High Tide

by Jude Deveraux

  She had to give it to him: he could drive. He wasn’t reckless, and she doubted if he even once exceeded the speed limit, but he moved in and out of traffic with quick efficiency. He wove the car down side streets in residential areas, always with his eyes on all three mirrors as he watched to see if anyone was following them. She didn’t ask him if he had a place for them to go because she was afraid that he would have a negative answer.

  Once he mumbled something.

  “What?!” she asked in fear.

  “Redheaded woodpecker,” he said. “Rare in this area.”

  Given their circumstances, she could only blink at this remark.

  After about forty minutes he pulled the sun visor down and removed a little black remote control, pushed a red button and the next minute they glided into a garage and the door closed behind them. “Come on,” he said without looking at her, then disappeared inside a door, leaving her in the car.

  Slowly, Fiona got out of the car, her backpack on her shoulder. When she stepped through the door, she was in a small kitchen, very plain, clean, but with a feeling that no one actually used it. She could hear a voice through the doorway. Cautiously, she stepped into a living room that had a white Berber carpet and black leather furniture. There were three big watercolors of local Florida scenes on the walls. Hotel rooms were more personal than this place.

  Ace was sitting on the couch talking into a telephone.

  Fiona thought that she should put her finger on the button and cut him off, but she didn’t. Common sense overrode her fear. If the police didn’t know where they were, why did she have to fear a telephone tap?

  “You have the names?” Ace was saying. “Right.” “Yes, I understand.” “Yeah, here at Joe’s.” “No, I’ll stay here as long as I can.” “Yes, she’s here with me.”

  At that Ace leaned back against the couch and looked at Fiona sitting on the matching black leather chair. “No, no, of course not,” he said into the phone, then smiled. “She’s as tall as me, so she’s wearing my clothes.”

  At that Fiona sat upright and glared at him.

  The reply of the person on the other end made him smile broader. “Yeah, okay, tell her not to worry, I have it under control. I’ll wait for your fax.” He paused. “Yeah, okay, and you too.”

  When he put down the receiver, Fiona was still glaring at him, but he ignored her. “Are you hungry? I’m not sure what there is to eat here.”

  Fiona came off the couch in one motion and planted herself in front of him. “I want to know what’s going on. What do you have under control? Where are we? Who were you calling, and what was so funny about your … about these clothes? Except that I’m sick of them, that is.”

  He was wrong, she thought, he was at least two inches taller than she was. They’d be equal if she had on heels, but in the old tennis shoes, she had to look up to him, ever so slightly, but she was looking up.

  As he often did, he ignored her; he stepped around her and went into the kitchen. Fiona was inches behind him, so close in fact that he almost hit her in the face with the freezer door of the side-by-side.

  “Ah, here we have a variety of frozen grease. So what’s your poison?” He held up two packages—one of eggs wrapped around ham and another of eggs wrapped around cheese.

  She took a deep breath. “I want to know what’s going on,” she said as calmly as she could. “I am wanted for murder. The newspaper—”

  “No, we are wanted for murder.” He’d put the frozen packages back into the freezer and was now looking in the cupboards. “You know how to make pancakes?”

  At that Fiona put her arms straight down to her sides, her hands in fists, opened her mouth, and let out a scream.

  Ace had his hand over her mouth before she’d let an ounce of air escape her lungs. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he demanded. “If someone heard you, they might investigate.” Slowly, he removed his hand and nodded toward the countertop in the kitchen. “Now sit down while I make breakfast.”

  She didn’t move. “So help me, if you don’t tell me what’s going on, I’ll scream my head off.”

  “You really do have trouble with anger, don’t you? Have you thought of seeing a counselor?”

  At that Fiona opened her mouth again, but this time he didn’t move. Instead, he just looked at her speculatively.

  Closing her mouth, Fiona narrowed her eyes at him. “So why aren’t we at the police station, Mr. Do-Gooder? Just hours ago you were telling me that I couldn’t be a fugitive from justice, that I had to turn myself over to the police. But now that you’re also accused, we’re hiding.”

