Hoodwinked

That puzzled him. “I don’t understand the joke,” he said.

“Well, look at me,” she said miserably. “I wear glasses, I’m too tall, I have the personality of a dust ruffle, and even when I try to wear trendy clothes, I still look like somebody’s spinster aunt. Can’t you just see me in silk and satin and lace, draped across a king-sized bed?”

She was laughing, but he wasn’t. He could picture her that way, and the image was disturbing.

He lifted his cigarette to his wide mouth. “Yes, I can,” he said quietly. “And stop running yourself down. There’s nothing wrong with you. If you don’t believe that, ask the janitorial department.”

She felt her cheeks going hot. “I’ve, uh, caused them a lot of trouble in the past. I can’t imagine that they’d give me a reference.”

He laughed softly. It was a pleasant sound and, she imagined, a pretty rare one. “All the same,” he replied, “they haven’t forgotten the little things you’ve done for them. Pralines from New Orleans, cotton candy from the carnival that came through, a pot of homemade soup on the day we got snow after the New Year. You can spill coffee on the carpet year-round and they’ll drop everything to clean it up. They love you.”

She colored prettily. “I felt guilty,” she murmured.

“Mr. Wyman, the security guard, is another admirer,” he continued, blowing out a thin cloud of smoke while he watched Bagwell finish off one last piece of pear. “You sat with his wife when she had to have an emergency appendectomy.”

She cleared her throat. “He doesn’t have any family out here. He and Mrs. Wyman are from Virginia.”

“You may not be Miss America, but you’ve got a heart, Miss Harris,” he concluded, letting his gaze slide back to her face. “People like you just the way you are.”

She clasped her hands and let them droop between her jeans-clad knees. It didn’t occur to her at the moment to ask how he’d found out so much about her. “Well, I don’t,” she muttered. “I’m dull and my life is dull and mostly I bore people to death. I want to be like old Joseph MacFaber,” she said, her face brightening so that she missed the look on her companion’s face. “He took up hang gliding last year, did you know? He’s raced cars in the Grand Prix in France and ballooned on the Eastern Seaboard. He’s gone off with archaeological expeditions to Peru and Mexico and Central America. He’s gone deep-sea diving with one of the Cousteau expeditions that signed on amateurs for a couple of weeks in the Bahamas, and he’s lived on cattle stations in the outback in Australia. He’s climbed mountains and gone on camera safaris in Africa and—”

“Good God, will you stop?” he groaned. “You’re making me tired.”

“Well, you do see, don’t you?” she asked, with a wistful, faraway look in the green eyes behind her glasses. “That’s the kind of life I wish I could live. The most adventurous thing I do in a day is to feed Bagwell a grape and risk having my finger decapitated.” She sighed. “I’m twenty-four years old, and I’ve never done anything risky. My whole life is like a bowl of gelatin. It just lies there and congeals.”

He burst out laughing. “What a description.”

“It suits the situation,” she murmured. “I thought coming out here to Kansas and starting over again might change things, but it didn’t. I’m still the same person I was in New Orleans. I just changed the scenery. I’m the same dull stick I used to be.”

“Why do you want to climb mountains and go on safari?” he asked.

She shrugged. “Because it’s there?” she suggested. “I don’t know. I just want to get out of my rut. I’ll die one day, and I’ve never lived.” She grimaced. “The most romantic thing I’ve ever done with a man was help change a tire.” She threw up her hands. “No man who’s seen me will risk taking me out!”

He chuckled deeply. “I don’t know about that. I wouldn’t mind taking you out.”

She stared at him. “No. I don’t need pity.”

“I agree,” he said easily. “I’m not offering any. You’ve got enough self-pity for two people as it is.”

She glared. “It isn’t self-pity, it’s reality.”

He shrugged. “Whatever. How about a movie? I like science fiction and adventure and police drama. How about you?”

She began to smile. “I like those things, too.”

