by JC Grey
Rowdy looked uncomfortable. ‘Look, Miz Blaze. It’s really not necessary. I’ve found a young bloke to help out when need be. Name’s Trent Blamey. Nice kid.’
‘Oh.’ She was crestfallen. No one wanted to be around her today, it seemed.
‘But someone has to choose all the fittings,’ Rowdy pointed out. The closet design, handles, bathroom fixtures, tiles. Could you do that? And perhaps you could take care of the paperwork?’
‘Yes, yes of course.’ Blaze beamed. ‘And when you get around to the tiling and painting, maybe I can help with that. I stripped some of the old paint from the front windows yesterday. Have a look and tell me if I did okay.’
Rowdy grinned back at her, his face creasing into the first full-blown expression of satisfaction she’d seen. ‘Right you are, Miz Blaze.’
‘Just Blaze,’ she reminded him. She was smiling as she headed up the stairs.
But she wasn’t smiling four hours later. She’d met Stella for a rushed bite to eat between her new friend’s shifts at the airport. It was too hot to sit outside so they’d found a casual café that promised air conditioning, although it was still far from cool. Their trout salads, though, were crisp and fresh and the herb bread freshly baked.
‘Did you hear about Peggy Fairchild?’ Stella asked as they tucked in.
Blaze frowned. ‘Isn’t she Macauley Black’s housekeeper?’ She controlled the urge to spit out the man’s name.
Stella nodded, face grim. ‘Apparently they had an intruder at Rosmerta last night. Peggy’s got serious head injuries. They’ve put her in an induced coma.’
Blaze put a hand to her mouth in horror. ‘That’s terrible. Do they know who did it?’
‘No idea. I mean who’d want to hurt a nice lady like Peg?’
Blaze thought about that one. ‘Pete . . . Pete someone,’ she blurted suddenly. ‘I heard he and Macauley Black had a run-in. Maybe it was payback and he got the wrong person.’
‘Maybe.’ Stella pursed her lips and her eyes had a sly gleam. ‘And you know what? Mac wasn’t at home when it happened! I’d like to know whose bed his boots were parked under.’
Casually popping another morsel of trout into her mouth as though the topic was only of mild interest, Blaze shrugged. ‘Who cares about Macauley Black’s sex life?’
‘You kidding?’ Stella laughed. ‘Everyone, including me! You have to admit he’s a hunk, all dark and brooding. And he knows his way around a woman’s body.’ She fanned her face. ‘From what I hear.’
‘Do we have to speculate about my neighbour’s sex life?’
‘Well, there’s precious little else to gossip about in this backwater.’ Stella’s smile died. ‘Sorry, I forgot . . . I didn’t mean anything. I mean, there’s been talk, but I just ignore that stuff.’
‘Forget it,’ Blaze told her, searching for a way to change the subject. ‘Anyway, as long as you promise not to gossip about this, I can tell you that I’ve started renovations on Sweet Springs. Or at least Rowdy Parsons has. We’re going to turn the attic level into a master suite, and open up the kitchen to the dining room. But please don’t say anything,’ she pleaded. ‘I really don’t want to have to be under siege from photographers in my own home.’
Stella made a lip-zipping sign. ‘Don’t worry, us Meriwetherans always protect our own. Although, actually, I knew about it already.’
Blaze groaned. ‘The local grapevine.’
‘Sort of. My little brother, Trent, is going to be helping Rowdy.’
‘God!’ Blaze shook her head. ‘I forgot how there’s only about half a degree of separation in this place.’
‘Yeah. But anyway, I’ll emphasise to Trent about no blabbing to his mates.’
‘Thanks,’ said Blaze. ‘I appreciate it.’
‘Yeah, well, to show me how much, tell me how you keep your hair in such fabulous condition.’
Their conversation slid readily into more comfortable territory, but despite the pleasant chatter, Blaze’s thoughts returned several times to Macauley Black’s housekeeper. It seemed that even this sleepy backwater wasn’t immune to violence.
