Matchpoint (3 page)

“That’s what I tried to tell him.” Belinda appeared above me, the third head to hang over my face. “He wouldn’t listen.”

“Well, I’m afraid the news isn’t all that great, but it’s fixable,” said Dr. Dulur. “Lucky you came in when you did.” He put the instrument down and smiled at me. “Seven cavities.”

My hand flew to my mouth. “Seven what? No, I don’t have cavities. I’m just neurotic. It’s in my head.”

“Yes, it’s in your head, all right,” he said, still smiling. “All seven cavities are right there in your head. Somebody hasn’t been brushing regularly.”

“But that can’t be. I brush and floss religiously.”

I wasn’t lying. I was a big brusher, and I changed toothbrushes every month. I did what I had to so I wouldn’t have to see a dentist.

“Oh, then it’s probably age. We’re not as young as we were, you know.” Dr. Dulur was still smiling. He must not have realized how close my fist was to his face.

“Age?” I echoed. “Age?” I was carded at the 7-Eleven only last year. Was it the generic face cream I was using?

Dr. Dulur flinched. “Maybe not age. You probably just need to do a rinse before bed. Keep your mouth moist during the night. Dry mouth can cause cavities. You must have your mouth open at night when you snore.”

“I don’t snore!” I said a little too loudly.

“Should we fill up those little holes right away? How about I get you numbed up and start drilling?” Dr. Dulur asked.

And then I was running. I made it out of the chair, through the office, and out the front door in a matter of seconds.

Once outside, I gulped fresh air. Matchmaking wasn’t easy.

I started counting my teeth to make sure they were all still there. That’s why I didn’t see him until it was too late, until his strong arm caught mine in a viselike grip and pulled me around the side of the building.

HE PULLED me so hard, my teeth rattled. I gathered air in my lungs to scream, but he stopped me, putting his hand over my mouth. He had me pinned against the
wall of the building, and his body leaned into me. That’s when I realized who he was.

“What the hell, Spencer, you scared the pants off me,” I said, pushing away his hand. Spencer Bolton was the Cannes police chief and an unapologetic man-whore. He also made my body temperature rise to a nice rolling boil, but I didn’t want him to know that. He was almost as new to the town as I, and we had run into each other last month when I stepped on his toes in the legal department.

He was tall and muscular, with dark blue eyes that could see right through a woman’s Walmart skirt to her pink underpants. His thick, wavy dark hair was silky. I knew because I touched it once and I didn’t want to let go. He was a metrosexual in the best sense of the word, and he usually had a supermodel attached to his body at some level—an arm, a leg, something.

He was infuriating.

“Pinkie, don’t tease me, talking about your pants.” He ran his fingers through my hair. “What the hell is this? I barely recognized you.”

“It’s the Ecuadoran Erect. It cost me a month’s salary. You don’t like it?”

“Since when do you get a salary?” He slid his hand down my smooth hair. “It’s nice, but—”

“What do you mean, since when do I get a salary?” He was right. I didn’t get a salary. Grandma said she would cover my expenses, but I wanted to pull my own weight and live off the matches I brought in. So far, those matches had bought me generic deodorant and Ecuadoran Erect. Warren Buffett, I wasn’t.

Spencer had me pinned against the wall, and he was looking over his shoulder every couple of seconds. “What’s going on, Spencer?” I asked. “Do you mind unlocking your hips from mine?”

“Oh, yeah, sure,” he said, and took a step back. It
was unusual behavior, to say the least. Spencer would have normally taken a lot longer to unlock his hips. “Listen, can you do me a favor, Pinkie?”

“You want
me
to do you a favor?”

“I need a place to stay. Just for a little while.”

“I don’t have time for your pickup lines, Spencer. I have cavities. Real ones. Ones that need a drill.”

Spencer looked around and ducked next to me, flattening his body against the building. “Sorry about your teeth, Pinkie. But I need to stay at your place. I’ll take the couch. A couple nights, tops.” He gave another look around. “Just until things blow over.”

“Blow over?” I asked, but the door to Bliss Dental opened, and a woman came out. When I looked back over at Spencer, he was gone.

Like Batman.

I NEEDED coffee. I also needed a margarita, but I was going to start with coffee. I drove back to the historic district. Tea Time had the best coffee in town, despite its name and despite its crotchety old owner, Ruth Fletcher, an eighty-five-year-old woman who despised coffee drinkers.

I circled the block three times before I found a parking space. I had never seen so many cars on Main Street. I figured there must be some kind of event in town. The Cannes townsfolk were always putting together some kind of fair, festival, or rummage sale. Tourism was the number one moneymaker for the mountain village, and Cannes kept things popping with the apple-pie-eating, antique-buying set.

I looked forward to a tranquil moment in the tea shop. Sure, it used to be a saloon back when Cannes was a gold-rush town in the 1800s, but now it was all lace tablecloths, yellow painted daisies, porcelain teapots on every
table, classical music piped in at a respectable level, and a rack of crocheted tea cozies for sale at ludicrous prices. I needed a moment of Zen, and Tea Time was the closest I would get today.

Out in front, a crowd had gathered. Two middle-aged women dressed in sheer white dresses with flowers in their hair argued with several shirtless men in bare feet and torn jeans. It wasn’t Ruth’s usual crowd, and a feeling of foreboding marched up my back like ants at a picnic.

I caught the words “the Arrival” as I made my way to the door.

Inside was bedlam. Every chair was occupied, and people huddled around the tables in thick groups, most in color-coded clothes, so that one part of the tea shop was blue, another was green, and so on. Piles of duffel bags and backpacks covered the empty places on the floor. I had to step over them on my way to the bar.

