The Romance Reader's Guide to Life

I’d discovered, in my time as a dog, that people don’t take you seriously if you’re a dog. They hit you with things, and abandon you, and take away your favorite stuff; but then, they do that to each other too. I was comfortable as a dog because my nature is loyal and steady and basically affectionate. It’s like Neave’s nature.

I am Neave’s protector. As far as I know I’ll always be her protector. Sometimes I fail at it, I know. I’m not confident that I can protect her now, but it’s my job and I’m going to do it as well as I can. That’s why I was sitting on the curb outside George’s Sweetheart Market. I was there to follow her home. That’s why I was here to greet Lilly when she became Dead Lilly. I was there to get Lilly to lead me to Neave, to get Neave to see us so we can intercede, advise. Maybe, I hope, save her.

Lilly and Neave share parts of their minds that overlap in ways they don’t see or understand. It’s this kind of powerful attachment that holds the universe together, and I am here to use it to save Neave. Their bond is very strong—flexible and porous and twisty in places where the connections are thickest. The fact that Lilly is dead is not as much of a problem as you might think. It could even be an advantage.

If Neave is going to save herself from Lilly’s fate, she’s going to have to be more like Lilly. I know that doesn’t make perfect sense, given what Lilly’s judgment has been like, but it’s true. Lilly has to get mind-to-mind with Neave, cross over the distances between them and get in her sister’s head. Lilly is there all the time even now, of course, but I don’t mean her being in Neave’s mind as a memory. I mean in Neave’s mind as part of Neave. A grafted Lilly-Neave, a seeped-into-each-other new entity.

Neave needs to figure out how to stand in front of three hundred salesgirls and make them want to be her. Just like Lilly can. She needs to feel powerful, sexually confident, full of authority over Ricky Luhrmann, just like Lilly did. She can’t be Neave-ish and stand there thinking about things.

Right now Ricky Luhrmann is stronger than Neave, but he might not be stronger than the two of them together.

That’s the plan.





NEAVE

I Talk to Max Luhrmann

You aren’t held to keeping promises to a person who’s lost her mind, and I didn’t keep my promise to Lilly to stay out of her business. I went to the police to report the bloody piece of meat being hung from my door. The police said Do you know who did it? and Do you have proof? and I said not really. They said that hanging meat on a door was not a crime, and no property damage had been done, and I didn’t even really know who did it, did I? Could have been a joke, right?

“Why would a piece of bloody steak be funny?” I asked the uniformed man behind the counter.

He shrugged. “Could be funny.”

The policeman saying these things wore a badge that identified him as PETZOLDT #4967. “Officer Petzoldt,” I said, “that meat is a threat. And if it isn’t a threat, let’s say it’s destruction of property.”

“Lady, what does a nail in a door cost you? Some spackle.”

“Let’s say it’s harassment. Let’s say I want a restraining order. Or I just want you to talk to the guy. What do I need?”

“I can’t talk to the guy or deliver a restraining order if I got no idea where the guy is, sugar.”

“Well, you’ll try to locate him, right?”

The officer rocked back a bit and lifted one shoulder vaguely. No, he was not going to try to locate anybody.

“If I find him, give you an address, will you question him?”

“Well, yeah, but nothing’s gonna happen if we don’t have the guy to talk to.”

I looked in my rearview mirror all the way back to the apartment that day, certain that a blue Ford had made at least three of the turns I had and then fallen out of sight. That night the telephone calls started, all to my home number, all just before dawn or a couple hours after midnight. At first I picked up the receiver and talked to the breathing thing on the other end. I addressed it as Ricky and I told it I was going to track his ass down and get him in a world of trouble if he didn’t leave us alone. More calls. When I didn’t pick up the receiver they kept ringing: twenty rings, thirty rings, forty rings. I unplugged the telephone.

Lilly had sworn that she didn’t have a telephone number or address for him. How can that be? I’d protested. You’re meeting this man in hotel rooms but you don’t know how to call him? Didn’t she see how controlling that was? How perverse? I wasn’t entirely sure she was telling me the truth, but it looked to me that even if she did have a telephone number and address for Ricky, she wouldn’t give them to me.

I called the last construction company he’d worked with and the foreman said he’d had to fire him months ago. He wouldn’t say why. The only Luhrmann I could track down was his brother, Max, who was listed in a university oceanography department. I wrote the number down and put it on my kitchen table. I didn’t call it.

I took the problem to Charles. “Have you ever hired a private investigator?” I asked him.

“Once for an accounting scam. We hired a numbers guy, a specialist who knew how to tease stuff out of cooked books. Why?”

I told him. He shrugged. “I have no experience with that kind of problem. Are you sure her ex-husband is the one who nailed it to your door?” I said I was sure. Then I said I was 99 percent sure. I said Lilly was sure too, even if she said she wasn’t. He said, “So it’s a hunch. Maybe not true at all. Don’t take everything personally, Neave. This might not be what you suspect.”

I protested. He suggested that maybe there was some teenage prankster in the neighborhood, some fool who’d had a few beers. “Maybe he had a crush on Lilly. Or someone in the office.”

“A crush?”

“You know—like an older guy’s version of the way third-grade boys show a girl they like her—they hit her. Throw things at her. Are you dealing with anybody who might have a crush on you? Maybe that’s why it was left for you.”

I was already pretty sure that wasn’t the case. I decided not to talk any more about the problem with Charles. If Charles understood anything at all about the impulses that could be expressed in a piece of raw meat nailed to a door, he had decided to pretend that he didn’t. He was useless here. He wasn’t a stupid or inexperienced man, so this willful blindness infuriated me. In what cramped corner of his mind must a man crouch in order to see nothing?

I drove to the university where Max Luhrmann worked. In the engineering building I threaded myself through what felt like a series of basement tunnels, following signs and arrows to “Oceanography” when I could find them nailed or glued to the cinder-block walls. I stopped a passing man and asked him if I was heading toward Max Luhrmann’s office. “The smart guy?” he asked.

“Isn’t everybody here smart?” I asked.

“Not like him.” He pointed left.

Sharon Pywell's books