I slid the last box onto the counter. “I’ll talk to you later,”
I said, and headed for the door.
“Sherri.” Marley’s voice had changed. It was softer and less bossy.
I looked over my shoulder at her, still annoyed. “Stay safe,” she said and smiled.
My anger melted. During the last evacuation we took refuge with some other fools in a bar a hundred miles inland and partied for two days. Those days were gone and I missed them already. “You too, Marley.”
“And for heaven’s sake, just this once, try and stay out of trouble.”
Well, it was almost a tender moment.
Black storm clouds tumbled and rolled over each other, scurrying north ahead of the storm as I crossed back to the island. It’s always worse out on the island than it is on the mainland but the force of the wind still surprised me when I reached the top of the bridge, buffeting the pickup and bouncing it sideways.
The wind grew worse as I crossed to the gulf side of the island and turned south onto Beach Road. Out in the mountainous waves the odd surfer still challenged nature. Some guys live for this kind of surf and the hotdoggers would be the last to leave the sand, risking their very lives to catch crazy-big waves.
I clenched the wheel, struggling to keep to my side of the road while the wind raged and blew and danced the pickup around, making it more like tacking than driving. Sand and sea spray covered the windows. Wind bent the palms in half and set the light standards trembling. What was happening here? We should have had hours before the storm got this strong. I told myself it was only because there was no protection. Things would be better on other parts of the island.
I parked beside the three cars huddled together as close as they could get to the white historic building that housed the Sunset. “Shit, this is a really stupid idea,” I said. Only forty feet of sand separates the road from the Gulf of Mexico. There’s no barrier of land, no trees, no tall buildings between the breaking waters on the beach and the Sunset. There’s only sand, some beach grasses and light standards and a flat strip of road, letting the wind get a real good run at the building. Now that I was there, I hated to leave the shelter of the cab. The sand was going to sting like the devil, like someone taking a rotary sander to your skin.
I checked my cell phone for missed calls. None. “Don’t call. See if I care.” I tossed it back in my purse and leaned forward to look up at the Sunset Bar and Grill on the second floor of the building.
Metal storm shutters had been lowered over the floor-to-ceiling windows. The old building no longer looked gracious and elegant but blind and fortress-like. The Sunset’s dining room runs along the front, facing west and overlooking the beach, which gives diners an unobstructed view of the sun setting out towards Texas. Originally, back in the early twenties when the building housed a hotel, a balcony ran along the front of the second story. Later the balcony was closed in with Palladian windows, and in the early nineties the wall between the two rooms was removed. The new space was two steps lower than the old dining room, giving the room a theatrical feel, enhanced by the nightly round of applause as the sun set out over the Gulf of Mexico. For a few seconds each evening everyone paused to watch the sun dip below the rim of the world, setting the sky on fire with reflected glory.
Today the lowered shutters would turn the dining room into a dark and dreary cavern. That alone would scare away customers even if they hadn’t started to leave the island like a line of ants going to a picnic.
Tucked behind the restaurant was the bar. This elegant space functioned like a private club for the elite of the island and more million-dollar deals were sealed over a drink in the Sunset than in any office in town. Every day I watched and listened to movers and shakers from up and down the coast changing the lives of ordinary people. Unfortunately, I never figured out how to make a dime out of any of it. Still, I lived in anticipation.
I gave up contemplating the building and admitted why I’d come to the Sunset. “He’s not coming,” I told myself. “No knight on a white horse for you. Get your ass gone.” But hope dies last…and hard. And sometimes hope is all you have to get you through the night. I’d been so sure that Clay would give in and come back to evacuate with me.
“Shit,” I said and pushed open the door. Gusting wind stole my breath and then shoved air, too much air, down my throat making it impossible to breathe out. My lungs were under attack.
I fought my way to the building, hands cupped over my face to protect my eyes from the biting grit while my hair whipped around my head, lashing and tangling around my fingers.
Ignoring the elevator beside the stairs, I struggled up the broad steps, blown in tight to the railing by the force of the blast.
Chapter 4
Chris Cooper, the obnoxious rookie manager of the Sunset, held the etched-glass door open. “This is just awful,” he said as he wrestled it closed. Chris had turned tropical shirts and dark trousers into a uniform. Today’s shirt was in shades of gray and black, as if he’d dressed for the weather. Thin-faced, with sharp pointed features, Chris had a perpetually worried air about him. “Just awful,” he repeated. A harsh nerve-jarring screech filled the foyer.
“It’s a palm scraping against the shutters,” he reassured me as though he were the hurricane veteran. “It keeps happening.”
“Well, that should entertain the customers.” I fingercombed my hair back from my face. “The only people likely to show up are the ones coming to experience a hurricane close up and personal, fools who head south as soon as an eye starts forming. They’ll like the noise.” I stuck my head into the dining room. Gwen Morrison was setting up tables. I gave her a wave and turned back to Chris. “Is it worth opening?” “I don’t know,” he wailed. New to Florida, he had only taken over managing the Sunset in May. Not much happens here in the summer months, except storms. “This is worse than anything we’ve had so far. I just don’t know.” Visibly shaken, nearly bouncing with anxiety and shifting from one foot to the other, he said, “I don’t know what to do.”
