Tangled Thing Called Love (7 page)

Gran turned to Mazie, eyes snapping. “Well, young lady, what do you have to say for yourself? We were all worried sick.”

Mazie raised her chin. “You shouldn’t have worried. I was just getting the eggs, remember?”

“And where, may I ask, are those eggs?”

Mazie gazed around as though expecting the eggs to materialize out of thin air. “I didn’t get around to it. I was busy.”

“Aunt Mazie’s dru-u-nk,” Joey chanted, and Sam took up the chant as they all trooped into the house.

She ought to give the boys a lecture on respecting their elders, Mazie thought, but at the moment she didn’t feel up to it.

They’d waited on supper for her. She’d figured it was around four in the afternoon, but somehow time had been sucked into a black hole and spat out again hours later. It was actually six o’clock in the evening. Supper was sauteed bass—apparently the fishing
expedition had been successful—along with red potatoes in butter and parsley, baby carrots from the garden, and spice cake with cream cheese cinnamon frosting. As Mazie’s vodka-induced ebullience evaporated, guilt settled in to take its place. She should have been here, helping Gran fix supper. Good thing there’d been the miracles of the fishes, because otherwise—God forbid—they would have had to have eggless meat loaf.

The twins bragged all through the meal about the fish they’d caught and the ones that had gotten away. Mazie kept an eye on Muffin in case the boys tried to slip him bits of fish, because small dogs could easily choke on bones.

Gran broke into the fishing drivel. “Well, Mazie—I hear you’re going to be in the Miss Quail Hollow Pageant.”

“What?”
sputtered Mazie. “Bodelle Blumquist’s dog-and-pony show? Where’d you hear that?”

“Oh, it’s quite the buzz. They’re getting all the former beauty queens together for the pageant. Folks are already laying bets on who’ll win.”

“They could get Jake Gyllenhaal to emcee and I still wouldn’t be in it.”

“Of course you’re going to compete,” Gran snapped. “Every woman in my card club has already pledged a hundred dollars toward your queenometer. And you’ve got all those Maguire relatives who’ll donate, too—if they know what’s good for them.”

“Not gon-na hap-pen,” Mazie sang, glancing across the table at Ben, who was avoiding her gaze. He was mad about Hoolihan, she guessed.
Good!
Was she going to exploit that fact?

Oh, shamelessly.

“Come on, Mazie,” Scully said. “Go ahead, enter the pageant. You’ve got to uphold the family honor.”

“Screw the family honor.”

“Mazie, you’re going to be in it, and you’re going to win it.” Gran dinged her fork against her coffee mug. “All those in favor—”

The kitchen resounded with clanging silverware. Sam broke his glass. Milk spilled on the floor and Muffin started lapping it up. Mazie sank her head into her hands and tried to rub away the vodka headache that had settled behind her forehead.

Fortunately for her, Scully volunteered to do the dishes. Exhausted, sunburned, and
now beginning to feel the aches from her bike accident, Mazie started upstairs, intending to down a couple of Tylenol and go to bed. She got as far as the fourth step before Ben Labeck, who’d glided silently into the hallway, reached out a long arm and snagged her wrist. “Oh, no, you don’t.”

“Let go of me. I’m going to bed.”

He smiled. “Not a prayer. You’re going for a ride with me.”

Chapter Nine

“Tell me about this Johnny Hooligan,” Ben said, his jaw set.

They were driving along a country road at twilight. It was the first time they’d been alone all day, and it would have been romantic if it hadn’t been for the crackling tension between them.

“It’s
Hoolihan
. I happened to run into him this afternoon—”

“At a bar where you
happened
to be hanging out,” Ben said. “Your old boyfriend?”

“He wasn’t my boyfriend. We didn’t move in the same circles.”

“You must have had a lot to talk about. You were gone for hours.”

“Well, we didn’t talk the
whole
time.”

Shut up, now!
warned the Smart Mazie, but as usual, Dumb Mazie kicked Smart Mazie’s butt. “We danced a couple of times. The bar has this old jukebox—”

“You
danced
with him?”

“Just casual jukebox dancing. It’s not like we were Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey doing the lift scene.”

“Who’s Patrick Sway?”

“It’s
Swayze
—Patrick
Swayze
.” Mazie swatted Ben’s shoulder with a rolled-up road atlas, which felt so good she whacked him again.

“Hey—what was that for?” Ben asked indignantly.

