“Well, then, what does make the heart grow fonder?” He leaned over her, fitting his body along hers, welcoming the melting of her muscles, the hardening of his own.
“Practice,” Phoebe said with a wicked smile.
And so they did.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
TOMMY KNEW BETTER THAN to charge out to find Sam Pettit right after he’d read the article. What was left of Adam’s election run would not be aided by the arrest of his friend and campaign manager for the murder of a Brash Girl Reporter.
So he waited until Monday morning. He was sitting in her desk chair in the newsroom when she came to work.
She gave him the satisfaction of halting dead in her tracks when she saw him. Her jaw dropped and her eyes went round.
“Hey, Sam.” He waved. “Come on over. I brought doughnuts and coffee.” Opening the box, he took out a jelly-filled specimen and offered it with a napkin. “These are your favorites, as I recall.”
“Look, Tommy—”
“Sorry, I’m in your chair. Have a seat.” He got to his feet, and gave her no real choice but to sit down. “Here’s your coffee.”
“I know you’re mad—”
“No, I’m not.” Her brows rose in question. “I am as far beyond mad as you are beyond shame.”
“That’s—”
“Bad enough that you stab my candidate in the back, don’t give me any advance notice of the nuclear weapon you’re about to launch on the campaign. All’s fair in love, war and politics. Fine. I can deal. Adam can deal. But, for God’s sake, why did you do this to a nice person like Phoebe Moss? She didn’t deserve this treatment, and I can’t begin to figure out what kind of person you have to be if you can do something like this and still sleep at night. Or keep food in your stomach.”
She hadn’t, in fact, taken a bite of the doughnut or a sip of coffee. “I can explain. If you’ll shut up.”
He crossed his arms and sat on the corner of her desk. “Be my guest.”
Sam dragged a key chain from her purse, unlocked the bottom drawer of her desk and pulled out a fat blue file labeled Moss. Shoving the doughnut box aside, she slapped the file down and flipped it open.
“When I got to Atlanta and started nosing around, I discovered that somebody else had beat me to it. Everywhere I went, I was asking the same questions somebody else had asked. A private investigator, it turned out, named Dean Martin.”
“You’re kidding.”
Her grin was brief. “Wish I were. He, of course, would not tell me who he was working for. But he shared some of his results with me. Some, Tommy. Not all.”
She started pushing papers in his direction. “Interview with a client who said she’d considered a lawsuit because her speech impediment didn’t improve. Interview with a client’s mother who tried to file charges with the licensing board over a kid who fell for Phoebe Moss during therapy. The board told her to take a hike, but it looks bad. This Martin guy obtained work evaluations that suggested Phoebe was ineffectual, inefficient. Of course, these were turned in by the therapist who took over her clients when she left Atlanta and, incidentally, is now married to a man Phoebe was dating at the time of the evals.”
Tommy looked at the papers. “Shit.”
“Exactly. Phoebe’s mother is a bitch, plain and simple—I talked with her for an hour and was never so glad to get away from anybody, including Cynthia DeVries. Her dad is a pompous bastard, and her brothers and sister carry the family genes.” She shook her head. “I think Phoebe was adopted.”
“So what’s this all add up to?”
“There’s more, but we don’t have to go through it all. Somebody in New Skye—and there are only three suspects, as far as I’m concerned—had Phoebe investigated. Martin’s really good at his job and totally without principles. He may have been authorized to pay people to make things sound as bad as possible. I’m sure all of this information, plus more he didn’t show me, belongs to somebody here in town now.”
“And so,” Tommy concluded slowly, “you wrote the article trying to defuse the bomb, so to speak. You think that by walking the edge like this, you can take the thunder out of Martin’s revelations?”
She shrugged. “I didn’t know what else to do. If I’d withdrawn the article entirely, that left them a free field. I didn’t want to write a ‘they say this but it’s not true’ piece, ’cause what people remember is the accusation, not the defense. A fluffy, do-gooder write-up like Kellie Tate’s would have set Phoebe up for a bigger fall. What’s left?”
