All Shook Up (5 page)

“And?” Char demanded when the silence went on too long.

“And the next thing I know, I’m ratting him out over his complaint about the dock.” She flopped onto her
back and drummed the fingers of her free hand on her stomach. “As if I hadn’t already told him exactly what the deal was.”

“That was mature.”

“Tell me about it. I looked even more adult when J.D. told them, cool as you please, that while I had explained the arrangement, he still felt there should be a sign spelling out the exact rules and regulations, with a warning that swimmers proceed at their own risk.”

“I, uh, hate to say this, cookie, but that’s not such a bad idea.”

“I know,” Dru agreed glumly. “Ben and Sophie thought it was brilliant, for legal purposes if nothing else. So naturally J.D. came off looking all grown-up and rational, while I looked like the whiny little stool pigeon I was.” Her heels hung over the edge of the window seat and she toed off her flip-flops. “It didn’t help that I wasn’t wearing any underwear.”

“Why, did he stare at your boobs or something?” Char’s sigh filtered down the line. “I wish someone would stare at mine, but some of us are more mammary-challenged than you well-endowed types.”

Dru made a rude noise. “And when we’re both sixty, yours will still be perky, while mine will probably be down around my knees. My heart bleeds for you.”

“
Did
he stare at ’em?”

“No, it wasn’t that. I doubt he even noticed. It was more—I don’t know—he was so together, and my hair was wet, my boobs kept shifting back and forth every time I
breathed
, and my big butt was spread out all over the chair.”

“Stop that. I should be so lucky as to have enough boob
to
shift, and your butt is not big.”

“Well, it sure felt that way without my undies. I felt vulnerable, okay? Kind of an awake version of that caught-naked-in-public dream. I could have used the armor of my silkies and a blow-dryer.”

“I understand that. For me, it’s lipstick. Give me a tube of Estée Lauder, and I can face just about anything. But what about him? What kind of underwear do you suppose he wears? Tightie-whities or boxers?”

“My guess would be none.”

“Oooh,” Char breathed. “Ya think?”

“If his attitude is anything to go by. He acts like such a swinging dick, you’d think he has to kick it out of his way with every step he takes.”

“Damn. But, Drusie, if you don’t think he was wearing any underwear, either, shouldn’t that have you feeling less uncomfortable?”

“No, it’s that attitude thing again. I felt big and blowzy.
He
was probably busy congratulating himself on what a big one he has.”

“I have
got
to meet this guy. You think he might need a massage?”

“His ego sure as hell doesn’t. But I imagine you’re talking about a
real
massage, right?” Which Char provided at the lodge four days a week.

Char’s voice sounded wistful. “It’d sure be nice to deal with some real muscle for a change. All I’ve gotten lately is soft tourist bodies.”

“Well, hey, who knows? He’d probably eat it up with a spoon, the way he did the crème brûlée, so if you wanna take a run at him, be my guest.”

“You know better than that, Dru.”

Dru stared at the receiver with blank surprise. She and Char had made a pact back in junior high school never to horn in on the other’s relationship with a guy—and panic bloomed that her best friend thought that was what J.D. had the potential to be. “It’s not like that!”

“Uh-huh.”

“It’s not, Char. I don’t even like him.”

“Yeah, that must be why your heart pounds every time he’s around, huh? Dislike.”

“Dammit, Char,” she began in exasperation, but a sleepy voice interrupted her.

“Mom?”

She sat up, peering around at Tate, who stood ruffle-haired in the doorway. “Hey, baby, what are you doing up?”

“Gotta go?” Char inquired. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”

Dru turned off the phone and, getting up, set it back in its stand on the end table. “Can’t sleep?”

“I hadda pee.” A huge yawn escaped him. “Then I heard you talkin’. I thought someone was here.”

“I was just talking to Char.”

Tate nodded and yawned again.

“You ready to go back to bed?”

“Uh-huh.” He shuffled in front of her down the short hallway to his room. A moment later he climbed onto the mattress and flopped down on his back. He immediately rolled onto his side.

Dru pulled the blankets up around his shoulders and leaned down to give him a kiss. “’Night, sweet pea. Luva-luva you.”

“Love you, too, Mom,” Tate murmured. Before Dru
had straightened, he was once again sound asleep.

Leaving his door open a crack, she went back into the living room. She flipped on the television to a Seattle channel for the news, but after hearing about an oil spill in the straits, the mutilation of a horse in Arlington, and the death of a cashier who had been shot during a convenience-store robbery last Tuesday, she snapped it off again.

