LITMIR.BIZ

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people her real identity, she had enough to focus on without worrying about his love life. Or, past love life.

      Not present. Caroline was definitely not part of his present.

      “So you’re going to rent out a room in your house. I still can’t understand why you didn’t just tell us if you needed help making the mortgage.”

      An old story. His parents were always trying to help, whether it was popping by to cook enough food for a battalion or offering him money. No matter how many times he’d told them he didn’t need their help, they never stopped offering. Sophie suffered the same endless good will.

      “I don’t need help making the mortgage.” True. He was fine, at least until the slow winter season came. That was the worst time of year in his business. So he’d thought he’d rent out a room in his big house—which he’d bought at auction and fixed up over the past two years—to fill in some. Of all the bad ideas he’d ever had…

      “And this Caro, she’s going to be living in your house, but you still say she’s not your type?”

      “She’s not going to live in my house,” he insisted as he sipped his rapidly cooling coffee, inhaling its aroma. Ed’s served good coffee. Good thing, since the food sucked.

      “What do you mean?”

      He sipped again. I mean the minute she finds out she’s signed a lease to room with the big bad wolf, a Day-Glo green room or a little cigarette smoke ain’t gonna seem so bad.

      “She’ll make other arrangements when she arrives Sunday.”

      In fact, he was going to make damn sure of it. He was ninety-nine percent sure Caroline would storm out on her own the minute she found out she’d rented a room in his house. And he’d give her every penny of her money back. The look on her face would be payment enough.

      But just in case, in the slim event that she liked his house enough to overlook the company, he’d developed a plan to help…uh…convince her.

      He wasn’t sure how yet, but one thing was definite. When Caroline Lamb arrived in Derryville, she was going to find a welcoming committee she’d never forget.

      

      CARO HATED FLYING. It seemed unnatural that something so big should stay in the air, defying gravity. If humans were meant to ride in airplanes, they’d be born with a frequent flier card and an airsick bag.

      Unfortunately, her job sometimes required long-distance travel. Like today. But, for once, landing didn’t seem much better than flying, which said a lot about how little she wanted to arrive at her eventual destination.

      “Derryville, Illinois,” she muttered. “How on earth could I have forgotten the name of Mick’s hometown?”

      She quickly put him out of her mind. Unfortunately, as had been the case for the past three weeks—not to mention the past eight years—he was never completely gone.

      She killed time in the usual way during the flight. And, as usual, she drew a few sidelong looks from her seat-mates and the passing flight attendant. Because she was singing.

      Oh, she tried not to, tried to do it just in her head, but she couldn’t help it. When Caro was nervous she couldn’t stop herself from breaking into song in a low, quavering voice. This time as she sang, she pictured Tootie and Blair and the gang.

      The woman next to her shot her a puzzled look. Caro almost identified the song as coming from The Facts of Life. Then she realized the woman probably wasn’t curious about the song. More about the wacky singer.

      Okay, so she was a professional twenty-eight-year-old woman with a great hairstyle, perfect makeup, wearing a thousand dollar Donna Karan suit and carrying a leather briefcase that had cost more than her first junker car.

      And she sang TV jingles under her breath.

      Sue me.

      Everyone had their quirks, didn’t they? At least she wasn’t clicking her teeth or cracking her knuckles or blowing her nose into a tissue and then peeking at the goods like other people she’d sat next to on airplanes.

      All in all, her nervous habit seemed pretty innocuous. It was just the TV part that made it look weird. If she’d been humming the latest Alanis Morissette song, nobody would have looked twice.

      But Caro’s nervous singing habit stuck strictly to her childhood repertoire of TV theme songs and jingles. Like a gambler might only play at a particular table, or an athlete wear a particular pair of socks, Caro relied on her old standby for good luck in avoiding things like midair collisions: television.

      It had been her baby-sitter, then best friend and closest companion throughout her childhood. She’d needed somewhere to lose herself with two parents who worked all the time and either fought like cats and dogs or went at it like bunnies—depending on their moods—when they were home. Either way, she’d learned to keep the TV turned up as a kid. Loud—to block out the sounds. So loud that she could swear she still sometimes heard the tune the Huxtables had danced to in 1983 or every note from the Family Ties ditty.

      Family Ties or The Cosby Show her family definitely was not.

      From the seat in front of her, a man began to hum the song from Cheers. Funny how everybody responded to TV. Like it or not—and Caro liked it—television was as intrinsic to American culture as a Big Mac. It sparked water cooler debates, show-watching parties, betting pools and hairstyles.

      It was also good for airline small talk. Caro strictly avoided weather chats on airplanes, because of the whole lightning, burning, crashing thing. She stuck to TV. She just had to be sure she didn’t talk about any disaster movies of the week. Sitcoms were safe. Soaps were right out.

      This wasn’t the first time Caro had gotten distracted from her fear of flying by getting into a discussion of how the dancing midget had been the beginning of the end for Twin Peaks, or how lame the last season of Roseanne had been.

      Or this. “Mikey from the Life commercials did not die of a Pop Rocks and Pepsi eruption,” she said to the older woman sitting across the aisle. Caro was in the biz. She knew the urban legends.

      “Well, I heard he did.” The woman sniffed and turned away.

      The one beside her in the center seat continued to feign sleep, probably wondering why she always ended up beside the psychos on airplanes. Caro didn’t mind seeming psycho. It kept her distracted from the flying. Or, rather, the crashing. That was the part about flying that she really didn’t like—the crashing part. She wasn’t MacGyver, who’d crashed with four teenage gang kids and survived by making stuff out of other stuff.

      “Another one down,” she whispered after the plane landed.

      “Next time take a sleeping pill,” she heard. Turning, she saw her seat mate. The woman smiled. “I do. It works every time.”

      “Thanks.” Caro could have been put out with general anesthesia and she didn’t think that’d relieve the anxiety. Frankly, she’d rather be conscious and alert in the last few minutes before her death, if she really was going to do the crashing and burning thing.

      “Crash and burn,” she muttered. Funny, that’s pretty much what had happened on her first ever plane trip. Okay, not on her first plane trip, but rather right before it.

      She and Mick had crashed and burned right before she’d dropped out of college and flown out west, needing to make a fresh start somewhere where she wouldn’t hear rumors about his latest escapades or run into him with his latest girlfriend. A distinct probability since the first couple of times she’d met Mick had been when he was with his girlfriend of the week.

      She’d heard the stories from the time she’d started school. Mick was the guy who’d climbed down a third-floor drainpipe to avoid being caught with someone in an on-campus sorority house. The charmer who’d somehow managed to get Hootie and the Blowfish to play at the homecoming dance. The prankster who’d rigged the electronic scoreboard at the football

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