The walls of the room shook, coffee quivered in cups, and a copper Jell-O mold fell off the wall and clanged to the floor.

Scully was out the door in a second, the others close behind. Outside on the lawn Sam and Joey were loading a large potato into a weird-looking gadget that appeared to be made out of PVC tubing, with a grill igniter duct-taped onto it.

“What
is
that?” Mazie asked.

“Potato gun,” Ben answered, scooping up a handful of raw potato chunks scattered across the back porch, obviously the cause of the shaking walls.

“What the heck were you trying to do?” Scully thundered at the boys. “Knock down the house?”

“We weren’t aiming at the house,” Sam said. “We were aiming at the cat.”

“It’s a wonder you didn’t blow yourselves up!” Scully yanked the gun out of Sam’s hands.

Mazie snatched a container out of Joey’s pocket. “Is that my hair spray?”

“It was just sitting out on your dresser,” Joey said, rolling his eyes. “It’s not like you were using it or anything.”

“Can I see that?” asked Ben, and Scully handed him the gun. Ben examined it from all angles, squinting into the barrel and testing the ignition while Sam went into a garbled explanation of how they’d hacksawed off some lengths of PVC tubing for the barrel and hooked up the firing mechanism to the barbecue igniter with screws and wires.

“Ingenious,” Labeck said.

“Yeah. They’re geniuses at mayhem.” Scully glared at his sons, trying to play the stern father but ruining the effect by allowing a note of pride to creep into his voice.

“Your firing mechanism is too slow,” Labeck told the boys. “You need to switch it
to an actuator.”

“Don’t tell me you’re going to help them?!?” Mazie asked in disbelief. The boys were regarding Labeck as though he’d just explained how to build a full-fledged Wii system from cereal boxes and flashlight batteries.

“Show us how you do the actuator thing,” Sam demanded, listening so hard his ears were practically vibrating.

“I can show you, if the right tools are on hand and if it’s okay with your dad.”