“I’m sorry, but the stroller has to be folded,” I said.
“Now, see here—” the young father began, but was cut off from above.
“How dare you?” the docent cried. “Let those people on this instant!”
I leaned over and peered up at her. She was poised, full of sound and fury, part-way down the ramp. “They have to fold the stroller,” I explained, reining in my temper. “Otherwise, I can’t take them. Believe me, there really isn’t room. And there are people in line ahead of them.”
“What’s your name?” the docent demanded. “I’m going to report you. For insolence,” she added to make herself perfectly clear.
I told her. Then I turned to the father and raised my brows. I thought I saw his lips twitch. He stood at attention, snapped off a smart salute. “We’ll walk,” he said.
“You haven’t heard the last of this,” the docent shrieked as I drove away with the six passengers who had calmly piled aboard while our little altercation raged.
“Good for you,” said a white-haired gentleman from the seat behind me. “They’re young, they can walk. One can only hope their endurance exceeds their manners.”
I tossed him a grin of thanks, although, obviously, I couldn’t comment. Truthfully, I felt the young couple understood the problem. They had chosen not to wake the baby. It was the docent who was the Wicked Witch of the West. Ah, well, perhaps one day the Casa Bellissima would fall on her.
It was a thought that would come back to haunt me.
The insidious suspicion that the sudden disappearance of The Sleeping Satyr had left some evil essence behind took root in my mind and wouldn’t go away. It was like the proverbial pebble thrown into a pond, a disturbance that rippled out over the grounds, infecting the air, the people, the very quality of life we so treasured at the Bellman. Threatening that certain something that kept all five hundred volunteers coming back time and time again. But at that moment I chalked up my unease to outrage. I had heard about those who believed there were two classes of unpaid employees at the Bellman—Docents and Volunteers. The reality, however, was disturbing. I was still seething when I ran into Billie for the second time that afternoon.
It was five o’clock, the quiet time, a half hour before the last lingering visitors burst out of the three museums, all demanding a tram at the same time. It was also the time the other two drivers went home, leaving me as the last tram running. I was sitting at the main tram stop at the Art Museum, waiting to see if anyone needed transportation to Handicapped Parking down by the Casa when Billie pulled up beside me. For the very first time, I noticed the walkie-talkie on the seat beside him. In spite of heavy-duty training in being observant, I had previously missed this tool of instant communication that distinguished the security guards from the tram drivers. Since my injury, I’d had tunnel vision. I had shut the world out, asking no questions, as I had no wish to give answers in return. So I’d gone eight weeks as a tram driver and not realized Billie was Security instead of a groundskeeper or simple gofer.
I leaned on my steering wheel and smiled at him from under my rolled-up plastic side curtains. “I’ve a confession,” I told him, “I can’t remember your last name.”
“Billie Hamlin, but most of my friends call me Billie Ball. Around here, though, just Billie seems safer.”
I digested this for a moment, mentally apologizing to my ears for questioning their hearing. “Mind if I ask why?” I said.
He unfolded his lean well-over-six-feet from his golf cart and came over to duck his head below the level of the curtains. Although he set off no romantic pitty-pats in my wounded heart, he was definitely a hunk.
“I work Security, y’know. And I’m at the Bellman School of Art, part-time. Student,” he added, leaning closer. “But it’s hard to keep it all together, y’know, so I do a little moonlighting on the side.” He paused, far-seeing blue eyes examining me with solemn intensity, deciding if I was trustworthy. “They’d crucify me if they ever found out. I’d be out on my ear so fast—here and at school, probably.”
“I promise you, Billie, I’m a reliable keeper of secrets.” Lots of secrets.
He nodded. “Okay . . . well, there’s good money in golf balls, y’see. And there are so many golf courses around here, it’s a wonder there’s any room left for houses. So I thought to myself, ‘You can dive, boy, so why not use it?’”
Billie flashed a mischievous grin, glanced around to make sure no one was close by. There wasn’t another person in sight from the front corner of the Art Museum to the far edge of the vast lawn where it met Sarasota Bay.
