Switched (10 page)

I still had my doubts, but Doyle and Maisey were so sure they were right that it made me doubt my doubts.

After the stuffed animals were gone, it was time to go through the pile of dirty clothes on the floor. I sat cross-legged with the last box next to me, and I carefully folded the clothes. Felicity had more than her share of bathing suits and panties. Without my suitcases, I had only the one pair of panties I arrived in, which I had washed a dozen times before I decided to just go commando.

I put a couple of Felicity’s bathing suits to the side to wear until I got my clothes back, and I also snagged a little blue dress that would come in handy while I worked.

It didn’t take long to get to the bottom of the pile. “Holy shit,” I breathed. Under the mound of laundry was Felicity’s purse with her wallet and passport sticking out of the open zipper. I grabbed them and marched into the other room.

“Doyle. Doyle! Look at this.” I sat down next to him and showed him the purse’s contents. “She wouldn’t have left her passport behind, would she?”

“She might still be on the island,” he said. “Or on Ibiza. She wouldn’t need her passport for that. Maisey’s probably right about her being on a yacht. I’m telling you, Debra, she’s out partying. Felicity is a party girl.”

I opened the passport. Felicity stared back at me from her photo. Young, fresh, with way too much makeup and a ring in her nose, she smiled from ear to ear, as if she was thrilled to be on her way to grand adventures. By the amount of stamps in her passport, it was obvious that Felicity had been successful in finding them. She had gone around the world: Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America. She was a wanderer, a free spirit. Basically she was my opposite.

“Wow, she’s done a lot of traveling,” I said.

“Most of these girls working on the island are the same,” Doyle said. “I told you. She’s off somewhere. She won’t be back except maybe to pick up her stuff, but that could be months from now. I’ll hold her papers for her.”

He moved to take the purse from me, but I was unwilling to part with it so soon. “I’m going to look at it a little while longer,” I said.

“Suit yourself.”

I went back to the bedroom and lay on the bed. I put the passport down on the nightstand and opened the wallet. Felicity had fourteen euros, no credit cards, a receipt from the grocery store for wine, and three business cards. Two cards were from clubs on the island I didn’t recognize and one was personal, marked
Bruno Perrier
with a number. Could Bruno be the viscount who took Felicity away on his yacht?

I put the wallet on top of the passport and rifled through the rest of Felicity’s purse. I came up with two condoms, a bunch of candy wrappers, lip gloss, and some used Kleenex.

And a diary. Felicity left behind her diary.

***

I fell asleep while reading Felicity’s diary and woke up the next morning with “Journal” written backward on my cheek. I had slept in my clothes with the light on, and with my face lying on top of the book. I had gotten about halfway through before I fell asleep.

Felicity wrote in short, clipped sentences. Misspelled words and haltingly bad grammar were the rule throughout her diary. Most of the entries were lists of cities she visited, hotels she stayed at, and good and bad bathrooms. Sometimes she would take longer to describe a good-looking man or a really fun party or a side adventure, such as kayaking, hiking, or riding on the back of a motorcycle down an empty dirt road in the Himalayas.

Felicity had lived adventures I had never dreamed of, and sleeping in her bed, wearing her clothes, and reading about her life, I sort of became obsessed with her. I had taken the road traveled by professionals, and she had traveled the road. All roads. Any road. I had gotten straight A’s and gone to college while she obviously hadn’t even learned to spell. I’d had a high-powered job in a corporate office, and she’d had a job selling hot dogs at a soccer stadium in Bolivia.

And here we were, arriving at the same place, waiting tables in a café in Mallorca with fourteen euros to our name and a wardrobe from the 99-cents store. It made me think hard about my life choices. Perhaps Jackson Remington and the home exchange weren’t my only errors in judgment. Maybe my whole life was a mistake.

I was desperate to finish reading the diary, but I had an early shift at the café. I slipped the diary back into Felicity’s purse along with her wallet and passport and put it in the nightstand. I changed my clothes, vowing to myself to pick up my suitcases as soon as possible, and ran downstairs, only fifteen minutes late for my shift.

“Omelets!” Gunnar shouted, slamming two plates down on the counter in kitchen. “Table two!”

