“What are you doing?”
The sound of Cassie’s voice in her ear jumpstarted her.
“What do you mean, what am I doing?” Bree turned and started, a little wobbly, down the sidewalk.
“I answered the phone two minutes ago. You’ve been doing that thing with your teeth.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
But of course Bree did know what her best friend of twenty-six years was talking about, and of course Cassie knew that Bree knew exactly what Cassie was talking about.
Leave it to her best friend to answer the phone and sit there listening to her nervous tick like a creeper.
In the background of Cassie’s line, screaming erupted.
“Hold on a sec.” Cassie’s voice was brisk and husky, which really was the appropriate term for the woman who in the past year had gone from single chum and adventure pal, to single chum in custody of three kids, to, as of precisely thirteen months ago, married chum loaded down with six kids—four of them under five.
After some prodding, then vague threats, the screaming died down to a reasonable level.
“So, what’s going on down there?” Cassie asked. “Why the beatbox session?”
“Nothing. Absolutely nothing.” But Bree’s feet slowed as her eyes fell upon him. Chip. Her right foot floated six inches off the ground.
Keep moving! she commanded it, but her foot was as stubborn as her. She felt like she was pulling it through quicksand, but she managed to push one heel to the ground and move on to the next step.
Bree’s eyes stayed on him. He was across the street, standing on the curb beside a gleaming pearl-colored SUV, with the pearl-dressed woman in his arms. She with her pearly cheek pressed against his chest. He looking down at her with that same smile he had bestowed upon Bree on the metal stairway.
Honestly, what did she expect would happen? She had come out of her way to see this little picture of the cozy couple. All they needed were a few butterflies and songbirds and the scene would be complete.
Did she really expect him to be incapable of thinking of anyone but her for the rest of the play? To be unable to tear his eyes away from her while she lounged upstage in her mossy surroundings?
To be standing beside that gleaming SUV right now, breaking that shiny girl’s heart by explaining he had just experienced an ethereal moment with the green girl holding a potted plant, and by golly, he just had to find her? Right there? Right then?
Yep. That sounded about right.
Instead, there he was, hands in both of his jacket pockets while he waited for the woman to slip inside her SUV, grinning in that same charming, crinkly-templed way.
The engine turned, and he headed toward the parking lot where his truck was parked.
Bree faced forward and resumed her pace.
No, no. She’d made a fool of herself enough tonight, thank you. No need to add Staring at Stranger from a Distance Like Vengeful Imaginary Ex-Girlfriend to her list.
She would just forget him. Put everything about him behind her.
In fact, good for shiny blond girl. Way to find a good one.
Bree hopped off the curb.
Focus, Bree. Task at hand.
“So, Cass, tell me,” Bree said, unlocking her car. “What makes a better impression at a party: a bowl of pistachios or two cut-up bananas and a splash of watermelon?”
“How much watermelon are we talking?”
“One, maybe two cubes.”
“How nice is the bowl?”
“Lime-green plastic. But dishwasher-level clean.” Bree slipped the keys into the ignition. “And quiche! I can steal three, maybe three and a half, pieces of Evie’s quiche.”
“Didn’t she start locking her food up in those plastic containers?”
“Please. These are desperate times. I can pick a lock if needed.”
Bree cranked the car, then reached for the five-hour-old coffee in her cup holder. She took a cool sip while Cassie’s voice went fuzzy.
“Hand it to me. Give. It. Now. Drew . . . No, I’m not doing the mean voice . . . Well, if you weren’t trying to poke his eye out with it—” Cassie’s voice switched over at lightning speed. “Are we talking about a fancy party here?”
Bree turned the wheel with her pinky and ring finger while gripping the coffee cup with the rest. “A high-profile gala where my boss can judge me by my sad food contribution while sorting out the cast placements for the summer season.”
“Ah. So nothing special or important in any way.”
“Precisely.”
