Chasing Happy Read online

  He'd tried to pinpoint what it was about her that intrigued him so much. Was it the way she’d laughed at Dallas’s interrogation or the blush that stained her cheeks when she’d come back from the bathroom? He liked the way she’d just owned it and admitted her embarrassment. But there had been a look that crossed her face, some shadow that entered her eyes when she raised her hands and held them off from giving her a ride. It had just come across as bleak and he'd felt an ache in his chest for her.

  Yesterday, he’d found himself on his hands and knees, tilling next year’s herb garden when he stared at the sky and compared the color to Rosie’s eyes. Yesterday’s sky was too blue, her eyes more crystal-like but he’d keep watching to see if he found a color that compared. He couldn't stop thinking about the bottom half of her eye, completely black and mesmerizing, and her long, whitish silver hair, wavy and all over the place. Without knowing her, he could tell Rosie wasn't a woman that primped in front of the mirror, trying to be perfect, but somehow, she just was.

  The girl was wearing combat boots for heaven’s sake. You don’t get much more low-maintenance than that. Flannel shirt, skinny jeans, she might have been the poster child for casual. He was a jeans and t-shirt guy himself. Running a garden made work boots and jeans his go-to style every day of the week.

  “You’re quiet,” she said as they pulled onto his sister’s street.

  “Just following your lead,” he explained.

  She didn’t answer, just looked back out the window. When they got to Wendy’s condo, he opened the door, letting himself right in.

  “Hey,” he called out. “We’re here.”

  “Come on in!” Wendy’s shout came from around the corner.

  He sat himself at the island while Rosie made her way to Wendy almost warily.

  “What in the world is all this?” she whispered to his sister.

  Wendy’s face was beaming with pride, but Rosie's was a cross between shock and horror. He hoped like hell this wasn’t about to blow up in his sister's face.

  “Well,” Wendy said in that long drawn out way of hers. “You never told me you were from Massachusetts before, that stuff wasn’t on your resume. So, I thought I’d make you dinner featuring? You guessed it, food from Massachusetts.” At Rosie’s bewildered expression, Wendy forged on with a smile. “Boston baked beans, something called a Boston boiled dinner, which is just corned beef and cabbage. That takes a long time, so I got us pastrami and coleslaw, plus I made cranberry sauce and homemade clam chowder.”

  Rosie just stood, staring between Wendy, the pots bubbling on the stove and the table set for three.

  “You…” She stammered.

  Wendy laughed again, but Max wasn’t feeling the humor. Rosie looked like she was ready to make a beeline for the door.

  “I made you dinner. Come on, let’s eat.”

  “Why?” Rosie whispered.

  “To see you happy.” Wendy shrugged. “Are you?”

  “Am I what?”

  “Happy?”

  Butch had thought she was just a little kid. He’d seemed surprised when she told him she was almost seven. After three weeks in three different foster homes, he’d shown up asking if she’d want to go home with him to live with him and his wife.

  She hadn’t told him she missed her mom, and he’d never asked. Happy didn’t really want a new family, she just wanted her old one back. At least with her mom, she knew what to expect. The last few weeks, there'd been so many people wanting different things all the time. In one house, she was always supposed to take her dirty dishes to the sink. In another, she wasn’t allowed to touch the real dishes, let alone eat off them. In another, they ate frozen meals that came with their own plates. In one, she was supposed to shower in the morning and another at night. One of the houses had six other kids and some of them were mean. Really mean. When she had been staying there, she'd been too afraid to sleep at night.

  “Come on, Happy.” Butch knelt down so he was looking right at her. “You’d have your own room. There are no other kids, just me and Erin. The school is right down the block. You could ride a bike.”

  “I don’t know how to ride a bike,” she told him.

  Butch coughed into his hand and looked away for a second before turning back to her. “I’ll teach you, kid.”

  “I don’t have a bike anyways.”

  “We’ll get you one,” he promised.

  She took a deep breath. “What happens when my mom gets out of jail?”

