Nightwing

by Lynn Michaels

  “I don’t know.”

  “There’s skid marks in front of the snake.”

  Whit laughed, said, “Call me later” and hung up.

  So did Willie. How odd that both Whit and Raven had had car trouble last night. But maybe not. Radiators overheated and hoses broke all the time in heat waves like this.

  Willie iced the rest of the coffee and drank it on the terrace while she put away the luminarias. The sense of peace she’d always felt at Beaches settled over her like warm, strong hands on her shoulders. The sea hissed, “You’re safe, you’re safe,” beyond the dunes, and made Willie smile.

  Whit said its unending murmur drove him nuts and kept him awake nights. He used to wake up crying when they were kids, certain he’d seen something in his room.

  “Monsters in the closet, Granma had said with a wink.

  Willie had winked back and kept her mouth shut about her pirate, the imaginary friend she’d dreamed up for the game of buccaneers she and Whit played on the beach.

  Some days, when the sun hit the water just right, she could almost see him. A tall man in breeches and knee boots, with long dark hair and a white shirt with sleeves that billowed like sails in the wind. Just like the man she thought she’d seen on the porch last night.

  Whoa. Willie put her glass down with a clunk and rubbed a shiver of gooseflesh on her arms. Was that weird or what? She hadn’t thought about her pirate in years, not since she and Zen had found the Andrew Wyeth print Giant in a gallery in Soho on their lunch hour. It showed six kids on a beach watching a giant spun out of clouds and surf stride across the sky with a club on his shoulder. She’d bought it and hung it in her office at Material Girl. On bad days it worked better than tranquilizers.

  She’d tried to tell Whit how the painting made her feel: safe and watched over, the way she felt at Beaches. He hadn’t understood, but Zen had. She’d tell Zen about the man on the porch the next time she called, but she wouldn’t tell Whit. The boy who’d seen monsters in the closet always told her she had too much imagination for her own good. Go figure.

  Willie thought briefly of asking Frank to go with her to Stonebridge, but decided against it. There was enough talk about them already. Unfounded talk, since they’d known each other since they were fifteen, but Willie didn’t want to stir up gossip. It might get back to Raven; who just might be interested in more than Beaches.

  And maybe the national debt was just a subtraction error. But a girl could dream. Willie hummed “Some Day My Prince Will Come” while she pulled the yellow Jeep Wrangler she’d bought used when she’d moved to Beaches out of the garage and parked it next to the terrace.

  Her father had really thrown a fit about her plans for a garage, so of course she’d gone ahead and built it. Whatever Whit Senior wanted her to do, Willie did the opposite.

  That sent her Raven fantasy up in flames, since her father still dreamed that someday she’d marry a rich doctor. What girl in her right mind wouldn’t love to, but Willie would rather eat cranberries, which she loathed, than admit it to her father.

  She ought to at least admit to herself that her libido was stuck in overdrive, that it had been since she’d watched Dr. Jonathan Raven stretch out of his red Corvette. The thought of watching him do that every night when he came home to his darling, devoted little wife—namely, her—made Willie’s pulse thud in places she didn’t even know she had a pulse. He was a doctor, so he’d know all those secret little pulse points, and he’d make them trip-hammer when he kissed her hello and asked her what was for dinner. He would never ask about dessert; they’d both know what that would be.

  “Down, girl,” Willie told herself sternly. “You are absolutely nuts to even think he’s interested in you. The only thing he wants is Beaches. Period.”

  Maybe that was why she wanted him, because he didn’t want her. She hadn’t spent her life being contrary and dating oddballs because it drove her father up a wall for nothing. And that was exactly what she had to show for it—nothing but a string of dead-end relationships. A relatively short string compared to most of her friends. Her current love life was as dull and boring and alarmingly predictable as the rest of her life.

  Which suited Willie just fine. Daydreams were fun, but she wasn’t a boy-crazy teenager anymore. At least, Willie didn’t think she was until the florist van from Petunia’s Posies crunched up the driveway ahead of Jim Eggleson’s blue pickup. Then, God help her, she almost squealed as she hurried to the door to meet Petunia’s husband, Bob, bearing a white vase full of long-stemmed yellow roses.

