His face looked worried even seeing me upright. “Are you all right?” Clearly, his face said, no one could look like this and still be okay.
“Yes,” I said to be polite. It was still raining but with less determination. The water in the parking lot was only about an inch deep now. I looked about for snakes.
“I saw you here last night,” the smiling man told me. “My wife had a baby. A girl. We’re going to call her Myrna.”
“May I suggest Bernice as a middle name? That way she’ll be fully equipped for life.”
“Well,” he said. The smile was smaller. “Well.” I guess he didn’t like the name, or perhaps he’d met my mother-in-law. He looked me over. No food or shower in twenty-four hours and wearing clothes that were still wet when I fell into unconsciousness on the front seat of a car, I was not at my best. And my always-eccentric style of dressing wouldn’t have been improved by being slept in. Actually, I must have looked like shit.
When I walked into Bernice’s room she confirmed this. “You look like shit,” she said.
“Thank you.” I could’ve returned the compliment. Her normal blond helmet hung in strings around a face dominated by red-rimmed eyes underlined with black smudges. Except for the day before, I hadn’t seen her since Jimmy’s funeral nine months earlier. Easy to see she hadn’t been having a real good time. She’d always been thin, worked hard at it, tennis, aerobics, personal trainer, thin was what she did with her life, but now she was spectral. The bones of her chest were hard ridges under the thin hospital gown.
“How are you doing?” I straightened the bunched-up sheet that covered her good leg. “How’s the pain?”
I was sorry I’d asked. This woman could complain with her throat cut: the staff, the shared room, the food, the view, nothing lived up to even her minimal standards. And it wasn’t the pain of the surgery or the broken leg that had her in a snit but the inability of underlings to recognize her innate superiority and treat her accordingly that got up her nose. It only stopped when the local news came on the muted television and I grabbed up the remote, saying, “Let’s hear this.”
“Myrna spared Fort Myers and touched down on Heron Island, a state wilderness park between Fort Myers and Cypress Island. Although it wiped out nearly three hundred acres of the park, only one death was reported and that was on Cypress Island. The name of the dead woman from Pennsylvania is being withheld until the next of kin can be notified.” I hit the mute. “But she wasn’t killed by the storm.” “How do you know?” Suspicious, leaning sideways on the bed to see if I was covered in blood, as always, Bernice was expecting the worst from me.
I tucked a hank of hair behind my ear. “It’s a long story. I’ve got to get back to Jac.”
“You can’t. The electricity is off and wires are down all over the place. No one is being allowed out on the island until they are fixed.” It was the smirk on her face when she said it that really grated. I wanted to smack her silly. The only thing that held me back was the knowledge she was on so many painkillers she’d never feel it.
“Great.” No food for twenty-four hours and in desperate need of clean clothes, I eyed Bernice to see if something in her trunk might fit me. Well, maybe half of me. The bitch was real skinny.
“Didn’t you bring me anything?” she whined. “At least you could have got me something to read.”
The gossamer-thin thread of my uncertain temper tore. I thought of unzipping my wrinkled capris, spinning around on my clogs and sticking my butt out at her. Hopefully, when I said, “Read this,” and she saw the tattoo of a red heart with “Jimmy’s” written in the center she’d stroke out. But I’ve reformed. I’ve learned manners, learned to be nice and give up my bad girl ways. Instead, when I spun around, I kept walking.
Chapter 27
I stomped to the elevator as the doors opened.
Clay, impeccably groomed as if he’d just come from a board meeting, stood before me. His face lit up and his arms came out to embrace me. “Clay,” I screamed as I launched myself at him, wrapping my arms around his neck and my legs around his waist. Still holding me in his arms he stepped back and punched the down button. My tears dampened his collar.
