Paradise Burning

by Blair Bancroft

  Louder. Real loud. Melinda Mary pulled the covers over her head. Daddy sounded like a roaring lion. Mommy sounded . . . scared.

  Shaking, Melinda Mary crawled out of bed, crossed the room by the faint glow of her butterfly nightlight, opened the door. She crept down the short hallway toward the living room.

  The shouting stopped. Carefully, she stuck her head around the corner of the opening that led to the living room. A great sob of relief shook her. Mommy was alone. She looked sad, sitting on the couch with her head in her hands, but Daddy had gone away. No more shouting. She could go to Mommy, give her a hug . . .

  Daddy came out of the kitchen. There was something in his hand. Mommy started to run. So did Melinda Mary. All the way back to her room, where she slammed the door, jumped into bed, and lay very still, pretending to be asleep. A good girl. Always a good girl.

  Back in the living room, Mommy wasn’t so lucky.

  One scream, and all was silent.

  There was a limit to how fast a full-time research assistant could shop for a birthday present, bake a cake, and put together a gourmet meal. After considering her options, Mandy decided to order the cake from a local bakery, where her special instructions left the baker’s eyes gleaming at the prospect of a new design.

  Unfortunately . . . Mandy stared blankly at the three-tiered wedding cake on top of the bakery display case. A graceful waterfall of white roses, beginning at the feet of the classic bride and groom on top, tumbled down the side of the cake, bringing a rush of memories.

  Oh, hell . . .

  They’d had a grand Boston society wedding, her gown from a world-famous bridal couturière on Newbury Street, the guest list ranging from Boston Brahmins to the academic elite of Harvard, MIT, and Peter’s alma mater, Boston University. A reception on the top floor of the Copley, with rivers of champagne, mountains of food, and music by the finest wedding band in New England.

  Gone in sixty seconds. Or so it had seemed.

  She’d been too young, too indoctrinated into her parents’ dream. Her world too narrow, too isolated. She’d taken one look at Peter, back in her early teens, and never questioned that after she graduated from college, she would marry Jeff’s hand-picked heir apparent, and they’d all live happily at AKA forever after.

  Put like that, no wonder Peter headed for the hills. And how perfectly lowering—mortifying, in fact—that it had taken Eleanor to roust her out of the hole she’d dug for herself and shove her back into Peter’s life.

  “Will there be anything else, miss?” The bakery clerk was patiently waiting, holding out Mandy’s copy of her order slip.

  “Ah, no, thank you. I’ll pick it up around four tomorrow.” Mandy slunk off for home. Hopefully, an early morning trip to Golden Beach’s Art Center would take care of Peter’s gift. As for the meal . . . Mandy sighed. Peter would probably prefer steak, baked potato, and green salad, but how could she show off with that?

  She had, after all, packed her recipe books. Every last one of them.

  Shoulders back, eyes front, arms swinging in cadence at his side, Major Karim Shirazi strode toward the chain link fence. The branches of the trees on both sides of the road met overhead, providing a leafy canopy that allowed only intermittent flashes of sunlight to filter through. It wasn’t much, his daily walk—a half mile down, a half mile back—but it helped curb his restless energy, his driving need to get out of a house that stank of sex and smoke. And prison.

  A prison that was his as much as the girls’.

  There were no bombs here, no guns, tanks, RPGs. No shattered houses, splintered bodies. He should throw himself onto his knees and thank Allah for deliverance instead of . . .

  He broke out of the tree canopy, the chain link gate directly in front of him. In the distance a great cloud of charcoal smoke billowed into the sky, blotting out the bright Florida blue that usually met his gaze when he entered the clearing. Karim swore. Fire. And close, not more than a mile or two.

  There had been enough wildfires on the TV news to make him instantly aware of the danger. Did they need to run? Who to call for information? Certainly not the police.

  With a rhythmic roar a chopper flew low overhead. The instincts of a soldier urged him to dive for the ground. Stoically keeping his feet, Karim watched the helicopter race toward the fire, a huge bucket dangling on a long rope beneath its body. The chopper was so low the bucket seemed to skim the treetops.

