by Wendy Wax
Her arms clung to his neck as he rose, taking her with him. Her mind was a lovely blank except for the strong arms and solid wall of chest. The world had stopped spinning, but she held on anyway. The word “bed” made her feel all warm and tingly. Her nipples strained against the thin fabric of her T-shirt and there was a deep tug between her legs. If this was a dream, she wasn’t anywhere near ready to wake up.
Then there was another voice. One that she knew. But it wasn’t at all warm or rumbly.
In fact, it was the tone of shock in it that roused her.
“Avery?” the voice said. “Avery, what’s wrong?” And then, “What in the hell are you doing to her, Hardin?”
Avery’s eyes flew open. It took them a moment to adjust to the sunlight and bring the person standing in front of them into focus. Recognition hit her like a pail of ice water. The voice belonged to Trent. Trent Lawson, her ex-husband.
“Where’s Trent?” Deirdre asked that evening over sunset drinks. “Is he going to join us for dinner?” She looked closely at Avery as if she knew her well enough to glean the answer just from studying her face.
The rain was finally gone, and while Avery wouldn’t have called the air refreshing, it had cooled things off a bit. Except for the flush of heat she felt each time she remembered her behavior that day.
“I can’t believe we missed all the excitement,” Madeline said. “Did you really get high from the polyurethane?”
Avery winced. The details were mercifully sketchy, except for the fact that she’d been clinging to Chase like a second skin when Trent showed up out of nowhere.
“We could have saved a ton on alcohol this summer if we’d known,” Nicole added, handing her version of mango daiquiris around. “I’m pretty sure a gallon of poly is less expensive than a gallon of good rum.”
“And apparently faster acting,” Avery said as she declined the drink to stare out over the Gulf. It was difficult to decide which part of today she didn’t want to think about most.
“It’s a lucky thing Chase was here. If you’d been exposed to the fumes any longer, there could have been serious consequences,” Deirdre said.
As opposed to abject humiliation. “Yes,” Avery said. “I certainly feel lucky.”
“So where is Trent?” Deirdre asked again. “And what did he want?”
Avery continued to stare out over the water. The sky had lightened to a pale gray shot through with even paler pink streaks. As hazy as her memory of all that had come before still was, the conversation with Trent was excruciatingly sharp.
“He asked me to come back to Hammer and Nail.”
There was a brief silence as they all processed this bit of information.
“Well, I hope he apologized first for letting them treat you the way they did on that show.” The comment was from Deirdre again. Her tone was fierce.
Avery looked at her in surprise. “I thought you were such a big fan of Trent’s. As I recall you sent me a letter of congratulations after we announced our engagement, telling me how lucky I was to ‘land him.’ ” She’d torn the letter up, furious that Deirdre had presumed to comment, but had secretly agreed.
“We all make mistakes,” Deirdre said. “On paper, he seemed perfect for you. But he didn’t love you anywhere near as much as he seemed to love himself. I’ve been in Hollywood long enough to know that what you see is often not what you get. And I got Trent all wrong.”
“It happens,” Nicole said quietly. “Even the people you think you know the best can shit all over you. If you ever find anyone who puts you first, you need to hold on to them.”
“Your father put me first, but I was too young to understand how rare that was. Or that it might never happen again.” Deirdre was looking at the sunset now, too.
Avery considered the women around her. All of them looked solemn. Maddie’s eyes glistened with tears. Kyra just looked wistful, but she didn’t chime in with her usual comment about Daniel and their love for each other. Maybe she’d run out of excuses for why he hadn’t shown up yet. Not that having your past materialize unexpectedly before your eyes felt like such a good thing at the moment.
“So?” Nicole asked. “Are you going to do it? What did you tell him?”
All of their gazes fixed on her, but she knew it was out of concern and not just idle curiosity. It was odd how important they’d become to her, how reassuring it was to know she wasn’t slogging through everything alone. Well, everyone but Deirdre anyway.
