If Wishing Made It So (29 page)

Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary describes an interlude as anything that fills the time between two events, as in the interval between the arrival of two trains. The interlude for Hildy and Mike began with the dying out of the storm. Neither of them could have foreseen where it would end.

In the sparkling daylight, it seemed as if nothing could go wrong. The bike ride was exhilarating. They felt optimistic and so much in love. They stopped at the cottage for Hildy to change; then they rode the bikes across the causeway to the rented Chevy Suburban that Mike had left in the strip mall on the far side.

After loading the bikes in the back of the vehicle, Hildy discovered cell phone service had been restored. She reached Corrine and calmed her down.

‘‘But what about the St. Vlad’s bus? Are the parishioners okay?’’

‘‘Corrine, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’’

‘‘The St. Vlad’s bus made another excursion right before the storm. They never made it back. It was a big story up here. We’re hoping the whole bus-load had to bunk down in the casino and ride out the storm. Imagine that! I missed all the excitement.’’

‘‘Corrine, I don’t want to think what would have happened if you spent twenty-four hours at a slot machine,’’ Hildy said.

‘‘I might have hit the jackpot, you know. Hildy, if you go down to the casino, check to see if everybody’s okay. We’ve all been worried. We think they’re headed back here tonight.’’

‘‘Sure. I’m pretty sure I’ll be back in AC soon,’’ Hildy said, and looked at Mike with glowing eyes.

‘‘Love you,’’ Corrine said.

‘‘Love you too,’’ Hildy echoed, and ended the call. Then Hildy checked her voice mail and after deleting twenty messages from Mike and about the same number from Corrine, she found one from the state police. Her red Volkswagen had been recovered; it had been abandoned on Collings Road in Camden. They left a number to call and an officer to contact so that she could pick it up.

Hildy’s spirits soared. Perhaps the bottle remained under the seat, perhaps Jimmy the Bug was on the run, perhaps Kiki was out of Mike’s life, and perhaps the course of true love would run smooth. As she was to discover, one out of four improbabilities coming to fruition was probably better than average.

‘‘It’s here! It’s here! It’s here!’’ Euphoric, Hildy pulled the pretty amber glass bottle from under the front seat. She held it up for Mike to see.

‘‘That’s great, Hildy. I wish you’d tell me why finding it was a matter of life and death,’’ he said.

She got quiet, then softly replied that one day soon she hoped she could. Then she asked him to please check under the hood to see if the brake lines were cut or if a bomb was planted there.

Mike raised his eyebrows and gave her a puzzled look. ‘‘Why in the world would Jimmy the Bug have booby-trapped
your
car?’’ he asked quite reasonably.

She stared at him, tongue-tied. She wanted to tell him all the reasons why the Mafia boss might want to blow her up or blow her away. But she couldn’t, since if she blurted out the truth and he didn’t believe her, he’d think she had delusions— a woman destined for the booby hatch, not for a major role in his life.

On, the other hand, in the unlikely case he said, ‘‘Sure you found a genie in a bottle and Jimmy the Bug is ready to kill you for it,’’ he would soon be aware of the lies she had told and the trickery she had used since she first met him, not at all accidentally, on the beach.

‘‘Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive,’’
she thought. She opened her eyes very wide. She hoped to look very innocent. ‘‘Oh, Michael,’’ she exclaimed, trying for the ditzy blonde effect, ‘‘the awful man who took my little car was that Mafia person, wasn’t he? Maybe he wants to destroy the evidence or something. Please, Mike, I’m afraid to drive it unless you check it out.’’

Mike had never known Hildy to be the least bit irrational. She didn’t even get upset by spiders or snakes. He chalked up her strange request to the tumultuous events of the past forty-eight hours. He humored her and opened the hood. He saw nothing whatsoever amiss. He pronounced it safe.

She stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the cheek. ‘‘Oh, thank you
soooo
much. Now I’ll just go on back to the cottage and, and. . . . chill until I hear from you.’’ She attempted to flutter her eyelashes at him.

‘‘Do you have something in your eye?’’ he asked.

‘‘I’m fine, forget that. Anyway, I’ll be at the cottage in Ship Bottom. I want to be there when Mrs. Baier brings back my cats.’’

‘‘Okay, I’ve got a ton of things to take care of. I’ll call you later.’’ Mentally, Mike was already focusing on other things besides cats and cottages. He needed to recover stolen machinery and get his business going. He never gave a single thought to Kiki. He wasn’t thinking about his ex-girlfriend, his current girlfriend, or romance.

