Tangled Thing Called Love: Life and Love on the Lam (A Loveswept Contemporary Romance)

by Juliet Rosetti

  It was heartbreaking. A lump came to Mazie’s throat and tears stung her eyes at the thought of those little boys who’d lost their mother and then their sister. Still, she couldn’t help feeling that there was something a little prefab about Gil Fanchon’s spiel, like a pitchman on late-night television. An air of the huckster clung to Gil.

  Ben kept one eye on Mazie as he videotaped. He didn’t trust Fanchon one inch. Every time Mazie turned her back, the guy’s eyes tracked to her ass. Ben had already discounted 90 percent of what Fanchon had told them. He was a big-time bullshitter, and Ben didn’t like the way he was playing on Mazie’s sympathy.

  Tomorrow, Ben vowed, he was going to do some investigating, and he wouldn’t be one bit surprised to discover that the person behind Fawn Fanchon’s disappearance was her own father.

  Chapter Eleven

  How not to start your morning: with a phone call from a teacher.

  “Is this Miss Maguire?” asked an unfamiliar woman’s voice.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m Abby Stowe, the third-grade summer school teacher?”

  Summer school. The greatest advancement in education since chalk as far as Mazie was concerned. It provided a bright yellow school bus that siphoned up the twins and didn’t regurgitate them until five hours later.

  “I believe you’re the contact person for Joseph and Samuel Maguire?” Miss Stowe went on. “Did you give the boys permission to bring a dog to class?”

  “No, I did not.” How had the little weasels managed to pull off a stunt like that? One of them must have popped Muffin into a backpack just before getting on the bus. Assuming that Muffin was in the kitchen with Gran, Mazie hadn’t noticed him missing. She and Ben had hurriedly left right after the boys, both of them eager to get started on their investigation of Fawn Fanchon’s disappearance.

  Their first stop had been the Coulee County Sheriff’s Department. There was a surprising amount of information available to the public under the open records law: three thick manila file folders, in fact. The sheriff’s department hadn’t started computerizing its files until 2004, so there was no way to search or cross-reference material; everything had to be gone through one item at a time. It was a mess—not indexed or alphabetized and with papers virtually exploding out of the folders. But Ben was looking at it as though it were breakfast and lunch combined.

  “What are we looking for exactly?” Mazie asked him.

  “Possibilities. In the documentary, we want to be able to provide half a dozen alternate scenarios: Fawn being abducted by a stranger, or meeting her secret lover, or the devil thing—”

  “Do we have a point of view? Are we leaning heavily on the random rapist, or do we want to have Fawn living in a Florida trailer park with—” Abruptly Mazie lowered her voice. She’d forgotten she was in the scuttlebutt center of the world. Margery Kienast, the sheriff’s department secretary, was hovering nearby, pretending to file paper, but eavesdropping so blatantly it was a wonder her ears didn’t lift her off the ground. Margery was not a believer in the “loose lips sink ships” approach to life, and the news that someone was poking into Fawn’s disappearance would be all over the dirty-laundry clotheslines by noon.

  “No, we don’t have a point of view,” Ben said, lowering his voice as well. “We’re open to all possibilities. Can you get hold of a computer? I’d like to see what kind of video is available on Fawn, see what the news coverage was like at the time.”

  “I could use one of the library computers,” Mazie suggested. She heard how tight her voice sounded, and realized that she and Ben were on a cautious footing with each other this morning. There was a sense of unfinished business between them. Mazie had expected Ben to come to her bedroom again last night, but if he had, she hadn’t noticed. Exhausted, she’d slept heavily, dreamed vividly, and hadn’t wakened until Gran had rapped on her door in the morning.

  She set off for the library, but getting access to a computer wasn’t as simple as she’d thought it would be. Her library card had expired ten years ago and she had to fill out a lengthy form before being allowed to access the library’s old, slow computers. She’d just brought up the video of the 2001 pageant when she’d gotten the phone call from the school about the contraband dog. Mazie left hurriedly and walked the four blocks over to the school.

  All of Quail Hollow’s kids from kindergarten to twelfth grade attended school in one sprawling building: the grade school kids in one wing, the middle schoolers in another, and the high school kids in the large two-story central building, which currently was undergoing renovation, judging by the construction equipment all over the place.

