Tangled Up in You Read online

  The Mercedes’ headlights cut through the inky night as she turned left at the only traffic signal in town. The very first car she’d ever owned had been a Volkswagen Rabbit, so battered the seats had been held together with duct tape. She’d come a long way since then. A long way from the Roundup Trailer Court where she’d lived with her mother, and the cramped little house in Boise where she’d been raised by her great-aunt Martha.

  Until the day of her retirement, Martha had worked the front counter at Rexall Drug, and they’d lived off her small paycheck and Maddie’s Social Security checks. Money had always been tight, but Martha kept half a dozen cats at any given time. The house had always smelled like Friskies and litter boxes. To this day, Maddie hated cats. Well, maybe not her good friend Lucy’s cat, Mr. Snookums. Snookie was cool. For a cat.

  She drove for a mile around the east side of the lake before turning into her driveway lined with thick towering pines and pulling to stop in front of the two-story home she’d bought a few months ago. She didn’t know how long she’d keep the house. One year. Three. Five. She’d bought rather than leased for the investment. Property around Truly was hot, and when or if she sold the place, she stood to make a nice profit.

  Maddie cut the Mercedes’ headlights and the darkness pressed in on her. She ignored the apprehension in her chest as she got out of the car and walked up the steps and onto the wraparound porch lit up with numerous sixty-watt bulbs. She wasn’t afraid of anything. Certainly not the dark, but she knew bad things did happen to women who weren’t as aware and as cautious as Maddie. Women who didn’t have a small arsenal of safety devices in their shoulder bags. Things like a Taser, Mace, a personal alarm, and brass knuckles, just to name a few. A girl could never be too careful, especially at night in a town where it was difficult to see your hand in front of your face. In a town set smack-dab in the middle of dense forest where wildlife rustled from trees and underbrush. Where rodents with beady little eyes waited for a girl to go to bed before ransacking the pantry. Maddie had never had to use any of her personal safety devices, but lately she’d been wondering if she was a good enough shot to zap a marauding mouse with her Taser.

  Lights burned from within the house as Maddie unlocked the forest-green door, stepped inside, and flipped the deadbolt behind her. Nothing scurried from the corners as she tossed her purse on a red velvet chair by the door. A large fireplace dominated the middle of the big living room and divided it into what was meant to be the dining room but what Maddie used as her office.

  On a coffee table in front of the velvet sofa sat Maddie’s research files and an old five-by-seven photograph in a silver frame. She reached for the picture and looked into the face of her mother, at her blond hair, blue eyes, and big smile. It had been taken a few months before Alice Jones had died. A photo of a happy twenty-four-year-old, so vibrant and alive, and like the yellowed photograph in the expensive frame, most of Maddie’s memories had faded too. She recalled bits of this and snatches of that. She had a faint memory of watching her mother put on makeup and brush her hair before leaving for work. She recalled her old blue Samsonite suitcase and moving from place to place. Through the watery prism of twenty-nine years, she had a very faint memory of the last time her mother had packed up their Chevy Maverick and the two-hour drive north to Truly. Moving into their trailer house with orange shag carpet.

  The clearest memory Maddie had of her mother was the scent of her skin. She’d smelled like almond lotion. But mostly she recalled the morning her great-aunt had arrived at the Roundup Trailer Court to tell her that her mother was dead.

  Maddie set the photo back on the table and moved across the hardwood floor into the kitchen. She grabbed a Diet Coke out of the refrigerator and unscrewed the cap. Martha had always said that Alice was flighty. Flitting like a butterfly from place to place, from man to man, searching for somewhere to belong and looking for love. Finding both for a time before moving on to the next place or newest man.

  Maddie drank from the bottle, then replaced the cap. She was nothing like her mother. She knew her place in the world. She was comfortable with who she was, and she certainly didn’t need a man to love her. In fact, she’d never been in love. Not the romantic kind that her good friend Clare wrote about for a living. And not the foolish, mad-for-the-man kind that had ruled and ultimately taken her mother’s life.

