High Tide

by Jude Deveraux

  “Sounds like a mature relationship.”

  “It works. And you? Boyfriend missing you?”

  “Sure.” She tried to give a smile of insouciance. “And he’s terribly jealous of you, too. So at last we have something in common. I think I’ll call my office and just see what’s going on.”

  Before he could reply, she had dialed the number of her office. Gerald answered.

  “Fiona, darling, where in the world are you? No, don’t tell me. If I know, I’ll have to tell the police. They’ve been here all morning. It’s been awful.”

  Not as awful as finding a dead man on top of you, Fiona thought but didn’t say. “Any problems at work?” she asked, trying to get her current situation out of her mind.

  “Well,” Gerald said, “I had to change Kimberly just a tiny bit, but the launch this morning was a great success.”

  Fiona could feel hysteria rising in her throat. “You launched Kimberly early? Without me?”

  “Considering what was going on with you, Garrett thought we should go ahead and get her out there, and besides, he said that since you’d killed Roy, our chances of getting the Raphael franchise were now greatly reduced, so we need everything we can get from Kimberly.”

  Fiona was sputtering. “I—did—not—kill—anyone.”

  “Oh, sure. I know that. And in the pool, I bet on your side.”

  “Pool.” Her voice was flat, emotionless.

  “Oh, Fee, by the way, the maps in the trunks look divine. Listen I gotta go. Soooo much to do. If the police call again, what should I tell them?”

  “That Kimberly and I are—Oh, the hell with it,” she snapped, then hung up.

  Fiona tossed the phone onto the top of her backpack and plopped down onto the black leather chair. If possible, she felt worse than she had. When was this nightmare going to be over? She had to get back to work before that treacherous Gerald did something dreadful to Kimberly.

  “If you don’t mind my asking,” Ace said, “who is Kimberly?”

  “Mine, mine, mine!” Fiona half shouted. “And if that little pink-eared swivel-hipped Gerald thinks he can take her from me, he’d better be prepared to fight to the death.”

  Ace blinked at her for a moment. “You want a drink? How about a little TV? Maybe something on the Disney Channel?”

  Fiona was smoldering, furious, as she glared at him. “You think this place has any paper in it? And a pen? Or a pencil?”

  Immediately, Ace stood up, left the room, and moments later returned with a legal pad in a plastic folder and a roller-ball pen. “Best I could do. Will it be okay?”

  “Fine.” She snatched the pad and pen from him.

  Minutes later they had both settled down to do the only thing they could do: wait. Ace watched TV while Fiona drew. A couple of times she looked up at him, and each time she marveled that the man could find so many bird shows on TV.

  Phrases from the TV show came to her.

  “One hundred and sixteen species of birds breed in the Everglades.”

  “One ounce of feathers was worth two ounces of pure gold to the people who made ladies’ hats.”

  Minutes later she looked up to see a picture of the man whose portrait she’d seen in Ace’s house.

  “In 1905, Guy Bradley was killed trying to protect a rookery at Oyster Key. It was the day conservation was born in America.”

  But she didn’t have time to think much about what Ace was doing as her own mind was going fast and furiously and she was sketching her ideas as quickly as she could move the pen. Drawing and designing for Kimberly soothed her. She didn’t plan to use anything that she was drawing now, but in the way professional chefs cooked to relax and race car drivers took a Sunday drive, Fiona calmed down with a pen and a pad of paper.

  She didn’t look up again until she heard the music for the show’s credits, and there the name “Dr. Paul Montgomery” appeared again and again. For a moment, Fiona stared, transfixed. He had written, produced, and researched the show. He’d even supplied “additional photography” and “consultations.”

  For the rest of the day she drew while he flipped through ninety-some channels and watched TV, and he managed to find one show after another about birds. Bird names, phrases, and sounds floated about her head.

  “The stately sandhill crane …”

  “The great egret …”

  “The blue-winged teal stays here year round….”

