Considering we were talking about Alice’s funeral, from which they’d just returned, that was better than I expected.
His gray gaze slid to his daughter. “You got homework to do?”
“Dad,” she complained.
Important to note, Celeste liked to be involved.
In everything.
It was about the fact she clearly worshipped her brothers and had practically deified her father (when he wasn’t punishing her for telling off a teacher or asking her to skedaddle because the adults needed to talk).
But fallout from a mother leaving when you’re eleven and your house being filled with men— you became the woman of it.
She’d become the woman of it.
I supposed that wasn’t a terrible thing. She’d need to take care of her own place one day, with roommates, and by herself, and eventually sharing that task with a partner.
It still filled me with rage.
But suffice it to say, she didn’t like being left out.
And she hated to be treated like a kid.
“Fifteen minutes,” he said.
She gave him a look. Shot me a look. Then she stomped off in that way only teenage girls could do, which was loud, but feminine, and annoying, but cute.
Bohannan took several beats while he listened with Dad Ears.
The door opened and Jace came in with the rest of the stuff.
I knew Celeste was out of ear shot, and Jason (as ever) was not out of the loop, when Bohannan asked, “You offer a reward for info on Alice?”
I stood silent and still.
I then stomped off, as only middle-aged women could do, not loud, not feminine, not cute, but determined.
I stood on their back deck.
I stared at the lake.
I clenched my teeth very hard.
When I understood I wouldn’t scream in frustrated fury, I turned back and re-entered the house and kitchen.
“Feel better?” Jace asked.
“No,” I answered.
“Yeah, Dern has a lasting effect on everyone,” he muttered, lifting up a container I’d bought online yesterday, had overnighted, and filled not two hours before. “What are these?”
“What do they look like?”
“They look like cupcakes.”
“Well deduced, Sherlock.”
“Will you marry me?”
“I’m way too old for you.”
“You have daughters.”
“One’s a lesbian and one’s flying sorties in Korea and falling in love with a fighter pilot named James.”
“First you give a guy cupcakes, then you destroy him.”
“I’m sorry, that’s the way life goes.”
“Are you two done?” Bohannan broke in.
Another important note, Jason and I were bonding.
He was hysterically funny, and I liked people who were hysterically funny.
It was a win-win.
I turned back to his father.
“You seem to have a very diverse and accomplished skillset. Do you know how to commit the perfect murder?” I asked him.
“Yes,” he answered.
That was it.
Further important note, in our late evening conversation five days ago, Cade Bohannan had used up his share of words for the next, I wasn’t sure, but I was guessing probably two to three months.
As you could see, he had a reserve. But he was conserving them.
Jason grinned at me as he walked toward the doors to the deck.
With the cupcakes.
And now an aside, Jason and Jesse were roommates. They lived together in the house up the hill. A house Bohannan had built for them when they were twenty-two and both had shared that they intended to be his apprentices (my take, they didn’t want to be far from their dad and sister after their mom flew the coop, but also, they wanted to follow in their father’s footsteps), and therefore they weren’t leaving home.
Bohannan felt kids needed to get out of the house.
Building one for them next door became the compromise.
David Ashbrook, incidentally, helped them build that house.
“That’s all the cupcakes,” I said to his back.
“I know, thanks,” he returned, and disappeared out the door.
I turned again to his father.
“I half wish Fenn wasn’t falling in love. Jason deserves her particular art of being a pain in the ass. And she deserves his.”
“Babe, the entire fuckin’ town knows about the reward.”
I thought when Bohannan told me about it five minutes ago, that meant Dern had mentioned it to him.
Not everybody.
“Wait, what?” I demanded.
He jerked away from the counter when I made to stomp out again.
“Don’t,” he ordered tersely, holding up a hand. “It’s Dern. You had to know that was not a good call.”
“No, I had to do something.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Yes, I did.”
“Larue.”
“Bohannan.”
He glowered at me.
Another aside, I’d started it, he’d jumped on board, and now we’d fallen into the habit of calling each other by our last names.
I’d always loved my first name. It was the only good thing my mother and father gave me. I used it to concoct extravagant fantasies when I was a little girl about living in Paris and wearing fabulous clothes and eating croissants and dating artists who wore berets. These fantasies took me away from the neglect and loneliness that limned my childhood.
But the way his growly voice wrapped around Larue, I hoped he never again called me Delphine.
He leaned back against the counter, resumed his crossed-arm pose and shared, “I had to inform the FBI. They were about as happy you did that as I am.”
“I—”
“You are very, very safe here.”
With this new tone to his voice—low and purring and dangerous and exciting—I was transfixed.
“You might not be as safe somewhere else,” he went on. “Cut the crap, and for Christ’s sake, lay low.”
“I was speaking to the sheriff, and I told him that was an anonymous gesture. He promised me he would keep it to himself.”
