The Fiance Thief (9 page)

“So are you calling the local anchors, or shall I?”

“I’m going to get something to eat,” Mick said. “Want to come?”

“You’re not going anywhere,” Hank said, trying to silence that nagging voice in his head that reminded him that he was talking to Mick Regan, the man whose journalistic exploits he had admired from afar, the man whose lectures he’d memorized word for word in j-school. It was this
local hero, he told himself, who’d scrapped the writing that had been entrusted to their care. He hardened his heart.

“Have something delivered if you have to,” Hank told him. “Until we’re due at a barbecue cook-off at seven, we aren’t going anywhere.”

5

“I’
M SUCH A MISERABLE
idiot,” Claire said, smacking herself on the forehead.

“Hey, now, you leave the insults to me,” Alec said. “Is there anything in particular you’ve done wrong, or was this just a broad self-appraisal?”

Alec’s car featured one of those modern cabin climatecontrol systems, and the temperature inside the car wasn’t supposed to creep past sixty-eight. So why did Claire feel as though she were about to have a heatstroke? She lifted her hair off her neck, and started fanning herself with the paper.

“I forgot to tell them I’m a vegetarian. And I forgot to pack a bottle of wine in my suitcase like I was going to,” Claire said.

Alec didn’t look very worried. “What if you had to drink from the host’s bar? Afraid Miranda Craig’s going to slip something in your cocktail?”

Claire laughed, glad to have the upper hand for a moment or two. “You, my friend, are out of luck if you thought you were going to be imbibing high-quality beverages out here, because the Craigs don’t drink.”

“Old-fashioned?” Alec made the word sound like the first visible symptoms of a fatal disease.

“Old-fashioned.”

Trying to steer with his knees, he dug into his pocket and pulled out a five, grabbing the wheel again just as Claire
covered her eyes and screamed. She felt him put the bill in her lap.

“Five dollars,” he said. “Says we get there to find this jaded crew of entertainment types swilling stuff a lot stronger than cheap wine. And don’t worry about your peculiar eating habits. These people will have them, too. There’ll be more pestos and pastas there than you could possibly scarf down.”

Claire opened her eyes. “And what will you eat, if that’s the case?” she asked him.

“There’s going to also be a sizable minority of red-meat-eating, cigar-smoking he-men. I’m going to join their club.”

She didn’t doubt that. She could just see him flitting off somewhere to schmooze with Miranda’s friends. Trying to make her request sound lighthearted, she said, “Don’t abandon me to the clutches of that ruthless woman, okay?”

He reached down and encircled her wrist with his fingers. “I’ll stick to you like handcuffs. I promise.” His fingers, which she’d expected to be as cool as the rest of him, tingled where they touched her pulse, and she knew he could tell exactly how much he was suddenly making her heart race. Slowly, deliberately, she removed his hand.

“I don’t think restraints are necessary,” she tried to say lightly, but it came out as wispy and choked as anything she’d ever said to him.

“I don’t know why you’re so nervous,” Alec said. “You, of all people, know that she puts her panty hose on one leg at a time.”

“I know a lot more than that about her,” Claire muttered.

“Like what?” Alec asked. “Something that wasn’t in her book? She locked all her baby dolls in the closet or swindled some kid out of his ice-cream money?”

Claire couldn’t understand why Alec thought Miranda was capable of nothing more malicious than petty elementary school high jinks. “What makes you think Miranda can do no wrong?”

“So she stole your fiance.” He shrugged. “That’s old news.”

“Gee, Alec, thanks for your concern.” He glanced at her, as if wondering whether he’d really hurt her feelings, but she was too riled up to feel any stabs of pain over Scott and Miranda. “Okay, I’ve got something for you. You know the movie
All About Eve?”
She interrupted him as he started to speak. “And before you say Nancy Davis, it was Bette. Anyway, there’s this scene where the scheming ingenue arranges for Bette to get stuck out of town so she can take her place in the play. Well, at the time, Miranda was in the play
Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean.
She wanted a bigger part, one that had gone to Casey Lyle. Instead, she was Edna Louise, who goes to the bathroom real early in the play and doesn’t come back for a while.”

