Ten Beach Road (22 page)

The salon fell silent except for Barbara’s careful lisp and Deirdre Morgan’s elegant tones. The musical sound of her voice brought a rash of memories hurtling back, and pretty much all of them hurt. Avery had seen her in person only a handful of times over the last twenty years. The last time had been at her father’s funeral. She had no interest in repeating the experience.

“I guess this is just your night, Avery,” Chase said. “You are all the hell over the television tonight. What were the chances, huh?”

Madeline, Nicole, and Kyra turned to look at her as she practically cowered in the chair cushion.

“What does that mean?” Nicole asked. “What does Deirdre Morgan have to do with Avery?”

“Nothing,” Avery said. “Actually, less than nothing.” She heaved her way out of the chair and stood.

“Unless you count the fact that Deirdre is Avery’s mother,” Chase said quietly as everyone, even the people on TV, seemed to freeze in surprise.

“No,” Avery said. “No, she’s not.” She shot Chase a withering look and stepped away from the others, more than ready to make her escape. “She gave birth to me. That’s all. She left us more than twenty years ago. As far as I’m concerned, she gave up her rights to the title then.”

The days began to lengthen, keeping pace with the rising temperatures and thickening humidity that acknowledged the approach of summer. The dismantling of Bella Flora was complete; almost everything removable had been detached from its mooring for cleaning and/or refinishing. The house was now stripped down to its barest and, Avery thought, most beautiful bones.

The thick stucco walls and hollow tile construction kept the house a good seven or eight degrees cooler inside than it was outside—something they were all thankful for now that the central air-conditioning had been pronounced dead and had not yet been replaced. Most days lunch was a quick pick-up affair from whatever Maddie, who was their most frequent and inventive grocery shopper and coupon clipper, had stocked in the refrigerator. They quit the harder manual labor by five thirty or so and took an hour to themselves to regroup before sunset.

As often as possible, they gathered to toast and watch the sunset—a show that changed nightly and never disappointed. Sometimes they lingered outside eating dinner at the concrete picnic table near the gaping wound of the pool, mosquito repellant perched nearby.

At the moment, although it was barely four P.M., Avery was more than ready to call it a day and more than relieved that Chase had decided to take the weekend off. She’d spent the day helping sandblast the wrought iron and her clothes and hair were filled with grit. The only part of her that may have benefited was her face, which had been sorely in need of a facial before she’d started and now stung from the crude, if powerful, dermabrasion.

She’d like to say she wasn’t sure what had driven her to participate, but the truth was it was only Chase’s automatic “no” to her offer of help that had compelled her to insist on being included. All she wanted now was a shower that would remove the grit that had found its way inside her clothes and under her skin. But first she had a task to complete.

She waited until both Chase and the rest of the workmen had left for the weekend before she went into the empty garage where Chase’s circular saw was set up. Carefully, she pulled several two-by-fours from a pile and cut the blocks of wood she needed then gathered the other women to help her carry them up to the master bathroom.

They stood now in front of the sink and its old etched mirror. “I want to take the legs and fixtures to be refinished, but the sink’s attached to the tile wall. I need you to help slide the piles of wood into place to support the front of the sink.”

“You’re going to remove the legs?” Nicole asked.

“Yep.”

“Can’t we just polish them and leave them alone?” Maddie looked dubious.

“They’re too far gone for that,” Avery said. “But they’re original and they’re really fabulous. I have an idea about where we might get them re-chromed, but I want to take a sample and be sure before we dismantle all the bathrooms.”

“It’s not like the bathrooms are usable anyway,” Nikki said.

“True. But I want to make sure my idea works first.” She shoved the blocks of wood, which she’d arranged in two piles, closer to the sink. “When I remove the first leg, Maddie, I need you to shove the pile of wood into position.”

“Okay.” Maddie slid the stack closer as Avery pulled out her screwdriver and dropped down under the wide rectangle of porcelain. The tile floor turned gritty as the sand poured out of her clothes like some portable beach that crunched beneath her body. It took some muscle power, but she managed to unscrew the bolts on the first leg. Kyra’s feet moved in an arc around the sink, probably filming the operation. Avery tried not to think about which parts of her were visible to the camera.

“Here.” With the bolt loosened, Avery removed the curved chrome leg and handed it to Nicole while supporting the sink with her other hand. “Can you slide that first pile in here, Maddie?”

“I feel like I should be wearing a trench coat,” Nicole said after she’d set the leg down. “Does Chase know you’re doing this?”

“No.” Avery scrunched over to start on the other leg. “And contrary to his opinion, I don’t actually need his permission to take care of things.”

Kyra crouched close to the tile wall and aimed her lens under the sink.

“Do you really need to do that?” Avery asked, reaching out with her free hand and gently pushing the camera lens out of her face. “I’m not exactly made-up and ready for my close-up.”

“Just documenting,” Kyra said as she panned the camera across Avery and presumably out to Maddie and Nicole’s feet.

“You know, I think you might want to reexamine your relationship with Chase,” Nikki said, reaching a hand down to help Avery up. “It’s pretty volatile.”

“I don’t have a relationship with Chase,” Avery said, brushing off her bottom as best she could. Sand littered the tile floor and she knew there was a mop in her immediate future.