She hesitated for a few moments, remembering how reluctant Chase had been to put her down and leave her with Trent. He’d bristled like a guard dog, practically growling at Trent, until she’d convinced him she was capable of talking for herself.
She smiled at them all, still surprised by how urgently Trent had tried to convince her to come back; she wished she’d had a tape recorder to play back all the things he’d promised.
“Oh, he apologized all right,” Avery said. “But then he told me he knew just how bad things were for me, how he’d heard I had pretty much nothing left, and that the show was doing great, but he really wanted to help me.” She grimaced at the memory. He’d been so certain of himself. And of her.
“And?” Nicole asked the question Avery saw in all of their eyes.
Avery’s smile turned even grimmer as she remembered how thick Trent had poured it on: how much he missed her; what an unappreciated asset she’d been to the show; how different it would be if she came back. His feigned sympathy had made her want to puke.
“And if I were as big an airhead as Trent and the producers of the show seem to think I am, I’d be on my way back to Nashville right now,” she said.
Deirdre’s eyebrow went up. She smiled. “They always underestimate us blondes.”
“But I saw a recent blurb in the trades about how Victoria Crosshaven, Trent’s biggest admirer, has lost interest in the show. And that there’s some question about whether it’ll be picked up for another season.” She looked up and smiled. “And, of course, he made the mistake of mentioning the following we have on YouTube. How there’s been chatter all over the Internet about Ten Beach Road. Apparently someone’s even set up a fan site for us.”
Only Kyra didn’t look surprised at the level of Internet interest. All of them leaned closer.
“And?” Madeline asked, clearly needing to hear her answer.
“And I thanked him for his belated concern.”
Avery smiled as she remembered the shock on Trent’s face at what followed. It had been so incredibly sweet. “And then I told him to go fuck himself. And I showed him to the door.”
Thirty-three
On August 6 another tropical storm formed in the Caribbean and held together long enough to be given a name. While they waited for the wood floors to dry, Tropical Storm Bernard rained down upon the islands of Haiti and Jamaica. Winds blowing from the east moved it farther westward where it gathered strength and picked up speed. Intent on finishing before the Labor Day weekend, Chase stepped up the start date for exterior painting. In hopes of finishing before the band of thunderstorms preceding Bernard or any sibling storms it might spawn could reach them, they prepared to paint.
It was August 8, the end of the first week of the month, the date by which Steve was supposed to appear. Maddie opened her eyes slowly when the morning light first trickled through the blinds, hoping against hope that he’d somehow be sitting on the side of her mattress dressed and smiling and ready to help them start painting Bella Flora, like he had last night in her dreams.
All she saw was three out of her four roommates still sleeping around her and the light shining out from beneath the closed bathroom door. Swallowing back her disappointment, she put on a pot of coffee and pulled a Danish ring out of the refrigerator. As she waited for the bathroom, she gave herself a stern talking-to. The day wasn’t over yet. Technically, Steve had until midnight to get here. Even a text or an email that he was on the way or planning to be would be good enough for her.
“Shou
ld we be worrying about Bernard becoming a hurricane and landing here?” Maddie asked thirty minutes later as she and Kyra and Nicole and Deirdre finished off the Danish and stepped out of the pool house. At the moment the sun was a bright cartoon-like ball of yellow, the sky a watercolor blue. It was hard to imagine a cloud, let alone a rain cloud, blocking even a portion of that picture-perfect sky. Maddie told herself not to look for one more thing to worry about even as she pulled out her cell phone and glanced at the screen. She’d had two more texts and one email since Steve’s apology, but they were all oddly vague while satisfyingly upbeat. Things like: I’m thinking about you. Wish you were here. Or Edna’s house is coming along. They implied that he was doing something besides lying on the couch wielding the remote, but whatever he was doing he wasn’t doing it here. And so far there was no message today, vague or otherwise, about when she might expect him.
