Unplugged (14 page)

Creepy images darkened my thoughts. When she and I had first escaped Schaumburg, I’d promised Laney’s dad I’d take care of her. I know it sounds kind of funny, since we’re the same age, and supposedly the same gender, though one couldn’t be too certain if one compared our cup sizes. Still, it had seemed like the right thing to do at the time.

“So you’re all right?” I asked.

“Sure.” Digging her keys from the bottom of her purse, she stood up and headed toward the door. “I guess I’m not the first girl to get dumped.”

I ground my teeth and reminded myself that this was what I deserved for lying my ass off, so I simply retrieved my handbag and followed her outside. “When I’m reincarnated as a gorgeous, nubile blonde with big boobs and a stratospheric IQ, I’m not going to be so humble,” I said.

“Promise?” she asked.

“Count on it,” I told her, and left the building.

T
hirty minutes later I was at Tiffany Georges’s house. Well, actually, thirty minutes later I was stuck in traffic and conversing, via sign language, with a guy who’d missed my rear bumper by a curse and a hair. Twelve minutes after that I was parked in the Georges’ driveway.

I took a deep breath and steadied myself. Okay, maybe Tiffany really had identified me as the prowler in her backyard. Maybe she would take one look out her window and call the cops. Maybe Rivera would come charging through her front door and haul me off by the hair. But I was willing to bet that none of those things would happen. In fact, I was willing to bet Rivera had been lying through his teeth. For while I was certain Tiffany had reported seeing someone perched on her fence, I was pretty sure she couldn’t have seen my face.

Which meant that Rivera had jumped to that outrageous conclusion on his own. Why the hell would I be scampering across Solberg’s lawn in the middle of the night?

Anyway, it was now or never. Carting up all my moxie and lifting my chin like a Marine on a mission, I stepped out of the Saturn and marched up to Tiffany’s front door. I could hear the bell chiming in the interior, then nothing. I tried again. Waited again. Still nothing.

I took an abbreviated step to the left. Maybe she wasn’t home. In which case I could probably take a little stroll through her backyard and . . .

“Can I help you?”

I actually squealed as I jerked toward her. The little sneak was standing behind me. I clasped my hand to my chest and considered having my heart attack right there on her cobbled walkway.

“Oh! I just . . . Oh,” I said again. Clever. I might as well have said, “I didn’t break into Solberg’s house. It wasn’t me falling over your fence. And I’m pretty sure you’re not digging a grave in which to bury your latest victim.”

“Do I know . . . Oh,” she said, and looked almost relieved. “You’re, ummm . . . Christina, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Yes.” I realized rather belatedly that she was carrying one of those four-pronged garden thingies, but so far she had neither stabbed me with it nor called the cops.

This is what I call a good day.

“Haven’t you heard from Jeen yet?” she asked.

“No,” I said, still trying to catch my breath, and maybe a few fluttering brain cells. “I haven’t, and I was just wondering if maybe you had learned anything.”

“No, but there’s been some weird goings-on over there,” she said, nodding toward Solberg’s yard.

I was tempted to blink, press my fingertips to my chest, and say, “Whatever do you mean?” in my best Scarlett O’Hara imitation, but I managed to control myself. “Really?” I said.

“There was someone in his house the other night.”

I felt as stiff as uncooked linguine. “Maybe it was Solberg.”

“Well, if it was, he came shimmying over my fence and racing across my yard.”

“Across your yard?” I actually gasped when I said it. Move over Julia Roberts.

“In fact, I think there might have been two of them.”

“Two of what?”

She scowled a little. I think. There wasn’t a wrinkle to be seen. Either she’d been introduced to Botox or her face was made of wood. “People,” she said.

“You’re kidding.”

“I wish I were.”

“Well . . .” And here is where my real genius shone through. “I hope your husband was home.”

She paused for just an instant, shifting the garden implement to her other hand. “He’s, ummmm . . . out of town.”

“You mean you were alone when all of this was going on?”

She nodded and glanced restlessly down the street. “What did you say you needed?”

“Oh.” I shook my head. “I was just concerned about Solberg, but now I’m worried about you. Your husband’s home now, isn’t he?”

“Yes. Of course. He came home last night.”

