Stryker's Wife (Man of the Month)

by Dixie Browning

  Kurt pretended an intense interest in the rumpled statement from Pierce’s Electronic Service.

  Overhead, a gull flapped past with a finger mullet in his bill. Something hit the water not two feet abaft the port beam. It wasn’t the finger mullet.

  “Splotch alert,” Frog quipped.

  Kurt decided the boy’s vocabulary had improved, even if his grammar hadn’t. “Thanks, mate. We’re covered, but maybe you’d better pass the word.”

  Kurt glanced up at the overhang from the flying bridge that covered a portion of the cockpit. They grinned at each other. Frog nodded toward the woman in the white shorts and halter, who was stroking her legs with after-sun lotion, her gaze straying frequently toward Kurt.

  “Bet that stuff she’s rubbin’ on ‘er ain’t gullproof.”

  When Kurt didn’t reply, Frog noisily finished his drink and dumped the ice overboard. “Know why she keeps looking at you?”

  “No, but I expect you’re going to tell me.”

  “It’s that eye patch. Makes you look like a pirate. Women like pirates.”

  “Oh, yeah? How would you know what women like?” They’d talked about women before. Mostly warnings on Kurt’s part and bragging on Frog’s.

  The boy shrugged. “I notice stuff like that. What about tomorrow, you gonna let me go out?”

  “That’s a negative.” They had talked about this subject, too. No weekday charters during school months. It was still a sore spot between them, because in season, Frog’s tips could run anywhere from twenty-five to a hundred dollars a trip, depending on the length of the charter, the number of fish caught and the size and generosity of the party. Kurt had insisted on starting a savings account for him, much to the boy’s disgust.

  “How you gonna run the boat and wait on fishermen? You need me, man.”

  “What I need is a partner who can read a chart, lay out a course and follow it. What I need—”

  “Awright, awright! So maybe I’ll just shove off and try my luck somewheres else where I don’t have to learn all that crap.”

  It wasn’t the first time he’d threatened to leave. Kurt could only hope he didn’t mean it. He had no hold on the boy. No legal hold. “Anyhow,” Kurt said, “this Kiley fellow’s not a fisherman, he’s a photographer. No hooks to be baited.”

  “So who’s gonna put film in his camera and hand over his fancy bottled water when he wants a swig?”

  “Nice try, kid.” Kurt chuckled. Another crisis avoided. “Now go below and get started on your homework. I’ll be down directly to check you out.”

  It had taken two years, but Debranne Eliza Ellen Kingsly Kiley, called Deke by most of her friends, was on her way. Finally!

  “Funeral, here I come,” she muttered, and was mildly shocked by her own irreverence.

  Her husband’s first funeral had been a circus. His brother had planned it with no input at all from her. Not that she’d been up to it at the time. She’d still been in shock.

  Once she’d been able to think again, she had thought about having her own private memorial on the first anniversary of the occasion, but when the time had come she’d been sick with stomach flu that had dragged on for weeks, so she’d postponed her plans for another year. A year and six weeks wouldn’t do. Deke was cursed with an orderly mind, which meant that anniversaries came annually, not any old time it was convenient.

  So now it was the second anniversary, and she was in perfect health. This time, she was determined to see it through. The champagne alone had cost nearly a week’s rent, but it was Mark’s favorite kind. While she was at it she had splurged on a pair of beautiful, brand-new crystal champagne glasses, too, because Mark had also appreciated fine crystal.

  The leis had been even harder to find than the champagne, but as they had honeymooned in Hawaii, leis had seemed a fitting floral tribute.

  So now she was on her way. She refused to think about those nasty whispers she had overheard a few weeks after Mark’s death, about his wandering eye. He’d been too busy building an empire for any extracurricular hanky-panky.

  Goodness, he’d hardly had time for his own wife, and they’d still been in the honeymoon stage.

  To clear her mind of unworthy thoughts, Deke went over her checklist. She had been taught early and well that orderliness was right up there alongside cleanliness, which was right next door to godliness. “Camera case, notebook, overnight bag—check! Champagne, glasses, leis—check!”

