She grins. “Let me guess, you complimented her eyes, and she hasn’t given you a moment’s peace since?”
I laugh because while I’m the target of her joke, I find myself enjoying her feistiness. I get the impression that she doesn’t take shit from anyone, and that thought shoots an electrical current of awareness through my body. “If it worked that well with her, you can understand why I’d try it again. Did your sister’s dog adopt you too?”
“No, I’m dog-sitting her two dogs for the next few weeks while she and her husband take a babymoon.”
I squint at her. “A baby what?”
Chuckling, she says, “It’s a fancy way of saying you’re taking a vacation while you’re pregnant.”
It’s the verbal equivalent of taking a shortcut, but it still seems silly. Then I realize she said she’s watching two of her sister’s canines. “Dogs?”
She squints up at me with a playful look. “Cats.”
I snort. “I was about to say that you said you were watching her two dogs. Plural. But I only see one leash.”
“I had to leave the other one back at the house,” she says. “He’s a grumpy old man. If I brought him with us, he’d be telling all the other dogs to get off his lawn.”
“He must get that from his aunt,” I say.
She stares at me for a moment and laughs. “Hey, your lines are improving.” Only it wasn’t a line. I consider telling her so, but she speaks before I can. “If someone is on my lawn and I don’t want them there, I have no trouble telling them they’re trespassing.”
“Am I on your lawn?” I ask before I can stop myself.
Her smile fades as she studies my face. I can see emotions flickering in those gorgeous eyes of hers, and I have the sudden urge to lift my hand and cup her cheek to see if her skin is as soft as it looks. But that’s ridiculous. I don’t even know her name.
The corners of her mouth tilt up, but her teasing tone is gone. “I was the one who approached you, so technically it’s your lawn.”
“Technically it belongs to the city of Asheville,” I say, unable to take my eyes from hers. “But I’m not telling you to go away.”
Chapter Three
Molly
Rules #1 and #2 of Bad Luck Club are not to talk about Bad Luck Club with anyone who’s not luck-challenged. But I have risked breaking those rules for you, dear readers, because you really are that important.
Rule #3 of Bad Luck Club is to share your misfortunes with everyone in the club. That way, you have incentive to follow through on your promises, or pay a hefty price. Your colleagues in the club will have the power to release your information anonymously, abiding by Rules #1 and #2, of course, if you don’t do your part. It may not be nice, but that’s how we get things done.
—Augusta Glower, Bad Luck Club
I’d considered going straight to my sister’s friend Blue for information about the Bad Luck Club, but the last time I tried to get the scoop from her and her husband, they were quick to uphold rules one and two—Don’t talk about Bad Luck Club. Plus, I figured there was a very strong chance she would immediately call Maisie to warn her that I was poking my nose where it didn’t belong.
Another possibility was to approach Augusta herself, but I ditched the idea of talking to her this early because I strongly suspect she’s a liar.
Which was how I landed on the idea of finding Karl-slash-Cal. I figured I could ask him some questions and maybe, if I got really lucky, wheedle my way into the local Bad Luck Club. One time I sweet-talked my way into a meeting of asexual swingers, which ended up being less interesting than you would think. It was basically people who liked to argue with people other than their significant others for the sake of variety.
But I digress.
Finding Cal was easier than it should have been, thanks to Augusta’s big mouth and inability to properly conceal identities. Toward the beginning of the book, she wrote, Karl and Wolf adopted a dog together as one of their first challenges, because Wolf said he wanted someone to come home to, and if she was happy every time he showed up, all the better, given that his second wife had looked like she wanted to bang his head in with a frying pan toward the end. The dog was from a local, no-kill shelter.
I took that to mean that Karl—probable name Cal—and his dad might have adopted a dog from Maisie about three years ago, which was when the club launched. Thankfully, my sister had left me with a list of emergency numbers, including contact information for her outreach manager, Dustin, at the shelter.
I’ve met Dustin half a dozen times, and the man was a reporter’s dream: an unrepentant busybody who watches people as if he were Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window. Okay, dated reference, but my mom and I used to watch old thrillers together in the basement, and that one stuck. Maybe because I was an unrepentant busybody too, and at the time my dream was to discover a fascinating story, one no one else had scooped.
That dream died back in high school, but I’d felt that old itch again lately, and now it’s like someone has switched my Jimmy Stewart mode back on.
Hopefully my scoop wouldn’t involve a body bag and a shovel.
Still, even though I was cautiously optimistic that the dog might have been adopted from Maisie’s shelter, I didn’t expect to get lucky with my first call. You almost never get lucky with your first lead. But within five minutes, Dustin was talking my ear off about that hot dish, Cal, who’d adopted Ruby with his father, Bear. He remembered because he saw them at the Azalea Dog Park all the time. According to him, Cal went practically every day.
“That’s great, Dustin. You’re a gentleman and a scholar. Now, how am I going to know it’s him? Will he be carrying a single red rose?”
He just laughed and said, “Oh, you’ll know.”
Then barking sounded over the line, someone shouted something about a Danish, and he quickly said goodbye and hung up.
Karl and Wolf. Cal and Bear. It fit, although I thought even less of Augusta’s shitty attempts to disguise her friends’ identities. It was borderline shocking she’d gotten it past the publishing house’s attorneys, although presumably she’d lied and either hired or strong-armed witnesses into backing up her story. It happened, even in the blogosphere.
On my first attempt to meet Cal, Sunday afternoon, I made the mistake of bringing both dogs. Within five minutes, Ein had herded a much larger dog into a corner and proceeded to snap at him every time he so much as wagged his tail. I did not report that to Maisie in our daily check-in call.
The second day, problem solved. I only took Chaco. Still no Cal…and I developed a new worry that unemployment was turning me into one of the stalkery weirdos I’d fielded when I worked for Beyond the Sheets.
Then I got an email back from Kate Jeffries, the lead editor at Rogue Word, an online magazine that’s a bit like Vice, except with slightly blunter teeth. The gist of her note was that she likes my style and they’re actually looking to hire someone at the end of the summer, but they need a writer who can do investigative pieces in addition to lighter stories. Big Mouth Me, I replied that I was working on one. Her response was to immediately call me. Although I didn’t share my theory with her—given that I don’t have much of one at this point—I did tell her I was working on something related to Augusta’s book. She’d heard of it, thankfully, and she all but promised me the job if I can pull off a newsworthy scoop.