Twanged

by Carol Higgins Clark

  “I’ve never seen a gold digger with a bigger shovel,” his mama had said.

  But the story had a happy ending. Bettina, just separated from a husband she couldn’t stand talking about, had called Chappy to express her condolences when she’d learned of Chappy’s mother’s passing. So what if she’d only heard a couple of years after Hilda Tinka’s demise?

  “I’ve just heard the terrible news,” she’d said. “We’ve lost Mother.”

  Funny, Chappy had thought at the time. Bettina had never called her anything but “that old bat” during their marriage. But Chappy had realized that maturity brought forgiveness and understanding to Bettina. They’d been reunited and in September would celebrate the one-year anniversary of their second go at marriage. Now they divided their time between a sprawling Park Avenue apartment and their castle in Southampton.

  “She’s getting ready for a season with Peace Man in the meditation room. The ladies have all arrived,” Constance said breathlessly.

  “Very well,” he grunted as he charged down the hallway, past the old family snapshots of his parents and grandparents in their Sunday best sitting in the sand under the broiling hot sun. Framed pictures of celebrities in the grips of his and Bettina’s arms also adorned the walls. Most of the celebrities wore the expression of deer staring into headlights, having been pounced on by Bettina at the moment of recognition.

  A blown-up picture of a miniature Chappy smiling out from his baby buggy was Chappy’s favorite.

  He kept walking. At the other end of his gargantuan summer home was a turreted room with floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out on the Atlantic. Peace Man was Bettina’s new guru, and he liked to lead his chanting sessions in there.

  “We are close to the sea and the salty air. We are close to the source of life. Peace Man likes it in here,” he’d said, as usual referring to himself in the third person.

  Chappy stood in the hallway and watched as ladies from other expensive houses, who had been scrounged up by Bettina, sat down in yoga position on the floor and shut their eyes. Peace Man was busying himself plugging in his lava lamp. Bettina was sitting right up front, anxious to soak up every scrap of New Age garbage that Peace Man would offer. It really bugged Chappy to see her so mesmerized by a weird guy with a shaved head who wore a light green outfit that looked as if it had been issued by the state.

  Finally, Peace Man spread out his hands to the assemblage. “My sisters, are you ready to get in touch with your inner child?”

  “Yes, Peace Man,” they answered in hushed tones.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, Peace Man.”

  “Now I want you all to relax. We need to open ourselves up. To be available to what the universe sends us. To pick up its energy and heal ourselves. To see the light. Have any of you, my sisters, had a near-death experience?”

  “YES! I did, Peace Man!” a platinum-haired twig called out with her eyes still shut tight.

  “Tell Peace Man about it,” he said in a soothing tone.

  “My husband cut up my American Express card.”

  Gasps rippled through the room. “That’s worse than death,” a nasal voice honked from the corner.

  “Sisters, sisters, hush now. Material goods are not what we seek. Spirituality is something that money can’t buy. . . .”

  Chappy turned away. “Then what do you do with all that money you collect from me?” he grumbled to himself.

  “Mr. Tinka, oh, Mr. Tinka,” Constance called, breathless again, as she came running toward him, practically skidding in her cowboy boots on the slick mahogany floor. Chappy liked it when the staff wore western-style clothing.

  “What now?” God, what a day, he thought.

  “Duke is back. He’s looking for you.”

  “He’s back! He didn’t call first. Well, where is he? Where? Where? Where?” he asked, spitting out the words.

  Constance gestured dramatically. “I told him to wait in your study and I’d find you. This house is so big and I feel old today.”

  Chappy didn’t run very often, never really exercised much because he was out of shape and it was so hard to start, but this occasion deserved a bit of a sprint on his part. He reached the double doors of his study and frantically pushed them open.

  Duke, grinning like the Cheshire cat, sat in the studded leather wingback chair, holding on to the fiddle case. “I’ve got it, boss!” he cried, raising it up in the air as if he had just won Wimbledon.

  Fumbling, Chappy closed the doors behind him. “Give me that,” he blurted, grabbing the treasure and laying it out on his antique desk. Carefully he unbuckled it. “I’ll have to replace this cheap case.”

