“Oh, totally. I saw him at an Urbana Elementary function once. I can still spell acquiesce, thank you very much.”
“How apt.” Andy threw a Cheerio and hit her hair. “Stop it!” she hissed at him.
“What?” Loreen asked.
“Let’s do it. If we keep the business going, there’s no reason we can’t pony up personal donations. You know, they’re probably even tax deductible.”
Tiffany stopped to get some unsalted almonds from the bulk section. “I like it. The Happy Housewives have been good to us,” she agreed.
Tiffany thought about it for a moment. Initially this was supposed to be just to pay off the PTA stuff, but they’d gone to a lot of trouble to come up with the name, form the business, put together a Web site, and piece together models, to say nothing of the ten employees they now had. She hated the idea of just demolishing it all. “Let’s do it,” she said. “Get the best programs we can. No one needs to know how we paid for them.”
“Okay.” Loreen sounded a little giddy. “Does it say something bad about me that I don’t want to give it up?”
“If it does, it says the same thing about me,” Tiffany said, then lowered her voice. “Who would have thought professional phone sex—no, make that phone acting—could be so much fun?” Her phone started to beep. “Hey, my battery’s dying, I’ve got to run.”
“See you tomorrow night?”
“Absolutely. Bye.” Tiffany snapped her phone shut and cursed the stupid battery. Perhaps from the amount of use it had been getting, the charge seemed to be going quicker and quicker. Sometimes it felt like she got only fifteen minutes’ use out of it. It was a huge drag to be tethered to the electrical outlet by the dryer during her calls.
She stopped and dug a spare battery out of her purse and clipped it in. Now that she was a single parent, she had to be available to the school at all times, in case of emergency.
She turned the phone on again, then pushed the cart around the corner and almost ran smack into Deb Leventer.
This was one of the consequences of living in a development with only one grocery store within ten miles.
“Deb!”
“I thought I heard your voice,” Deb said, tipping her frosted head to the side. “And here you are.”
“Here I am,” Tiffany agreed, and Andy threw another Cheerio.
Deb would undoubtedly consider that bad breeding.
“I hear we have Merle the Spelling Wizard coming to give a presentation,” Deb said, tipping her newly frosted head. “How on earth did you swing that?”
“Just good fortune, I suppose.” Tiffany wheeled her cart toward checkout four, where Mary—who Tiffany had long thought was the fastest cashier there—was working. “Will you be bringing Poppy?”
Deb shrugged. “I’m not sure. Frankly, Merle’s act is a little old at this point. I was hoping we might get the Pluto Group to come talk about the solar system.”
“Why don’t you mention that at the next PTA meeting?” Tiffany suggested. “We’ll see what we can do.”
Deb raised an overly dark eyebrow. “I’ll just bet you will.”
A large, very hairy man rounded the corner holding a family-size bag of chips. “I’ve been carrying this all over the place, looking for you.” He dropped the bag into the cart. Then he looked at Tiffany. “Oh, hey. Did I interrupt something?”
“No, we were just discussing PTA business,” Deb said. “This is Tiffany Dreyer,” she added, with a distinct the one I told you about tone. “She’s in charge of the programs.”
“Mick.” He held out a hairy hand. “Like Mick Jagger.”
Tiffany’s breath caught in her throat. Did every guy named Mick say that? In that same particular way? Or was this, in fact, her regular caller?
The one who was so proud of using his own name.
Her eye fell on a bag full of zucchini in their basket.
Tiffany knew her face was turning pink, and she was barely able to hide the laughter that threatened.
Deb Leventer, high and mighty, was married to a regular Happy Housewives patron!
“Where’s Poppy?” Deb asked her husband.
“I thought she was with you.”
“No, she was with you. Find her!”
“That little sneak,” Mick said. “She’s probably in the cookie aisle.” Without another glance back, he went off, looking at the signs at the end of the aisles.
Little sneak, huh?
Mick was Mick all right.
This was incredible.
What a stroke of luck.
“Excuse me,” Deb said. “But I have lots to do.”
“Well, it was good to see you, Deb,” Tiffany said, meaning it more than she ever could have before. “And I just loved meeting your husband.”
Deb just looked impatient. With a toss of her new hair she said, “Ta ta,” and started to wheel her organic-food-filled cart away, but the wheels caught on the wheels of Tiffany’s cart, and tipped it over. Tiffany grabbed Andy from the seat just in time, but food, soda cans, and the contents of Tiffany’s purse spilled across the floor.
“Oh, no!” Looking genuinely embarrassed, Deb bent down to try to pick the items up, along with Tiffany. “I didn’t mean to do that,” she said a bit defensively.
“I know.” Tiffany shifted Andy onto one hip, then grabbed her prescription bottles with the other hand and plopped them back into her purse.
The confusion was multiplied when the bag boy showed up and started putting the food into Deb’s cart instead of Tiffany’s, which got a rise out of Deb.
Finally, with each cart sorted out and everything but a few dimes and pennies Tiffany didn’t feel like chasing down in place, Tiffany went through the checkout line and took her bags, and her boy, out to the car.
She had a new bounce in her step and she knew it.
