High Tide (26 page)

And she reached the bedroom door before he could stop her.

It was the bedroom Ace was using, the larger master bedroom. The curtains had been drawn, but the lamp on the left side of the bed was on. It was almost cozy looking, with
the sleeping woman lying on the bed, looking so peaceful, the pretty spread tucked up to her collarbone.

If it hadn't been for the gold nail in her throat and the thin trickle of blood running down the side of her neck, no one would have guessed that anything was wrong.

As Fiona stared, her pulse raced.

Pushing past Fiona, Ace went into the bedroom and bent over the woman in the bed.

It was Rose Childers, the woman who had pursued both of them, trying to persuade them to do a bit of “wife swapping.”

“Poor old woman,” Fiona said, standing at the foot of the bed and trying very hard to control herself. As Ace said, they couldn't afford hysteria now. “Should we call an ambulance?”

Ace gave her a look of disbelief, then straightened and went to Fiona. Grabbing her shoulders, he ushered her to the chair in the corner. “Sit down and be quiet. I need your brain now. We have to figure out what to do. If she's missed, the police could be all over this place in the next few minutes.”

When Fiona lifted a hand to push her hair back, she was trembling so that she decided to sit on her hands as she watched Ace carefully pull back the bedspread. The woman was naked, the way she said she was most natural. “Nature” and all forms of the word were what had come out of her mouth the most often. “Being natural is what nature intended,” Rose used to say.

“I wish I hadn't disliked her so very much,” Fiona whispered. “Whatever she was, she didn't deserve to have … to have this done to her.” She couldn't bring herself to look upward to the nail in Rose's throat. And she couldn't allow herself to think about what the woman had felt when that had been done to her.

Her naked body was not a pretty sight, and now lifeless, it was embarrassing to look at her. When Ace put his hands on the body and gently turned it over, Fiona looked away. In her old life one didn't handle dead bodies.

“Wonder if she called herself Rose before or after
this?”
Ace said, making Fiona look up.

The woman's buttocks were covered with a huge tattoo of a bouquet of roses.

One second Fiona was sitting down, a weak, nervous wreck, and the next she was on the other side of the bed staring at the woman's behind. “Oh, my God,” she said, her hand to her mouth.

“What is it? And so help me, if you clam up on me like you did this morning, I'll make you regret it.”

Fiona swallowed the lump in her throat and took a breath. “In
Raffles,
the man who is actually a woman had …” She pointed at the tattoo.

Ace dropped Rose back against the bed with a thump and straightened. “Now we're getting somewhere.”

“Where?” Fiona's voice was rising. “Closer to death? Closer to having nails put into
our
throats?”

At that Ace bent over the woman and pulled the nail from her throat and started to examine it. “Number three,” he said.

Fiona thought she was going to be sick. Her knees gave way, and she sat back down on a chair.

When the telephone rang, both of them jumped. Fiona put her hand to her mouth, her eyes wide as she looked at Ace.

“It's line two,” he said, “the fax. Stay here and I'll go down and—”

She didn't bother to answer him but took one stride with
her long legs and was right behind him as he went down the stairs. When he reached the fax machine, Fiona was as close to him as his underwear.

“You're so close I don't have room to move my arms,” he said as he tried to pick up the papers, but there was no annoyance in his voice.

Reaching around him, her front plastered to his back, Fiona snatched the papers from the machine. Looking at them, she said, “Good girl,” then handed them to Ace, and he carried them into the dining room, where they were already set up with tape and scissors.

Minutes later they had half of two maps and a third of four others. “Very good, don't you think?”

“Yeah sure,” Ace mumbled, looking at the papers. “I was thinking,” he began slowly. “Maybe you'd be safer in—”

She backed away from him. “You aren't going to say, ‘in jail,' are you? You stay on the outside and I get put behind bars? You follow a treasure map while I fight off hairy women? You—”

“You stay safe while I risk—” He broke off when he saw her face. “Okay, we're in this together, right?”

Looking into his dark eyes, she nodded. At that moment she wanted to say that she'd follow him to the ends of the earth.

“Hey, Burke,” he said softly. “You aren't falling for me, are you? It's one thing to have a good time together, but love is something altogether different.”

“I …” she began, then stiffened. “Who could fall for
you?
You're the last man on the earth who I'd—”

She stopped talking because the doorbell rang, and after a fearful glance upward toward the bedroom, she looked at Ace in fear.

“Stay here and keep quiet.”

Again, Fiona didn't pay any attention to his order, but glued herself to the back of him as he walked to the door. After giving her a push backward, which had no effect in putting any distance between them, he opened the door. It was Suzie, the jogger, again in tiny shorts, her fabulous legs exposed to the point of indecency.

“Sorry to bother you, but could I borrow a cup of sugar?”

“Sure,” Ace said, holding wide the door so she could enter, and it wasn't easy to move since Fiona was attached to his back. As he led the way to the kitchen, Fiona didn't leave him. Once in the kitchen he managed to peel her hands from his arms and put them on the end of the countertop. Then, giving Fiona a stern look, he went to get the sugar from the cannister on the countertop.

“Nice day, isn't it?” Suzie said, looking about the kitchen.

Fiona gave her a weak smile in answer. She was much too aware of what was in the room over their heads to be able to think clearly.

As Ace handed Suzie the sugar in a paper cup, he said, “So how's Rose this morning?”; then he had to grab Fiona's elbow to keep her from falling to the floor in shock.

“Fine, I guess,” Suzie said, smiling so wide her perfect ponytail bounced. “You wouldn't have any coffee, would you?”

“No, but I can make some,” Ace said pleasantly, then turned his back on the two women as he went to the coffeepot.