No doubt some hours from now Mike’s body would encourage him to think of sex and the woman he wished to engage in it with, as any normal under-thirty male would. But for now, he kissed Hildy on the tip of her nose, gave her a pat on the fanny when she turned around to get in her car, and waved absentmindedly at her as she drove off alone . . . or at least he believed she was alone.

Meanwhile Hildy had already begun an excited conversation with the bottle on the passenger seat.

‘‘Tony G.? Can you hear me in there? I can’t let you out yet, but I wanted you to know how terrific it is to see you again,’’ she called out, nearly giddy with relief.

The voice coming from behind the amber glass said, ‘‘I wasn’t aware that you could actually see me. You appear to be looking out at traffic.’’

Hildy frowned. She
was
in city traffic. She couldn’t possibly stare at the bottle right now. ‘‘Are you annoyed? Why in the world would you be mad at me? I was frantic with worry.’’

‘‘
You
were frantic with worry?
I’m
the one you left under the seat for nearly forty-eight hours. Since the last thing I saw was your boyfriend flaggingdown the car, I have a pretty good idea what you were doing all that time. You could have taken a break to let me out to stretch my legs. Some friend you are.’’

‘‘But I wasn’t— Don’t you know that Jimmy the Bug stole this car? He drove it all the way to Camden with you right there under the seat.’’ Hildy was incredulous.

‘‘Oh!’’ The genie’s surprise gave way to a snicker. ‘‘That explains it. I heard some muttering, cursing, and a lot of grunting. The dashboard got smacked hard a couple of times. I tried to close my ears. I thought maybe you were fooling around in the car.’’

Hildy’s cheeks instantly turned cherry red. ‘‘How could you think such a thing!’’

‘‘I’ve lived for two thousand years. Nothing surprises me. There was this time in Greece . . . a woman who made her living in the oldest profession, she had this snake and she was famous for—’’

‘‘Stop! I don’t want to know! Listen, I’m going to pull off the road and let you out of the bottle. We have a lot to talk about.’’ And she did.

Battered and bruised, his arm in a sling, Jake Truesdale sat behind his desk in his Atlantic City office. He was a very unhappy man. His partner had just walked in, and they too had a lot to talk about.

‘‘Are you still in pain?’’ Mike asked, seeing the frown on Jake’s face. ‘‘This should make you feel better. I recovered a dozen skid steers and two backhoes at the Sleep-E-Z along with a bulldozer, three skid steers, and, would you believe, a cherry picker down in Delaware.’’

He reached over and grabbed a calculator off the desk. Jake continued to glower at him as he punched in some numbers. Then he turned the calculatoraround to show Jake the total. ‘‘That’s roughly a million dollars’ worth of equipment and at twenty percent, we stand to collect around two hundred thousand. Pretty good, huh?’’

Jake shifted uncomfortably in his chair. His shoulder was killing him. His ankle felt like there was a red-hot iron poking it. But his injuries weren’t what was bothering him. ‘‘Yeah, pretty good. But we have a problem, which I hate to bring up, but you need to know.’’

‘‘What kind of a problem?’’ Mike asked, totally in the dark.

‘‘A blond, five foot four, female problem.’’

‘‘Hildy? Why in the world is she a problem? Everything is great with us. Better than great. I haven’t felt this good in years.’’

‘‘You’re not making this easy for me, Mike. Why don’t you stop running your mouth and let me get it out.’’

Mike leaned back in his chair, wondering what in the world had his partner so riled up. ‘‘Sure, go ahead.’’

‘‘First off, I couldn’t buy that this girlfriend of yours just happened to be passing by the Sleep-E-Z Motor Lodge at the exact moment you were out in the road trying to get help.’’

‘‘It’s a weird coincidence, sure, but we always did have this special connection—’’

‘‘Mike, shut up. It wasn’t a coincidence. I talked to the cops who interrogated the two guys we beat up. They work for Jimmy the Bug, no surprise there. The big surprise was that those same two thugs were also caught on videotape trying to abduct two women in the bus docking area of Caesar’s a couple of days ago.

‘‘The cops confronted them with the tape. They said they were after one woman because she had stolen something really valuable from their boss. The other woman was her sister.’’

‘‘So what does this have to do with Hildy?’’

