Happiness Key (36 page)

She stepped away from him, turned and started up the sand, cutting across it at an angle and back toward her car.

He caught up in a few strides. “We can be
everything
to each other, Janya. Everything that matters. Neither of us married for love. But we can have that, too. We can’t be husband and wife, but we can be lovers.”

She said nothing. She just found the path, crossed one lot and then the street. She halted before crossing the hotel lot. Darshan put his arms around her and pulled her behind a tree.

“I will never love anyone else. I know you love me. Look at me.”

She did. She searched his eyes, and she realized who he had reminded her of, the other man who had come to mind on the beach.

She shuddered. “You said mistakes were made? You’re correct. I made two, Darshan. First I fell in love with a man who thought he was better than I was.” She pulled away and started toward her car.

He caught up again. “This is foolish. What do we care if the world sanctions our relationship? We would have so many happy nights together.”

She couldn’t walk fast enough. She unlocked the car with her remote; then she opened the passenger door and
took out the bag she had so carefully packed. She opened it and began to draw out objects, dropping them on the ground at his feet.

“The sari you bought for me. The bracelets. The ring. The pashmina shawl. The book of love poetry.” She was dropping the items faster and faster, flinging them at his feet now, until the bag was almost empty. “I kept them. I brought them into my marriage, and now I’m so ashamed. If my husband notes their absence, I will tell him they were soiled beyond repair and not nearly as lovely as the things he has given me.”

For just a flash he looked at her with the eyes of a cobra. “You fool!”

“I said I made two mistakes. The second? I fell in love with a man who can only love himself. But Darshan, there was a third mistake, too. I didn’t see until right this moment that
you
must have helped Padmini plan my humiliation.”

His fury was suddenly tinged with surprise, a cobra caught in a net, and she knew for certain that although she had only been guessing, she was right. Now she knew him for the man he was. She also understood exactly what he had been capable of, although knowing gave her no pleasure. She set the facts before him, his very own feast of lies.

“When you finally realized you had been blinded by lust, you knew you had to act quickly. Padmini was willing to do anything to become your bride, even destroy her best friend and cousin, so the two of you found a way to make that happen.
You
were the one who made certain your colleagues and your father’s saw that Web site. For all I know, you helped Padmini put it together.”

He had recovered his poise. “This isn’t true.”

She reached into the bag and pulled out the only thing
left, the portrait of Padmini. This she handed to him. “Give my cousin this gift, along with all the things I’ve outgrown, Darshan. And don’t contact me again. If you try, I’ll telephone Padmini and tell her what you’ve said. I will call your parents, and the men at this new firm of yours. I will beg them to make you leave me alone.”

She rounded the car and got in, glad he didn’t try to follow her. She turned the key and drove off without looking back.

Never would she have expected to see Lee Symington simmering deep in the eyes of the man she had loved. She supposed this would be the only time in her life that she would be grateful she had ever met Alice’s son-in-law.

She drove calmly, carefully. But she didn’t go home. She drove to Rishi’s office to insist that he come back with her for dinner on their little patio.

Wanda wasn’t familiar with Tampa, but Ken knew it well. It was a thriving international city, but like any city, it had high-crime neighborhoods. When he told her where she could find Gloria Madsen, Ken warned her that the neighborhood was primarily industrial, but the cops still dealt with illegal alcohol sales and prostitution. A flourishing adult entertainment business was a magnet for people Wanda didn’t want to meet on a dark street corner.

“You be careful,” he said. “If you want to wait for my next day off, we can go together.” But on Friday morning, rather than take a trip to and from Tampa with Ken sitting silently beside her, Wanda left alone. As payment for what was surely going to be nothing more than a wild-goose chase, she planned to treat herself to a real Cuban lunch in Ybor City.

She hadn’t been surprised to learn that Gloria Ann Madsen, born in Cargo Beach in 1928, had a long record of arrests, most recently for forgery. She had served part of that sentence, but as the oldest inmate at the correc
tional institution, she had been moved to a halfway house as soon as it was legally possible. That was where Wanda was heading now.

After the long drive and a staggering portion of paella, Wanda parked in front of a run-down house on a side street she’d spent a frustrating hour trying to find. The house was stucco, with a red tile roof, but anything that had added beauty to the basic Spanish-style architecture had been stripped away. The house number was scrawled on the wall by the front door. Halfway houses were rarely flush; halfway houses for ex-cons were probably the poorest.

She checked the street before she got too far from the car. The sun made her head ache, and if bad guys normally lurked in doorways, today they were lurking inside, where the beer was icy cold.

The walkway to the house had been swept, but patches of sandy soil and weeds bordered it. Apparently, landscape beautification was not on the agenda for residents. Wanda rang the doorbell and waited. A young black woman with short braids and a nose ring answered, and looked her over carefully. Wanda explained who she was and who she wanted to see.

The woman gestured Wanda inside without asking what she wanted. “She doesn’t get much company,” she said, as she headed toward the back of the house. “Even if you’re a bill collector, she’ll be glad to see you.”

