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  He was on his feet, too. “I’ve been busy.”

  “Busy!”

  “Things have been crazy. Work—”

  I stopped him right there. “It’s perfectly okay. I understand completely,” I said, and reached for the doorknob. Somehow, he got there first.

  “Just wait a minute.”

  But I’d been waiting. And there are only a couple of things I liked less. Exercise was the first thing that came to mind.

  I glared at him. “What do you want, Rivera?”

  “Something came up,” he said, “with my ex-wife. I had to take care of it.”

  I remembered his ex-wife. We’d met in a dog park under rather unorthodox circumstances. She was as cute as a button and as sweet as a lollipop. I could pretty well imagine what had come up.

  “Nothing big, I’m sure,” I said.

  “Well, it was . . .” He scowled, not seeming to appreciate my pointed entendre. “We had a problem, but we got it worked out.”

  Worked out? I could feel my stomach do a three-foot free fall. “Well . . . I’m glad for both of you,” I said, and nodded to emphasize my euphoria. “Really.”

  His scowl deepened before apparent realization dawned. “No. Shit.” He thumped his palm on the door not twelve inches from my head and glanced impatiently out the window. “I didn’t mean we’re back together.”

  “Oh,” I said. My heart did some complicated maneuver in my chest. I don’t know why. It’s not as if I cared. Couldn’t have cared less. He may smell like sun-warmed lust, but he isn’t my type. My type has an Ivy League education and doesn’t carry handcuffs like most guys sport hair-combs.

  “Well . . . I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.

  He glared. “Are you?”

  I gave him a fabulously casual shrug. “She seemed very nice. Sweet even.”

  “She’s . . .” He drew a deep breath through his nostrils and straightened slightly. “The point is—it was her . . . who called when I was at your house.”

  “She,” I said. He quirked his brows in question or irritation or a twisted combination of the two. “It was she who called,” I corrected.

  I think he gritted his teeth. “It sounded urgent. I thought I’d better take care of it right away.

  “The point is . . .” He paused, probably trying to remember the point. “I should have contacted you afterward. Told you I couldn’t make it the next day.”

  “Or the next,” I added congenially.

  He glanced out the window again. The muscle worked in his jaw. “I know it’s been a long time.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and reached for the door again. “I have to go. I think I left my toaster on.”

  He grabbed my arm. “Damn it, McMullen, I’m trying to apologize.”

  I gave him my sweetest expression. “Having any luck?”

  “You could make this easier.”

  “Easier!” My voice had risen a little. Casual was beginning to fray toward maniacal. “We had a date,” I reminded him. “You’re a month late.”

  “So you settled for Solberg?”

  My mouth dropped open. “What?”

  “He’s got the cash. I’ll admit that.”

  “You think I’m dating Solberg?”

  He tilted back his head and laughed. “You could have thought up a better story.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Elaine!” he said. “And Solberg?”

  I straightened my back. “So. You think Solberg and I are a match, do you?”

  He shrugged. “He was spending a lot of time at your house, as I recall. Seven o’clock in the morning. Five o’clock in the afternoon. I mean, shit . . .” He glanced to the side again, tension tight across his jaw and throat. “I know you’re lonely, but . . . Solberg?”

  It was difficult to resist kneeing him in the groin. But self-discipline saved the day. That and the idea of sharing a jail cell with a tobacco-spitting woman named Slammer. “Get your hand off me,” I said. “Or I swear to God, I’ll file charges that’ll make your eyes cross.”

  “Listen, McMullen—”

  “Move it or lose it!” I snarled, and jerked out of his grasp.

  He glowered down at me, but I was already leaving.

  Sadie lurched away from the door just as I stepped out. Sidling her gaze to the left, she shuffled some papers on a nearby desk as if she couldn’t have cared less if we’d just been going at it like Energizer bunnies.

  “He’ll be back!” I growled.

  She glanced up, no eyebrows to be seen. “What you talkin’ ’bout, girl?”

  “Solberg, he’ll be back,” I snarled, and stalked out the door.

  I’m pretty sure Freud himself couldn’t possibly have handled the situation with more panache.

