Running Up the Score

by Jacqueline DeGroot

  Craig’s arm stole around my shoulders and he walked me out of the shop in a very proprietary manner. “Come, let’s go back to the hotel and get ready for dinner. I want you to tell me what you think of my new chef—I just hired him away from Harrah’s.”

  I did not like the feeling that I was “under a man’s wing again.” Although his touch felt nice, it did not feel right, but I didn’t know how to shake it off without seeming incredibly ungrateful for all he had done for me. And hell, I had to eat.

  Chapter Thirty

  We had a wonderful dinner in the hotel restaurant watching the sun set over the eighteenth green of the hotel’s golf course. I was in a lovely slip of a dress—honestly it really wasn’t much more than that—which had been sent up by the shop in the galleria at the hotel—courtesy of Mr. Craig Johnson, a.k.a. owner.

  I hated taking his charity but the only clothes I had hastily grabbed were tank tops and shorts. I hadn’t even remembered underwear, so I would have to rinse my one bra and my one pair of panties out each night.

  Even though the meal was served in tappas style, I’d managed to stuff myself with the delicious specialties of Craig’s new chef. And of course, each selection had to be celebrated with its own complimentary wine, so I was sloshing on the inside, and was decidedly mellow when Craig stood and pulled me onto the dance floor to dance with him.

  I hadn’t danced in ages but it was one of those slow numbers that all you really had to do was lean into someone and shuffle your feet in time to the music. Being in a man’s arms, and then somehow being wrangled between his thighs, made me think of Brick and just how much I missed him. I sighed deeply, wishing with all my heart that he was the man holding me in his arms instead of Craig Johnson.

  At the sound of my sigh, Craig stepped back and looked down at me. “Aren’t you having a good time?”

  “Oh yes, a wonderful time. I’m just . . . Well, I’m just remembering another time, another place.” I suspected he thought I was referring to my husband and to happier times. He couldn’t know I was pining for a man I’d met not all that long ago. Interesting how I had left a man after six years of marriage, determined never to be vulnerable to a man’s attractions again, and here I was like a broken record echoing Brick’s name over and over again in my melancholy mind.

  Craig gathered me back into his arms and brought me close to his chest and for a moment I took advantage. I closed my eyes and pretended he was Brick. I wrapped my arms around him and laid my head on his shoulder as the musician crooned and swayed on stage. My lips close to his neck, my hips swaying with his, I was transported to a place where it was only the two of us. I imagined it was Brick cinching me tighter, Brick’s hand stealing down my spine to press me against his arousal.

  When the song ended, we reluctantly broke apart and I felt guilty as soon as I saw his all-knowing smile. I had unintentionally sent him the wrong message; he thought I was coming on to him, that I found him desirable. On the way back to the table I tried to think of a way to let him know I hadn’t meant to send those signals to him.

  As soon as we were seated, a waiter tapped me on the shoulder and handed me a folded note card. I looked up at him in surprise and said, “For me?”

  “Yes, the gentleman said to give this to you.”

  “Gentleman? Where?”

  “He left. He did not wish to wait for an answer.”

  I took the card and opened it, my eyes widening with each succeeding word.

  You don’t appear to be “stranded,” “desperate,” or “dying from the heat.” You don’t look like you need rescuing. In fact, it looks like the only thing you and your cowboy need is a condom. Don’t call me again.

  “Oh, dear God.” My hand went to my chest and for a moment I couldn’t seem to get any air into my lungs.

  “What is it?”

  I couldn’t think of a thing to say. My eyes, filled with tears, blinked hard and fast trying to keep the hot tears from running down my face but they did anyway. I pushed back my chair, nearly toppling it, and ran out of the restaurant. I scanned the lobby looking for Brick, then ran out the front door and stood under the portico trying to catch a glimpse of him. There was no sign of him; he hadn’t wasted any time getting away from here. And I couldn’t blame him. What he had to have seen would have been devastating if I’d come upon him in a similar circumstance.