“Got a newspaper?”

“No,” she groaned. “Only the weekly. I can’t afford a daily paper.”

He let out a whistle. “I haven’t been here long enough to get one started. Well, we can drive around and look at the billboards.”

She felt like a new penny, bright and shining. “A matinee?”

“Why not? They’re wasted on kids. I hate going to pictures at night and trying to see around couples making love in the seats. The heavy breathing makes it hard to hear.”

“You cynic,” she accused, daring to tease him.

He smiled at her as he got to his feet. “What about your green friend there?”

“Bagwell, it’s early bedtime for you tonight,” she told him.

“Apple,” Bagwell said and let out a war whoop when she nudged him into his cage. He began to scream.

“Now, now.” She calmed him while she cleaned his cage and gave him fresh water, seeds and a vitamin additive.

“He’s a pretty bird,” Jake remarked.

“I think so. He’s a lot of company, anyway,” she replied as she covered his cage. “I don’t know how I could manage without him. He’s sort of my best friend.”

That touched him deeply. He knew that she was rather a loner at the plant, but he hadn’t realized that this was true of her private life, as well. He scowled, watching her rush around the apartment before she excused herself to change into a white sundress and tie her hair back with a ribbon.

He’d suspected her from the beginning of being involved in the problems with the Faber jet, and he still wasn’t convinced that she was totally innocent. But she didn’t fit the picture of a saboteur. Then he reminded himself that they rarely did. He couldn’t afford to let himself get too involved with her at this stage of the game. First, he had to find out a little more about her. And what better way than to involve himself in her private life?

“I’m ready,” she said, breathless as she stopped just in front of him, almost pretty in her white spike heels, white sundress with its modest rounded neckline, and white ribbon in her hair. Despite the glasses, she wasn’t bad to look at, and she had great legs. She grinned at her good fortune. Imagine, having him actually ask her out. She could find out a lot about him this way. Playing the role of superspy was making her vibrate like a spring. She was having the time of her life. It was the first dangerous thing she’d ever done, and if he really was a saboteur, it was certainly that. She had one instant of apprehension, but he smiled and she relaxed. It was just a date, she told herself firmly. She wasn’t going to try to handcuff him and drive him down to police headquarters. That thought comforted her a little. She could always tell Mr. Blake what she found out.

“Let’s go.”

He put her in the pickup truck, noticing that she didn’t complain about the torn seats and the cracked dash. She smiled at him as if he’d put her in the front seat of a Rolls-Royce, and he felt a twinge of conscience. He knew for a fact that none of the women in his world would have smiled if he’d asked them to go on a date in this ancient, clattering iron rattrap. But Maureen looked as if she were actually enjoying it, and her smile wasn’t a suffering one at all.

“You don’t mind the pickup?” he fished.

She laughed. “Oh, not at all! My dad used to have one. Of course, it was in a lot worse shape than this one. We went on fishing trips in it and threw our tackle in the boot with the ice chest.” Her eyes were dreamy. “I remember so many lazy summer days on the bayous with him and my mother. We didn’t have much money when I was a child, but it never seemed to matter because we had so much fun together. Both my parents were educators,” she explained belatedly. “That should give you an idea of their combined incomes.”

“Yes.” He put his almost finished cigarette to his lips. “Ironic, isn’t it, that we pay garbagemen in the city more than we pay the people who educate our children and shape the future. Football players are paid millions to kick a pigskin ball around a stadium, but teachers are still being paid like glorified babysitters.”

“You don’t sound like a football fan,” she said.

“I like ice hockey,” he mused. “And soccer.”

“You’re built like a football player,” she murmured shyly.

He flashed her a smile. “Believe it or not, the school I attended didn’t have a football team. My father refused to let me participate in what he saw as an educational wasteland.”

“You didn’t participate in sports at all?” she persisted.

“I did join the wrestling team,” he said with a grin. “I was school champion two years running and graduated undefeated.”