Free Tangled Thing Called Love by Juliet Rosetti Page B

who’d lost their mother and then their sister. Still, she couldn’t help feeling that there was something a little prefab about Gil Fanchon’s spiel, like a pitchman on late-night television. An air of the huckster clung to Gil.
    Ben kept one eye on Mazie as he videotaped. He didn’t trust Fanchon one inch. Every time Mazie turned her back, the guy’s eyes tracked to her ass. Ben had already discounted 90 percent of what Fanchon had told them. He was a big-time bullshitter, and Ben didn’t like the way he was playing on Mazie’s sympathy.
    Tomorrow, Ben vowed, he was going to do some investigating, and he wouldn’t be one bit surprised to discover that the person behind Fawn Fanchon’s disappearance was her own father.

Chapter Eleven
    How not to start your morning: with a phone call from a teacher.
    “Is this Miss Maguire?” asked an unfamiliar woman’s voice.
    “Yes?”
    “I’m Abby Stowe, the third-grade summer school teacher?”
    Summer school. The greatest advancement in education since chalk as far as Mazie was concerned. It provided a bright yellow school bus that siphoned up the twins and didn’t regurgitate them until five hours later.
    “I believe you’re the contact person for Joseph and Samuel Maguire?” Miss Stowe went on. “Did you give the boys permission to bring a dog to class?”
    “No, I did not.” How had the little weasels managed to pull off a stunt like that? One of them must have popped Muffin into a backpack just before getting on the bus. Assuming that Muffin was in the kitchen with Gran, Mazie hadn’t noticed him missing. She and Ben had hurriedly left right after the boys, both of them eager to get started on their investigation of Fawn Fanchon’s disappearance.
    Their first stop had been the Coulee County Sheriff’s Department. There was a surprising amount of information available to the public under the open records law: three thick manila file folders, in fact. The sheriff’s department hadn’t started computerizing its files until 2004, so there was no way to search or cross-reference material; everything had to be gone through one item at a time. It was a mess—not indexed or alphabetized and with papers virtually exploding out of the folders. But Ben was looking at it as though it were breakfast and lunch combined.
    “What are we looking for exactly?” Mazie asked him.
    “Possibilities. In the documentary, we want to be able to provide half a dozen alternate scenarios: Fawn being abducted by a stranger, or meeting her secret lover, or the devil thing—”
    “Do we have a point of view? Are we leaning heavily on the random rapist, or do we want to have Fawn living in a Florida trailer park with—” Abruptly Mazie lowered hervoice. She’d forgotten she was in the scuttlebutt center of the world. Margery Kienast, the sheriff’s department secretary, was hovering nearby, pretending to file paper, but eavesdropping so blatantly it was a wonder her ears didn’t lift her off the ground. Margery was not a believer in the “loose lips sink ships” approach to life, and the news that someone was poking into Fawn’s disappearance would be all over the dirty-laundry clotheslines by noon.
    “No, we don’t have a point of view,” Ben said, lowering his voice as well. “We’re open to all possibilities. Can you get hold of a computer? I’d like to see what kind of video is available on Fawn, see what the news coverage was like at the time.”
    “I could use one of the library computers,” Mazie suggested. She heard how tight her voice sounded, and realized that she and Ben were on a cautious footing with each other this morning. There was a sense of unfinished business between them. Mazie had expected Ben to come to her bedroom again last night, but if he had, she hadn’t noticed. Exhausted, she’d slept heavily, dreamed vividly, and hadn’t wakened until Gran had rapped on her door in the morning.
    She set off for the library, but getting access to a