True Confessions

by Rachel Gibson

  Suddenly Hope didn’t feel so comfortable lying to Shelly. “Yeah,” she said, which wasn’t a real lie. She was taking pictures of the area for her alien article. She took several more photos; then the boys ran up the beach toward them and grabbed some towels.

  Adam dug into the pocket of his swimming trunks and handed Shelly several small rocks. He told her she could have the most special one.

  “Take a picture of me, Hope,” Wally urged as he flexed his pencil-thin arms.

  “No, me.” Adam pushed Wally out of the way and posed like a bodybuilder.

  “I’ll take a picture of each of you and give them to you when I get them developed.” She took several photos before the boys grabbed their peanut butter sandwiches and sodas and took off to find more “cool rocks” on the lake’s shore.

  “When are you going to finish your article?” Shelly asked.

  Hope opened her mouth to rattle off a fictitious deadline, but stopped. They’d shared picnic baskets. She’d drunk Shelly’s orange soda and eaten her Oreos, and she didn’t feel like lying anymore. Shelly hadn’t judged Hope when she’d discovered that Hope didn’t have any children. Maybe she wouldn’t judge her profession or want to relate Elvis sightings. “Well, if you won’t spread it around, I’ll tell you who I really write for.”

  Shelly sat up a bit straighter and leaned toward Hope. “I can keep a secret.”

  “I really write for The Weekly News of the Universe. I lied about the Northwest magazine article.”

  “You did? Why?”

  “Because people assume all sorts of things about tabloid writers. Like we’re sleazy and write gossip.”

  “And you don’t?”

  “No. I write stories about Bigfoot and aliens and people living beneath the ocean in the Bermuda Triangle.”

  “Hmm… that black-and-white tabloid they always sell next to the Enquirer?”

  Hope waited for a boat to speed past before she snapped a picture of the clear green lake. “Yes.”

  “The one with Bat Boy on the cover?”

  “Bat Boy,” Hope scoffed as she focused her camera on the distant shore. She made the trees the focal point and blurred the beach in the foreground. A perfect spot for fuzzy aliens to picnic. “That’s Weekly World News. They can’t write their way out of a paper sack. Those people have absolutely no imagination.” As far as she was concerned, Bat Boy was one of the stupider stories she’d read from the competition.

  “Oh! Giant ants attack New York?”

  “Bingo.”

  “Oh, my God! Did you write that?”

  Hope lowered the camera and looked at her neighbor. “No, but my stories are feature articles, and once in a while I write a sort of point-counterpoint advice column under the pseudonyms Lacy Harte and Frank Rhodes.”

  “You’re Lacy Harte?”

  “I’m both Lacy and Frank.”

  “You’re kidding! I always thought those two were separate people. I mean, they’re just so rude to each other.”

  “At first I kind of felt schizophrenic, but I like it now. I also write features under the name Madilyn Wright.”

  “What have you written that I might have read?”

  Hope put the camera back inside its case, then stretched out in her chair and lifted her face to the sun. “Last year, my series of Bermuda Triangle articles turned out to be real popular. I followed those up with the Micky the Magical Leprechaun features.”

  “Oh, my God! I read some of those Micky the Magical Leprechaun stories. That was you?”

  “Yep.”

  “My mother-in-law buys those magazines and she gives them to me when she’s through.”

  As far as Hope could tell, only “mothers-in-law” bought tabloids. Everyone read them, but she’d never met anyone who’d confessed to actually buying one. Kind of like trying to find anyone to admit they’d voted for Nixon.

  Yet subscriptions alone to The Weekly News of the Universe were around ten million worldwide. There were a lot of closet readers, and they weren’t all mothers-in-law.

  “I really liked it when Micky transformed himself into RuPaul.”

  That story had been the last of the leprechaun features and the beginning of her trouble. “He hated that particular story.” When he’d read it, he threatened to sue Hope, her editor, and the president and CEO of the paper.

  “Micky the Leprechaun is a real person?”