In the living room, Wanda took a seat on a worn sofa. The house smelled like fried onions, BENGAY and urine. Judging from the walker and wheelchair shoved in a corner, this particular halfway house specialized in inmates making their return to a community they had left a long time ago. Of course some, like Gloria, were
probably career felons, who hadn’t let age stop them from plying their trade.

A dying rubber plant stood against the opposite wall. At some point somebody had draped it with colored Christmas lights. Now the plug was dangling over one leafless branch, along with a sad strand of tinsel. Growing old was bad enough, but doing it here? Worse than depressing.

The woman who finally crept into the living room looked all of her eighty years. She was tiny and frail, with thin hair that had been dyed a pale orangey-red. Several inches at the root were stark white in contrast. She had penciled in eyebrows with a shaky hand and dabbed on coral lipstick. But there was little left of the woman for whom a man named Clyde Franklin had abandoned his family and changed his name.

“Who are you?” Gloria demanded. “You one of those door-to-door evangelists trying to save my soul again?”

“Not hardly.” Wanda got up to help her to the sofa, but Gloria jerked her arm away.

“You think I don’t know where the sofa is?”

Wanda understood. Most likely this woman was the husk of the person she had been years ago. She was trying, in her own angry way, to maintain dignity. Wanda also understood why Gloria had few visitors.

She waited the interminable length of time it took the woman to seat herself on the sofa. Then Wanda took a seat beside her and handed Gloria a CVS gift bag she had put together the night before. “My name’s Wanda. I brought you a few things. I figure it can’t be easy living here.”

Gloria didn’t ask why Wanda cared. She opened the gift bag and sorted through the items. “Postcards? Why the hell do I need postcards?”

“I figured there might be somebody you’d like to write to.”

Gloria snorted. She didn’t say anything about the other items—a candy bar, some lavender body wash, a new comb and two packages of pantyhose. She closed the bag and set it beside her, a distance from Wanda, as if she were afraid Wanda might snatch it back.

“I ain’t got a thing you need, so if you come here to get something from me, you’re out of luck.”

“That might be true.” Wanda looked around the room, and her gaze settled on the television set. “Does that thing work?”

“The picture stinks, but we get most stations.”

“You watch
All My Children?
”

“So what if I do?”

“Did you watch today?”

“And if I did?”

“Just trying to find out if Colby mentioned that secret plan of his again.”

That sparked something in the old woman. She relaxed a notch. “Better, even. We got to see it. The whole thing.”

“You remember what it was?”

Gloria lit into a description. Wanda planned to see the show at home later, since she’d been sure to tape it, but Gloria was on a roll. She gave Wanda a blow-by-blow of the entire hour. Wanda was sorry she’d gotten her started.

“So what, you come to this dump just to get a recap of your favorite soap?” Gloria said once she’d finished.

“No, I came to see what you know about a man named Clyde Franklin. Later on he called himself Herb Krause.”

Gloria didn’t look surprised, and she didn’t look worried. “What for?”

“He died back in May. I’m one of his neighbors. We’ve
been trying to find his family to let them know and see if they want anything of his.”

Now Gloria looked interested. “He have anything good? Anything anybody would
want?
”

“Just mementoes, mostly. Nothing valuable.”

“No surprise, I guess. Herb never had much get-up-and-go.”

Gloria Madsen’s own get-up-and-go had gotten her
here,
but education wasn’t on Wanda’s agenda.

“Did you know him mostly as Herb?” she asked instead.

“That’s how I think about him. When we lived together, that’s what he called himself. I got in the habit.”

“He got the name from a dead war buddy, didn’t he?”

“I never paid much attention to what he did or how he did it.”

“Do you mind telling me how long you were together?”

“Why?”

Wanda sat back. “I guess I’m interested. He gave up a lot to be with you, so I wondered if he got his money’s worth.”

Gloria’s laugh sounded like an old dog yapping. “I was something else in those days. Men crawled all over me. ’Course, most of them came back from the war right after I grew a big set of knockers.” She demonstrated with her hands. If her breasts had really been that big, she would have made Dolly look like Olive Oyl.

“Them guys were looking for a woman, and I was looking for a way out of Cargo Beach,” Gloria said. “What a hole!”

“You seen it lately? It looks like they turned Walt Disney loose with a thousand gallons of Easter egg dye.”

Gloria yapped again in appreciation. “Herb was my
ticket out of there. About a year later I found a ticket somewhere else. Herb never really settled into the life I wanted. He never got over leaving his wife and kid the way he did. Maybe he never got over the war, either, I don’t know. So I made it easy for him. I found another guy more to my liking and took off.”

“He didn’t go back to his family. At least not from what we can tell.”

“Maybe his wife didn’t want anything to do with him after that.”

“Could be.”

“He wrote her all the time.”

That was a surprise. “No kidding?”

“I’d find letters crumpled in the trash. He never knew what to say. He’d start them, then give up. He addressed envelopes, too. Just in case he ever figured out what he was going to write. But he didn’t use a one of them, not that I know of, anyway.”

“You wouldn’t possibly remember the address, would you?”

Gloria appeared to be considering.

“Maybe it was on Hall Street?” Wanda prompted. “We know he lived there before the war.”