  Fire control. The chopper scooped up water from lakes, even the gulf, and dumped it on fires. He’d seen that on TV too, yet never anticipated any personal danger. The thick woods around the old house was excellent camouflage, not a menace.

  He had, perhaps, made a mistake.

  Karim loped back up the road and jumped into his black Jeep Wrangler, one of the percs of his job. They’d actually let him choose it himself. The leafy canopy flashed overhead. He activated the electronic device that opened the gate. His body thrummed with impatience, hands clutching the wheel, as the gate inched open.

  Karim drove rapidly down the long dirt road, with suddenly ominous woods closing around him on either side. As he hit the paved road, his foot pressed even harder on the gas pedal, the Jeep careening around a corner as it approached the small cluster of houses east of the river. Where children were playing, people mowing their lawns, tending their gardens. One man was washing his boat. All totally unconcerned.

  Karim’s foot came off the gas. He drove sedately past. Obviously, he’d missed something somewhere. In just over a minute he was out of the populated area and there, about a hundred yards up the road, was an array of fire trucks blocking the entrance to a large county park noted for its wilderness hiking trails. The cloud of smoke behind the trucks was larger, darker than before, towering at least a thousand feet into the sky.

  A roar from behind. The helicopter was making another run. This time Karim could actually see the bucket open, the water tumble down near the edge of the column of smoke.

  The last thing he wanted to do was call attention to himself, but he had to ask. As Chief of Security, it was his responsibility. Karim pulled the Jeep up behind a private car. The man standing beside it, gazing at the towering smoke, was fiftyish and not wearing a uniform. Hopefully, just an interested spectator.

  Karim joined him. “What is happening?” he inquired.

  “Controlled burn that almost got out of hand,” the man said without turning his head. “That’s why they called in the chopper. Burn like this got away a few years back, roared all the way to Pine Grove, licking up a couple of houses with it. So they’re being extra careful.”

  “No one back there seems concerned.” As the man glanced at him, Karim waved a hand toward the small settlement east of the river.

  “Burn was announced. You live in the woods, you get used to it.” The man’s eyes suddenly grew cautious; his body stiffened ever so slightly. “Say . . . you’re the guy from the house at the end of line. The one with the humongous fence. Not a great place to be in a wildfire. Come out to look it over, did you?”

  “Ah . . . yes. I did not know the smoke was from a controlled burn. I was concerned.”

  “Your English is pretty good.”

  Karim sensed the unspoken: For a raghead. “Thank you,” he said through gritted teeth. America was supposed to be a melting pot, yet Middle-Eastern males seemed destined to be the ingredients that would pop to the top for decades to come, rejected and indigestible.

  Unfair! He wasn’t a terrorist. Maybe not quite on the right side of the law, but . . .

  The black smoke was dissolving to gray, with puffs of near white here and there. The cloud was not so broad, not so high. A small plane was making slow circles over the area. Probably a spotter plane. The helicopter did not return.

  The danger was past. For the moment.

  When Karim drove back toward the house surrounded by woods, he allowed a scowl to crease his handsome face. Wildfire could leap through the chain link, soar over the barbed wire, consume the signs that
said, “Private Property, No Trespassing.” It could swallow up the house, the staff, the clients, the girls.

  Imagination was his curse. A soldier was far better off without it.

  And fire was not his only problem, Karim thought as he waited for the gates to open. Lately, there was something different about his lovely, his very special, Nadyenka. An air of suppressed excitement, sparks of hope in her eyes, quickly extinguished when she thought he was looking.

  Why?

  Not that he hadn’t seen flashes of defiance from time to time. For one so fragile, she was spirited, his little Nadya. But her present mood was something stronger, more concrete. As if . . . as if she were no longer alone.

  Impossible. The jungle around that clearing was impenetrable, the river full of alligators and snakes, the campground far downriver on the opposite bank. And yet . . .

