The Girl Most Likely To... Read online

  He liked to think of himself as a pretty reasonable guy, slow to anger, fair to all. Anyway, that’s how he would have described himself until this morning, when he’d developed a hair-trigger temper. What disturbed him the most about the entire disaster with Dana was the fact that he wasn’t relieved to have found an easy out. After all, he’d gotten exactly what he’d bargained for—an unforgettable night and no strings. Unexpectedly, he’d also found something more. At least he thought he had, right up until he’d been given a pat on the back for services rendered. Or more accurately, a shove out the door.

  Cal checked his rearview mirror, then scowled. Behind him, a red pickup truck wove through traffic at a speed that would have been stupid on a good day.

  “Slow down, buddy,” he muttered.

  The truck blew past him on his left. It was one of those extended cab jobs and so new that it still had its paper temporary plate in the back window. No payload to give that big cargo bed stability, either. He winced as the truck fishtailed. Why did the guys with the biggest engines always believe they were exempt from the laws of physics? Cal moved a lane to his right just to be safe.

  Avoiding Sandy Bend and heading up to his lodge was also a matter of playing it safe. Not that the rambling family farmhouse he shared with his absentee dad and brother, Mitch, was a bad place; it simply wasn’t the proper locale to work his way out of a funk. He needed solitude.

  Ahead on the road, the flash of something unusual caught Cal’s attention. He spat a blunt word as the red truck swerved into the center barricade, bounced off it and began executing slow-motion doughnuts across the highway.

  He drew in a breath and tried to relax. There was no avoiding impact, so Cal tried to reduce the damage by taking his foot off the accelerator. In the stomach-lurching moment before it was his turn to be nailed by the truck, Cal wondered when, exactly, his whole life had become a car wreck.

  AT ABOUT SEVEN O’CLOCK on Saturday evening, Dana pulled into her snow-covered driveway. She was glad she’d waited for the roads in Michigan to clear before escaping Chicago, even if every additional minute in that hotel room had been hell. Trying to distract herself, she’d stared at CNN on the television for what seemed like ages. Even so, if asked, she’d be hard-pressed to recite a single bit of news. That is, other than the fact that her love life had tanked once again. She figured she’d eventually recover from the colossal mistake of sleeping with Cal Brewer, but not today.

  Overnight bag in hand, Dana trudged up the steps to her front door. The porch’s deep overhang had kept the doormat clean of all but a dusting of snow. She stamped off her feet and unlocked the door. A quick glance told her that her shiny brass mailbox was full to brimming.

  “Catalogs, of course.” She grabbed the bundle and wrestled with the door again.

  Once inside, she plopped the mail on an end table in the living room. The stack slipped and slid, then landed on the carpet. She bypassed the mess, dropped her overnight bag next to the couch and headed to the answering machine. Its light flashed three times in rapid succession. Dana pushed the play button. Elbows propped on the kitchen counter and head in hands, she listened.

  “Hey, it’s Hallie. Give me a call as soon as you get home. I just wanted to know whether…um, just give me a call.”

  Dana winced. “No way, José.” She waited for the next message.

  “It’s me again. You know, I wouldn’t have done what I did unless I thought that sooner or later, you two were going to get together on your own. I was just trying to speed the process. Um, well, I guess that’s it for now.”

  The process, as Hallie had put it, couldn’t have gone any faster. In less than a day, an entire relationship—the thrill of meeting, the rush of passion and the ugliness of breaking up—had been pulled into the vortex of a black hole.

  Dana didn’t blame Hallie at all. The situation was no one’s fault but her own. Before she could sink too deeply into berating herself, the beep preceding the next message drew her attention.

  “Miss Devine, this is Len Vandervoort,” an ancient, gravelly sounding voice announced. “You got the Notice to Quit, right? I need to know when I can start moving back in and—”

  Whatever else her landlord was saying was lost as Dana dashed into the living room. She sat cross-legged on the ivory carpet, surrounded by catalogs full of springtime pastel photos of flowers and vacation wear. Her hands shook as she sent the mail flying. Beneath the phone bill, she found what she was dreading—an envelope bearing her absentee landlord’s Florida return address.