  “You wouldn’t believe what Pet offered me,” he said, “but I wouldn’t let her read the card. You owe me, Willie.”

  “Lemme guess, Bob. Key lime pie?”

  “That oughta square us.”

  While Bob wolfed pie in the kitchen, and Jim and the boys unloaded a compressor from the pickup, Willie carried the flowers into her office. She put them on her desk, sat down and opened the card.

  “Thank you for a lovely dinner. Please reconsider my invitation. Your brother really isn’t my type.” It was signed Raven, with a P.S. that read “Promise I won’t offer you money or even mention the h-o-u-s-e,” followed by his phone number.

  If only he hadn’t mentioned Beaches, Willie might have fallen for it. Instead, his note convinced her that he was no more interested in her than the man in the moon. The flowers were a nice touch, though; she was sure Bob had told him yellow roses were her favorite.

  Her father would probably tell Raven to shove his roses, which meant she should pick up the phone and say yes. But there was something not quite right about Raven, something missing. She didn’t know what, but she trusted her intuition to tell her eventually. She put the card in a drawer, picked up her purse and mail and turned on the answering machine.

  She saw Bob out, hollered down the basement stairs to Jim and the boys that she’d be back for lunch and headed for Stonebridge. She might as well have stayed at Beaches handing screwdrivers to Jim and the boys. She learned only two new things about Raven: his address and the fact that every single woman in town was trying to trip him and beat him to the ground.

  Even Hester Pavao at the post office knew no more about him than Willie did—only that he’d moved to town two months ago, and when he’d found out about his uncle’s will he’d thrown a fit in the county clerk’s office that Whit Senior would have envied.

  “Don’t talk much when he comes in,” Hester told her. “Minds his business and nobody else’s.”

  The checkout girls at Pac ‘N Save pumped for details Willie while they rang up her groceries. Everyone in Stonebridge, it seemed, knew she’d had Raven over for dinner last night.

  Clouds began to gather and darken on her drive back to Beaches. So did Willie’s mood. Just her luck the weather would break after she sprang for central air conditioning.

  She didn’t see the cat, a black, tan and gray calico, until she almost hit it — as it came pouncing out of the salt grass edging the road in pursuit of a field mouse. Willie slammed on the brakes, hard enough to make them screech. The cat froze, cringing in terror.

  So did Willie, her heart pounding in her throat. She was afraid to get out and look. But she had to, and she did, holding her breath and one hand over her mouth as she dropped to her heels and peered under the Jeep.

  The cat blinked up at her beneath the bumper, its gold eyes huge, its tail bristling. Willie sobbed with relief and sagged against the hot fender. The cat meowed and rubbed her shins. It was hardly more than a kitten, its fur dirty and gritty with sand and matted with burrs. It purred and arched its back when Willie reached out to it. She felt every vertebra in its spine, and her throat swelled with memory.

  Granma had always kept cats at Beaches. She’d had four when she died last August, but they’d all run away within days of her death. Just slipped away into the dunes and never came back. This scrawny, half-starved little calico was the image of Betsy Boyle’s favorite old tom, Patches.

  “Do you know
my father?” Willie scooped up the cat and tucked it in the curve of her elbow. “He says I’m the first certifiable sucker ever born in the Evans family.”

  The cat said “Brruup,” and closed its teeth gently on the tip of Willie’s finger.

  “I see you’ve met him. Good. Then you won’t be surprised when he throws a fit about you.”

  Willie drove home with the cat curled in her lap, its eyes half-closed and its ears twitching. Jim and the boys, his two middle-aged sons, Jeff and Jim Junior, broke for lunch and carried her groceries into the house.

  The cat was a female—Jim Junior checked—and hopped from lap to lap mooching tarragon chicken until Willie opened a can of tuna and filled a bowl with water. The cat ate and drank, then collapsed in a sunbeam slanting across the dining room floor. Willie named her Calico, Callie for short.

  “Y’oughta have a dog rather’n a cat,” Jim told her as he carried his empty pie plate and coffee cup to the sink. “A nice big dog with a real loud bark.”

