“Too bad.”
“You’re not going to get me jelly?”
“Not tonight.”
“I won’t be able to eat breakfast without jelly.” Adam stuck his chin in the air. “Lunch, either. I guess I won’t ever eat again.”
Dylan stood. “That will save me the trouble of fixing you anything to eat.” He pointed to Adam’s plate. “Now, you’re sure you’re finished?”
“Yes.”
“Then go brush your teeth and get your pajamas on.” For a few tense moments, Adam looked like he was going to fight about that, too, but he stuck out his lower lip and left the room. Dylan grabbed Adam’s plate and put it on the floor. “Here, dog,” he said, and Mandy crawled from beneath the kitchen table and devoured the steak and biscuit in seconds. She licked the corn, then turned away.
He should have saved himself some trouble and just fixed Wheaties for dinner, he thought as he picked up the plate from the floor. A little over twenty-four hours ago, he’d thought his life had gone straight to hell. He’d been wrong about that. It hadn’t quite hit bottom yet. Now. Now it was hell.
Before dinner, he’d spoken to his mother on the telephone, and in her most optimistic voice, she’d reminded him that “things could always be worse.”
Yeah, he supposed she was right. He could get kicked in the nuts or Adam could get sick, but barring physical abuse or illness, he didn’t see that things could get much worse.
Dylan left the dishes on the table and the pans on the stove and relaxed in front of the television. He reached for the remote and started to flip channels. Jeopardy! Wheel of Fortune, and Inside Hollywood. Just as he was about to flip to the next channel, a picture of Julie flashed across the screen.
“Heaven on Earth star, Juliette Bancroft, has a seven-year-old son that she has kept secret from the world,” the report began as film footage rolled of him and Julie and Adam leaving the Cozy Corner. “An unnamed source informs us that Juliette’s son lives with his father in the small town of Gospel, Idaho, about fifty miles west of…”
Dylan watched himself shove Julie and Adam into his truck. A few seconds elapsed and Hope burst from the crowd and grabbed his arm. She appeared pale and as beautiful as ever. He watched her lips move, but the microphones didn’t pick up what she said. But then, he didn’t need to hear it. He knew. He knew she pleaded her innocence. It was a lie, of course, but even as he watched her image fade from his television, even though he knew she’d lied, there was a part of him that wanted to believe her. She twisted him inside out and had the power to make him want her even after what she’d done. Even after what he knew about her. She made him want to grab her and shake her and hold her and bury his face in the side of her neck.
Wanting her was a constant ache in the pit of his stomach, like he was standing on the edge of a cliff, swallowing air.
Disgusted with himself, he switched the television station to Cops and tossed the remote onto the couch.
He was absolutely going to stop thinking that things could not get worse. Because the minute he thought it, they sure as hell did.
When he went to bed that night, his thoughts returned to Hope. He figured that if he’d run a check on her before they’d become involved, he could have saved himself a lot of trouble. It was too late now, but he figured he should probably do it first thing in the morning. Just in case.
But the next morning, he found paparazzi camp
ed at the end of his driveway. He and Adam jumped into the truck and headed for the Double T. They spent the weekend riding horses and doing the little things his brother-in-law hadn’t gotten around to doing yet, like fixing the chicken wire around his mother’s henhouse and regrating the gravel road. Julie called to let him know that she and Gerard were hiding out at his family’s vineyards in Bordeaux and that she planed to do an interview with People magazine in a few days.
By the time Dylan went to work early Monday, most of the reporters were gone. He was brought up to speed during roll call, and he had Hazel bring him the accident reports and booking actions for the past two weeks. He skimmed the DUI arrests, and read a complaint filed by Ada Dover which charged Wilbur McCaffrey with purposely letting his dog out in the morning to “do his duty” in the motel’s flower beds.
He waited until he’d read through the stack of reports before he contacted the California Department of Motor Vehicles. Within a few minutes, he received Hope’s address in Los Angeles and her social security number. Once he had that, finding out information about her was incredibly easy.
He found out that she really was employed by The Weekly News of the Universe and that she had three pseudonyms. Before the Porsche, she’d owned a Mercedes, and right out of college, she’d worked for The San Francisco Chronicle and later The Los Angeles Times. And he dug into her court records and read the date she’d been married and the date her divorce had been final.
He dug deeper and read about the civil-harassment restraining order she’d won against a wrestler named Myron Lambardo, a.k.a. Myron the Masher. She’d won it three months prior to her arrival in Gospel, and in his defense, Mr. Lambardo had argued that he was angry and only wanted Ms. Spencer to continue with the Micky the Magical Leprechaun series and turn him back into a “stud muffin” so people wouldn’t think he was a “homo.”
The court not only found in Hope’s favor, but ordered “that the defendant not threaten, strike, or make physical contact with the plaintiff, not telephone plaintiff, not block plaintiff’s movements in public places or thoroughfares, and stay at least one hundred yards away from the plaintiff while at work, home, or any other place the plaintiff may request.”
Dylan shook his head and leaned back in his chair. He guessed he shouldn’t be surprised by what he read. She hadn’t mentioned the restraining order, of course, but there were several important things she hadn’t mentioned. Being stalked by an angry dwarf was just one of them. He wondered what else he didn’t know.
Over the course of the next week, Hope refused to keep herself locked up in her house. She drove to Sun Valley to shop in the trendy boutiques and spent a lot of time with Shelly. She learned how to can pickles and hunt for huckleberries and she worked on her stories. She finished several for The Weekly News of the Universe and had most of the rough draft down for her article on Hiram. After writing fiction for so long, nonfiction was proving more difficult than she expected, but she was enjoying the challenge.
From Shelly, Hope learned that the Donnellys had been a picture-perfect family. The three children were older than Shelly, but she remembered that they never got into trouble and kept mostly to themselves. Two boys and a girl, raised by the county sheriff and his God-fearing wife. Together, Hiram and Minnie had been the moral compass of the community. Holding themselves up as the perfect family, yet their children had never come back to visit once they were out of the house. Something had been horribly wrong with the picture. But what?
It had taken Hope a few days of digging to find out more information on the Donnelly children. Although none of them would speak to her directly, what she discovered was enough to answer her questions and add a new dimension to her article.
She learned that the older son had died of alcoholism, the younger was in prison for domestic abuse, and the daughter was a crisis counselor. Hope didn’t need to hear the particulars to figure out that behind closed doors, the picture-perfect family was dysfunctional as hell. What Hope found particularly amazing was that they’d managed the facade in a town that fed off everyone else’s business.
Most of the time Hope spent trying to forget about Dylan, but she never succeeded for very long. He appeared in her sleep and in her daydreams as well. He’d even made an appearance in her work, too. In her latest alien feature, she’d added a bit of a new slant. A new character in the form of a cross-dressing alien sheriff. She’d named him Dennis Taylor.