“Where are your parents now?”
“They moved to Florida when my dad retired. I went to school at George Mason and decided I liked Northern Virginia. So here I am, and here I’ll stay.”
Jake pulled on the oars. “Don’t have a wanderlust?”
“Nope. I’ve done enough wanderlusting. How about you?”
“My DNA is missing the wanderlust chromosome.”
“I know,” Amy said. “Instead of a wanderlust chromosome, they gave you a detective chromosome.”
Jake stopped rowing. “I’m not much of a detective. I’m stumped, and the part that’s really driving me nuts is that there’s a clue in the office, and I can’t find it.”
“Why don’t we just ask Veronica?”
“What would we say? Excuse me, Miss Bottles, but we’d like to know why you kidnapped your own chicken?”
“Yeah. They do it all the time on television. Then the person gets worried and does something stupid, and they get caught.”
“We could count on Veronica Bottles doing something stupid,” Jake said, reaching for a can of soda in the cooler between his feet. “Everything Veronica does is stupid.”
Amy took a sip of his soda. “That’s why this is such a good idea.”
“I thought you were the one who didn’t want to do any more detecting?”
“That was when I was a virgin,” Amy said. “Now I’m bold.”
Jake turned the boat toward the concession stand. “Okay. Let’s go see what Veronica has to say.”
Chapter 7
“We need to be professional about this,” Amy said. “You were right. We need equipment.”
Jake turned onto Ox Road and looked at Amy sideways. “Equipment?” There were gray people and there were black-and-white people, Jake thought. Gray people were middle-of-the-roaders, easing through life with a pleasant smile on their placid faces. He suspected he was pretty much gray. Amy was definitely black-and-white. She didn’t do things halfway. Once she chose a project she pursued it with gleeful intensity. He’d realized that the first time they made love. The remembrance of it brought a stab of heat to his groin. “What sort of equipment did you have in mind?”
“A digital recorder, of course. I have one at home. I’ll just put it in a purse, and no one will know. Then we’ll have a recorded confession.”
An hour later they pulled into Veronica’s parking lot. Even before they cut the engine, Amy and Jake could hear the shouting in Veronica’s apartment. A window flew open and a big stuffed bear came sailing out, landing face first in the grass.
“And I don’t want your stupid bear!” Veronica shouted.
Brian Turner rushed out and picked up the bear. His face was florid and his lips were pressed tightly together in a bloodless slit in his face.
“That does it,” he shouted back, flinging the bear into his car. “Only a heartless woman would throw Good-luck Bear out the window. You’re a monster, Veronica. Do you know how to spell that?”
Veronica’s face appeared in the window. “B-R-I-A-N,” she replied sweetly.
“Very funny.” He ducked a tennis racket and got hit in the head with a tennis shoe.
“I don’t want any of your junk,” Veronica told him, tossing an armful of clothes out the window into the shrubbery. “You and your big ideas, telling me I was going to be a television star. Some television star. You had me playing straight man to a chicken. Now there’s no chicken, and you’re telling me I’m fired. Lulu the Clown didn’t have a chicken. Why do I need one?”
“Lulu the Clown had talent,” Turner said.
Veronica’s eyes narrowed. “You’re slime, Turner. You’re scum and gunk and doo-doo. You have no sensitivity, and you killed that poor chicken,” she cried. “You fiend.”
Amy’s eyes widened at the whirring recorder. “Son of a gun,” she whispered. All those hours watching crummy television shows paid off. She’d actually gotten incriminating evidence.
“Me?” Turner screamed. “I didn’t kill that Frank Perdue reject. I gave him his big break, and he blew it. You’re the one who killed him. Feeding him pizza and jelly doughnuts and keeping him up until all hours of the night watching David Letterman.”
“He liked the stupid pet tricks.” Veronica’s bright-red lower lip trembled. “And I didn’t kill him. What a rotten thing to say.”
Turner crawled through the azaleas retrieving socks and shirts. He found a black lace garter belt and stared at it for a moment. “This is yours,” he said, dangling the garter belt from one finger.
