A Bad Day for Romance (27 page)

There was an uncertain murmur from the crowd, while Stella’s living room erupted with laughter. “Only thing she’s going to win is Miss Regularity,” Novella observed.

“A mountain lion could make a meal out of her and have room for dessert,” Gracie added.

“And that goal, folks, just to remind our audience, is to eliminate all of the competition with these specially modified bows.” Jack held up a lightweight curved bow, as well as an arrow with bright orange feathers on one end and a quarter-size plastic ball where the point should have been. “Now they won’t be shooting to kill, only to hit the other contestants with these specialized paint pellets. When this comes into contact with a target”—he tapped the ball—“the ball bursts and nontoxic paint is released. I’m told it can’t be washed off, though it gradually wears off over a few days. And once you’re hit, you’re off the show, right, ladies?”

Lots of nodding and smiling from the contestants.

“All right, let’s meet our final guest. Divinity Flycock hails from central Missouri, where she’s known for her beautiful singing voice. And you’ve been performing in Branson!”

“What’s that?” The Club asked, while Bernadette examined her short, unpainted nails. Divinity went rigid, her smile fixed and fire in her eyes.

“Oh, The Club shouldn’t have said that,” Taffy said. “Divvy’s not going to be very happy.”

“I believe it’s a, well, a country-music theme park, is that right?” Jack asked. “And music is your passion, correct?”

“Yes, Jack, you’re right,” Divinity said, shifting in her chair so that her eyes were downcast, her hands folded demurely in her lap. “Ever since I was a little girl, my dream was just to sing. And it’s true that I have focused most of my energies on my music—practicing my scales, learning piano, helping sew robes for my church choir, and giving lessons to the little ones. Just anything having to do with music, really.”

“What’s she doing?” Tilly demanded. “Is this some new strategy she came up with?”

“She never sewed a stitch in her life, or gave anyone any lessons,” Taffy assured her sister. “I don’t know what she’s up to.”

The audience was silent as the camera panned out to include the other guests. Bernadette watched Divinity with a predatory smile, while The Club smirked and brushed imaginary lint from her skirt.

“And how do
you
plan to compete?” Jack inquired. “Do you have any survival skills you’ve been keeping to yourself? Can you read a compass, maybe? Any good at tracking?”

“No, I’m afraid not,” Divinity said softly, not meeting his eyes. “I’ll probably do some singing, even if it’s just to keep my spirits up, but mostly I’ll have to learn as I go.” She lifted her eyes and looked directly in the camera, her pink-glossed lips turning up sweetly into a shy smile. “Of course, my daddy
is
a stone-cold killer, and they say I favor him, so there’s that.”

After a shocked silence, the audience erupted into thunderous cheering. So, after a moment, did Stella’s guests.

Divinity wasn’t especially well regarded by the people seated in Stella’s living room, with the exception, maybe, of her mother. But she was one of their own, and they’d cheer her on as long as she managed to stay in the game.

The segment ended, and a commercial came on. Noelle turned off the TV and got some music playing, and most of the guests wandered into the kitchen to refresh their drinks. The older ladies stayed in their seats, so Chrissy and Ian pushed the food over close enough for them to help themselves.

“Hey, Stella, come on out back a minute,” Goat said, helping her up from the floor. “Saw something on the way over here that made me think of you.”

Stella followed him out the back door onto the porch. “It’s cold out here, but we won’t be but a minute,” Goat said, putting his arm around her. She snuggled in close and walked out into the yard with him.

When they were standing where the clothesline pole had once stood long ago, next to the little Japanese maple Stella had planted a couple of years back in honor of her mother, Goat put his finger under Stella’s chin and tipped it up.

“Look at that moon,” he said.

It was a perfect crescent, a sparkling silver sliver low in the star-studded night sky.

“It’s beautiful,” Stella breathed. “But how does it remind you of me?”

“Well, it’s—now don’t laugh at me, Stella.”

“I’d
never
,” Stella said with all her heart.

“That’s a waxing moon. It just turned. For the next twelve days, it’ll get a little bigger and brighter every night, and in a couple weeks it’ll be a full moon shining up the whole damn town.”

