Night Moves (15 page)

I interrupted, “I would have called and saved you the trip, but I didn’t know the dog was gone. It has nothing to do with my memory—”

“Well, the important thing is, you’re okay,” Hannah breezed along. “At a certain point, a middle-aged man, he starts doing things that are sorta clumsy. Like walking into walls or, you know, that cause him to look just plain dumb and thoughtless. A Christian girl has a duty to check on a person like that or I wouldn’t’ve risked interrupting your nap.”

“Hannah,” I said, “you’ve made your point. Only thing missing now is the part where you tell me what you’re talking about.”

The woman’s tone returned to normal, but more business-like than friendly. “So I finish up my six-hour charter. I drop my clients at Boca Grande, then run like crazy ’cross the backcountry to tend to your dog, just like I promised. And what do I find?”

My brain had raced ahead in search of a scenario that could cause upset, which is why, just in time, the image of Cressa Arturo surprising Hannah popped into my mind. Two women meet unexpectedly in a small house.
My
house.

“I can explain that,” I said.

“There’s no need, Marion. We’re friends. It’s okay.” Hannah’s sudden sincerity only caused me to feel worse when she added, “We’re fishing pals and swim buddies. I understand that. What I don’t understand is why a woman I’ve never met—a girlfriend you’ve never even mentioned—would talk that way right to my face.”

I dreaded the answer but had to ask, “What did she say?”

“I don’t use rude language as a habit. You know that.”

“We’re both adults,” I replied. “And she’s not my girlfriend.”

“It’s not the sort of thing I’d repeat. What kind of parents would name a girl Crescent, anyway? Flower children, is that what you used to call them? Probably where she learned it was okay to use raw talk.”

I said,
“Hannah?”

“Okay! ‘Doc only picks workout partners he wouldn’t screw.’ That’s what the woman said! But didn’t say ‘screw,’ if that’s plain enough. So it made sense to her—after looking me over—that you partnered up with a woman not nearly as pretty as her. Is it true you talked that way about me?”

“No,”
I replied. “Not to her, not to anyone.”

To mask the hurt, the woman added, “My lord, as if I’d even think about hopping into bed with a man who dates married women! Just because she’s rich and owns a beach house? It’s not my place to judge, but there’s some who consider stealing another man’s wife to be shabby behavior.”

Hannah’s gambit of using pride as a mask was even more upsetting. I was thinking,
Tomlinson did this!
He had dredged up some throwaway line I’d used months ago, probably after a few beers:
I’m not going to lose another workout partner to the bedroom
. Then he had blabbed it to Cressa Arturo, oblivious to the possibility of her storing it away to use later if needed.

I said, “The woman had no right to be in my house, Hannah, let alone confront you. I have no idea why she’d say something so mean.”

“You don’t remember asking her to check on your dog?”

“Absolutely not. I barely know the woman! And she knows even less about me.”

In a very different tone, Hannah said, “Please don’t lie to me, Marion, or I
will
get mad.”

Once again my brain raced ahead, and I pictured the married mistress moving around my house like she owned the place, already familiar with every drawer and cupboard. So that’s how she had played it. Hannah was the unwelcomed outsider, Cressa a member of the Ford and Tomlinson inner circle. No one in their right mind would believe that Cressa Arturo and I weren’t close after finding her alone in my house.

What to do?

Beyond the porch, fragments of a winter sunset told me it would be dark soon, but the moon, almost full, would be up in an hour. Perfect night, cool and calm, to travel by boat. I’d had a long day, but it was only six-thirty. Plenty of time to retrieve the retriever, say a sharp word to the married mistress, then win back Hannah’s respect over dinner. But at what risk?

The truth was, Hannah Smith scared me—scared the bachelor in me, anyway. She is not the type to share her favors, or even confidences, without first establishing a relationship based on trust. With the few Hannahs that exist in this world, a date was not just a date, secrets were not just secrets, and bed was a hell of a lot more than a recreational trampoline.