“As Grandma Jenkins would say, ‘Piss or get off the pot’ — better make up your mind pretty quick.”
“Maybe it will blow by. Maybe this is the worst we’ll get.”
“And maybe I’ll be Miss America,” I replied, heading to a second set of glass doors leading off the foyer to the bar. I stopped with my hand on the frame. “Have there been any calls for me, any messages?”
“No,” Chris said, too upset to even go into his normal song and dance about personal calls.
I paused inside the door and took a deep breath. If rich had an odor it would smell like the bar of the Sunset: like expensive perfume, old leather chairs and smoky single malt scotch, the essence of power. And power was what the Sunset was all about.
The lights were on but I switched on the giant fans. Twelve feet across and still operated by huge pulleys, they’d come from North Carolina, along with the twenty-foot mahogany bar, back in the thirties when a private lumber barons’ club went bankrupt. Now the fans creaked and groaned before settling into stately circles, spreading a soft breeze through the room. They gave the room the feeling of an era long gone by.
Normally, soft jazz floated on that gentle zephyr of the fans, but that day the only music was the creaking of the leather pulleys and the low growling of the wind, demanding to be let in. I set my cell phone on the counter and took a small radio out of my leather bag, fiddling with the dial until I got the Coastal Weather Station at the House of Refuge on Hutchinson Island.
The calm voice of the announcer gave wind speeds and direction. I lowered the volume.
I started a pot of coffee and then got the two small coolers out from under the counter. When special customers call for meals to go, the coolers are used to deliver them. I took the coolers into the kitchen and told Miguel, the luncheon chef, what I wanted before I helped myself to some fruit. “Time to have a
little fun,” I told Miguel. “I’ll bring you a taste.” I backed out of the kitchen with the loaded tray.
I’d just cut into the first melon when the whine of the wind increased in the foyer as someone opened the outside door. Another fool had arrived. I heard voices and then the glass doors to the bar were flung open. Gina Ross paused dramatically in the opening, “Oh my god, I thought my hair was going to blow off.”
I laughed. “What are you still doing here?”
Smoothing her hair, she came to the bar. “That coffee smells great,” she said and hoisted herself up on a stool. “You should be in Georgia by now,” I told her.
Gina was a high school English teacher from Pittsburgh. I couldn’t figure out what brought Gina to Florida at this time of the year because she hated heat and humidity, and that’s pretty much all there is in October. She’d come on down sometime in September and found the Sunset right away. Around forty, at least ten years older than me, we’d become friends in a casual sort of way, playing a couple of games of golf and talking over her nightly drink. I reached for the coffee carafe. “If not Georgia, at least go to Jacksonville, anywhere away from here.”
“And miss the fun?” Gina smiled easily. She wasn’t the usual unattached female who came into the Sunset, not one of the human barracudas. Hungry and dangerous and circling the bar for prey, they come to Jacaranda for sun, sex and surgery. Not Gina. Not only did she hate doing nothing in the sun, she took no interest in how she looked. Gina’s washed-out blue denim dress hung straight down from her breasts to her ankles while the sandals on her feet were sensible flat black canvas, screaming practical and cheap. Her thick salt and pepper hair, her best feature, was cut in a severe bob and parted in the middle. Small plastic butterflies held her hair back from her round face. Not one thing about her said, “Hello, sailor,” so it was a pretty safe bet it wasn’t sex that brought her here.
“Haven’t you heard that Myrna is heading back towards Florida?” I asked her.
“Yup.” With her hands planted on the bar, she swiveled the stool back and forth. “ Sounds exciting.”
I shook my head at her. “Too much excitement.” This woman needed to be shocked into good sense. “The temperature will hit the high nineties or more and the humidity will be off the gauge. If the storm takes out the electricity there’ll be no refrigeration and no air conditioning. And that’s only if we get extremely lucky. Real bad luck will bring a tidal surge of ten to twenty feet. In a hurricane more people die from drowning than ever die from the wind.”
She went perfectly still. Her eyes grew wide before her face froze in panic.
I relented and softened my words. “Don’t worry,” I assured her. “We aren’t going to get anything like that unless Myrna turns east towards us. But you should still go.”
“What about all those hurricane parties we read about back home?”
“For idiots only and you’re no idiot.” I poured myself a coffee. “And they don’t happen on the beach. Really, Gina, I’m not kidding. Cypress Island is no place to be in a hurricane.”
“But you’re here.”
“Did you see that red pickup in the parking lot?” She nodded.
“Well, it’s mine and it’s packed with all my worldly possessions. If Myrna comes any further east I’m out of here, up to Orlando to hang out in a motel until she’s long gone.”
“But…” She got no further. The voice of the announcer changed, catching my attention. I put fingers to my lips to quiet her as I turned up the volume.
“It’s confirmed now, Hurricane Myrna has changed direction. The eye of the hurricane is moving north towards the Florida Panhandle. People living in coastal areas from Tallahassee to Tampa should be prepared to leave for higher ground.” I turned the volume down.
Gina asked, “Where do you go in Florida to find higher ground?”
