Bowled Over

Chapter One

Maggie sat with her back to her computer, looking around her living room, which also served as her office, her dining room, her den, her library, her—how had she ever thought this arrangement worked for her?

Claustrophobics-R-Us.

Figuratively choking herself with both hands as she stuck out her tongue and gurgled, she decided, once and for all, that she had to relocate. Expand. Grow.

Leave Alex.

Whoa.

Leave Alex?

This time the gurgle was audible, closely resembling a whimper.

Not that Alex lived with her anymore, showing up in her kitchen early in the morning, looking put together while she leaned against the sink in her ratty pajamas, just trying to stand up straight until her morning caffeine kicked in.

He wasn't sleeping just down the hall anymore, leaving the top off her toothpaste, beating every password protection she put on her computer, and generally driving her insane.

No. He was now gainfully employed as a perfume company's photo model, financially self-sufficient, and happy, living in his own condo directly across the hall. He and Sterling both were happy.

She was happy, having them live directly across the hall.

She could watch out for him, keep an eye on him, make sure he didn't do anything too herolike.

And then there was the fact that, once Sterling was tucked up in bed, Alex could tiptoe across the hall to her for a few hours and they could ... well, how could she possibly leave Alex?

And the idea of moving had nothing—nothing!—to do with the fact that her onetime friend and now archnemesis, fellow author Felicity Boothe Simmons (once Faith Simmons, back before she went NYT and figuratively left the planet), had just bought herself a two-level condo soon to be featured in Architectural Digest.

Nothing to do with that. Absolutely nothing.

Okay, maybe a little bit.

But there were better reasons.

Maggie's accountant had told her she needed the interest deduction. Her bathroom was too small; she didn't even have a bathtub, for crying out loud.

She had to keep her new treadmill in the living room (the treadmill a gift from Faith no less, given just so that Faith could comment without commenting that Maggie still hadn't lost the weight she'd gained after she quit smoking), and Sterling had this way of walking in without knocking, to see her sweating bullets as she ran her tail off in the hopes of running her tail off.

There were a lot of reasons for her to move, sell the condo, buy a bigger one. Good reasons.

And one very big drawback. Leaving Alex.

But she'd just signed a new contract with Toland Books. An obscene contract. It wasn't as if she didn't have the money, plus most of the money she'd earned in the past six years. When success hit in the publishing arena, it hit. Big. Even her earlier Alicia Tate Evans novels had been re-released, and were in their sixteenth printing, for crying out loud.

So she had buckets of money, and it wasn't because, as Alex had teased on more than one occasion, she squeezed every penny until it squealed.

Okay, maybe a little bit.

For crying out loud.

"For crying out loud, I'm becoming a little bit redundant," she said, looking over at her Christmas tree, which had been shoved into the corner of the small room. Faith's tree had been a good twenty-feet high in her two-story living room. It was pink, with real crystal ornaments, and probably snowed on itself. Not that it mattered, for crying out loud, even a little bit.

Maggie swiveled back to face her desk and looked once more at the real estate page she'd brought up on the computer screen.

The building pictured on the screen was big. Extremely big. And it had character.

If you could call vaguely resembling a wedding cake having character.

Constructed of light gray stone, the ground floor had its own straight lines and straight roof, but then the next three floors rose in half-rounded tiers. Like a wedding cake.

Built in 1897, it had seven huge bedrooms, nine fireplaces, seven full bathrooms, two kitchens, a couple of balconies, a pair of staircases, a rooftop garden, and an enclosed backyard fashioned of marble, or something. At any rate, there were two huge stone greyhounds guarding the entrance to the patio like twin sphinxes.

If stone greyhound sentries didn't say class, what did?

And the house—not a floor, not a condo, an entire house!—was on West Seventy-sixth Street, just off Broadway. Close to Central Park, not too far away from Riverside Park, and not within easy walking distance of Faith's pink and white penthouse on the Upper East Side.

The interior had original woodwork to die for, kitchens that would be any gourmet's dream—Maggie didn't really care about the kitchens, but Sterling would—and the main room on the top floor had a twenty-by-forty-foot glass ceiling. A domed, many-paned glass ceiling! Jeez.

The house called to her.

Alex called to her.

She needed both of them.

She looked at the page again.