  Had he been careless? Too lenient? Perhaps besotted was a better word. He had wanted her to owe him. To like him . . .

  The next time Nadya went to the river, he would follow.

  From the co-pilot seat a thousand feet above the wildfire, Special Agent Doug Chalmers peered out the window of the small private plane. How very fortunate he had an accommodating friend with an airplane at the small Golden Beach airport and even more fortunate that the county’s burn provided such a perfect excuse to patrol the area from Golden Beach to Pine Grove and back again. And he was willing to bet that the picture that was coming together was going to be of great interest to the Pennington oddcouple—and what a surprise when his team turned up the fact that they were married.

  What he’d seen from the air, plus information rolling in from agents in the field, was enough to make Doug’s heart sing. Mandy Armitage was on to something. He liked Florida, but things had been pretty tame at the Manatee Bay field office since he’d left the New York, following the lure of a sweet-faced woman with blue eyes who’d promptly fallen in love with someone else. In the past six months there had been no challenges like the kidnapping of Jamie Langdon, Claire Blue’s son by her first marriage. And no killers like the psycho who had stalked Claire in the early days of Amber Run. Lately, Doug had been stuck searching for terrorists in a county traumatized by discovering that fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers had, at one time or another, been their neighbors. One of history’s nasty jokes on a sleepy Gulf Coast town.

  Not surprising, then, that local agents had leaped at a new kind of puzzle. By the time Doug got back to the office, the picture was taking shape.

  The old house in the woods had been recently renovated. The workmen, who had been paid well to keep their mouths shut, spilled the beans with eager relief the minute they saw the FBI badges. A “really nice” living room, they said. A billiards room with plasma TV and four bedrooms in the house, six more fitted into an old barn and stables. Outside, the workmen agreed, the place looked like a wreck. Inside, it was state of the art, everything painted and polished and decorated like a picture in a magazine.

  Why had no one noticed all this activity? Easy, the men said. What had once been an old horse trail, barely passable with four-wheel drive, had been widened and smoothed into a marl highway, mostly through the woods. The road ran four miles southeast to within a hundred yards of a public road in the neighboring town of Pine Grove. The last bit of road beyond the woods had been left untouched. To the casual eye, it looked like nothing more than a horse trail or a cow path, winding through a sea of palmetto fronds and plunging across a narrow, deliberately uninviting, unrailed wooden bridge over a deep drainage ditch before finally reaching the safety of county-maintained macadam. And even that road was in an area of no houses, no one to notice the comings and goings to the old house in the woods.

  Nice, very nice.

  The workmen, shame-faced, seemed to have no doubt about the what all those bedrooms were for. Well, sure, hey . . . world’s oldest profession, wasn’t it? You had to admire all that enterprise. And who was getting hurt?

  There was a general groan around the conference table when that particular comment was repeated.

  Doug shook his head. That was the trouble with trafficking. Hard to get men to take it seriously. They never seemed to think about the women whose lives were being ruined. Tomorrow he was going to take a boat ride. Hire a skiff at Bud’s Fish Camp and go trolling for something larger than snook.

  Chapter Twelve

  Peter scowled at the perfectly straight mile of road that connected Amber Run to Calusa Campground. Five minutes door to door wasn’t enough to settle his unease. Mandy had ignored him all day. Except for a brisk Happy Birthday as she’d arrived that morning, plus an admonition to ignore any clouds of smoke, he might as well have been invisible. She hadn’t even stopped to share the morning newspaper, just poured a cup from the Mr. Coffee on the counter, informed him she couldn’t waste time because she was leaving early today, and disappeared into her office.

  At lunch she’d made such a stealthy visit to his aerie that he hadn’t realized she’d come and gone until he caught a glimpse of a roast beef sandwich out of the corner of his eye.

  She was avoiding him. Sorry she’d invited him for dinner.

  So no wonder butterflies were beating their wings against the lining of his stomach as he drove toward Calusa Campground. An ache in the groin he could understand, but he’d been less nervous on his first date. More confident of success the night he’d lost his virginity.

