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

by Juliet Rosetti

  “What’s she doing these days?” Mazie asked Holly.

  “She got married for about a minute, got divorced, couldn’t keep a steady job, and came home to live with Mommy. She teaches Tiny Tot swimming at the Y in Platteville.”

  Channing moved confidently onto the center of the stage, her posture impeccable. She wore a skimpy yellow bikini that revealed powerful back and shoulder muscles and a midsection so flat she could have ironed her evening gown on it. Her black three-inch heels were all wrong with the bikini, though; she looked like she’d forgotten to take off her church shoes when she’d changed for the beach.

  “She’s a Stepford,” Holly muttered.

  Mazie nodded. Channing was like those beautiful, perfect cyborgs in The Stepford Wives. When she smiled, it appeared as though she’d had to consult the Smile section of an instruction manual.

  “I don’t know exactly why I don’t like Channing,” Holly said. “She’s always nice, and she never snarks about other people, but I just feel like I have to go stand in the sunlight after I’ve been around her for a while.”

  Mazie licked her dry lips and straightened her shoulders—2002 would be up next.

  “Miss Quail Hollow 2003,” Bodelle announced.

  Holly, who hadn’t expected to be called up yet, looked surprised.

  “Wait a sec,” Mazie said. Handing Muffin to Holly, she shoved through the curtains and walked over to Bodelle, who was standing at a podium. Bodelle’s eyebrows shot up as Mazie approached.

  “Excuse me,” Mazie said, “I think you accidentally skipped 2002.”

  “Mazie Maguire?” Bodelle made a big show of consulting her clipboard. “You told me you wouldn’t be participating.”

  “I changed my mind.” Mazie forced a smile. “It is for a good cause, after all.”

  “I’m terribly sorry,” Bodelle said, tapping a pen against her teeth, “but our board of directors changed its mind. They decided that your participation would adversely affect the pageant brand.”

  “What board? You run this thing.”

  Bodelle’s gaze settled over Mazie like frost. “Allowing in an ex-convict would lower the tone of this pageant, set a bad example for our impressionable young people, and offend community standards.”

  “I didn’t know our community had any standards.”

  Bodelle’s mouth pursed. “I’m afraid I have to ask you to leave now.”

  Mazie started to argue, then closed her mouth. This was her ticket out! It wasn’t her fault if she couldn’t be in the stupid pageant.

  Holly barged onto the stage, Muffin dancing along with her, barking excitedly. “You can’t kick Mazie out.”

  “This doesn’t concern you, Miss ’03,” snapped Bodelle. “Get back in line.”

  “If Mazie goes, I go too!” Fists on hips, Holly scowled at Bodelle.

  “If Holly quits, I’m quitting, too!” Darlene Krumke steamed back toward center stage. “You’re disqualifying Mazie but you’re allowing the one with the shoplifting record to participate? And the one who assaulted the ice-cream truck driver? Want me to point out who they are?”

  Gretchen Wuntz swung around on Darlene. “Go ahead and quit, then. Rules are rules, and anyone who doesn’t respect them has no right to be in this pageant.”

  “Yeah, quit. Good riddance to bad rubbish,” sneered Tabitha Tritt-Shimmel.

  “And you ought to know about rubbish!” Holly snapped.

  Suddenly every Miss Quail Hollow was onstage, yelling at the top of her lungs. It was like a baseball brawl where both dugouts empty out, except these were women in high heels and ridiculous amounts of makeup, shoving and shrieking. Muffin tensed and growled. Any second now he was going to start nipping ankles.

  Mazie, who’d had enough of hormone-crazed, backstabbing females in prison, decided that this was an excellent time to leave. Snatching Muffin up, she jumped off the stage, strode down the aisle, and marched out of the school. Once outside, she took several deep breaths, relieved to be out of the pageant but feeling a pang of regret. It might have been fun doing the whole thing with Holly.

  The sound of electric drills and hammering came from nearby and the heavy odor of tar drifted through the air. Scaffolding had been erected over the sidewalk in the construction zone. Mazie made her way beneath the framework, clutching Muffin because she didn’t want him wandering around without his leash. Footsteps echoed on the boards just above her, seeming almost to be keeping pace with her. Curious, she glanced up as she reached a gap between two segments of scaffolding. She caught a glimpse of a figure up there just before something large hurtled down, missing her by millimeters, its shock wave slamming her to the ground.

