by Reinke, Sara
“And what clever little moniker have you come up with for it?” he asked with a smirk.
She awarded him her patent-pending Duh! look. “The guest house.”
“Ah.” John nodded once. “Got it.”
He was trying to pretend like nothing was wrong, that his entire body didn’t ache, his neck and shoulder in particular. The lidocaine the E.R. doctor had used to numb the area surrounding his bite wounds before conducting his impromptu, unsolicited exploratory surgery was wearing off. His head was a throbbing, agonizing mess. His eyes hurt. Even with his sunglasses on, the glare of the sun had grown unbearable. His entire arm felt numb now, not just tingling and cold, but leaden. The chill that had enveloped it now seemed to be spreading throughout his upper torso and chest, seeping in thin, icy, slow-moving fingers. And to top it all off, he had to piss.
The Pink Palace overlooked the marina and beaches of the Little Sister Golf and Yacht Club, the posh residential community in which it stood as one of the dominant landmarks. No one on Little Sister Island made less than six figures annually, in contrast to its neighbor, Big Sister, which had nearly three times the land area and four times the population.
“Painting seashells sure has its benefits,” he remarked as they pulled up the long driveway toward the Mediterranean-style mansion. With its clean lines, red Spanish-tile roof and graceful colonnades, it looked like a giant, pink sentry keeping a genteel if not serene watch over the multi-million dollar yachts and pleasure cruisers below. The surrounding grounds were expertly manicured and landscaped with a lush variety of blooming tropical foliage. A wide, sweeping staircase let up to the main entrance, where French doors stood open upon an expansive veranda.
“Oh, sure,” Sandy said. “Gracie’s got some of her stuff on exhibit at the Smithsonian. She made a conch-shell diorama of the Grateful Dead once that wound up being photographed for Rolling Stone magazine. She also makes a new one for every incoming president. You can see the one she sent to Obama in some of the pictures they publish of the Oval Office. It’s on the left-hand side of his desk, his left, not yours, beside his telephone.”
John blinked at her in amazement.
Sandy parked the car at the base of the front stairs and killed the engine. Unfastening her seat belt, she said, “Come on. We’ll cut through the house to get out back.”
Inside, the Pink Palace was as impressive as out, with stone-tiled floors and expensive, tropically themed rattan furniture complemented by vibrantly colored upholstery and wall hangings. There were windows everywhere, everything floor-to-ceiling, bay or hinged to open onto the adjacent poolside patio. John kept his sunglasses as he followed Sandy across the entry way, then through a broad living room.
“What’s with all of the hand pictures?” he asked, as they passed by at least the thirtieth framed portrait of a woman’s hands that they’d passed since entering the home. He’d paused a couple of times under the pretense of looking at them, but mainly it was because he’d felt wobbly on his feet, his balance unsteady ever since he’d gotten out of the car.
“They’re Gracie’s,” Sandy replied.
“What, does she collect them or something?” John asked. Seemed like a weird hobby to him, but then again, little if anything about Sandy and her mother had ever struck him as being conventional.
“No.” Sandy laughed, turning to him. “I mean, they’re hers. She used to be a hand model back in her teens. She was the Albolene Cream Girl. She had insurance on them and everything.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope.”
“Who insures their hands?”
“People insure their body parts all the time. Like Mariah Carey. She’s got million-dollar policies on each of her legs.”
She said more, but he didn’t pay attention. He’d come to a standstill in front of another framed picture, this one on the wall in a hallway leading from the dining room toward the kitchen. It was a cover from Playboy magazine and the dateline said November, 1968. A Wild Interview with Don Rickles, the cover promised, along with “Astropolis: The First Space Resort.” A leggy brunette, her hair bouffanted high above her head, sat perched on a barstool in the cover shot, wearing a black satin Bunny swimsuit complete with fluffy tail and matching ears, a faux bow-tie around her throat. She balanced a tray of martinis in one hand and offered a light with the other, all the while smiling cheekily.
