Death by Marriage (7 page)

I made it to the Farmer’s Market on the old Tamiami Trail five minutes before it closed. In addition to an impressive array of locally grown vegies, they make their own gator jerky. It’s a taste I’ve never acquired, but Scott likes it, and even if I hadn’t wanted to ask him some questions, I would have bought the jerky. He’d had a tough night and deserved a treat.

But when I pulled
into the driveway, Scott’s red ’
06 Vette was noticeably absent. Mom, never one to favor one child over another, had given it to him the year she helped me establish DreamWear. Scott loved that car, though why a guy built like a Viking warrior would want to compress himself into a space the size of a shoebox was beyond me. It wasn’t as if Scott needed a Vette as a chick magnet. Far from it. For his sixteenth birthday I’d glued pink ribbons to an aluminum baseball bat and wrapped it up with a can of skunk spray. I’d added a card telling him he was never going to make it through high school without these added bits of chick deterrent.

We’d all laughed about it at the time, but the truth was, he’d have been better off if he’d actually used them.

I took one last look at Scott’s apartment over the detached garage before starting up the brick path to the back door. I’d lived here for as long as I could remember, but somehow, today, the beauty of it leaped at me. Perhaps, after an overdose of harsh reality the past twenty hours, I needed a generous dollop from the other side of the scales.

Our house might not qualify as a mansion by the standards of Palm Beach or Miami, not even by some of the sprawling McMansions built in Sarasota over the last twenty years, but for a gulf-front retirement town built from scratch back in the nineteen-twenties, the Wallaces’ three-story pink stucco with red-tiled roof was the cat’s meow. Nothing but the best for the railroad executives who started it all. And saw it slip through their fingers during the Great Depression.

The landscaping around our house on Royal Palm Drive was elaborate when it was built.
Ninety
years later, it could only be called lush. In the front, a giant live oak and its companion magnolia sheltered the house from the street. The back yard was a mass of greenery, including orange, grapefruit, and avocado trees. Scott swore the avocado deliberately dropped its fat fruit onto his roof like a thunderclap in the middle of the night just to give him a hard time. The backyard was fenced, with orange trumpet vine, yellow alamondon, and hot pink bougainvillea providing a riot of color against the coral pink stucco wall that matched the house.

Also scattered along the
fence
was an amazing variety of hibiscuses, with azaleas tucked into sheltered corners. In the back, along the south wall, a staghorn fern crawled up one of the original slash pines that hadn’t been cleared when Golden Beach moved off the drawing boards and into reality. Nestled between the pine and a giant split-leaf philodendron was an old-fashioned wooden bench swing, shaded to the point of obscurity by the trees and plants around it.

I’d spent a lot of time in that swing as a child, as a teen, as a black-haired gypsy trying to co-exist in a world of sun-streaked blonds with names like Bubba, Bo, Mary Sue, and Betty Jane. The odd thing was, I was more intellectually suited to my parents than Scott was. When he was nine, he’d asked if he was adopted too. Heart-wrenching maybe, but not too surprising from a boy whose father, mother, and older sister loved to learn, while Scott was a throwback to the era of knights in shining armor or maybe the barbarian hordes that overran Europe, taking the Roman Empire with them. Every last warrior well-muscled and happily illiterate. Which didn’t mean they weren’t intelligent. They simply had the right skill set for their day and age. In the twelfth century Scott would have been the King’s Champion.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t the twelfth century. Mom was a graduate of the University of Florida at Gainesville; my father, a History Professor at New College. The small state-funded college in Sarasota—Florida’s answer to the Ivy League—was frequently number one on the list of the best college “buys” in the country. A reputation well-deserved. We lost Dad two years ago to a surprise cancer that was unstoppable, but we’d had him long enough to benefit greatly from his gentle humor, sharp wit, and good old-fashioned common sense. No wonder I was so naive when I went off to college, and still trusting when I charged off to New York. Growing up with the constant love and support of family, and surrounded by the peaceful ambiance of Golden Beach, it wasn’t surprising I didn’t recognize evil, even when it wormed its way right into my bed.