  And then she moved on to her next list. Lights off, stove off, windows locked, door locked. Done, done, done and done.

  Orphaned at the age of thirteen, Deke Kingsly Kiley could barely remember her father, who had died when she was five, but she’d never felt a lack of love. She’d been brought up by a mother who found life rather overwhelming, and by three elderly women whose notion of propriety had been formed during the Coolidge administration. She had loved them all dearly, and they had loved her right back. Although she had to admit that none of them had left her particularly well prepared for life as a single woman in the nineties. The nineteen nineties, that is.

  Still, she’d made it. She was doing just fine, thank you. She had two published books to her credit, another one under contract, a part-time job at a day-care center and another one at Biddy’s Birdery, feeding baby birds and cleaning cages.

  Not to mention one brief marriage.

  Three and a half years ago she had married a handsome, highly successful businessman from nearby Norfolk. Mark Kiley had owned the shopping mall where she’d been signing her first book. He’d seen her there and stopped by to ask how it was going, and one thing had led to another. A week later, on their third date, he told her that her serenity and her quaint, old-fashioned beauty had knocked him clean off his pins.

  Two weeks later they’d been married.

  Her great-aunts had been horrified. A year’s engagement was de rigeur, Aunt Ellen had insisted. Anything less was hardly even decent, according to Aunt Eliza.

  If Granna Anne hadn’t passed away the previous spring, Deke might never have been allowed to marry, because Anne Kingsly had been nobody’s pushover. Of all the Kingsly women—Deke’s mother, Deborah, her grandmother, Anne, and her two great-aunts, Eliza and Ellen, Granna Anne had been the only one with any backbone at all. Deke liked to think she had inherited it, but there were times when she wondered, she truly did.

  Hers had been a storybook romance. Unfortunately, it hadn’t had a storybook ending. No happily ever after. She’d been so sure that once her family got to know Mark they would love him as much as she did, only there hadn’t been time. First Great-aunt Ellen had died, and then, in less than a year, Great-aunt Eliza had died. Mark had been too busy overseeing a huge development off the coast of South Carolina to help Deke deal with her grief. Not to mention dealing with all the legal red tape of a joint will that had been written before Deke had even been born.

  She had begged Mark to help her. He’d promised to look into it just as soon as he could spare a minute. He was always incredibly busy, but then, one of the things that had attracted her in the first place had been his ambition. His aggressiveness. It had been enormously appealing to a woman who’d been trained from the cradle to be pretty, polite and passive.

  It had been shortly after that that she’d seen the advertisement for a mail-order course in self-empowerment and assertiveness. If she hadn’t been so worried about her marriage—the gloss seemed to have gone off rather quickly—and overwhelmed by all the legal hocus-pocus she was hearing from her great-aunt’s executor—not to mention her concerns about her second book, which wasn’t coming along as it should…

  If it hadn’t been for all that, she never would have sent off for the blasted thing.

  Not that it had helped much. When it worked at all it was in fits and spurts, usually when she least expected it. She still blamed Lesson Two for what happened when she’d asked Mark if they could please start a family. Empowerment is the birthright of every woman, the first paragraph had state
d. It is important to express your needs in unequivocal language.

  So she had. An only child, Deke had desperately wanted babies of her own. She’d said so.

  Mark had laughed. He’d told her she was child enough for him, and that it was about time she grew up because she was beginning to bore him with her childish demands.

  That had hurt her feelings. With all the dignity and empowerment she could summon, she had asked why he had married her if he hadn’t wanted a family.

  “Why? God knows. Maybe because you were a virgin and that’s a pretty rare commodity in this day and age.”

  “You couldn’t possibly have known that—not then, at least.”

  “Ah, come on, honey, you were practically advertising the fact. The way you dressed—the way you talked—even the way you sat there, with your knees together and your feet flat on the floor, like you were scared to death a fly would buzz up your petticoat.”

