Lucy looked at her. "Maggie, do you still think my consultants in New York were bogus? You know Quentin Washington's reputation."
"Yes, but you saw my pieces. As they say in Waco, them's the real thing, honey."
"I guess we'll just have to track the wild boy down to get to the bottom of this," Lucy said. They entered the terminal and a blast of cool. "Ah, A/C," Lucy sighed. "Let's hear it for civilization."
"I hope it's that easy. He's an elusive character," said Maggie.
They rented a VW bug and drove to Punta Sam, where the next car ferry to Isla was an hour away. Passing time drinking beer under a slow-moving ceiling fan in the little pale blue ferry terminal, they watched lizards climb the walls, watched the chop-laced sea through unglazed windows. There were no other turistas around; the few visitors who'd selected Isla over the glitzy attractions of Cancun had all gone over from Puerto Juarez, where the passenger ferries plied their trade. "So tell me, Rosita," said Lucy. "What, in the end, did Darren have to say about this trip?"
Rosa took a swallow of beer. "He was OK about it," she said. "Although he wasn't sure why I had to go right now. We had talked about honeymooning in Mexico."
"So you're definitely getting married?" Lucy said. “When we talked the other day you seemed like you weren’t so sure. Rosie, that is so great. Did you set a date?”
"No, not exactly, but it’ll be this year."
"I tried marriage a couple of times," said Maggie. "Frankly, I prefer dogs to men."
"They are more loyal," said Lucy.
"Hey, I love this guy," said Rosa. "You two are so cynical, I swear to God."
"I've just been burned too many times," said Lucy. "You know that, Rosalita.” She covered Rosa's hand with hers, then hoisted her beer bottle. “Here’s to you and Darren, bona fide husband material.”
"Looks like they're loading," said Maggie. "You ready to roll, ladies?"
At the end of the ferry ride across the eight or nine wind-thrashed miles separating Isla from the mainland, Maggie drove the bug off the boat. She maneuvered through the narrow, little streets, dodging taxis, dogs, sailors from the local Mexican Navy base, children, and an assortment of stoned, sunburned northern European men with Jesus hair and eyes that pleaded silently with the three American women as they passed, begging for sex, companionship, or maybe just beer money. Lucy snapshot half a dozen of them through the window of the bug. The Blurred German Beggar Series. "At least the Isla hasn't been Cancooned," Maggie said as they edged out of town and headed south on the road which hugged the east side of the island. "Yet. Still looks like a real village, doesn't it?"
"Complete with an assortment of low-rent hippies,” Lucy said. "Just like the good old days." She was happy. The afternoon sky was huge, with enormous puffy clouds posed like abstract white Buddhas against the blue. Sitting in the back seat of a red VW bug, cruising down a tropical coastline in balmy sunlight, she felt a certain serenity along with her charge of excitement. This was the air she was meant to breathe, and every time she came back to the Caribbean she remembered.
After a few moments they swung left abruptly off the main road onto dirt, entered an inconspicuous grove of trees, and emerged from the thicket to pass through an arched gateway. A tumble-down gate was pushed permanently aside, creating the only opening in a long, faded whitewash wall. "Welcome to South of Carolina," said Maggie, pulling to a stop and turning off the car as three small children dashed out of sight into the bush and two scrawny dogs charged up to the car, barking. Aside from brash dogs and shy children, the Clements compound encompassed a dense abundance of trees and shrubs, a couple of small outbuildings—servant's quarters, it appeared, with dim faces showing in the black holes of unglazed windows—a dozen or so dirt-eating chickens, and, beyond an overgrown tangle of giant pothos, bougainvillea, banana trees, decrepit fountains, and statuary, the red-roofed, white-walled two story main house, just barely visible through the unkempt jungle. An old Harley Davidson was parked at the side of the dirt driveway, and the scattered remains of another lay alongside the parking area, among the coconuts and palm branches that had blown down in the wind. Parrots and gulls screamed in the palm trees. "Mama came from South Carolina, and so when Daddy bought her this house that's what she named it," Maggie said as they got out and stretched. "South of Carolina. My goodness, what a ruin. I guess the place just never got over the last hurricane," she added. "Hugo did his slamdance right on top of the Isla, you know."
"But it's so elegantly decayed," said Rosa. "Feels like some demented tyrant from a Marquez novel ought to stagger out here in full dress uniform to address the troops. Only the troops will be chickens, dogs, children, and coconuts."
"And a trio of deranged gringo dames, eh? Is this your brother's bike, Maggie?" Lucy said, checking out the Harley.
