Rules of Lying (Jane Dough Series) (23 page)

O
nly two weeks remained before the homeowners’ association would levy a fine that would eventually put me out on the street—or force me into the home of one of my sisters. The latter thought was so horrifying that I threw on all my yard work gear and ran outside.

I figured I could get an extension since the city was giving extensions on everything, thanks to the hurricanes, so the homeowners’ association would have to do the same. But it might mean hiring an attorney, which I couldn’t afford to do.

It wasn’t as if I’d done nothing all this time. I’d done plenty, and I was about dead from it. But it wasn’t enough. I still had two lots that needed serious work.

The problem was, I couldn’t stop thinking about Mark and Sue. I’d gotten over the anger, but it had come back, unsettling me. There was no cause to be angry, so along with the anger had come guilt. Now I was wavering between the two emotions, and neither felt good.

Since I believed Sue when she said she hadn’t realized she loved Mark
and
I understood that Mark wouldn’t want to admit to loving Sue when he thought she couldn’t love him back, why was I angry? Maybe something was just messed up inside me. Maybe it wasn’t even anger, but simply fear. Fear that something would go wrong between the two of them and our best-friend threesome would be no more.

The rat-a-tat-tat of a woodpecker broke into my thoughts, and I dropped my cutting shears to the ground and sought him out. There he was, not the red-bellied type I often saw, but one I didn’t know. His back was similar to the red-bellied, but black streaks ran down the sides of his chest. His head was different too. Another woodpecker was beside him, holding something in its mouth, and I figured the two woodpeckers were mates. Male birds usually had more color than the females, but these looked the same.

I grabbed my shears and went back to cutting the weeds around the trees, but my thoughts lingered on nature.

Drab female birds got to pick the mate they fancied after checking out plumage, ability to nest, and whatever else female birds found important in a mate. That was what God had intended. A woman should be able to sit back and let the show begin, then pick out the guy who struck her fancy. But somewhere, way back when, a woman decided to get all dolled up and strut her
own
stuff, which made all the other women have to do the same. Once the women were putting on the shows, it was the men who sat back, taking it easy.

I’d be willing to stop wearing make-up and figure-flattering clothes and all the other stuff we women wore to give us an edge over each other, but there would always be that ten percent who would agree to forgo those things and then use them behind our backs. That ten percent would get ninety percent of the men, leaving slim pickings for the rest of us.

But my situation had nothing to do with any of this. I was single now because I’d made bad choices, picking out men who didn’t want to nest.

I wondered how male birds felt after they were chosen by their mates. Did they keep looking, as men did, thinking,
gee, I could have had that bird over there?
Did the female get tired of her mate messing up the nest, thinking
if he leaves one more empty bug carcass lying around, I’m gonna boot him out?

No, they were fighting for survival; they didn’t have time to be picky. And neither did I.

That brought my thoughts to Richard. I’d never planned to marry him, but I hadn’t suspected him of screwing me up on purpose. But what if he hadn’t? What if he’d done all the right things, had seemed to be the right guy for the make-believe job? Would I have been able to pair up with him for life based on his ability to build and protect my nest? I was thinking
no.

And that was the difference between people and animals. People did too much thinking.

At the squeaking of baby birds, I lifted my head in time to watch the woodpecker with the food give it over.

“That’s pretty cool,” said Hank from right behind me.

I almost jumped out of my skin. “Holy crap! Give a girl some notice you’re sneaking up!”

He grinned. The sexy grin. He didn’t need a sexy grin to be sexy though.

“Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to scare you. But it’s so cool you got cockaded woodpeckers. They’re an endangered species, you know?”

“Really? How did
you
know that?”

“I’ve been readin’ about the birds … the birds and the bees …” He chuckled at my raised brow. “Just kiddin’. Birds only, no bees, though I don’t have anything against bees. We couldn’t have any of this other stuff without them. But every time I help with your property, I see birds I don’t get in my yard. It’s pretty wild since you only live two hundred feet away. But then I don’t have a pine grove, like you do.”

Or a swamp. Swamps probably attracted special birds too. Birds that ate dead things or liked muck. I was so lucky. I had a pine grove and a mucky swamp and probably an alligator to boot. Add to that a jerk who’d pretended to be good husband material and a house I’d worked my ass off to turn into a home, but which would probably be taken away from me, and you could say I had it all.

I scowled, suddenly wanting to be in a bad mood all by myself.

“What? Did you find out somethin’ else about Richard?” Hank asked. He knew about the episode at the bank. The photo of Richard gripping my arm so I couldn’t slap him again, along with the headline,
Romance Writer Calls Wedding OFF!
had clued him in.

