Wish Upon a Christmas Star

by Darlene Gardner

  “James Smith.” He tapped his chest and gazed at her expectantly. She squinted, trying to think how she knew him.

  “You’re hurting my feelings here,” he said with a lopsided smile. “You might remember me as Jimbo.”

  “Jimbo Smith?” Kayla’s mouth dropped open. They’d gone to high school together. He’d even sat beside her in a number of classes. “How much weight have you lost?”

  She covered her mouth with her fingers and grimaced. “Forget I said that. It’s none of my business.”

  “No, I don’t mind.” He waved a hand. Slung over one of his arms was a digital camera. “Eighty-five pounds.”

  Jimbo—no, James—was way taller than Kayla but probably no more than five feet eight. Subtract eighty-five pounds from a man of that size and no wonder she hadn’t recognized him.

  “You look great.” She ran her eyes down the length of him, taking in his tan, toned limbs. He was just right, neither too fat nor too thin.

  “You do, too,” he said. “But then you’ve always looked fantastic.”

  “Thanks,” Kayla said, surprised by the effusiveness behind the compliment. “I don’t think I’ve seen you since high school. You’d think we would have run into each other before now.”

  “I only moved back to Key West a few months ago, when I got the job at the Sun,” James said. “I jumped at the chance. I never forgave my parents for moving when I was a junior in high school.”

  He hadn’t graduated from high school with her? Why didn’t she remember that?

  “It’s nice to have you back.” She injected enthusiasm into her voice to make up for not noticing he’d left town.

  “Sorry I wasn’t here earlier,” he said. “A motorboat crashed into the dock and another ship last night. I needed to get the photo before somebody cleaned up the damage.”

  “Perfectly understandable,” Kayla said. “I’m thankful you could meet with me at all.”

  “For you, anything,” he said with a wide grin. “You want to get a cup of coffee?”

  She picked up her cup from the table beside her and held it out. “I’m good on coffee. What I need is information.”

  “Cool,” he said. “Nobody will be in Photography. We can talk there.”

  Aside from the blown-up photos lining the walls, the photography department looked as bland as the rest of the place. Beige carpet, beige walls, desks nestled inside cubicles beside photography equipment.

  James rolled out a desk chair for her, waited until she sat down and hoisted himself up on the edge of the desk. His calves were nicely toned, she noticed.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked.

  “Two things, actually.”

  First she asked if he recognized Mike DiMarco and discovered Maria had beaten her to the punch. She and Logan had run into the photographer when they were leaving the newspaper office. James was already in possession of an age-progression image Maria had asked him to show around the office.

  Then Kayla got down to the real reason she was there, explaining how the merchants association had hired her to save the group from additional embarrassment.

  “Wow! So you’re a private eye now.” James grinned at her. He’d been doing a lot of that. “I’m impressed!”

  “Don’t be. If I don’t crack this case, my uncle will can me. And then it’s back to making bottle art.” Now why had she told him that? Until now, she’d shared that information only with her mother and Maria.

  “I’ve got faith in you,” he said. “You’ll kick the case’s ass.”

  She giggled. “I’m trying, which brings me to my question. Did somebody tip you off Thursday morning that Santa had been defaced with Magic Marker?”

  “Yeah. I got a text,” he said. “It was the second one about that statue. That’s how I got the photo of Santa looking like a zombie.”

  She was right! But he’d gotten a text and not a call. That was interesting.

  “Who was the text from?” Kayla asked.

  “I didn’t recognize the number.”

  “Wouldn’t it have to come from someone you know?”

  “Not necessarily. I give my cell number out to lots of people.”

  “Why text you, though? Why not call the newspaper?”

  “It was seven in the morning. Usually nobody’s around the newspaper that early,” he said. “Whoever it was must have really wanted me to get the photo.”

  “Do you still have the texts?”

  “Nah,” James said. “I get so many, I delete ’em after a few days.”

  “Can you check your bill and give me the number?”

  “Sure thing.” He hopped down from the desk, logged on to the computer and a few minutes later handed her a piece of paper with the number written on it. “Here you go.”

  “Thanks,” she said and got up to leave. “You’ve been a big help.”

  “Let me walk you to your car,” he said.

  “Um, okay.” She hid her surprise at the offer. Maybe he was leaving the office, too.

  He was strangely silent on the way to the parking lot. Kayla was never quiet. She filled him in on what some of their former high school classmates were up to. In no time, they were at her car.

  She hit the remote and went to open the driver’s-side door. James got there first and opened it for her.

  “Thank you,” she said and started to duck inside the car.

  “Would you like to go out sometime?” James blurted, the first thing he’d said in minutes.

  Kayla paused in the act of getting into the car. If she’d seen this coming, she’d be better prepared to handle it. But maybe she was reading the situation wrong.

  “You mean, like, on a date?” she asked.

