by Alice Orr
“These things wouldn’t be of interest to anyone but me.”
“Are you sure about that?”
Detective Santos had spoken from the doorway. He was dressed more casually than he had been last night, in an open-necked polo shirt and slacks with no jacket. However, Taylor didn’t get the impression that he had also relaxed his vigilance.
“May I see that, please?” Santos walked into the room and held out his hand for the portfolio.
Taylor hesitated.
“You don’t have to show him anything until he gets a search warrant,” Des said, stepping between Taylor and the detective.
A moment ago, Taylor might have welcomed Des’s protectiveness, the way she clung to remaining in his embrace. This situation was different. She touched Des’s arm and moved him aside.
“A warrant won’t be necessary,” she said and handed Santos the portfolio.
He walked to the bed and sat down. He opened the portfolio and pulled out one piece of paper after another, checking each over then returning it to the case, until he came to the blue folder containing Netta’s will. He spent more time on this item, studying the pages one by one, so slowly and carefully that Taylor began to feel like fidgeting from restlessness. Des, on the other hand, didn’t appear to be the least bit impatient with the thoroughness of Santos’s examination. Des was busy craning his neck to see the papers himself. Meanwhile, Taylor was growing impatient with both of these men who seemed so intent upon poking around in her private business.
“Is there something in particular you’re looking for?” she asked.
Santos glanced up at her as if he might have registered the sharp edge in her tone. His dark eyes revealed nothing of what he might be thinking. He waited a long moment before answering.
“Actually, I may have found it.” He folded the will slowly, carefully creasing the edges between his thumb and forefinger. He lifted the flap of the portfolio, as if to put the document inside. Instead, he tapped the folded paper on the corner of the flap as he continued to watch Taylor with the same enigmatic expression on his face.
“What have you found?” Taylor asked even more sharply than before.
“Most of these papers are about your aunt’s house,” he said.
“That’s right.”
“The same house that burned down twenty-some years ago.”
“Not the same house,” she said. “Another house built on the same spot.”
Des had moved over next to her. She could feel some agitation in his manner, but he didn’t speak.
“What do you remember about that fire?” Santos asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “I wasn’t there.”
“You weren’t?” Santos’s interest had heightened enough to narrow his dark eyes into a stare lasered directly at her.
“No, I was not,” Taylor snapped, no longer able to hide her impatience. “What does any of this have to do with April Jane Cooney’s death? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to be investigating?”
“Why would you think your papers might have something to do with the murder?” Santos asked.
“I don’t think any such thing.”
“Wait just a damned minute here.” Des stepped in front of Taylor once more. He put his hand behind him to keep her from pushing him aside again. “This has gone far enough, Santos. If you want to question Miss Bissett, you’ll have to do it officially over at the station house with her lawyer present.”
“I don’t need a lawyer,” Taylor began to protest until Des took hold of her arm and squeezed it.
The urgency of his grasp told her she should stop talking, even if she didn’t want to. Reluctantly, she obeyed his signal. Common sense, so notably absent only minutes ago when she was locked in his embrace, now dictated that Des knew this territory and Detective Santos a lot better than she did. Maybe there was some justification for Des’s urgency. She sighed her acquiescence, and he relaxed his grip on her arm.
Santos had watched this interchange. He might not have seen Des take her arm because that happened behind Des’s back, out of the detective’s line of vision. Still, she wouldn’t be surprised if he guessed something like that had happened. He smiled. She wondered what else he might be guessing at about Des and her. Could he have been outside the door longer than she had assumed? Could he have heard the unmistakable sounds of their passionate kiss, or maybe even seen them through the crack at the doorjamb? Taylor did her best to suppress the urge to blush.
“I won’t need Ms. Bissett for official questioning,” Santos was saying. He slipped the will back inside the portfolio and closed the flap. “At least not today.” He stood up and handed the portfolio to Taylor.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Don’t thank me.” He was still smiling, still watching. “Thank your friend Mr. Maxwell. If he hadn’t been here to give you your cues, you and I might still be comparing memories.”
“I don’t need anybody to give me cues.” Taylor pulled her arm away from Des before he could give it another squeeze.
“Maybe you do. Maybe you don’t,” Santos said. “What you definitely need is to plan on staying in Key West till this investigation is completed.”
“Why does she have to do that?” Des asked. “Is she a suspect?”
Taylor had been about to point out that she could ask her own questions without Des’s help. His suggestion that she might be a police suspect froze the words in her throat.
“A suspect for what?” Santos had asked what Taylor wanted to know.
Des didn’t answer.
“What could I possibly be suspected of?” Taylor turned Santos’s question back at him.
“What have you got?” he responded.
“What is that supposed to mean?” Taylor could hardly believe she was speaking so disrespectfully to a police officer. That simply wasn’t like her.
Santos walked past them to the doorway. He glanced over his shoulder, first at Des and then at Taylor. “Ask Elvis. Or was it Brando?” Santos said and walked out of the room.
