Stars (The Butterfly Trilogy) (55 page)

     "I said, I guess you found out my secret."

     Charmie saw a scattering of crumbs down the front of his tight T-shirt, where bulging pectorals beckoned promisingly. Her fingers itched to reach over and just brush those crumbs off. "What secret is that?"

     He held up the bag and smiled sheepishly. "I don't really have any kids. I got these for myself."

     "What's wrong with that? So you enjoy potato chips."

     "Well, I have a problem. Compulsive eating, I guess they call it."

     He wore his hair in a crisp military crew cut that emphasized the football player-ness of his neck and shoulders. He looked Air Force, Charmie thought. Or maybe a body builder. From what she had seen in the drugstore and what she could see here—good God, the way the jeans stretched over his thighs!—he looked like he was in excellent shape. "You don't look like a compulsive eater," she said.

     "Yeah, well, I work it off, I guess." Dimples appeared in his cheeks when he smiled. Charmie wanted to stand there forever, but, realizing that they had pretty much exhausted the potato chip subject, she said, "Well, good luck," and started to walk away.

     "I try to diet," he said, "but nothing ever works. Diets are so boring, you know?"

     Charmie suddenly thought, Uh oh. He had given her an opening, and now came the tricky part. She always carried Starlite booklets with her, ready to hand out should anyone express interest; the booklets listed the main office phone numbers, plus the addresses of the forty-eight salon locations throughout California. The only problem was, whenever she explained that she worked for the company, there was always that little flicker in the eyes that said,
You?
Charmie was the first to admit that she wasn't exactly a walking advertisement for the Starlite diet; in the six years since she had shown up on Philippa's doorstep when that little meeting was going on in her living room, Charmie had shed not a single ounce. But she usually rode it out with aplomb; let them think what they want, Starlite's program spoke for itself.

     But now the thought that such a look might flicker in this man's eyes filled her with such dread that she almost didn't produce one of the booklets. But she didn't want to walk away just yet either, and there was nothing more to say to keep her there hanging around his Mustang as if she were sixteen instead of twenty-nine and married, the mother of one and, soon, two. But then he wasn't exactly giving her the brush-off. After all, she had been about to walk away when he had picked up the conversational thread. Doing a quick wedding-band scan of his hands and not finding any ring, she said, "Maybe this is what you're looking for," and she dug into her big bag and brought out a booklet. They were over fifty pages long now and came with glossy covers.

     "Yeah, Starlite," he said, taking it from her. She saw how big his knuckles were; his fingernails were trimmed and clean. Definitely military. "I've heard of it."

     "Oh? Does your"—she couldn't believe she was saying this—"wife belong?"

     He laughed. "I'm not married. So you think this will help? I need to lose about twenty pounds."

     
Where from, your toes?
"It will definitely help." She braced herself. "I guarantee it."

     But when he looked from the booklet back to her, Charmie didn't see the usual
Oh yeah? Then why aren't you thin?
in his eyes. Instead those dimples deepened with an ingenuous smile as he said, "I might give it a try. What do I have to do?"

     "Well, right now the salons are only for women, but we're starting to form men's groups in gyms. Victor's on Sherman Way, for example—"

     "I'm familiar with it."

     Her eyes flickered to his biceps.
Wow.
"They have Saturday groups. That's to make it convenient for men who work Monday through Friday." God, was she really sounding this obvious? Just come right out and ask the guy for a minute by minute rundown of his life.

     He shrugged those Atlas shoulders. "Doesn't make any difference to me, I'm self-employed. I make my own hours."

     "Oh?"
Doing what, training marines all day and wrestling Dobermans in your spare time?

     He gave that little laugh again that didn't go with such a large guy. "I'm a private investigator."

     She nearly dropped her purse. "You're a
what?
"

     "Please," he held up a defensive hand. "I'm no Peter Gunn. Whenever I tell people what I do, they get these crazy visions—"

     "No, wait," she said. "I have a friend who's looking for a private detective. I mean, do you search for missing people and all that?"

     "It's a big part of my business. Who's your friend looking for?"

