Cry Uncle (16 page)

AS SOON AS HE HEARD the
screen door clap shut, he rose from the table and hurried to the
front door. Through the metal mesh he watched her saunter across
the dewy lawn.
She’s too
thin
, he told himself.
She lacks curves
.

But she
did
have curves, a slight flare to her
hips, a nicely understated roundness to her bottom, an intriguing
width at her shoulders. Her hair caught the morning sunlight and
glittered with hints of silver and gold. Her arms were as graceful
as a dancer’s.

He wanted to be dancing with
her right now. The way they’d danced last night to
Stand By Me
. The way
they’d danced in the front hall, the way their lips had danced, and
their tongues, and their hips. He wanted his wife in his
bed.

He felt a painful tug in his groin and
cursed. Last night would have been perfect. They’d had the entire
house to themselves. No five-year-old twerp to consider, no snotty
little kid to startle them awake at the crack of dawn, no nosy
young miss to ask how come Pamela hadn’t spent the night in her own
room. It would have been one of the most fantastic nights in Joe’s
life—and maybe Pam’s, too.

Instead, he’d spent the night kicking his
blanket, punching his pillow, engaging in all manner of bed-linen
violence in a futile attempt to burn off what could be burned off
only one way—and that way required a man and a woman and no
violence whatsoever.

Joe had exercised his
scruples last night. What amazed him was that he actually had
scruples to exercise. He didn’t use to be bothered by right and
wrong and all that. Sure, he had always tried to avoid bruising a
woman’s ego, and he was invariably a good boy when it came to
protection, but the rest of it, the
shouldn’t’s
and
mustn’t’s
... When had he developed a
sense of morality?

The day Lizard had become his responsibility,
that was when.

How ironic that it was Lizard’s fault he was
suddenly hung up on setting a good example, behaving properly,
toeing the line. If it weren’t for the brat, he would have had no
compunctions about seducing Pam last night.

But if it weren’t for the brat, Pamela
wouldn’t have become a part of his life.

He watched until she was no longer visible.
Abandoning the door, he tried to erase the image of her from his
mind, her long, elegant strides, her fair hair, the curves of her
not-too-curvaceous body.

Tried to, but failed. Pamela was his wife,
and no matter how much he’d like not to be tempted by her, she was
going to be a full-time, under-his-roof temptation for quite some
time.

Blame it on Lizard, he thought, although he
felt pretty damned guilty blaming the kid for his own wayward
passion. It was Lizard’s fault he’d had to get married. But it was
his own fault for choosing Pamela Hayes as his wife.

Chapter Seven

PAMELA SHOULD HAVE expected Birdie’s house to
be strange. Any woman who attended a wedding dressed in feathers
would be likely to live in a peculiar house.

Then again, it had been a peculiar wedding.
And Lizard was a peculiar child, with a peculiar name. Of course
she would have a peculiar baby-sitter.

Birdie answered the door wearing a flowing
caftan printed with a tropical bird pattern. Her wooden-bead
earrings were long enough to brush her shoulders, and silver bangle
bracelets were stacked several inches deep on each forearm. When
she beckoned Pamela into her house, the metal loops clanked,
resembling the sound of dragging chains in a bad horror movie.

Enhancing the spooky mood, the angular
hallway was lit only by a few candles which lent the smell of hot
paraffin to the air. Eerie paintings of brightly colored frogs
adorned the walls. The floor was covered with braided straw rugs.
If a candle fell over, Pamela imagined the entire building would
incinerate in under a minute.

“
We’re making something,”
Birdie said vaguely, leading Pamela through the dim hall and into a
kitchen too cramped and narrow to hold a table. The window above
the sink looked out onto another room. Pamela figured that at one
time the sink had stood against an outer wall. The room beyond
might at one time have been a porch, since it featured a floor of
painted concrete, and it seemed to be on a slightly lower level
than the kitchen.

Through the smudged pane of glass she spotted
Lizard kneeling on a chair, kneading a pink, doughy substance. If
Pamela were an optimist, she’d assume it was modeling clay. But
given its color—and everything else she’d learned about Joe’s
niece—she suspected that whatever the stuff was, Lizard was
eventually going to eat it.