Mac squeezed Peggy’s still hand where it rested on the bedcovers and retreated outside her hospital room to join Detective Sergeant Andrew Ryan. For the first time since the young policeman had moved to Meriwether six years ago, he looked genuinely alarmed.
‘Who the hell would do this to Peggy?’ He asked the question rhetorically. ‘It just makes no sense. She had no enemies, there’s little financial motive, she wasn’t in a relationship.’ He stopped at the last, and shot a look at Mac from world-weary cop eyes. ‘Are you sure there was no guy hanging around?’
Mac rubbed a hand over his face tiredly. He’d been at the hospital since early this morning. ‘Unless she had a secret lover tucked away somewhere. But I just don’t see it. She still spoke about Frank, her late husband, like he was the love of her life.’
‘Doesn’t mean she didn’t need companionship or sex,’ Ryan said.
‘True,’ Mac agreed. ‘But she never mentioned anyone. You’ve spoken to her kids, her friends, and they say there was no man on the scene.’
‘Well, I don’t get it. Crimes like this, it’s almost always someone known to the victim. I won’t close off any avenue of enquiry, but the chances of it being a random attack or a robbery gone wrong in this area, well, it’d be the exception that proves the rule.’
Together they walked down the hospital corridor, two powerfully built men lost in their own thoughts. Outside, Mac unlocked the door to his truck and was about to get in when he stopped suddenly.
‘Pete Woodall.’
‘Your jackaroo?’
‘Ex.’ Mac told Ryan bluntly. ‘Fired him the other day. Paid him off but he wasn’t happy about losing his job.’
‘So why would he attack Peggy? He’d go after you —’
Mac raised his eyebrows. ‘Exactly. Just think. Woodall’s been brooding for a few weeks; reckons he’s been hard done by and wants his revenge. Peg rarely stays nights at Rosmerta. She’d had painting done at her place and didn’t want to sleep there last night because of the fumes. But Woodall probably wouldn’t have known that.’
‘He would have assumed you’d be the only person at home.’ Ryan tilted his head to one side. ‘Could work. It’s dark, he whacks the wrong person.’
‘Probably he’d had a skinful, too. Not thinking straight.’
‘Well, the forensics guy is almost certain the skillet did the damage. Maybe we’ll get some useful info from him.’
Mac got into the truck and lowered the window. ‘Woodall would have been in the kitchen a number of times when he was working for me, so his DNA’s almost certain to show up on the bench top and elsewhere.’
‘Even if we get a fingerprint on the skillet, it could be hard to prove a connection with the attack beyond a shadow.’ Ryan sighed. ‘Anyway, thanks, mate. I’ll track him down. You know, I thought I’d left crap like this behind when I got the hell out of Sydney.’
‘Well, you’ve had a good run the last few years.’
‘I guess I’d got to like the idea of small-town policing,’ Ryan mused. ‘Pub brawls, the occasional shoplifting case and traffic snarls during the Meriwether Festival are about as intense as it usually gets up here. We haven’t seen this kind of violent crime since before I moved up here.’ He frowned. ‘I kind of like the quiet life. I just hope this isn’t a sign of things to come.’
Chapter Seven
Blaze threw her mobile on to the couch in disgust, in part because Macauley Black still hadn’t called, and also because it was the fifth time she’d checked it since she’d returned from town. And that didn’t include all the other times she’d glanced towards it during the day, wondering if by some freakish chance she’d missed his call. She hadn’t because he hadn’t called. Sure, he’d probably had a horrible day, what with the attack on his housekeeper, but still, a call only took a couple of minutes.
Paddy laid his head on her knee, and sh
e scratched absently at it. She should be happy with her productive day. Following her lunch with Stella, she’d checked out all the kitchen and bathroom stores in the vicinity, of which there were precisely three, and one of those had been nearly thirty kilometres to the north of Meriwether. None had been high-end, but one had a catalogue with the sort of good-quality fixtures Blaze favoured, and had given her some useful web addresses. They could order in anything she chose, they said.
