Renegade Player

by Dixie Browning

  “Well?” Melanie prompted now, watching her from those perfectly guileless blue eyes.

  “Well, what?”

  “Don’t you have anything to say for yourself?”

  Willy moved her shoulders in a gesture of resignation. “What can i say? If you believe that of your fiancé, then you’ll be only too glad he escaped my vicious clutches, won’t you? When’s the wedding?” Randy and Melanie. Now that she knew, it seemed perfect. The trouble was, where did Kiel come into this?

  And with that thought, the crux of the matter hit her like a sledgehammer. Kiel had been courting her deliberately! He had set out to meet her. The car, the sherry—had Randy told him how much she enjoyed cooking and about her enthusiasm for good cars? Lord, even that added up to the picture of a mercenary female out for a good time! Something inside her crumpled and she got to her knees and dragged herself up as if she were a hundred years old.

  “What’s the matter, Willy? Don’t tell me you’ve had enough sunshine?” Melanie taunted softly, stretching herself like a kitten.

  Not bothering to answer, Willy scooped up her towel and turned toward the dune, deliberately grinding her cut foot into the sand as if the pain might erase the far worse pain of the past few minutes. She didn’t pause when Melanie called after her, but her chin rose a fraction as she continued her escape.

  “Just don’t get any ideas about the way Kiel’s been pretending to be nice to you, honey. He knew all along who you were, he just wanted me to see for myself what sort of a woman you were, one who’d chase any man who looked at her if he had enough money. He doesn’t want me to blame poor old Randy, but it really doesn’t matter, now. You see, I’ve already decided to have Kiel instead.” She had raised her voice for the last few words, for Willy’s progress was more rapid than she might have expected, and the sound of that sugary drawl, sounding slightly shrill as it carried out over the late-afternoon quietness, lingered in Willy’s ears for hours, robbing her of an appetite, destroying any chance she might have had for a night’s rest.

  The phone rang several times, and in desperation, she got dressed and hobbled downstairs to her car. She could handle the clutch and the brakes better than she could any mealymouthed excuses from Kiel Faulkner, she decided grimly as she drove herself toward Oregon Inlet.

  With no conscious decision on her part, she found herself in Hatteras. She pulled up into the parking lot at the base of the lighthouse and sat there, her arms resting across the steering wheel, and she realized with a shaky laugh that her chin had been jutting out so far, so long, that her neck muscles were tired. She also made the discovery that she was starving.

  An hour and a half later, she sat in her motel room and dialed an outside line. She was replete with a seafood dinner, none of which she even tasted, but at least it had momentarily put an end to that awful hollow feeling inside her. She had been lucky in the matter of a room, coming on a cancellation before any other tired and homeless transient pulled up.

  “Hello, Ada? It’s me, Willy,” she said when the familiar brogue came on the other end.

  “Good Lord, Willy, where in the world have you got to? There’s been all sorts of bother the past hour or two over you.”

  Kiel. It could only be Kiel, trying to explain away his behavior, although she hardly saw why he bothered, now that she knew. Certainly he and his little Melanie could pack up and get back to wherever it was they came from—Atlanta, Bar Harbor. “What’s wrong, Ada? I’m at Hatteras, and the reason I called, I left—”

  “Hatteras!” The exclamation stabbed her ear and she held the receiver away. “Willy, that man across the way’s been beatin’ my door off the hinges wantin’ to know what happened to you, an’ I told him plain out I didn’t know, because I didn’t, but then that other fellow came, and—”

  “Matt? Matthew Rumark, my boss?”

  “Matthew? No, it was some good-looking dude, older than Matt, but still—you know what I mean—the sort I’d follow if he so much as frowned at me. Drove a fancy car, sort of heavy and foreign-looking and—”

  Jasper. It could only be Jasper. “Did he say what he wanted, Ada?” she asked cautiously.

  “Nope. Just asked if I knew where you were and when you’d be back, and I told him you was as likely to be out all night as not. Give him something to chew on. Doesn’t pay to let ’em think they have you where they want you, not even silver-plated ones like this gent.”

