In Plain Sight

by Lorena McCourtney

  “Okay, thanks.” He turned his back to me, hesitated a moment, and then put the binoculars to his eyes again. They didn’t appear to be focused anywhere in particular.

  “Beautiful day for bird-watching,” I suggested, mostly fishing for information.

  “Yeah, it is.”

  He raised the glasses higher and scanned the sky with so much speed that he couldn’t have focused on a flying elephant. I’m not familiar with bird-watchers, but somehow I doubted this was standard technique.

  “Are you doing one of those bird count things?” I asked.

  “Just looking.” After about thirty more seconds of rapid sky searching, he muttered something about not seeing much today, jammed a pair of mirrored sunglasses over his eyes, and hurried back up to the trail.

  An unsettling thought suddenly raised goose bumps on my arms. Something didn’t feel right here. Could the Braxtons have gotten wind of my whereabouts and sent this guy to reconnoiter? Was all this looking around on the lake just a ruse, and his real purpose was to spy on me?

  4

  Get off it, I chided myself. You’re on a one-way route to Paraoidville Sure, the Braxtons were underhanded, tricky, and clever, and I was certain this guy was no bird-watcher. But his binoculars had not been aimed in my direction, so whatever he was doing had nothing to do with me.

  Unless he was just playing it clever …

  Paranoidville. Right at the city limits.

  I went on to the Thursday morning Bible study, with a lively discussion on Corinthians. By that afternoon a light drizzle had started, but I got my umbrella and went for a walk anyway. Would Ms. Standoffish be jogging on a day such as this?

  Yes, indeed. And no more friendly than before. I deliberately stood in the middle of the pathway, thinking she’d have to acknowledge my existence then. But she jogged around me as if I were one of the bushes dripping puddles onto the trail.

  People have problems, I reminded myself, and perhaps she was too absorbed in hers to be aware of anything else.

  But that evening, after I’d picked up Sandy at the gymnastics studio where she had after-school practice three times a week, I was still fretting about the woman. Was she that unfriendly to everyone, or just me?

  Sandy, Skye, and I were at the breakfast bar eating homemade chili, salad, and corn bread I’d jazzed up with bits of bacon and jalapeno. Skye had been with Sandy at the studio, which is only a couple of blocks from the school. With minimal urging, she’d come home with us for dinner.

  “There’s this woman I see jogging on the trail every afternoon. I was wondering if either of you know who she is. Tall, blonde, no makeup but quite elegant looking, rather like a young, more athletic Grace Kelly?”

  The comparison with Grace Kelly drew blank looks from Sandy and Skye, who were no doubt more familiar with blondes named Britney or Christina.

  Sandy suddenly got a lightbulb-turning-on look. She lifted her spoon. “Expensive velour sweats, some designer brand, a different outfit every day? Jogging shoes that cost, like, two hundred dollars? Friendly as a shark?”

  I’m not familiar with shoes in that price range, but I could tell this woman’s footgear was beyond the $9.98 area of my purple tennies. And “friendly as a shark”? Bingo.

  “You know her?” I asked.

  She and Skye looked at each other. “Leslie Marcone,” they said in unison.

  “Has to be,” Sandy added. “She’s a mystery woman. She bought that big Southern plantation place across the lake a year or so ago, but no one knows much about her.”

  “Does she have a husband or children?”

  “Not unless she keeps them stashed in the basement or attic. Which she might, she’s that weird. But I’ve never seen or heard anything about them.” Sandy looked at Skye, who nodded agreement.

  “You mean she lives there in that big place all alone?”

  “I heard she has a housekeeper and a gardener. And that she goes all the way into Little Rock to get her hair styled.”

  Skye held out a strand of her own hair, eyes turned sideways to study it disconsolately. “I wish I could go to Little Rock. That woman the Dumpling sent me to destroyed my hair when she cut it.”

  Her hair looked lovely to me, long and dark and shimmery, like something out of a conditioner ad, but at the moment I was more interested in the mystery woman than Skye’s hair problems. Leslie Marcone had appeared to be in her late twenties. Why in the world would a young, healthy woman living alone have a housekeeper?