  So long as she had her father she didn’t need a watchdog, Willie thought, but just smiled at Jim. He and the boys went back to work and she headed for the beach with a beat-up old baking pan. Callie went with her, slithering in and out of the salt grass and digging alongside Willie when she knelt to fill the pan with sand.

  She raced ahead on the way back to the house and meowed to be let in when Willie came up the porch steps. In the laundry room she stepped into the pan and christened it when Willie put it down. She climbed out shaking her paws, rubbed Willie’s shins and blinked up at her, purring.

  “You know what to do with sand,” Willie said, scooping her up. “Now let’s see how you do with water.”

  It was possible to bathe cats, Willie knew, so long as the stars were aligned just so in the heavens. She gathered towels and soap, put Callie on the drain board and turned on the water. The cat batted and played and swooped and dived until she soaked herself. All Willie had to do was soap her hands, rub Callie down and let her play again, with a few strategic handfuls splashed here and there, until she’d rinsed herself.

  The phone rang twice while Willie sat toweling the cat dry in her grandmother’s rocking chair. She wanted to leap up and grab it, just in case it was Raven, but steeled herself and let the machine answer. When Callie jumped down to finish on her own, Willie hung up the towel and checked the messages.

  Neither one was from Raven. One was a client, the other was Zen. Willie called her first, in her office at Material Girl, where she was still art director.

  “I’ve been thinking about you all day,” Zen said, her voice as soothing as chamomile tea. “What’s up?”

  Willie smiled. Zen always knew when something was up. Sometimes she even knew what.

  “Dr. Raven came to dinner last night, and guess what?”

  “He’s old, ugly and filthy rich.”

  “Nope. He’s young, gorgeous and filthy rich.”

  “That was my second guess. How young and how gorgeous?”

  Willie told her. Zen made a wolf whistle.

  “He offered me five million dollars for Beaches and this morning he sent me flowers. Yellow roses.”

  “I see. So you think he’s only interested in the house.”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  “I might if I’d dated one loser too many just to get even with my father for being arrogant and overbearing and trying to run my life. What else is going on?”

  “Who said there was?”

  “I did. What is it?”

  “Remember my imaginary friend the pirate? I could swear I saw him on the front porch last night.”

  “Maybe you did.”

  Only Zen or Shirley MacLaine would think such a thing.

  “He isn’t real, Zen. I made him up.”

  “Are you sure? Spirits are often drawn to places, you know. Sometimes people.”

  “He’s not a spirit. He’s a figment of my imagination.”

  “If you say so. Just don’t be surprised if you see him again. I have a hunch you might.”

  “How about Dr. Raven? Got any hunches about him?”

  “I’ve got a hunch you’d give him Beaches if he blew in your ear.”

  “That obvious, huh? Even long distance?”

  “Especially long distance.” Zen laughed. “I can hear your heart throbbing in your voice.”

  Willie laughed, too, sheepishly, promised to call Zen in a week or so and phoned the client, who happened to be Frank. He was thirty, like Willie, and already semi-famous for his ceramics and Chinese porcelains.

  “Is this business or buddy stuff?” Willie asked him.

  “What are you in the mood for?”

  “Moo goo gai pan.”

  “Shrimp or pork?”

  “Shrimp. No, pork. No, shrimp.”

  “Have you found Betsy’s recipe for chop suey yet?”

  “No,” Willie lied. In truth, she’d forgotten.

  “I know there’s lots of notebooks. Want me to look?”

  Willie wished she hadn’t told Frank she’d found the tarragon chicken recipe. Finding the card made by eight-year-old Whit had made her cry. Besides the letter to the newspaper, she’d found a funny, exasperated note Betsy had written about her father. If there were any more like that, she wanted to be the one to find them.

  “I’ll keep looking,” she told Frank. “Promise.”

  “Okay. I’d just like to know how she got the flavor right without MSG. How ‘bout seven-thirty for the moo goo gai pan? I just fired up the kiln.”

