Piet thought it was revealing.
“Way less than a bikini,” I said.
“You’re not wearing a bra,” he said.
“I don’t need one under this dress.”
“Like hell you don’t.”
He huffed about needing another roll of mesh from the hardware store to repair the window in Mother’s bedroom. Mosquitoes came in.
“What about Elladaire?”
“She could get bitten, too. I read they carry West Nile virus.”
Add mosquitoes to the peanut butter on the list of things a surrogate mother had to worry about. “I mean what about taking her with you?”
“No car seat in the camper.”
“You can take my car.”
“You want to be alone with Barry that badly?”
“No. I don’t want to be alone with Elladaire. Badly.”
“You have to test it sometime. I’ll be gone for fifteen minutes. Play outside if you’re nervous.”
Who, me? Nervous to tend a baby who might go up in flames—in front of a man writing about my books?
I tried to stay away from Elladaire while I waited, to stay clean. She didn’t cry, which was a relief, but no good test of her return to normalcy outside Piet’s range. Besides, she’d spent every minute with him. What if his magic wore off when he was gone, not just for fifteen minutes, but a week or a month? What if there was no permanent cure? How could anyone trust her, ever? Poor baby.
I felt so sorry for her I picked her up, and got muddy footprints and animal cracker fingerprints all over my yellow dress. I took her inside and changed into a Paumanok Harbor shirt, over a bra, and cut-offs with frayed hems. Hamptons shlep.
Maybe Elladaire could stay with my grandmother during Barry’s photo shoot. Sure. And maybe I’d ask Granny to lend me a cup of eye of newt while I was at it.
There was no need; Piet rumbled down the dirt road before Barry arrived, late. That pissed me off. I could have gone with Piet to town, maybe had an ice cream, maybe found root dye at the drugstore. I could have changed my clothes again. Or worked on my book in progress, whichever story I dared to use.
He didn’t apologize for being late, or for grimacing when I said Elladaire and Piet were coming along on the photo shoot. I wanted an objective opinion, I told Barry, if my picture was going to be broadcast across the Internet.
“Beach or gardens?” I asked him.
I thought I heard him mutter, “What effing difference does it make?” but that had to be wrong.
Grandmother Eve’s old Jeep was in her driveway, which meant she was home. “Let’s go to the beach.”
Which meant Elladaire needed sunscreen and a hat and the stroller.
“Can’t you stay here with her, man?” Barry asked Piet.
“I could. But I’m not going to, man.”
Maybe having more than one man interested in me at the same time wasn’t such a good idea. I made it all better by bringing Little Red and the two big dogs. “You want to show an accurate portrait of how I live? This is it. Muddy footprints, dog hair and . . . low tide?”
Something stank at the beach. We didn’t see any swath of rotting seaweed, dead fish, or empty shells, but the putrid odor was enough to gag on. Sometimes we got the dreaded red or brown tides that killed the sea life and put the bay fishermen out of business, but I didn’t know if they smelled. The shallow water looked clear enough and the pebbly beach appeared clean.
Piet and Elladaire started home.
Barry took a few hurried pictures, and I didn’t bother to look at the playback screen on the digital camera. I did ask if I could see the article before he sent it in, to check for facts.
“That’s not how it works. If the subject of an interview gets to rewrite the piece, it’s not an honest opinion.”
I didn’t know this was a review. I thought he was doing a bio, which was not a matter of opinion. “Can you at least show me the article before it’s online, so I’m prepared? And I’ll need the name of the ezine so I can tell people about it.”
“Sure. I’ll send you a link.”
Good. If I hated the picture or what he wrote, I didn’t have to forward it to anyone. “I suppose you’ll be going now that your car is fixed and you’re done with the article?”
“No, I paid for two weeks at the motel after I left Martin’s place. He was too fussy. No smoking. No one needs me in the city, and I like the area. You can say it inspires me to write more. I might do another piece about the off-season, or side trips, out-of-the-way locations no one knows about. You know the kind of thing.”
“For side trips, there’s the aquarium in Riverhead.” Where I was thinking of taking Elladaire and my picture of the mysterious creature to show their marine biologists. “For off the beaten path, there’s an incredible garden in East Hampton that’s open to the public a couple of days a week. Or you could write about the hidden army bunkers along the shore all the way to Montauk.”
“I was thinking more of those wetlands right here. I could do a fascinating environmental piece on what changes manmade ditches bring.”
The smell wasn’t the only thing that caught in my throat.
“Have you heard about West Nile fever? The place must be overrun with mosquitoes. And ticks. There’s not much to see, either, just an expanse of sea grass. You can’t walk on much of it except at low tide, and if you think this stinks, you don’t want to go to the salt marshes then.”
“I’d like to see them anyway. And the lights. When are you getting rid of the kid and the smoke eater?”
The smoke eater was sitting at his computer when the dogs and I got back, without Barry. I hadn’t invited him in, claiming an urgent need to go grocery shopping, which was no lie. I hadn’t planned on company, much less a baby. In fact, I usually counted on Susan to cook or bring leftovers home from the restaurant. We were low on dog food, too.
