Life Guards in the Hamptons (3 page)

She sniffed in disapproval. “You always enjoyed melodrama, Willy. The bites’ll go away in a day or two. Maybe a week. Or two.”

She must have heard me gasp. “You could always try flea powder. That kills almost anything. Of course I never use those horrible chemicals on any of my dogs when I can avoid it.”

“But it’s okay for your only daughter?”

Snort. “There you go, finding fault and acting like an abused child. You’re thirty-five, Willy, so stop whining.”

“I’m not whining.” Or sniffing in deviated septum scorn. I wasn’t surprised either. My mother always put her animals ahead of her family, which made sense for one of the world’s best dog whisperers.

She never claimed to be the world’s best parent. “Just like your father, taking yourself so seriously and never listening to what I say. You asked me, I told you.”

She was right. So I called Dad in Florida.

“That’s what I always hated about the summer place,” he said when I explained my problem. “Poison this, stinging that. Undertow here, sharks there. And your mother—”

“Dad! I called about chiggers, not about your divorce.” Which occurred almost two decades ago. Neither one ever got over it. Mom had gone to Florida, where I am certain they have fire ants and snakes and alligators, to help Dad after his bypass surgery in the spring. He survived the surgery better than he survived the visit. Mom discovered the plight of racing greyhounds and hadn’t come home to Paumanok Harbor since.

My father didn’t have any advice about the bites. “The old bat will have the solution,” he said, referring to my grandmother. “But don’t let her read your tea leaves. She makes up that fortune-telling crap anyway.”

Considering that my father was a precog himself, I never knew who or what to believe. “Any danger in sight?”

“I don’t think anyone’s ever died from chiggers. Blood poisoning, maybe. But now that I think of it, I did have a glimpse of something foreboding last night.”

“What, one of your lady friends trying to pin you down to a long-term commitment?” My father’d had a long string of widows and divorcees since he moved to Florida after the divorce. Maybe before, according to my mother.

“Stu.”

“What, she’s a lousy cook?”

“Not cooked stew, I sense, but S-t-u.”

“Oh, she has a jealous husband. Find another ch—” My mother called Dad’s women chippies. “Charmer. You don’t want to break up a marriage.”

Oops. That’s what caused the divorce, I guess. “I mean there’s a lot of women in Florida.”

“We’re talking about you, not me, baby girl. You know
I only get bad feelings if someone I love is in danger. All I know about the threat is its name is Stu. Be careful. Watch out. You know how I worry.”

“Sure, Dad.” That may have been another reason for the divorce: my father’s constant fretting and half-assed presentiments. What they lacked in sense, they made up for in sincerity. “I’ll avoid any man named Stu, and stewed prunes and stewardesses, just to be safe. Love you.”

By now I’d peeled the nail polish off, slathered on all three anti-itch creams again, and took an allergy pill for good measure. But every time I sat down I felt a new bite. Chances were I’d already contaminated my clean laundry, too, and I’d forgotten to buy clear nail polish at the drugstore. Tough. I used the red again. I was tired and cranky and I hated this day. It wasn’t even lunchtime yet. I’d never make it for a week.

So I knocked on Mrs. Abbottini’s door. She and I shared the third floor of the old brownstone. I had the front unit, my parents’ old apartment where I’d lived most of my life. My front windows overlooked the street. Mrs. Abbottini’s apartment faced the sooty back of the building behind us. She resented that. Still, she and my mother were good friends. The old lady visited Mom at Paumanok Harbor every summer after my parents split. Maybe she knew about chiggers.

“They gave your father a heart attack, your mother says.”

“Chiggers,” I shouted, “not chippies.”

“Chicago? Never been there.”

I turned down the TV so she could hear me yell “chiggers.” Now the whole building knew I had bugs.

Her false teeth clacked. “What were you doing, rolling around in the grass with one of your lovers? Your mother told me all about you and your carrying on this summer.”

