Maggie and the Inconvenient Corpse

by Barbara Cool Lee

  "Good for you."

  "So I'll give her the same chance you gave me. Be a mentor to her. Help her avoid the worst of the mistakes she's facing."

  "She's not you, kid."

  "She's young and pretty and stupid, and is making the biggest mistake of her life. Sounds exactly like me."

  Nora smiled. "You were never stupid. You are way too nice, but not stupid. And not cruel."

  "Neither is she," Maggie said.

  Nora shook her head. "She wants you to host a bridal shower for her."

  "She's trying to make friends. And throw some business my way."

  "If you need business I'll hold a cocktail party for all the bigwigs on The Row. We'll have them eating out of your hand. No need to do this for her."

  "Yeah," Maggie said. "I need to do it. I need to be above the pettiness."

  "And that's why you were never like Virginia Foley."

  Maggie shrugged. "But I was the first one he cheated with."

  Nora laughed. "The first? Oh, honey. How can you have spent so much time in our world and still be so blind?"

  "He was a good liar. It doesn't matter anymore." She sighed. "But if he has a baby with her, I don't know if I can let that go so easily."

  "I always felt bad that he didn't talk to you about that before you got married," Nora replied. "I should have warned you he wouldn't want to have children with you."

  "It wasn't your responsibility to warn the woman he cheated with," she pointed out.

  "Don't worry about it," Nora said. "I may be an old lady of 50, but there's still time for you."

  "I'm not ever getting married again," Maggie said. "Not after the mess I made of it. But a baby would be nice."

  Reese walked in the door just then, tall and blond and wearing gold-mirrored shades and taking up most of the oxygen in the room.

  He took off his shades while everyone tried to catch their breath, then smiled when he saw Maggie and Nora sitting at the counter and headed their way.

  "Maybe Reese can be a sperm donor," Maggie muttered.

  Nora laughed. "Junior, if that's an option, I wouldn't do it with a test tube."

  Chapter 5

  Reese kissed Nora on the cheek, said hello to Maggie, and then ordered his coffee.

  Brooke had started making it as soon as he'd walked in the door. "Large skim milk cappuccino," Brooke said, sliding it across the counter to him.

  Maggie went over to him. "I need to talk to you," she said quietly.

  "Okay," Reese replied, looking a bit wary at her serious tone. "Now?"

  She nodded. "Privately."

  He grabbed his coffee mug and headed over to the beat-up piano at the far end of the room. He set his mug on top of the piano lid, then sat down on the bench, facing away from the keyboard.

  He raised an eyebrow. "Something serious?"

  She stood in front of him and crossed her arms. Shrugged. Then hesitated. "Not serious. Maybe. But we need to talk about it."

  "Oh, dear," he said with a wry smile. "I feel like a naughty boy called into the principal's office. What did I do now?"

  She looked out O'Riley's front window. The spinning barber pole in front of her bead shop caught her eye.

  "Maggie?" Reese asked.

  She looked back at him. "I—it's embarrassing," she said.

  "What is?"

  She hemmed and hawed a bit, until he finally said, "I can't read your mind, Maggie. Let me have it."

  "Why do you want to rent my house?" she blurted out.

  "What?" He looked totally confused. "I've been here for two weeks. We signed a lease. What's the problem?"

  "Just answer the question. Please."

  He leaned back against the piano. "Well, it wasn't the awful sculpture in the yard, I can tell you that."

  "I'm serious," she said.

  "I can see that," he replied. "But I don't get what the grilling is about."

  "It's a simple question," she pointed out. "You could buy anything you want. Why are you renting Casablanca? Why don't you buy a house here in Carita?"

  He rolled his eyes. "I need another house like a hole in my head. I already have four houses. No, five." He paused. "No, I have a penthouse in New York I only use when I travel. So I guess that's six. I should probably sell the one in Tahoe since it's just sitting there empty and I haven't hung out with the ski bunnies in years…." He drifted off.

  "Are you putting me on?"