‘‘I’m coming to that. Mike, I saw the security tape. The woman they were trying to abduct was Hildy. I don’t know what her connection is to Jimmy the Bug, but there is one. I don’t know what she was doing at his office in that motel, but she sure as hell had to have been there. Something’s wrong, buddy, really wrong. She’s not who you think she is. I think you’ve got your dick caught between a rock and a hard place.’’

Mike looked confused. ‘‘I’ve known Hildy since I was in kindergarten. I don’t understand this at all.’’

‘‘Well, how much have you seen her lately? You’ve been with Kiki for as long as I’ve known you.’’

‘‘Well, yeah, but still. Are you sure you’re talking about Hildy Caldwell?’’

‘‘Mike, I checked. I double-checked. I wanted to be sure. This chick is into something with Jimmy the Bug up to her baby blue eyes. And you’re being played. I don’t know how, I don’t know why, but whatever’s going on, it’s not kosher.’’

Mike couldn’t get his mind around what Jake was saying. But yet, so many things that had happened involving Hildy didn’t quite add up. Then there were the odd things she had said about Jimmy the Bug, and her making him check for a bomb in her car. Jake had a point, but he knew Hildy. She was a straight arrow.

‘‘Look, Jake, I’ll go talk to her. I’ll get it straightened out. There’s got to be some simple explanation for all this. Maybe she’s working undercover for the FBI.’’

‘‘For your sake, I hope so. But I think that’s as likely as me being J. Edgar Hoover in blackface.’’

Chapter 29

Another serious conversation had taken place in the Volkswagen. It continued after Hildy reached Ship Bottom, after she and Tony G. entered the cottage.

Hildy had filled the genie in about all that had happened since Mike flagged her down at the Sleep-E-Z Motor Lodge. She told him about Jimmy the Bug’s men being caught and about the motel catching fire. She told him Mike now had proof that Jimmy the Bug was behind this really huge construction equipment theft ring. She emphasized that she believed Jimmy the Bug was now on the run, and therefore, she said, she believed their troubles with the mobster were over.

Tony G. disagreed. Finally, he gave up trying to convince her and said he supposed they’d find out one way or another. There was no sense arguing about it.

Hildy grinned. She was sure she was right.

They stopped talking while Hildy thoroughly checked the cottage for damage. Then she phoned the number Mrs. Baier had left. She wanted to thank her and to find out when Shelley and Keats would be coming home.

Hildy was delighted to discover that Mrs. Baier was on the verge of leaving Princeton to return to Long Beach Island. Poor little Henry didn’t care for her sister’s Chihuahua, although Hildy’s cats didn’t seem to mind the ankle-biter at all.

Heartened to hear that she’d soon be reunited with her cats, Hildy felt the time had come to tell the genie what she had decided to do. ‘‘Tony G., Antonius Eugenius, I have done a lot of thinking and I have something very important to discuss with you.’’

Tony G. didn’t like the sound of this pronouncement. He hoped Hildy wasn’t going to use her third wish to turn Jimmy the Bug’s criminal empire into the largest cat rescue operation in the world, or something equally as difficult, like peace in the Middle East. ‘‘It sounds quite weighty and may be better put on the table after a meal. It’s only midafternoon. It’s not supper yet. Would you care for some tea and cucumber sandwiches?’’

‘‘No way!’’ Hildy burst out. ‘‘I haven’t had anything but coffee since very early this morning. I want a steak, medium rare, French fries, and a salad. Remember, dressing—make it Thousand Island—on the side.’’

‘‘Your wish is my command,’’ Tony G. said with just a hint of sarcasm. Hildy heard a snippet of something familiar being sung by Annie Lennox, a wisp of glitter fluttered by, and the genie pointed to the dining room. ‘‘Shall we eat?’’ he asked.

The table was set and laden with all the food that Hildy requested. She sat. She dug in. She discovered she was really famished. The steak was excellent; she enjoyed her meal. The genie seemed to be quite pleased with his cuisine too. And although Hildy hadn’t requested wine, two glasses of a nice dark red Pinot Noir sat by their plates. In a way, she thought, she and the genie had something to celebrate.

‘‘I’d like to propose a toast,’’ she said and picked up her glass.

Clearly surprised, Tony G. lifted his too. ‘‘What are we toasting?’’

‘‘To your future,’’ she said. ‘‘I’ve figured it all out.’’