“Guilt,” Ace said early on. “I think he felt guilty for what he’d done to us or to someone close to us. We just have to figure out what and who it was.”
But, try as they might, they couldn’t come up with any tragic thing that had been done to them that could have been someone else’s fault.
And heaven knows that they’d tried.
This morning Ace had said that they had to leave the house and go somewhere where no one could find them. At the time Fiona had been glad because the house was so barren that it had depressed her just being there. Little did she know that in comparison to where he was taking her, the house was a palace.
Where Ace was taking her was to his “childhood home.” The place where he’d grown up.
While she was packing, shoving the clothes of a man she’d never met into a suitcase, she didn’t know what was waiting for them.
But one thing she’d already learned on this trip: they couldn’t call a deli and have food sent up.
“So how do we eat?” she’d asked as she slipped three cotton shirts into the case.
Ace shrugged. “Off the land, I guess.”
Fiona wasn’t going to go hysterical. She’d read The Yearling and had seen the movie Cross Creek. “Does that mean”—she swallowed—“fishing?”
Ace paused in packing long enough to glare at her. “If you think the two most-wanted people in America can walk into a grocery, I want to hear about it.” Then he looked her up and down, all six feet of her. “You especially are easily recognizable.”
Fiona knew that there was truth in his words, for all that he made her feel as though her height were a physical defect. She bit her tongue to keep from saying that all women couldn’t be overdeveloped dwarfs such as he seemed to like. Now was the time to think with her head and not her emotions.
“Are you going to pack?” Ace snapped at her. Ever since he’d seen the TV show that had destroyed his theory that lack of motive would clear them, he’d been a monster.
“I was thinking,” she said softly. “Two years ago Kimberly was in such a jam that she had to use a disguise to get herself out. She had to wear a fake mustache and men’s clothes so she wouldn’t be recognized.”
“What kind of friends do you have?” he asked.
She ignored his question as she looked toward the chest of drawers across from the bed. After a moment’s searching she withdrew a black rayon scarf that was the size of a small tablecloth.
“Now what?” he snapped. “We don’t have time—”
He broke off when he saw Fiona drape the scarf over her head, then pull it across her face. She was the picture of a veiled Muslim woman.
Ace stood there blinking for a few moments, then disappeared into the bathroom, reappeared with a large container of bronzing gel and started smearing the lotion on his face and hands. “You’re not stupid, are you?” he said softly, and Fiona was glad the veiling hid the enormous grin on her face. She didn’t know when a compliment had pleased her more.
After that Ace took over. Since the scarf could only be made to cover the upper half of her and they had no long black skirt, her trousers and old sneakers showed below. “We’ll take my friend’s car,” he said as he went into the kitchen, Fiona behind him. He started pulling supplies out of the cupboards and putting them into paper bags. “We’ll take what we can from here because we’ll need to conserve all our money. How much do you have with you?” He began emptying a broom closet of cleaning supplies.
Incongruously, as she watched him, she thought, Wherever we’re going doesn’t have maid service. “About fifty dollars. I was going to use my NYCE card down here, but I never had a chance.”
“Great. I have about twenty for the same reason. It’ll have to last us for”—he glanced up at her, then back down—“for as long as we can hold out. Are you ready?”
“I guess so,” she said, but instead of moving, she sat down on a barstool. “I have to admit that I’m—”
She was going to say that she was frightened, but Ace didn’t give her a chance. Instead, he put his hand behind her head and gave her a hard, hard kiss. It wasn’t a kiss of passion. It was a kiss of courage, and it told her that he was just as afraid as she was but that it would be better if neither of them actually said the word.
It worked. When Ace moved away, he stood there looking at her, and she knew that he was again asking her to decide what she wanted to do. He wasn’t forcing her into this; he was letting her make up her mind of her own free will.
Standing, she put her shoulders back and took a deep breath. “Ready when you are, sahib.”
Ace laughed. “I think that’s Hindi, not Arabic.”
“Whatever. Let’s go.”
Their disguise worked. In the garage, Ace took the dark blue Chevrolet of the house’s owner and left the Jeep behind. Fiona draped the black scarf over her upper half and used a pin she’d found in the bathroom to hold the veil in place.
As soon as they pulled out of the garage, Ace said, “Damn! I meant to put on more of that bronzing stuff. I want to be as dark as possible.”
For a few moments Fiona watched him as he fumbled with the bottle and the steering wheel; then she took the bottle from him and put lotion on his face. He had nice skin, and the warmth of his body flowed down her fingertips, up her arm, and seemed to land on her lips.
After a moment, he glanced at her out of the corner of his eyes, and she said, “Turning you on?” in such a way that he laughed.
“Not quite. Ow! Watch the fingernails.”
“Sorry,” she said; then when she felt Ace’s face go rigid, she stopped and looked at what he was staring at.
There was a roadblock in front of them, six state police cars, and at least a dozen men with rifles in their hands.
Fiona sat back down on her seat.
“What would your friend Kimberly do now?” Ace asked quietly.
“Brazen it out,” Fiona said, then looked at him. “Unless you want to throw open the car doors and make a run for it.”