The Calusa Indians thought the panthers were magical. Clay was my panther, my magic. Like the Florida Panther, he was elusive, impossible to trap and mysterious. And like the panther, silent and deadly, he could rip the heart out of you and melt away without a sound. Lean and as sleek as any prowling cat, his black eyes mesmerized me, his skin of polished bronze made me ache to touch him. He was strictly top of the social register but his permanent tan and hawk nose said somewhere in his past was a Calusa ancestor who didn’t come over on any Mayflower.
A half-hour after I clamped onto him we were in a no-tell motel. Actually we were on the floor making a hurricane of our own. When we finally made it from the floor to the bed, I started telling him about being trapped on the island with a murderer. All of the panic returned and I trembled in his arms. “You’re safe,” he whispered into my neck.
Ashamed of my fear but still in its grip, I whispered, “I was so scared. And what if the guy that killed Gina comes after me?”
“You don’t know for sure that it wasn’t an accident.”
“It was no accident and what if he comes for me?”
“Why would he do that?”
I shrugged against him. “Maybe he thinks I know who he is.”
“If there was a murderer, he probably didn’t even know you were there. It’s over,” Clay said. His tone of voice said the conversation was over as well. His hands were already exploring the length of me.
“It’s not over for me. I’m still scared. What if the murderer is someone I know, someone who comes into the Sunset?”
“More likely it was someone stranded out there and trying to steal her car.”
I looked up at him. “You mean a coincidence — someone needed a car to get off the island and killed her to get hers?”
His frown said he got how stupid his idea was but I had to turn the knife a little more; I so seldom win an argument I like to let everyone know I’m winning. “And if he just wanted a lift, why kill her? Even Bernice would have given him a ride off the island, would’ve given her the chance to make someone’s life miserable for a time.”
“Leave it. You’re only getting yourself worked up. Forget about it.”
“How can I do that? You didn’t see her lying there so don’t tell me to forget about it.”
His hands stopped making their interesting circles. “I was the last person to see Gina alive so I’m involved whether I want to be or not.”
He rolled onto his back and said, “If you’d come to Cedar Key, none of this would have happened.” He threw back the covers and got out of bed.
Even the sight of his tight little butt couldn’t distract me from my anger. “How can you blame me for getting stuck out there? Okay, I forgot my keys, but other than that, none of this is my fault.”
He jerked the zipper down on his carry-all and took out a toilet kit. “You hung in there at the Sunset ’til the very last second.” He stalked to the bathroom. “What in hell were you thinking about?” The door shut.
I was thinking he would come like a white knight and rescue me but what I hollered at the door as I jumped out of bed was, “Myrna was supposed to hit the panhandle. Remember? Cedar Key was a stupid place to be and you stayed there until the last minute.”
He opened the door and said, “I had to make sure a couple hundred thousand dollars’ worth of material was safe. You were just pouring drinks.” The door closed.
“Myrna wasn’t supposed to come ashore anywhere near Jac. Besides, why didn’t you meet me in Orlando like I wanted?”
There was no answer. I went over and pounded on the door, demanding an answer not entrance.
He flung the door open. “You never got to Orlando,” he said.
“You let yourself be trapped out on South Beach with a crazy woman.”
“She wasn’t crazy.” He started to close the door but I stopped it. “And how was I supposed to prevent that? I didn’t have any choice. No keys remember? I had to go with Gina.”
“You should have got rid of the pickup months ago. You don’t even like it. You only keep it because it was Jimmy’s.”
That was too stupid even for a reply but then what part of this argument wasn’t stupid? And when had we stopped just being glad to be alive? The door closed.
“Fine, whatever,” I yelled at the door. “You know best. You always do.” I heard the sound of a razor start up. “I’m going out to get a toothbrush and some clean clothes.”
Then I remembered I had no money and no car. the door opened. He stood there naked, the electric razor in his left hand. “My wallet and keys are in my pants pocket.”
I started to smile. His answering smile put the shopping trip on hold.
Things got rocky as soon as the fun stopped. We went from mad passionate love to mad passionate hate with nothing inbetween and I don’t know why or how. We fought about things that happened years before we even knew each other and we fought about things that happened during the hurricane. Clay was normally unflappable, his calmness and dependability in any crisis earned him the reputation of a stand-up guy who could be counted on. I wasn’t seeing it. In fact, I never saw it.