  “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. But, until then, if you want, you can come live with us.”

  “What if you decide you don’t like me? Will you send me back?”

  Butch held her skinny shoulders. “We’ll never send you back, Happy. You’ll always have a home with us. I promise.”

  “Why?”

  “We just want to see you happy.”

  “Rosie?” The voice broke in and Rosie shook off the memory.

  “I’m sorry.” She held up a hand and looked around. “Of course I’m happy. This is too much, Wendy. You’re too much.”

  She pushed Butch and Erin Hardy as far away as possible and concentrated on the here and now.

  Wendy let out a breath and held her chest. “You scared me for a second.”

  “I’m sorry.” Rosie forced a laugh. “This is just too much. I can’t believe you did all this.”

  She sat at the table and tried to let the camaraderie of the funky dinner and friendly people ease her mind. Things were mostly quiet in her world, save the one obnoxious elderly spirit that nagged the ever-loving shit out of her.

  Through pastrami, coleslaw and beans the woman harped on her. Through chowder and cranberry sauce, she nagged.

  “I can’t believe you did all this,” Rosie told Wendy.

  “I can’t either. Why would she bother with someone who so obviously doesn’t care about her?”

  “I didn’t mind,” Wendy said at the same time, muddling both comments. “It was actually kind of fun.”

  “Do you have any idea how hard she worked to build her company? Her reputation?”

  “I think shucking the clams was the hardest.”

  “I told her to buy frozen,” Max said.

  “Years of work and you’ll let it all go down the drain. For what?”

  “I think living up north would be fun. What kind of food do people think of when you say Florida?”

  "Seafood," Rosie answered.

  “Blue crab,” Wendy ventured.

  “Oranges,” Rosie added.

  “I love oranges,” Max admitted. “Grapefruit too.”

  “Alligator.” Wendy and Max both looked at her skeptically. “What? You’ve both lived here your whole lives. Don’t tell me you haven’t tried alligator.”

  “Never,” Wendy laughed. “There's a line, and that’s over it.”

  “Yeah, I’m with her,” Max chuckled.

  Rosie shrugged. “Tastes like chicken.”

  “Tastes like deceit. Betrayal. Humiliation. Financial ruin.”

  She mentally rolled her eyes as Wendy and Max laughed.

  “Let me clean up. You did all the cooking.” She stood and began collecting plates.

  “No.” Wendy waved her away. “No. I invited you, I’ll deal with cleanup later. For now, we have coffee and Boston Cream Pie.”

  “Coffee and lies, is more like it,” Grandma grouched.

  Rosie sat quietly while Wendy brought pie and coffee to the table.

  “You okay?” Max asked, his voice low.

  She turned and found his green aura pulsing with pink. Pink could represent love, but it also denoted sincerity and friendship.

  “Yeah, why?” she asked.

  He quirked his mouth in a way that drew her attention. She had to pull her eyes away.

  “You have this thing,” he waved in the general direction of her forehead, “going on here that screams stress.”

  “Stress,” Grandma Murphy repeated indignantly. “It’s guilt, hon
ey. Don’t let that pretty face fool you.”

  “I’m fine, thanks.” She took another deep breath and tried to let some of the bad energy go.

  “You say that a lot, you know,” he remarked. “That you’re fine.”

  “Fine and dandy, letting her best friend go on living a lie. How do you live with yourself? How do you sleep at night?”

  “Pie!” Wendy sang as she set the pastry down.

  “No wonder you’re all alone. Is this how you cared for your family? Did you leave them all to fail while you went on like nothing was wrong?”

  When she held out her mug, her hand shook too much for Wendy to get any coffee in it. Without a word, Max reached out and put his hand over hers, steadying her.

  “What’s that? Is your conscience getting to you?”

  “I’ve never made a cream pie before,” Wendy and her grandmother spoke at the same time.

  "What a waste, making a pie for her," Grandma said as Rosie wiped the sweat off her upper lip, her hand still shaking.