One item she was definitely after was the egg bath. To be totally in keeping with Sweet Springs, she should have looked for a restored ball-and-claw-foot tub, but the freestanding egg bath was the modern equivalent and would look wonderful in the spacious bathroom Rowdy would carve out of the attic space. She’d also seen a large shower rose that would work well, but she needed to do more research.
Late in the afternoon, she’d hit the mall to buy work shirts, shorts and jeans, and a few groceries. Marianne had been working another supermarket checkout, but Blaze had waved at the girl, receiving a surprised ‘Hi’ back. The girl looked as unhappy as ever, but the store was busy and Blaze didn’t have a chance to ask her if the situation with her mother had improved at all.
Guiltily, Blaze had realised it had been a while since she’d thought of her own parents, perhaps because even before their deaths, she’d drifted away from them, emotionally as well as geographically.
As she’d driven back through the town, she’d stared out the window at the mothers and occasional father who’d picked up their kids after school. Waiting at the crossing near an ice-cream van, she’d overheard snatches of squabbles, whining, homework reminders, discussions about the school day just gone, teasing and affection. Maybe her memory was warped, but Blaze didn’t remember much in the way of teasing affection from her own childhood.
Until her teens, Blaze had thought her family entirely normal. And then for a couple of years, it had seemed her life was so much more exciting than her friends’. Acting and dance classes, talent contests, auditions, commercials. She’d had fabulous clothes, been allowed make-up far earlier than her peers, and if her school marks weren’t up to scratch she was told not to worry because she, Blaze Gillespie, was destined for stardom. Nothing had been allowed to intrude on her charmed world.
For a few years she’d been a thoroughly precocious princess until her sixteenth birthday arrived, bringing with it a sudden rebellious reluctance to do anything her parents wanted. The dance classes and talent contests came to an abrupt halt when she simply refused to go. She wanted to go to the movies and the beach with her friends, flirt with cute boys and steal an illicit smoke behind the bike sheds at school.
Bewildered rather than angry, her parents had tried rational explanation and then pleading. It was her destiny, they’d told her over and over. She had rare talent – and every advantage they could give her. How could she think of throwing it all away? Did she have any idea of all they’d sacrificed for her? How lucky she was?
But as adulthood dawned, so, too, did the realisation that it was their dream she had been following rather than her own. And when, at seventeen, she dropped out of performing arts school, her parents conveyed their disappointment with a chilly dismissal that drove a permanent wedge between them.
Ironically, she was a few days short of her eighteenth birthday when a TV producer who remembered seeing one of her commercials from years before approached her for a new teen series. It didn’t last long, but it reignited her interest in drama and led to an impressive cameo in a little-seen but well-regarded local film and an offer of representation by a US agent. At barely twenty she moved to Los Angeles to follow the path that struggling actors had taken for decades.
She’d found it so tough that, at the end of three years, she’d been almost ready to give in and consider other careers, but her innate stubbornness had kept her going. And then she’d struck gold.
Blaze had met a brother-sister screenwriting team at a party, struck up a conversation, ended up reading their work, made a call and one thing led to another. The movie had been made the following year with Blaze in the first of many high-profile vamp roles she would play. Then her face began appearing on magazine covers and within months her asking price hit six figures. Blaze Gillespie was the new ‘It’ girl. And her parents suddenly started telephoning, seeking reconciliation.
Too busy still holding a grudge, Blaze had put off a visit home, and four months later they’d tried to drive through a flash flood and been swept to their deaths. Blaze was the triumphant, tragic glamour girl of Hollywood, and the guilt was almost unbearable.
The phone buzzed beside her on the couch, jolting her from unpleasant memories. She snatched it up, and her heart did a quick double pump at the display: Macauley Black. But she wasn’t the kind of girl who waited for men to call, so she answered with a casual ‘Hi’ and waited for the apologies to flow.
‘Is Rowdy there?’ His voice was brusque and un-lover-like.
Blaze felt her hackles rising. ‘No. And this is not his voice mail service, so if you want to speak to him —’
‘Calm down. I don’t want to speak to him. I want to know if you have anyone with you.’
‘Don’t you tell me to calm down, Macauley Black,’ she flared. ‘How dare you walk out this morning like I was some easy lay, and then not call?’
