LITMIR.BIZ

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History Channel, or occasionally the Discovery Channel.

      Bernice watched all day long. She was hooked on MTV and daytime sleaze shows. She bought herself a cheap boom box, and when she wasn’t watching TV she played the thing at full volume with the bass turned all the way up—or down, as the case may be—claiming her hearing wasn’t what it used to be.

      Small wonder.

      Lately, with the noise going full blast, she’d taken to doing something with her body she called the macaroni. Annie thought it looked as if she were counting off her body parts to be sure nothing was missing.

      And she had a cat. A house cat. The Reverend and Mrs. Summers had never allowed Annie to own a pet, claiming a parsonage was no place for animals. Annie had been meaning all along to get herself a nice, quiet cat from the shelter, but that was before Bernie. Before Zen. Bernie’s tomcat, Zen, was a fat, smelly, evil-tempered beast, half Persian, half coon cat, who delighted in doing his business in the indoor window boxes that lined the sun parlor and sharpening his claws on the upholstery.

      Now that it was too late, Annie realized she should have laid out a few house rules right from the first, but she hadn’t. Sweet, docile, dutiful Annie had been taught to respect her elders, and with all her eccentricities, Bernice was still an elder.

      So she politely fumed in silence, thought bad thoughts about Zen, who obviously thought them right back at her, and wallowed in guilt over her own uncharitable nature.

      But this was too much. Annie didn’t know whether to believe Bernie or not. She was obviously up to something, but marriage?

      Absurd. It was probably just another attempt to force Annie to find her an apartment and help her pay the rent. Merciful heavens, it was all Annie could do to keep up with the maintenance and repairs on her own house. She’d have sold the thing long ago except for the niggling feeling that it would be disloyal to her father, who’d been so thrilled at finally owning a house of his own, even if it was a relic in a declining neighborhood.

      “Oh, Bernie, why did you have to go and do something so foolish?” she asked the cat, who stared unblinkingly from a pair of malevolent yellow eyes.

      She would have to go after her, that was all there was to it. After a long day at school, dealing with the usual bureaucratic headaches, Annie had counted on leaving Bernie to her MTV and settling down in her bedroom study with a pot of tea, a little Mozart and a plate of whole-wheat crackers spread with tahini.

      Being head of a family was no easy job, even when that family consisted only of a couple of cousins who had nothing in common except for a single ancestor. So far, she hadn’t even found a way to explain Bernie to her fiancé and his mother.

      Four and a half years ago, Annie had gotten herself engaged. Since then she’d been waiting for Eddie to work the wanderlust out of his soul, come home and find a teaching position so they could settle down and raise a real family.

      Annie read the note again, ignoring the is dotted with tiny hearts. Ignoring the instructions for looking after Zen, who liked pink salmon, not dry cat food, and four percent milk, not one percent.

      Somewhere upstairs a loose shutter slammed against the side of the house. Zen whipped his bushy yellow tail around her ankles and smirked at her. “No wonder you’re such a fat slob,” she told the creature. “I hope you get hair balls.” She still hadn’t forgiven him for uprooting her twelve-year-old geranium.

      The Blue Flamingo was north of town on Highway 52. Miles and miles north of town. And it was raining. Annie hated driving in the rain. So did her car. Trust Bernice not to make this easy.

      Prove you love me.

      Is that what she was saying? Like children acting out in wildly inappropriate ways to get attention? To see if anyone cared enough to haul them back into line?

      She’d read reams on the subject of behavioral problems, but as assistant principal she’d never actually been called on to deal with them in person. Mostly she dealt with the mountains of paperwork necessary to the operation of a private day school.

      Almost everything Bernie did was wildly inappropriate for a woman of her age. She knew exactly how to get what she wanted, which was probably what this whole exercise was all about. It had taken her less than a day after moving in to learn how to play on Annie’s overgrown sense of responsibility.

      “One of these days,” Annie muttered as she backed down the driveway and headed north into the teeth of a cold, blowing rain, “I’m going to do something seriously irresponsible, I swear it.”

      The motel was even worse than she’d expected. Totally dismal, practically deserted, it made her want to cry. If there was anything more depressing than wet concrete blocks and scraggly, dead azaleas, she didn’t know what it was. Especially when seen in a drizzling rain under the flickering light of a broken neon sign.

      There were six units in all. Bernie’s elderly red convertible was pulled up in front of unit five. Annie took a deep breath and reminded herself once more that when children acted up, more often than not it was to gain attention. And as she hadn’t been as attentive as she might have been, Annie accepted at least part of the blame.

      With both her temper and her anxiety tamped down to a manageable level, she swung open the driver’s side door and stepped out just as a motorcycle roared into the space beside her.

      “Would you please watch where you’re going?” She glared first at the rider and then down at the muddy water he’d splashed on her coattail and pantyhose.

      “Lady, I’m not the one who opened a door without looking to see if it was clear.”

      “Well, excuse me, but the parking places are clearly marked.” Annie dug out a rumpled tissue and blotted a gray-spattered shin. She knew all about men who rode motorcycles.

      Well, actually, she didn’t. Not personally. Her dentist, a perfectly respectable father of three, owned a Harley. He had more pictures of the machine on his office wall than he did of his children.

      But there was nothing at all respectable looking about this man. He could have modeled for Bernie’s favorite poster, the one showing a quartet of grungy, angry young men slouching so that their respective pelvises were thrust forward in a way that was unsettling, if not actually indecent.

      Not that his was. Thrust forward, that was.

      She snapped her gaze back up to his face to find that he was glaring right back at her, taking in everything from her wet shoes to her soggy silk scarf, her rain-spattered glasses, her wrinkled old trench coat and the hair that was dripping down on her face.

      His opinion couldn’t have been more obvious.

      All right, so she was damp and a bit disheveled, at least she was decent. His jeans were not only wet, muddy and ragged, they showed every bulge on his body. And if that jaw of his had seen a razor in the past three days, she would be very much surprised. He looked like the kind of man parents of impressionable teenage girls warned their daughters against, and with just cause.

      A stick figure done in shades of brown. That was Tucker’s opinion of the woman who clumped past him, lifted a fist and banged on the door of number five, which, according to the zombie in what passed for an office, was registered to a Mr. and Mrs. H. Dennis.

      If this was the broad who’d sunk her hooks into his father, then the old man had lost his last marble. Coming up behind her, he said, “After you.”

      She glanced over her shoulder, not bothering to hide her uneasiness. “My next-door neighbor knows where I am. He’s a deputy sheriff.”

      “Yeah, well mine’s a retired dairy farmer. You going to knock again?”

      “Bernice doesn’t have any money. I don’t know what she led you to believe, but—”

      “Bernice? You’re not her?”

      “She. And of course I’m not.”

      “She, her—Lady, there’s

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