Taylor made a move to go after him, but Des stopped her. “I want to ask him what he’s talking about. What could Elvis Presley and Marlon Brando possibly have to do with me?” she asked, struggling against Des, who was holding her by the arms.
“I think he’s talking about something one of them is supposed to have said.”
Taylor stopped struggling. “What was that?”
“I can’t remember who said it either, but the story goes that somebody asked one or the other of them what he was rebelling against and the answer was, ‘What have you got?’, meaning he was rebelling against everything.”
“So Detective Santos was making a joke? I’m surprised to hear he has a sense of humor.”
Des looked at the empty doorway for a moment then back into Taylor’s eyes. “He doesn’t,” he said.
* * *
THE SIGN SAID Higgs Beach. The sand bore the indentations of heavy foot traffic, but the first sun worshippers of the day hadn’t yet arrived. Des parked the Jeep just off the highway at the edge of the beach. The Atlantic ocean stretched clear across the horizon in front of them, silver-blue and sparkling with points of dancing light in the yellow-white morning sun. Any other day, Taylor would have pulled off her sandals and walked barefoot to the shore. She imagined how the sand would feel between her toes and wondered if it would still be cool to the touch or already warming in the tropical sun. She might have found that out for herself, but she was too troubled right now to move from where she sat.
Des seemed to sense that and didn’t disturb her. He busied himself with opening the bakery box from the back seat. The two croissants he took out were large and puffy. The delicate crust flaked easily as he set each on a napkin atop the deep dashboard, one on her side of the vehicle, one on his side. The rich, buttery aroma came to her along with the scent of the sea. Some memory of her former hunger stirred in her, especially when Des unscrewed the top from the widemouthed Thermos he had pulled from be
neath his seat and the smell of coffee overpowered both pastries and ocean.
“Café au lait?” he asked as he poured the pale, foamy liquid into a metal cup.
Taylor didn’t speak. She only nodded a little and tried to smile as she took the cup from his hand.
“You really should try the croissants,” he said. “They’re delicious, and it must be a long time since you’ve eaten.”
The solicitousness of his tone produced exactly the opposite effect in her than it probably should have. “If I want to eat, I will eat,” she snapped. “I can take care of myself.”
“I don’t doubt that,” Des said, only a little less solicitously. She could feel him studying her, even though she wasn’t looking at him.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know you’re trying to be kind to me. I shouldn’t jump all over you for it. I’m afraid I have a problem with people who think I need taking care of. It makes me feel suffocated.” She turned to look at him. “Does that make any sense to you?”
“I suppose I can understand how somebody might feel that way. Being smothered by attention hasn’t exactly been the experience of my life.”
A cool distance had entered his tone. Taylor wondered what his experience of life might have been and if a man as carefully controlled as Des would be willing to talk about that experience much. Right now, however, she had a more pressing question to ask.
“What do you know about the Stormley fire?”
He watched her for a moment from behind his dark glasses. Then he sighed, deep and long, like letting out a breath he’d held for quite some time. “Just about everything,” he said.
Taylor hadn’t expected that. She pulled a chunk of feathery pastry from the croissant on the dashboard and put it in her mouth for something to do while she decided whether or not she really wanted to know “everything.” The flavor spread over her tongue, as sensual as it was startling.
“You were right,” she said. “This is delicious.”
He had cocked his head quizzically to one side, as if he might know that she was avoiding something. “I’d tell you to try my coffee, if you weren’t so touchy about being urged to eat.”
Taylor could tell by his slow smile he meant that as a friendly tease rather than a taunt. “You made this?” she asked, lifting the cup.
“Every morning, sure as sunrise.”
She tasted and was even more pleased than with the croissant. A hint of cinnamon and just strong enough.
“It’s still hot,” she said and was glad for the warmth as it began melting the constriction in her throat. She had been feeling the urge to cry ever since they left the Key Westian. Too much confusion, too little sleep were her best explanations for that feeling, and for something else...
“There’s a special technique involved,” he was saying. “You have to heat the milk to just the right temperature before pouring it together with the hot coffee into the cup.” His voice was as warm and liquid as the process he was describing.
“I’ve seen that done,” she said, wanting to let herself flow along with the spell of that voice, just as she had wanted to stay in his arms back at the guesthouse.
“Your Aunt Netta made coffee that way. She was the one who taught me.”
Her aunt’s name returned Taylor from her momentary reverie to the question she’d danced up to and then retreated from a few moments ago. Still, she was reluctant to abandon contemplation of being entranced by Des’s voice.
“Tell me about the fire,” she said, not because she wanted to, but because she had to.
“You don’t remember any of it?”
Taylor hesitated. She knew that she was asking these things because of what she guessed Detective Santos was about to say this morning at the Key Westian. There was also what Jethro had told her last night about how old he remembered her to be when she was last in Key West as a child. She already suspected what they had both been getting at. For the flicker of an instant, she was gripped by the urge to jump out of the Jeep, run down the highway to the airport and fly back to her insulated life in the drafty rooms of northern New York. She waited for the instant to pass before she asked the most dangerous question of all.
