Word Gets Around Part 5

"Whaaah?" I muttered.

Things began coming back to me-slowly, at first, then faster and faster, until the events of the past day rushed through my head like a pencil through a maze, then circled and came back again. My father's phone call, packing my suitcases, the Mr. Ham message, leaving town, driving for hours, the hide-a-key out back, the stubborn door, debating about surprising my father or Aunt Netta in the middle of the night, then deciding to sleep in my Durango until morning ...

It wasn't morning yet. It was still dark outside.

A hot flush burned into my cheeks and traveled down my neck. I'd just been found sleeping, and even worse, muttering irrationally, in my car in an alley-by two people I didn't know. How humiliating.

I recognized the dark-haired man from somewhere-the outline of his face, the perfectly placed hair ... Where had I seen him?

He curled a hand over the edge of the gla.s.s, and I scooted toward the console, feeling vulnerable.

"Come on, honey." He sighed, thumbing over his shoulder. "Start it up and drive off. No photo ops tonight. Move on."

I sat gaping at him, my rear end in the cup holder. Who was this lunatic and what did he want?

The back door of the hotel was open. Maybe I could dive out the pa.s.senger door and make a run for it. But there were two of them. I'd probably never get there before they caught me.

"Just clear out and I won't call the police, sweetheart," he said. "You don't want that kind of trouble."

"Just clear out and I won't call the police, sweetheart ... you don't want that kind of trouble" ... I'd heard those words before. Those exact words. In the same voice, with the same intonation, from a guy who looked just like that. It had happened someplace else- someplace in the Middle East ... some exotic location ...

The strangest sense of deja vu slipped over me, and I squinted at him, trying to separate dream from reality. I'd never been to the Middle East, but I'd heard someone ... no, him. I'd heard this guy say those words before ...

The second man moved closer, peered in the window tentatively, and laid a hand on his partner's shoulder. "Come on, dude, I don't think she's looking for a photo op right now. Just leave her alone."

"n.o.body's supposed to be here. I'm gonna go call Buddy Ray, have him come lock her up a couple days so she can't tell the whole world we're in town. The Sheriff's Department helps me out with the paparazzi."

"Come on. Don't be a jerk. It's no big deal."

The dark-haired man set his chin like a playground bully determined to have the monkey bars all to himself. "This is my town, Nate. These people can't just come and-"

"This is not your town!" For some idiotic reason, I reached for the door handle and sprung the lock, then pushed open the door, knocking both of them back a step. No matter what, I didn't want anybody calling Buddy Ray. The last, last, last thing I needed was Buddy Ray Baldridge reporting that Lauren Eldridge had just been found pa.s.sed out in the alley behind the Daily Hotel. Police scanners would wake sleeping Dailyians all over town. Whoever these guys were, they apparently had hotel keys, which was good enough for me. One way or another, we were going to negotiate, and I was headed through that door and into Aunt Beulah's empty room upstairs. Everything else could wait until morning.

Snagging my purse and overnight bag from the pa.s.senger seat, I climbed out on rubbery legs and explained my situation in the fewest number of words possible, while standing pinned in a triangle of door, car, and annoying man who didn't seem to be moving out of my way. "My key wouldn't work. I'm going up to my room now. Thank you."

"There's not supposed to be anyone here," the dark-haired man insisted, crossing his arms over his chest so that the slinky fabric of his shirt pulled tight over pecs that looked like he put a lot of time into them.

"It doesn't matter," the other one said. His face was in shadow, the neon shining through his hair-light brown or blond, slightly long, curly and tussled, so that when it caught the neon it produced a lopsided green halo. "It's cool, Shay. Let it go. It's late."

Shay. The name slipped through my brain, and suddenly everything from the silk shirt to the Rambo impersonation and the sappy dialogue made sense. "Just clear out and I won't call the police, sweetheart ... you don't want that kind of trouble." It was a line from some cheesy international action-adventure movie I'd watched on late-night cable. No wonder he looked so familiar. This was the Justin. Justin Shay. The celebrity customer Aunt Netta and everyone else in Daily catered to in every possible way. The talk of the town.

A potentially disabling heat crept into my cheeks, and I slapped a hand over my eyes. Aunt Donetta was going to kill me in the morning. She'd be completely aghast when she found out her prized guest had discovered me sleeping in the alley.

On second thought, I didn't want to imagine Aunt Netta's reaction. It was too horrifying for the middle of the night. "I'm just ... going to go up to bed now," I muttered.

"Sounds good. Me, too," Green Halo Guy agreed. Moving a step closer, he laid a hand on the movie star's arm again and attempted to shift him away from my car door. "You're ... in the way there, dude."