  “She’s a real exercise nut,” Sandy added. “She’s out there jogging almost every day, and in the summer she swims back and forth across the lake. Or sometimes she goes out and rows for hours.”

  My own thought was that she could do her own gardening and housework, get plenty of exercise, and save the expense of hired help. But someone who has money enough to buy a place on the “estate” side of Little Tom probably has a different agenda.

  “The Dumpling says she showed up at the health club a few times when the weather was really bad,” Skye said. “And she actually does something, of course, when she’s there.”

  The Dumpling again. And I heard a certain snideness in Skye’s crack about actually doing something. As compared to someone—the Dumpling, perhaps?—who went to the health club and didn’t do anything? I made a mental note to ask Sandy about all this later.

  “I’ll bet she doesn’t have more than 15 percent body fat,” Skye added, her tone admiring. “After taking a look at that crummy little health club, she probably set up her own exercise room at home. Hey, there’s my dad!” She pointed to the TV in the living room, where the local news from a Fayetteville station had just come on.

  “Really?” I looked closer.

  “I guess I forgot to mention it.” Sandy sounded guilty for not having informed me of this celebrity status. She grabbed the remote and flicked the sound to a higher level. “Skye’s dad is the anchor for the local news. His name’s Brad Ridenour.”

  “They call him ‘the Big Brad,’” Skye said with obvious pride.

  We all watched Skye’s father tell about a weekend fire in Fayetteville. He had an excellent voice, deep and mellow, good, clear enunciation. He didn’t get maudlin about the two dogs that were lost in the fire, but he sounded as if he cared. Though a moment later he was kidding with his coanchor about her frequent changes of hair color.

  Skye must have inherited her dark-haired, willowy good looks from her mother, I decided, because I couldn’t see any resemblance between her and this husky, blond guy with the cleft chin. “The Big Brad” definitely fit him. He was good-looking too, but in a heavy-necked, ex-football-player kind of way. I also saw no resemblance between Skye’s quiet reserve and the way Brad Ridenour bantered and kidded with the coanchor and the weather girl.

  “He’s going to be the speaker at our high school commencement ceremonies in May,” Sandy added, as if to make up for not giving the man his proper due earlier.

  “He’s into all kinds of civic activities,” Skye said. “It’s good for his image. Some people have been suggesting he should consider politics, and he’ll probably run for state representative in the next election.”

  After the local news ended, Sandy lowered the sound again, and I went back to the subject of the mystery woman.

  “Does this Leslie Marcone work somewhere?”

  “If she does, it must be nights, because she’s out there exercising like a maniac in the daytime,” Sandy said. “Except I sometimes see lights on at, like, 5:00 in the morning over there, so it looks as if she’s home.”

  “A home business?” I suggested.

  “Maybe. Mom did some work for her, but I don’t know what it was about.”

  There was nothing in particular to make me think so, but a hint of disapproval in Sandy’s tone made me wonder if this was the client DeeAnn had said she’d move to Mars to escape from.

  “I think she’s fascinating,” Skye stated suddenly. “Rich and beautiful and mysterious—”


  Just as suddenly Sandy stated an opposite opinion. “I think she’s a stuck-up snob.”

  I was mildly shocked by Sandy’s hostile comment. Usually Sandy goes out of her way to look for the good in people.

  Apparently my surprise showed.

  “She is a stuck-up snob,” Sandy repeated, though now her tone held a defensive note. “She acts like she owns the trail. She jumped all over some little kids last fall, just because their dog came out of the water and shook on her. Elly, who did Mom’s hair, told Mom that Leslie got up and stomped out because she had to wait about five minutes for her appointment. I guess that’s when she started going to Little Rock. And Mom said she practically went into riot mode over some little two-dollar photocopy charge on the bill Mom sent her for the bookkeeping work.”

  Okay, those weren’t particularly likeable traits, and I could understand Sandy’s defensiveness about her mother, but the vehemence of her announced dislike for Leslie Marcone seemed out of proportion. I looked to Skye for her reaction.

