He placed two of the paper twists at the bottom of his pile of kindling and set the Zippo to the edge of one of the twists. He held his breath while the edges of the paper blackened and then began to burn. “Come on,” he coaxed. “Burn, baby, burn.”
The wicks flamed briefly, and just as quickly died out.
“Damn,” he muttered, tucking more twists under the firewood.
Gina duckwalked over to where he worked. “Looks like everything’s wet,” she said helpfully.
He gave her an exasperated look. “We’re in a monsoon,” he pointed out. “Dry wood’s kinda hard to come by right now. The store was fresh out.”
She said nothing but went back to his treasure trove, which he’d also placed out of the rain, under the shelter of the boat. She pawed through the junk, then brought back the citronella candle, and held it out to him.
“What were you going to do with this?” she asked.
“Insect repellent,” he said. “When and if this storm dies down, I’ve got a feeling we’re gonna have a hell of a swarm of gnats and mosquitoes.”
“Good thought,” she said, shaking her head in agreement. “Can I borrow that?” She held out her hand for the Zippo. “Please?”
He handed the lighter to her reluctantly. “We need to conserve it. No telling how much lighter fluid is in there,” he warned. “Somebody left it at a campsite up at the end of the island, along with a lot of other garbage.”
“I’ll be careful,” she promised. “Can I borrow your knife too?”
She sat down beside the fire pit Tate had dug in the sand, and began slowly working the knife’s edge around the edge of the candle. A minute later, she popped a bowl-shaped hunk of the candle free of the glass jar. She carved off a pie-shaped chunk of the wax and set it on top of the driest-looking piece of driftwood on the fire.
“May I?” she asked, pointing to the pile of paper twists Tate had manufactured.
She took one of the twists, lit it with the lighter, and set it under the chunk of candle. The twist sputtered momentarily, but soon set the candle ablaze. She then repeated the process, scattering chunks of the candle at various points in the fire pit, then lighting them with a twist that she’d designated as her candle lighter. Within five minutes, the wood had begun to burn.
“Damn,” Tate said admiringly. “I never would have thought of using the candle that way. Where’d you learn a trick like that?”
“Girl Scouts,” she said, holding her right hand in the three-fingered Scout salute. “Before we went on camping trips, our leader would have us save empty tuna fish cans. We’d cut up strips of corrugated cardboard, coil them up and put them in the can, then pour melted paraffin over the whole thing. We called them a buddy-burner. Now, if you’ve got a big ol’ empty lard can, I could cut a little door on the top of it, put the buddy-burner under it, and we’d have a hobo stove. Just like a miniature griddle.”
“Not bad,” Tate admitted. “I should have known you were a Girl Scout.”
“And a 4-H’er,” Gina said, laughing. “Want me to tell you how to get your laying hens to produce better? Or maybe demonstrate the proper way to hem an apron? Mama was a home ec teacher before Lisa was born, so she made me get involved in all that kind of small-town useless South Georgia stuff.”
“I wouldn’t call it useless,” Tate said. “You did get the fire started.”
“You would have thought of something. Weren’t you in Scouts too?”
“Not me,” he said. “I was way too cool for anything as dweeby as Boy Scouts. Misspent youth and all that.”
He stood up and fetched the coolers and set them down beside the fire.
Tate opened his own cooler and brought out the redfish. Moonpie wandered over and sniffed the fish appreciatively.
“You hungry?” he asked Gina, wiping the candle wax off the blade of the knife.
“Starved,” she said, without hesitation. “But…your redfish. The Food Fight—”
“Forget about the fight,” Tate said. “We’re on this island, and we may not get off till morning. We’re hungry. And unless you’ve got a steak packed in that cooler of yours, this is looking like our best bet for supper.”
Gina reached for her own cooler. She opened it and began inventorying its contents. “Insect repellent and an apple,” she said. “Three bottles of water. A turkey sandwich.” She blushed as she held out the final item in the cooler. “Jumbo bag of fried pork rinds.”