“To stop you from saying any more stupid things. You don’t know Patrick Swayze? Didn’t you ever see
Dirty Dancing
?”

“Yeah. Monday nights, where those celebrities—”

Mazie hit him again. “The
movie
, dummkopf!”

How could there be this parallel universe where males had never heard of
Dirty Dancing
? Every woman worth her estrogen adored
Dirty Dancing
. They’d played the movie nonstop in the prison rec room until the DVD disc wore out. Mazie loved Patrick Swayze because he was a wildly handsome, muscular hunk who made dancing more macho than sacking a quarterback. She adored Jennifer Grey because she was short, not
stereotypical Hollywood gorgeous, and still got the guy.

“You think
I
can’t dance?” Ben said.

“How would I know? We’ve never danced.”

“Because you never said you wanted to. Okay, so you want to dance, I’ll take you dancing.”

Mazie slumped down in her seat, rolling her eyes so hard she thought she might need a corneal transplant. “Dancing isn’t something you check off your I’ve-got-to-do-this-to-get-laid bucket list. It should be spontaneous. It should be I’m-feeling-the-music-and-I-gotta-move.”

I’m feeling the music?
Had she actually said that? What was happening here? She was regressing back to adolescence. If she didn’t get back to civilization soon she’d start popping pimples and shopping for dangly earrings at Claire’s.

Labeck was quiet for a couple of beats, then asked, “What else is on the do-it-to-get-laid bucket list?”

“If you don’t know I’m not going to tell you.”

He thumped a fist against the steering wheel. “I hate when women say that. Guys
don’t
know! Guys are clueless! You have to give us an instruction manual.”

“How can you not know about women when you grew up with all those sisters?”

“My sisters? I tried to stay as far away from them as possible. I’d hand ’em money when they overspent their allowance, patch up their wounds when they got hurt, punch out any guys who gave ’em grief, and tune out all the girl stuff.”

“Well, that explains a lot.”

“I think I’ve just been insulted.” Ben glanced over at Mazie and smiled. Against her will, she smiled back. He was looking way too good—dangerously good—his skin freshly tanned from being out in a boat today, his hair damp from a shower. “I’ve got a confession to make,” Ben said. “I had a motive for getting you alone—beyond wanting to get the lowdown on that khaki-pants-wearing, pimpmobile-driving dickhead. I wanted to ask you to show me the spot where Fawn Fanchon disappeared.”

Mazie looked at him, surprised. “What for?”

He cleared his throat. “The mystery about her disappearance—I think it would make a terrific documentary.”

“Hundreds of teenage girls disappear every year, though—and Fawn isn’t exactly front-page news anymore.”

“Maybe not, but there are a lot of unique elements here. The beauty queen angle, the outlaw family, the abandoned truck—it’s dynamite. I’d like to scope out the scene, maybe take a couple shots. It’s not that far, is it?”

“No, just a few miles, over in Punhoqua Coulee.”

“What are these
coulees
, anyway?”

“They’re steep valleys between ridges, usually with streams or wetlands at the bottom. Turn left at the next intersection, drive about three miles, then it’ll be on the right.”

“You really know this area.”

“My brothers and I used to hike and canoe in these coulees. It’s a really huge area, probably a couple of hundred square miles. My grandpa told me that moonshiners used to hide their stills out there. Nowadays there are marijuana patches all over the place.”

Ben opened his window to a chorus of spring peepers. The scents of pine, cedar, and wildflowers wafted into the car. An owl hooted in the woods. Ben slowed down as a raccoon waddled across the road.

“Would Fawn have known these back roads too?” Ben asked.

“Sure. Her family only lives a couple of miles down the road. Turn here—it’s a dirt surface, so you’ll have to go slow.”

Ben turned onto Skifstead Road. It was rutted, muddy, and flooded in places, and so narrow that tree branches whipped against the sides of the car. After a mile or so, it ended in a turnaround just wide enough for a single vehicle.

“This used to be a farm,” Mazie said. “A family of Swedish immigrants lived here eighty or ninety years ago, trying to make a go of farming. But the soil was too poor and they abandoned the place. This turnaround used to be the end of their lane. The farm buildings burned down years ago and the fields reverted to wilderness.”

Ben stopped the car, grabbed his camera from the backseat, and got out. The light was fantastic: the sun just setting, flinging bright plumes of gold, salmon, and purple into the sky. He walked around slowly, trying to absorb everything. “Was Fawn’s disappearance covered by the local media?” he asked.

