Most of the clothing she owned had been purchased for work and the cooler climate of Washington state—wools, tweeds, silk blouses and tailored suits. One local shopping trip had harvested the sleeveless shift she’d worn last night and the cotton walking shorts she was wearing now. The cream-colored shell she had on looked too formal, but it would have to do. If Joe had been looking for a babe, he wouldn’t have proposed marriage to Pamela.
She gathered up her map, her purse, and her cocktail napkin and left the apartment. This time, she noticed, Kitty’s curtains were open. She told herself she only wanted a clarification of where Joe lived, but deep inside she knew she really needed a pep talk. If anything, she was edgier today than she’d been last night. Perhaps Kitty could offer some guidance.
Pamela tapped lightly on Kitty’s door. “Hold your goddamn horses!” Kitty’s voice bellowed from inside.
Pamela’s tension increased. She didn’t know much about her neighbor, other than that she worked the evening shift at the Shipwreck, her hair was bleached a radioactive shade of blond, and she had the sort of physical endowments that made women like Pamela feel pathetically scrawny. Yet something about Kitty had put Pamela at ease yesterday morning, when they’d met in the laundry room. As they’d folded their clothing across a long Formica-topped table from each other, Kitty had somehow convinced Pamela that Joe was the greatest thing since French fries and if Pamela didn’t marry him she’d regret it for the rest of her life.
“Marry him?” Pamela had asked, wondering why, if this guy was so great, he needed Kitty to find him a wife.
“He’s got a legal situation. Nothing major, nothing criminal. It’s just, he’s looking for a fine upstanding woman like yourself who’ll serve as his wife for a short while. Someone who’ll take his name and wear his ring. Nothing serious.”
Nothing serious? Pamela had thought. Taking a man’s name and wearing his ring sounded pretty serious to her. So serious she wouldn’t consider it. Pamela was definitely not the home-and-hearth type. She was devoted to her career and her craft, and she’d always been an exceedingly private person. Marriage meant opening up to someone else, making oneself vulnerable, feeling someone else’s fears as longings as if they were one’s own. Pamela simply wasn’t ready to make a commitment like that, and everyone who knew her knew that.
Which meant that if she got married, the likelihood of her being found, by Mick Morrow or anyone else, might decrease. Who would hunt for a single-minded, independent woman like architect Pamela Hayes in a cozy, domestic setting? Who would expect to find her doing her impersonation of a wife?
“Marry him,” she’d ruminated once Kitty had run out of superlatives for Joe.
“Yeah. He’d make one helluva husband. And you better believe I know a thing or two about marriage.”
Pamela smoothed the cocktail napkin between her hands and gazed hopefully at the open curtains, longing for Kitty to give her another inspiring speech before she paid a call on what might soon become her new home.
At last the door swung open. Kitty filled the doorway, a vision of wild platinum hair and cleavage in a colorful silk kimono. Her face broke into a smile. “Oh, Pamela! I didn’t realize it was you. I thought it was this jerk who tried to pick me up at the bar last night. A real loser, you know? Swore he was the reincarnation of Ernest Hemingway, which was reason enough to want to punch him in the nose. He kept saying he was going to look me up in the phone book and come after me.”
Pamela found nothing amusing about that. Her own experience with Mick Morrow made her suspicious to the point of paranoia about men who threatened to come after women. She stepped inside Kitty’s apartment—a mirror-image of hers, only embellished with great quantities of clutter—and closed the door behind her. Then she drew the chain lock. “Make sure you look through your peep-hole before you open your door to anyone,” she instructed Kitty.
Kitty appeared unconcerned. “The island is full of guys who think they’re Ernest Hemingway. I’m used to it.” She bounded across the room to her unmade bed and did a belly-flop onto it, her head propped in her hands and her knees bent so her feet hovered above her rump. She looked like a superannuated teenager at a pajama party, eager to gossip and giggle about boys. “So, what did you think of Joe?”
“He’s...very nice,” Pamela said, lifting a filmy garment of some sort from a chair and lowering herself to sit. “He wants me to go to his house today.”
“To meet Lizzie Borden,” Kitty guessed.