He cocked his head and looked at her. “You’re just full of surprises, aren’t you?”
She flashed the Girl Scout pledge sign again. “Be prepared.”
While Tate cleaned the redfish, Gina wandered over to reexamine Tate’s salvage pile. She held up a faded yellow plastic child’s sand pail. “Any plans for this?”
“Figured we could use it as a bail, once we get back on the boat in the morning,” he said.
She nodded. “Okay. I’ll bring it back.” Then she set out on foot through the rain.
“Dinner in an hour,” he called to her retreating back. “Don’t get lost.”
Gina turned and shot him the Girl Scout salute.
Keeping the wind at her back, she headed north, until she could no longer see the dull shine of the upended aluminum boat. The rain had diminished to a soft but steady drizzle. She was going toward the tip of the island. She walked at the water’s edge, stopping occasionally to examine a broken seashell or a bit of driftwood tossed up by the storm.
At one point, she turned and looked at her own plodding footsteps in the sand. With each step she took, she thought, her chances of winning the Food Fight competition were eroding, just like her own footprints in the sand, which took only a moment to fill with water and disappear.
She could walk the length and breadth of this island, she thought, and there would be no sign that she’d been there. The wind and the surf would wash everything away.
And what would it matter? Forget the damned Food Fight, Tate had advised. That was fine for him—he still had his own show, even if he somehow managed to lose the competition. She, on the other hand, would soon be jobless—and homeless.
During their discussion that morning, Scott had assured her he had a plan for both their careers. But wasn’t that plan predicated on her making a respectable showing in the Food Fight?
How would Barry Adelman react to her disappearance? And what about Scott? He’d be concerned for her safety, she felt sure. But what would he make of the fact that Tate had gone missing at the exact same time?
She smiled at the delicious irony of it. Scott already disliked Tate intensely. Would it occur to him that she and Tate had snuck off together for some kind of romantic tryst?
God no! She was appalled that the idea of a romance with Tate had even crossed her mind. But, she had to admit, it had crossed her mind. And more than once, especially after she’d awakened back there at the boat and found him caressing her face. His touch was gentle, tender even. Literally an eye-opener.
Suddenly, her wet clothes felt unbearably clammy against her skin, and the gritty sand that had sifted up into her sneakers chafed at her feet. She took her shoes off and hooked their shoestrings through the belt loops on her pants, and after a moment of hesitation, unbuttoned her soggy shirt and tied it around her waist.
She stood motionless for a moment, enjoying the sensation of the rain on her bare shoulders and back. She caught herself glancing furtively around, as if to make sure no prying eyes were watching. Idiot! she thought. They were alone on this island. Tate was half a mile away, cleaning fish and tending the fire. And Mama? Mama and her cell phone and text messages were far, far away, in a place called Odum, Georgia.
Feeling wildly adventurous, rebellious even, she peeled off her pants, and after just a little more hesitation—she was the careful Foxton sister, after all—she stripped off her tank top and everything else, right down to the buff.
She stood like that—nekkid as a jaybird, her grammy would say—very still, on the beach at Rattl
esnake Key.
Gina Foxton was almost thirty years old, and she couldn’t remember if she’d ever been so naked before. She hugged the bundle of wet clothes to her chest, not quite ready yet to give them up.
Prude! She shook her head, disgusted with her inability to totally liberate herself from convention. What would her wild-child sister do if she found herself in the same situation? Lisa? Her sister would have tossed her clothes to the wind, Gina felt sure. She would have run and romped in the wind and the rain, danced naked on the beach, danced naked by the fire.
But that was Lisa. She was Gina, the firstborn. The careful one, who’d refused to let her daddy remove the training wheels from her bike until long after all the other kids her age were riding solo.
