Hollyhock Ridge (18 page)

As Claire got up to leave, she was surprised to see Eve
enter the bar.

“Do you have a minute?” Eve asked.

“Sure,” Claire said, dismayed to find her heart racing.

She hadn’t done anything wrong; why was she so scared of
Eve?

They sat down at a table by the window, the furthest from
the eavesdropping locals. Eve waved away Patrick’s offer of something to drink.

“I thought it would be good for us to have a talk,” Eve
said. “My husband told me how fond he is of you and how close you’ve become, so
I  imagine you weren’t too happy to see his pregnant wife come back to town.”

“I don’t think of you two as husband and wife,” Claire said.
“Obviously, for the past ten years, neither have you.”

Eve dropped any semblance of friendliness.

“Listen,” she said. “I can’t help what happened. We’re just
trying to do what’s right for our baby.”

“Your baby, obviously,” Claire said. “But I’m guessing the
father must be somebody pretty inconvenient.”

“I strongly suggest,” Eve said, “that you back off and leave
Ed alone. You don’t know me very well, because if you did, you’d be much more
careful.”

“What exactly are you threatening to do to me, Eve?” Claire
said. “You obviously think I’m pretty stupid, so you can’t be surprised you
have to spell it out for me.”

“I have connections in Hollywood,” Eve said. “I made a few
phone calls this afternoon, and one of them was to a private investigator. If
there’s anything you wouldn’t want Ed to know about your time out there, or
that you wouldn’t want the board of trustees at Eldridge to know, I suggest you
watch your step.”

The look on Eve’s face was pure malice spiked with
self-entitlement. Luckily for Claire, she had twenty years of experience
dealing with rich, powerful sociopaths.

“Here’s the thing I learned in the film industry about
blackmail,” Claire said. “The only way to stop a blackmailer is to hit them back
hard with your own blackmail. I know quite a few people in your industry, the
kind nobody pays attention to, the ones who see and hear everything because
they’re not considered important enough to be discreet around. If you wanna
play that game with me, Eve, then you should know who
you’re
dealing
with. You may wound me, but I can destroy you.”

Claire said what she did with a friendly smile, using the
same tone she would’ve used if she were sharing an amusing anecdote. The
achievement of her intended effect was evident in the micro-expression of fear
that flitted across Eve’s face. It was gone quickly, but it was proof that
Claire’s counterpunch had landed.

“So here we are,” Eve said, “at an impasse.”

“Except that I have little to lose compared to you,” Claire
said. “I can always go back to cutting hair, and I can always find another
boyfriend. I wonder, however, if you could afford to bear what I could do to
your career. Not blatantly, of course, but through my connections at all the
tabloid magazines, gossip sites, and entertainment television shows. Think of
all the media mileage they could get out of guessing who the real baby daddy
is. You better hope that kid has blue eyes and a bald head instead of the brown
eyes and dark hair of a certain senator.”

An expression of blatant fear was now firmly established on
Eve’s face, along with the fury of one used to getting her way through guile
and intimidation being thwarted by an opponent she has fatally underestimated.

“How much is it going to cost to make you go away?” Eve
asked.

“Confess to Ed before I get to him,” Claire said.

“I’ll see you in hell first,” Eve hissed as she struggled to
get up.

In her haste to leave, she knocked over a chair, and
everyone in the bar turned around to look.

“Let me know when the baby shower is,” Claire called out
after her. “I can’t wait to see the sonogram pictures!”

“What was that about?” Patrick asked as he righted the chair
that had fallen.

“Just another clever bitch who thought I must be stupid
because I’m from here,” Claire said.

“Yeah, I hate when that happens,” Patrick said.

Claire walked down Rose Hill Avenue toward the post office.
She was all wound up from her fight with Eve, and feeling queasy about how
vicious she had been, even if it was in self-defense. Claire tried to put
herself in Eve’s place, and imagine what she would do in the same situation,
but she had nothing to lose compared to Eve, with her public image and nascent
media career threatened by a scandalous affair with a married politician.
Claire couldn’t imagine being in that situation. It must feel awful, though,
after all Eve went through to get where she was.

It was so common it was a cliché to fall in love with the
wrong person, and then do even more stupid things as a result. Claire could
easily imagine doing that, because she so often had.

