Savage Distractions (The Love is Murder Social Club Book 3)

by Talia Maxwell

  “You’re missing out on all my charms,” he said and he swiped a bite with his finger, licking his own snack off his finger with a wink.

  Annie sighed.

  Yes, she was.

  She liked to call herself Annie the adventurer. Annie the brave. She thought the more she told herself who she was, the more likely she’d turn into that person. But Annie was still a coward. She couldn’t face her father and her brothers without wounded pride—she couldn’t abandon their gift for the journalist with the kitchen skills. As much as she tried to push the idea of him away, Benson came back.

  “Please,” Annie said and she set down her fork. “My feelings about you don’t matter at this point…”

  He clutched at his chest, over-playing how much of an impact her words had on him.

  “They don’t matter,” he repeated. “But they do,” he said and stood up straighter. “You want to trust in this system because it was the one chosen for you, but don’t you think maybe you can choose better?”

  No, Annie repeated. I can’t. I haven’t. I can’t. This is my only chance.

  She wondered if she believed those words; she wondered if she could commit to a process that gave her The Date and the solid dating advice of being herself. And when her mind shifted to something negative, immediately it brought her back to the family interest and the money spent.

  “Every choice,” Benson continued, his voice breaking, “is yours. Trust you.” He pointed at her. She breathed deep, ashamed and lost, wondering if there was any point of arguing.

  “It’s not that simple,” she tried, wondering if he’d let her explain the expectation that there would be a ring on her finger by next Christmas. Old school? Yes. Degrading? Maybe, if she really thought about it. But isn’t that what she wanted, too?

  “Pretty simple to me,” Benson said. He leaned against the counter, his arms pulling against the cotton t-shirt. He dipped a piece of his own chicken in the pan mixture and popped it in his mouth. “You can’t tell your family no. So, you can’t tell me yes.”

  It was the way he was positioned in her own house, so confident, as if he belonged—Annie in her pajamas, the taste of his kiss still on her lips—that sent the biggest signal. All her life Annie played by the rules with vociferous complaints for those who didn’t. She believed in karma and justice; that if she did the right thing, then the right things would happen for her.

  “You’ve figured it all out,” she answered.

  Annie lifted her head and faced Benson straight on, her eyes big and wide and free of tears. She stood tall and put her hands on her hips, strengthening her stance.

  “I’m sorry,” Annie continued. “I need a friend. I need to do this…”

  He looked into the pan and discovered a lone bite. He scooped it up and brought it over to Annie, holding his hand beneath the spoon, positioning the chicken and rice near her lips. She opened up and took the spoon, and he withdrew the utensil but stayed close-by, his breath on her cheek.

  She went to lick her lips and Benson leaned in again and Annie’s knees wobbled as she leaned back against the counter, feeling his body grace by hers and then pull back.

  “Sure thing,” Benson said without a hint of disappointment. She nodded and bit her lip feeling a wave of tears push forward again. What was she doing? “I can be that.”

  Her phone vibrated. She’d moved it to her pocket and it shook between them, rattling them back into the present moment. He kissed her one last time, a tiny peck and moved backward.

  Annie dug into her pants and looked at the screen. Gloria.

  “Hey,” Annie answered swiftly. She wiped her lips with the back of her hand.

  Gloria’s voice on the other end was steady, measured, and low. “You in the middle of something important?” her friend asked.

  “No,” Annie replied swiftly and she walked away from the counter, putting some distance between herself and Benson. “What’s going on?”

  “Sit down.”

  Without any other option, Annie lowered herself to the ground and sat squarely on the tile floor in her kitchen. Benson watched her wordlessly; she pushed their kiss away—she pushed his inevitable disappointment even further.

  “I’m sitting,” Annie replied.

  “Robin Schubert is gone.”

  Gone. Yes. Annie knew that. “I know, Erin updated me. She got in an airplane…”

  “No,” Gloria stopped her. “I mean gone. Gone. Dead. Her plane went down in the Colorado Rockies. No one survived, Annie. Bill’s wife is gone.”

