by Reinke, Sara
“And anyway, I miss you,” he heard her saying. “No, Gracie’s taking the boat out today, a group outing to look for more sea shells, I guess.”
Harlowe, he thought. She was talking to her dearly betrothed. Not wishing to intrude, he occupied himself by looking around the room. A large painting framed on the wall caught his eye and he went to look more closely at it. A portrait set against a bright, somewhat garish blue background, it featured a headshot of a stern-faced, balding man with a large, almost comically bushy mustache, dressed in a dark blue tuxedo with ridiculously oversized lapels and bow tie. In the bottom corner of the painting, in small, slanted letters, someone had printed Anthony Fitzgerald Dodd, then the initials G.A.D. and the date, 11-20-81.
“That’s my father,” he heard Sandy say from behind him, and startled and somewhat sheepish, he turned to find her in the patio doorway. “Gracie did that ages ago, when she worked on canvas instead of seashells.”
As she crossed the room toward him, she continued. “She’d originally painted him in his Army uniform, but she got the ribbons wrong. He said something about it and pissed her off. So she put the mustache on there—he didn’t have one—and slapped that awful tuxedo over him. She also wrote ‘asshole’ above his name, but I got her to paint over it.”
John squinted again at the name on the portrait, sliding his sunglasses down his nose momentarily. “Anthony Fitzgerald Dodd?” he read aloud, glancing back at Sandy, his brow raised. “I thought your dad’s name is Joe.”
“Oh, no.” Sandy laughed. “But everyone calls him that.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “Must be short for Anthony Fitzgerald.”
She gave him a photographic grand tour, showing him a nearby bookcase that had been stocked with dozens of framed photographs. Several showed a beaming, happy Sandy standing next to a tall man John assumed to be Harlowe. Assumptions were all he could manage, however, because in the images, the man always stood with his back to the camera. John couldn’t even be sure it was the same guy every time.
“Oh, it’s Harlowe, alright,” Sandy said when he asked. “This is from our trip to Yellowstone last year. This is from when we went to Philadelphia two years ago. Oh, and here’s when we went to New Orleans, right before Katrina. We keep meaning to go back. There was this one little restaurant in the French Quarter that we just fell in love with. The chicken etouffee was absolutely to die for, and we’ve been wondering if it reopened after the storm.”
“Why is his back turned every time?” John asked.
“He hates having his picture taken.”
John studied the photographs for a long moment. “You mean you’re going to marry this guy and you don’t have a single picture of him?”
“I have plenty of pictures of him,” Sandy replied. “Just not of his face.”
“How’s that going to work on your wedding day?”
She shrugged. “He’ll wear a tux with tails, I guess.” With a mischievous grin, she added, “Or maybe a thong and some ass-less chaps.”
In another picture, a very young Gracie Dodd stood in high heeled shoes, a cowboy hat and fringe-trimmed vest atop what looked like a one-piece satin swimsuit. Between her hands, she carried a rifle that looked about two sizes too big for her slim, diminutive frame.
“That was when she was a part of the Ringling Brothers Circus,” Sandy said. When John turned to her in surprise, she nodded. “She did hand modeling for three years out of high school, then took up sharp-shooting for a hobby.”
Who takes up sharp-shooting for fun? John thought, then shook his head. Never mind, he told himself. After all, this was Gracie they were talking about.
“She got pretty good,” Sandy remarked. “But her modeling agency was afraid of what it would do to her hands, all of that gunpowder residue and what-not. Plus she was wearing calluses onto her fingertips. Not good for the hand-modeling business. In 1967, a guy named Irvin Feld bought out Ringling Brothers and started revamping it. Gracie got a job with them shooting clay pigeons and stuff, putting on a show. She did that for about two years before she got on at the Playboy Club.
“They billed her as ‘Audrey Hepburn meets Annie Oakley,’ called her the ‘Sharp-Shooting Pin-Up’ and had her replicate some of Annie Oakley’s most famous stunts. Gracie could shoot the spades out of a five-of-spades playing card from across the circus tent. Sometimes they’d put clowns in the act with her, sometimes she’d dangle upside from a trapeze and hit targets on the ground.”
