Hoodwinked

Jake. He didn’t look like a Jake. She stared after him. He was pretty dishy—big and capable looking. And he’d made her feel different. Almost reckless. Imagine her talking to a man like that and being bold enough to ask his name. She grinned to herself. Maybe she wasn’t totally helpless. It was like a milestone in her life, and she was glad that she’d decided to stay in Wichita. She’d thought that a change of scenery might bring her out of her shell and help her become independent and capable. It still might. But her newfound male co-worker hadn’t seemed too interested. Not that she was surprised. She had so little luck in attracting men. Maybe it was the glasses. If she hadn’t been so nearsighted without them, she might have put them back in her purse and risked talking to hat racks and potted plants.

She dashed into Arnold M. Blake’s office breathlessly and sat down behind her desk. She glanced at the phone. One line was open. Thank God. Mr. Blake was at his desk. Maybe he wouldn’t realize how late she was. She punched the second of the four lines and rang the janitorial department.

“Someone has spilled coffee all over your spotless carpet in the entrance,” she reported with blithe innocence. “Could someone attend to it, please?”

There was a world-weary sigh on the other end. “Miss Harris?”

She swallowed. “Yes.”

“No problem,” came the dry reply. “Late again, are you?”

She flushed. “My washing machine flooded.”

“Last time,” the man’s voice drawled, “it was a strawberry milk shake.”

“I’m sorry,” she groaned. “It’s my karma, you see. I must have been an ax murderer in a previous life.”

“We’ll get up the stains, don’t you worry. And thanks for that bag of pralines you brought us from New Orleans,” the voice added. “We all enjoyed them.”

She smiled sadly. She’d had to go home for a few days to approve the sale of her parents’ home. It was her last link with the old life. They’d planned to move to Wichita, Kansas, with her, but a tragic car wreck just before the move had taken their lives. She’d almost gone back herself, after that, but she had decided that a new start might help ease the pain. So she’d invested the money she’d received from the sale of her parents’ home in half of a duplex in Wichita and stayed there. Since she’d already gotten her job with the MacFaber Corporation, at least she didn’t have to worry about living expenses. The pralines had been an afterthought, and she was glad now that she’d thought to bring the harried janitorial staff a little sack of treats.

“Thanks.” She hung up and dabbed again at her skirt. It would have to be light blue. Nothing was going to take that stain out.

“So there you are,” Mr. Blake said from the doorway, smiling at her. “I need you to take a letter, Miss Harris.”

“Yes, sir.” She grabbed her pad and pen. “So sorry. I was late, and I’ve spilled coffee…Everything’s gone wrong…”

“No problem,” he said easily. “Come in, please.”

She took several letters in a row, all pertaining to the new Faber-jet design. She never paid much attention to what they contained, which was so much gibberish when he started using technical terms. She had to ask the spelling of one or two of them, but Mr. Blake was very patient and never yelled.

Joseph MacFaber, it was said, could rage like a wounded bear when he was in a bad temper. But then he was filthy rich and used to getting his own way. He spent most of his life trying to commit suicide in a variety of dangerous hobbies, from what Maureen could gather, and left his subordinates in charge of the MacFaber Aircraft Corporation in his absence. He was in Rio now, she’d heard. He’d been away for the better part of a year, getting over the death of his mother—or so they said. Mrs. MacFaber had died in a car wreck in Europe, gossip said, and MacFaber was still grieving. They said he’d been driving the car, so perhaps he was running away from his conscience. It would be a hard thing for a man to live with.

Mr. Blake finished his dictation and Maureen went back to her desk to transcribe her notes on the electronic typewriter. That was a signal for the phone to start ringing nonstop and two other secretaries to come in and ask questions that she had to ask Mr. Blake to answer.

It was almost time for lunch before she got enough of her backlog cleared away to even start on the mail. By then Mr. Blake was leaving, and she was left with a handful of letters that she could do nothing about until he came back.

She usually went to lunch herself at noon, but she felt guilty because she’d been late. So she went along to the canteen and got herself a soft drink and a chocolate bar and sat by the window alone, eating it. It wasn’t nutritious, but it was filling. She was finishing the soft drink when the new mechanic sat down at a table near the middle of the room and opened his lunch pail.

Without meaning to, Maureen found herself watching him. He was so big. She wasn’t used to particularly masculine men, and she usually didn’t stare. But he was a dish. A real dish. She sighed, just as he looked up unexpectedly and caught her in the act. He glared at her as if he found her interest infuriating, and she flushed furiously as she quickly turned her eyes back to the window. This was absurd. Probably she’d been working too hard and her mind was disintegrating. She finished the soft drink, put the bottle up, and smiled faintly as she passed the mechanic. She meant the smile as a kind of apology, but his dark eyes only glittered more angrily.

He dropped his eyes to his coffee cup and ignored her completely. He was still wearing his cap and kept it pulled down over his face. She felt uncomfortable. He made her feel like a man chaser, and she wanted to crawl off into a corner and hide. His anger had actually hurt her.

She put thoughts of the mechanic at the back of her mind and doggedly spent the rest of the day answering the mail. Mr. Blake had a long conversation with some official, and at the end of it he wandered around, preoccupied, for the better part of an hour.

“Is something wrong, sir?” Maureen asked gently.

He glanced at her, running a hand through hair he hardly had on his balding head. “What? Oh, no, thank you, Maureen. Just a knotty problem. There’ll be a government inspector here in the morning, by the way. Do try to be on time, will you?”

“Is it about the Faber-jet design change?” she asked.

He smiled grimly. “I’m afraid so. We may be in for some stormy weather from the aviation people trying to get this thing approved.”

