Читать книгу Woman Most Wanted - Harper Allen - Страница 14

Jenna was stiff from spending the night on a hard bus terminal bench, her hair looked like the proverbial burning bush, and her dress had wrinkled as only a natural fiber could. Jenna smoothed ineffectually at it with the palms of her hands and realized, for the first time in her life, that there was something to be said for polyester.

The bus station washroom was empty, so when her stomach gurgled the sound echoed hollowly around the tiled room. A skimpy lunch yesterday, no dinner, and she didn’t have any money to buy breakfast.

She shifted slightly, and the muted silvery chime of her ankle bracelet tinkled off into a delicate echo. At the sound, Jenna’s chin lifted and her slumped shoulders straightened.

She hadn’t been able to sleep much last night, and her insomnia hadn’t been because she’d kept slipping off the plastic bench. She’d run a whole gamut of emotions before she’d finally dropped into a fitful doze; from fear and anguish to a sense of betrayal to bewildered confusion. And just as dawn had begun to filter through the grimy terminal windows she’d come to a conclusion that had brought her a faint ray of hope—enough so that she knew she could go on.

Maybe Franklin had passed on the instability that had robbed them both of a normal, settled life. It seemed as if he had, judging from everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours. But she was Sara Moon’s daughter, too—Franklin had always said that Jenna took after her mother more than she did him—and Sara Moon had been the sanest person Jenna had ever known.

She didn’t remember much about her mother, but she could recall a voice that was never raised in anger, a calm acceptance of Franklin’s spur-of-the-moment upheavals and a reassuring presence that had managed to turn each new and bewildering town into a comforting home for a lonely little girl. Sara Moon was as much a part of her as her father was, Jenna thought. Her mother’s strength would keep her from veering over the edge as Franklin had.

From now on she would live a dull, uneventful, normal life, Jenna decided. If she saw Elvis walking down the main street wearing blue suede shoes and eating a peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich this afternoon, she’d smile politely and walk on. She wouldn’t tell anyone, she wouldn’t phone anyone and she wouldn’t try to convince anyone of her crazy story.

Least of all that snake in the grass Matt D’Angelo.

She walked casually through the bus terminal, drifting by the vending machines and surreptitiously pulling on their handles to see if anything dropped out. Nothing did. There was a line of pay phones flanking the far wall that she’d tried earlier, but just in case, she glided like a hungry shark by them again, flipping open the coin return on each one hopefully. She was walking dispiritedly away from the last one, the bells on her ankle bracelet jingling sadly, when she heard a cascade of coins dropping to the ground behind her.

Jackpot! Jenna stuffed the money into the pocket of her dress and dodged out the nearest exit door as guiltily as if she’d just pulled off a major heist. Half a block away she stopped to count her winnings—four and a half…no, five dollars in quarters. If she was careful, she could get breakfast and lunch out of that.

The tiny corner diner was packed with truck drivers and, for some reason, six or seven young women dressed as if they were going out for an evening’s club-hopping, instead of sitting hunched over cups of coffee and half-eaten pieces of toast at six-thirty in the morning. Just looking at them while she placed her order at the counter, Jenna felt like a wreck, but when a seat at one of the tables became vacant, she slid in with a murmured apology.

At one of the communes she’d lived on a few years ago there’d been a woman who made all-natural herbal cosmetics, but her beeswax lip balm had felt sticky and the buttermilk and orrisroot eyeshadow she’d given Jenna had smelled like—well, like sour buttermilk. She’d never really gotten the knack of makeup after that, Jenna thought.

Out of the corner of her eye she cast an envious glance at the woman sitting beside her. Her lipstick was an iridescent mauve, and her eyelashes were thick and black and the longest Jenna had ever seen. She wore a white denim bomber-type jacket that was so short it showed her navel, and under it was a black lacy bra top. Her skirt was some kind of stretchy fabric that clung to her curves, and under the table five-inch-high stiletto heels lay toppled over on their sides. One of her feet was wrapped around the rungs of her chair. She was massaging the other one when she met Jenna’s interested gaze.

“You a working girl, Ginger?”

It took a moment to realize who she was speaking to, but then Jenna flushed, embarrassed to be caught staring. She tucked a fiery strand of hair behind her ear. “Oh. Yes, I guess I am. I just started a couple of days ago. Sorry I was staring, but I love your lipstick. What’s it called?”

The other woman fished in a tiny purse with a chain-link strap that lay on the table, finally pulling out a black plastic tube. She squinted at it. “Mauve,” she said in a disappointed tone. “What a rip-off name. So who do you work for, Ginger?”

“The Skipper. And the Professor’s her best customer,” another girl said. She flipped open a compact and checked her teeth in its mirror, then snapped it shut and started humming a tune. The other two girls at the table started giggling and humming along with her, and even the woman with the mauve lipstick grinned and joined in. The only words they seemed to know were the last few, and the whole table finished on cue.

“Here on Gilligan’s Isle!”

