The Scarlet Ruse (9 page)

She slid back to a straight track behind the stern. She smiled and rolled her shoulders. She cocked her head and then tried some signals on me. First she held her left hand up, finger and thumb an inch apart. Then she pulled her hand across her throat, in the cut-power signal. Then as I started to turn toward the controls, she shook her head violently and held her hand out, palm toward me. I waited, puzzled, and she pointed toward the water off to the port side of the boat, and then she bent her knees and swung her fanny out to the right. So I had the message. I decided I'd better leave it on pilot but be close enough to take it out in a hurry.

She moved out to the side and gave me her signal and swung wider for speed. I pulled the throttles halfway back, and she tossed the line clear, into the wake, and came angling in too fast toward the port side, amidships. I moved quickly to grab her, but she yelled me off, turned parallel to the direction of the boat, slowing and just as the speeds were identical, she gave a little twisting hop which hoisted her rear onto the flat gunwale and would have been perfect except she was overbalanced. The slalom ski went up, and she fell over backward into the cockpit. I wasn't close enough to break her fall, and I heard the thump her head made against the deck and felt it through the soles of my bare feet. She scrambled up and went to the stern and brought the tow line in, and then I cut the power all the way back. In the semisilence I said, "You are totally mad. Miss the edge and you'd get swept right into the port wheel."

"That's how come I jumped too far."

"Did you ever try that before?"

"Onto docks. It's trickier because you have to get it just right, ending up at the dock just when you stop and start to sink. So this is easier. You can kind of adjust because it's like the dock is moving too."

"And that makes it easier?"

"You're cross because it scared you, Trav. Well, I'm a little scared too. I always get scared after I try things."

"You thumped your head pretty good."

"All this hair worked like a cushion. It's my elbow that hurts."

She showed me. She had knocked a flap of skin loose. I got out the kit and disinfected it and put a bandaid patch on it. She stretched and then squatted on her heels and bounced a few times and came up slowly. "You know, that's really a workout," she said. "I wish I could do that every day. I'd get hard as rocks. It would really firm me up."

"I didn't notice anything very loose."

"Then you weren't looking."

"I'm pretty sure I was looking."

She gave me a quick sidelong glance, not at all flirtatious. It backed me off from whatever was about to come into my mind. She said, "Pretty soon I am going to start eating those life jackets."

I looked ahead and picked out the familiar island shapes. I established my location and knew the water I could trust. I said, "You'll be eating in fifteen minutes, and you can start drinking right now, if you're up to it. Look in the ice chest over there. I laid aboard some of those cocktails in cans. Take your pick. Give me a vodka martini, please."

She picked a marguerita, pulled the tabs off the cans, and handed me mine, then clinked cans. I was glad to note I did not have to tell her why we don't throw the shiny tabs overboard.

"I feel great," she said over the engine noise. "Everything is pulled loose, sort of. All stretched. I want to have two drinks, eat myself blind, go to sleep in the sun, and then have a swim, and then ski all the way home."

"So be it," I said. "Won't you burn?"

She poked at her thigh. "My skin is thick and tough, like some kind of plastic. I don't burn at all. After I get pink about nine thousand times, then I gradually turn the color I am now, and then nothing else happens, no matter what."

I read the shallows ahead and slowed down and eased up to them and then along the edge until I found a notch deep enough to get me close to shore. I cut everything and put a couple of hooks over and slung the boarding ladder.

Then we offloaded everything and, in two trips, carried it up over the dune and down to the little cove on the Atlantic side, dispossessing a pale and malevolent crab, when we spread the two giant beach towels in the semi-shade of a pair of wind-torn old casuarinas. We had more of the extravagantly convenient drinks-in-a-can. (Were the emerging nations targeting on this delight in their misty futures?)

I went back and checked the hooks, reset one and trod it into better bottom, and brought back the battered and eroded old battery radio. It brought in the most useful Cuban station, playing, on this Saturday afternoon, a concert of symphonic pieces for Spanish guitar. With very few commercials.