“North Carolina,” I said and opened the fridge to get out a bowl of creamers. “You should get the hell out of here. The roads will be crammed and they’ll only get worse.” I set a bowl with packets of sugar by her mug. “Finding a motel will be hell if you haven’t booked.”
She frowned, as if giving the suggestion serious thought, and then shook her head in denial. “Not yet.” “Why? What are you waiting for?”
Chapter 5
Gina dumped two sugars in her coffee. “Do you think anyone else will come in today?”
“No.” It didn’t escape me that she hadn’t answered my question. I let it pass. One thing I’d learned behind the bar, there’s a difference between listening and prying. And besides, sooner or later it all comes out. People really want to talk about themselves, even the bad things and just being there is enough to get them started. Add a little alcohol to the mix and you can’t shut them up…the things I could tell you about the good people of this town!
Gina asked, “Did you hear about the woman who was murdered on Monday?”
I stopped cutting up the honeydew melon. “Yes, but my attention was fixed on Myrna’s teasing little antics.”
“I knew her… the dead woman.” She watched her spoon going round and round in her mug. “Actually I met her in here.”
“Jesus, sorry.”
The spoon stopped its circles. She raised her eyes. “Why was she murdered? That’s what I keep asking myself. Why? Is the reason in her past or her present?”
“Present?” What in hell was she talking about? “She’s dead. I don’t think she has a present.”
She canted her head to the left, intent on her own thoughts. “Think of all the reasons people are murdered. Anger, for instance.”
“Like maybe she cut someone off in traffic?” I offered. She lifted her shoulders. “Or perhaps it was the type of person she was that led to her murder.”
“You mean someone said ‘that bitch is just too mean to live.’ The victim is responsible for what happens?”
“Not exactly. I was thinking more like she was killed because she fit a certain profile.”
“Oh, like I think I’ll go out and kill someone five foot two and a hundred and ten pounds?”
She shook her head, impatient with me. “No, no. Maybe she was killed just because of the kind of person she was.”
I went back to carving up the melon, more interested in my creation than her ponderings.
“I suppose all murder is personal,” Gina said.
Pointing the bar knife at her, delighted that I finally understood, I said, “Psychology. That’s what you’re talking about.” I sliced through the second melon and spread it open, the smell of it rising to fill my nose. “Find the murderer by knowing the victim. But you’re overlooking something. People bring all kinds of things south with them. Colds, enemies…I even know a guy who lugs down his favorite recliner every year. Just because it happened here doesn’t mean it has anything to do with any of us.”
“Oh, please. Don’t tell me you think crime only happens in the North.”
“Well,” I thought about it as I cubed the melon, “Jacaranda is a small town. People here know each other too well for you to be able to hide your sins. On the other hand when outsiders come to Jac their secrets are their own and who knows what follows them.” I scooped up the melon pieces and filled a blender. “The paper said she was a tourist from New York so she was likely down here for a facelift or tummy tuck. Probably didn’t know anyone here well enough to give them a reason to murder her.”
“What makes you think she was here for plastic surgery?”
“According to the Jacaranda Sun, Florida has more plastic surgeons per capita than any other state.” I loaded up the second blender. “I thought that’s why you might be here…a little surgery.”
With a soft laugh, she said, “I’m not the kind of girl who’s into self-improvement.”
The screech of the wind filled the bar and Chris slunk in. He slumped onto a stool, nodding at Gina, n
ot really seeing her just acknowledging her presence. He was taking this storm real hard. He must be getting paid by meals sold or something. “Where is everyone?” he asked.
“They’re probably putting away their garden furniture so it doesn’t end up in the next county and boarding up windows so they don’t blow out.” I got out a small stepladder and climbed up to the top shelf for a dusty bottle of kiwi syrup. “Of course, if you live in a trailer park everything is pretty well ‘Hasta la vista, Baby’ because the whole mobile home blows away.”
His ratlike little face got confused and his pointy nose twitched. Rats don’t like it when you introduce a new piece to the maze.
As I climbed down, the radio announced that the rain would start within the hour in coastal areas. Winds were expected to reach sixty miles an hour. I was betting they were already close to that out here on the beach.
Chris’s face screwed up in pain. “Why is this happening to me?”
The feral little shit definitely had a piece of the action. “Marley will be heading out in that old crapped-out Baptist Church bus to start rescuing people as soon as the rain starts,” I told them. “The homeless always refuse to come in until the rain actually starts.” I resisted the urge to call her, wanting to tell her to be careful just to reassure myself. Why do we think our loved ones are safer just because we tell them to be? Never mind common sense, I knew if anything happened to Marley and I hadn’t called I’d blame myself.
“September’s receipts were down over last year,” Chris whined. “I was hoping October would make up the loss. And now this.”
“Relax.” I wiped the sticky dust off the kiwi bottle and twisted it open, difficult because a hard crust had formed around the neck. “People will come out in droves when it’s over. You’ll make it up in no time.” I took a sniff of the syrup. “Things with alcohol in them can’t go bad, can they?” Another good sniff. “That’s the theory I’m working on, alcohol preserves forever. I should live to be two hundred.”
Sex in a Sidecar Page 2