“That’s Gracie,” Sandy said, although this was unnecessary. Sandy bore an uncanny resemblance to her mother, and in the Playboy cover, it could have been Sandy herself on the stool, her hair grown out and dyed chestnut brown.
“She worked at the Playboy Club in Chicago for awhile before she started with the Army and met Joe. Hugh Hefner used to come in sometimes. Gracie says he was sweet on her.” Sandy chuckled. “Anyway, he asked her to pose for the magazine, so she did. This is only a galley of the cover, though. It was never actually printed. They wound up going with some kind of political cartoon instead. It was an election year. Nixon and Hubert Humphrey.”
“Hef always felt really bad about that,” remarked a voice from behind them. “He still sends me a Christmas card every year.”
“Gracie, hi,” Sandy exclaimed with a smile.
“Hi, darling,” Gracie said, as her daughter moved to embrace her. John had met her before, of course, numerous times. She’d come by the office to visit Sandy or they’d all go out for lunch together, maybe dinner. He’d never been to the Pink Palace before, and he’d sure never known about her brush with Playboy infamy, and thus blinked at her now as if meeting her for the first time.
“John, hello.” Now Gracie stepped toward him, hands outstretched, but instead of hugging him, she pressed her palms against his cheeks. “What a lovely surprise.”
“Hey, Gracie,” he said, as she kissed the corner of his mouth.
Still holding his face, Gracie cocked her head and studied him, her smile fading. “You look terrible.”
He laughed. “It’s nice to see you, too.”
“No, I mean you’re pale.” Gracie glanced at her daughter. “He’s too pale.”
Sandy nodded, with a taxed expression on her face that seemed to suggest John was somehow responsible for his pallor, and that she’d tried vainly to keep him from it. “I know. He’s clammy, too. I’m going to put him up in Little Pink for awhile. He has to go back to the hospital in three days for stitches.”
“Little Pink?” John asked, puzzled.
“The guest house in the back,” Gracie supplied.
“I thought you said you didn’t have a name for it,” John said to Sandy.
“No, I said I didn’t have a moniker for it,” she replied. “Little Pink is more of a sobriquet. A metonym, even.”
“Or perhaps a synecdoche,” Gracie suggested. “By adding metonymy into the metaphor, you could easily derive the metalepsis. Although that might be a solecistic characterization.”
“No, that’s a catachresis,” Sandy said.
John pinched the bridge of his nose. “God,” he muttered. It was no damn wonder his head hurt.
***
He would have thought that Sandy’s house, “Little Pink,” would match, if not surpass, her mother’s in terms of wacky, vibrant décor. To his surprise, however, he found that the guest house was a modest reproduction French villa, versus the more gaudy, Mediterranean inspired architectural style of Gracie’s Pink Palace. The front entrance consisted of double lattice doors leading from a broad stone patio. Inside, the furnishings were all antique or Rococo-inspired reproductions, all glass and brass and filigree, with pale woods and pastel colors, richly textured upholstery and ornate wall hangings. It seemed so utterly un-Sandy, in such marked contrast to her bubbly, if not somewhat outlandish personality, that for a moment, John didn’t actually believe it was her home.
“This is really nice,” he told her.
“Thank you,” she replied. “I like to think of my decorating style as a tropical chic meets the British East Indies meets minimalist Victorian, all w
ith a sort of post-modern interpretation.”
With its open floor plan and plenty of windows, the house was also filled with sunlight and no corner seemed unlit or untouched, much to his chagrin.
“Do you want to lie down for awhile?” Sandy asked, as she first unfettered, then drew closed heavy, olive-colored draperies in what she’d described as the “more manly” of her two bedrooms. Its wrought iron bed frame, mahogany dresser and armoire, and earth-tone bed linens did indeed lend a more masculine note to the room and he wondered if Harlowe used it during his infrequent visits to the island, if only for a place to stow his stuff.
“No.” John shook his head. With the curtains closed, the room had actually dimmed enough for him to remove his sunglasses. “I want to try and get some work done. You remembered to grab my laptop off the boat, didn’t you?”