“Mommy happy?” Andy asked.
“Yes, Mommy is very happy. Are you happy?”
He nodded. “I happy.”
“If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands,” she said in a singsong voice, and Andy picked up the tune.
She joined in, but all she could think about was getting home and finding some privacy so she could call and tell Loreen what had just happened.
The ringing phone was driving Deb crazy. She’d left the grocery store, dropped Mick off at the mechanic’s to pick up his car, then gone on to the post office and Target, and everywhere she went, she heard that obnoxious song.
“Mom, what’s that song?”
“I don’t know,” Deb said as they pushed a cart through the girls’ department. “But you hear it, too?”
“It’s coming from your purse.”
Deb bent down to put her ear closer to her purse. Sure enough, that’s where the noise was coming from. What the heck was that? She reached in and fished out her cell phone. At least, she thought it was her cell phone. But now that she looked at it, it didn’t have the crack in the screen from when she’d thrown it at Mick last week after he forgot her birthday.
And, of course, it didn’t have her ring.
She fished in her purse some more and produced the cracked phone. So where had the extra one come from?
Then she remembered. When Tiffany Dreyer had run into her cart, everything had spilled. She must have grabbed Tiffany’s phone, thinking it was her own.
“I want the Bratz pajamas,” Poppy said, grabbing things off the racks and throwing them into the cart. “And that jean skirt.”
“That’s too short,” Deb told her, still holding on to the phone. She looked down at it and noticed she’d pressed a button and it was dialing. She pushed END quickly.
“It is not!” As usual, Poppy went from zero to ten in less than one second. “All the other girls get to wear them. You’re so mean!”
“I don’t care,” Deb started, but then the phone rang again.
Tiffany’s phone. The caller ID said UNKNOWN. Ooh! A mystery caller!
The curiosity was too much for Deb to resist.
“Go try the skirt on,” she told Poppy. “Take that shirt, too,” she said, pointing to a pop princess shirt she objected to on every level but which she knew Poppy would want to try.
Sure enough, Poppy skipped off to the dressing room happy as can be.
With only a fraction of a second’s hesitation, Deb opened the phone. “Hello?”
“It’s Ed from the relay center,” a voice said. “I got a call from your phone. Are you logging in?”
“Can I have the skirt in black, too?” Poppy called from the dressing room.
“Yes,” Deb said to Poppy, but it was the man on the phone who answered.
“You got it,” he said.
She hung up, shaking her head. Whatever.
The phone rang again, almost immediately. Probably Ed from the relay center again.
“Hello?”
“I was afraid you weren’t working and they were going to send me back to the relay for another girl.”
Deb frowned. “What?”
“I’ve been waiting all day to talk to you.”
“Okay . . .” She’d never been good at imitating voices, so Deb figured her best bet was to say as little as possible.
“Unzip me.”
“What?”
“Unzip me. You know, with your teeth. I want you to suck my cock before it bursts.”
Deb gasped so loudly that two women turned to look at her.
She clipped the phone shut, her face burning.
That had to be a wrong number. Deb had met Charlie Dreyer. There was no way a good, dignified man like that would stoop to talking to his wife like that.
She kept the phone in her hand and walked to the waiting area for the dressing rooms to sit down. This was seriously disturbing.
She wished Tiffany had gotten the call instead of her.
The phone rang again. Deb looked and, again, the caller ID said UNKNOWN. Was it possible that the call really was intended for Tiffany?
“Hello?”
“Crystal—”
“No—”
“—I’ve been thinking about you all day. Gimme some sweetness.”
“Who is this?”
There was a hesitation. “Is this Crystal?”
“No.”
“Which one are you?”
“Deb.” As soon as she’d said it, she regretted it. She never should have given her real name out. Now Tiffany would find out she’d answered her phone! Oh well, she could get away with that by telling the truth, that she thought the phone was hers after the confusion when Tiffany rammed her cart into Deb’s. It certainly wasn’t Deb’s fault!
She wouldn’t mention the fact that she’d answered the phone even after she knew it wasn’t hers, however.
“Deb,” he said. “I haven’t seen you on the site. What do you look like?”
“What site are you looking at?” she asked.
“The Happy Housewives site,” he said. “Listen, I don’t want to pay two ninety-nine a minute for this shit. Are you going to get me off or not?”
“Um, that would be not,” Deb said crisply.
He hung up.
Okay, that was two sexually explicit calls in ten minutes. One could have been a crank call or a wrong number or some other coincidence, but two?
She had to get to this Happy Housewives Web site.
“Poppy, we have to go.”
“But I haven’t finished trying everything on!”
“I don’t care, put it in the cart. If things don’t fit, we’ll return them later.”
Deb drove home as fast as the speed limit would allow, ignoring the ringing phone, even though she was dying to know who was calling now.
Once home, she went into Mick’s den to use his computer. She didn’t want to use the one in the kitchen, in case Poppy came in and saw something sexually explicit.
The desktop came up, and she clicked on Internet Explorer. But before she was finished typing happyhousewives.com, Internet Explorer automatically finished it for her.