  “I still think she’s fascinating,” Skye said. “And you can tell just by looking at her that she isn’t from around here.”

  Skye’s here dripped enough scorn to relegate Woodston to the outskirts of civilization, something out of those old Beverly Hillbillies reruns where the swimming pool is called a cement pond.

  “I hate those black-eyed peas and hog jowls everyone here thinks you should eat on New Year’s Day,” Skye added. She rolled her eyes. “And those burgers at that Biff’s Burgers place downtown taste like they’re made out of roadkill.”

  I looked at Sandy again, wondering how this scornful attitude about Woodston sat with her. I also considered inquiring of Skye just how much roadkill she’d sampled in order to make this judgment but decided better of it. Sandy scowled and squashed her napkin with uncharacteristic ferociousness, but she didn’t say anything.

  I couldn’t help asking, “I take it you don’t like it here in Woodston, Skye?”

  “I wouldn’t even be here except my mother got this cool new job in New York and had to move back there in a hurry. As soon as she gets settled, I’ll go live with her.” She paused, small frown between her perfectly arched dark brows. “Though being with my father is great too, of course.”

  I suspected what her problem was. She saw wanting to be with either parent as somehow disloyal to the other. “What does your mother do in New York?”

  “She’s editor of a new magazine called Edge. It has cool fashion and makeup and decorating articles.” She didn’t ask if I’d ever read it. I suppose it’s obvious I’m not on the cutting edge of fashion. Skye held out her hand, slender fingers spread to show her pale blue nails with silvery sparkles. “This is the nail polish the cover model was wearing last month.

  My mom sent it to me.”

  “That was nice of her.”

  “She’s going to set me up with the same modeling agency when I get to New York.”

  I glanced at Sandy. She was busy buttering a chunk of corn bread. I had the distinct impression things were not quite as they appeared on the surface here, but I’d made myself a promise not to be a nosy LOL with Sandy’s friends. I went back to the original subject.

  “So, if this Leslie Marcone doesn’t have a family or job, does anyone know what she does in her big house all the time?”

  “Yeah, I wonder. What does she do all the time?” Sandy said.

  Skye leaned back in the chair and looked off into space with a dreamy expression. “I think she’s into something sophisticated and glamorous, but she keeps it secret because she wants her privacy.”

  “Like what?” Sandy asked skeptically.

  “Oh, maybe she used to be a model, and now she’s a fashion designer who’s famous under a name we’d all recognize if we heard it. Or maybe she’s a best-selling author, but her books come out under a pen name, so no one here knows. Whatever it is, she must make tons of money.”

  “Maybe she married some rich old guy and grabbed all his money in a nasty divorce,” Sandy said, a suggestion that rather startled me with its hint of worldly cynicism. Her expression brightened. “Or maybe she embezzled millions of dollars and is hiding out here. But the FBI and CIA and everybody are about to catch up with her!”

  Sandy seemed to find that prospect appealing, if not necessarily plausible, because it ended on a giggle.

  After a moment, Skye said, “But her hair will look great, and she’ll be slim and gorgeous when they put the handcuffs on her,” and giggled too.

  I was relieved that the difference of opinion about Leslie Marcone was apparently no real rift between them.

  But this talk of embezzlement and handcuffs suddenly made me think about that phony bird-watcher down on the dock again. Now I targeted something else about him that bothered me. He wore those hayseedy clothes, but he’d never fit in with the genuine farmer types down at the Woodston Feed & Seed. Combined with that deep, non-Woodston-looking winter tan and nervous jitters, the clothes were too much like a carefully chosen costume. An outsider’s idea of what an Ozarks hayseed would wear.

  And the way he’d jammed those mirrored sunglasses over his eyes, as if he didn’t want me to get a good look at his face …

  Okay, I’d semi-canceled him as an agent of the Braxtons up to something nefarious concerning me. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t up to something.

  The question was, what?

  5

  The answer came to me like one of Harley’s old fly-fishing lines zinging across a creek to hit a target in the water.

