Page 26 of The Lonely Hearts Book Club

“You.” Arthur burst through the kitchen door with his customary frown. There was a hitch in both his step and his breath, but he didn’t let them slow him down. “The busybody from across the street. You have to save me.”

Since the singing was still going on, I could only assume there was another person in the kitchen. And since Arthur was about to throw himself on my chest, I guessed it wasn’t a person he liked very much.

“How good are you at getting rid of unwanted guests?” he demanded. Without waiting for an answer, he laughed. “Who am I kidding? All we have to do is start you talking, and anyone in their right mind will run screaming for the hills. Quick, Sloane… What are that fool’s least favorite topics of conversation?”

Once again, he took it upon himself to answer. He pointed at me. “Tell him the plot to your favorite soap opera. That’ll do the trick.”

Since soap operas wereliteralexperts when it came to telling a compelling story that kept people coming back for more, I didn’t let his insults get me down. Arthur McLachlan was a man who wouldn’t know a good amnesia backstory if it bit him on the a—

He took one glance at the box under my arm and grunted. “And hide that food. Whatever you’ve got in there smells delicious. It’ll only make him want to stay.”

The box was lifted from my hands, and I found myself being pushed through to the kitchen. Sloane uttered a faint protest, but as soon as I stepped onto the cracked linoleum floor, I saw my mission as clearly as the newly cleaned windows along the back wall.

“Tesla Model S!” I called brightly. “I didn’t notice your car outside.”

The man who’d accompanied Sloane the first night whirled at the sound of my voice, the Gershwin song dying on his well-molded lips. From the way his sleeves were pushed up to his elbows and the air reeked of vinegar, it was obvious he’d been at his window-cleaning task for some time.

“Oh,” he said, blinking at me. “It’s you.”

I was ready for this reaction. In my forty-four years on this planet, I’d never been the sort of woman who lit up a room when she walked into it. I’d been cute enough in my twenties, partly because I’d jumped headfirst into the lifestyle and wardrobe of a post-hardcore groupie, but mostly becauseeveryonewas cute in their twenties. It just took a couple decades of hard living and suddenly sagging skin to realize it.

“You’re the lady who got Sloane into this mess in the first place,” the man continued flatly. “The one who made her sign up to be that old man’s caregiver.”

“That’s me,” I said without letting the smile from my lips. “Andyou’recleaning those windows wrong. Paper towels leave streaks. What you want is a wad of newspaper.”

“I know how to clean a window, thanks.”

I shrugged. “Just trying to help. You want a hand?”

He eyed me suspiciously but held out a spray bottle. “Have you come to relieve Sloane’s shift for the night? This arrangement seems highly irregular—actually, this wholesituationdoes. In my medical practice, we’d never approach a care plan so haphazardly.”

“You’re a doctor. Becauseof courseyou are,” I said, more to myself than to the man. The expensive haircut, the car, the fact that he was wearing surgical gloves to apply a mild vinegar solution to glass—it was written all over him. “Let me guess. Dermatology? No. Radiology?”

I tapped my teeth and called upon the powers of the universe—or, in this case, the fact that he was off from work before six o’clock and looked incredibly well rested for a member of the medical profession. With a snap of my fingers, I had it. “You’re a chiropractor, aren’t you?”

“Sloane told you, didn’t she?”

With that, my decision was made. Even if it killed me—even if I had to recall a decade’s worth of soap operas until I found the slowest, most ridiculous story line—I was getting this man out of Arthur’s house. He could have at leastpretendedto be impressed by my clairvoyance.

“I knew a chiropractor once,” I said as I sprayed the vinegar solution onto the nearest window and swiped. It was just like I said—streaks. No matter how hard you tried, paper towels always left residue behind. “He had three wives, but none of them knew the others existed. No kids, thank goodness, but his second wife wanted them really badly. After a while, she got so desperate she started to stuff her shirts with pillows to make it look like she was pregnant. And a good thing, too, because she got shot in a bank robbery gone wrong, and those pillows saved her life. Should we open these windows to let in a little air, do you think?”

A snort of laughter caused me to turn around. Arthur stood a few feet back, his body curved over his cane like a comma. “Leave them closed,” he said. “I like the smell of vinegar.”

This felt a littletooobvious to me, but Sloane’s doctor only grimaced. He obviously wasn’t an easy man to dislodge.

Unfortunately for him, neither was I.

“The woman had to have emergency surgery, but they managed to save her life just in time,” I continued. “Only the blood donor they used had a rare condition that causes instant and spontaneous pregnancy.”

Sloane’s doctor coughed indignantly. “That’s not a thing.”

“Oh, it’s a thing,” Arthur interrupted without missing a beat. “My late wife had it. We had to be very careful with her diet, or who knows how many kids we would’ve ended up with.”

“You’re making that up. Both of you.”

“It’s a form of porphyria, I believe,” Arthur continued. He rolled a knowing eye toward me and explained, “Many literary sources link porphyria with the earliest tales of vampirism. Browning, in particular, heavily influenced the concept.”

I nodded as though I understood what he was talking about. The only literary vampires I knew were the ones from the Twilight series—which, to be fair, heavily influenced a conception of my own. There was a reason my daughter was named Bella.