  “Roseate spoonbill …”

  “Black-bellied plover …”

  But she always looked at the TV when she heard the music for the ending credits for a show, and she always saw the name “Dr. Paul Montgomery” roll over and over on the screen.

  When it grew dark outside and Ace said he was going to bed, she barely heard him.

  “If you want the bed, I’ll take the couch,” he said.

  “No, no,” she said absently, not lifting her eyes from the paper. “Take the bed. I’m staying here.”

  After a moment of watching her, Ace shrugged, then went to bed and was asleep instantly. But later he awoke, saw the light still on in the living room, and got up to investigate. Fiona had fallen asleep, the notebook on her lap, pages falling all about her. Carefully, he pushed the pages off of her, carried her into the bedroom, and placed her on the bed.

  As he pulled the light spread over her, he said, “I don’t know who Kimberly is, but I don’t think she’s worth all this.”

  Turning, he went back into the living room, turned off the light, and stretched out on the sofa. He was tempted to look at her drawings, but there was something in him that held back. He didn’t want to know more about her than he already did. No, he just wanted to get out of this absurd situation and return to Kendrick Park and the life he loved.

  Two minutes later, he was asleep.

  Seven

  I get to go home today, was Fiona’s first thought upon waking. This nightmare of hiding from the police, of finding dead bodies, of hearing that Kimberly had been launched without her, was about to end. Stretching, she thought of all that home meant: her own clothes, seeing her facialist again, having a massage.

  “Coffee?” came a voice from the doorway, then Ace’s head came into view. “There are some bagels, but they’ve been frozen.”

  Fiona grimaced, then forced a small smile. “Sure. Anything. What did the fax say?”

  “It hasn’t come yet,” he said as he entered the bedroom as though it were his right. “Look, don’t worry. It takes time for these things. My brother and my cousins know a lot of people, and they’ll find out things.”

  She took the steaming mug from him and sipped. He could drive and he could make coffee. “I don’t think I want to know what kind of business your relatives are in. Do they have names like ‘Bugsy’ and ‘Scarface’?”

  For a moment Ace blinked at her as though trying to understand what she was implying, then he gave her a crooked grin. “Sure. And I got a brother named ‘Deuce.’ What about you?”

  “No brothers, no sisters. Just me.”

  “Lonely childhood, huh?”

  “Not quite. I spent most of my life in boarding schools and had a wonderful time. Can you call someone and see what they’ve found out?”

  “Already did. So far no one’s heard back from anyone. That could be good or bad.”

  “Would you explain please? I’m not up to the jargon of criminals or the Mafia.”

  Again Ace blinked at her before he spoke. “If none of the people doing the searching have reported back yet, it could be bad, meaning that they’ve found nothing. On the other hand maybe they stepped on so many toes that they were wiped out.”

  “I don’t like your sense of humor,” Fiona said as she handed the empty mug back to him. “All I want to do is get out of here and back to New York.”

  “And to your beloved Kimberly,” Ace said, looking at her as though he hoped she’d explain.

  “Would you give me some privacy? I want to take a shower.”

  “Sure. T
here are eggs, so I’ll make a couple of omelettes.” As he stood up, he nodded toward the bedroom closet. “There’re clothes in there.”

  “Men’s?” she asked with a grimace.

  “What else? At least this way you won’t give Lisa anything to be jealous about.”

  “Oh? How tall is this Lisa?”

  “Five four,” Ace said from the doorway. “Why?”

  “When I meet her, I want to be wearing the tiniest skirt this side of the children’s department. My legs are five foot four inches long. Now get out of here!”

  He left, but Fiona had the sweetest sense of revenge when she thought of the look on his face. It was almost too bad that this whole escapade was going to be over so soon; after all, it might be nice to have someone to use to make Jeremy jealous. He altogether took her too much for granted.

  Fiona stayed under the shower until the hot, hot water washed away some of her fatigue and the sense of doom she’d lived with for the last two days. Today she just knew that everything was going to be all right. Today she was going home!

