by Tracy South
“Oh, I’m not,” Claire said, unable to believe how nervous she was in front of her old friend. This was the Miranda she’d had to comfort after she’d been laughed out of the changing room in seventh-grade gym class for being the only one who still didn’t wear a bra. This was the Miranda who had called Claire the morning after she’d spent the night with Trent Daniels. There was nothing Miranda could do to her. Except steal Alec, a warning voice said. Ridiculous. Alec wasn’t Claire’s to steal.
“I’ll give you guys some time alone,” Claire said.
“Christine is going to want to interview the two of us together sometime,” Miranda said. “I’m afraid we’re behind schedule, so I don’t know exactly when it will be.”
“You know where to find me,” Claire said.
She left, wondering if she should go retrieve Alec from his lonely post at the frog pond. She decided that he could take care of himself. Besides, it wasn’t like he hadn’t abandoned her, midkiss, to chase after Miranda. Let him grow moss-covered down by the water. She really did have work to do.
SINCE ALEC HAD HEARD a great deal on the news about an apparent worldwide shortage of frogs, he thought he should bring all those alarmed scientists down to the Craigs’ pond, where he had just spent at least half an hour being tormented by the amphibians’ croaks. Every “ribbit” was designed to sound like “idiot.” He was surrounded by a crowd of critics, all telling him what he already knew. Claire didn’t respect him, and Miranda was playing him for a fool.
Passing the time with the pondside crowd had given him plenty of opportunities to brood about his argument with Claire. Last week, he would have had a good laugh at the expense of anyone who’d asked him whether it was possible that he and Claire could ever be right for each other. This past day and a half, though, had made that possibility not only realistic but tempting. Now he was back to the divide that had existed between them earlier.
He was the kind of guy who wanted to bulldoze farms for upscale housing developments, and she was the kind of girl who encouraged the commonfolk to lie down in front of the bulldozers. He was all flash and style, and she was nothing if not rock-solid substance wrapped up in deceptive packaging. She was all integrity. He was, as she’d said, shallow. He plopped down on a grassy spot on the bank. He hadn’t always been shallow, he told himself in his own defense. Claire only thought that because she was new to this business. She was still at that neophyte save-the-world stage. She didn’t know yet how quickly her ambitions would whither, how skeptical she would become about any story that didn’t arrive via fax machine or as a result of drinks with some political insiders at the local bar. Although Alec had once wanted to turn the town on its ear with the paper, he was now content simply to make less spelling and grammar errors than the daily. When exactly had that happened? he wondered.
“I’m so glad you’re still here,” he heard someone yell. He looked up to see Miranda flying down the hill toward him. She looked like a commercial—in fact, during her early days, hadn’t she played in a commercial in almost this setting? Lavender-scented soap, he recalled. He stood, and she reached him at last and took him by the arm.
“You won’t believe the trouble I had getting away from everybody at the house. And all the time I was thinking, Alec’s at the frog pond, and he’s going to think I was trying to stand him up.” The corners of her mouth turned down a little. “Please say you forgive me.”
“Of course,” he said. The scientists also talked about the hallucinogenic properties of some frogs. Had he caught some of that in the air, or was Miranda really apologizing to him?
She went on. “I’ve been thinking about what you said about how the Weekly Tribune wasn’t around when I played Elena in Uncle Vanya, and that it’s not really fair to punish you for what the daily did.”
“Right,” Alec said. “Plus, this would be one way of maybe getting back at them. They know that you’re never going to give them an interview—for good reason, of course. They’d hate it if they saw that you had decided to take your story to us.”
Miranda was nodding thoughtfully. “You’re right, you know. I don’t have to be anywhere for a couple of hours. Is this a good time for you?”
“Perfect,” Alec said. He couldn’t understand his good fortune, although he was trying not to question it. But the only explanation he could think of was that the kind things Claire had said about Miranda had softened her up.