It had to be a television thing again, Jenna thought in frustration. She smiled weakly. There was so much she’d missed through Franklin’s vow never to own one. People were always using catchphrases that meant nothing to her— “Book ’em, Dano,” or “I’ll buy a vowel, Pat,” or “Lu-u-ucy, I’m home!” For a while it had seemed that every second person was hitting his head and saying, “Doh!” and she’d never figured out what that had been all about. This song had to be something along those lines.

“I work for Parks, Parks,” she said as the laughter subsided. “At the corner of Barton and South Streets.” Just then her breakfast came; scrambled eggs and toast with a side order of home fries and a cup of tea with the tea bag still in it. Jenna stopped talking and started eating.

Nothing had ever tasted so good in her whole life. The eggs were a little greasy and the home fries were a lot greasy and the toast was soggy, but she was so hungry it wasn’t until she was scraping the last blob of grape jam out of the tiny plastic container onto her last triangle of toast that she realized that the table of women had fallen silent.

She looked up in midchew.

“You sure can pack it away.” The woman with the mauve lipstick was staring at her in awe. “You better hope that the johns on the corner of Barton and South like ’em a little chunky, Ginger, ’cause at that rate you’re not going to fit into a size eight much longer.”

Jenna swallowed the last bite of toast and started jiggling the tea bag up and down in her cup. “I don’t usually—”

Johns? She took another look at the table of women, but this time her perceptions weren’t dulled by hunger. Short clingy skirts, full makeup, high heels…not exactly a.m. attire. Not unless a girl had been working all night….

“You’re not one of us, are you?” The question came from the woman who’d started humming the song, and there was an edge of suspicion in her tone. “What are you doing here, slumming?”

“Cool it, Crystal.” The woman with the mauve lipstick stared curiously at Jenna, taking in her wrinkled dress and the faint smudges under her eyes. “She’s right, though—you’re no working girl. You running from some man, honey?”

The rough kindness in her voice was almost Jenna’s undoing. She’d been up half the night, her thoughts chasing each other in ever-tightening circles, and although she’d finally come to a decision about her unanticipated legacy from Franklin, she still hadn’t been able to bring herself to examine the hollow sense of betrayal and loss she’d experienced when she’d realized that Matt was trying to trick her into giving up her freedom.

How could he have done that to her? After that moment of electricity that had passed between them, how could he have reverted so swiftly to being the perfect Agency operative—to that stiffly correct, by-the-book persona that she’d thought was just a mask for the real Matt D’Angelo? He’d been willing to dump her at the nearest hospital and wash his hands of her, just because she’d come off as a little flaky.

Okay, a lot flaky, Jenna admitted to herself. But the man couldn’t have it both ways. Either he should have treated her from the first with an arm’s-length formality or he should have acknowledged that there was some kind of inexplicable bond between them and tried to help her, not have her locked up. He wasn’t allowed to go touching her hand one minute and selling her out the next. That was just confusing, and irritating and…and painful.

“I guess you could say I’m running from a man,” she said slowly. “On top of that, it seems like since I first met him yesterday my whole life’s disappeared—my money’s gone, I don’t have an apartment anymore and even the cat I thought I had doesn’t exist. Not that any of that was Matt’s fault, of course,” she added hastily.

“Honey, you might as well have Welcome written down the middle of your back.” Crystal leaned forward, her earlier antagonism gone. “Don’t be a doormat! Of course it’s his fault. It sounds like he really did a number on you—just like when Tiffany’s man trashed her place and cleaned out her bank account, right, Tiff?”

Mauve-lipsticked lips pursed together disapprovingly. “Stevie was no good, but he never would have had a cat whacked. That’s just plain twisted. Listen, Ginger—if you ever need help or money or anything, here’s the number of this place.”

She rooted around in her purse again and came up with an eyebrow-pencil stub and a pack of matches. Scrawling something on the inside flap of the matchbook, she handed it to Jenna and nodded her head at the unshaven man behind the counter. “Joe takes messages for me, and I’m in here a couple of times a day. You need any money now?”

“No.” Jenna felt a lump rise in her throat, and she gave a hasty cough. “I really am a working girl—just not in the way you meant, I guess.”

“Don’t apologize, Ginger.” Behind the thickly mascaraed lashes Tiffany’s eyes held a hint of wistfulness. “Somehow you didn’t seem the type, anyway. But remember what I said—call if things don’t work out or if this Matt jerk tracks you down and starts hassling you again.”

Jenna nodded, too touched to speak, and rose from the table. She fished out a heavy handful of quarters from her pocket, but before she could start counting out enough for her bill, Crystal’s sardonic voice stopped her.

“We’ll cover the tab, Ginger. Just say hello to the Skipper for us, okay?”

All the way to Parks, Parks the catchy little tune they’d been humming as she left the diner kept running through Jenna’s head. People were pretty nice, once you got to know them, she thought. She’d never need to take Tiffany up on her offer, but the generosity of spirit behind it just bore out what she’d learned growing up on the communes—it didn’t take much to turn a stranger into a friend.