We had a short swim before lunch. The drinks were making the bright day faintly, tantalizingly unreal. I caught her looking stealthily at my ugliest and most impressive souvenir of old trauma, the long deep one down the top of the thigh. I told her it was surgical. A wound had become infected, and they had chopped around in there three times, planning to take the leg off if they had to schedule the fourth. She asked if it was something that happened in some war, and I said that no, it had been a civilian difference of opinion. There were some less impressive marks from one of those wars, and the rest of them were either bad luck or good luck or bad judgment. She swallowed and said she couldn't stand the thought of being hurt. She simply couldn't stand it. Oh, not the little bang and bumps and sprains you get from athletics, or even a couple of busted ribs and a broken collarbone, which she got when she fell from the rings in a gym one time. She meant really really hurt, with stitches and drains and operations and needles and all that. She swallowed again. She said she had never even been really sick, not ever.

Having seen her eat and knowing that outdoors improves appetites, I had ordered enough for four. Hunks of sharp cheddar, cucumber salad, giant roast-beef sandwiches on dark bread, corned beef sandwiches, big crisp kosher dills, a big thermos of iced coffee, two big pieces of tart, deep-dish apple pie. It was successful. She kept making little humming sounds and small chuckling sounds. Through the dark curtain of hair I saw the solid jaw muscles bulging and sliding under that golden hide as she chomped away. I warned her about the horseradish but she slathered it on the roast beef anyway, yelped when she got into it, and then finished the sandwich, eyes tearing, snuffing as though with a head cold.

She yawned and lay back on the big towel I had provided her. She put a forearm across her eyes. In the middle of a sentence her voice dwindled and blurred and stopped. I saw the deep, slow, diaphragmatic breathing of heavy sleep, lips apart, edge of white teeth showing. Her up-flung arm revealed the faint, sooty shadow of the shaven stubble. Her palm was turned to the sun, fingers curled. Her other hand, almost a fist, rested against the flattened, muscular belly. Tiny round beads of perspiration, the size of the heads of the pins they put in expensive shirts, clung to the pale fuzz of her upper lip.

I looked at the angle of the sun and got my watch out of the side pocket of the canvas bag I had brought from the boat. A straight shot to the Royal Biscayne would take forty minutes. And I wanted to be coming into Lauderdale past the sea buoy no later than eight-fifteen. So, to have some of the day left for more swimming, more skiing, I wouldn't want to sleep more than about a half-hour. I set the alarm. Meyer had given the watch to me because it amused him. It does not make a sound. At the specified time, a semisharp little metal nub starts popping out of a little hole in the underside of it, stabbing you in the wrist.

"And what was the big hurry?" I asked him.

As we strolled back toward his dumpy cruiser he said, "There's something I never thought of before. When you want to deliver surprising news, your first impulse is to do it in a hurry. If it's good news, the second decision is to slow down, take your time, savor the pleasure of delivering it. But with bad news, you keep hurrying. You want to get it off your hands. Share it."

"Which means yours is bad?"

"Bad. Sad. It's nothing I want to hang onto for the pure relish of it. Jane Lawson was killed yesterday."

I stopped. He kept going for three strides and turned and looked at me and said, "I know. She was more alive than most."

"Vehicle?"

"No. From what I understand from Hirsh, somebody trashed her house. The police think it was high school kids. The younger daughter runs with a batch of kids who have been feuding with other gangs of girls. They think it was revenge of some kind. The girl's possessions were pretty much destroyed, and it looks as if perhaps Jane came back while the damage was happening. She would have run into her place and tried to stop them, of course."

"If it was a gang of girls, yes. I'd buy that."

"It doesn't look intentional. It looks as if she could have been grappling with someone, trying to restrain them, and someone else grabbed her from behind by the hair to pull her away and broke her neck."

"Jesus God!"

"When she went down, they got out of there in a hurry. The other daughter came home and found her late yesterday afternoon. Hirsh woke me up at eleven-thirty last night, phoning me to tell me about it. For a while I could hardly understand him."

"Do they have a time of death?"

"They say between one-thirty and three, preliminary. The electric clock in the younger daughter's room stopped at two-fifteen when somebody threw it against the wall."

"Do they have the younger daughter, Judy, in custody?"

"Maybe. Hirsh said they were still looking for her at ten last night. Apparently neighbors are no help in that place. It's designed for a kind of privacy, so it is difficult to see people come and go. There are no community areas or activities. People are moving in and moving out frequently. With all the window air conditioners on and the televisions and radios and all the children in that development, nobody hears anything. And if there was some suspicion of something unpleasant going on, the neighborhood reaction would be to turn up the volume on the set and not check the time. Otherwise one might become involved. If you get involved, you can spend untold hours sitting around, waiting to be called into court."