  He pulled out the fiddle, examined it as Duke sat there smiling, and suddenly screamed, “I ALWAYS KNEW YOU WERE AN IDIOT! THIS ISN’T IT! WHERE ARE MY INITIALS?”

  Duke, an aspiring actor himself, who had devoted the last ten of his thirty-five years to working as Chappy’s assistant when he wasn’t chasing down a part or memorizing lines from plays, frowned at the employer he’d actually met in an acting class a decade before. Chappy had had to secretly sign up for it because his mother was still alive: She disapproved of Chappy’s thespian aspirations almost as much as she disapproved of Bettina. “What are you talking about? You can always get it mono-grammed.”

  “THE MAGICAL FIDDLE I WANTED HAD MY INITIALS ON IT! THIS ISN’T THE RIGHT FIDDLE! WHOSE IS IT?” he screamed.

  Duke stared blankly, something that he did many times a day. He ran his hands through his wavy, shoulder-length blond hair and shrugged his broad shoulders. “I don’t know, man. I snuck into Malachy’s house, risking my butt, and took the fiddle he was playing with. I saw him playing it! I stuck it in the case and never looked at it again until now!”

  “Well, this isn’t the fiddle I need for Fiddler on the Roof!” Chappy stomped his foot and sat down.

  “Fiddler on the Roof?” Duke repeated. “Did you get a part in something and not tell me?”

  “NO! For the Chappy Theatre, stupid. And I also need it for feng shui when the theatre is built.”

  “Is that a new play?”

  “NO! It’s the Chinese art of placing special objects around the home so things go better. Rearranging the furniture and such.”

  “I get it.”

  “Well, thank God. Now, you didn’t see any other fiddle in his house?”

  Duke stared into space and scrunched up his nose, the only indication he ever gave of being deep in thought. “No, man, he lived in a one-room cottage. Wow, it was small. Not too much furniture to arrange there. I didn’t see any other fiddle. Hmm,” he uttered. “Hmmmm. Hmmmmm.”

  “WHAT ARE YOU HMMMMMING ABOUT?”

  “I stole a tape recorder he’d been talking into.”

  Chappy looked at him, appalled by what he had just heard. “Why did you do that?”

  “Mine broke before I left. Maybe we should hear what he was talking about.” As he reached into his carry-on bag, Duke said, “It was really weird. I thought the old dude was just talking to himself when I was watching him from the window. But when I went inside I saw this . . .” He placed the small machine on the desk.

  “HURRY UP!” Chappy yelled.

  “Chill, man, chill,” Duke urged. He rewound the tape and pressed PLAY.

  The two men listened intently as Malachy blathered on about fiddles and storytelling. Finally they got to the good part.

  “HE GAVE IT AWAY!” Chappy moaned as he pounded his desk. “BUT TO WHOM?”

  “Play on, Brigid!” Malachy said.

  “BRIGID?” Chappy cried. “Ignore the curse? What was he talking about?”

  “Listen,” Duke said, his ear cocked. The sound of a door opening and the wind whistling came through the tinny machine. “That’s my entrance,” he noted excitedly.

  “You are an idiot,” Chappy said as he scratched his face. “Brigid. Brigid was the name of the girl he was playing with at the pub. The bartender said she’s about to become a real
star.”

  Duke sighed. “Lucky duck.”

  “We’ve got to find her. Somehow we’ve got to find her. Maybe you should go back to Ireland.”

  “But I’m tired right now,” Duke complained. “And I’ve got a suitcase of dirty laundry.”

  “Tomorrow, then.” Chappy leaned over his desk and growled at his employee and fellow thespian. “Don’t forget. I’m doing this for Chappy’s Theatre by the Sea, and you know what that means.”

  “You’ll hire no directors who won’t cast both of us.”

  “That’s right, you moron. Now go do your wash. Tomorrow you’re headed back to Shamrocksville so we can find Brigid and that cursed fiddle once and for all!”

  That night Chappy lay in bed with the big fluffy quilt pulled up around his chin for comfort, one hand exposed just enough so the ever-present remote control could be aimed at the big-screen television opposite the king-sized bed. The cavernous boudoir was designed with every creature comfort as yet thought-up by man. Ocean breezes blew through the large window, and if nature couldn’t be depended on to lower the temperature in the room to a pleasant sixty-five degrees, an electronic cooler kicked in. The place was built to look like a castle but behave like the starship Enterprise.