  Inside was one of those fill-in-the blank legal forms. According to the blanks he’d completed, she had thirty days to find a new place to live.

  “Oh, no.” In her heart and mind, everything tangled into an awful mess. Dana felt as though the last thing she was certain of was being ripped away.

  Even though she didn’t own it, this was her first home. In Chicago, she and Mike had lived in the same flat she’d rented before they had married. Money had been tight, mainly because Mike couldn’t stop spending it, so they’d had some roommates who always seemed to party. Once she and Mike had moved back to Sandy Bend, at least they’d had their own apartment. That is, until she’d caught him cheating and had packed her stuff and moved out.

  Pierson House, with its three stories of fantasy gingerbread exterior and peeling paint, was hers. The rent was cheap, thanks to rumors it was haunted by Old Lady Pierson, who’d disappeared ninety years before. Dana just considered the occasional inexplicable footsteps as part of its character.

  She’d stenciled the living room walls, stripped layers of wax off the old linoleum and made the place sing. Now she had to hand it back to a man who’d left it vacant a good two years before she’d rented it. A man who already had another perfectly good house in Florida. How greedy was that?

  Dana lay on the floor, arms spread. She stared at the plaster ceiling, which she’d painted a shimmering butterscotch gold. She wasn’t sure if what her landlord demanded was legal, and knew it would cost her more money to find out. She was already paying for her divorce on the installment plan, and that was small potatoes compared to her business loan for Devine Secrets. Her palms grew clammy every time she thought about that number. How much expense would fighting an eviction add?

  The short answer was, more than she had.

  She rolled to her side and curled up into a ball among the catalogs. Maybe she’d just lie there forever, her form of passive resistance. When Vandervoort came to town, he could drag her bones out. It would serve him right.

  BY EARLY SUNDAY MORNING, Cal felt like a hostage in his own house. He’d escaped the accident with no major damage, just a bump and a bent rim that left the Explorer undriveable until the repair shop in Muskegon opened. His brother, Mitch, had picked him up and given him plenty of grief once he was sure Cal was okay.

  To Cal’s mind, “okay” was a relative state. Discounting issues of the Dana Devine variety—which, granted, was like ignoring a tornado bearing down on him—he supposed he was doing as well as a guy without transportation could.

  Last night, he’d pushed aside thoughts of Dana and the corresponding need to escape to his lodge just long enough to fall asleep. The urge had returned today with a vengeance. Travel coffee mug in hand, Cal stood in the middle of the family barn. The old wooden building held such rarities as the float his family entered in Sandy Bend’s annual Summer Fun Parade. Until this past summer when his dad had taken off to see the world, it had also held his father’s classic Corvette.

  Cal’s remaining choice of vehicles was a tight competition between ugly and hideous. First, there was the gray ’84 Dodge Ram pickup, on which the most appealing feature was the duct tape holding the sagging headliner to the interior of the cab. The truck had seemed to go into some sort of decline since his dad had left. Then there was the International Harvester tractor of indeterminate vintage—a definite loser of an option with six inches of snow outside.

  Cal climbed into the Dodge. The
keys were in the ignition, where they’d been since summer. Amazingly, the engine turned over and sputtered to life on the first try. Cal retracted every cutting thought he’d had about the truck’s appearance.

  After checking some loose duct tape to make sure the headliner wouldn’t become a shroud, he backed out of the barn. Once down the large earthen ramp and on level ground, he pulled the parking brake, climbed out and began to slide the barn door shut. His work was interrupted by a shrill whistle from the farmhouse porch.

  Cal knew it was Mitch, so he didn’t bother to turn. His brother wouldn’t be hunting him down to tell him he’d won the lottery or they’d struck gold in Sandy Bend. No, Mitch was guaranteed to be on his tail for bad news. Work news, since Mitch was also on the Sandy Bend police force.

  “Hey! Are you deaf?” his brother shouted.

