“Oh, Molly… not again.” The consternation in her sister’s eyes made Molly wish she’d worn a hat.
“Relax, will you? Nothing’s going to happen.”
“How can I relax? Every time you do something drastic to your hair, we have another incident.”
“I outgrew incidents a long-time ago.” Molly sniffed. “This was purely cosmetic.”
“I don’t believe you. You’re getting ready to do something crazy again, aren’t you?”
“I am not!” If she said it frequently enough, maybe she’d convince herself.
“Only ten years old,” Phoebe muttered to herself. “The brightest and best-behaved student at the boarding school. Then, out of nowhere, you hack off your bangs and plant a stink bomb in the dining hall.”
“Nothing more than a gifted child’s chemistry experiment.”
“Thirteen years old. Quiet. Studious. Not a single misstep since the stink-bomb incident. Until you started combing grape Jell-O powder through your hair. Then presto change-o! You pack up Bert’s college trophies, call a garbage company, and have them hauled away.”
“You liked that one when I told you about it. Admit it.”
But Phoebe was on a roll, and she wasn’t admitting anything. “Four years go by. Four years of model behavior and high scholastic achievement. Dan and I have taken you into our home, into our hearts. You’re a senior, on your way to being valedictorian. You have a stable home, people who love you… You’re vice-president of the Student Council, so why should I worry when you put blue and orange stripes in your hair?”
“They were the school colors,” Molly said weakly.
“I get the call from the police telling me that my sister—my studious, brainy, Citizen of the Month sister!—deliberately set off a fire alarm during fifth-period lunch! No more little mischief for our Molly! Oh, no… She’s gone straight to a class-two felony!”
It had been the most miserable thing Molly had ever done. She’d betrayed the people who loved her, and even after a year of court supervision and many hours of community service, she hadn’t been able to explain why. That understanding had come later, during her sophomore year at Northwestern.
It had been in the spring, right before finals. Molly had found herself restless and unable to concentrate. Instead of studying, she read stacks of romance novels, drew, or stared at her hair in the mirror and yearned for something pre-Raphaelite. Even using up her allowance on hair extensions hadn’t made the restlessness go away. Then one day she’d walked out of the college bookstore and discovered a calculator that she hadn’t paid for tucked in her purse.
Wiser than she’d been in high school, she’d rushed back inside to return it and headed for Northwestern’s counseling office.
Phoebe interrupted Molly’s thoughts by jumping to her feet. “And the last time…”
Molly winced, even though she’d known this was where Phoebe would end up.
“… the last time you did something this drastic to your hair—that awful crew cut two years ago…”
“It was trendy, not awful.”
Phoebe set her teeth. “The last time you did something this drastic, you gave away fifteen million dollars!”
“Yes, well… Getting the crew cut was purely coincidental.”
“Ha!”
For the fifteen millionth time, Molly explained why she’d done it. “Bert’s money was strangling me. I needed to make a final break from the past so I could be my own person.”
“A poor person!”
Molly smiled. Although Phoebe would never admit it, she understood exactly why Molly had given up her inheritance. “Look on the bright side. Hardly anybody knows I gave away my money. They just think that I’m eccentric for driving a used Beetle and living in a place the size of a closet.”
“You adore that place.”
Molly didn’t even try to deny it. Her loft was her most precious possession, and she loved knowing she earned the money that paid her mortgage each month. Only someone who’d grown up without a home that was truly her own could understand what it meant to her.
She decided to change the subject before Phoebe could start in on her again. “The munchkins told me Dan hit Mr. Shallow with a ten-thousand-dollar fine.”
“I wish you wouldn’t call him that. Kevin’s not shallow, he’s just—”
“Interest-impaired?”
“Honestly, Molly, I don’t know why you dislike him so much. The two of you couldn’t have exchanged even a dozen words over the years.”
“By design. I avoid people who speak only Gridiron.”
“If you knew him better, you’d adore him as much as I do.”
“Isn’t it fascinating that he mainly dates women with limited English? But I guess it prevents a silly thing like conversation from interfering with sex.”