“Most nights I go golf-ball diving,” he confided. “You’d be amazed how many balls there are in those ponds. Chock full, most of ‘em. I can get a thousand or so in a couple of hours. Sell ‘em, mostly on the Net, for twenty to fifty cents apiece, depending on condition. Maybe four to five hundred for twp hours’ work. Keeps me goin’ just fine.”
I laughed. For the first time in months, I laughed. And then the implications hit me. “Do you have permission?” I asked.
“Well,” Billie hedged, “I had an arrangement with one of the pros, but he wanted his cut, so . . .” He shrugged.
“So it’s trespassing and theft,” I finished for him.
“Not a real worry,” Billie replied calmly. “All the courses know we do it and aren’t about to stir up a fuss. They’d soon have big white piles of balls instead of all those pretty ponds if the ball-divers stayed home. ’Course the gators and water moccasins can be a bit of a pain.”
I pictured big blond Billie groping about the bottom of a pond in the dark, gathering golf balls, having no idea what might be lurking just out of sight. Night after night after night. Surely his luck had to run out one of these days.
“Billie?” I questioned.
He patted my shoulder. “Not a problem, darlin’. I’m bigger’n most of the gators. And a moccasin’d have to have pretty big teeth to get through my wet suit.”
“You’re insane,” I told him.
“That’s what my mom says, but in two hours a day I make five times what she gets in a week from her Zoning job with the county. And her there twenty years now.”
“So what are you doing working Security?”
“Part-time,” Billie said. “Trying to keep my face before the Museum, so to speak. I’m hopin’ for a grant, maybe a chance to work on sculptures to go with all the new buildings they’re gettin’ now the State’s gone and given them all that money.”
“You’re a sculptor?”
He straightened up, struck a pose similar to David’s. “Just call me the modern Michelangelo,” he declaimed.
Eight weeks, and I’d never really talked to Billie Ball Hamlin. I’d settled for exchanging a few platitudes as we passed each other on the grounds. Was my newfound reality another unsettling ripple from my favorite Satyr? Or was it just a nudge to tell me it was time to get back my life? Or at least salvage what was left of it.
I told Billie I thought he was amazing. But he wasn’t listening. He’d straightened up, his attention focused solely on something behind me. I leaned my head out of the tram and took a look. Billie was standing there, his face suffused with that perfectly asinine look some men get when in the throes of unrequited love.
“‘Lo, Lygia,” he said, and I realized he wasn’t as far gone as I had thought.
Her name was Lydia. One of the nubile young things who worked their tails off for entry-level salaries, she was, at the moment, driving an oversized golf cart with a boxed-in carry-space, similar to those driven by the groundskeepers. Except hers was piled high with rolled-up posters and sundry other replacements she was obviously trundling from storage to the Gift Shop.
“I told you not to call me that!” Her sea blue eyes regarded Billie with considerable annoyance. Even her long dark waves of hair seemed to quiver with outrage. I suspected Billie’s admiration was going to stay unrequited.
In order to understand Lydia’s anger, you have to know ab
out the bull sculpture at the entrance to the Art Museum. Back in the early years of the twentieth century, a sculptor named Giuseppe Moretti was given a commission to create a bronze based on the novel, Quo Vadis. When complete, it was placed in a Philadelphia park, only to be promptly retired to a warehouse when the good citizens of the city declared themselves scandalized. Naturally, Richard Bellman bought it and placed it at the front of his brand new Museum of Art.
I had long since decided I liked Richard Bellman.
But I digress. You’re wondering about the scandal. Moretti’s sculpture is of a beautiful young girl named Lygia, clad only in two ropes skimpily adorned with occasional flowers. She is in the process of being sacrificed to the raging bull, her perfect young body splayed over the beast’s horns and back. It’s dramatic. It is not a reproduction.
It is, however, a bit awkward if you happen to be an equally lovely, long-haired young woman named Lydia who has to pass by the statue every day under the not-so-subtle salacious glances of the younger groundskeepers and Security guards.
“But Lygia’s so much more intriguing,” Billie cooed. “I was thinking of doing the bull thing in miniature for my next project. Wanna pose?”
Lydia jammed her foot onto the cart’s pedal, zooming off up the slight rise to the front of the museum. If any dust had been allowed to gather at the Bellman, she would have left us in it.
