Matchpoint (20 page)

“Well, obviously, that wasn’t Belinda,” I told him as we dripped muddy water on the floor of the Ternses’ kitchen. “She can’t run nearly that fast.”

Spencer didn’t say anything for a long time. I could almost hear his blood pressure rising, and if Dr. Dulur’s face hadn’t been on a scarecrow in Grandma’s backyard, and a killer hadn’t been on the loose in the neighborhood, I would have run as far from Spencer as I could.

“I should have left you up on that telephone pole the first time I saw you,” Spencer said after a while. He grabbed a fistful of my shirt and tugged, pulling me behind him out of the house and across the street.

I stumbled after him as he marched us back to Grandma’s
yard, my shirt wadded up in his clenched fist. “I wish you would never speak about the pole,” I said. It wasn’t that great of a memory, not my finest moment.

“Fine, Gladys.”

“Don’t call me Gladys,” I said, swatting at his hand. “You are not allowed to call me Gladys.”

“Stay here, I’m going to get a flashlight.” He left me next to the scarecrow. I hadn’t had the presence of mind to refuse to stand there by myself, and by the time I realized where I was, Spencer was in the house and I was too scared to move. I tried to recall a self-defense class I watched when I worked as a janitor in a karate dojo for four days, in case the killer returned, but I couldn’t remember a thing, and besides, it only took Spencer a few seconds to come back.

Spencer shined the light on Dr. Dulur’s face. He studied it for quite some time, squinting his eyes as if to see it better or to better believe what he was seeing. “Okay,” he said finally. “I’ve called a couple officers. We’re going to keep this very quiet for the time being. No sirens, no one will know we found the face, no one will know I’m here.”

“The killer knows you’re here.”

“That might work to our benefit.”

“I don’t understand.”

Spencer knocked on my forehead. “When are you going to get it through your thick skull that you don’t need to understand? I am the chief of police. I am the investigator. You are a matchmaker. You fix people up so that they can be miserable together for the rest of their lives. You do not solve murders. You do not get involved in police business. Got that?”

“It’s not my fault dead people follow me,” I said. “Besides, the chief of police is hiding in my bedroom. So, technically, you got me involved in police business. You
and your happy-pants penis are dragging me into this investigation.”

Even in the dark and through the rain, I could see Spencer’s face turn red, his eyes large and furious. “Go inside and get cleaned up while I wait for them!” he ordered. “Go or I will shoot you. You got that, Gladys?”

“Are you going to call me Gladys forever?” I asked. I hated my name. I tried to change it to Fantasia when I worked in the box office at a burlesque show for a month, but my grandmother gave me a guilt trip. Gladys had been my great-great-grandmother’s name, she explained, and it was good luck.

I stood in the pouring rain, covered head to toe in mud, staring up at poor Dr. Dulur’s face sewn onto a homemade scarecrow in my grandmother’s backyard, and wondered if the name really was good luck or not. “Well, at least I’m not dead,” I said, and spit against the evil eye.

INSIDE, GRANDMA was waiting for me with a towel and a cup of hot chocolate. “Strip down here,” she said. “No sense traipsing through the house like that. I told you not to go outside. Why don’t people listen to me?”

“I know. I’m sorry, Grandma.”

“And that mayor. You were thinking all lopsided with that one. Well, you’ll have another chance with Belinda.”

“I will?”

“Yes, that fool went on about Barbra Streisand again, and Belinda took off. She’s been trying to call you for hours.”

“I need to pay my cellphone bill.”

“You still have the pen in your purse?” she asked me.

“Yes, I think so.”

“Good, dolly. Keep it there.”

I TOOK a long, hot shower and got into bed. Spencer had changed the sheets and made the bed with hospital corners. It felt great on my clean body. I snuggled under the covers and tried to wait up for Spencer in order to get an update on the face and the killer, but after fifteen minutes, I was fast asleep.