  No, Maddie had no interest in a man’s love. His body was a different matter, and she did want an occasional boyfriend. A man to come over several times a week to have sex. He didn’t have to be a great conversationalist. Hell, he didn’t even have to take her to dinner. Her ideal man would just take her to bed, then leave. But there were two problems with finding her ideal man. First, any man who just wanted sex from a woman was most likely a jerk. Second, it was difficult to find a willing man who was good in bed rather than who just thought he was good. The chore of sorting through men to find what she wanted had become such a hassle, she’d given up four years ago.

  She hooked the top of the Coke bottle between two fingers and moved from the kitchen. Her flip-flops slapped the bottoms of her feet as she walked through the living room and passed the fireplace to her office. Her laptop sat on an L-shaped desk shoved up against the wall and she flipped on the lamp clamped to the hutch of her desk. Two sixty-watt bulbs lit up a stack of diaries, her laptop, and her “Taking Names and Kicking Ass” sticky notes. Altogether there were ten diaries in various shapes and colors. Red. Blue. Pink. Two of the diaries had locks, while one of the others was nothing more than a yellow spiral notebook with the word “Diary” written in black marker. All of them had belonged to her mother.

  Maddie tapped the Diet Coke bottle against her thigh as she gazed at the top white book. She hadn’t known they’d even existed until her great-aunt Martha’s death a few months ago. She didn’t believe Martha had purposely kept the diaries from her. More than likely she’d intended to give them to Maddie someday but had completely forgotten. Alice hadn’t been the only flighty female on the Jones family tree.

  As Martha’s only living relative, it had been up to Maddie to settle her affairs, see to her funeral, and clean out her house. She’d managed to find homes for her aunt’s cats and had planned to donate most everything else to Goodwill. In one of the last cartons she’d sorted through, she’d come across old shoes, outdated purses, and a battered boot box. She’d almost tossed the battered box without lifting the top. A part of her almost wished that she had. Wished she’d spared herself the pain of staring down into the box and feeling her heart shoved into her throat. As a child she’d longed for a connection with her mother. Some little something that she could have and hold. She’d dreamed of having something she could take out from time to time that tied her to the woman who’d given her life. She’d spent her childhood longing for something…something that had been a few feet away in the top of a closet the whole time. Waiting for her in a Tony Lama box.

  The box had contained the diaries, her mother’s obituary, and newspaper articles about her death. It had also held a satin bag filled with jewelry. Cheep stuff, mostly. A Foxy Lady necklace, several turquoise rings, a pair of silver hoop earrings, and a tiny pink band from St. Luke’s Hospital with the words “Baby Jones” printed on it.

  Standing in her old bedroom that day, unable to breathe as her chest imploded, she’d felt like a kid again. Scared and alone. Afraid to reach out and make the connection, but at the same time excited to finally have something tangible that had belonged to a mother she hardly remembered.

  Maddie set her Coke on the top of her desk and spun her office chair around. That day, she’d taken the boot box home and placed the silk bag in her jewelry box. Then she’d sat down and read the diaries. She’d read every word, devouring them in one day. The diaries had started on her mother’s twelfth birthday. Some of them had been bigger and taken her mother longer to fill. Through them she’d gotten to know Alice Jones.

  She’d gotten to know her as a child of twelve who’d longed to
grow up and be an actress like Anne Francis. A teen who longed to find true love on The Dating Game, and a woman who looked for love in all the wrong places.

  Maddie had found something to connect her to her mother, but the more she’d read, the more she’d felt at loose ends. She’d gotten her childhood wish and she’d never felt so alone.

  Chapter 2

  Mick Hennessy slipped a rubber band about a stack of cash and set it next to a pile of credit card and debit receipts. The sound of the electric coin sorter sitting on his desk filled the small office in the back of Mort’s. Everyone but Mick had gone home for the evening and he was just balancing the tills before he headed that way himself.