  4

  If at first you don’t succeed, stretch out on your La-Z-Boy with a six-pack and a porn flick. Y’ still won’t succeed, but you sure as hell won’t give a shit.

  —Victor Dickenson,

  better known as Vic the Dick

  I T TOOK THE rest of that morning and three maple-frosted long johns to stem the tide of curses I laid on Rivera.

  But by noon I was back on track. By three I had filed a report with the sheriff’s station on Briggs Avenue. No one there accused me of dating outside my genus or tempted me to knee him in the gonads.

  When I returned home, my phone was ringing.

  I answered before my machine picked up, but there was no one there.

  It rang again five seconds after I hung up.

  “Hello?”

  “Chrissy.”

  “Mom.” Perfect. That’d teach me to check caller ID. It’s not as if I don’t love my mother. It’s just easier with a little distance between us. Say, two thousand miles and an inhospitable desert or two.

  “I’m so glad I got ahold of you.” Her voice was tense. “Have you heard from Peter John?”

  “Pete?” My stomach immediately cranked up a notch. Pete’s my middle brother and probably the reason for four years of teenage acne. I’d like to blame him for other things, too. Say, the depletion of the ozone layer and the disappointing number of calories in a cup of peanut butter—but that might be unfair. “No. I haven’t heard from him. Why?” I asked, and immediately started rummaging through my cupboards, stretching the tangling telephone cord past the corner of my aged refrigerator. Familial contact tends to make me want to eat my weight in saturated fats.

  “He’s gone.”

  “Gone?” I repeated, momentarily abandoning my search. “What do you mean, gone?”

  “Just gone. Holly’s worried sick.”

  Holly is Pete’s girlfriend. She hadn’t been foolish enough to become Mrs. McMullen yet, but it didn’t look good for her continued mental health. She’d allowed him to move in with her last February as a kind of trial to see if they could cohabitate peaceably together. If Holly had the brains of a tea biscuit, she’d hie herself to a nunnery before the fatal words were spoken. History has shown that the McMullen brothers do not good husbands make. They’re not that fabu-lous at being human, either.

  “So he hasn’t called you? Or stopped in?”

  “Stopped in!” I gripped the cupboard door with white-knuckled fingers. “Here?”

  “He’s always wanted to see L.A., you know.”

  “No! No, I didn’t know.” I felt inexplicably panicked. Maybe it’s the fact that Pete had, in our younger years, enjoyed dispensing dead rodents like confetti and making me eat unpleasant items disguised as food. I don’t want to put too fine a point on the subject, but Pete’s an idiot.

  “Well, he has, and Holly thinks he might be heading your way.”

  I started rummaging in the cupboards again. Faster now. Where the hell was that peanut butter? I needed fat grams, stat.

  “Chrissy?”

  “Yes. I’m here.”

  “So you’ll call me if you hear from him, won’t you?”

  “Yes.” Right after I contacted 911.

&n
bsp; “Maybe if he shows up the two of you could drive home together.”

  My head snapped up. “What?”

  “It’s almost Thanksgiving.”

  “I know, but I—”

  “We haven’t seen you in months.”

  “Well, I can’t really leave—”

  “I bet Elaine is going to see her parents.” There was a grating whine in her voice, followed by dead silence. I stiffened my back.

  “I’m afraid my practice—”

  “Is she?”

  I cleared my throat. “What’s that?”

  “Is she coming home for the holidays?”

  “I don’t really know.” It was an out-and-out lie. Elaine had bought plane tickets more than three weeks ago. I felt perspiration pop out on my forehead like dandelions on Dad’s front lawn.

  “She’s always been such a nice girl. I bet she is.”

  “Well, maybe. I’m not—”

  “Never caused her mother a moment’s worry. Remember when she was in grade school? Remember? She’d bring her mom flowers every time—”

  I could feel a pimple erupting as she spoke. “Hey, Mom,” I said. “I think someone’s at my door.”

  “At your door?” Her tone was breathless. It’s not easy making Mom breathless. “Is it Peter John?”

