Wild Ride: A Changing Gears Novel by Nancy Warren

one, she headed for her bedroom to take off her clothes. “Gillian?” As though she had to ask. Who else ever phoned in mid-sob?
    “Eric wants to get back together.”
    Dead bodies could litter Swiftcurrent like fallen autumn leaves and they wouldn’t divert Gillian from her personal crisis—whatever that week’s crisis happened to be.
    With anyone else, an estranged husband wanting to get back together might be considered good news. But with her cousin, everything was disaster and heartache. Good news, bad news, it didn’t matter. Had the drugs done this to her or had her overwrought personality drawn her to the drugs?
    Alex realized a full minute had passed without anything but sobbing and hiccup noises passing across the phone line. Clearly, something was required from her. She ought to be more sympathetic; the woman’s husband had left her, but over the years, Alex’s stock of sympathy had worn thin. Gillian brought most of her problems on herself.
    “Oh, really?” was about all she could manage.
    For once, she’d like someone to lean on. Someone close enough she could call and say, I had a shitty day. Found a dead body and it went downhill from there. But there was no one. That’s why she’d made such an error in judgment and gone to lunch with a man who had another’s blood on his hands.
She shuddered.
    She slipped off her skirt. Tom would most likely agree with her that the obvious cause of Forbes getting blood on him was from flipping the body. She was pretty sure there was a test that showed if a person had fired a gun. Had they done it on Duncan Forbes? Or did they need a reason to test him for gunpowder residue? She’d seen that on many a crime show. It was amazing how much evidence a killer left behind. Surely, she hadn’t kissed a murderer.
    Had she?
    “So what do you think I should do?”
    Alex forced her concentration back to the phone call. “About Eric wanting to get back together?”
    “Ye-e-es,” Gillian wailed.
    Hope flickered, but not brightly, at the thought that her ditzy cousin might be reunited with the man who’d kept her more or less stable for almost a decade. It wasn’t a beacon of hope, more like a twenty-five-watt bulb on its way out. Eric had surprisingly turned out to be the one strong influence in Gill’s messed-up life. It was only once he’d left, after seven years of marriage, that Gillian had taken to calling Alex. Prior to that, their relationship had been rocky at best. They were cousins, but classic good girl/bad girl opposites.
    She jammed the phone between her ear and shoulder while she freed her hands to pull off her pantyhose. “Did he tell you he wants to get back together?” Or was it a cocaine mirage. The irony of Gill and Eric’s relationship was that drugs had brought them together and, when Eric cleaned up and Gill didn’t, had driven them apart.
    She pulled on the stretchy black pants she used for yoga,spread the toes of her bare feet in relief after having had them squished in dress shoes all day, and peeled the blouse over her head.
    “I’m so confused,” her cousin sniffled on the other end of the phone. “I’m not good on my own. I’m not strong like you.”
    Yeah, well, she was tired of being strong. Tired of being leaned on. “Take him back, then.”
    “I can’t. Look—do you think we could go to a movie or something one night?”
    All of a sudden, Alex saw Gill as she’d been before she ran away to L.A. in her senior year. She’d been so pretty and carefree. She could have any guy she wanted with her luscious body and wild-child ways, and mostly she’d had them. She’d developed a crush on Tom Perkins, Alex remembered now. One of those violent teenage crushes, but he hadn’t been interested. He was probably the only man who ever said no to Gill.
    It must have been seeing him today, and now hearing from her cousin, that brought that memory back. She bet Gill didn’t even remember that intense teenage crush.
    Then Gillian left