07 Uncorked - Chrissy McMullen Mystery Read Online Free PDF

couldn’t see it from where she was. Which was on location in Matamata, New Zealand. Elaine Butterfield is a kick-ass actress, my best friend since grade school, and something of a weird-ass telepath, but generally she can’t see my body motions unless she’s there in front of me. I wished rather desperately that she was there right then, but she’d gotten married about a year earlier and tended to spend a good deal of time with her husband, a dweeby little nerd named J.D. Solberg.
    “Yeah. Sure.” I stared at my back door for a second and whined. It took me a moment to realize it wasn’t me that sounded like an abandoned pup. It was Harley. Rising like an automaton, I trailed off to let him in. He slunk inside, swinging his boxy head left and right in search of Rivera. It’s a well-known fact that even the most neglected kids love their deadbeat dads. “I’m fine.”
    “Is he gone?”
    “Looks like it.” I tried to buck up. “What’d you say to him?”
    “I told him the truth.”
    “That he’s a jackass?” I said, but I didn’t really think he was a jackass. I thought I should think he was a jackass, but when I considered his ass I rarely had the equus asinus in mind.
    “That you deserve more than a panting reunion once every few months,” she said.
    “Uh huh.” I nodded dismally. “But did you threaten him with some kind of bodily harm or something, too?”
    “I said he was being unfair to you.”
    This was kind of a disappointment. I mean, it’s not as if I wanted Rivera hanging around or anything. But I would have preferred to know he wasn’t that easy to dissuade from the whole panting reunion thing. Although, I have to admit, Brainy Laney Butterfield has amazing powers of persuasion. She’s been convincing men to act like idiots ever since the advent of her boobs.
    “I’m sorry,” she said.
    “For what?”
    “That he left.”
    “Are you kidding me?” I said, and snorted. It was a first-class snort despite my exhaustion. “You did me a huge favor. I didn’t want him hanging around here.” She remained silent. I fidgeted in the quiet. I’m never comfortable lying to Laney.
    She could make me fidget from another solar system. Silence is kind of like her own personal truth serum.
    “Well…” I paused and sat down. “Most of me didn’t want him here.”
    “My apologies to those bits that did.”
    “Yeah, well…” I breathed deep and rotated my neck, beginning to relax a little as I fiddled with Harley’s ear. His search for Rivera had been fruitless and he had come to plop his snout on my thigh and give me the droopy eye. “Those bits are fickle.”
    “And happy with Marc, right?”
    I sat up a little straighter. Harley rolled his eyes up at me but didn‘t move his head.
    “Of course they’re happy with Marc. They’re thrilled with Marc. Did I tell you he sold out at the bookstore in Pinsk?”
    “Do you mean Minsk?”
    “No.”
    “Okay. Well…that’s…exciting,” she said, and for a moment I almost wondered if she was being sarcastic. Laney does sarcasm so well it’s sometimes difficult to detect. I’m not always so subtle. “I’m just not sure what that does for your fickle bits.”
    “My fickle bits are unimportant, Laney. Because I’ve changed. Grown up. I’m classy now.”
    “Instead of Irish?”
    I ignored her. “I’ve learned to make chicken marsala.”
    “Really.”
    “I wash my car on a regular basis,” I said, and didn’t bother to add that my less-than-classy automobile sometimes rebelled by popping a door an orifice open at rather surprising moments…such as when I was driving down the interstate.
    “Wow.”
    “And I’m reading…” I glanced toward the dog-eared romance novel on my coffee table, then searched for the classic I had begun six months earlier and lost a half an hour after that. “…The Sun Also Rises.”
    “Yikes.”
    “Because I now realize that cerebral stimulation is so much more important than a couple moments of