Ace looked at her as though she were stupid, for there was no cover along the sides of the road. If they ran, they’d be mowed down in seconds … Which, of course, was her point.
“Brazen it is,” he said, then inched the car forward.
A big blond state trooper looked into the car. “You folks just passin’ through?”
“My English is no so good,” Ace said to the man; then he heard Fiona’s sharp intake of breath and realized he was doing a bad Italian accent. But what did an Arabic accent sound like?
“Ooooh,” Fiona groaned, and both men looked at her.
To Ace’s great delight, he saw that Fiona’s belly had increased by a foot and a half. Obviously, she’d shoved her backpack up under the tail end of her veil. And the bulge hid her trouser-clad legs.
“My wife is not well,” Ace said. “The baby will be born soon.”
Fiona leaned toward the window and batted her lashes at the man. “In my country we have heard that American policemen can deliver babies. This is true?”
The man stepped back so suddenly he almost tripped; then he banged the top of the car twice. “Out of here,” he said, and Ace lost no time driving through the roadblock.
Ten minutes later Ace pulled off the main highway and stopped at a small grocery with a large produce stand next to it. Fiona waited in the car while he purchased three bags full of fresh produce, then went into the store and came out with more bags of unknown contents.
It was during this time, while sitting alone in the car under a shady tree, that she was able to catch her breath and think. And the first thing she thought was: He’s not what he seems.
For the last few days she had been under so much stress, so much turmoil, that her senses had gone into hiding and she hadn’t thought about what she was seeing or feeling. But now, watching Ace choose fruit from the outdoor stand, the words screamed in her head: He’s not what he seems.
From the first she’d prejudged him based solely on
his name—Ace. She’d assumed he was a redneck or—what was it they called them in Florida?—a cracker. Where he lived, in that run-down place on a derelict bird farm, seemed to fit her prejudgment of him, but, try as she might, she couldn’t seem to fit him into that cracker pattern.
First of all, there was his education. How many rednecks had advanced degrees in ornithology? For that matter, how many did anything with birds except shoot and eat them? But Ace watched one TV show after another about birds, birds, and more birds.
And then there was his accent. It was slight, but now and then he pronounced a word in that rare, distinctive New England accent. Maybe he originally came from Rhode Island or Boston or Maine, she thought. Wherever, he hadn’t always lived in backwater Florida.
Besides his words, there were his movements and the way he wore clothes. She had a feeling that he could sleep in his clothes and get up looking smooth and unrumpled. And bed head would never dare afflict that thick black hair of his.
As she watched Ace pick up fat red tomatoes and smell them before putting them into a bag, she thought, What redneck cooked for a woman? And when he paused and looked up into a tree, she knew he’d sighted some bird.
So who was this man she’d turned her life over to? she wondered. He was poor, that was true, she’d seen that, yet he had relatives he could fax to do detective work. He drove like he was a professional race car driver, yet his apartment had been filled with books.
The only thing Fiona was absolutely sure of was that he wasn’t what he seemed and he was not telling her the whole story. In fact, now that she thought of it, he was telling her next to nothing. He was demanding that Fiona tell him lots and lots about herself, but in return he was keeping himself a secret.
As she watched him go into the store, she thought, Two can play this game. If he was going to keep secrets, so could she. First of all, she sure as hell was not going to explain Kimberly to him. And second, she was going to use any method she could think of to find out as much about him as she could. Remember, she thought, knowledge is power.
When Ace got back into the car, he told her that the police had been there, but no one thought that the two murderers would be able to get through the roadblocks. “They think we’ve gone south to Miami,” Ace said as he swung back onto the road. “It seems that the police received three anonymous tips that we’d been seen that far south.”
“So they won’t be looking for us here?”
“Not for a while yet, and I’d be willing to bet that the tippers were named Taggert.”
“Are they relatives or birds?”
“Cousins,” Ace said with a quick grin as he got back on the highway, only this time they were heading back the way they came.
“Please tell me we’re not following whatever bird you saw back there.”
“Blue-gray gnatcatcher,” he said. “I’d like to see the nest—it’s held together with spider silk—but, no, I just wanted to make sure that no one was following us. If the policeman tells anyone about the woman about to give birth, someone else might be suspicious.”
“Right,” Fiona said, and for minutes she didn’t breathe, but, as far as they could tell, they were safe and no one was following them.
But when Fiona saw the house where Ace had grown up, she almost said that she’d rather turn herself in to the police. Jail couldn’t be as bad as that cabin.
It had a rusted metal roof that was peeled up in places, and in others the metal was missing altogether. But she doubted if too much rain got inside as thick piles of Spanish moss covered the big holes. There was a sort of porch on the place, but one of the columns had collapsed, so the roof was hanging down on one side. There was a front door and two windows with missing panes. The upper part of the building was gray wood, and the lower was rotting.
No wonder he liked Kendrick Park, she thought. This building made those at the park seem like the Taj Mahal.
Ace got their bags out of the car, then stood holding them while Fiona stared at the cabin. “It’s a bit rustic,” he said under his breath.