  Chapter Ten

  The news out of Colorado was nothing more than a paragraph. Robin herself was a blip in the cycle, a face of a bright and sunny grandmother taken in her retirement years. The owner of the plane was a wealthy businessman and the other two passengers had yet to be confirmed. Mechanical trouble was the word. It seemed to everyone that the timing was suspicious, especially to Benson who knew he had to shoulder some of the responsibility for spooking her out of the state.

  He’d left Annie’s that night with a sense of confusion and determination. If Annie only wanted to meet her future through the matchmaker, then he’d meet her through the matchmaker. The kisses they shared, brief and sweet, sent her into a moral dilemma. It wasn’t a dilemma for Benson—he’d never been one to say no to himself when there was something worth pursuing.

  He found himself thinking about her for longer stretches of the day, imagining things that would make her grateful or less stressed. He thought of the energy they shared as they bantered on the podcast. He’d gone back and listened to the recording again and again—up until the part where he stopped; up until the part where he took a chance and kissed her.

  He sent Polly his matches. One of them was Annie; he was certain. (Names were aliases and pictures were avatars, for secrecy.)

  The kiss with her lingered.

  And Polly sent him a note: We have a match for you, Benson. You’ll love her. Meet Andrea DeCarlo. She’ll be in town for her date this weekend, if that works, and we’ve reserved you a place at the Oceanside Lounge. Have a wonderful evening. We’ll be in touch!

  “You snooze, you lose, Annie,” Benson mumbled to himself as he looked up the swanky Oceanside Lounge and planned his evening. Before long he had set up the microphone and pushed play, the seconds recording.

  With a sigh, Benson said to no one and everyone, “I got my first match and I only have her name…which I suppose means I can do some social network sleuthing. So, let’s see what we can do.” He opened up a screen and typed in Andrea’s name. A list of potential people cropped up and he eliminated them based on location or age. He narrated the scan until he happened upon a charming brunette with tattoos gracing her arms.

  “I see this picture,” he said to the recording, “and I hope it’s her, you know. That’s the strange piece of this process is that you’re trusting someone else to know what you want better than you do.”

  He flipped over to a new screen and saved was his search of Annie. A picture of her from a newspaper article graced his screen. She was arguing, the caption said, an immigration case and her client was a nine-year-old girl from Honduras. Two pictures showed Annie in two visions of herself—an irate lawyer on the rampage and a kind-hearted woman who kneeled beside her tiny client and offered up a hug.

  “By my age though, I know what I find attractive.”

  He kept staring at Annie hugging the little girl.

  “And when I find it, it’s hard not to hold on for dear life. Maybe that’s what I want this matchmaking service to understand about me. I want to see if they can truly find me a partner, an indefatigable match who loves me back. Isn’t that what we all want? Not someone who is perfect, but a person who gets us. Bring it on, I guess. Bring it on.”

  He pushed pause.

  Benson arrived five minutes before the date and opted to be taken the window booth ahead of Andrea. When the host brought a long-legged beauty over to him nearly one minute later, he stood up and gave the wom
an a brief and friendly hug, before they simultaneously scooted into their respective sides and mirrored happy faces at each other.

  As a journalist, he was skilled at small talk, but that didn’t mean he enjoyed the first tentative steps into any conversation.

  “Benson,” he said and folded his hands in front of him. “Nice to meet you.”

  “Andrea,” she replied. “Forgive me if I’m a little rattled to start. I should get some wine. Polly just called me with this date and I’ve been running myself ragged at work this week. Had some custom orders keeping me busy.”

  “What do you do?” Benson asked casually, his eyes moving between his date and the menu.

  “I run a little décor shop on the coast. We make custom candles and stationary, letterpress, that sort of thing.”

  “Nice,” Benson replied. He had nothing else to say about custom candles and letterpress.

  “What do you do?” Andrea asked.

