Tangled Up In You

Chapter 1

The glowing white neon above Mort’s Bar pulsed and vibrated and attracted the thirsty masses of Truly, Idaho, like a bug light. But Mort’s was more than a beer magnet. More than just a place to drink cold Coors and get into a fight on Friday nights. Mort’s had historical significance-kind of like the Alamo. While other establishments came and went in the small town, Mort’s had always stayed the same.

Until about a year ago when the new owner had spruced the place up with gallons of Lysol and paint and had instituted a strict no-panty-tossing policy. Before that, throwing undies like a ring-toss up onto the row of antlers above the bar had been encouraged as a sort of indoor sporting event. Now, if a woman felt the urge to toss, she got tossed out on her bare ass.

Ah, the good old days.

Maddie Jones stood on the sidewalk in front of Mort’s and stared up at the sign, completely immune to the subliminal lure that the light sent out through the impending darkness. An indistinguishable hum of voices and music leached through the cracks in the old building sandwiched between Ace Hardware and the Panda Restaurant.

A couple in jeans and tank tops brushed past Maddie. The door opened and the sound of voices and the unmistakable twang of country music spilled out onto Main Street. The door closed and Maddie remained standing outside. She adjusted the purse strap on her shoulder, then pulled up the zipper on her bulky blue sweater. She hadn’t lived in Truly for twenty-nine years, and she’d forgotten how cool it got at night. Even in July.

Her hand lifted toward the old door, then dropped to her side. A surprising rush of apprehension raised the hair on the back of her neck and tilted her stomach. She’d done this dozens of times. So why the apprehension? Why now? she asked herself, even though she knew the answer. Because it was personal this time, and once she opened that door, once she took the first step, there was no going back.

If her friends could see her, standing there as if her feet were set in the concrete, they’d be shocked. She’d interviewed serial killers and cold-blooded murderers, but chatting up nut jobs with antisocial personality disorders was a piece of cake compared to what waited for her inside Mort’s. Beyond the no one under 21 sign, her past waited for her, and as she’d learned recently, digging into other people’s pasts was a hell of a lot easier than digging into her own.

“For God’s sake,” she muttered and reached for the door. She was a little disgusted with herself for being such a wimp and a weenie, and she squelched her apprehension under the heavy fist of her strong will. Nothing was going to happen that she did not want to happen. She was in control. As always.

The heavy thump of the jukebox and the smell of hops and tobacco assaulted her as she stepped inside. The door shut behind her and she paused to let her eyes adjust to the dim light. Mort’s was just a bar. Like a thousand others she’d been in across the country. Nothing special, not even the array of antlers hanging above the long mahogany bar was anything out of the ordinary.

Maddie didn’t like bars. Especially cowboy bars. The smoke, the music, the steady stream of beer. She didn’t particularly care for cowboys either. As far as she was concerned, a pair of snug Wranglers on a tight cowboy butt couldn’t quite make up for the boots, the buckles, the wads of chew. She liked her men in suits and Italian leather shoes. Not that she’d had a man, or even a date, in about four years.

She studied the crowd as she wove her way to the middle of the long oak bar and the only empty stool. Her gaze took in cowboy hats and trucker caps, a few crew cuts, and a mullet or two. She noticed ponytails, shoulder-length bobs, and some of the worst perms and flipped bangs to ever come out of the eighties. What she didn’t see was the one person she’d come searching for, although she didn’t really expect to see him sitting at one of the tables.

She wedged herself onto the stool between a man in a blue T-shirt and a woman with overprocessed hair. Behind the cash register and bottles of alcohol, a mirror ran the length of the bar while two bartenders pulled beers and blended drinks. Neither was the owner of this fine establishment.

“That little gal was into AC/DC, if you know what I mean,” said the man on her left, and Maddie figured he wasn’t talking about Back in Black or Highway to Hell. The guy in question was about sixty, sported a battered trucker’s hat and a beer belly the size of a pony keg. Through the mirror Maddie watched several men down the row nod, paying rapt attention to beer-belly guy.