What was he up to? she wondered, because she had the feeling that this wasn’t real, that he was trying to make her believe he was a poor little boy from the wrong side of the tracks. There were bells ringing in her head that told her that he was doing this for a reason. But what reason?
She didn’t know the answer, but she did know that she could play this game too. If he wanted to believe that she thought he was some redneck briar, so be it. She could pretend as well as he could. “So. Do these Taggert relatives of yours wear shoes? Pick their toenails with a Tennessee pig sticker? What about the Montgomerys? Ever seen a bathtub?”
Tension visibly left Ace’s body as he opened the front door. Not that it mattered much whether it was open or closed, since it was hanging on one hinge. “Come on, we’ve electricity,” he said, motioning with his head for her to enter.
“Let me guess. Your family knew Edison.”
“Sure. He built the house. Wait until you see the woodstove.”
Fiona had to close her eyes for a moment to give herself strength, and she vowed that when this mess was over, she was going to give more to charity to help poor people. It was disgusting that anyone in America should live like this.
Some part of her was hoping that the inside of the cabin would be nice, but instead animals had been using it for their own. There was an old couch that should have been discarded twenty or so years ago, and it looked as though something had built a nest in it. She hoped it wasn’t a bird or he’d never allow it to be cleaned.
On the other side of the cabin was what passed for a kitchen, with a few battered cabinets, a big woodstove against the wall, and in the middle was a table with a broken leg.
Toward the back was a door.
“Let me guess,” Fiona said. “One room and a path, right?”
“Two rooms,” Ace said cheerfully as he put a load of groceries down on the table, then had to catch them as they nearly slid off. “We’uns gotta bedroom.”
“Tell me again how bad jail is,” she said as she tested a chair for sturdiness, then sat down cautiously. Surprisingly, the thing held.
“The point is that you might get out of here, but you won’t get out of jail.”
She looked about the cabin again. “Let me think about that and get back to you.”
Again Ace laughed. “Here,” he said, “put these on and let’s get busy.”
When he handed her a pair of bright yellow rubber gloves, she looked up at him in question.
“This place hasn’t been used in a while.” He grinned. “Well, okay, maybe in years, and Florida’s wet, so it reclaims places quickly, so …”
He seemed to think that she knew what he was getting at, but she had no idea what was going on inside his mind—not about anything.
Putting his hands on the table, he bent over until his nose was close to hers. “We clean while we talk.”
“Clean?” she said as though she’d never heard the word before. Behind him something furry ran across the floor. “This place needs a veterinarian and a really hot fire.”
“Up!” he said, then grabbed her wrist and pulled her out of the chair.
When Fiona moved, the chair, never sturdy to begin with, broke a leg and nearly sent her sprawling. To keep from falling, she clutched at the nearest thing, which happened to be Ace. He grabbed her to him and held her upright.
“Sorry, I …” She stopped speaking as she looked into his eyes, her body pressed against his, and she saw interest there. But she wasn’t about to admit her own interest. She wasn’t going to find out any of his secrets if she let his terrific good looks sway her. Why, oh, why couldn’t he have been five feet tall and fat?
“Don’t get any ideas,” she said as she pushed away from him, but carefully keeping her head turned so he couldn’t see her face.
But Ace had seen and felt the attraction between them. “I think you’re the one who—”
He broke off at the look Fi
ona gave him. “Okay, peace,” he said, then held out his hand to shake hers.
But Fiona turned away and didn’t touch him. “Look, abnormal circumstances make for abnormal relationships,” she said, “so let’s think about the future and other people who are involved in this, and let’s not let circumstances …” She turned back to look at him and saw that he had one of those male smirks on his face.
“What?!” she hissed at him.
“You really must tell me what you read that makes you live in such a fantasy world.”
“Give me that!” she said then snatched the broom out of his hand.
“Don’t tell me you know how to use a broom,” Ace taunted. “Not Miss Cotillion. So where did you go to school? No, no, let me guess. Miss Somebody’s School for Young Ladies.”
“Oops,” Fiona said as she swept a cloud of dirt and couch stuffing and, she hoped, animal droppings in his direction. “Are you going to continue to waste time, or are you going to fill that bucket? I do hope this place has water.”
“With or without alligators?”
“If you’re fetching it, with.”
At that Ace laughed, then went out the front door. In minutes he was back, the bucket full of water, and he was still smiling. “Okay, you first. You now, me later.”
She gave him her most wide-eyed, innocent, ingenue look. “How economical—two baths from the same tub of water. A Montgomery family tradition?”
But he didn’t take the bait and reveal anything about himself. “No bath for you if you don’t start,” he said, smiling.
She was truly puzzled and paused in sweeping to look at him. “Start what? Other than doing your dirty work, that is?”
“I want you to tell me everything about yourself. There’s a connection between us, and we need to find out what it is. So now you tell me about your life, and later I talk about me.”
Fiona hesitated. This was going to be tricky. How did she reveal but not reveal? How did she let him know that she wasn’t going to tell him anything unless he told her everything, without sounding like a petulant child? As to that matter, how did she know what to keep hidden?
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