Heat Wave (2 page)

He wasn’t sure how long the woman hovering
near his table might have been there before he noticed her. His
peripheral vision snagged on a flowing, flowery skirt. His nostrils
caught a faint whiff of fresh roses—and then lemon as the waitress
set a fresh iced tea down beside his laptop. He thanked her and she
moved on to the table behind his, her tray bearing an array of
festive-looking mixed drinks, the sort of sweet-with-a-kick stuff
Caleb avoided whenever possible.

The skirt moved a step closer. He noticed
long, tan legs.

“Excuse me?” she murmured.

He finished typing a sentence with a
flourish of clicks, then glanced up. Then stood as courtesy kicked
in again. He was raised well. He knew to stand in the presence of a
lady.

And she was a lady. A woman, yes, but also a
lady. He could tell by her perfect posture, her neat blond hair
pulled back from her face, her smooth, even features. And her
voice. In just those two words, he heard velvet and bourbon—not
quite a drawl, but a definite Southern inflection. In this proud
New England town, you didn’t hear Southern accents that often.

“Are you Caleb Solomon?” she asked.

“I am.”

“I phoned your office. The woman I spoke to
there said I’d find you here. I hope you don’t mind.”

“The air conditioning in my office is
broken. I came here to cool off. What can I help you with?”

She gestured toward the banquette previously
occupied by Jerry Felton. “May I?”

“Please.” He waited until she was seated,
then searched for the waitress. “Can I get you something to
drink?”

“No, thank you. I won’t be long. I just…”
Her voice trailed off. She pursed her lips and folded her hands
primly on the scarred wooden tabletop. “I’m sorry. This is
just…very awkward for me.”

What was awkward? Meeting him? Meeting him
in a bar?

“I believe I need an attorney,” she
said.

“Okay.” He settled back in his seat and
smiled. One of his most useful traits as a lawyer was the ability
to listen. And to wait. Wait long enough, and people often wound up
saying exactly what you needed to hear.

The first thing he heard was a song. Someone
must have fed a coin into the antique jukebox that stood on the far
wall of the tavern. According to town lore, it played only songs
old enough to have been recorded on vinyl. The song that spilled
out of the speakers right now was a smooth rock-and-roll oldie. The
Allman Brothers, he identified it. Even though the steamy afternoon
air had annoyed him when he’d been at his office, the lilt of the
band singing about a sunny day made him grin.

“Oh, I love this song,” the woman said, a
smile skimming her lips. Then she grew serious again. “I’m sorry. I
don’t mean to be wasting your time. My name is Meredith Benoit, and
I have something of a problem.”

“Okay,” he said again, still waiting.

“What happened was…” Her fingers flexed. Her
nails, he noticed, were perfectly oval and polished to look like
pink pearls. “I was sunning myself at the town beach on Sunday.
Please don’t lecture me about skin cancer. I was wearing a lot of
sunblock.”

Lecturing her about skin cancer wasn’t on
his to-do list. He loved the way women looked when they were
sprawled out on a beach in their skimpy swimsuits, their skin
glistening beneath the summer sun.

“I just wanted to get a nice, even color,”
she explained. “I have to be a bridesmaid in my cousin’s wedding in
August, and the dresses she picked for us are, well, not entirely
prim.”

It occurred to Caleb that while he’d enjoy
observing Meredith Benoit sunbathing, he’d also enjoy checking her
out in a not entirely prim dress. Her outfit now tended toward the
prim end of the scale; her blouse had elbow-length sleeves and a
rounded neckline, and her skirt’s hem covered her knees. She was
willowy and fit, the skin of her throat smooth, her eyes blue. Her
nose was narrow, almost too small for her face, and her chin formed
a delicate point. He bet she would look damned good in something
less prim than what she was wearing right now.

“The thing is,” she continued, “the
bridesmaid’s dress is scooped low in the back.”

Bridal fashions held little interest for
him. But he remained patient, figuring she’d get to the point
eventually.

“I don’t want a tan line across my back.”
She swallowed, her cheeks flushing slightly. “So I was lying on my
stomach on the beach, and I opened the strap of my bikini top to
prevent a tan line.”

