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Ida Mae called Ivy the black widow spider.
Ivy called Ida Mae the cold-hearted bride of Satan.
But God forbid anyone else call one of the sisters as much as miserly, for the other one would let loose a razor-blade tongue to defend her.
They lived next door to each other, on the north side of town in two ramshackle old houses that had once been Victorian but could now only be called sorry. Some days they sat in Ida Mae’s kitchen drinking tea while arguing over who Buddy Hoolihan had loved more. And some evenings they sat on Ivy’s front porch drinking bourbon while arguing over which of them had the tinier waist back in the day. Sometimes they merely sipped daisy wine and reminisced about the men they’d killed.
Most often, though, they talked about Mama. How she’d laughed. How she’d made the best pumpkin bread. How she’d tanned them when they were bad. How she’d taught them which poison to use on a man who was a little too free with his fists, or who couldn’t keep his man-parts safely buttoned in his own trousers or between his wedded wife’s legs.
This would inevitably lead to arguments about their daddy, whom both of them had loved to pieces when they were children. Whether Mama really murdered him, and whether Daddy truly had deserved it.
Ida Mae thought she did and he probably had.
Ivy thought she did but he definitely had not.
The argument—or any number of other ones—would eventually lead one of them to steal the beautiful Sears, Roebuck urn with the glossy faux mother-of-pearl handles—which was full of Daddy’s ashes—and hide it so the other one couldn’t say good-night to him. Which was why Ida Mae was currently tugging all the flour, sugar, stale chocolate chips and dried-up boxes of prunes out of Ivy’s dusty pantry.
“It’s not your turn to take care of Daddy, it’s mine. I have him until tomorrow night, sundown!”
Ivy was smiling as she watched from the other side of her kitchen. Curling her fingers together and resting her hands on the cracked linoleum surface of her faded, yellow kitchen table, she merely watched, a satisfied gleam in her eye. “Seems to me that he was feeling a little ignored.”
Ida Mae glared at her sister, knowing by Ivy’s expression that she wasn’t even close in her hunt for Daddy’s ashes. Ivy wouldn’t be smiling like that if she were. If her sister had put Daddy on the roof again and Ida Mae had to climb out the third-story window, she was going to snatch her bald.
“I haven’t ignored him.”
“You were gone for two hours yesterday,” Ivy replied. “Two whole hours and heaven only knows where you were. I thought we were going to start talking about the next book we’re going to write.”
Ivy had it in her head that the two of them could be the next Agatha Christie, even though the one murder book they wrote a few years back never had gotten sold anywhere. “Nobody’s been killed around here in years, so we don’t have anything to write about,” Ida Mae retorted, hoping to change the subject.
It didn’t work. “We’ll discuss that later. Now, tell me what sneaky things you were up to yesterday.”
Ida Mae felt hotness in her cheeks, the kind of heat she hadn’t had rush through her since she’d gone through the change twenty-five years ago. “I don’t know what you mean.”
Her hawk-eyed sister noticed. “You’re blushing.”
“Where’s Daddy?”
“Why? Where were you? What aren’t you telling me?” Ivy braced her hands on the table. Pushing herself up with her strong, wiry arms, she rose on her spindly legs. She tottered over on those ridiculous high-heeled shoes that her vanity kept her from tossing into the trash heap where they could rest with Ivy’s youth.
The heels put her nose to nose with Ida Mae—another reason Ida hated them—and Ivy took full advantage. Staring so hard her eyes almost bugged out, Ivy pasted on that mulish expression that said she wasn’t going to give up until Ida Mae came clean with her secret.
But, no. Not this one. She wouldn’t.
Unfortunately, as it turned out, she didn’t have to.
“It’s a man!”
Damnation, her sister was a know-it-all.
“Who? Who? Who?” Ivy chirped, like a greedy baby hoot owl opening its mouth for a still-wiggling worm dangling from its mama’s beak.
“Don’t be so foolish…”
Ivy grabbed the front of Ida Mae’s blouse—her favorite one, with the little birds stitched on the collar. She knew how much Ida Mae liked birds because Ivy had stitched the thing herself as a Christmas gift. “Bye-bye, blackbird,” she whispered in a singsong voice as she began to pluck at the threads with the long tips of her nails.
“Stop it.”
“Who is he?”