“Sue’s moving up to North Carolina with Mark!” I blurted out.

Hank cocked his head. “Mark is movin’ to North Carolina?”

“He’s gotten some promotion and has to go up there for a year. He stopped by to tell me he’d taken the job because he’s been in love with Sue forever and he couldn’t go on living here. And the next thing I know, Sue’s in love with him too!”

“That’s great. I’m happy for them. But you’re … not?” He was giving me a hard stare.

I looked away. “No. I mean, I don’t know. I mean, I can’t understand how Mark could have been in love with Sue all this time and kept it hidden from me. We’re supposed to be best friends. And Sue … the same goes for Sue. Except I don’t think she’s really in love with him. I think she’s making a mistake. I think she’s flattered over the idea of him loving her all this time.”

And the cherishing. Let’s not forget the cherishing,
said a tiny, slightly envious voice inside.

“What’s the real problem here? You jealous? Or are you just angry because Sue made an important life-changin’ decision without consultin’
you?”

“Neither.” And I would stick to that story until the day I died. “I’m angry because Mark never told me how he felt about Sue. I thought we were friends. Here he was coming over all the time, because he was my friend, I thought, not because he was hoping he’d run into Sue. And either way, he should have told me how he felt about her. I never dreamed …”

Hank made a huffing sound, and I stopped talking because he clearly had something to say.

“Maybe if you’d opened your eyes you would’ve caught on,” he said. “I barely know Sue and hell, I only met Mark once, but I could see right away he was in love with her.”

“Huh?”

“Yeah, Jane, that’s right. He was wearin’ his heart on his sleeve—and everywhere else. You didn’t notice the way he stared at her, like she was the only woman in existence? Where were you?”

“Where was I? I was right here, and no one else saw that in Mark. Just you. None of my sisters or my mother ever mentioned it, and they’ve been around both of them plenty.” I was almost daring him to argue with me. My depression had turned into anger. I felt like fighting, and Hank looked like he could go a few rounds.

Hank made a noise that sounded like
humph.

“What? What did you say?” I stood there, feet planted firmly, arms akimbo, just waiting. He turned and faced me, standing the same way, but six or seven inches taller and half a body wider. I shrank back a little. Just reflex.

“I said,
humph.
If you’re using your self-centered family as proof that Mark wasn’t thinkin’ what he so obviously
was
thinkin’, then I don’t know what to say except the apple doesn’t fall from the tree.”

“Excuse me? Excuse me? What the hell does that mean?”

“It means you’ve got the same genes as your sisters; they’re just arranged a little differently. You’re always complainin’ that Katherine thinks she knows how everyone should live their lives, but so do you. You’ always complainin’ that your family judges and criticizes everyone, but so do you. You’re always complainin’ that they care more about themselves and what everyone will think of them, but so do you.”

I’d already missed half of what he was saying because I was stuck on the complaining part.
I
was always complaining? I was
always
complaining? That wasn’t true. I wasn’t
always
complaining. Maybe I was complaining sometimes, but not always. And I was nothing like my mother and sisters. Nothing. And I was about to let him know it.

But Hank wasn’t finished.

“Take some responsibility for your life, for your problems. You got one set of standards for yourself and one for everyone else. Don’t try to tell me you’re not keepin’ secrets from anyone because that’s a load of bull. Everyone keeps things to themselves; it’s human nature. Quit feelin’ sorry for yourself and be a sister and a lover and a friend. You probably need to be a lover most of all. So some jerk treated you like crap; grow up and get over it. So your best friends have fallen in love and are movin’ away? Try bein’ happy for them. Get over yourself.”

I felt the steam rising from my face where sweat was vaporizing thanks to the hundred-degree angry flush that had swept up from my neck. Quit feeling sorry for myself? Grow up and get over myself? Well that was bloody, freaking
it.

I had no brilliant riposte since everything he’d said was true and we both knew it. So I turned on my heel and stomped off.

*****

I stalked around the house all evening, banging things, swearing. Even the kittens stayed out of my way. Night didn’t pass any better; I was too furious to sleep.

The next morning I called Rose. I didn’t need to get laid to write a book. Who the hell needed romance anyway?

“I’ve got an idea for a new book!” I screamed before I realized I was yelling at my agent. I snatched up the electric bill and crinkled it near the phone. I tapped the phone—loudly—a couple of times for good measure.

“This phone is really acting up,” I whispered. “One minute everything is loud and the next minute I can’t hear a thing.” There. That should confuse her.