Elladaire sat on the couch, rapt attention on one of Louisa’s videos and a sippy cup of apple juice. “Want to go bye-bye car?” I asked. She didn’t look at me. Little Red ran to the door, ready.
Piet said he needed a few more minutes.
“Find anything we can use?”
“It’s what I didn’t find that’s the problem. There’s no website for a Barry Jensen. No Facebook account. A freelance writer looking for work has to have a way for people to find him, doesn’t he?”
I didn’t have Barry’s email address either, now that I thought about it, or the name of the ezine he worked for, only a cell phone number. “Maybe you spelled his name wrong. Try Jenson. Or Jenssen.”
“I tried all of them. None are writers.”
“That’s odd.”
Piet looked up, with the expression I usually saw on my grandmother’s face. “Odd is that you didn’t think to look him up before you went out with him the first time. Odd is your being the only single woman I know not to do a Google search before letting a stranger in your house.”
Barry wasn’t exactly a stranger. Susan knew him, didn’t she? She’d brought him home when his car died. Susan brought home a lot of men, though, which didn’t make Barry an automatic friend.
I found a nearly empty bag of chocolate kisses. I needed one. Piet needed an answer. “He must write under a pen name. That’s not altogether unheard of, you know.”
“When he doesn’t give it to people he meets? People he’s trying to impress with his writing?”
“You don’t like him, that’s all. I can take care of this in a minute.” I called Kelvin at the garage and asked what name was on Barry’s credit card when he picked up his car. And if he had left an address or anything.
“You know I’m not supposed to give out that kind of information, Willy.”
“Do you want me to lie and say he left his sunglasses at my house and I lost his phone number?”
“Hell, no. I don’t need that aggravating itch now. Hang on.”
When he came back to the phone, Kelvin reported that Barry’d paid cash. No numbers or addresses
.
Getting more anxious by the minute, I repeated the lack of information to Piet, who asked if Kelvin had a license plate number.
He did, right on the copy of the paid bill. “What’d the guy do, anyway? I thought you liked him?”
“Want me to lie?”
He hung up.
Piet pushed a button on his cell phone and read the license number into it. Most likely he called the Department of Unexplained Events, whose people had access to a staggering amount of personal information.
He set his phone down. “They’re going to call back. What kind of guy pays cash for a car repair?”
“Someone on vacation who took a lot of money with him?”
“With an ATM on every street corner? No one carries a fat wallet anymore. It’s too dangerous. I can’t believe you didn’t ask to see his credentials.”
“Like what? He said he was just starting out writing, sold a couple of pieces, that’s all.”
“What did he do before?”
“I have no idea. I didn’t think to ask.”
“Well, you should have. Or did you let his flattery flatten your common sense?”
“That’s not fair. I didn’t ask to see your birth certificate or your driver’s license either.”
“You asked for a demonstration. Did you ask to see anything he’d written?”
“It was free publicity! And there wasn’t time. The lanterns appeared and I—”
His phone rang. The ring tone was “Come on Baby, Light My Fire.” Piet wrote something down, thanked the person at the other end, and went directly to hitting the computer keys. I looked over his shoulder.
“Barton Jenner?”
“The Third. Got him. Website and all. And the scandal sheet he writes for.”
I put another kiss in my mouth. With its little paper tag. Yeck. “You must be wrong.”
He tapped the screen, and I leaned closer.
Piet enlarged the picture. “That’s your pretty boy, isn’t it, in the picture beside his father, Barton Jenner the Second. The owner of the sleaziest dirt rag to hit a supermarket checkout counter. You know what they specialize in? Alien babies, UFO abductions, and demon possessions. You couldn’t have picked a worse tabloid for ruining Paumanok Harbor if you tried. You screwed up big time, Tate.”
So did my father.
No old table.
A tabloid.
And a shitload of trouble.
CHAPTER 17
IN SOME TOWNS, the whisper of a pervert was a call to arms. In Paumanok Harbor a child molester was child’s play. Between Grandma Eve and the town council, he’d never harm another victim, not in the Harbor, not anywhere. Here the worst villain, the evildoer unspoken, was a reporter. Like the Grim Reaper, a nosy journalist could bring life as we knew it to an end. Tourists, Paumanok Harbor could handle. Demon hunters, paranormal fanatics, federal investigators, and curious, jealous, demanding mobs, not so well. Publicity was the last thing a village of espers wanted or could afford.
Word went out. We’d meet at Town Hall.
Elladaire didn’t want to leave her movie. “This is important, kid, and you’re not going to set anything on fire, so don’t waste the effort of crying.” I ate the last kiss but gave her the tippy-top of it.
“Nice parenting skills.” Piet was grabbing up her stuff, his laptop, and the fake “experimental” fire retardant canister.
“She stopped crying, didn’t she?” I gave the dogs wait-here cookies.
I drove too fast, my mind racing, too. How could we stop Barry, whatever he called himself, short of tossing him and his camera and computer into the bay? The picture of me was no problem, and I knew nothing otherworldly left an image, but what else had he shot and speculated about? Worse, had he transferred his story and photos to the magazine yet?