  "Huh?" he asked, pulling himself back to the conversation. "No." Then he laughed. "Yeah, I guess that does sound weird. But you know how it is, Maggie. You used to be rich."

  "No," she corrected. "My husband was rich, and I had his black AmEx card and too much time on my hands."

  "But you had a bunch of houses. Okay, fine," he added when she gave him a funny look. "He had a bunch of houses. You only have one multimillion-dollar estate. But how many houses does Big Mac have?"

  "That's not the question."

  He just looked at her.

  "Fine. Seven, now that he bought the one next door to Casablanca."

  "Seven?" he said with a thoughtful look on his face. "I hate to think I'm becoming too much like Big Mac. Maybe I should sell one of mine."

  "Back to the point," she said. "We're talking about Casablanca."

  "So we are. But I don't know why." He scooted over to one side of the piano bench, then patted it. "Sit down, Magdalena."

  She sat next to him.

  He leaned over close. "Now. Tell me what you're all worked up about."

  She clenched her fingers together in her lap. "I don't want pity."

  He let out a big sigh. "Ah. Got it. That's what this is all about. So who's been getting on your case?"

  "Who said someone's getting on my case?"

  "Maggie, get real. Everything was copacetic, and now all of a sudden you're all upset."

  "Okay," she said. "Virginia told me you rented Casablanca because you felt sorry for me."

  "Virginia is an idiot and I don't feel sorry for you."

  She glanced at him. "You sure?"

  He leaned over very close to her ear. "I'm very sure."

  Then he sat back. "So. You want to know why I decided to rent a house in Carita instead of buying my seventh useless, overpriced piece of California real estate?"

  "No," she said, standing up again and pacing a few steps back and forth in front of the piano bench. "I get why you might not want to buy yet another house. But why Carita? Why Casablanca?"

  Reese leaned back and put his hands on his head, fingers interlaced. "I like Carita. It's at the beach. But it's far enough from Hollywood that I don't get papped." He grinned viciously. "Except on rare occasions when I get caught kissing Big Mac's wife at the stroke of midnight on New Year's."

  She rolled her eyes at him.

  "I like the privacy I have here. But it's close enough to LA that I can get to appointments when I need to. It's relaxing. And Brooke makes a good cup of coffee."

  "—And you feel guilty," she added.

  "Okay," he said. "I confess. I feel a tiny bit guilty for messing up your prenup. But I was going to be here all summer anyway. I'm always hanging out in Carita, so why stay at a hotel? I thought it was time to lease something long term. Really get a break from it all. Spend the whole summer here. Find my zen. Work on my tan."

  "Sure," she said sarcastically.

  He dropped the joking tone and got a serious look on his face. "No, really. I'm actually not kidding. My son doesn't live in LA anymore. Now that he's turned fourteen, he's in boarding school, and he was really my last tie to Los Angeles. So there's no reason for me to go back to the city. And getting away from the chaos is good. LA is too tempting."

  "Tempting?"

  "I'm tempted to drink and drug again," he said honestly. "I'm tempted to succumb to the shallow famewhore lifestyle. I'm tempted to strangle Olivia."

  Olivia was his ex-girlfriend, the mother of his child, and the single most ambitious social climber Maggie had ever met.

 
; "As long as you aren't just feeling sorry for me."

  "I don't feel sorry for you. You're better off divorced than you were with that jerk. You have a business, a nice group of friends, and a honking big oceanfront house."

  "Yeah. A house that's underwater on the mortgage with the bank breathing down my neck."

  "Which is why we're having this conversation," he said. "Here's the bottom line: No, I am not just feeling sorry for you. I do think you got shafted in the divorce, and I do feel it's a tiny bit my fault. But I want to live here. I wouldn't be living here if I didn't."

  "Okay," she said. "As long as it's not just pity. I don't want pity."

  "No pity. I like your house. I love your swimming pool. I hate that stupid sculpture. And I'm reasonably fond of you. So let's not rock the boat."

  "Deal," she said.

