by Wendy Wax
The pool was cracked and filthy. A one-story cube of a building sat near it, barely visible through the hedge that surrounded it. “That’s the pool house,” Max said. “It was the first space we rented out.” In a far corner of the yard, several citrus trees sagged against the wrought-iron fence.
Everyone was tired and they were far too aware of the Lifetime crew recording every word to engage in chitchat. Kyra had her video camera out too. The lenses moved so constantly that Avery had no idea what they were actually shooting. She tried to keep the worry off her face as she absorbed the extent of The Millicent’s damage and noted the ancient wall air conditioners, whose back ends protruded from the house like blemishes on a teenager’s face. Surely the inside had been better maintained.
“Is there any central heat or air?” Maddie asked.
“No,” Max said. “But a lot of the wall units still work.” He said this with a certain amount of pride.
“South Florida Art Deco homes were built to make the most of cross breezes,” Avery pointed out, though she wasn’t sure whom she was trying to reassure. “And the walls are thick, though probably not as thick as Bella Flora’s.” Avery turned to Max, who had slung his jacket over one shoulder and was once again mopping at his brow. “I’m assuming the house was built around 1938 or ’39. Do you have any idea who designed it?”
“Henry Hohauser,” he said without hesitation. “We bought it from the people he built it for.”
“It’s a Hohauser?” Deirdre said, perking up. “That should up the price significantly when it’s ready to go on the market.”
An odd look passed over Max Golden’s face. Once again he fiddled with the unlit cigar.
Dustin began to cry in Maddie’s arms. He reached out toward his mother, who was filming the others staring at the house and talking. The film crew filmed her filming them.
Following behind Max, who now clung to the wobbly handrails, they started upward. Avery sent up a small prayer that the interior of The Millicent would be in better shape than the stairs that now swayed and shuddered beneath their feet.
Chapter Four
Inside, the air was thick with trapped humidity and smelled of too little air-conditioning and the underuse of cleaning products.
There were three bedrooms, each with a small kitchenette. The two bedrooms on the west side of the house shared a Jack-and-Jill bath.
“Do you mind if I open a window?” Nicole asked in the third bedroom. Her face had taken on a greenish tinge.
Avery had been doing her best to breathe only through one nostril. Which was no easy task when you were also trying not to hyperventilate.
“Here, let me.” Max shuffled over to a block of casement windows. The first handle he grasped came off in his hand. He couldn’t budge the second. Avery could barely keep herself from rushing over to help him when he put all of his weight into the third. All of them relaxed slightly when he managed to crank that window open a few inches.
Max turned on the room’s wall air conditioner, which made noise as if it were on. Nothing stirred.
The baby started fussing in earnest. Avery had a bad feeling that her face looked as horrified as the others’ and, of course, she was wearing ridiculously short shorts and what was now a sweat-stained halter top.
Max too was drooping, his earlier banter and stage persona long gone as he led them out to the eastern deck, where they stared out over the bow in the direction of the night-shrouded Atlantic.
“This would be a great place to watch the sunrise,” Madeline said. “The ocean’s only a few blocks away.”
Avery winced at the suggestion. She was not now, and never intended to be, a morning person.
“I have to agree that sunset toasts seem a lot more civilized,” Deirdre said, referring to their ritual at Bella Flora. “And I don’t think I could bear watching Avery eat Cheez Doodles that early in the morning. It was bad enough at sundown.”
Madeline and Nicole laughed.
“There’s never a bad time for Cheez Doodles,” Avery scoffed. “I’m pretty sure it says so right on the bag.”
Max mopped at his forehead. His cheeks seemed even more sunken.
Cradled in his grandmother’s arms, Dustin whimpered and yawned. His eyelashes brushed his cheeks.
“I think we’ve done enough for today,” Avery said. “Let’s divvy up the rooms and get a good night’s sleep.” As tired as she was, she knew she’d be spending most of the night open-eyed and praying that the bottom of the house was in better shape than the top. She did not want to see it for the first time with the Lifetime crew documenting her reactions.