"Meyer?" I said.

He gave a little start. "Sorry. I got sidetracked. Come along. I do have coffee made. I'll have to suggest a study of why people become involved and why they don't."

"Like the forward pass."

"You lost me, Travis."

"When you pass the ball, six possible things can happen, and five of them are bad."

He was silent until he handed me the mug of black coffee, reaching out over the stern quarter to hand it to me where I sat on the dock. "Five things can go wrong?" he asked.

"One, incomplete. Two, intercepted. Three, caught and fumbled. Four, penalized for offensive pass interference. Five, caught for no gain or for a loss."

"I forgot about the penalty."

"Also, they can smear your quarterback just as he unloads and put him out for the rest of the season. That makes six bad things out of seven chances. Why are we doing this, Meyer?"

"So as not to discuss Jane Lawson."

"Let's let her wait in the wings while I tell you about Dave Davis and Harry Harris."

He listened and had no comment until I requested one. And his comment was a pass. He said it needed thought. The alternate assumptions put it into the province of symbolic logic.

I said, "Jack does the family marketing whenever it rains in the afternoon, if it is not one of Jill's bridge days, provided it is not one of the Tuesdays or Fridays when Jack rides to work with Ben."

"Scoff, if it amuses you."

I gave him back his empty mug and stood up. "I have the feeling that nothing is going to be able to give me much amusement for quite a while."

When I was two steps away, he said, "You had your phone turned off last night?"

"I do believe I did."

I went back home and sat in the lounge and thought about Jane Lawson for a little while and looked at my watch. Twenty-five minutes before noon. I went to the master stateroom and opened the door. Mary Alice had shifted position since I had crept out. There was a faint breath of coolness in the air conditioning-she did not like it turned high-and she lay face down, diagonally asprawl across the big bed, sheet down to her bare waist, one hand under her cheek, the other fist clenched close under her chin. One tangle of black hair was sheafed across her sleeping eyes, and shining strands hung down over the side of the bed.

I eased myself stealthily onto the bed to sit and look down at her. There was her own mix of scents in the cabin air, a smell of sleep and girl and Mary Alice, a sort of smoky smell, pungently sweet, with an undertaste of tart, like a wine just turning.

I had not believed she would be in my bed. Not after I had defied Jane's warning about her. When the watch had stabbed me awake on the beach, I had leaned and propped my arms on either side of her and bent to her lips and kissed her awake. Her lips rolled softly open, and then she pushed me away and stared at me, pulled me back down very strongly for about a low four count, then shoved violently and rolled away, rolled up onto knuckles and haunches and stared at me through dark hair. I reached out and caught her arm and said, "What is it with you?"

She tossed her hair back, yanked her arm free. "I don't want to get into that anymore. I really don't."

"Never?"

"Never," she said and stood up.

I got up too and said, "It's… an unusual decision."

"Now you can tell me it's ruining my health. Anybody can look at me and see I'm a wreck."

"Mary Alice, it's your body and your decision to make. I'm not going to argue and pressure you. I didn't mean to upset you. I'm sorry."

"Why should you be sorry?" she said. "I'm… going for a walk, okay?"

She went down the little stretch of beach. She went as far as she could go without swimming, which was about a hundred feet. She picked up a handful of small shells from the tide line and stood plunking them out into the sea, I found a piece of driftwood, a flat board off somebody's dock or beach steps, and used it as a shovel and dug a hole deep enough to bury our debris above the tide line, with about eighteen inches of sand stomped down on top of it. When I looked at her again, she was sitting on the little slope of beach, arms around her legs, chin on a knee, staring toward Africa. I could tell that it was a time of thought for her, a time of decision. When at last she came back, she was determinedly merry and carefree. I could not read her at all.

There was time for another swim. We swam around to the bay side, and I got two sets of masks, snorkels, and swim fins out of the locker. We swam to a place where boats had anchored, and we found rare and unusual treasure on the bottom. Genesee and Blatz and Pauli Girl. Coors and Utica Club and Hockstein brewed in Rollie, Alabama. Vintage aluminum. Rare brands brought from afar.

Her forced jolliness seemed to become genuine later on. We frolicked and raced and startled some small fish. Then it was time to pack up and run for it, with no time for skiing on the way back to the Royal Biscayne.