Phoebe laughed in spite of herself.
Although Molly shared almost everything with her sister, she hadn’t shared her own infatuation with the Stars’ quarterback. Not only would it be humiliating, but Phoebe would confide in Dan, who’d go ballistic. Her brother-in-law was more than a little protective where Molly was concerned, and unless an athlete was happily married or gay, he didn’t want Molly anywhere near him.
At that moment the subject of her thoughts burst into the room. Dan Calebow was big, blond, and handsome. Age had treated him kindly, and in the twelve years since Molly had known him, the added lines in that virile face had only given him character. His was the kind of presence that filled a room by reflecting the perfect self-confidence of someone who knew what he stood for.
Dan had been head coach when Phoebe had inherited the Stars. Unfortunately, she hadn’t known anything about football, and he’d immediately declared war. Their early battles had been so fierce that Ron McDermitt had once suspended Dan for insulting her, but it wasn’t long before their anger turned into something else entirely.
Molly considered Phoebe and Dan’s love story the stuff of legend, and she’d long ago decided that if she couldn’t have what her sister and brother-in-law had together, she didn’t want anything. Only a Great Love Story would satisfy Molly, and that was as likely as Dan rescinding Kevin’s fine.
Her brother-in-law automatically wrapped an arm around Molly’s shoulders. When Dan was with his family, he always had an arm around someone. A pang shot through her heart. Over the years she’d dated a lot of decent guys and even tried to convince herself she was in love with one or two of them, but she’d fallen out of love the moment she realized they couldn’t come close to filling the giant shadow cast by her brother-in-law. She was beginning to suspect no one ever would.
“Phoebe, I know you like Kevin, but this time he’s gone too far.” His Alabama drawl always grew broader when he was upset, and now he was dripping molasses.
“That’s what you said last time,” Phoebe replied. “And you like him, too.”
“I don’t understand it! Playing for the Stars is the most important thing in his life. Why is he working so hard to screw that up?”
Phoebe smiled sweetly. “You could probably answer that better than either one of us, since you were a pretty big screwup until I came along.”
“You must have me confused with someone else.”
Phoebe laughed, and Dan’s glower gave way to the intimate smile Molly had witnessed a thousand times and envied just as many. Then his smile faded. “If I didn’t know him better, I’d think the devil was chasing him.”
“Devils,” Molly interjected. “All with foreign accents and big breasts.”
“It goes along with being a football player, which is something I don’t ever want you to forget.”
She didn’t want to hear any more about Kevin, so she gave Dan a quick peck on the cheek. “Hannah’s waiting. I’ll have her back late tomorrow afternoon.”
“Don’t let her see the morning papers.”
“I won’t.” Hannah brooded when the newspapers weren’t kind to the Stars, and Kevin’s fine was sure to be con
troversial.
Molly waved her good-byes, collected Hannah, kissed the sibs, and set off for home. The East-West Tollway was already backing up with rush-hour traffic, and Molly knew it would be well over an hour before she got to Evanston, the old North Shore town that was both the location of her alma mater and her current home.
“Slytherin!” she called out to the jerk who cut her off.
“Dirty, rotten Slytherin!” Hannah echoed.
Molly smiled to herself. The Slytherins were the bad kids in the Harry Potter books, and Molly had turned the word into a useful G-rated curse. She’d been amused when Phoebe, then Dan, had started to use it. As Hannah began to chatter about her day, Molly found herself thinking back to her conversation with Phoebe and those years right after she’d finally come into her inheritance.
Bert’s will had left Phoebe the Chicago Stars. What remained of his estate after a series of bad investments had gone to Molly. Since Molly was a minor, Phoebe had tended the money until it had grown into fifteen million dollars. Finally, with the emancipation of being twenty-one, along with her brand-new degree in journalism, Molly had taken control of her inheritance and started living the high life in a luxury apartment on Chicago’s Gold Coast.
