Shadowed Paradise

by Blair Bancroft

  Phil’s gaze made the rounds of the room, silently demanding eye contact from each of her agents and employees. “Do you understand what I’m saying? I’m talking to the men too! No matter how much you need the money, it’s better to lose a few thousand than lose your life. Have we got that straight?”

  “Yes, ma’am!” Jake Spanos’s voice rose above the general murmur of assent.

  Phil turned sharply to her right to pin Vicky DelVecchio with her glance. “What was that, Vicky?” she inquired softly.

  “I said,” Vicky returned defiantly, “that Mike’s getting me a gun. He’s going to take me to the practice range out by the old Blue place and teach me how to use it.”

  “That’s all we need,” Phil snapped. “Some poor transferee from up north goes to your Open House looking for a place for his family, and you shoot him. Frankly, Vicky, dead customers are not high on my list of priorities.”

  Phil, every inch the Boss, issued a decree. “There will be no guns, is that clearly understood?” Though not with grumbles, everyone nodded.

  After they spent another twenty minutes tossing around ideas for Realtor safety, the meeting broke up. The only viable suggestion for Phil to take to the Brokers’ meeting seemed to be a team approach to most basic aspects of real estate.

  Ordinarily Claire was so busy she had to be reminded to go to lunch. Today the minutes dragged. She just wanted out. She needed to think. On the dot of 12:30 she was out the door. Her favorite picnic spot was the Golden Beach jetties, just beyond the Pelican restaurant where she’d dined with Brad. There she could count on a seabreeze and a panorama of boats, birds, fishermen, and scenic voyeurs like herself.

  Her usual picnic table, perched on the edge of the rocky revetment that lined the channel between the Intracoastal Waterway and the Gulf of Mexico, was empty. With a sigh of satisfaction, Claire settled onto the wooden bench facing the water as a jet ski zipped through the channel, shooting a glistening rooster tail behind. A pelican swooped down, stuck his head beneath the water and emerged to fly off with Claire’s curiosity unsatisfied, until she saw the bird toss its head and swallow what had been momentarily stored in the great pouch beneath its beak.

  She unzipped her lunch bag, took out her bottled iced tea and bagel with cream cheese and fresh vegies. A dolphin surfaced directly in front of her, its charcoal back wet and gleaming before it once again plunged under the water. Lunch forgotten, Claire kept watch as the dolphin periodically resurfaced on its race back out to the Gulf.

  As she brought her attention back to her lunch, Claire found herself almost eye to eye with a great blue heron. The bird was standing on the top of the embankment not three feet away, his dark eyes fixed on her bagel. “Didn’t anyone tell you you’re a carnivore?” Claire inquired. “Next time they have lox I’ll bring you some, but you won’t like this, I promise you.” The bird ignored her, never taking his beady eyes off Claire’s lunch. “Okay, okay,” Claire scolded, breaking off a piece of bagel, but you won’t like it.”

  The heron eagerly seized the piece she threw to him, savored it. Dropped it. “Told you,” Claire said. The heron, evidently labeling Claire unworthy of his attention, took a couple of steps toward the edge of the rocks on his towering legs, then launched himself out over the channel. His six-foot wing span dwarfed the pelicans as he went in search of a more tasty offering. This is paradise, Claire insisted to herself. It really is. But the shadows wouldn’t go away. Today’s meeting had jogged old fears. What did she really know about Brad Blue? His life in Golden Beach seemed to be an open book, but what about all those years he was elsewhere? There was something dark in him. Shadows behind those brilliant blue eyes that only another person who had known pain could see. A darkness beneath the affability. He was one of them. By association, one of Jim’s killers.

  And she’d thrown herself at him. At this dark-souled near-stranger. She’d humiliated herself. Feds did not have hearts. He probably considered her little less of a pushover than Diane Lake. Maybe worse. She was, after all, supposed to be a respectable widow with a young son.

  And that’s why he’s called you every day since Saturday night. That’s why he’s threatened to come over tonight and drag you out of your castle. Eat your bagel, Claire. Go back to work. Stop fighting.

