Matchpoint (15 page)

“A voter?”

“You might have to take her to dinner first,” I muttered. “Right this way.” I was being far more assertive than normal, but I had a now-or-never feeling.

“May I bring my donkey?” he asked.

“Sure.”

But the donkey had other ideas. Because of the change
of route, the cult bellowing about the Arrival, or my perfume, the donkey wouldn’t budge.

“Perhaps I could meet the voter some other time,” the mayor said. But unwilling to let the opportunity slip away from me, I panicked and slapped the donkey on his rump to get him moving.

Karma is a bitch.

The slapped donkey went berserk, rising on his back legs and whinnying. He snapped at the mayor and the rest of the Christmas pageant players and then went on a rampage through the crowd.

Townsfolk went running, screaming through the street. The end-of-worlders’ bellows changed to bloodcurdling screams as the donkey changed direction and went right for them. I stood in the middle of the street with people coming and going wildly, throwing up their hands as if
everyone
believed the world was coming to an end, not just the pagans.

I spotted Lucy and Bridget clutching margaritas while pressed up against the pharmacy’s front window, but Belinda was nowhere to be found. I hoped the donkey hadn’t gotten her. The pageant actors had scattered like shrapnel, and I could make out turbans and veils sprinkled through the stampeding crowd.

It took forever, but it finally started to die down after a few minutes, and I had just turned to join Lucy and Bridget when a glint of metal caught my eye. Down the alley, across from me, Rosalie Rodriguez was running straight out, a Rachael Ray cleaver in one hand, heading right for me.

SHE CAME at me, fast, like Flo-Jo at the Olympics, without the nails but with a Birkin bag and crazy psycho-killer eyes.

I saw it all in slow motion, giving me a flashback of the time when I was a kid at a baseball game and a foul ball flew into the stands directly at my head. That broken nose hurt for weeks. And now I was frozen in place, watching a middle-aged woman come at me with a cleaver in her hand and a determined expression on her face.

“Run, Gladie, run,” I muttered, trying to will myself to move, to flee from Rosalie. Finally my feet complied. I turned on my heel and ran for everything I was worth, which wasn’t much because I hadn’t exercised since I moved to Cannes. What was wrong with me? I really needed to change my daily habits. I needed to try Ruth’s Chinese tea. My priorities were all skewed. I had to think of my health.

I could hear Rosalie catching up to me. She was obviously in better shape than I was. She was barely breathing hard, whereas I sounded like a freight train.

I made a sharp left into an alley. If I couldn’t outrun her, I thought, maybe I could outsmart her, confuse her. Lose her. But as crazy as she seemed to be, Rosalie was a woman with focus. She never let me out of her sight, and we wound up at the back of the alley in a dead end, my back up against a tall fence in between a couple dumpsters.

“Hey, Rosalie, how’s it going?” I asked. Her eyes and mouth were wide open, like she was trying to suck up all the crazy in the world for herself.

I noticed that her face was perfectly done, and not a hair was out of place. She was also well dressed. Some people are like that. Even when they are on a murderous rampage through town, they take the time to care about their appearance. Meanwhile, my hair was a rat’s nest, and I was wearing jeans, a Disneyland sweatshirt, and sneakers. No wonder Holden blew hot and cold. I don’t wear enough eyeliner.

Rosalie grunted and raised the cleaver over her head.

“Love that outfit,” I said truthfully. “You get that at Macy’s?” I tried to think of an escape plan, but all I could think of was I should have had ice cream for breakfast.

Rosalie blinked twice. “No, Bloomingdale’s,” she said. “Calvin Klein.”

“Love Calvin Klein,” I said. “But I’m more of a Walmart-special girl these days. You know, not a lot of money.”

Rosalie visibly relaxed and lowered the cleaver halfway to shoulder level. I took a deep breath, realizing that I had been holding it all this time. I eyed the dumpsters. If I could get on top of one, I might be able to climb the fence to safety. But on second thought, if I could climb the fence, Rosalie could do it in half the time. She looked like she did a lot of power yoga.

“I thought you Burgers were rich,” Rosalie said.

“Rich?” Was that true? Were we Burgers rich? I wondered how much money Grandma made. She had a steady stream of clients, and not much in the way of expenses.

“I’m still in training,” I explained. “Not much work yet. Hey, I have an idea. Why don’t I fix you up?”

It was a stroke of genius. Rosalie perked up. “Really? That would be great. I could use your help.”

“Sure, you’re a real find, Rosalie. Any man would be thrilled to date you. You don’t want Spencer, anyway. He’s such a jerk.” He was a jerk, but I wasn’t sure who else I could get to date a woman who runs through town with a cleaver. “Maybe Joe the butcher,” I said, a spark of an idea coming to me.

Rosalie’s smile crashed. “I want Spencer!” she yelled. She raised the cleaver again. “He loves me, do you hear me? He just forgot that he loved me. Those other women confused him. He’ll come around.”

“Oh, Rosalie, you’re better than he is,” I said, although at that point, I believed that she was only marginally better than he was. “He doesn’t deserve you.”

She raised one eyebrow and cocked her head to the side, making the hair on the back of my neck stand up. She was only a few chromosomes away from being Jack Nicholson in
The Shining
. It occurred to me that I might
get murdered because Spencer was a man-whore, and that pissed me off.