“Tah-dah.” Sandy had placed a large duffel bag she’d packed for him on the bed. She reached inside of it now and grunted as she pulled out his computer. Then she blinked, her bright expression faltering. “Oh, jeez. That reminds me.”
“What?”
“Your neighbor, Ethel Merriwether, came over while I was there. She said her cute little dog was missing.”
“Nutsy?” John said. Finally, he thought. Some good news.
Sandy nodded, looking mournful. “She’s just brokenhearted. Said he disappeared sometime overnight. She thinks he must have jumped off her boat and run away.”
Small yapping dogs and the indigenous predatory species of Florida notoriously didn’t get along. Ethel was right to worry. More than just the risk of being hit by a car or picked up by the island’s Animal Control, the greatest threat to Nutsy would be the alligators, crocodiles and other restless natives for whom he’d be considered a delicacy.
“We should send her something,” Sandy remarked.
He glanced at her, puzzled. “What, like another dog?”
“No. I mean like a card or flowers. Something sympathetic.”
“Why would we do that?” he asked, at a loss. “It’s just a dog, for crying out loud.”
“Not to Ethel, it’s not,” Sandy said. “Nutsy is her friend, her constant companion, like a child to her.” When he rolled his eyes, her frown deepened. “Haven’t you ever had a pet?”
“Of course I have. When I was growing up, we had a cat named Sugarloaf. He got run over by a school bus. My dad scooped him up with a shovel and dumped him in the canal behind our house. We called it a burial at sea.”
Sandy stared at him for a long moment, then shook her head. “You’ve got issues.”
He took the computer from her hands. “Tell me about it.” He sat down on the bed, balancing the laptop on his thighs and opening it. “You take care of sending whatever to Ethel. I want to find out how to get a hold of Boyd Wilder.”
“He wasn’t at the Show Me?”
“No.” He fired up the computer. “And I need to know when he’s going to be back. Maybe you can call out there? He might be more available if he thinks it’s a woman looking for him.”
Sandy shrugged. “Sure. But why do you still want to talk to him? You said so yourself. Lucy Weston isn’t missing.”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean Wilder isn’t involved in whatever’s going on with her,” John said. “Lucy was fine, as far as we know, until she hooked up with him.”
“Well, nothing too exciting or strenuous for you,” Sandy admonished, wagging her finger. “Dr. Prescott said your preliminary tests showed you’re anemic.”
“Who?”
“Dr. Prescott. From the emergency room. He said your red cell count is incredibly low, from blood loss, he’s pretty sure, but he wants to run some additional tests when you go back in for your stitches. He said it could cause weakness, headaches, dizziness, even this condition called pica where you have an irrepressible urge to eat strange things like paper, paste, raw meat. Any of this sound familiar?”
“I haven’t eaten paste since preschool,” he assured her dryly.
“Good. You sit up here and take it easy while I go fix you some supper. He also said you need to eat.”
“I’m not really hungry,” he began, then his voice faded as he caught a wink of light from the bathroom against a ring around her finger, a sizable diamond solitaire set in a simple gold band. “Wow.” He blinked in bewildered surprise. “That’s…wow. Quite a rock.”
He could have sworn she blushed, but the light was dim and it was hard to tell.
“Where’d that come from?” he asked.
“Found it in a cereal box,” she replied solemnly, then laughed. “Where do you think it came from? Harlowe gave it to me.”
“Is it…” The question faded as he looked into her eyes, saw the gleam of unmistakable giddiness there, more so than was customary, even for Sandy. It was all of the answer he needed.
“Yup.” She spoke in a quiet, somewhat shy voice, and now he was sure she blushed as she nodded. “He asked me to marry him.”
“Wow.” John blinked again, at a loss.
“I said yes,” she supplied helpfully.
“I gathered that. Wow. Hey. That’s something else, Sandy. When did he pop the question?”
“Oh, not long ago.” Sandy shrugged. “His last visit.”
The little calendar inside John’s mind began flapping backwards, estimating days. “But was what? A week ago?”
“Two,” she said and he nearly groaned aloud.
