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With a shake of her head, Hannah pointed toward the back of the house. “I’m sorry Taz. We already ate. You know I can’t go because Georgia’s—”
“You ate already? That’s just like you. Since I’ve known you, you have never gone out. Not once. You’re going to go crazy if you don’t get out of the house at night at least once. You’re going to snap. I’ve seen it happen.”
Hannah could almost feel it happening.
“I’m really sorry, Taz.”
“I have a girlfriend with some kids two houses down who’ll sit.”
“Taz, no—” Just the thought of leaving Georgia alone with a stranger at night scared her.
The phone rang before Hannah could say no again. She covered the phone and mouthed to Taz that it was Zoë. “I’ve got to schedule an appointment with her.”
“Zoë?” Tasmania’s eyebrows arched as Hannah rummaged through her purse for her calendar. “The doctor’s wife?”
Hannah shook her head.
“Oh, right, the new client…the shady lady from Shady Lomas, who’s here looking for a house in town, Veronica Holiday’s editor? She’s here? Now?”
Hannah nodded as she pulled out her calendar. “In that new beach hotel.”
“Ask her to meet us at the bar in her hotel.”
Hannah covered the mouthpiece. “I’m not going out. Besides, she’s married and pregnant.”
“All the more reason for her to get out—before the baby comes and ties her down. This is fate.”
Hannah sighed. “You’re hopeless.”
She flipped her dog-eared calendar to the right page and jumped. Stuck between the pages was that darn picture of her in the thong bikini that she’d accidentally given Joe Campbell.
“Tell her we’re going out,” Taz insisted. “This feels destined. Besides, we had a date.”
Why had she ever mentioned Zoë to Taz? As a Realtor, Hannah was alone with her clients in her car long hours. While they drove or walked through empty houses, people tended to share their most intimate secrets. Zoë had told her most of her incredible story the first thirty minutes they’d known each other.
Then this afternoon while they’d checked for mold on a waterfront house, Zoë had filled in the last gaps in her tale. Not that Hannah had paid as much attention as usual since the deposition had been looming over her.
The scene replayed itself in her mind. Her most trusted carpenter, a retired navy guy with a bad knee, Tommy Thompson, had been on a short, wobbly ladder sawing a hole in the ceiling. Zoë had chattered underneath him about her new husband, Tony, a rancher, who’d been her high school sweetheart. Their ranch was sixty miles south on the outskirts of a gossipy town called Shady Lomas. Apparently, they’d had a lovers’ quarrel as teenagers. To get revenge, Zoë had gone to a pig race at a rodeo, and Tony’s scandalous Uncle Duncan had gotten her drunk there. Uncle Duncan had had his own plane, and when Zoë had awakened in Vegas the next morning, she’d had a ring on her finger and was married to the old reprobate.
Zoë had been in the middle of her tale of woe when a hunk of drywall had fallen out of the ceiling and shattered, spraying both women with white bits of wallboard. Tommy had yelled “no mold,” triumphantly, and Hannah had grabbed his ladder to steady it.
“I’ll make an offer tomorrow,” Zoë had said, clapping.
“Everybody ready to go? I’m late,” Hannah had said.
“The deposition?” Zoë had asked.
“Joe Campbell is like an ax hanging over my head.”
On the way to Zoë’s beachfront hotel, Zoë hadn’t stopped talking. “Duncan knew he was dying all along. He married me so he’d go out with a bang.”
“For this reason he ruined your life?”
“No, he was sweet.” She’d paused. “He died a few weeks after the wedding and left me everything. Unfortunately, the inheritance included the ranch Tony leased and believed should have been his. Then Duncan’s daughters sued me, too.”
By the time Hannah and Zoë reached the hotel, Hannah was thirty minutes late, and Zoë was still talking about the gossip, lawsuits and spite that had driven her from Shady Lomas and the man she’d really loved to Manhattan, where she’d become an editor.
“Not a very good one, though, I’m afraid, and I was so lonely,” Zoë had admitted sadly. “My only claim to fame is that I discovered Veronica Holiday and edit her books.”
“The Veronica Holiday? I’ve read all her books. She’s fabulous.”
“Well, I’ll tell her I met a fan. She’s here, you know. At this hotel. On tour…and…writing.”
“What?”
“Thought I’d kill two birds.…Shop for a house and help her.…Long story.”
Still, Zoë hadn’t gotten out. “Oh, I almost forgot—the adoption papers on Noah came through.”
The entire conversation flashed in Hannah’s mind as she jotted 2:00 p.m. on her calendar for tomorrow.
Zoë needed a house in town because the schools in Shady Lomas didn’t challenge Noah, her nine-year-old stepson.
Never one to be left out of a conversation for long, Taz punched the speaker phone button while Hannah slid her calendar back into her purse.
“So how did your deposition go?” Zoë’s voice blared into the kitchen.
“He’s got the hots for her,” Taz said. “He fixed her flat.”
“Who’s this?” Zoë sounded both surprised and curious to hear a new voice.
“Joe Campbell does not have the hots for me!”
“I’m her next-door neighbor—Taz. Her spiritual adviser. She’s trying to stand me up for supper.”
“Did he or did he not hit on you, Hannah?”
Flushing, Hannah glared at Taz.
“The…the only thing he tempts me to do is murder—”
“Lawyers. The only good lawyer is a dead lawyer,” Taz said.
Zoë laughed. “Joe Campbell’s partner, Bob Africa, is suing me.”
“What?”
“Tony called me about it today. Bob Africa had Tony served today. Apparently, my stepdaughters hired Bob. They’ve gone through all the money I gave them when we settled the first lawsuit. Now they say I suckered their lonely old father into marriage and killed him for his money. People have stopped speaking to Tony and me. Tony hung up so tense he would barely speak to me. I’ve been crying ever since.”
