Chapter 3
THREE
Riding a scooter wasn’t anywhere near as dangerous as people believed.
I could count on one hand—literally—the times I’d been in danger of getting hit.
The roads at the Landings weren’t what I expected, though.
There were speed limits posted, but I figured they were low because golf carts could only go so fast, not because there were tight curves to worry about.
Apparently, I was wrong. I didn’t see the golf cart exiting the restaurant parking lot until I was directly in front of it. Behind me, Hayley gripped my stomach so tightly I thought she was going to pop a kidney out of an unexpected orifice.
The driver of the cart was just as surprised to see me as I was to see him. I couldn’t correct what I’d already done. If I tried, I would dump the scooter onto the pavement, and that would be … well, ugly. Seriously, there was nothing worse than road rash.
The driver was the one to save us. He directed his cart to the side of the road, where he proceeded to slide over the embankment that led down to a slow-moving creek.
Then, to make matters worse, the cart rolled.
I didn’t even know golf carts could roll.
It wasn’t as if they were top-heavy. His rolled. Yes, twice.
I managed to come to a stop by the time he finished rolling. I froze in the middle of the road, gripping the handlebars of the Vespa, and stared in the wake of the cart. Hayley was the one who snapped to action.
“Oh, my goodness gracious!” she exclaimed.
Then she was off. She was already at the edge of the embankment when I registered her movements.
That broke my out of my reverie. I left the Vespa at the side of the road and followed her.
The embankment was steep. Seeing it, I could understand how the cart had rolled—there was no way it could remain flat with such a short wheelbase.
Despite the steep decline, I was hopeful that nobody had been seriously hurt.
It’s a golf cart. People don’t get hurt in golf carts. That was what kept going through my head. I wanted to believe it. I just didn’t know if I could. All I could picture was body parts being crushed as the golf cart careened end over end.
Hayley reached the bottom of the hill before me. She crouched next to a guy who had been thrown clear of the cart. He had dark hair, and I didn’t see any blood. He might have been a little dazed, but I could deal with dazed.
“Check the driver!” Hayley barked.
She was good in a crisis, probably because she’d grown up on a ranch. She’d seen actual catastrophes and the way her parents and the ranch hands reacted. She knew to keep calm. I rarely kept calm.
I followed her orders and moved to check the driver.
He was still in the cart somehow. I didn’t see a seatbelt, but he was in his spot, his white-knuckled hands gripping the steering wheel as if he was still driving.
His skin was pale—the color of death—but he didn’t look as if he was bleeding.
I was relieved when I cataloged his features.
He was strong, fit, and obviously freaked. I could deal with all those things.
“Congratulations,” I announced, going for levity. Maybe if I turned this into a fun story, he wouldn’t make a big deal out of it. “You just survived the sort of thing that is going to be an icebreaker story at boring cocktail parties for years.”
Slowly, so slowly it reminded me of a scene from a scary movie—it could have been any horror movie really—the man shifted his gaze to me. He blinked in shock when our gazes snagged, and it was only then that I recognized him.
“Wait,” I said as things started shifting in my mind.
His reaction told me I was right. This was the man I remembered—the man I’d stalked online after what I referred to as the incident and Hayley called the catastrophe. My assistant Paisley called it Satan’s hemorrhoid, but that was a visual I couldn’t dwell on too long.
“You,” I said.
“You,” he gritted out. He sounded a lot angrier than I was. I really couldn’t blame him.
“Big Butt Bates.”
That wasn’t his name—it was B. B. Bates.
After his meltdown following the conference panel, where he accused me of any number of things including stealing his thunder, trying to eclipse his sun, and being determined to get him put on Amy Ryan’s personal assassination list—and I thought I was dramatic—he’d knocked over a tray of cocktails and run from the room.
I hadn’t seen him since. In the aftermath, I’d started referring to him as Big Butt Bates because, well, I’m apparently a toddler.
It made me feel better. Painting him as the problem allowed me to gloss over my culpability.
The plan had been to track him down at the next conference and apologize.
The only thing was, he didn’t show up at the next conference …
or the next … or even the one after that.
He’d just disappeared from the writing circuit.
That wasn’t unheard of—writers were theatrical little things—but the timing didn’t sit well with me.
“What did you call me?” he demanded, drawing me back to the here and now.
“Buddy,” I replied, not missing a beat. “I called you Buddy.”
