Flirting With Pete: A Novel

I first came to know Jenny Clyde and her Pete seven years ago.
Flirting with Pete
has been on my mind ever since then, waiting for the right moment to emerge as my book of the year. Now that it has, I realize how precarious publishing can be and how easily this book, which has consumed so much of my heart and soul, might have gone unwritten. That it didn’t is as much a result of the tenacity of the story as the endless support of my agent, Amy Berkower. Amy understands Pete, my audience, and me. Her encouragement has made all the difference in the world.

As with most books I write, this one involved a significant amount of research. Helping me with that task were Elizabeth Fisk and my daughter-in-law, Sherrie Selwyn Delinsky. Both are experts in their fields. If there are mistakes herein, I take full responsibility for them. I do try to get things right. On occasion, though, I either misunderstand, unintentionally misstate, or simply assume that I know the answer and therefore don’t ask the right question. Connie Unger would not be pleased with me. My apologies to him, and to you.

I thank my editors, Michael Korda and Chuck Adams, for being there for me. I thank the entire Scribner team, from Susan Moldow on down, for enthusiasm, creativity, and smarts. I thank my assistant, Wendy Page, for deflecting phone calls so that I might have uninterrupted writing time, and my Webmaster, Claire Marino, for exploring the hidden gardens of Beacon Hill with me and throwing her knowledge of plants into the mix.

My family knows what
Flirting with Pete
means to me. I thank them all— Eric and Jodi, Andrew, and Jeremy and Sherrie— for being excited each time I breathed word of this book. To my husband, Steve, for his forbearance, indulgence, and input, always my thanks and love.

Again, always, still, I thank my readers, who embrace every new book I write, appreciate the differences between them, and incite me to write better and more. You are good folk. I am lucky, indeed.

Little Falls

The call came at three in the morning. Dan O’Keefe rushed into his uniform and drove out to the Clyde house, not because Darden Clyde demanded it or because it was Dan’s job, though both were true, but because he was worried about Jenny.

He should have been used to worrying about Jenny. He had been doing it since signing on as his father’s deputy eight years before, when she had been a bruised sixteen-year-old who always kept a distance from her peers and could never quite look you in the eye. He had worried when she was eighteen, when her mother died and her father went to prison, and he had worried in the six years since then, watching her become more and more of a pariah in town. He hadn’t done much to help her. So he felt guilt.

That guilt was compounded now. He didn’t want Darden out of prison any more than Jenny did, but he hadn’t fought against it. So he felt guilty
and
he worried.

And then there was his shoulder. It always ached when bad things were in store. His father blamed that on his being a lousy football player, but those old injuries were long healed. Tension needled the scars, that was all. The shoulder had burned when Darden Clyde stepped from that bus onto Little Falls dirt at 6:12 the evening before. Now it ached something fierce.

He sped through a drizzle out from the center of town, straight down West Main, past houses so dark he wouldn’t have known they were there if he hadn’t memorized every inch of the town. A mile out, and the houses grew farther apart. Turning in at the only one with a light, he held the wheel tightly as the Jeep bounced through puddles down the Clydes’ rutted drive. He parked near the kitchen door, which was ajar, took a pair of mud-streaked steps in a single stride, and pulled open the screen.

The kitchen was a tired pine— cabinets, table, and chairs— with pink Formica counters and linoleum so compulsively scrubbed clean as to be the color of flesh, which at that moment was the most human element in the room. Darden sat on the floor at the end of a trail of mud. He was propped against the wall under the phone, looking like a wet rat, with his hair and clothes sodden and gray. His face was streaked with blood. He was cradling his right arm, favoring his entire right side. He raised only his eyes, as if he didn’t have more strength than that. Even then, those eyes held evil.

“She ran me down,” he charged in an angry growl, “knocked me right out. I was lying in the rain for hours. It took more hours to crawl in here. My hip’s killing me.”

Dan couldn’t have cared less about Darden’s hip. He went to the door that led to the hall and listened. The house was dead still. “Where is she?”

“How the hell do I know? That’s why I called you. She ran me down with my own friggin’ car and took off. That’s hit-and-run, theft, and driving without a license.”