  Defeated, Cal turned to face him. “Whaddya want?” he yelled back.

  “Rob Lorimer’s wife is having her baby.”

  “And?” He’d no sooner prodded his brother than he recalled the answer to his own question. And it wasn’t an answer he liked. He grumpily scuffed one work boot into a snowdrift.

  “He says you’re scheduled to cover for him.”

  Cal winced at hearing the words aloud.

  Mitch closed in on him. “He needs you now. Something about Cassie’s water breaking and other childbirth stuff I didn’t want to hear. Bottom line…you promised.”

  Actually, Cal had earned that duty over a losing coin toss with the department’s rookie member. He should have pulled rank, but that wasn’t his style. So here he was, ten miles from his lodge and with no potential of getting any closer.

  Cal parked the truck in the barn, then thought about closing himself in, too. Barring the door and hiding from the world didn’t sound bad. In fact, his dad had installed inside door locks for that very reason. When one of the kids pulled a dumb stunt, after dispensing justice, his dad would go to the barn and tinker with his Corvette as a way of blowing off steam.

  Just thinking of his dad made Cal smile. After his wife’s death, Bud Brewer had single-handedly fed and raised his children. He’d loved their mother so completely that until very recently he’d fended off every question about remarriage. Though at present, Cal couldn’t manage even some hot, Chicago fun, he wanted to love like that one day.

  “Don’t even think of closing yourself in there,” Mitch called from just outside, breaking off Cal’s thoughts. “I’m pretty sure I can make it through the window over the milking stall. Besides, I’m feeling generous—I’ll even drive you to town.”

  Cal shook off the remainder of his black mood. It was a damn good thing he loved both his brother and his job.

  SUNDAY MORNING had dawned clear, and Dana had been wide awake to witness it. During the hours when she should have been sleeping, she’d had fitful dreams that she hadn’t really graduated from high school and she’d have to go back and take phys ed again. She knew it was just stress snaking its way into her subconscious, but that didn’t make this morning’s puffy eyes and foggy mind any easier to deal with.

  While she drank her morning coffee, she’d considered calling Mr. Vandervoort and asking him if he’d postpone his move back to Sandy Bend. She’d eventually concluded there was no point in delaying the inevitable. Even a few months longer wouldn’t change the fact that she was starting over. Again.

  By seven o’clock she’d done ten or so of the one hundred abdominal crunches she knew she should be doing every day, had eaten a yogurt and a freezer-burned bagel, and had dressed in her grubbiest clothes. She was more than ready for some construction mayhem at Devine Secrets.

  Luckily, she could take out her aggression on a wall she had to take down in what would eventually be Athena’s Escape, a private massage room. Since Dana’s grand plan didn’t require a masseuse until June, a few hours with a sledgehammer would serve to alter her mood, which lingered somewhere south of cranky. She’d conjure Mr. Vandervoort’s face—not that she’d ever seen him—then swing with all her might. It was cheaper than therapy.

  As was her habit, Dana walked the five blocks from her home to the salon. Hands tucked into the pockets of her favorite winter parka and face tipped down to avoid the bite of the wind, she tried to list the good things in her life.

  One—I have a best friend who would do about anything for me.

  Maybe “to me” was more accurate, considering the way Hallie had set her up with Cal.

  Two—I have my health.

  Okay, so maybe she shouldn’t examine that one too closely, either, given her sleep-deprived state. Or the fact that mental health fell under the same banner, and what she’d done with Cal was downright crazy.

  Three—I have my business.

  Dana smiled a smile of pure relief. The business part was true. She knew that being totally in love with her job was uncool, but she was the adult version of that kid back in high school who panted and drooled while volunteering to answer all of the teacher’s questions. Of course, back then she’d been slumped in her seat doing her best to prove that she was different than Catherine and Josh, her two overachieving older siblings—a point she’d established vividly with Sandy Bend High’s faculty.

