Cool it, he told himself, all this alpha male bullshit was understandable when he was a teenager, but Prescott was twenty-three. He was independently wealthy due to the sale of a revolutionary Internet application he’d invented, he had a higher IQ than anyone he knew and a fabulous house, and he didn’t make a living screwing with people’s lives like Joe did.
“Damn.”
None of those things could cancel out the fact that Joe stood beside Mignonette Olson. Prescott pivoted his head against the wall and gazed forlornly down at them.
When Prescott had moved in three months ago, he’d asked one of the workmen about the abandoned resort next door. He’d assumed it was a resort because of the old sign with a wood-burned Daffy Duck–like creature squatting at the bottom of the drive. It read CHEZ DUCKY. To his surprise, he’d learned it wasn’t a resort at all, and despite appearances, not abandoned. It was apparently some sort of enclave belonging to a family named Olson, a huge extended family whose members drifted in and out all summer long as the spirit moved them.
Prescott, who had never done anything without adequate preparation and plenty of forethought, and whose only relatives consisted of a set of ancient maternal grandparents, an elderly second cousin he’d never met, and Joe, was enchanted. Watching them from his tower—something he admitted he maybe spent a little too much time doing—was as good as reading a Dickens novel. Not the maudlin ending, but the cheery, warming middle part describing all the good and decent people who would soon be snatched away from whatever pathetic little lisper Mr. Dickens was tormenting. The only constant, the only fixture in the ever-changing cast of characters populating that tumbledown compound, was her.
The first time Prescott had seen her, she’d been sitting under one of the big pine trees cutting her toenails and singing an Abba tune. Loudly.
He’d cracked the window open to hear better, even though he knew it would play hell with the state-of-the-art HEPA filtration system he’d installed in the house’s ductwork. Not to mention the havoc it would play with his allergies. She didn’t have a very good voice.
As Prescott had listened, wincing, a teenage kid came up to her. Prescott hadn’t been able to hear what he’d said, but he’d assumed it was a question about life or love or some other weighty matter because the woman had taken the kid’s hand, looked soulfully up into his eyes, and said, “Oh, honey, just let it slide.”
Prescott could see the tension seep out of the kid, and, as weird as he knew it sounded, he felt some of his own melt away. The woman had smiled her Madonna-like smile and gone back to trimming her toenails.
He was smitten.
Here was a woman who didn’t care that her voice was lousy or the song she warbled even lousier. She apparently didn’t care that she would never be young again or that she must have no money because she spent her summers in what was little more than a shack. He didn’t know how he knew these things, but he did. She was a little disheveled, she didn’t have much of a wardrobe, but she obviously didn’t care about those things, either. This woman had it all figured out.
She spent hours (and there were a lot of them) floating on the lake in an inner tube, likely contemplating some bottomless well of inner tranquility. She was probably some sort of Zen yoga master. That she was the center point around which the Chez Ducky world revolved was evident. She was the only one who’d been up here every day since he’d moved in.
“Let it slide.” To someone who had dedicated his short life to excelling, no words had ever resonated so loudly. He saw her constant presence here as a beacon, guiding the way home for all her family. The only constant Prescott had known in his life had been his 4.0 grade point average. Joe’s seasonal visits didn’t count because they were merely duty calls.
Joe was big on duty. But as far as Prescott was concerned, Joe’s visits were a waste of time. He and Joe had nothing in common. Prescott did have a lot in common with the woman at Chez Ducky. They were both conscientious, both environmentalists (Prescott had decided this was a likely reason she wore vintage clothing), and both spiritual rather than physical beings.
Prescott had discovered that her name was Mignonette Olson. Mrs. Olson, he assumed because, first of all, being short and dark, she didn’t look anything like the big blond Olsons, and second, he couldn’t imagine her not sharing her life with someone. She was a sharing sort. He could only conclude by the absence of a Mr. Olson worshipping at her feet that she was a widow. A childless widow.
And he was an orphan. Or as good as one.
He released a gusty sigh and pushed away from the wall. He wondered what she was saying to Joe. Were they talking about his house? Was Joe trying to charm her? She didn’t look charmed. She looked frankly disgusted.
Take that, Joe, Prescott thought, mentally pumping his arm. Your sleep-aid-commercial voice and used-car-salesman charm aren’t going to cut it with a woman like Mrs. Olson. She’s not so easily bamboozled.
A shout drew his attention back outside. He looked down to see a teenage boy racing out of the woods, gesticulating wildly.
Prescott gnawed his thumbnail. He wanted to hear what was going on but he didn’t want the Olsons to think he was eavesdropping, and he was afraid they might see him if he lifted the window sash. On the other hand, everyone had turned their attention to the kid.
Prescott dropped to all fours and crawled under the window, reaching up and shoving the sash up an inch or so. He was going to pay for this tonight when his allergies kicked in, but it was worth it. Observing the Olsons had become more than an idle pastime. He’d invested so many hours watching them, he felt he’d adopted them.