“As I was saying, I have a great idea for a new book.” Rose didn’t think I needed to get over myself. Rose liked me. Thank God for Rose.

I heard her suck on her cigarette. “Is the hero a duke?”

“No! This book doesn’t have a hero!”

Ten seconds of dead silence shouted back at me; then, “No hero. Jane, honey, it’s a romance.”

“It doesn’t have to be. I mean, there are tons of books about women without men. Chick lit, for example. Women’s fiction. Books about women making their way in life, trying to find themselves.”

“You switching to contemporary?”

“No! You know how I love the Regency era.”

“Women in the Regency era weren’t looking for themselves. They were looking for husbands.”

“I just think women have always been the same. They felt the same back then as we feel now. Nobody has written about it, is all.”

“Nobody has written about it because nobody wants to read about it. When we read a historical romance, we want a happily-ever-after ending for the heroine.”

“Women don’t need a man to live happily ever after,” I snapped. At least they didn’t need to marry one.

“But we want them to have a man anyway, don’t we? A man, children, a home of their own? Admit it, you came up with this idea because you’re not in the mindset to write romance, and that’s because you don’t have any romance in your life. Here we are back to the same old thing. You need to get laid. And it needs to be by a guy who knows how to romance you so you can forget the clod who left you behind.”

“He didn’t leave me,
I
left
him.”
Well, sort of. I left him after he’d moved out and taken all my stuff and then never came back even though I waited a year for him to do it.

“Okay, the clod
you
left behind. I’m just saying you need to find an attractive man who knows how to treat a woman. And it wouldn’t hurt if he was great in the sack. I saw an article about you and some hunky doctor. If you don’t wanna jump those bones, then give his number to me.”

An image of Bryan popped into my brain—smoky gray eyes, black hair curling down his neck, wide shoulders filling out his doctor’s coat. Or maybe a tuxedo. No, a doctor’s coat. Did they make a tuxedo that looked like a doctor’s coat? Then Hank shoved him out of the picture. Hank, with his strong jaw, brown eyes speckled with gold, arms crossed over his bare, muscled, sweaty chest—yuck, maybe not sweaty. Well, maybe a bit sweaty. Maybe …

Oh, forget it. Neither of them was going to romance me. And they certainly weren’t going to do any
cherishing.
I dropped my forehead to the kitchen table and banged my head against it a couple of times for good measure.

“I don’t have to have romance in my life to write about it,” I finally said. “Just like I don’t have to have mind-blowing sex to write about it either.” I should know. I’d written plenty of mind-blowing sex scenes while I’d been living with Pete.

There was silence on Rose’s end for several seconds before she said in a softly pitying voice, “That’s true, Jane, but you have to believe the possibility exists.”

And that was the problem. I knew it didn’t.

I
worked in my yard by myself and, surprisingly, got a ton of work done. Anger spurred me on.

Granny once told me that nothing got rid of grief like anger. She’d said that after learning about Grandpa’s second family following his death. Evidently, anger was the cure for other negative emotions too, like fear and sadness and depression. The problem was that anger didn’t feel any better than those. It just felt different. I doubted I would have worked so hard if I’d been depressed, though, so for now anger was better.

I figured I should work my butt off for as long as I was out of sorts because for me, anger was always followed by guilt. It’s part of the whole passive-aggressive thing we have going in our family. We get angry and say things we wish we hadn’t. Then we feel guilty because we said them, and so we apologize and say we didn’t mean them, even though we meant every word. The apology doesn’t assuage the guilt—the guilt is from saying those things in the first place because good girls are always nice, at least to everyone’s face. Apologizing eventually leads back to anger, though, when we realize the person actually believes we didn’t mean the things we said, even though we did.

This case was a little different since I wasn’t the one who’d said all the unkind things. That had been Hank. The problem was that he hadn’t really been unkind, just honest. I wasn’t used to dealing with honesty. I kept saying I wanted everyone to be honest with me, but then I couldn’t take it when they were.

Maybe Hank was right. Maybe I was operating with a double standard. Maybe I wanted to be able to say how I felt but only wanted other people to be honest with me when I agreed with what they had to say. I shook my head; that didn’t feel exactly right either.

I think I really did want people to be upright and straightforward with me. I just needed to learn how to deal with their honesty when what they said wasn’t what I wanted to hear. It wouldn’t be easy for me. Mom had taught us not to deal.