  Actually . . . being dragged out of Virginia Bentley’s stilted castle might be rather exciting.

  If she could bear to face him after her wanton behavior.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Hi.”

  Claire’s embarrassingly satisfying vision of being carted off, hanging over Brad’s broad shoulder, shattered. Red stained her cheeks as she focused on the man standing at the end of the picnic table. A familiar face, though he seemed strangely different out of the office. Taller, better looking, his innocuous features surprisingly attractive under the glare of the noonday sun.

  “You work at T & T, don’t you?” he inquired in a manner less diffident than Claire had come to expect. “I’m Ken Millard, Phil Tierney’s accountant. Do you mind if I share your table?”

  “Please . . . sit down.”

  “Do you come here often?” he asked, stiffly polite as he seated himself on the far side of the picnic table, his back to the water.

  “It’s my favorite lunch spot,” Claire admitted. “Although my clothes always get strange looks from the shorts and T-shirt crowd. I think most of them find it hard to believe that anyone in Golden Beach actually works.”

  While she talked, Claire sternly repressed a smile as Ken unpacked his bag from Checkers with the precision of a golfer lining up his tee. Hamburger and French fries precisely side by side and just the proper distance from his paper drink cup. He removed the plastic cover on his straw with surgical precision. After studying the straw’s angle, he adjusted it with the tip of his index finger. He flattened the checkerboard bag into a plate for his hamburger, then neatly tucked his napkin under the edge of the makeshift plate to keep it from blowing away.

  Accountants are a special breed, Claire reminded herself, lips clamped tight over a fit of the giggles. And wouldn’t we all be in serious trouble if they weren’t so precise?

  “I’ve thought about getting a boat,” Ken said, after giving his lunch a final inspection and evidently deciding it was laid out to his satisfaction. “But it’s considerably more economical to come down here and simply watch them go by.”

  Claire managed a suitable reply, even though she had no idea if Ken was completely serious or exercising some strange brand of dry humor.

  A seagull swooped down, grabbed the piece of bagel and cream cheese scorned by the blue heron and was out over the channel, all in the blink of an eye. In an effort to make polite conversation with her pedantic lunch companion, Claire told Ken about the heron’s rejection of her offering.

  “They’re carnivores,” he explained kindly. “Meat eaters. And fish, of course. I feed two herons and an egret nearly every day at home. Egrets are the big white ones. They once were hunted almost to extinction for their plumes,” he added. “For ladies’ hats.”

  “You have a house then?” Claire inquired, seizing at any sliver of a viable conversational topic.

  “On a lake. Ken offered Claire a french fry, which she promptly popped in her mouth, grateful for the excuse not to talk.

  “Sometimes I even get an ibis in the back yard. That’s an American version of a stork,” he explained with patient tolerance for her northerner’s ignorance.

  “How about alligators?” Claire asked with a grin, determined to pierce his gravity.

  “One or two,” he admitted, still unsmiling. “When they get over six feet, the Homeowners’ Association calls the county to come and get them. They used to take the gators out to Calusa State Park and let them go, but they tended to find their way back, so now it’s shoes and handbags.”

  Claire winced. Gators might be scary but they were here first. To be made into shoes and handbags because you grew longer than six feet . . .

  “Six
feet is pretty big,” she said, trying not to feel sorry for the alligators.

  “I’ve seen bigger,” Ken returned with classic one-upmanship. “I started out to get the newspaper one morning a couple of years ago and my front door wouldn’t open. I kept pushing, but it wouldn’t budge. So I went out the back door and around the house, and there’s an alligator lying on the front porch, right across the doorway. The gator hunters must have missed that one, because he was at least eight feet.”

  “Oh, my!” Claire didn’t have to fake it. She was every bit as shocked as Ken undoubtedly wanted her to be. Or did he? He was so solemn about it all, it was hard to tell.