One of the bartenders set a napkin in front of her and asked what she’d like to drink. He looked to be about nineteen, although she supposed he had to be at least twenty-one. Old enough to pour liquor within the layers of tobacco smoke and knee-deep bullshit.

“Sapphire martini. Extra dry, three olives,” she said, calculating the carbs in the olives. She pulled her purse into her lap and watched the bartender turn and reach for the good gin and vermouth.

“I told that little gal she could keep her girlfriend, so long as she brought her over once in a while,” the guy on her left added.

“Damn right!”

“That’s what I’m talking about!”

Then again, this was small-town Idaho, where things like liquor laws were sometimes overlooked and some people considered a good bullshit story a form of literature.

Maddie rolled her eyes and bit her lip to keep her comments to herself. She had a habit of saying what she thought. She didn’t necessarily consider it a bad habit, but not everyone appreciated it.

Through the mirror, her gaze moved up, then down the bar, searching for the owner, not that she thought she’d see him plopped down on a stool any more than sitting at a table. When she’d called the other bar he owned in town, she’d been told that he would be here tonight, and she figured he was probably in his office examining his books or, if he was like his father, the inner thigh of a barmaid.

“I pay for everything,” the woman on Maddie’s opposite side wailed to her friend. “I even bought my own birthday card and had J.W. sign it, thinking he’d feel bad and get the hint.”

“Oh, geez,” Maddie couldn’t help but mutter and looked at the woman through the mirror. Between bottles of Absolut and Skyy vodka, she could make out big blond hair falling to chubby shoulders and breasts spilling out of a red tank top with rhinestones on it.

“He didn’t feel bad at all! Just complained that he didn’t like mushy cards like the one I bought.” She took a drink of something with an umbrella in it. “He wants me to come over when his mother goes out of town next weekend and make him dinner.” She brushed moisture from beneath her eyes and sniffed. “I’m thinking of telling him no.”

Maddie’s brows drew together and a stunned, “Are you shitting me?” escaped her mouth before she knew she’d uttered a word.

“Excuse me?” the bartender asked as he set the drink in front of her.

She shook her head. “Nothing.” She reached into her purse and paid for her drink as a song about a Honky Tonk Badonkadonk, whatever the hell that meant, thumped from the glowing neon jukebox and coalesced with the steady hum of conversation.

She pulled back the sleeve of her sweater and reached for her martini. She read the glowing hands of her watch as she raised the glass to her lips. Nine o’clock. The owner was bound to show his face sooner or later. If not tonight, there was always tomorrow. She took a sip and the gin and vermouth warmed a path all the way to her stomach.

She really hoped he’d showed up sooner rather than later. Before she had too many martinis and forgot why she was sitting on a barstool eavesdropping on needy passive-aggressive women and delusional men. Not that listening in on people with lives more pathetic than hers couldn’t be highly entertaining at times.

She set the glass back on the bar. Eavesdropping wasn’t her first choice. She much preferred the straightforward approach: digging into people’s lives and plumbing their dirty little secrets without distraction. Some people gave up their secrets without protest, eager to tell all. Others forced her to reach deep, rattle them loose or rip them out by the roots. Her work was sometimes messy, always gritty, but she loved writing about serial killers, mass murderers, and your everyday run-of-the-mill psychopaths.

Really, a girl had to excel at something, and Maddie, writing as Madeline Dupree, was one of the best true crime writers in the genre. She wrote blood and gore. About the sick and disturbed, and there were those who thought, her friends among them, that what she wrote warped her personality. She liked to think it added to her charm.

The truth was somewhere in the middle. The things she’d seen and written about did affect her. No matter the barrier she placed between her sanity and the people she interviewed and researched, their sickness sometimes seeped through the cracks, leaving behind a black tacky film that was hard as hell to scrub clean.