“You were talking to Dern. He’s in deep shit because he’s got a predator on his patch who mutilated a little girl, so he’s gonna use everything he can to make that shit stink less, and he threw you right under that bus. Just you living in town is enough to turn people’s minds. The fact you stepped up like that gives it warmth he’s not getting. Me and Jace and Jess and David did what we could to get the word spread that you’re here because you wanted a private retreat, away from people who treat you like a celebrity. Most folks in this town are gonna be good with that. They’ll go to the mat to keep quiet and make things normal for you. But most folks are not all of them, and some of that rest would sell their grandmother’s used underwear if they thought it’d get them a few bucks.”
I made a face. “Gross.”
“You, of all people, know I’m right.”
I did.
My eyeballs studied the ceiling.
“It’s a little freaky how much you remind me of Celeste.”
I focused on him. “What a nice thing to say.”
“I meant it in the way you act like a teenager.”
“I’m deciding to take that as you find me girlish, which I’ve further decided to take as a compliment.”
“Of course you have.”
“If you’re grouchy because your son stole all the cupcakes, don’t take it out on me. You know where he lives.”
He tipped his head back and I liked the way he studied the ceiling a lot better than how I did it.
One last important note, Cade Bohannan looked absurdly incredible in a turtleneck.
“Speaking of your sons, where’s your other one?”
He righted his head and stated baldly, “Searching for a girl to bury his troubles in.”
My mouth tightened.
“We had a convo. He told me to fuck off.”
“Your daughter said much the same thing, and she was suspended for a week and grounded for two,” I pointed out.
(Yes, I’d learned quite a bit about the Bohannans, that happened when you fed people—the patriarch might not be a font of information, but food loosened his kids’ lips, or at least it did Jason’s.)
“She’s not an adult.”
“Mm-hmm,” I hummed, lacing the noise with how unconvinced I was by his lame defense.
Bohannan returned to unresponsive.
“I know it’s none of my business,” I began.
Bohannan re-entered the conversation. “You don’t know that. You know it became your business when I agreed to bring my family to dinner.”
I was taken aback.
But this needed to be confirmed, so I set about confirming it.
“Are you really giving me permission to meddle in your lives?”
He glanced pointedly at the Viking before looking back at me. “Are you really pretending you need permission?”
“Fair point,” I mumbled.
“So what’s none of your business?” he pushed.
This was serious, so I got serious.
“Jesse needs professional help.”
He nodded. “I got someone I talk to. In my line of business, shit can get dark. This is some of the darkest shit I’ve ever seen. So yeah, he needs some tools to deal. I’ve trained both my boys, this was not edited from their training. He’s just that fucked up by it.”
“I usually hate to point out the obvious, but this is a problem.”
Bohannan held my gaze.
And agreed, “Yeah, babe. This is a problem.”
Fourteen
Silent Treatment
I stood on my back deck and punched my phone with my finger.
I put it to my ear.
“What?” Bohannan greeted.
“I need to get out of here, or I’m going to kill somebody.”
“David says that’s the most complicated closet he’s ever seen. David says even the Kardashians wouldn’t dream up that closet. David says he’s installed a dozen custom closets, and they’ve all taken one to four days. And David says yours might not be done until his kid graduates from college.”
“I prefer you not talking.”
“You can’t ask a guy to build you a closet and then get hassled because it’s noisy.”
“And my clothes and shoes and handbags are strewn all over hell’s half acre.”
“I feel your pain.”
He did?
“Do you like clothes?”
“No, I had a wife who liked them, and she’d lose her shit if I put the clothes away, and I hung something pink in the wrong shade of pink section.”
“Not to defend a woman who walked out on you and your family, but that is a high crime in closet organization.”
“I was happy to be guilty. My punishment was that I didn’t have to put the clothes away.”
“I sense a scam.”
“Stop with the evasive maneuvers. You’re under house arrest.”
Why had I not worn sunglasses during our every interaction so he hadn’t been allowed to read me?
And what was the equivalent of sunglasses when you were talking on the phone?
“Bohannan.”
“The funeral was only a few days ago. Let Dern’s shit die down before you start showing up around town.”
“Bohannan, I can’t avoid town forever.”
“Give me three weeks.”
God, I hoped they found my stalker in less than three weeks. It had already been way more than that.
And those women…
“I can’t cook another meal,” I informed him. “I can’t believe I’m going to say this about the mastery I create in the kitchen, but I’m sick of my own food. I need to get out and not just to escape this closet. I haven’t been out since I visited Dern, and that was no fun. Wait, no, the grocery store, but that doesn’t count, because that was no fun either.”
“Baby, I’m tryin’ to find a kid killer.”
I shut up because one, that was way more important than me escaping the noise and dust and piles of clothes, and two, he’d called me baby.