She turned onto Church Street to avoid the steady post-play traffic on Main. She eased to a stop at the Plumb Alley crossing, and her eyes ticked up to the rearview mirror while she waited for a pair of joggers to cross.
She frowned.
Behind her, monster truck tires vibrated beneath a block of rattling red metal—although the owner of the ancient Ford F250 resting his fender two inches from her bumper would’ve no doubt called the color “the blood of the latest buck I shot with my Ruger American Magnum.” From her vantage point, which was nearly beneath the massive vehicle, she saw oil dripping from the chassis.
“So, your mom was asking me the other day . . . ,” Cassie started, hesitation deep in her voice.
“You’re going to have to talk louder. I have an earthquake squatting behind me,” Bree shouted.
Cassie raised her voice. “Are you going to make it back next weekend for Anna’s birthday party?”
Bree’s lips pursed, that same involuntary wave rolling through her body whenever she heard her eight-year-old niece’s name. Anna.
Bree had seen a lot in the six months since she’d left her home of twenty-six years and made her way to Abingdon to live with Nana and try her hand onstage. No one had any clue that Nana would pass away that morning four months ago—especially not Bree, who’d found her. Who’d shaken her. Who, in a state of panic, had made a shabby attempt at CPR until the medics came and finally pulled her away. None of them knew how much that moment had tipped Bree over the edge.
She knew her family had their suspicions that losing Nana was harder for Bree than she let on. The fact was, they didn’t know how hard. How deep she had sunk. How dark everything had become in recent months.
Unlike everyone else in the family, Bree couldn’t keep herself together when she saw Anna. Ironic as it was, she—the only one getting paid to pretend—was the only one in the family who couldn’t slap on a happy face and keep conversation light in Anna’s presence. Her niece, just a child, was dying, and one day someone would wake up and find her the way Bree had found Nana. She tried to muster courage two months ago, at a family supper, and panicked. Ended up in a bathroom stall heaving.
Bree pushed everything about Anna away—her name, her image—looking instead to the fuming grill that edged closer to her bumper with each second.
“Chill out, you old rattletrap,” Bree said aloud, waving with her old coffee cup toward a couple pushing a stroller across. “You think I don’t have somewhere to go, too, buddy?”
For a moment she considered darting around them, and her toes lifted off the brake. But then a curly-headed boy on a bike jumped in front of her, pedaling fast toward his parents.
One more agonizing moment of watching the boy cross the road, and she hit the pedal.
“Sorry, Cass. What were you saying?”
“I was asking about next weekend.”
“We have shows all day,” Bree said, stopping at the stop sign and looking left, then right, then back at the truck who hit the gas at an alarming speed.
She turned onto Valley Street and, to her chagrin, the truck lurched in her direction with so much vim she jerked her wheel. Drops of the cold black coffee splattered the skirt of her borrowed dress.
“Shoot.” Bree rammed her cup into the cup holder and began swiping at the spill.
The engine behind her roared.
“I’m going to kill this guy behind me.”
&n
bsp; Deidre’s muffled voice came from far off in the background.
“No, honey,” Cassie said. “Bree isn’t going to kill anyone. She didn’t really mean that—”
“Yes, I did,” Bree said.
“Ha-ha!” Cassie replied in an overbright tone. “No, of course she didn’t.”
Bree bit her lip. “Did.”
There was a pause. Muffled words in the background.
“Of course she won’t go to jail,” Cassie said.
More muffled words.
“Yes, well, even if she does go to jail, she’ll still send you Christmas presents . . .”
She turned on Court Street and blinked as the truck jerked left as well.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Bree hissed.
Was he following her on purpose? Who was this guy?
Bree maneuvered with sleek precision around a car parked along the slim street. She did a full swivel-head twist at the truck riding so close to her Subaru anyone would have assumed it was hitched to the back.
“Bree.”
Perhaps it was some eccentric art critic who didn’t appreciate her costume fiasco. Her disruption in the play was entirely out of line, and in order to save the world from terrible actors, he was hunting her down.