“
Has she had breakfast yet?”
Pamela asked Birdie, speaking in a whisper even though the child
seemed totally oblivious to the two women spying on her through the
window.

“
She ate.” Birdie eyed
Pamela speculatively. “You and Joe, everything okay?”

“
Everything’s fine,” Pamela
lied, wondering whether as a Boo Doo Chief Birdie could read her
mind. “Thanks for keeping Lizard overnight.”

“
Lizard and I, we’re pals.
You want tea?”

“
No, thanks.” Pamela took a
minute to survey the room where Lizard was playing with the pink
dough. On the far end of the room was another door, leading to
another room. “This is an unusual house,” she said
tactfully.

Birdie shrugged, her voluminous dress
billowing in an aftershock. “Joe.”

“
Joe?”

“
He put it
together.”

“
He did?” Pamela glanced up
at the beamed ceiling, the two rickety steps leading from the
kitchen into another hallway, the plank floor and luridly painted
cabinets. “It’s awfully eclectic.”

Birdie’s dark eyes narrowed on Pamela. They
were perfect for someone named Birdie—sharp, omniscient, leaving
Pamela with the impression that she was being observed from above,
even though Birdie was in fact shorter than her. If Birdie were
truly a bird, she would be a hawk, or perhaps something colorfully
exotic, like a mina. Certainly not a cute little hummingbird or a
domesticated blue parakeet.

“
Eclectic
,” the older woman enunciated slowly. “I don’t know what that
means. I know
awful
.”

“
I didn’t say your house was
awful,” Pamela clarified. And really, it wasn’t. Just strange, with
rooms tacked on here and there, floors on different levels and
misplaced windows. There was something phantasmagorical about the
place, as if it were a carnival fun house.

Birdie shrugged again. “It is awful. But me,
I don’t care.”

“
It’s
not
awful,” Pamela argued. As an
architect, she viewed a building like this not as a disaster but as
a challenge, a puzzle to be solved. “Did Joe really build
it?”

“
No. He put it together. He
fixes it. Used to be, it was falling down. He propped and patched
and painted. A good man, that husband of yours. You take good care
of him.”

“
I’ll certainly try.”
Refusing to dwell on the subject of her wifely duties to that good
husband of hers, Pamela returned her attention to the house. “Mind
if I look around?”

“
Sure, you look around. Just
don’t step on the animals.”

Pamela wasn’t sure she wanted to know what
sort of pets a woman like Birdie would keep. Spiders for her voodoo
activities? Lambs for ritual slaughter? Snakes so Lizard would have
some of her own species to cavort with?

Moving cautiously, Pamela left the kitchen
for the crooked hallway. The floor dipped in one part, apparently
following the contours of the earth beneath it. The hall veered
ninety degrees and ended in a small, trapezoid-shaped sitting room
which a small army of cats currently occupied. On the other side of
the sitting room, a door led to a bedroom with a cot against one
wall and an abundance of toys on the floor. Lizard’s room, Pamela
guessed.

Turning, she found Birdie lurking behind her,
a tiger-striped kitten cupped in her palm and her hard, dark eyes
observing Pamela. Her face was ageless, but her hands showed the
ravages of time, her fingers bony and her knuckles knobby. The
kitten didn’t seem to mind; it curled contentedly in her palm and
closed its eyes as Birdie scratched behind its ears.

“
I don’t know if you were
aware of it,” Pamela said, watching Birdie as intently as Birdie
watched her, “but I’m an architect.”

“
Legos,” Birdie confirmed.
“Lizard told me.”

“
Actually—” Pamela smiled
“—I don’t work with Legos. I build buildings. More precisely, I
design them. But I do know a bit about construction. I’m just
thinking...” She weighed the older woman’s silence, wondering if
what she was about to propose would offend her. “Your house has an
awful lot of potential.”

“
Potential
I don’t understand.
Awful
, I know that word.”