Okay, I’d spent time with a couple of different guys recently. I was thirty-five and unattached. My personal affairs—not that I’d call them affairs, of course— were no one’s business but mine. Besides, I dared any female,
pushing Mrs. Abbottini’s eighty or not, to resist Agent Grant from DUE and the British peerage, or Ty Farraday, the famous equestrian rodeo star, or Piet Doorn, the intrepid firefighter. All three were secret superheroes, with supernatural talents, and super sexy. And nice. I don’t regret being close to any of them or loving each of them in his own way. What I do regret is how we all lived such different lives that nothing could come from the relationships but a summer romance.

“Bug bites, Mrs. A. Not my love life.”

More clacking and cackling. “Too bad. If you married that Englishman and moved to his castle, I could have had the front rooms.”

“Maybe I’ll die of cooties.” I headed for the door. “You can always hope.”

“Oh, sit down. I’ll go get my razor.”

Holy shit. “It’s not that bad! Sorry I bothered you.”

“Maybe you ought to do it yourself anyway. My eyesight isn’t what it used to be.”

Neither was my heart rate. I was halfway across the hall before she shouted directions. “You shave the bites really close to open the hard crust.”

I was nauseous already.

“Then you pour in peroxide to kill the buggers. Or is it alcohol? Maybe vinegar. I’d go with scotch.” She licked her thin lips. “Hmm. I think I will.”

I went home and tried to work, but nothing came to me except a fierce itch where I’d been sitting. I took a long walk down Third Avenue so I’d be tired enough to sleep, but couldn’t. I started to read a book, but got bored and put on the Yankees. They lost. That’s how things were going.

I didn’t sleep all night. The bastards liked the dark. Now I had welts up and down my legs, my thighs, my stomach.

Little Red didn’t even ask to sleep on my bed. He curled up on the sofa and licked his toes.

I gave up, conceded defeat, and called my grandmother. I loved her. I knew she loved me. We just couldn’t get along. She knew what was best for everyone
and told them so, often and loudly. She thought every child born in the bloody, bewitched Harbor should be tested for psychic ability by the people at the Royce Institute. Then they should marry according to some genetic pattern, like breeding horses for stamina or cows for better milk. I wasn’t a freaking labradoodle. I wasn’t a freak.

Half of Paumanok Harbor was terrified of her after that incident with the cabbages. The other half relished her fresh vegetables and tea readings. I didn’t want to know the future she had in mind for me.

I guess she had a point about studying with the espers at Royce, though. I’d had to learn in a hurry about Royce, DUE, Unity and the rest, and still had no idea what a Visualizer like me was supposed to do half the time. Not that any of the so-called experts did either. But this was chiggers, nothing arcane or out of the ordinary.

“Of course I know how to get rid of chiggers.”

“It doesn’t involve a razor, does it?”

“No. They’re bad this year. I have to make up a new batch of ointment, but I am too busy right now. You have heard about the Patagonian oiaca, haven’t you?”

“Yeah. It’s got pink toes.”

“It’s wrecking my fields.”

Grandma Eve had experimental gardens tucked all over the working farm, growing exotics, illegals, and heaven knew what. Some had government approval; Eve Garland was such a renowned herbalist. Most witches were.

“I thought it was a small bird. How much could it eat?”

“It’s not the bird. It’s the jackasses come to gawk at the poor thing.”

I almost asked if any of them were named Stu, but she was on a rant. “They’re trampling everything in sight, showing no respect for private property or ripening crops. I’ve had to hire extra workers just to guard the perimeters and put up more fences. The bird can’t survive here, anyway, not with winter coming. It has no mate, either.”

Either? People could survive without a mate. People like me. Grandma Eve never missed a cheap shot to remind me of my unmarried state, or my lack of propagating the species of paranormals. We’d ridden this merry-go-round enough times that I ignored the dig. “Why don’t they catch it and take it home to South America?”

