Page 4 of Rest In Pink

I turned as I heard the whine of a dirt bike coming down the road. A solidly built man with white hair flowing behind him—we don’t have a helmet law in Ohio, good for organ donations—was rolling by on a souped-up off-road motorcycle, below the speed limit. He stared in our direction through dark wraparound sunglasses as he went by and I could swear he smiled. Probably because he’d been speeding and spotted my lights and hit the brakes and Thacker’s stop saved him from a ticket. Sometimes life is all karma.

Little did I know how much at the moment.

“We done?” Thacker asked.

I nodded and he pulled out, slowly and carefully, and drove down the road, stopping just before he got into the village proper where he’d have to face our lone stoplight, which always blinked red, making it really a four-way stop. I always meant to ask George if the light could be set to change.

As I watched, Thacker turned right into the Shady Rest Motor Court.

He must have really wanted to stay in town because nobody stopped at the Shady Rest for relaxation. Liz says there’s a complementary dose of antibiotics in every room to make up for the lack of clean sheets, double-glazing, and privacy. The Shady Rest does a lot of one-hour business in the afternoons.

George and the mayor were not going to be happy about Thacker.

I, on the other hand, was going to see Liz Danger in a dress with ties on the shoulders when my shift ended.

I was just fine.

Chapter Three

I clicked off my phone and turned to Anemone. “That idiot Thacker is in town.”

Anemone waved that away with her perfectly manicured hand. Everything about Anemone’s appearance is perfect which is why she doesn’t look a day over forty in spite of being twenty-five years past that. If you ask her how she does that, she just waves her hand again and says, ‘“Maintenance, darling.” Now her hand wave was followed by, “Don’t worry, darling, I have lawyers for people like him.” She stared at my t-shirt, dying to say something to me about it, but I didn’t care. Anybody who would object to a t-shirt that said,Jesus is Coming. Look Busy, is no friend of mine.

“I want to know what he’s doing in town.” I sat down across from her on one of the ugly blue velvet couches in the barn of the living room of the house she was renting and letting me stay in. “He doesn’t need to be here to annoy people, the internet is very freeing, he can annoy from anywhere.” I shook my head. “Okay, he’s nothing major but still something I have to deal with.”And I have enough to deal with working with you,I thought but did not say.

I’d slept late and then run my daily five miles, mostly downhill and around town twice—Burney is not a five-mile town—and then headed back up that bastard hill. My favorite music for running that hill wasBurn Down This Town, a good angry song accompanied by my own mental chorus—“You can do this hill, just keep running, you can do this” until I’d looked down at my feet and realized I was walking. Forget mind over matter, my matter had bitch-slapped my mind because my mind was asking ridiculous things of it. Back at the Blue House, I’d had a horrible lunch from the pathetic remains of takeout in the fridge, and now I was trying to go back to The Book, aka Anemone’s autobiography that I was ghostwriting.

Ghostwriting autobiographies means I spend a lot of time talking to people to get a sense of their lives, the things they find most important, wading through masses of information to find the key stuff, and then I hang it all on the spine, the central idea that holds everything together. The spine of their lives is rarely what they think it is, so my job is to convince them that this is what their lives are really about so that they get the book they want while telling the truth, or as close as I can come without depressing the hell out of them. They give me the plot and I make it make sense.

That’s harder for some people than for others, but I was thinking I had a pretty good grip on Anemone Patterson, a truly remarkable woman. We were now working on the last chapter (I was working on the last chapter) and rewriting the first eight chapters (I was rewriting, Anemone was commenting), so it was time for me to find the spine in Anemone’s life. Anemone herself had plenty of spine, just try crossing her, but her life kind of . . . sprawls.

I looked at her now, reclining on the other ugly blue velvet couch with Veronica, the Perpetually Put-Upon Rescue Dog, aka, the blonde dachshund curled at her feet. Veronica was supposed to be mine, but she and Anemone had gotten to know each other during the month since Veronica was dumped on me, and now it was a match made in heaven. I wouldn’t have been surprised if Veronica’s claws were painted the same pink as Anemone’s. They were both beautifully languid blondes with soulful eyes, melting gazes, and sharp teeth. Twin souls.

“We have to get to work on this rewrite, but first we need to do something about food,” I told them. “We can’t keep eating takeout and frozen dinners. For one thing, the options are not wide. McDonald’s does not have onion rings.”

“I’ve hired a cook,” Anemone said. “She’ll be here tomorrow. Now let’s think about good things!”

I tensed.

Anemone has two speeds.

One is the Perpetually Cheerful Little Blonde, the one that makes everyone think she’s a fluffy little thing while she gets them to do her bidding. That’s the smile she was flashing me now.

The other is I-Will-Cut-You serious, and nobody who’s dealt with that one ever believes in the Perpetually Cheerful Little Blonde again. Anemone has a dark side and I have seen it.

This, of course, makes her fascinating to write about, but also nerve-wracking at times.

“Not that I have anything against good things,” I said diplomatically, “but we need to finish The Book. So—”

“It’s not finished?” Anemone said, frowning.

“No. The first draft is done with all the chapters but the last—”

“I don’t like the last chapter we did.”

“I know. You weren’t married in it. Still, we need to account for those lost years. And then the real last chapter is about the future. But first—”

“Really, Liz, those years weren’t lost just because I wasn’t married.”

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