  “Nobody said we couldn’t bring Muffin to school,” Sam explained to his aunt, displaying the flexible conscience of a person who might grow up to be a tax lawyer. The boys had kept Muffin quiet beneath their worktable for an hour by feeding him dog treats, but at recess, Muffin had run around barking and chasing terrified first graders, resulting in a near riot.

  Mazie scolded the boys and made them apologize to their teacher—who actually seemed quite taken with Muffin—then left with the dog in tow, cutting through the high school wing. Things looked pretty much the same as when she’d gone to school here. Same lockers, classrooms, and bulletin boards. Same aromas of varnish, cafeteria food, and adolescent sweat. There was the chem lab, where Melvin Konkol’s Bunsen burner had exploded one day, billowing black smoke and forcing the evacuation of the building. There was the Home Ec room, site of Mazie’s many rage-filled battles with sewing machines. She peeked into the gym. The bleachers were up and a couple of janitors were scrubbing streak marks off the floors. Bumps and thumps and the odor of asphalt came from above, where the roof apparently was undergoing repairs.

  She stopped at a bubbler next to the auditorium and lifted Muffin up for a drink. He was a sloppy drinker, his tongue darting in and out of the stream of water, spraying water in all directions.

  “Mazie!” someone behind her shrieked. “Ohmigod—Mazie Maguire! I heard you were back—you should have called me!”

  Mazie swung around just as Holly Greenberg rushed up and overwhelmed her in a hug, laughing, cooing over Muffin, and talking in a single breathless stream. “You’re here for the pageant, right? You’ll win, of course, you look so damn good and look at me I’m big as a house, still wearing maternity pants two years later.”

  Mazie finally stepped back and got a good look at Holly. Pixie-short, glossy black hair, sparkling brown eyes, the kind of olive skin that doesn’t show wrinkles until long after menopause, and a va-va-voom figure that unfortunately was no longer in style since supermodels had made wishbone clavicles mandatory. She’d been Miss Quail Hollow the year after Mazie, who had mentored her for the pageant. Holly was a year younger, but miles ahead reproductively speaking, with four kids under the age of ten.

  Holly patted her gut. “Don’t look,” she moaned. “I never lost the blubber from the last baby. But that’s what I get for marrying straight out of high school. I should have been smart, like you.”

  “Get sent to prison, you mean?”

  “Oh, sweetie—I fantasize about prison cells! A room where they lock you in and nobody can get at you. No meals to make. Lights out at ten o’clock. Eight hours sleep. Do you know what I’d give for—oh, hell, I’d settle for two straight hours where nobody’s pestering me because they’re throwing up or wetting the bed or wanting to have sex. You’ll understand when you have kids of your own.”

  “I’m suddenly rethinking having kids.” Holly wasn’t exactly the poster child for marriage and parenthood.

  Holly laughed. “That’s why I agreed to be in this ridiculous pageant,” she confided. “It gets me out of the house three hours a day for a whole weekend and I can pretend I’m only doing this because it’s my civic duty. And now you’re here and we can go through it together and it’ll be fun—that is why you’re here, right?”

  “Uhh … no—I just stopped here to collect my dog.”

  “You’ve got t
o be in it, Mazie—don’t make me go up against Tabitha Tritt and Gretchen Wuntz by myself!” Holly worked the puppy eyes, and boy was she good at it! Their lives had gone in different directions since high school—Holly marrying her hometown boyfriend and staying in Quail Hollow, Mazie going on to college and infamy as a murderess—but now the years fell away and they were picking up where they’d left off.

  “I can’t do the pageant,” Mazie explained. “I’m babysitting Emily’s boys all week.”

  “I’m on it!” Holly began towing Mazie toward the auditorium’s stage door, using the experienced grip of a woman who has dragged screaming toddlers away from Choco-Coated Sugar Bombs in the supermarket. “You’re babysitting the twin gangsters, right? They happen to be my son’s best friends—a case of Bad hanging out with Superbad. They can go over to my place after summer school. I’ll pay the babysitter double. Hell, I’ll pay her five times over! Just do this pageant with me, Mazie.”

  “I don’t know—”

  “That’s a yes!” They were climbing the steps that led to the rear of the stage. “I don’t know equals yes—unwritten rule!”

  “I can’t bring Muffin back there.”

