A movement in the distance caught his eye, and he trained his binoculars to zoom in on Alice. It was impossible not to smile. She wore those high-heeled wedge sandals she looked so good in. Espadrilles, she called them. They made her legs look fantastic even though her floaty skirt covered her knees. Her hair was blowing in long, soft billows and looked pretty enough to be in a shampoo commercial.
Something was wrong. Her entire body looked tense and her face looked like she was trying not to cry. He dumped the binoculars, then strode across the fairway to meet her.
“Hey, pretty lady,” he called out as he drew near. She managed a half-smile.
“Hey, Jack. I need a favor.”
“Anything.”
“I’ve heard that another round of really bad gossip is circulating about me on the web. I don’t have the heart to look. Can you do it and tell me what’s out there? It has something to do with cocaine.”
A spark of anger flared. Alice and cocaine didn’t even belong in the same sentence, but he didn’t comment as he yanked his cell phone from his back pocket, opened an app, and searched for her name.
It didn’t take long to land on a story.
The comments were savage. Sebastian Bell was a widely respected actor, and Alice was the nobody who dangled cocaine before him to attract his attention. The story claimed that when Sebastian tried to distance himself from her and the cocaine, Alice began stalking him. By the time Sebastian sought help, he was hooked again and Alice had to be served with a restraining order.
“Well?” she asked.
Jack continued clicking around because there were countless posts on the topic. One of them had a photo of a young, bleary-eyed Sebastian Bell staggering out of a nightclub with smears of white powder on his dark sweater. It was probably an old photo from the worst years of Sebastian’s early addiction. Most of the posts also included the infamous photo of Alice in handcuffs being led off the movie set.
Jack wished he could lie and downplay this, but she needed to know. He tried to soften his words. “It’s pretty bad,” he acknowledged. “They’re blaming you for supplying Sebastian Bell with coke and getting him hooked again.”
She gazed at the sky as though looking for answers. “It’s ridiculous. I don’t even smoke cigarettes, let alone smoke cocaine.”
Peoplesnortedcocaine, they didn’t smoke it, but her error just went to prove how naive she was when it came to drugs. He continued skimming posts. One man was quoted over and over in the posts.
“Who’s Graham Garfield?”
“He’s Sebastian’s agent,” Alice said. “He’s part creepy lawyer, part Lord Voldemort. Even Sebastian doesn’t like him, but he’s the best in the business.”
Part of an agent’s job was to defend his client’s reputation. If the client took a financial hit, so did the agent. Jack knew enough sports agents from men on the PGA tour to know that their job went well beyond negotiating contracts and managing publicity. Product endorsements were a huge part of a celebrity’s earning power, and Sebastian Bell had endorsements from Rolex and Dior. No wonder his agent was eager to foist the blame somewhere else.
“The college released me from teaching in the fall semester,” Alice said. “They put me on indefinite suspension while they conduct an investigation. From the way my department head spoke, it sounds like a foregone conclusion that they’re going to fire me for cause unless I go quietly.”
He looked away from the phone to draw her into a hug. “Oh, Alice, I wish I could stand in front of this craziness and take the brunt of it for you.”
His phone beeped with an incoming text, and he instinctively reached for it.
Sophie’s name appeared on the screen. He clicked it off and stuffed it in his back pocket, but not before Alice saw.
“Who’s Sophie?” she asked, pulling away from him.
“Nobody.”
Alice let out an exasperated breath. “She keeps texting you, and you keep saying she’s nobody, but your entire body tensed up the moment you saw her name.”
Sophie truly was nobody … at least, nobody he wanted to discuss. He’d never even met the woman, and owed her nothing. In the distance, the foursome was moving on to the 9th hole, and he hadn’t been paying attention.
“Let’s not do this here. She’s nothing for you to worry about.”
“The only thing that could make this day worse is for my boyfriend to be flirting with another woman behind my back.”
He shifted uneasily. The wordboyfriendmade him uneasy. It had all sorts of connotations he didn’t like. Japan beckoned, and even if it didn’t, he would never stay in Williamsburg or anywhere else for very long.
He reached for the binoculars. “I’ll come over to your place tonight and I can tell you about Sophie. Deal?”
She looked a little mollified. “What do you want for dinner?”