  Those binoculars hadn’t been aimed upward to look for birds. At least not until the guy latched on to my suggestion that he might be a bird-watcher. They’d been aimed straight ahead. At Leslie Marcone’s imitation Southern plantation. Was there some connection between the man and the mysterious woman?

  “Does anyone know where this woman came from?” I asked.

  “California, I bet. Or New York,” Skye said, with an air that said anybody who was anybody came from one of those two states.

  “Skye’s from California,” Sandy added.

  “I used to spend practically all summer hanging out at the beach. ’N Trouble and their friends came to the same beach to surf sometimes. I talked to Nick LeClaire a few times.”

  This was obviously important name-dropping, but I was not knowledgeable enough to be properly impressed. I looked to Sandy for explanation.

  “’N Trouble is a rock group,” Sandy said. “Nick LeClaire is the lead singer.”

  From her hothouse complexion I wouldn’t have guessed Skye to be a beach girl. But maybe Little Tom’s narrow beach, without a rock star in sight, didn’t meet her eligibility requirements for outdoor activity.

  Skye went home a few minutes later, and Sandy ran upstairs to start packing for her trip. Spring vacation was next week, and she was going with a mixed group of teens and adults from church to a small town just across the Mexican border for a project at a mission orphanage. The trip had been planned for some time, and Mike and DeeAnn had taken care of all the permissions and paperwork before they left.

  I put the leftover chili in cartons for the freezer and then went upstairs to see if I could help Sandy. “Don’t forget sunscreen,” I offered as she stuffed denim cutoffs in a duffel bag.

  “Right, I’ll need that.” Sandy rummaged in a dresser drawer and came up with a blue plastic bottle.

  “Is Skye going on the trip too?”

  “No. I asked her, but she thought she’d be spending spring break with her mom in New York.”

  “Which isn’t happening?”

  “She said her mom had to fly over to Italy for some last-minute fashion shoot thing.”

  “But she is going to go live with her mother before long?”

  “Her mom’s been in New York since last fall. How long can it take to get ‘settled’? Skye thought she was going to New York at Christmas too, but then her mother had to go to London and sent a bunch of presents instead.”

  Includi
ng an expensive watch, I suspected.

  Sandy held up a pair of red thong sandals. Apparently they fell short on some rating standard that escaped me, and she tossed them aside.

  “Skye’s older than you, isn’t she?” Their relationship rather surprised me. I’d thought older girls considered it beneath them to hang out with younger ones.

  “I’m a freshman and she’s a junior. But all Woodston has is an elementary school and a four-year high school, so Skye and I have one class together.” Sandy hesitated, as if she was uncertain about confiding something to me, but finally she added, “Skye isn’t too popular with most of the kids.”

  “She’s very pretty. And she has a car of her own.”

  “But she’s always talking about how much better everything in California is, and how she’s going to be a model and everything. People would like her a lot better if she’d just … you know, be herself, instead of acting so phony and superior.”

  I wondered if “being herself” was the problem, that what you saw with Skye, shallow and self-centered, was exactly what she was.

  “Does she go out on dates?” Mike and DeeAnn weren’t letting Sandy date yet, but Skye was two years older.

  “With any of the guys here in, as she calls it, Hillbilly Heaven?” Sandy scoffed. “She’d rather eat hog jowls, and you heard how she hates them.”

  “Sounds as if she’s her own worst enemy.”

  “She’s really not so bad, down underneath all the name-dropping and stuff,” Sandy said with what I thought was admirable compassion, given how Skye had trashed Sandy’s hometown of Woodston. “Mostly I think she’s just scared.”

  “Scared?”

  “Her folks toss her back and forth like a Frisbee. She’d never admit it, but I think she’s afraid that neither of them really wants her. So I’ve tried to be friends with her and tell her about Jesus. I try to make her feel … not so alone and shut out.”

  I was ashamed of myself then. Fourteen-year-old Sandy had looked deeper into Skye than I had and was conscientiously trying to help her.