The place was sterile and her neighbors much older, but she was slow to realize she’d made a mistake. Instead, she’d indulged herself in the designer clothes she adored and bought presents for her friends as well as an expensive car for herself. But after a year she’d finally admitted that the life of the idle rich wasn’t for her. She was used to working hard, whether in school or at the summer jobs Dan had insisted she take, so she’d accepted a position at a newspaper.
The work kept her busy, but it wasn’t creative enough to be fulfilling, and she began to feel as if she were playing at life instead of living it. Finally she decided to quit so she could work on the epic romantic saga she’d always fantasized about writing. Instead, she found herself tinkering with the stories she made up for the Calebow children, tales of a spunky little bunny who wore the latest fashions, lived in a cottage at the edge of Nightingale Woods, and couldn’t stay out of trouble.
She’d begun putting the stories on paper, then illustrating them with the funny drawings she’d done all her life but never taken seriously. Using pen and ink, then filling in the sketches with bright acrylic colors, she watched Daphne and her friends come alive.
She’d been elated when Birdcage Press, a small Chicago publisher, bought her first book, Daphne Says Hello, even though the advance money barely covered her postage. Still, she’d finally found her niche. But her vast wealth made her work seem more like a hobby than a vocation, and she continued feeling dissatisfied. Her restlessness grew. She hated her apartment, her wardrobe, her hair… A jazzy little crew cut didn’t help.
She needed to pull a fire alarm.
Since those days were behind her, she’d found herself seated in her attorney’s office telling him she wanted all of her money put into a foundation that would help disadvantaged children. He’d been flabbergasted, but she’d felt completely satisfied for the first time since she’d turned twenty-one. Phoebe had been given the opportunity to prove herself when she’d inherited the Stars, but Molly had never had that chance. Now she would. When she signed the papers, she felt feather-light and free.
“I love it here.” Hannah sighed as Molly unlocked the door of her tiny second-floor loft a few minutes’ walk from downtown Evanston. Molly gave her own sigh of pleasure. Even though she hadn’t been gone long, she always loved the moment when she walked inside her own home.
All the Calebow children regarded Aunt Molly’s loft as the coolest place on earth. The building had been constructed in 1910 for a Studebaker dealer, then used as an office building and eventually a warehouse before being renovated a few years ago. Her condo had floor-to-ceiling industrial windows, exposed ductwork, and old brick walls that held some of her drawings and paintings. Her unit was both the smallest in the building and the cheapest, but the fourteen-foot ceilings gave it a spacious feeling. Every month when she made her mortgage payment, she kissed the envelope before she slipped it into the mailbox. A silly ritual, but she did it just the same.
Most people assumed that Molly still had a stake in the Stars, and only a few of her very closest friends knew she was no longer a wealthy heiress. She supplemented her small income from the Daphne books by writing articles freelance for a teen magazine called Chik. There wasn’t much left at the end of the month for her favorite luxuries—great clothes and hardback books, but she didn’t mind. She bargain-shopped and used the library.
Life was good. She might never have a Great Love Story like Phoebe’s, but at least she was blessed with a wonderful imagination and an active fantasy life. She had no complaints and certainly no reason to be afraid that her old restlessness might be rearing its unpredictable head. Her new hairstyle was nothing more than a fashion statement.
Hannah threw off her coat and crouched down to greet Roo, Molly’s small gray poodle, who’d scampered to the door to greet them. Both Roo and the Calebows’ poodle, Kanga, were the offspring of Phoebe’s beloved Pooh.
“Hey, stinker, did you miss me?” Molly tossed down her mail to plant a kiss on Roo’s soft gray topknot. Roo reciprocated by swiping Molly’s chin with his tongue, then crouching down to produce his very best growl.
“Yeah, yeah, we’re impressed, aren’t we, Hannah?”
Hannah giggled and looked up at Molly. “He still likes to pretend he’s a police dog, doesn’t he?”
“The baddest dog on the force. Let’s not damage his self-esteem by telling him he’s a poodle.”