She’s been engaged for two weeks and I’m only just now noticing?
“It’s alright,” Sandy said gently, because his expression must have withered.
“No, it’s not.” Now he did groan. “I’m really sorry, Sandy.”
“You’ve had other things on your mind.”
“I should have noticed,” he said. “You should have said something to me. I would have sent you something, flowers, a card. Something sympathetic.”
She laughed. “What have you got against marriage?”
He raised his brow. “You’ve met Bevi.”
“Yes, and she was perfectly nice,” Sandy said. “Make yourself at home. Stretch out, relax. I’ll call you when dinner’s ready.”
***
Sandy’s getting married, he thought after she’d left the room. Because this struck him as alien a concept as eating a hamburger with his feet, he tossed it around in his mind for awhile, trying to get a handle on it. She’s getting married. And then she’s moving to Miami.
She hadn’t said so, not in any uncertain terms, but it hadn’t been necessary. Of course she’d move to Miami. Harlowe lived there. His job was based there. And considering Big Sister Island was a long commute along the intercoastal highway from the mainland to the Keys, in all likelihood, Harlowe and Sandy wouldn’t be setting up housekeeping at Little Pink upon their pending nuptials.
“What about Gracie?” he’d asked her.
“She knows, of course. She’s seen the ring. But she knew before it happened.” Sandy’s fingertip had tapped her brow. “Intuition.”
“No, I mean, who’s going to stay here at Little Pink and look after her?”
Sandy had shrugged noncommittally. “I don’t know. We haven’t really talked about it. Maybe your mom could stay here. She and Gracie would have a blast together.”
“Oh, sure,” he’d replied. “Gracie could talk about her Playboy days and Wilma could pass out in horror.”
Sandy had laughed. “But hey, nothing’s going to happen, not for awhile. I mean, Harlowe and I haven’t even set a date yet.” With a mischievous smile, she’d added, “Why? Will you miss me?”
“Like I’d miss a migraine,” he’d assured her.
He’d left his computer on a nearby desk, the lid open, and now he Google-searched for Michael Gough. After wading through a bevy of links to sites about a British-born actor by the same name, he stumbled across one with a heading that immediately piqued his curious interest.
Origin of the Species: The Etiological Mythos of Werewolves, Revenants and Vampires, by
Michael A. Gough, PhD.
“Hello,” John murmured, clicking to open the link. A PDF file opened, a lengthy document that downloaded slowly. However, the first page, which was almost immediately viewable, contained a brief biography of the paper’s author:
Dr. Michael A. Gough is a research epidemiologist on staff with the Center for Public Health Studies at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Upon completion of a Bachelor degree in anthropology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , Dr. Gough obtained a Master of Health Sciences degree in the field of epidemiology from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health (Baltimore, Maryland) and subsequently, a Doctor of Philosophy degree in epidemiology from this same institution.
Why is someone with his pedigree writing a term paper about vampires and werewolves? John wondered. He went to his in-box, copied Michael Gough’s email address from his correspondences to Lucy, and started to type.
Dear Dr. Gough, he wrote. My name is Jonathan Harker. I’m a former Miami-Dade County police officer working now as a private investigator on Big Sister Island in the Florida Keys.
He hated playing the former-cop card and seldom, if ever, did it, reserving it only for those occasions in which he thought it might make a difference in whether or not someone would respond to his questions. For some people, the mere mention of police officer was enough to trigger the ingrained childhood instinct to trust and obey. For others, it was simply a matter of intimidation. He was willing to bet that Michael Gough was either one sort or the other.
I am trying to get in contact with an individual named Lucy Weston, who I understand to be an acquaintance of yours. If you’re able to provide any information that may assist me, please email or call me as soon as possible.
He added his name and hit “send,” shooting the message off into the abyss of cyberspace.
“Done,” Sandy said from the doorway, startling him. He looked up to find her grinning broadly, a cat that had just swallowed the proverbial canary.
“What?” he asked.
“You have an appointment to meet with Boyd Wilder tonight at the Show Me! club, ten-thirty sharp.”
