Welcome to Temptation/Bet Me

by Jennifer Crusie

  “Amy, somebody just got murdered here. I’m not going—”

  “It was Zane,” Amy said. “Everybody wanted him dead—nobody wants to hurt you—just go look. Oh, please, Sophie.” Sophie hesitated and Amy said, “Please. This is my chance, please help me.”

  Sophie closed her eyes. “If I get killed, I’m haunting you.”

  “Oh, thank you,” Amy said. “Thank you, thank you, you always come through for me, Sophie.”

  And I’m getting a little tired of that, Sophie thought, as she headed for the main road and the other side of the river. The Old Bridge was just too creepy this late at night.

  When she turned off the road and began to walk down the river path, she realized the whole place was creepy at night, thick with trees with the swollen river rushing below. Just find out what that glint is and go, she told herself. Once she knew for sure what was going on—

  She stopped when she was behind the Garveys’ house because somebody was moving on the path above the dock. She stepped into the shelter of the trees and saw Stephen, binoculars ready, staring across the river.

  They were screwed.

  She bent to look through the trees to see the dock so brightly lit they could have counted Clea’s freckles from the courthouse.

  They were completely screwed.

  Then her Dempsey instincts kicked in and she realized she wasn’t alone, but before she could turn, somebody shoved her hard, and Sophie tripped and fell into the trees, smacking her head hard on a branch and toppling down the steep slope half-conscious, grabbing instinctively at branches that ripped at her hands until she plunged headfirst into the river.

  She hit the water hard and went under, and it was cold, ridiculously cold, and that helped bring her back from the head blow. The pull of the current was strong as she fought her way to the air, shuddering and gasping as the river took her. She was past the farm dock by the time she surfaced. She saw Junie’s dock off to her left, and kicked off her shoes and began to swim for it, cutting diagonally across the current, but the water was so cold and her head hurt and she missed the dock, slipping under the water twice as she almost lost consciousness.

  I’m not going to die, she thought, and kept fighting her way across the current, and then the current was weaker, and there was another dock and she managed to get close enough to shore that the river took her against the pilings. She clung to the edge of the dock, feeling herself slip away, and then she thought, No, and pulled herself up, painfully, to collapse on the splintery boards. You can’t stay here, she told herself, and put her hand to her head where it hurt the most. It was wet, she was wet all over, but when she brought her hand down, it had blood on it. I’ll get help, she thought. I’ll get help in a minute.

  And then there was nothing.

  Phin was opening the bookstore the next morning when Wes came up the steps. “I got the lab report and I’m heading out to the farm,” Wes told him, biting off the words. “You coming?”

  “I have this store I’m running,” Phin frowned at him. “What are you so mad about?”

  “The lab report.” Wes stopped on the top step. “And the Dempseys. They’re going to tell me the truth this time or I’m going to fry them, and that includes your girlfriend. I don’t care how banged-up she is.”

  He started down the steps, and Phin said, “What?”

  “Sophie,” Wes said. “She didn’t call you? Somebody shoved her in the river last night. She’s got the same wound on her forehead that Zane had. Ed’s pretty sure they both hit their heads on the same tree.”

  Phin flipped the sign Back at 4:30 over, slammed the door to the bookstore shut, and went down the steps past Wes. “Drive,” he said.

  When they got to the farm, Phin was out of the car and at the door faster than he’d ever moved in his life. He didn’t bother to knock.

  “Oh, hi,” Sophie said from the living-room couch. She had a livid scraped bruise on her forehead and blue circles under her eyes, and she looked like hell. Davy and Amy stood over her, scowling at each other, but when they heard Phin come in, their faces smoothed out to bland.

  “What the hell did you think you were doing?” Phin said to Sophie, not caring that everybody was listening. “It’s dangerous out there.”

  “What?” Sophie frowned at him and then winced and put her hand to the bruise, and Phin wanted somebody dead. “Whoever killed Zane doesn’t want me, unless you think you’ve got a serial killer on your hands, which doesn’t seem—”

  “If you ever do that again,” Phin snapped, “you won’t need a serial killer. I’ll do you myself just to get the suspense over with.”