Tonight it was Crystal’s turn to cook. She’d gotten up early this morning and popped all the ingredients for a pot roast with vegies into a crockpot.
Voilà
! Instant supper. Mom had called to say she had a late house showing, rare on a Saturday afternoon. Since this was the age of the cellphone, we had the table set and I was pouring scotch onto a tumbler full of ice cubes when she walked through the door. She tossed her purse onto a marquetry side table in the foyer and grabbed the glass.

“Bless you!” Mom said, and drained half the scotch in one swallow. Jo—short for Jo-Ann—Wallace, is an inch or so shorter than I am, but she makes up for it in attitude. Or maybe it’s what they called “carriage” back in the nineteenth century. That thing where girls had to walk around with books on their heads so they’d learn to stand up straight and hold their heads high. Mom sails through life like a Coast Guard cutter after drug smugglers. She inherited a small-time real estate business, which my grandfather ran more like a hobby, and skyrocketed it into the top agency in Sarasota County, heavily aided by advertising as Jo Wallace Real Estate in an era when Gulfcoast women did not dabble in real estate or any profession except teacher, librarian, nurse, and hair-stylist. Many a customer had been shocked to discover “Jo” was female. But, in the end, it hadn’t kept them from buying.

No one has ever seen a gray hair on Mom’s head. It’s as beautifully sandy blonde as it was when I was a child, shaped into vaguely tousled designer perfection by the owner/operator of Beauty Is Us, Golden Beach’s finest salon. She may have put on a pound or five, but she still looks as if she belongs on a runway instead of fighting the daily cut-throat battle of real estate in Golden Beach. Whether wearing a pantsuit, skirt suit, or tailored dress, Mom’s the ultimate model of a professional businesswoman, complete with unchipped manicure and pedicure.

“Pot roast,” Mom chortled, taking her place at the head of the table. “Crystal, you are a treasure.”

Crystal beamed. She needed that, I realized, afte
r the day we’d had.

Mom looked up, fork poised halfway to her mouth. Concern clouded her sharp eyes. “Scott is late. Don’t tell me there was another emergency.”

“I’m not sure he went to work,” I said, squirming. “I had a call from Zack Stevens about one o’clock asking if I knew where he was.” Zack managed the marina at the jetties, and he had added with more than a hint of annoyance that Jeb Brannigan was working his ass off trying to keep up with distress calls from weekend boaters.

“Oh.” One word that concealed a hundred meanings. Mom loved Scott, but she’d given up her illusions years ago. Someday Scott might grow up. Evidentl
y, it wasn’t going to be today.

I could tell Mom shared my bad feeling about his absence. After last night, Scott needed support from his family, and I had my doubts about the kind of sympathy he might be getting elsewhere. Okay, so where Scott is concerned, I tend to hover. Unfortunately, he’d never given us any reason not to.

After supper I cleaned up, while Mom went off to put her day’s notes into the computer and Crystal did her laundry. Then I climbed the stairs to the third floor. Saturday night in Golden Beach and I had a date in the attic with Randi Wolff. It’s not quite an attic. Half the third floor was a gloomy attic; the other half had been designed for two bedrooms and a bath for live-in “help,” an era that was gone in less than a decade after the house was built. Until the birth of DreamWear, the rooms had remained empty.

To make a workshop, we’d taken out the wall between the two bedrooms and added a large skylight. I had a design table, a cutting table, and a sewing machine table, surrounded by cabinets along all four walls. Mom and I had also tackled nearly fifty years of accumulated Wallace discards in the attic across the hall. We kept the historical items, such as old photos and weddings dresses, sold the unwanted antiques to Peter Koonce, and made room for rolling racks of costumes under construction, costumes awaiting repair, or costumes that should be trashed but I just didn’t have the heart to do it.

To top it all off, Mom gifted me with a dormer window overlooking the backyard. It was wide enough to accommodate my sewing machine table, giving me a terrific view twenty-four/seven. Well, maybe not tonight. The stars were always at their most brilliant in the winter, but I’d have to turn out the lights to see them. And I had too much work to do to take time out for star-gazing. But first . . .

