Duets No. 104 : A Real Work of Art and Thick as Thieves

by Samantha Connolly; Jennifer McKinlay

• ISBN13: 9780373441709
• ISBN10: 0373441703
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-07-01
• Publisher: Harlequin

Excerpts

"Where's Copenhagen?" Megan looked around crossly.

"It was right here. I had my hands on it and ... oh great, now I've lost Copenhagen."

She flung her pen across the room and watched it bounce harmlessly against the door.

"How can two weeks worth of notes just vanish? Could somebody please explain that to me?"

She supposed if there was someone else in the room they might have, but there wasn't so Megan felt free to continue muttering.

"I hate this. It's too hard and I can't do it and anyway, I don't even want to."

She swiveled in her chair and looked up at the rows of books on the tall bookshelf behind her desk. It was crammed with guidebooks and pamphlets as well as an impressive collection of dictionaries in a multitude of languages, thesauri and books of grammar. And there on the top shelf, in pride of place, were the travel guidebooks she'd written. Out of the four hundred titles available in the Going Native series she was the proud author of five: India, Alaska, New Orleans, Austria and Tokyo. The book on Scandinavia would make six.

It wasn't everybody's idea of security, flitting off to spend eight months of the year in a strange country, but Megan loved it. She even loved writing about it afterward.

Just not right now. Much as she loved coming back to San Francisco, which was as much her home base as any place in the world could be, it was always a bit anticlimactic to knuckle down to the actual work after having an adventure. In a few weeks she'd be back in her stride, but the only way to get there was to do the work.

She glared at the messy stacks of notes on the desk in front of her and on the floor around her. She'd already spent a week sifting through them, trying to create some kind of order, yet it seemed as if she'd made no progress whatsoever.

If only she was a little more organized when she was traveling, but no, she scribbled disjointed paragraphs on whatever came to hand, dotting the margins of her guidebooks with exclamation marks which now meant nothing to her and jotting down helpful notes like remember story about kids in river . She may as well have written make up story about kids in river . All this and there was still a stack of dictaphone tapes to be transcribed. The pages she had already organized were festooned with yellow sticky notes and cross-references and now she couldn't even find her Copenhagen notes.

"I could be married," she said, sinking into a familiar daydream. "I could be a suburban housewife. I could be in my kitchen waiting for my husband to come home, and my biggest dilemma would be what to give him for dinner. Or no, wait, it's Sunday. We'd probably be in the park with the kids. And I wouldn't care about Copenhagen or reindeer or snow sculptures or Vikings or even Isak Dinesen because I wouldn't have to write about them!"

She dragged herself wearily out of her chair and went over to get her pen. She bent over to pick it up and smiled.

"Of course," she said. She picked up the bundle of notes that the pen had landed on and offered up a little prayer of thanks to the playful patron saint of travel writers.

She sat down again and rubbed her hands briskly together, still talking encouragingly to herself. "All right, let's do this. Two more hours and we'll have the Copenhagen chapter in some kind of shape, and then, by tomorrow -"

She stopped speaking and looked up.

"I'm working," she said, and waited.

The doorbell rang again.

Megan squirmed. "I'm working," she said desperately. "I really am. I can't answer the door. I definitely have to do another couple of hours and then I've got all that transcribing and I haven't even begun to sort out the photographs and - wait, I'm here, come back!"

This last exclamation burst out of her as she flung open her front door and called to the person at the bottom of the stoop.

"Rachel?" she said, as her sister spun around and ran up the steps, sweeping past her and into the house. Megan frowned, rubbing her hip where she'd bumped it against a table in her mad dash to the door.

She followed Rachel into the kitchen and the two of them faced each other over the counter.

"Are you planning on robbing a bank?" asked Megan.

Rachel sighed. At least, Megan thought she did. It was hard to be sure since Rachel's face was swathed in a black scarf. She was also wearing a baseball cap and wraparound sunglasses.

Megan scratched her chin thoughtfully. "I know what it is. You've become invisible again, haven't you? How many times have I told you not to drink the -"

Megan abandoned the rest of the sentence because Rachel had unwrapped the scarf. Megan, open-mouthed, leaned forward to peer at Rachel's face, which was a distinctly unhealthy shade of blue.

"What is it?" she said.

"You tell me," snapped Rachel. She fished in her handbag and pulled out a small plastic packet which she thrust at Megan.

Megan looked at the packet which had a picture of a woman on the front. Her face was the same color as Rachel's.

"A face mask," Megan said. She looked up at Rachel.

"You do know that you're supposed to wash these off?"

"Are you?" said Rachel in a threatening tone. "Are you really? Well, what happens when you wash it off and you find that your face has been dyed blue!"

"Where did you get this?" said Megan, flipping the packet over. The writing on the back appeared to be in Swedish.

"It was in that beauty pack that you sent me a few months ago. With the shampoo and body lotion? That was in the bottom."

"So you put it on and when you went to wash it off, your face ..."

"Ta-daa," exclaimed Rachel. She sat down opposite Megan and pointed frantically at the packet. "Look, there's a twenty-four hour helpline number on the back, you have to call them, find out what to do."

Megan began to look as worried as Rachel. "I don't know if my Swedish is that good. I really only mastered the basics, how to order food, get a cab, find my hotel, that sort of thing."

"I don't care," snarled Rachel. "Get your dictionary and call them."

"Okay," said Megan. "Just run through what happened again. How did you follow the instructions?"

Rachel lifted her eyebrow sardonically. "Well, there was a picture of a woman with the stuff on her face so I kind of figured that that's what you do with it. And there on the back it says 30 which I guessed meant thirty minutes, so after half an hour I washed it off and ended up with this. I came straight over here and that's the whole story. I can probably sue them."

Megan was studying the packet. She nodded. "Yeah, see, that says thirty years of excellence, or excellent service to the public or something. You're actually only supposed to leave it on for, uh, two minutes."

Rachel's hands flew to her face as if to check it was still there. "Maybe I should go to the hospital?"

"Does it hurt?"

"No," said Rachel, still massaging her cheeks absently. The movement made them look so much like Play-Doh that Megan had to press her lips together to restrain a smile. "I guess you should get checked out although it probably isn't harmful. I got the beauty pack in a natural health store. They only used natural products. The body lotion was made from seaweed."

Rachel gave her a cold look. "That's terrific."

Megan looked down again at the picture on the front of the packet. "It seems to be made from some kind of berries. Unless they're suggesting that the woman is eating berries while she's relaxing." She looked up and met Rachel's eyes.

"I'll phone them," said Megan.

After ten tortuous minutes on the phone, Megan hung up. She hoped Rachel hadn't been able to hear the woman's peal of laughter.

No such luck.

"She thought it was funny," said Rachel.

Megan winced. "It was sympathetic laughter. Anyway, don't worry about it, because the good news is that it isn't harmful and it'll fade in a couple of days."

"Two days?" Rachel said with despair. She stood up and began to pace.

"Either that or two years," Megan added under her breath.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from A Real Work of Art/Thick As Thieves by Samantha Connolly Jennifer McKinlay Copyright © 2003 by Harlequin Enterprises Ltd.
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.