Last Chance at Love (20 page)

Jake followed Allison up the stairs carrying their bags. At the top, he cradled her face in his hands. “I thought you said your aunt would expect you to be circumspect. She practically told you I could sleep wherever you want me to sleep.” He pinched her nose. “You’re the one with the rules; she couldn’t care less.”

“But you don’t expect me to—”

“No, I definitely do not. I have a hunch she’s more modern than either of us. It’s still fairly warm. I’d like a swim. How about you?”

“I’m not in the mood, but I’ll go with you. If you’re going to wear those bathing trunks I saw you in, you should have a chaperon. Those things were three inches short of decent.”

He looked at her, a grin lighting his face and his twinkle hard at work. “Got your attention, didn’t it?”

She winked right back at him. “And then some.” She put on a bathing suit and a long beach robe, her straw hat, and sandals.

He met her at the top of the stairs. She gulped and made no apologies for it.
I’m human,
she thought,
so why shouldn’t I react to him this way?
She got a beach towel from the linen closet, folded it, and threw it across her arm.

“Ready to go?” he asked. She nodded, but if she told him the truth, she would shock him. His face creased into a smile and quickly dissolved into a laugh. “To the beach, I mean.”

Caught ogling him, she put on a stern face. “Clever. I should swat you for going out in public like this.”

He doubled up with laughter, and although she tried to resist, she joined him, laughing with him until they were both nearly breathless.

Sobriety took over, and his eyes blazed with passion. “If we made love right now, we’d get on a high and stay there indefinitely. See what kind of notions you put in my head? Let’s go.”

“If I put notions in
your
head, it wasn’t until after you filled
my
head with them. What do you think crosses a healthy woman’s mind when she sees you in that getup?”

With her hand snug in his, they strolled along Michigan Boulevard. “Probably the same thing men think about when they see you in
that
thing.” He pointed toward her uncovered waist and hips.

“I’m wearing a robe.”

“You weren’t wearing one the morning I saw you out there, and let me tell you the view was just as nice as if you’d been Aphrodite rising from the sea.”

She squeezed his fingers in place of the hug she wanted to give him. “What a lovely metaphor. To be likened to Aphrodite makes me feel like beating my chest.”

His arm encircled her and brought her closer to him. “Believe me, I can do better than that. A lot better.”

They reached the beach and he handed her his watch. “I’ll be out there ten or fifteen minutes. The wind’s rising. If it gets much stronger, shout. It’s almost too windy now.”

“All right.” She spread the beach towel on the sand, put on her sunglasses, and stretched out.

* * *

“I thought I asked you to... Say, are you asleep?” he asked sometime later.

She opened her eyes, barely aware of her surroundings until he leaned over her and kissed her lips. She patted the place on the blanket beside her. “Let’s stay for a few minutes. It’s so quiet and peaceful here by ourselves.”

He lay on his side, resting his elbow on the towel. “I’ve always loved the water. I can sit by the ocean, a river or a lake and know a peace, a kind of tranquility that doesn’t come to me anywhere else. I wish we had more time out here, but it’s getting too breezy and too cool, and I do not want to suffer the consequences. Let’s go back.”

But she couldn’t bear to end the moment there with him. “Can’t we stay a little longer? It’s so pleasant and... Let’s sit over there under that maple tree. We can shake out the beach towel and wrap it around you.”

“After I dry off. Not that this towel is big enough to cover me.”

They sat beneath the maple, an old and gnarled arbor that looked as if it had stood guard in that spot for centuries. She locked the fingers of her right hand through his left ones and leaned against the back of the bench.

“Aunt Frances said they’re expecting a huge crowd tomorrow. The barbecue is a part of the plan to restore Idlewild to its former eminence as a resort. So many people are coming that the residents are offering their homes to those who have to spend the night.”

“From what I’ve seen, I expect they welcome the income. Didn’t your aunt plan to take any?”

“Auntie? Much as she loves Idlewild and as hard as she’s worked to make the barbecue feast successful, she wouldn’t think of it. Auntie likes her solitude and her privacy.”

“I could use a little of your warmth. Move closer,” he said, holding her in his arms and resting her head against his chest. “I can’t imagine a more comforting setting.”

She kissed his bare chest, reveling in the moment. “Me, neither. It’s idyllic.” She nuzzled his chest, her cheek brazing his left pectoral.

