Roman Holiday: The Complete Adventure (2-Book Bundle: The Adventure Begins and The Adventure Continues) (14 page)

“I can’t imagine him bribing anyone,” she said. “He’s a straight shooter.”

But she flashed back to his rain-covered face. His flat eyes.

I lie
.

She didn’t know him. She didn’t know much of anything, but she knew she loved Sunnyvale, and she wished that were enough. She wished
that
were all it would take to convince Roman to back off.

“You know what would be great?” she asked. “If I could take him back in time and make him
see
it. Like, summer before last, when I was selling jewelry at the flea markets and failing spectacularly at all those online premed classes—remember when we made those drinks with the coconut shavings for happy hour, and we had that limbo contest and Arvind and Prachi kicked everybody’s asses? I wish I could make him be there for that. I wish I could show him what he’ll bring an end to if he knocks it down.”

“That would never work, doll. You can’t make him have a change of heart if he doesn’t
have
a heart.”

“Roman has a heart.”

“Have you looked in his eyes? The man’s got scary eyes. No, you need something to hold over him while we dig around and figure out what dirty trick he used to get Susan to sell. Secret perversions, clubbing baby seals, toxic waste dumping, violating zoning regulations. You suppose Little Torch is zoned for what he wants to do to it?” Mitzi frowned, then shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. He hasn’t done it yet, so we can’t zap him for that. What about the animal angle? Can we invent some manatees or sea turtles or something? Or there’s birds, maybe, or those little Key deer that are always in the paper. Or I know! Snakes. We’ll look on the Internet, there have to be some snakes you could say you’d seen, and then—”

“Wait,” Ashley interrupted. “Back up.”

“What’d I say? I’m just riffing, here, so you can’t expect me to remember every little—”

“Key deer. We have Key deer. Sunnyvale does. I’ve seen them.”

“You have?”

“Yeah. Just the other day, in fact, there was this little one in the pool, drinking water from a puddle. But—that’s not news, right? I mean, the refuge is just over on Big Pine.”

“I’ve never seen Key deer at Sunnyvale.”

Ashley considered. “I guess I hadn’t, either. I’ve seen them on the beach, and all kinds of other places. But not right there at Sunnyvale. That was the first time.”

Mitzi grinned, brilliant and a little bit menacing. “One time is all it takes.”

“But he must have gotten permission already. Environmental impact statements or whatever.”

“Probably, but that doesn’t matter.”

“It doesn’t?”

“So he got an impact statement. So what? You say, ‘Your experts were bogus, this development is going to threaten the fragile ecosystem of our Key deer, and I have these three other experts who agree with me. I’m going to sue your ass, and we’ll let the courts figure it out.’ ”

“I can’t sue him. I don’t have any money.”

“No, darling, that’s not the
point
. The point is the threat. The point is the
wrench
. We tie
him up in hearings and experts and money, and meanwhile the court—or the state or whoever—says, ‘No demolition on this property. Not until it gets sorted out.’ And while that’s all happening we dig around, talk to all the other people who knew your grandma, and find out what this guy
did
to her, and we can use that to force him to quit. This is perfect.”

“It is?”

“It is. It’s so perfect, it’s like it fell from the sky. It’s like Susan gave it to us.
Here’s your Key deer, darlings. Hit him where it hurts
.”

“I don’t know, Mitz. I’m not sure anymore that I know what Grandma would want.”

“Sure you do. You two were peas in a pod.” Mitzi picked up the paddle and turned around. “We’re going back, and I’m going to do some research and make a few phone calls, and then you’re going to cut his
balls
off with this.”

She twisted to smile over her shoulder, and Ashley smiled back, because that was what she was supposed to be doing. Smiling.

This was the plan she’d been looking for.

But she felt kind of dirty.

She couldn’t help but wonder why Mitzi hadn’t known about the sale. Ashley had been afraid that Mitzi
did
know, but somehow it was worse that she didn’t, because why had Grandma left Mitzi out of this plan, when they were such good friends?

Maybe Mitzi was right, and Roman had somehow taken advantage. But try as she might, Ashley couldn’t believe he would do that.

Or maybe Ashley’s worst fears were true, and her grandmother just hadn’t cared what happened to Ashley after she was gone. Maybe she’d considered her job done once Ashley was raised, and she’d been trying to cut the apron strings, to force Ashley out into the world so she’d find a real life, a real job, and stop returning to Sunnyvale every winter.

The youngest snowbird in Florida
, Grandma had called her once, and Ashley hadn’t been able to tell even then if it was a good or a bad thing.

And there was another possibility. The possibility that the answer to all these questions was in those boxes in the Airstream that Ashley couldn’t bring herself to open.

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

She didn’t know what any of it meant—the way her grandma had died, how she’d distributed her estate—any more than she knew how to change Roman’s mind. But she couldn’t
help feeling that the two things were bound up together, somehow.

Mitzi paddled hard, cutting through the water with gusto. The Key deer revelation was clearly the most exciting thing to happen to her in weeks.

Ashley wasn’t excited, though. The thought of siccing a bunch of lawyers on Roman made her heart sink, and she could no longer be certain she’d picked the right ally in this fight.

It was just that if she couldn’t trust Mitzi to get her out of this, she’d have to trust herself.

Cupped in his palm, Roman’s phone chirped a low-battery warning.

The alligator raised its head.

He took a step back and ran into the porch railing.

“Don’t worry about Flossie,” the man behind him said. “She just likes music.”

Roman spared him a glance. The man had wispy white hair, silky as the innards of a cracked-open milkweed pod. Khaki pants, untucked button-up shirt, glasses. He looked like a slightly nutty university professor, or the PR guy for some nature conservancy.

Roman had met him last night, but he couldn’t remember his name until he saw his feet.

