Sunset Bridge (3 page)

“
I
feel fine.”

“Maybe you got all the good ones.” She held the towel to her face anyway. “Or maybe I’m coming down with something. There’s been some kind of virus going through the center. A…lot of kids have been sick. I…” She buried her face
again. She was shivering now, after a whole day of steaming in the heat.

“Are you okay? Do you need to stay here a little longer?”

She could hardly think. She no longer felt nauseous, but that might not last. “You go back. I’ll join you in a minute. I’m okay. Really. I just want to wait here by myself to be sure. Go.”

He hesitated, but she reached out and pushed his shoulder. “Go, please.”

He shook his head and left her. She waited until the darkness swallowed him. Then she buried her face in the towel and bent over, rain sluicing down her back. But the rain was nothing compared to the revelation.

There was no mysterious virus making the rec center rounds, and even if there had been, she would not have succumbed. She was known for her cast-iron stomach.

She was not going through the change of life, although her life was certainly about to change forever. The problem was hormones, all right, but not their absence. In fact, if she was right, she was suffering from an overabundance. All the evidence had finally fallen into place and revealed an answer so ludicrous, it was no wonder it had eluded her.

She hadn’t been poisoned by oysters, raw or roasted, but she did have something in common with the bivalves. She, too, could harbor something infinitely precious and priceless inside her.

Not a pearl, but a baby.

Tracy was almost certain she was pregnant.

“L
ast time I decorated a place for Maggie, she was moving out of the nursery into a big-girl bed, so the baby-to-be could sleep in her crib. I painted her new room pink, and not that beigey pink that looks like a bad sunburn, but the real deal. Like my mama’s favorite roses. Pink walls, pink bedspread and curtains, even a little pink rug. And you know what that girl told me?”

Wanda Gray stopped the narrative and looked at Janya Kapur, who was rolling ivory paint onto the largest wall in the cottage Maggie would be moving into that afternoon.

Janya, who knew a cue when she heard one, turned her head. “What did she tell you?”

“She said she wanted to sleep with her daddy and me ’cause her room looked like a strawberry ice-cream cone, and it made her tummy hurt.”

“Children say clever things.”

“She meant it, too. We tried to make her happy, but Maggie
always knew exactly what she wanted. Once she made up her mind…? There was no changing it.” Wanda shook her head.

Before she went back to rolling paint, Janya patted her friend’s shoulder. “And, of course, there is no one else in your family who acts this way.”

“Oh, please. Me? Nothing like it. Maggie and me, we’re as different as a palm tree and an oak. I had to go back into that room, me expecting a baby in a month, you understand, me as big as that Statler mansion where you fell into the swimming pool—”

“It would be polite not to remember that afternoon out loud.”

Wanda was always glad to get a rise out of her young friend. “I still think of you, dripping wet and that pretty Indian thing you were wearing all clinging to you, and those men staring at you like you were some kind of water goddess come to earth.”

Janya was only in her twenties, with long black hair and a body men noticed even when it wasn’t so perfectly revealed. “’Course,” Wanda continued, “you fell in to help me out of a jam, so I’ll just pretend I don’t remember. But anyway, there I was, at least as big as that Statler place or more, having to go back to that beautiful room I’d already painted once, and paint the walls pale green. She picked out that color herself, and her hardly even three. To me, that room looked like a head of iceberg lettuce, but Maggie, she was happy.”

“She will be happy with
this
color? It is very soft, like morning light.”

“She’s not happy, she can paint it herself.”

“She will be bringing some of her own things to make it her home?”

Wanda didn’t know what her daughter would be bringing
with her. She was still amazed Maggie was coming to Happiness Key to live. Maggie, the unemployed cop and jilted lover. Maggie, who until now had always known exactly where she was going and how to get there.

“I doubt she took much when she walked out on her job and Felo,” Wanda said.

“Felo? This is an American name?”

“Short for Rafael. Spanish. Rafael Estrada. Family’s from Cuba. He’s third-generation here on American soil. Grandparents on both sides came right after the revolution—theirs, not ours. One side were dentists or something like that, but couldn’t be dentists here, on account of different rules and such. I guess it was hard, the way things changed for his family. One minute you’re a hotshot, the next you’re sweeping floors and washing windows. Rafael’s grandmother had to live with an aunt when she came over ’cause her parents never got out at all. Sad story, huh?”

“Very sad, yes. And this Felo? He had problems? This is why Maggie walked away from him?”