“Hey!” he said. “You’re circumspect, and you’re sleeping by yourself. Remember? So go easy on that.” He hugged her when she kissed him again. “Why wasn’t your aunt surprised to meet me?”

“Beats me. If she opened her door and found a unicorn standing there, she’d probably say, ‘Hi. Where’d you come from?’ You can’t get more laid-back than my aunt Frances.”

“That’s not quite the answer I want.”

“Well...I described you to her after I saw you on the beach that morning, and after the two of you fished together she told me that the man she fished with had to be the same man I saw on the beach. She said you were as tight-lipped as a kid in a dentist’s chair.”

“I don’t make a habit of giving strangers my life history. Look!”

She sat up and followed his gaze. “What a sight!” she said of the large round red disc that was the setting sun.

“Yeah.” He held her closer. “Whenever I see anything in nature as striking as this, I have to thank God for my eyes.”

That was a message she never expected to receive from him, and in spite of herself the reporter replaced the woman. “I had no idea you were religious.”

He raised his right hand as if acknowledging the absurd, a gesture she had observed at his lectures. “Considering where I came from and where I am, why wouldn’t I be religious? I certainly don’t consider myself all-powerful, so I expect I’ve had a good deal of help.”

She turned to get a good look at his face while he spoke as if he talked about himself that way all the time, as if she should have known that about him.

I love him, but I don’t know important things about him, just as he has no knowledge of the crucial things in my past. If only I could level with him, but I’m scared. If he knew about Roland Farr, if he knew why this job is so important to me, he wouldn’t let me finish the tour.

“Surprise you?” he asked her when she didn’t respond.

She couldn’t tell him she hadn’t answered because she didn’t know what to say. She thought for a minute longer. “In a way, but I would have been much more surprised if you told me something about yourself that wasn’t positive.”

“Woman, you’re good for my ego,” he said, hugging her.

“It’s just about to slip away from us,” she said of the setting sun, its red image across the lake growing shorter and shorter.

“What’s slipping away from... Oh! You mean the sun. I hope those words don’t prove prophetic.”

He stood, folded the towel, draped it across his left shoulder, and extended his right hand to her. “If your aunt will lend me her fishing gear, I can still fish for half an hour or so.”

“Course you can borrow it,” Frances told him when they returned to the house. “They’re biting right good, too. I got four catfish and a pike, but I’ve been fishing in these lakes so long I know where to go and how to do it. What did you catch when you were here a few weeks ago?”

“A four-or five-pound striped bass. I gave it to the cook at Morton Inn.”

“Hurry back now,” she told him after he dressed, loped down the stairs, and selected the fishing gear. “I’d like us to eat at seven or seven-thirty. You going?” she asked Allison.

“He needs his space, and I want to call Sydney.”

To her surprise, Jake bent down and kissed her mouth in her aunt’s presence. “Be back in an hour. Give Sydney my best,” Jake said and left.

With her hands squarely on her hips, Frances looked at Allison, her expression that of disbelief. “I can’t believe you didn’t figure out the man you saw on the beach was the one you were traveling with almost every day.”

“He didn’t pass that close to me. Anyway, I barely glanced at his face; I was too busy ogling the rest of him.” Laughter bubbled up in her throat and poured out as a giggle. “He wears clothes on the tour, so I had nothing for comparison.”

“Do tell!” Frances rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. “You don’t have to tell me how you found out he was the same man.”

“Uh—”

“Keep it to yourself, child. I’m eighty, and I wouldn’t be able to resist him, either. Lord knows, I wouldn’t even want to, much less try.”

Allison wanted to get off that subject. “Hmm. He’ll be back here in a few minutes. I’d better put some clothes on. Any entertainment tonight?”

Frances stopped breading the catfish and stared at her niece. “Seems to me like you brought your entertainment with you. The band arrived this evening, but they’re just practicing tonight over at the art center. They get paid for Saturday and Sunday, and you believe me they won’t be blowing a single note till 12:01 tomorrow.”

When Jake returned—his pride evident in the two bass and one pike dangling from the fishing rod— Allison apologized for the lack of entertainment, explaining that the band wouldn’t play until Sunday afternoon. It struck her as odd that he seemed relieved, though that didn’t make sense. But on more than one occasion, she had thought his behavior that of a man leading a double life. Her lower lip dropped.

