Twice Kissed - Lisa Jackson [42]
“I’m telling you, it’s the truth.” She grabbed Maggie’s arms in a grip that wouldn’t quit. “So I don’t know how or why you heard it. But you’ve got to understand one thing that…that what you saw last night…it, it was nothing.” Sharp fingernails bit into Maggie’s skin. Mary Theresa’s green gaze was intense, angry. “You’ve got to believe me.”
Maggie tossed off Mary Theresa’s hands and backed toward the sliding door leading to the pool. “Look, I’m outta here. You don’t have to say anything else. You and Mitch’s little secret. It’s…it’s safe with me.”
“It’s not a secret,” Mary Theresa insisted, and tears filled her eyes. “Really, Maggie, you’ve got to believe me. Nothing happened.”
“Right. That’s what Mitch said.”
“I know, but it didn’t, not last night…”
“And…and I believe you,” Maggie lied. She didn’t want to think about it. Each time she remembered the scene in the misty hot tub with Mitch’s hands on the slick skin of Mary Theresa’s bare back, Maggie’s stomach turned over and threatened to spew all over again. She slid the door open to the patio and stepped outside, where the sun was blazing and insects buzzed in the bushes. She’d walk the two miles to the horse barns if she had to, but somehow she’d get away from here and all the sickness that seemed to be seeping through the thick stucco walls of the house she called home.
Slipping a rubber band from her pocket to her teeth, she scraped her hair back with her fingers until it felt right, then snapped the band around her clump of hair. Everything in her life seemed a little surreal these days.
Hang in there, she told herself as she headed down the street, toward the main part of town. At the base of the hill, she jaywalked across traffic, then ducked down a shady alley to the main highway. This craziness will subside. It has to. At the far end of the alley she made her way around a nest of garbage cans that were beginning to foul the air and startled a black cat sunning himself on the top rail of a fence. Tail aloft, he leaped to the ground and slunk to the protective shade beneath an old Chevy Nova parked near a garage with a sagging roofline.
The alley dumped itself into the heart of downtown, and Maggie appeared at the back parking lot of a McDonald’s restaurant. She found enough change in the front pocket of her cutoffs for a Coke, then, sipping from a plastic straw as the late-morning sun beat against the back of her neck, she started walking. Her mother would be ticked off when Maggie called her at the tennis club for a ride home, but too bad. Worse yet, Bernice Reilly probably wouldn’t disrupt her massage or bridge hand, so she’d find a way to locate her stepson and send Mitch to pick Maggie up. Great.
Squinting because she’d forgotten her sunglasses, she felt the heat of the sidewalk through her tennis shoes and considered, for one fleeting, wild-hare moment, sticking out her thumb to hitchhike. Lots of kids in school did it all the time, but her parents were death on the idea, so she thought better of it and continued walking though she was starting to sweat.
Heat shimmered in waves rising from the street, distorting her vision of the four lanes of cars that inched through the stoplights in this part of town. The terrain was flatter down here where the markets, fast-food restaurants, taverns, and strip malls lined the road before giving way to cheaper houses than those up on the hill. Telephone and electric wires were strung from huge poles where handwritten signs and printed flyers were posted.
“Lost dog—three-year-old cocker spaniel answers to the name of Roscoe…”
“The end is near; listen to the Reverend Bill Ballantine at the New Hope Church Sunday, February twenty-eight, nineteen seventy-eight at eight o’clock p.m….”
“Six-family yard sale, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday!”
Ignoring the gum and crud that stuck to the sidewalk, Maggie trudged through the commercial area past shops and storefronts, watching the traffic through eyes that were turned in to