  “Who says? Listen, I happen to know Tritt is allergic to dogs. Her eyes will water, she’ll get all stuffed up, and she’ll start sneezing. There’s no downside.”

  This was crazy, Mazie thought, as Holly dragged her backstage. She couldn’t be in the pageant. She’d sworn a solemn vow to herself not to be in this pageant. And now she was weakening, allowing Holly to flimflam her into it.

  “Okay, here’s the deal,” Holly said breathlessly. “We’re supposed to be rehearsing for the opening ceremony tomorrow night. Which is also the swimsuit competition. A two-piece swimsuit—do you believe it? Even Miss America is doing bikini nowadays.”

  Mazie gasped in horror.

  Holly pinched her hip. “What are you whining about, Miss Skinnyass? I’m the one who should be kvetching. I’ve got hips like a BarcaLounger. I was going to wear my granny swimsuit—you know, the kind with a skirt? The kind a nun could wear for an audience with the pope? Can you imagine me in a bikini bottom? My ass would look like one of those rise’n’bake cloverleaf rolls. And you know what else it means, don’t you? Waxing. Down there.”

  The horror, the horror.

  “I don’t have a swimsuit,” Mazie said, a last-second desperation pass. Despite the fact that she’d spent the last three months as a lingerie waitress, she’d never felt at ease displaying her assets in public. She was the kind of person who in high school had her period twenty-eight days a month to avoid the group showers after gym class.

  “Maybe you could borrow something from Tritt,” Holly said. “She brought along enough swimsuits for three months on the Riviera. I saw her unpacking them this morning in the teachers’ lounge.”

  “She’s a teacher now?” Mazie tried to imagine the kind of class Tabitha Tritt might teach. Basics of Bitchery?

  Holly chuckled. “Sully her hands with chalk dust? No, we’re using the teachers’ lounge for our dressing room—the locker rooms are being renovated.”

  Mazie spotted Tabitha Tritt over in front of a full-length mirror, adjusting the straps of a bikini and admiring her perfect, volcanic-cone breasts.

  “Boob work, you think?” Mazie whispered.

  “Oh, yeah. Big-time. Big-big-time.”

  Tabitha was a tall redhead—the brown-eyed kind that didn’t freckle—with a nose the size of a piece of candy corn and a cobralike neck. She’d been three years ahead of Mazie in high school, a Mean Girl who’d grown up to become a Mean Woman. Mazie would sooner have had hot wax dribbled in her ear canals than ask to borrow so much as a hair clip from her.

  “She’s Tabitha Shimmel now,” Holly said.

  “Not the Septic Shimmels?”

  Holly snickered. “Yeah. She married Buddy Shimmel, the Septic Tank King.”

  “I guess that makes her the Septic Queen.”

  “Tabitha was septic even before she got married.” They both giggled. Mazie felt about fourteen years old.

  “Actually, she’s hyphenated,” Holly said. “She’s Tabitha Tritt-Shimmel now.”

  “Sounds like a German skin fungus,” Mazie whispered. “Ach! Dunt scratch zat trittshimmel!”

  Holly snorked—that oinking noise women make when they laugh through their noses. Then she whispered, “Try rearranging the letters in Tritt-Shimmel.”

  Which set off Mazie, who’d now regressed from fourteen to seven.

  “Tabitha drives around in this big pink Hummer that Buddy bought her,” Holly said. “The plates read IM2SXY.”

  “Why do you need a Hummer in Quail Hollow?” Mazie asked.

  “I dunno. In case we’re invaded by a fleet of pink Mary Kay Cadillacs?”

  “Is that Holly Greenberg and Mazie Maguire I hear snorking over there?”

  Darlene Krumke’s head appeared above a scenery flat. Darlene had been the very first Miss Quail Hollow—twenty-five years ago, which now made her forty-three, Mazie figured. She had a round face, curly brown hair streaked with gray, and a sunny disposition that kept the customers coming back to her café, the Coulee Kitchen.

  Mazie and Holly grinned up at her. “You’re taller,” Holly commented.

  “I’m standing on a step stool, but I have grown wider. I heard you talking about the swimsuits. I’m all over that.”