He gently turned Stella so she was facing him. As pretty as the moon was, the view of Goat’s handsome face, his sparkling eyes, was still her favorite. Her heart did the little skippy-jump thing it did whenever Goat was about to kiss her.

“See, you’re the same way,” he said softly. “You’re just starting to shine. You got great things ahead of you, Stella. There’s no telling how far you’ll go. And along the way, you’re just gonna keep lighting up the place for everyone else.”

Stella wrapped her arms around Goat’s neck and pulled him closer, and the rest of the world faded as she kissed him by the light of the moon and a million lucky stars.

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BLOOD BOND

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CHAPTER ONE

JOE BASHIR STOOD IN THE GLOW
of the streetlight shining through the triple-glazed windows of his girlfriend’s Berkeley townhouse, pulling up his trousers and staring thoughtfully at the tableau unfolding in the street below.

Six years after a thicket of half-million dollar “green” homes had been built among the bungalows that stood on these streets for nearly a century, the long-term residents seemed unimpressed with their hipster neighbors. As Joe watched, a skinny woman in a stained parka tugged at something protruding from a drain next to a shopping cart loaded with cans and junk; a few paces away a boy who looked about fourteen palmed a baggie to a man in a knit hat pulled low on his brow. In this neighborhood, it was likely to be a doub, a twenty-dollar rock, but Berkeley was well outside Joe’s jurisdiction. In Montair, folks tended to chase their highs with wine racks and hydrocodone prescriptions.

Amaris padded down the stairs, coming to rest on a step near the bottom. She’d put her bra and panties back on, but that was all. Today she’d managed to get most of Joe’s clothes off before they made it to her bedroom. Joe still hadn’t gotten used to the vertical nature of her place: a kitchen and living room perched above the garage, and a couple of bedrooms on top of that. He’d had to come downstairs just to find his pants.

Joe watched her watching him, buttoning and zipping by feel, unwilling to look away. This was part of it, for him.

“Mother found me a cardiologist to date,” Amaris said. “He’s taking me to the symphony.”

Joe shook his head and sighed. “Amaris, you really don’t understand how this works. If you’re going to rebel by dating a non-Jew, you have to actually tell your parents you’re doing it.”

Amaris flicked out her tongue at him and smiled. “But you’re Muslim. That’s like, quadruple points.”

“I’m hardly Muslim,” Joe said. “I go to the mosque with my dad a few times a year to make him happy, and I feel guilty when I order lunch during Ramadan. That’s about it.”

“Yeah, but my parents don’t need to know that. Besides, look at you.”

Joe finished tying his tie, then sat down next to Amaris on the stairs. An odd and not terribly comfortable tenderness hit him.

“Amaris,” he said, taking her hand, lacing his fingers through hers. “What do you see when
you
look at me? Because if it’s all about provocation for you—not that you aren’t very, very good at that…”

Amaris pulled his hand to her face and rubbed his knuckles against her forehead. “I see a beautiful, dark, righteous man,” she mumbled, pressing his fingers over her eyes.

It was not lost on Joe that she wouldn’t look at him. He sighed. “Amaris, I don’t really care when I meet your parents. Or what they think. But what about you? Sometimes I can’t tell if you’re terrified of what they’ll do, or if you want to throw a grenade right into the middle of your family. Sometimes…”

He was going to add that sometimes he felt like the heat when they made love was Amaris imagining that explosion, the immolation of everything that bound her to the life she’d always known.

There wasn’t an easy way to put that into words. Instead he gently pulled his hand away. He was still trying to figure out what to say when his phone rang. He answered as he always did, his attention diverted by watching Amaris disappear behind the facade she maintained so carefully, the one that only fell away completely when they made love. She examined a flaw in her manicure and pretended not to listen.

“I have to go,” he said after a brief conversation, slipping the phone back into his pocket.

“Why hurry? Whatever it is, the deed’s already done,” Amaris muttered, stretching luxuriously, looking both feline and predatory. “Right?”

“I guess you could say that,” Joe said. “Guy’s dead. Hurrying won’t change that.”

“Really? Where?”

“The Foothills, if you can believe it.”

“Oh, I believe it. Rich people are the unhappiest. And the angriest.”