“Billie,” I chided, “I don’t think that’s quite the right approach.
“I know,” he groaned, “but she’s so . . . ” He molded a curvaceous figure with his hands and shrugged, looking adorably smitten. “I know I haven’t a chance, so I get her attention the only way I can.”
As we talked, we’d both been keeping an eye on an elderly couple making their way slowly down the sidewalk toward the tram. Chat time over. It was back to work for both of us. Billie, his southern manners firmly back in place, folded up the old gentleman’s walker and stowed it in the rear of my tram. Then he blew me a kiss, slid back into his cart and was off down the bumpy back road toward the rear of the museum.
I greeted my new passengers and headed for the Handicapped Parking down by the Casa, where I dropped them off a few steps from their car, which was parked in the shade of yet another giant banyan tree. They thanked me profusely, and I drove off.
It had been more than just another day at the Bellman. A seminal moment, if you will. I had looked outside my own misery, made tentative contact with another human being. Billie Ball Hamlin. Sharing his secret had moved us closer to being friends. I had even managed to empathize with poor Lydia’s hot embarrassment. (Okay, the statue was pretty racy.) I had lifted my head and seen something besides a reflection of myself. For a few moments I’d cracked the wall and actually made a connection with someone in my new world.
I’d done it with Josh Thomas in ten seconds flat. But, then, I still wasn’t sure if he truly was of this world.
Chapter 4
In spite of rush hour congestion, I floated home that night. I’d done it. I’d reached some sort of psychological milestone. I’d looked up, and out, and actually seen that life still existed around me. There were people out there. And they hadn’t shut me out. I’d done that to myself. I only had to reach out and touch . . .
When I walked into the condo, Jody informed me that Aunt Hy had been talking to Madame Celestine for the past hour. My buoyant spirits plotzed.
Shortly after arriving in Sarasota—and after a hint from Marian Edmundson who had been writing out her employer’s checks for a quarter century or so—I had taken over the payment of Aunt Hy’s bills, using the excuse that I needed something to do. That was when I discovered the elegant and sophisticated Hyacinth Van Horne harbored a secret addiction. Aunt Hy was enamored of Madame Celestine. Or, more precisely, of the television guru’s psychic predictions. (Although Aunt Hy had never actually met Madame Celestine, she considered the self-proclaimed seer her nearest and dearest friend. At phone rates that seemed to hover around twenty dollars a minute, I am quite sure Madame Celestine considered Aunt Hy her best friend as well.)
When one’s phone bill begins to resemble the National Debt, even people as sinfully rich as Hyacinth Van Horne need to reassess the situation. I begged, I pleaded, I lost my temper (a surprise, as I had no idea it still lingered beneath my apathy). Aunt Hy had merely looked at me through her eight-hundred dollar Daniel Swarovski spectacles and breathed, most solemnly, “But she tells me such lovely things, Aurora, my dear. Today, she predicted you will meet a dark, dynamic stranger. Isn’t that glorious? A new man in your life.”
Her words, spoken two weeks ago, echoed in my mind. Dark, dynamic stranger. My steps faltered. Dammit, no way was I catching the Celestine disease. Dark, dynamic strangers were the fortune teller’s stock in trade, assuring that the only fortune making an appearance was what went into their own pockets.
Gently, I removed the phone from my aunt’s delicate hand. “Goodbye, Celestine,” I murmured and hung the cream and gilt Art Deco dial phone back on its stand.
“Aurora,” my aunt chided, loading that single word with the immensity of her disappointment in my behavior, “our whole conversation today was about you. Celestine cares about you, truly she does. She warned me that dark days are coming.”
“What happened to the dark, dynamic stranger?” I demanded, attacking when I knew I was teetering on the slippery slope of disrespect. This was Aunt Hy’s home, her money to waste as she chose—
“Oh, he’s already come,” said Aunt Hy. “Merciful heavens, Aurora, didn’t you notice?”