“Only this.” He braced one hand on the arm of her chair, grabbed her chin with his free fingers and kissed her. Slowly, thoroughly. “Thanks, Sam. I owe you more than doughnuts.”
She stared up at him with those big, dark eyes. “I’ll remember that.” Then she shook her head. “What are you going to do?”
Tommy was halfway to the newsroom door. “First, damage control. And second…attack.”
THE REPERCUSSIONS OF Samantha Pettit’s article hit about midmorning on Monday and, like a boulder heaved into a lake, set up waves of ever-expanding disaster.
Willa came to Phoebe’s office after a spate of phone calls. “That’s four appointments canceled so far this mornin’, and two of them askin’ for referrals to another practice. What’s goin’ on?”
“You read the article, right?”
“Well, yes. It wasn’t so bad.”
“But was there anything to inspire confidence in me as a therapist? Or even as a person you wanted to know?”
Willa couldn’t answer and went back to the front desk shaking her head. Jenna knocked on the door shortly afterward. “Are you okay?”
“I am hanging by a thread between heaven and hell.”
“Excuse me?”
“Too dramatic? Okay, then. I don’t know whether to be deliriously happy or desperately depressed.”
“Assuming I know the reasons for being depressed, would you like to share the good news?”
“Adam.”
“Adam? Oh…Adam.” Jenna smiled. “You do look a little tired this morning. I was assuming you’d lost sleep over the article.”
“Yes, and no.”
“Good for both of you. And listen, just hold tight and we’ll get through all the rest of this mess. People will forget soon enough.”
“I hope so.” Terrible as the situation might be, however, Phoebe couldn’t keep from smiling. Being with Adam was so miraculous, so much more than she’d ever experienced with anyone….
The intercom buzzed. “Phoebe, Samantha Pettit would like to speak with you.” The crisp, angry voice was barely recognizable as Willa’s.
And Phoebe had the same gut reaction. “Does she need a speech therapist?”
“She says not.”
“Then tell her she has nothing to say that I want to hear.”
Standing at the desk with the receptionist, Sam got the message. She glanced over her shoulder at the waiting room, where reporters from two smaller newspapers in the county lurked, hoping to catch Phoebe Moss for a statement or a story. To her right, the hallway obviously led to the therapists’ offices. One of those doors would be Phoebe’s.
The nice, grandmotherly receptionist glared at Sam. “I am sorry, Ms. Pettit, but Ms. Moss is unavailable.”
“Thanks.” She stepped directly back, forcing the person behind her to sidestep. The brief confusion created all the distraction she needed. Before anyone could stop her, she was striding down that hallway in search of a door with the name Moss on it.
Having arrived, she knocked briskly and entered without being invited, then leaned back against the panel. “Sorry. But I really do have to talk to you.”
At the desk across the room, Phoebe Moss got slowly to her feet, the shocked look giving way to indignant rage. “I imagine my receptionist will have the police here in a matter of minutes. You’d better talk fast.”
“I’ve already explained to Tommy what’s happened. I wanted to be sure you knew, too, as early as possib
le. The article was lousy…but it could have been so much worse.” Quickly, she recounted what had happened in Atlanta, except for the part about hating Phoebe’s family. Maybe she didn’t know how truly awful they were. “Somebody in this town intended to bury Adam’s campaign with twisted information about you. I don’t know if it would have worked. But I tried to head them off with the article. I really am sorry you’re hurt.”
Phoebe sank into her desk chair, still staring at Sam. “Who would do something like that?”
Sam sat on the sofa nearby. “I would bet on L. T. LaRue. This is his style, for sure. Or it could have been the mayor, though he usually lets LaRue do his dirty work. The other possibility that occurs to me…Cynthia DeVries.”
“Just because I’m engaged to Adam?”
“Just because Adam’s running for mayor, and she really doesn’t want him to. Maybe she planned to use the information to force him to withdraw. Assuming she’s the one who paid for it. I don’t know.”