“Oh, good. I mean . . .” I laughed. Ha ha ha. “Men. They’re the next best thing to a guard dog and a loaded bazooka, huh?”

She didn’t say anything.

“And I’m told they’re good for yard work,” I rambled. “But mine never has been.”

I waited for her to chime in. She didn’t.

“It looks like you have to do your own, too, huh?”

She glanced down at her pronged thingy. “Well, Jake’s awfully busy with work.”

“Oh? What does he do?”

“He’s a corporate attorney . . . with Everest and Everest.”

“Probably works evenings and weekends.”

“Sometimes.” She shifted her gaze away again. “Well, I’m sorry I can’t help you with Jeen. Tell me if you learn anything, will you?”

“Of course,” I said, and knowing that was my cue to leave, I headed for my car. I drove away waving merrily, rounded the block, and headed up a windy road into the foothills. It wasn’t five minutes later that I parked on a scruffy little knoll that overlooked Solberg’s neighborhood. Los Angeles has a thousand such places. The city covers about a zillion square miles of desert, but half of that is perched on inaccessible crags that even Angelites avoid.

On this particular mountaintop, paths marched away through the scrub in several directions, but I was only interested in the houses below. If I’d had binoculars I could have looked straight into Tiffany’s toilet bowl.

But why would I want to?

Three hours later, I’d had ample time to consider that question. I was also hungry and my left butt cheek had been numb so long, it felt like it had been amputated.

No one had entered or exited the Georges’ abode, which, of course, didn’t tell me much, but as I traversed the 210 toward Sunland, I was sure Tiffany had lied her little ass off.

Her husband hadn’t come home. And she knew more than she was saying.

Which was a hell of a lot more than could be said about some of us.

O
ne glance at Elaine’s face on Friday morning reminded me why I was continuing the search.

She’d been crying. Her eyes were red and her nose was runny, but she still looked gorgeous.

No one ever said life was fair. At least no one in the McMullen clan. But then, we come from a long line of depressed Irishmen who tend to drink when they’re down, or happy, or otherwise emoted.

“Angie.” I greeted my final client of the day. She’d just turned seventeen a couple weeks ago and had celebrated by getting a tiny clutter of stars tattooed below her left ear.

Angela Grapier had been my client for over a year. She was small and cute and would have been adorable even if you dressed her in burlap and cut her hair with a buzz saw.

“How are you doing?” I asked.

“Good.” She shrugged, and grinned a little. “Well . . . pretty good. I suppose if I were too good, I wouldn’t get to skip Algebra and come here, huh?” She tossed her backpack onto the floor, slipped out of her untied sneakers, and curled her legs under her on the couch.

If I ever have a daughter, I’d like her to be like Angie. Only without the drug addiction and the boyfriends I wanted to exterminate.

Or rather, ex-boyfriends. I gave myself a mental high-five. I took some credit for getting rid of Kelly. He’d been a loser of profound proportions. She’d known it even before coming to me, but I liked to think I helped her muster up the nerve to kick his ass out of her life.

“So . . . how’s it going with Sean?” Sean Kippling was her latest beau. He liked classical music and wore pants that didn’t fall off his hips and show his underwear, which was what the cool guys wore, but Angie seemed able to forgive him his fashion faux pas.

“He’s good.”

“Have you made him see the glory of rap music yet?”

“I’m working on it.” She grinned again. I’d seen her smile more in the last three weeks than in all the previous months put together. “You ever heard of Enya?”

“Just polkas for me. Remember?”

“Oh, yeah.” She laughed. “Anyway, she’s not too bad.”

“I’m sure she’d be thrilled to have your endorsement.”

“Sean gave me her CD,” she said, and fell silent.

I waited. She chewed her lip. “Other day he left an African violet on my desk in Chem class.”

“You like violets?”

“Yeah.” She looked thoughtful. “I guess I must have told him. But I can’t remember when.”

I stifled a sigh. A guy who listened and actually responded appropriately. Maybe if she dumped him I could get him on the rebound. So what if I was his girlfriend’s therapist . . . and sixteen years his senior. There’s not much point to living in La La Land if you can’t do something idiotic, and maybe felonious, once in a while.