“This two seemingly unrelated plot snippets come together in a minute, don’t they?” Alec asked. “I’m going to be real disappointed if they don’t.”

“Shut up,” Claire said. “I talked Miranda into watching this movie with me one Saturday morning. Guess who just happens not to show up for the play that night? Casey Lyle.”

“Miranda knocked her over the head and buried her alive somewhere, I guess?”

Claire ignored him. “Miranda paid this guy Casey had been dating to take her to the mountains and wait too long to hike back down, so that they had to stay overnight at a hiker’s shelter.”

Alec looked disgusted, although not, Claire guessed, at Miranda’s actions. “I can’t believe you expect me to buy this story. What difference does it make who plays who…”

“Whom,” Claire corrected automatically.

“In some tiny play.”

“That’s the other part of the story,” Claire said.

“I don’t know if we’ve got room for another part. With James Dean and Bette Davis involved, the cast is getting pretty crowded as it is.”

“Trent Daniels was in town, and she knew he was coming to the show. Now, I know that Trent Daniels is a joke now,” Claire said, heading off Alec’s protest, “but at the time he was one of the most promising young actors in Hollywood. He even got a little minipicture in the corner of the
People
cover one week. Before Miranda, he was the only actor from Ridgeville to ever make a dent in the business, and everybody was gaga over him. He brought a director friend of his who was casting an off-Broadway play. He gave Miranda her first big break.”

She glared at him, daring him to contradict her story. Alec, smiling smugly, said, “I hate to hurt your feelings, Claire, but this Trent Daniels rumor is old news. He’s always calling the paper to suggest Miranda did something devious to get access to his director friend, although he doesn’t quite know what it was. He even says he slept with Miranda.”

They were out in the country now, and Claire faked an interest in the hay bales and cows they passed before she turned to Alec and said, “They did.”

“Watch your mouth,” Alec told her.

She turned to him. “I picked her up at his hotel the next day.” Guessing that his horrified expression meant that she was striking a nerve, Claire said, “I’m not saying she slept her way to the top. She was very good in that role. And she worked her butt off once she got to New York.”

“What about the girl in the mountains?” Alec asked. “Why doesn’t she say something?”

“She and Jason Butler fell in love that night. She switched from theater to nursing, and they got married.
They’re grateful to Miranda, especially since she sends their kids Christmas presents every year.”

She knew she’d made at least a small crack in Alec’s skepticism. “Why haven’t you shared this story?”

“I’ve told you before that I’m not the kind of person who airs other people’s business in public,” Claire said. Then she realized that by telling Alec, that was exactly what she’d done. “And I don’t want you to, either. I didn’t tell you this so you could put it in your article.”

He didn’t answer, and soon they came upon the Craig estate, the wall around it visible well before they got to the driveway. It was an odd fortress on land so far out in the sticks that they hadn’t passed a single car in the last five miles.

A Loudon county patrol car was parked in the grass next to the Craigs’ gate. The officer stepped out and introduced himself as Jimmy, and told them he was acting as security for the weekend. He punched a code on a box next to the entrance, and the gate swung open.

Expensive trees and shrubs, both native and imported, beckoned all the way to the top of the long driveway. Once there, Alec whipped his car between a black Mercedes and a huge van, audiovisual equipment spilling from the van’s open back door.

The house Miranda Craig had built for her parents may have been smack in the middle of east Tennessee, but that hadn’t stopped the architect from going for a Spanish villa, stucco paradise look, rough cream brick with dark red tiles. The house meandered all over the bank of Fort Loudon Lake, the same lake that backed up to Claire’s property. Her sense of geography was woefully off, she knew, and she didn’t have any idea whether her house was just across the lake or miles down the road from the opposite shore. But more than anything, she was flooded with a desire to be home.

“I don’t want to do this,” she started to tell Alec, but he sat with the keys in the ignition, making no move to get out of the car.

“She knew the part already,” Alec said.

“She’d hoped that the director would change his mind, but he was really mad at Miranda at the time. She’d also been hoping something would happen to Casey. I just don’t think she’d thought of speeding it along.”

“Who played Miranda’s part?”

She smiled at him. “Guess.”

He nodded, as if he suspected as much already. “You knew the role from running lines with her, I guess.” She barely had time to wonder at his sympathetic smile before he said, “Poor kid. Good thing you spent most of your time offstage.”

