Woman Most Wanted. Harper Allen

that lay on the table, finally pulling out a black plastic tube. She squinted at it. “Mauve,” she said in a disappointed tone. “What a rip-off name. So who do you work for, Ginger?”

      “The Skipper. And the Professor’s her best customer,” another girl said. She flipped open a compact and checked her teeth in its mirror, then snapped it shut and started humming a tune. The other two girls at the table started giggling and humming along with her, and even the woman with the mauve lipstick grinned and joined in. The only words they seemed to know were the last few, and the whole table finished on cue.

      “Here on Gilligan’s Isle!”

      It had to be a television thing again, Jenna thought in frustration. She smiled weakly. There was so much she’d missed through Franklin’s vow never to own one. People were always using catchphrases that meant nothing to her— “Book ’em, Dano,” or “I’ll buy a vowel, Pat,” or “Lu-u-ucy, I’m home!” For a while it had seemed that every second person was hitting his head and saying, “Doh!” and she’d never figured out what that had been all about. This song had to be something along those lines.

      “I work for Parks, Parks,” she said as the laughter subsided. “At the corner of Barton and South Streets.” Just then her breakfast came; scrambled eggs and toast with a side order of home fries and a cup of tea with the tea bag still in it. Jenna stopped talking and started eating.

      Nothing had ever tasted so good in her whole life. The eggs were a little greasy and the home fries were a lot greasy and the toast was soggy, but she was so hungry it wasn’t until she was scraping the last blob of grape jam out of the tiny plastic container onto her last triangle of toast that she realized that the table of women had fallen silent.

      She looked up in midchew.

      “You sure can pack it away.” The woman with the mauve lipstick was staring at her in awe. “You better hope that the johns on the corner of Barton and South like ’em a little chunky, Ginger, ’cause at that rate you’re not going to fit into a size eight much longer.”

      Jenna swallowed the last bite of toast and started jiggling the tea bag up and down in her cup. “I don’t usually—”

      Johns? She took another look at the table of women, but this time her perceptions weren’t dulled by hunger. Short clingy skirts, full makeup, high heels…not exactly a.m. attire. Not unless a girl had been working all night….

      “You’re not one of us, are you?” The question came from the woman who’d started humming the song, and there was an edge of suspicion in her tone. “What are you doing here, slumming?”

      “Cool it, Crystal.” The woman with the mauve lipstick stared curiously at Jenna, taking in her wrinkled dress and the faint smudges under her eyes. “She’s right, though—you’re no working girl. You running from some man, honey?”

      The rough kindness in her voice was almost Jenna’s undoing. She’d been up half the night, her thoughts chasing each other in ever-tightening circles, and although she’d finally come to a decision about her unanticipated legacy from Franklin, she still hadn’t been able to bring herself to examine the hollow sense of betrayal and loss she’d experienced when she’d realized that Matt was trying to trick her into giving up her freedom.

      How could he have done that to her? After that moment of electricity that had passed between them, how could he have reverted so swiftly to being the perfect Agency operative—to that stiffly correct, by-the-book persona that she’d thought was just a mask for the real Matt D’Angelo? He’d been willing to dump her at the nearest hospital and wash his hands of her, just because she’d come off as a little flaky.

      Okay, a lot flaky, Jenna admitted to herself. But the man couldn’t have it both ways. Either he should have treated her from the first with an arm’s-length formality or he should have acknowledged that there was some kind of inexplicable bond between them and tried to help her, not have her locked up. He wasn’t allowed to go touching her hand one minute and selling her out the next. That was just confusing, and irritating and…and painful.

      “I guess you could say I’m running from a man,” she said slowly. “On top of that, it seems like since I first met him yesterday my whole life’s disappeared—my money’s gone, I don’t have an apartment anymore and even the cat I thought I had doesn’t exist. Not that any of that was Matt’s fault, of course,” she added hastily.

      “Honey, you might as well have Welcome written down the middle of your back.” Crystal leaned forward, her earlier antagonism gone. “Don’t be a doormat! Of course it’s his fault. It sounds like he really did a number on you—just like when Tiffany’s man trashed her place and cleaned out her bank account, right, Tiff?”

      Mauve-lipsticked lips pursed together disapprovingly. “Stevie was no good, but he never would have had a cat whacked. That’s just plain twisted. Listen, Ginger—if you ever need help or money or anything, here’s the number of this place.”

      She rooted around in her purse again and came up with an eyebrow-pencil stub and a pack of matches. Scrawling something on the inside flap of the matchbook, she handed it to Jenna and nodded her head at the unshaven man behind the counter. “Joe takes messages for me, and I’m in here a couple of times a day. You need any money now?”

      “No.” Jenna felt a lump rise in her throat, and she gave a hasty cough. “I really am a working girl—just not in the way you meant, I guess.”

      “Don’t apologize, Ginger.” Behind the thickly mascaraed lashes Tiffany’s eyes held a hint of wistfulness. “Somehow you didn’t seem the type, anyway. But remember what I said—call if things don’t work out or if this Matt jerk tracks you down and starts hassling you again.”

      Jenna nodded, too touched to speak, and rose from the table. She fished out a heavy handful of quarters from her pocket, but before she could start counting out enough for her bill, Crystal’s sardonic voice stopped her.

      “We’ll cover the tab, Ginger. Just say hello to the Skipper for us, okay?”

      All the way to Parks, Parks the catchy little tune they’d been humming as she left the diner kept running through Jenna’s head. People were pretty nice, once you got to know them, she thought. She’d never need to take Tiffany up on her offer, but the generosity of spirit behind it just bore out what she’d learned growing up on the communes—it didn’t take much to turn a stranger into a friend.