  As fate would have it, though, Dana was simply a late-blooming overachiever. She had turned around her life and seized success. Maybe even in her new, improved persona, she wasn’t suited for country club men, as her nastier classmates had predicted. No matter what else happened, she could look at Devine Secrets and take pride in how far she’d come from being viewed as her high school incarnation of Down ’n Dirty Dana Devine, Sandy Bend’s wild child.

  She neared the salon with its flower-bordered sign hanging above the stairwell. Instead of taking the customer entrance, she walked down the sloped side street toward the back of the spa. At the bottom of the street was a small parklike area overlooking the currently frozen Crystal River. In the summertime, she planned to have a friend give yoga classes on the broad ribbon of grass. Hard to imagine now, with last night’s snow covering the expanse.

  Dana frowned as she glanced at the path in front of her. She wasn’t the first person here. She knew that Missy Guyer, the insurance agent next door, wouldn’t be working on a Sunday. Sandy Bend’s former homecoming queen, class president and leader of the popular clique treated her business as an amusing hobby. Besides, the footprints were too large for perfectly petite Missy. In fact, there was too much variety for them to be just one person’s.

  Reaching deep into her jacket pocket, Dana grabbed her keys and quickened her pace. An ugly feeling had settled in the pit of her stomach.

  The tracks led straight to the rear entry of Devine Secrets. And she wouldn’t need her keys. The salon’s back door stood wide open. A stream of water rushed out, adding to the treacherous blanket of ice that had already formed.

  She told herself that any sane person would turn back and get help. However, she wasn’t feeling particularly sane. Gripping the door frame for balance, she slogged through the mess, then headed to the storage room—the logical source of the flood.

  “Dammit!”

  Instead of a broken pipe, as she’d half-hoped, the spigot to the utility sink flowed full force. Water sheeted down the front and sides of the white plastic tub. She ignored the alarmed voice in her mind asking who could have done this, and focused on fixing the mess.

  Dana turned off the tap. Not even bothering to remove her jacket, she reached into the icy cold water and pulled out a rag jammed tightly into the drain. With an angry cry, she flung the sodden mess to the floor.

  Taking care not to slip, she returned to the open back entry. She supposed she should be grateful that the floors sloped to the rear of the old building, and not to the front. And she should be thankful that all the renovated rooms were safe from the flowing water. After kicking loose the ice that had built just over the threshold, she slammed the door.

  “Okay,” she said to herself, “we simply pick up and move on. That’s what we
do, all right.” Her utter lack of conviction made her wonder if she shouldn’t take a few cheerleading lessons from Missy. She also wondered who the “we” was she’d heard herself referring to. In truth, she’d never felt more alone.

  Dana unzipped her soggy jacket and hung it on a hook in the utility room. I’m trying to be positive, she pointed out to whatever kind and guiding spirits were in charge of hairdressers who’d maxed out on stress. Just a little help would be nice….

  She turned up the thermostat in the hallway. A few extra dollars on her heating bill were less worrisome than the chance that some of her hair-coloring products might be damaged by the low temperature in the salon.

  The salon…

  She glanced at the doorway that led to the finished part of her property. The part where some real damage could be done.

  Her heart drummed a double-time beat. Operating on sheer panic, she flew into the salon. She’d gone no more than two steps when her feet slid from beneath her and she landed hard on her tailbone and elbows. Pain shot up her back, taking with it the ability to draw a breath. She lay back and felt the slick, viscous liquid on the linoleum. She turned her palm over and looked at the stuff coating it. Shampoo and hair coloring.

  Gasping for breath, she rolled to her hands and knees. How could she have missed the open tubes, packets and bottles littering the floor? Sobbing, Dana crawled back to the doorway. Still hurting too much to stand without help, and unwilling to spread the damage by touching the walls, she fought to catch her breath.

  Mike. It had to be Mike, she thought, feeling almost disconnected from the chaos around her. Sabotaging her salon was so infantile and petty it had to be him.

  Mike, whose idea of hiding the fact that he was sleeping with someone else, was to come home, take a shower, then dump all his clothes smelling of the other woman’s perfume in the laundry pile.