A Quarter for a Kiss

by Mindy Starns Clark

  “Take me through the long version,” Tom said grimly.

  I paged through everything and then began.

  “A few months ago, right after Christmas, Eli and Stella went down to their vacation house in the Virgin Islands to stay for a while. They flew into St. Thomas first and then they took a ferry from St. Thomas over to St. John, which is where their house is. While they were on the ferry, Eli thought he recognized one of the passengers, an older woman who reminded him of someone named Nadine Peters. He kept looking at her, trying to decide if it was her when he saw a nasty scar on her leg—a scar in the very spot where apparently he shot this woman Nadine years before. That more or less confirmed it for him.”

  “Except that Nadine was supposed to be dead.”

  “Exactly.”

  I dug through the papers until I came to the computer printout from the St. John police, showing the name and address registered to the woman’s license plate number.

  “Anyway,” I said, “Eli stewed on it for a few days before finally taking the plate number from the woman’s car down to someone named ‘A.’ The plate checked out for an address on the East End of the island under a completely different name. Eli went over there and looked for her house, but all he found was just a long driveway up a mountain with a ‘No Trespassing’ sign. He decided it was too much trouble, just coincidence. He let it go.”

  “For a while.”

  “For about six weeks. Then at the end of February he accidentally spotted her again, this time while shopping in St. Thomas. Unable to resist the opportunity, he quickly bought a camera and then tailed her while she was shopping. She stopped at someone’s house for a while, and he wrote down the address. He got photos of everything.”

  I flipped through the pile until I came to the pictures, all of which had been blown up to 8 x 10 size. I studied the ones that showed the woman’s face, though most were in profile. She wasn’t unattractive, but there wasn’t anything conspicuous about her either.

  “That’s a nose job, for sure,” Tom said, glancing at the pictures in my hands. “Face lift too. Maybe the chin.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I live in Southern California. You get to know the look.”

  I rolled my eyes and continued.

  “After that second sighting, Eli decided to set up a surveillance on her house—well, on her driveway at least. He used the beach across the street from there as a cover, and he sat and waited for some action for…” I counted the dates in his notes. “Well, for a day and a half, until she received a delivery of groceries. Eli tried to make some headway with the delivery guy, but it was a wash.”

  “Gerald at Island Foods, right?”

  “Very good,” I said. “After that, Eli continued the surveillance for two more days, all to no avail. Then he decided to take a different approach.”

  “The satellite photos.”

  “Yes,” I replied, pulling the computer-printed pictures from the pile. They were very interesting to look at, a vivid bird’s-eye view of the woman’s estate. There were about five photos, all very similar, all showing a gorgeous mountaintop home and the different facilities surrounding it. She really had the whole hill to herself, a wonderful fortress for someone who didn’t want to be observed by anyone in any way.

  “I’d like to live like that,” Tom said. “High up on a hill, away from the world.”

  “You would?”

  “If you were there with me.”

  I looked down, knowing I felt the same. Not that it would be the wisest course of action, but there was something about being in love with this man that made me want to steal away with him and shut out everything but each other.

  “That’s when he hired the local private investigator too, right?” Tom asked, snapping me from my thoughts.

  “Yeah. Windward Investigations,” I said, pulling their report from the file. “He paid this local guy two hundred dollars to research the security level of the estate. Big surprise when it turned out that the place was locked down tighter than Fort Knox.”

  “In the meantime Eli stashed away some spy tools and hired a sailboat.”

  “Yes, somebody he calls ‘T’ took Eli out on a sailboat with a telescope. He got a better look at the place, and then he spent a little while on her private beach, talking with a man named William who apparently worked for her.”

  “He tried to question the guy about Nadine.”

  “Except her name now is Dianne.”

  I pointed down at Eli’s notes.

  “What does this mean, ‘Is she still an active agent?’”

  “I don’t know,” Tom said, but I could see something shift in his expression, as though something just closed off. I wanted to ask him what he was thinking, but he interrupted my train of thought.

  “You understand the significance of the woman’s name, don’t you?” he asked.

  “Dianne?”

  “Dianne. Nadine. Peters. Streep. She’s playing word games. Scramble the letters for Nadine and you get Dianne. Scramble Peters and you come up with Streep.”

  I stared at the names on the page in front of me, mixing up the letters with my eyes. He was right.

  “Leave it to you to notice something like that,” I said.

  “I’m good at word puzzles,” he replied. That was the understatement of the year. With all of the board games we had played in North Carolina, I learned not to go up against him in anything that required using letters or numbers to win.

  “So then he and Stella returned to Florida, and the next day he flew to Baltimore,” Tom said, interrupting my thoughts again.

  “Where he met with a docent at a museum,” I continued. “A docent he calls ‘R.’ Apparently R. tried to tell Eli that Nadine was definitely dead, and that this new sighting was all in his imagination. Eli used the Freedom of Information Act to pull some old reports on Nadine anyway.”

  “Reports that showed she sold secrets to the Russians during the Cold War. She must’ve been an NSA agent.”