“Lizzie Borden?”
“Okay, his niece hasn’t taken a hatchet to anyone yet. She’s a maniac, though. Take her with a sense of humor and you’ll be fine. I adore that kid.”
A maniacal child, Pamela thought. Alternately referred to as a lower order of vertebrate or America’s most famous ax murderer.
“But look, Pamela...” Kitty tilted her head slightly, her dark eyes narrowing as she appraised Pamela. “Can we speak frankly? If you’re going to marry Joe, you ought to jazz yourself up a little, know what I mean?”
Pamela didn’t take criticism from others well—usually because she spent too much of her time and energy criticizing herself. “Jazz myself up,” she said warily, trying not to bristle.
“A couple of weeks down here and you’ll develop some color, you know? But right now, you look kind of washed out. Here.” She sprang from the bed, hauled Pamela out of her chair, and dragged her into the bathroom. A forceful nudge landed her on the toilet seat. “I’m just going to give you a little color, okay? Nothing extreme.”
With that, Kitty attacked Pamela’s face with a vast array of cosmetics brushes. Choking clouds of tinted powder billowed into the air as Kitty went at her with blusher and eye shadow. Pamela tried in vain to glimpse herself in the mirror above the seat, but all she saw was the reflection of Kitty’s arm wielding her brushes like Jackson Pollock assaulting a canvas.
Pamela hoped she wouldn’t look like a Jackson Pollock painting when Kitty was done.
“It’s not as if the situation between Jonas and me has anything to do with physical attraction,” she protested feebly as Kitty laid down a brush and brandished a mascara wand.
“Jonas? Did he ask you to call him that?”
“It’s his name.” It only just occurred to Pamela that she preferred Jonas to Joe. She liked the Biblical ring of it.
“Gee, he never told me that. I guess he must be serious about you.”
“Of course not,” Pamela scoffed. “He just wants to marry me.”
Kitty stepped back and assessed her handiwork. “Not bad. All you need now is...” She rummaged through a drawer and pulled out a rainbow-striped ribbon. “There you go,” she said, arranging it around Pamela’s hair. “You ought to do something about those earrings,” she muttered, now that Pamela’s ears were exposed, along with the plain gold buttons that adorned the lobes. “They’re awfully boring. But earrings are one thing I don’t lend.”
Pamela almost responded that if necessary she could borrow some earrings from Joe. Instead, she rose from the commode and confronted herself in the mirror. The face that stared back at her looked a bit feverish, but that was an improvement over her usual waxy pallor. Kitty stood beside her, beaming proudly at what she’d wrought, making Pamela feel as if she were part of some pagan ritual, the sacrificial virgin who’d been primped by the tribal matriarch before offering herself to the gods so the crops would grow and the local volcano wouldn’t erupt.
“So what do you think? You look gorgeous,” Kitty answered her own question.
“Thank you.” Pamela didn’t agree that she looked gorgeous, but if she said so, Kitty might think she was referring to the make-up job and not the face behind it. “Actually,” she said, turning from the mirror and following Kitty out of the cramped room, “I didn’t come here for you to attempt to make me pretty. I came to get directions to Jonas’s house.”
“That bum! He invited you over and he didn’t tell you where he lives?”
“He did tell me,” Pam
ela defended him. She pulled out her cocktail napkin and showed the blurry diagram to Kitty. “He gave me this, but I can’t make heads or tails of it.”
Kitty took the napkin, squinted at it, rotated it a hundred and eighty degrees, then shook her head. Without having to be asked, Pamela supplied her with the Chamber of Commerce map. “Ah, here we go. See, here’s Leon Street. You’re going to head down to South Street and hang a left, and then you just keep going till you get to Leon Street and make a right. Easy as pie.”
“What does his house look like? Have you been there?”
Kitty’s laugh was just a tad too knowing. “Sweetie, there isn’t a woman on this island who wouldn’t want to call that house home.”
“What is it, a palace?”
“No—but a prince lives inside. Go get him, Pam. Be the first one to reel him in.”
Pamela might be the first, but she wouldn’t be the last. This was a marriage with a built-in conclusion. And as far as reeling Joe in, the only reason he was biting on her hook was because of Elizabeth. Lizzie Borden. Lizard.