Suzie gave her megawatt smile to Fiona. “Is that a telephone ringing?”

When Fiona didn't answer, Ace said, “It's the fax. Sweetheart, you want to go see what someone has sent us?”

Fiona had no idea who “sweetheart” was, so she just stood there staring at Suzie. What if she found out about the dead body upstairs? But then she and Ace were already accused of having committed two murders, so what was one more going to matter? They couldn't be hanged more than once, could they?

“I think the fax might be part of the map,” Suzie said softly, “and we wouldn't want to miss that, would we?”

It was Ace who suddenly remembered that the house was probably wired for listening devices and that they were giving someone an earful. In one swift movement, he grabbed the arms of both women and half shoved, half pulled them outside. Once they were outside by the pool, in a silent gesture, he looked at Suzie and pointed around the pool.

She shook her head no.

“You want to tell me what's going on?” Fiona said impatiently. “Or are you two planning to open a mime school?”

“Bugs,” Ace said as though that explained everything.

“Lots of bugs in Florida,” Fiona said; then realization dawned on her. “Oh.
That
kind of bug.”

Ace gestured to Suzie to take a seat on one of the four green chairs around the glass-topped table, then sat across from her. He left Fiona to stand or sit, her choice. She sat.

“You want to start talking?”

“Is Rose … ?” Suzie asked.

“Yeah, she's dead,” Ace said. “In our house, in our bed. I'd like to know who knows what.”

“Do you mean whether or not everyone in the Blue Orchid knows who you really are?” She didn't wait for them to answer. “Of course they do. We'd have to be blind and deaf not to know. And, honey,” she said, looking at Fiona. “No
surgeon is good enough to make a woman look as young as you do.”

Right then and there, Fiona decided that she liked the woman.

“Half of us in this place are looking for the lions,” Suzie said.

At that Fiona drew in her breath. So much for great secrecy.

Suzie leaned across the table toward Ace. “And if you find them, there will be a dozen people right behind you with guns.”

“Except for Wallis,” Fiona said quietly. “He only used a knife.”

At that both Suzie and Ace looked at her. “I don't think either of you realize how much she knows,” Suzie said quietly. “There are some people who want her dead for that knowledge, and some who want her alive because of what she knows. Truth is,” she said, looking directly at Fiona. “You'd be a lot safer in jail.”

“I think so too,” Ace said quickly; then, under the table, he took Fiona's hand in his and squeezed it, and he didn't let go when he felt her trembling.

“Who killed Roy Hudson?” Fiona heard herself ask. She was trying to pull herself away from this whole matter and look at it logically. Forget the woman dead upstairs. Forget that the fax was ringing again and it was probably more of a map to a treasure that people had been killing each other for for a couple hundred years.

“One of them,” Suzie said with a shrug. “I wasn't there and I don't know much about it. And now I try to stay out of it; I don't like to know things that could get me killed.”

“Neither do I!” Fiona said with passion, then felt Ace's hand tighten on hers.

“But you were Smokey's daughter, so you were told things. Who would have thought that entertaining a kid with a broken leg could—”

“How do you know about her leg?” Ace snapped.

“I was there,” Suzie said, contradicting herself. “I mean I wasn't part of the expedition that was searching for the lions, but I—”

“You were one of the women who researched the story,” Fiona said, eyes wide. “You were the girlfriend of … of …”

“Edward King,” she said slowly, looking into Fiona's eyes. “In the story he's called Wallis. And that's with an
i-s
on the end, not
W-a-l-l-a-c-e,
as the papers call him in the reviews.”

For a moment Fiona blinked. “Of course, as in Wallis Simpson.” She looked at Ace. “You know, the man who gave up being king was Edward and the woman was …” She broke off because Suzie and Ace were exchanging looks.

“Now
what have I missed?” Fiona said with great sarcasm, but she knew that, once again, she'd revealed that she knew more than she thought she did.

“Who was the other researcher? If you were ‘one' of them, who was the other one?” Ace asked softly.

“Lavender,” Suzie whispered.

“Oh, no, you don't,” Fiona said as she stood up so suddenly she knocked the chair over. “There was no one in the story named Lavender. Not now, not ever.” With that she started back toward the house.

Standing quickly, Ace reached out for her, but Fiona sidestepped him, moved past his grasp, and went into the house. Once he and Suzie were alone, Ace turned to her. “What
was that all about? I haven't heard anything about anyone named Lavender.”

Suzie took a deep breath. “From her reaction, I guess that Smokey told his daughter that one of the researchers was a prostitute, but he doesn't seem to have mentioned her name.”

Ace was still puzzled.

“There wasn't much about her in the story, but what was there was pretty awful. You know, drugs, men, a lifetime of involvement in some very nasty dealings.”

Ace just looked at Suzie, still not understanding.

“She hadn't always been such a loser. I was told that a few years before she'd been a tall, dark beauty. I was told that she even had a kid and the father named the kid after its mother.”

When Suzie didn't say any more, Ace stood there looking at her. It took him a moment to remember that he'd seen the initials FLB on Fiona's backpack. Fiona Lavender Burkenhalter.

“Her mother was …”

“Yes,” Suzie said just before Ace turned on his heel and went into the house to find Fiona.

Seventeen
 

It took Ace a few moments to find Fiona. She was in her bedroom, the borrowed cell phone to her ear. “You'll do it for me?” she was saying. “WordPerfect, yes, that's right. And, Jean … I … Okay, so I won't say anything, but you must know how much this means to me.” With that she put down the phone; then, without a look at Ace, she went to the closet and began pulling out clothes—jeans and T-shirts, thick cotton socks—then started stuffing them into her backpack.