Matchpoint (27 page)

I must have looked doubtful. “You Googled me,” he guessed.

I had found nothing on him. No books. No photos.

“So, one day I was in New York City, giving a lecture to the National Geographic Society,” he continued, “and I witnessed something. I testified in a trial about the incident. Do you get where I’m going with this?”

“Holy crap, you’re in witness protection. That’s why
there’s nothing on you, like you dropped from the sky.” It all clicked together. The secrets, paying for his house in cash, and the weird fact of a gorgeous intellectual moving to our small town.

Holden nodded.

“Who’s Becky?” I asked.

“A woman who can get me my life back. With her help, I can get to the man who wants me dead. Get to him before he gets to me.”

“You sure you don’t want to be a butt model?” I asked. “Less dangerous, and I bet you would be good at it.”

Holden smiled. “There’s a spot I want to share with you in the desert along the Red Sea. The moon is so big there, you can almost reach up and touch it.”

I exhaled, and to my horror, a tear rolled down my cheek. “You talk good,” I said.

And then we stopped talking. We sat on my bed in silence, staring into each other’s eyes, trying to read each other’s thoughts, as the light from the sunrise filtered through the curtains. He was a beautiful man. Kind and strong.

“When are you leaving?” I asked, finally.

“Soon. Now. Mr. Steve gave me a lead, and I don’t know how long it’s good for.”

“Are you allowed to leave?”

“No.”

The next, obvious question was whether he would take me with him. I was surprised to realize that I didn’t want to go.

“It would have been easier if you were hiding from your Facebook friends,” I said.

“Excuse me?”

“When are you coming back?”

Holden didn’t answer. He looked out the window and exhaled.

“Does Spencer know?” I asked.

“I don’t think so.”

I wondered about that. Could Spencer keep a secret like this?

“We have a lot of unfinished business, you and I,” Holden said.

“Are we going to finish it now?” I wanted him, but I knew it would make it more painful after.

“I’m not a jerk, Gladie. We have time. We’ll get down to business when I come back.” He looked out the window again.

He kissed me lightly and stood up.

“Wait,” I said. “What’s your real name?”

Holden smiled, surprised. “Between you and me, it’s William. William Burton. Friends call me Burton.”

And then he was gone, and I was left alone with a toothache and a miserable sense of loss.

I HEARD the door click closed behind Holden. Sleep was impossible. I walked downstairs to make a pot of coffee.

Grandma was waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs.

“I tried to steer you clear of him,” she said.

“He’s a good guy,” I said. “But he’s going away for a while.”

“A pot’s on, and I’m defrosting the Sara Lee.”

Half a cherry cheesecake later, I was feeling better, despite the throbbing in my tooth. “It’s been a bad month for love,” Grandma said, her mouth full of cake. “People all turned around and moving backwards. Just like this town. We’ve got a surplus of crazy happening here. Can’t wait for it to end. If I hear one more word about that
fakakta
donkey …”

“When is it going to end?” I asked.

“I can’t get a reading, but I think it will end in a blaze of glory.”

“That doesn’t sound good.”

I WENT back to bed and turned on the TV.
Gone with the Wind
was playing again. I fell into a deep sleep as Atlanta burned.

I woke to a voice in my room. For a moment I thought Holden had returned, but this voice was higher and crazier.

“It’s 8:05. Do you think I have all day?”

Rosalie stood over me, her eyelash extensions batting at an alarming rate.

“It’s 8:05,” she repeated. She pursed her lips, forcing her lipstick to ooze into the tiny lines around her mouth.

I screamed. I screamed really loudly. Rosalie took a step back. That’s when I noticed she wasn’t armed and I remembered I had made a date with her.

“Are you ready to go?” she asked.

“I’m in bed. Today’s not a good day. How about tomorrow?”

“No, I’m going to a wedding tomorrow. It’s now or never. They’re waiting for you.”

I threw back the covers. “Fine!”

There’s nothing like getting dumped to change my mood. I ran into the bathroom and slammed my legs into a pair of jeans and threw on a T-shirt. When I went back into my room, Rosalie’s eyes grew big.

“Yeah, that’s right,” I said. “No bra. You want to make something of it?” The truth is I forgot to put on a bra, and when I remembered, I didn’t want Rosalie to know I was that stupid.