Dan knew that the Buick was gone. His headlights had lit up the empty garage when he had turned in off the street. But he figured Jenny might have ditched the car somewhere and come back. Yes, she told him she was leaving town and, yes, she mentioned a friend, but no one had ever seen the guy. Alone, Jenny Clyde was shy and insecure. Dan couldn’t see her suddenly wandering off after all this time. Easier to see her crouched in the dark on the roof, taking her life in her hands on the rain-slick slate.

He headed that way.

“Hey!” Darden hollered after him. “Where do you think you’re goin’?”

Ignoring him, Dan made a fast check of the house. He braced himself against finding the kind of gruesome scene he had found there six years before, but he saw neither Jenny nor any sign of violence. Other than a wet dress on the bedroom floor and a nest of pillows, quilts, and newspaper clippings in the attic, everything was neat. The roof was deserted, as was, mercifully, the ground far below.

He returned to the kitchen.

“I could a told you she wasn’t here,” Darden groused. “She took my car. Want me to say it again?
She took my car
. You have to look out
there
.”

Dan intended to do that. He knew Jenny wasn’t much of a driver. He had caught her behind the wheel more than once and had given her a talking-to each time, but what more could he do? Ticket her for weaving across the road? Take away her keys? Haul her in for driving without a license and send her over to the county jail to be locked up with cokeheads and hookers?

What worried him was the possibility that she’d had an accident. There were many places around Little Falls where a car could go off the road and not be seen for days. He planned to check out those places. First, though, he wanted Darden to talk.

He pulled out a chair and sat. The remains of dinner, dried-up beef stew and half-eaten rolls, were still on the kitchen table. An upset bottle reeked of warm spilled beer. “What happened here?”

Darden put his head to the wall. “I told you. She ran me down and left.”

“Why?”

“How the hell should
I
know? I was having supper. She said she was leaving. When I tried to stop her, she ran me down.” His eyes were cold and hard. “Find her, O’Keefe. That’s your job. If you have to charge her, charge her. Just get her back.”

“Why? She’s twenty-four and the farthest she’s ever been from here was visiting you in prison. Maybe it’s time.”

“The hell it is. It’s time she was
here,
” the man argued, jabbing a rigid finger at the floor. “She’s had six friggin’ years—”

“To do what?” the deputy cut in loudly. “Escape? How could she? You busied her here keeping things up the way you wanted, and you told her how much she owed you each time she went to visit, and that’s not counting phone calls. I can’t
begin
to imagine what you said to her in those.”

“She’s my daughter. She did what she did because she loves me.”

Dan came to his feet. He figured that if he didn’t use his legs to get out of there, they’d soon be kicking Darden Clyde. He wasn’t one for police brutality— actually he detested it, which was only one of the points he and his father argued about— but he was coming close to it now himself. He was that angry.

“Let’s get one thing straight, scumbag,” he said. “Jenny did what she did all these years because you scared the living daylights out of her. She should have sold the house after what happened here, but you wouldn’t let her. She should have sold it or burned it or just left it and took off. I kept telling her to, but you kept telling her not to. You wanted her tied to those memories, you and your perverted mind. That poor thing suffered for a whole lot more years than you spent in jail, and you’re the one to blame.” He leaned in, feeling a hatred so raw he could have spit. “So listen to me and listen good. If I find that girl harmed by your hand, you’ll wish you died in jail. Got that?”

Darden sputtered dismissively. “You don’t have the guts to touch me. Your daddy does, maybe. Not you.”

Dan straightened. “And I’ve had more’n thirty-two years of watching him,” he warned, “so don’t you underestimate me. If she’s harmed, you’ll see just how deep my guts run. I got no use for you.”

Darden’s face said the feeling was mutual. His eyes could have killed.

The deputy rubbed his shoulder. “Did she say where she was going?”

“No.”

“Do you have any
idea
where she was going?”

“She mentioned someone named Pete.”

“Do you know him?”

“How the fuck would I know him? I haven’t even been back here twelve hours!”

“Maybe she met him up at the prison?”

Darden stared at him in silence, and, not for the first time, Dan wished he had pushed the issue of Pete with Jenny. He had let it be, because she had seemed happy enough, and Jenny happy was such a rare thing. Given the turn of events, though, he would have liked to know she had run off with someone good. He would have taken great pleasure in telling Darden that.

“Did she ever mention him to you before?” Dan asked. “Did she ever mention any guy before?”

Darden grunted a no.

“So what’d you say when she told you about him?”

“I told her,” Darden snarled, “she wasn’t going anywhere.”