Justin Shay was unconvinced. "Yeah? I let her in here, and she'll be in my face in the morning with a camera. Where's Fred? He's supposed to be doing security. I want him to check her duffle bag."

"I don't think so!" I protested. For one thing, my underwear and Pooh Bear pajamas were in there. For another, this was my family's hotel. I would have said as much, but the last thing I wanted was for anyone to call the management.

Hiking up my purse and overnight bag, I prepared to use them as weapons. "I'm not showing you what's in my duffle."

"She's not showing you what's in her duffle," Halo Man repeated. I was starting to like him better. Grabbing both of Justin Shay's shoulders, he shifted the blockage to one side so I could exit my car without causing anyone bodily injury.

"Thank you," I breathed, then kicked the car door shut.

Halo Man, my new hero, waved toward the hotel as if he were ushering Cinderella into the palace. "G'night," he said and grinned, his teeth white in the shadow.

"Thanks," I grumbled and hurried into the building before anyone could protest or decide to call Aunt Netta.

Familiar scents enveloped me as I headed upstairs and to the end of the hall-Suite Beulahland, the pair of rooms that served as the designated repository for treasures belonging to the woman I affectionately called my great-aunt Beulah, and also functioned as a visiting-mother-in-law containment area whenever Beulah showed up for the dreaded extended stays with Aunt Donetta and Uncle Ronald. Considering that Aunt Netta and her mother-in-law got along about as well as two alley cats in a toe sack, the Beulah room had probably saved lives.

I slipped the spare key from behind the sign on the door, where it was always stored, because Aunt Beulah could lose keys faster than any human on the face of the earth. Footsteps echoed on the stairs behind me as I opened the door, tucked the key back, and slipped inside, then stood leaning wearily against the jamb.

The strangest observation crossed my mind as I stood in the dim glow of the tall street-side windows, surrounded by Aunt Beulah's collection of Elvis memorabilia.

Halo Man had a really nice smile.

What a stupid thought.

Voices from the hallway seeped through the keyhole.

"She went in that room, dude. I'm telling you I just saw the door shut. Don't open it. I'll stay in a different one."

"I don't have the keys to a different one." The voice belonged to Justin Shay. "I always stay in the suite. There's no way Donetta would give it to anyone else. She knows I take the suite. The other rooms are just plain, but this lady named Beulah decorated this one. See the door?"

"Suite Beulahland."

"Yeah. Suite, like hotel suite, get it? This side's got Elvis, my side's got those little Precious ... whatever they're called ... statue things-those little statues like Mama Louise had in her dining room, remember?"

"You're sentimental for Mama Louise all of a sudden?"

"Yeah, right." Shay snorted. "I sleep on the Elvis side sometimes, but I wanted you to have that room. Remember that Elvis poster you used to keep on the wall at Mama Louise's?"

"Yeah, I remember." Halo Man's voice was momentarily tender. "Thanks for the thought, dude, but I'm too tired to care where I sleep. How many beds in your room?"

"One ... I think. Yeah, one."

"All right, I'm almost too tired to care where I sleep. I'm not crashing in a bed with you, dude."

"There's a sofa thing. You can have the sofa thing. ... "

The conversation faded as they left my door and entered the other half of the Beulah suite. Fortunately, the adjoining door was closed. Letting out a long sigh, I slipped on my Pooh Bears and melted into bed. In the morning, we could straighten out the confusion about the rooms. For now, I just wanted to catch a few hours' sleep before facing Aunt Netta, my father, and all the hometown folk. I tried not to think about how it would be, finally returning after so long away. "Troubles look smaller in the morning," my father always said. Everything would look better in the morning. ...

When I awoke Friday morning, the blackness in the room had turned to gray. I could feel, even without opening my eyes, that dawn was coming soon. I snuggled closer to the mattress, looking for that moment when I didn't remember where I was, not only physically, but in life. I loved that moment. I'd keep my eyes closed and enjoy it as long as possible. In those dawning breaths, I'd be back in my father's house-Kemp and me getting out the breakfast dishes while Dad burned the bacon and cooked the eggs until they were crispy around the edges. Outside, the horses were nickering in the barn, impatient to be cared for. The cows were calling from the pasture because the feed truck was still parked in front of the house instead of coming their way loaded with chow. In the pink light, the sunrise was a watercolor wash over the hills in the distance. There couldn't be anything wrong in the whole world. ...

That moment of quiet peace eluded me when I awoke in Suite Beulahland. I knew where I was. I knew why I was there. Someone in the next room was snoring so loudly, I could hear it through the wall. The noise stole away any sense of morning tranquillity.

It also brought back the night before, and my mind began spinning toward the day ahead. Any time now, Aunt Donetta would open the shop. She'd want to know why I'd arrived last night instead of waiting until today. She'd tell me it was dangerous to be on the highway so late. She'd say I should have called her, so she could properly worry about me during my traveling hours. She'd ask why I hadn't come on over to the house last night when I got in.