  “You want blueberries in your pancakes?”

  “I want some answers!” she shouted at him.

  “All right,” he said, “but sit while you ask me what you want to know.”

  “No,” she said calmly as she took a seat on a barstool on the far side of the counter, “I don’t play that game. I don’t beg you for information. You start talking.”

  “I guess it would be too much to ask that you would cook while I explain.”

  Fiona gave a snort of derision. She had no idea how to turn on a stove, much less make food with one of the things.

  “Thought not. All right, as you know, Eric killed Roy Hudson last night so we—”

  “Wait a minute,” Fiona said slowly, her hands on either side of her head. “I thought you believed that I killed the man.”

  Ace was at the stove, his back to her, but he turned around, a look of astonishment on his face. “How could you have killed a man twice your size?”

  “This is not funny,” she said, “and I don’t appreciate your levity.”

  “Okay,” he said with a sigh as he turned back to the griddle on the stove. “I had to get you out of there last night, so I pretended to Eric that I believed you were the killer. For all I knew he had a couple of stowaways on the boat ready to attack us.” He placed the first stack of pancakes in front of her.

  Since it was more than she usually ate in two days, she got up, found another plate, then lifted all but one of the pancakes and put them on the empty plate. During this she was thinking about what he was saying and doing her best to remember all that had happened last night.

  “But later when we were alone, why did you keep saying that you thought I was a murderer?”

  “To keep you angry so you wouldn’t think about what had just happened.” He had a spatula laden with yet more pancakes. “Is that all you’re eating?”

  “Yeah,” she said with a cold look at him. “We unwomanly women don’t eat too much.” But the pancakes were quite good.

  He put two more on her plate, put three pats of butter on each pancake, then slathered the whole stack in syrup.

  “You were going to turn me in to the police,” she said as she looked at the pancakes and decided to take just one more bite.

  “Protective custody. Seemed to me that Eric had it in for you. Or maybe it was just that you were the weaker of the two of us.” At that he held up his hands as though to prevent her attacking him for his non-p.c. reply, and she saw that the backs of his hands were deeply scratched. It must have been painful for him to drive.

  “I’m sorry,” she mumbled, her mouth full, her eyes on her plate, her face red in memory of his holding her in the shower.

  “What did you say? I couldn’t hear you.” He cupped his hand to his ear.

  “I said that you had no right to treat me as though I were a child. You could have told me what was going on,” she said loudly.

  “Right. Before or after you went into shock over finding a bleeding corpse on top of you?”

  At that Fiona pushed her now-empty plate away. “So what now? Where are we, by the way?”

  “This house belongs to a friend of mine. It’s my getaway when he’s not here and I’ve had too much of …” When he paused, Fiona got the impression that he didn’t want to reveal too much about himself. “Anyway, no one in Florida knows about this place, so we won’t b
e found here. I called my brother to find out what he can about Eric and your Roy Hudson.”

  “My Roy Hudson?” She almost exploded. “What is that supposed to mean? At least you met him before when you hit him up for money for that bird farm of yours.”

  “No,” Ace said thoughtfully, “I hadn’t met him, and I never asked him for money. Oddly enough he came to me. I received a badly typed, misspelled letter saying that he thought he was about to come into some money and he wanted to give some to Kendrick Park. He said that if this was all right with me, we’d meet at the park and leave from there to go on a fishing trip; then he gave a date and time.”

  He looked back down at his huge stack of pancakes. “I didn’t know anything about you until the day we left. Even then I was only told your name.”

  “Okay, so now what do we do? Or am I not to ask that? You seem to like the caveman role, where all women just obey and don’t ask too many questions.”

  “You have a sharp tongue on you,” he said, looking at her from across the counter.

  “Some men like my tongue,” she snapped back, then regretted her words.

  He didn’t reply to that but kept his head down for a moment before looking back at her. “I want to wait until I see what my brother can find on Eric and Roy. There has to be a motive. Unless Eric just likes to kill for the fun of it, which I doubt.”