  “My neighbor had been feeding the alligators marshmallows,” he explained. “They love marshmallows. The trouble is, when you feed them, they begin to associate people with food. Not a good idea, I assure you. My neighbor had gone north for the summer, and I guess the alligator came looking for his marshmallows.” Ken took a bite out of his hamburger and chewed carefully—Claire wondered if he was counting the number of mastications—before adding, “Believe me, I wasn’t sorry to see the gator trapper drag that one off.”

  “How dangerous are they?

  I have a little boy, and one of his great passions is catching a glimpse of an alligator. So far the only ones he’s seen are from the boat that cruises Calusa Lake. It was cold the day we went, they were mostly under water. We only saw a few snouts . . . and the back of one swimming away.”

  Ken picked up another fry, chewed . . . swallowed. “If you took that cruise, you must have gotten the captain’s standard warning.” Suddenly—oddly?—Ken Millard came alive. His voice deepened, eyes brightened, his shoulders straightened. He had become the captain of the tour boat.

  “There are only two things that move on this lake at night,” he quoted with the force and confidence of an actor declaiming one of Shakespeare’s immortal lines. “Alligators. And alligator food.”

  “I remember that!” Claire cried. “You’re right, he did say it. But, well, I just thought he was talking about that particular lake.”

  Suddenly, as if horrified by his assertiveness, Ken deflated, returning to the persona of Ken Millard, the all-but-invisible accountant. He finished the last of his hamburger, fished out the napkin from beneath the checkered bag and carefully wiped his hands. “Well,” he pronounced, “if there’s one thing you can be certain of in Florida . . . if there’s fresh water, there’s probably an alligator in it. The only place it’s safe to swim in fresh water is your backyard pool. And there have even been a few surprised homeowners who woke up to find their pools had been invaded overnight. Gators are nocturnal, you know,” Ken added. “They feed at night.”

  “But are they dangerous?” Claire persisted. “I mean here, around Golden Beach.”

  Ken gave the question careful consideration. “Well, until recently they mostly ate dogs, a child or two—”

  “What?!” Claire all but shrieked. Passers-by turned to stare.

  “Sorry,” Ken apologized, “but it’s true. Really. Only two in this area that I know of, both wading in shallow fresh water. Got dragged under. But last spring we had a really bad week,” he added over Claire’s horrified exclamations. “Three women dead in one week. In separate parts of the state.”

  Appalled, Claire felt her head buzz under the blinding heat of the noontime sun. What planet had she been living on that she didn’t know that alligators—their habitat invaded by wave after wave of humans—had developed a taste for something other than turtles, snakes, fish, their own young. And marshmallows.

  Claire’s bagel rose in her throat. “Excuse me,” she gasped, “I’m late getting back to work. Thanks for the gator lesson.” She was going to put Jamie in a suit of chainmail. She was never going to let him go near the water again. Dear Lord, it was as bad as Jaws. Worse. Somewhere she’d read there were a million alligators in Florida.

  Impossible to keep Jamie safe. They were living on the fringe of ten thousand square miles of swamp teeming with carnivores of every description. South Florida was a vast and dangerous jungle. With some of the two-legged predators as bad as the four-legged variety.

  What was she doing in this godforsaken place?

  And Brad Blue was building homes along the Calusa . . . where he wanted her to show his models.

  Alone.

  Dear God, help! I want to go home.

  “He was talking about alligators eating people. Women and children,” Claire told her grandmother later that day. “And he said it as if he were saying alligators eat fish. My hair stood on end. Am I just a city slicker, or do I have a right to be shocked?”

  “You must remember Ken Millard has lived here all his life,” Ginny replied in the calm, reasonable manner that characterized her personal life and was at startling odds with the characters who populated her Gothic novels. “In Florida the veneer of civilization is very thin. The natives grow up learning to live with it. The tourists are simply blissfully ignorant. If they’re lucky, someone will tell them not to swim in the gulf after four or five in the afternoon and that the only place to hike is on a well-marked trail. The palmettos and pine woods are full of rattlesnakes. Fresh water abounds with water moccasins as well as alligators.”