Then she stopped me as I was slowing to make the turn between the club channel markers. She wanted me to wait a minute, right there. So I got myself opposite the tide and held it in place with just the port engine turning softly in gear. She stood in balance, her back to me, and then turned and came over and stood close in quarter profile.

"Would they mind my leaving my car there?" I had to lean close and make her repeat it.

"No. They wouldn't mind. Is it what you want?"

She turned her face further away. "I don't know what I want. I'm stuck. Right in the middle. Dammit, when I want somebody to hustle me…"

I pulled her chin around and uptilted it, but she would not look at me. Her glance slid down and away, off to the side. I put the starboard engine in gear. I turned the boat until she was headed northeast, toward the channel. I took Mary Alice's hand and put it on the starboard throttle. I took hold of the port. I put the loop of line over the spoke to lock the wheel.

I said, "Okay. As I push this throttle, the port engine is going to pick up speed, heading for the channel, heading for home. Let's say that is my intention. But the wheel is locked, so if the starboard throttle stays right where it is, all I am going to do is make one hell of a big circle and end up aiming back into the yacht club."

She didn't say anything. Her hand was slack on the throttle. I slowly pushed mine up. We went almost straight and then began to turn more and more easterly. I could see I was going to have some problems with water traffic if I waited too long for her. She took her hand off, and as I was about to accept that as her decision, she hit the throttle with the heel of her hand, banging it all the way forward. She sat in the copilot's chair. The maneuver gave me a couple of very busy seconds flipping the loop off, yanking the throttle back, turning the wheel.

I said, "When you make up your mind, honey, you-"

"Shut up and drive," she said.

I went outside, got on my heading, and put it on pilot. She did not want a beer. She did not want a drink. She did not want any conversation, thanks. So I took a beer back and sat on the engine hatch as we roared through the calm sea, tipping and lifting a little in the swell that was just beginning to build. She stood up and leaned her folded arms on the top of the windshield, staring ahead for a long time, standing hipshot with ankles crossed. The light of the dying day was gold and orange. The shore was turning blue-gray, the sea to indigo.

I guessed that in another five minutes I would take it out of pilot and turn toward the sea buoy and the early lights of Lauderdale. She came striding back, losing her balance and catching it, looking angry, and said, "Can you turn everything off and sort of just float out here? Please?"

Done. A sudden silence until ears can find the smaller sounds. Dip and pitch and roll, water slapping the hull, something rolling and thumping in a gear locker, water sloshing the cooler.

She went back and sat on the broad transom which was also the engine hatch, swiveled to hang her legs over the stern. I sat beside her, facing inboard.

"I don't talk about my husband," she said.

"People have noticed."

So she talked about him. She hopped back and forth in time and space, with silences between. I didn't come in with questions. She had to set her own tempo of revelation. She had gone steady with a boy for several years. She'd caught the eye of an older man, one of the McDermit brothers who had a lot of food-service companies in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, catering airlines, operating coffee-break concessions and cafeterias in factories and offices, owning vending machines and warehousing facilities. He had big cars, phones in his cars, a duplex apartment with a staff, an executive jet.

She had played one against the other, in a girlish mischief. Then abruptly Tom, the boyfriend, had died in a one-car accident, lost control at high speed on the interstate. McDermit had been gentle, understanding, comforting. She had married him.

"Then it all turned so rotten," she said. "They owned race horses, those brothers. I was another thing, like a horse that costs so much to keep, you can do any damn thing you want with it. He liked to hit. He liked to hurt. He couldn't really make it any other way. He was trying to break me. We had a big fight, and I told him Tom had been a man, and he wasn't a man. He said he had a specialist put a gadget inside the wheel cap on Tom's right front wheel, set so that at seventy it would push a weight against a spring thing and blow the lugs off. He said Tom was dead meat. I said he was never going to touch me again, and I was getting a divorce. He said nobody was ever going to touch me again, so I didn't need a divorce. He said to get out if I wanted to, but if I let anybody have me, he'd have both of us killed."

She hadn't really believed him. She'd gone to a lawyer who accepted the divorce action eagerly, then suddenly cooled off. When she insisted on knowing why, he took her into a little conference room and closed the door. He was sweaty. He told her she should go back to her husband. He said the brothers were always involved in legal actions, and sometimes they were indicted, but nothing had ever gone any further than that. He told her he didn't want her business, she didn't owe him a dime, please leave.