  Owning and running bars was in Mick’s blood. Mick’s great-grandfather had made and sold cheap grain alcohol during Prohibition and opened Hennessy’s two months after the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed and the spigots once again flowed in the United States. The bar had been in his family ever since.

  Mick didn’t particularly care for belligerent drunks, but he did like the flexible hours that came with being his own boss. He didn’t have to take orders or answer to anyone, and when he walked into one of his bars, he had a feeling of possession that he’d never felt with anything else in his life. His bars were loud and raucous and chaotic, but it was a chaos he controlled.

  More than the hours and feeling of possession, Mick liked making money. During the summer months, he made tons of money from tourists and from the people who lived in Boise but owned cabins on the lake in Truly.

  The coin sorter stopped and Mick slid stacks of coins into paper sleeves. An image of a dark-haired, red-lipped woman entered his head. He wasn’t surprised that he’d noticed Maddie Dupree within seconds of stepping behind the bar. It only would have surprised him if he hadn’t noticed her. With her beautiful smooth skin and seductive brown eyes, she was just the sort of woman who drew his attention. That small mole at the corner of her full lips had reminded him just how long it had been since he’d kissed a mouth like hers and worked his way south. Down her chin and the arch of her throat to all the soft places and sweet parts.

  Since his move back to Truly two years ago, his sex life had suffered more than he liked. Which sucked. Truly was a small town where people went to church on Sundays and married young. They tended to stay married and if not, looked to remarry real quick. Mick never messed with married women or women with marriage on their minds. Never even thought twice about it.

  Not that there weren’t plenty of unmarried women in Truly. Owning two bars in town, he came in contact with a lot of available women. A good share of them let him know they were interested in more than his cocktail list. Some of them he’d known all of his life. They knew the stories and gossip and thought they knew him too. They didn’t, or they would know he preferred to spend time with women who didn’t know him or the past. Who didn’t know the sordid details of his parents’ lives.

  Mick shoved the money and receipts into deposit bags and zipped them closed. The clock on the wall above his desk read 2:05. Travis’s latest school photograph sat on a polished oak desk; a sprinkling of brown freckles scattered across the boy’s cheeks and nose. Mick’s nephew was seven going on fourteen and had too much Hennessy in him for his own good. The innocent smile didn’t fool Mick one bit. Travis had his ancestors’ dark hair and blue eyes and wild ways. If left un checked, he’d inherit their fondness for fighting, booze, and women. Any one of those traits by themselves wasn’t necessarily bad in moderation, but generations of Hennessys had never cared squat about moderation, and the combination had sometimes proved lethal.

  He moved across the office and set the money on the top shelf of the safe, next to the printout of that night’s transactions. He swung the heavy door shut, pushed down the steel handle, and spun the combination lock. The tick-tick of the lock filled the silence of the small office in the back of Mort’s.

  Travis was giving Meg hell, that was for sure, and Mick’s sister had little understanding of boys. She just didn’t get why boys threw rocks, made weapons out of everything they touched, and punched each other for no apparent reason. It was up to Mick to be the buffer in Travis’s life and to help Meg raise him. To give the boy someone to talk to and to teach him how to be a good man. Not that Mick was an expert or a shining example of what made a good man. But he did have firsthand knowledge and some experience in what made an asshole.

  He grabbed a set of keys off the desktop and headed out of the office. The heels of his boots thudded against the hardwood floor, sounding inordinately loud in the empty bar.

  When he was a kid, no one had been around for him to talk to or teach him how to be a man. He’d been raised by his grandmother and sister, and he’d had to learn for himself. More often than not, he learned the hard way. He didn’t want the same for Travis.

  Mick flipped the light switches off and headed out the back door. The cold morning air brushed his face and neck as he stuck a key in the deadbolt and locked it behind him. Right out of high school he’d left Truly to attend Boise State down in the capital city. But after three years of aimless pursuits and a rotten attitude, he’d enlisted in the army. At the time, seeing the world from the inside of a tank had sounded like a real smart plan.