I woke for a moment when I heard Spencer turn on the shower and then again when he got into bed and wordlessly gathered me to him like a spoon, and then I fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

I woke to featherlike kisses on my ear. “You better stop that, or I will bean you,” I yelled, slapping him away.

“Sorry.” Instead of Spencer, I realized quickly, it was Holden’s lips on my earlobe. He had brought me breakfast in bed and was lying next to me, kissing me.

I looked around quickly for Spencer, but he was nowhere to be found. The clock read 8:00
A.M.
, and I hoped Spencer had decided to finally face the music and go home.

“Oh, sorry, I was dreaming,” I told Holden. “How did you get in here?”

“The front door was open, and I let myself in.” I doubted the front door was open, especially after last night, but I let that slide, since he had brought lattes and bagels.

“You look beautiful in the morning,” he said, and kissed me, letting his tongue slide into my mouth. It was a fabulous way to wake up. We kissed for ages, long languid kisses like we had all the time in the world. We had had a lot of practice kissing each other, and we had
become really good at it. He was my Brad Pitt, and I was his Angelina Jolie. Without the kids.

It was perfect.

After about fifteen minutes, we rested our lips, enjoying looking in each other’s eyes.

“Are those lattes from Tea Time?” I asked.

He nodded, and I went to grab one from the nightstand, letting a napkin drop to the ground. I was leaning over to pick it up when a hand shot out from under the bed and grabbed me. I stifled a shriek when Spencer’s head peeked out and made the international shushing gesture, his index finger touching his mouth. My forehead began to sweat, and I thought quickly.

I pulled away from his grasp and snapped back onto the bed. “How about we go downstairs and enjoy this?” I asked Holden, holding up a latte.

“I thought we could spend a moment by ourselves,” he said, pulling me closer to him. “Maybe continue where we left off the other night.”

“Uh,” I said, pulling back. The situation had all the parts of a fantasy I had played out in my mind on several occasions, but in my fantasies, Spencer was not under the bed, and besides, I didn’t think either Spencer or Holden was the sharing type. Holden misread my apprehension.

“I understand, Gladie. We have unfinished business about yesterday, about what happened with Mr. Steve.”

I had elected to omit that bit of information from Spencer. I didn’t want him to know that Holden had dealings with the cult or that he was searching for a woman named Becky.

“Oh, we don’t have to get into that. Really, not important at all.”

“No, I’m ready to talk about it, at least part of it,” Holden said. He looked deeply into my eyes, making me blink furiously as the powerful pungent wave of sexy hit me like a jalapeño.

“Oh,” I said. “That’s not necessary, really. Let’s go downstairs and eat up.” I moved to get out of bed, but he pulled me back.

“It will keep,” he said. “Won’t you allow me to look at you a little? You are so beautiful in the morning light.”

I heard Spencer make a noise under us, either a chuckle or some kind of vomiting noise, and I pretended to cough and hack to cover up the sound.

“How beautiful am I?” I asked Holden after I cleared my throat. It was time for Spencer to get a little lesson on how to treat a lady. Spencer was a player of the worst sort, but Holden was all class and dreamy-eyed, yummy, sexy body.

“Oh, that’s the start of great poetry,” he said. “Byron, Browning, poets like those might be able to take a stab at describing your beauty.” He took a deep breath. “I can’t take my eyes off you. I can’t stop thinking about you.”

He looked me in the eyes, unblinking, as if he was seeing me down to my soul and all the building-block truths that made me up. I held my breath while he studied me. Finally, he blinked and arched an eyebrow. “And you have a great ass,” he added.

And then he was on top of me, and it was going awfully fast. I was tempted to let it go fast, because I was pretty hard up. I had almost made it all the way with Holden several times, and if I just let things play out, in a few minutes I would be singing in a happy soprano voice.

It was tempting, all right, to let Holden fondle all my lady parts and give me the world’s biggest orgasm. But the faint smell of Spencer’s aftershave wafted up from under the bed, which effectively threw cold water on doing the big nasty with Holden. No matter how hard
up I was, I could not have sex with Holden while Spencer lay under us.