No . . . I was walking a fine line. I had already lied to her more than once—most recently about my trip to “Tampa” and the bite wound on my arm. My god, deception wasn’t just a tool in my life, deception was my
profession
, and I had no right to lead someone like Hannah on. Yet, now this good woman with the solid laugh, and her gift for honesty, was warning me not to lie again and she meant it. Had in fact, I sensed, come very close to hanging up on me.

So I said, “I only met her last night for the first time and she’s Tomlinson’s friend, not mine. And I
did
tell Tomlinson once that I didn’t like losing workout partners to the bedroom, but it wasn’t about you. He must have mentioned it to her, anyway, and she decided to use it. I don’t know why, Hannah. I’m sorry.”

There was a long silence. Finally, the woman said, “Thanks.”

“I really am,” I told her.

“I can tell . . . or we wouldn’t be talking.”

Yes, she had come damn close to hanging up. For Hannah, there would’ve been no going back. The relief I felt was unexpected. Way out of proportion to saving what, until now, I had considered to be an interesting, peripheral friendship. So I prattled, “I just got out of the shower. I’m out here walking around in a towel, so I skipped the truth to hurry the conversation along. Stupid. I feel like an ass.”

“We’ve all got one. Sooner or later, we show it,” was the reply.

I laughed. Probably overdid it, because Hannah quickly amended, “That didn’t come out right. I wasn’t hinting around about . . . Not that I’m a prude, because I’m not!”

“If you are, who cares?” I said. “How about a run and a short swim tomorrow. Around sunset?”

For some reason, that prompted another thoughtful pause before I heard, “You don’t care, huh? I guess that’s a good thing.”

“Sure it is. Your personal life is none of my business.”

“But I’m not a prude. Just careful when it comes to men—unless I was actually
interested
in someone.”

“If you say so. Point is, it doesn’t matter. Not to me, it doesn’t.”

“I see,” she replied, then thought about it some more before telling me, “I don’t make friends easily, Marion. Wish I could. That’s one of the things I admire about you. If you don’t mind, though, let’s take a week or two off. I understand the way things are now. By then maybe I’ll feel like running.”

End of conversation.

I stood there mystified, phone in my pocket, wondering what new blunder I had committed. I walked a few feet, then stared at the dog’s empty food bowl. Then a few feet more and my eyes found the empty bench that was the cat’s favorite spot to doze in the sun. A black cat gathers heat like an oven on winter mornings, so Crunch & Des had been as warm to the touch as freshly baked bread.

I berated myself:
You live alone by choice, Ford—THEIR choice, every woman you’ve ever met.

Then Mack’s voice came into my head:
I’m a fool, a bloody fool.

No shit, Sherlock! Six words that summarized the regrets and dumb behavior of every male who has survived the slippery trip through the womb and then stumbled through life.

I went into the house where I changed, then continued to wallow in self-pity as I did the grunt work required of an aquarist. Three times the phone rang and I ignored it—Cressa Arturo was pissed, apparently, because I had yet to appear.
Good.

But not a word from Hannah Smith.

Can you blame her?

When the phone beeped a fourth time, I looked and read a text. Bernie Yeager wanted to make contact via military SATCOM. That, at least, presented an opportunity to think about something else. So I dried my hands, hung my lab apron on a hook, and called.

—

F
IFTEEN
MINUTES
WE
TALKED,
Bernie doing most of it while I made cryptic notes. He didn’t have all the information I’d requested, but enough to snap me out of my piteous mood. My wise old friend also grounded me with an axiom I had jotted in a notebook and shared with him long ago:

The fact that unexplained elements are noted within a similar time frame while in the field does not guarantee those elements are linked or are even significant.

He was referring to the jumble of unknowns I’d dumped on him: a strange boat, missing planes, a married mistress, and a filmmaker who seemed to have ulterior motives.

“Focus,” Bernie told me after he’d shared what he’d uncovered. “You don’t have to be a botanist to cut down a tree.”

The homespun aphorism wasn’t an exact fit, but close enough to get his point across. And by the time we signed off, I
was
focused, fully in the moment, even though there were plenty of blanks unfilled.

The hunter is being hunted,
Tomlinson had told me.
That’s your drug of choice.