She nodded. He left for the day shortly afterward. It took Maureen until six-thirty to finish answering the mail. By the time she had put away her typewriter and straightened her desk, most of the other employees had vacated the building. As she passed MacFaber’s office on her way to the time clock, she heard noises and paused.

There was a voice behind the door, a solitary voice—it was muffled, but it sounded deep and hard and demanding. Its owner was apparently talking to someone on the phone. Maureen wondered if it was the venerable J. MacFaber himself in there. Perhaps he’d returned early from Rio. She’d have to ask Charlene tomorrow. She walked on by. It wouldn’t do to be caught spying outside the big boss’s office. She punched her card, left it, and went out of the building.

It was a delicious spring day. A lush, green lawn stretched from the streamlined building with its glass front, and she liked the smell of young buds breaking on the trees. The parking lot was almost deserted. There was a rather beat-up-looking red-and-rust pickup truck sitting nearby. Just that and Maureen’s little yellow Volkswagen. The pickup had seen better days, like her poor, battered beetle. It ran beautifully when it wanted to, but it was tempermental.

With a long sigh she got in behind the wheel. It had been a difficult day. She put the key in the ignition and turned it. Nothing happened.

“Oh, Yellow Plague,” she moaned. “Why today of all days?”

She got out and opened the hood at the back of the car, kneeling down to glare at the small engine. And there was the trouble. A gummy battery terminal, eaten up with acid. She wondered if she could hit it hard enough with the heel of her shoe to unclog it.

She was considering that when she noticed the big dark mechanic standing a little distance away, studying her with what could only be described as a calculating stare.

She glanced toward him, but before she could even speak, he moved closer. “Isn’t this a little obvious?” he asked with faint amusement. “First you spill coffee all over me. Now your car stalls right next to my pickup.”

His pickup? She felt as if fate were out to get her. It really had been a horror of a day. And now here was this big, dishy mechanic under the impression that she was putting on an act to get his attention. It was her own fault, she supposed. To someone who didn’t know her, her behavior might have seemed come-onish. And she had stared at him in the canteen.

“It’s all right,” she said quickly. “I know what to do.”

“Why don’t you just crank it?” he asked, eyeing her curiously. He folded his arms across his broad chest. “For future reference, I don’t like come-ons. I don’t have much trouble attracting women, and I sure as hell don’t want you lying in wait for me every day. Clear enough?”

That was insulting, uncalled-for and surprisingly painful. Tears stung her eyes, but she blinked them away hurriedly. She got to her feet, staring at him numbly. She wasn’t quite her old, feisty self. Losing both her parents at once had been a terrible blow, and she still wasn’t quite recovered. Too, she’d always been sheltered. She simply didn’t expect cruelty from people. It was shocking to find that, and mocking contempt, in a total stranger.

“I suppose you’re justified in what you’re thinking,” she said quietly, “but you’re quite wrong. I’m not trying to come on to you. This morning was really an accident. And I have a bad battery connection that I meant to see about earlier, but I had some distractions. All I have to do is beat on it with a shoe, and I can crank it. So please don’t let me detain you.”

She turned back to the engine, her hands trembling with mingled hurt and confusion, took off her shoe and slammed it against the battery terminal with a sharp, angry blow. She stood up and almost collided with the mechanic.

“There does seem to be a little corrosion there,” he said slowly, obviously surprised.

She didn’t answer him. She didn’t even look at him. She closed the hatch, got in behind the wheel and tried the key. This time it cranked.

She didn’t look back as she drove off, fighting tears all the way. Horrible, arrogant, conceited man, she thought furiously, and wished she could call him what she was thinking he was.

Maureen had an active mental life. In her mind, she could be and do anything. But in real life, she was only a shadow of the person inside her. The inner Maureen could engage in verbal battles and give people the devil. But the outer Maureen, the one who seemed always to blend into the background, was a different proposition. She fumed and muttered, but she was too softhearted to argue with people. She walked away from fights. She always had.

Back at the small duplex in which she lived, she kicked off her shoes and flopped down on her worn sofa. She couldn’t remember a time in her life when she’d been as weary. Everyone had bad days, she reminded herself. But hers seemed to go from bad to worse.

That ill-mannered mechanic’s sarcasm had been the last straw. So he was dishy. That gave him no excuse to accuse her of chasing him, for heaven’s sake. Who did he think he was? Nobody who really knew her would ever think her capable of such a thing. She smiled ruefully when she remembered that there wasn’t anybody who really knew her. Only her parents, and she’d lost them. She had nobody anymore. She didn’t make close friends easily because she was basically shy and introverted. She waited for other people to make the first move. But no one ever had. And that was too bad, she thought sadly, because the inner Maureen was as vivacious as Auntie Mame, as outrageous and outgoing as any comedienne, as sexy as a movie star. But she couldn’t get out of Maureen’s mind to tell people that she was. The reckless, devil-may-care person inside her needed only a catalyst to bring her out, but there had never been one. She dreamed of doing exciting things, and she admired people like the absent Mr. MacFaber who weren’t afraid to really live their lives. But Maureen was a slow starter. In fact, she’d never really started anything, except her job.

She put on jeans and a T-shirt, brushed out her long, dark hair and went barefoot into the kitchen to cook herself a hamburger. On the way she almost tripped over Bagwell, who’d let himself out of his cage and was having a ball with her measuring spoons.

“For heaven’s sake, what are you doing down there?” she fussed, bending over. “Did I forget to put the lock on the cage again?”

“Hello,” the big green Amazon parrot purred up at her, spreading his wings in a flirting welcome. “How are you-u-u-u?”