“What time do you want to get started tomorrow, Kyra?” she asked, intentionally ignoring Troy and Anthony. “Nine or nine-thirty?” She emphasized the latter, which would give her more time for a quiet walk-through and a chance to rough out a schedule, and was relieved when Kyra chose nine-thirty.
“Does that work for you, Max?” Madeline asked.
“Perfect,” Max said, the relief etched clearly on his face. “I’ll see you in the morning, kiddos. There should be clean sheets in all of the bedrooms.” He tilted his captain’s hat in their general direction and headed toward the gangplank staircase.
The women looked at one another and Avery knew she wasn’t the only one who would have liked to help him down the stairs; just as she knew he would have rejected such an offer.
Dustin let out a serious wail and reached for his mother. Kyra set down her camera and reached for her son. “That’s a wrap,” she said as she held the baby against her, his back to the network camera.
“But…” Troy began, his camera still raised atop his shoulder.
“I said, we’re done,” Kyra repeated in much the same tone that an officer might command an underling to “stand down.” She continued to stare at him until he finally lowered his camera. “We’ll pick up again tomorrow morning at nine-thirty if you want to come back then.”
“We have instructions to stay here and be available to shoot twenty-four/seven,” Troy said, shoving a hand through his hair. “I assumed we’d be assigned rooms on-site.”
“I don’t see how,” Kyra said. “It looks like most of us are going to have to double up as it is.”
Troy crossed his arms in front of his chest. “We’re not leaving,” he said.
Maddie fisted her hands at her sides, ready to spring to Kyra’s aid. Avery, Nicole, and Deirdre faced Troy and Anthony. If this had been a movie, the opening strains of “I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar” would have begun to swell in the background.
“We’re not going to argue about this right now,” Avery said. “We’ll call the network once we’re settled in and make sure we’re all clear on who shoots what.”
“And where they’re supposed to stay,” Troy added.
“In the meantime, you two can have the pool house,” Avery said, gesturing vaguely toward the hedge covered concrete cube outside. “If you hurry you’ll beat Max to the front door and you can ask if there’s a key.”
“But we don’t have any idea if it’s habitable,” Anthony pointed out.
“I didn’t even see a door,” Troy added, clearly irritated.
“Not our problem,” Kyra said.
“We’ve done uninhabitable,” Nicole said. “There’s no such thing. It’s just mind over matter.”
“And you can always go to a hotel if you don’t think you can hack it,” Kyra added sweetly.
Troy and Kyra stared each other down for a few long seconds. Troy folded first, signaling to Anthony and grabbing their gear. Dustin cried and rubbed his eyes.
“I need to get Dustin’s things out of the van. Then I need to feed him. We’re way past his bedtime,” Kyra said.
Sweat trickled down Avery’s back. All of them looked like something the cat dragged in. She sincerely hoped there was running water.
“Would you mind if we take this room?” Kyra asked as they moved inside. “The attached sunroom will give us a little more space to set up Dusti
n’s portable crib and you won’t have to live with a diaper pail in your bathroom.”
“Works for me,” Avery said. “Are you all right with that?”
Deirdre and Nicole nodded. The three of them walked across the landing, which was lit by what little moonlight managed to penetrate the rectangle of filthy glass block and its neighboring porthole window.
“I think Avery and I should room together,” Deirdre said. “Since we’re going to have to share a double bed, it seems to make sense to divide by family.”
“As far as I’m concerned, you and I aren’t all that related,” Avery said.
“Well, I don’t have any plans to visit my sole remaining family member anytime soon,” Nicole said. “I’m not a big fan of bars on the windows.” Her tone was dry.
Avery remained silent, unable to actually choose Deirdre as a roommate.
Deirdre’s lips pursed. “Fine. I’m going to take the back bedroom. If you don’t want to share a room with me, maybe Max will let you sleep downstairs. Or you could bunk with the crew.”