  “Remember the pie Mom and Dad tried to make a few years ago?” Max asked Wendy.

  “What a disaster. Remember smiling through the whole thing, even though it was so awful we could barely swallow it?”

  “Disaster. That’s what you’re leading her to.”

  “I’ve never made a pie before,” she told them, her voice wobbling. “Is it a lot of work?”

  Again, the women spoke at the same time.

  “The crust is the most work, but I was surprised how much went into the pastry cream.”

  “Not as much work as building a company and losing it all because of one selfish employee.”

  That was it, Rosie decided. She couldn’t do it anymore. The old hag was right. As much as she tried to distance herself from Wendy and say she was only her boss, that wasn’t quite the truth. She cared for Wendy, even if she didn’t have any plans to let the woman into her life. She cared enough that Wendy deserved to hear the truth.

  “Tell her, Rosie. Tell her the truth.”

  Rosie looked at Max and Wendy, hating to break the mood but having to tell the truth. Even knowing telling the truth never gained her anything in life. If anything, it had been the opposite, the truth taking everything from her. Over and over again, the truth had done nothing but destroy her, but Wendy deserved more.

  “Lisa’s been stealing from you,” she blurted.

  4

  She'd had the dream after her second night at Murphy Maids, the day she met Lisa, Wendy's office manager.

  In the dream, she walked down the hall at work, talking to Wendy when Lisa stepped out of her office, dressed in black and white horizontal stripes, wearing a black mask like a thief. Lisa asked a few questions about one account and then disappeared back into her office. Rosie woke, knowing there was something going on with Lisa. Oftentimes, her dreams were indecipherable or took weeks to work out, but it didn't take a rocket scientist to come to the conclusion that Lisa was stealing somehow.

  That had been months ago.

  It was like she’d turned the volume off, Max and Wendy sitting there, just staring at her.

  “Thank you, dear,” Grandma Murphy sighed.

  “Wait? What?” Max asked, his handsome face contorted in confusion.

  Wendy was staring at her. “She what?”

  "I think..." Rosie rubbed her face, trying to articulate what she wanted to say.

  “You know,” Mrs. Murphy corrected. “You and I both know.”

  “Lisa’s been stealing money from the business."

  “How?” Wendy asked, sounding dazed. “When?” After a second, she added. “How do you know? How did I miss it? I check the books all the time.”

  All their attention was on her, and Rosie tried not to avert her eyes in shame.

  “A while ago, I had to go back and check an invoice I’d left at the Leland and Brown office. Their office manager asked me some random question about the check number they wrote or something, so when I got back to the office I checked their file for the invoice. But when I checked, it wasn’t there.”

  “What do you mean, it wasn’t there?” Max asked. “Like, it wasn’t in the file?”

  “There was no record of the invoice at all. The only reason I had the invoice number was because their office manager gave me a copy of it. She thought I’d be able to tell her the check number and she could fix her records. But I couldn’t find the invoice.”

  “What does that have to do with Lisa?” Wendy asked. “She goes over the books with me step by step, every month.”

  “You did tell me last month something wasn’t adding up. That you thought with more clients, you’d be making more money.”

  “Yeah, but I assumed it was more supplies being used and more staff eating up the money.” They both looked back at her.

  “I’ve dropped one invoice a week off at Leland and Brown, but in the file, it looks like we only bill them biweekly.”

  “Maybe she filed them somewhere else.” Wendy sounded hopeful. “Maybe we just don’t understand her filing system.”

  It got worse. Embarrassed, Rosie hesitated to tell Wendy how sure she was that Lisa had been stealing, because she hated for them to see what an awful person she was. She didn’t want to hurt Wendy. She’d never wish her business to fail or for her to get caught up in something like this, but more than any of that, she was always looking out for herself. She’d learned that getting involved backfired on a person, every time. Telling the truth had only ever hurt her. It had come back to bite her every time.

