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5


It was nine-thirty when I left the Voice, hauling hard against the outside door until I heard the night latch snap home, then paused in the meager protection of the entryway, car keys in hand and irritated by the vague notion that I was forgetting something.

Upstairs, I'd had the newsroom to myself. I wrote my story on Bill Jacques' computer, and left a petunia-pink sticky note in the middle of his monitor, the file name carefully printed in purple letters. I stayed a couple minutes longer, cleaning up odds and ends, then pulled on the parka and headed out.

So, then. Nine-thirty of a blustery Friday evening. Time for Jen Pierce, girl reporter, to return to the house on Wimsy Point and feed her–

"Oh, hell," I said to the cold darkness. "Cat food."

The Wimsy IGA had been closed for half-an-hour, as had the rest of town, except those places that shut down earlier.

"Waterville, here I come," I said with a sigh, and headed across the parking lot toward the Camaro.

*

There were a dozen or so cars and trucks clustered close to the doors of the 24-hour Shop 'n Save in Waterville's Elm Plaza. I pulled in between a red Ford Tempo and an old Dart showing body rot like leprosy under the vapor pink lights.

Inside, I unzipped the parka, shifted my pocketbook to my right shoulder and began a leisurely tour of the premises. Cat food was aisle four, clear across the store, but I figured it would still be there in fifteen minutes or so, after I'd worked the kinks out of my legs.

I toured Produce and Seafood, skirted the live lobster tank and turned up Condiments.

Fox was half-way up the aisle, reaching for a bottle of salad dressing.

Life is full of ironies. It wasn't all that long ago that I desperately needed to locate Fox and had no hope of finding him. Now, it seems I meet him everywhere.

Bottle in hand, he turned from the shelf toward his basket, saw me, and smiled his slight smile.

"Hello, Jennifer."

"Hi," I said, my own smile feeling ridiculously wide.

Fox bent over his basket and deposited the salad dressing, his movements unhurried and graceful. Straightening, he put his long hands along the push bar and cocked his head.

"Shopping or touring?" he asked.

"Both," I admitted, stepping aside to let him move the basket forward. "Mission objective is cat food, but I wanted to walk out the rally before I went home."

"Rally?" We were shoulder-to-shoulder now, and it seemed perfectly natural to turn and walk with him, back the way I'd come.

"The Say No To Drugs Rally at the high school," I explained and sighed. "It was about what you'd expect–skits from the kids and a friendly chat from the state trooper attached to the drug dog. But the last act…" I shook my head while Fox paused to take aboard a jar of spicy brown mustard.

"The last act was a bomb?" he asked, slanting a cobalt-blue glance at me from beneath thick auburn lashes.

I looked at him and took a breath. "The last act," I said, "was incredible. A woman named Peggy Neuman–" I let it drift off, at a loss to describe the song–the power.

"I've seen her a couple times at the Chez," Fox said, naming Waterville's best–and roughest–live music club. "The lady is very good."

"Very good," I agreed. "And very brave. I don't think I'd have the guts to stand up in front of the town I grew up in and lay out all my mistakes."

"Maybe she thinks she can keep someone else from making the same mistakes," Fox murmured as we reached the end of the aisle.

"She said that. I just hope they don't–" crucify her, I was going to say, because with a small town you can never tell who'll be a hero and who'll be the goat.

But I never got a chance to finish the sentence.

Fox pushed his basket to the left, apparently meaning to go up Baking Needs. A flicker of sable in the corner of my eye was all the warning either of us got before Janice Younger erupted on the scene.

With her fur jacket snugged tight at her tiny waist, her black hair cunningly wind-tousled, and her pink-and-cream complexion, she looked gorgeous, as always. Also as always, she spared me one disdainful glance from eyes as green and as hard as emeralds before closing in on her intended prey.

"David!" she cried, in accents of ringing joy. She pressed a perfectly manicured hand to her fur-encased bosom. "How wonderful to see you again!"

It's a source of amazement to me, that Janice Younger remains as yet unmurdered by an outraged Significant Other.

Janice is accustomed to adoration. She is accustomed to a certain, shall we say, slavish gratitude from the men she chooses to honor with her notice. I have seen grown men–mature, stable men–drawn across a busy room by a flutter of soot-black lashes, to be held by the goddess' side, sometimes for hours, while the abandoned wife or lady friend of the ensorcelled seethed and steamed and tried, usually unsuccessfully, to pretend there was nothing amiss.

Adoration and impotent fury–these are the emotions Janice Younger most commonly awakens. She neither inspires, nor is accustomed to meeting, indifference.