  “I’m a writer,” he said.

  “You gonna write about this?” Andrea asked with a shocked smile. “I’ll need to make sure I’m on my best behavior then if I’ll end up in some novelist’s book.” Andrea seemed invigorated by the idea of him writing about her. It certainly appealed to his flattery, but it was Annie that flitted through his mind as he thought about writing. Oh, how she’d disapprove.

  Annie.

  He made a strong mental note: Do not, at any point, say Annie instead of Andrea. Don’t do it. Despite his own warnings, he knew the possibilities were high. Benson refrained from wine, ordered a steak, and tried to “trust the process” but as the evening continued, Benson was growing bored of the simple and surface level questions, all of which took hard work.

  “Tell me about…” he paused, going through the questions he’d already asked, flooding through his mental checklist, “…your worst first date,” he asked. Immediately he thought of Annie again. “I have a friend,” he started to say without stopping himself, “who went on a horrible date and…” he wondered if she’d be jealous, so he flipped the pronouns, ashamed, “he was traumatized by it. The date was rude, late, making jokes about her, erm, his job and, yeah.”

  Andrea took a bite of salad, a little drop of dressing gathering in the corner of her mouth. He didn’t let her know it was there and he watched it as it moved up and down.

  “Worst first date?” she hummed, thinking. He supposed he was grateful she hadn’t answered “this one” right away. “I really try to look for the positives of all situations, so I don’t think I’ve had a bad enough one to make a good story. I’m sorry.”

  “Okay, okay…most memorable date, then?”

  “They all kinda blend together…” she mused putting more lettuce in her mouth, the salad dressing still there.

  Benson hummed—he never trusted people who couldn’t tell a good story.

  His phone rang and it was a relief; Benson realized he hadn’t turned it to silent or vibrate and the chipper tone sang out to the entire restaurant while he fiddled to stop it.

  He saw immediately that is was Annie.

  “This is work,” he apologized. “Must be an emergency. I’m sorry.” He answered and started to move away from the booth. “Benson here, hold on a quick second, please.” He covered the mouthpiece with his hand and slid across the vinyl booth to make a swift exit. “I’ll be right back. I’m so sorry.” Then he high-tailed it to the men’s room. Once inside, each stall checked, he confirmed it was empty and leaned against the wall and said, “Hey there.”

  “You out?”

  “At dinner?”

  “Alone?”

  He didn’t want to lie to her, but Annie didn’t know he’d joined Twoly against her every desire. He cleared his throat.

  “An old friend came into town.”

  She breezed by it quickly, not interested. “Okay. Well, I won’t take up too much of your time. I have all the police interviews with Schubert’s wife pulled. They tried to convince her it was an affair…she never gave in. Here’s the thing, she mentions that her life had been threatened once and her husband had taken extreme precautions after that.”

  “Extreme precautions,” Benson repeated. “Sounds like the title of a book.”

  “Yeah, but here’s the other thing…I can tell, Benny,” his heart skipped a bit as she said the nickname, he liked the way it sounded, and he felt himself go warm at the thought of her saying it again, “she knew something. She doesn’t ask questions. Not many. Not the questions someone would ask if they needed to know how their husband just died.”

  “You think she knew who killed him and was afraid?”

  Someone walked into the men’s room and kept their eyes averted from Benson as he sidestepped away from the stalls to make room. The guy walked over the furthest urinal and Benson turned entirely away and faced the door, his back to the guest.

  Benson exhaled.

  “Let’s take it from there. If we make that assumption, that she knew, then doesn’t that make the crash more suspicious.”

  “I don’t know. We don’t have enough of this figured out yet. We have another meeting with the sister in a few days if you want to come over for the video call?”

  “Yeah, I’d like that.”

  He thought of Andrea, waiting patiently back at the table for his work call to end. There wasn’t anything wrong with Andrea—he wasn’t disgusted by her; he was bored.

  His mother once told him boring was underrated, but he thought that was strictly a matter of preference.