“No, that’s fine.” Rosalie was blinking a hundred miles an hour. My boobs are too big for me to go braless, especially in a threadbare Porky’s Pig Farm T-shirt. I
was probably quite a sight, but it was too late to go back now. Besides, I was in a foul mood, and I just didn’t care.

Downstairs, Grandma’s house was filling up with the Saturday morning Cooking for Love class. I found Grandma supervising the setup.

“Grandma, Rosalie is taking me—”

“Holy hell, it’s the sixties all over again,” Grandma exclaimed. Her eyes were glued to my chest. I resisted the urge to cover myself with my arms.

“I’ll be back soon.”

“Don’t be gone long,” Grandma said. “Trouble is coming over at ten with some seamstress she found. The wedding is tomorrow, you know.”

I moaned and stomped a foot on Grandma’s kitchen linoleum.

“You can’t get out of it,” she said.

I wanted to get out of it. I wanted to get out of all of it. After all, I had been dumped by the sexiest man alive, a man who wanted to take me to the Red Sea. I didn’t want to be a maid of honor or be dragged around town by whiny, complaining Rosalie Rodriguez. I wanted to throw my own fit. I wanted to wallow. I wanted my own set of Rachael Ray knives.

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll be back by ten.”

Rosalie and I got to the front door just as Lucy and Bridget opened it. Lucy was soaking wet, her silk dress glued to her body, and her once perfectly done hair stuck to one side of her head, dripping down her face.

“You will never believe what happened to us!” Lucy shouted.

With the week I had been having, it could have been anything.

“Uh,” I said.

“Darlin’, who are you supposed to be today? Jenna Jameson?”

“Right on, sister,” Bridget declared with glee, and
proceeded to take off her bra. It didn’t have the same effect. Bridget was an A cup at best and was wearing a blousy top. Still, she never lost a chance to fly her feminist flag, so to speak.

I wanted to tell my best friends that Holden was leaving. They would have wrapped me up in love and understanding. But I didn’t want to say anything in front of Rosalie. Not only wasn’t it her business, but I didn’t want to remind her of being dumped and be responsible for giving her a relapse of crazy.

“We were just going out to interview mothers of kids who were abused by Dr. Dulur,” I said. “Supposedly,” I added.

“ ‘We’?” Lucy asked. She arched one eyebrow so high it almost reached her hairline. “That’s quite all right. Give me two minutes to right myself, and we’ll go with you.”

Rosalie wasn’t happy about the delay, but Lucy was true to her word about only being two minutes. She changed into an emergency dress she kept in her purse, one that you can scrunch up and unroll without a wrinkle, and emerged from the bathroom a moment later completely made up.

We left the house and had just gotten to the driveway when Nathan Smith arrived in his Geo and parked at the curb. All of a sudden, I was the world’s most popular woman. Nathan ran up the driveway and waved at me. He tried to look me in the eyes, but his gaze kept slipping to my chest.

“You said I could come anytime,” he said, slightly breathless.

“Sure, why don’t you tag along,” I said.

The five of us squeezed into Rosalie’s BMW. Bridget called shotgun, and that’s how I wound up wedged between Nathan and Lucy in the backseat.

“So, how did this little party come together?” Lucy asked me. “I mean, Rosalie and you.”

“We talked last night after the hygienist got shot,” Rosalie explained as she drove.

“After the what got what?” Lucy asked. “Bridget, I think we missed something.”

Rosalie gave the rundown on Holly’s shooting. She had more information than I thought she would, like the fact that Holly was stable in a coma in the ICU.

“Gladie, you were almost killed again,” Bridget noted. It was getting to be my theme, almost getting shot or killed.

“You should get a vanity license plate,” Lucy said.

“ ‘Magnet for Murder and Mayhem.’ ”

“I think that’s too many letters for a license plate,” I said.

“Who are you? You look familiar,” Lucy said to Nathan.

“I assisted Dr. Dulur with your root canal.”

Lucy pointed at him. “Oh, yes. That’s it. Everything’s a bit fuzzy from that day. Loved the gas.”

“I’d love some gas right about now,” I mumbled.

“What’s that?” Nathan asked.

“I was just saying I’d like some gas. My tooth is throbbing.”

“Oh, I have good news for you,” Nathan said. “The replacement dentist arrived last night. He’s taking patients starting this afternoon. I can get you in as an emergency.”

My throat constricted and my stomach dropped. Little beads of sweat erupted on my forehead. “I’m sure I’ll be fine,” I said.