Ivy wasn’t going to stop. She’d tear the delicate birds right off her blouse, then move on to something else Ida Mae loved, until she got what she wanted. The name. Ida Mae knew it…because she’d have done exactly the same thing.
“All right,” she snapped, determined that one day she would learn to keep a secret.
A joyful smile took ten years off Ivy’s face. Ida Mae made a mental note to not tell any funny stories around her sister when eligible bachelors were in the vicinity.
“Really? You’ll share?”
She’d rather share a bowl of rat pellets. But there would be no stopping Ivy now. “Yes.”
“Who?” her silver-haired sister asked, almost bouncing on her toes like a debutante.
Ivy always had been man-crazy. Unlike Ida Mae, who simply liked men so much she sometimes felt the need to marry one for a while. “Just a stranger.”
“A handsome one?”
“No.”
“Liar. Where’d you meet him?”
She wasn’t lying. The stranger hadn’t been what you’d call handsome. More like, startling…striking. Vivid. That was a nice word for Mr. Potts.
“Where?” Ivy pressed, reaching for Ida Mae’s collar again.
“He moved into Stuttgardt’s old house.”
Ivy wrinkled her nose. “That one…he was a nasty bad man.”
“I know. Remember when Mama threatened him with a rifle if he didn’t stop coming to pester her into selling that land between his place and hers?”
“Those clocks…”
“The scandal…”
They met each other’s eyes, sharing a quick, unspoken memory. Ida Mae half hoped her sister had gone off the scent and would forget all about the stranger. Ivy was almost as fascinated by murder as she was by men, and Wilhelm Stuttgardt’s had never been solved. The old German clockmaker had been dead and buried for five years but he was still talked about nearly every day. His villainy—and the money he’d stolen from the town, not to mention the pension funds he’d taken from his own employees at the clock factory—was fresh in everyone’s minds. Even her sister’s.
Stuttgardt had lived in Trouble for more’n thirty years, but most folks still called him “the German.” Or “the Clockmaker.”
Or just “the Thief.”
He might have moved here at the age of twenty, planning to bring his silly, fussy clock-making business into their quiet, small community, but to Ida Mae’s mind, he’d never been one of them. She hadn’t been surprised that he’d eventually stolen anything he could get his hands on, bankrupting Trouble so that a few short years later it’d had to prostitute itself like a cheap street whore to stay alive.
And she most definitely hadn’t been surprised that someone had made him pay for his crime. Pay hard.
“Oh, yes, he was a bad one. Someone took care of him, though, didn’t they?” she said, hoping Ivy would now be good and distracted.
Today, however, wasn’t her lucky day. Ivy wasn’t distracted for long. “Now, tell me everything about him. This newcomer.”
Sighing, knowing she had no choice, Ida Mae began the tale. She told her sister about how she’d met the latest resident of their small hometown while picking over the badly wilting lettuce at Given’s Grocery in town.
His name was Mr. Mortimer Potts. And despite his long, wild white hair, he was a gentleman. A true, noble, old-fashioned gent the likes of which hadn’t moved to these parts in many a year.
And Ida Mae knew, by the gleam in her sister’s eye, that even though she, herself, was seventy-seven years old and Ivy seventy-five, they were once again about to embark upon their favorite pastime. Competing for a man.
Maybe to the death.
SABRINA COULDN’T DECIDE which was worse: staying in a tiny old B&B called the Dewdrop Inn, or the fact that it was run by a pseudo-nudist. At least the innkeeper, who had introduced himself as Al Fitzweather when she’d arrived yesterday at the crusty old house pretending to be an inn, was only a nudist on the weekends, and only in the backyard. Unlike the Dewdrop Inn, which was always as nauseating as its name would imply.
She was still hearing Nancy’s laughter through the cell phone a full minute after she’d described the first day of her assignment in Trouble. While waiting for the laughter to stop, she concluded that the inn was worse than its owner. His dangly bits probably couldn’t compete in grossness with the fake grape arbor complete with Cupid statue, the heart-shaped bed and mirrored ceiling in her room, and the eight-person hot tub that probably contained the DNA of the last eighty people who’d been in it.
The Dewdrop obviously longed to run off to the Poconos to be a star in the honeymoon biz.
“So have you seen Mr. Hot Stuff yet?”