No, even though it would be a great story to tell Lucy and Bridget, I couldn’t bring myself to let it happen.

Luckily, Grandma was on top of things. She burst through the door in her royal-blue sateen-finish housecoat and plastic house slippers, her hair in rollers and her face greased up in circa-1950 cold cream. Holden was oblivious, as he was on top of me, his back to her, and he was working to touch every inch of me under my nightgown.

“There you are, Arthur. I’m so happy you came to visit us,” Grandma announced loudly and a little out of breath.

It took a minute for Holden to understand what was happening, but as soon as he turned his head and saw Grandma in the doorway, he jumped off me like a Mexican jumping bean, almost flying into a standing position in the middle of the room.

“Just the man I wanted to see,” Grandma continued, as if this was the most normal situation in the world. “I have a light bulb that needs fixing. Yes, indeedy.”

She winked at me and unceremoniously pushed Holden out of the room. Then she walked back in, wagged her finger in my direction, and tsked again before joining Holden, wherever the light bulb in need was located.

Spencer slid out from under the bed. “You’re killing me,” he said, staring me down and wiping dust bunnies out of his hair.

“You are so bad for my sex life, Spencer.”

“What did he want to talk about? What happened between you two? Is there trouble in paradise?” he asked, dusting himself off and taking his place on the bed. I ignored all his questions, grabbed the lattes and bagels, and ran after Holden before he could come back and discover Spencer in my bed.

I FOUND Holden standing precariously on a tall ladder on the stairway landing. The rickety ladder must have been as old as the house, and Grandma had dragged it out of the shed to offer a good distraction from the man under my bed. I was about to object to Holden risking his life just to change a light bulb, but he seemed very comfortable straddling the ladder about twelve feet in the air.

“There you go, Zelda,” he said, sliding down. “All fixed. You got anything else?”

“No, that’s enough. Isn’t that right, dolly?” she asked, looking at me.

“Fine for me,” I said. “Let’s eat.”

The kitchen was clean, with no sign of the previous night’s activities. Grandma must have cleaned up the muddy tracks Spencer and I had brought in. I made a show of putting on a pot of coffee in order to look out back.

The storm had laid waste to Grandma’s tomatoes. I could see where our footsteps had torn up the wet ground and a large hole where the creepy scarecrow had been.

I still didn’t know what Spencer and his men had discovered about the scarecrow. Were there clues about who had made it or where it had come from? The rain had probably washed away prints and DNA, I reasoned, but I was sure some answers could be gleaned from the scene. Grandma took a bagel from the bag Holden had brought, and sliced it in half.

“Cream cheese?” she asked Holden.

Absent was any mention of last night’s events. Spencer wanted to keep it quiet for some reason, and so now Grandma and I had to keep it secret from Holden, like nothing out of the ordinary had happened. That is,
nothing except for the alien cult, the donkey, crazy Rosalie, and Dr. Dulur’s murder.

I was keeping secrets from Holden and secrets from Spencer about Holden. In fact, I was keeping a lot from Spencer. He didn’t know that Holden was dealing with the cult, that he was searching for a woman. And with all my secrets from Holden and Spencer, I wondered what secrets they were keeping from me.

Grandma smeared cream cheese on a bagel and poured cream in her coffee, rejecting Holden’s offer of a latte. I imagined she could help me regarding Becky and Holden’s secrets, but so far she had been awfully quiet. Maybe she was keeping secrets, too.

“So, today is Belinda day?” she asked me.

“Yep, I’m going to get her fixed up no matter what.”

Last night’s activities pretty much proved Belinda’s innocence. We hadn’t made out the shadowy figure in the dark and the rain, but there was no way Belinda could have outrun Spencer.

“Sometimes clients have a mind of their own,” Grandma said. “It’s unfortunate, but sometimes we don’t have a thing to say about it. Sometimes they run wild, like
Lord of the Flies
. Blech.”