She had problems of her own. Hearing those cheery little tidbits didn’t help.

B
utch hung up the phone receiver and threw himself back on the couch. Taking a pull from the beer bottle in his hand, he thunked his feet on the coffee table. Gina always went ballistic when he did that, but she wasn’t home to see him, so what the hell.

Where the fuck was J.D.? The man Butch had shot in that farcical robbery last Tuesday had died yesterday, and his alibi was out doing God knew what, God knew where.

Dammit, how was it possible for everything to turn to shit so freaking fast? It wasn’t like he’d
meant
to shoot the guy or anything—that old pistol had been in his glove box for years, stuffed under wads of fast-food-joint napkins. It was the last remaining link to his wild-child years, and he’d kept it around not because he’d ever expected to use it, but for the protection it represented.

He hadn’t set out to knock over the convenience store, either. He’d just been so damn tired of being broke and having to listen to Gina rag on and on about what a deadbeat he was these days, and why the hell wasn’t he out there beating the pavement looking for work now that Lankovich, that crook, had closed his doors. So sheer impulse had made him dig the gun out of the glove compartment when he’d stopped at the store for a six-pack. Damned if he was going to beg his old lady for beer money again.

He hadn’t intended to actually
use
the gun, but the idiot behind the counter just had to play hero. It was his own damn fault Butch had to shoot him; anyone with half a brain knew you were supposed to just hand over the money. But nooo, he’d argued about it in his lousy English; then he’d reached under the counter. Hell, how was Butch supposed to know a gun hadn’t been under there? That’s what anyone would have thought—and there was no way in hell he was gonna let some minimum-wage-earning towelhead get the drop on him.

Even so, he hadn’t meant to squeeze off a round. But Jesus, not one frigging thing had gone the way it was supposed to go that afternoon, and his finger had simply convulsed with nervous tension against the trigger. The next thing he’d known, the guy was spinning backward and collapsing against the shelves of cigarettes behind him. And there’d been blood—great fucking amounts of bright red blood—all over the damn place.

Now he had to do something about J.D., before J.D. heard about it and got it into his head to do something irretrievably stupid. The more Butch thought about it,
in fact, the more he realized that whatever he ended up doing would have to be permanent.

Shit. It gave him a headache just thinking about it. They’d been buds forever, him and J.D., and he liked him; he really did. But J.D. had always had that inconvenient moral streak running through him. Butch laid the blame for it on the old broad who’d taken him in that one year. But the bottom line was that J.D. would never understand about what he’d done.

He knew exactly what would happen: the minute J.D. caught wind of the store clerk’s death, either he’d expect Butch to come clean about Kittie so the cops could talk to her and clear his name once and for all, or he’d double- and triple-check her story himself. And Kittie wasn’t exactly the brightest bulb in the marquee. If J.D. grilled her hard enough, Butch wasn’t sure he could trust her not to fold right in the middle of the story he’d fed her.

And hell, if it came down to a choice between friendship or twenty-to-life in Walla Walla, there was no fucking contest. He was real sorry about it, but that was just the way it went. And he wasn’t about to sit around twiddling his thumbs until he was taken by surprise, either. Especially after that phone call—he’d almost crapped when J.D. phoned practically on top of his hearing about the store clerk. He’d tried to trace the call, but that had gotten screwed up too. Just when he was about to hit *69, Gina had rung up to let him know she was catching a drink with a friend after work.

Sometimes life just sucked.

He knew J.D. too well. The man was a frigging pit bull when he wanted information. Much better to
make a preemptive strike against him than wait around for J.D. to get wind of this new development and “help” his ass right into the slammer.

Trouble was, he didn’t know where his old buddy had gotten himself off to. The temporary job he’d taken was finished; chances were he’d picked up work out of town. Or maybe he’d just moved across town and Butch would run into him down at the union hall.

But he wasn’t gonna sit around on his ass counting on that. He climbed to his feet and hunted down his car keys. It was time he put out a few feelers and found out who the hell knew where J.D. was.

J.D. stood barefoot on the dew-dampened front porch, scraping crème brûlée off the oval sides and bottom of the white ribbed custard dish Sophie had sent home with him last night. He licked the last of the dessert off his spoon. Damn, this stuff was good. With a regretful look at the empty container, he walked back into the cabin, held the dish under a running tap, and scrubbed it clean. He knocked back the last of his coffee and rinsed that cup out as well. A moment later he brushed his teeth, then finished dressing and let himself out of his cabin.