I called the pool hall on my cellphone. No Scott, Stan told me. Hadn’t seen him for a coupla days. I tried Bud’s Snook Shack, out on the Arcadia River at the eastern edge of town. Scott Wallace? Bud had heard about last night, but hadn’t seen Scott for three or four days.

That was it. Any more calls and Scott would go postal about my checking up on him. I was being silly, turning feminine freakoid over nothing. This was far from the first night Scott had failed to appear for supper. It was just that . . . well . . . it’s not like he pulled mutilated bodies out of the Intracoastal canal every night of the week.

I settled down to a job for my Designer Hat Number Three. I called this branch of the business “Semi-Randi.” For DreamWear I mostly went for the authentic look. Outfits that looked as if they really might have been worn by Medieval Knights, Fair Maidens, Robin Hood and his Merrie Men, or by seventeenth century pirates and their female companions. I designed for SCA members, for heaven’s sake, and you couldn’t get a more demanding clientele than the members of the Society for Creative Anachronism. I mean, those guys are authenticity Nazis.

But my Semi-Randi designs were for a catalog business that specialized in outfits for those who wanted sexy, slinky, provocative, slit-down-to-
there
or slit up to where the sun don’t shine—while keeping the essentials covered. Which was what made these designs Semi-Randi instead of full-out Erotic Designs by Randi Wolff. At the moment I was working on a female pirate outfit that was going to end up looking a bit like the French Maid Mrs. Santa. Lots of red, but with black trim instead of white, and black front lacing that allowed the bouffant red “silk” mini-dress to pouf out in all the right places.

I sketched in a few more layers of see-thru red fabric on the short skirt, added a black scarf set at a rakish angle on the drawing’s head. I pursed my lips, then added a row of gold coins to each end of the scarf. Oh, yeah. The buyer for the catalog company was going to love it.

I glanced at the wall clock above the design table. Eleven-forty. A natural night-owl, why was I so tired? And it all rushed back. Martin Kellerman. Scott. Maybe three hours sleep last night. Time to call it a night.

My bedroom is a corner room on the second floor, with views of the backyard and the driveway. Scott’s Vette still wasn’t there. We had a two-car garage, but only Mom got to put her car inside. The other garage space was taken up by the ride-on mower and full panoply of garden equipment. Whenever Mom got fed up with a particularly difficult customer, she whacked the stuffing out of the weeds and other invasive species in the backyard. Since Golden Beach real estate customers were not known for their unfailing amiability, the backyard looked like we were bucking for space in
Better Homes & Gardens
. So far Mom hadn’t hacked up my old swing, but I always feared that day was coming.

I make good money designing nightwear for my Randi and Semi-Randi lines, but for myself, I tend to grab my nightgowns off the rack at Target. It was Florida in January, however, and I was sleeping alone. Again. I slipped a full-length, long-sleeved cotton nightgown over my head. Embroidered with pink flowers, it came straight out of the Smithsonian catalog’s elegant imitation nineteenth century nightwear. So I’m a wuss. After all, there was no one to see my Mother Hubbard but me.

I pulled up the covers and sank into sleep like a rock plunging into the depths of a pond.

At some point my dreams got a bit scary—Martin Kellerman dripping blood instead of water as his remains were hoisted onto the diving platform. And there was a noise that wouldn’t go away. The dream faded and I surfaced to my cellphone ringing so insistently I swear I could hearing it flopping across my bedtable. The glowing numbers on my digital alarm read 2:45.

Phone. 2:45. Oh, God!

“Hallo,” I mumbled, still not quite awake.

“Laura Wallace?”

“Yes.” I hadn’t been Laura Wallace for a very long time. Even my mother had adjusted, but . . .

“This is Deputy Morrison of the Sheriff’s Department. “We picked up your brother Scott for DUI.”
Thank you, Lord
! Yes, it was awful, but I’d been afraid of so much worse. I heard noise in the background. “He wants to talk to you,” the deputy said.

“Laurie, you can’t tell mom. Promise me you won’t tell mom!” Drunk enough to call me Laurie for the first time in more than a decade, but not too drunk to be beg me to keep his latest transgression to myself.