Claire had only a few seconds to wonder if that was meant to sound as insulting as it did before Alec jumped out of the car and came around to her side. “Be sweet, Claire,” he whispered.

“Remember,” she whispered back, “what I told you is not for the record.”

Not bothering to respond, he hauled her out of the car, and she got her bearings just long enough to hear her name shouted in a girlish Southern shriek.

“Claire. Oh my goodness, it’s really Claire.” The tanned, blond woman hurled herself at Claire. “Oh, I knew you’d come.”

Claire stepped back from her oldest friend, who was now sniffling back tears, and was surprised to find that her own throat had tightened a little. She heard herself say, “Hey, Missy. How are you?”

“Wait, stop.” A beefy arm interjected itself between them. From her irregular reading of
People
magazine, Claire recognized the man as Larry Cole, Miranda’s personal manager. “Sweetie, sugar, it’s…”

“Miranda, I know,” Claire said. “It just slipped my mind for a second. It won’t happen again.”

Miranda stamped her expensively shod foot on the ground. “Larry. This is not for tape. I don’t know why you have to barge in on everything you think is your business.”

“Making this weekend run smoothly is my business,” he said.

Miranda’s fit of sweet sentimentality had passed, and she was all business now. “But maybe Claire should call me Missy?” Miranda asked. “That’s how she knows me, after all.”

Claire backed away from Miranda, annoyed with herself for the split second she’d allowed herself to miss her old friend. No matter what her former pal said, it was clear to Claire that publicity and attention were still Miranda’s main concerns, and that trying to repair their friendship was not at the top of the list.

“Yes, don’t forget that I’ve been a country bumpkin these past few years, and was completely unaware that my friend Missy had changed her name and become a Hollywood legend,” Claire interrupted, but they didn’t seem to hear her.

“It’ll confuse the audience,” Larry said stubbornly.

“Ask Christine’s people about it,” Miranda countered.

Claire felt Alec’s mouth near her ear. “Do you think both of them played guitar in rock bands in college?”

She turned her face toward his, and said in a low voice, “Maybe Miranda should donate the proceeds of her next movie to research into the problem of selective hearing.”

While they were whispering, an assistant of Larry’s was dispatched to ask an assistant of Christine Colby’s whether Claire should say “Missy” or “Miranda.” Alec was just removing his lips from the vicinity of Claire’s hair when Miranda’s attention fell on them again. She put her hand over her mouth.

“I forgot to ask you all about this guy you’re snuggling up to. Who could he be?” Miranda reached her hand out for Alec’s, but Claire was suddenly determined that Miranda wouldn’t touch him as long as she could help it. She preempted the move by taking both of his hands in hers and gazing into his eyes. “This is Alec Mason, my fiancé. He edits the newspaper where I work.”

Miranda’s tone was coy.

“And do you have a ring?”

Claire covered Alec’s foot with her sandaled one, putting just a fraction of her weight on it to get the point across. She pulled her hand away from his, and showed Miranda the ring.

“An amethyst….”

“Sapphire,” Claire interrupted. Hadn’t Miranda played a geologist in a movie once?

“Of course. I get all the lesser stones mixed up. It’s beautiful.”

“Thank you,” Claire said. She put her arm around Alec’s waist and pulled him close to her, shocked at her own boldness, certainly, but shocked also by the way she could feel his heart racing near hers. “His great-grandfather spent his life savings on the stone so he could bring it with him from Scotland when he came to America to find his childhood sweetheart. He gave it to her, and it’s been in the family ever since. We just had it put in a new setting.”

Although Claire was personally touched by her invented story, Miranda’s attention had already wandered. “How sweet,” Miranda said. “Come and see everybody.” She hooked her arm around Claire’s waist, and pulled her along with her. Claire had no choice but to drop her hold on Alec and go. Propelled by Miranda, she reached out behind her to gesture to Alec to follow.

“Everybody, Claire’s here with her fiancé.” A chorus of greetings rose up from beside the pool, although Claire
only recognized a couple of the faces. Miranda turned to her parents, who were dragging chairs out to the poolside. “Look, Mama. Isn’t Claire pretty?”