  From the file I pulled out a stack of papers that was about an inch high, old documents from the early ’60s detailing this woman’s activities as a double agent and, sure enough, she worked for the NSA. I knew that when we had time, we could probably glean a lot more data simply by reading each and every page—though many of the pages were black with ink from a Magic Marker. Even with the Freedom of Information Act, certain types of information could be legally withheld.

  “According to Eli, he already knew she was a spy. Here’s where I get confused.” I held up Eli’s notes and read them out loud. “‘Sold secrets to Russians during CMC, worked as mathematician for NSA.’ What’s CMC? What’s NSA?”

  Tom hesitated.

  “I would think NSA is the National Security Agency,” he said finally, his voice sounding tight.

  “Of course,” I said. “What’s the old joke about the NSA? They’re so secretive, ‘NSA’ stands for ‘No Such Agency’?”

  I tried to think of what I knew about the National Security Agency. I thought it was located outside of Baltimore, around Ft. Meade. I had seen signs for it when I traveled the Baltimore/Washington Expressway, and signs for the new Cryptological Museum located next door.

  “What does the NSA do?” I asked. “Aren’t they intelligence, kind of like the CIA?”

  “More like code breaking. Code making. Transfer of information.”

  “Hey, maybe that’s the museum where R. is a docent—that new museum of cryptology.”

  “If Eli was dealing with the NSA, that would be the likely one,” Tom said.

  I looked at him and noticed a strange expression in his eyes.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  He shook his head dismissively.

  “Nothing,” he replied. “I’m just tired.”

  Certainly, we were both tired at this point. But there was something odd in Tom’s eyes. I took a deep breath and decided to pursue it later.

  “So Eli pulled some files on Nadine
,” Tom said, continuing on with our recap, “that confirmed she used to work for the NSA but that she sold secrets to the Russians. The files also confirmed that she was dead.”

  I dug through the stack for the gruesome pictures at the bottom, the autopsy photos of Nadine Peters. She sure looked dead to me, though, certainly, the photos could have been staged. From the looks of it, she had about five bullet wounds—four in her back and one in her leg. The one in the thigh must have been the shot that Eli had made.

  Under those were some photos of an old, dilapidated cabin in the woods.

  “This must be where they went to have their affair,” I said. “He says here, ‘Full reports of her relationship with me! Including photos of us together at cabin.’”

  I studied the pictures more closely and realized that one of them showed a very young Eli embracing a partially disrobed Nadine, seen through one of the windows of the cabin.

  “So, basically, what we’re thinking,” Tom said, “is that years ago Eli fell in love with a woman who turned out to be a spy for the Russians? That he was there when she was killed? That now in his golden years he realized she isn’t dead after all?”

  “Yes,” I said, turning that over in my mind.

  We drove along quietly for a moment, each of us lost in thought. Eli had dated a few women over the years, but as far as I knew he had never been in love, not until he met Stella. Now, I realized, that might not be the full story. Perhaps Eli had been in love once before, years ago, with a woman he ended up shooting. Perhaps Nadine thought turnabout was fair play and now she had come to Florida and shot him. I suggested the idea to Tom.

  “Doesn’t work,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  Tom accelerated to pass a slow-moving truck.

  “Because when Eli was shot, he told Stella ‘Nadine said he was coming.’ That leads me to believe that Nadine had recently made contact with Eli in some way, and that she had warned him of something—or someone, rather.”

  “He’s coming? But who’s ‘he’?”

  “I don’t know. But why would Nadine warn Eli of something and then turn around and shoot him herself?”

  He shook his head without speaking. I knew there was much going on here he wasn’t saying. Suddenly, the biggest question on my mind—after who shot Eli, of course—was why Tom was involved here at all. I mean, I understood why Eli had asked for me to come. As his former partner, I knew him and his ways well enough to figure out the location of this sensitive file. But what about Tom? Eli’s words to Stella were to show Tom the notes.

  What did Tom bring to this situation that I didn’t understand? Why would Eli want Tom to see these notes?

  I looked at him, at his broad shoulders, at his serious face. There was so much about Tom I didn’t know, so much he kept from me. As I thought about all of the questions that remained unanswered between us, a wave of exhaustion swept over me. Would I ever know all of this man’s secrets?

  I closed my eyes and leaned back against the headrest, thinking about our brief history together. So many things about Tom had always been an enigma to me, but he had laid out the privacy ground rules in the beginning of our relationship, and that was how it had remained. Though I had come to know him on a number of levels, there were still important facts about his life he simply would not share.

  Once, several years ago, when he had first hired me at the foundation, I had become so curious about my new boss that I had attempted, discreetly, to use my investigative skills to investigate him. I’m not sure what kind of security systems he had in place, but as soon as I started putting out some feelers, he found out about it. Angrily, he told me that I could investigate him or I could work for him, but that I could not do both.

  I agreed that I wouldn’t investigate him, but only because of our mutual connection with Eli. Eli had said that Tom was a good (but very private) man, and I would have to leave it at that.

  Many things had changed since then. Yet now here we were, back to that same old line drawn in the sand.

  “There are things about this case you’re not telling me, aren’t there?” I asked in the quiet of the car.