I finished thinning out the palmettos and then weeded and mulched around them. I only thinned enough to get rid of the dead branches because palmettos were important for Florida wildlife, another golden nugget I’d learned from Hank, who had really gotten into the whole nature thing. As long as I made the area appear to be part of the landscape, the homeowners’ association couldn’t say squat. Was it any of their business if I wanted to landscape my yard with palmetto? I think not.

Now all four lots had been weeded and de-vined, trees had been trimmed, and non-native saplings and brush cut and cleared away. The structures were gone, except for the concrete pads left behind, and I went ahead and stained those so they blended with the environment. There was only one thing left to take care of: the swamp and what surrounded it. I wasn’t eager to start on that because I’d read that alligators could outrun people.

I’d already contacted the homeowners’ association, going on the offensive about how the previous owners hadn’t been cited. They insisted that the swamp hadn’t been there before I moved in, and I couldn’t prove otherwise since the word
swamp
wasn’t on the survey. I figured they couldn’t really fine me for it, but the only way I’d know for sure was to go to an attorney.

I’d been debating that issue. It meant borrowing money since I couldn’t even come up with the one-time consultation fee, not after paying the exorbitant fees for neutering, spaying, and inoculating Little Boy and his mate. Well, they weren’t mates now. They didn’t even like each other now.

Maybe that was the secret.
Hormones.
It was probably why women were supposedly happiest at the age of sixty. No more nasty hormones directing them to get laid, which meant they didn’t have to put up with men. No wonder they were so happy. It was something to shoot for, being sixty. The problem was that I’d have to go through the forties first and from what I’d read, even women who hadn’t liked sex before forty became wanton sluts then. Uh-oh on that because I already liked sex. Too bad I never got to have it.

Rain was approaching from the east, so I put away my tools and jumped into the shower so I’d be out before lightning could travel along my copper pipes and electrocute me. It would really piss me off if I made my deadline, only to drop dead mere days before I could flout my triumph in Carlson’s face.

I couldn’t stop thinking about Hank. More specifically, I kept mulling over what he’d said. The part about taking responsibility for my problems and my life. Hadn’t I done that? Wasn’t I fighting to keep my property? What did he mean? What more could I do?

A half hour later I was sitting at my computer, surfing the web. A couple of ideas, brought on by my decision to be proactive rather than reactive, had come to me while pondering Hank’s words.

My first idea had to do with the woodpeckers. What had Hank said? That they were an endangered species? Or did he say threatened? And what were they called?
Cock
something. That was the only part of the name I could remember. I went to Google and typed in
Florida woodpeckers endangered OR threatened.
The very first link showed it: the red cockaded woodpecker.

It was an endangered species. Their nesting trees, old pines, of which longleaf seemed to be a favorite, had been harvested to the point that the woodpeckers were running out of places to nest, and it was therefore against the law to cut down longleaf pines. I wondered if my pine trees, and the ones in the woods behind me that looked exactly like mine, were longleaf.

I looked up longleaf pine. It was one of the two Southeastern U.S. pines with long needles, the other being slash pine. Longleaf pine leaves occurred only in bundles of three, whereas slash pine also occurred in bundles of two. I printed off the descriptions of the two types of pines, along with the pictures, to take outside so I could check my trees.

Next I went to the county’s property appraiser’s website and looked up the property behind me. Hmmm … Some land development company owned it. Oh, joy, just what I wanted: development going on behind me. The main reason I’d bought this particular property was because it was large and at the edge of the neighborhood.

According to the online records, the property behind me had been purchased six months ago. Or maybe it was refinanced. I wasn’t sure. The property stretched all the way to the lake—wow, that lake was pretty big—and across to the other side.

I googled the land development company and came up with zilch. I sat there for a few minutes, wondering how I could find out more about the property or the company that bought it. Who could I ask? I didn’t know.

My other idea had to do with Mr. Carlson. I’d been on the defensive since receiving the first letter in the mail. Never once had I looked into his background. I didn’t even know the man’s first name.

I went to the website for his bank and there he was, Sidney U. Carlson, SUC. How appropriate, since he definitely sucked. Next, I typed in his name and searched, but nothing of interest came back. What now?

I returned to the property site and searched by owner name for him. Nothing. That told me his property was listed under a trust because I knew he lived in my neighborhood. According to the covenants, in order to be on the homeowners’ association board, you had to own and live in a property in the neighborhood.

I knew which house was Carlson’s, but I didn’t know the exact address, so I searched by street name and just picked a house number. I chose map view and discovered I was only two houses off, so I clicked on Carlson’s lot. Two thousand three hundred square feet, pool, fireplace, enclosed patio, and fence on a half-acre lot. Twenty-five years old. He’d only purchased the house six months ago, which seemed a little odd. Though this had been a very nice neighborhood once upon a time, it wasn’t one I’d expect a bank president to move into now.