  The man zipped up and walked to the sinks. He washed his hands in the periphery of Benson’s vision. Only then did he get a strange feeling that something was off. He started toward the door, but the man quickly followed, too, keeping a closer pace than Benson expected, his hands still wet.

  “Can I call you back in a little bit?” Benson asked.

  “Sure, yeah! There’s a chance I fall asleep halfway through a glass of pinot and Wheel of Fortune, just in case I don’t answer,” she said and hung up before he had time to issue a proper goodbye.

  With the silence in his ear, he put the phone back in his pocket and walked back to the table. Once back in the booth, he looked up, ready to apologize, but Andrea wasn’t there.

  In her place was a well-dressed man with a slim nose, square jaw, hair cut short against his scalp. He scowled at Benson and settled back against the leather seat, ripping off a piece of bread and dipping it into a small plate of olive oil. He popped the bread into his mouth and kept eye contact.

  Benson looked confused. At first, he thought he’d simply sat at the wrong table and he started to leave to look for Andrea and his own bread and water and wine. But a quick glimpse into the corner of the booth revealed that Andrea’s yellow purse was still there and Benson stopped moving, sensing danger.

  “Where is she?” Benson asked and the gentleman who’d crashed their date took another piece of bread, taking his time with the bite as he sopped up as much oil as the piece would hold. He ate the bread then licked the yellow oil off his fingers before rubbing his hand on his pants.

  “Don’t know what you’re talking about,” the man said. No trace of an accent. Simple and deep and non-descript. He looked and sounded like everyone else.

  “You’re in the wrong booth, buddy,” Benson tried.

  The man laughed, a smoker’s laugh, deep and it turned into a brief hacking cough. “Andrea had to go home. I’ll take her things back to her when I’m done with you…”

  “I don’t think—” Benson started to say, the confusion giving way to frustration. These men thought he was someone else and they had done something with Andrea? Was this some sort of meta practical joke where he asks about a worst first date while his date engineers a horrific first date scenario?

  Your date is replaced by a man with a neck tattoo and he’s eating all the leftover appetizers. What to do you?

  The man didn’t wait for Benson to react further.

  “There’s no negotiation, Benson Douglass. We know
who you are and we know why you’re here and we don’t want any trouble. We simply want you to pack up your little house on President Whatever Avenue and go back to Portland and get lost. I’ll be real simple with my demands until you make me ask in a different way…”

  At the sound of his own name, Benson sat up and squinted his eyes, frozen. No. They knew exactly who he was.

  “Where’s Andrea?” he asked. He felt helpless, but he knew he couldn’t let the man harm his date—even if he barely knew her.

  “She’s in a car outside. You want to say goodbye? I’ll arrange it. And then you’re going to come back inside and answer some questions.”

  “Your questions?”

  The man laughed again. He flashed his mouth this time and Benson noticed his missing top molars, pink fleshy mounds where the white should be. Without answering, the stranger hopped out of the booth and reached across the leather to grab the purse by the strap, dragging it along after him as he exited into the winter night.

  Benson left the food and followed.

  Two more men—including the one from the urinal—materialized in front of him, their bodies blocking his way back to the restaurant. He was blocked and at their command as they led him outside. True to his word, Andrea sat in the driver side of an idling car outside the restaurant. A fourth man was driving; the windows were rolled up and music played. Andrea appeared to laugh. Then she turned and saw him, waved, and rolled down the window.

  “They told me you left,” she called but made no move to get back out and join him.

  “You wanna go back in and finish up?” Benson asked, he spun toward the restaurant and her, the men only eyeing him with blank patience as he made up his mind.

  “Oh, he doesn’t know yet?” he heard Andrea say as she dipped her head and waved goodbye. “Night!” she called, the window rolling back up, the music’s volume following.

  A strong hand clasped him on the shoulder; his collarbone ached underneath the pressure.

  “Go sit down,” the booth man said. “Finish your dinner. Get a dessert.”