“You gave it to me,” Veronica sobbed, “and I never want to see it again.”
“Well, you gave me this tie.” Turner pulled his tie over his head. “Take it back.”
“Never. I don’t want a tie that’s been wrapped around your scrawny neck.”
Turner stomped into the apartment with the tie clutched in his fist. “I said take the tie back!”
“No, no, no!”
There was a deathly silence. Jake and Amy exchanged anxious glances. “You don’t suppose he’d hurt her?” Amy asked.
They crept to the open door and peeked inside.
“Holy cow,” Amy whispered.
“You were right,” Jake said. “Veronica Bottles doesn’t waste time on preliminaries.”
They backed away, quietly closing the door. “This probably isn’t a good time to question Veronica,” Jake suggested.
Amy slunk down in the passenger seat of the car. “I need a glass of lemonade.”
Jake grinned, putting the car in gear and heading for Amy’s house. “I’ve noticed squeezing lemons has a calming effect on you.”
Amy pressed the stop button on her recorder. “What do you make of that conversation? They accused each other of murdering Red, and then they both denied it.”
“I don’t think either of them killed the bird,” Jake said, disappointment obvious in his voice. “I’m having serious doubts about my theory.”
Amy listened to the recording. “They might not have killed him, but they obviously think he’s dead. Notice how they accuse each other of murder rather than bird-napping.”
“Uh-huh,” Jake said, cruising down the street, distracted by a van parked in front of Amy’s house. “Are you expecting company?”
Amy squinted at the van. “There’s someone in the front seat…with a camera.”
Jake pulled into the driveway and helped Amy from the car. The cameraman got out of the van and walked toward them. He was short and very young. His blond hair was tied back in a ponytail.
“Ron Grosse,” he said, extending his hand. “I’ve been sent by Local News to do a follow-up interview with Lulu the Clown. This is Dan Flyn…” He motioned to a second man, joining them from the van. “We do a Sixty Minutes–type show, except it only lasts twenty minutes.”
“I don’t think I feel like being interviewed today,” Amy said coolly. “I don’t have much to say about all this.”
“Aren’t you the veterinarian?” Dan Flyn asked. “This is a coup. We didn’t expect to find the two of you together. Are you…um, you know, an item?”
Jake leaned forward slightly, stopping inches from Flyn’s nose. “Excuse me? An item?”
Flyn stood his ground. “There had been rumors of this being an inside job, or at least a coverup.”
Jake set his jaw. “That does it. I’m going to rearrange your face.”
“No,” Amy shouted, grabbing Jake by the arm. “Lord, what will my neighbors think? Cameramen and vans and men fighting on my front lawn. You can’t do this sort of thing in suburbia. And besides, we just cut this grass, and now you’re standing on it and bending it. Shoo,” she said to the twenty-minute news team. She made go-away motions with her hands. “Shoo.”
She pulled Jake into the house. “Shame on you. Rearrange his face. Good grief.”
Jake locked the door and closed the drapes. “I’m pretty tough, huh?”
Amy rolled her eyes and reached for the lemons.
“I wa
s surprised you didn’t give an interview. I would have thought you’d want to tell your side of the story.”
“I know those two,” Amy said, slicing lemons. “They aren’t interested in the truth. They just want something juicy. I wouldn’t dignify them with an interview.”
Jake put the cooler on the kitchen counter. “We have a couple chicken salad sandwiches left. What say we eat them for supper?” He set two placemats and plates on the little kitchen table and doled out the sandwiches.
Amy took a bowl of potato salad and a container of pickled beets from the refrigerator. “I have some leftovers.”
“I know this sounds strange, but you make me homesick. My mom is a great cook…just like you.” Jake tasted the potato salad and sighed.
“This is just as good as my mom’s. When I was a kid we had potato salad all summer long. And there was always cold fried chicken. I have two brothers, and I can’t tell you how much chicken we went through during the month of July. My mom is a seasonal cooker. In the winter she makes homemade chocolate pudding. I’d come home from school and walk into the house and almost get knocked over by the smell of that pudding cooking.”