He nodded, trying not to allow her
long-winded story to bore him. Tan lines. Scooped low. Sunbathing.
Sooner or later, she’d get around to telling him something
useful.

“Anyway, I was half-asleep, dozing in the
sun, when this boy—a teenager—dumped a bucket of ice on my back. I
was so startled, I jerked to my feet and started chasing them.” Her
cheeks blushed darker. “I forgot that I’d unfastened my top.”

All right. Now they were getting
somewhere.

Meredith Benoit, this tall, slender, blond
specimen of Southern Womanhood, had chased a teenage boy across a
public beach with her breasts exposed to the world.

He gave his head a resolute shake to erase
the vision her words had conjured. She’d gone to the effort to
locate him at the bar after calling his office. She wanted to hire
him. He was ethical enough not to undress potential clients in his
mind. Even pretty potential clients with big blue eyes and alluring
Dixie accents.

“A police officer happened to be on the
beach,” she continued. “He stopped me, threw a towel over me, and
cited me for public indecency.”

That might be humiliating, but was hardly
the sort of incident that would require the services of the best
hot-shot criminal defense lawyer on the North Shore.

“I need to contest this citation,” she said
firmly.

“Ms. Benoit.” He smiled indulgently. “What
is it, a twenty-five dollar fine or something? It’s like a parking
ticket. You don’t need me for that.”

“I do.”

“Go to the police station. Write them a
check. Believe me, it’ll cost you a lot less in time and energy,
not to mention money. You don’t want to hire me for this.”

“Yes, I do.” She sighed. “I teach at the
high school. I come up for tenure next year. I’m a good teacher. My
students do well. They emerge from my classes with college-level
writing skills, and some of them even fall in love with
Shakespeare. I should get tenure. But the school’s budget is tight,
and they’re always looking for a reason not to renew someone’s
contract. An arrest for public indecency—especially since I work
with teenagers, since the boy who dumped the ice on me was probably
a student at the school… People saw my—well, they saw me. If I
don’t get this expunged from my record, I won’t get tenure.”

Caleb tried to recall the last time someone
had used the word “expunged” in a conversation with him. Then he
gave his head another shake. Why did he keep getting distracted,
his mind detouring from the matter at hand? Usually, he prided
himself on his laser-sharp focus. That, along with patience and
being a good listener, served him well as a lawyer.

He decided to blame his wandering thoughts
on the heat. Even though the bar was a comfortable temperature,
he’d spent too much of the day in his office, where the
unconditioned air had wrapped around him like a smothering wool
blanket. His brain was partially fried. And what wasn’t fried was
fixed on Jerry Felton’s legal situation, which was a hell of a lot
more interesting than a public indecency citation.

Yet looking at Meredith Benoit was a hell of
a lot more interesting than looking at Jerry Felton.

Still, he couldn’t justify charging her his
usual hourly rate just to make her citation go away. He could see
how this transgression, however trivial, might screw up her chances
for getting tenure. A high school boy, a teacher’s naked
breasts—yeah, it could be a problem.

“Do you have the citation?” he asked. “I’ll
stop by the police station tomorrow and see if I can make it go
away.”

“I’d be terribly grateful,” she said,
lifting the flap of her purse and pulling out a rectangular printed
document. It even looked like a parking ticket. “It doesn’t seem
fair,” she added as she handed him the citation, “that a woman
should be penalized for appearing on a beach topless when men go
topless on the beach all the time. Aren’t there laws against gender
inequality?”

He grinned. “There are also laws
establishing community standards.”

“Community standards that exist only because
men lose all control when they see a naked breast,” she said.

“Indeed we do,” he agreed
with a laugh. He decided he liked her. He also decided that, if he
was handling her case—something he had apparently agreed to do—he
shouldn’t like her. Not
that
way

His laptop was still open and running. A
quick tap of the space key woke it from its snooze, and he opened a
new file and typed in Meredith Benoit’s contact information as she
recited it: cell phone number, street address, email address. “I’ll
let you know what happens,” he told her, not bothering to mention
one final decision: that unless this turned into a federal case, he
was not going to charge her for his time. She was a school teacher,
after all, not a hedge fund executive, not a corporate CEO. Not
even a town manager. Ten minutes at the police station was not
worth billing.