  Bettina was in the bathroom, nearly a city block away, engaged in her nightly ritual of applying creams and potions, anything on the market that laid any claim whatsoever to staving off the aging process. It was at this time every night that Chappy would lie there, the remote control in his hand giving him a heady sense of power, and zap from one station to the next. Most of the images went by in a blur. His limited attention span presented a particular challenge to broadcasters. If he wasn’t enticed within seconds, like a child with a new toy, the program on the screen was passed over for the next offering.

  Tonight he felt positively peevish. Peevish and restless. “And miles to go before I sleep,” he kept thinking. “And miles to go before I sleep.” I won’t rest until I have that fiddle, he thought. I know I won’t.

  Normally he enjoyed the nice feel of his Brooks Brothers pajamas and “one hundred and ten” percent cotton sheets, as he liked to call them. But all he could think about was the stick of wood from a dead tree back in Ireland that was enjoying its incarnation as the Fiddle of the Cliffs. It intrigued him that not only did it bring good luck, but it also carried some kind of curse. It only made him want it more.

  Zap! went the remote control. “Good evening. On werewolf hour we have as our special guest—”

  Zap! “ . . . To find out about your hidden potential, call our operators at 1-800-. . .”

  Zap! “ . . . When I found out he liked to wear my nightgowns around the house, I must admit I got a little worried. . . .”

  “How distasteful,” Chappy muttered. But it was the next zap that changed Chappy’s life. At least temporarily.

  “ . . . Country Music Cable is here in Nashville, and we’re talking to Brigid O’Neill, who with a heated performance won the fiddling contest at Fan Fair just yesterday. Brigid, tell us how that feels.”

  “Oh, it’s just the greatest, Vern. My mentor in Ireland gave me his fiddle. He’d won the all-Ireland fiddling contest over there with it. It’s a very old, magical instrument, and when I got up there at the contest yesterday, I felt like I was being swept away by its power. Legend has it that this was made from the wood of a special tree. . . .” As the bubbly redheaded chanteuse held up the fiddle for the camera, Chappy let out an ungodly moan.

  “I’ll be right there,” Bettina yelled from the bathroom. “Every year this takes longer and longer.”

  Chappy sprang from his bed as the initials CT jumped out at him from the fiddle on his enormous-screen TV. With trembling fingers he quickly pressed the RECORD button on his ever-ready VCR. “This is it,” he mumbled. “This is it!”

  “We’ve heard that this fiddle is supposed to have a curse on it if it leaves Ireland,” the interviewer said to Brigid.

  “Well, isn’t that the silliest thing, Vern? I just won the Fan Fair fiddling contest with it. If that’s a curse, then I want to be cursed all the time. . . .”

  Vern laughed. “I suppose you’re right, Brigid.”

  When the brief interview, which in his excitement he had barely focused on, was over, Chappy yanked the tape out of the machine and ran like a man possessed from his room and into the hotel-sized hallway, nearly bumping into a table that had been moved by the feng shui expert. In a blur he raced to the wing where Duke was now dead to the world, resting up in his room for the trip to Ireland he would no longer have to take.

  3

  AT A DINER ON THE ROAD BETWEEN

  BRANSON, MISSOURI, AND THE HAMPTONS

  He stared down at the little article in USA Today that heralded the addition of Brigid O ‘Neill to the Melting Pot Music Festival in the Hamptons on July the Fourth.

  Nervously he slurped his coffee. “Hey, waitress,” he called in a squeaky voice. “How about another cup of joe? I’m running low here.”

  “No prob,” she called back as she added up the check she was about to plunk on the counter where another lone diner had just partaken of his breakfast. Scooping up the coffeepot without even looking, she walked to the booth and started to pour. “So, hon, can I take these dishes away for you?” She asked.

  “Not done yet,” he said.

  She looked down at the thick white dinner plate, practically licked clean except for the thinnest coating of egg yolk she ‘d ever seen in her twenty-odd years of slinging hash. He’d mopped it mighty hard with his English muffin. It didn ‘t faze her, though. She’d seen it all in this job. Especially on the late-night shift. “Another muffin?” she asked.