Quickly, she closed her mouth, for he was attuned to her every gesture. “I am not going to start thinking like that,” she said to herself. “I promised to report on what I see and hear during his working day, and not on what I surmise.”

Chapter 9

“T
his is the best catfish I ever ate,” Jake said at dinner, savoring his third helping. “This is the standard by which catfish should be judged.”

“Talk that way, and she’ll have you eating it till you pass out,” Allison told him, pleased that he enjoyed her aunt’s cooking.

“As long as there’s a bed nearby, I wouldn’t mind.” He stopped eating long enough to ask Frances, “How did you, a Southern woman, happen to settle here?”

A smile of sweet memory lit Frances’s face. “I sang with the big bands,” she said, her eyes sparkling with remembrances of her younger days. “There wasn’t a girl singer anywhere who could top Frances Wakefield.”

Allison’s head jerked up, and he realized she heard the gasp he hadn’t been able to stifle. The woman was legendary, but he couldn’t acknowledge knowing that without inviting questions from Allison, and maybe tipping her off about Mac Connelly.

“I’ll be doggoned,” he said. “You mean to tell me a celebrity can cook like this?”

“Honey, I haven’t been a celebrity since the end of the fifties, almost half a century ago. Back there in the thirties, forties, and fifties, Idlewild was ‘Black Eden.’ All the greats came here. Count Basie, the Duke, Cab, Earl Hines, Mr. B., everybody. Right here in this resort, you could go to see Billie Holiday, Ella, and Lionel Hampton the same night.

“In the days of segregation, very few places that weren’t black-owned booked black entertainers. They couldn’t work in the clubs of Las Vegas and Hollywood, but they were welcome here, and they came. All of them. And black professionals and businessmen came here to enjoy them and luxuriate on some of the finest beaches in the country.

“Let me tell you, from the twenties through the fifties this resort rocked with talent. And a lot of those professionals who came here for vacation bought property here. It was nothing to see Dr. Du Bois and people like that walking around here. Integration changed it all. Our entertainers could work most anyplace, and blacks with money could stay where they liked.

“They all left Idlewild in droves and headed for Las Vegas, New York, and Hollywood. My husband and I had made our home here, so we stayed.” With a faraway look in her eyes, she said, “We’re bouncing back. Wait till tomorrow. You’ll see.”

Jake plowed his fingers through his hair. “I can’t imagine anybody preferring Las Vegas to this place. It’s peaceful, and such natural beauty. First time I came here, I was awed.”

“Well, a lot of ’em left, all right. You two want to play a couple of hands of pinochle? Haven’t had a good game of cutthroat in ages.”

After about an hour of losing to Frances, boredom crept in, a state with which he had no tolerance. “Now that you’ve beaten me to your satisfaction, Frances, I’d better start figuring out what I’ll include in that one-hour lecture I’m giving Monday night in San Antonio.”

He had to find out what time Saturday or Sunday the chief wanted to debrief him on his activities aboard the
Saint Marie,
and he needed time to prepare for that.

“You go right ahead, Jake. I’ll have some hot chocolate on the stove for you, or you can open the fridge and get a beer or some white wine if you like. Make yourself at
home.”

“And don’t forget to tell me good night,” Allison called to him as he headed up the stairs.

He stopped, turned around, and asked her, “Are you suggesting I’m not rowing with both oars? How could I forget something so pleasant?” He placed his right hand over his heart. “Sweetheart, you wound me.”

“He can talk when he wants to, all right,” Frances said, enjoying the exchange. “He sure can. You go on do your work, honey. If you fall asleep, it won’t kill her not to hear good night.”

He thought she snickered, and a grin spread over his own face.

“I’ll have breakfast and coffee ready by seven-thirty. And don’t worry; the smell of those biscuits will get you out of that bed.”

He teased for a few minutes, assured himself that he hadn’t displeased Allison, went into his room, and began working on his report to the chief.

Satisfied with what he’d accomplished, he knocked on Allison’s door at a quarter of ten, knowing she wouldn’t be asleep. “I’m here for my good-night kiss,” he told her when she opened the door, and was rewarded with an open-arm invitation.

“Don’t pour it on too thick, baby,” he said. “We’re circumspect here, remember?”