Amy gave Jake his lemonade and sat across from him. “Sounds like you had a nice childhood.”
“I guess it was average. I was always fighting with my brothers, but we really liked each other.” He wolfed down his sandwich and looked enviously at Amy’s.
Amy got the chicken salad from the refrigerator and made Jake another sandwich. “Did you always want to be a vet?”
“Yup. I collected baby birds that had fallen from their nests, and rabbits that cats had maimed, and rescued turtles from the middle of the road. My mom was terrific. She put up with a lot. I had fish and hamsters and lizards and never cleaned my room.”
He took Amy’s hand in his. “I’d like you to meet my family. My brother Nick lives in East Stroudsburg. He has a wife and two kids. My brother Billy lives in Wind Gap with his wife and three kids. And my parents are just down the street from Billy.” His eyes had turned warm, and his thumb stroked across her wrist, causing her to lose interest in chicken salad.
“East Stroudsburg and Wind Gap are in Pennsylvania?” she asked halfheartedly, trying to steel herself against the rush of heat in her body.
He nibbled her fingertips, closed his eyes and pressed a kiss into the palm of her hand. “Mmmm. Pennsylvania.” His voice hummed against her skin.
“Pennsylvania is very romantic. In the Poconos they have honeymoon hotels with heart-shaped bathtubs. And the northwestern part of the state is wilderness with deer and bear and raccoons.”
“Raccoons,” Amy mechanically repeated, watching him kiss her wrist and work his way up her arm.
He skirted the table and pulled her to him. “You make me crazy,” he rumbled in her ear. “I can’t even sit across from you at the kitchen table. I keep thinking about you in bed, naked.”
Amy shivered. She liked the easy possessiveness of Jake’s touch.
They walked hand in hand to the bedroom and kissed again. Amy turned to close the curtains and gasped in dismay. “They’re still here!”
Jake looked out the window. The van was parked across the street. “What are they doing there?”
Amy gritted her teeth. “They’re waiting for a story. Ugly little scandalmongers.”
“I don’t believe this. This is all over a chicken. The bird wasn’t even healthy.”
Amy made a rude gesture and snapped the curtains closed. “Damn.”
Jake tweaked a blond curl. “Boy, you’re really steamed.”
“These guys could make life very unpleasant. They’ll stick to me like glue until they get something damaging, or until a better story comes along. I’m Lulu the Clown. There are lots of children out there in television land who love and respect me. I have a responsibility to those kids. It was bad enough they blipped me off the air without so much as an explanation, but now my personal conduct is under attack.”
He kissed her nose affectionately. “This is a painful question to ask, but I should go home now, shouldn’t I?”
“Yes. I can’t afford to have you spend the night here.” She touched his lower lip with her fingertip. “I don’t want you to go.”
Jake smiled. “I know. Don’t worry. I’ll be back.”
Amy waved good-bye to Jake and locked all her doors. She drew her curtains closed, took the iron poker from the fireplace, and checked each and every closet. What a goose, she thought. How many years had she lived alone…and now suddenly she was frightened. Not so much frightened as uneasy. The house didn’t feel right. It was empty. It needed Jake.
Jake sank deep into his couch, his long legs stretched in front of him, crossed at the ankles. Spot grunted and flopped down under the coffee table. “Look at this place, Spot. It’s a dump.”
Just two weeks ago he’d thought it was a palace. He’d arranged everything around his favorite couch cushion. The TV, the microwave, and his veterinary journals were all within arm’s reach. He never had trouble finding clothes because they were spread across the floor. He’d lived like this for as long as he could remember. Weeks. Maybe years. Now all of a sudden he didn’t like it. It was the messy habitat of a couch potato.
How had he become such a lazy slob? Practice, he decided. Years and years of practice had honed his slobbery to a fine art. Not only was his home a mess, but his body was falling apart. Amy had almost killed him on the jogging trail.
He looked at his watch. Eight o’clock. Not too late. He carried the microwave to the kitchen and found a place for it on the counter.
“Look at this counter,” he said to Spot. “Immaculate. You know why? Because I never use it.”