“What kind of lowlife sues a pregnant lady?” Taz began. Then she told Zoë she was being sued, too.
Zoë giggled after she’d heard the story. “He’s going to tell the judge he’s mad because a hot pickle burned his pink pickle?”
Everybody laughed.
Zoë said, “We’ve got too many lawyers, or at least the wrong kind. In South Texas, anyway.”
Taz chugged a second glass of wine. “Hey—I say we adjourn to your hotel bar and have a serious discussion about this issue.…”
“No,” Hannah said.
“Yes! And the more the merrier,” Tasmania persisted. “I’ve just been dying to meet the shady lady of Shady Lomas.”
“I’d love to meet you, too, but this is sort of a work night. I’m with a writer. She’s here on tour for her latest book, Four Wishes, but her work-in-progress is late. And she’s blocked. And when she’s blocked she gets so crazy there’s no telling what she’ll do. Tomorrow, she’s got a television show and a book signing, and she’s publicity shy. I promised her tonight I’d play Muse.”
“Sounds like you both could use a break,” Tasmania persisted. “Besides, I swear I’ll inspire her. Have you been to that great bar in your hotel that overlooks the beach?”
“I can hear the music all the way up here. Okay, if you really want to come…but just for a little while.” Zoë gave them her room number.
“No way am I driving back to town,” Hannah began.
But Zoë and Taz had already hung up.
“I’ll drive then,” Taz said. “A writer,” she mused. “This is great. She’s got to have a creative mind. She’ll know just what to do about Mr. Billboard and Mr. Hot Pickle whose pickle wasn’t all that hot if you want the truth.”
“Murder,” Hannah suggested.
“But how? Honey, we need specifics…a plot.”
“It doesn’t take a genius to shoot a guy in his parts, grind him into hamburger meat and sell it to Big Burger to feed the natives,” Hannah said. “How’s that for specifics?”
“Honey, I know you’re off burgers and mad as all get out, but, please, don’t ruin my appetite. I’m dying for a burger, cut the pickles, please, even if every bite decides to live on my thighs. Besides,” Taz said, “Joey boy is too cute to shoot, and you don’t have a gun.”
“That’s no problem in Texas.”
BOOK TWO
The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU
Five
Campbell’s head pounded as he wheeled into the nursing home parking lot so fast he spun gravel. His headache got worse as he parked his gleaming black Porsche near the front doors of the red brick building. Twice a month he came here, and he hated every minute of it, even as he hated himself for being such a sap as to come.
A group of old men and women, their wheelchairs jammed together in a tight little semicircle, were smoking and telling stories until they saw him. Every one of them set his cigarette aside and stared at him blankly—as if he were someone interesting.
Campbell cut the ignition and got out of the car. Poor devils, didn’t they have anything better to do? No, they were out here every time he came to visit. He smiled and they smiled back, just like always. Hell, at least they had one another. Who the hell did he have?
When he got nearer, they waved and he waved to each one, scanning each wrinkled face. But his father never left his room.
His mood darkened as he headed inside, striding down a long hall past limp, corpselike figures in recliners on wheels, past the nurses’ station, where the head nurse eyed him warily.
He wasn’t the most popular visitor. Too many lawyers had won huge judgments in Texas against nursing homes by charging neglect for bad results that were nothing more than the natural consequences of old age. Not that Campbell ever took such cases, but the old battle-ax didn’t know that.
He stalked down the hall and into his father’s room. As always, the shades were drawn. Still, he made out two beds squashed together in the gray light. The bed nearest the door was empty, yet the floor and bed linens and chairs reeked of old man and dried urine and pine-scented disinfectant. Vaguely he wondered what had happened to the old fellow who’d been here last week.
When a thin stick figure with grizzled hair and a wizened face that somehow still resembled his own stirred in the bed by the window, Campbell snapped on the light.
“Dad?”
The old man hadn’t been washed or shaved that day. He blinked a couple of times and then held up a thin hand that was spotted with age.
At the sight of Campbell, the old man’s expression darkened just like it used to. “Turn out the damn light and get out of my sight! Nobody invited you. You ain’t no son of mine.”
Campbell shrank from him just like he had when he’d been a boy.
“I came by to see if you needed anything.”
His father snorted. “As if you give a damn.”
The harsh words hurt way more than they should have. Campbell couldn’t account for it, didn’t want to account for it. He’d never known anything but pain from his father.
“I know we didn’t get along in the past—but you’re sick now. Maybe you need somebody.”
Maybe I do, too. Did they have to hate each other forever? Then he remembered his mother. Yeah, maybe they did.
“Are you deaf? And crazy, too?” His father picked up a bedpan and threw it at him.
Campbell ducked as he hadn’t been able to duck as a kid, and the pan whizzed past him out into the hall.
“Get the hell out of here,” the old man said.
When Campbell hurled himself outside into the brightly lit hall a dozen patients stared blankly at him and the bedpan.
“You killed her. Remember that. Just like you’re killing me. Don’t come back.”
Campbell told the nurse the old man smelled bad and needed a bath. She told him three orderlies had tried, but he’d fought them so hard, they’d given up.
Campbell walked down the hall, his spirits lifting, but only a little, when he saw the exit sign.
The trouble with old people in nursing homes waiting to die was they slammed you into your own mortality. Campbell couldn’t come here without taking a long, cold look at himself.
What the hell was he doing with his own life? Would anybody care if he died tomorrow?
Yes, they would. A lot of people would be glad.
War Party.