“You’re never going to let me forget that, are you?”

“I wouldn’t count on it, if I were you. I’ll be down for breakfast at seven-thirty. Would you walk to the beach with me after we eat? I like it out there early mornings.”

The back of her left hand grazed softly over his cheek. “If you promise to wear clothes, yes.”

He stepped back, giving the impression of one deeply offended. “You don’t like my G-string?”

“Trust me. I’m not going there.”

He hated to leave her because he adored her most when she was in one of her playful, laughing moods, when her softness overrode everything else about her.

“Kiss me, love. See you in the morning?”

When he turned to leave, she pulled the hem of his T-shirt. “What kind of guy deserts a woman at her bedroom door?” She intrigued him when she mugged, as she did then.

“The kind who’s been warned to be circumspect,” he answered, kissed her, and went to his room. He had played with fire in his lifetime, and often, but only when he had the means of extinguishing it. If he had stayed with her five minutes longer, he’d have said, “Circumspection be damned.”

* * *

After a hearty Southern-style breakfast the next morning, Saturday, Allison and Jake strolled along the beach at Idlewild Lake, warm in their sweaters and their feelings for each other.

“I’m sorry you have to leave shortly,” she told him, “but it means a lot to me that you came.”

“Yeah,” he said, shortening his steps to match her shorter ones as they strolled hand in hand. “We’ve done some serious bonding here. From now on, this will be
our place.
Let’s plan to come back here, this winter, maybe when the small lake freezes. It
does
freeze, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t know for certain, but I think so.”

“Do you ice-skate?” She nodded. “Good, then we’ll do that.”

Allison neither agreed nor disagreed, and she neither disputed him nor allowed his certainty to raise her hopes. Instead, she replied, “
Inshallah
—God willing, as the Muslims always say.”

She pretended not to have read his quizzical expression, only placed an arm around his waist and turned toward Frances Upshaw’s house.

* * *

“If you get into Washington by six-thirty,” the chief told Jake when he called him two hours later at the airport in Reed City, “come straight here.” Fearing that their conversations could be intercepted, Jake and the chief did not identify themselves or the chief’s location when speaking by phone, a precaution that Jake occasionally found restraining, as he did then. It would have been easier for Jake if they could have met closer to the home of either one.

“I’d as soon not come to work tomorrow, and you’re leaving Monday morning,” the chief went on. “I’ll wait here for you.”

“That suits me, too, sir.”

Twenty-five minutes after the plane landed in Washington, Jake knocked on the chief’s office door.

“Sorry, we don’t yet know precisely what Ring’s role in this is, but I’d swear he’s involved, and more than casually,” the chief said. “His former lover works at the consulate there, and we suspect the two of them are doing a lucrative business.”

“Did you pick him up?”

“Not yet. The agency is tracking both Ring and his contact at the consulate. We want to get the leader; a guy like Ring is a gofer. Someone’s behind him. You did a fine job, Jacob.”

“Thank you, sir.” Having learned that his efforts were useless, Jake had stopped reminding the chief that he preferred to be called Jake.

“Going to Blues Alley tonight?”

“I had planned to. Why?”

“In that case, we’ll have a couple of men there. Your Rockefeller Center nemesis—Mr. Harasser, we call him—went back twice, didn’t see you, and hasn’t been there lately. But his kind doesn’t give up. Be careful.”

“You mean they released him?” Jake didn’t bother to disguise his feelings about the ridiculousness of letting the man go.

The chief rubbed his jaw, already a mass of stubble at seven in the evening. “No grounds for keeping him. So watch it.”

At home, Jake checked his house, found nothing amiss, and prepared to go to Blues Alley. He donned a pair of brown pants, his well-worn tweed jacket with leather patches at the elbows, put on his old felt hat with the brim turned up in the back—a style he borrowed from the great jazz saxophonist Lester Young—got his guitar, and headed for the club. A block before reaching it, he put on his dark glasses.

“Man, did we miss
you!
” Buddy Dee said when Jake walked through the back door. “We had a guitarist here last night, but man, you wouldn’t believe how poor the guy was. Take your seat. We’ve got just a couple of minutes before going on.”

When the lights went up, Jake sent his gaze slowly over the patrons, looking for the one he considered his enemy. He didn’t see the man, but this was one night in which he didn’t plan to lose himself in his music.