As Joe got to his feet, steadying himself with the handrail, he considered that it was easy to make statements like that when your father was still paying your bills a few months shy of your thirtieth birthday.

“I’ll call you if it’s not too late.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Amaris said lightly. Only her refusal to look at him gave her away. “I’ve got a
ton
to do. I’ll be up for
ever
.”

“Lock up after me.”

“Mmm.”

“I mean it, Amaris. Don’t forget.”

Letting himself out the front door, he tried to put out of his mind the shining tears he’d seen trembling under her lashes.

Joe’s mood darkened as he cruised through the tidy, manicured streets of Montair toward the Foothills, a massive gated community nestled into the base of Mount Diablo. He had to figure out what to do about Amaris. She was almost frighteningly intelligent; she was beautiful and she was a tornado in bed. But Joe wasn’t sure how much longer he could tolerate her eternal dissatisfaction, especially when it seemed like what she loved most about him was an illusion. Joe suspected that Amaris found him exotic—how could he make her understand he was the opposite?

Joe’s father emigrated from Pakistan in 1967, his mother six years later. Osman found work as an accountant; Mumtaz raised her boys, watching
Sesame Street
and
Schoolhouse Rock
with them to practice her English. They blended the life they’d brought from home with the culture that lapped at the edges, coming ever closer like a summer tide. Half the kids at Joe’s elementary school were white, something he and Omar didn’t even notice until they’d been there a few years. Their classmates’ ancestors came from everywhere, or so it seemed when his fourth grade teacher had every child show on the world map where their grandparents had come from. Joe’s best friend in middle school was a boy named Jojo, who lived with his Filipino grandparents; Joe could still recite every Tagalog insult Jojo taught him on long summer afternoons skateboarding in Central Park. Joe’s first girlfriend was an older woman, a high school sophomore named Cindy Bell who played harp and wore her hair in a fluffy blond perm. Joe spent most of his freshman year making out with Cindy in the band building every chance he got; it was the first—but certainly not the last—time he would disappoint his parents.

Joe liked girls and sports and Xbox; he excelled at science and math when he tried, and did pretty well when he didn’t. He moved effortlessly between his brother’s desi friends and the other cliques at school, got himself elected to student government, and quit when he got bored with the meetings. He hated disappointing his parents, and lied to avoid doing so, which on one memorable occasion made his mother cry. There were a few boundary-testing incidents—minor vandalism, a little weed, a few missed curfews—that served to label Joe as trouble among his parents’ friends, but all in all the Bashir family survived the boys’ adolescence relatively unscathed.

Joe was the second son of a happy American family, a member of the MTV generation. He arrived at adulthood culturally as well as spiritually agnostic, and would have remained so if it hadn’t been for the days following 9/11. These had marked him forever, but this was not a subject he discussed with Amaris or, for that matter, with anyone. He was a good cop, a loving son, a decent boyfriend—but as he arrived at the Foothills with Amaris’s scent on his skin, he wondered if that was enough for her.

Joe slowed at the guardhouse long enough for the guy to wave him through. He recognized the man, a heavily mustachioed Croat who’d worked the gate on weekends for as long as Joe could remember, keeping the criminal element from sullying the pristine streets, golf course, and country club within the gates. Which was a joke, because if you counted narcotics and white-collar crime, there was probably more lawbreaking going on within the gates than outside them.

Murder, though—the last one to take place in the Foothills had been before Joe’s time. And it had been an unusual situation—the disabled adult son of a wealthy widow in her sixties had bludgeoned his mother to death in her bathrobe; he’d been declared unfit long before the case ever went to trial. Word was the house sold cheap because of what happened, knocked a few hundred thousand off the price.

Of course, the economy had hit the Foothills as hard as anywhere else: as Joe drove slowly past the enormous estates, he noticed more than a few with dried-out lawns and untrimmed shrubs, which in this zip code hinted at bank ownership.

Eight fifteen Apache Drive wasn’t one of these, however. The flower beds were in full and glorious bloom despite the fact that summer was past. In Northern California, time and money could make a garden thrive all year long. Joe braked a little too late and snugged the curb in front with a rubbery impact. He felt no remorse, though: the department-issued Dodge Charger was hardly a model of precision engineering.