At some point, she would hear about the fiasco with Justin Shay and Halo Man in the alley, and that would be a whole other discussion. Heaven help us when that got started. Like everything else in Daily, it'd be all around town by the time the morning coffee pot went dry at the cafe.

Did you hear that Justin Shay found Lauren Eldridge sleeping in the alley last night? Darned near scared her to death, poor thing. He thought she was one a them poppa-rot-sees, waitin' to take his picture.

Well, I heard he found her in the Beulah room, and she grabbed the alarm clock and threw it at him, almost hit him in the nose and broke a whole shelf of Beulah's statues. ...

I heard it hit Justin Shay and broke his nose. He's down in Austin having emergency surgery right now. ...

I heard Beulah's headed up from Tampa to look over the damage. ...

I heard it hit the light fixture, and sparks about set the whole buildin' on fire. ...

The possibilities grew in my head, expanding like a balloon. I wasn't sure whether to laugh or try to sneak to my car and head out of town before anyone saw me. A story could morph faster in Daily, Texas, than anyplace else on Earth.

The best thing to do right now was probably to get up, get dressed, and meet Aunt Netta at the door. If she heard about my presence from her other hotel guests, she'd be even more rattled than necessary. If they told her there was a strange woman occupying half of the Beulah suite, she'd have no idea who it was. Fortunately, judging by the snoring, there was no activity in the room next door yet.

It occurred to me that either Justin Shay, super-stud movie star, snored like a little old man, or else the guy with the cute smile did. There was something slightly vindicating about that. It's nice when people who look perfect don't turn out to be perfect, after all.

I climbed from the bed feeling surprisingly rested, considering. Maybe it was the hometown air, but by the time I'd showered, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, put on makeup and combed my hair, I felt ... well ... amazingly good. I left my hair loose around my shoulders, where normally at school, I would have clipped it out of the way, because, even though it looked fine now, it would get bigger and curlier as the day went on. Aunt Donetta said I had exactly what every Texas girl wants-natural big hair.

After taking one last look in the Blue Hawaii mirror and towel rack, I headed for the door. Fear seized me as I gripped the handle. I paused, swallowed hard, and pulled open the door just in time to hear the creak-snap-creak of someone coming up the stairs. Undoubtedly, that would be Aunt Netta. I braced myself for the squeal, the hug, then the inevitable barrage of questions.

A hand slid over the banister-not Aunt Netta's hand. A moment later, he followed, Halo Man, holding a cup of coffee with a huge plate of sweet rolls balanced on top.

I stood blinking at him, in shock. Fresh sweet rolls could only mean Aunt Donetta had already come in. Maybe he hasn't told her you're here, the voice of panic whispered in my head. There's still time to sneak out, jump in the car, book it out of town ...

Halo Man saluted me with the plate and the smile I remembered from last night. "Morning, Red Sofa," he said cheerfully, and I felt myself blush from head to toe.

Chapter 6.

Nathaniel Heath I've never been accused of being particularly smooth. In high school, Justin was the cool one, the football star, the ladies' man. I was the funny, scrawny kid who was behind the growth curve, so that I remained shorter than all the girls until my junior year. I was the guy the girls danced with when they were mad at their boyfriends, the one who was good for a shoulder to cry on and a laugh. Half the time, I wasn't going for a laugh; I just opened my mouth and something stupid came out.

Hence the Red Sofa comment. Some brain blips you never outgrow completely.

The girl looked confused and slightly mortified. I guessed she didn't have much of a sense of humor, but she also didn't have a camera around her neck, so at least there was the satisfaction of knowing I'd been right about her all along. She was just a hotel guest, going about her business with no particular interest in Justin. He'd hate that-it made him wrong and not the center of attention, all at once. There was an attractive female in the room right next door, and she wasn't waiting in the hall for an autograph. Ouch.

"You and Elvis sleep all right?" Well now, Nate, that was stupid, too. You're zero for two this morning. Must be the lack of shut-eye. Sleeping in a room with Justin was like curling up in a cave with a hibernating grizzly.

The girl blinked and blushed another shade. "I really apologize. I drove in late. This is my aunt's hotel, but I didn't want to bother her in the middle of the night. The hide-a-key wouldn't work, and I was just ... well ... stranded. I hope I didn't scare-" In the Precious Moments room, The Shay snorked, caught his breath, and let out a rumble that probably registered on an earthquake monitor somewhere.

"Don't tell the media," I joked. "The snore is an insider secret."

