Jennifer Crusie - GETTING RID OF BRADLEY

He really wanted to kill Bradley.

“Now we search the upstairs,” he told her when they got home. “All your secrets will soon be mine.”

“I don’t have any secrets,” Lucy said.

“Well, then you should get some,” Zack said, and they looked at each other for a moment, and then both looked away.

The first room they searched on the second floor was Lucy’s- a big sunny room almost filled with a huge Victorian bed covered with an equally huge crazy quilt.

“I made the quilt,” Lucy said. “It’s just tied, not quilted, which is why it’s kind of lumpy, but that’s okay because that way I could put more layers of fill in it.” She smiled at Zack. “It’s really warm. I love it. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done.”

Her smile made Zack’s mouth go dry. He hadn’t seen it often enough to get used to it, and the thought made him both sad and angry. She should be smiling all the time. If she were his, he’d make damn sure she was smiling all the time.

Of course she wasn’t his, and he didn’t want her to be his because he was too young to settle down, and anyway, he couldn’t visualize her naked, which he was pretty sure meant she was like a sister to him, but still…

She should be smiling all the time.

“Zack?”

“I really like the quilt. Let’s look at your closet.”

Her closet had two racks in it. One side was full of soft pastel flowered dresses. The other was full of severe tailored suits in navy and black and dark brown, all with their price tags still attached.

“You schizophrenic?” Zack asked.

“No,” Lucy said. “I bought the dresses. Bradley bought the suits.”

“Then Bradley should have worn the suits. Why did you stay with this guy?”

“He wasn’t a bad person…” Lucy began, but she stopped when Zack rolled his eyes. “I know. The blonde. But that isn’t the Bradley Porter I knew. He was good to me. He loved me. He just wasn’t…fun. And he didn’t approve of me, really. He wanted to, but he didn’t None of that is enough grounds for divorce. He’s not a bad person. He’s just…lonely. I couldn’t leave him. He was so lonely.”

“Which would explain the blonde,” Zack said and then kicked himself as Lucy winced. “Sorry.”

“No, I asked for that one,” she said. “What next?”

They tapped the walls, and turned the drawers upside down, and looked under the rug and found nothing. By late afternoon, they’d turned both the second and third floors as upside down as Lucy’s drawers and found exactly the same thing- nothing.

“You don’t even have any junk,” Zack complained as they finished the last room on the third floor. “What’s wrong with you?”

“I’ve only lived here nine months,” Lucy protested. “It takes time to accumulate good junk.”

“You’ve had time to accumulate three dogs.” Zack stepped over Maxwell, who was staring into space again. “If you could do that, you could accumulate a little junk.”

“You don’t accumulate dogs.” Lucy patted Maxwell, who didn’t seem to notice. “You meet them, and you both know that you belong together. And even if you know that that’s dumb, and you don’t need a dog, and you can’t handle the responsibility, and you don’t even want a dog anyway, there it is and you have to go with it. It was meant to be.”

Zack stopped in his tracks. “Why does this sound like some dumb women’s magazine description of the perfect relationship?”

Lucy’s head jerked up from Maxwell to him. “Listen, the best relationships of my life have been with dogs. And they aren’t dumb at all. Einstein never brought a blonde into my house, and Maxwell never stood me up in a restaurant, and Heisenberg never grabbed me in an alley.”

“Hey,” Zack said. “How did I get into this?”

“Sorry,” Lucy said.

ANTHONY CAME BY THE house late in the afternoon. He stood in the middle of Lucy’s soft, flowered living room and said, “This is a wonderful room. It feels good just to be here.” He smiled down at Lucy. “It’s like you.”

Lucy beamed back. “That’s the nicest thing you could have said to me.” She stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the cheek, and he put his arm around her.

“Hey,” Zack said. “Let’s be professional here.”

“You want to be professional?” Anthony raised an eyebrow. “Get a haircut.”

“Very funny. What are you doing here?”

Anthony let go of Lucy and sat down in one of the overstuffed armchairs. “I went in to catch up on the reports this afternoon and found a message from the lab. You know the bomb that blew up Lucy’s car?”

“I’ll never forget it” Zack sat on the arm of the loveseat and pulled Lucy down onto the cushions beside him.

Anthony leaned back in his chair. “It wasn’t much of a bomb to begin with, according to the lab, although granted it did a nice job on the car. But the really interesting part is that, besides the extremely long timer that not only gave you time to notice the cat, knock Lucy into the driveway, and then have a long conversation with her-”

“Get to the point.”

“It also had a hell of a big alarm clock taped to it with a lot of sinister-looking wires. None of which had anything to do with the mechanism that caused the explosion.”

“Oh, hell,” Zack said.

“I don’t understand,” Lucy said.

Anthony turned to her. “If you had looked in your car, you would have seen a big package about the size of a shoe box with a clock taped to it and a lot of wires. What would you have done?”

“I’d have thought it was a bomb and run like crazy,” Lucy said. “I still don’t get it.”

“He’s trying to tell you that you were right,” Zack said, disgusted. “Nobody’s trying to kill you. They’re just trying to scare you out of the house. You would have called us, the bomb squad would have confirmed that it was a real bomb. And we would have moved you out of the house for safekeeping, so the house would have been empty. Except that you wouldn’t leave the dogs.”

Lucy looked back and forth between them, incredulous. “My car blew up. This guy blew up my car to scare me out of my house?”

“Well, he didn’t know about the dogs,” Anthony said. “Without the dogs, it would have worked.”

“He could have killed me!”

“No,” Zack said. “The timer on that sucker was almost five minutes. If the package was as big as Tony says, you’d have been long gone before it went off. This nut was just trying to scare you.” He met Anthony’s eyes. “Which means…”

“…there’s something in this house,” Anthony finished.

“No, there isn’t,” Lucy said. “We’ve looked. We’ve looked everywhere.”

Anthony shook his head to stop her. “That’s not all. Your report from the patrolman came in. And not only has Mrs. Dover been complaining about prowlers around this house for two weeks, she also phoned in another complaint last night. If she’s really seeing somebody, he’s still around.”

“You know, I wanted to move out of my apartment because I never felt safe there,” Lucy said. “I moved here because it felt so safe.” She looked around her at the bright, warm room. “I don’t feel so safe anymore.”

“Are you crazy?” Zack said. “You’ve got me for a bodyguard and you don’t feel safe? What’s wrong with you? First no junk, and now this.”

“No junk?” Anthony said.

“Cleanest house I’ve ever searched,” Zack said. “No junk.”

“That’s un-American,” Anthony said.

“So what happens when I go back to school tomorrow?” Lucy said.

“We keep somebody in the house,” Anthony said.

“You’re not going back to school,” Zack said.

Lucy and Anthony both frowned at him.