  “Why? Why doubt something like that? Lots of people kill just because they enjoy it.”

  Ace picked up her plate and his, then walked with them to the sink. “I don’t know. It’s just a feeling I have. I think this thing was planned, and I think it has something to do with you.”

  “Me?” Fiona said, then started to defend herself but stopped. “I don’t know anything or anyone involved in this.”

  “Even if the police dig deeply,” he said softly, “they won’t find something that could be construed as a motive?”

  “You mean like he had photos of me naked and he would have published them on the Internet if I didn’t pay him, what was it you said?: ‘Everything you have, everything you will earn, and for what you plan to leave your children.’ Is that about right?”

  “You have some memory on you. So?”

  “So what?” she asked, staring at him.

  “Do you have those photos or not?”

  “Very funny. No, I don’t have any nudes of myself, and where have you been for the last decade? It’s fashionable to be photographed naked. But it doesn’t matter anyway. I haven’t done anything that anyone could blackmail me for.”

  “Surely you have some secrets.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “Not that I would tell you and not that Roy Hudson could know.” Her voice rose before he could speak. “Any secrets I have might cause me embarrassment, but there’s not much that couldn’t be printed in the church bulletin. What about you?”

  “Me?” he asked as though he were a bystander and not part of this.

  “Yes, you! That newspaper said that you were my accomplice.”

  “Oh that,” he said in dismissal as he put the dishes in the dishwasher. “I’m sure that was an afterthought. What I want to know is who beat up Eric? Was that part of the plan, or did he anger someone else?”

  “Maybe he beat himself up.”

  “Saw that on TV, did you?” he said, obviously laughing at her.

  At that Fiona got up and went into the living room. She really didn’t like his attitude of flippancy. He was treating all of this as some great joke and just as soon as his brother sent a fax, all would be cleared up. She heard him doing whatever it is that people do in a kitchen, and when he finally returned to the living room, he didn’t seem in the least perturbed. “Doesn’t any of this bother you?” she snapped. “Don’t you want to get back to your birds?”

  At that he turned to glare down at her. “You think I want to stay cooped up inside this place? You think I want to be here with someone who has made my life a living hell since she stepped off a plane? No, I don’t. But, unlike you, I’m trying to make the best of it. I’m trying to save us some time in jail, because that’s where they’d put us until this thing is figured out. So, if you don’t mind, I’d like a little appreciation, if not thanks.”

  “Sorry,” she muttered.

  “I didn’t hear you.”

  “I apologize,” she shouted. “Did you hear that?”

  “Yes, and I’m sure the neighbors did too,” he said. She watched as he opened a desk drawer and took out a cell phone.

  “Who are you going to call?” she asked suspiciously.

  “Not that it’s any of your business, but I plan to call my fiancée. I’m sure she’s worried sick.”

  “But the police—”

  “Won’t be trying to trace calls from this phone—it belongs to the owner of this house.”

  “Well, I’ll just …” she said, and nodded toward the bathroom. But the truth was that she had no intention of getting out of earshot of him and his call. Was his fiancée the perky little blonde in the photo she’d found under his bed? And, for that matter, what was the photo doing under his bed?

  Fiona stepped into the bathroom and turned on the water, but she left the door open. Miss Perky must have been sitting by the phone because she answered it instantly.

  “Yes, honey, I’m fine,” Ace said in a voice she’d never before heard from him. It was an almost fatherly voice, very tender and soothing. “Yes, yes. I know. I saw the papers. No, of course none of it’s true. It was just a misunderstanding, that’s all.”

  At that Fiona made a sound in her throat that caused Ace to get up and walk around the corner where he could see her.

  Close the door, Fiona thought, but she couldn’t make herself do it. This man’s private conversation was none of her business, but, still, she couldn’t seem to work up the command to close the door.

  “Yes, she’s here with me,” Ace said softly into the receiver.