Claire decided that Eve’s predicament was the most
convincing evidence yet that bitches could indeed have sorrows. They were still
bitches, though, even if they were pregnant.

As she crossed the street she looked down Pine Mountain Road
toward the river and saw the lights were on in Ed’s office. She did an
about-face and walked down there. He was sitting at the computer, typing
something. She tapped on the window. He smiled and jumped up to let her in.

“How goes the newspaper business?” she asked him.

“I’ve been calling you,” Ed said. “I thought maybe you
weren’t speaking to me.”

Claire took a seat on the other side of the work table, and
refused the beer he offered.

“I’m sorry I’ve been such a bitch about the baby,” Claire
said.

“I don’t blame you for being sore,” Ed said.

“Is Eve going to stay here in Rose Hill for a while?”

“No,” he said. “She wants to have the baby in Atlanta, where
she thinks the hospitals are better. She’s going back next week. I’ll go down
there when she’s due so I can be there when it’s born.”

“Are you thinking about moving to Atlanta?”

“No,” he said. “I’m a Rose Hillian, born and bred. Besides, Tommy’s
in school here, and I’ve got the job at Eldridge and the
Sentinel
to
think about. Eve will go wherever her career takes her and I’m not cut out to
be a camp follower. We’ll work something out.”

“You could bring up the child here,” Claire said. “It takes
a village, I hear, and Rose Hill’s one of the finest.”

“Eve wants more than we can give it here,” Ed says. “Private
schools, you know, a college covered in ivy, and so forth.”

“Last I looked Eldridge was covered in something, but it may
be kudzu.”

“I think she has something more prestigious in mind.”

“Like Hogwarts.”

“That’s the one.”

“So what will your role be, exactly?”

“Father as needed, I guess,” he said. “Daddy on call.”

Claire started to say something and then shut her mouth.

“It’s convenient, you were going to say,” he said. “You
think she’s using me.”

“What’s it matter?” Claire said. “The child will have a
great father; that’s more important than any baby mama drama.”

“That’s what I think,” he said. “I know it’s more about
what’s best for her career than having any kind of real relationship with me. I
know all that, but there’s a chance it’s mine, you know? And even if it isn’t,
it will be. I love Tommy, but we both know I’m only a stand-in for Melissa.
This could be my only shot at having a child of my own.”

Claire stood up, more as a response to that last comment
stabbing her in the heart than anything else. Tears stung at the back of her
eyes but she sniffed them back.

“I’ll let you get back to work,” she said. “Are you writing
about Knox?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Trying to get it in tomorrow’s Pendleton
paper. Do you mind telling me what happened?”

Claire sat back down, told Ed everything that happened, and
he took notes. She took out her phone and gave him the times of the calls and the
owners of the phone numbers.

“Sarah doesn’t know I have this information,” she told him.
“I can call Anne Marie; she may be willing to tell me what Knox’s call was
about. I’ll let you know what she says.”

“I won’t put any of this in the
Pendletonian
,” he
said. “I’ll follow up on all of the other calls and use what I find out in
Sunday’s
Sentinel
. That should give Sarah enough time to disseminate the
information among the ranks, which will clear you, and still give the
Sentinel
the scoop.”

“Pip didn’t kill him,” Claire said.

“I’m calling him a person of interest,” Ed said. “Sorry, but
that’s as innocent as I can make it sound when he took off like that.”

“Pip’s an idiot, but he’s a passive idiot,” Claire said. “He
doesn’t have it in him to kill anyone.”

“I hope you’re right.”

Claire was irritated by Ed’s refusal to take her word for
it, that Pip did not kill Knox. It felt as if the chasm between them, created
by Eve’s pregnancy, was widening further by the minute. Claire now felt like an
old girlfriend Ed was distantly fond of, instead of the role she had played a
few weeks ago, when he was pledging to see her through what turned out to be a
pregnancy false alarm of her own. He was already driving down the road to
fatherhood with Eve riding shotgun, and she was left behind, coughing in the
dust as they sped away.

Claire had the ammunition to shoot the tires off of that
car, but there was a baby to consider. It was bad enough she had just verbally
threatened a pregnant woman, albeit one who had tried to blackmail her. That
kid might be born with a lightning bolt on its forehead and it would be all
Claire’s fault.