Sabrina dropped the curtain and stepped away from her window. No longer distracted by the sight of her landlord—who, since it was a weekday, was mercifully clothed while doing yard work—she was able to give her full attention to her boss.
She almost tossed out a quick, instinctive reply that, yes, she definitely had seen Mr. Hot Stuff, and he was an adorable mechanic who liked merry-go-rounds. One whose name she hadn’t even asked for, though she supposed she could excuse herself for that—the man had been attractive enough to make a woman forget her own name.
But for some reason she wanted to keep that encounter to herself. “I haven’t. But I have made a connection and am going to get introduced to his grandfather today.” She threw off the instinctive dismay the word grandfather brought to her mind. “Max Taylor is staying with him, so I should have him directly in my line of sight within a few hours.”
“Okay, but what about in the meantime?” Nancy said. “Have you learned anything that could be useful in defending against a possible lawsuit brought by the loverboy? That is still the objective, right?”
Oh, yes, it definitely was. Sabrina ticked the whole plan off in her mind: stop the lawsuit, get the book into print so it could make a big splash, earn a promotion because of that big splashy book, and make more money so she could take care of Allie. Should be simple—four little steps to her goal.
Too bad they suddenly seemed huge and insurmountable.
“Yes, it’s still the objective.”
“So what have you found out?”
She perched on the edge of a desk, on which sat a greasy phone book blackened with graffiti drawings of bearded men and enormous phalluses, and a Bible blackened with graffiti of bearded Jesuses and enormous crosses. “I’ve heard people talking about him. According to my waitress last night, he’s Saint Max, the new benevolent lord who’s come to help his grandfather save them from disappearing off the map.”
Huh. More likely he was working on making the panties disappear off every attractive young female in the vicinity.
“From the sound of it, if there’s a town that should disappear from the map, it’s that one.”
“Trouble, Pennsylvania, has definitely been hit with some hard times.”
Not just hit with hard times, it’d been smacked about the head and shoulders with them. Then dipped in a tar of misery and feathered in dismay.
“Makes the city look a little more appealing, huh?”
“Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, sounds like heaven to me right now. I swear, the buildings here are only being held together by decades’ worth of dried-up paint.”
Not to mention everything else that was wrong with this place. The potholes on the main road had jarred her so hard during the drive in, she seriously thought she’d cracked a tooth. There were more businesses closed and shuttered than open. And the ones that were open appeared to have been sucked through a time warp—when she’d seen the old movie theater advertising Smok y and t e B nd t, the effect had been complete.
The theater unbelievably had seemed like the newest building, every other place having signs that looked original to the 1950s. From the pharmacy/drugstore, to the hardware shop that needed some of its own products to repair the front awning, the town wore its aura of abandon and weariness the way a tired old woman wore a housecoat—with lazy, haphazard helplessness.
Then there were the people…
“Okay, but what about the people, are they cheerful despite living in a rust bucket? Is everyone just as cloyingly friendly as they are in every TV small town?”
Sabrina thought about the small towns she’d seen on television and tried to find one that might compare. Finally, with a sigh, she admitted, “I can think of one or two episodes of The X-Files that could come close. Every single time I go down the street, I see this one man wearing a gray sweatsuit sitting on the same bench, in the exact same position. If his skin was gray, too, I’d swear he was dead and nobody in this place was interested enough to find out.”
Uninterested. Gray. Dead. Three words that described Trouble and its residents very well. Except for the few bright, splashy colorful ones…like her landlord.
And one amazingly hot mechanic.
Nancy snorted. “Your choice, honey. You’re the one who wanted to catch the guy in the act.”
Wanted? No. Sabrina didn’t want to catch Max Taylor schmoozing his way through every woman within range of his overactive hormones and the laser-precision missile between his legs. She had to. So much depended on it.
“I’ll get him, Nancy. The next time that shark lawyer of his calls, we’ll be able to hit him with proof his client’s a reprobate and practically a gigolo and just dare him to try to sue for defamation.”
And then the book would go to print as written—complete with the titillating, attention-grabbing details of Grace’s shocking sexual affair with Max Taylor. Sabrina would get a lot of attention…and hopefully a promotion. Not to mention a raise, which she would need if she was going to be able to help her sister pay for the baby she was expecting.
No, it wasn’t her fault Allie had had unprotected sex and gotten pregnant. But it was Sabrina’s fault that an older, sophisticated man had intentionally targeted the innocent college student for seduction and heartbreak.
