Almost Home. Debbie Macomber

as she drove, laughing. “You were a daredevil, Chalese. Remember how you hid—”

      “Brenda!” I screamed as she took the corner by the glass-art gallery waaaay too fast. “Slow down, it’s not a racetrack! You’re gonna get a ticket.”

      Too late. Chief O’Connaghey’s blue and red lights started to swirl. I turned around. The chief wiggled his fingers at me in greeting.

      “Gina, I have to call you back.”

      Brenda pulled over, refreshed her lipstick, then rolled down her window. “Good morning, Chief. It’s a pleasure to see you again.”

      I muffled my despair, my head still crammed with tiny knives taking stabs at my cranium.

      Chief O’Connaghey grinned. “License and registration, Brenda. Say, I’ve been thinking these last few minutes, and your last movie, Pranks and Love on the Island, was my favorite. We didn’t think that Old Man Stuckey needed to die, though. But the movie touched my heart.” He touched his heart. “Made me cry. Same with Mrs. Chief O’Connaghey.”

      I rolled my shoulders. They hurt like holy heck.

      “’Course, Mrs. Chief O’Connaghey also laughed so hard she had to leave the theater and run to the bathroom,” he added.

      Oh, please.

      As we drove into the two-lane town, the ocean sparkling in the distance, Brenda assured me she would keep it quiet about Aiden’s occupation and why he was here and not act hostilely toward the Enemy. “I’ll tell everyone he’s your lover.”

      “I beg you, no.” We both waved at friends on foot and on bikes.

      “I’ll tell everyone he’s your secret lust, your childhood love.”

      “Let’s skip that one, too.”

      “Hoo boy. I have it. He’s a previous husband …. No? He’s your vacation plaything, and he wants to be serious now …. No? Then he’s your pen pal, your e-mail pal, and he’s come uninvited … Or how about he’s a previous boyfriend released from his duty in the CIA? Hoo boy.”

      “Now, don’t you go all stalkerish on me, Chalese,” the chief reprimanded me in front of Aiden when he was getting the paperwork together at the station. “Stephen can date whoever he wants. Let him go. He was never good enough for you.”

      “You’re a stalker?” Aiden asked. “Now that’s cool.”

      “No one understood why you were dating him in the first place. He’s … dweeby,” Angie Aluko, the secretary, said. She was wearing one of her bright African outfits. She and her husband, a businessman, had six kids. She and Christie were very close. Christie had not been charged, because she’d hid out in the car. The mere thought of giving birth to twins in a cell made her numb with panic.

      “I don’t care about Stephen at all. I was up on the roof,” I said, then lost my words. I tried again. “I was up on the roof because … because …”

      “Hoo boy!” Brenda interrupted with great fanfare. “We had chugged down a few daiquiris and were insanely curious about what Snaky Stephen was up to. So we snuck up on the roof to take a peekie.” She smiled at everyone as if we were at some cocktail party. Everyone smiled back. That’s how Brenda is. Everybody loves her. “Plus, I needed a real-life experience for my next movie, and you all have been perfect!”

      The chief, two officers I played pool with regularly at Old Harold’s Bar and Grill, and Angie preened and giggled.

      “Could you handcuff me, please?” Brenda asked one of the officers.

      “So is this your new special friend, Chalese?” Angie asked. “That’s what the chief says.”

      I froze. Froze like a constipated snowwoman.

      Aiden stared at me, green eyes almost twinkling out of his head with humor, and waited for the answer. I couldn’t say the truth. Did not want to lie, but felt I had to lie to save myself.

      “And the answer is …” Brenda paused for an imaginary drum roll. “This is Chalese’s new special friend. Isn’t he devilishly handsome? A raw, masculine specimen!” She waved her hand from his head to his feet, then made a growling sound.

      Aiden jokingly lifted his arms and flexed his muscles: to the right, the left, then back to the right. Angie hooted. Brenda cackled.

      “What exactly is a special friend?” Officer Doytoech drawled. “How is a special friend different from a regular friend, precisely?”

      “Yes, what does that entail?” Officer Lopez asked. “Sometimes department stores have special sales—red sales, blue sales. Is this the same thing?”

      “I know,” the chief said proudly. “This means you’re dating.”

      I fumbled, I blushed, I stuttered. I sounded like this: “Sdfkjlksad …”

      Aiden grinned. “Well, she’s hard to resist. Especially in her leathers. And those boots! Dangerous!”

      “She’s beautiful,” Angie declared. “Not looking so fresh this morning, but other days she’s a beauty!”

      “A true beauty,” Aiden said quite seriously. “Naturally beautiful. That hair, those eyes. She’s irritated now, but still.”

      “Chalese is a superpolite criminal.” Officer Doytoech thunked me on the back. “She never argues with us when she’s brought in—” I kicked him with my heel. “Ow!”

      “Yep, our Chalese is a lady, through and through,” Officer Lopez added. “Why, that time we had to go and rescue her and Brenda from the water tower, she was real cooperative. Took a couple of fire engines and a special unit from another island, but we got ’em down. Why were you all up there anyhow? Can’t remember …”

      “It was because Brenda thought she was a terrible writer,” Angie jumped in helpfully, “and needed a new perspective. So they climbed up the water tower, and then the ladder broke. I remember that scene in The Water Tower Diaries, Brenda! And I loved that Courtnay Hayes played me in the movie!”

      They then discussed the movie, at length, with Aiden enthusiastically adding his comments about character development, while Brenda was handcuffed at her request.

      “Chalese has said no four times to eager-to-be fiancés,” Angie said to Aiden, holding up four fingers.

      “Yep, four,” Officer Lopez confirmed. “Four men asked her to marry them, she gave ’em a big nope. Nope nope nope nope.”

      “Why a nope nope?” Aiden asked the group, not me.

      Everyone spoke at once. I heard “Too pompous … too showy … not manly enough … too hairy … not smart enough for our Chalese, mind like a steel trapdoor … no one liked him … hot temper, Chalese has a hot temper … he was dull/flighty/bum … Chalese indulges in crazy stuff … wouldn’t have worked …” And the finale: “She wasn’t in love with any of them, we could tell.”

      “Yoo-hoo! I’m still here!”

      No one stopped talking.

      “Yoo-hoo!”

      Before we criminals were released on an unsuspecting public, the officers reminded us that Tuesday night was the annual Whale Island Poker Tournament and invited Aiden, who said, “I wouldn’t miss it.”

      But not before Aiden heard again:

      That Stephen wasn’t good enough for me, to which he said chivalrously, “I can’t imagine any man would be good enough for her.”

      That I was a “treasure, a gift to any man” (Angie), to which Aiden said, “I treasure every moment with her.”

      That I was “an upright citizen (Officer Lopez said this while laughing like a drunk hyena), to which Aiden said, “I understand