     "She was adopted, and she wants to find her real parents. But there are no records that she knows of."

     "Can be a challenge," he said. "But I like challenges. I'll be glad to talk to her if you like."

     Charmie couldn't believe this. There was Philippa, sitting in her office across the street, discouraged because the men she had so far found in the yellow pages had turned out to be less than honest and a bit slippery, and here, out of the blue, was a guy who not only wasn't seedy or sleazy, but had a John Glenn haircut and a GI Joe build. All-American and squeaky clean. Surely Philippa could trust
this
one.

     "If you have a minute," Charmie heard herself saying. "She's right over there, in that Swiss-looking building."

     "Sure," he said. "I didn't have any plans for the next hour except to eat these potato chips. Why don't I follow you over there? Which car is yours?"

     And two minutes later she was driving out of the Cut-Cost parking lot, right across Ventura Boulevard and into the Starlite parking lot, without for a second remembering that Ron was at home, watching wrestling and babysitting Nathan.

     There was a big fight going on at Starlite.

     "Damn it, Alan," Philippa said as she walked into his office and threw a memo down onto his desk. "I asked you not to bring this up again. I will
not
hire outside people to work as Starlite counselors, and that's all there is to it."

     He scowled at the memo. This was the third time in the past year she had discarded his idea, and he wasn't going to give up. "I'm telling you, Philippa, you're missing a great opportunity to raise profits. With trained therapists, women who have college degrees for God's sake, we can charge three or four times as much for membership as we do now."

     "Alan," she said evenly, "my counselors have to go through the program. They have to know what it's like to be overweight and struggle to lose it. My members will not want to tell their troubles to some skinny person they feel can't possibly understand."

     "Therapists are trained to understand!" he shouted back.

     "I agree with Alan," said Hannah, who was sitting in the corner of his cluttered office, sorting through bolts of fabric. Although Hannah had an office of her own, where she wrote her weekly fashion tip, she liked to work in Alan's office whenever she could. "I think it's a good idea to hire professionals. Profits would go through the roof."

     "Oh, Hannah," Philippa said in exasperation. "Have you forgotten your persecution so soon? Remember Ardeth Faulkner who'd been thin all her life and who said, 'Why don't you just go on a diet?' Remember how we didn't like talking to Dr. Hehr's skinny nurse? If we hired people who had never been through what we've been through, membership would
drop
, it wouldn't go up. Don't you see that?"

     "Listen, Philippa," Alan said, getting up and coming around his desk. He had started wearing lifts in his shoes, so that now he was taller than his wife. But he wasn't taller than Philippa. "When you invited me to take over Starlite's accounting division, you also said you would welcome any financial advice I had to offer. I'm telling you, this is a wise move."

     "Well we're not doing it. Not only for the sake of the members, but also for the sake of the counselors. Many of the women we employ would not otherwise be able to find jobs. And one of the important things they have to offer is their sympathy, because they were once fat like the rest of us, and that's something you can't get through a college course. Are
you
willing to tell the nearly four hundred counselors we currently employ that they're no longer wanted?"

     Alan backed down. Again.

     Philippa marched out of his office, nearly knocking Molly, her secretary, out of the way. It galled her how blithely, for the sake of profits, Alan was willing to forget the main purpose of Starlite, its origins, how it had started. And Hannah! If Alan said the sky was green, she'd agree with him!

     "Are you all right, Miss Roberts?"

     She forced herself to calm down. "Yes, I'm fine, Molly. Is that today's mail? Let's go through it as quickly as we can. I have an appointment this afternoon."

     Molly cast a puzzled look at her employer before hurrying into the office. She had never known her boss to be so irritable. Everyone had heard the argument between Philippa and Mr. Scadudo—so unlike Miss Roberts. Molly wondered what was wrong.

     What was wrong, and what nobody knew, was that Philippa had a serious problem, and worrying about it was affecting her mood.