Her job made her see the world a little differently than those who’d never sat across from a serial killer while he got off on the retelling of his “work.” But those same things also made her a strong woman who didn’t take crap from anyone. Very little intimidated her, and she didn’t have any illusions about mankind. In her head, she knew that most people were decent. That given the choice, they would do the right thing, but she also knew about the others. The fifteen percent who were only interested in their own selfish and warped pleasure. Out of that fifteen percent, only about two percent were actual serial killers. The other social deviants were just your everyday rapists, murderers, thugs, and corporate executives secretly plundering their employees’ 401(k) accounts.

And if there was one thing she knew as certainly as she knew the sun would rise in the east and set in the west, it was that everyone had secrets. She had a few of her own. She just held hers closer to the vest than most people.

She raised the glass to her lips and her gaze was drawn to the end of the bar. A door in the back opened and a man stepped from the lit alley and into the dark hall.

Maddie knew him. Knew him before he walked from the shadows. Before the shadows slid up the wide chest and shoulders of his black T-shirt. Knew him before the light slipped across his chin and nose and shone in his hair as black as the night from which he’d come.

He moved behind the bar, wrapping a red bar apron around his hips and tying the strings above his fly. She’d never met him. Never been in the same room, but she knew he was thirty-five, a year older than herself. She knew he was six-two, one hundred and ninety pounds. For twelve years he’d served in the army, flying helicopters and raining Hellfire missiles. He’d been named after his father, Lochlyn Michael Hennessy, but he went by Mick. Like his father, he was an obscenely good-looking man. The kind of good-looking that turned heads, stopped hearts, and gave women bad thoughts. Thoughts of hot mouths and hands and tangled clothes. The whisper of warm breath against the arch of a woman’s throat and the touch of flesh in the backseat of a car.

Not that Maddie was susceptible to those thoughts.

He had an older sister, Meg, and he owned two bars in town, Mort’s and Hennessy’s. The latter had been in his family longer than he’d been alive. Hennessy’s, the bar where Maddie’s mother had worked. Where she’d met Loch Hennessy and where she’d died.

As if he felt her gaze, he glanced up from the strings of the apron. He stopped a few feet from Maddie and his eyes met hers. She choked on the gin that refused to go down her throat. From his driver’s license, she knew his eyes were blue, but they were more a deep turquoise. Like the Caribbean Sea, and seeing them looking back at her was a shock. She lowered her glass and raised a hand to her mouth.

The last strains of the honky-tonk song died out as he finished tying the strings, and he stepped closer until only a few feet of mahogany separated his gaze from hers. “You going to live?” His deep voice cut through the noise around them.

She swallowed and coughed one last time. “I believe so.”

“Hey, Mick,” the blonde on the next stool called out.

“Hey, Darla. How’re things?”

“Could be better.”

“Isn’t that always the case?” he said as he gazed at the woman. “Are you planning on behaving yourself?”

“You know me.” Darla laughed. “I always plan on it. Course, I can always be persuaded to misbehave.”

“You’re going to keep your underwear on tonight, though. Right?” he asked with a lift of one dark brow.

“You never can tell about me.” She leaned forward. “You never know what I might do. Sometimes I’m crazy.”

Just sometimes? Buying her own birthday card for her boyfriend to sign suggested a passive/ aggressive disorder that bordered on crazy as hell.

“Just keep your panties on so I don’t have to toss you out on your bare butt again.”

Again? Meaning it had happened before? Maddie took a drink and slid her gaze to Darla’s considerable behind squeezed into a pair of Wranglers.

“I just bet you all would love to see that!” Darla said with a toss of her hair.

For the second time that night, Maddie choked on her drink.

Mick’s deep chuckle drew Maddie’s attention to the amusement shining through his startling blue eyes. “Honey, do you need some water?” he asked.

She shook her head and cleared her throat.

“That drink too strong for you?”

