Birds of Prey : Previously Copub Sequel to the Hour of the Hunter (9780061739101) (34 page)

“What for?” I asked.

“For my nasty comment this morning. You were interfering in my family, and I'm interfering in yours. We deserve each other.”

“Apology accepted,” I said. “But speaking of families, that reminds me. There's a voice-mail message from your daughter.”

“From Melissa?” Naomi asked eagerly. “You mean she actually called me back?”

“It wasn't a very nice message,” I cautioned. “I saved it for you, but you may not want to listen to it.”

“Let me guess. She told me to go to hell.”

“More or less.”

“You're right. I don't need to listen to it.”

“Why does she hate you so much?”

“She thinks that if I hadn't divorced her father—who, it turns out isn't her father anyway—he wouldn't have gotten sick and died.”

“Didn't I understand you to say that Gary died of liver cancer?”

“Right. Missy maintains that if he had still been at home with us when he first became ill, he might have seen a doctor sooner and maybe they would have caught the cancer in time to do something about it—that with early detection they might have saved him. She thinks his death is all my fault,” Naomi added.

“But isn't liver cancer incurable?”

“Pretty much,” Naomi said quietly. “At least that's what I was told.”

“So what Melissa thinks isn't even logical. It doesn't make sense.”

“Who says teenagers have to make sense?”

There was no arguing with that. “I'm sorry,” I said.

“Me, too,” Naomi agreed with a sigh. “And you're right. I'm not going to listen to that message. All it would do is make me feel worse than I already do.”

She kicked off her own shoes and stretched out on her bed. Lying there side by side with our sock-covered toes pointing up at the ceiling, I felt a rare moment of intimacy. Naomi and I were together without really being together, and yet we understood one another in a way I couldn't possibly have explained to a third party.

“What are we going to do about dinner tonight?” I asked. “Order from Room Service again?”

“Beverly and Lars invited us to join them and Claire and Florence during the first seating. I hope you don't mind, but I told her fine. For one thing, they eat in the other dining room. Beverly said she'd clear it with their maître d'. I just don't have what it takes to go back and face down Sharon and Virginia.”

“It's all right with me. Besides,” I added, “I know how Beverly is. Once she gets an idea into her head, there's no stopping her.”

“It's lobster night,” Naomi informed me after a while. “Semi-formal instead of formal.”

“So I don't need to haul out my tux.”

“No,” Naomi said. “But you looked quite handsome in it.”

“Thanks,” I said grudgingly. There's nothing like a compliment to turn any right-thinking American male into your basic monosyllabic kind of guy.

“And there's one other thing,” Naomi added warily.

“What's that?”

“Beverly signed us up for the tango contest.”

I sat up in bed. “She what?”

“She entered our names for the first-seating tango contest in the Twilight Lounge. It starts at five o'clock. She said you'd won one before, years ago. She asked if I could tango, and I told her some. She says she's sure we'll do just fine.” Naomi paused. “Is that true, by the way?” she continued. “Did you really win one in your youth?”

“It's true,” I admitted reluctantly. “A girl from my dancing class, Denise Hughart, I think, and I were chosen to represent Rose Toledo's Dance Studio at a citywide youth dance contest at the bathhouse on Greenlake the summer I graduated from eighth grade. We won, and a picture of Denise and me showed up in the local section of the
Seattle Times
.”

My family history isn't something I usually talk about with relative strangers. It hurts too much. But Naomi Pepper was dealing with her own fractured family relationships, so I doubted she'd find mine all that shocking or unusual. After all, in her own way, Naomi was as much of an unwed mother as my own mother had been.

“My parents never married,” I admitted after a slight hesitation. “He was a sailor over at Bremerton. They were engaged to be married, but my father was killed in a motorcycle accident before they had a chance to tie the knot. When I made my presence known a few weeks after my father's death, it caused a big family rift. My grandfather and namesake, Jonas Piedmont, immediately disowned both my mother and me. She and her parents were estranged the whole time I was growing up. In fact, I didn't even meet Beverly or my biological grandfather until just a few years ago—long after my mother's death and just before my grandfather died as well.”

I glanced over at Naomi. Instead of looking at me, she was staring up at the ceiling. Somehow the fact that she wasn't looking directly at me made it easier for me to continue.

“My grandfather forbade my grandmother to have any contact with my mother or with me, but the whole time I was growing up, Beverly kept a scrapbook that included every mention of me that made it into the newspapers—from my truncated career in Cub Scouts and my few good mentions in Ballard High School sports, right on through my crime-fighting exploits at the Seattle PD. When I finally reestablished contact with my grandparents, the very existence of that scrapbook helped bind over some long-festering wounds. No doubt that picture of me as a gangly-legged tango winner made it into Beverly's collection.”

“So that's where your initials come from?” Naomi asked. “From your mother's father?”

I nodded. “The J. P. part comes from him, from Jonas Piedmont.”

“And Beaumont?”

“I was named after Beaumont, Texas, my father's hometown. I don't know anything more about my father than just that—where he was from. I don't even know his name. On the father line of my birth certificate all it says is ‘deceased.' ”

“Don't you wonder about him sometimes—about what he was like and what his family was like?”

“Some,” I admitted, “but not enough that I've ever done anything about it.”

“And what about your dance partner? Whatever happened to her?”

“Denise? I don't know. When school started that fall, I don't remember her showing up at Ballard High School. Once we won the contest, she just dropped out of sight.”

After that we were quiet for some time. I appreciated it that Naomi didn't find it necessary to say anything more. Finally, with a groan, I heaved myself off the bed.

“Where are you going?” Naomi asked. “We still have the better part of an hour to go. If we wanted, we could probably even grab a nap.”