She smiled, so she did have a sense of humor after all, and a nice laugh. Beautiful eyes. I debated a minute on what I'd call that color if I were writing her in a story. Green, maybe hazel, with little gold streamers toward the center. She'd be the pretty freedom fighter in war-torn Greece or at the battle of the Alamo, the one with the olive skin and ringlets of dark reddish-brown hair, slightly ethnic in her features, a little vulnerable, naturally pretty but too preoccupied to flirt.

When Justin woke up, he would like her. He would want to know who she was.

It occurred to me that the early bird gets the worm, and thanks to Justin's snoring, I was the early bird. "Nate Heath," I said, by way of beginning introductions.

"Lauren Eldridge." She offered her hand a little tentatively, the way women do when they want you to know the boundaries right up front. I checked for a ring on her other hand. It's always rea.s.suring when a purposefully noninterested woman is married. Then you know it's not you she doesn't like. The circ.u.mstances just are what they are.

I looked around for a place to set my plate or my coffee, or both. Lauren waved off the handshake. "Oh, hey, don't bother. It's all ri-ight." She had a nice little Texas tw.a.n.g-not the whole southern drawl thing like Amber's, but just the slight stretch of a few words here and there. Cute.

Justin snorked again. The sound echoed into the hall, and the building seemed to shift. The walls crackled, and a gust of air moaned in what I'd concluded was a dumbwaiter that went to the first floor. Downstairs, the turn-of-the-century lobby had been converted into a beauty shop and health club-at least that's what the sign on the front window said. Daily Hair and Body. There wasn't anyone to ask and the lights were still off, but food had appeared on the buffet table and the cookie basket was gone. After listening to Justin tell spooky hotel stories, I could only guess that the ghosts of bygone Dailyians had baked breakfast and left it for those of us who could still enjoy a good sweet roll.

Lauren gaped at the door to our room. "Does he always do that?"

"Pretty much," I said, yawning into my sleeve and blinking because my eyes were grainy.

"You must've been up all night."

"I slept quite a bit on the plane." Which was good planning on my part, because Justin talked half of the night, as usual, then when he finally decided it was time, he downed a couple of sleeping pills, conked out, and commenced snoring. I bedded down on the antique, stiff, and lumpy sofa thing, which incidentally was red, and lay there remembering the old days, when Justin and I shared a set of bunks at Mama Louise's. I kept a pile of things on the top bunk to throw at him when he got too loud, but most nights I gave up, and since the rules prohibited wandering around the house after lights out, I sat up with a book to read or a notepad to write on. I did most of my sleeping in math cla.s.s, which was probably why I was now a writer and not an engineer designing the next international s.p.a.ce station. "You get used to it," I said, patting myself on the back for being cavalier so early in the morning. No sense making her feel bad about stealing the Elvis room.

Her lips twisted to one side in a way that seemed mildly flirty. I experienced a blip on my man-radar. She had a cute little dimple when she did that.

"Okay, you don't really get used to it," I admitted. "I stayed up and read the rest of the script."

"The script? For The Horseman?"

Ahhh ... she knew about the script. So she wasn't a completely disinterested party after all. The mystery deepened. Who was the cute girl from the Elvis room and why was she giving me the hawkeye? "That's the one." I stopped just short of adding, Sure cure for insomnia, let me tell you. By five a.m. I could have drifted off with a freight train in the next bed.

"You have the script?" Was it my imagination or was I suddenly twice as interesting? Maybe she wanted a part in the movie. She didn't seem the type.

"Yes." If you can call it that.

"Can I see it?"

"The script?" All righty then, what's going on here, Nater? The random girl in the alley isn't so random after all. ...

"Yes." She glanced impatiently toward the room, where Justin had finally rolled over and quit snoring.

"It's not ... " fit for public consumption. If the screenplay (with Justin's idiotic notes in the margin), in its present befuddled, impractical, confused condition leaked out, Justin would look like the world's biggest idiot. "It's ... uhhh ... it's in the process still. It needs ... " to be burned "some work."

Lauren seemed to sense that there was something I wasn't saying. Odd, because I'd always been pretty good at keeping people from getting a read on me. Old habit from life with Doug, and a skill that had served me well over the years in LA. When ego is everything, it's best not to let people know what you really think.

We stood silent a moment, and I had the weird, uncomfortable feeling that the little Texas girl was tunneling right through me. Her lips pressed together in a skeptical line that wasn't unfriendly, exactly, but there was an astute look in her eye. The blip on my man-radar vanished like a ship in the Bermuda Triangle. Clearly, we were talking business here.

She barricaded herself behind crossed arms, and I sensed that we were about to level with each other. "Look, I don't mean to be rude," she said, which is usually what people say right before they're going to take a shot at something that isn't nice, either. "But I'm wondering what in the world is going on here."

"Here?"