I grabbed the plates and skipped outside to table two. It was another beautiful day in paradise. The air was thick, hot, and humid without a cloud in the sky. Despite how early it was, the sun was strong, and I squinted against the light. Half the tables were already filled, and more early risers were walking over and taking seats at the plastic tables.

“Here you go,” I said to the older couple at table two, putting down their plates without incident. I had been getting much better at waitressing. I was hardly dropping a plate, and I mostly got diners’ orders correct.

I took three more orders, going from table to table and then relaying the information to Gunnar in the kitchen. I had a flow going. I was enjoying chatting with the tourists, suggesting the omelets, fetching coffee and tea. I had a break in four hours, and I planned to take one of Felicity’s bikinis and head for the beach. The water around Mallorca was everything I was promised it would be. The crystal clear turquoise Mediterranean Sea was as warm as bathwater, and the beach in Cala Millor was clean with silky soft sand.

So, I was in a stellar mood when a short, thin man sat at table six. I handed him a menu. “Oh,” he said, as if he was surprised to find himself at a table in a café, face-to-face with a waitress.

“Are you okay, sir?”

He held a stack of papers in one hand and pulled one out and slapped it on the table. “You see, girl?” he asked me in halting English. His face was half hope and half anguish. I looked at the paper. A young girl, not more than sixteen with short curly hair stared back at me with a shy smile. Underneath her picture was written something in Spanish.

“Maria,” the man said, pointing at the picture.

“No. Sorry,” I said. “I haven’t seen her.”

He nodded, and a tear rolled down his cheek. “Let me get you a coffee,” I said. I came back with a coffee and croissant and sat down at the table with him. “Who is this girl?”

“Daughter,” he said, thumping his chest.

“Did she run away?”

“Missing,” he said. “Disappeared.”

A little ding dong warning bell went off in my head.  “Hold on,” I said. “I’ll be right back. Don’t go anywhere.”

I ran into the café, upstairs, and burst into Doyle’s bedroom. He was lying spread-eagle on his bed, the covers in a ball on the floor, stark naked and sleeping like the dead. He had an amazing ass. He had an amazing body from head to toes. He was built like a Mac truck: large and hard.

I shook his shoulder. “Get up. Get up.”

“Fuck off,” he mumbled and turned over.

“Get up! Wake up! I need you!”

Doyle’s body went completely rigid and then he flew up out of the bed, landing in a battle-ready pose.

“Oh, my,” I said.

His eyes scanned his surroundings, orienting himself to whatever threat he had imagined. The moment he realized he was safe in his room with his nakedness on display registered on his face with horror, followed by surprise, and finally amusement.

“Come with me,” I ordered, throwing him a pair of shorts. “Someone needs to talk to you.”

He put the shorts on. “Hand me a shirt.”

“No time for shirts.” I tugged at his hand. “Let’s go.”

I pushed him, topless and barefoot, down the stairs and outside to the little man sitting and staring at the picture of his daughter.

“This is a policeman,” I announced. “He’ll help you.”

“Excuse me?” Doyle asked.

“My daughter,” the little man said and handed Doyle a flier.

Doyle scanned the paper and slid his eyes toward me. I read everything in his expression.
Why are you annoying me with your missing girls?
he seemed to ask me. Doyle spoke to the man in Spanish for a while. I couldn’t follow the conversation. When it was done, Doyle patted the man on his back and said goodbye, taking a handful of flyers from him.

“You’ve got tables to cover,” Doyle said to me and walked back inside the café. I ran after him.

“But what about the girl?”

He kept walking. “She’s probably a runaway, and I’m not a cop in Mallorca.”

“But another missing girl. Don’t you see, Doyle?”

“Yes. It’s hard to keep track of girls. Table four wants their check.”

“But—” I stopped running after Doyle and stood by the bar, watching his back as he made his way up the stairs. It had suddenly gotten very tiring running after a man. I suppose there’s a moment in every woman’s life when she no longer needs a man, when she no longer needs to prove herself, when she no longer needs approval and becomes fortified with the self-confidence and absolute belief that her goals and her chosen plan of action are correct, desirable, and possible.

This wasn’t that moment. In fact, that moment wouldn’t come for a while. This was more of an I’m pissed off moment.

“Son of a bitch,” I muttered.