  “Fine. My place.” She smiled and stroked Callie’s fur as she leapt into her lap. “I’ve got a surprise for you.”

  “If it’s black peekaboo lace I’ll be right over.”

  “It isn’t.”

  “Then I’ll see you at seven-thirty.”

  Jim and the boys finished at three. Willie wrote the check and walked them out to the truck. It was blistering, the wind kicking sand up around her ankles. Only a few clouds were still hanging around, their undersides bruised and shot with silver where the sun broke through.

  “It’ll take the house a spell to cool down,” Jim said as he climbed in behind the wheel. “Thanks for lunch, Willie.”

  “My pleasure.” She waved goodbye and went back to her office, where she lifted Callie off her chair and into her lap, fired up the Mac and started on a press release for a mystery-writer client with a new book.

  Outside the window the compressor thrummed, slowly pushing the mercury in her desktop thermometer-barometer below eighty. Cool and relaxed for the first time since the onset of the heat spell and the arrival of the first letter from Dr. Raven’s attorney, Willie lost herself in her work.

  She meant to stop about six and shower and change before Frank showed up with the moo goo gai pan, but it was almost quarter past seven when her glance caught the desk clock. Uh-oh. She’d have to hurry. Frank was notoriously on time.

  Callie glided upstairs beside her, jumped on the bed and went to sleep. She was gone when Willie came out of the bathroom in a towel, probably off to explore her new territory. Humming “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles,” Willie dug dean underwear out of a drawer and shut it. She glanced up in the mirror as she started to turn around—and froze.

  The man in riding breeches and knee boots, the vest and white shirt with sleeves like sails, the man she’d only thought she’d seen on the front porch last night, stood beside her bed watching her.

  Oh, my God, Zen was right, Willie thought dazedly, it’s my pirate. And he looks exactly like Dr. Jonathan Raven.

  Chapter 5

  It was not her imagination. He stood leaning on one foot with his head cocked, as if he was peering at her around a door. Any girl who’d ever caught her brother spying on her knew the look. And any woman who’d ever sat across a table from Jonathan Raven, even on a hot, candle-lit summer night, would know those luminous dark eyes.

  What Willie didn’t know was how he’d found out about her pirate, how he’d managed the projection
on the porch last night and how he’d gotten into her house. She only knew he wasn’t going to get away with scaring her out of it.

  “All right. Dr. Raven.” Willie spun around on one foot. “I don’t know what you think—”

  There was no one beside the bed, yet there was something beside the bed. A silvery shimmer in the air that swept her with vertigo. Her head spun and the room with it, which was far more frightening than having a man in her bedroom. It had been so long since that had happened—

  The shimmer moved and so did Willie, without thinking or screaming. She didn’t run, she flew—clutching the towel around her—out of her bedroom, along the hall and down the stairs, until her still wet right foot shot out from under her on the uncarpeted steps.

  She bounced down the last two and landed, hard, on her tailbone on the dining room floor. Needles of pain flashed up her spine and her right shin; she’d somehow managed to wrench the hell out of her ankle, which Callie gripped with her claws. The cat suddenly let go of her ankle and leapt into Willie’s lap, her fur bristling and her eyes huge.

  “It’s not black lace,” Frank said, “but it’ll do.”

  Willie swept the cat off, whipped her head around and saw Frank standing in the kitchen doorway, holding a covered wok with blue-checked hot pads.

  “Knock it off, Chou, and help me up. I sprained my ankle.”

  “I wondered why you were sitting on the floor in a towel.” Frank put the wok on the table and knelt beside her. “You didn’t answer when I knocked, so I let myself in.”

  Thank God, Willie thought, holding on to Frank with one hand and her towel with the other as he eased her up, her weight on her left foot. Callie meowed and rubbed Frank’s bare, dark-haired ankles above his brown leather boat shoes.

  Frank nodded at the cat. “Is this the surprise?”

  “One of them. Her name’s Callie.” Willie sucked air between her teeth and gave up trying to put weight on her right foot. “I had Jim Eggleson over today. Can you tell?”

  “I wondered why the place was shut up and cold as a mausoleum. How’d you sprain your ankle?’