     "These are all requests for Starlite to open salons in other states, Miss Roberts," the efficient young Molly said as she placed a neatly gathered pile of letters in front of Philippa. Molly had decided some time ago that she had landed a plum job. Her boss, though demanding, was generous with praise and she appreciated good work, and the offices were attractive, with comfortable furniture and air-conditioning that never fritzed. "And these," Molly said, placing another stack next to the first, "are questions regarding the diet."

     Pulling herself out of her preoccupation, Philippa read a letter on the first stack: "When is Starlite coming to Orlando, Florida?" she read, and a second: "I hate to cook and I'm no good at it. Are there any frozen dinners allowed on the diet?"

     As she stared at this letter, her mind went back to her own problem: for some mysterious reason, she was gaining weight.

     She set the letter aside and picked up another one, which, she saw, contained a recipe for a rich carrot cake that was by no means allowable on the Starlite diet. She set it down.

     
Why
was she gaining weight? She should in fact have lost weight over the past week because she had had a bad cold and had eaten less than she normally did, subsisting mainly on fruit juices and tea with lemon and honey. When she did her weekly check on the scales, she had expected to see a loss, not a gain.

     She was just looking at her watch—she had a doctor's appointment in a few hours—when Charmie made a theatrical entrance into the office, unannounced. "Philippa!" she declared in her usual breathless way. "I've brought someone to meet you!"

     "Charmie! I didn't think I'd see you until next week. What—"

     "You won't believe what I've found." Charmie looked at Molly, who stiffened, then said, "If you don't need me right now, Miss Roberts," ending it like a question.

     Philippa said, "Thanks, Molly, we'll pick this up later. Would you please bring Mrs. Charmer and me a couple of diet sodas?"

     "Make that
three
sodas!" Charmie said, then she turned to Philippa and said, "You are not going to believe this! I was just at Cut-Cost across the street and I met this man." Throwing down her oversize bag, Charmie pulled the office door open and said, "Come on in!"

     A large, well-developed young man stepped a little self consciously into the office, seeming to fill it up with his bulk and masculinity. As Philippa said, "How do you do," he held out a beefy hand. "I'm Ivan Hendricks, private investigator."

     Philippa shot a surprised look at Charmie, who smiled and said, "What did I tell you?"

     They got right down to it. Mr. Hendricks brought out a notepad and pen and asked personal questions in an impersonal, professional way. He nodded and wrote as Philippa told her story, while Charmie sat sipping her soda with her eyes riveted on Hendricks as if he were a piece of cake.

     "What do you think, Mr. Hendricks?" Philippa finally said when she had finished telling him everything.

     "I'd like to take a look at the file you've collected," he said. "But this looks like a fairly straightforward case."

     "Will you take it on?"

     Charmie shifted to the edge of her seat until he said, "Sure, I'd love to." Good, she was going to see him again.

     "Now, I'm not making any promises, Miss Roberts," Ivan Hendricks explained. As he went on to outline his methods of investigation and his fees, Charmie got up and paced a little. She paused at the window to look out over Ventura Boulevard where palm trees wilted and the blacktop looked as if it were going to melt into tar pits and trap the cars like dinosaurs. She was listening to Ivan Hendricks's voice, which was as strong as his physique, when she saw a familiar car slow down at the red light and then take off again as soon as it changed to green.

     Ron. It had been Ron. Right out in front of Starlite.

     What was he doing out on the streets?

     She realized he must have been on a beer run.

     Had he seen her car?

     Pressing her forehead against the window, she tried to see if her Volvo was visible from the street.

     It was.

     "Philippa," she said suddenly. "Excuse me, Mr. Hendricks. Philippa, I just remembered an appointment." She picked up her purse. "I have to go."

     Philippa kicked off her shoes and walked on the cool linoleum; it felt good beneath her burning feet. It had been a hot, hectic day, starting with Ivan Hendricks, the private investigator, and ending with her doctor's appointment. As she opened her fridge and took out the makings for a salad, she assessed the two verdicts she had received that afternoon. From Hendricks: "I don't see why I should have any problems locating your parents." From Dr. Stahl: "It's a mystery to me why you're gaining weight."