A second, smaller frame, about the size of a business card, sat in front of Gracie’s circus portrait. A single, shiny cartridge rested inside on a bed of cotton.
“She’d give those out to kids after the shows for souvenirs,” Sandy said. “You can still find them on eBay sometimes. She’s still got a couple of boxes of them over at the Pink Palace. All of the guns she used to use, too—big-bore single action six-shooter pistols, lever-action, and replica single-shot rifles. You want to go see?”
John shook his head, returning the photo to the bookshelf. “No, thanks.”
“You sure? They’re pretty cool.”
He could have told her that even from across a crowded room, a gun could cause him to hyperventilate, his buttocks to clench, his balls to shrink into his groin. He’d be paralyzed with anxiety, unable to think or breathe. He’d be utterly helpless.
“No, thanks,” he said again instead.
As she walked away, Sandy said, “I’ve got a pot of coffee on in the kitchen. Feel free to help yourself. I’m going to go into the office for a little while today, take care of some things, so you just make yourself at home. Mi casa es su casa, and all that.”
“The office?” He followed her. “What sort of things?”
“I checked the business email last night and we’ve had a couple of background check requests come in from the Kingston resort. It’s contract work, nothing exciting. I usually handle those anyway.”
“Anything else?”
“An inquiry on some surveillance. An email from a lady in South Shore who thinks her husband is cheating on her, said she found our website in a Google search.” She smiled brightly. “I told you setting up a WYSIWIG site with a GUI interface and using white-hat search engine optimizing in the HTML coding would increase our indexing potential, while adding in the server-side script form with CAPTCHA verification would be good point-of-sale marketing.”
He looked at her for a moment. “Okay, I didn’t understand a word you just said, so if you told me before, I’m willing to bet I didn’t get it then, either.”
“I have a CCP,” she told him and when he continued blinking at her, at a loss, she supplied by way of translation: “A certificate in computer programming. It was part of my post-baccalaureate studies. I was considering a master’s degree in software engineering but ended up going with integrated marketing communication.”
He blinked at her again. “You have a master’s degree?”
She nodded. “Got it right after I tried medical transcription work. It was on my resume.”
Shaking his head, he said, “Never mind. Look, let me go upstairs, throw some clothes on. I’ll head into the office with you. I’ll call this lady back.”
“I can take care of it,” Sandy said.
“No, it’s okay. I’m the one who’ll be doing the surveilling anyway.”
“I can do that, too. It sounds pretty cut and dry. This guy isn’t exactly being subtle, according to his wife’s email. She basically just wants some pictures so she can use them when she files for divorce. I’ve got a telephoto lens attachment for my digital camera, and I can—”
“Sandy, I do the surveilling,” John said again. “Always have. Always will. This isn’t McMillan and Wife. It says Harker Private Investigations in great big letter on the door, remember?”
“Dr. Prescott said you’re supposed to be taking it easy. As in bed rest.” She planted her hands on her hips. Which caused the V-front of her robe to obligingly wi
den, revealing the inner swells of her breasts. Which made him remember the dream of her in the baby-doll teddy, a recollection he might have found more titillating had she not tried to impale him with a wooden stake in this same dream. “And you fell last night, were bleeding again. You shouldn’t be on your feet.”
“I’m feeling much better,” he began feebly.
“Bed,” Sandy said simply.
He tried again. “It will be good for me to go into the office.”
She pointed imperiously to the doorway, her brows narrowing. “Go.”
“Really, Sandy, hanging around the house, nothing to do…it makes me antsy. I’m better off if I just—”
“Now.”
He hunched his shoulders. Which admittedly caused a shudder of pain to radiate outward from his wounds, through his torso, enveloping his back. “Fine,” he grumbled, limping toward the door.
***
He watched through a window in his upstairs bedroom as Sandy’s car, a bright yellow Volkswagen Beetle, pulled out of the parking pad in front of Little Pink, following a narrow, winding path toward the main gates. As soon as she was gone from view, and he’d counted to one hundred and fifty-seven, just to make sure she wouldn’t loop around and sneak back on him, he went back downstairs.