  I sobbed and swiped the back of my arm over my face, trying to stem the hot flow of tears. Brick . . . he’d been here, he’d found me. He’d come to be with me, and instead had seen me dancing with Craig. And by the dreamy look on my face, it must have seemed to him, as it would to anyone, that the man holding me in his arms captivated me. He had no way of knowing that the man whose arms I had longed to be in at that moment were his.

  “There you are! What in Sam Hill is going on?” Craig took my shoulders and roughly turned me to face him. I know I must have looked a sight with my makeup streaked and my eyes and nose red from my tears.

  How had this happened, I asked myself. Why was Brick even here? Then it dawned on me, there was only one way this could have happened and I had been the one who had unwittingly put everything in motion.

  “Do you have WiFi here?” I asked in a dead voice.

  “Yeah, sure, every hotel has it. You have to. People won’t stay in a hotel that doesn’t.”

  “I have to go to my room.”

  “Tell me what’s going on first!”

  “I can’t,” I sobbed. “I can’t say it or it’ll be true.”

  But all the way up to my room my mind screamed it: He hates me, he thinks I used him, he believes I betrayed him, and he’ll never understand. He’ll never forgive me.

  As soon as I could manage to get the keycard to work, I bolted through the door and yanked my laptop from its case. I opened Outlook Express and clicked on the Sent Messages icon. My heart stopped in my chest, my worst fears were realized—I had lost Brick forever due to my own incredible stupidity.

  Needing to know just how badly I had screwed things up, I opened the message that I had tried to send when I had been stranded—when it hadn’t been able to be sent due to not having a connection. It had apparently gone into a queue, waiting until there was a connection, which occurred the moment I walked through the lobby door of the hotel yesterday. I forced myself to read the words I had written, the hysterical ones that had brought Brick here looking for me.

  HELP! I broke down in the middle of Death Valley. There’s nothing but dirt and rocks for as far as I can see. I am stranded. I think the engine is gone. I may have overheated something. My situation is pretty desperate, I’m afraid I’m going to die in this heat. I can’t get a signal on my phone to call for help. As soon as you get this, please ask someone to come look for me. I’m near Furnace Creek on a turnoff not far from Artist’s Drive. Jen

  Well, that had done it. The panic in my words had brought him. And now look at the mess I’d made of things! I slammed the top down on the laptop and threw myself across the bed and cried until I heard someone knocking on the door. I lifted myself up and saw my reflection in the mirror. My face was puffy and red, my eyes barely slits and I had crushed the fine silk dress into folds so deeply creased that they would probably never iron out. I couldn’t face anyone this way.

  “Go away!”

  “If you don’t open up, I’ll use the master. I’m not kidding, Jenny, open this door!”

  “Fine! Fine! Just wait a minute!”

  I went into the bathroom and grabbed a washcloth and ran it under cold water before sopping it all over my face. I didn’t bother to wring it out, which didn’t help the dress any. As I turned to leave the bathroom, I saw Stumpy in his terrarium looking at me with blinking eyes. “I know, I know! I’ve ruined everything!” I said the words with venom, but not for him, for me.

  Sobbing and wiping my face with the dripping washcloth, I opened the door to Craig.

  “You’re going to tell me what’s going on and I’m not leaving here until you do!”
He kicked the door shut behind him and I noticed that the force of his heel left a black mark on the door. The sound of it slamming shut echoed for what seemed like several minutes as I stared into his concerned face. He had the note in his hand. I hadn’t even realized that I’d dropped it.

  “Your husband leave you this?” he waved the note sending it flying across the room.

  I slumped down on the bed then kicked my shoes off. Technically, they were his shoes. At least they were faring better than the dress.

  “No, not my husband. My . . . I don’t know what to call him . . . I guess you could say he was my boyfriend in a way. But he’s certainly not that anymore.”

