Rachel Gibson - True Confessions

“Me?” She set the glass back down and innocently placed a hand on her chest. “I swear to God, you aren’t even going to know I’m in town.”

“Somehow, I doubt that.” He rose from the booth and looked down at her. “If you need help with the Donnelly house, ask the Aberdeen boys. They’re about to turn eighteen and not doing anything this summer. They live right across the street from you out there on Timberline, but ask before noon or they’ll already be out on the lake.”

Hope gazed up at the man towering over her, at his deep green eyes and the lock of brown hair that fell in an arc over his forehead. The light from the windows picked out streaks of gold that Hope would bet her Porsche were put there by the sun and not a beautician’s brush. Too bad he had no sense of humor, but she supposed when a man looked like the sheriff, humor wasn’t essential. “Thank you.”

He smiled, and for the first time, she noticed that while he certainly could have been cast in a big-budget Western, his teeth weren’t movie-star straight. They were white enough, yes, but they were a little bit crowded on the bottom. “And good luck, Ms. Spencer,” he drawled.

She supposed he meant she needed luck finding someone to take care of her bat problem and she hoped she didn’t need luck. He headed toward the front of the diner and her gaze followed.

His tan shirt fit flat against his back and was tucked inside tan pants with a brown stripe running down the side of each leg. Those pants should have looked like a fashion nightmare, but on him they seemed to accentuate his tight glutes and long legs. He had a revolver strapped to his hip, a pair of handcuffs, and a variety of leather pouches and cases hooked to his service belt.

Even with all that leather and hardware, he managed to move with the easy grace of a man who was in no great hurry to be anywhere other than where he happened to be. He exuded the confidence and authority of a man who could take care of himself and the little woman in his life. A testosterone cocktail that some women might find irresistible. Not Hope.

She watched him reach for the cowboy hat on the counter with the same fluid motion he used to comb his fingers through his hair. He shoved the hat on his head and spoke to the older waitress near the cash register. The woman with the big hair giggled like a girl, and Hope glanced away. There had been a time in her life when she, too, might have melted just a bit beneath his slightly imperfect smile. Not anymore.

She looked back one last time at the sheriff and watched the rude waitress with the long braid hand him a paper sack. The journalist side of her brain churned with questions. She’d noticed the absence of a wedding ring on the man’s finger, not that that meant a damn thing, but by the conversation he’d had with the waitress, Hope would guess he wasn’t married. She would also hazard a rather obvious guess that the waitress had a thing for the good sheriff. Hope wondered if they were involved, but she doubted it. From just the few moments she’d witnessed them, any feeling beyond friendship seemed to be completely one-sided and rather pathetic. If the waitress had been nicer to Hope, she might have felt sorry for her. But the waitress wasn’t nice, and Hope had problems of her own.

The hard chair in her motel room put Hope’s behind to sleep. She stood, stretched her arms over her head, and yawned. Her eyes, fixed on the blank screen of her laptop, blurred and she rubbed them with the heels of her hands. Nothing. For three hours she’d sat in that chair, straining her gritty eyes, racking her tired brain for something to fill up the screen. Anything. Yet the screen remained empty. She didn’t have one idea. She hadn’t written one sentence. Not even one bad sentence she could expand into something better.

Hope dropped her hands and turned from the laptop. She flopped on the bed and stared up at the ceiling. If she were at home, she was sure she’d be scrubbing her spotless bathroom, ironing her T-shirts, or flipping her mattress. If she had her nail kit, she’d be giving herself a manicure. She’d gotten so good at it, she sometimes wondered if she should just give up writing and do nails for a living.

Giving herself manicures was only one of the many time-wasting contrivances she performed to avoid the reality of an empty screen.

One of the many time-consuming tricks she used to avoid the reality of her life. The painful reality that she had no one. No one to talk to when the nights got lonely. No one to hold her hand and tell her she was okay.

Her mother had died in the fall, and her father had remarried by spring. He’d moved to Sun City, Arizona, with his new wife to be near her family. He called. Hope called. It wasn’t the same. Her only sibling, Evan, was stationed in Germany. She wrote. He wrote. That wasn’t the same, either.

