Fortunate Harbor (13 page)

As always, Palmetto Grove looked bleached, even wizened, by the sun. Waterfront houses and condos quickly gave way to cheaper developments with patchy yards, and strip mall traffic. Still, she supposed she was developing a different perspective
now that she had to worry about upkeep on five houses battered by the effects of sun and salt. These days she concentrated on riotously blooming bougainvillea and powderpuff, or happy kids playing on swing sets and vacant lot baseball diamonds.

Wanda pointed. “He turned right.”

“Saw him. Thanks.” Tracy turned right, too.

“Back way into town,” Wanda said. “We aren’t far from my shop.”

“I thought maybe he’d be going to Edward Statler’s, but he lives on the water. I checked out his house. You ought to see it.”

“He just turned again. You see?”

“I did.” Tracy made the turn, as well. The street was familiar, but for a moment, she couldn’t place it. Then it hit her.

“This is my Realtor’s street. The office is a block ahead on the right. Sessions Realtors: Homes of Distinction. Of course, these days it’s more like Homes of Foreclosure.”

“Slow down.
He
is.”

Tracy saw that CJ had indeed slowed and was, in fact, pulling up against the curb directly in front of Sessions Realtors.

“Park!”

She had already begun to pull into an empty space about half a block from where CJ had landed.

Wanda gave her a report. “He’s getting out. He’s walking around his car. He’s going into—”

“Sessions Realtors.” Tracy turned off the engine.

“How’d you choose this particular outfit when you were trying to sell the property?”

“They helped broker the original deal. Maribel Sessions called me Tracy Craimer until I thought I’d scream. I think she had a thing for CJ.”

She stopped and turned to look at Wanda. “You don’t think…”

Wanda was still staring out the window. “She got dandelion fluff hair and four-inch heels?”

Tracy’s head snapped front and center just in time to watch CJ close the door behind Maribel, who was wearing a white cocktail dress with a plunging neckline.

“No way.” She shook her head, but the vision of Maribel and CJ didn’t change.

“That’s got to be some party they’re going to,” Wanda said.

“What’s CJ doing with my Realtor?”

“Maybe it has something to do with all that sneaking around at Happiness Key.”

“He doesn’t own even one grain of sand on that key. It’s all mine.”

Wanda didn’t look convinced. “Are you going to follow them?”

Tracy considered, then reached for the key. “No, I’m going to stop by Gonzalo’s on the way home, and buy their extra-large sausage-and-mushroom pizza. You’re invited.”

“Thanks, but Ken’s going to be back for dinner. You’re sure you need a greasy, fattening pizza?”

“Don’t start on me, okay? These days, every man I know has a pretty blonde on his arm. After I eat the whole pizza, I’m going to bleach my hair.”

“You sound jealous to me.”

Tracy started the engine. CJ and Maribel were gone now, and no, she wasn’t jealous. She was just heart-deep lonely, but that sounded too pathetic to voice.

“There’s nothing wrong that pizza won’t cure,” she said, keeping her voice light. “Men come and men go, but pizza’s always there when you need it.”

“Not all that much fun cuddling up to one, though.”

“Maybe I’ll buy some ice cream, too. I think I have a coupon.”

“It sounds like you got a long night ahead of you. Drive slow on the way home so it starts a little later, okay?”

Tracy heard the sympathy in Wanda’s voice. It was funny how a little compassion took away the worst of the sting.

A few minutes later she pulled into Gonzalo’s parking lot. She sent Wanda a half smile. “I can hear you thinking. I’ll skip the ice cream.”

“Kenny loves Gonzalo’s. Why don’t we go in on a medium and eat at my place? Saves me from cooking tonight.”

“You’re trying to cheer me up, aren’t you?”

“Don’t you know me better than that?”

This time Tracy managed a full smile. “It’s working.”

“Well, don’t mention it. And I mean what I say. Don’t. Not to anybody.”

“Pizza’s on me,” Tracy said. “Let’s go see what we can dump on top of it.”