Which is why I will treasure the look of startled blankness that passed over Fox's face for a long, long time.

In a heartbeat, he had placed her. I like to think it was the resemblance to Marian that clued him in.

"Mrs. Younger," he said, with Fox-like gravity. She extended a hand and lay it tremulously along his sleeve, face uptilted, green eyes dewy and soft.

"Janice. Please."

"Janice," Fox repeated, and something in his tone persuaded me that he had utterly forgotten her given name. He stepped back from the basket, neatly slipping away from her hand, and glanced over to me, cobalt eyes a trifle wide. "Jennifer, this is–"

"Oh, Jenny and I are well acquainted," Janice assured him. "She and Marian are such good friends! So much in common!" She smiled dazzlingly up into his face.

"I see," Fox said, and even Janice caught the dry note on the edge of his voice. She smiled again, a little wistfully, dropped her eyes and stepped aside.

"I don't want to keep you," she said, demure now and almost as grave as he. "I know you're a very busy man. I just wanted to make sure that you knew you were always welcome at the house. Stop by anytime."

Fox inclined his head. "Thank you," he said seriously. "You're very kind."

She copied his gesture, bowing her head as chastely as a nun, and went one more step aside before throwing me another hard green glance.

"Good-night, Jenny," she said, too sweetly.

"Good-night," I said evenly, and followed Fox up Baking Needs.

He paused in the flour section and bent to pick up a sack of cornmeal, then stood holding it in his hand while he fished the gold-rimmed glasses out of his breast pocket, opened them with a practiced flick of the wrist and slid them onto his nose.

"You don't go by–Jenny–do you?" he asked, voice excruciatingly even as he frowned down at the recipes printed on the brown paper sack.

"Jennifer, or Jen, if I get a choice." I shrugged. "I don't usually get a choice. Most people just assume 'Jenny.' It's not really worth fighting about."

He nodded, pulled the glasses off, folded and stowed them in one fluid motion, then bent and put the cornmeal back. He turned to face me across the cart.

"I met her for five minutes this afternoon," he said, and it was bewilderment in the eyes. With Fox, you have to watch the eyes. "When I went to see Marian."

"Guess you made an impression," I said, trying for lightness. He shook his head, eyes level on mine and not moving.

"The first time I visited Marian," he said, as if it explained something, "back in October. I met her father. It seemed to me that he was living there."

I shrugged. "If it doesn't bother them, I don't guess it should bother you."

I don't always think before I talk, a trait that's gotten me in so much trouble in my life you'd expect I'd've learned better by now. Fox's eyes widened, shock showing along the edges of bewilderment, and I glanced aside, feeling like a certified heel.

"I'm sorry," I muttered, then sighed sharply and forced myself to look back at him.

"See," I said, taking refuge in the patient, non-judgmental secretary-voice I'd learned years ago; "it's nothing personal. It's just… Some people collect dolls, OK? Janice collects men." I shook my head, unsure of what else I should say–what he wanted me to say. "Everybody knows it."

"Everyone except the new collectible on the block," Fox commented with unexpected bitterness. He put a hand up to comb the hair off his forehead. "Thank you."

I hesitated, wondering if this were sarcasm; if I had–another of my specialties–failed some arcane test of friendship and was now dismissed…

"No," Fox said gravely. "I mean it, Jennifer. Thank you." He went to the back of the basket, put his hands on the bar, and paused.

"I'm new around here," he said, and offered me one of his slender smiles. "I'd appreciate any help you can give me."

I smiled, absurdly relieved, and turned to walk beside him again. "I'm nothing but a flatlander, myself," I told him, and grinned. "There's a story about a guy who moved to Maine with his wife when they were in their twenties. Ten or twelve years later he meets an old Mainer who wants to know if he's a native. And the guy says, 'No, my wife and I are from Away. But my children were born here. They're natives.' To which the old Mainer replies, 'Ayuh. And if yer cat had kittens in the oven, would you call 'em muffins?' "

Fox stopped the basket, eyes wide and dancing. He didn't laugh–I hadn't really expected him to laugh, I told myself–but the smile seemed a shade wider than usual.

"I like him–the old Mainer."

"So do I. Unfortunately, there's less and less of them. Maine kids think it's cool to dress like ghetto kids and listen to rap music." I shook my head. "What's rap got to do with Maine? But they see it on MTV and it's not what's around here, so it must be the way to go."

"Welcome to the homogenized society," Fox said, reaching up for a bottle of maple syrup. "We worked hard for this."

"Yeah?" I considered him. "You remember why?"

*

We continued the tour at a leisurely stroll. Fox talked about the police station job and the rare mess he'd found in place.