She was responsible for her sister’s situation. Even her mother believed it. And now that she and Sabrina’s grandparents had turned against Allie—cut them both out of their lives in shame—Sabrina was all she had. She owed her.
“Okay, kid, it’s your game. Let me know if you need anything else. I expect daily updates.”
“You bet. Remember, if Allie tries to reach me at the office, I’m at a book expo.” Her little sister had seemed suspicious about the sudden trip. Sabrina knew the twenty-year-old might call the office and try to find out exactly where Sabrina’s “business trip” had taken her. Considering how bored and lonely her unpredictable sibling had been lately—now that she could no longer work as a waitress due to her advanced pregnancy—Sabrina wouldn’t put it past Allie to try to follow her.
After finishing her phone conversation, Sabrina began to prepare herself for her visit to Max Taylor’s grandfather, Mortimer Potts. She needed to get in character—to get her mind around her mission—since she might very well be meeting her quarry in just a few hours.
And you’ll be seeing him.
She thrust that thought off. Sabrina couldn’t afford distractions like small-town mechanics right now. Not when there was so much at stake. She had to get to work, focus on the real reason she’d gone shopping on a Philadelphia street corner to buy knock-offs of expensive-looking clothes and had rented a car that probably cost as much as she’d make for the next two years. It had seemed silly, but Nancy had insisted that she look the part. Because her whole purpose for being in Trouble was to validate every word Grace Wellington had written about playboy pilot Max Taylor. The man addicted to rich, vulnerable women.
Which meant she had to look like one.
Hmm…small-town girl who’d never seen a real pair of Gucci shoes, much less worn them…social klutz who’d once fallen facefirst in a giant bowl of cocktail sauce at a writers’ conference—how tough could it be?
“This is ridiculous,” she muttered. Then she shook off the doubt because she had to make this work. And she would.
Once she’d caught Taylor in the act of being exactly the heartbreaking, sex-addicted loverboy Grace had made him out to be, she’d cut his legal legs out from under him. Nip his lawsuit to stop publication of Grace’s book in the bud. And laugh all the way to the bestseller lists.
Piece of cake.
She just had to remember one thing—this was only about the book. No matter how curious she was about Max Taylor, the world’s greatest lover, her clothes were staying on.
Because if they didn’t, all bets would be off.
IF MAX WERE A PSYCHO serial killer or a cannibal or something, the pretty blonde walking beside him through the woods would be in serious trouble. She’d shown up at the old, abandoned park this afternoon, and Max had no sooner said he was ready to take her to meet Mortimer than she’d started walking—away from the main road and possible witnesses. He’d fallen into step beside her, leading her toward the path going up the hill to hell. Er…home.
He wondered if she was a black belt. Or if she was armed. Or simply very, very trusting. Like a certain little girl with a red riding cape complete with hood.
“Why did you come with me?” he asked, unable to contain his curiosity. “Weren’t you the least bit concerned that I could be dangerous?”
Her curvy lips twitched. An invisible string in his chest tugged his heart until it twitched along with them. Either that or his empty stomach was reminding him he hadn’t eaten breakfast.
Had to be hunger. Max’s heart hadn’t been involved in any relationship with a woman in years.
“I’m prepared. I have something in my pocket….”
He shifted away a bit, giving her more room on the dirt path that led to his grandfather’s new white elephant. “Please don’t mace me, I was just asking a question.”
She pulled her hand out of her pocket, and he saw her cell phone.
“Were you going to ring-tone me to death if I turned out to be Freddy Krueger in disguise?”
“I’m pretty sure I’m awake—not dreaming—so you can’t be Freddy,” she murmured, tucking her phone back into the pocket of her white slacks.
Considering they were delightfully tight, he wondered how she had the room, but quickly figured it out. God bless spandex. Spandex is my friend.
“I had my finger ready to speed-dial my friend Butch.”
“Butch?”
Color rose in her cheeks and she cleared her throat before explaining. “The ex-Marine turned bouncer.”
It was all he could do not to tsk, knowing she was lying.
She might have made a flip comeback, but she had also stepped away from him on the path. He hadn’t intended to scare her. Honestly, he found her openness and trusting spirit incredibly attractive…if a bit naive. “There’s no Butch.”