“The ornithologists think it escaped from some private contraband collection. They can’t bring it back to its original habitat in case it picked up a disease that could wipe out the last of the species found in some obscure bit of forest. Now the high muckety-mucks in charge are trying to decide where to take it. If they can find it. The dratted thing keeps flitting around, hiding in the shrubs. One faction fears they’ll hurt it worse by capturing the bird. Another says let nature take its course. I say they’re already traumatizing the creature with all the hubbub.”

“Is anyone worried about a hawk or an owl or a feral cat carrying it off?”

“They’re not sure that hasn’t already happened. No one has seen the oiaca in two days. You should be here.”

“Why, to look for pink toes something spit out?”

“No, Willow, you should be here to stand by your family in time of need. That’s what we do.”

No, what we did was more complicated than that. Grandma Eve brewed herbs and incantations. My mother talked to dogs, my father predicted doom. Susan’s cooking could change moods, her father read dirt, and her mother wrangled schoolkids. Before she died, my other grandmother talked to invisible people who answered her back. Some family, huh?

As for me, sometimes I imagined magical beings that actually appeared, but mostly I wrote books. I tried, anyway, after hanging up the phone to cut off my grandmother’s usual disappointment in me.

My hero still had no sidekick and I had a wastepaper basket filled with wasted paper. After that I spent another night wrestling with the sheets and the scratching before I took a Tylenol PM. Little Red woke me up before dawn with a loud, constant slurping at his toes.

“Damn it, Red, go back to sleep.”

He didn’t.

I put on the light so I could yell louder. Then I looked at him. He had wet, raw wounds on both his front feet where he kept frantically licking, pulling the hair out. He didn’t stop to look at me, and snarled when I tried to nudge his mouth away from the ugly sores.

Oh, shit. My dog had chiggers, too.

M
IDWEEK, MIDMORNING, MID-SEPTEMBER, the Hampton Jitney was middling filled. Little Red got a seat of his own, out of his carrying case, without my having to pay for an extra ticket or hold him on my lap for over two hours. He got the window seat so he could look out, which kept the Pom too excited to gnaw at his toes. I’d put some of the anti-itch cream on his feet, then wrapped them in gauze and taped them so he wouldn’t lick off the salve. That was the best I could do until we got to the only vet I’d trust with the snarky, snappy little dog I’d come to love. Abused and abandoned, he couldn’t be blamed for being insecure and unsociable. We were working on it. Right now, for better or worse, we were going home to Paumanok Harbor, to Matt.

Whose life I may have ruined.

I wasn’t quite as excited as Little Red to be headed east.

Before the bus had reached us at its last pickup spot on East 40th Street, between Third and Lex, some of the passengers—the ones whose thumbs or ears or mouths were not connected to one electronic device or another—chatted about the latest news from the Hamptons.

More robberies had occurred last night, this time at the new 7-Eleven in Montauk, then the East Hampton Cinema’s box office. Ski masks, no arrests, no IDs. The bus passengers credited the thieves with great skills and savvy. They blamed the local police for great stupidity
and sloth. I had my doubts about both, an uncomfortable feeling that something was not right about the crime scenes. Not that I’d ever written detective stories or researched police investigations.

I made a mental note to pass on my father’s vague warning about someone named Stu to Uncle Henry in case there was a connection to the break-ins. Uncle Henry Haversmith was Paumanok Harbor’s police chief and not really my uncle, just an old friend of the family. He knew about my father’s forecasts and might take them seriously.

Sure, and traffic might go the speed limit on the Long Island Expressway. No one gave credence to Dad’s premonitions except me, when I could figure them out.

One woman on the waiting line said she’d left all her jewelry home as a precaution. Another said she had her cash and credit cards stuffed in her bra. A tourist couple visiting their daughter in Hampton Bays worried about going out to dinner. The gang had already targeted a couple of the more expensive restaurants. A man in a last-summer’s fashion fedora thought they’d be safe eating in small, cheaper places where the cash register didn’t hold so much and the patrons’ wallets weren’t as fat.