  Maybe, but more likely it was just my fiendish attempt to get her off the phone before my head exploded like Chinese firecrackers. “I don’t know,” I said. “I’d better check.”

  “Call me if it is.”

  “Sure,” I said, and hung up like the chickenshit I am.

  After that, I went through my kitchen like a threshing crew, eating everything but the door handles.

  Guilt, and the fact that I felt like an overinflated water balloon, convinced me to go running. I laced up my shoes and chugged up Grapevine Avenue, then across on Orange. By the time I returned home I smelled like fermented skunk juice, but felt marginally better. Sometimes I run to keep the fat from squeezing the air out of my lungs. But sometimes it’s just because I don’t have a camel-hair shirt.

  I checked caller ID instead of the answering machine since it was several inches closer. Nothing. So I showered, then, limp from the exhilaration of exercise, I sat in my kitchen and carefully didn’t think about things . . . such as Pete and his fondness for dead rodents cleverly positioned between my blankets . . . or my mother and her fondness for other people’s daughters. Or Rivera.

  His memory sparked hot, dark feelings inside me. But thinking about him wouldn’t do me any good, since I’d never perfected the art of voodoo, so I might as well consider something else, like where the Geekmaster had gone.

  He was still nowhere to be found, despite my stellar sleuthing. In fact, I didn’t even know where he wasn’t, although I was pretty sure I could rule out the immediate vicinity, namely my kitchen.

  But maybe I was being hasty. Perhaps I’d better look in my freezer again. I did. He wasn’t there. But there was a bag of green beans, some fish sticks, and a box of individually packaged cheesecake slices.

  I was hungry again, maybe from running, maybe from talking to my mother, so I took out a piece and sampled it while I ruminated. It wasn’t bad, even frozen.

  I sat down at my battered kitchen table and called Elaine, but she didn’t answer. She was probably at her audition. But maybe she was home, moping and refusing to answer the phone.

  The idea made me a little sick to my stomach. I ate some more cheesecake as a sort of gastric balm.

  After an adequate influx of sugar, I realized that if I had so much as a pair of brain cells ricocheting around in my cranium, I would forget this whole Solberg fiasco. It wasn’t as if Laney couldn’t find herself a new and better man . . . one with hair that hadn’t been harvested from south of his belt line. So why was I knocking myself out trying to find the little twit?

  The truth was painfully obvious and came hard on the heels of the first wave of my glycogen high. I wanted to know there was hope . . . for me . . . for happily ever after . . . for Mars and Venus in the same orbit. And I knew, I was certain, that if someone like Solberg couldn’t be faithful to someone like Laney, girls like me—everyday kind of girls, girls with fat cells and hair disasters—were dead out of luck.

  I mean, she was Zany Elainy, voted girl most likely to . . . do whatever the hell she wanted . . . with whomsoever she damned well pleased.

  Why she chose to hang out with a freakazoid like Solberg was beyond my comprehension. I’d met him more than ten years ago at the Warthog in Schaumburg, Illinois, where I used to serve drinks. His come-on line had had something to do with his hard drive getting it on with my motherboard. Not the kind of suggestion that makes a girl go weak in the knees.

  I mean, I know good men are hard to come by. In fact, judging by my own rather checkered past, the species might have become extinct shortly following the demise of the Tyrannosaurus rex. Still, no woman with all her ducks in a row should settle for a Solberg. In fact, no woman who had any fowl of any sort should associate with a guy like Solberg.

  Then again, his neighbor had seemed strangely interested. And she looked like she had some poultry. What was that all about? One hip cocked against my cracked vinyl counter, I finished off the slice of cheesecake, returned to my frozen Mecca, and rummaged for something toward the ground level of the food pyramid. But the nutrition fairy had yet to arrive, so I settled for another cream cheese treat and was immediately rewarded with an insight: Why had Solberg’s classy neighbor been gardening in the dark?

  I’m not sure why I hadn’t come around to that question earlier. Maybe my own misplaced guilt regarding the confiscated mail had retarded my suspicions, but now the entire episode seemed ultimately surreal to me. Most people don’t go rummaging around in their backyards in the middle of the night.

