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“Easy on the leather,” Rain said.
“Sorry. First thing I’m doing when I get back to Burney is track that little shit down.”
CHAPTER 9
Ioverslept and Vince was gone when I woke. I rushed up to the Pink House to get Peri for her swim lesson, running late, no time to eat or run. Not that it mattered because no one was at the breakfast table. I could hear Anemone and George talking in the library, Veronica sitting outside the door looking disgruntled, or whatever dachshunds are when they’re balked of their prey, so I slipped her into the library, made sure Peri had the right bag, and scooted her out to the car.
“You okay?” I asked as I sped down the driveway toward the country club to make up the time. I didn’t want her worrying. Her mother, Margot, had offered to take over the swimming chauffeur job now that she was back from rehab, but swimming was a routine Peri and I had, and we’d all agreed for me to keep doing it, at least until school started. I wanted to because it was the only time I had these days with the kid, and I missed her. I think Peri wanted it because it was something solid, routine, normal. The one thing Peri needed right now was a boring life.
“I’mfine,” she said now. “We had breakfast early, French toast, because stuff is going on, but Anemone says she’s on it.” Peri had obviously fallen under Anemone’s spell since Anemone was competence porn made flesh, solid as a rock in the chaos of Peri’s life. “I don’t get your t-shirt,” she said. “What’s Sanctuary Moon?” and I told her it was a fictional TV series in one of my favorite books, and she asked if she could read it, and I was trying to remember if there was any reason she shouldn’t readMurderbotaside from the fact that she was seven, when we arrived at the country club.
While Peri was swimming, I sat back in my poolside chair and argued with myself about my living situation, telling myself to be sensible, that I loved Vince, and that it didn’t matter what color the bedroom was. Except it mattered, damn it. And I was going to have to go through the factory papers fast because Cash was going to be a problem, Vince was right about that, another place where I was going to have to conform to somebody else’s needs because it was practical. But I really wanted to spend time in that factory, my family’s factory even if they’d never claimed me. And then there were the copy edits. I was going to have to get tough with Anemone over all the changes she’d made. Publishers will let you change ten percent of a manuscript in copy edits, but after that they get cranky and start charging. Anemone wouldn’t care about the money, but I cared about the book. We were going to have a come-to-Jesus talk soon.
When Peri finally finished her laps, I told her she was amazing and took her home and tried to talk to Anemone, but she was too distracted by something, probably George, to do much more than say, “Whatever you think, Liz.” That would be great until I actually showed her my version of the copy edit, and then it would be “What the hell, Liz?” all over again. I ran my five miles late and then had a high estrogen lunch—Anemone, Molly, Margot, Peri, and that dimwit Faye, with Marianne dropping bowls of good-for-you salad for all of us—but I was too wired to say much beyond “Please pass the ranch.” The salad was, of course, marvelous, full of healthy, crunchy things and Marianne’s homemade ranch which was amazingly good, but all I could think of was Vince saying, “I don’t want a blue bedroom,” as if that settled it. Which it did. It was his bedroom, not mine. The paint in the bedroom was theleastof my problems . . .
I tried to regroup, but I must have done a lousy job of it because both Molly and Anemone were looking at me with concern by the time I reached the bottom of my bowl, and Peri said, “Are you okay, Liz?” when I turned down ice cream for dessert.
“I’m fine,” I told her. “I’m just having strange thoughts.”
“What kind of strange thoughts?” Peri said.
“Real estate,” I told her, finally admitting that to myself. “Which is so not like me.”
“What’s wrong?” Anemone said.
“Did you ever read Virginia Woolf?” I asked her.
“No,” Anemone said.
“That’s a shame, she would have liked you,” I said, thanked her for lunch, yelled “I love you, Marianne” in the direction of the kitchen, and beat feet out the door before she could ask me anything else or try to fix me.
I drove back to the Big Chef, which was empty of Vince, who had texted me he was busy for lunch.
I looked at that beautiful blue bedroom. It was a perfect blue. What was done of it.
And then I sighed and got out the brushes and paint and spent the next hour making it white with his paint. His bedroom, not mine. If I wanted a blue bedroom, I was going to have to find one of my own. It was only fair.
As I was cleaning out the roller for the last damn time, Anemone texted me and distracted me.
I LOOKED UP VIRGINIA WOOLF
GO TO THE SHADY REST
TALK TO COLIN AT THE FRONT DESK
YES RIGHT NOW
One of the key points in my relationship with Anemone is that I work for her. So I left the now-white bedroom that wasn’t mine, threw my laptop bag into the Camry that Vince had restored for me without telling me—I can’t paint his bedroom blue, but he can buy me a car and paint it red without asking if I wanted to be a blaze of color wherever I went—and drove to the ancient motor court to see what Anemone had done with Burney’s only drive-in flophouse.
I pulled up to the office of the Shady Rest, a newly painted, pale green, gable-roofed building only slightly larger than the gable-roofed motor court units now painted pale pink by Anemone’s henchmen. The parking lot had been repaved since the last time I’d been there, and there were little trees in buckets on each side of the doors to the units, and white shutters and flower boxes full of pink and white flowers contrasting with the pink walls, and the whole place was cute as hell, seven units on each side of the parking lot, fourteen total. It looked like a place elves would come to shag in the afternoon. Not exactly a big money maker, I’d have thought, but Anemone never lost money on anything, so I was betting she had a plan.
The guy behind the very nice marble-topped check-in counter wasn’t anybody I knew: medium height, thin, beautifully dressed, and styled so cleanly that he pretty much screamedI’m not from Burney. I said, “Colin?” and he said, “You must be Liz Danger.”
“Must I?”
He sighed. “Only if you want Cottage Seven and all the Diet Coke and food I just unloaded into it on Anemone’s orders. Otherwise, you can sit in your car, and I’ll move in there.”
I held out my hand. “Hi, I’m Liz Danger.”