“Bree?”
The Deranged Art Critic Serial Killer. He’d be known in the newspapers simply as The Critic. He would ride her bumper until she hit the lip of a small road, right next to a cliff, and ease her right on over . . .
Cassie’s thoughts must have been on par with her own, because the next thing Bree knew, Cassie’s voice was off speaker and booming in her ear. “Bree.”
Bree winced and pulled the phone away. “What?”
“Don’t do anything stupid. Just let the guy pass.”
A chant of “stupid, stupid” began in the background.
Bree squinted in the mirror. It was time for a dose of his own medicine. “Oh, I’m letting him pass.”
“No, you sound like you’re forming an evil plan. Use a normal voice. A nonmalicious voice. Let’s try it now. I am letting him pass.”
“I’m letting him pass.” The words held all the unyielding weight of Thor’s hammer.
“See? That’s exactly what I just told you not to sound like.”
With a quick, one-handed swerve, Bree stole between two parked cars in front of a two-story Colonial. The roar of the truck’s rusted-out exhaust pipe shook her car as it passed. She gripped the worn leather of the steering wheel, her hawk eyes now as focused on the truck as if it were her last meal.
“Don’t forget you have a dinner to get to,” Cassie said, snatching for a distraction.
Too late.
“Unbelievable.” Bree’s preying eyes locked on his bumper—or what she could see of it. As if tailing innocent vehicles and contributing to noise and earth pollution weren’t enough, the bumper was covered in outlandish, chauvinistic stickers. The kind that should’ve been illegal. The kind that made a person speed up to see what sort of woman could possibly sit in the passenger seat beside such a moron.
Bree’s blood pressure rose as her eyes moved from Then Satan said, “Let women drive” to Looking for your cat? Try under my tires.
Surely the police wouldn’t charge her if she rammed him. Surely they’d give her an underhanded fist bump and wish her on her merry way.
The truck began to ascend the hill.
“Bree, where are you now? What are you doing?” Cassie said.
Bree’s tires answered for her, squealing as she gunned it after his trailing black smoke.
The nice thing about her 1998 chipped green Subaru was exactly that—it was a 1998 chipped green Subaru. Car insurance? They practically paid her. The road took on new meaning in such vehicles, one being the overwhelming impression that life was just one big game of bumper cars.
“Please,” Cassie said on the other end of the line, “please tell me you aren’t silently doing your villainous monologue about the world being a game of bumper cars. Please.”
The old Ford diesel flew up the road toward her neighborhood. With her foot pressing the pedal to the floor, the Subaru bravely held on, huffing as it chugged up the hill. She tightened her grip, leaning forward until her nose nearly touched the wheel.
There? How does it feel? She eased back to make the turn into her neighborhood.
But just as her car broke off to give him space and make the turn, the truck turned onto her street.
Her street.
She jerked her car after him.
Standing along the sidewalk beside a hedge, her neighbor Mrs. Lewis tugged her dog leash close to her heart and watched the pair speed down the road. Bree gave a sheepish wave and ducked her head but kept on.
What was there to apologize for, anyway? She wasn’t the criminal here but the hero, chasing the man out of her neighborhood, seizing him by the collar and giving him the boot. Showing the inconsiderate hooligan exactly what it feels like to get pushed around.
They covered the length of the street quickly, rushing toward the cul-de-sac and its abrupt end. The truck flew by each house, the options for where it was going dropping by the second. There were only six, five, four houses left before it’d have to turn around—
The beast of a truck pulled into a driveway.
Bree barely managed to swerve in time.
At the same moment Bree hit the brake, her head whipped around to stare as she passed the parked truck. The world was moving in slow motion. Her mouth popping open and dangling like a codfish at the shock of being above water.
Ten feet into the cul-de-sac, her car came to a stop.
She put her car in reverse.
Pulled back.
Turned her wheel.
Drove into her own petite, graveled driveway.
The engine of the truck beside her cut off.
She cut hers and climbed out of the vehicle.