  A red Dodge Ram was parked next to the Dumpster and he climbed inside. He’d certainly seen the world. Sometimes more of it than he cared to remember, but not from the inside of a tank. Instead he’d viewed it from thousands of feet in the air within the cockpits of Apache helicopters. He’d flown birds for the U.S government before getting out and moving back to Truly. The army had given him more than a kick-ass career and a chance to live a good life. It had taught him how to be a man in a way that living in a house of women had not. When to stand up and when to shut the hell up. When to fight and when to walk away. What mattered and what wasn’t worth his time.

  Mick started the truck and waited a few moments for the vehicle to warm up. He owned two bars, and he figured it was a very good thing that he’d learned to deal with belligerent drunks and assorted dipshits in a way that didn’t require throwing fists and cracking heads. Otherwise, he’d get little else done. He’d be in one fight after another, walking around with a black eye and busted lip like he had growing up. Back then he hadn’t known how to handle the dipshits of the world. Back then he’d been forced to live with the scandal his parents had created. He’d had to live with the whispers when he walked into a room. The sideways glances at church or the Valley Grocery Store. The taunts from other children at school or, worse, the birthday parties he and Meg had not been invited to. Back then, he’d handled every slight with his fists. Meg had retreated within herself.

  Mick flipped on the headlights and shoved the truck into reverse. The Ram’s taillights lit up the alley as he looked over his shoulder and backed out of the parking space. In a larger town, the salacious lives of Loch and Rose Hennessy would have been forgotten within a few weeks. Front-page news for a day or two, then eclipsed by something more shocking. Something bigger to talk about over morning coffee. But in a town the size of Truly, where the juiciest scandal usually involved such nefarious deeds as a stolen bicycle or Sid Grimes poaching out of season, the sordidness of Loch and Rose Hennessy had kept the town talking for years. Speculating and rehashing every tragic detail had become a favorite pastime. Right up there with holiday parades, the ice-sculpting contest, and raising money for the town’s various causes. But unlike decorating floats and instituting after-school just-say-no-to-drugs programs, what everyone seemed to forget, or perhaps didn’t care about, was that within the wreckage that Rose and Loch had created, there had been two innocent children just trying to live it all down.

  He shoved the truck into drive and rolled out of the alley and onto a dimly lit street. A lot of his childhood memories were old and faded and thankfully forgotten. Others were so crystal clear he could recall every detail. Like the night he and Meg had been woken up by a county sheriff, told to grab a few things, and taken to their
grandmother Loraine’s house. He remembered sitting in the back of the squad car in his T-shirt, underwear, and sneakers, holding his Tonka truck, while Meg sat next to him, crying as if their world had just ended. And it had. He remembered all the squawk and adrenaline-laced voices on the police radio, and he remembered something about someone checking up on the other little girl.

  Leaving the few city lights behind, Mick drove through the pitch-darkness for two miles before turning onto his dirt street. He drove past the house where he and Meg had been raised after the death of their parents. His grandmother Loraine Hennessy had been affectionate and loving in her own way. She’d made sure he and Meg had things like winter boots and gloves and were always filled with comfort food. But she’d completely neglected what they’d really needed. The most normal life possible.

  She’d refused to sell the old farmhouse where he and Meg had lived with their parents. For years it sat abandoned on the outskirts of town, becoming a haven for mice and a constant reminder of the family that had once lived there. A person couldn’t enter town without seeing it. Without seeing the overgrown weeds, the peeling white paint, and the sagging clothesline.

  And Monday through Friday, for nine months out of every year, Mick and Meg had been forced to pass it on their way to school. While the other children on the bus chatted about the latest episode of The Dukes Of Hazzard or checked out the contents of their lunch boxes, he and Meg turned their heads away from the window. Their stomachs got heavy and they held their breath, praying to God no one noticed their old house. God hadn’t always answered and the bus would fill with the latest gossip the kids had overheard about Mick’s parents.