Wanda didn’t know how to answer that. She had always liked Felo Estrada. Oh, sure, at first she’d been surprised Maggie’d chosen somebody from a different culture. Then Maggie and Felo moved in together, into a house in Little Havana, which was, in Wanda’s view, as strange as moving to Argentina or Peru, although not like moving to Cuba, since the people in Little Havana weren’t all that fond of Castro. Still, Maggie had been happy there in the tidy bungalow with a lanai looking over a postage-stamp pond Felo had put in all by himself. Their neighbors came from different places. Some from Cuba, of course, but some from Haiti and Nicaragua, or maybe it was El Salvador—Wanda could never keep those Latin countries straight. Maggie was fluent in Spanish
and chatted with anybody in the neighborhood—or arrested them, if it came to that. She’d fit right in.

“I don’t know as you could say Felo has problems,” Wanda said. “He’s a cop, just like she used to be. He’s as handsome as sin and just as enticing, you know what I mean? He attracts women the way orange blossoms attract honeybees. Maggie said even the old ladies on her street used to flirt with him.”

“I know this kind of man.”

Wanda shrugged. “Maybe, and maybe not. I like Felo, and so does Ken.” Ken was Wanda’s husband, a police officer himself and the best judge of people Wanda knew. “Seemed to me Felo always made women feel good about themselves, while he kept just enough distance to let them know he was taken.”

Janya made one more stroke down the wall, then she stepped back. “But not taken now?”

“I don’t know for sure what went wrong. I just know Maggie left the force, then she left him. She’s been off camping for six whole weeks. Half the time we didn’t know where she was. Then the last time we talked and I told her how sick I was of the assistants parading through my shop who don’t know lard from butter, she said she’d come and help out for a while.”

“It’s good she’s moving here. You will like having her so close.”

Wanda hoped that was true. She and her daughter were so different. Wanda was never quite sure what to say to Maggie. Maggie kept her thoughts to herself, but Wanda was just about sure she didn’t approve of her mother. Loved her, sure. But approve? Not so Wanda could measure.

“What else do you think we should do in here?” Wanda
asked. “I wish Ms. Deloche had seen fit to stay behind and give us an idea or two.”

“There was no reason for Tracy to miss the camping trip, and I can be here when Maggie comes.” Janya glanced at Wanda. “Would you like that?”

Wanda realized she hadn’t fooled her friend. That was what she and Janya were, of course, even if Janya was younger than her own daughter. They were friends, no mistaking it. All the women at Happiness Key were friends, even if they’d gotten off to a rocky start.

“It wouldn’t hurt,” she said. “I can introduce you that way.”

“The kitchen’s clean, and there is so much food in the refrigerator, she won’t have to shop for a month. You put in the new shower curtain?”

Wanda nodded. “And I made up Lizzie’s bed. Only it’s not Lizzie’s anymore, is it? I still can’t get used to her and Dana being gone for good.”

Dana Turner had been the last tenant of this cottage, and she and her daughter, Lizzie, had become part of the Happiness Key family until an abrupt and lamented departure. Dana had also been the only decent assistant Wanda had so far been able to hire for Wanda’s Wonderful Pies, her pie shop and café. The women received postcards now and then, but so far no one knew exactly where the two had gone. Or Pete, the man who had disappeared with them.

“The new slipcovers and pillows look cheerful and bright,” Janya said. “Maggie will be happy here.”

Wanda straightened the edge of a throw rug she’d bought to set in front of the sofa. “I always got along better with Junior. He’s more like me. Maggie, she’s like Ken. She won’t
tolerate a fool, not Maggie. That’s how come she’s not a detective anymore.”

“She got in trouble?”

“Anybody would have, doing what she did. See, she was assigned to the crime-suppression unit—drug stuff mostly. She worked on this big case for most of a year. There was this dealer, headed a whole ring of dealers, kind of a CEO, if you want to call him that, or a kingpin. She and her partner laid up enough evidence against him to build him a jail cell for the rest of his life.

Only the state’s attorney, a guy named Paul Smythe, declined to prosecute him. Just up and said, ‘Nope, what you brought me isn’t good enough. So go work on something else, ’cause this case is going away.’”

“A year?” Although she hadn’t been in the country for long, Janya seemed to understand the significance.

“A year. And everybody was mad about it, you bet. But her superiors told her to let it go. Felo told her to let it go, too, and the thing was…? That drug dealer…? He was a Cuban American, just like Felo. Even worse, Felo’s best friend, who’s a hotshot in one of the big sugar companies, knew him real well, even partied with him sometimes.”

“Did Maggie believe there was a connection?”

“She must have. Why else would she walk out on him the way she did? The day Felo told her to back off, she walked into a press conference Paul Smythe was giving, took off her badge, laid down her gun and in front of all those reporters, said she was quitting the police force because the real criminals were wearing suits and giving press conferences, and she didn’t want any part of that. Then she went home and packed.”

