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He walked to the front door, stopped, turned back. “I can’t leave. You’re alone. With your oblivious brain, you’d probably take a long lonely walk on the beach. Or, hey, you feel so guilty about what that idiot woman said to you maybe you’d shoot yourself.”
“Nah, this is what I’m going to do.” She managed to heave herself up onto one elbow, then grabbed a pillow and threw it at him as hard as she could, but it wasn’t much of a missile. He grabbed the pillow out of the air, tossed it from his left to his right, back and forth, gri
If her muscles were fit for anything more, she would have leaped to her feet and rammed him. Her arm that had made the paltry throw throbbed and knotted. All she had were words. “You can leave. I won’t be alone for long. Lou Lou has asked some people over tonight. I think she’s decided it would make me feel better. She asked me to invite you, but please feel free to back out. Please feel free to remove your butt from the premises.”
“No, not until other people come.” But he was looking at that front door like he wanted to slam through it.
She managed to sit up on her sofa, swing her legs to the floor. “How long were you eavesdropping in my kitchen?”
That brought his head up. The jerk gri
“That’s only on the surface. You’re all huff and puff, afraid of my little sister.”
“Any sane man would be afraid of Kelly, Pitty Pat included.”
“Go away, Chief Wolf. Or is Margie right? Did you change your name so people would take you seriously and hire you as a cop?”
“You found me out.”
“Go away.”
“Believe me, I would certainly like to. The thought of hanging back with a beer, maybe watching a ball game on TV instead-”
“Or you could always go all the way back home.”
The big clod stood in the middle of her living room and laughed at her. Then she knew he was looking at her mouth.
She grabbed her empty mug, intending to flatten him with it, but the sudden movement hurt everywhere. She felt a sudden spasm in her arm, dropped the mug, and let herself fall back into a chair.
THIRTY-FOUR
Irna Phillips created and wrote some of the most successful radio soap operas in the 1930s and 1940s, including The Guiding Light, which premiered in 1937.
“What’s wrong? What did you do?”
She rubbed the muscle frantically. He slapped her hand away and began massaging her arm, deep and hard. She moaned, rocked back and forth on the chair.
“What did you do to your arm?”
“Just a cramp.”
“I can see that. It’s your biceps.” He continued massaging, lightening up a bit. “Make a muscle for me.”
“Are you nuts? No, no way. It’s all right.”
“Make a freaking muscle, would you?”
She made a freaking muscle, held the whimpers in her throat as he massaged. To her surprise, it helped.
“Okay, now loosen. That’s it-flex, loosen, flex, like that. It’s hard to tell which you’re doing, you’ve got such ski
“My arms are fine, you macho jerk.”
He stared down as she held her arm. “Did you overdo it with weights at the gym?”
“No, I wasn’t at the gym.”
“Then what did you do? It had to be over the top to make your biceps cramp up like that.”
Mary Lisa pictured herself in a graceful profile, sending her leg out smoothly at Chico to land her foot solidly in his gut. She pictured him grabbing his belly and keeling over onto the ground. Two weeks. Two more weeks and she could do that. “Too much shopping. Trying on all those shoes is tough on the arms.”
“It’s interesting,” Jack said slowly, watching her stand up, still cradling her arm, “you’re a good actress, I’ll give you that, but still you’re not convincing playing the spoiled prima do
She didn’t know what else to say, and it was infuriating. She stomped off toward her bedroom, still holding her arm.
“Where are you going?”
“I think I’ll go surfing with Carlo. If he’s not around, there are usually lots of cute young guys to help me out.”
She slammed the door.
“Yeah, right, give it a try, see how many of those horny teenage boys even know what a massage is.”
She growled through the door. He heard it. He was pissed and horny, a miserable combination, and he guessed she knew it. He’d almost kissed her when he’d flattened her on the sofa. Almost. He’d managed to stop himself in time. He thanked the Lord he had gotten ahold of himself. He was here to help find out who was terrorizing her, not-well, he didn’t want to think about that. He walked to the kitchen, got himself a bottled water from the fridge, rubbed it over his forehead. He sat down on the sofa, saw the soap script, and picked it up.
He was still reading it ten minutes later when Mary Lisa, wearing a cover-up over a swimsuit, paused a moment when she saw him. “The mail is due soon. Perhaps you’d like to read that too.”
“Nah. You’ve seen one electric bill you’ve seen them all. Hey, this is pretty cool. I like this scene between Sunday and her father. Except-”
“Yeah, except…?”
“It seems to me that you could make the a
“It will go on for at least a week, maybe two, before it’s done. Welcome to the wonderful world of daytime entertainment.” But she couldn’t leave it alone, she had to justify it. “The viewers want to know how each character will react, or at least their favorite character. And every character will react differently to the news, depending on who they are, what’s happened between them and Sunday or her mother, Lydia. Now, please feel free to take yourself home, Chief. I’m going out to the beach.”
“I was lying on top of you, Mary Lisa. I very nearly kissed you and you know I probably wouldn’t have stopped, and you wouldn’t have stopped me-”
She started humming, very loudly. She grabbed up the script and went out back through the kitchen. Five minutes later, Jack was leaning on the deck railing, his opaque sunglasses in place, looking for Mary Lisa. He spotted her sitting in a deck chair some twenty yards down the beach, reading her script. Four surfers, all of them male, all of them below the legal drinking age, were clustered near her, occasionally eyeing her like she was an extra-crispy chicken breast.
They were playing around, strutting the way teenage boys do, poking each other, trying to impress her. It was almost enough to make a grown man wish he were back in Goddard Bay. Three girls in bathing suits walked up and joined them.
He pulled up a deck chair and sat down, his feet up on the deck railing, ankles crossed. He leaned back his head and closed his eyes. The midmorning sun was soft and warm against his face.
He must have dozed off because he only thought he heard a gunshot. There was a yell, then screams. He leaped over the deck railing, landed light, and ran toward Mary Lisa.
To his utter surprise, none of the kids had scattered. They’d shoved Mary Lisa down, covering her with their bodies. Her beach chair was overturned, and Mary Lisa lay on the sand, her script pages fluttering in the afternoon ocean breeze. He came to a halt over the pile of bodies. “I’m a cop. Is anyone hurt?”
A chorus of voices sang out, “We’re okay. Mary Lisa’s okay.”
“Does anybody know where the shot came from?”
One of the boys-no, not a boy, this one hadn’t been a teenager in at least five years-raised his head to look down the beach. “A guy fired at Mary Lisa from over there, from beside the Sanderson’s house, the second to the end. I saw the bullet kick up sand a few feet from Mary Lisa’s chair. We all dove on her.”