“How awful for Adam.”
“And for you. I slanted the piece as best I could—negative but innocuous. As opposed to deadly.”
“Right.” She rubbed her eyes and straightened her back. “Well, then, I should thank you. Though it’s hard.”
“I know.” Sam stood up to leave. “You didn’t bargain for any of this, back when they sprang that engagement on you at the rally.” Before Phoebe could confirm or deny, she was on her way out the door. “Keep a stiff upper lip. And carry a big stick.”
In the waiting room, she nodded to the two reporters. “I got the scoop while you were twiddling your thumbs, guys. Better go look up the crop forecast for your big news of the week.”
They came after her, protesting, and bought her lunch in an effort to mine a story out of her. Sam fed them old news and sent them on their way to do no harm. She’d warned and protected Phoebe as well as she could.
Tommy Crawford and Adam DeVries would have to do the rest.
SACRIFICE, PHOEBE DECIDED after just a few days, was the synonym for political campaigning.
Her days started at dawn, taking care of the horses and the cats and the dogs, with barely any time for a few throws of a stick or ball. Then she made the drive into town for breakfast—a sausage biscuit eaten standing in a drafty warehouse, talking and smiling with the workers, or a stale doughnut and bad coffee during a radio broadcast from the parking lot of the tool-and-die plant. Tommy had written scripts for her with a variety of possible questions and the best answers for any situation.
Today the radio announcer hit her with the most obvious right away. “What did you think of the article about you in the New Skye News last Sunday?”
“I thought it sounded like someone I’ve never met.” She laughed, and the announcer joined her. “Unlike the article’s suggestion, I enjoy meeting people and getting together with friends. And now, with the campaign in full swing, I’m really excited about Adam’s chances, and his ideas for making New Skye an even better place to live.” Launching into a campaign spiel, she gave the woman no chance to refer back to the negative publicity. When she glanced at Tommy, she got a double thumbs-up.
Given the drop-off in her client base, she had plenty of time at lunch to visit the mall and shake hands, to meet with the women in Miss Daisy Crawford’s book club, the Woman’s Club of New Skye, and the Women in Business Club. Late afternoons saw her racing back to the farm to feed the animals, let the dogs out, change clothes for whatever dinner meeting was on the agenda, then lock the dogs up again, jump in the Beetle and high-tail it back to town. With the short days of autumn, and then the change from Daylight Saving to Standard Time, she only saw her house and her animals in the dark. She hated that.
She hated, too, the fact that there was no time anymore to be with Adam, except in front of the voters. Their kisses were public, all their conversations for other ears. She’d come to depend on him for his strength and integrity, but what she missed most in these harried days was his generous, caring companionship. Phoebe had thought she was happy alone with her animals, until Adam showed her how much her solitary life lacked. Now she wanted him back.
The polls showed Adam closing the gap between himself and Curtis Tate. And the madness would stop on the first Tuesday in November. Two weeks. Phoebe assured herself she could do anything for two weeks, especially for Adam.
She could even put up with Kellie Tate. The Raffle Committee met at the mayor’s house for a final meeting on the Friday before the Stargazer dinner dance at the Botanical Gardens. Phoebe arrived exactly on time, dressed in the uniform—she’d already made two campaign appearances by ten o’clock—with a smile on her face and a determination to remain unaffected by any and all insults.
“Do come in.” Kellie stepped back to let her in the house. “Not everyone is here yet, so have some coffee cake and cider.” The words were warm, the delivery as cold as the blustery day outside.
“Thanks so much.”
Conversation around the dining room table stopped completely as Phoebe entered, and only gradually resumed. One brave woman to whom she’d never been introduced finally sidled over to speak with her. “I loved your article in the paper.”
“You did?”
“Well, I mean, any publicity is good, right?”
Phoebe pretended to consider. “I suppose so. Unless it’s your obituary.”
After a shocked moment, the women around the table began to giggle, and then to laugh. Obituary jokes and horror stories followed, with Phoebe included as a member of the group. She actually found herself having fun, enjoying the chance to talk about something besides the damn campaign.
