But she knew she had to face him, even if for thirty seconds, before she blew out of town to seek a fresh start.
She also knew she’d bent Doris and Bird’s ears long enough.
So she forced a smile as she chucked the handful of underwear back into her bureau. Then she reached for her phone to call Linette. “Looks like I’m staying put.”
Doris spoke firmly. “Good. And we’ll back you up.”
Chapter 4
Rigo
Rigo walked around the pretty seas
ide town, appreciating the sea air, until it was time to meet Joey for lunch.
But when he arrived at the restaurant, it turned out Joey wasn’t alone.
“I know you came to help us with Long Cang,” Joey said. “But first, what can we do to help you?”
“Look, I appreciate the offer,” Rigo said, his gaze brushing past Doris sitting shoulder to shoulder with Joey in the coffee shop booth, her expression about as warm as Siberia in mid-January. “But I don’t want to get y’all involved in my messes. Seems to me I ought to go calling on Godiva, flowers in hand, and fix it up myself.”
Joey’s gaze dropped as he slipped the pack of dog whistles Rigo had given him into his pocket. Yeah, this guy sensed the tension from the women, too.
Doris said, “I wouldn’t.”
“Not like a stalker,” Rigo said to her. “Just go knock on her door. Once. If she tells me to git, I’ll git.”
Bird, who was sitting next to Doris, said, “That’s good to know. But it might not be good for you.”
Rigo was glad Joey had picked out a round booth in the coffee shop. Otherwise, he suspected strongly that both women would have squeezed in on either side of Joey rather than have one of them sit next to him. “Why? She does have a loaded cannon in her front yard?”
Silence, just long enough to make it real clear that his joke had croaked like a squashed bug.
“No,” Doris said, and pushed a stray French fry around on her plate. “But she has houseguests. What you’d be facing are a lot of women whose experiences, let us say, don’t lend themselves to trusting strange men rolling up to the door uninvited.”
Bird leaned forward. “Not to mention Godiva’s neighbors, all of whom know her. She’s been watching out for them for years. They know what the situation is at Godiva’s, and like as not, you’d find the local police turning up between the time you parked your car and walked halfway up her driveway.”
Rigo remembered what he’d learned about her childhood. Of course she’d be saving strays. She’d been a fierce protector of those needing protection when she was barely older than any of them. “She takes in battered women, is that what you’re trying to say?”
Doris hesitated, then said, “Maybe one or two. Most victims of violence get help through organizations or social services. Godiva takes in the women who fall through the cracks.”
“Older ones,” Bird amplified. “Who you can say were kicked around by legal means.”
Rigo shook his head. “I’m not getting it.”
As he’d hoped, they were talking to him. Bird fixed her wide, serious gaze on him as she said, “There’s one who came home from work early one day to discover the husband she’d been supporting for years—bad back, he said—being surprisingly athletic in her bedroom, on the wedding ring quilt she’d stitched herself, with the neighbor across the street. She threw him out that night. He retaliated by siccing his brother the shady divorce lawyer on her, which left her barely with the clothes she stood up in. All legal. She had nowhere to go until Godiva took her in.”
Doris said, “Another lived with her son until that son turned forty and fell into the clutches of a barracuda who schmoozed the clueless schlimazl step by step into marriage, then getting power of attorney over Mom’s affairs in case ‘something happened’, then into shoving Mom into a cut-rate warehouse for the old while the barracuda used Mom’s life savings to redecorate the house for hubs’ ‘important business entertaining.’ Mom escaped from that dump with nothing but the clothes on her back. Again, every step was legal. But not fair by any means. Godiva took her right in.”
Bird finished up the tag-team not-quite-attack with, “Any strange man showing up at Godiva’s house is liable to find something worse than a cherry pie flying through a window at him.”
“Got it,” Rigo said, thinking, You walked into this with your eyes wide open, boy.
From the basilisk: silence.
Rigo forced the sharpness of disappointment—regret—down. He knew he deserved what he was getting. But . . . “Seems to me what y’all are saying is, I’m arrested, tried, and convicted before I get much past ‘howdy.’”
“If the shoe fits,” Bird whispered, making Rigo wonder what kind of no-good sidewinder lay in her past.