The more Wanda thought about everything she’d done, the more worried she became. Sure, buying the luncheonette hadn’t been nearly as expensive as it would have been a few years back. Her agent had assured her the price was a steal, considering the prime location. With the city doing all it could to beautify the central business district, even if Wanda decided she didn’t want to keep the place, she would probably sell at a profit.

The carpenter who’d built new storage shelves had been grateful for work and priced them accordingly. The plumber had done the same. Two friends of Ken’s had come in after work four nights running and painted the inside a creamy white. The entire population of Happiness Key had come in on a Sunday to paint the trim and baseboards Williamsburg blue.

Wanda had decided that since pie was so all-American, she would capitalize on the theme. She and Janya had stenciled red cherries and apples on the new white wooden tables, and the chairs had red cushions to coordinate with those on the counter
stools. Framed covers of old
Life
magazines were hanging in strategic spots

The narrow storefront had been given a fresh coat of pale blue paint, and Janya, Olivia and Lizzie had painted a mural of trees with assorted pies hanging from the limbs in between the windows and door. Janya had added Wanda’s Wonderful Pies over the windows in script and designed a similar logo for paper place mats. Between friends and discounts, Wanda had made out well. No, her biggest worry was that nobody would buy her pies. Nobody who didn’t know her and feel obligated, anyway.

On the Monday morning of her grand opening, she squinted at the bedside clock. Five o’clock. Wanda’s Wonderful Pies flung open its doors in just five hours, and she was worried there were still things she needed to do besides get all the pies finished and displayed.

Unfortunately, she wasn’t sure what those things were, and that worried her more. Even in the midst of a sunrise panic attack, she knew the place looked spiffy. The health inspector had complimented her on the shop’s appearance. He’d found a few problems, of course, but she had slapped a couple of coats of paint on the pegboard behind the stove, and raised the bottom shelf on a butcher-block table so it cleared the floor at the requisite height. She had gotten her permit on time.

“You get any sleep at all?” Ken turned over and flopped his hand onto her shoulder.

Wanda was sorry he was awake, since she preferred to worry alone. “Slept like a baby.”

He grunted. “A baby with colic. You tossed and turned all night long.”

Every morning Wanda pondered the unfairness of life. When he first woke up, Ken looked wonderful, hair mussed,
eyelids drooping, beard bristling. Somehow all that made him sexier. In comparison, every single morning she was scared spitless at the sight that greeted her in the bathroom mirror. She suspected more divorces occurred over this simple difference between men and women—something no psychologist ever seemed to take into account—than any other.

“I kept checking the clock,” she admitted.

“You set the alarm, didn’t you?”

“I was afraid it might not go off.”

“You set your cell phone, too.”

“That would be just the way. Set two and have ’em both malfunction. I guess I’ll feel better if everything’s ready earlier than later.”

“You go ahead. Better than holding yourself back.”

She leaned over and kissed his cheek. Any other morning she might have tried for more, but today, sex was the last thing on her mind. She would be baking pies in her head, and as sexy as pie was, thinking about it shouldn’t be anything but a prelude.

In the bathroom she avoided so much as a glance at herself and took a shower first. Still, when it was time to paint her drooping eyelids Shady Lady green, she wished she had used the money she’d spent on the shop for a face-lift. This morning she looked every one of her fifty-seven years.

Once her hair and makeup were done, she slipped quietly back into the bedroom and donned her new uniform She and Dana had decided on navy blue shirtwaist dresses covered by voluminous red-and-white-striped bib aprons with Wanda’s Wonderful Pies embroidered on them. Wanda fastened shiny earrings shaped like cherries in her earlobes. Tracy had found them, along with apples, and slices of limes and lemons. All
that shopping experience from Ms. Deloche’s former life in California was good for something.

Her last act before leaving the bedroom was to slip on comfortable white sneakers. She and Dana had left their Dancing Shrimp heels on the Dancing Shrimp stoop one day last week, just for fun.

By the time she got into the kitchen she was too worried to manage breakfast. She figured she was as ready as she was going to be. It was time to face the day.

She heard a noise behind her, whirled and saw that Ken had gotten up to see her off.

“Everybody at the station knows you’re opening today,” he said, after a yawn. “But I told them to take their time and stop in over the next week. You don’t want them descending all at once, or the other businesses on State Street will think you’re in trouble with the law.”