“I don’t know,” Nikki said. “I’ve dealt with power outages and terrorist threats in New York, and mudslides, forest fires, and earthquakes out in L.A. But other than living in the Florida panhandle for about ten minutes as a child, I have no personal experience with hurricanes. Maybe Avery or Chase would have a better idea.”
“Probably,” Maddie said as she spotted the two of them setting out paint cans and brushes in the shade of the loggia, being careful not to look at each other. Whatever had happened the day Avery succumbed to the polyurethane must have been a doozy, Maddie thought. Ever since, you could have cut the “awkward” between them with a knife.
“What do you think, Chase?” Deirdre asked when they’d assembled on the loggia. She was expecting delivery of the kitchen cabinets today and the counter tomorrow and had been absolved of painting duty in order to finish the kitchen and coordinate the designers’ installations. “Should we be worried about Bernard?”
“Nah.” Chase began to parcel out the paint and pans. Avery inspected the stack of paintbrushes. There was a good two feet between them. “It’s still way south of us and the most we’re probably going to see is some heavy rain. There hasn’t been a direct hit here since 1928.”
Nicole’s friend Joe arrived to help and Maddie found herself wondering, once again, why the word “friend” didn’t seem to fit. Like Chase and Avery, something else crackled between them; but in their case Maddie was fairly certain it wasn’t lust. Of course, given the state of her own marriage, perhaps she was no longer qualified to judge.
“But even an indirect hit could be dangerous, couldn’t it?” Kyra asked from behind her camera. She’d passed from “rounded” to obviously pregnant and had begun to lead with her stomach. Worry for her daughter wriggled to the forefront of Maddie’s mind. Even as she willed it away, she marveled that so many worries could fit into such a confined space; at this point they were stacked up like airplanes at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson waiting for the go-ahead to land.
Chase shrugged but was careful not to do it in Avery’s direction. “Hurricanes are nothing to take lightly. But Bernard isn’t even hurricane strength yet and probably won’t be. The odds are with us.”
Maddie’s stomach dropped. They were living on the very tip of a tiny spit of land that jutted out into the Gulf of Mexico. She did not want to lay odds on the possible trajectory of a hurricane that could wipe them off the face of the map. Another planeload of worry began to circle her mental airport.
“Our goal right now is to get Bella Flora painted as quickly as possible and to do whatever we can to help the designers finish their installations before Labor Day.” Chase looked at all of them. “We’ve got just over two weeks and it’s going to be tight.” He pried a lid off one of the paint cans, then moved on to the next. Avery laid a paintbrush next to each pan. “Will Renée Franklin and her ladies be ready to come finish the landscaping as soon as the paint dries?”
“I’ve got them on standby,” Nicole said. “But we’re thinking late this weekend or early next week, right?”
Chase nodded, then watched surreptitiously while Avery assigned them to different sections of the exterior. The scaffolding had already been adjusted to allow them to begin cutting paint into the corners and around edges. The real painters would move in behind them to fill in the large expanses of wall.
Feeling almost like an old hand, Maddie climbed the scaffolding up to her position at the top of the arch of the westernmost salon window. The pan of paint and her brush were handed up to her. For a moment she stared out over the rooftop and down the beach, where the Don CeSar pierced the watercolor sky. Bella Flora would be done in the same flamingo pink that had been so popular in Florida in the 1920s, the limestone moldings and balustrades would be left their natural sand color, and the wrought iron would receive a fresh coat of black paint.
She sat down on the scaffolding next to her paint supplies and let her legs dangle over the side. Instead of picking up her paintbrush, she pulled her cell phone out of her pocket, wishing it were a genie’s lamp and all she had to do was rub it and concentrate, maybe do an I Dream of Jeannie blink to make Steve appear. For an embarrassing moment she actually considered rubbing the phone—a quick just-in-case, covering-all-your-bases rub—then settled for simply staring at its screen with intent.
Nothing.
Maddie’s eyes misted in disappointment, and she turned her blurry gaze back out over the Gulf as a flock of gulls glided low over the water, looking beneath the surface for their midmorning snack. For them the Gulf of Mexico was one giant drive-through.
