A crease appeared between Maddie’s dark brows. “Why are you scared? Is he crazy? What did he do?”
“Nothing. Maybe scared is too strong a word.” Lucy paused and tilted her head to one side. “Puzzled might be better.”
“Why are you puzzled?”
“Because he wants to see more of me. He wants to call me and take me out and-”
“He’s pursuing you,” Clare pointed out.
“I guess.” Lucy paused a moment to collect her thoughts. “It’s just that I’ve never met a man who wanted to see so much of me right off. You know how men are, they take you out and might call you again in a week or two or not at all. Quinn doesn’t seem to know that he’s supposed to keep me waiting by the phone, wondering why he isn’t asking me out again.”
“Wait.” Adele held up her fork. “You don’t want to go out with him because he seems really interested in you? Now that’s crazy.”
Lucy shrugged. Maybe, but there was something about him that she just couldn’t quite put her finger on. Something that told her he was too good to be true, and in her experience, if something looked too good to be true, it was too good to be true. “Maybe I don’t trust the whole my-wife-died thing. I don’t get the impression that he’s lying about it-exactly. I can’t put my finger on it, but I just don’t trust him completely.” She shook her head and cut into her chimichanga. “Maybe I’m being overly suspicious.”
Adele looked up from her salad. “Get him to take you to his house. If he won’t take you, then it’s probably because his wife isn’t really dead.”
“Are you high? That’s how Richard Franko got five of his victims,” Maddie said, referring to the serial killer she’d written about several years ago. “He just invited them home and, like lambs to slaughter, they went. Lucy could be walking into a nightmare.”
It really was no wonder Maddie didn’t date. She viewed most men she met as psychopathic killers. “He’s not a killer. I just wonder if he’s too good to be real.”
“Adele might be on to something,” Clare said. “If you see his house, you can tell right away if he’s still married, or if he’s set up a shag pad. If he won’t take you home, he’s married. If he does take you home-”
“Then he’ll expect sex,” Maddie interrupted.
“True.” The thought of having sex with Quinn wasn’t unappealing, but so soon after meeting him was out of the question.
“If you’re going to be foolish enough to go to his house,” Maddie said, “be sure and take the personal protection I’ve given you.”
“I will,” Lucy promised. For Christmas the previous year, Maddie had given them all pepper spray, a personal alarm, a stun pen, and a pair of brass knuckles. “And I’ll make sure I have my car,” she added, even though she wasn’t even sure she would ever end up at Quinn’s house. “So I can leave before there’s any danger of getting naked.”
“I don’t know which is more dangerous,” Adele said. “You at some guy’s house you don’t know, or driving your car.”
“I’m an excellent driver,” Lucy insisted.
“That’s what Rain Man said,” Clare pointed out.
Lucy knew that her friends thought she was a bad driver, but she wasn’t. Sure, she drove a little fast and yelled things at other cars, but she hadn’t had a wreck in five years. “How’s everyone else’s love life?” she asked, purposely changing the subject once again.
“Nonexistent,” Maddie complained. “There aren’t any men in this town.”
Adele reached for her margarita. “I found an old face scrubby and a Crock-Pot on my porch yesterday.”
“Dwayne,” the other three said, all at the same time. Alean, mean, buff machine, Dwayne Larkin hung drywall for a living, and for two years Adele had thought he just might be Mr. Right. She’d overlooked his habit of picking his teeth at the table and smelling the armpits of his shirts before he put them on. Because he looked kind of like Viggo Mortensen, she’d put up with his beer-guzzling, belching ways, right up to the moment he’d told her she was getting a “fat ass.” No one used the f-word in reference to Adele’s ass, and she’d kicked him out of her life. Too bad he wouldn’t go completely. Every few weeks, Adele would find one or two of the things she’d left at his house sitting on her front porch. No note. No Dwayne. Just random stuff.
“Sheesh. He just doesn’t give up.”
“It’s like he’s holding your stuff hostage,” Lucy commented. “Doling it out like body parts or something.”
“It’s creepy.”
“How much more does he have?”
Adele shrugged. “I don’t know. We were together for two years, and I stayed at his house a lot. I’m sure there’s more.”
“If I hadn’t already killed Dwayne off in Shot of Love,” Lucy said, referring to her third book, “I’d kill him for you.”
“Thank you.”
The subject changed from men to writing, and by the time Lucy paid her portion of the check, they’d given Adele advice on what to do about her problem with Dwayne and helped Clare plot the next three chapters of her book.
Earlier, Lucy had printed out the first six chapters of her current manuscript for Maddie to look over for inconsistencies and mistakes. Maddie might be a little freaky and inappropriate sometimes, but she was brilliant and gave excellent critiques. In turn, Lucy helped Maddie out when she needed it.
Maddie followed Lucy to her car. “Promise you’ll be careful about this Quinn guy.”
Lucy handed over the manuscript pages and looked into Maddie’s brown eyes. Sometimes Lucy got the feeling that her friend was hiding from something. Something that she hid behind her brash personality. Something she never shared with anyone. Lucy wasn’t the sort of person to dig and pry, but if Maddie ever wanted to share, Lucy would be there to listen. “I promise,” she said. “And you promise not to be such a hard ass.”
Maddie said but didn’t promise a thing.
Lucy jumped in her car. On the drive home, her thoughts returned to Quinn. Maybe Adele and Clare were right. Maybe he was just a normal man pursuing her. Maybe she was looking for trouble.
She wove in and out of traffic and blew through a yellow light on Thirteenth and Fort, telling herself that it was safer to go through a yellow than to slam on her brakes. As she drove past the junior high she’d attended as a teenager, the rational part of her brain took the opportunity to ask her if normal men trolled for women in chat rooms. No, they didn’t. Not unless there was something wrong with them. Or…they were in it for sex.
After a few more turns, she pulled into the alley behind her house. When she was with Quinn, she didn’t get the perv or creep vibe. On the contrary. More like he had a smooth sexual energy vibe. One that she had to admit was a little mesmerizing.
She hit the garage door opener pinned to the visor and waited for the old wooden door to lift. A lot of the houses in Boise’s North End had been built around the turn of the twentieth century and still had carriage blocks by the curbs. But once Packards started rolling into town, Boiseans abandoned their carriages and built small detached garages in their backyards. Many of the single-car structures like Lucy’s were still in use because there wasn’t room for anything larger.
Lucy pulled the Beemer inside and shut the garage door. She entered the back of her house through the kitchen and tossed her purse on the tile counter. She looked out the window over the sink and into the neighbor’s backyard. Mrs. Riley was out back, pulling up plastic poinsettias and replacing them with bright tulips. Plastic, of course. She would repeat the process this coming summer and fall. Lucy had asked her once why she planted plastic flowers each season, and she had answered as if it had been the most logical thing in the world, “Why, because I like pretty things.” Which also explained why she’d painted her house bright yellow, blue, and green.