  “Ginny, what am I doing here?” Claire burst out. “I swear the Wild West was less dangerous. How can I expose Jamie to such things? You know how kids are. In a year or two he’ll be at that age when the more I tell him not to do something, the more he’ll want to do it.”

  “Your parents brought you up on beachfront, didn’t they?” Ginny reminded her. “Did you toddle down to the water and start dog paddling toward Long Island?”

  “Of course not!”

  “Well then . . .?” When Claire merely grimaced, Ginny added, “Any place you go is going to have its dangers. Did you take Jamie to play in Central Park at night?”

  “All right, all right,” Claire conceded, “but I still can’t understand somebody who casually says, Oh, by the way, alligators eat people.”

  “No one ever said Ken Millard was a perfectly normal, well-adjusted human being,” Ginny said, “but then who among us is? Ken does my taxes, and I admit he’s a bit introverted. A shame, when he’s such a handsome young man.”

  “Okay, the table’s set,” Jamie called from the greatroom.

  Claire leaned over the dividing countertop. “That’s very good . . .,” she responded automatically before trailing to a halt. “You’ve only set two places.”

  “Gramma said you weren’t eating here.”

  “Ginny?” Claire’s tone was ominous.

  Claire’s grandmother bent her head over a sauce pan, stirring industriously. “I was told you were eating out,” she murmured. “Jamie and I are having rotelle.”

  “Eating out?” Claire echoed faintly. “Who told you that?”

  “Brad called,” Jamie replied. “He said seven o’clock and you didn’t need to dress up. Isn’t that right, Gramma?”

  “Casual was the word he used,” Ginny confirmed, carefully keeping her eyes trained on the rotelle spiraling in the rapidly boiling water.

  “Thanks for telling me.” Claire’s voice dripped sarcasm. She stepped toward the stove and leaned down to hiss in Ginny’s ear, “Since when are you arranging my dates?”

  “I wasn’t given a choice,” her grandmother replied with studied innocence. “I was simply told. Obviously, I thought you already knew about it.”

  Miserable, manipulating, arrogant . . . She wouldn’t go. She’d stay home. She’d be eating pasta when Brad arrived. She’d smile sweetly, open her eyes wide, and tell him she had absolutely no idea he was planning to drop by . . .

  He’d warned her. He’d told her if she didn’t agree to see him, he was going to kidnap her. And how neatly he’d arranged it. She could make a scene in front of Jamie and her grandmother. Or she could get dressed and go.

  And make a scene in front of Brad Blue, the ex-farmer, ex-fed Russian cracker developer who was entirely too acc
ustomed to having his own way. And his way with women.

  Women. Plural. And no way would she let herself be just another line on his hit list.

  The other night she must have been mad.

  Yet it had seemed so right. Two people who needed each other. And she’d certainly made it horribly clear she was willing!

  Claire’s New England common sense had only caught up with her later, leaving her wondering how she could have been so weak. It had felt right, but how could she really know? There hadn’t been enough time to discover what Brad Blue really wanted. Perhaps he was sending out all the right signals just to get her into bed?

  Well, he’d succeeded. And she was terrified of what happened next.

  So who’d been fantasizing about being carried off by her knight in shining red armor? Face it, girl, you’re conflicted! Every inch of her anatomy was throbbing with anticipation, his touch riding roughshod over every last vestige of her New England reticence.

  Claire’s pulse pounded. Her brain spun as wildly as the rotelle in swirls of light and color and blatant desire. She was lost. She had only to see him, touch him. Hear his name. And she fell over the edge into some yawning, self-indulgent abyss of desire.

  It wasn’t right.

  Nothing that felt this good could possibly be right.

  There was no way Claire Langdon of Manhattan and Bedford deserved this terrifying miracle called love.

  “Do you wish to order now, Miss Lake?” The waiter hovered beside the stunning blond seated at a window table in the elegant dining room of Heron Lakes Golf & Country Club.

  “Not yet, I’m expecting a guest.” Diane Lake’s smile, so well known to local television viewers, was notably absent, her tone abrupt.

  “Another martini, perhaps?” the waiter inquired solicitously.