“Why would you call me Buddy?” He was practically seething.
“It’s your name. What else would I call you?”
“My name is Brody.”
I swallowed hard. Brody. Right. How could I forget that? He was named after my favorite character in Jaws. Or that was what I’d told myself because it made him more interesting. Yeah, that wasn’t the conversation we should be having now. I needed to get things back on track.
“Are you hurt, Brody?” I asked, keeping my voice level. “Did you break any bones when you fell off the road?”
The look he shot me was incredulous. “I did not fall off the road. You ran me off the road.”
That was a gross exaggeration. “You turned off the road yourself.”
“So I wouldn’t hit you.”
“That’s not exactly how I remember it.”
His mouth fell open. “Excuse me?” He was getting shriller with each passing moment. “You were flying at me like a monkey in a Wizard of Oz movie. You had claws out, and your tail was twitching, and you were completely out of control.”
For some reason, the visual he was painting made me grin. “Did you just call me a flying monkey?”
Brody wasn’t in a laughing mood. “This is not funny!”
He moved to get out of the cart. I was gratified to see he was steady on his feet. Of course, because this day was jinxed, he slipped on the grass and fell face-first into a pile of moss.
My mouth dropped open as he rolled to his back. There was moss plastered to his face and dirt smudged across his neck. Yup, there was a worm there too. I pressed my lips together, darted a look toward Hayley, and found her watching the scene with abject horror.
“What do I do?” I mouthed.
She shrugged, which had me glaring. She was going to have to do better than that.
“What do I do?” I mouthed again in exaggerated fashion.
She didn’t even bother shrugging this time. She just stood there like an idiot.
I made up my mind on the spot and squared my shoulders. I took two tentative steps toward Brody and leaned over to look down at him. The worm was still there, still really gross. The dirt wasn’t the worst thing I’d ever seen. The look in his eyes, however, was otherworldly. He looked possessed.
“Have you ever seen The Exorcist?” I asked without thinking.
“Are you about to spew pea soup on me?” he asked blandly.
“No. There’s just something about your eyes that reminds me of that movie.”
“Ah.” He was calm. Too calm actually. He made me think of a firecracker that was about to blow. He was just sizzling along, but he was going to hit the payload sooner or later.
“Would you like me to help you up?” I asked, determined to be helpful.
“No. I think I’m going to stay here.”
“Just staring up at the sky?”
“Eventually, I figure I’ll wake up from whatever this terrible nightmare is.”
“Wouldn’t that be nice?” I was all for this being a nightmare. I had some bad news for him, though. “Unfortunately, this is real.” I had to tell him the rest of it. “You have a worm on your face.”
He moved so fast I thought he was going to pull his arm out of its socket. He swept the moss off his face, made a weird whirring noise, then fixed his glare on me. “Why are you here?” he exploded.
“You mean in the ditch? I’m here to check on you. When you swerved the way you did, I figured it was my civic duty to make sure you were okay.”
“Because you’re the reason I’m in this ditch.”
I opted not to comment on that. “Would you like me to help you up?” I used my most pleasing voice and extended my hand.
He looked at me as if I was trying to wipe poop on him after a bad toilet-paper swipe. “Why. Are. You. Here.” He gritted it out as if he had a mouth full of marbles.
“I just told you.” Maybe he had a head injury. That could explain the way he was acting.
“Not in this ditch,” he replied. “Why are you here, in the Landings?”
“Oh.” That was a very good question from his perspective. “I just moved here. I live on Yam Gandy Road. Do you know what a Yam Gandy is?”
Brody was deceptively blasé as he shook his head. “You don’t live here.”
“I do. I just moved in today.” I beamed at him proudly. “It’s my first house.”
He clearly wasn’t impressed. “You don’t live here,” he repeated.
“Of course I do.” Something occurred to me. “What are you doing here?”
“I live here. You can’t live here. This is my place.”
Uh-oh. It hadn’t even occurred to me that Brody would live here. I mean, what were the odds of that? “Do you know what a Yam Gandy is?”
Brody growled. “You do not live here!” He screeched, reminding me of his meltdown at the writer’s conference, something else I felt inexplicably guilty about.
“Just avoid Yam Gandy Road,” I suggested.
He started patting his clothes, and I assumed he was looking for broken bones.
“Does anything feel like it’s going to fall off?” I asked.