  “The office manager for Leland Brown made me copies of their checks eventually, when I told her I couldn’t find the invoices. She found her check numbers, but I couldn’t find the invoices. She was really nice about the whole thing.”

  “How long ago was this?” Max asked.

  Rosie took a deep breath, knowing how this was going to play out.

  "A month."

  Wendy reared back as though she’d been slapped. “Why didn’t you come to me sooner?”

  She didn’t have an explanation that would appease her boss, her reasons completely self-serving. She held up her hands in a gesture that screamed, I don’t know. “I didn’t think it was my business.”

  “It was my business! How could you not tell me?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “But what about the money?” Max asked. “Where’s the money going? If there are no invoices to Leland Brown in our records, what happens to the checks when they pay?”

  She had to do this. She just had to tell them the truth and get the hell out of there.

  “She deposits them into her own bank account.”

  Wendy lost it then, standing from the table, knocking the mugs over and sending coffee cascading across the table. Max tried to steady her. Rosie stood and took a step away.

  “I can’t believe it,” Wendy ranted. “I can’t believe she did this to me. I trusted her. And the bank isn't supposed to...” She turned her narrowed eyes to Rosie. “I trusted you. I can’t believe you didn’t tell me. All this time.” She threw her hands out. “I’m so stupid. I thought we were friends.”

  Max grabbed her arm then. “Don’t,” he told her. “Don’t say things you’re going to regret. Let’s get to the bottom of this thing with Lisa first, then you can figure everything else out. I’ll take you over to the office and we’ll go over things with a fine-tooth comb.”

  “I wouldn’t even know where to start.” Wendy angrily swiped a tear that leaked out of the corner of her eye.

  “We’ll figure it out,” Max told her confidently.

  “You should start by checking the schedules for the last few months and making sure all the invoices for all the jobs are there.”

  “I think you’ve helped enough, Rosie.” Wendy was furious, and she had every right to be.

  Knowing she didn’t belong there anymore, Rosie dismissed herself from the table and made a hasty exit, and neither of them tried to stop her. When she was outside, she walked ar
ound the corner of Wendy’s building and waited. Five minutes later, she watched as Max led Wendy to her car and they drove away.

  “I’m sorry that turned out the way it did, dear.” Mrs. Murphy sounded sad. “She needed to know. I’m sure she’ll come around.”

  Rosie shrugged. “Doesn’t matter.” She pushed herself from the shadow she was hiding in and headed back to Wendy’s door.

  “What are you doing?” Grandma Murphy asked.

  “Cleaning up the mess Wendy made cooking dinner. Seems like the least I can do, doesn’t it?”

  “This wasn’t your fault, Rosie,” the older woman told her as she searched for Wendy’s spare key. She found it hidden under a plant.

  She shrugged again as she unlocked the door. “It doesn’t really matter whose fault it is, does it?” she asked. “I tried to tell you. The truth’s never done me any favors. I don’t see why it would change now.”

  She let herself into Wendy’s apartment, which she realized was a complete violation. But Wendy had gone out of her way to do something nice for her and she’d ruined it. The least she could do was clean up some of the physical mess she’d made.

  It always surprised Rosie how dark it could be at night. The dark you experience when you’re in your home with your eyes closed isn’t the same as the all-encompassing dark of night.

  Rosie had spent two hours scrubbing dishes and countertops in Wendy’s condo. She’d made sure all the dishes were washed and put away. The leftovers were in Tupperware and in the fridge. The tablecloth Wendy had spilled coffee on was hand-washed and drying in the bathroom. The floors were swept and there was no trace of the ill-fated dinner other than the smell that lingered in the air.

  She’d taken the seven forty-five bus the two miles to her stop and was walking the remaining mile to the camper. Mrs. Murphy had disappeared shortly after she’d started cleaning, Rosie assumed to watch over Wendy and Max at the office.

  What would she do now? Would she have to get a new job? Would she have to move to a new town? Get a new name? That seemed extreme, though it wasn't completely far-fetched.