  After that remark, Fiona knew that she’d die before she moved an inch.

  Ace laughed in a seductive way, then said, “Very tall, very skinny,” then paused. “Oh, that. Flat.” He held the telephone an inch away from his mouth. “Lisa wants to know how old you are.”

  “Thirty-two,” Fiona said before she thought.

  “See, I told you,” Ace said. “Now stop worrying. Mike has Frank working on this. By this evening we’ll know everything there is to know about both of them, especially why Eric killed Roy. That’s the key to everything. And after we find out the reason, then Miss Burkenhalter and I will go to the police and it’ll all be over with.”

  Pausing as he listened, Fiona watched him in the mirror. He had the softest, sweetest smile on his face, as though he were ice cream sitting in the sun.

  “Come on, now, sweetheart, stop crying. I’m fine. No, I can’t tell you where I am, and you can’t visit me.” He smiled broader. “Yes, I know she’s here, but she’s also been accused of murder. No, of course she didn’t kill anyone.” “Yes. You can tell the police I said so. Look, why don’t you take a couple of pills and go to bed? There’s nothing you can do to help me.”

  He paused for several long moments, then turned his back so Fiona couldn’t see his face. “Yes, me too,” she heard him say, then, “Okay, I’ll call you when I can”; then he turned the phone off and handed it to Fiona without making a comment on her eavesdropping.

  “You want to call someone, do,” he said over his shoulder as he headed for the kitchen.

  Jeremy, was Fiona’s first thought. He must be frantic with worry over her. Quickly she pushed the buttons for his number as she walked into the living room.

  Like Lisa, Jeremy must have been waiting for her call.

  “Where the hell are you?” he exploded. “Do you have any idea how much trouble you’re in? Fiona, I don’t know if I can get you out of this. You must turn yourself in and immediately.”

  “Ace has some relatives looking into why Eric killed Roy, and—”

  “Fiona, are you out of you
r mind? Are you insane? As far as I can tell, this guy Eric is in the hospital with a battered face and a ruptured spleen. He says that you and this guy Ace beat him after you killed Roy.”

  “Oh,” Fiona said, and her body began to tremble. “I haven’t really heard all of it. We didn’t see the papers, and—”

  “It seems to me that you didn’t really think about anything. Do you know how your case is going to look when you’re reported as flaunting your flight in front of a diner full of people? They say that you and that man nearly ran down a busload of children in your wild escape.”

  “We did no such thing. Jeremy, do you think I’m too skinny? And old?”

  “Merciful heavens, Fiona, have you lost your mind? Wait, wait, later I can testify that you were in shock and incoherent.”

  Maybe he was trying to be helpful and maybe she should be grateful that he was thinking like a lawyer, but she didn’t like being called “incoherent,” for any reason, and she wanted to get him back. “Did you see the photo in the paper of Ace?” she practically purred. “He’s really quite beautiful. I never saw such thick hair in my life, and—”

  “Fiona,” Jeremy said coldly, “if this is an attempt to make me jealous, I don’t think this is the time or place, do you?”

  When Fiona heard a step by the doorway into the living room, she mumbled, “I gotta go,” then hung up on Jeremy’s loud protests. She didn’t want to be chastised by Jeremy—even if she did deserve his anger at her ingratitude.

  Ace entered the room with a tall glass of iced tea. “He upset about the mess you’re in?”

  “Oh, yes,” Fiona said as lightly as she could manage. “He was very worried about me. He always worries about me. And your girlfriend? Lena?”

  “Lisa. Fiancée. The wedding date is set for three weeks from now. You want something to drink?”

  “No thanks. So, you told her I’m tall and skinny and old, not to mention …” She glanced down at her chest. It was true that she wasn’t going to win a wet T-shirt contest, but clothes hung better on her than on …

  Oh, hell, what did she care what this man’s girlfriend thought of her?

  “Sorry about that,” Ace said, his mouth full. “She thinks that every woman I meet is after me, so I have to tell her that all of them are real dogs.”