  Well, all right, technically ten o’clock isn’t the middle of the night. But it was well after dark. What had Tiffany Georges been doing out there in her Barbie doll capris and gardening gloves?

  Curious enough to abandon dessert, I wandered into the adjoining room. Its size suggested that it might once have served as a closet for an adolescent midget. I used it for my office. I squeezed inside. Turns out my cheesecake had accompanied me. Huh. Loyalty. I like that in a dessert.

  Sitting down at my desk, I pulled the greater L.A. phone book from the bottom drawer and dragged it open.

  Georges isn’t an uncommon name. But it just so happened I knew Tiffany’s address—or at least her next-door neighbor’s.

  Her number was listed under “Jacob Georges.” Which probably meant that either little Tiffany was still living with her parents or she was married. Remembering her deplorable lack of fat molecules, I was betting on the latter.

  So where was her husband, and how did he feel about his wife inviting the Geekster over for supper? Not that he’d have anything to worry about. After all, Solberg wasn’t exactly Pierce Brosnan . . . or human. But still, he might be considered competition if . . . Nope, I thought. He was an irritating little worm from every possible angle. Surely there wasn’t a husband alive who would approve of his presence. So where was the husband?

  Firing up my PC, I did a Google search, but it soon became apparent that if Tiffany had buried her spouse in the backyard, it hadn’t hit the Times yet.

  And what the hell was I doing? I dropped my forehead onto my desk and groaned. What was I doing? Protecting Laney? Maybe. But the question remained—what should I do next? Logic suggested that if I was idiotic enough to continue my foray into Solberg’s missing person status, I should ask Elaine for some pertinent information about her little geek beau. But truth be told, I wasn’t absolutely positive Solberg wasn’t doing the horizontal bop with some bimbo in Vegas, and I had no desire to upset Laney further until I had all the facts. So I’d have to garner information by some other clever means.

  I ruminated on that for a moment, wondering who might know his whereabouts. No great brainstorms brewed in my mind. In fact, other than Solb
erg’s parents, I couldn’t think of anyone who might take an active interest in his life.

  So I dialed 411 and asked for the number of any Solbergs in Schaumburg, Illinois, where I’d first met him. The woman on the other end of the line sounded less than ecstatic that I didn’t have a first name, but she looked it up, then duly informed me there were more than twenty such listings in the surrounding area. She could give me the first three. I wrote down the names and phone numbers. Amy, Brad and Joyce, and Brianna. I called all of them. On the first two tries, I got answering machines. I left messages, asking to have Jeen contact me, and tried Brianna. She hung up before I even got done with my spiel. Brianna was kind of rude.

  Not knowing what else to do, I called Directory Assistance back and repeated the entire process. Whoever said third time’s the charm must have had more Irish luck than I do, because it wasn’t until my sixth trio of names that I hit the jackpot.

  “Solberg residence, Teri speaking.”

  I sat bolt upright in my chair. The woman’s voice sounded exactly like J.D.’s. If she had brayed like an ass, I would have been sure she was lying about her identity and was the Geekster himself. As it was, I cleared my throat and launched into “Hello. I’m looking for Jeen Solberg.”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line. I held my breath and scrambled to figure out how to handle the situa-tion. Maybe I should simply tell the truth.

  But the truth had rarely garnered me more than a grinding headache and a pack-a-day smoking habit. And I had no idea what to expect from this conversation. Maybe the geekster had taken out a second mortgage and bribed a Vegas dancer into spending the week with him. Maybe his parents thought fraternizing with a professional fornicator was a dandy idea and wouldn’t appreciate me sticking my nose in their baby boy’s business.

  “I’m sorry. He doesn’t live here anymore,” Teri said. “Can I take a message?”

  My plans fell into place with a snick of insanity. “Oh, well . . . hope so. This is Frances Plant.” Mail theft having its advantages, I’d seen the name in the byline of a Nerd Word article. It wasn’t until that moment that I realized Frances might be a man’s name, but it was a little late to change the timbre of my voice, so I charged on like a demented rhino. “I do a column for a kickin’ techno mag.”