Applause, stomping, whistles, and yells of “all right, Mac” greeted him before he or the band played a note. He expressed his thanks by bowing his head and touching the brim of his hat, got Buddy’s downbeat, and sent his fingers flying over the strings in a hot rendition of “Honeysuckle Rose.”

The more he played, the more the patrons demanded of him, but with his attention mainly on a man who might want to kill him, he couldn’t lose himself in playing as he usually did, and therefore, because he couldn’t let go and enjoy it, he soon tired. Finally, to let them know that they had exhausted him, he nodded to Buddy and played “Back Home in Indiana,” his signature, and always his last song. He tipped his hat, looked over the audience once more, and waited for the lights to go down.

* * *

“This isn’t working,” Jake told the chief later that night, irritated at receiving a call after midnight. He wondered whether the man ever slept.

“Sorry. This just got to me, and I know it’s a bad time, but we need you to testify at a closed Senate committee hearing. Just that one day is all I’m asking.”

Jake raised himself up in bed and balanced his weight on his right elbow. “Yeah. You always make it sound as if the inconvenience you’re proposing is the last unreasonable request I’ll get. I’m scheduled to be in Texas.”

“I know that. Cancel the last two days, will you? Authors do that all the time.”

“Some of ’em. What about my reputation? The word will go out that I’m a no-show.” And what about his relationship with Allison?

“We’ll fix that.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Jake said, though he didn’t mean it charitably. “I’m sure you’ll let me know the details.”

He hung up and fought for hours to get back to sleep. He’d be willing to bet that Allison already had a dozen questions about his odd schedule changes and even more about his peculiar behavior on that cruise. And according to their agreement, she was entitled to put it in print. If only he could be sure he meant more to her than a sizzling story and a promotion.

* * *

Allison arrived at the Delta counter that morning dressed in a yellow handkerchief-weight linen pantsuit. Her Balmacaan raincoat lay folded atop her suitcase. As his loose, almost lazy gait brought him toward her, she fought back a premonition, unusual for her because she didn’t worry about imagined unpleasantness.

“Hi,” he said, not stopping until his lips touched her. “Got your ticket?”

Taken aback by his boldness, she could only nod. As had become his habit, he placed her bag atop his, grabbed the handle of his own suitcase, and started with her to the gate.

“What is it?” she asked, noticing his expression of concern.

“Just remembered something.”

He stopped, took out his cell phone, and pushed a couple of buttons.

“Hi,” he said to the person he called. “I’m at the airport. Yeah. Just getting to the gate. No, but if you need anything while I’m away, you know where to reach me.” He appeared to listen carefully. “No, I didn’t. I’d recognize him anywhere. You take care. Love you, Mom.”

Relief flooded her, though she didn’t think him so callous that he would telephone and speak with another woman while standing less than two feet from her. After they boarded the plane, she reflected on Jake’s conversation with his mother and wondered at the lack of warmth in his voice.

“Would you believe my phone rang at midnight last night?” he asked her. “I almost never got back to sleep.”

“Lay your head on my shoulder,” she said after his third or fourth yawn, and patted the shoulder closest to him.

“Thanks.” In a few minutes he was asleep, and didn’t awaken until she checked to see whether his seat belt was fastened for landing.

“Feel better?”

His grin, sheepish and embarrassed, endeared him more to her. “Yes and no. I couldn’t have kept my eyes open, but it would have been heaven if I could have stretched out. Where are we?”

“A few minutes from landing.”

He checked the papers that he carried in the inside pocket of his jacket. “A car should be waiting for us at the airport. The lecture is at six, so we ought to be able to get dinner around seven-thirty.”

They checked in at the Hyatt Regency, and as the elevator took them up to their floors, he said, “Be sure and look out the window first thing. You’ll get a nice surprise. I’m in room 940. Can we meet in the lobby for lunch in, say, forty-five minutes?”

She looked at her room key. “I’m in 740. Lunch sounds great.” The elevator stopped and she was about to step out, when he put his foot at the door, leaned to her, and kissed her, flicking his tongue around the seams of her lips. “See you,” he whispered before she could recover and welcome his tongue into her body.

“I owe you one,” she said, “and it won’t help you to mention the word
circumspect,
either.”