“There’ll always be a free cup of coffee for a PG cop. I’ll alert my neighbors, so they won’t think it’s a raid.”

“You got good advertising,” he said, as if he could read her insecurities, which, of course, he could.

Wanda had put expensive ads in the local daily and weekly papers. In exchange for pie and coffee, she had bribed nearby shopkeepers to let her post the pretty flyer Janya had designed; then she had paid three high school students to stand on street corners to give away more of them, complete with a discount coupon good all week. Most important, she had told everybody who worked at her busy beauty salon to pass on the word, which was probably the best advertising she’d done.

“There’s a lot more to this than I thought there’d be.” Wanda didn’t even try to smile. Ken knew her too well to be fooled.

“You’ve managed it like a pro, Wanda. Finding a good spot,
fixing it up, planning your menu, getting out the word. Now just go and make some great pies. Nobody does it better.”

She nodded. “Okay, then. Off I go.”

“Your feet aren’t moving.”

“Aren’t they?”

He enfolded her in his arms for just a moment; then he turned her and aimed her toward the front door. Chase, who was sleeping in his bed in the corner, lifted his head to see what the fuss was about.

“What if I made too many pies?” she wailed. “What if I didn’t make enough?”

“If you didn’t make enough, take orders. If you made too many, bring them to the station at the end of the day.”

“Am I moving yet?”

“Looking like you’re about to.”

She put one foot in front of the other and made it to the car.

Dana hated to see anybody suffer. In fact, overblown empathy was probably the single most significant thing about her. As a girl she had rescued crows with broken wings, grasshoppers with the hop gone, pond fish her father and brother had cast aside as not worthy to grace the supper table. In school she had befriended the new girls, the girls with bad complexions or plus size figures. The moment she got her driver’s license, she’d signed up to visit three shut-ins from church, a route she covered every week in the family pickup until she went off to college.

She hadn’t really been a do-gooder. She’d been popular, and as self-centered as any teenager. She just hadn’t known how to ignore other people’s misery. Unfortunately, despite a lifetime of trying to armor herself and the consequences she had suffered, she felt other people’s sorrows right to the marrow of
her bones. Some people read minds, or had prophetic dreams or visions. Dana just felt other people’s pain.

Right now she was deeply in touch with Wanda’s, and it felt like a sledgehammer pounding in her chest.

“I should have known that Mertz woman would do something to spoil my opening day,” Wanda said at two o’clock, as she stared at the empty sidewalk in front of Wanda’s Wonderful Pies. “I should have figured that out. Any good businesswoman would have known.”

“Nobody can read minds.” Dana tried not to let compassion ooze through every word. “How were you to know the Sunshine Bakery would spend all that money just to keep customers from coming here?”

“Free doughnuts all morning with free orange juice. Cakes and pies for lucky winners all day long. Free cookies
and
coffee all afternoon? Tell me why
anybody
would want one of those cardboard cookies, free or not?”

Dana didn’t have the heart to tell Wanda that on her late-morning spy mission to Sunshine Bakery, the cookies had not looked like cardboard. They’d been riddled with chips, nuts and dried fruit, and she suspected the coffee had been brewed at a nearby Starbucks.

Worse, the pies had looked passably good. They weren’t anything like Wanda’s, which were perfect enough to serve in heaven, but they wouldn’t shame anybody who set them out for dessert. The crusts had been golden-brown and flaky, and the fillings had plumped them out nicely. The decor wasn’t nearly as fresh or innovative as Wanda’s, but the place had been too packed to notice.

“How’d it smell in there?” Wanda demanded. “The day I went, it smelled like an old lady’s attic.”

“I didn’t notice.”

“Well, the smell is the first thing you notice when you walk in my door. Butter and fruit and spices. If anybody walked in!”

Of course they’d had customers. As soon as they opened, half a dozen people had streamed in bearing coupons, and two of them had bought entire pies, one chocolate sin, one luscious lemon. The owners of the gift shop next door—which had more flamingos per square inch than any shop in the world—had come to indulge in pie and coffee, and had insisted on paying, despite Wanda’s protests. The children’s bookstore across the street had sent their cashier to buy a pie for lunch and paid their way, as well.