  “He’s not a leprechaun, he’s a dwarf. His real name is Myron Lambardo, but he’s also known as Myron the Masher. I met him in Vegas while I was there researching an article on Elvis impersonators. At that time, he worked in a little dive of a bar, wrestling women in a plastic kiddie pool filled with mud.” She’d paid him to let her photograph him, and she’d made sure he’d signed a release for the photos. “At first he really liked the stories. He made the most of his fifteen minutes of fame and managed to get a few higher-profile wrestling matches as Micky. He used to call and leave messages on my business line, telling me how much he liked them. Then I did the RuPaul feature and he thought it made him look gay. He said I exploited and humiliated him, as if women pinning him in the mud was so much more dignified.

  “When Myron discovered that he’d signed away his rights,” Hope continued, “he started calling and threatening me. He wanted me to morph him into someone macho like Arnold Schwarzenegger. When I didn’t respond to his threats, he found out where I lived and showed up at my door. He harassed me and wouldn’t leave me alone, and I had to take him to court and get a restraining order against him.”

  Shelly swung her legs over the side of her chaise. “You’re being stalked by Micky the Leprechaun?”

  “Myron Lambardo.”

  “Has he hurt you?”

  “No, he just threatens to ‘tombstone’ me.”

  “But you’re bigger than him.”

  “Yeah, but he’s one buff little dude. He wrestles for a living.”

  Shelly’s eyes got big and she raised a hand to her mouth. Hope thought she might have shocked her neighbor speechless, until Shelly burst into hysterical laughter.

  Wally and Adam turned and looked at Shelly as if she were nuts. “What’s so funny, Mom?” Wally called out.

  Shelly shook her head and the boys switched their attention to Hope, as if she had the answer.

  Hope shrugged. What could she say? Some people were just plain nuts. Sometimes she wondered if she was the only sane person in an insane world.

  Chapter Seven

  BOY GROWS POTATOES IN HIS EARS

  Water sprayed across Dylan’s gray T-shirt, turning it black in spots. “Hey,” he said as he poured shampoo on Adam’s head. “Get your fingers out of the spout.”

  “I can do it myself, Dad,” Adam complained, sitting in the empty bathtub, the water running down the open drain.

  “I know you can.” Sometimes Adam forgot to scrub his whole head, and Dylan liked to make sure at least once a week that all of Adam’s hair got clean. “What’s in here?” Dylan asked. “A gravel pit?”

  “Nope. Wally and me got into a sand fight at his house.”

  Like he’d done since the very first time he’d bathed his son as a newborn, Dylan shaped Adam’s short hair into a point on top of his head, then leaned him back and rinsed out the shampoo. “I’m surprised Shelly didn’t beat on your behind.”

  “Hope was there,” Adam said as he shut his eyes and relaxed. “Shelly never whacks ya in front of company.”

  “Hope went down to the beach with you?”

  “Yeah.” Adam raised his hands to his face and cleared the water from his eyes.

  “In a swimsuit?”

  “Yeah. It was blue and green.”

  “One piece or two?”

  “One.”

  It was on the tip of his tongue to ask how she’d looked, but he guessed he knew anyway. Hope Spencer would look good in a garbage bag. “What did you all do?”

  “Hope took some pictures, and then after a while she helped me and Adam build a sand castle
. Only it got all wrecked when a beetle flew on her arm.”

  Dylan raised Adam to a sitting position, then, using his hands, squeegeed the water from Adam’s head. “Did she scream?”

  Adam laughed. “Yep, and jumped around, too.”

  Dylan would have liked to see Hope jump around in her swimsuit. He shoved the rubber plug into the drain and poured banana-scented bubble bath into the running water. “There’s the soap and washcloth,” he said, pointing to the soap dish. “Scrub yourself real good.” He set a plastic basket filled with a mask, snorkel, and various action figures on the edge of the tub. “Don’t forget your parts. And,” he added over his shoulder as he stood and walked toward the bathroom door, “clean your ears. There’s enough dirt in there to grow potatoes.”

  He moved down the short hall to the kitchen and the stack of dinner dishes waiting for him. He reached into the refrigerator, took out a bottle of Bud, and shut the door with his hip. He twisted off the cap, placed it between his thumb and middle finger, and snapped. The cap sailed under the kitchen table instead of into the garbage can and hit Adam’s dog. The puppy lifted her head, then went back to sleep.