And took her to a site for phone sex, promised by women who could cook, clean, and caress at your leisure. There were thumbnail photos of Crystal, Mimi, Brandee, Sophia, Lulu, and a host of other cosmetically enhanced bimbos. None of them were Tiffany.
That was strange.
Then again, if Tiffany was involved in phone sex for money, she probably wouldn’t be stupid enough to use her real name or put her real picture on the Web site.
Deb scrolled around, looking for any information that could lead her to Tiffany’s connection. All she could find was a counter at the bottom of the home page that listed how many hits there had been since a date that was about a week after they’d returned from Las Vegas.
Which was about the time Tiffany and Loreen had seemed to get so secretive and weird.
This was so exciting!
And Deb knew exactly how to use this to her advantage.
She wasted no time. She looked up Tiffany’s home phone number and called it, waiting with bated breath for her to answer.
“Hello?”
“Tiffany, it’s Deb Leventer.”
“Hi, Deb. Look, I’m in the middle of something, so I can’t really talk right now—”
“Oh, I think you want to hear what I have to say.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The jig is up, Tiffany. I know what you’ve been doing. And unless you and your entire board resign from the PTA right away, I’m going to tell the rest of the world.”
There was a short, tense silence. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Tiffany said in a voice that betrayed she knew exactly what Deb was talking about.
But that was okay. Deb didn’t mind elaborating. “I’m talking about the fact that you are a phone sex operator. A whore if you want to get right down to it. And I do not think that’s the kind of person we need as a PTA president.”
Tiffany let out a long breath. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, you do. Funny thing happened today. I accidentally picked up your phone at the grocery store because it looks like mine.”
She could hear Tiffany scrambling, probably rummaging through her purse, on the other end of the line. “You took my phone?”
“Mmm-hmmm.” Deb was enjoying this. “And Ed from the relay center called. You know Ed, don’t you?”
The answering silence told her that yes, Tiffany certainly did know Ed.
Deb gave a carefree laugh. “Well, the next thing I know, all sorts of calls were coming through. Unsavory calls.”
“You were answering my phone?”
Deb sighed. “I couldn’t resist. I know it was wrong, but not nearly as wrong as what you’ve been doing. Wouldn’t you agree? Tiffany?”
“What do you want, Deb?”
“Funny you should ask. I want you and all your friends off of the PTA board. And you have until tomorrow at noon to resign formally or I’m going public.”
Deb was so pleased with herself. She kept replaying the conversation in her head over and over, imagining the look of horror that must have crossed Tiffany’s face when she realized she’d failed to put this one over on Deb.
It was delicious.
When Tiffany’s phone rang again, she had the feeling things were about to get even more delicious.
She looked at it. What to do? She could put Tiffany out of business. But then there would be no evidence to take to the school board. Surely the county didn’t want a phone sex operator in charge of the PTA!
So it was best for Deb not to answer it.
But the curiosity proved too much.
“Hello?”
“It’s Mick. I’ve got to be fast because I’m in the men’s room at the car dealership. Blow me quick, lots of teeth.”
“Mick?”
Stunned silence. Then, “Deb?”
“Yes, Deb.” She glanced at the phone. Was it hers and not Tiffany’s? “What the heck are you talking about?”
“I—I must have dia
led the wrong number.”
“And who exactly were you trying to call?”
“Suzannah.” Suzannah was Mick’s secretary. “She’s handling a time-sensitive deal for me.”
“And you were calling her from the men’s room?”
“Yeah, look, uh, I’ve got to go. Talk to you later.” He hung up before she could object.
What the heck was going on? She looked at the phone. It wasn’t hers. There was no crack, and . . . and no way around it. The phone was Tiffany’s.
Mick had just called Tiffany’s sex phone.
Mick probably thought the phone lines had crossed and dialed from his phone book—their cell phones did that with some frequency—but Deb knew the sad truth. He’d been calling Tiffany for sexual gratification.
It just didn’t seem possible.
Maybe it was a mistake. Or a onetime thing.
She went into the history cache of Mick’s computer to see how often he’d been to the Happy Housewives Web site.
Apparently he’d been there a lot. A lot. Suddenly Deb felt unclean sitting at his desk. He’d ruined everything for her, all in the quest of his own stupid, hedonistic pleasure. Deb was devastated. This should have been one of the best moments of her life, finally getting the goods on her worst enemy.
Tiffany Dreyer was a phone sex operator.
But Mick was one of her clients.
Chapter
25
What’s the emergency?” Loreen asked, coming into Tiffany’s house without bothering to knock first. “Are the kids all right?”
“They’re upstairs watching a movie, armed with popcorn, Ho Hos, and everything else I could think of to keep them from wanting to come down,” Tiffany said. “I don’t want them to hear a word of what’s going on.”
“Well, what is going on?”
Sandra was there, looking anxious from her vantage point on the sofa. “I don’t know,” she said when Loreen looked at her. “She won’t tell me.”
Tiffany was pale. “I don’t mean to be mysterious.” She used a corkscrew on a large bottle of Mondavi wine and carried it and four glasses over to the coffee table. “We just have a huge problem and I’d rather tell you all at once.”
Secrets of a Shoe Addict Page 26