  Chapter Twelve

  “Mazie!” Holly, who’d just emerged from the school, stood for a frozen, horrified moment before rushing over. “Oh my God—that thing missed you by a hair! Get out of there—something else might fall!” Hauling Mazie to her feet, then scooping up Muffin, Holly yanked them out from under the scaffolding and into the parking lot.

  Mazie’s knees suddenly went weak and she had to lean against the side of a car. The object that had nearly pancaked her, she saw, was a five-gallon bucket of roofing tar. Amazingly, it hadn’t burst on impact or she and Muffin would have been covered in black gunk. And possibly dead. She carefully examined Muffin to make sure he hadn’t been hurt.

  “That thing must weigh a ton—an inch closer and you’d have been killed!” Holly’s voice trembled; she seemed more shaken than Mazie herself.

  Mazie peered up at the scaffolding. From this angle she could see that the boardwalk atop the framework was empty. “Someone was up there,” she said. “A workman, I think.”

  “Who was he—did you see him?”

  Mazie shook her head. “It all happened too fast.”

  “Criminal negligence!” Holly sounded furious. She whipped her phone out and started jabbing buttons. “I’m reporting this to the police.” Holly talked for a minute, seeming familiar with the person on the other end, then hung up. “The police chief himself is coming over to check this out. I told him we’d meet him at Oscar’s.”

  “Oscar’s?”

  “Because you and I both need a drink after this. I haven’t had a drink since I was pregnant with my youngest, and Mallory is twenty months now. She’s finally weaned and I can have a drink if I want to. And I do want to.”

  They took Holly’s big burgundy mommy-van. As she drove she made arrangements for her sitter to take the twins after school, tossed toys into the backseat, and applied lipstick—all the sloppy driving habits that ordinarily drove Mazie bonkers but which she forgave because Holly, after all, had not only dropped out of the pageant on her behalf but was also taking the twins off her hands. A minute later they pulled up in front of Oscar’s.

  Mazie took Muffin inside with them because it would be too hot in the van.

  “Do you allow dogs?” she asked Oscar as they came in.

  He eyeballed Muffin. “No dogs. Rats with bad hair, okay.”

  Muffin found a comfortable spot beneath Mazie’s bar stool and flopped down, tired after a morning of sucking up to beauty queens and enduring near-death experiences. Oscar brought out a plastic bowl filled with water and set it in front of Muffin, who lapped with noisy gusto.

  Oscar raised a silver-hooped eyebrow at Mazie. “Same as last time?”

  “Why mess with perfection?”

  “I’ll have what she’s having,” Holly said. “As long as it contains booze. I haven’t had a drink in months. You can’t drink when you’re breast-feeding.”

  Oscar winced. “Too much information.”

  He mixed the drinks and set them down on the bar.

  Holly sipped. “Oh, yeah—I can taste the vodka! What is this?”

  “A Pain in the Ass,” Mazie said. “My signature drink.”

  Holly giggled. “It kinda fits. You want to know what happened after you walked off the stage? Bodelle blamed you for the whole blowup. But guess who stuck up for you�
�Channing.”

  “You’re kidding. Ms. Stepford?”

  “Weird, huh? She told Bodelle you should be invited back into the pageant.”

  Before Mazie could make any sense out of that, Oscar cut into the conversation. “Hey, Mazie—I hear you and some hotshot photographer are making a movie about the Fanchon girl’s disappearance.”

  Even for Quail Hollow, this news had traveled fast. “Who—”

  “It’s all over. Your boyfriend is looking through the case files, right? And you’re shooting film over in the coulee and you made a million-dollar deal with Gil Fanchon for the rights. You think you could get Jennifer Lawrence to play Fawn in the movie?”

  “Wait—what’s this?” asked Holly. “You’re making a movie?”

  “It’s not a movie. It’s investigative journalism.”

  “Like 60 Minutes?” Holly asked.

  “Exactly.” Except without facts, sponsors, or a million-dollar budget.

  As she and Holly worked their way through the bowls of peanuts set out on the bar, Mazie explained about Ben’s idea for a documentary on Fawn Fanchon, describing the encounter with Gil Fanchon in the woods and how he’d agreed to the project.