  It wasn’t true. None of it. Oh, it was true enough that she’d been a virgin, but she’d been wearing a sophisticated new outfit, a new hairstyle and a new shade of lipstick in honor of her very first autographing when they’d met.

  Besides, things like that didn’t show…did they? “I don’t believe you,” she’d said flatly.

  Mark had sneered. There was no other way to describe it. “You were a novelty, darling, but let’s face it—novelties wear off, so be a good little girl and get off my back, will you?”

  That was when the mail-order course had kicked in. She’d thrown a vase of roses at him. A Steuben vase. It had been a wedding gift, and Mark had known to the penny how much it had cost, which she’d thought rather crass at the time, but of course, by then, her training had quit cold on her, so she hadn’t told him so.

  Never go to bed angry. That, along with that business about turning the other cheek, was one of her great-aunts’ favorite sayings.

  So Mark had slammed out, and Deke had waited up, unable to sleep until she had apologized and smoothed things over between them.

  He hadn’t come home at all. The next day his partner had called to tell her that Mark had gone out of town on another business trip and wouldn’t be home until the following Tuesday.

  Still furious, hurt and determined to get over both, she had applied herself to packing away her great-aunts’ clothing to give to the church’s Helping Hand Society.

  And then word came that Mark had been killed in a plane crash.

  Deke had run the gamut of emotions. Remorse, regret, anger, denial, grief—although not necessarily in that order. Suddenly, she’d found herself completely alone, without family and dangerously short on resources. In the midst of all that, poor old Mr. Hardcastle, her own family lawyer, had come to inform her that he had finally finished settling her great-aunts’ convoluted estate, and that, my how he wished he had insisted they update their will, but then, the Misses Ellen and Eliza had been a law unto themselves, hadn’t they?

  The Kingsly home place, where Deke and her father and his entire family had grown up, was now the property of a distant cousin from Cleveland, who intended to put it on the market immediately because he needed the money.

  The furniture was to be auctioned off, all except for one or two personal bequests.

  On the heels of dealing with all that had come the news that the house she had shared with Mark had been leased in the name of the jointly owned development firm, of which Mark’s older brother, Hammond, was not only the legal counsel, but senior partner and major shareholder.

  Deke had blamed herself for not becoming more informed while there’d still been time. She had blamed that darn course in self-assertiveness for letting her down and for her last quarrel with Mark. She still felt guilty over that. It was the last time she had ever seen him.

  However, having no other choice, she had picked up the pieces and got on with her life. Not particularly gracefully, but at least she’d managed to deal with things as they came.

  And boy, had they come! The minute word of Mark’s death got out, people she had never even met had swarmed all over her, taking over, talking over her head, going though things, shoving papers under her nose for her to sign. Hammond, who might have been more supportive, had been among the worst.

  After all three estates had been finally settled with all the whereases and heretofores and bequeathings—goodness, the process took forever!—Deke had ended up with her husband’s camera and his last name, and her grandmother’s parlor organ, which was seven feet tall and weighed a ton.

  Not that she could play a note, because she couldn’t. And even if she could, the bellows wheezed, but all the same, she appreciated the sentiment.

  By then, of course, she had been informed that although state law allowed the widow a portion of her late husband’s assets, when those assets were corporate assets, and the corporation was privately held by a partner who was not only a lawyer but a relative, and when her late husband had allowed his life insurance to lapse rather than pay the premiums that had increased dramatically when it was discovered that both his blood pressure and his cholesterol levels were in the stratosphere—why, then, there was really nothing much the state could do.

  Deke hadn’t pushed. She’d still been feeling guilty on too many counts, including the fact that once the initial shock had worn off, she’d been more angry than grieved.

  It had been the most hectic period in her life, what with everything piling on at once. Tomorrow would be the second anniversary of the day Mark’s plane had gone down off a place called Swan Inlet, killing him and the secretary who’d been traveling with him. The time had come to bid a proper farewell to her late husband and get on with the rest of her life.

  Unfortunately, it was easier said than done.