“I really appreciate this,” she said,
closing her purse.

She seemed ready to leave, and he started to
rise to his feet—but then a new song blasted through the jukebox’s
speakers. A few loud chords, the guttural honk of a saxophone, and
a gutsy, ballsy woman’s voice singing about a heat wave.

That it was a catchy song couldn’t explain
why he found himself suddenly unable to move. That the song seemed
far too appropriate, given the steamy weather outside and the
oven-like conditions he’d tried to work in for most of the day,
couldn’t explain why his gaze locked onto Meredith’s, her eyes wide
and startled, her lips pressed into a perplexed frown.

The two of them remained at the table,
transfixed. Could a song about a heat wave freeze people? He felt
frozen…and hot. Something dark and smoky burned the length of his
spine, searing his brain at one end and his groin at the other.
Despite the tavern’s air conditioning, a film of sweat pooled at
the base of his skull. The song was loud and bouncy, yet the singer
wailed that she was crying and being torn apart. The lyrics
filtered into his consciousness: high blood pressure, burning, the
devil.

Yes. All those things. All those things and
more.

He wanted Meredith Benoit. Like a
lust-crazed stud. Like a sex-starved prisoner just paroled after a
ten-year sentence in solitary. Like a pimply adolescent who’d just
taken a bath in testosterone.

I ain't never felt like
this before
, the singer wailed.

The way Meredith stared at him, he wondered
whether she could see his wild hunger, or feel it. She didn’t look
alarmed or frightened. Merely stunned.

The song didn’t last long. It faded out, the
way old rock-and-roll songs often did, as if the singer didn’t know
how to end things so she just let the words and music trail off
into silence. This song didn’t end in silence, though. It grew
softer and softer until it no longer existed, and then Caleb felt
his ears pop, as if he were in an airplane descending toward a
runway. After the pop, all the normal sounds of the tavern swarmed
his senses: conversation, laughter, the scrape of a chair, the
clink of glasses touching, a waitress shouting an order at the
bar.

Meredith stirred. Her hands flexed and her
throat fluttered as she swallowed. “Well,” she said, her voice
slightly raspy. “I shouldn’t take up more of your time—even though
I assume you’ll bill me for it.”

He opened his mouth to tell her he’d
represent her pro bono, then silenced himself. Before the song,
he’d figured he wouldn’t bill her because getting her citation
waived would probably take no more than five minutes of his time,
and she was an untenured schoolteacher, earning what untenured
schoolteachers earned, which wasn’t much. But now, if he told her
he wasn’t going to bill her, it would be for another reason:
because he wanted her. Bare breasts. Bare everything. He wanted her
as hot as he was, in his arms, in his bed, in ecstasy.

Jesus. He was insane.
I ain't never felt like this before.

He remembered to stand—he knew his
manners—but she was already out of the booth and walking toward the
tavern’s entrance. She moved slowly, planting each foot solidly on
the scuffed wood-plank floor before taking the next step, as if she
were making her way across a slick sheet of ice.

No ice in here, though. Just a heat
wave.

Meredith didn’t let out her breath until
she’d stepped outside. The air was muggy, the early evening light
hazy. The sun wouldn’t set for another two hours, but the sky had a
rosy cast to it, as if revving up for a spectacular sunset.

Maybe the sky wasn’t pink, she thought.
Maybe her ability to perceive color was skewed.

 
Something
was definitely skewed. She felt disoriented,
dizzy, as if her blood had evaporated into steam.

She wasn’t much of a bar person, she
reminded herself as she strolled down the sidewalk to Atlantic
Avenue, where she’d parked her car. She enjoyed a tasty drink with
a kick to it, and she found a glass of chilled white wine on a hot
afternoon refreshing. But she’d never been one to hang out in seedy
pubs where the sole reason for being there was to get hammered.
Perhaps she’d experienced some sort of contact high from being
surrounded by drinkers inside the Faulk Street Tavern.