Rachel Gibson - Tangled Up in You

At the far end of the aisle, Travis turned the corner and stopped in his tracks. His mouth got a little slack as he stared at Maddie. Mick knew the feeling.

“It says here that odor problems can occur if rodents expire in inaccessible areas. I really don’t want to have to search for stinking mice.” She looked up at him out of the corners of her eyes. “I wonder if there isn’t something better I could use.”

“I wouldn’t recommend the tape.” He pointed to a box of glue boards. “Mice get stuck on it and squeak a lot.” There it was again. Strawberries, and he wondered if Handy’s had some scented feeders for hummingbirds. “You could use traps,” he suggested.

“Really? Aren’t traps kind of…violent?”

“They can snap a mouse in half,” Travis said as he came to stand beside Mick. He rocked back on his heels and grinned. “Sometimes their head pops off when they go for the cheese.”

“Good Lord, kid.” Maddie’s brows drew together as she lowered her gaze to Travis. “That’s gruesome.”

“Uh-huh.”

Mick stuck the pipe under his arm and placed his free hand on top of Travis’s head. “This gruesome guy is my nephew, Travis Hennessy. Travis, say hello to Maddie Dupree.”

Maddie stuck out her palm and shook Travis’s hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Travis.”

“Yeah. You too.”

“And thanks for telling me about the traps,” she continued and released him. “I’ll keep them in mind if I decide on decapitation.”

Travis’s smile grew to show off his missing front tooth. “Last year I killed tons of mice,” he boasted, employing his special brand of seven-year-old charm. “Call me.”

Mick glanced down at his nephew and wasn’t sure, but he thought Travis was puffing up his skinny chest. “The best way to get rid of mice,” he said, saving Travis from embarrassing himself further, “is to get a cat.”

Maddie shook her head and her brown eyes looked into his, all warm and soft and liquid. “Cats and I don’t get along.” His gaze slid to her mouth and he again wondered how long it had been since he’d kissed a mouth that good. “I’d rather have severed heads in my kitchen or hidden carcasses stinking up the place.”

She was talking about severed heads and stinking carcasses and he was getting turned on. Right there in Handy Man Hardware, like he was sixteen again and couldn’t control himself. He’d been with a lot of beautiful women and wasn’t a kid. He’d saved Travis from embarrassing himself, but who was going to save him?

“We’ve got some plumbing to do.” He held up the sealant and took a step back. “Good luck with those mice.”

“See you boys around.”

“Yeah,” Travis said and followed him to the checkout counter. “She was nice,” he whispered. “I like the color of her hair.”

Mick chuckled and set the PVC next to the register. The kid was only seven, but he was a Hennessy.

Maddie tossed the diary on her desk and stretched her arms above her head. Besides the husbands, Alice had dated single men also. In the end, they’d all cheated and lied and left her for someone else. All except Loch. Although, if the affair hadn’t been cut short, Maddie was sure Loch would have cheated and lied like all the others. Single or married, her mother had chosen men who left her heartbroken.

Through the open windows, the noise from her neighbors’ barbeque carried on a slight breeze. It was the Fourth of July, and Truly was in full celebration mode. In town, buildings were decked out in red, white, and blue bunting, and that morning there’d been a parade down Main Street. Maddie had read in the local paper about the big celebration planned in Shaw Park and the town’s “impressive fireworks show” to begin “at full dark.”

Maddie stood and walked into the bathroom. Although really, how “impressive” could the show be in such a small town? Boise, the capital city, hadn’t had a decent show in years.

She plugged the drain in the deep jetted tub and turned on the water. As she undressed, her neighbors’ laughter carried though the small window above the toilet. Earlier in the day, Louie and Lisa Allegrezza had come over to invite her to their barbeque, but even at her best, she wasn’t very good at making polite conversation with people she didn’t know. And lately, Maddie had not been at her best. Finding the diaries had been a real mixed blessing. The diaries had answered some important questions for her. Questions that most people knew from birth. She’d learned that her father was from Madrid and that her mother had become pregnant with Maddie the summer after graduating from high school. Her father had been in the States visiting family, and they’d both fallen madly in “luv.” At the end of the summer, Alejandro had returned to Spain. Alice had written him several letters to tell him about her pregnancy, but she’d never heard from him. Apparently, their “luv” had been one-sided.

Maddie swept her hair up and clamped it on top of her head with a big claw. She’d come to terms with the fact long ago that she would never know her father. That she would never know his face or the sound of his voice. That he’d never teach her to ride a bike or drive a car, but like everything else, reading the diaries had brought it all to the surface again and she wondered if Alejandro was dead or alive and what he might think of her. Not that she would ever know.

Maddie poured German chocolate cake bubble bath into the running water and set a tube of chocolate-cake-scented body scrub on the side of the tub. She might not care about matching underwear or the brand name on her shoes, but she loved bath products. Scented potions and lotions were her passion. Give her a creamy scrub and body butter over designer clothes any day.

Naked, she stepped into the tub and lowered herself into the warm scented water. “Ahh,” she sighed as she slid beneath the suds. She leaned back against the cool porcelain and closed her eyes. She owned every scent imaginable. Everything from roses to apples, espresso to cake, and years ago she’d made peace and learned how to live with her inner hedonist.

There’d been a time in her life when she’d binged on almost anything that gave her pleasure. Men, dessert, and expensive lotions had featured high on her list. As a result of all that bingeing she’d developed a narrow view of men and a large behind. A very soft and smooth behind, but a big butt nonetheless. As a child, she’d been overweight and the horrors of once again hauling a wide load had forced her to change her life. The realization that she needed to change had happened on the morning of her thirtieth birthday when she’d woken up with a cheesecake hangover and a guy named Derrick. The cheesecake had been mediocre and Derrick a real disappointment.

These days she was still a hedonist at heart, but she was a nonpracticing hedonist. She still overindulged on lotions and bath products, but she needed those to relax and destress and to stave off dry, flaky skin.

She sank farther beneath the water and attempted to find a little peace for herself. Her body succumbed to the bubbles and warm water, but her mind wasn’t so easily quieted and continued to roam over the past few weeks. She was making real progress on her timeline and notes. She had a list of people mentioned in her mother’s last diary, the few friends she’d made in Truly and people with whom she’d worked. The county coroner from 1978 had died, but the sheriff still lived in Truly. He was retired, but Maddie was sure he could provide valuable information. She had newspaper accounts, police reports, the coroner’s find ings, and as much information on the Hennessy family as she could possibly dig up. Now all she had to do was talk to anyone connected to her mother’s life and death.

She’d discovered that two women her mother had worked with still lived in town and she planned to start with them tomorrow morning. It was past time she talked to people in town and unearthed information.

The warm water and scented bubbles slid over her stomach and the bottom swell of her breasts. Reading those diaries, she could almost hear her mother’s voice for the first time in twenty-nine years. Alice wrote about her fear at finding herself alone and pregnant and her excitement over Maddie’s birth. Reading about her hopes and dreams for herself and her baby had been heartbreaking and so bittersweet. But with the heartbreaking and bittersweet discoveries, she’d learned that her mother wasn’t the blond-haired, blue-eyed angel she’d created in her child’s head and heart. Alice had been the sort of woman who had to have a man in her life or she’d felt worthless. She’d been needy and naive and eternally optimistic. Maddie had never been needy, nor could she recall a time when she’d been naive or overly optimistic about anything. Not even as a child. Discovering that she had absolutely nothing in common with the woman who’d given her birth, nothing that tied her to her mother, left her empty inside.