  She scanned the two-lane highway ahead for a gas station. Her car was a guzzler, which was probably why it had been so cheap. She blamed her great-aunts for not teaching her such practical things as how to deal with bankers and lawyers and nosy reporters. She blamed Mark for not teaching her practical things like how to shop for a reliable secondhand car. And she blamed herself for trying to blame others for her own shortcomings.

  Maybe she should shop for a mail-order course for handling guilt.

  It was late in the afternoon by the time she checked into Swan Inlet’s one and only motel. Fortunately, it wasn’t one of the costlier chains. This entire project was beginning to erode her meager savings rather badly.

  Before setting out to locate Captain Stryker and his boat, to make sure that everything was on schedule, she washed her face and brushed her straight, shoulder-length hair, tying it back with a narrow black ribbon. Not for the first time she wished she’d been born with black hair. Or red, or platinum blond. Anything but plain old brown. The next time she broke out in a rash of self-assertiveness, she just might march down to Suzzi’s Beauty Boutique and get it cut, bleached and frizzed to a fare-thee-well before she came to her senses.

  Kurt was on the flying bridge hanging out laundry because the marina’s dryer was on the blink again when a woman pulled up in a spray of gravel. He noticed her right off because her car obviously needed a ring job. And then he noticed her because of the way she was dressed. Most women around these parts dressed pretty casually. It was that kind of place.

  This one was wearing a dress. Not just any dress, but a floaty, flower-printed thing with a lace collar. The kind of dress he could picture his mother wearing to teach Sunday school back when he was a kid.

  She had a plain face. Not homely, just plain.

  Although she couldn’t be much more than five feet tall, there was nothing at all plain about her body.

  She picked her way carefully out along the finger pier, dodging the clutter of lines, buckets and shoes. And the cracks. She was wearing high heels.

  “Excuse me, sir, but do you know where I can find a Captain Stryker?”

  “You found him.” Kurt dropped the pair of briefs he’d been about to pin to the line and waited. She smiled then, and he decided mayb
e she wasn’t so plain, after all.

  “Oh. Well, I’m Deke Kiley. Debranne Kiley? I wrote you—I sent a check? For tomorrow?”

  From the hatch just behind him, Frog said softly, “I thought you said you was taking out some camera guy tomorrow.”

  Deke Kiley. D.E.E. Kiley. That had been the name on the check. The stationery had been plain. No letterhead. If she was a Deke, then he was a blooming hibiscus. “Yeah, I got it. You’re on.” And under his breath, he said, “Pipe down, pea brain. She’s a paying customer.”

  “Yes, well…I’ll see you tomorrow morning then,” the woman called out in a soft little voice that reminded him of something from the distant past. “I just wanted to be sure which boat was yours,” she went on. “Eight o’clock, is that all right?”

  Kurt nodded. It wasn’t all right, but it would have to do. A charter was a charter, and if some lace-trimmed lady photographer wanted to snap pictures of dolphins, he reckoned her money was as green as anyone else’s.

  “Hey!” he yelled after her. She stopped and swiveled around and he remembered what it was she reminded him of. The ballerina on a tinkling little music box that used to sit on his mama’s dressing table. “Wear sneakers tomorrow, okay?”

  She smiled and nodded, and Kurt watched her swish her shapely little behind down the wharf, climb into a yellow clunker about the size of an aircraft carrier and drive off.

  Semper paratus, man. The Coast Guard’s motto was Always Prepared. Kurt had a feeling he just might not be prepared for this one.

  Two

  The widow wore black. Black slacks and a black silk blouse, bought especially for the occasion. She also wore a faded yellow sweatshirt because it had turned cooler than expected. Her shoes were red high tops, which weren’t exactly proper funeral attire, but she wore them anyway because Captain Stryker had said to. And Deke, while she was no great sailor—had never been on a boat in her life, in fact—was savvy enough to know that a boat was no place for high heels.

  She was heading out to the pier carrying the basket, her purse and her camera bag when a lanky, freckle-faced boy emerged from Captain Stryker’s boat and hurried to meet her.