Of course Wanda’s husband had stopped by with several other enthusiastic cops. Wanda had waited on them, and Dana hoped that was going to be a trend, since it was a nice break for Wanda. Tracy had darted in and bought two pies for her rec center coworkers. Alice had driven all the way to town for a slice of Key lime and coffee. Rishi and Janya had arrived after lunch and bought a pie for Rishi’s staff. Undoubtedly, as the day wore on, more customers would trickle in.

The problem was that Wanda couldn’t make a go of the shop if friends, acquaintances and her husband’s colleagues were her only customers. Of course the Sunshine Bakery would not be able to sustain the ads that had flooded the newspaper and local radio station, or the tasty giveaways. Plus, if they continued to outsource their baked goods, they would go broke quickly. But Frieda Mertz had scored a point by stealing Wanda’s opening day thunder. When people thought about today, they wouldn’t think about Wanda’s Wonderful Pies. They would think about the Sunshine Bakery, where they had stuffed themselves with sugar and caffeine for free. And that was a memory they would savor for months.

“I bet she took out a loan,” Wanda grumbled.

Dana tried to sound matter-of-fact. “Well, she’ll have to pay it back, and once people realize the quality’s slipped again, and it’s back to business as usual, she won’t have any revenue to pay it with.”

“But will they find their way here in time to keep
me
from going broke?”

Dana had considered this all morning. She had no doubt once people found out how fabulous the pies were, Wanda’s shop would flourish. But sooner was better than later. She didn’t know anything about the shop’s finances, but she did know something about Wanda’s state of mind. She could feel her fear of failure. She understood fear as well as she understood pain, and she didn’t want Wanda to suffer either.

“Care to make a guess how many pies we’ll have left by, say, four o’clock?” Dana asked.

“Since I made way too many, I’d say at least a dozen.” Wanda looked dejected. “Kenny said I should bring them to the station.”

“Well, here’s my thought. Those cops are already your devoted audience. They’ll be by a lot, especially with you giving anybody in uniform free coffee. So you don’t need to recruit them. That’s more than $300 worth of good publicity down the drain—or rather, the gullet—if you look at the price for a whole pie, and more if you add it up slice by slice.”

Wanda still looked bedraggled. “You got a better idea?”

“What if we close up at four o’clock, put a sign on the door saying we’re all sold out for the day, turn on the answering machine and leave the number, so anybody can call if they want to make a special order. We were going to close at five this week anyway.”

“Just so we can say we sold out?”

“No, so we can find the tallest, most important office
building in Palmetto Grove and go office by office to offer a pie for free. Take the pies right to them. The most exclusive offices, the kind that order from top restaurants for working lunches, offices with executives who’ll tell their wives and give them your card after they’ve had a piece of pie, so you’ll be contacted for the next big party.”

Dana watched Wanda think this over. “You think that will do some good?”

“It sure won’t hurt.”

“You think it’s legal?”

“I don’t think there’s a PG cop who would arrest you.”

Wanda smiled a little at that. “I guess it’s worth a try. In for a carton, in for a case.”

“That means yes?”

Wanda began to untie her apron. “It does.”

Wanda narrowed the choice down to two three-story buildings, both just a short drive from the shop. She wanted to stay nearby to increase the likelihood her targets could easily find her. She and Dana parked between the possibilities and scouted a little more. In the end, the building without a security guard in the lobby was the logical choice.

Now they stood by the elevator and read the names of businesses on a marble plaque so shiny they could see their own reflections. Each of them had six pies in two triple-decker carriers.

“Creative Development and Investment,” Wanda read out loud. “Why does that sound familiar? That where you keep your millions?”

Dana pulled out a notepad. Wanda admired how organized her new manager was. Besides helping with prep work in the kitchen, she’d already set up an easy accounting system, a pro
cedure to keep track of inventory, a work calendar, and this morning she’d called the local high school to see if the guidance counselor had any thoughts on a responsible teen with computer skills to develop a simple Web site. Next she planned to see if Tracy had any recommendations for someone to work behind the counter.