There was something about the chemistry between us that turned up the heat a notch in all situations, love, anger or outright silliness.
We were back in bed, the only place we fit together fine, when I asked, “Why do you always seem mad at me?”
He removed his arm from under my head and slid away from me.
I propped myself up on an elbow and looked down at him. “Seems to me you hate needing me, loving me.”
He looked startled. He started to speak and then closed his mouth, tossed back the covers and left the bed. I watched him dress, quickly and efficiently, the way he did everything.
“You said right at the beginning you don’t like losing control of yourself. Is that what this is about?”
He glanced at me but didn’t answer, sitting on the end of the bed to put on his shoes.
“Loving me means everything isn’t in your control anymore, doesn’t it?”
He picked up the remote. Conversation over.
I called Marley. “How could you let that happen?” she said when I told her my story. “How do you get yourself into such messes?”
“This one wasn’t my fault.”
“They never are.” The conversation ended abruptly. We watched the news channel in silence, staring at pictures of destruction while I stole glances at Clay. His profile, lean and hard and uncompromising, never flinched. His stillness makes you aware of Clay, like a rock in a raging river, unmovable and hard to his core.
I wanted to stroke his cheek and kiss along his jaw, wanted to wrap my arms, my legs and my whole body around him. I ached to soften his coldness towards me, to touch him, to taste him, to cry out in the delight of him, but he’d shut me out.
The man’s heart was made of Kevlar and nothing could pierce it. Even when I sighed and moved restlessly, he stared straight ahead and ignored me. His toughness must be genetic. Clay’s family was among the early settlers in Florida, wrestling hundreds of acres of scrubland from snakes, gators and other hard men out in the Piney woods. Actually, they were the true crackers, Florida cowboys who used whips to move the long-horned cattle through the thick underbrush. Clay’s family survived everything that nature could throw at them but it was progress and development that finally brought them to their knees and took away their land. The cancer of expansion spread inland and ate into their holdings, taxing and zoning them out of business.
And so they’d sold out, but Clay’s family didn’t get real wealthy. Oh no, they just moved farther inland and started again with a smaller spread while the developers and their agents got rich. Seeing the developers make millions off a golf course or a gated community plus strip malls and plazas where his family’s long-horned cattle had grazed inspired Clay never to come out on the short end of a deal again and after college he’d set out to win at this new game. The very grit that made his family hang on beyond endurance made him rich.
I met Clay at the Sunset soon after I’d started there, at the height of the Jimmy wars, when I was at the depths of my battered soul. He started coming in every night ’bout four for a couple of hours. I liked his black eyes watching me. He never made a pass or said a thing to tell me he was interested, he just watched.
Clay, Peter and Brian, the three guys who came in every night and shared jokes, troubles and just plain living with me, became part of a running commentary on life that lasted hours, and then days, before it grew into years. We knew pretty much everything a bout one another, or thought we did, and I’d come to count on these guys for a reality check. But mostly it was Clay I waited for every day. When Jimmy took away my sense of self, Clay gave it back to me, and slowly my feelings for him changed.
I told myself he wasn’t my type. Judging by Jimmy Travis, my type was drunked up, drugged out and totally beyond control, while Clay was all about control and taking care of business. Where’s the fun in that? Definitely not my kind but Mr. Cool turned out to be Mr. Hot as Hell and I couldn’t get enough of him. Who knew? When ice melts it can be a whole lot of fun.
But I often wondered if we really had anything in common besides sex. While the honest part of my brain always yelled, “Who the shit cares?” the sensible part said there had to be more if we we re going to have a future together. Oh, where’s the fun in sensible? And since when did I start doing sensible?
“Let’s go north for a little holiday,” Clay suggested.
I lay in his arms, stroking his lovely smooth skin in the rose glow of the neon light through the thin curtains. “I haven’t any clothes.” I settled on his shoulder.