  “Nope,” he answered as he slurped his freshly refilled cup.

  “Holler if you need me.” She walked off, her white rubbersoled shoes squeaking slightly on the grimy floor.

  He stared down at the paper again. The Melting Pot Music Festival in the Hamptons. Melting Pot, my foot, he thought. You’re allowed in the Melting Pot only if you ‘ve got a lot of gold to throw in with you.

  But Brigid O ‘Neill was coming to the Hamptons with her fiddle. That’s all that counted. Right after he was so rudely thrown in jail, her hit song, “If I’da Known You Were in Jail (I Wouldn‘t a Felt So Bad about You Not Callin’),” had come on the radio. It was the first time he had heard it. He was sure she was sending a message to him.

  Now he was in love with her. If he could just get the chance to be alone with her, he was sure she would feel the same way about him. Like in the movie The Sheik, which his mother liked to watch. Rudolph Valentino had kidnapped the girl and carried her off to his tent in the desert, and she fell in love with him. Why couldn‘t that happen to him with Brigid? He hadn’t been able to get close to her at Fan Fair or in Branson, where he’d camped out in the woods. But she was coming to the Hamptons, where he lived in a shack off the beaten path. Another sign from her! He would find a way to get to her there!

  Time to get back on the road and head home. He ‘d done enough wandering around this week.

  4

  FRIDAY, JUNE 27

  LOS ANGELES

  Regan Reilly sat at the scarred wooden desk in her perfectly adequate office on the fourth floor of an old building on Hollywood Avenue in Los Angeles—home to her private investigative agency. Battered files lined the opposite wall, old-fashioned black-and-white tiles covered the ancient floor, and a small window offered a somewhat limited view of the Hollywood Hills.

  To Regan it was the perfect home office—actually the only office of her one-woman operation. She had contacts all over the country to help her out when she needed it, and her handy computer with all its databases to find out everything you wanted to know about who were checking out and were probably right in being afraid to ask.

  Investigating suspects’ past, uncovering their present, and maybe altering their future gave Regan great delight. Her parents, Nora and Luke Reilly, concluded that the choice of occu
pations of their thirty-one-year-old only child could be attributed to equal parts nature and nurture. “You were born with an antenna for gossip,” Nora always said. Since Nora wrote suspense novels and Luke owned three funeral homes in Summit, New Jersey, Regan’s formative years were spent listening to numerous conversations about crimes and cause of death.

  Regan poured a second cup of coffee from the thermos on her desk. Lately she’d decided that making a pot of coffee when she woke up and bringing the remains with her to work made sense. The sole drawback was that it didn’t fill the room with the wonderful scent that only a coffeepot gives off, but the old-building smell that permeated her office, nothing antiseptic about it, made Regan happy.

  Outside, the California sun was shining mercilessly, it being unseasonably hot for the month of June. On days like this, Regan loved to hole up in her office and become absorbed by her work. But today was Friday, and Regan was really there just to tie up loose ends. In the evening she was flying out on the “red eye” to Newark. A car would pick her up and take her to her parents’ house, then in the afternoon they’d all drive to the vacation home in the Hamptons that Luke and Nora had bought just last year.

  The Hamptons, a collection of beachside villages on the South Fork of Long Island, were about a two-hour drive from New York City, depending, of course, on the traffic. Sometimes called “Hollywood East,” the South Fork was considered a high-profile stage because of all the celebrities it attracted during the summer months. With its tip jutting out as far as eighty miles into the Atlantic Ocean, the Hamptons were renowned for an almost-magical light that illuminated the flat picturesque landscape. People flocked there to see and be seen and to enjoy not only all that nature had to offer but also the parties and socializing that went full steam ahead between Memorial and Labor Days.

  Regan’s Fourth of July week would be spent going back and forth between her parents’ home in Bridgehampton and the group house that her best friend, Kit, an insurance agent from Hartford, Connecticut, had unexpectedly joined out there. Group houses in the Hamptons consisted mostly of singles from the New York City area who rented houses together in pursuit of sun, fun, and that elusive someone who might be found at any of the parties that took place in the more than fifty-mile stretch of towns from Westhampton to Montauk. It was like a big game of hide-and-seek for adults.