Much too large a place for one person, definitely, but not at all too large for three people. Alex and Sterling could move in, maybe even share expenses, and they could all be together and yet private from one another, even while they were all under the same glass roof.

Maggie loved it when a plan came together.

And all for only six million nine hundred and fifty dollars. For Manhattan, for a house like that, six million nine hundred and fifty dollars was pretty much chump change. Right?

"Meanwhile, back in the land of reality," Maggie muttered to herself, closing the window on a photograph of the roof garden. "Besides, when you get to nearly seven million, why bother with the fifty bucks on the end? That's so tacky."

Wellington, the black male Persian, stood up, stretched, and waddled over to rub himself against Maggie's ankles.

"I wasn't talking to you, fish-breath. I was talking to myself," Maggie told him, reaching down to scratch behind his ears. "But, as long as you're here—would you like a new house, hmm? It's got a walled garden out back. I could open the door, and you and Nappy could go outside, sprawl belly-up in the sun. You'd like that, wouldn't you?"

Wellington purred, rubbed his head against her hand.

"Sure, that's it," Maggie said, inspired. "I'm the old maid cat lady, thinking about buying a nearly seven-million-dollar house so her cats can lie in the sun. Is that as bad as Faith enrolling that pee-machine mutt of hers in doggy day care? No, it's probably worse. Cripes. Worse than Faith. You got to go some to be worse than Faith, Welly, trust me."

Wellington looked up at Maggie, meowed something probably Persian-speak for "I'm going to assume we're through here," and headed back to the still-warm spot on the carpet.

Maggie swiveled back to face the screen and called up the Realtor listing again. There it was; bottom right corner of the page: Rodgers Regency Realty. Regency? Like the English Regency, the one in which her perfect hero cavorted? Was that an omen, or what?

Especially the cavorting part.

It could work.

But did she have the guts to actually do this?

She and Alex and Sterling were leaving for New Jersey in a few days for the Annual Kelly Dysfunctional Christmas. By the time she got back, the house could be sold. An opportunity, gone.

Then she'd spend the next year or so kicking herself around the apartment, bemoaning her missed opportunity. And, with the size of this place, she'd be dizzy in a week, just from booting herself in circles.

She looked toward the bookcase, saw the Dan Mittman book Doctor Bob had given her for Christmas. Remembered a quote from the book: The time is now, the place is here. Stay in the present. You can do nothing to change the past, and the future will never come exactly as you plan or hope for.

Not so shabby, Danny boy, even if you ended with a preposition.

Maybe even prophetic.

Maggie picked up her nicotine inhaler—minus its medicinal cartridge now, so that it was, in reality, a pacifier—sucked on it like the pitiful ninny she was, and then reached for the phone.

As Maggie knows, one of the time-honored (or timeworn) ways to heighten anticipation and keep readers turning the pages while the author is busily filling in the background information several books into an on-going series, is to introduce some shadowy figure at about this point.

Put him in italics at the end of a chapter, make him sort of deep, sort of ambiguous, sort of scary.

Foreshadowing. Foreboding. Dropping an oblique hint or two. Maybe a red herring to throw off the armchair crime-solver. Setting the hook in the reader's mouth.

Or, if feeling less literarily inclined—flipping the reader a fish.

One way or another, fish always seem to be involved ...

Anyway.

The object of the exercise is that the reader hears the footsteps, knows Something Wicked This Way Comes a few chapters down the road.

So what the hell, why not.

Introducing, ta-da, the Shadowy Figure.

Just don't count on the baddie being deep. Not in Maggie's world ...

Sometimes you just have to do what you have to do. Circumstances demanded as much.

And it wasn't like, hey, there were a million different ideas out there. Just this one. A good idea. Good ideas didn't come along that often. There had been Dad and the hula hoop, but somebody else got there first.

Somebody else was always getting there first.

Now. What about the weapon ... ?

A gun?

God, no. Too loud.

A knife?

Ix-nay on the knife. Too messy.

Strangulation? No way. Much too up close and personal.

Okay, okay. So the idea still needed some work ...

See? That's how it's done. Fun, huh? And not just senseless banter, either, because that wouldn't be fair to the reader. There's a clue in there, honest!

We'll do it again in a little bit. Stay tuned.