Normally I wouldn’t have braved the crowds just for a latte, but the experience at the dentist’s had left me unsettled. I needed coffee in a bad way, and I was relieved when I made it to the bar with Ruth behind it, a tea towel in her hand.

“Ruth, business sure is booming,” I said, plopping my Visa down on the bar. “The usual, please.”

Up close, Ruth didn’t look so good. Despite her advanced age, she usually had more energy than I, and looked a good twenty years younger than she actually was, even without a smidge of makeup on her face and wearing a Katharine Hepburn–esque wardrobe of men’s trousers and baggy shirts. But now she looked haggard and disoriented. It took a moment for her eyes to focus and recognize me.

“Booming?” she asked, her voice rising over the din. “Business? You call this business? The lunatic, sandal-wearing, mushroom-chewing, New Age loopdie-doos
have come to roost in
my
tea shop. Who the hell are you?”

“What do you mean? It’s me, Gladie.”

Ruth blinked and scowled. “What the hell did you do to yourself, girl? Have you gone Hollywood? Cannes not good enough for you anymore?”

“I didn’t go Hollywood.” Whatever that meant. “I had my hair straightened. Why is that such a big deal to everyone?”

“You’re a curly-headed girl, Gladie,” Ruth said. “What would you think if a rat terrier tried to look like a poodle? I’ll tell you what you’d say. You’d say it was unnatural, a freak of nature.”

“Am I the rat terrier or the poodle?” I asked.

“Accept who you are, girl,” she said. “It don’t matter if you’re not what you want to be. Nobody is.”

“Ruth, you have a way of brightening a person’s day,” I said. I tapped on my Visa to remind her about my latte, but she was distracted by the surge in her clientele. “A new crowd?” I asked.

“End-of-world crackpots,” she said. “But that’s not the worst thing.”

“Excuse me,” a man in a Laura Ashley floral-print dress said, interrupting Ruth. I stumbled to the left as he crowded me with his elbow. “I have been waiting for my milk thistle tea for twenty minutes,” he told her, patting down his ruffled bodice, which had gotten rolled up in his beard during his walk through the crowd.

“Hey, I was here first!” I shouted. I really needed coffee. Why couldn’t we get a drive-through coffee place in this town?

“Hey, hottie, I was here first,” he growled. “I have been waiting for twenty minutes. What do I have to do to get some milk thistle tea?”

“You think I’m a hottie?” I asked.

“Oh, Gladie, get over yourself,” Ruth said. She grabbed
the guy by his bow neckline. “Listen, buddy, you can wait for milk thistle tea until there’s bacon in the trees because pigs fly. Screw you with your milk thistle tea. I don’t serve commie tea!”

“Ruth, remember you’re a Democrat,” I said, trying to calm her before she came to blows with the man.

“Wackadoo pot tea!” she screeched.

I had heard Ruth won Miss Congeniality in the Miss Cannes pageant of 1942, but I had my doubts.

I watched the guy’s face transform as he debated with himself whether to deck the old lady or to hold back. I didn’t know what milk thistle tea was, but it sure got people’s hackles up. No one ever got violent over a mocha.

“Hey, Ruth,” I said. “Is this a bad time to remind you about my latte?”

Ruth gripped the guy’s dress tighter. “What do you say? Is this a good time?”

“Sure,” he said, pulling back from Ruth’s grip. “The aliens under the mountain aren’t going to spirit
you
away,” he told Ruth acidly. I didn’t know how to take this statement, and neither did Ruth from the look of her. She stood stock-still, speechless. We watched the Laura Ashley guy walk back to a table of yellow-wearing, hairy people.

“The world is spinning backwards,” Ruth said to me. “This whole damned mess is your grandmother’s fault. Wackos attract wackos.”

I wondered if that was true. Did like attract like? As a matchmaker in training, I should have been an expert on attraction. Grandma had made some peculiar matches. Vegan Josephine Fellows had found love with cattle rancher Philip Rojos. Baritone Joe Segelman was married very happily to Mary Smith, who had been deaf since birth. Grandma thought out of the box when it came to attraction, but she was different. She knew things
that nobody could know. Maybe Ruth was right. Maybe Grandma was a wacko.

“Grandma is not a wacko,” I said. “Ruth, take that back.”

Ruth handed me a latte in a to-go cup. “The only thing I’ll take back, Gladys Burger, is that latte if you give me an ounce of trouble. I’ve got enough trouble. These lunatics put my shop on the Internet as a beacon to all the other lunatics. I’ll never get these freaks out of here. There’s not enough DDT in the world.”

“Julie’s not around to help?” I asked. Julie was Ruth’s grandniece and my first match.

“And pour kerosene on this fire? The damned girl is more trouble than she’s worth. Besides, she got a job at the Christmas store. She’s already broken half the ornaments stock, but Loretta won’t fire her. Fool woman.”

It was a much more congenial visit with Ruth than I was used to. Normally she harangued me about my coffee habit, which she considered only slightly better than sniffing glue, but now she was too distracted by the wackos to give me grief over drinking a latte.

“What the hell do you think you are doing with that teapot?” Ruth yelled at a group on the other side of the shop. “That’s a genuine Harrods special from Prince Charles’s wedding. The first wedding!” She stomped out from behind the bar, wielding the tea towel like a weapon, and headed toward a group of shirtless men with
THEY COME
written in black on their bare chests.

Ruth was right. The lunatic, sandal-wearing, mushroom-chewing, New Age loopdie-doos had come to roost in her tea shop.