  Dylan raised the bottle to his mouth and eyed the dishes stacked in the sink. Sometimes he thought it would be so much easier if he just got married. If he just found someone who could put up with him and be a good mama to Adam. Someone who wouldn’t mind taking her turn doing the dishes, and who would be home when he needed to take off on an emergency. Someone to talk to late at night. Someone to run the tips of her fingers across his belly.

  But Dylan knew from experience that there was nothing worse than living with a woman for the wrong reasons. Nothing worse than living in a house with a woman he couldn’t love for the long haul. Lying next to her in bed. Having sex with her because it was available, but no longer making love.

  He’d done that with Julie. If it hadn’t been for a broken condom, their relationship probably wouldn’t have survived a year. Except for the fact that they’d both been raised on a ranch and both had hated it, they’d had nothing in common. If it hadn’t been for Adam, the relationship wouldn’t have lasted as long as it had. He loved his son and felt truly blessed to have him. They were buddies, but raising a child on his own wasn’t easy. On him or on Adam, and he wouldn’t have chosen it. He wouldn’t have chosen the sole responsibility of raising his son to be a good boy and a decent man.

  He wouldn’t have chosen to see the pain and confusion in his son’s eyes when they talked about why Adam’s mama didn’t live with them and why they didn’t live with her.

  Every July when Dylan took Adam to the airport to meet Julie, he always had to answer the same question: “Why can’t you come with Mommy and me?” And every year Dylan had to dance around the truth. He didn’t want to spend time with Julie, but, more important, he didn’t want Adam to get the idea in his head about their living as a family. Adam already had some weird notion that once his mother wasn’t on television anymore, she’d move to Gospel and live with them. But even if Julie’s show was canceled tomorrow, Adam’s dream would never come true.

  Every year Adam would still go visit her, and every year Dylan would camp out at the Double T for the two weeks that Adam was gone, looking over the books, helping out where he could, and irritating the hell out of his brother-in-law, Lyle. Lyle was a good cattleman and pretty good at the business, too, but even though Dylan had no interest in running the place himself, half the ranch was still his, and it would someday belong to Adam.

  Dylan spent the first two weeks of every July going over the price of seed and feed and doing one of a million things that needed doing. But mostly he did it to avoid his empty house.

  The water in the bathroom shut off, and Dylan set his beer on the counter. He rinsed the plates in the sink, and as he placed them in the dishwasher, his thoughts turned from his troubles with Adam to his problem with Hope Spencer.

  Hope Spencer was a beautiful woman, and there was no denying that he liked the way she filled out her clothes. Even though he would probably never tell her, he liked that she was sort of sassy and smart-mouthed. He liked the smile she brought to his lips, even when he didn’t know why he was smiling.

  Kissing her had been a huge mistake. He’d known it even as he’d lowered his mouth to hers. She’d tasted all smooth and boozy. Like a swallow of expensive whiskey, she’d warmed him clear down to the very pit of his belly. The touch of her hands had squeezed his insides until he could hardly breathe. The look in her blue eyes, the passion shining back at him, had nearly sent him to his knees. Sent him there begging her to let him touch her naked skin and kiss between her thighs where she was warm and slick. If he’d had a condom in his wallet, he wasn’t so sure he would have stopped. He wasn’t so sure he wouldn’t have had sex with her right there, in the kitchen, against the refrigerator.

  Dylan closed his eyes and pressed a palm to the front of his Levi’s. He wasn’t so sure he wouldn’t have stripped off those Lycra shorts and buried himself deep within her. His tongue in her mouth, his hands on her breasts, and his penis inside where she was hot. Moving with her until her moist walls contracted and squeezed around him.

  Beneath his hand, he was hard and he ached, and he didn’t know what to do about it. Well, yes, he did know. He could do nothing or he could take care of business himself. Dylan reached for his cold beer.