Pamela shrugged back her shoulders and girded herself to meet the maniac. “Okay,” she said, tucking an errant strand of hair into her ribbon. “Here goes nothing.”
“Here comes the bride,” Kitty sing-songed as she ushered Pamela to the door. “You’re going to love being married, Pamela. Trust me—I’ve done it plenty of times myself.”
Done what? Pamela wondered as she waved and departed from Kitty’s disorderly apartment. Marriage, or the part of marriage she and Joe weren’t going to do? Last night he had promised her that she would have her own bedroom. Without separate beds, the deal was off.
Pamela wasn’t a prude—and, tribal sacrifices to the contrary, she wasn’t a virgin. But she wasn’t going to get involved any more than she had to with Jonas Brenner. This was a business arrangement. Safety for her, a custody judgment for him. Sex would only complicate matters.
Besides, he was much too grungy to appeal to her in a romantic way. Torn apparel, unshaven cheeks, the mop of hair, the absurdly blue eyes...the taut, lean body...the firm, powerful grip of his hand around hers and that sly, seductive dimple punctuating the corner of his mouth...
Definitely not her type.
She gave a final wave to Kitty, who was watching her from the window with a go-get-’em grin plastered across her face. Then she descended the steps to the parking lot adjacent to the building. The asphalt felt sticky in the late-morning heat; the warm, damp air wrapped around her like a compress. Hers was the only car in the lot with out-of-state plates. She’d have to change the registration.
Right after the wedding, she resolved—assuming she and Joe went through with the marriage. She would get Florida plates and a license under the name Pamela Brenner.
Pamela Brenner. Would that ever sound anything less than bizarre to her?
It’s only temporary, she reminded herself as, after instinctively checking the back seat to see if a hit man was hiding there, she unlocked her car. A gust of scorching air slammed into her when she opened the door, and she gingerly lowered herself onto the steaming seat. The first time she’d gotten into her car after it had baked for a while in the Key West sun, the steering wheel had nearly given her second-degree burns.
Pamela Brenner.
What if she ultimately discovered that she couldn’t stand Joe? What if they were incompatible? What if he expected her to pick up after him, and cook for him, and iron his shirts, and perform all the other mundane homemaking chores she loathed? Even if he didn’t expect her to be a real wife, he might expect her to be a housewife, a prospect that made facing Mick Morrow almost palatable in comparison.
She ordered herself to calm down. Nothing had been forged in concrete. She was going to visit Joe’s home and meet his niece, that was all. She was going to pay a social call on the proprietor of a bar and his ax-murderer niece.
Allowing herself a fatalistic smile, she turned on the air conditioner and cursed as fiery air blasted from the vents. In a minute it cooled down, and after a final glance at her map, she steered out of the parking lot.
In the week she’d lived in Key West, she’d grown reasonably familiar with Duval Street, which ran through the heart of Old Town and seemed to be the commercial center of the island. The sidewalks were crammed with souvenir shops, restaurants, bars, art galleries, T-shirt boutiques, bars, pharmacies, and more bars. Perhaps the overabundance of liquor merchants was in some way related to the island’s population of men who thought they were Ernest Hemingway.
Stranger than the stores, though, was the landscape itself. Pamela had visited Southern California plenty of times; she knew what palm trees were. But here they didn’t seem like lonely oases sprouting in the desert. Key West was the tropics, everything lush and green and voluptuous—and humid. Hot and humid.
She followed Kitty’s directions and navigated into a residential area of cozy, pretty houses. The neighborhood seemed too homey for someone like Joe, although as an adoptive father to an orphaned girl he must have a domestic side to him. She recalled what he’d said last night about abruptly finding himself the primary caretaker of a two-year-old who ate only pink food and sobbed for her parents. There was clearly more to Jonas Brenner than frayed jeans and an earring.
At last she found his address, a sprawling white bungalow-style house on a plant-choked lot. The wide front porch overlooked a shaggy lawn interspersed with a variety of palm species. Flowering bougainvillea crawled up the trellis-like underpinnings of the porch. Slouching wooden chairs sat empty beneath the broad overhang.