He switched his tape recorder on, and they chatted as they walked toward the lake. Alec clarified the basics of what he knew about Miranda’s career, while trying not to duplicate questions he knew she’d been asked many times before. They sat down on the pier beside the lake, and Miranda slipped her shoes off, dangling her feet off the pier toward the water. Alec remembered that he had dreamed about this moment, Miranda confiding to him at lakeside. But as he looked off toward the shore, all he could think of was Claire. Did she ever sit on the bank of her lake? What went through her head when she was there?
“What are you thinking about?” Miranda asked him.
Alec came back to earth and grinned at Miranda. “I’m supposed to be interviewing you, not the other way around.” He ran through some possible answers that didn’t involve Claire. “I was wondering if you ever miss sitting beside this lake when you’re in California or New York.”
“I miss it a lot, actually,” she confided. “It’s funny—as soon as I had the money, I built this house for my parents so they could go fishing. I always say it’s my home, too, but that’s the kind of thing I left Tennessee to escape. Now, sometimes when I’m eating lunch at some really trendy place, I wish I was sitting here with a bologna sandwich.”
Alec took a good look at her. She seemed sincere. She continued, “I’m not saying I’m sorry I left. I like what I do, and I wouldn’t want to work in some office or some restaurant. I didn’t really have any other plans.”
Alec restrained himself from filling the silence, wanting to give Miranda a chance to share more of her thoughts. Instead, she asked him another question. “What about you? Did you want to do something besides be the editor of the Tribune?”
“You mean like write a novel or something?” In fact, he had no burning desire to write a novel, which made him stand out from almost every other reporter and editor he’d ever known. But that’s what people seemed to accept as the secret desire of the newsman.
Her eyes widened. “Oh, goodness, no. I’ve had it up to here with novel writers. That’s what Scott was.”
“Right. I forgot,” he said. He wondered if Scott was more likely to write his novel than any of the newsmen he knew. Probably not, he decided, glad to think the worst of Scott.
“No, I mean something else. Or doing what you do somewhere else.”
“I did do something else,” he said. Always careful not to share any of himself with his subjects, Alec wondered what he was doing chatting so intimately with Miranda Craig. It was the thing with Claire, he knew, that had left him off kilter. “I wanted to be a big-city reporter, so I left for Atlanta when I got out of school. I really loved it, too. Then Mick Regan, my favorite professor, called. He wanted to start a weekly paper with some money he’d inherited. He was eventually going to take it twice-weekly, then daily. He made the whole thing sound so exciting that I quit and drove on up that night.”
“Has it been exciting?” Miranda asked.
“In some ways,” he told her. Maybe not as exciting as it could have been if he’d gotten out of the office and chased a real story once in a while.
Alec steered the conversation back to Miranda, and the two talked until it was time to switch sides on the ninetyminute tape. He had another tape stashed in his other pocket, just in case he needed it.
“I really appreciate you changing your mind about this interview,” he told her.
Miranda, he thought, looked almost guilty. “I should tell you…” she started to say, then stopped.
“Tell me what?”
She gave him a bright smil
e. “That I’m ready to talk some more.”
HALFWAY INTO the recitation of his experiences at the city council meeting, Mick realized that Hank’s slow and methodical typing was not the best way to convey all that he had burning in his heart.
“Give me that damn machine,” he said, wresting control of the keyboard away from Hank. Mick surprised himself by remembering, almost verbatim, what had been said and done at the meeting. But more importantly, he emphasized in his article that the same goofballs were saying and doing the same stupid things they’d been doing since he last attended a meeting decades ago.
He carefully saved the article on a disk, just so there’d be no room for mistakes. “You’ve got to read this right away,” he bellowed at Hank, but when he looked up at the reporter, he’d fallen asleep in his chair. Mick considered taking his hat and tiptoeing out of the office.
He half rose from his chair, then sat back down again. Starting a new, untitled file in the word processing program, he told himself he’d leave after he finished one thing. He was going to give that wedding the city council treatment, beginning with how the groom’s mother made a pass at him by the reception table.