“No. It’s fine.” She coughed one last time and set her glass on the bar. “I just got a horrifying visual.”

The corners of his lips turned up into a knowing smile that made two dents in his tan cheeks. “I haven’t seen you in here before. You just passing through?”

She forced the image of Darla’s big bare butt from her head and her mind back on the reason she was in Mort’s. She’d expected to dislike Mick Hennessy on sight. She didn’t. “No. I bought a house out on Red Squirrel Road.”

“Nice area. Are you on the lake?”

“Yes.” She wondered if Mick had inherited his father’s charm along with his looks. From what Maddie had been able to gather, Loch Hennessy had charmed women into the sack with little more than a look in their direction. He’d certainly charmed her mother.

“Are you here for the summer, then?”

“Yes.”

He tilted his head to one side and studied her face. His gaze slid from her eyes to her mouth and lingered for several heartbeats before he looked back up. “What’s your name, brown eyes?”

“Maddie,” she answered, holding a breath as she waited for him to connect her with the past. His past.

“Just Maddie?”

“Dupree,” she answered, using her pen name.

Someone down the bar called his name and he glanced away for a moment before returning his attention to her. He gave her an easy smile. One that brought out those dimples of his and softened his masculine face. He didn’t recognize her. “I’m Mick Hennessy.” The music started once more and he said, “Welcome to Truly. Maybe I’ll see you around.”

She watched him walk away without telling him the reason she was in town and why she was sitting in Mort’s. Now wasn’t the best time or place, but there was no “maybe” about it. He didn’t know it yet, but Mick Hennessy would be seeing a lot of her. Next time he might not be so welcoming.

The sounds and smells of the bar pressed in on her and she hung her purse over her shoulder. She slid from the stool and wove her way through the dimly lit crowd. At the door, she looked over her shoulder toward the bar and Mick. Beneath the lights above him, he tilted his head back a little and smiled. She paused and her grasp on the handle tightened as he turned and poured a beer from a row of spigots.

While she stood there, the juke playing something about whiskey for men and beer for horses, her gaze took in his dark hair at the back of his neck and his wide shoulders in his black T-shirt. He turned and placed a glass on the bar. As she watched him, he laughed at something, and until that moment Maddie hadn’t known what she’d expected of Mick Hennessy, but whatever it had been, this living, breathing man who laughed and smiled hadn’t been it.

Through the dark bar and cigarette haze, his gaze landed on her. She could almost feel it reach across the room and touch her, which she knew was pure illusion. She stood in the darkened entrance and it would be near impossible for him to distinguish her from the crowd. She opened the door and stepped outside into the cool evening air. While she’d been in Mort’s, night had descended on Truly like a heavy black curtain, the only relief a few lit business signs and the occasional streetlamp.

Her black Mercedes was parked across the street in front of Tina’s Mountain Skivvies and the Rock Hound Art Gallery. She waited for a yellow Hummer to pass before she stepped from the curb and walked from beneath the glow of Mort’s neon sign.

A keyless transponder in her purse unlocked the driver’s-side door as she approached, and she opened it and slid inside the cool leather interior. Normally, she wasn’t materialistic. She didn’t care about clothes or shoes. Since no one ever saw her underwear these days, she didn’t care if her bra matched her panties and she didn’t own expensive jewelry. Before purchasing the Mercedes two months ago, Maddie had put over two hundred thousand miles on her Nissan Sentra. She’d needed a new vehicle and had been looking at a Volvo SUV when she’d turned around and locked eyes on the black S600 sedan. The showroom lights had been shining down on the car like a signal from God, and she could have sworn she heard angels singing hallelujahs like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Who was she to ignore a message from the Lord? A few hours after walking into the dealership, she’d driven the car out of the showroom and into the garage of her home down in Boise.

