Read Online Flipped Out by Jennie Bentley - Free Book Online

I have to sew pillows and curtains. Derek has to make window boxes.”
    “Isn’t the camera guy going to want to tape you doing those things?”
    “I’ll leave a seam undone for the camera,” I said. “Derek can make most of the boxes and leave one for demonstration, as well.”
    “We’ll be at Avery’s house if you need us.” Derek guided me toward the truck while Kate opened the door to the Volvo station wagon and slid behind the wheel. The TV van had already pulled away from the curb in the direction of the B&B.

    It ended up being a long night. After dinner, I put together a dozen pillows from bolts of fabric I had sitting around in the spare bedroom upstairs while Derek used Aunt Inga’s front porch to saw and hammer window boxes to hang outside the cottage. While he was at it, he made two planters, as well, one for each side of the front door.
    “They’re no different,” he explained as he worked. “If you know how to make one, you can figure out how to make the other. Planters are square with legs while window boxes are rectangular. The most important thing, whether you’re making a box or a planter, is to drill holes through the bottom so the water can drain out.”
    “Makes sense.” I had taken a break from sewing and had brought Derek a cold drink to keep him going. A bottle of beer, as it happened. He doesn’t care much for wine. In all the time that he was married to Melissa, she only ever succeeded in getting him to share one certain type of Bordeaux with her, he’d told me. Like Melissa, I prefer red wine to beer, but since we had to be up early tomorrow and I still had work to do tonight, I thought I’d better not indulge. I was sitting in Aunt Inga’s porch swing with Mischa on my lap, sipping from a can of Diet Coke, while Derek kept working and giving me a running commentary on what he was doing. He had removed his shirt, and I stroked Mischa absently and tried not to drool too visibly as I watched him flex and bend.
    Mischa was on duty, of course. I could see the determination on his little furry face and in the way the tip of his tail twitched occasionally as he watched Derek. When we walked through the door earlier, Derek with the friendly greeting, “Hello, killer,” Mischa had crouched and hissed. I’d been too slow to intercept him: He had launched himself at Derek’s leg, and I’d had to unhook him from the denim, claw by claw. Now he was curled up on my lap, a boneless bundle of silvery blue fur, with his eyes wide open and watching Derek’s every move. Derek kept his distance; if he were to come any closer, Mischa would most likely try to eviscerate him.
    “So what did you think of them all?” I asked after a moment.
    Derek glanced over at me. “The crew? They seemed OK, didn’t they?”
    “All except Adam.”
    Derek lifted the bottle and toasted me with it, grinning, before he took a swallow of beer. “Nina seems nice. And she must be competent, if she’s in charge.”
    “Funny coincidence, that she knows Tony Micelli.”
    “Small world.” Derek nodded, putting the bottle back down on the windowsill. “Or maybe not. Television is a community. Anyone who has lasted fifteen or twenty years probably knows, or knows of, anyone else who’s been around that long.”
    “She didn’t seem too happy to see him, did she?”
    Derek pondered for a moment. “Not very, no. More surprised or shocked than unhappy, though, I think. And she must have gotten over it if she agreed to have dinner with him.”
    “I guess so. Ted didn’t seem to like him much, either.”
    “No,” Derek said, “he didn’t. Then again, you and I don’t like Tony much ourselves, so I don’t know that I can blame him for that.”
    “That’s true.” I had taken against Tony last autumn, when we’d found that skeleton in the crawlspace of the house on Becklea Drive, and I had overheard him wishing for a case of serial murder, with bodies buried all over the yard. John Wayne Gacy in