10
A GORGEOUS MAN and a gorgeous day. Even if she was on a mission, Lissa wasn’t going to let those elements go to waste. She’d filled Mick’s cooler with a few bottles of white wine, a brick of cheese and some grapes. Who knew that Mick, whose idea of a great lunch was a greasy steak in a sack, sported such gems in his refrigerator? Lissa sat back in her chair and sighed in contentment.
“What are you so happy about?” Scott asked. He’d been in a touchy mood ever since she refused to help him start the boat. Lissa firmly believed there were things that every man should know how to do: driving a stick-shift vehicle, mowing the grass and killing spiders were a few of them. Starting boats had just been added to that category. After flooding the engine once, they were finally tooling down the lake.
“So I’ve never gotten a chance to ask you how your career as a novelist is going,” Lissa said.
He slumped back in the captain’s seat. “If you’re trying to cheer me up, that’s not the way to do it.”
“Your novels are still unpublished, huh?”
“Mostly they’re still unwritten.”
“You know, if I were you, I’d write a book about what kind of person Miranda really is. You could sell it for scads of money.” Lissa was a firm believer in working with the assets you had at hand.
“Nah. I couldn’t sell out my art like that.”
She leaned back in her chair. “Well, how do you support yourself?”
“I have a trust fund, for one thing.”
“You do?” Lissa’s heart soared. Why had Claire never mentioned this to her?
“But it only pays five hundred dollars a month,” he said. “So I temp the rest of the time.”
“Five hundred dollars? Temp?” She felt like she was back in freshmen economics, so convoluted were the principles he was trying to explain to her. “I never heard of a trust fund that didn’t support its recipient. What kind of trust fund is that?”
“The kind I have, with my kind of luck.”
At that, the motor made kind of a weird lurching sound, then all was still.
They looked at each other. Scott’s mood had been so fragile, she was almost afraid to speak. “What now?” Lissa asked.
Scott shrugged. “Break out the wine, I guess. It’s been that kind of day.”
HER STORY WAS FINISHED. Gathering up the pieces of stationery she’d used, Claire couldn’t help admiring her work. She’d chronicled, logically and thoroughly, how, since 1970, Carbine Industries had begun dumping toxic wastes on properties in south Ridgeville. She’d put in the “no comments” from the plant’s officials, the angry testimony of the residents there, and she unraveled, as best she could, the tangled question of who owned the properties. In her heart, she knew it was a solid piece of reporting. But would it ever see print?
That was up to Alec, she knew. His laptop and modem were sitting on the desk. Just as soon as he’d written his profile of Miranda, he’d zap it in over the phone line and see it become front-page material in next week’s edition. And what would she have in that issue? A puff piece on a local author, a few movie reviews…
Oh, no. She hadn’t put any of that stuff on the paper’s computer drive before she left. It was all sitting on a diskette next to her own computer. Glancing at her watch, she took a chance that Allie would be home. She grabbed the phone and called her.
“Allie, I need you to do a huge favor for me.”
“Have you slept with him yet?”
“What kind of question is that?” Claire asked.
“That sounds to me like you think you’re very close. Just remember, it’s like driving, something you never forget.” Allie paused, then said, “I forgot what a terrible driver you are. It’s just a figure of speech.”
“Get this straight. I am not sleeping with Alec Mason.”
“Do you really want Scott Granville to be it? Do you want to go to your grave knowing that sleazy, low-life little cheater was the last man to make love to you?”
“Thanks for your concern, but I’m sure I’ll have plenty of opportunities to sleep around before I die,” she told Allie. “You, though, are in imminent danger of losing your life unless you shut up and listen to me.”
“All right,” Allie said. “What do you need me to do?”
Claire explained about the diskette.
“I’d wait until we got back, but the production staff was going to lay out the life-style section this weekend. Just go slip it under the door to the newspaper office. I don’t think anyone will be there.”