She pressed the start button on the shifter and hit the lights. The CD in her stereo system filled the Mercedes with Warren Zevon’s Excitable Boy. She pulled away from the curb and flipped a U in the middle of Main Street. There was something brilliant and disturbing about Warren Zevon’s lyrics. A little like looking into the mind of someone who stood at the line between crazy and sane and occasionally pushed one toe over. Toying with the line, testing it, then pulling back just before getting sucked into looneyville. In Maddie’s line of work, there weren’t many who pulled back in time.

The Mercedes’ headlights cut through the inky night as she turned left at the only traffic signal in town. The very first car she’d ever owned had been a Volkswagen Rabbit, so battered the seats had been held together with duct tape. She’d come a long way since then. A long way from the Roundup Trailer Court where she’d lived with her mother, and the cramped little house in Boise where she’d been raised by her great-aunt Martha.

Until the day of her retirement, Martha had worked the front counter at Rexall Drug, and they’d lived off her small paycheck and Maddie’s Social Security checks. Money had always been tight, but Martha kept half a dozen cats at any given time. The house had always smelled like Friskies and litter boxes. To this day, Maddie hated cats. Well, maybe not her good friend Lucy’s cat, Mr. Snookums. Snookie was cool. For a cat.

She drove for a mile around the east side of the lake before turning into her driveway lined with thick towering pines and pulling to stop in front of the two-story home she’d bought a few months ago. She didn’t know how long she’d keep the house. One year. Three. Five. She’d bought rather than leased for the investment. Property around Truly was hot, and when or if she sold the place, she stood to make a nice profit.

Maddie cut the Mercedes’ headlights and the darkness pressed in on her. She ignored the apprehension in her chest as she got out of the car and walked up the steps and onto the wraparound porch lit up with numerous sixty-watt bulbs. She wasn’t afraid of anything. Certainly not the dark, but she knew bad things did happen to women who weren’t as aware and as cautious as Maddie. Women who didn’t have a small arsenal of safety devices in their shoulder bags. Things like a Taser, Mace, a personal alarm, and brass knuckles, just to name a few. A girl could never be too careful, especially at night in a town where it was difficult to see your hand in front of your face. In a town set smack-dab in the middle of dense forest where wildlife rustled from trees and underbrush. Where rodents with beady little eyes waited for a girl to go to bed before ransacking the pantry. Maddie had never had to use any of her personal safety devices, but lately she’d been wondering if she was a good enough shot to zap a marauding mouse with her Taser.

Lights burned from within the house as Maddie unlocked the forest-green door, stepped inside, and flipped the deadbolt behind her. Nothing scurried from the corners as she tossed her purse on a red velvet chair by the door. A large fireplace dominated the middle of the big living room and divided it into what was meant to be the dining room but what Maddie used as her office.

On a coffee table in front of the velvet sofa sat Maddie’s research files and an old five-by-seven photograph in a silver frame. She reached for the picture and looked into the face of her mother, at her blond hair, blue eyes, and big smile. It had been taken a few months before Alice Jones had died. A photo of a happy twenty-four-year-old, so vibrant and alive, and like the yellowed photograph in the expensive frame, most of Maddie’s memories had faded too. She recalled bits of this and snatches of that. She had a faint memory of watching her mother put on makeup and brush her hair before leaving for work. She recalled her old blue Samsonite suitcase and moving from place to place. Through the watery prism of twenty-nine years, she had a very faint memory of the last time her mother had packed up their Chevy Maverick and the two-hour drive north to Truly. Moving into their trailer house with orange shag carpet.

The clearest memory Maddie had of her mother was the scent of her skin. She’d smelled like almond lotion. But mostly she recalled the morning her great-aunt had arrived at the Roundup Trailer Court to tell her that her mother was dead.

Maddie set the photo back on the table and moved across the hardwood floor into the kitchen. She grabbed a Diet Coke out of the refrigerator and unscrewed the cap. Martha had always said that Alice was flighty. Flitting like a butterfly from place to place, from man to man, searching for somewhere to belong and looking for love. Finding both for a time before moving on to the next place or newest man.