His door popped open.
Out of the heinous truck, with nothing but a tiny patch of grass between them, hopped Chip. Duct-tape man. With the bright, innocent face of a cherubim.
He shut the door, oblivious to her while he pressed a phone to his ear. “Well, then just upgrade service to 200 amp. But hey, I gotta go. I’ll call you when I get to Rodefer.” He kicked a chunk of gravel at his feet. “Sounds good.”
He slipped his phone into his pocket, and she watched as he put his hands on his hips and looked up at the run-down two-story brick house before him—from the limp Sold sign in the meager front yard to the crisp, white-capped Blue Ridge Mountains in the distance. A smile played on his face as he surveyed it all, as though he was now lord of the Biltmore. When he spotted her, his smile widened.
“It’s you.”
“Bree?” Bree nearly jumped at Cassie’s voice in her ear. “What’s happening?”
She lowered the phone to her side and stood motionless, her eyes moving from the sign and back to him. To the sign again.
What was happening?
Oh, nothing.
Nothing except the fact that she was standing in her driveway staring into the face of the man who’d owned the range of her emotions for the past two hours, who just so happened to be her new neighbor.
They say that 95 percent of the time the first impression you have of a person is right.
And in this case, she had been dead, dead wrong.
Chapter 2
Chip
Sixteen hundred square feet of 1906 red oak flooring ready to be restored to all its herringbone-bordered perfection. Twenty-two windows—three of which were cracked—ready to be torn out and replaced with double-pane, energy-efficient, crystal-clear glass. One tired but nonetheless chugging along oil furnace. Two Pepto Bismol–pink tubs. Fourteen hideous green cabinets begging to be thrown into the dumpster that was making its way up Main Street this very moment.
One incredible, panoramic view of the frosted peaks of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
And one mysterious fairy he’d had the surprising p
leasure of meeting on a nondescript staircase, now staring at him.
Granted, this stare wasn’t entirely of the positive kind. She was frowning. And still caked from forehead to throat in pea soup–green makeup, matched by a stunning green dress (also the object of a recent coffee spill, it seemed) that enhanced her striking emerald eyes.
A discreet cough in the back of his mind brought him back into line.
Right.
He had a girlfriend. A terrific, wonderful girlfriend.
Yes, this woman had striking green eyes, but he could’ve noticed that about anyone. It was a perfectly harmless, meaningless observation.
Just like he’d noticed how nice that green dress looked on her, so very appropriately her color. Good for her. It was hard to find such color-complementary clothing these days.
Well, whatever the cause of the frown directed his way, he felt himself rising to the challenge to turn her frown around. And he could do that. In fact, he had done that, just two hours before. His behavior was perfectly appropriate, with or without Ashleigh—his wonderful, steady, and also very color-coordinated girlfriend.
He could start by bringing up the happy coincidence that they were now neighbors. Mention how coincidental it was that they had both left the theatre and followed one another here.
Maybe the topic of his driving skills wasn’t the best to bring up in a moment like this. Fact was, he could hardly see her little green Subaru from the cab of the lifted work truck he’d bought off Craigslist this morning. It had over three hundred thousand miles, oil and antifreeze leaks, burned-out turn signals, no air, and so many unsavory bumper stickers even the Marion jailhouse citizens would be scandalized. And the way the gas and brake pedal jolted him every time his boot so much as graced the pedal . . . well, it wasn’t his best look.
He’d do better, much better, to opt for a general statement.
About her green makeup, which she clearly had no qualms about wearing in public.
About the house.
The neighborhood.
The surprising moment they’d shared behind the theatre.
The way he’d stood there alone on the platform after they’d said their good-byes, then how he found himself racing to the front to get back inside. The way he’d managed to soft-soap the elderly usher with a few sweet words to get back into his seat before she delivered her line. The absolutely epic two-word line. Then how their eyes met, as he felt himself hoping so much they would. And then—
The Cul-de-Sac War Page 2