Cry Uncle (6 page)

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
ignorance. “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.

“
Lizard, Birdie, Kitty... Is
there anyone named Toad I ought to know about?”

Joe threw back his head and laughed. It was
such a deep, warm laugh Pamela almost begged him to remove his
sunglasses. She wanted to see what happened to his eyes when he
dissolved in robust laughter—whether they squinted into two
crescent slits or sparkled, or... No, she didn’t want to know
anything about his eyes at all.

“
I reckon I’m as close as
anyone gets to being a toad around here,” he said. “We should all
count our blessings we’re about to add a swan to the
menagerie.”

It took Pamela a full minute
to realize he meant that
she
would be the swan. She felt her cheeks grow warm.
She hadn’t prepared herself for flattery—especially not after
Lizard’s succinct assessment of her appearance. And Joe’s
compliment wasn’t like the usual line a man would use to beguile a
woman. He had already established that he wanted to marry her, and
that once he did they would sleep in separate beds. Maybe he was
trying to soften her up so she would overlook his niece’s
tactlessness.

Or maybe he really meant she was
swan-like.

That was a discomfiting thought. This
marriage was going to work only if she knew it was based on nothing
more complex than sheer necessity. “Your house is nice,” she said
to distract herself.

“
I’ll show you around.
Here’s the living room.” He waved through an arched doorway off the
hall. “And through that doorway is the dining room, which leads
into the kitchen.”

“
Everything’s so tidy.”
Given Lizard’s appearance and behavior, Pamela would have expected
the living room to be strewn with toys—or arrows. But it was an
oddly sedate room, full of old, comfortable-looking furniture
brightened with throw pillows and antimacassars and a few
oddities—a brass peacock umbrella stand in one corner, an unused
brown candle shaped like a turkey on a table, a strange tree-shaped
light constructed of artistically bound fiber-optic threads, a
clumsy crayon drawing of two stick people, one large and one small,
elegantly framed and hanging prominently on a wall.

“
I told Lizard if she didn’t
pick up her things before you arrived, I’d hang her from the
ceiling fan by her toes and turn the fan on high speed. Apparently
that was the wrong thing to say,” he added, at last removing his
sunglasses and treating Pamela to a twin flash of glittering blue.
“She pleaded with me for half the morning to tie her to the fan.
She said she wanted to see if she could vomit in a perfect circle
on the rug. The thing about Lizard,” he went on, leading Pamela
back into the hall and up the stairs, “is, she’s as gross as any
boy. There’s not a prissy bone in her body. I like to think she’s
liberated.”

“
Does she vomit much?”
Pamela asked delicately.

“
Rarely.” Joe tossed her an
easy smile. “I’ll be in charge of all upset stomachs. Don’t worry
about it.” The upstairs hall was also lined with a faded runner
rug. Joe gestured toward a half-open door. “That’s Lizard’s room. I
wouldn’t look inside if I were you. It’s a nightmare scene. My
room’s way down at the end of the hall. And your room would be
here,” he said, U-turning and heading to the opposite end of the
hall.

Despite the sloping ceiling beneath the
eaves, the bedroom he led her into was bright and airy, the walls
papered in a sunshine yellow pattern, the double bed neatly made
and the few pieces of furniture polished to a high gleam. The
mirror above the dresser wasn’t warped; the dresser itself was
constructed of solid maple, not particle-board. The rug covering
the floor was the color of honey.

She closed her eyes and visualized the
bedroom in her sleek condominium back home in Seattle, with its
cool parquet floors, its marble master bathroom, and its
floor-to-ceiling windows. She pictured her platform bed, the simple
lines of the room’s decor—a hybrid of Shaker and Asian styles—and
the enormous dimensions of her closet. Opening her eyes, she saw
the exact opposite of the exquisitely designed bedroom she’d left
behind when she’d fled for her life.

“
This is beautiful,” she
said.

“
I think you’ll find it
pretty quiet. The windows overlook the back yard, so you won’t get
much street noise. If it’s too hot for you, I can install a window
AC unit. But with all the windows open, you’ll probably get a nice
breeze in here.” He watched her expectantly, as if not quite
convinced she liked the room.

She turned and smiled. “Really. It’s
fine.”

He returned her smile. She wished he would
laugh again, another big, rousing, heartfelt laugh. In spite of his
smile, his eyes were serious, the blue of his irises layered in
shadow. He seemed as nervous today as she’d felt last night.

She was nervous, too. Even though they seemed
to have cleared a hurdle, they hadn’t finished running the course
yet. Too many things could still go wrong. She could still discover
Joe was a slob, a wastrel, demanding or moody or any number of
other unpleasant things.

And then there was his lunatic niece, armed
and dangerous.

Yet her anxiety waned when she stood with him
in the sun-filled room that would be hers if she agreed to marry
him. She thought about what she’d seen of the house—the massive,
well-used furnishings, the old-fashioned arrangement of the rooms,
the verdant yard, all of it the antithesis of her condo back home.
She considered the comforting order of the living room, the small,
personal touches, the framed crayon drawing of a man and a child
side by side, holding hands. She surveyed the room that would be
hers, and contemplated the long hallway that connected her room to
Joe’s.