With a sharp click of her high heels, Kellie came into the dining room. “Everyone’s arrived. Let’s get started.” The little cluster of friendly faces immediately broke apart to scurry across the hall under the baleful gaze of their hostess.
Another basilisk waited in the living room. Cynthia DeVries had come to the meeting. “I attend all the final committee sessions,” she told Phoebe, who’d had no choice but to greet her future mother-in-law with a kiss on each smooth cheek. “How are you holding up, after such a dreadful article?”
Thinking of Sam Pettit’s theories, Phoebe studied the cold, beautiful face. Could this woman be responsible for such misery? And then be bold enough to bring up the subject as if she knew nothing?
Phoebe decided she wouldn’t bet against the possibility. “I’ll be sure not to believe everything I read in the paper from now on, since I’ve seen firsthand how the truth can be distorted.”
Before Cynthia could comment, Kellie called the meeting to order. Settling all the details seemed to take more time than really necessary, but Phoebe waited patiently to be assigned her final task. She would have to leave by noon, regardless. The Association of Women Realtors expected her for lunch at twelve-thirty.
“That’s all, then.” Kellie looked over the paper she held, apparently double-checking the agenda. “We’re set. I’ll expect to see each of you tomorrow night at six o’clock. We want everything in place before the guests begin to arrive. Cynthia, did you have anything to add?”
Adam’s mother rose to her full, impressive height. “Not a thing, Kellie dear, except to add my thanks for a marvelous effort. This event could not have come to pass without the assistance of every one of you. Future generations in New Skye will be grateful for your work and dedication.”
A smattering of applause broke up the meeting. Most of the women gathered to pay court to Cynthia. Phoebe headed toward her hostess.
“Kellie?” The mayor’s wife turned, the lingering remnants of a frown on her face. “I’m sorry, but I missed my name when you went through the assignments. Could you let me know what you’d like me to do?”
One long, rose-painted fingernail ran down the list of names on Kellie’s clipboard. Again. Finally, Kellie looked up in surprise. “Why, I don’t find your name on the list at all. You must have been left off. Inadvertently, of course.”
“Of cou
rse.” Phoebe loosened her jaw. “Just write me in wherever I’ll be useful.”
“Well, you know I would. But the task list is really quite complete. I believe we have everything covered just as is. So I suggest you just not worry about the raffle at all. You dance and drink and eat and have a good time. We’ll be fine without you.”
“I-I will. Th-thanks.”
Phoebe left with her chin high, if trembling. She didn’t have to work the raffle at the fundraiser. She could enjoy the whole evening in Adam’s company—much more fun than counting tickets or reading out numbers or double-checking results. Most women would be grateful for the reprieve.
Unless, as she did, they understood the insult behind the “oversight.” How better to say she wasn’t wanted than to say, simply, “We can’t use you”?
She couldn’t arrive at the Realtors’ luncheon with tears on her cheeks. Pulling into the parking lot of First Methodist Church, she dragged out her makeup bag—something she’d never carried before the campaign—and tried to repair the damage. Just as she put the mascara wand to her right eye, her cell phone rang.
With her eye now streaming tears from the jab and the smear of black goo under her lid, she answered the phone. “’Lo?” She couldn’t find the tissues she’d put in her purse, couldn’t stop crying. Both eyes were weeping now.
“Phoebe, it’s Jacquie. You okay?”
“Um, not really. What’s up?”
“I stopped at your place just to check on things. I know you’re busy these days, so I’ve been looking in occasionally.”
Her nose was running, too. Time to admit that mascara wasn’t the real problem. “And you know how much I appreciate it.”
“Yeah. Today, when I got here, Marian was on the ground, rolling.”
A cold fist clamped down on Phoebe’s stomach. “You don’t mean for fun.”
“She’s in pain, Phoebe. I got her up and walking around. But she looks bad. I think you’ve got a case of colic on your hands.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Last Honest Man Page 20