"I wonder about this consultant," he said, shaking his head. "He specified a Windows LAN–" He threw me a glance, one eyebrow up. "Local–"

"–area network," I finished. "I know."

"Right. He specifies Windows, which a child on the street can tell you needs at least four megabytes of RAM to run properly–and I have at least half of them with two megs– one RAMless wonder–someone cooked the hard drive in that one, too…" Another headshake. "And one copy of Windows for Work Groups."

I blinked. "One?"

"I did a recount," he assured me gravely. "One it is. And then I had to explain to the chief of police why I couldn't just install it on all the machines."

I laughed. Fox walks tall–Air Force brat–and in fact matches my own six foot, but Chief Twitchell is big, loud and belligerent where Fox is quiet and incisive. I'd have paid twenty bucks for a front row seat during that donnybrook.

"Who won?"

Fox stopped the basket and took on a couple cans of coffee. "I asked Carl to order in half-a-dozen more."

"Wow."

"What I can't understand is this consultant–John Custer. I'm told he came with the very highest credentials–yet he orders in trashed machines, inappropriate machines, one copy of the software. What on earth was the man thinking?"

"He was thinking 'easy money,' " I told him. "People from Portland are always coming up-country to make a killing from the locals."

He looked at me. "Another one of those things everybody knows?"

"No, this is one of the things only flatlanders know and Mainers think you're rude to mention," I said. "Portland's a city, see? So it stands to reason that all good things proceed from it. Of course, if you want the best you need to go to Boston."

"I'll remember that."

"See that you do."

We finished out the paper goods aisle in silence, then turned into Pet Food.

"How are things at the paper?" Fox murmured.

"Same as always. There was a hit-and-run out by the high school that the State cops don't think they're going to get lucky on. Sixteen years old. In a coma at Waterville Hospital." I shook my head, and pushed the grimness aside with a pure effort of will.

"That's the hottest scoop–except for the fact that the owners are giving a black tie affair at the Mill. Command performance for all employees." I sighed. "The press room guys are going to all have to rent tuxes–might rent one, myself." I made a detour across the aisle.

"I have a tux," Fox said as I reached up to pull down Jasper's favorite brand of cat food.

I threw him a grin over my shoulder. "Won't fit, but thanks."

He raised an eyebrow. "I assure you, it fits quite well."

I turned carefully, half-a-dozen cat food boxes trembling in my arms. "What's a computer geek doing with a tux?"

Fox widened his eyes in what I strongly suspected was utterly bogus innocence. "I had to attend an awards banquet."

"And so naturally you bought a tuxedo," I said in a tone of broad enlightenment just as the top three boxes jumped ship. Fox leaned forward, caught them, and dropped them into his basket.

"I have room for the rest, too," he murmured.

"Thanks," I said, and dumped them in, helter-skelter. "It's cheaper to rent a tux than buy one."

He shrugged. "Kathy liked it," he said, which is the third time I've heard him say his dead wife's name since October. "My own mother was pleased to proclaim me 'entirely presentable'–a rare compliment. It was a giddy moment."

I grinned. "Sure it was. And you schlepped this tux all the way to Maine?"

"One never knows," Fox said virtuously, "when the duties of society will overtake one."

"Very true," I was able to concede gravely in a moment or two. "However, this affair might be more profitably considered as a masquerade. The Wimsy Voice, its employees, hangers-on and et ceteras are not haute ton."

"Yet an opportunity to wear a tuxedo should not lightly be set aside."

I took a second to consider him: Pointy face serious as always, eyes… Intent. Something important was going on–or Fox thought so. And I very much wished that I knew what it was.

"Odds are the party's going to be horrible," I told him, which was the truth as I believed it. "The Twins don't tend to think very highly of anybody who'll work for them."

"I'd never join a club that would have me as a member," Fox murmured. I nodded, with a faint grin to Groucho.

"God only knows why they've taken it into their heads to throw a staff party–but it's the wrong party and it's a couple years too late. You'd be bored to death."

He tipped his head, watching my face. "Will you be bored to death?"

"Well, naturally." I sighed. "But it's my job–I have to go. It doesn't mean I have to let you offer yourself up as a human sacrifice."

His lips twitched. "But I might be amused. After all, I don't work for the paper."

"And so might actually be considered human by the real people. It's a possibility," I conceded, and chewed my lip.

"You really want to go to this thing?" I asked finally.

He met my eyes square. "Yes."

"Be it on your head, then," I said dubiously. "I don't want to hear you say I didn't warn you."

"You won't," Fox promised, and smiled.



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