"I guess," Maggie said. "Leastwise I know that one is—or was," she added, glancing at the strewn parts. "Looks like he got another. Well, let's go see if anybody's home." Lucy and Rosa followed her as she scattered the chickens, heading down an overgrown tiled pathway towards the house. Off to the right, faces dodged from view as they peered at the dark window holes of the servant's quarters. "They don't seem too happy to see us, do they?" Maggie said drily. "The quote servants unquote, I mean."
"Do they know you?" Lucy asked. "They act scared."
"They probably don't recognize me—or maybe it's a new generation, and they don't even know who I am. Once upon a time that was a nice pool,” she added sardonically, with a glance at a swimming pool visible beyond the undergrowth. They pushed through for a closer look. The pool, with a naked cherub statue poised on a pedestal at each end, was empty but for a wallow of green slime collected in the deep end. The pool bottom had been tiled with a striking, Moorish-influenced design, still visible through a layer of moss. "Darn, that Nathaniel is really out to lunch, I swear," Maggie said sadly, bitterly. Lucy took out her digital camera and started shooting. This equatorial rot was too good to miss.
"Looks like it once was nice," said Rosa. "Beautiful tilework, anyway."
"Yes, I guess so," said Maggie. "My Mama designed the pattern." She sighed. "She was a talented woman." They all jumped, as the natural noise level was abruptly ripped by the blast of a motor starting up in the environs of the house just ahead. It got the dogs barking again. "What in the hell." said Maggie. "Somebody's sure here," she added.
"Sounds like a gas-powered generator to me," said Rosa.
Another layer of noise blasted out over the ratatatat of the generator, and was immediately recognizable. Loud rock n’ roll, early seventies variety. "The Rolling Stones!" Lucy cried. "Exile on Main Street."
Maggie pushed the carved mahogany front door open and led the way into a foyer. On the left a formal stair rose to the second story. "Hey, Nate! Natty boy, you here?" she called over the din. The foyer, and the rooms beyond it, were empty, and felt abandoned, although light spilled in from the other end of the house, facing the sea. Lucy, still firing away with her camera, followed Rosa and Maggie through tile-floored, pale pastel rooms strewn with mismatched furnishings—lacy plantation wicker mixed with heavily formal mahogany antiques. The house appeared uninhabited, although as they passed through a huge dining room, a table strewn with dirty dishes suggested otherwise. Lizards scattered, disappearing into cracks in the walls. Ahead, the Stones rocked on.
A moment later they reached the living room, a grand, two story volume with a row of wide French doors opening onto an enormous patio facing the sea, with a view ordered by a row of dead palms, their tops starkly bald from hurricane damage. On the patio a blonde woman wearing only a brief black bikini bottom and a pair of pink wraparound sunglasses practiced erotic aerobics on the patio's edge, dramatically framed between two palm trunks, facing the sea.
They observed the woman's writhing rear for a moment, transfixed. Tossing her mane, she danced well, as if she'd put in some time in dance school, or perhaps in a cage dangling over a disco dance floor, or most likely, Lucy decide
d after a few seconds of watching the pelvic pulsations, peeling scant threads off in a table-dancing joint in Texas, thrusting herself into the faces of gin-drunk entrepreneurs. Gleaming with sweat, she had a tight ass, nine yards of legs, serious muscle definition, and long blonde hair with dark roots.
The Stones thrashed, and so did she. Maggie, arms crossed on her chest, cleared her throat. They watched. The woman continued to dance. Lucy walked over to the stereo system, looked over the control panel, and punched a button. The music stopped. The generator rattled on. The woman whirled around. Her breasts turned with her, stiff, unripe, silicon-supplemented. "What the fuck!" She snarled, then saw them. "Oh. Whoops." She lifted her sunglasses, and smiled at them. An aging California babe. "Hi." She smiled, came towards them with one hand and two tits outthrust. "I'm Starfish. Sorry I didn't hear you, I was just doing my workout." She had the voice of a child.
Starfish went straight to Maggie, who radiated ruffled authority. "Hello. I'm Margaret. Margaret Clements. This is Rosa Luxemburg, and Lucy Ripken."
"Clements!" she said, ignoring the others. "You must be Nathaniel's sister! Oh, I'm so glad to meet you. Nathaniel's told me all about you," she went on breathlessly, taking both of Maggie's hands. "I had no idea you were going to be coming down."
"Where is Nate—Nathaniel, Miss—"
"Starfish. Just call me Starfish." She giggled. "I changed my name, because I love the ocean so much."