  Kissing her had been like being struck by lightning. It had raised his hair and burned his insides, but what really worried him about last night was that once he kissed her, he hadn’t given another thought to her profession. She was a writer, and he just happened to be hiding the biggest story since the fall of Jim and Tammy Faye Baker. America’s angel and PTL sweetheart, Juliette Bancroft had an illegitimate son.

  Something that was so important, he’d forgotten the second his tongue had swept the inside of her mouth. He was afraid the only thing that had stopped him was the thought of bringing another unplanned child into the world. No way in hell did he want another child under those circumstances.

  Dylan looked out the window above the sink. In the dirt driveway, the setting sun cast long shadows on his Ford truck, parked next to the sheriff’s Blazer. He wondered what Hope was doing over on Timberline. He wondered if she was watching TV or getting ready for bed. Adam had mentioned something about her taking pictures. Maybe she really was writing an article for an outdoors magazine. Maybe she hadn’t been lying about that. Yeah, maybe, but that still made her a writer.

  He could always run a check on her. He could run an NCIC and see if she had a criminal past. He could also run her license plates through his computer to find out anything he might want to know about MZBHAVN, but he wasn’t going to do that. Not only was it against police ethics, it was against Dylan’s. Unless she broke the law, she had a right to her privacy. She had a right to have all the people mind their own business.

  Dylan understood privacy. Unfortunately, in Gospel, he seemed to be the only one.

  Hope waited until Monday afternoon to drive to the M & S Market to buy a copy of The Weekly News of the Universe. She grabbed a blue plastic shopping basket and reached for a copy. The headline for her chicken bone article appeared beneath the picture of a crazed-looking chicken in the bottom left corner of the paper. Her gaze lifted to the At-a-Glance box and she flipped to page fourteen. Dang, she’d been stuck behind “Tinsel Town Gossip.” At least the feature was a full page with a photograph of fairly normal looking women dancing around chickens, and the cutline: “Bizarre cult eats the bones of chickens.” As she walked to the produce section, she flipped to the middle of the magazine. Clive Freeman’s alien cow-mutilation article had been given the center spread.

  Good, alien features were still hot. She’d sent off her own alien article the day before, complete with the slightly blurred shore of Gospel Lake and a few fuzzy aliens she’d retrieved from her CD-ROM library. She’d lined them up behind a rustic-looking table, and beneath the photograph she’d written the cutline, “Aliens
place bets on unsuspecting tourist in Northwest wilderness area.” She was extremely happy with the way the feature had come together and was already working on a follow-up article.

  She’d also read the newspaper articles she’d photocopied at the library, and she’d thought there was an interesting story to be told. Not about the salaciousness of it all, although there was plenty of that, but of a man whose personal and public lives were so diametrically opposed. How his personal choices had slowly consumed him until he’d become morally bankrupt in the end.

  Hope slid the paper into her basket and picked through the sorriest bunch of avocados she’d ever seen. She’d been invited to the Aberdeen boys’ eighteenth-birthday barbecue that night, and afterward she planned to ask Shelly a few questions about Hiram Donnelly.

  The cantaloupe weren’t much better than the avocados, but the lettuce was decent. Shelly had told her they were serving hot dogs, hamburgers, and the boys’ favorite-Rocky Mountain oysters. Hope was taking a salad with sweet dressing, which was wonderful with seafood. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d made her famous salad. Well, actually, when she thought hard enough, she could remember, but it had been a long time ago and was a sad commentary on her social life. Funny, she thought as she picked up a few household items, how moving to such a small town had emphasized the empty holes in her life. Funny how a few lunches with a woman she hardly knew, and an invitation to barbecue with her neighbors had left her wanting to get out more.

  She thought about taking a bottle of wine to loosen Shelly’s tongue, but Dylan and Adam had been invited, and she didn’t want the sheriff to think she was a big boozer. She didn’t know why she cared, and she didn’t know what to think of the man who glanced at her from beneath the brim of his hat and stopped her heart. It was probably best not to think of him at all.

  Hope took her place in line behind a couple decked out in REI and holding bottled water. Behind the counter, Stanley Caldwell rang up the purchases while his wife, Melba, bagged.