  I flopped back on the bed and tossed the wet washcloth over my face. “It’s a long story,” I mumbled through the cloth. I heard him walk across the room and felt it when his weight pressed into the mattress. My eyes popped open and I bit my lip. Great, now what?

  Craig lifted a corner of the washcloth off one eye and I turned my head. He was lying on the bed beside me, his head propped on his elbow. “I got all night, and I like stories, as long as they’re not tall tales.”

  I had to laugh at that. “Believe me, I couldn’t dream up anything as crazy as our relationship.”

  “I’m listening.”

  For an hour I told my tale, while he and I both stared at the ornate ceiling. Then he picked up the phone and ordered coffee and brandy. As an afterthought, I heard him include chocolate truffles.

  “You know, I never do meet the right kind of women. Most take my money, some take years off my body, but you take the cake, my dear.”

  “Why is that?”

  “You took my heart.”

  “I didn’t mean to.”

  “I know. So, now that we’re both broken hearted, what do you suggest we do about it?” His crooked smile of irony broke my mood.

  I smiled back at him and said, “I say we go get a dog!”

  He ruffled my hair with the damp washcloth. “Deal. I’ll call my pilot and tell him to be ready whenever you say.”

  “Give me a few days.”

  “Take as many as you want. You gonna be okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re welcome here as long as you want, you know that don’t you?”

  I nodded, fresh tears now brimming my eyes. Why hadn’t I found a man like this the first time?

  Room service knocked on the door and Craig let them in. He left when they left, grabbing a handful of truffles as he went by the tray. “I should take the lion’s share because my heart’s bigger than yours.”

  “Chocolate must have been invented for star-crossed lovers like us.”

  “Remind me to buy some stock in Hershey in the morning.”

  Chapter Thirty-one

  As soon as Craig left I searched my large tote for my cell phone. I hadn’t bothered to turn it on since leaving the RV as I hadn’t been expecting any calls. I could have avoided this major fiasco, if I’d only bothered to check it. Brick had tried to call no less than ten times. All the voice mails were terse with worry, demanding, and often filled with profanity that I wasn’t picking up. The last one informed me that he’d finally tracked down the RV at a repair shop in Pahrump and that he was on his way to the hotel where I was staying. That had been a few hours ago, a few very long and stressful hours.

  Ignoring his admonition not to call, I pressed the redial button and listened to it ring, and ring, and ring.

  By two the following afternoon it was apparent that he was never going to accept another call from me. The service to his cell phone was disconnected and the e-mails I had been sending all night were bouncing back as returned mail. He had pulled his accounts and was no longer available to me. I had no way to get in touch with him.

  Brainstorming the following afternoon, I remembered he had a friend who was a State Trooper in Tehachapi. I called the station where I had dry camped less than a week ago and spoke to the sergeant on duty. He took my message and said he’d have someone call me back. When they did, it was only to tell me that Brick had no desire to talk to me and to stop trying to contact him.

  I couldn’t believe I had screwed up what had promised to be a romance on par with the Highlander’s. In desperation, I grabbed the file on Brick’s sister that was poking out of the sleeve in the laptop case I had thrown across the room last night. It had a picture of Brick in it and I wanted to see his face. I needed to trace his lips, look into his eyes and talk to him, if only to his photograph.

  It was a picture of him and Jillie. He was holding her in his lap while she was opening a present. They both looked happy and smiled for the camera. I could see his twinkling eyes mirrored in hers. Even though she was his half-sister, you could tell she favored him. I brought the picture to my lips and kissed his smiling lips. It was obviously the only way I was going to be able to kiss him until I could get him to listen to me.

  An idea popped into my head and began to bloom. One thought formed after another until my head jerked from the outlandish way my mind was working. If I found Jillie, Brick would have to talk to me. I could find Jillie by finding Snooks, the man who had her. Snooks had one very distinguishing characteristic—he had one brown eye and one blue eye; any eye doctor would have noted that. Most people saw an eye doctor yearly if they wore glasses or contacts, 78% of all adults did. Living in an RV and working as a vendor at RV rallies would necessitate joining certain clubs for membership discounts. Doctors often provided special discounts to club members in order to increase their business. I had an ingenious idea of how to find out the names of those patients. Despite the H.I.P.P.A. laws, I thought I had a good chance of tracking down the names of men with heterochromia iridium. I would do a state-to-state search beginning with Oregon where Brick had been focused. I was very excited.