“Patatas Bravas for table three,” Juan Carlos announced with a ding of his bell. I picked up the plate. “Trouble with your love?” he asked me.

“I have no love,” I insisted.

“I think it’s big, big love,” Juan Carlos said.

“Trust me. No love. The opposite of love.”

“So just sex?” he asked. “Smart. Much better than love.”

***

I sat at a table inside the café and drank a lemonade. I was exhausted. The café had been swamped all morning, and I had been the only server until Maisey came down at eleven. At last I was off, and I didn’t know if I could muster the energy to go to the beach as I had planned.

Maisey, on the other hand, had boundless energy. She danced around from table to table and finally with everyone happy, she danced over to me, plopping down gently on the chair across from me.

“We’re going to have the best time tonight,” she gushed.

“We are?”

“Of course! It’s not every day you get invited on a tycoon’s yacht, you know.”

“Maisey, back up. What are you talking about?”

“Tycoon. Money coming out of his ears, luckily for us, because he loves to spend it every which way,” Maisey said. “So, he’s doing a party on a yacht, and you and I are going. Never mind viscounts, dearie, we’re going yachting with tycoons.”

With all of Maisey’s excitement over tycoons and yachts, I forgot about the beach and Felicity’s diary. Besides, Maisey kept me busy the rest of the afternoon and evening with preparations. Over Doyle’s protestations, she put a reluctant Gunnar in charge of serving and dragged me around town to buy every tool in the arsenal for capturing the heart of a tycoon.

Maisey and I got really close that day. It’s hard not to get close when you’re waxing each other. She insisted that we do complete head-to-toe makeovers to prepare for the boat party. Ahem, yacht party.

We started by shopping for the best tycoon-catching outfit we could find. According to Maisey, that meant a see-through cover-up.

“I’m not wearing this,” I insisted, holding up the wispy thin material.

“It’s not porn. Your bathing suit will be underneath.”

“I’m not wearing this.”

Maisey stepped forward and looked up into my eyes. “Yacht,” she said.

“I don’t want a viscount,” I said. “I’m from Chicago.”

“Tycoon,” Maisey corrected. “Everybody wants a tycoon, Debra. Everybody.”

I had no idea what I wanted. I was confused. Disoriented. I had fallen into a different life, and I couldn’t remember who I was and what I wanted. “I’m not wearing this.”

With the wardrobe complete, Maisey expounded on the need for a different hair color. “We need to stand out. I’ve got this,” she said, gesturing to her body. “But you . . . ”

I put my hands on my hips and harrumphed. “What? What about me? What do I have?”

“You have me,” she said, putting her arm around my shoulder.

“Okay,” I sniffed. She caught me in a weak moment, and I agreed to a temporary red hair dye.

We walked home carrying bags of cosmetics, hair products, and every secret accoutrement that women use to make them look naturally beautiful.

“Let’s start with the waxing so we have time to recover,” Maisey instructed when we got home.

“We? Let’s?”

“No body hair. None. I’m even going to take those eyebrows of yours down a notch,” she said.

The bathroom was dark, small, and windowless with a bathtub, toilet, and small sink with a mirror over it. We took it over like wild banshees. Maisey poured out the contents of the shopping bags onto every available surface. It was chaos. I didn’t know how two women could ever possibly use so many products.

“I’ll do you, and you’ll do me,” she told me. “Sit on the toilet and lift up your arms.”

Her eyes were wild with purpose and determination.  She was a woman on a mission. She was scary. I stripped off my T-shirt, sat on the toilet, and lifted up my arms. “This is cold wax. It’s not supposed to hurt,” she said.

After a few minutes of waxing Doyle shouted and pounded on the bathroom door. “What the hell is going on in there?”

“Keep out! Go away!” Maisey yelled.

“It sounds like someone’s getting murdered!”

“Yes! Me!” I yelled from my seat on the toilet. “She’s killing me!”

“I’m not killing you,” Maisey said and ripped the cold wax off my thigh, taking some skin with it.

I screamed. I couldn’t stop screaming. The cold wax might have been less painful in the hands of someone who knew how to use it, but Maisey was learning as she went, and she was a slow learner. She was awe-inspiring in her complete disregard for my agony. If I was screaming or bleeding, it didn’t matter to her. Maisey only cared about beauty and the tycoon.