I opened my mouth, closed it, took a deep breath. I sat down hard on the edge of Aunt Hy’s elaborately draped four-poster, where she was reclining, propped up against a stack of needlepoint pillows. Hyacinth Van Horne, my maternal grandmother’s elder sister. Aunt Hy, whose hair was as blond and well coifed as it had been when she was a newly married matron sixty years ago. Aunt Hy, who encased her still slim figure in the flowing fashions of the Art Deco era and inevitably made me feel like an underdressed clown about to do a pratfall. At what I suspected was eighty-odd years (sometimes very odd), her face was beautiful, in that way most women never achieve, even when they’re twenty.
I loved her, I truly did, but she was well on her way to making me as dotty as she was.
Ignoring her question about the dynamic stranger, I said, “Tell me about the dark days to come.”
The rings on Aunt Hy’s fingers winked at me as she plucked at the quilted bedspread. Her multitude of rings—diamonds, sapphires, and rubies in a nicely patriotic display—stopped just short of being gaudy. Unless, of course, you subscribe to that quaint rule about anything over five carats being shockingly nouveau riche.
“I fear Celestine was rather vague,” Aunt Hy admitted.
Would wonders never cease. “She must have given some indication,” I prompted.
Aunt Hy frowned, her parchment-skinned nose wrinkling in concentration. “Dark days at work,” she crowed. “That was it. A warning about trouble at work.”
I stared at her perfectly innocent face, wreathed in triumph because she had remembered. I fought down a wave of nausea, panic. Despair. “I’ve already had that, Aunt Hy,” I said as gently as I could. “Remember? That’s why I’m here. Lots of trouble at work. And I lost Eric as well.” But he wasn’t dark. Dynamic, yes; dark, no. Eric had been blond. Golden. A being to warm the heart, like my private pipeline to the sun.
I shouldn’t have mentioned the past. Why should I inflict my anguish on poor Aunt Hy? Her face crumpled, a tear rolled down her cheek. She patted my hand. “Yes, dear, I know,” she murmured, “but Celestine has promised you someone new. Perhaps he will help you through the dark days ahead.”
I didn’t need any more dark days. Never. Ever. Wasn’t that why I had agreed to exile in sunny Florida?
The phone jangled, startling us both. Surely Celestine didn’t make call-backs. She must have enough other gullible clients to keep her occupied. I picked up the phone, not sur
e what to expect.
It was Burt, the Tram Boss. Could I do a morning shift tomorrow as the regular driver was flying north to see his new grandchild?
Reprieved. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to face Aunt Hy’s problems . . . or my own . . .
Yes, it was. Driving my tram was such an easy escape from reality. I welcomed it, almost as eagerly as the hypochondriac welcomes his next trip to the doctor. I would report for duty in the morning and be too busy to think about Madame Celestine, dark days at work, dark, dynamic strangers, or that insensitive ape, my rehab therapist.
But in the morning Chaos arrived. Secretly, silently. Unseen until the security guards began unlocking the multitude of doors into the Art Museum’s courtyard. And even then it seemed an almost welcome glitch in the serenity of the Bellman. If any of us experienced a frisson of warning of worse to come, we kept it to ourselves. No one stepped forth to prognosticate. No one declaimed in pretentious tones (as academics are wont to do): “Even Chaos begins with a single event.”
Face it, we were clueless.
The following morning, with all the cars streaming south toward offices in the center of the city, I made the drive north to the Bellman in eight minutes flat. I stopped by the Security Desk, picked up a tram key, and drove cautiously over the pocked-marked shell roads that wound through the museum grounds. After parking next to the tram barn at the back of the Art Museum, I made sure I had my bottle of water, my car keys, my cell phone, and my hand bell (for unwary visitors walking down the middle of the road), then I locked everything else in the trunk of my car. I was backing out my tram when the excitement started. Golf carts erupted over the lawn, all headed toward the Security Entrance. I heard shouts from the courtyard—from behind the wall topped by the bronze figure of David, currently glowing in the morning sunlight.
Shouts? At the Bellman?
Instinct—and that old bugaboo, curiosity—got the better of my sense of duty. I swung the wheel and headed my tram up the rear sidewalk, squeezed between the hedges, and headed toward Security. I parked my tram and joined the mass of burgundy-shirted guards streaming into the Art Museum. Bypassing the Security Desk without asking questions, I followed the general hubbub down the hall. Obligingly, the elevator full of guards squeezed together and made room for me.
Art of Evil Page 4