“Screw that!” she said aloud, surprised at her own fierceness. She tossed the ball of clothing on the sand and dashed into the waves, screaming at the shock of the cold water on her bare skin. She dove under, splashed, screamed some more, it felt so good. Then she ran up, onto the beach, and let the rain rinse off the salt water. She shook her wet hair from side to side, the way she’d seen Moonpie do in an effort to dry off.
She felt different. Lighter. She could feel the burden of her worries wash off her skin as easily as the salt water. Her show was over. She would most certainly not win this competition for her own cooking show. She and Scott were history. But it would all work out. Gina felt sure of this.
To celebrate, she needed to do something bold. Something extraordinary.
She yelled like a banshee, ran down the beach to build up a head of steam and, pumped full of adrenaline, planted first her left palm and then her right palm in the sand. She flung her legs up, up and over her head, and it wasn’t until the exact moment when she literally turned her world upside down that she remembered she’d never had any talent for gymnastics, especially for a cartwheel. But it was too late. She felt herself overbalance. Her arms collapsed in on themselves, her legs spun wildly, and she felt herself go crashing onto her back. As she lay sprawled out on the sand, feeling like a crippled cockroach, she was uncomfortably aware of another sensation from childhood. She was naked. With sand in her crack.
Chapter 54
He was admiring the fillets he’d cut from the redfish when he noticed how uncharacteristically quiet Moonpie had gotten. Glancing over, he saw what was preoccupying the dog. Moonpie was crouched beside the fire, happily gnawing away on the Zippo.
“Moonpie, no!” Tate shouted. He lunged for the dog, and the dog bounded away, the lighter clenched firmly between his jaws.
“Moonpie, come!” he yelled. But the dog was in full retreat.
Tate sighed. This was a game the English setter never tired of playing. Call it tag, or chase, or keep-away, it didn’t matter. Once Moonpie got something in his mouth that Tate wanted, the game was on. Tate had no choice but to play.
He scrambled to his feet and went after the dog. Moonpie dashed for the beach, stopped once to make sure his master was following, and then sped across the dunes.
As he ran after Moonpie, Tate cursed his own inability to make the dog do anything he damned well didn’t want to do. The setter was a skilled hunter, good at finding quail and pheasant in any kind of cover. He’d find downed birds, and he had a light mouth. But he retrieved birds only if he felt inclined to do so, and would deliver them to Tate with infuriating irregularity. He was the best dog Tate had ever had.
If Moonpie had stolen a bone, or a shoe, or something inconsequential, Tate might have quit the chase and returned to the campsite. Sooner or later, the dog would grow bored of the game and give it up if his master refused to play along. But it would be dark soon, and he needed that lighter. More importantly, if Moonpie chewed through the Zippo’s plastic casing, which he surely would do, given the opportunity, Tate feared the dog would be poisoned by the lighter fluid. And he couldn’t let that happen.
Tate ran as fast as he could—and even in his mid-thirties, he prided himself on being pretty damned fast—but he was no match for the dog, which Moonpie knew. Every once in a while the dog would double back, run straight at Tate, then peel away at the last second and reverse course again.
Now Moonpie headed away from the water, up to the dunes, toward the tip of the island. It was slow going in the floury white softness of the sand, and he soon lost sight of the dog. He ran in the direction Moonpie had gone, and when he reached the oyster-shell mound that marked the abandoned campground he’d visited earlier, Tate stopped to catch his breath.
“Moonpie,” he called softly. “Come here, boy. You win, okay? Come here, and I’ll give you a treat.”
He heard a rustling in the underbrush, and spotted Moonpie, rolling happily on the pile of disposable diapers.
“Come here, buddy,” he coaxed. The dog stood up, tilted his head this way and then that way, considering his options. He still had the lighter in his mouth.
“Here, Moonpie,” Tate called. “Good boy. You win, okay? Let’s go get your treat.”
The dog’s ears perked up at the mention of his favorite word. He trotted over, sat on his haunches, and dropped the lighter at Tate’s feet.