I perused his information. The owner was listed as Carlson Family Trust but the mailing address, which wasn’t a post office box, was somewhere else. I leaned forward to take a harder look. It was an address in Island Hill.

My heart started to beat a little faster. I searched the property site again, only this time for the Hill address. Quite a different property it was. Seven thousand square feet, four fireplaces, pool and pool deck, screened porch, and patio on a half-acre lot. I went to Google Earth and zoomed in to study the property. I couldn’t see much except the roof, the pool, the paved driveway, and the landscaping but wow, not bad at all. While I was there I looked around at the other houses on the Hill, wondering what it would be like to come home to that every day. It occurred to me to look for Bryan’s house on the property appraiser site and so I did, but it wasn’t under Rossi, and I didn’t have the patience to click on every lot on the island trying to figure out which one was his.

The question was, did scumbag Carlson live in the house in my neighborhood or in the house on the Hill? I never saw him around here, except when he was visiting me. Before I started working in my yard, I’d ridden my bicycle every night and I’d not once seen a sign of life at his address. There was always the possibility that someone else in his family lived at the Hill address, that the properties were just bound up in the same trust, but why did I never see Mr. Carlson around here?

If his legal residence wasn’t in my neighborhood, he couldn’t remain president of the board. I didn’t know if the material I’d uncovered could help me, just as I didn’t know if the information about the woodpeckers could help either, but I was damned sure going to find out. At the very least I could dump some trouble back on Carlson’s doorstep, and that possibility made me feel oh-so-much better.

*****

While I was fixing a tuna salad sandwich, I had an epiphany. Sheila knew a private investigator. He’d gotten the dirt on both of Sheila’s husbands for her, enabling her to get fantastic divorce settlements that had included the homes. Homes that evidently had belonged to the men before they met Sheila.

Sheila had returned from up north the week before without her husband, or at least I hadn’t seen him. Because he traveled all the time, I’d never even met the man. That was probably the reason she was still married to him. Absence makes the heart grow fonder and all that crap.

I saw Sheila almost every day, though, when she click-clacked down the driveway in her high-heeled sandals to pick up her mail.

I rang her doorbell, and she opened the door dressed in her usual fare—shorts, halter top, and sandals. She motioned me inside while she took a drag off a cigarette attached to a jeweled cigarette holder.

Two minutes later I was at her kitchen table with a cup of coffee I didn’t really want but which I took because I didn’t wish to appear rude. I examined her décor as I told her about my idea. She was into flamingos, it seemed. They were on the wallpaper, the dish towels, the art work, and the cookie jar. All in shades of pink and green. It would take me about fifteen minutes to start puking over this décor. I planned to be out in ten.

“What do you mean, you want my investigator to find out where Carlson lives? Doesn’t he live on Benton?”

“That’s the thing. He owns the house, but I’ve never seen him there. He also owns a house in Island Hill. Why would he live here when he can live there?”

“Why do you care?” Sheila frowned at me, or at least tried to frown, but the only wrinkles that showed up were above the outside corners of her brows. She obviously didn’t mind paying for Botox. I guess if you cultivate husbands who give you everything you want, Botox is just one more line item.

“I care because he’s making my life a living hell, trying to boot me out of here because I’m not following the rules, and if this isn’t his main residence, he isn’t either. Following the rules. That means he doesn’t have the right to tell me what to do.”

“Whether he’s breaking the rules or not has nothing to do with you or me. Sure, they could kick him off the board, but that won’t help you if
you’re
breaking the rules.”

“It might. They only have three people on the board. Without Carlson, there’s only two. If I could get one of those two on my side, I could get a reprieve until I can get that swamp cleaned up. I can’t get the work done in the next ten days. I can’t even borrow the money and settle on a company to do the work in that short of a time. I need an extension.”

“You won’t be able to afford my PI either. He requires a thousand-dollar retainer.”

“A thousand dollars! That’s ludicrous!”

My epiphany hadn’t been much help. Everything always came down to money. I’d had another thought though. I could do my own investigation. It wasn’t as if I had to plant a bug on Carlson or anything. I just needed to know if he was in residence at his house on the island, because I was pretty sure he wasn’t in residence here.

I had a good idea how to find out too, and it made my heart go pitter-pat. Bryan Rossi was part of the idea. Bryan lived on the island.