"That's nice, Starfish," said Maggie, extracting her hands. "But where's my brother? You must have come here with him, right?"
"Of course," she said. "How else could I have found this magical place? He's gone on business over to somewhere called Tiki or Taco or something. He said he'd be back in a couple of days, I don't know. Gee," she giggled again. "It's too bad the electricity's gone and everything's falling apart in the house. Otherwise it's a pretty amazing place. The beach is dreamy." She looked out to sea. The imminent arrival of evening had turned the sky a pale shade of lavender. A flock of gulls flew past. Two boats cruised the horizon, where soft clouds had gathered, gold in the fading light. "See what I mean?"
Lucy decided the woman's eyes gave her away. The giggles were disguise, those icy green eyes revealed the real face. And those hard, pushy tits. Playing seventeen, she was circling forty. Twenty years of that game will turn anybody cold. "I'm sorry," Starfish said. "Lucy, was it?" She offered a hand. Lucy shook it. Her grip was powerful, and tipped with serious, hot red nails. She was not so much muscle-bound as lithe, catlike. "And Rosa?" Another handshake.
"Hullo," said Rosa. "So you dig those antiques the Stones, huh?"
"Oh yeah. Mick is like a god. I met him once." She giggled. "He said I gave the best head in California. Course that was a few years back, I must admit, but—" She grinned. "I've only gotten better." She laughed again. The three of them stared at her, appalled. Was she for real? "Gee, if I could only get one of the servants to come in I'd get you some drinks. But ever since Nathaniel left they've been avoiding me. Hey, I know, there's some beers in the cooler. Do you smoke? I have a couple of joints if you're interested."
"Please," said Maggie, her civility stretched by the bare-breasted space cadet. "Don't worry about it. But where is—oh, never mind. We'll get our own bags."
"Bags? You mean you're staying here?" Starfish said.
"This is my family's house, Starf—Mother of God, don't you have a real name?" She was getting pissed. "Of course we're staying here. And maybe if you'd put a shirt on one of the houseboys might show up to help with our bags."
"Hey, take it easy, there's no need to get uptight," Starfish said. She strolled over, picked up a pink tanktop off a wrought iron patio chair, and pulled it on. "I just—Nathaniel wasn't expecting anybody is all. He said nobody else in the family ever came here, so I thought we'd have the place to ourselves."
"Well he was wrong, wasn't he?" Maggie snapped. "Let's go get our things." She strode back through the house. Lucy and Rosa went after her.
"Take it easy, Maggie," said Lucy. "She's harmless, I think."
"Yeah, well, running around with her boobs out like that isn't harmless. The women around here are modest, for God's sake. They're practicing Catholics! Who the hell does she think she is!" She mimicked the giggle. "God, Nathaniel's had some trailertrash girlfriends in his time, but this one tops them all."
"Those tits look hard as coconuts, don't they?" said Lucy. "I wonder where they were manufactured."
Rosa said, "God, where did she come from?" she said. "And more important, when is she going?"
"As soon as I find Nate," said Maggie. "Meanwhile, the bedrooms, such as they may be, are upstairs. Let's unload our stuff, and maybe now that the bimbo's got her boobs under wraps I can rouse a little help to go buy some fish for dinner."
Lucy woke at dawn. Bedding down on a thin stack of blankets on a tile floor made the early wake up inevitable, but regardless of that, the allure of the pale light gently pulled her up to consciousness. She got to her feet, careful slipping out from between Rosa and Maggie. They had slept in a row on the floor in a bedroom that once was shared, then fought over, by Maggie and Nathaniel. Starfish occupied the other seaside room, the master bedroom that once belonged to the parents and now contained the only remaining bed, post-Hugo. Lucy slipped on a one-piece swimsuit and a pair of shorts, grabbed her camera, and tiptoed quietly downstairs and out onto the front porch. The sun lifted through banks of clouds over the sea to the east, bathing the decaying old house in a sweet glow, rose-tinted gold at the heart of a blue-gray morning. The high tide surf danced along the sandy beach, where a few shorebirds ran. Lucy put down the camera, pulled off her shorts, and dashed into the lapping waves. She dove, and impulsively peeled her suit off as she streamed through the salt sea. Warm dawn water felt best on naked skin. She surfaced, threw her suit up on the sand, and dove back in. She did the crawl for 500 strokes out to sea, then reversed direction, turned over and backstroked shorewards, watching the mobile etchings of bird silhouettes, black against the pale blue of morning sky overhead.