“Oh, yeah—it was pretty sensational, not just locally, but it made the national news,
too. TV stations as far away as Alaska were covering the story.”

“Do you know where Fawn’s shoes were found?”

“Sure. Everyone knows. It’s passed into local lore and legend.”

Mazie led him down a narrow path between stands of birch and alder, a trail that appeared to have been trampled down over the years by the curious and the ghoulish. It opened into a small open glade above a sluggish, olive-colored stream whose surface was speckled with dead leaves. A rock the size of a laundry basket thrust up from the creek’s mossy banks.

“This is it right here,” Mazie said, nudging the rock with her toe. “The spot where Fawn’s shoes were found.”

The rock was scrawled with graffiti, some of it fresh, some of it so faded it was unreadable, but the general gist was
We Luv U, Fawn! Hope U.R. OK
. Other sentiments were cruder and lewder. Faded plastic flowers were stuck in the dirt around the rock, Mardi Gras beads were strung across it, a stuffed kitten was half-buried in weeds at the base, and scraps of a bright helium balloon lay scattered among the used condoms.

Ben began moving around the rock, snapping shots from several angles. “Okay, Mazie Maguire, girl detective—what’s your take on Fawn’s disappearance?”

Mazie picked up the kitten and brushed off the dirt. “It’s possible she just drove out here on an impulse that night. Maybe the turnaround was her favorite place—a quiet place to think. She might have wandered down to the creek, waded in, lost her balance, and drowned.”

“But they dragged the creek, right? They would have found her body.”

“Not necessarily. It could have snagged on an underwater log or—what are you doing?”

Ben was shucking off his shoes and socks and rolling up his jeans legs. When he finished, he stepped into the creek and slogged through the water to the opposite bank, a distance of about twelve feet, the water never higher than his mid-calf. “She’d have had to be pretty clumsy to drown here. It’s not deep.”

“Maybe she was drunk,” Mazie suggested.

“You knew this girl, right?”

“A little. We rode the bus together. She was a year ahead of me in school.”

“Was she the type to get drunk by herself?”

“No,” Mazie admitted.

Standing on the opposite bank, Ben lined up a shot of the clearing, making Mazie the focal point. “Don’t move,” he ordered. “You’re Fawn.”

A crashing sound came from the woods behind Mazie. She whirled around with a startled yelp. Ben reacted immediately, plunging into the water, lunging across the creek and up onto the bank. Something large was bashing through the undergrowth a few yards away.

“Probably a deer,” Mazie quavered, and Ben was gratified to discover that she’d instinctively moved close to him. They stood still for a moment, then the thrashing noises stopped.

“Your brother told me there are bears and wild pigs around here,” Ben said in a low voice. “Was he shining me on?”

“No—they’ve been sighted here, but I’ve never heard of them attacking people.” Mazie looked up at him with a mischievous look. “Of course it could be the Coulee Devil.”

“Snipe hunt.” He grinned. “See if the dumb city slicker falls for it.”

“The Coulee Devil is a kind of Sasquatch creature that’s supposed to live in these woods. It walks upright; it has yellowish-gray fur and glow-in-the-dark eyes, and it reeks like sulfur.”

“Some idiot in a gorilla suit.”

“Reliable witnesses swear they’ve seen it—a sheriff’s deputy, a school bus driver—”

“I suppose this thing dragged Fawn off and ate her for supper. A Sasquatch running around in the backwoods—mind-blowing!”

“You don’t seriously believe there’s a Coulee Devil?”

“Doesn’t matter what
I
believe. It’s what people
want
to believe. A maiden and a monster. Beauty and the Beast. The Devil and the Damsel. People eat this stuff up.”

Ben walked ahead, holding aside branches for Mazie as they took the trail back toward the road. When they broke out of the trees Ben halted so abruptly Mazie rear-ended him.

A man stood a few feet away, holding a strung arrow on a high-powered bow,
aiming it directly at Ben’s heart.

Chapter Ten

“Who the hell’re
you
?” snarled the man.

He was tall and gaunt, probably in his early fifties, with gray-brown hair scraggling to his shoulders and a mouthful of bad teeth in a long, lean face. He wore a hunter’s camouflage shirt with the sleeves ripped off, jeans, and neon orange sneakers that must have scared off wild game for miles around. A leather arrow quiver was strapped across his back.