Halfway up the pebbled driveway Pamela stopped her car and climbed out. Some sort of tropical bird, camouflaged by the foliage, cawed a greeting.
She wasn’t sure what she’d expected, but whatever it had been, this was better. The house had been recently painted. The roof was in good repair. A child’s bicycle lay on its side next to the slate front walk. The front door stood open, the screen door veiling the interior of the house from her view.
She could imagine herself living in a house like this. It was certainly big enough, and charming. Although the landscaping was as much in need of a trim as Joe’s hair, it was lovely. Yes, she could imagine it...
An arrow whizzed past her head. She shrieked and flattened herself against the notched bark of a royal palm, clinging to the rough surface until her trembling stopped. It took most of her courage to glance at the missile, which lay on the grass a few feet away.
Red plastic, with a suction cup at the end.
Another arrow flew toward her from a cluster of bushes at the side of the house. This one missed her by several yards. She pushed away from the palm and glowered at the bushes.
A girl emerged from the shrubbery. She stood about three and a half feet tall, with brownish-red hair braided into two narrow plaits on either side of her face and hanging loose in the back. Gull feathers were woven into the braids. The child had dark eyes, a smudge of a nose, a pouting mouth and rings of grime circling her neck. She wore a yellow T-shirt with bright purple letters across it reading “Life’s a Beach,” and a hula skirt constructed out of shreds of green plastic. Her feet were bare and dirty, and her equally dirty hands clutched a toy archer’s bow.
She scowled at Pamela. “You’re dead,” she announced.
Pamela met the girl’s stare. “Do I look dead to you?”
The girl considered the questionfor a minute, then shrugged. “You’re ugly,” she said.
Pamela knew better than to ask the child if she looked ugly. Her smile, however, felt as plastic as the hula skirt looked, and she abandoned all pretense of friendliness. “Where’s your uncle?”
“He’s not here. He went to Birdie’s.”
“He invited me for lunch.”
“Yeah, well, he’s at Birdie’s. You wanna play?”
No, Pamela did not want to play. Not with a heavily armed savage who called her ugly. “Who is Birdie?”
The girl smirked at Pamela’s apparent i
gnorance. “You know. Birdie. Come on, let’s play. I’ll be the Boo Doo Chief. You can be the biker.” With that, the girl spun around and plunged into the shrubbery.
Pamela took a deep breath and let it out. She didn’t want to be the biker. What she wanted was for Jonas Brenner to appear and explain what in God’s name was going on.
Her prayers were answered promptly. “Pamela!” his voice sailed toward her from the street.
She turned to see him jogging up the driveway, a bouquet of pale squares drooping from his hand. As he drew nearer, she saw they were loose tea bags.
She shifted her gaze from the tea bags to the man holding them. His grooming had improved considerably overnight. Although his hair was still too long, his chin was clean-shaven and his apparel—a sky-blue cotton shirt tucked neatly into a belted pair of khakis—was untorn. His eyes were hidden behind a pair of mirror-lensed sunglasses, and his earring was dangly and gold this time, either a heart or a skull, or maybe—she hoped—a peace sign. She couldn’t make out the shape.
“Sorry,” he said, then smiled. Without the stubble to hide it, his dimple was more pronounced. “I realized you might be a tea drinker and I didn’t have any tea bags, so I had to borrow some. Actually, I wanted to borrow the whole box, but Birdie can be funny about stuff.” He had reached Pamela’s side, and she fell into step next to him as they ambled up the front walk to the porch. “You should have rung the bell. Lizard would have let you in.”
“Lizard is outside playing,” Pamela told him. “She invited me to join her.” She told me I was ugly. Honestly, Pamela reproached herself, she shouldn’t let a child’s opinion mean so much to her. But it did. “Who’s Birdie?”
“She’s Lizard’s main baby-sitter. She lives across the street. You’ll meet her eventually,” said Joe, holding the screen door open for Pamela and following her into an entry hall. The walls were a muted beige, the oak floor covered with a thick, faded runner rug. The shadows kept the interior air surprisingly cool.
CRY UNCLE Page 4