Janya was silent a moment. “She will not be going back to him,” she said at last. “This is a hurt she cannot heal.”

“Maybe, maybe not. He’s been calling me, you know. For the past six weeks, ever since it happened. Calling to find out where she is. I told him it wouldn’t do any good, but he calls anyway. Called two days ago, as a matter of fact, and he knows I hate being in the middle like this.”

Janya wiped her hands with a wet rag; then she put her arm around Wanda’s waist. “We will do one more tour of the cottage, just to be sure. But your daughter will feel welcome here. All of us will welcome her.”

Wanda put her arm around Janya, too. “I can count on you. I know that. But I might need some advice, you being closer to Maggie’s age and all.”

“Tracy and I will do what we can. And Alice can be her grandmother, if she needs one.”

Wanda wasn’t sure what her daughter was going to need, but she figured that whatever it was, Maggie was coming to the right place to find it. Even if Wanda herself couldn’t provide the answers.

“Okay, I know you didn’t like staying with Mrs. Sanchez,” Maggie Gray told the yowling cat in the travel carrier beside her. “Even if she did feed you fresh chicken twice a week. But your memory’s short, right? You’re a cat, Rumba, despite what Felo told you. And sometimes cats just have to go along with whatever life throws at them.”

Rumba, sleek and white, with eyes the color of duckweed, continued to glare at her, although the yowling dropped a decibel.

Maggie hadn’t wanted to leave Rumba with a stranger. Six weeks ago, when she packed her suitcases and loaded her
car, she had considered leaving Rumba with Felo, in the cat’s familiar home, until she was settled somewhere. But Felo, whom Rumba adored, might have refused to give her back. Instead, Maggie had left Rumba with the mother of a friend, who liked cats, but liked to travel, too. Mrs. Sanchez had been glad for a temporary companion.

The cat was clearly Maggie’s. A year before she and Felo moved in together, Maggie had found Rumba, a pathetic tuft of white fur, in the burned-out shell of a drug house and nursed her back to health with an eyedropper and unstinting devotion. But in the four years she and Felo had shared a home, Rumba had extended her aloof feline affection to him, as well. Maggie supposed once she and Felo were able to have a civil conversation, she would grant him visiting rights. It seemed cruel to remove the cat from his life the way she had removed herself.

“You’ll like living near the beach,” Maggie said, although she had no plans to let Rumba out of the house to chase seagulls. “And my mother will probably bake you a pie, something with tuna and hard-boiled eggs. She’ll come up with a winner.”

Maggie smiled just a little at that. During her childhood, any disaster had rated one of Wanda’s pies. Maggie’s mother was a practitioner of pie therapy. Strawberry pie on the day Maggie came home from school with a sprained ankle. Chocolate meringue the day Junior was sent home with lice—but only after Wanda had fiercely scrubbed his head, of course, and given him a crew cut. In the years that followed, every time her scalp itched, Maggie had been terrified her own auburn hair would be quickly reduced to stubble.

“We had key lime pie for the most special occasions,” she said out loud, because the cat had started yowling again.
“Sweet potato pecan or walnut chocolate chip when family got together on holidays. Lemon pie as light as clouds, anchored by slices of candied lemon. Luscious Lemon. That one’s still my favorite.”

Maggie realized how silly all this must sound. She could hardly believe she had been reduced to discussing pie with a cat. She’d never imagined that someday her mother would own her very own pie shop. And she had certainly never imagined that she would become Wanda’s assistant.

“You’ve met my mother,” she told Rumba. “Maybe you didn’t notice she and I are related, but we are. She’s a character, and she’ll take some getting used to. She has a dog, a greyhound named Chase. She rescued him, the way I rescued you. Maybe you two can be friends.

“And you already like my father,” she went on. “You sat on his lap last time he visited. Felo and I were surprised.”

She could think his name, but saying it out loud? Harder. Much harder.

“I don’t know how long we’ll be staying,” she said, starting a new topic. “Mom needs an assistant, and Lord knows, nobody else would know better how to work with her. We’ll get things stabilized there, then I’ll look for something more up my alley.”

The problem, of course, was that she had no idea what that might be, which was why she had volunteered to help her mother for a while.

She had always wanted to be a cop. From the moment she understood what her father did to support his little family, she had wanted to follow suit. Her mother had discouraged her, believing one cop in a family was plenty. Maggie had understood her mother’s fears, even as she quietly worked around them.

At the University of Miami she had taken a double major in criminology and psychology, all the while knowing that both would serve her well when she applied for the force. She had also been a competitive swimmer, to stay fit and ready. She had talked to her father’s friends, sought relevant summer jobs, made contacts.