“Says you.”
“If there’s a Butch, he’s a five-foot-six engineer trying to counter his geekiness and ninety-eight-pound physique by having a tough nickname.” Her audible sigh of defeat told him he’d hit home. “Sorry if I just offended your…boyfriend?”
Shaking her head, she reluctantly laughed, and little sparkles of delight seemed to spill out of her and bathe him in her good humor. “No, no boyfriend.”
Hallelujah. He’d already noticed there was no wedding ring.
“But there really is a Butch…”
“Oh, yeah?”
Instead of meeting his eye, she glanced down at her feet, kicking a small branch away with one sneaker-clad foot. “He’s my dog. A toy poodle.”
“Is his name really Butch?”
She tugged one corner of her lip between her teeth before slowly shaking her head. “It’s Giorgio.”
Max snorted. “Who named him?”
“Me.”
Shaking his head, he mourned for poor old Giorgio. “That should be against the law. Saddling a completely hideous name on another living creature.”
“I like Giorgio. It’s very…Mediterranean.”
“Bet he gets the snot beat out of him by the other pups at the doggie park.”
“He’s got a bit of a Napoleon complex,” she admitted. “So he does tend to get in trouble with some of the bigger dogs. That’s why my younger sister decided to start calling him Butch once she moved in with me.”
A sister who lived with her. He filed the information away for future use. Not that he knew for sure that he’d ever be invited in for coffee and an all-night sex-fest after one of their inevitable dates. But he was hoping. And a live-in sister could make things a little…crowded.
Now, however, wasn’t the time to be thinking that way. Not until he was out of this whole book jam. Best behavior, he reminded himself. You’re Mr. Boy Next Door. Because, though he wanted to believe this woman was in Trouble for exactly the reasons she claimed, he wasn’t ready to completely discount the possibility that he was being played.
A player was always on the lookout for anyone who wanted to play him. And once upon a time, Max had been one of the best players around.
“So whose speed-dial number did you have your finger on?”
“The Trouble Police Department. They are programmed into my cell phone.” She shuddered lightly, though the day was warm and comfortable. “I put them in there when I arrived and found out my landlord likes to get naked and prune the rosebushes in his backyard on the weekend. Which, to me, seems like a dangerous combination—thorns, hedge clippers and nudity.”
“Ah. You’re staying at the Dewdrop.”
“Yes.”
“Could be worse. You could be staying at Seaton House, which used to be open as a hotel just north of Trouble.”
Cringing, she admitted, “I saw pictures on the Internet of that place, hulking over the town like a gargoyle hovering over its still-bleeding prey.”
Good visual.
“I had this image of a nightmarish version of Satan’s Hotel where demons turn down your bed and you realize it’s full of snakes. You check in and you never check out. It looked as if Norman Bates and his mother lived there.”
“They might. Or so says the Trouble gossip mill. The hotel closed down a month ago, leaving the Dewdrop as the only lodging option within twenty miles of here.” He grinned. “Nicely worded description by the way.”
“Thanks. I guess I’ve got a lot of practice trying to paint pictures with words.”
“Ah. You’re a writer?”
She didn’t answer right away, staring at the ground in front of them as if afraid she’d trip and fall over a jumbled mound of brush. Finally, though, she said, “I’ve wanted to be a novelist since I was a kid.”
Though he had no fondness for writers lately, he admitted, “Well, you’re good. As long as you stick to fiction and none of that tell-all crap.”
Like Grace. But this blonde was nothing like Grace, who wasn’t really a writer at all. She was merely a spoiled brat who was never happy if she wasn’t messing with someone’s life.
His companion stumbled a little and Max grabbed her arm to steady her. “Careful.”
“Thanks,” she said, her voice low.
They walked in silence for a few yards, then Max said, “Just so you know, I’d read your books. You’ve got me convinced to never set foot in Seaton House, much less sleep in it.”
He wondered if she’d believe him if he told her there was somewhere she could be staying that was even more frightening—the house where they were heading. The one where he currently resided.
Because hearing a few dozen screaming cuckoos every hour had to be worse than sleeping one thin wall away from the owner of the Seaton House, a man most of Trouble apparently considered a murderer. Or from Al Fitzweather, whose goods, one would hope, would at least be hidden by his beer gut whenever he was walking around the house in the buff.