“We all have a relationship with Chase,” Nicole said. “And it’s in our best interests for it to be a smooth one.”

Avery removed the handles and faucet and pulled out the drain. She was way too tired to analyze herself or Chase Hardin. “Well, you’ll have to talk to him about that. The way I see it, he’s too busy treating me like an imbecile to actually consider that I might have something worthwhile to contribute.” She stared at Nicole for a long moment and then down at the sand-strewn floor.

Maddie slipped an arm around her shoulders. “You know, I just don’t get why they never show you doing anything real on your show. It’s like some kind of fifties time warp. Or something designed for the Playboy Channel.”

Kyra stepped back and shot video of Avery unbuckling her tool belt. “Don’t worry about the floor, Avery. You go ahead and take a shower. I’ll take care of the mop up,” Madeline said.

“Thanks, Maddie, I appreciate it,” Avery said. “Almost as much as I’m going to appreciate having three whole days without the Big Cheese around.”

 

 

Nicole stole a look at her passenger seat, still trying to figure out how Kyra Singer had ended up in it. As soon as she’d heard that Chase was taking the weekend off, she’d accepted an invitation to a former client’s home in Palm Beach. She’d no more mentioned her plans than Kyra had asked for a ride.

“I have a friend who lives in West Palm. She’ll pick me up anywhere you say and will drop me off wherever you are whenever you want to head back.”

Nikki had wanted to say no, she didn’t need her past and present lives rubbing together quite so closely, but it was hard to come up with a good reason to refuse. It was just a couple of hours in the car each way. And she could hardly say she needed the alone time to get her current story straight and her former act together. Or that one of the reasons for going was to try to find at least some bread crumb of information that might help her pick up Malcolm’s trail.

In the first fifteen minutes of the drive, Kyra polished off two chocolate iced doughnuts, a large glass of milk, and a banana. Nicole made no comment; she was not the girl’s mother and her daily caloric intake was not her concern. They drove over the Sunshine Skyway, which arched high over Tampa Bay. Boats cut through the blue green water, leaving frothy white wakes like airplane trails behind them. The sun looked almost golden against the pale blue of the sky.

Malcolm had always had a soft spot for Florida—as children they’d lived in several of the state’s northern cities. One Thanksgiving, which had been celebrated in a tent in a panhandle campground, they’d offered thanks for the clear skies and warm temperatures. After they’d finished their meal, a feast of KFC extra crispy with two sides and a roll for each of them, the six-year-old Malcolm had vowed that one day he’d own a beachfront mansion. Apparently one of the few promises he’d kept.

Once her food was gone, Kyra stared silently out the window while the palmettos and scrub brush flashed by. As they continued along Highway 78 with its sugar-cane-field border, she turned her gaze on Nicole, who kept her own on the road.

“Could you tell which couples you matched up would stay together?” she asked.

“Sometimes.”

“What was it that gave it away?” Kyra asked. “Their personalities, their backgrounds? What they did for a living?”

Nicole thought about it, something she’d tried not to do too much over the years. She’d always been afraid that it would render her too cynical to continue in the lucrative field. “Motivation.”

She could tell it wasn’t what Kyra had been expecting. She was a little surprised herself. “It comes down to how much both parties want to stay married. I think that has to be fairly equal, even if their reasons are different, for it to work. One person wanting it isn’t enough.” She knew this not only from observation but her own two disastrous marriages, failures she rarely mentioned and wished she could forget. Deep down she’d known that she’d chosen badly, an irony that haunted her, like a doctor failing to diagnose his own illness. Or a hairdresser who arrived at the salon with her own hair uncombed.

“So those reasons could be about a person’s career or something and not just about how much they love the other person,” Kyra said.

“Yes.” Nikki looked at the girl wondering whether it was her parents’ apparently strained relationship on her mind, or one of her own. “I’ve seen horribly mismatched couples—not by me of course—stay together if the reasons were compelling enough, while others who appeared perfect for each other couldn’t make it through the first disappointment.”

“Do you ever advise people to split up or try to keep them together?”

Nicole laughed. “Fortunately, my business is introducing people who meet each other’s criteria, not keeping them married. I’m a matchmaker, Kyra, not a marriage counselor.” At least she was before Malcolm ripped that business out from underneath her.

This was met with silence and more staring out the window, but as she’d just pointed out, Nicole wasn’t a therapist. Kyra and her mother belonged in the “not my problem” category. She already had far too many problems of her own.

Still, she was curious. When they’d first met, Madeline had seemed stretched to the breaking point and Nicole recognized a loneliness in Kyra that reminded her of her own.

With each passing mile, Nicole felt less and less monkey-like. The thought of spending the entire weekend in an interior-designed guest bedroom with its own plush private bath, waited on by a well-trained staff, had her foot pressing ever more firmly on the accelerator.

“Did you ever date a married man when you were young? Er, I mean younger?”

As if she couldn’t date any married man she chose right now. Nicole sighed. “I have,” she said. “But not intentionally.” She looked at Kyra. “It’s a bad idea from every point of view. Even if you’re able to overlook the morality of the question, those kinds of scenarios rarely end well for anyone.” She watched Kyra’s face for a reaction but didn’t get much. “A cheater is a cheater is a cheater.” She’d learned this during marriage number one. “Any man who would cheat on his wife with you would cheat on you with someone else.”