Hannah gave Roo an extra squeeze, then abandoned him to head for Molly’s workspace, which took up one end of the open living area. “Have you written any more articles? I loved ‘Prom-Night Passion.’ “
Molly smiled. “Soon.”
In keeping with the demands of the marketplace, the articles she freelanced to Chik were almost always published with suggestive titles, although their content was tame. “Prom-Night Passion” stressed the consequences of backseat sex. “From Virgin to Vixen” had been an article on cosmetics, and “Nice Girls Go Wild” followed three fourteen-year-olds on a camping trip.
“Can I see your new drawings?”
Molly hung up their coats. “I don’t have any. I’m just getting started with a new idea.” Sometimes her books began with idle sketches, other times with text. Today it had been real-life inspiration.
“Tell me! Please!”
They always shared cups of Constant Comment tea before they did anything else, and Molly walked into the tiny kitchen that sat opposite her work area to put water on to boil. Her minuscule sleeping loft was located just above, where it looked out over the living space below. Metal shelves on the downstairs walls overflowed with the books she adored: her beloved set of Jane Austen’s novels, tattered copies of the works of Daphne Du Maurier and Anya Seton, all of Mary Stewart’s early books, along with Victoria Holt, Phyllis Whitney, and Danielle Steel.
Narrower shelves held double-deep rows of paperbacks—historical sagas, romance, mysteries, travel guides, and reference books. Her favorite literary writers were also well represented, along with biographies of famous women and some of Oprah’s less depressing book club selections, most of which Molly had discovered before Oprah shared them with the world.
She kept the children’s books she loved on shelves in the sleeping loft. Her collection included all the Eloise stories and Harry Potter books, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, some Judy Blume, Gertrude Chandler Warner’s The Boxcar Children, Anne of Green Gables, a little Sweet Valley High for fun, and the tattered Barbara Cartland books she’d discovered when she was ten. It was the collection of a dedicated bookworm, and all the Calebow children loved curling up on her bed with a whole stack piled around them while they tried to decide which one to read next.
Molly pulled out a pair of china teacups with delicate gold rims and a scatter of purple
pansies. “I decided today that I’m calling my new book Daphne Takes a Tumble.”
“Tell me!”
“Well… Daphne is walking through Nightingale Woods minding her own business when, out of nowhere, Benny comes racing past on his mountain bike and knocks her off her feet.”
Hannah shook her head disapprovingly. “That pesky badger.”
“Exactly.”
Hannah regarded her cagily. “I think somebody should steal Benny’s mountain bike. Then he’d stay out of trouble.”
Molly smiled. “Stealing doesn’t exist in Nightingale Woods. Didn’t we talk about that when you wanted somebody to steal Benny’s jet ski?”
“I guess.” Her mouth set in the mulish line she’d inherited from her father. “But if there can be mountain bikes and jet skis in Nightingale Woods, I don’t see why there can’t be stealing, too. And Benny doesn’t mean to do bad things. He’s just mischievous.”
Molly thought of Kevin. “There’s a thin line between mischief and stupidity.”
“Benny’s not stupid!”
Hannah looked stricken, and Molly wished she’d kept her mouth shut. “Of course he’s not. He’s the smartest badger in Nightingale Woods.” She ruffled her niece’s hair. “Let’s have our tea, and then we’ll take Roo for a walk by the lake.”
Molly didn’t get a chance to look at her mail until later that night, after Hannah had fallen asleep with a tattered copy of The Jennifer Wish. She put her phone bill in a clip, then absentmindedly opened a business-size envelope. She wished she hadn’t bothered as she took in the letterhead.
STRAIGHT KIDS FOR A STRAIGHT AMERICA
The radical homosexual agenda has targeted your children! Our most innocent citizens are being lured toward the evils of perversion by obscene books and irresponsible television shows that glorify this deviant and morally repugnant behavior…
Straight Kids for a Straight America, SKIFSA, was a Chicago-based organization whose wild-eyed members had been appearing on all the local talk shows to spew their personal paranoia. If only they’d turn their energies to something constructive, like keeping guns away from kids, and she tossed the letter in the trash.
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