“Good boy,” Tate said, snatching it up with one hand and grabbing the dog’s collar with the other.
Tate squatted down and put his face right in Moonpie’s. He shook the Zippo. “No! Bad! Understand? Bad!”
Moonpie thumped his tail enthusiastically.
“Incorrigible,” Tate muttered, scratching the dog’s ears anyway.
“Let’s go home,” he told him. “We gotta get supper on.”
He was walking back down toward the dunes and the beach when he heard an earsplitting scream.
He ran without thinking, toward the beach, but stopped in his tracks when he saw where the scream was coming from.
At first, he wondered if he could be dreaming. Or hallucinating. Through the thin gray mist of rain, he thought he saw a woman. She was naked, running down the beach, arms spread joyously wide. And she was yelling bloody murder.
“Whoa,” he whispered.
The woman was Regina Foxton. She was totally oblivious to him. Without thinking, he dropped down into the sand, hoping to stay unnoticed. Moonpie sat down beside him.
Tate knew he should look away. Or leave. He should definitely leave. And give her some privacy for whatever demented ritual she was performing. But he couldn’t move. She was so lovely, unfettered by clothes, her slim body glistening with the rain. She ran and dove into the waves, yelling again, and then diving under the water again. Frolicking, that was what she was doing. It was very un-Reggie-like behavior, and it was totally captivating.
He glanced over at Moonpie, who was panting hard. Tate nodded in agreement.
Suddenly she ran out of the water, and he threw himself flat on the dune. Now would not be a good time to advertise his presence. A moment later, he raised his head, just in time to see her go running full-tilt down the beach.
It was a lovely sight, Regina Foxton sprinting naked through the rain, her face the essence of pure, unadulterated bliss. She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, prettier than a trophy bass, prettier even than Moonpie as a puppy. He could spend the rest of his life remembering this vision of her.
Wait. What was she doing now? Oh, God. Oh, no. She let out another scream, and one minute her body was hurtling through the air.
And the next, she was flat on her ass in the sand. He couldn’t bear to look anymore. He covered his eyes with his hands.
Poor Reggie.
Chapter 55
After making a mental note to give up all forms of gymnastics in the future, Gina waded back out into the waves to try to rinse away all the sand. When she reached the shore again, she felt suddenly chilled—and vulnerable. She hastily scrambled back into her damp clothing, finger-combing her wet hair into some semblance of order.
The rain had almost let up, and she could see the sun valiantly trying to break through the low-lying cloud cover.
She resumed her
trek, rounding the tip of the island. Suddenly, she found the visibility clearing. Off in the distance, across the sound, she saw a long low shape that she decided had to be Eutaw Island. How far across was it really? she wondered. Less than a mile? If the tide weren’t running in the wrong direction, if they’d had a boat with a motor, she bet she could be back on dry land in less than an hour. But right here, right now, she felt like she was hundreds of mile from civilization. From the Food Fight. From Scott.
She saw an object moving slowly across the water, and when she squinted, she could just make out the shape of a boat with nets extending out on booms from both sides. A shrimp trawler.
Feeling ridiculous, she stepped out into the water and waved her arms wildly over her head, but only for a moment.
What was she thinking? Rescue me? From what?
Her foot scraped something sharp. She reached down into the water and pulled out an oyster. It was small, but tightly closed and intact. She reached down, and by groping cautiously with her fingers and toes, managed to unearth another, and then another.
Oysters! She ran to the beach, slipped her shoes on again, grabbed the plastic bucket, and waded back out to the same spot. She filled the bucket almost to the brim before deciding she was cold and wet and tired.
Slogging back to the beach, she stood and faced the sound—but now the clouds and mist had obscured the island so that all she could see of it was the faintest gray suggestion of a faraway landmass. The shrimp boat, too, had disappeared.
So that was it, she thought, heading back to the campsite. She was on this island for the night, and she wasn’t getting off. And what was so bad about that?
Deep Dish Page 28