Maddie drank from the bottle, then replaced the cap. She was nothing like her mother. She knew her place in the world. She was comfortable with who she was, and she certainly didn’t need a man to love her. In fact, she’d never been in love. Not the romantic kind that her good friend Clare wrote about for a living. And not the foolish, mad-for-the-man kind that had ruled and ultimately taken her mother’s life.

No, Maddie had no interest in a man’s love. His body was a different matter, and she did want an occasional boyfriend. A man to come over several times a week to have sex. He didn’t have to be a great conversationalist. Hell, he didn’t even have to take her to dinner. Her ideal man would just take her to bed, then leave. But there were two problems with finding her ideal man. First, any man who just wanted sex from a woman was most likely a jerk. Second, it was difficult to find a willing man who was good in bed rather than who just thought he was good. The chore of sorting through men to find what she wanted had become such a hassle, she’d given up four years ago.

She hooked the top of the Coke bottle between two fingers and moved from the kitchen. Her flip-flops slapped the bottoms of her feet as she walked through the living room and passed the fireplace to her office. Her laptop sat on an L-shaped desk shoved up against the wall and she flipped on the lamp clamped to the hutch of her desk. Two sixty-watt bulbs lit up a stack of diaries, her laptop, and her “Taking Names and Kicking Ass” sticky notes. Altogether there were ten diaries in various shapes and colors. Red. Blue. Pink. Two of the diaries had locks, while one of the others was nothing more than a yellow spiral notebook with the word “Diary” written in black marker. All of them had belonged to her mother.

Maddie tapped the Diet Coke bottle against her thigh as she gazed at the top white book. She hadn’t known they’d even existed until her great-aunt Martha’s death a few months ago. She didn’t believe Martha had purposely kept the diaries from her. More than likely she’d intended to give them to Maddie someday but had completely forgotten. Alice hadn’t been the only flighty female on the Jones family tree.

As Martha’s only living relative, it had been up to Maddie to settle her affairs, see to her funeral, and clean out her house. She’d managed to find homes for her aunt’s cats and had planned to donate most everything else to Goodwill. In one of the last cartons she’d sorted through, she’d come across old shoes, outdated purses, and a battered boot box. She’d almost tossed the battered box without lifting the top. A part of her almost wished that she had. Wished she’d spared herself the pain of staring down into the box and feeling her heart shoved into her throat. As a child she’d longed for a connection with her mother. Some little something that she could have and hold. She’d dreamed of having something she could take out from time to time that tied her to the woman who’d given her life. She’d spent her childhood longing for something…something that had been a few feet away in the top of a closet the whole time. Waiting for her in a Tony Lama box.

The box had contained the diaries, her mother’s obituary, and newspaper articles about her death. It had also held a satin bag filled with jewelry. Cheep stuff, mostly. A Foxy Lady necklace, several turquoise rings, a pair of silver hoop earrings, and a tiny pink band from St. Luke’s Hospital with the words “Baby Jones” printed on it.

Standing in her old bedroom that day, unable to breathe as her chest imploded, she’d felt like a kid again. Scared and alone. Afraid to reach out and make the connection, but at the same time excited to finally have something tangible that had belonged to a mother she hardly remembered.

Maddie set her Coke on the top of her desk and spun her office chair around. That day, she’d taken the boot box home and placed the silk bag in her jewelry box. Then she’d sat down and read the diaries. She’d read every word, devouring them in one day. The diaries had started on her mother’s twelfth birthday. Some of them had been bigger and taken her mother longer to fill. Through them she’d gotten to know Alice Jones.

She’d gotten to know her as a child of twelve who’d longed to grow up and be an actress like Anne Francis. A teen who longed to find true love on The Dating Game, and a woman who looked for love in all the wrong places.

Maddie had found something to connect her to her mother, but the more she’d read, the more she’d felt at loose ends. She’d gotten her childhood wish and she’d never felt so alone.