  He held out his hand and she shook it. "It's settled, then," he said. He turned around on the piano bench to face the keys.

  She leaned against the upright and looked out the window toward the street. "I guess it is," she replied.

  He began playing a lilting piece, very quietly, not calling attention to himself. The café customers didn't seem to notice.

  She watched his hands.

  He didn't watch them, playing by touch, from memory.

  Reese Stevens was a Movie Star. In capital letters. And music was in his past. Mostly. Except for afternoons at O'Riley's, the village coffee house with the old beater piano in the corner and the locals who let him pretend he was just an anonymous guy fiddling around on the keys. She wondered why he didn't just get a big grand piano for Casablanca. But maybe it was about the isolation of days spent with employees and hangers-on and people who didn't really know him at all. Maybe it was the constant loneliness she knew lurked just beneath the surface of his fabulous life.

  "What is that song?" she asked, enjoying the lovely melody.

  "Guns'n'Roses. Sweet Child o' Mine."

  "Seriously?"

  "Yeah."

  She wondered briefly if he would begin to sing, but he didn't. That would have been a bridge too far, even in Carita. Breaking out into that instantly recognizable gravelly baritone would end his illusion of anonymity, making it impossible for people to pretend that they didn't notice a former rock star noodling on a piano in a coffee shop.

  He started playing one-handed, grabbing his coffee mug with his left hand and taking a swig, while keeping the song's melody going with his right hand.

  She imagined he'd done that same move a hundred times in concerts. Only back then, he'd been grabbing for a bottle of whiskey instead of a cappuccino.

  "You left or right handed?" she asked.

  He set the coffee cup on the piano lid and went back to playing two-handed. "Left. But if you play piano long enough, you become ambidextrous—or mostly so, anyway. I still write left-handed. Smoked left handed, back when I was a chainsmoker. Tie my shoes left one first, too." He grinned.

  She shook her head, still watching his hands, and listening to the building melody of the song.

  He still didn't do more than glance down occasionally, and carried on the conversation as if his hands had a life of their own.

  "I can barely tie my shoes," she said.

  "You can make jewelry out of beads as tiny as sesame seeds," he said. "I wouldn't call that uncoordinated." He smiled and his fingers flew into an arpeggio as the song built to a climax.

  She leaned on the piano and played with the battery-operated candle that was sitting there. She twirled it around, and the light swayed back and forth in time with the music.

  He smiled wistfully. "Reminds me of the sea of cigarette lighters in the audience when we played stadiums. All those pinpoints of light out there."

  He'd played live in front of a hundred thousand people when he was just a teenager.

  "Must have been overwhelming," she said.

  "Yeah." He finished the song. "It was." He took another drink from his mug, tilting his head back to drain it.

  "Is that why?" she asked.

  "The drugs?" he asked in reply.

  She nodded.

  He had been a notorious heroin addict, and only quit after almost killing himself.

  "Maybe," he said. He shook his head. "I don't know. It's a surreal experience. Being famous on that level. And we were just kids, all of us in the band. Looking back, the drugs just seem so stupid and pointless. But at the time…." He shrugged. "I don't know why we did it. It was like driving full speed toward a brick wall. Knowing you were doing it. Laughing while you did it. And putting your foot down on the gas the whole way."

  Then he stood up and stretched. "Who knows? If David hadn't died…."

  David Zimmer had been the guitar player. He'd died when Reese crashed his car into a palm tree on the PCH.

  "If he hadn't died, you would have kept on?" she asked.

  He nodded. "Absolutely. Right into that wall." His eyes glistened with tears, and he looked down at the piano keys for a minute. Then he whispered, "if he'd been driving, maybe he would be alive and I'd be the forever-young dead guy with a million people visiting my grave."

  "Mr. Stevens?"

  He turned around. There was a woman there, with a teenage daughter who giggled and blushed at the sight of him. "I love you, Rex!" the girl blurted out, then covered her face with her hands, all embarrassed.

  Rex was the vampire king he'd played in a franchise a few years ago.

