The Brush-Off: A Hair-Raising Mystery - By Laura Bradley Page 0,1

my front door, heavy with its beveled glass, clank shut.

Our eyes met in the mirror. His registered relief. Mine, abject embarrassment.

“Trudy?” Mario quavered. He turned his head toward the door. Or tried to. Our precarious positions wouldn’t quite allow it without him taking half of my body with him, which he tried to do but only made it about a quarter of the way.

I should’ve been grateful to be rescued, but the fact that it was Mario’s wife doing the rescuing completely squelched my relief. Why me? No one else on earth would go through the rest of her life making sure neither one of us forgot this horrible moment in time.

I had visions of being hounded every day by this embarrassment. I could be a poster girl for Just Say No…to Overstyling. Didn’t they teach us to know our own limitations (and those of our customers) in cosmetology school?

“Where are you?” Her voice was getting louder—a dreaded clue that she was obviously headed in the right direction. Damn.

“Down here, Trude, in Reyn’s chair.” Mario was crying again, this time for joy. And I always thought the phrase “drowning in emotion” was an exaggeration.

Trudy appeared in the doorway, and I craned my neck just in time to see her mouth fall open and her hands bury themselves in her shimmering copper tresses. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, save me…and spank my heinie,” she breathed while tracing the sign of the cross—forehead, chest, right breast, left breast.

Trudy was a Catholic with style. I admired that, although not as much as usual right at that moment.

“What’s happened to you two?” she demanded after intoning a modified prayer for religious absolution.

“What does it look like?” I muttered with a surly glare at her via the mirror.

Trudy closed her mouth and opened it again. She shook her head and licked her raspberry lips. She rubbed her fingers with their raspberry-tinted nails over her eyelids. She smoothed down cotton-candy-pink silk over her buxom bustline. I wasn’t quite sure cotton candy went with raspberry or that raspberry didn’t clash with the highlights in her hair, but I wasn’t opening up those color debates now. Finally, she said, “I wouldn’t venture a guess.”

“Very funny,” I retorted, seriously eyeing the scissors as a weapon now instead of as an escape route. Trudy had recovered from her shock, and the twinkle in her contact-created aquamarine eyes hinted at the infectious giggle-snort I loved so much when we were laughing. At something or someone else, that is.

Mario, weakling that he was, had held his tongue, no doubt in the hopes that I would talk us out of the sticky situation. Seeing I wasn’t going to try, he gave up his silence. “Trudy, mi corazón, Reyn threw out her back.”

“While doing what, pray tell?”

“Trude, I wanted that look that I was talking to you about, you know, that early-nineties Michael Bolton/Julio Iglesias combination. It’s just so romantic.” He tried to crane his neck to look at me. “Trudy calls it a variation on a faux hawk. Get it? Not a mohawk because of the long hair.” He looked back to Trudy. “But the lift and height on the crown, the curls…I wanted to surprise you for your birthday.” Mario’s eyes brimmed with so much earnestness I almost regained my sense of humor. Almost.

“Julio and Michael, huh? How come it looks more like Lyle Lovett, then?” she quipped with a straight face that broke into a grin the moment she finished the sentence.

Here came the giggle-snort.

Actually, it took longer than I expected, a testament to the fact that Trudy was really trying for restraint, although not hard enough. I knew I should be damned grateful she wasn’t jealous, that she wasn’t thinking the worst—that I might have been in a clinch with her honey. But frankly, if she’d even entertained that idea for an instant, she wouldn’t have been my friend for long, because Mario was so far from someone or something I’d want to be swapping spit with that I’d be seriously insulted if she even imagined it. Besides the fact, of course, that I would never do that to a friend. Except maybe a friend married to Harrison Ford…

Mario bowed his head, taking me with him and stretching my back. “Argh,” I moaned.

“Oh, Dios mío, Reyn. I’m sorry,” he sputtered, throwing his head back up, sending me off-balance, teetering off the edge of my stool, taking my hands and his hair with them. Mario screeched in pain. Trudy dove to grab