  She sighed. “Thanks, Ada,” she said, hanging up the phone absently. So Jasper had not revealed his relationship to her. He probably thought he was bending over to be fair, allowing her to play at being a poor working girl up to the last minute, she thought bitterly. Well, he could just cool his heels for a spell. She had this room until tomorrow afternoon at least, and she’d just sit tight and work out her next steps before confronting her father. He’d still be there when she finally showed up, making hourly calls or maybe even having the place staked out.

  So let him worry a bit. It might arouse some long-dormant paternal streak in him—not that she was at all sure she wanted that! She lay in bed staring at the ceiling for a long time, trying to chart a course through a sea of imponderables. She never even thought of the fact that she had forgotten to ask Ada to go up and close her windows if it rained.

  And then, with a streak of innate honesty, she admitted to herself that she didn’t care if it flooded the whole place; she had only wanted to be told that Kiel had asked after her.

  Chapter Nine

  Awakening to see the curtains standing straight out from the windows, it occurred to Willy that if her father had been looking for proof that she wasn’t capable of looking after herself, she had handed him a platterful. It was blowing a fitful rain from the northeast and she was here without so much as a change of clothes, much less a sweater or a raincoat. For that matter, she probably didn’t even have her checkbook with her. What a shiny crowning touch to her career as an independent operator, to have to call on her father to come bail her out.

  Deciding there was no point in remaining cooped up here in her motel room until checkout time, she quickly pulled on yesterday’s jeans and shirt and did the best she could with neither toothbrush nor hairbrush. At least there was no vast, intimidating lobby to cross, wondering if she could make it without either stumbling over a potted palm or tripping on a rug. She had never been the most self-assured of adolescents, and sometimes she wondered if she had improved all that much since, in spite of all the very expensive schooling that seemed to make her only more self-conscious.

  She drove slowly through the village, seeing places she had walked with Kiel only a few days ago, and making a rude noise at her maudlin sentimentality, she swerved into the parking lot of a supermarket, where she bought herself a bottle of grapefruit juice and a hunk of cheese, with a box of crackers that was already going stale as soon as she opened it. She hadn’t even counted her money, but there was no point in being more extravagant than she had to be. At least not until she had paid her tab at the motel.

  With no particular goal in mind, she drove on down toward the Ocracoke ferry landing and, on impulse, took one of the free ferrys across Hatteras Inlet to the northern end of Ocracoke Island. She had never been down that far south on the outer banks, for it was in another county and they had no listings there, but it was well worth seeing. As narrow as Hatteras Island, there were plenty of places where you could stand in the middle and practically throw a stone into both ocean and sound. Besides, she rationalized, it would be a shame to return to Florida, if worse came to worst, without ever seeing the place where Blackbeard operated; for all she knew, she might be cruising over the very spot, right now, where he and Lieutenant Maynard engaged in the fatal fray. Her history of the area was spotty at best, having been put together from bits and pieces gleaned from clients and locals over the past few months.

  She rolled off the ferry and pulled over to allow the more determined of the vacationers and fishermen to streak on south to the village of Ocracoke, and
when several carloads of fishermen got out to try their luck in the rain there at the inlet, she decided she’d get out too. For all the northeast wind, it wasn’t cold and she could no more bear to be cooped up in her car with her thoughts than she could in her motel room. Remembering that brief moment on the beach just before she had stepped on whatever it was that had cut her foot, she wondered if she were an escapist. She had had a feeling then of being able to physically outrun her problems. Was that behind her precipitate trip south?

  At least her foot seemed improved, which was a good thing, considering that she had not brought along so much as an aspirin, much less the antibiotic the doctor had prescribed. Come to think of it, she had paid for neither the pills nor the visit.