  After she’d dressed in yet another pair of men’s trousers and another man’s shirt, she went into the kitchen, where Ace was making some heavenly smells.

  “You don’t eat enough,” he said as he slid a fat, gooey omelette onto a plate. “You had one meal yesterday and that was it.”

  “Nerves,” she said as she dug into the omelette. “Usually I eat—” She broke off because she was becoming too friendly with this man.

  Ace stood there waiting for her to finish her sentence, but when she didn’t, he turned away. “Hey! Look what I found.” With a flourish, he opened a kitchen cabinet door to reveal a small TV and the controls to a stereo system.

  “Oh, great,” she said, mouth full. “Birds for breakfast. Did I tell you that I love squab? And roast duck and—”

  “Cannibal!” he said with so much disgust that for a moment she thought he was being serious, but a twinkle in his eyes gave him away.

  “And pigeon eggs,” she said. “And I have a hat with osprey plumes on it.”

  Ace was smiling as he picked up the remote control and turned on the TV to a national morning show. But his smile vanished instantly as a news reporter came on. Photos of Ace and Fiona were behind her head.

  “And now we have an update on the brutal slaying of Raphael creator Roy Hudson in Fort Lauderdale. In an attempt to find a motive for the murder, police had Mr. Hudson’s will read. It seems that the sole and only heirs of what could be a vast estate are Fiona Burkenhalter and Paul, better known as ‘Ace,’ Montgomery.

  “Through an anonymous tip, police have also found out that Burkenhalter and Montgomery were in the same hotel in different states three times in the last fourteen months. Police are speculating that this murder of Roy Hudson has been in the planning for quite some time.

  “And yesterday it was revealed that Burkenhalter and Montgomery were the cause of the bombing scare at the Fort Lauderdale airport on the day before the murder. Deliveryman Arnold Sacwin told police that he believed that the two alleged killers were working together in an insurance-fraud plot to destroy an expensive mechanical alligator manufactured in Hollywood.”

  The news reporter paused a moment to allow a film clip to be shown. Arnold Sacwin, the man who had delivered the alligator, was on camera saying that he’d known from the beginning that there was something fishy about the “whole operation.” “This woman comes out of nowhere and knows just where to throw that bomb so the ’gator explodes,” he was saying into the microphone. “Then that guy Ace had the … well, you know, to try to make me think that he’d never met this broad before. Didn’t fool me for a minute.”

  After that, the picture switched back to the woman in the newsroom. “Police are investigating every possible lead on the whereabouts of the two alleged killers, and all citizens are asked to call the police if they are spotted. And the police ask, please, don’t get near them. They are believed to be armed and dangerous.”

  Ace pushed the button to turn the TV off, and the next minute he grabbed Fiona’s shoulders and was pulling her upright. “Don’t you pass out on me now!” he shouted into her face. “We don’t have time for this. You hear me?”

  All she could do was nod. Her mind was too horror-struck to comprehend what she’d just heard.

  “Listen to me,” Ace said, his nose close to hers. “I’m going to give you a choice, but I’m also going to give you some advice. Are you hearing me?”

  Fiona looked at him, and she could hear his voice as though it were a long, long way away.

  “Someone has gone to a lot of trouble to set this up. This person has spent a lot of time on this, so it’s my guess that if we went to the police now when we’re as innocent as we are, they’d …” Pausing, he looked at her white face, her eyes huge in her face. Sheer, stark terror was what he was looking at.

  He had to readjust his hold on her because she was sinking further down. “Listen to me! We have to get out of here. If we go to the police now, we’ll never be able to clear ourselves. Are you understanding me?”

  “I want to go home,” she whispered. “I want to get Kimberly ready and …”

  “Don’t give up on me now.” He took a breath, then moved her to sit on the stool. “You and I know something,” he said. “Do you understand me?”

  “No,” she said honestly. She didn’t understand anything at all.