  Mandy didn’t use to drive him nuts. She was his, marriage a foregone conclusion. Seven years her senior, he’d been the wise one. Experienced. All-knowing. Patronizing as hell.

  Yet she’d seemed a willing, even eager participant in her parents’ marriage scheme.

  Not seemed. Was. Everything had been great. Until he’d wanted to spread his wings, and Mandy refused to leave the nest. Shit!

  She could have refused to be his research assistant, whispered the small voice of hope. Refused to come to Florida.

  She’d invited him to her RV for dinner. That said a lot.

  But she’d looked preoccupied all day today. Worried. As if some imp of nostalgia had offered the invitation, and Amanda the Sensible wanted to rescind it.

  Well, she hadn’t. She’d zipped out the door just before four o’clock, after reminding him to meet her at the campground office promptly at seven, lest dinner be ruined, and scooted off down the driveway, presumably to begin preparations for the grand occasion.

  Well, hell, there was nothing grand about being wifeless and childless at thirty-seven, Peter reflected gloomily. Which was precisely why his hands were as shaky on the wheel as the wings of the butterflies in his stomach. Tonight was big. What if he blew it?

  What if dinner was merely the opening gambit in a complicated chess match that might, if he was lucky, lead to a reconciliation in a month or two? Or three. What if he was salivating for more than dinner while Mandy only wanted compliments on her cooking and a goodnight handshake?

  Shit! Was he going to have to court his own wife?

  Probably.

  Very likely.

  Peter groaned. His body was screaming, Now! No waiting. Hell, no!

  Glumly, he turned left into the campground, driving slowly down the dirt road until he saw the building marked, “Office.” With Mandy standing on the porch, haloed by spotlights. Her hair, unfettered by scrunchies or butterfly clips, fell to her shoulders, reminding him of the teenager he first met so long ago. She was wearing a slinky ankle-length dress in a black and white flower print and one of those sexy little jackets that tied just under her breasts and was enough to have the hands of any red-blooded male twitching to get at the knot.

  Whew! Was she sending the message he wanted to hear? Or was that outfit donned with the specific intention of torturing him?

  Probably the latter. Face it, the chance of both of them being on the same wave length tonight was slim to none.

  Peter found a parking space, pasted a nonchalant smile on his face, and got out of the car. Striding up to the porch as if
he hadn’t a care in the world, he offered his arm to Mandy. “So where’s this RV I’ve heard so much about? Lead on, Mrs. Pennington.”

  He would swear he saw her wince.

  Mrs. Pennington. When Peter used those red flag words yesterday, the arrival of Special Agent Chalmers had distracted her from the sudden churning in her stomach. Saved by the doorbell. But tonight the name was an intimacy that sparked a strikingly different reaction as a shiver of excitement swept her from head to toe.

  Impossible. Not going to happen. No matter what ridiculous feminine weakness had prompted the invitation to dinner, she was living in a fish bowl. Surrounded, cheek by jowl, by a hundred nosy neighbors. With every last one of them peeking out a window, watching them walk to her RV. Not to mention Orion peering down from the dark not-quite-spring sky above.

  Technically, she and Peter were married. But no one at Calusa Campground knew that.

  Did it matter?

  Mandy recalled the sly jokes and innuendos that circulated so freely, spicing up the doldrums of the elderly residents’ days. One trailer even sported a small wooden sign that read, “If this trailer’s rockin’, don’t bother knockin’.”

  Damn right it mattered—if Peter thought her invitation included conjugal rights for dessert . . .

  A curtain twitched. A vertical blind swayed. A few steps beyond, a face, openly curious, flattened against the window glass.

  “’Evening.” Knowing eyes gleamed as a white-haired gentleman passed them, walking his dog.

  “A-ah,” Peter breathed, catching the atmosphere, “are we on stage?”

  “Afraid so. Sorry.”

  A hitch in his walk, a small huff of breath, then silence. Well, good. He’d gotten the message. She was surrounded by chaperons. It was going to be dinner, birthday cake, and sayonara.