  “Yeah.” He rolled his eyes when she continued to say nothing. “C’mon, Kayla. I’m dying here. I’ve wanted to ask you out since high school.”

  Her jaw dropped.

  “Wow. What a question,” she said, stalling for time. The last thing she wanted was to hurt his feelings. “Not a bad question, don’t get me wrong. A very good question.”

  He shifted from foot to foot. “What’s the answer?”

  “The thing is, I can’t. I’d like to,” she said quickly, trying to soften the blow, “but, well, I’m sort of seeing somebody.”

  “Sort of?”

  “Yes.” She couldn’t explain without going into great detail about the subtle signals Alex had been giving her at the bar last night. “It’s in the beginning stages.”

  “No problem,” James said, backing away, not doing a very good job of hiding his disappointment. “Good seeing you again.”

  He was across the parking lot and back in the newspaper building before Kayla gathered herself to get in the car.

  James hadn’t expected her to say yes, she realized. He probably had insecurities dating back to before he’d lost the weight, although the inside of a person had always been more important to Kayla than the outside.

  The next time she saw James, she’d make sure he knew her refusal had nothing to do with him. Why, if he’d asked her out in high school, when he was eighty-five pounds heavier, she might have said yes.

  She thought again of the wounded look that had entered his eyes when she’d refused him and suppressed the urge to run after him and tell him that now.

  CHAPTER TEN

  KAYLA’S UNCLE FRANK was exactly where she said he would be, with three of his cronies on the covered back deck of a houseboat
moored at the Key West City Marina. Cronies was his word, not Maria’s. She had expected Frank Knowles to be around the same age as Kayla’s mother, but he was easily twenty years older. Maria put Frank and his friends in their mid to late seventies.

  “Me and my cronies play poker out here every Friday. Beats sitting in a dark smoky room.” Frank gestured to the glistening blue water of the Gulf of Mexico, which contrasted with the white masts of sailboats. Seabirds soared overhead and the smell of salt water filled the air.

  Maria, however, was most aware of Logan’s hand resting gently on her back.

  He’d turned into a distraction—no surprise, considering how great the sex had been between them. Her mind should be one hundred percent on finding Mike and not on how her skin tingled whenever Logan touched her. She should have told him to go back to New York. He’d developed a stubborn streak, though. There was no guarantee he would listen to her.

  “It’s a great setting,” Logan said, “but I guess that’s what you get when you live on a houseboat.”

  “This is a floating home,” Frank said. “Unlike a houseboat, it’s stationary. I can’t take it out on the water, but I’ve got a million-dollar view without the price tag.”

  The floating home was also surprisingly spacious, with rooms on two levels leading to the double-decker patio with the killer views.

  “We used to play poker at night before Arturo started falling asleep on us,” a thin man with a craggy voice said. He was one of three men sitting at a fold-up table, drinking what appeared to be iced tea. All were deeply tanned with varying amounts of white hair and wrinkles.

  “I need my beauty sleep,” retorted a man in a Miami Marlins baseball hat who looked to be of Hispanic descent. He must be Arturo.

  Everybody laughed, with Frank guffawing the loudest. If Maria had overheard Kayla’s uncle from an adjacent room, she would have guessed he was a big, stocky man like his brother, Key Carl. In reality, Frank was probably five feet four and about one hundred thirty pounds. His last name was different than his brother’s, though, indicating they didn’t have the same father.

  “You two want to join us?” the guy with the craggy voice asked.

  “They’re not here to play poker. They’re here to ask questions. This is Maria DiMarco and that’s Logan Collier,” Frank said in his earsplitting voice and completed the introductions. The man in the baseball hat was indeed Arturo. The craggy-voiced man was Pete. The quiet guy was also named Pete, but his friends had nicknamed him Repeat. “You all know my niece Kayla. She sent Maria and Logan over. They’re private eyes.”

  “Maria’s the private eye,” Logan corrected, still with his hand on the small of her back. Maria supposed she could move away. She stayed put.

  “What kind of questions? What case? Anything we can help you with?” Arturo shot the inquiries at her.

  “Let the girl speak!” Frank bellowed. “Geez. Anyone would think you were the private eye.”

  “I’d be good private eye,” Arturo retorted.

  Maria figured she better cut in before the men got even more off track. “I appreciate that you want to help. The more people who look at the image, the better.” She dug the age progression out of her slouchy bag and set it on the table. “This is an approximation of what my brother Mike would look like today. He’s been missing eleven years.”

  Pete whistled loud and low. “That’s a long damn time.”

  “I’d appreciate if you’d pass it around and take a good look,” Maria said. “I have reason to believe my brother is in Key West, probably under an assumed name.”

  “Let Frank look first,” Pete said. “He knows everybody who lives here year-round.”

  “Almost everybody,” Frank amended. “People come and go around here.”

  Maria held her breath while he considered the image. Logan moved closer to her, putting a hand on her shoulder. Again, she thought she should move away. Again, she didn’t.