  With a dawning horror, she realized who must have paid the tab, and she had taken it as her due. Lord, if he needed any reinforcement for Randy’s accusations, she had certainly provided them. She was so used to having her father settle everything for her that it hadn’t occurred to her that Doctor Whelan wasn’t on the Silverthorne payroll.

  The bandage, even with her rubber flip-flops, didn’t last more than a few yards and so she stooped and unwrapped it, tossing it into a covered container near the ferry landing. Saltwater was supposed to have curative powers, so let it cure.

  She waded through shallows, walked the hard, low-tide shoals, all with no notice of the dramatic seascape surrounding her. Dark gray clouds raced over water that was churned to a pale, milky green, and the audible wind lashed frostings of white spume across the surface. She trod the pink-white sand carelessly, setting herself up for another accident, had she but considered it, but for once, her luck held, and she returned to her car after a while with nothing worse than a dripping head and drenched clothes.

  Reconsidering her initial idea of going all the way down to Ocracoke village, she caught the next ferry back to Hatteras. As it was, she had just about enough gas to see her home and she’d best not waste it. Tbo wet to go traipsing into a restaurant, she stopped by a seafood takeout place and invested in a plate of clam strips, the least-expensive thing on the menu, and surprisingly good, at that. She ate in her room, watching an inane game show on TV to keep her mind—well, if not exactly occupied, at least numb.

  It was almost four by the time she reached home and already growing dark with the clouds that had followed her up from Hatteras. The wind had shifted now, bringing with it a tendency to thunder and lightning.

  There was no sign of Jasper’s Ferrari, nor of the Porsche either, although Kiel’s garage remained enigmatically closed. Ada would still be sleeping and she hoped Jasper hadn’t made a pest of himself by coming around every hour or so to wake the poor woman up.

  Letting herself inside, Willy decided that Ada Willits could take care of herself in that respect. She had been doing just that for a good many years now, according to her son, who talked far more about his family than he should.

  Sure enough, there was a puddle in the living room and another in the bedroom and by the time she had mopped them up, she realized that unless she wanted to top off her list of personal calamities with a streaming head cold, she’d better do something about her wet clothes. Running a tub full of steamy water, she searched out her last pair of clean jeans and a long-sleeved shirt. At least now that she was among the ranks of the unemployed, she’d have more time for such mundane chores as laundry.

  The phone rang just as she was about to climb into the claw-foot bathtub and for a minute she considered letting it ring. She hadn’t the self-restraint. Naked, she padded across the living room, stopping to hook her screen door on the way, and when she reached the phone and picked up the receiver, it was to hear an expressively firm click on the other end. She lifted her shoulders disdainfully. So much for that!

  The next time it rang she was heating herself a can of she-crab soup, adding a good-sized dollop of sherry for good measure. She caught the phone after the third ring this time and heard her father’s impressively stern voice asking for—no, demanding—Wilhelmina.

  “Hi, Jasper,” she said impassively. “This is Mina.”

  There followed a tirade that Willy promptly tuned out, even considering at one time putting the phone down long enough to go stir her soup. Finally, Jasper came to the end of his breath, or his indignation, or both. Willy told him evenly that she had been to Hatteras overnight and that, no, she wasn’t broke, nor was she starving, and the “What’s this I hear about your having to see a doctor,” was nothing more than a minor cut foot.

  She could almost feel his letdown at that. He would have enjoyed having something drastic to hold over her, like a pregnancy, or the latter stages of malnutrition—anything to enable him to deal swiftly and peremptorily and then force her back into his suffocating care. “Look, Jasper, I don’t want you to come over tonight. I’m tired and I’m having a bowl of soup and then I’m going to hit the pillow for at least the next twelve hours. Then, and only then, will I see you. Call me tomorrow . . . after ten.”

  So saying, she hung up the phone, halfway expecting him to call back immediately. For that matter, he’d be more likely to barge in on her unannounced, and she got up and locked her door, turning off all the lights except the dim fluorescent in the kitchen. It was enough to see by, although it occurred to her that if Jasper could see her now, eating her soup from a plastic bowl with a stainless-steel spoon, drinking hot tea from an exquisite bone-china cup with a chipped rim that she had picked up at a yard sale, he’d have apoplexy. She had grown up with rock crystal that rang in the correct key, bone china whose renowned hallmark could almost be read through its translucency, and silver that required a full-time servant just to polish it.