  I emptied the desk of all the stationary I could find and got to work. I worked six hours straight and came up with nothing. It turned out that researching this was a lot harder than I thought.

  I did my research on heterochromia iridium and discovered that multicolored eyes are a fairly rare phenomena, occurring in only about one percent of the population. So . . . the U.S. being just a tad over 300 million, that left just 300,000 people. It seems to occur without prejudice to sex, taking out more than half for the female population that still left about 140,000. Factoring in age, I figured I could narrow my search down to a paltry 90,000 men afflicted with this condition. I definitely had my work cut out for me.

  Jumping from one chat room to another, along with doing an impromptu online survey, I discovered that most full-time RVers preferred to have their eye examinations at either Wal-Mart or Costco. Wal-Mart had approximately 2,500 locations; Costco, for the most part, used independent optometrists, so that narrowed it down a lot.

  Flipping through the file I came upon several flyers that had been nationally circulated at the time of Jillie’s disappearance. There was even a poster that had been used for television bulletins. I sat back in my chair and stared at Jillie’s picture, begging her image to talk to me, to give me some kind of clue where to go next.

  What I got was a perverse train of thought that began with: because of the large circulation Brick could have easily achieved with these fliers, and the news stations that would have eagerly jumped in to help, surely this man had to have considered going into hiding by at least camouflaging one eye, if not both. Maybe this man was wearing colored contacts. Nearly everyone wore disposables these days. Followed by: you had to have annual checkups to get prescriptions written, and as a fulltime RVer you would want a place that was convenient, inexpensive, and a chain of some sort so you could get your prescription renewed wherever you happened to be at the time that yours ran out. I had come full circle back to Wal-Mart.

  I opened the directory for the Wal-Mart webpage under the heading of Oregon, and I began to systematically call

  Wal-Mart Vision Centers. My story was that I had found an engraved gold contact lens case with their business card tucked into a
slot in the lid. The owner’s name was etched into the case, but it read simply “Snooks.” On the back of the card “heterochromia iridum” was written in big block letters, presumably by a doctor’s hand, so I had to assume he had this eye condition, whatever it was. The reason I was trying to track this person down? There was also a valuable ring and a locket inside the case. Invariably, the harried receptionist slowed down and checked with her colleagues, often the doctors themselves. I left my number, sounding genuinely concerned about getting the case and the jewelry back to its rightful owner. I didn’t expect any return calls; I just expected to systematically cross off every eye care center that a reasonable and thrifty RVing-type person might go to. If “Snooks” wore contacts or glasses or had eye exams, I was fairly confident a Wal-Mart store in the West serviced him. It was a shame I couldn’t access some kind of database and do this with a few clicks of a mouse. Instead, I resigned myself to cold calling. I figured I could make thirty calls a day, and possibly knock off one or two states in a week’s time, if I didn’t go absolutely insane.

  I treated it like a full-time job, getting up early, starting the calls by nine, and taking coffee breaks and lunch breaks before winding down at five. Carol had called and said the puppies were doing better and that mine could be picked up in a few days so I told Craig while we were having dinner. Craig and I had agreed his pilot would take us to Tucson in five days, so I didn’t have any time for days off or for sick days. I also didn’t have much time to be broken hearted or engulfed in grief—until the whistle blew and I was off duty.

  From five o’clock to seven, I filled the time by checking in with my sister and my parents and encouraging Connor in his search for his Julia. With only two possible days of the week where he might run into her again, waiting from one weekend to the next was sheer torture for him, as he knew time was running out—he was almost halfway through his stateside leave. He had only four more weeks to go.