thinking, and I didn’t want to hear it. “Don’t you dare tell me you honestly believe Brian ran off with this . . . trailer trash person, or I’ll have to kill you with my bare hands.”
“All right, I won’t say it.” But she continued to stare squarely at me, forehead pleated. “No, dammit, I will. I’ll say exactly what I’m thinking, because it’s sounding more and more like the truth every minute.”
“Stop—” I tried, but she didn’t listen.
“They hooked up, Kendricks. Malone got a buzz in his britches for a hootchie mama, and he went home with her, now he’s too embarrassed to show his face. What other explanation is there?”
“Stop it.” Despite myself, I started trembling. This was wrong. Completely wrong and upside down. Not really happening. “I won’t assume the worst before I have the chance to talk to Brian.”
My daddy had always taught me to never judge too swiftly, for fear of getting things totally ass backward.
I knew Brian. Maybe not backward and forward, perhaps not all the littlest details or even some middling ones, but well enough to be sure he wouldn’t pull a stunt like this. It didn’t sound like him at all, and I was not going to buy it until he looked me in the eye and said, “Andy, I’ve left you for another woman.”
Only then would it be true.
“Don’t be a fool.” Allie made a noise of disgust and toed a sequined boa lying near her sharp-toed pump. “The stripper in question has obviously flown the coop, and there’s no sign of Malone, not at home, not at work, not with any of his friends. I’m piss-poor at math, but I can put two and two together.”
“It’s not what it seems,” I resisted. “You’re wrong, Allie.
It doesn’t add up.”
“You’re in denial, girl.”
I fought the urge to attack.
If I hadn’t hated Allie Price before, I hated her now, with a passion.
But pulling her hair out by the roots wasn’t going to help.
As Allie righted the room’s only chair and planted herself in it, I stepped over to the mirror and plucked the photo from the frame.
It showed a petite woman with enormous blond hair—flipped up like Farrah Fawcett, just as Matty had
described—wearing the tiniest of panties and a spangled bra, posing in this very room, only there was a small framed painting hanging on the wall behind her. I could just barely make out a horse’s hind end.
Must have been the “pretty picture” Lu had mentioned.
I put the photo back just as Lu reappeared. Her expression didn’t reassure me any, not with her eyes all teary.
“Nobody’s heard from Trayla since last night,” she said
and blinked back tears with tarantula lashes. “I can’t believe she’d bail without telling me. Not that we were that tight, but she used to stay and have a drink with me after hours sometimes, before we closed. She had dreams, Trayla did. She wanted to be somebody. Said she had big plans for herself.” Lu sniffled. “Could be her plans included your guy.”
My guy?
Straight-Shooting, Straight-Laced, Full of Midwestern Sensibility Brian Malone?
Impossible.
There was a greater chance of The Men’s Club turning into a nunnery.
“No,” I said, because Lu was dead wrong. Any plans her stripper pal had with a man definitely didn’t include Malone.
Allie laughed, and I felt relieved at first, assuming I wasn’t the only one who found Lu’s assertion absurd. Until she opened her pie hole and cackled, “This is priceless.
Really. Brian’s probably never screwed up in his life, and all of a sudden he’s walking on the wild side with a woman who straddles a pole for a living.”
“I’m gonna miss her,” Lu babbled, off somewhere in her own little miserable world. “Betsy was a real firecracker.”
“Betsy?” Allie piped up. “So her real name wasn’t Trayla?”
“All the girls make up names for the stage,” Lu replied.
“You know Betsy’s last name?” Allie went for broke.
“No,” Lu said. “Sorry. I never