“That’s comforting to know, considering I’ll be walking around downtown all by myself.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that,” Claire said. “There’s a regular group of bums who hang out in front of the building. They watch out for guys who try to harass women.”
“How comforting,” Allie said. “I guess the key’s in the bird feeder where it always is?”
“Yes,” Claire said. “I really appreciate this.”
“No problem,” Allie said. “And, Claire? Don’t forget to use protection. Remember, I…”
Blushing, Claire hung up on Allie and sat on the bed for a second before leaning back into it. She wrapped last night’s blanket around her and imagined that she could still smell Alec’s scent in it. Here the two of them had lain together all night, with Claire blissfully unaware of whatever it was that was protecting her from unpleasant dreams. What if she had known? Could she have stopped herself from sliding her hand under his shirt and feeling his powerful chest muscles? What would she have done if she had felt his hands caressing her thighs, if she had felt his mouth warm and hungry on her neck?
She sighed and rolled herself up more tightly in the blanket, unable to stop herself from fantasizing about Alec’s hands on her. Alec cradling her breast, Alec bringing his delicious lips to hers.
A knock at the door startled her, and she bounded up from the bed. “Just a second,” she said, thinking, and hoping, that it was Alec. She prayed that her flushed face wouldn’t belie her racy daydreams.
“Chris,” she said, opening the door to Miranda’s cousin. “What’s up?”
“Don’t bother to hide your disappointment. That glow in your cheeks gives it all away,” he told her. “Your friend Roger sent me to tell you he’s getting together a bunch of people to play badminton.”
“Badminton?” she echoed.
“And the beautiful redhead at the end of the hall says, Not in this lifetime,’“ Chris said.
“You know how I am about organized sports,” she said.
“I’ll break it to Roger gently. I think he thinks you’re the outdoor type,” Chris said, starting to walk away.
“Hey, Chris,” she said, calling him back. “You haven’t seen Alec, have you?”
His guilty expression told her he knew something. “Chris
tine caught up with him and Miranda by the pier, and she said Miranda was finally giving Alec that interview he’s been hounding her about.”
“That’s really nice for Alec,” Claire said.
“It’s your paper, too,” Chris reminded her.
“You’re right,” she told him. “I’m not losing a fiancé, I’m gaining an exclusive.” As she was saying it, it didn’t even occur to her to confess to Chris that Alec wasn’t really her fiancé. The pain was just as real as if he had been.
“Claire.” Chris seemed shocked by her cynicism. “It’s not like you to be this way.”
“But maybe it’s about time,” she added quietly. He started to walk away again, and she stopped him once more. “I’ve got to ask you something,” she said in a low voice. “Is anyone else around?”
“They’re all out in the clean, fresh air.”
“Be honest with me. Does your tabloid editor want you to get something from this weekend?”
“I’m sending him something, yes,” Chris admitted. “Right now it’s going to be as big of a yawn as Miranda’s next movie.”
“Well, if you found out something about Miranda that you didn’t know about, wouldn’t you feel obligated to tell him?”
“What are you getting at?” Chris asked. “Do you have something on her?”
Before he had a chance to question her further, she heard Alec whistling as he came down the stairs.
“We’ll talk later,” she said. Chris nodded and nearly bumped into Alec as he went back up the steps.
“Badminton?” he asked a startled Alec.
“No thanks,” Alec said. He stopped at the doorway and gave Claire a hug. She stayed still as a statue at his touch, and she refused to move when he tried to squeeze past her in the doorway.
“Are you going to let me in?” he asked.
“I suppose I must,” she said, moving abruptly out of the entrance. He stumbled a little, then shut the door behind him. “I guess it’s your room, too.”
The room hadn’t seemed so small before, not even when she’d woken up to find herself practically on top of him. Alec said nothing, merely leaned against the door and folded his arms, his eyes measuring her with a look she couldn’t read. She walked to the desk and straightened the pile of papers there. Then she went to the sofa and pretended to fiddle with something in one of her suitcases. All the time, she could feel Alec’s eyes on her.