Pamela swallowed a laugh. “Potential means,
well, something like raw ingredients. A house like this... If you
opened a few walls, widened the hallways, brought more natural
light into the rooms—it would really brighten the place up. And
instead of all these tiny cubicles, you’d have wide-open spaces,
with flow and cross ventilation and sunlight and...” She faltered,
unable to interpret Birdie’s opaque expression. “What I’m trying to
say,” she concluded humbly, “is that it’s a wonderful house, an
architect’s dream.”

“
You dream of a house like
this?” Birdie snorted. Even the kitten in her hand seemed to
snort.

“
Well, not exactly, but...”
The woman’s toothy grin heartened Pamela. “It’s just that I’ve
always had a career, but now I’m married and living here in Key
West, and I’m wondering what I’m going to do with my time while
Joe’s at the bar and Lizard is with you. What I’m thinking is, I
could renovate your house.”

Birdie frowned. “Why?”

“
To make it brighter and
easier for you to live in,” Pamela explained. “I could do that for
you, if you’d like.”
Please,
she implored silently.
Please let me do this. For me if not for you.
She needed something to keep her busy. If she
didn’t come up with an activity to absorb her time and energy, she
would wind up spending that time and energy on Jonas Brenner. If
she didn’t work, thoughts of Joe would take over, fantasies of him,
memories of his mouth on hers. Nature abhorred a vacuum, and if she
didn’t find something to fill the vacuum, Jonas and his wild little
niece were going to fill it.

And once they did, Pamela would be in big
trouble.

How much safer to pursue a project—and
Birdie’s house was ideal. Pamela could simplify the maze of rooms,
make the space more efficient and cheerful, and have something
other than Joe to think about. That the work would benefit Pamela
was clear, but it would benefit Birdie, too. The woman was getting
on in years. Her hands were already arthritic; her hips couldn’t be
far behind. How was she going to navigate all the uneven hallways
and steps in another decade?

“
I’d do it for free,” Pamela
added. “How about if I just draw up some sketches and you can look
them over and tell me what you think.”

Birdie chuckled and shook her head. “I like
you, Pamela,” she declared. “Another crazy bird, that’s you. No
wonder Joe loves you.”

Pamela was too diplomatic to correct Birdie’s
misperception of their marriage. “I don’t think I’m such a crazy
bird,” she said amiably.

“
Oh, yes.” Birdie appraised
her, then nodded. “A loon, maybe.”

“
Joe said I was a swan,”
Pamela murmured, although she had to admit he’d said that a long
time ago. After her behavior last night, he probably thought she
was a chicken.

“
Another crazy bird, like
me, like Lizard. like Joe. You want to fix my house, be my guest.
Joe is always fixing it, and now you’re fixing it. You and he,
you’re two of a kind.”

“
I’m not so sure of that,”
Pamela said quickly. She didn’t want to think of herself and Joe as
being two of anything.

Again Birdie’s eyes took on an annoyingly
wise look. “Oh, yes. Two of a kind, you and Joe. Birds of a
feather.”

Birdbrains, is more like
it,
Pamela thought. “We’re really not that
much alike—”

“
If it makes you happy to
fix my house, go ahead.” Birdie tossed the kitten onto an old
armchair with clawed, frayed upholstery and left the room, Pamela
at her heels. “For myself, I don’t care. But if you’re happy,
you’ll make Joe happy, and then Lizard will be happy. And that I
care about. So make yourself happy, and then everyone else will be
happy.” They had reached the enclosed porch, where Lizard hunched
over the table, shaping her dough into gooey pink balls and then
flattening them into pancakes with her fist. “Maybe Lizard can help
you. She’s good with Legos.”

“
She’ll want to paint the
whole house pink,” Pamela warned.

“
I don’t want the outside
pink,” Birdie said.

“
I may not have to touch the
outside. I’ll just tear down some inner walls...” She gazed around
her, smiling at the prospect of digging in and making something out
of the ramshackle house. “I won’t do anything without your
approval. I’ll scribble some ideas on paper, and then—”