  “It’s just a scrape,” Sophie said. “It’s no big deal.”

  “The hell it isn’t,” Phin said. “And you were in the river. Tell me Ed pumped you full of penicillin.”

  “Yes,” Sophie said. “I’m fine.”

  She sat there with her chin in the air, and he said, “No, you’re not. You’re too dumb to live,” and went out and sat down on the porch steps and put his head in his hands and thought, I almost lost her.

  Davy came out and sat down beside him.

  Phin braced himself. “If you’re coming out here to kick my ass because I yelled at your sister, go right ahead.”

  “No, I think you pretty much summarized the situation for her,” Davy said. “She’s just used to taking care of everything. Sophie’s not one for waiting around if the family’s in trouble.”

  “Wes said she says she just went for a walk.” Phin raised his head and looked at Davy. “Tell me she’s not that damn stupid.”

  “I wasn’t there,” Davy said. “As I understand it, they were shooting on the dock, and Sophie thought she saw somebody watching, so she went to see. Amy would like that to be Sophie’s idea, but my bet is, Amy leaned on her. The movie is making Amy crazy, but it’s family that makes Sophie stupid. You should be able to relate.”

  Sophie came out on the porch. “You still here? I thought you’d have gone back to the smart people by now. Davy, Wes wants us.”

  Phin looked at the bruise on her forehead and the misery in her eyes and felt like hell. “You are not allowed to leave the house again until you get your driver’s license.”

  “I already have a driver’s license.”

  “That’s what you think,” Phin said, turning to stare back across the yard. “I’m making Wes take it.”

  Davy stood up. “Don’t scare the mayor again,” he told his sister and went inside.

  After a moment, Sophie sat down beside Phin. “I’m sorry if I upset you.”

  “You didn’t upset me,” Phin said. “You took ten fucking years off my life.” She leaned into him a little, and he felt her warm weight against his shoulder. She was so close and so important, that he put his arm around her and kissed her, very softly because she’d been hurt.

  She closed her eyes. “I’m sorry if I scared you. I scared me, too. I even lost my rings.” Her voice shook a little and he kissed her again.

  “I’ll get you new rings,” he said against her mouth, and then Wes came out and said, “I want Sophie in here now.”

  Phin sat on the arm of the couch with Sophie close against him, and Amy leaned on the fireplace and stared malevolently at him. Warm little family you got, honey, he thought and then remembered his mother. Never mind.

  “A couple of things,” Wes said. “Somebody filled Zane full of sleeping pills.”

  Sophie straightened against Phin, and he thought, Great, now what did they do?

  “Enough to kill him?” Phin said, and Wes scowled and said, “No. But there’s more.” He turned back to Amy. “There was mildew smeared deep into that letterman sweater. I’d like to see your shower curtain.”

  Amy froze, and Davy said, “I made them get rid of it. It was so gross I couldn’t stand it.”

  “You know,” Wes said, “you’re pissing me off.” He looked at Amy. “You got anything you want to tell me?”

  Amy stuck her chin out. “No.”
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  Wes nodded. “I know damn well you moved that body, and I need to know where you found it.” He never took his eyes off Amy’s face. “Don’t lie to me.”

  Amy flushed, and Sophie looked miserable.

  Phin took her hand. “Sophie’s sick,” he said, and pulled her outside, away from her family. “Okay,” he said, when they were back on the porch step. “You don’t have to tell me a damn thing, but don’t go down for them. There’s a limit to what you do for family.”

  “I don’t think there is,” Sophie said miserably. “We didn’t kill him, Phin, I swear, we didn’t.”

  “Okay.” He put his arm around her. “Don’t get upset. How’s your head?”

  “It hurts,” she said, and he kissed the scrape. “We moved the body,” she blurted, and he looked back over his shoulder to see if Wes was close enough to hear. “I can’t stand lying to you.”

  “That why Davy came for you,” he said, and Sophie nodded.

  “Amy wanted to film on the dock, but the body was there, so she moved it into the trees, and then we moved it to the Tavern.”