Claire left Ed’s office and walked up the hill to the
crossroads of Pine Mountain Road and Rose Hill Avenue. The lights were on in
the Little Bear Bookstore, and Eldridge orientation attendees were congregating
in groups on the sidewalk between there and the college. The air was crisp and
clean smelling, a steady breeze coming off the Little Bear River. There were
bright stars in the dark sky and an almost full moon had crested the hills to
the south east.

Claire felt as lonely as she had ever felt, even more so
than when she was on the other side of the earth from what she thought of as
home. Now she was home, but with her mother and cousins away at the beach, Ed
working things out with Eve, Laurie drunk to the point of unconsciousness, one
ex on the run from the law and another in the arms of her ex-employer, who
cared where she was or what she was doing?

Melissa had Patrick, Eve had Ed, Maggie had Scott, and
Hannah had Sam. Even Kay, who hadn’t had a date in years, now had two brothers
vying for her heart.

‘I don’t have anybody,’ Claire thought.

She knew she was sinking into the quicksand of self-pity but
she didn’t care. She felt a kind of perverse satisfaction in being proved
unworthy. At least you knew where you stood in the scheme of things, instead of
hoping life would somehow miraculously get better.

Some days being optimistic took too much effort.

Claire used the pay phone to dial 911, gave the operator all
the information she had about the meth lab, refused to supply her identity, and
then headed home. As she passed Ed’s house she avoided looking through the
uncovered window into the lighted front room.

Why didn’t people draw their curtains at night? Didn’t they
know the effect their belly cupping and supportive hugging could have on an old
spinster? Well, technically, a divorcee, but she felt more like a spinster.

She even had the requisite cat.

Barren.

Unloved.

Unemployable.

Willing to stoop low enough to threaten a pregnant
blackmailer.

And she couldn’t even shop online lest she go broke before
her lonely old age set in. It was pitiful. All she needed now was a hearing aid
and she could be a junior scanner granny.

Inside her parents’ house, her father was snoring in his
recliner. Melissa was working on the laptop, and waved hello. Mackie Pea was
curled up beside her, and Junior the cat was stretched out on the carpet near
them.

“I saw the cat chase the dog,” Melissa said.

“What?”

“I always say ‘I seen’ when I should say ‘I saw.’ ”

“That’s right,” Claire said. “How’s it going?”

“It’s hard,” she said. “There’s a lot to remember.”

“You’ll get there,” Claire said.

“Listen to this,” she said. “Fitzpatrick Legal Services,
Melissa speaking; how may I help you?”

“Very good.”

“Mr. Fitzpatrick is not available,” Melissa said. “May I
take a message?”

“Melissa,” Claire said. “Did it hurt your feelings that I
suggested you improve your grammar.”

“Course it did,” she said. “Nobody likes to be told they’re
not good enough for something.”

“I’m sorry,” Claire said. “I stuck my nose in where I
shouldn’t have.”

“I ain’t mad at you,” Melissa said. “I’m thinking of it like
you said; I can pretend to be a secretary who talks good all day, and then talk
like myself the rest of the time. It’ll be my job to talk good.”

“Well,” Claire said.

“What?”

“Never mind,” Claire said. “Just so you know, I love you
just the way you are, as does everyone else.”

“Thanks, Claire. I love y’all, too.”

Claire considered the list of phone numbers she had given
Ed. She knew anyone in Rose Hill wouldn’t hesitate to share all they knew with
Ed; they’d known him all his life or theirs. This didn’t include Marigold
Lawson, whose run for mayor was not supported by the local paper. The attorneys
would claim client privilege until they received legal proof of Knox’s death and
a subpoena.

She knew Anne Marie from way back in the Hollywood days when
Claire was Sloan’s assistant. Anne Marie had been Sloan’s go-to psychic, and
Sloan had promoted her services to the Hollywood contingent of the California
New Age community. Claire wasn’t sure who’s side Anne Marie was currently on
visa vie the murder of Courtenay by her assistant, Jeremy, or if she blamed
Claire for helping the FBI nab Jeremy, but it was worth a try.