“Babe” was common. You called your girlfriends that. You could call the grocery store clerk that.
“Baby” was something else.
He had not once given any indication he was into me.
He ate my food. He watched me banter with his son. He allowed me to take some of the onus off his daughter.
That was it.
In large part, I’d left the public life.
Every year, my agent and I selected—from the hundreds of requests we received—a half a dozen high schools and universities for me to visit to talk about We Pluck the Cord.
Other than that, nothing.
Yearly, and sometimes more often, I got requests to do reunions or make a movie or star in the first episode of a reboot of Those Years, and I always turned it down.
Incidentally, this was to my costar, Michael’s, extreme displeasure.
Constantly, I had offers to do other things. TV shows. Movies. Advertisements.
I turned those down too.
I was not a recluse, but I was private.
It was the enduring love for that show and the reach of the book that kept me rather forefront in the public conscious.
That, and the fact I’d married a still box-office-topping action star (Warren) and a rock ’n’ roll legend (Angelo), and whenever they did something—and they were always doing something—my name got dragged into it.
Which made it all the more important to keep the work I currently did strictly secret.
I shared all of this because I was no longer an actress. For all anyone knew, I wasn’t anything (even though I was).
What I was, was vain.
I blamed my mother because it was all her fault.
She was vain.
She was about being slim and in shape and perfectly put together at all times. She was about the right shoes and purse combo. She was about perfecting the art of the Just Nipping Out Look so you never left the house without your face on, even if it wasn’t the normal effort you put into making up your face. She was about moisturizing your skin from an early age to combat future lines and drinking enough water to do the same thing and shouting at me when I didn’t let her sleep because I had to, say, get to school or something (and sleep helped you combat lines).
I wasn’t certain while growing up if she very much cared if I lived or died.
But she took the time and effort to drill all of that into me.
I might not be as slim as I was when I was younger, but I’d taken pains to keep hold on what I could for as long as I could.
What I was not, was a striking classic beauty, like Celeste.
And although Bohannan was tall, built and attractive, he was not classically handsome or conventionally so either.
Celeste got that from somewhere.
Which meant she got it from Grace.
I was also trouble for a man, even when I didn’t have a psychotic stalker out there holding two women hostage until I agreed to marry him (though, I was sure it didn’t say, “I love you,” to send a bomb in the post to my dear friend and ex costar, Alicia’s house; poison my other dear friend and ex costar, Russ’s dog (don’t despair, Russ noticed Bookworm acting weird and got him to the vet just in time); or send disturbing pictures of men with their members cut off to Michael, who had been my love interest and eventual husband on the show).
But it had to be said, that was a lot.
Though it was more.
I was independently wealthy.
I was highly successful.
It was widely considered that I was very talented in two high-profile fields.
And many men didn’t like it like that.
So I could have the greatest ass in the world (and I kin
d of did) and perky tits until I died (and I had those too, now, only because of a reconstructive boob job I got a couple of years after I had Camille), these two things being valued very highly by the opposite sex, and I’d still be toxic.
“Okay, fuck, fine,” he said, cutting into my reverie.
“Fine?”
“Don’t cook. We’ll go to the Double D tonight.”
“Am I…getting my way?” I asked tentatively.
“Are we going out tonight?”
Were we?
“I’ll tell the kids to prepare. The Double D is a three-course meal for Jace and a four-course one for Jesse,” he shared. “They’ll be pissed they eat something and fill up before we go.”
So we weren’t, but we were.
And why, when it was far from normal, did I like it so much that his family was so close, to the point he thought of going out to dinner and his grown sons were invited.
“Let me get this straight,” I started. “I gave you the silent treatment for I don’t know, what? Maybe ten seconds? And you caved?”
He said nothing.
“You do know I’ve filed that away in the special vault only females have that’s hermetically sealed and preserves things for eternity, right?”
“We’ll swing around and pick you up at seven thirty,” was his reply. “Don’t kill David in the meantime, and if you need a break, I got a TV. Come down. I’ll get Jace to come home and let you in.”
And then he hung up.
I heard a drill coming from inside my house.
Which meant I texted, I’ll be waiting outside your door in ten minutes.
Bohannan didn’t respond to the text.
But Jason was there to let me in ten minutes later.
Fifteen
Double D
“As you know, I’ll start with a vanilla malt.”
We hadn’t even made it to a table when Jesse called this out toward the horseshoe-shaped, Roseanne’s Lunch Box counter in the middle of the Double D Diner.
“You got it, bub,” a tall, curvy woman with platinum blond hair, a dab hand with a teasing comb and an artist’s touch with eyeliner called back.
I thought this place was great, I wanted a vanilla malt, I was so excited not to be at my house (or theirs), I could spit, so I was surprised when I heard Jace mutter, “Oh shit.”
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