  “Amy’s been leaning on you for too damn long,” Phin said grimly. “When are you going to let her clean up after her own mistakes?”

  “When are you going to let Dill?” Sophie said. “When she gets her driver’s license? I don’t think there’s an age where you say to the people you love, ‘You’re on your own.’ ”

  “No, but there’s an age where you say, ‘I’m on my own,’ ” Phin said. “And you’re there. Can I tell Wes?”

  Sophie closed her eyes. “I don’t want to betray my sister.”

  “As long as she didn’t shoot Zane, you won’t,” Phin said. “Wes isn’t going to arrest her for moving the body, he’s after bigger fish.”

  She shuddered. “That damn shower curtain. I see it in my dreams.”

  “You don’t think she shot him, do you?” Phin said, and Sophie was quiet for too long.

  “No,” she said finally. “But I think she might have given him the sleeping pills. Davy got revenge once using sleeping pills, and we’d just been talking about it. I don’t know.” She put her hand to her head. “You know, this really hurts.”

  “You need quiet,” Phin said and stood up. “Come back with me. I’ll have Ed give you some stronger pain stuff and you can sleep upstairs at the bookstore.”

  Sophie closed her eyes. “I can’t leave Amy.”

  “You have to leave Amy,” Phin said. “It’s the only way you’re going to survive.”

  The council meeting the next day was depressing, even more depressing than telling Wes the Dempseys had moved the body or leaving Sophie at the farm with her conniving sister. Stephen asked to table the streetlight vote for another week so he could present more evidence of Phin’s fiscal depravity and neglect of civic duty. Then, during the new business, he tried to pass a formal thank-you to Phin for working so closely with the movie people, said thank-you to be printed in the Temptation Gazette. The motion went down when only the Garveys voted for it, the rest of the council viewing them with deep suspicion. Stephen fumed, his hands shaking, and then he played his last card.

  “I have an announcement,” he said. “I’ve talked to the people at Temptation Cable and they’ve agreed to preempt their usual programming so that we can show the “Return to Temptation” video at eight next Tuesday night.”

  “Uh-oh,” Rachel said from beside Phin.

  “Have you asked the people who made the movie, Stephen?” Phin said. “They have rights, too.”

  “I’m sure they’ll be thrilled,” Stephen said smugly. “Why wouldn’t they be? A chance to preview their film to a receptive audience. And besides”—his voice dropped a little—“We should see what they’ve done. We gave them a permit, after all. I’m just doing my civic duty.”

  You watched them film on the dock, Phin thought. What do you know?

  But he already knew.

  They were making porn.

  Half an hour later, Phin stopped by the police station and told Wes about the cable premiere.

  Wes stubbed his cigarette out on the edge of one of the coffee cups that littered his desk. “They know about this out at the farm?”

  “I doubt it,” Phin said. “I haven’t heard any screaming. Rachel will tell them when she gets out there. You want to go out?”

  “No,” Wes said, sourly. “Amy won’t tell me anything anyway. When you go, find out if they have a .22.”

  “Everybody has a .22,” Phin said. “Hell, I have a .22, or at least, my dad did.”

  “I know,” Wes said. “I ran the registration forms. There are almost four hundred of the damn things in this county alone.”

  “An armed populace is a secure populace,” Phin said. “Also, this is southern Ohio. What did you expect?”

  “You have one, Frank has one, Clea’s dad had one, which could mean it’s still at the farm, Ed has one, Stephen has one, hell, even Junie Miller and Hildy Mallow have one—” He stopped, caught by an idea. “Your entire city council is armed.”

  “That, I didn’t need to know,” Phin said, standing up.

  “I went to Cincinnati today,” Wes said, and Phin sat down again. “No bank book anywhere, although Zane showed it to a couple of people on Friday.”

  Phin winced. Missing money and Dempseys were a no-brainer.

  “Also, he had the whole council investigated.” Wes tossed a thick folder across the desk to him. “He had a crackerjack research team. The people at the station thought a lot of him. Evidently he was a damn good reporter. He’d been an investigative journalist before doctors found his heart problem and made him quit, but he trained the research team. They thought he was God.”