She’d had a husband once. For seven years she’d lived a beautiful life in a beautiful house in Brentwood, gone to lavish parties, and played a mean game of tennis. Her husband, Blaine, had been a brilliant plastic surgeon, handsome and funny, and she’d loved him desperately. She’d been secure and happy, and the last night they’d spent together, he’d made love to her as if she were the wife of his heart.

The next day, he’d had her served with divorce papers. He’d told her he was awfully sorry, but he’d fallen in love with her best friend, Jill Ellis. The two hadn’t wanted to hurt Hope, but what could they do? They were in love, and, of course, Jill was five months pregnant, giving him the one thing Hope could not.

Hope no longer had a husband; had no friends, no children.

She had her career, though, and while that wasn’t how she’d necessarily envisioned her life, it hadn’t been so bad. At least until she’d hit the wall blocking her.

For three years she’d turned her back on her past, refusing to acknowledge the depth of her pain even to herself. She’d ignored the ruins of her life and buried herself in her work. First as a freelance writer for magazines such as Woman’s World and Cosmopolitan, and she’d also done some freelance reporting for the Star and The National Enquirer. She’d done that for a year, but she hadn’t really enjoyed sneaking around prying into the lives of celebrities, and besides, she’d done it for the wrong reasons anyway.

She’d quit gossip completely to take a job as a staff writer for The Weekly News of the Universe, one of those black-and-white tabloids that claimed Elvis was alive and well and living on Mars. No more rumor or scandal. Now she made up fictional stories. Under the pen name Madilyn Wright, she was the most popular writer at the paper, and she loved it.

That is, until two months ago, when it seemed she’d hit an invisible wall. She couldn’t ignore it, couldn’t go through it, and couldn’t see to go around it. She was stuck. She couldn’t seem to hide from it or get lost in the bizarre stories she made up in her head. She hadn’t been able to write a decent sentence for a while now. Hope figured a psychiatrist could tell her what was wrong with her, but she also figured she already knew.

Her editor had become extremely anxious and had suggested Hope take a break. Not because he was a hell of a guy, but because she made him look good. She also made the paper a lot of money, and they wanted their most popular reporter back, churning out the strange and unusual.

Walter had even gone so far as to choose her vacation destiny, and the paper had paid the six months’ lease on the house. Walter told her he’d picked Gospel, Idaho, because of the fresh air. That was what he’d said, but he hadn’t been fooling anyone. He’d picked Gospel because it looked like the sort of place where Bigfoot hung out. Where people were routinely abducted by aliens, and where weird cults danced naked beneath a full moon.

Hope sat up on the edge of the bed and sighed. She’d agreed to Walter’s plan because she recognized that her life had become stagnant, a rut she no longer enjoyed living in. She needed a new routine. She’d needed to get out of L.A. for a while. Take a break and, of course, put the entire Micky the Magical Leprechaun fiasco behind her. She needed to clear her head of that whole trial.

Without much enthusiasm, she rose, changed into a pair of flannel shorts and a Planet Hollywood T-shirt, then returned to her seat in front of the laptop. With her fingers poised above the keyboard, she stared at the blinking cursor. Silence surrounded her, heavy and complete, and before she knew it, she’d lowered her gaze to the ugly sculpted carpet beneath her feet. It was without a doubt the grossest carpet she’d ever seen, and she spent fifteen minutes trying to determine if the colors were supposed to run like that, or if a previous guest had dropped some pizza.

Just when she concluded that the carpeting was supposed to look splotched with deep red, she caught herself procrastinating and forced her attention back to the screen.

She stared like a hypnotized cobra, counting each blink of the cursor. She counted two hundred and forty-seven flashes when a shriek split the still night and propelled Hope to her feet.

“For the love of God,” she gasped, her heart lodging in her throat. Then she realized it was her Viper alarm and dug into the bottom of her purse for the transmitter hooked to her key ring. She shoved her feet into her sandals, then ran outside and wove her way through the small parking lot filled with pickups, minivans, and dusty SUVs with kayaks strapped to the tops.

The manager of the Sandman stood by the hood of Hope’s Porsche. The sponge rollers were still in her hair, and a deep scowl narrowed her eyes as she watched Hope approach. Fellow guests looked out their windows or stood in the doorways of their rooms. Dusk had settled over Gospel, painting deep shadows across the rugged landscape. The town appeared laid-back and relaxed, except for the six tones of the Viper piercing the calm. Hope pointed the transmitter at her car and disengaged the alarm.