“Should I remember?”
He didn’t answer right away. She could feel the intensity of his gaze, but she couldn’t actually see it. His dark glasses were in the way. She had to see his eyes when he spoke. That was suddenly very important to her. She fitted her coffee cup into the holder on the low hump between the car seats and reached with both hands to take off his glasses. She had eased them away from his face when he stopped her hands with his own.
“You were there,” he said.
She had expected that was what he would say, but the reality of the words was no less a shock for being anticipated. He took his glasses from her grasp with one hand but kept hold of her with the other. She knew she was hanging on to him for dear life again, just as she had done earlier this morning, but as if to keep from slipping over the edge of something this time. She also knew somehow that he would hold her back from that precipice as long as she wanted to be held. Finally, she knew that the plunge was inevitable and might as well happen now. She pulled her hand from his, not abruptly but with resolve. She needed to hear what he had to say on her own, without the kind of shielding protection she had been blessed, or burdened, with all of her hovered-over life—at least as much of that life as she could recall.
“If I was there,” she asked, “why don’t I remember?”
The sun brought out golden lights in his green eyes. She could see the compassion there softening his usual cool gaze, just as he had softened toward her at the guest-house. She could also see that he wanted to take her in his arms once more. She wondered why he didn’t. Maybe he understood and respected her need to be strong right now. Whatever his reason, he kept his distance, leaning against the door on his side of the Jeep. She was grateful for that.
“Why don’t I remember something as unforgettable as the fire that destroyed my home and killed my mother?”
“I don’t know the answer to that for sure,” he said. “But I think Winona Starling might.”
Taylor was struck silent for a moment. What did Winona Starling have to do with this? In that moment of Taylor’s surprise, Des tossed what was left of his coffee out of the window and turned the ignition key on the steering column. She didn’t have to ask where they were going.
* * *
THE WHITE HOUSE on Elizabeth Street still looked as quiet and asleep as it had when Taylor left it less than two hours ago. Under other circumstances, she might have tiptoed to her room and waited for her hostess to make the first move before confronting her with such gloomy subjects on a lovely morning. But Taylor had questions that pressed for answers, pressed her past courtesy to urgency. She went straight to the front door. When she found it unlocked, she went directly inside, and she didn’t tiptoe.
The foyer and the rooms off it were in shadow from the shutters that shielded all windows from the heat of the sun. The only morning light came from the far end of the central hallway that ran from front veranda to back veranda. Taylor headed toward that light. She pushed through the wide screened door onto a deep porch that spanned the width of the house.
Canvas shade curtains of dark green-and-white stripes had been rolled down partway at each end of the portico for privacy. A soft breeze whispered through the opening between the bamboo batten at the bottom of the shade and the white balustrade that surrounded the veranda, except in the space where three wide steps led down to the luxuriant lawn and garden. The genteel grace of the scene was much at odds with Taylor’s agitated state of mind.
“Good morning, my dear.”
Winona Starling was seated at a round breakfast table covered by a cloth and china, all as immaculately white as the caftan she wore. Her hair was hidden, as it had been the night before. This morning she was wearing a wide-brimmed hat instead of a turban. The hat was white with a purple chiffon sash tied around it as a
hatband and knotted in the back to trail down behind her. That sash was the only touch of color in the scene, other than the flowers in the white vase on the table and the red of Winona’s lips.
“What is he doing here?” Winona asked in a none-too-genteel or graceful tone.
Taylor turned toward the direction of Winona’s stare. Des had followed Taylor through the house and onto the veranda, but she hadn’t noticed him doing that. She was too engrossed in the urgency of her mission to notice much of anything. The questions that had surfaced since her arrival here yesterday, along with all those never entirely formed, which had haunted her most of her life, suddenly demanded instant satisfaction. She felt as if she must not delay that satisfaction a moment longer. She also felt, with a certainty she couldn’t explain, that when Des said Winona Starling might know the answers to at least some of Taylor’s confusion, he was right.
“I don’t want him here,” Winona said. “He is not my friend, and only my friends are welcome in my house.”
She said that in the tone of a pronouncement, as if nothing but compliance were possible. Taylor, if she thought about it for a moment, would have preferred Des to stay. He had become a kind of unexpected and unlikely ally. The same instinct that told her Winona held the key to at least part of the mystery of the past also told Taylor that Des could guide her through the thorny passages of that labyrinth. Despite her resolve to face on her own whatever life and the future might bring, she sensed that the murky recesses of times gone by could be much more perilous territory. She would have welcomed Des’s company for this particular journey, but Winona’s manner made it clear that was not a choice.
“Des, I need to speak with Mrs. Starling alone,” Taylor said. “You had better go.”
He didn’t move. Standing there in his jeans and T-shirt, with his feet planted resolutely apart, he reminded Taylor of a tree rooted on this veranda, as solid as any northern New York oak.
“Please, Des,” she said. “I would rather do this by myself.”
That wasn’t entirely true, but she understood that only her insistence was likely to dislodge this particular mighty oak.