  “Yes,” he answered softly, letting out a long, slow breath. “For one thing, I understand now why Eli wanted me here.”

  “Can you tell me about it?”

  “No,” he said. “I’m sorry, but I can’t.”

  I looked out at the blue, blue sky, at the flat ground, at the scrubby brush and palm trees.

  Somehow, despite the man sitting beside me, I felt very much alone.

  Ten

  It was almost 4:00 P.M. by the time we were back in Cocoa Beach. There were so many directions we could go with what we had learned, so many avenues to pursue, but I was starting to feel nauseous from lack of sleep. Tom wasn’t looking much better; dark circles were visible under his eyes.

  We went to the condo and found the women still cleaning it. They had made a lot of headway, but with one room left to do, they would be around for a while longer. I called the hospital to learn that Eli’s condition was still listed as critical. Tom suggested that he and I get some rooms at a local hotel to catch a quick nap, but I reminded him of the friendly offer from the neighbor to use the empty condo as needed. Too tired to resist, Tom followed along behind me as I dug around for the spare key and let us into the place.

  It was a mirror image of Stella’s home, though it smelled musty and stale, as if it had been closed up for a while. We opened some of the windows and the light sea breeze swept through almost immediately. Tom and I sank onto the couch, where the air flowed best.

  We were silent as we rested there together, Tom lightly tracing a pattern across the back of my hand with his fingers. I closed my eyes and exhaled slowly as his hand moved up to caress and knead the knots at the back of my neck.

  “Mmmm…” I sighed, relaxing into the steady, pulsing movements of his hands.

  Soon, shivers of desire began to whisper through me. My breath caught, and in an instant I knew we were entering dangerous territory. How wonderful it would be, I knew, to close out the rest of the world for a while and simply make love to each other.

  But we couldn’t. As Christians, Tom and I were both committed to celibacy outside of marriage. And though it hadn’t been easy, we had managed to get through the past few weeks without ending up in bed together. I wasn’t about to use the excuse of our current troubles to compromise now.

  In North Carolina, it had helped that I had stayed out in the guest house, Tom slept in the main house, and Wilbert and Ida Jean Miller—an older couple who served as the caretakers of the property—resided between us in a small cottage. In the past three weeks, we had turned the two of them into sort of ad hoc chaperones, inviting them over to the main house for board games on the evenings whenever we found ourselves feeling especially tempted. In the last three weeks, the four of us had played many games of Scrabble, Monopoly, Clue, Trouble, Life, and Yahtzee.

  Fortunately, during the daytime hours, Tom and I seemed to have developed a sort of tag team approach to chastity—just when he was feeling weakest, I would be strong, and vice versa. Once hands or thoughts began to wander, that’s when we knew it was time to go out and do something constructive to clear our minds and occupy our bodies. It was no wonder I had learned to mountain climb in a mere three weeks’ time! Tom was getting to be a pretty good canoer too.

  “It’s tag team time,” I whispered now, leaning back into the caresses of his hands.

  “I know,” he moaned, shifting forward to wrap his arms around me, his breath sweet and warm against the back of my neck.

  I realized I would have to be the strong one this time, and so finally, reluctantly, I pulled away.

  “You rest here,” I whispered. “I’ll find somewhere down the hall.”

  He let me go with a deep groan.

  “And what’s to stop me from following you there?”

  I stood and smoothed my hair and then gave him a smile.

  “You
know the answer to that question as well as I do,” I said.

  Leaving him on the couch, I found one of the back bedrooms and opened a window. What we had to remember, what we had to keep telling ourselves, was that even though we were alone together, we were never completely alone. Our Savior was always watching, and He’s the one to whom we were both accountable.

  A fresh ocean breeze swept into the room, and I lay down across the bed, exhausted. Despite all that had just happened, I felt myself slipping into sleep almost immediately. I closed my eyes, inhaling the smell of the sea.

  Slowly, I became aware of a hand on my arm, gently shaking me. The light in the room was soft and shadowed, and it took a few seconds to remember where I was. Tom was there, sitting on the side of the bed, saying my name.

  “What time is it?” I asked, sitting up.

  “Almost seven,” he replied.

  We had slept much longer than either of us had intended. He stood as I slid my legs to the edge of the bed, trying to clear my foggy brain.

  “I’m really sorry about earlier,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking straight.”

  “It’s okay,” I replied, smiling up at him. “We’ve had a tough day.”

  I went to the bathroom and splashed some water on my face. What I really needed was a nice, long shower. I looked at my reflection in the mirror. A very pale, very tired Callie looked back at me. Using the few items I carried in my purse, I tried to freshen up, smoothing my hair and putting on a bit of mascara and a dab of lipstick. I took a deep breath and let it out, wondering when I could get an entire night’s sleep.

  When I returned to the living room, Tom was standing at the door, jiggling his keys. He seemed to have pulled himself together also, managing to finger-comb his dark hair into place.

  “Let’s go back over to Stella’s,” he said, looking somber, “and see what’s up there.”

  He had closed and locked all of the windows, so I locked the door, stashed the key under the flowerpot, and followed him down the sidewalk to Stella’s unit.