She didn't stop until her backstroking hand hit bottom in the shallows near shore; then she paused for a momentary float, catching her breath. The sun had burned off the clouds, and now warmed the house with direct light. She caught a glint of reflection, and realized someone had come out onto the patio and picked up her camera. She waved, assuming it was Rosa or Maggie; after all the tequila and reefer Starfish had consumed before, during, and after dinner, no way it could be her.
But it was Ms. Fish, Lucy realized, as the woman rose from a crouch and came down to the water's edge, where the light snared her golden hair. Starfish, in her pink tanktop and a pair of warm-up pants, was playing with a very expensive toy: Lucy's camera. Lucy swam closer. "Hi," she said. "You're up early."
"I'm always up early," Starfish said. "I like to go in the water before the sun gets too high, while the moon vibes are lingering. I'm a Pisces, you know, with a Cancer moon and a lot of planets in Scorpio. Heavily into water, you know."
"Yeah, well, that camera's not into water at all," Lucy said, "So please be careful." The woman was holding it by the neckstrap very casually. She slung it up.
"Oh, I'm sorry. Don't worry." she smiled. "You want me to take a picture of you?" She looked over at Lucy's suit, lying on the sand, and Lucy, who had forgotten that she was naked in the water, remembered.
"Nude? No thanks," Lucy said, treading in the shallows. "But if you'll hold on a minute, I'll get dressed and we'll do some pictures of you. The light is perfect." She stood up and ran for her suit.
"That sounds like fun," said Starfish, pointing the camera as Lucy dashed past, and firing off one shot.
"Hey, I thought I told you no nude shots," Lucy said, jumping into her suit.
"Sorry," Starfish smiled. "I couldn't resist." She came over and proffered the camera with a smile. "You have such a wonderful body," she added huskily. In spite of the sun-baked skin, she looked softer and better in morning light, without
make-up—a fortyish childwoman, pretty-faced, with a lift to preserve it and a mane of bleached locks to frame it. But the compliment and the look that came with it added up to a come on, and Lucy knew it. Lucy took the camera, slipped the strap over her head, and looked at Starfish through the lens.
"Well, no harm, since it's mine to delete. So: you want to do some more dancing, or dive, or—hey, why don't you start by doing some warm-ups, you know, just like you would if you were getting ready to perform. Great," she said, as Starfish, needing no coaxing, leapt up on the low patio wall, the attentive camera transforming her. She went into a kind of Egypto-erotic dance step, moving down the wall in a stylized prance. At the corner of the patio she whirled back to face Lucy, who was firing away, and suddenly pulled her shirt off over her head. She was pretty hot stuff, Lucy had to admit, watching the dancing Starfish through the camera. Lucy held the camera a foot away from her face, in the new digital mode of image-making, as Starfish writhed back along the wall, abandoning the Egyptian moves for a more straight-on sexual dance. She leaped off the wall onto the beach, undid the drawstring of her pants, and stepped out of them. Naked, she shook her hair back, raised her arms into the sun—Lucy circled around her, shooting her body in the golden light—and slowly lifted a leg and twisted herself into an elegant, birdlike yoga pose.
The camera shut itself down. "Damn," she said. "I gotta get a new battery. Gimme a minute." She ran for the house, found her camera bag, quickly changed the batteries, then went back outside.
Starfish had seated herself in the sand and assumed full lotus position, facing the morning sun with her legs crossed and her hands open in her lap. Her eyes were closed. Lucy took a closer look at her weathered face. There was character there—a measure of sorrow, and some hard-earned peace, she thought, reflected in the grace of the lotus. The yoga looked effortless. There was more to this woman that plastic boobs.
Lucy photographed her in profile, then moved around front. "Yoga brings me back to myself," Starfish said softly. "I get so lost sometimes." The little girl voice was gone. Lucy continued to shoot. "My real name's Isabel. Isabel Chapin. I used to dance in the San Francisco ballet, when I was a girl. Then I discovered LSD and that was that," she finished matter of factly, and opened her eyes. "Have you ever met Nathaniel? Margaret's brother?" Lucy shook her head as Starfish—Isabel—stood up and stretched. "He's—I don't know what Margaret's like, she doesn't seem to care much for me, but Nate's a real sad guy. I mean, he's a lot of fun, we love to party together, but just about every time he gets drunk he—did she tell you about their Mom?"
Mexican Booty: A Lucy Ripken Mystery (The Lucy Ripken Mysteries Book 2) Page 9