“Let me take a look.” Nathan turned in his seat, grabbed hold of my chin with two fingers, and tugged my mouth open. He murmured all kinds of dire sounds. “Doesn’t look good,” he said. “You better come in. You’re working on an abscess.”

Rosalie whistled. “Ouch. You don’t want to go there,
Gladie. My cousin had an abscess, and they had to remove part of his jaw before the infection traveled to his brain.”

“I’ve got a slot open at eight tonight,” Nathan said.

I felt the blood drain out of my head, and I saw stars. It wasn’t even the thought of getting my tooth filled that sparked terror in me. It was going back to the scene of the crime and being helpless on the dental chair, under the gas.

Nathan surprised me with his sensitivity. “We don’t have to put you under the gas this time,” he said, reading my mind. “We’ll numb the area. You won’t feel a thing. I promise.”

Infections traveling to my brain didn’t sound too good. I agreed to the appointment before I could think about it any longer.

“Hey, where are we going?” Nathan asked.

“We’re going to visit Tiffany Theroux to talk about what a sadistic bastard that boss of yours was,” Rosalie explained.

“What?” Nathan asked, startled.

But Rosalie didn’t answer. She was focused on her rearview mirror as she swerved onto Orchard Road, the road that led out of the historic district east toward the apple orchards. “What the hell?” she grumbled. “The world is full of nutjobbers.”

We let that go without comment, but I could tell it was killing Lucy to remain silent. Considering only yesterday Rosalie was running through town clutching a cleaver, she was a pretty black pot to diss any other nutjobber.

Rosalie sped along the road, swerving in and out of the lane. I got nervous. Maybe her crazy quotient hadn’t diminished at all, and maybe she was planning on finishing me off here in the back of her BMW. I turned around to see what Rosalie was looking at.

Trouble Weiss was behind the wheel of her Smart car, chasing after us. I could barely make out the small
toot-toot
of her car horn as she frantically tried to get our attention and, I figured, make us pull over.

“What is in there with her?” asked Bridget. “It’s hurting my eyes.”

It looked like Trouble was being swallowed alive by a cloud of neon pink so bright the color could provoke seizures.

“That’s tulle,” Lucy said with confidence.

“Are you sure?” asked Bridget.

“Honey, I know tulle. And I would imagine there’s about nine yards of it in that clown car.”

I had a bad feeling about the tulle.

“Maybe you should pull over,” I said.

“I drove three years for an oil executive in Cartagena, and I never got carjacked,” Rosalie said, driving like a madwoman, all the while keeping her eyes on the rearview mirror. “I’m not going to let a ballerina in a Smart car take me down now.”

Spencer really had bad taste in women. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what attracted him to Rosalie.

“She must be a hot tamale in bed,” Lucy whispered in my ear.

I sighed. My sex life had taken a big hit today. Who knew when I could be a hot tamale again? Maybe my hot tamale days were over. Maybe with all my inactivity, I was a lukewarm enchilada.

“Maybe we could stop for lunch,” I said.

“I ain’t stopping for nobody!” Rosalie announced. She made a hairpin turn and headed back toward town.

“Does this car have air bags?” Bridget asked.

“Whose idea, exactly, was it to have Rosalie drive?” Lucy asked.

“I think it was Rosalie’s idea,” I said. “I think you lost her,” I told Rosalie. Sure enough, Trouble’s Smart
car just couldn’t keep up with a Colombian-trained professional driver in a turbocharged BMW. We finally made it to Tiffany Theroux’s condo complex.

We tumbled out of the car and followed Rosalie as she marched up to Tiffany’s front door.

“So, what are we doing here?” Nathan asked me. He was a little green around the gills, and I sensed he was regretting his decision to seek me out for company and comfort.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I’ll buy you lunch after.” What was I saying? The only money I had was earmarked to pay off my cellphone bill. “Or we could eat at my grandmother’s house,” I amended. “The Cooking for Love class usually has great leftovers.”

“Is Rosalie driving us home?” he asked.

TIFFANY WELCOMED us in. “Oh, my, look at you all. What fun!”

She was the polar opposite of Rosalie. Where Rosalie was put together in sharp lines and designer clothing and exhibited an eternal-victim complex, Tiffany was homemade chic and radiated happiness. She was bedazzled, knitted, and macraméd. I recognized her at once as one of those people who in the face of tragedy says, “I am so blessed.”