“Fine.” Avery raised an eyebrow. “But if you snore I won’t be responsible for my actions.”
Deirdre shot her an eyebrow in return. “I don’t snore.”
“Yes, you do.” They’d shared a room at Bella Flora briefly. And slept in the same bathroom when Hurricane Charlene had come calling.
They sighed.
“Oh my God.” Nicole laughed. “You two are like mirror images of each other. It’s downright Darwinian.”
Avery gave her an eye roll and winced when she noticed Deirdre doing the same.
“All right,” Avery said, careful not to purse her lips in the same way that Deirdre was doing. “I’m going to go down and get my things.” She was almost looking forward to watching Deirdre carry all her luggage up the gangplank on her own.
She followed Nicole down the back stairs and around the house to the drive, pulling the warm night air into her lungs. Extracting her single suitcase from the trunk, she stared up at The Millicent’s sinuous curves and soaring walls, bathed now in forgiving moonlight. This house deserved a second chance and so did they. It would be up to her to see them through this project unscathed.
Nicole opened her eyes slowly, taking in the strange surroundings and trying to make sense of them. She’d woken often during the night, the first time to the sound of Dustin crying, which had taken her a while to process and later in need of the bathroom, an urge she’d resisted as long as possible before feeling her way across the room and into a pink-tiled extravaganza.
Now early morning sunlight suffused the flimsy curtains and sneaked in through the gaps between and beneath them, illuminating the scars on the wood floor and the thick layer of dust that covered pretty much everything.
The dark wood nightstand and matching headboard had rounded corners and linear grooves cut at right angles. The lamp, fashioned from a totem of chrome and wood geometric shapes, had probably once been über-modern. Possibly around the time man began to walk upright.
Nicole turned onto her back with a groan and stretched to smooth out the kinks. The double mattress was both lumpy and deeply grooved and she really didn’t want to think about how many others might have slept on it. Instead she focused on the fact that the sheets she’d found in the room’s small cedar closet had appeared clean and at least this mattress, however lumpy, sat inside a bed frame and on top of a box spring. Unlike her mattress last summer at Bella Flora, which had sat firmly on the floor under a window with no covering at all.
With the exception of the irregular chug of the air-conditioning unit, the house was quiet around her. A lone bird chirped somewhere in the backyard and she heard what sounded like a garbage truck a few streets away. Removing her phone from its charger, she checked the time: seven A.M. Too late to go back to sleep. Definitely too early to deal with this house or her housemates if she could avoid it.
Promising herself coffee later, Nicole pulled on running shorts and a sports bra and T-shirt and laced up her running shoes. In the bathroom she twisted her hair into a clip and applied what she thought of as “basic armor”—enough makeup to banish the dark circles, even out her skin tone, and camouflage the wrinkles that screamed out for attention she could no longer afford to give them.
Treading softly, she walked past Avery and Deirdre’s room, out the back door, and down the stairs to the backyard, where she stretched for a few minutes, keeping her eye on the tiny pool house for any sign of life or flash of a camera lens. Satisfied that she was not on camera for the moment, Nicole walked around the garage and through the gate to the sidewalk, breathing in the warm salt-tinged air.
At the corner she launched the GPS on her phone and began to jog east toward the ocean. She crossed Washington, which was dotted with offices and small retail shops, and then Collins, which offered more of the same. On Ocean Drive, she jogged through a small but well-appointed park and followed a concrete path that led through the dunes and onto the beach.
The sun had barely breached the Atlantic and hovered close to the water casting the first rays of the new day sparkling across it. This beach was a much deeper affair than last summer’s Pass-a-Grille beach, just as the Atlantic Ocean was a completely different animal than the Gulf of Mexico.
Her morning jogs around Bella Flora had been accompanied by the caw of seagulls and the gentle wash of the waves on sand. Here the roar of the ocean was pronounced and the wave action more strenuous. Even the early morning beachgoers moved at a faster clip than they had on Pass-a-Grille, perhaps because here it was all about the sunrise and the start of the day. On the west coast of Florida there was a tendency to linger over the sunsets that closed out the day so spectacularly.