He shook his head in silent rebuke as he examined his refrigerator. A can of coffee and a six-pack of beer. Two TV dinners resided in his freezer.
A wave of lonely depression washed over him. Amy’s refrigerator had all sorts of good things in it, and her kitchen smelled like cookies and daffodils. Jake wrinkled his nose. His kitchen smelled like Spot.
An hour later Jake straggled into his apartment with bags of groceries. He filled his refrigerator with milk and cheese and a container of potato salad. He artfully arranged his apples and oranges and grapefruits. He proudly stuffed a chicken into the meat drawer, enormously pleased with his purchase, despite the fact that he hadn’t a clue what to do with it.
“Only healthy food,” he said to Spot. “No more greasy chips.”
Spot looked disappointed. He sniffed at a bag of carrots and went back to the couch.
“And that’s not all. We’re going running.” He clinked the leash onto the dog’s collar and pranced around the room.
“Come on, Spot, wake up those muscles. Get the lead out. Let’s go pound some pavement.”
Jake’s T-shirt was soaked through when he returned to his apartment. He unlocked the door and leaned against it for a minute, catching his breath, watching Spot bound up the stairs. “Show-off,” Jake grumbled.
He labored up the stairs and went straight to the kitchen for a glass of orange juice. “This is so damn healthy,” he said, leaning against the counter. “Why isn’t it any fun? How come everything that’s fun contributes to heart disease?” And why am I feeling so grouchy? he thought. He’d moved his microwave, bought good food, and run his buns off. He kicked at the kitchen chair and muttered an oath. He wanted to be with Amy.
There was more to a refrigerator than apples and oranges. He couldn’t simulate her kitchen any more than he could pretend she was in his bed. He’d changed, he realized. A whole chapter of his life had ended. His carefree bachelor days were gone.
Good riddance, he thought. He was never much of a bachelor, anyway. He wanted to be married. He wanted mortgage payments and crabgrass and Amy snuggled next to him for the rest of his life. Amy, who felt responsible to a bunch of Munchkins.
He stretched on his bed and linked his hands behind his head, wondering what Amy was doing. He didn’t like those two
slimeballs camped outside her house, but he felt powerless to remove them. He picked up the phone to call her and realized he didn’t know her number. He tried information, but she wasn’t listed.
“That’s it. I’m going over there.”
He stopped at the head of the stairs. He couldn’t go. It would compromise Amy’s image. “But maybe she’s in danger. Maybe those creeps are knocking on her door right now.” Jake, he told himself, this is the woman who wasted Safeway. Probably he should worry about the creeps. “Okay,” he shouted, making flamboyant gestures, “I’m going to take a shower. I’m going to put this out of my mind. I’m being silly, right?”
He was still asking that question at five in the morning. He was freshly showered and dressed for the office in a button-down and striped tie. He’d eaten a grapefruit, drunk a gallon of coffee, and tried to fry an egg, but it had stuck to the nonstick pan.
“So I’m being silly. Big deal. You know what they say. Better silly than sorry. I’m just going to go over there and check things out. I’ll be cool. No one will know.”
It was black as pitch when Jake drove past Amy’s house in a camouflaging cloud of his own exhaust. The van was still parked across the street, and the little Cape Cod house was ominously dark. Jake swore softly and continued on.
He parked around the corner and crept through a neighboring yard. He climbed Amy’s split-rail fence and sprinted across her back lawn. Now what? He tried windows. If he found any of them open, he was going to throttle her. Okay, all windows secure. Patio door locked with jimmy bar. He tiptoed up the stairs to her deck. Deck door locked with jimmy bar. Good. Motley looked at him from the other side of the sliding door and meowed. Jake tapped on the window to the cat.
“Kitty, kitty, kitty,” he said. Motley continued to howl. Jake saw a light flash on in the hall and a dark figure shuffle out of the shadows.
Amy scratched her head with both hands, yawned, and stretched. “Motley, you’re going to wake up the whole neighborhood. How can anybody sleep with this racket going…Ehhhhhh!” she screamed. There was someone on her porch! He was awful. Huge and crazy looking and…It was Jake.