  Oscar returned and began wiping the bar top in front of them. “You want my take on what happened to Fawn?”

  Mazie fished a maraschino cherry out of her drink and popped it in her mouth. “Shoot.”

  “Werewolves,” Oscar said.

  Holly and Mazie did synchronized eye-rolling.

  “Yeah, I know.” Oscar grinned. “But there’s something living back in those coulees. The Indians had this legend about a wolf that walked on its hind legs.”

  “Now you’re going to tell us you saw it yourself,” Holly said.

  Oscar took a bottle of water out of the fridge, opened it, and took a swig. “Matter of fact, I did. It was a while back. I’d had a few drinks up in Platteville and decided to take a back road through the coulee because I didn’t want to get pulled over for a Breathalyzer. All of a sudden something lopes across the road forty, fifty feet in front of the car. Big. Covered in fur. It had a snout, pointed ears—but it was upright, tall as a man. It stopped for a second, whipped around and—swear to God—stared right at me. Glowing yellow eyes. Oh, man—major Depends moment! Then the thing turns and runs off into the woods. I opened my car window a crack, and I could hear it crashing through the brush.”

  Holly shuddered. “You’re giving me the creepies.”

  “It was a dog,” Mazie said.

  Oscar shook his head. “It was not a dog. I know what I saw and it was something walking upright. It was the Coulee Devil. There could be a whole den of the things back in that swamp. The Fanchon girl was in the wrong place at the wrong time. She drove down Skifstead Road, got out of the truck for some dumb reason, and the thing pounced on her.”

  “But it spit out her shoes,” Mazie said.

  Oscar grinned. “ ’Course. Werewolves don’t eat shoes.”

  Oscar set a bowl of popcorn in front of them and went off to wait on another customer.

  “Werewolves,” Mazie said. “Grade-A bunk. Right?”

  Holly wigwagged her hand to indicate that she didn’t totally reject it. She lowered her voice. “You want to hear my theory? I think Gil Fanchon killed Fawn.”

  Mazie stared at her. “Killed his own daughter?”

  “What if he was molesting her? Maybe he decided to shut her up when she threatened to tell.”

  Mazie considered this, staring up at the moose head. “That’s what Labeck thinks too.”

  “Who’s this Labeck you keep talking about? Your boyfriend?”

  “I’m too old to be talking about boyfriends.”

  “Beau?”

  “Too Southern.”

  “Lover?” Holly raised her eyebrows.

  “I can’t introduce him like that in Quail Hollow,” Mazie protested. “Imagine if I run into Father O’Brien. ‘Oh, hi, Father—this is my lover, Ben Labeck.’ Besides which, he’s not my lover because we’re not—you know.”

  “Boinking? Shagging? Doing the horizontal bop? Why the hell not?”

  Mazie didn’t feel like discussing her nonboinking status with Ben Labeck. “We were talking about Gil Fanchon,” she reminded Holly.

  “Well, I just think he overdoes that poor-grieving-dad bit,” Holly said. “Did he tell you about the Fawn Foundation?”

  “Sure. He said it raises money to find leads on his daughter.”

  Holly snorted. “If someone claims they spotted Fawn in Las Vegas, off Gil flies to Vegas to spend the Fund’s money in the casinos. Fawn’s in Miami in February? He goes to Florida. Somehow there’s never a Fawn sighting in North Dakota in January.”

  “How convenient.”

  “You know what I think?” Holly said. “I think we need to go check out Gil’s place, see if we can find some clues. Greenberg and Maguire, crime scene investigators.”

  Mazie clinked glasses with her. “Cagney and Lacey.”

  “Tina Fey and Amy Poehler.” Holly clinked back.

  “Laverne and Shirley.”

  The last words had been uttered by Johnny Hoolihan, who’d entered unnoticed by either of them. He was wearing a navy knit shirt and worn khakis and looked even better than he had yesterday. His eyes skimmed over Mazie, not missing a thing.

  “Morning, Chief,” Holly said, raising her glass in a salute.

  “It’s afternoon.” Johnny raised his eyebrows. “I thought you weren’t supposed to drink while you were nursing.”