“We can stop in Tampa and pick some up.” His left hand came up to stroke my hair back from my forehead. “Buy some suitcases and just fill them up with whatever pleases you. Shop ’til we drop. It’ll be fun. We’ve never gone on holiday together.” He pressed his lips into my hair.
I pulled away from him. “How can you think of a holiday before we know everything is okay in Jac?”
His jaw hardened. “Fine, we don’t need to go on holiday. Let’s just go out to the ranch.”
It sounded like just one more attempt to get me out of Jacaranda. He’d been suggesting for months that we move up to Sarasota or out to Independence and his five-hundred-acre ranch. I wasn’t sure if he just wanted to get me away from my past and my friends or hide me away where his friends couldn’t see me because he was ashamed of me. He wanted us to be anywhere but Jacaranda but it just wasn’t for me. There was nothing that could induce me to leave my island.
Come morning, Clay and I started back in fighting big-time. “Let’s just go home,” I said at one point, thinking I was changing the subject and smoothing things out. “I want to talk to Styles about Gina and I want to go see the Sunset, make sure it’s okay.”
“And what about our place, don’t you care if it’s been wiped out?”
Chapter 28
This took our fight onto a whole new battlefield. It seems Clay thought, “The Sunset is more important to you than being with me.” Not true, but I could understand his point of view. I love that damn bar. I admit it. I’d spent a lot of my life there. It was where my friends hung out. They’d all be floating back to catch up on each other and I wanted to be there when they did.
“I want to take the Mercedes back,” I said, thinking I was changing the subject and making things better.
“Leave it,” Clay ordered.
Now I’ve never taken real well to being ordered about but I tried. “It’ll help the Travises. No need for them to get someone
to drive it back when I’m right here.” Don’t ask me why I cared. It was kinda like for once in my life I’d like to do things right so they had nothing to complain about even though I knew it was an impossible goal, rather like leaving for the moon in a biplane. You see, there was no right thing. Whatever I did it would automatically be the wrong thing.
“Why do you care?” Clay’s voice was full of suspicion.
“Fine,” I said, trying to keep the peace, “leave it sit there. I don’t care.”
It was nearly noon, after hours of silence, before the hydro to the island was functioning again and the police were allowing people over the bridge. We headed west. The day was still gray, the rain still fell in a steady drizzle and the wind was still tossing rubbish around but with less determination. None of that mattered. I wanted to be in Jac.
At one spot we had to back up and make a detour around downed hydro lines and once we had to take to the shoulder to avoid the roof of a house squatting on the road. Houses were missing roofs everywhere, the insides left standing open to the elements. Just east of I-75, about seven miles inland, a fourteen-foot aluminum boat lay on its side in the ditch, blown in from the gulf or picked up out of someone’s backyard. In an open field a lone steer stood almost to its knees in water. “Why is there only one?” I asked Clay. “You always see cattle together. Do you suppose the others blew away? How weird would that be, just seeing a cow flying by! Or imagine getting hit by a flying cow. That would be one helluva accident report.”
When we got to the north lift bridge, we were stopped by a state trooper in a yellow slicker. He bent over, both hands on the open window and smiled in at us. “Need to see some ID, folks. Only residents are allowed on the island. Everyone else is being turned away.” He took the license Clay offered and looked briefly at it. “Still a danger of looting until everyone is back in their homes.”
Clay asked, “Did many people try to ride it out?”
Rain dripped off the yellow slicker and fell on the license. “A few may have.” He flicked off the moisture and handed Clay his license. “One lady came back after we closed the bridge because she was worried about her boat in a storm surge. Told me it was worth a hundred and fifty thousand and she wanted to be there to let out the lines when the water rose. I asked her how much her life was worth but it seems it wasn’t worth as much as the damn boat. I couldn’t stop her. Just took down her name so we could notify next of kin if Myrna hit here.”
Sex in a Sidecar Page 8