  Phin picked up the folder and began to leaf through it. The top sheaf of papers had his name on them: a list of everybody he’d slept with for the past ten years, with significant details. “Fuck you, Zane.”

  The next set of papers was Hildy Mallow’s arrest record.

  “Everybody at the station hated Clea, though,” Wes was saying. “Said she was a conniving, manipulative bitch.”

  “That sounds like Clea,” Phin said, still reading. “Hildy went to jail for protesting the war?”

  “Often,” Wes said. “She said Zane tried to talk her into stopping the video on the basis of family values, and when that didn’t work he threatened to do her arrest record as part of a human-interest story. She offered him his choice of pictures of her behind bars from her scrapbook and asked him for a copy of the arrest records because she wants to frame them.”

  “Good for her.” Phin flipped through her records, his respect for Hildy growing. “Man, she was busted everywhere. She—” He stopped when he came to the next set of papers: Virginia Garvey’s record. “He knew about Virginia’s driving citations.”

  “She says he never mentioned them, but he did come by the house. She said he asked Stephen to stop the video on the family-values grounds again, and Stephen said he’d look into it.” Wes shrugged. “He probably didn’t use the records because he didn’t need them. They came on board without the threat.”

  “Did he have anything on Stephen?” Phin said, stopping to frown at an invoice from an online video-porn distributor. “He didn’t really think he was going to blackmail Ed for porn, did he?”

  “He tried,” Wes said. “Ed told him everybody in town knew he had the best porn collection in southern Ohio.”

  Phin flipped the invoices over and found a medical record. “What the hell? So Frank Lutz had a vasectomy in 1976. Who cares—” Then he heard Georgia again, talking about the little girl she didn’t get. “Frank, you moron.”

  “Yeah,” Wes said. “Frank’s revenge.”

  Phin looked at the Cincinnati address on the top of the form. “Georgia would have left him if she’d known. How the hell did Zane find this?”

  “Look at the next one,” Wes said. “Stephen has Parkinson’s disease.”

  “That’s why his hands have been shaking,” Phin sai
d, reading the next medical record and feeling sorry for Stephen for the first time in his life. “They don’t always, so I thought it was just rage.” He looked up at Wes. “That’s why Virginia was driving. He didn’t want to have an attack while he was driving.”

  “It’s more than that,” Wes said. “He didn’t want anybody to know because of the election.”

  “Why? I don’t—”

  “Because he thought you’d use it against him,” Wes said, and when Phin jerked his head up, outraged, Wes added, “He’d have used it against you.”

  Phin sat back and stared down at the folder. “Christ, what a mess.”

  “You know, this might be pretty much the last chance for him,” Wes said. “Parkinson’s is progressive, and he’s getting older. He only has to keep it a secret for another two months to win this time. But another two years, in this town—” Wes shook his head. “It’s not like Temptation’s ever given him a break before.”

  Phin winced. He’d never thought of it that way, and for the first time he wondered what it must be like to be Stephen Garvey in Temptation. While he’d been trapped under the weight of dozens of Tucker victories and one loss, Stephen had been carrying dozens of losses and one victory. What must it be like to be destined to strive for something you were lousy at, that your father had been lousy at, and his father before him? What would that do a man?

  What would a man do to end that?

  Phin met Wes’s eyes. “So did Zane threaten him with the medical report?”

  Wes shook his head. “Stephen swears it was all family values and agreement.”

  Phin spared one last sympathetic thought for Stephen and then flipped through the rest of the papers, through Davy’s record, and a page on Sophie’s relationship with the therapist that he definitely didn’t want to read, and a much thicker sheaf of pages on a Michael Dempsey that had to be dear old Dad. At the bottom of the Dempsey stack was a final clip of papers, and Phin stopped when he saw the newspaper article on top.

  Mayor’s Wife Dies in Accident.

  “He really was going after that, then,” Phin said, shuffling through Ed’s autopsy report and the police report with crime-scene photos and the newspaper report and Diane’s obituary. He tried not to look at the photos, at her pale face lit starkly against the dark of the grass. “What did he find?”