Her thoughts flitted at random as she turned north, jogging slowly and getting her bearings. A few blocks up she spotted the outlines of the pastel-colored Art Deco hotels and sidewalk cafés that had made South Beach famous. There would be nightlife here and the kinds of restaurants and shopping that had not existed on Pass-a-Grille, not that Nikki had the wherewithal to enjoy those things.
Another jogger passed her and she picked up her pace, breathing in the salt air with each step, expelling it with the next. As she ran, she studied her new surroundings, scanning from the hotels down across the dunes and palm trees, over the boardwalk, past the walkers and joggers that now dotted the beach, and then out to the Atlantic. A truly funky lifeguard stand shaped like a 1930s version of a rocket ship painted flamingo pink and canary yellow rose out of the sand in front of her. Nicole slowed for a more thorough look.
“It’s something, isn’t it?” The deep voice startled her and she stumbled as she recognized it. “There’s a long string of them stretching up the beach.” A strong hand reached out to steady her and she turned to see Special Agent Joe Giraldi falling into step beside her just as he’d done on Pass-a-Grille beach when he was trying to use her to hunt down her brother. As he’d done then, he’d removed his T-shirt and tucked it into the waist of his running shorts. Which made it hard to ignore the broad shoulders and lightly muscled chest that triangled to narrow hips. Nicole looked up to his face, noting the strong nose and chin. The thick black hair. The fine brown eyes that missed nothing and gave away even less were hidden behind the Maui Jim’s.
“Aren’t you a little out of your jurisdiction?” she asked.
“Actually, no.” His lips curved into a smile. He was breathing easily and, unlike Nikki, seemed to be expending very little effort. “I’m attached to the Miami Bureau now.”
“So you’re not here to follow or harass me?” she asked.
“I don’t recall ever intentionally ‘harassing’ you,” he said. “I believe I was actually doing my job. Following every lead in the pursuit of a fleeing felon.”
“Well, you caught your felon,” she observed.
“You caught my felon,” he corrected quietly.
She frowned at the truth of it, not wanting to remember. It wasn’t even eight o’clock in the morning an
d the day was already heading downhill.
Nikki turned her eyes forward and tried to ignore him. Women stilled as they passed, practically going on point like hunting dogs, their hungry eyes aimed at Giraldi. A woman whose chest had settled somewhere around her waist stopped to watch him pass. So did an octogenarian with a Geiger counter.
“I hear you’re doing another house here,” Giraldi said. “That you all ended up with a television series.”
“There’s just a pilot right now. We’re shooting a series of programs here that are slated to run next spring.” Nikki kept her eyes averted. “What did they do, put out an FBI bulletin?”
“Nope,” he replied. “People magazine. ‘Ponzi Victims Become TV Stars.’ I read it in line at the grocery store.”
“I hope you bought that copy,” she said primly. “Stealing is a slippery slope. One minute you’re speed-reading a magazine article in the checkout line, the next you’re—”
“—stealing three hundred million dollars and bankrupting the sister who raised you?” he finished.
That took care of the smile. “You know, sometimes I go a whole five minutes without thinking about that,” she said. Without discussion, she turned and headed back the way she’d come, hoping he’d continue on his way. But the man was used to tailing people and didn’t miss a step.
“So, what are you doing here, Agent Giraldi?” she finally asked. “I only have one felon in the family and he’s already in jail.” The sand wasn’t hard-packed enough to run easily on and she was starting to feel winded, though she tried not to show it. She did, however, make a mental note to try the boardwalk next time. “I thought I was no longer a ‘person of interest’ to the FBI.”
Two young women strolled by, long-limbed and gorgeous. Both of them were practically topless and perked right up, which was saying quite a lot, at the sight of Giraldi.