“I don't need a nap,” I told her. “What I need is more Advil. If I'm going to end up in a tango contest tonight, I'd better have plenty of painkillers in my system before I put my shoes back on. I remember how to do the tango, but when I won that trophy, I was a whole lot younger than I am now. My back and feet were younger, too, and I didn't have a broken toe, either.”

“Come on,” Naomi said. “It won't be that bad.”

“Are you kidding? By the time we finish, I'll be lucky if they don't end up sticking me in a full body cast.”

A
FTER DOWNING
two more Advil, I came back to bed and lay down again. Naomi was quiet for such a long time that I assumed she had taken her own advice and fallen asleep. I very nearly did the same thing.

“Thank you for letting me stay here,” Naomi said. Her voice roused me out of a doze.

“You're welcome. What was I supposed to do—leave you to sleep outside on the deck? This is Alaska, after all. It's cold and wet out there.”

“What was happening was a whole lot worse than being cold and wet,” she said. “I was feeling as though the whole world had turned against me—everyone but you. Even when you suspected me of killing Margaret—even when you found out about what had happened between Harrison and me—you still treated me like a decent human being. Your grandmother's got every right to be proud of you.”

I realized then that Naomi was right. Somehow the ground between us had shifted. I no longer regarded her as a suspect in whatever it was that had happened to Margaret Featherman. And maybe, in that respect, I was simply following Beverly Jenssen's lead. No matter what anyone else said or thought about Naomi Pepper—including derogatory opinions from at least two of her former friends—my grandmother regarded the woman as the genuine article. Good enough to enter a dance contest with, anyway.

At four-thirty Naomi and I didn't exactly bounce out of bed, but we did get up. Naomi took her clothes and disappeared into the bathroom to finish drying her hair and dressing while I made do with the closet and the mirror over the dressing table. At four-fifty, with me still limping slightly, we appeared at the entrance to the Twilight Lounge, where Lars and Beverly Jenssen, along with the Wakefield girls, had commandeered a front-and-center table.

In the end it wasn't much of a contest. All of the other entrants were far older than Naomi and I were. It was clear that many of them had danced with each other for years. Nonetheless, my Advil seemed to kick in, and I danced with only the slightest hitch in my get-along due to my injured toe. But it wasn't only the Advil that decided the contest's final outcome.

As Naomi and I danced together, something magical happened. Having a pair of thirteen- and fourteen-year-old virgins dance the tango is truly casting pearls before swine. When I danced with Denise Whatever-Her-Name-Was, I had no idea about what went on in the world or in life. The birds and bees were still pretty much a mystery to me. Back then I didn't have the first clue about women and what made them tick. By the time I danced the tango with Naomi Pepper, I knew a lot more than I did at fourteen, and so did she. When our hands touched, the air around us seemed charged with electricity. When our bodies met, it was with so much implied urgency and promise that it took my breath away. It also gave me an astonishing hard-on.

When the judges announced that Naomi and I were the winners, Naomi threw her arms around my neck and planted a triumphant smooch on my lips before we went up on stage to retrieve our trophy—a matched pair of Starfire Cruises coffee mugs. Then we had to stand, posing and smiling, while the ship's photographer did his
Starfire Breeze
photo-op duty.

As we filed out of the Twilight Lounge and headed for the dining room, Lars sidled up beside me. His color was better than it had been earlier. He seemed more like himself.

“I t'ink that girl likes you,” he said, giving me one of his familiar lopsided grins. “Ya sure, I t'ink she likes you a lot.”

When they opened the doors, we walked into the Regal Dining Room with Lars and Beverly leading the way. Claire and Florence insisted that we put our prizes in the center of a table set for six. I wondered what Beverly and Lars had done with their young whippersnapper tablemates who had been married a mere forty years. There was no sign of them.

Beverly had managed to whip the wait staff into shape. They graciously served a congratulatory and complimentary bottle of champagne for the ladies. I ordered a bottle of non-alcoholic champagne for Lars and me to share. That way, when it came time for the obligatory toast, no one had to feel left out.

Lobster with jasmine rice. Ravioli with a creamy sun-dried tomato sauce. I'm sure the food was wonderful, but I have to say I don't remember how any of it tasted. I was, however, painfully aware of Naomi Pepper's smiling presence next to me and of the disturbing effect she was having on my body. Every once in a while, I'd catch her looking at me, too. She appeared totally at ease, but I wondered if my face reflected my own inner turmoil.

Somewhere in the middle of that damned tango contest, lightning had struck, and I didn't know what the hell to do about it. The problem was, I couldn't tell from the discreet glances Naomi cast in my direction if the same thing had happened to her or if what I was feeling was totally one-sided.

During the pause between the entrée and dessert, I excused myself. Under the pretext of using the rest room, I hurried instead to the gift shop. There, feeling like a gawky, awkward teenager, I purchased a package of prophylactics. The two young women behind the counter were both younger than my daughter Kelly. It was one of those times when it would have been nice to be able to pay for my shipboard purchases in nameless, anonymous cash, but that's not the way cruise-ship accounting works. All purchases are charged to the room and then paid for at the time of departure from the ship. Refusing the simpering clerk's offer of a bag, I stuffed my purchase into my pocket and returned to the darkened dining room just in time for the cherries jubilee parade.

When I got back to the table, I found I had barely been missed. Lars was in the middle of one of his long-winded yarns. “Ya, sure,” he said. “We were on old Wally Torgesen's
Sea Wind
back then. We had sold off all our fish and had eight days to blow in Sitka before the next trip. Late one night somebody came up with a brainy idea. We filled the fish hold full of old tires and sailed them over to Kruzof Island. We put in just north of Cape Edgecumbe and off-loaded all the tires. Then we hauled them up the side of Mount Edgecumbe to the crater.