She was too pissed off to care that she’d blown her cool within five seconds of speaking to him.
‘Easy, Hollywood.’ His voice sounded tired. ‘I would have called, but it’s been a hell of a day. I’ve only just left the hospital. There was an incident this morning at Rosmerta, which was why I left so early. It wasn’t quite . . . what I had planned for this morning.’
Blaze squeezed her eyes shut. He must think she was totally self-obsessed, which she probably was.
‘Sorry,’ she muttered. ‘Stella told me about your housekeeper. How is she?’
‘In a coma,’ he told her, his voice hard. ‘Bashed senseless, and the cops don’t have a clue. Which means you’re not safe being there alone. I need to be here tonight and I want you with me.’
She thought about it for a moment. Someone was sure to find out if she spent the night there, and right now she would do anything to stay out of the gossip columns. Besides which, she’d been all but driven out of LA and the last thing she wanted was to provoke a media reaction that would end her peaceful life at Sweet Springs.
‘It’s not a good idea.’
‘Blaze . . . I can make it worth your while.’ His low voice was dark sin, rasping in her ear, and goose bumps shot up all over her body.
‘I can’t risk it. If it becomes public knowledge . . .’
‘Who cares?’ He was impatient now, his standard response when she refused to fall in with his plans. ‘People around here have got better things to talk about than who’s sleeping with who.’
Blaze rolled her eyes. ‘Maybe people who haven’t been the subject of a double-page spread of sleaze in the paper just days ago really believe that. But I’m over having my private life splashed all over the tabloids and the subject of idle gossip.’
‘Ignore it. People are going to know we’re seeing each other when I take you to dinner on Friday, anyway.’ It wasn’t a request for a date; it was a command.
‘I can’t,’ she said, her voice tight. ‘You don’t understand —’
‘Really? What don’t I understand?’
‘That it’s best if we keep this under wraps.’
‘Oh, I understand plenty,’ he said. ‘I’m fine to fuck but not good enough to have dinner with.’
‘It’s not like that. I just have to be discreet.’
‘Somehow the words “sex tape” and “discreet” just don’t go together in my mind,’ he snapped. ‘Shit! Forget that. I was out of line.’
Hurt and humiliation swamped Blaze and she bit her lip until she was sure she could speak without crying.
‘Way out of line.’ She cut off the call, only for a message to flash up almost immediately.
Need him? She needed men like Macauley Black like she needed another terrible headline – never again!
Blaze moped miserably about the house for the rest of the evening. Her stomach was too churned up to eat. After pouring a glass of wine, hoping it would relax her, she took Mac’s advice and lured Paddy in with a choice bone and locked the door behind him. Now that Rowdy had fixed it, there was no chance of anyone bursting in unexpectedly, but that was cold comfort right now.
Paddy seemed a little confused, but in the end settled down in the bed she made for him in the kitchen, while Blaze went upstairs to get an early night. What a difference twenty-four hours made. Last night at this time, she and Mac had been wrapped around each other like a vine around a tree, and —
Blaze put the brakes on her thoughts. There was no point tormenting herself; it had clearly been a one-night stand. Just chalk it up to a moment of insanity.
Her phone rang and her heart thumped, until she heard her agent’s voice, talking at a million miles an hour about the piece in Inside Hollywood, which had just hit the newsstands.
‘Everyone’s talking about it,’ Jaxon told her.
‘Is that good or bad?’ Blaze asked cautiously, wondering if she was going to get a blast for trying to handle her own media.
‘Surprisingly good, babe. You came across as very human, genuine.’
‘Well, I am – human. And I’m working on the genuine thing.’
‘I know. Sometimes the vamp typecasting gives people the wrong impression.’
‘You were the one who told me to play it up!’ Blaze teased him. ‘A modern-day Marilyn without the drugs or early death, you said, and I quote.’
‘Yeah, well, that was fine five years ago when you were still making a name for yourself. But perhaps it’s time to rethink. People who know about these things – and I include myself among them – believe the vamp thing was doing you more harm than good, even before . . . well, you know.’