  After putting her few dishes in to soak, she wandered restlessly from room to small room. With the windows closed against the rain it was growing impossibly stuffy and she slid open the door to the porch, which was somewhat sheltered from the direct weather. For a long time she stood there, hearing the muffled roar of the ocean, hidden behind a dark curtain of rain, and the sound was a solid, somehow reassuring background for her Own thoughts. She yawned widely and considered going to bed.

  Tomorrow would come quickly enough, and with it, Jasper and his demands and recriminations. It was only a little after seven, though, and there’d be empty, wakeful hours at either this end of the night or the other, for no matter how much she loved to he in bed and daydream in a delicious half-awake state, she could never sleep more than eight or nine hours at a stretch, and sometimes not even that.

  Lately, not nearly that! She switched on the small radio and searched out the few stations that came through the static. She should get herself a stereo and then she could have music on tap, of just the sort she was in the mood for. She might buy a few opera albums—The Pearlfishers, perhaps.

  But first she’d better see to getting herself a job. And before that, she had to deal with her father and send him on his way convinced that she was better off without his omnipotent assistance.

  As her mind veered from one thing to another, her restlessness not helped by the increasingly close flashes of lightning, she wrapped her arms about her and stood staring blindly out at the house across the way. Cutting through the rest of her mundane problems like a hot knife through butter came the conviction that the answer to all her problems could be summed up in one word: Kiel.

  With an impatient oath, she turned to the cabinet over the refrigerator and pushed aside the few bottles of wine to find her medicinal brandy. A panacea for seasickness, homesickness, shock and frostbite, plus Lord knows what else, she’d see how it was as a buffer against unwanted yearnings.

  Yearnings! She hadn’t yearned for anything since she was eleven and Jasper had told her remotely that, no, she could not become a veterinarian and she most certainly could not have the outstandingly pregnant mongrel bitch someone had dumped in their neighborhood as a bad joke. The dog had had a touchingly apologetic look on her face and Willy had wept while Astin summoned the local authorities.

>   An hour and a half later the level of brandy in the bottle had sunk by more than an inch and Willy was harmonizing badly with the music of a country-western station. “I’m tiddly,” she crowed to herself, carefully replacing the jelly glass on the edge of her coffee table. She digested that information during a break in the program while the announcer read off a list of bluegrass festivals to take place in the area during the month, and then she uncurled herself and made her unsteady way to the five square feet she called her kitchen and put on a pot of coffee.

  A loud blast of thunder tossed a ball of blue fire around the room, and before it subsided, she splashed water over her jeans, swore roundly and continued the makings. The electricity could go off any minute and she’d gone about as far with the brandy as she could; time to reverse the trend with black coffee before she went to bed.

  The coffee was made—barely—when the lights blinked and went out and the compressor on the refrigerator groaned as if to say, not again! She located a mug and poured herself a cup of the thick, black liquid in the dark. She had hardly finished more than half of it when the pounding started. The lightning had not abated and she was tucked up on the sofa, all her doors and windows closed tightly, and her head moved slowly in the direction of the door. It was impossible to see a thing, and when between bursts of thunder she heard the pounding again and a voice yelling for her to open up, she hurried across and threw open the door.

  Jasper, dam his hide, couldn’t wait for morning to tear a strip off her, but even so, she couldn’t leave him outside in all this.

  “Jasper, I told you I didn’t want to see you tonight!” she yelled over the almost constant rumble. All she could see was a tall figure shrouded in a dark raincoat.

  It could have been Blackbeard himself, for all she could tell in the eerie, flickering light. “Why couldn’t you have waited? I’m ready for bed and I don’t need a session with you to help me sleep, dam you!”