We left the baby with Mrs. Ralston, the town clerk and gatekeeper to the inner offices.
“Is she safe?”
“She is now.”
“Thank you, Mr. Doorn,” she said to Piet, ignoring my part in keeping Elladaire from burning down the town, or eating mushrooms from the lawn.
We headed toward the police side of the building, where Uncle Henry was waiting for us. The Chief of Police gave me that Grandma Eve look, filled with disdain, disgust, and disappointment. But not surprise.
“I didn’t—” I shut my mouth. Maybe I did.
Uncle Henry refused to arrest Barry/Barton, even if he’d given me a fake name. He wanted to lock me up instead.
This time Piet stood up for me, kind of. “Come on, Chief, there must be a way we can keep him from writing that story.”
“I wish I could keep you from writing your damn stories and painting your blasted pictures, too, Willow,” said the man who used to brag to everyone he knew how he’d encouraged me when I was just a kid, coloring outside the lines.
I ignored his wishes. “I know what we can do. You can bring the mayor to his room and wipe out Barry’s memory of everything he learned about us.”
“I already called the mayor. He’s in Albany trying to get the state to cough up more money for the school programs they insist we have. He’ll be home tomorrow, if he doesn’t forget what time his plane leaves.”
“Jensen—Jenner—will have the article written by then, unless he’s waiting to see the fire lights tonight,” Piet said. “We need to act now.”
I offered to go to the motel where he was staying and divert Barry. I’d say I forgot to tell him about my new book, which was the purpose he gave for writing the damn article, the lying slug. While I had him outside, someone—I looked at Piet—could go around back and smash his equipment.
Piet refused. He was no criminal. “And I’m not going to jail because you trusted a good-looking slimeball.”
The fire captain, who was also the building inspector, hurried into the chief’s office. If Barry was at the Harbor Inn, Mac swore, there’d be sprinklers. Mac had insisted on them himself. All we had to do was hold up a match to set them off and flood him and his equipment.
Mac looked at the pipe in his hand—the suddenly cold, dead tobacco—then at Piet. “Guess that won’t work.”
The next suggestion came from Micky, the firehouse maintenance man. He wanted me to call in a fake fire alarm so the volunteers came with hoses pumping.
The village finance director tried to crowd into the small office. We didn’t need a fire alarm, he said, a bomb scare would do. Evacuate the motel, confiscate the equipment as an agent of terror.
As if that would hold up in court, where we had to move, to fit in more people, including Mrs. Ralston and the baby. Everyone shouted their ideas, from giving Barry a bottle of drugged wine to feeding him laxative-laced brownies. The chief held up his hand for quiet. He didn’t want to hear any more. There’d be no breaking and entering. No false fire alarms, no damned bomb scares, no damage to private property, no poisoning the perp either. He’d go to the motel himself and tell Barry we don’t like our visitors operating under false pretenses and ask him to leave.
That wouldn’t work and we all knew it. Barry’d only move to Montauk’s motel strip and spy on us from there. We had to destroy his equipment—flash drives and external hard drives, iPads or smart phones, even yellow legal notepads—then keep him from rewriting the story another time, on another computer. Or calling it in, the way newsmen used to. If he hadn’t sent it in yet.
We needed the mayor, and a miracle.
No, offered the tech guy, Russ, who’d been updating the juror rolls. We needed a cone.
This was not the time for ice cream, but I’d take it.
He meant a cone of electronic silence. Russ was middle-aged now, but he made legends as the kid who shut down the stock market on a school trip to the Exchange. And he wreaked havoc with the power grid at the high school when he failed the computer class he could have taught. They’d shipped him out to Royce University to get control, and a conscience. Score one for the freaks in London. Now Russ volunteered to shut down the motel—the
electricity, the wi-fi, the cable—to keep Barry from filing his story.
Piet raised his eyebrows and whispered to me: “He can do that?”
I raised mine back. “You can put out fires, can’t you?”
Judge Chemleki banged his gavel. “What about the first amendment, you know, freedom of speech and all that?”
Everyone shouted him down. Homeland security overrode the constitution, didn’t it? The Feds thought so. If it was good enough for them, it was good enough for us, wasn’t it?
Mr. Graystone, the village lawyer, timidly raised his hand—the only one to do so—and in a quavery voice noted that the police could arrest the intruder if he was registered at the motel under a fake name. He’d be out on bail by morning, of course, but they’d have a little more time for the mayor to get home and to keep Barry from going public with his suspicions.
Unless he already had. Maybe that’s why Barry was here in the first place. Lord knew there were plenty of rumors about Paumanok Harbor after the spate of murders and drug raids, the mysterious mares and the unidentified mayhem while the unseen—except by me—troll wandered the streets. Yeah, the place just might interest a sensationalist rag sheet and its nepotic columnist. I bet he was a lousy writer.
Piet had his phone out. “Shutting it off at the other end,” was all he said until he completed the call. “Someone at DUE will close down the magazine, for libel or something. Or they’ll simply do what they do to hackers. That’s what DUE is for, to protect its people and keep their secrets.”
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