“What are you doing?” she asked me. “Are you trying to get in between us? Spencer and I belong together. I don’t think I like you.”

She took a couple steps toward me. I could see the crow’s-feet around her eyes more clearly. I noticed that the skin on her face had started to sag a little. It was still a surprise to me that Spencer dated older women.

“I know you belong with him,” I amended, trying to get her to like me. “I haven’t been myself lately, don’t know what I’m saying. The whole dentist situation has me turned around.”

Rosalie’s eyes grew enormous, and her attention shifted from her cleaver and her dislike of me. “You got a problem with your teeth? Don’t go to that sadist Dulur,” she said.

“I heard you had a story about him hurting children. Is that true?”

“Is that true? Of course it’s true. Nobody listens to me. He broke my son’s arm. My son was scared, and Dulur was impatient and wrenched his arm. I couldn’t prove it in court, but he hurt my baby when he was twelve years old.”

“Is that why you murdered him?” I asked like an idiot.

“Why? Is he dead?” she asked, surprised.

“He was murdered two nights ago.”

“That’s the best news I’ve heard in a long time,” she said. “Somebody popped the jerk. Fabulous.” Rosalie lowered the cleaver and fluffed her hair with her other hand. She seemed to notice the knife for the first time and then looked at me pointedly. “You think I killed him? If I wanted to kill him, I would have done it years ago when he hurt my boy. Listen, Gladie, a lot of people wanted that dentist dead. A lot of people.”

“Why did they want him dead?”

“I told you! He was a sadist. He was mean, especially to children, to those weaker than him. He loved his position of power, and he abused it.”

“Can you help me find the others who wanted him dead?” I asked, and instantly regretted it. I didn’t need Rosalie Rodriguez as my companion in clearing Belinda’s name.

“Sure, I guess,” she said, looking over my shoulder. “Do you smell that?”

“What? The trash?”

She sniffed the air. “No, Spencer. I smell Spencer.”

I turned back to what she was smelling but only saw the fence. “I don’t smell anything,” I said.

“I know Spencer when I smell him. It’s coming from your direction.” I tried to remember if I had put on his cologne this morning by mistake. If he was going to get me killed, I was going to wring his neck.

“It must be coming from behind me,” I said. “From the next street.”

And then she was gone, running around the block, searching for Spencer’s scent. I hightailed it, too, before she realized his smell was coming from me.

I half-skipped back to Main Street, looking over my shoulder every couple steps for Rosalie, but she must have lost the scent and gone in another direction. I quickly patted my body parts to make sure I was in one piece and she hadn’t stabbed me without me noticing.

It was starting to become clear why Spencer was in hiding. These women were crazy and determined. Not me. No matter how secretive and hard to get Holden was, I was not going to go berserk. I wasn’t going to let a man get between me and my sanity. There were no Rachael Ray knives in my future.

MAIN STREET was a shambles, mostly abandoned except for a few stragglers, some wandering in shock, some looking for loved ones, I imagined. It was like the second half of a Godzilla movie, after the monsters got through with Tokyo.

Lucy and Bridget stood in the middle of the street, holding their empty margarita glasses as if they were waiting for someone to come and fill them up again.

“I’m so glad to see you,” I said, hugging them. I was happy to be alive. It’s not every day that a person is chased through the streets by a cleaver-wielding psychopath. I gave them the rundown about Rosalie. They were sympathetic but not totally surprised.

“Oh, honey, you have to be careful. Rachael Ray makes some sharp knives,” Lucy said.

“Men make women go crazy,” Bridget explained. “Rosalie was sane before she met Spencer’s magic penis.”

“I think it’s the Food Network that makes women go crazy. This is just one more reason not to cook,” said Lucy.

I thought they were both right. Who needed men and cooking when there was takeout?

It was the perfect time for a drink, and we spent ten minutes looking for the remnants of the margarita stand before we remembered about Belinda. There was no sign of her.

“Do you think she went back to your place to get her car?” I asked Bridget.

“I saw her run after the donkey,” Bridget said. “Like she got confused and ran toward the stampede instead of away.”

“What direction was that?” I asked. Bridget and Lucy pointed toward the yurt camp. “I guess we have to find her,” I said. No way was I going by myself. I had had
enough adventures for the day, and I would need backup if I saw Rosalie again.

“Hallelujah,” Lucy said. “I have wanted an excuse to root around in that alien worshippers’ den. How do I look?” Lucy fluffed her hair and reapplied her lipstick.

IT WAS only a couple blocks to the yurt camp, which had taken over the small park in the historic district. Two short blocks, but it seemed to take us forever to get there, because we had to navigate the debris left in the street by the fleeing spectators, and because we started dragging our feet after we heard residual screams ahead of us.

Despite our reluctance, and despite the many obstacles in our path, we did arrive at the yurt camp after a few minutes. It was more or less abandoned, like the rest of Main Street. I was surprised to see that the cult had set up about twenty very large yurts in the small park. Each circular yurt was covered in some kind of tarp and looked like it could house about ten people. Against my better judgment, we decided to spread out, to better search for Belinda.