Don.

Don doesn’t believe in shoes
, Kirk had said.

Shoes are part of the social fabric
, Roman replied.
How can you not believe in shoes?

Kirk shrugged.
Feel free to ask him
.

Roman had learned his lesson about asking questions, though. The commune residents looked normal enough, but throw out one innocent question about whether the coffee was decaf and you found yourself on the receiving end of a lecture about the bleach content of coffee filters—which segued, improbably, into colonic cleansing, coffee-plantation labor abuse, the “bullshit” labeling of free-trade products, and, finally, obscure and truly disgusting African parasites.

He’d been forced to conclude that the only thing these people didn’t waste energy yammering about was the enormous alligator occupying the patch of grass just off the porch, between the dining hall and the swamp.

Roman had a lot of questions about the alligator.

He didn’t ask them.

“What kind of music does she like?” he asked, and then wondered what was the matter with him.

Heberto would ignore the man.
Some people aren’t worth your time
, he would say.
With your education, your experience, you’re worth five hundred dollars an hour to talk to, easy. You
have to ask yourself, is talking to this man worth five hundred dollars of your money?

Roman glanced at Don’s feet.

It wasn’t that he disagreed with Heberto. But old habits were hard to break. His foster father, Patrick, had believed everyone was worth listening to. Rapists and murderers, wife-beaters, alcoholics. It had made Patrick a pillar of the community—this insistence that everyone had value, every lost soul deserved an advocate.

Everyone but Roman.

“Her favorite’s Big Band,” Don said. “Aaron Everson’s been trying to get her into hiphop.”

Roman said “Hmm” and brushed invisible crumbs off the lapel of his suit jacket.

His phone flashed with the arrival of a new text from his PA. Roman fired back a response, shifting a bit so he could keep an eye on the alligator without accidentally allowing Don’s feet into his peripheral vision.

Their bottoms were the dull gray of hooves. Roman had glimpsed them at the drum circle last night, then wished for a way to un-glimpse them. Almost scarier than the alligator, those feet.

“She likes show tunes, too,” Don commented.

“Hmm.”

“One time we had a swing dance in the dining hall, and she came right up on the porch and looked in the window. I think she even smiled. Mitzi says gators always look like they’re smiling, though, so it’s hard to tell.”

“Hmm,” Roman said again, and tried not to think about what it would take to turn Don’s feet back into feet again.

Woodworking tools, most likely. A metal rasp.

“—gimpy leg, so Andy thought, ‘Why don’t we do our circle of healing on Flossie?’ And we brought all the drums out here and put them around—”

Roman tried to concentrate on what Don was telling him, but listening just made him yearn to escape. When he’d called the tow-truck place this morning, the owner-operator had declared himself “real busy” and asked Roman to call back after lunch. Then he’d hung up.

Was 12:05 too soon to call back?

And where the hell was Ashley? What was she playing at? What would happen to their
truce when he left?

“—wouldn’t believe the way she acted once that tambora drum came into the picture. First, she started lifting her feet, two at a time, like the ground was hot. My partner, Shari, said it was like Flossie had a demon inside her that needed out. But Shari’s people were revivalist types, so she saw a lot of that stuff at the tent revivals when she was a kid. Not with gators, of course—”

The phone chirped another low-battery warning. Flossie took three quick steps toward the porch, and Roman clutched at the railing. Everything in his field of vision sharpened. The smell of warm, yeasty buttered rolls and swamp decay seemed to intensify.

His palms tingled.

“Just like that!” Don said. “She was dancing forward and backward just like that, and we were drumming up a storm—really good drumming, with all these layers interwoven, and kind of mystical, where you could fall into the rhythm and get lost there. So—”

“She’s not dancing backward,” Roman said.

“What do you mean?”

“You said forward and backward, but she didn’t dance backward. She just lunged.”
At me. And then I jumped like an idiot
.

In the ten years he’d been living in Florida, he’d never gotten used to alligators. Not that he ran into them much in Miami, but even the idea of them made his skin crawl. Probably a legacy of his landlocked upbringing—he just couldn’t accept ancient reptilian dinosaur monsters skulking around in the murk.

Though Flossie here didn’t need to skulk. She could pick off a hippie anytime she pleased.

And yet the hippies seemed blithely unconcerned, chowing down on salad and casserole while Roman’s brain flashed neon-red words like
APEX PREDATOR
in large capitals across the space behind his eyes and made him dizzy.

He forced himself to loosen his grip on the railing.

Don noticed. “You’re not afraid of her, are you?”

“No.”

“She’s just a baby!”

The alligator staring at him from a spot just beyond the porch steps—eyes alert, jaw
hanging slightly open, poised to attack—had to weigh upwards of three hundred pounds. Roman didn’t know a lot about alligators, but he knew they came out of eggs.

It had been a long time since that gnarly creature fit in an egg.

“She could rip off my leg in about eight seconds.”

“Yeah, but Flossie wouldn’t,” Don said. “We practically raised her.”

“What, from birth?”

“She washed up, what, ten years ago, Kirk?” Don asked.

“Yeah, ten or so. She was just little then.”

“You fed her scraps and all that?” Roman started to relax.

“Well, no,” Kirk hedged. “We’re not allowed to do that. This is all part of the wildlife preserve, see, so we have to be strictly hands-off with the animals.”

“So in what sense did you raise Flossie?”

“She’s always hanging around, watching us,” Don said. “She likes us.”

Roman met the alligator’s beady black eye again. If Flossie liked him, she had a strange way of showing it.

His phone chirped three times fast, signaling the death of the battery.

Flossie moved onto the porch with terrifying speed.

Throwing himself backward, Roman tripped over one of Don’s horny feet and fell down, landing hard on his ass.

“Jesus
Christ
!”