  Darlene jumped down and reappeared a moment later around the side of the flat, wearing a halter top and matching shorts in a bright Hawaiian print. “Two pieces, right?” Darlene grinned wickedly. “If Bodelle don’t like this, she can kiss my butt. And there’s a lot of butt to kiss, in case you didn’t notice.”

  “There are only a few women here,” Mazie said, gazing around the stage. “Shouldn’t there be more?”

  “Most of the queens have moved away and couldn’t make it back for the pageant,” Holly pointed out. “Although they’re probably lying. There’s only twenty-one of us left. Three queens dead and one missing. It’s the Miss Quail Hollow Curse.”

  “There is no curse,” Mazie said automatically.

  Holly looked at her as though she were a cranky toddler insisting she didn’t need a nap. “Of course there’s a Curse! Remember Becca Lorbecki? Busted for selling cocaine. Then who was that girl who won in 2005—Evelyn something? Her hands got all burned when she was touring that jelly bean factory in Racine and the hot guava raisin exploded.”

  “That’s not the worst one, though,” Darlene said. “Suzi Bachmann? She always thought her heinie was too flat, so she went to this quack who injected her butt with cement, baby oil, and tire sealant.”

  Mazie winced. “What happened?”

  Darlene shook her head. “You’ve heard of abs of iron, right? This was glutes of concrete. To get her back to normal they had to sedate her with horse tranquilizer and go to work with a jackhammer.”

  “And what about Miss 1999?” Holly put in. “She lost her big toe when she got drunk at an animal park in Florida and fell in the alligator pond. And don’t forget—”

  “Nothing happened to either of you,” Mazie pointed out.

  “You don’t call defective birth control pills a curse?” Holly hissed. “Four kids in nine years, you should try it sometime.”

  “My first restaurant was out on the highway,” Darlene said. “One night an eighteen-wheeler missed the curve and smashed into it. The insurance company is still fighting me over the payout and I had to start over from scratch.”

  “You see?” Holly said, hands on hips. “What are the chances of a truck taking out a diner? Ten kazillion to one. It’s the Miss Quail Hollow Curse.”

  “All right, ladies, let’s get started,” Bodelle’s electronically magnified voice boomed from the sound system.

  The stage crew—a couple of high school boys—had just finished setting up the runway, a portable metal ramp on accordion struts and caster wheels. It extended like a giant tongue from the stage halfway down the center aisle o
f the auditorium.

  “Chronological order, starting with 1989,” ordered Bodelle, who was wearing a low-cut red top that matched her lipstick, a frilly skirt, and her trademark four-inch heels. Her strawberry-blonde hair was lacquered into an elaborate upsweep. Clutching a portable Oprah-style microphone, Bodelle looked like a TV evangelist touting her magical prayer envelopes. “Darlene Krumke, you’ll lead us off.”

  Darlene stepped out from behind the curtains, pasted on a smile, and started down the runway. She was one of the few contestants who’d bothered wearing swimwear to the rehearsal, although her Hawaiian togs didn’t look as though they wanted to go anywhere near water.

  Mazie and the others clustered behind the dusty, sneeze-inducing curtains, giggling and gossiping, waiting for their cue to go on. Muffin went around doing his Cute Doggie shtick, shamelessly sucking up, being petted and cooed over, until he trotted up to Tabitha.

  People thought dogs had built-in radar that allowed them to discern good guys from bad guys, but Muffin must have had his radar turned off. Tabitha nudged Muffin away with her toe, glaring over at Mazie. “Get it away,” she snapped. “I’m allergic. And it better not crap in here.”

  Biting back a retort that referred to her husband’s occupation, Mazie scooped Muffin into her arms.

  “Dogs aren’t allowed on school property,” said Gretchen Wuntz, Miss Quail Hollow 1998, whose pastime in grade school had been tattling and whose current occupation, according to Holly, was working for an insurance company, finding loopholes that allowed the company to refuse to pay its customers’ medical bills.

  “Miss 2001,” Bodelle warbled, and her voice took on warmth as her own daughter walked out onto the runway. Channing Blumquist had been runner-up the year Fawn Fanchon won the title. When Fawn hadn’t reappeared after a month, Channing had stepped in to assume the Miss Quail Hollow title.

  Channing was attractive enough—tall and all-American-looking, with straight, honey blonde hair, light green eyes, and classic features—but she lacked animation, as though somebody had forgotten to light the flame in her internal gas burner.