  A big, friendly grin immediately came to his face, and only someone who knew him well could see the forced self-control behind it. "Hello, young lady," he said to the girl, becoming Reese Stevens, Movie Star, available to the public at a moment's notice. "It's nice to meet you. And what's your name?"

  He signed her phone case with a sharpie, took a selfie with them both, and chatted with them for a bit.

  Then, once he'd finished, he put on his gold-mirrored Ray-Bans and left the coffee shop alone, not saying goodbye to Maggie.

  Chapter 6

  It was early evening when Maggie was sitting in her tiny house and there was a knock on the door.

  She answered it, and the guy from DoorDash handed her a bag.

  She thanked him. "You've got a cool house," he commented, and she agreed.

  They stood there for a while, with him asking a bunch of questions about tiny houses, how to build them, where they could be parked legally, and how they were moved from place to place. She was happy to share all the information she had, but then she felt herself starting to droop from tiredness.

  "I better go," the guy said. "But thanks for all the info."

  There was a piercingly loud bark from somewhere. It sounded like it was only feet away from them.

  "Is that your dog?" the delivery driver asked.

  "Next door," she explained.

  They said goodbye and she went inside and shut the door.

  The sound of the dog barking in the distance was just as loud inside as it had been out on the porch.

  She set the food delivery on her kitchen counter. One of these days she'd have to start learning to cook, but she just wasn't in the mood tonight.

  She unpacked the dinner. Chicken and rice from the Asian fusion place down at the pier. Peanut sauce on the side out of habit, even though she no longer had to starve herself into a size two for Hollywood parties. She looked at the plain meal in front of her, and sighed. It was going to be another night of eating takeout and reading. A far cry from her old life. She had to admit, occasionally she missed the glamour.

  The dog next door continued to bark, and she continued to try to ignore it.

  The first time she'd heard that particular bark, it had been the loudest one she had ever experienced, and when she had been in the same room with the dog, it had been so overwhelming she'd had to cover her ears to keep them from ringing.

  Even now, with the barking coming from the home next door, the sound was echoing through her tiny house. It was a bark designed to carry across miles of pasture. A bark so piercing
, so sharp, so incredibly loud, that a shepherd somewhere in the Highlands of Scotland could know that his Collie in a field far away had discovered a lamb in distress and needed help.

  "That jerk," she muttered.

  Her ex-husband had gotten a dog only a month before their divorce. Not by choice. He'd convinced some investors to buy into a dog-centric family movie by spinning a yarn about how much he missed his own childhood pet. He'd cribbed most of his fictional autobiography from Lassie Come Home, right down to the Lassie-like Collie. And so the backers innocently gave him a similar dog, thinking he'd be pleased. In reality, he'd never owned a dog in his life.

  So in typical Big Mac McJasper fashion, he'd named the dog "Jasper" after himself, had a few publicity photos taken with the animal, and then dumped him at his vacation home in Carita for the staff to handle.

  Now the poor dog sat around the beach house, bored out of his skull, and Mac, as always, ignored him.

  She would've taken Jasper herself in the divorce, but there were two minor problems with that plan.

  One, Jasper was an oversized purebred Rough Collie, and must weigh at least eighty pounds, far too big to fit in her tiny house.

  And two, the moment she'd expressed the slightest interest in the dog's welfare, Mac had gotten stubborn and refused to part with him.

  Jasper wasn't abused. He wasn't mistreated. He was just lonely. And so she'd let it go. There were far worse fates than being a properly cared-for but bored house pet.

  Jasper was still barking, and he sounded really upset. She finally realized that this wasn't his normal bark. Maggie had never owned a dog in her life, but it didn't take an expert to recognize the distress in the dog's bark. Something was bothering him.

  She got out her phone and called the housekeeper who was in charge of Jasper's care.

  She tapped her foot on the floor while listening to the phone ringing in one ear, and the dog barking in the other. The call went to voicemail, and the old lady's lilting Irish brogue reminded her to "put in a message into the machine, and have yourself a lovely day."