Apparently so, because the buzz of elevated awareness returned. I switched off lights in the lab, slipped a tiny semiauto pistol into my pocket—a .32 caliber Seecamp stainless—then headed for the door. I lived alone—so what? Their choice, my choice—either way, traveling life single was the least cluttered of vehicles. More maneuverable, life was cut closer to the bone.

As I closed the walkway gate, I was trying to convince myself.
The less baggage, the less chance of leaving something behind.

12

JUDGING FROM THE WAY CRESSA ARTURO WAS DRESSED,
she was, indeed, eager to make up for a decade of celibacy. She greeted me at the door in a bathrobe that was belted loosely, the bikini top or bra she had selected right there for me to see, two black hammocks of lace fully laden, the breasts separated by the palest of milk cleavage.

If she had seduction on her mind, though, it had been earlier, before the dog had dampened her mood on this night of dry wind and moon.

“My god, where have you been?” Cressa demanded, motioning me inside. “I can’t control that animal. Take a look at what he’s done to my house . . . and my pool!”

Swimming pool, too?
I managed to conceal my delight as I took a last glance behind me, then stepped inside.

I had arrived by pickup truck, a blue ’72 GMC now parked conspicuously in a drive that weaved through palms and landscaping to three tiers of stucco that was visible through the trees. The house was built on the beach close enough that I heard waves sluicing sand when I got out and pretended to yawn. While yawning, I scoped the area. If someone was watching the place, where had they concealed themselves?

Thanks to Bernie, I now knew things about Cressa, her husband, and her husband’s family that suggested the woman was dangerous company, possibly very dangerous. And that she was being watched.

I had narrowed it down to three likely spots before touching the doorbell, then covering a smile that now broadened as I followed Cressa into the living room.

“I think the rug’s ruined,” she said. “And my couch . . . I can’t make him get off the damn thing. It’s a Lilly Pulitzer, white sea worsted wool.” She pulled my elbow against her breast and pleaded, “Doc, please do something!”

The dog, asleep on his side, lifted his head for the first time and blinked at me while my eyes took in the room. White throw rugs on a black marble floor. Chrome-and-white furniture. It was an expensive couch. I had no idea how much something like that would cost, but the brand Lilly Pulitzer sounded pricy. Which only made sense in a beach property worth six, maybe eight million. No doubt about it, Rob Arturo and his family, father and crazy brother included, had done very well investing in Florida. “Are the rugs real sheepskin?”

“What could it possibly matter!”

“Dogs are drawn to animal smells.”

“The only animal in here that smells is him!” she snapped, then headed for the kitchen.

I called after her, “He usually minds pretty well. You tried the basic commands?”

“Yes!”

“Single words only?”

“For christ’s sake,” Cressa replied, “I tried everything but shooting him in the eyes with mace.”

“They can’t pick commands out of a sentence. You know, say it once in a normal voice.
Sit-stay-come.
Like that.”

Even though I strung the words together, the dog came to attention. So I signaled him with an open palm:
Stay.
Which caused the retriever’s head to teeter sideways, his fur darker for the white wool, and he was asleep when his jowls hit the cushion.

I asked, “Did he mind Tomlinson?”

“
No!
Well . . . not for long, anyway.”

The seaward side of the house was glass, sliding doors ten feet tall, one linked to another on tracks so the wall could be opened wide at sunset or on balmy nights like this. But the married mistress was an air-conditioned girl, so the room was warm as an orchid house in a structure sealed like a capsule.

The woman was obviously a compulsive neat freak—but she had kept the retriever inside, so there had to be a good reason. Did she know she was being watched, but didn’t want the dog to sniff out her observer? Was she manipulating the person who was paying to have her watched? If so, playing to the camera benefited the woman in some way. If true, I was now part of the act. So was Tomlinson.

I snapped my fingers and instantly had the attention of two alert yellow eyes. I motioned
Come
,
then I said, “Heel,” which caused the retriever to circle behind me and sit beneath my left hand. Didn’t say another word as I marched the dog across two white throw rugs, detoured to hit a third island of white in the dining room, then backtracked across the rugs, out the door and down the steps to the caged pool.