Chapter 41

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Gabby had been back from London a couple of weeks when she was visited one day at the office by a delegation from Pacific Arts. In fact, it was more like an armada. Mike, Wendy and Jan all showed up at her office around lunch time with faces reflecting a range of emotion from anger, embarrassment to remorse. Mike commandeered Gabby's office for a conference, pulling Robert in and shutting the door.

"Goddammit, Gabby, it's happened again! That tabloid bitch from Key West wrote another article about Micky, but this time she's spread her net and snared the whole goddamned family." He threw a copy of a magazine down on Gabby's coffee table, open to the offending article. The story was several pages long and included a couple of pictures from the original story, just to remind the readers about Micky's previous ignominy in case anyone had forgotten.

Robert, who had never bothered to read the original story, zeroed in on those photographs and gasped. "Holy shit, Gabby! That woman was here one day, waiting to see you. She was sitting right outside your office."

Gabby and everyone else gasped in turn. Gabby asked "How can that be? What was she doing here? How did she get in?"

Robert explained. "She had a copy of your business card that she showed the receptionist and said that you asked her to come in and speak to you about a job offer. So she got passed over to me and I told her to wait on that couch near my desk because you were on the phone. I think this was around the time you were getting ready to fly to London with Wendy and Mike."

Mike thundered "Why the fuck did you let her in?"

Robert threw up his hands in self-defense. "Hey, man, stand down. I never saw the original article. I didn't know who she was. She had Gabby's card. Gabby doesn't give those out to just anybody. She talked a good game."

Gabby put her hand on Robert's shoulder to soothe him down. "It's okay, Robert. You didn't do the wrong thing. I did give her my card."

All eyes turned to Gabby looking at her like she had insects crawling out of her eyes. Wendy demanded "What were you thinking, girl? Why would you give her your card? And for that matter, when did you meet her? When did your paths even cross?"

Gabby asked everyone to sit down and she described for them the nightmare encounter she and Micky had with the journalist outside the restaurant the night they were out to dinner with Jan, Mike and Wendy. She explained how she had tried to defuse the situation by making an appeal to this woman's better angels and feminist solidarity. Now she admitted it had been a miscalculation and naïve, but at the time it had been preferable to pursuing a fruitless restraining order.

Wendy patted Gabby on the knee and reassured her. "I get it, or at least, I get your line of thinking, knowing you as I do. You've always told me straight-up when I was a dumbass, Gabby, and loved me anyway, so I'm gonna do the same for you." She smiled and gave her a wink. Gabby gave a sheepish grin in reply. It was as close to a best friends bonding moment as they had had in years, and as painful as the circumstances were that had created it, she relished it nevertheless.

Gabby speculated "My guess is she was listening in on my phone conversation with you, Wendy, the day we were planning our trip to London, and we basically left her a trail of breadcrumbs to follow. But what I don't get is how she got all that dirt on everyone, and how she got all those details."

Mike blushed and pounded his fist on his knee. "Well, I reckon I have to take responsibility for some of it, or maybe me and Wendy. We got pretty loose lipped with Davy out in public, airin' our dirty laundry when he took us out that one night to a pub after the show, so if she was followin' us, all she had to do was listen in on our conversation to get the gist of some of it. It's been a while since we've been in the spotlight and I forget that we have to be careful about flappin' our gums about private things when we're out and about. Based on those pictures she took of us, she was right on our heels."

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