It wasn’t nearly as quiet this morning as it had been last night. He barely dodged three noisy pubescent boys who barreled around a blind corner in the lake trail, and already shrill voices from out on the water pierced the air. Reaching the dock, he saw the fluorescent floats Dru had lectured him about bobbing on the lake’s placid surface from dock to float, and kids
churned the water between the two berths. One rowboat remained in the roped-off area, one was tied up at the float, and the rest had been moved to the motorboat side of the dock.

He continued on to the Lawrences’ private dock and climbed the short switchback trails to the oversized log cabin on the bluff, where he saw Sophie in one of the flower beds that framed her front porch. Her back was to him and a small pile of weeds to her right testified to her activity. At the moment, however, her gardening gloves lay in a heap by her right hip and her bottom rested back on her heels while she vigorously flapped her shirttails, exposing half her back. He cleared his throat. “Hey.”

She jumped and swore. Swinging around to face him, she snapped, “What are you, a damn cat? Give a gal some warning!”

“Sorry,” he said mildly. He watched her drop the shirttails and blot her face with the back of her hand. Her face was flushed.

Then she dropped her hand to her thigh and sighed. “No, I’m sorry,” she said and struggled to rise to her feet. He stepped forward to assist her as she admitted, “I was having another hot flash, but that’s no reason to take it out on you. I’m jumpy as a bowlful of Mexican beans these days, and bitchy to boot.”

He couldn’t help but grin. “You call that bitchy? In my neighborhood, we’d call that downright hospitable. I ought to introduce you to a woman named Gina Dickson someday. Now,
she
has bitchy down cold.”

She blinked at him in silence for several seconds. “Wow,” she finally said. “You should do that more often.”

“Huh?” Had they skipped to a different frequency here?

“You should smile like that more often. You’ve got a terrific smile.”

He felt it drop away from his face. Dammit, he hadn’t come here to get all chummy. Until he knew more about these people, that would be plain stupid. He thrust the little custard dish out at her. “Here.”

She took it. But when he immediately turned away, she snapped, “Oh, get the stick out of your rear. Come sit on the porch with me and have a cup of coffee. Contrary to what you seem to believe, we’re not the enemy. And if you truly think we are, then wouldn’t the prudent thing be to infiltrate our camp, to learn what nefarious schemes we plan to hatch?”

Okay, so now he felt like a raving paranoid. That didn’t mean they still weren’t out to get him. All the same, he turned back, climbed the porch steps, and said gruffly, “That crème stuff was really great. You cook like that all the time?”

“I used to. I’m a pastry chef,” she said and patted the old wicker rocker next to hers. When he’d seated himself, she gently set her own chair to rocking. “I used to be the evening pastry chef in the restaurant here, but last year Ben and I decided to cut way back on our hours to get an idea of how we’ll handle retirement. So now he only does the buying for the gift and sport shops, and I bake the breads for the restaurant and the Eagle’s Nest, and occasionally a few of the desserts. I miss it sometimes, and every now and then I get a wild hair to whip something up.”

She leaned forward to pick up a cup from a tray on
the small wicker table, and held it under the spout of a thermos pump. Fragrant steam wafted in the slowly warming morning air as she handed him the coffee. “How are you settling into your cabin?”

“Fine.”

“I apologize for the porch roof. We’ve had a great deal of difficulty in the past couple years finding and keeping reliable help for the repairs. The most competent workers invariably end up leaving for Wenatchee or Seattle.”

“Not a problem.” He shrugged. “I picked up the materials to fix it while I was in town yesterday. I’ll get started on it as soon as I figure out what I’m going to use to cut the wood. I didn’t bring my circular saw.”

“You’ll fix it?” The smile she flashed him was so warm, he quit rocking and blinked. “Oh, my God, you’re the answer to a prayer. I’m not sure what a circular saw is, but Ben has all sorts of power tools in the garage. It’s never locked. And be sure to keep track of your receipts, dear, for reimbursement.”

Tate burst into the yard just then, followed an instant later by Dru. J.D. straightened in his seat. She looked crisp and efficient this morning in her neat shorts, polo shirt, and Keds, but he got a glimpse of the image he’d taken to bed with him last night: Dru braless and barefoot, with damp, rumpled hair and flashing eyes.