Below and to the right on the opposite end of the scaffold, she heard Nikki and Giraldi talking, their voices rising and falling, their words indecipherable. With a sigh, Madeline set her phone down where she could reach it if a call or text came in. She was the one who’d set the deadline and issued the ultimatum; she could change that deadline if she chose or push it back in some way. It wasn’t like she’d be filing for divorce one minute after midnight, if Steve didn’t show up in person. She just wanted him moving forward with their life. All she needed was a decisive sign that this was happening.
But even Maddie could hear the evasion in the thought; the urge to rationalize was strong, almost impossible to resist. Was this what Edna felt before she tucked her son in in front of the television? Would any sign of hesitation undo whatever good her ultimatum might have set in motion?
Once again uncertain, Maddie reminded herself that she had no choice but to let things play out. So deciding, she reached over, repositioned her phone a few inches closer, then dipped her paintbrush in the thick pink paint, tapped off the excess, and got to work.
Nicole dabbed at the thick plaster wall where it met the wrought-iron stair leading down from the master bedroom. Giraldi stood on the stair itself. The black paint he was using sat on the step in front of him. They painted for a few minutes in silence while the sun got stronger and the breeze off the Gulf grew warmer. She hadn’t seen him for over a week, though she realized that given what he did for a living, that didn’t mean he hadn’t been around.
“Where have you been?” she asked when what she really wanted to ask was, “Have you been chasing Malcolm? Do you know what he asked me to do?”
“Following up on a lead.” He didn’t say whether it had anything to do with Malcolm or was a part of some other investigation. “Did you miss me?” he asked.
“No.”
“Another hope dashed.” He moved down another step and dipped his brush into the black paint. “I keep thinking I’m going to grow on you.”
“Unlikely,” she said though the truth was if he weren’t chasing her brother and trying to use her to catch him, she might have appreciated his good looks and dry sense of humor. As it was, she worried when he was around all the time and worried even more when he wasn’t.
“You know, you don’t have to like me to do the right thing.” He looked her in the eye when he said it, and it took every bit of self control not to blanch at the very words she’d thrown at Malcolm. “You’re going to have to declare yourself, Nikki. You won’t be abl
e to ride the fence much longer.”
She swallowed painfully. She put down her paintbrush and opened the water bottle she’d brought up with her, buying time while she drank. He knows, she thought, while the cool liquid trickled down her throat. He knows Malcolm asked me to meet him on the twenty-fifth and he’s waiting for me to tell him. She set down the water bottle and licked her still-dry lips.
But once she told him, if she told him, the course would be set, and she wouldn’t be the one calling the shots. If she confirmed the time and place, Malcolm would be captured with no possibility of turning himself in. If she did what Giraldi considered the right thing, it would eliminate Malcolm’s chance to do the same. They’d catch him and lock him up. But if he refused to tell them where he’d stashed the money, what would happen then? Could they make him provide access? Could they retrieve the money without his help? She had no idea what the FBI could and couldn’t do or what Joe Giraldi was really capable of.
She, who had dug her way out of poverty by being ruthlessly decisive, dithered yet again while Giraldi watched her in the same way the big brown pelicans watched the schools of bait fish dart through the shallow water.
“If Malcolm turned himself in and gave back whatever’s left of the money he stole, would things go easier on him?” she asked.
“Probably,” he said. “It depends. I apprehend, I don’t prosecute.” He didn’t blink but continued to study her as if he knew all the thoughts racing through her head and even what she felt deep down in her heart. “If you think that’s going to happen or have any information at all about his whereabouts, you need to speak up. Don’t let him put you in the middle.” His dark eyes bored into hers, searching for answers, willing her to confide in him. “You haven’t been ruled out yet as a subject of interest, Nikki,” he said. “You could take a lie detector test to rule yourself out as an accomplice. Or you could simply agree to help us lure him in.”