Chapter 20 #2
Virginia leaned back against the counter and lifted her right hand, motioning to Rossi. “Take her to my place, okay? We can discuss this later, after we close up here.”
“I’m not going,” Tania Marie said.
“Of course you are, dear. But I have lots to do before I can leave. I can’t spend that time battling with you.”
“Didn’t you hear her?” Rossi touched Tania Marie’s arm. “She said she’s not going.”
“It’s your job to see that she does, dear Jay.” That was the sweet Virginia voice, the engaging voice that, along with a shitload of talent, had made her the most famous female chef in America. Not even Rossi would be able to stand up to that one.
“I’m out of here,” Tania Marie said. “You two wasted my night. You robbed me of my evening, and I’m going back to Santa Barbara.” She shot a glare in Rossi’s direction. “With or without him.”
“It’s with him.” Rossi squeezed her arm again. “I shouldn’t have brought you here. I thought she was afraid for you.”
“Afraid? You want to see afraid?” Virginia grabbed Tania Marie by the wrist, her fingers so cold that Tania Marie felt as if her hand were being amputated by an icy metal vise.
After that initial shock, Virginia let go, then marched into her tiny office, set off from the kitchen by a short glass-brick screen.
Tania Marie followed her in. The small room held a small glass desk.
On the desk, papers and sticky notes engaged in a competition that the sticky notes just might win.
“Okay, Miss Perfect.” Virginia reached into the pile of papers and pulled out only one envelope.
“What is it?”
“Why don’t you take a look, since you know so damned much.”
The envelope had been resealed and taped. Tania Marie slashed into it with her fingernail. Inside was a note, written in block letters that should have been easier to read than they were.
Get Her Away From Killer Body.
Tania Marie reached in again, pulled out something odd. She stared at it, trying to figure out why it looked so familiar.
Then she realized it was a photograph of the lower part of her body—shorts, shamrock tattoo above the ankle, strappy little shoes.
The photo had been torn in half.
“What does this mean?” She shook the ragged partial photo at Virginia.
“I don’t know.” For the first time Tania Marie could remember, Virginia looked on the brink of tears. “I want you to come stay with me for a while. I don’t want you all those hours away.”
Virginia was actually crying, crying for her. Tania Marie threw her arms around her. “I’ll be okay,” she said.
Virginia lifted tear-streaked eyes. “But you won’t stay?”
“I can’t. I’m sorry.” She hugged Virginia—her mother, damn it, her mother. “It’s just too late for that.”
Tania Marie huddled in the passenger seat of the horrible pickup, still seeing Virginia’s face.
“Well, I guess you told her.” Jay Rossi seemed to be hiding a smile, and that pissed her off even more. He wore the windbreaker over a pair of khaki pants and boots. The lenses of his glasses only partially concealed his eyes.
“I don’t think it’s very amusing that you kidnapped me and dragged me from my home, Mommy’s permission or not.”
“Maybe I made a mistake. She’s scared, though, terrified. You must have seen that.”
“More like a guilty conscience, if you ask me.” She still couldn’t figure out how it felt to know Virginia actually gave a damn about her, but she wasn’t going to share that with him.
She settled back in the seat as they flew down the freeway, its shadowed tangles of traffic and car lights.
At least he was a good driver. “So she gets some postcard of Julie Larimore and a torn-up photograph of me? It’s one of the others, probably that bitch Rochelle, trying to scare me away from the Killer Body gig. ”
“You hope that’s all it is.”
“When you’ve been through everything I have in the last year, you don’t let an anonymous note scare you off.”
“But you don’t have to fight the person who’s trying to help you.” He rubbed his cheek, and Tania Marie realized she’d left a scratch there during their earlier struggle. Good.
“Anyone who breaks into someone’s home deserves anything he gets.”
“I’d do it again,” he said, “and I don’t agree that you should go back there.”
She wondered, for a moment, if he was right. Were the threats coming from the same person, as Virginia feared, who’d locked her in the sauna at the gym? That dizzy, spinning feeling as she realized she was trapped, and as the heat sucked her breath and her hope from her, was one she’d never forget.
Rossi glanced over at her, but his gaze was more analytical than casual. “Having second thoughts?”
“Of course not.”
“Want to talk about it?”
“I don’t talk to kidnappers.” She crossed her arms and slid down in the seat.
“Virginia’s right. That place you’re staying is too open. You need to move.”
“To a Virginia-approved apartment? What do you know about the place, anyway?”
“You don’t have an alarm system. You have that door off the hall, no proper lighting in the back.
That backyard’s the size of a postage stamp.
You go out there at all hours, water your plants, dressed in a hell of a lot less than anyone should wear outside.
You leave the bathroom window open. The screen of the patio door in the bedroom has a hole in it. Anyone could just reach inside.”
She shivered as she heard her apartment and her habits so adroitly described.
“How long have you been spying on me?”
“It’s not spying. Virginia was paying me to keep an eye on you. That’s all I’ve been doing.”
“Without my knowledge.” Now she was doubly pissed. “Why couldn’t you have told me?”
She raised her voice, and he matched the tone. “Because you would have raised hell, okay? Get off my back.”
“You could have at least tried talking to me.”
“I did, remember? You told me to go to hell. You got yourself damn near killed in your gym, photographed wearing not much more than a towel, and now your mother gets a note all but threatening your life.”
She felt cold all over, reached to turn down the air conditioner.
“What can I do? She wants to pack me off to Europe again. That’s what she did when the shit hit the fan before. Do you know how lonely it is to be scuttling around Paris with a broken heart, scared to death, just so you can avoid the media?”
Some of the anger left his face, and he seemed to be thinking. Finally, he said, “No, I can’t imagine.”