This is bullshit, he thought. I’m not an invalid. And I’m sure not going to spend all day in bed like one.
Once in the living room again, he prowled restlessly. Gracie wasn’t at the Pink Palace. He had the estate to himself. It was huge, sprawling and framed by high walls and tropical foliage, but felt claustrophobic to him all at once, suffocating.
One of Gracie’s painted shells sat in the middle of Sandy’s coffee table, an enormous, bleached white clam shell nearly as wide as the table itself. He approached it, expecting to find garish paint splotches inside, maybe feathers hot-glued to it, some sequins or googly eyes.
Instead, to his surprise, he found a reproduction detail from Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, an extreme close up of Venus’ face and neck, her golden hair fluttering to the side. Rendered in warm, creamy hues against the plaster-smooth surface of the shell’s interior, the portrait bore an uncanny resemblance to someone else besides a Greek goddess.
It looks like Sandy, he thought.
G.A.D. had been inscribed in miniscule letters at the vertex of the shell. Had it not been for this, John would never have believed Gracie capable of producing something so exquisitely beautiful. All at once, he had no problem at all believing she had an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institute, or that Presidents of the United States, past and current, had thought enough of her work to display it prominently on their desks.
It’s amazing.
On the bookshelf nearby, he found another picture and this one took his breath away almost as readily as the Venus/Sandy painting. Like the circus photo, this one featured Gracie grinning at the camera, but unlike the former, this was a recent shot. In it, Gracie held an oversized cardboard check, the kind you see on The Price Is Right.
John raised his sunglasses to his forehead, squinting against the sunlight and leaning closer to the picture. Now he could clearly see the words written on the gigantic check: Florida Lotto. Beneath this—and John had to blink twice to make sure he wasn’t hallucinating—was the sum total of $81,000,000. He counted the number of zeroes three times to be certain.
He thought he might faint. Only this time it had nothing to do with his anemia.
Particularly after learning about Gracie’s history with both Playboy and the Ringling Brothers Circus, John had just figured these experiences, combined with whatever pension she received from the military and the supplement of her artwork had allowed Gracie to accumulate such enormous wealth. But now he understood.
I’ll be damned, he thought. Gracie won the lottery.
All at once, his head hurt again.
“I need a drink,” he muttered, shuffling into the kitchen. Here, the smell of brewed coffee, strong to begin with, became nearly overpowering. He turned off the coffee maker, then poured the still-steaming, full carafe down the sink drain. With it gone, the aroma began to dissipate, and his stomach began to settle again.
Sandy had left a box of brown sugar and cinnamon flavored instant oatmeal on the countertop for him to find, with a bright pink post-it note attached. High in iron, good for anemia! she’d written helpfully on the note, along with a little smiley face he’d promptly crumpled into a frown against the palm of his hand before tossing into the trash.
He thought maybe orange juice might settle okay on his gut and hoped that she had some. Ignoring the oatmeal, he opened the refrigerator and leaned inside. As soon as he swung the door wide, a blast of arctic chill struck him, and with it, another smell, this time something that made his stomach warble hungrily not queasily.
Sandy had stuck a package of pork chops, each about two inches thick, on the bottom shelf to thaw. John found himself staring at them, or more specifically, at the little puddle of blood that had formed in the far corner of the Styrofoam tray beneath them.
The blood.
That was the odor that had wafted against him when he’d opened the fridge, the smell that even now held him spellbound. He stared at the package of chops, that small, nickel-sized pool of thin, watery blood, and it felt for all the world like he swooned. He didn’t lose consciousness, didn’t pass out and hit the floor in a dead faint. But the world seemed to grow a bit hazy, not as much a complete black-out as a rolling one, if such things were possible with human consciousness. A brown-out.
But in any case, the next thing he knew, he found himself sitting on the floor, the refrigerator door wide open, the package of half-frozen pork chops in his lap. He’d peeled back the cellophane wrapper and to his shock and disgust, found himself eating one of the things, like some kind of pork-sicle.