Tate raced up the steps. “Hey, J.D.! We didn’t know you were here, did we, Mom?”

J.D. didn’t miss the irony in her voice when she stopped at the foot of the stairs, looked up at them, and replied, “No, I can honestly say we didn’t know.”

Or you wouldn’t have come anywhere near here, would you, sweetheart?

“So what am I, darling, that I don’t even rate a hello?” Sophie demanded. “Chopped liver?”

“I was gonna say hi, Grandma, but I got sidetracked when I saw J.D. was here.”

“And you’re always pâté in his book, anyway,” Dru assured her.

“Oh, well,
pâté
. That’s all right, then. For a minute there, I was afraid I was the stuff they turn into cat food.”

J.D. watched the two women grin at each other.

“Can I watch the big screen for a while, Grandma?”

“That’s entirely up to your mother.”

“Mom?” Tate showed her a winning smile.

“I suppose. Keep in mind that we won’t be staying long, though. I don’t want to hear any whining about being pulled away in the middle of a program.”

“’Kay.” The screen door slammed behind him as he ran into the house.

Sophie turned her attention back to Dru. “I’m surprised to see you this time of day—but delighted, needless to say. C’mon up. Would you like a cup of coffee?”

“No, thanks; I’m afraid I don’t have the time. I’ve actually come to beg a favor.”

“What’s that, dear? Oh, but first, I don’t believe you’ve said hello to J.D.”

Rocking back on her heels, hands thrust in her shorts pockets, she leveled a cool-eyed gaze on him. “Hello, J.D.”

“Drucilla,” he said, and watched with satisfaction as
her eyes narrowed at him, becoming a great deal less cool in the process.

She tilted her face up to her aunt. “Would you watch Tate for me for a couple of hours? Candy canceled at the last minute, and I’ve got a walk-through with that conference-site committee for the Spokane Dentists Association.”

“When?”

“Now, actually. The representatives are due in about twenty minutes.”

“Oh, darling, I’m sorry. I have an appointment at ten with Dr. Case, to go over some new strategies to get these damn mood swings and hot flashes under control. And Ben went to Wenatchee for the monthly Gun and Rod meeting; he won’t be back until tomorrow morning. Maybe…let me think…oh, dear, who could we get to fill in?” Then a brilliant smile lit her face. “I know!” She turned to J.D. and his gut did a little twist. “Didn’t you say you were going to work on the porch roof this morning, dear?”

“You are?” Dru demanded at the same time that he said warily, “Yeah?”

“Well, there’s our solution. Tate can stay with you; he’s a good little helper. And it will only be for, what did you say, darling, two hours?”

“Yes, but—”

“Perfect,” Sophie said with satisfaction.

J.D.’s rocker came to a dead halt. “I don’t know about perfect,” he said flatly. “You’ve only known me for one day. You want to leave a ten-year-old kid in my care? Hell, for all you know, I could be a card-carrying member of Pedophiles R Us.”

Sophie laughed. “Don’t be ridiculous, dear.”

“He’s not being ridiculous,” Dru said. “We
don’t
know him from Adam, and I don’t know that I want to entrust my child into his keeping.”

Though she was only agreeing with what he’d said, for some reason it put his back up. “Oh, get a grip,” he snapped. “I don’t lust after little boys, and I’m not going to hurt your kid. I don’t have a lot of experience with boys his age, but we can sure as hell muddle along on our own for a couple of hours.”

“And what are your other options, darling?” Sophie inquired with gentle reason.

“I could always—” Dru looked at her watch. “No, I guess I couldn’t.” And after all, his police record
had
been totally clean. She blew out a gusty sigh. “All right, fine.” Tacking on a grudging “Thank you,” she climbed the porch steps and pulled open the screen door, poking her head into the house. “Tate, I’m going back to work. You’re going to stay with J.D. for a little while.”

“Cool,” came the distracted reply from the great room. The volume on the television rose a notch.

“I can tell he’s real concerned,” J.D. said, deadpan. Then he shrugged. “’Course, I haven’t gotten him alone yet.”

Dru stopped dead and J.D. could practically see sparks from the electric-blue gaze she locked on him. “Don’t even joke about that,” she snapped. “I’m taking a huge step here, leaving my son with someone I barely know. I’ll be damned if I’ll listen to any sick wisecracks on top of it.”