  “Look, I’m not going to lie to you. I don’t know what’s going on either, but yesterday I kept seeing things that didn’t make sense, and now hearing that Roy made out his will to you and me seems to pull it all together.”

  “Pull what together?” she said, looking up at him. Her brain was fuzzy and not working properly.

  “You and me. I knew that Roy had something to say to us, but I had no idea what it was. He was going to tell us that he was leaving everything to us. To you and me. That’s what that fishing trip was all about.”

  “He wanted Davidson Toys to manufacture the … the little …”

  “I know. Like Star Wars, those things.”

  “Yes.”

  “But don’t you see? He was killed to keep him from telling us about his will.”

  “So we got to hear it on national news?” she asked.

  At her tone of sarcasm, Ace gave her a blinding smile. “That’s my girl. Yesterday I kept asking myself why Roy demanded that both you and I go on that trip with him. What was the connection? What do toys have to do with birds? New York with Florida?”

  “Am I supposed to reply to that?” Fiona wanted to give her mind to what he was saying, because if she didn’t, she’d think about the reality of what was being done to them.

  “You don’t know the connection between you and me, and I don’t either.” He bent so he was nearer her face. “But someone does, and that person was willing to kill to keep us from finding out.”

  “So how do we tell the police what the connection is if we don’t know it ourselves?”

  “We tell them when we know it,” Ace said quietly.

  “No,” Fiona whispered, then grew louder. “No, I’m no detective. I don’t know anything about sleuthing.”

  At that he grabbed the phone off the kitchen wall and held it out to her. “Then call the police and give yourself up. Tell them that you didn’t know anything about the will. Tell them that you had no idea that I was in the same hotel as you were three times in the last fourteen months. Tell them that it was just a coincidence of cosmic proportions that you destroyed the alligator of your fellow inheritor. Tell them that you liked Roy and had no self-interest in his giving the toy franchise to the company you work for. Go on. Why are you hesitating?”

  “I don’t like you,” she whispered. “I don’t like you at all.”

  “And I’m not crazy about you and your bad temper either,” he snapped back at her. “But I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in prison, especially not for something I didn’t do. Now, with or without you, I’m going to tr
y to find out who and why. But, quite honestly, I’m sure I’ll fail because the key to this is what’s between us, and we can only find that out together.”

  “You want me to run away with you?”

  “Basically, yes. I want you to help me fight this for as long as we can.”

  “We’re wanted by the police. We’re fugitives.”

  “Better that than to be put in a jail cell,” Ace said, then turned on his heel and walked out of the room.

  For a moment Fiona sat on the stool and looked about the room with unseeing eyes. She didn’t want to be here. For that matter, she hadn’t wanted to go on the whole trip. For that matter …

  But hindsight wasn’t going to get her anywhere, was it? she thought.

  “There are lambs and there are bulls,” her father used to say. “And bulls have all the fun.” So maybe she wasn’t her father’s daughter for nothing. He’d been the one to push her to take on Kimberly’s account, and he’d been the one—

  Fiona got off the stool and took a deep breath. Her head was filled with every movie she’d ever seen about prison, about jailbreaks, and filled with every bloody end that all movie and TV criminals seemed to come to.

  With her head up and her shoulders back, she went into the bedroom, where Ace was packing a bag.

  “Do you think your friend would mind if I took more of his clothes?” she said, but she couldn’t keep the trembling out of her voice.

  Eight

  “I don’t know. I don’t know,” Fiona said as she put her hands over her ears. “I’ve told you everything there is to tell. I don’t know any more.”

  “But we haven’t found the connection,” Ace said. “There must be something or someone who connects us.”

  “Maybe Roy chose me for one reason and you for another. Maybe—”

  “Then what connects you to him and me to him?”

  “I don’t know,” Fiona said, then turned on her heel and went outside to sit on the porch. They had been in the cabin all day long, and Ace had done nothing but ask her questions and try to make her come up with a reason why Roy Hudson should leave both of them all his money.