There it was in his hand, a crooked crescent shape gnawed out of its profile, while the rest of it lay against his back teeth and tongue, spongy and cold, a mashed and mutilated bolus of raw, tangy meat.
His gullet wrenched. Tossing the pork chop aside, he scrambled to his feet, crab-crawling clumsily across the kitchen floor and grabbing the trash can. He made it just in time, clutching the rim of the can in his hands and vomiting.
Shuddering in the aftermath, he slipped away from the trash can and slumped to the floor, curling onto his side and drawing his knees toward his chest. When he was able to get to his feet again, he grabbed a handful of paper towels and limped upstairs, wiping his tongue and lips furiously with it. Returning to his guest room, he rinsed his mouth out with water then brushed his teeth at least a half-dozen times, following up with a quick gargle of the hydrogen peroxide he’d been using to clean his wounds, just to be sure.
What’s wrong with me? he thought. I was eating that!
Remarkably little had come up when he’d retched, which gave him some comfort, because it meant he hadn’t actually swallowed much of the meat at all. Instead, it seemed he’d been chewing on it, like a cow might a wad of cud. Chewing all of the blood out of it, he thought in disgusted dismay. That’s what I was doing, because that’s what I’d wanted, what had smelled so good. Not the pork at all, but the blood.
John shoved the heel of his hand to his brow and closed his eyes. “Get a grip on yourself,” he told himself for the second time that morning. “Next you’ll have yourself as brainwashed as Lucy Weston, thinking you’re some kind of vampire.”
Didn’t Sandy say something about anemia causing people to want to eat weird shit? He wracked his brain, trying to remember. Sandy said so much, that was the problem. But she’d mentioned something like this. He was sure of it. Pinto, she’d called it, or something along those lines. Pie crust, Pike’s Peak. What was it?
Pica, he thought. That’s what it was. A condition where you have an irrepressible urge to eat strange things. That’s what she told me.
Even now, with the bathroom door closed and the kitchen far below him, he could swear he still smelled the blood i
nside the pork chop package. He’d shoved the whole thing, unwrapped and mangled, unceremoniously back into the fridge before slamming the door and rushing upstairs. There was no logical way he should still be able to smell something that, under normal circumstances, he shouldn’t have been able to smell in the first place. But there it was, floating up with the air-conditioning, following the intricate labyrinth of ductwork through Little Pink to find him there in the dark corner beside the toilet.
And goddamn if it wasn’t making his stomach growl again.
CHAPTER TWELVE
John changed into some jeans with his T-shirt, hopped into the Galaxie and headed for the Coconut Grove Marina. There was no way he was about to spend his day alone in Sandy’s oversized house having to smell the stink of those pork chops the entire time. He had an old laptop on board the Quagmire and he planned on digging it out, dusting it off and seeing if he could resurrect it from the virtual dead. Living on a sailboat wasn’t good for electronic equipment, he’d come to discover. Little things like computer circuitry tended to be intolerant of the humid, salt-water surroundings. But he was expecting a phone call from Michael Gough in California in less than an hour, and he’d wanted to have the man’s emails to and from Lucy open and in front of him for the course of their conversation.
“Hey, John,” he heard a voice calling out loudly as he tromped down the gangplank, sunglasses in place against the bright dazzle of sunlight off the water. John paused, glancing to his left, and visibly winced to see Gilbert Manfried, the marina manager, coming his way.
Of all the people in all the world, John really wished he could have avoided this one more than any other at the moment.
“John, hi,” Gilbert raised his hand in a wave, the large swell of his paunch bouncing up and down with every step. He was the only man John had ever met outside of Boyd Wilder who lived that far south of the arctic circle and still boasted the pasty complexion of the Pillsbury Dough Boy. His cheeks were bright red, most likely from the exertion of darting to catch up to John. He’d never seen Gilbert emerge from the air-conditioned interior of his office long enough to get anything close to a sunburn.