“He likes to give me stuff,” she said.

“Sometimes guys are like that when they’re in love,” I said. Not that I’d know. I’d once dated a guy who gave me panties at every possible opportunity. Size 2. I couldn’t fit a size 2 on my head.

But again, why would I want to?

“You think he loves me?” she asked.

The age-old question. I shrugged, hoping to look enigmatic but secretly thinking that plucking a daisy might give her more insight.

She scowled. I waited. It had taken her a few weeks to open up to me, but since then it had pretty much been nonstop chatter.

“Is something wrong?” I asked.

She looked at me. She had eyes like a beagle puppy. She shifted them toward the floor and back.

“He doesn’t want to do it,” she said finally.

Uh-oh. I leaned back in my chair, looking casual. “Do what?” I asked, but I was pretty sure I knew what she meant—the ubiquitous “it.”

“You know. Sex,” she said, confirming my suspicion. The topic usually comes up at therapy sessions. And if it doesn’t, it probably should. My personal theory is that hormones rule the world. But who rules the hormones?

“Oh.” I nodded, trying to look wise. But in my experience no one looks very wise where sex is concerned. It’s simply an illogical act. There’s no making sense of it. I mean, if you try to think of it in practical terms, it’ll boggle your mind. It’s been around since man exited his first cave, and yet it’s still a number-one box-office draw. The Rubik’s cube came and went, but it looks like sex is here to stay. “What makes you think that?” I asked.

“Well . . .” She chewed her lip some more. “He says we should wait.”

I folded my hands in my lap, patient and deeply philosophical. “Maybe there’s a difference between not wanting to and believing you shouldn’t,” I suggested.

She glanced up, eyes bright. “Yeah?”

“Could be.”

“You believe in waiting?”

I refrained from snorting. What the hell would I wait for? Judging by some pretty accurate physical evidence, I wasn’t getting any younger. “Sometimes it’s a really good idea,” I said.

“How come?”

“You’ve got a lot on your mind. School, family problems. Are you still hoping to get into Berkeley?”

“I’m going to fill out the application this week.”

“You’re going to have to keep up your GPA.”

“That’s what Dad says.”

She and her father had come to an understanding of sorts recently. I liked to think I’d had a hand in that, too.

“Sex can really mess with your head,” I added.

“Yeah.”

“Maybe Sean knows that.”

She looked thoughtful. “So you think maybe he wants to do it, only he doesn’t think it’s a good idea?”

Uh-huh. “Unless he’s a homosexual, I think it’s pretty likely.”

She scowled. “I don’t think he’s gay.”

I let her go at her own pace.

She scrunched up her face. “When we kiss I can feel his . . . you know.”

I thought I did, if memory served.

“So you think he finds you attractive?”

She shrugged. “Jenny Caron walked by the other day when we were talking and he didn’t even glance at her.”

“Jenny’s good-looking?” I guessed.

She rolled her eyes. “Jenny’s got boobs like torpedoes. Everybody looks at Jenny. Hell,
I
look at Jenny.”

I tried not to laugh, in honor of her serious expression.

“He says when I’m around he can’t think of anything else, and that he’s afraid if we had sex he might walk in front of a bus or something. Get spattered all over the street.” She crinkled her nose. “He’s a weird guy.”

I thought for a minute that I might be in love. Weird guys often affect me that way. My very first crush had had six toes on his left foot. He’d shown me on the playground on the first day of school—proud as a patriot.

“It does kind of sound like he’s attracted to you,” I said.

“Yeah.” She grinned again, impishly, then sobered slowly. “So you think . . .” She paused, thinking herself. “Do you think good guys, you know, the guys who really care about you, do you think they maybe think they should wait?”

“Could be,” I said, inscrutable to the end, but later I sat alone in my office and swore a blue streak.

I hate it when I learn stuff from clients. Especially when they’re half my age and recovering drug addicts.

But the truth couldn’t be avoided and went something like this:

A: I hadn’t had a mature relationship with a man in all of my thirty-three years; and B: I owed it to Elaine to find the long-celibate Solberg.

10

Men have two outstanding features—their brains and their genitalia. Unfortunately, both rarely function simultaneously.