Was that actually a note of concern in his voice? She looked out again. They must be getting close. The air smelled cleaner, the way it did when nearing the ocean. Her body ached from all of the hours she’d spent cramped in his truck.
“This time you might be risking a hell of a lot more than exposure to the media,” he said.
“Why me?” Remembering Paris, the sauna, the last miserable year, brought tears to her eyes. “It’s not fair, everything I’ve been through, and now, finally a chance at instauration.”
“At what?”
She recited from the word-of-the-day definition. Damn, she missed Marshall. Missing. Hating. They balled together in a tight knot in her stomach.
“Instauration,” she said. “A chance at something decent, and now it’s all starting up again. The talk shows won’t leave me alone, but all they want are the gory details.” And to look at my thighs, she thought.
“Do you have any idea who set you up at the gym like that?”
The question that had been driving her crazy. No answer made sense. “Rochelle, maybe. Maybe even her husband, Jesse.”
“What makes you think it’s one of them?”
“Jesse McArthur talked to Princess Gabby and me both, remember? He offered us representation if we’d step out of the running for the position. Besides, we’ve both had bad things happen to us, and nothing’s happened to Rochelle, not a frigging thing.”
She tried to wipe away her tears, but more took their place. So much pain inside of her; it would take years to cry it away.
Rossi drove with one hand, the other spread across the seat, the way farmers drove their pickups. This pickup he called Blackie was a farmer’s truck, if she ever saw one.
“Maybe there’s another reason,” he said. “Is there something you and Princess Gabby know? Something that Rochelle doesn’t?”
She tried to block his question, to block any answer that might try to escape her. “About what?” She felt queasy. She’d been trying to shut out the last year for too long. She hurt too much, was too scared to do anything else. “I don’t know what Princess Gabby knows.”
“What about you?” The moan of the traffic increased in volume. Too loud for questions or for answers.
“I don’t know anything that would put me in danger.”
She forced herself to breathe evenly, anticipating his response, the probing, familiar way he conversed with her. Instead, he said nothing, and the traffic noises blended into a comfortable hum once more. She leaned down farther in the seat, wiping her eyes again.
Finally, he spoke, as if an afterthought. “There’s always the possibility that what you don’t think puts you in danger may threaten someone else. Sometimes it helps to run it past another person.”
“You, for instance?” So he could run to Virginia with it.
“I don’t care who. Just talk to someone you trust. Tell them what you know.”
But she hadn’t told him she knew anything. She would never say that to anyone. Worse to defend herself, though. She’d appear even more suspicious. Instead, she said, “Don’t you tell anyone I cried.”
“I won’t tell anyone anything.”
“Yeah, right.”
“That’s the reason Virginia wanted me for this job. She knows most people would talk to tabloids or at least gossip about you.”
“What makes her so sure you won’t?”
“Come on.” He glared at her across the seat. “Do you really think I’d lower myself to do something like that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, I wouldn’t. I was raised not to kick people when they’re down. I just wouldn’t do it.”
She hadn’t expected a speech like this from such a full-of-himself asshole. She felt the tension ease up.
“No shit?” she said.
His thin lips spread into a smile. “No shit.”
They drove in silence, Tania Marie afloat in memories.
Marshall and her together, loving each other, swearing that they were forever.
How stupid could she be to believe that word, forever, from the lips of a married man?
How stupid was she to believe the war was between the wife and her, and that one could actually win?
The only one who won these three-way wars was the man.
“The worst part of this,” she said aloud, “is that everyone thinks I’m a tramp, and I’m not.”
“I don’t think you’re a tramp,” Rossi said.
“You don’t?”
“No. You were new on the job. You fell for the wrong man. That doesn’t make you anything but normal. Someday, you ought to tell your side of the story.”
“You mean write a book or do one of those tell-all interviews?” She could never expose herself that way. “Virginia doesn’t want me to,” she said.
“That’s natural. But this is your life, not hers.” He started to go on with the sermon, then stopped himself, shaking his head. “Big talk coming from a guy who lets his father dictate his college degree.” The self-ridicule in his voice was raw and far harsher than anything he’d directed at her.
She patted his shoulder. “Don’t be so hard on yourself, Rossi. You were pretty cool back there with Virginia. I’m amazed she didn’t fire you on the spot.”
“Screw her.” He slowed the truck as they neared Santa Barbara and cracked the window. “With all due respect, I’ll make it with or without her. I’m that good.”
She hoped he was right. More than that, she hoped Virginia would keep him around. Insane. She was confiding in a kidnapper, her mother’s stooge.
“Got any music in this kidnap-mobile?” she asked.
“Delbert McClinton work for you?” Without waiting for an answer, he punched a button on the dash, and a raw, bluesy voice reverberated through the pickup, singing about the blues, moving with and through the blues, not making light of it, but coping.
“Rossi,” she said. “You have potential.”
“Yeah?”
They’d been in the pickup almost all night. Soon it would be sunup. The ocean stretched out to her right, illuminated by boats and starlight. He didn’t look short in this light. He looked caring and handsome, in a cocky kind of way. Then he smiled.
“So, now that we wasted this night, what do you think about stopping for a glass of wine?”
The Interview
Who were your role models when you were growing up ?
No one. I was my own role model, and it wasn’t easy. I had this voice I couldn’t get rid of driving me on.
Perfect. I always had to be perfect. It was the only way out.
I did it in school. I did it with my looks, the looks that were the reason for my shame.
I made myself perfect. If it hadn’t been Killer Body, it would have been somewhere else.
I was athletic; I went to work for a gym, met Mr. Warren through a friend there.
I always called him Mr. Warren. And then I started working for Killer Body. I became Killer Body. Perfect.
I shut the doors on the past. My life started the day I became Killer Body. The doors are open again now, and I can’t close them. Weak as I am, I’m glad to be back, to be cared for. A child.