  “Mallory’s weaned. I’ve got two hours of babysitter time left and I don’t intend to waste a second of it.”

  “What’s this Chief business?” Mazie asked, feeling out of the loop.

  Holly gave her an odd look. “Because he’s the chief of police.”

  “Right. And I’m Catwoman.”

  Johnny grinned. “Honest to God truth, Mazie. Budget cuts, retirements—I was with the department seven years, and when the old chief retired, nobody could come up with a good enough reason not to make me chief.”

  “But—” She gestured at his pants. “You dress like a pro golfer.”

  This got a full-out laugh. “I’m on vacation this week. I can dress in bib overalls if I want. But I always end up hanging around the office anyway—I have no life.” He took a small notepad out of his pocket, and as he did so, his whole demeanor changed, the flirtatious guy vanishing, replaced by a serious law officer. “Tell me what happened over at the school this morning.”

  “Well, we were rehearsing for the beauty pageant—” Holly began.

  “Achievement pageant,” Mazie corrected. “Most people don’t realize you have to be a member of Mensa before they even let you in.”

  Big grin from Johnny. “Is that why the contestants have to wear swimsuits—to show off their big IQs?”

  “It doesn’t matter anyway,” Holly said. “Because Bodelle wouldn’t let Mazie be in the pageant, and I quit in protest.”

  “She won’t let you?” Johnny’s eyebrows rose. “Yesterday she was guilt-tripping you into it.”

  “No convicts need apply,” Mazie explained. “Bodelle’s new rule.”

  Johnny shook his head, then pulled his cop face back on and asked her about the scaffolding accident.

  “I was walking underneath, and someone was just above me—”

  “She could have been killed,” Holly interrupted. “I saw the whole thing. That tar bucket missed Mazie by a hair. It must have weighed fifty or sixty pounds. The blowback just knocked her flat.”

  Johnny frowned. “You said someone was up on the scaffolding. Did you get a look at him?”

  Mazie shook her head. “No. I just glimpsed a person—a man.”

  “Did you get the impression that he had the bucket in his hands and it slipped, or that he deliberately dropped it?”

  “It seemed to be deliberate—but maybe I’m just being paranoid.”

  Johnny fixed his blue-gray eyes on her, the cop part of h
im more intense now. “You’ve been back home one day, Mazie. You’ve been run off the road, bounced from the pageant, and nearly killed by a tar bucket. Who did you piss off?”

  Mazie’s phone rang. Ben, she saw from the caller ID, feeling a pang of guilt. She was supposed to be helping with the Fawn investigation and here she was sitting in a bar instead.

  “Where are you?” he said. “I’m at the library and nobody knows what happened to you.”

  “Emergency,” Mazie said. “The twins sneaked Muffin to school and I had to go and rescue him. Then I ran into an old school friend—”

  “It wasn’t Hoolihan, was it?” Ben growled.

  Mazie swiveled on her bar stool and hunched over the phone, hoping the sound wasn’t leaking out. “No. Her name is Holly Greenberg. She’s—”

  Holly grabbed the phone away from Mazie. “Hello, there, Ben Labeck—I’m Holly. Mazie has been telling me all about you.”

  Mazie tried to snatch the phone back. A tussel ensued, and Holly won. “She told me you’re a living god, Ben—I can’t wait to meet you.”

  Mazie didn’t need her ear plastered to the phone to hear Ben’s laugh. He knew he was being outrageously flattered, but seemed to be eating it up.

  Holly’s eyes sparkled evilly. “Would you let me borrow Mazie for about two hours this afternoon, Ben? I’m going to help with the Fawn thing. You know, two heads are better than one, four boobs are better than—”

  “Give that here!” Face flaming, Mazie seized the phone back. She gave Ben directions for picking up her and the twins at Holly’s house later.

  “I’ll find the place,” Ben assured her. “And Mazie …”

  “What?”

  “Try to stay out of trouble?”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Mazie drove. After twenty-nine nonalcoholic months, even a single drink had gone to Holly’s head and she was flying in the pain-free zone. Gil Fanchon’s trailer was about five miles outside town in a clearing so close to the edge of the swamp he must have had to sandbag his lawn during the spring floods. They drove past the trailer at about forty-five miles an hour, not wanting to risk going too slow because if Gil was home he might notice them.