“Mmmm,” Amy said, “we thought we’d start out with kittens and see how it goes.”
By noon, the front yard looked reasonably tame. The grass was neatly cut and trimmed. Jaws had been transformed into a meek shrub, a lilac tree had been discovered hiding in the mountain laurel, and Amy had planted a small fortune in flowers.
“Pretty nice,” Jake said.
“Doesn’t look like the same house,” Amy said.
Jake linked his arms around her. “You know, you’re very sexy looking, wearing all that potting soil. And I love those little blue shorts, especially when you bend over. And is it my imagination, or have you neglected to wear a bra this morning?”
She had purposely gone braless because she’d woken up feeling expansive. Her whole world had changed, grown larger, more wondrous. She hadn’t wanted to feel confined by anything as mundane as a bra. “Besides the bra thing, do I look any different? Can you tell I’m not a virgin anymore?”
“Absolutely. If I saw you walking down the street, I’d say to myself, that woman just lost her virginity. I could tell by the smile on your face.”
“Oh shoot, am I still smiling?”
“Mmmm. It’s very becoming.” He kissed her lightly on the lips. His eyes softened and grew serious. “I love you.”
She encircled his waist with her arms. “I love you, too. And it was nice of you to spend all this time helping me with my yard.”
“I wanted to do something for you. Being in love is a painful experience. It’s… obsessive. I have all this love energy.”
Love energy. Amy thought it was a great phrase. She knew exactly what he meant. She had love energy, too. She wanted to make his coffee, rub his back, iron his shirts. Well, maybe ironing was going too far. She lowered her lashes flirtatiously. “I think I know a way of getting rid of some excess energy.”
Three minutes later she was shamelessly naked on her rumpled sheets. She stretched luxuriously and beckoned to Jake. “This is my first matinee. Do you do anything different when you make love in the sunshine?”
He ran his hand the length of her silken leg and told her of a possible variation.
Amy closed her eyes and arched her back. “Yum,” she said breathlessly.
Amy lay back in the big aluminum rowboat and let her fingertips trail in the water. Her eyes were closed; the sun was warm on her face; the waves quietly slopped against the side of the gently rocking boat. Insects buzzed in the nearby woods and a duck quacked in the distance. Life didn’t get much better than this, she thought. A Sunday afternoon on Burke Lake with her lover manning the oars.
It occurred to her that she’d just gone to bed with a man she’d known less than a week. Hours and minutes, she decided, weren’t an accurate measure of progress in a relationship. She could marry Jake tomorrow and feel absolutely confident in their future. Of course, Jake hadn’t asked her to marry him. Only a matter of time, she told herself. The man was obviously crazy about her.
She splashed her hand in the water and knew she was being outrageously smug. It was allowed. Today was special. Every day would be special from now on.
“I’m going to plant a vegetable garden,” she said. “I’ve always wanted a vegetable garden. They seem… permanent. My father was an army officer and every three years we’d pack up and move to a new base. I have great parents, and it was an interesting life, but we never had a garden.”
“Where are your parents now?”
“They moved to Florida when my dad retired. I went to school at George Mason and decided I liked Northern Virginia. So here I am, and here I’ll stay.”
Jake pulled on the oars. “Don’t have a wanderlust?”
“Nope. I’ve done enough wanderlusting. How about you?”
“My DNA is missing the wanderlust chromosome.”
“I know,” Amy said. “Instead of a wanderlust chromosome, they gave you a detective chromosome.”
Jake stopped rowing. “I’m not much of a detective. I’m stumped, and the part that’s really driving me nuts is that there’s a clue in the office, and I can’t find it.”
“Why don’t we just ask Veronica?”
“What would we say? Excuse me, Miss Bottles, but we’d like to know why you kidnapped your own chicken?”
“Yeah. They do it all the time on television. Then the person gets worried and does something stupid, and they get caught.”
“We could count on Veronica Bottles doing something stupid,” Jake said, reaching for a can of soda in the cooler between his feet. “Everything Veronica does is stupid.”
Amy took a sip of his soda. “That’s why this is such a good idea.”
“I thought you were the one who didn’t want to do any more detecting?”
“That was when I was a virgin,” Amy said. “Now I’m bold.”
Jake turned the boat toward the concession stand. “Okay. Let’s go see what Veronica has to say.”
Chapter Seven
“We need to be professional about this,” Amy said. “You were right. We need equipment.”
Jake turned onto Ox Road and looked at Amy sideways. “Equipment?” There were gray people and there were black-and-white people, Jake thought. Gray people were middle-of-the-roaders, easing through life with a pleasant smile on their placid faces. He suspected he was pretty much gray. Amy was definitely black-and-white. She didn’t do things halfway. Once she chose a project she pursued it with gleeful intensity. He’d realized that the first time they made love. The remembrance of it brought a stab of heat to his groin. “What sort of equipment did you have in mind?”
“A digital recorder, of course. I have one at home. I’ll just put it in a purse, and no one will know. Then we’ll have a recorded confession.”
An hour later they pulled into Veronica’s parking lot. Even before they cut the engine, Amy and Jake could hear the shouting in Veronica’s apartment. A window flew open and a big stuffed bear came sailing out, landing face first in the grass.
“And I don’t want your stupid bear!” Veronica shouted.
Brian Turner rushed out and picked up the bear. His face was florid and his lips were pressed tightly together in a bloodless slit in his face.
“That does it,” he shouted back, flinging the bear into his car. “Only a heartless woman would throw Good-luck Bear out the window. You’re a monster, Veronica. Do you know how to spell that?”
Veronica’s face appeared in the window. “B-R-I-A-N,” she replied sweetly.
“Very funny.” He ducked a tennis racket and got hit in the head with a tennis shoe.
“I don’t want any of your junk,” Veronica told him, tossing an armful of clothes out the window into the shrubbery. “You and your big ideas, telling me I was going to be a television star. Some television star. You had me playing straight man to a chicken. Now there’s no chicken, and you’re telling me I’m fired. Lulu the Clown didn’t have a chicken. Why do I need one?”
“Lulu the Clown had talent,” Turner said.
Veronica’s eyes narrowed. “You’re slime, Turner. You’re scum and gunk and doo-doo. You have no sensitivity, and you killed that poor chicken,” she cried. “You fiend.”
Amy’s eyes widened at the whirring recorder. “Son of a gun,” she whispered. All those hours watching crummy television shows paid off. She’d actually gotten incriminating evidence.
“Me?” Turner screamed. “I didn’t kill that Frank Perdue reject. I gave him his big break, and he blew it. You’re the one who killed him. Feeding him pizza and jelly doughnuts and keeping him up until all hours of the night watching David Letterman.”
“He liked the stupid pet tricks.” Veronica’s bright-red lower lip trembled. “And I didn’t kill him. What a rotten