  “Nope, sorry,” Frank said. “At first I thought it might be Clem. Chin’s different, though.”

  “We’ve got that before,” Logan said. “It’s not Clem.”

  Frank walked over to the table and handed the photo to Arturo, who shook his head and passed it to Pete. He put on a pair of reading glasses and took his time, but ultimately the result was the same. Repeat was the last to look. He didn’t recognize her brother, either.

  “That’s a pretty good approximation, but he might have gained weight or grown a beard.” Maria repeated what Sergeant Peppler had said when she’d stopped by the police station.

  Logan glanced at her and she imagined she could read his mind. He thought she was grasping at straws.

  “Maybe it would help if you told us why you believe your brother’s here,” Frank said.

  “He mailed some envelopes that were postmarked from Key West to an ex-girlfriend,” Maria said.

  “What was in the envelopes?” Arturo asked.

  Why not tell them? Maria thought. It wasn’t as though she was breaking a confidence. Even if she mentioned that Mike’s ex-girlfriend was engaged to Austin Tolliver, it was the longest of long shots they’d recognize he was a state senator from Kentucky.

  “Nude photos,” she said. “The last one came with what could be considered a blackmail note.”

  “Wait a minute.” Repeat lifted his index finger. “I remember hearing something about naked pictures.”

  Maria tried not to get too excited. Caroline Webb wasn’t the first woman who’d posed in the altogether for a man. “From who?”

  “Not somebody I knew. Somebody I overheard. Now where was that?” Repeat screwed up his forehead. After a moment, he snapped his fingers. “I know. It was a couple weeks ago at the Daybreak Café, that Cuban-American place on Duval. Frank, you were there.”

  “I was?” He sounded doubtful. “I don’t remember anything about naked pictures.”

  “It was before you arrived,” Repeat said. “You were late, like always.”

  “Why didn’t you mention it?” Frank demanded.

  “My hearing’s not so good anymore,” his friend said. “I thought I might have it wrong. I didn’t catch much, anyway. Just that this guy had naked pictures of some woman.”

  It was a tenuous connection at best. However, at the moment it was all Maria had. She wasn’t about to discount the information. “What did the guy look like?”

  “I didn’t see him real good. Couldn’t even tell you if he was with a man or a woman.”

  “You didn’t turn around when you heard the word naked?” Pete asked.

  “’Course I did,” Repeat said. “But the guy was in the booth behind me. All I could see was part of his arm.”

  “Fat lot of good you’ll do Maria,” Pete said. “You can’t identify a person from an arm.”

  “Shows what you know,” he retorted. “This guy had a tattoo.”

  Maria’s breath caught in her throat as a scene from her past replayed in her mind. Mike coming home with a tattoo on his forearm when he was seventeen. Her parents hitting the roof, especially because minors were supposed to get parental permission.

  How had the fact that her brother sported a tattoo slipped her mind? If she’d thought of it before now, she could have mentioned it as an identifying mark when she was showing around the age progression photo.

  “What kind of a tattoo?” she asked.

  If Mike’s had been in a less visible place, her parents might not have been so hard on him. They hadn’t understood ho
w her brother could permanently etch a serpent on his forearm. They didn’t care that it was the logo of his favorite alternative rock band.

  “I saw it pretty good,” Repeat said. “It was a snake.”

  * * *

  A FEW HOURS LATER MARIA sat with Logan at an outdoor table at the Daybreak Café, the restaurant where Repeat had spotted the man with the serpent tattoo. She was peripherally aware of the steady stream of tourists passing by.

  Logan had pointed out two young women who’d paired their Santa hats with red micro shorts and sleeveless shirts trimmed in white fur. A middle-aged couple with their arms linked belted out a jaunty Christmas tune as though they were performing on stage.

  The constant distractions made it hard for Maria to think. Logan provided another one, although he seemed to accept that things between them couldn’t progress any further. Why that annoyed her she didn’t care to analyze.

  “This place closes at two, right?” Logan asked. “It’s almost that now. Alex Suarez might not make the time to talk to you.”

  When they’d arrived at the café more than an hour ago, they’d been told Suarez was occupied with restaurant business. Maria said they’d wait around until the owner was free. In the meantime, they’d finished off a lunch of Cuban-style sandwiches and fried plantains while Maria flagged down servers and busboys. None of them recognized Mike as a customer.

  “I’m not leaving until he makes time.” Maria picked up her water glass, only to find it empty. Their waitress had cleared their lunch dishes away about fifteen minutes ago. She hadn’t come by since to refill their glasses, a strong hint that it was time for them to leave. The restaurant was closing. It was already a few minutes past 2:00. “You heard that waitress. She said Suarez goes from table to table, making sure the customers are happy. He’s the man to talk to.”

  “Just keep in mind that a tattoo of a snake isn’t that unusual, Maria,” Logan said. “Lots of people have them.”