Twanged Read Online Free

though. She’d seen it all in this job. Especially on the late-night shift. “Another muffin?” she asked.
    “Nope,” he answered as he slurped his freshly refilled cup.
    “Holler if you need me.” She walked off, her white rubbersoled shoes squeaking slightly on the grimy floor.
    He stared down at the paper again. The Melting Pot Music Festival in the Hamptons. Melting Pot, my foot, he thought. You’re allowed in the Melting Pot only if you ‘ve got a lot of gold to throw in with you.
    But Brigid O ‘Neill was coming to the Hamptons with her fiddle. That’s all that counted. Right after he was so rudely thrown in jail, her hit song, “If I’da Known You Were in Jail (I Wouldn‘t a Felt So Bad about You Not Callin’),” had come on the radio. It was the first time he had heard it. He was sure she was sending a message to him.
    Now he was in love with her. If he could just get the chance to be alone with her, he was sure she would feel the same way about him. Like in the movie The Sheik, which his mother liked to watch. Rudolph Valentino had kidnapped the girl and carried her off to his tent in the desert, and she fell in love with him. Why couldn‘t that happen to him with Brigid? He hadn’t been able to get close to her at Fan Fair or in Branson, where he’d camped out in the woods. But she was coming to the Hamptons, where he lived in a shack off the beaten path. Another sign from her! He would find a way to get to her there!
    Time to get back on the road and head home. He ‘d done enough wandering around this week.

4
    FRIDAY, JUNE 27
    LOS ANGELES
    R egan Reilly sat at the scarred wooden desk in her perfectly adequate office on the fourth floor of an old building on Hollywood Avenue in Los Angeles—home to her private investigative agency. Battered files lined the opposite wall, old-fashioned black-and-white tiles covered the ancient floor, and a small window offered a somewhat limited view of the Hollywood Hills.
    To Regan it was the perfect home office—actually the only office of her one-woman operation. She had contacts all over the country to help her out when she needed it, and her handy computer with all its databases to find out everything you wanted to know about who were checking out and were probably right in being afraid to ask.
    Investigating suspects’ past, uncovering their present, and maybe altering their future gave Regan great delight. Her parents, Nora and Luke Reilly, concluded that the choice of occupations of their thirty-one-year-old only child could be attributed to equal parts nature and nurture. “You were born with an antenna for gossip,” Nora always said. Since Nora wrote suspense novels and Luke owned three funeral homes in Summit, New Jersey, Regan’s formative years were spent listening to numerous conversations about crimes and cause of death.
    Regan poured a second cup of coffee from the thermos on her desk. Lately she’d decided that making a pot of coffee when she woke up and bringing the remains with her to work made sense. The sole drawback was that it didn’t fill the room with the wonderful scent that only a coffeepot gives off, but the old-building smell that permeated her office, nothing antiseptic about it, made Regan happy.
    Outside, the California sun was shining mercilessly, it being unseasonably hot for the month of June. On days like this, Regan loved to hole up in her office and become absorbed by her work. But today was Friday, and Regan was really there just to tie up loose ends. In the evening she was flying out on the “red eye” to Newark. A car would pick her up and take her to her parents’ house, then in the afternoon they’d all drive to the vacation home in the Hamptons that Luke and Nora had bought just last year.
    The Hamptons, a collection of beachside villages on the South Fork of Long Island, were about a two-hour drive from New York City, depending, of course, on the traffic. Sometimes called “Hollywood East,” the South