“No. It was prettier than that. Allamanda. You know, like that pretty yellow flower you see all over down here. You know why I remember? Because I saw Herb’s wife once, Louise. And she weren’t no allamanda flower, I can clue you, though she was kind of sallow, I guess. He should have bought her a house on Sandspur or Crabgrass.” She winked in appreciation of her own joke. The eyelid took a couple of seconds to rebound, as if it were out of practice.

“That was so long ago. You’re sure?” Wanda asked.

“He bought that house right after the war, a little old
house in Palmetto Grove, with a screened porch up on concrete blocks. I saw it once. Drove down with another fellow to see how Herb was living. That was before we ran off together. It probably wasn’t worth a lot, but Herb figured Louise would sell it for some dough once he was gone. He checked every once in a while, but she hung on to it. She probably got work to make ends meet. He said she’d worked in a laundry during the war. Took their little girl with her. Washed and ironed sheets ten hours a day. He told me that so often I got sick to death of hearing it. Who cared?”

Wanda’s patience had extended an unusual length. Had she been able to reach that far, she would have patted herself on the back for being cordial and understanding. Gloria Madsen was a pitiful wreck of a human being.

Now she sat forward, ready to take off before cordiality made a beeline for the door before she could. “Is there anything you might remember that would help us track down the daughter? Louise died a long time ago. So we’re looking for Pamela, or maybe even her children.”

“I don’t know anything. Like I said, I lit out after only a year with Herb. He was drinking pretty heavy. I’m surprised he made it as long as he did.”

“He was well-liked where we live.” Wanda tried not to wince as she said this.

“Yeah, that was his problem. He was just too nice. His conscience just kept getting the better of him. We’d have had more fun without it.”

Wanda stood, brushing her skirt over her knees. “Well, good luck here. They’ll be letting you move out soon?”

“Got no place to go. Myself, I have a daughter somewhere, too. Not Herb’s kid, mind you. The next guy’s. But
she won’t want me around. I don’t like her that well, anyway.”

Wanda couldn’t imagine what to say to that. She nodded goodbye and made it to her car in record time. She rolled down the windows, but she sat there and baked for a few minutes, hoping she was wrong. Inside her head the conversation played, then replayed, and every time she reached the same conclusion. Could she possibly have something in common with revolting Gloria Madsen, a woman who had abandoned Herb because he was no fun, because he had a conscience, and just because she could?

She was sweating when she started the engine and started back home.

Tracy was finishing her daily report when somebody knocked on the rec room door. She glanced up to see Marsh Egan.

“I haven’t changed my mind about Happiness Key,” she said. “Just in case that’s why I’m so honored by your presence.”

“Want to have a barbecue out on the beach?”

Her eyes narrowed, the number one physical response she always had when Marsh was around. Number two was something approximating desire, and she didn’t want to think about that. She had to be misinterpreting. She couldn’t possibly have the hots for this casual, cynical, too-happy-with-his-own-cooking attorney who was trying to rob her of everything she owned.

She stood and stretched. “Why? So you can harass me about my property?”

“I was thinking more along the lines of us enjoying what passes for a cold spell around here.”

“Cold spell? You could fry eggs on the shuffleboard courts.”

“Well, you could, but my spareribs are tastier. And it only got up in the eighties this afternoon. It’s going to be a gorgeous sunset, and you could watch it with me and Bay.”

“Will you promise not to do a hard sell?”

He smiled, a very masculine smile. “Depends. I won’t try to sell you Wild Florida’s agenda, if that’s what you mean.”

She was melting, and not from the heat. She tried to remember why going anywhere with Marsh was a bad idea, but nothing came to mind.

He took lack of another protest as yes. “Go home and grab your suit. The beach directly across the key from my house is mostly empty on weeknights, and it’s a great place to watch the sun go down. I’ll set up my grill.” He told her how to get there, and when.

“What can I bring?”

He gave her “that” smile again. “The cutest bikini you own.”

“Don’t get any ideas.”

“I’ll have ideas aplenty. I’ll also have my son.”

“For once Bay will be in the right place at the right time.”

“I guess that’s all in how you look at it.” He gave a mock salute.

She finished the report, then some other business, closed up the rec room and let herself out the side door. So what if she had turned down a blind date with Sherrie’s doctor friend for tonight? So what if he had offered to spring for dinner at the ritziest restaurant in Palmetto Grove on this, the only night he had free? She had been sure she wouldn’t feel up to going out after a long day at work. A woman could occasionally be wrong.

Once she was home, she showered before she consid
ered her bathing suits. She did not choose the skimpiest. Not even a bikini. She pulled on a black strapless one-piece with a giant poppy a la Georgia O’Keeffe. Then she threw on a gauzy red cover-up and matching flip-flops, left her hair loose, and packed a basket with cheese and crackers, and a bottle of chilled Chardonnay.

She arrived at the beach as Marsh and Bay were setting up a portable grill beside a picnic table on the edge of some small dunes. On the sand below them, she spread a blanket and set up her iPod speakers. Then she sliced cheese and laid out crackers.