“—a funeral pyre!” the giant blond male was bellowing.
Prescott curled his fingers over the lip of the sill and peeked over. The people had circled around the kid.
“Yes, sir! She’s down at the dock right now pouring kerosene over a stack of kindling in the center of the pontoon.”
Prescott snatched the binoculars he kept by the window and rose to his knees. He trained the lenses on the small area of the beach visible in front of the blistered old two-story house at Chez Ducky. Sure enough, an older woman wearing some sort of white drapery stood knee-deep in the water, upending a red gallon can of liquid on top of a pile of branches in the middle of some sort of raft. He lowered the binoculars and pressed his ear to the window opening.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” the skinny redheaded woman next to Mrs. Olson was saying. “There isn’t any Ardis to burn.”
“She’s got a poster of Ardis on top of the wood,” the kid exclaimed.
“Aw, geez,” the blond guy muttered.
Prescott adjusted the focus on the raft. Yup. A life-sized, grainy picture of an old woman carrying a golf bag stuck out of the branches. As Prescott watched, the woman in the water struck a match and threw it onto the twigs. Fire flared up, followed by a black belch of smoke.
He wasn’t the only one to see the smoke. Mrs. Olson spied it, too. “Holy shit,” she said. “We better get over there before she burns the whole place down.”
She struck off into the woods with the others close behind.
Including, Prescott noted with a hollow sensation, Joe. But then, what did he expect? That Joe would have preferred his company?
Not likely.
Chapter Eight
Birgie plopped down on the plastic lawn chair she’d dragged down to the beach and watched the spectacle unfold.
As Viking funerary boats went, Naomi’s was a piss-poor example, but none of the crowd gathered round to watch seemed disappointed. Friends and neighbors and whoever the hell else these people were stood three deep on the beach, watching the pontoon bobbing gently twenty feet offshore, the poster of Ardis jouncing so gaily it seemed like Ardis was doing a little victory dance.
Maybe she was, Birgie thought. She should ask Mimi.
After the initial belch of smoke erupting from beneath the scaffolding Naomi had constructed, the fire had petered down to a few flames. Naomi
, who’d pushed the pontoon out from the shore and was still standing knee-deep in the lake with the hem of her bedsheet floating around her, turned around in disgust and slogged to shore.
“This sucks,” she said to Birgie, who happened to be the closest to her. “I knew I shouldn’t have used a match. You’re supposed to shoot a flaming arrow into the pyre.”
“Ah-huh,” Birgie muttered before upending the last swigs of a can of Diet Coke into her mouth.
“I don’t understand it,” Naomi went on. “I used a gal—”
A sudden whooshing sound spun Naomi around. Birgie was already staring. The flames had found the gas. The fire shot eight feet into the air, embracing the Ardis poster in glowing orange and blue. Birgie could hear the Styrofoam backing popping as the picture slowly melted, reminding her of the Wicked Witch of the West after Dorothy had doused her in water. Ardis would have appreciated the comparison.
“Hot damn!” Naomi said gleefully, rubbing her hands. “Wait here. I’ll say my piece and be right back.”
“Wasn’t going anywhere, Naomi,” Birgie said, crossing her ankles. She liked Naomi. She wasn’t nearly as crazy as the younger generations thought. Except for Mimi, of course. But then most of the younger generations thought Mimi was a little odd herself, what with the medium thing and living like a gypsy. Birgie suspected Mimi dragged eighty percent of her worldly possessions with her up to the lake each year and she still didn’t fill up the trunk of a midsized car.
“Oh, Viking Maiden, may your journey to Valhalla be swift!” Naomi waded back out toward the burning pontoon, her arms raised above her head. A rising wind whipped the bedsheet around her. Birgie had to admit it, Naomi looked pretty impressive.
“May you soon reach the distant shores of eternity!”
Impressive, too, was the way that same wind was whipping the fire higher.
“May your proud spirit find rest in the halls of your great ancestors!”
And really impressive was the way the wind had turned around the pontoon with its roaring fire and was pushing it back toward shore.
“May you—Aw, shit!” Naomi hoisted up her bedsheet and lurched toward the pontoon, obviously intending to push it back out into the lake.
“Don’t do that, Naomi!” Birgie called, a little concerned. “You’ll get your hair all burned off!”
Birgie had just lumbered to her feet when a group of people burst from the woods next to the Big House and raced toward the shore. Gerry, his kid Frank, and the guy who’d been following Mimi around the picnic were in the lead, but Vida and Bill were close behind, followed by Debbie and Hank Sboda. Mimi was last, but not by much; she was hop-skipping on one leg like a madwoman.
The well-dressed guy waded into the water next to Naomi and with a clipped, “Sorry,” tore the bedsheet off her, dunked it in the lake, and flung it across the pontoon.
“Well, crap,” Naomi muttered, looking down at her Playtex Eighteen Hour bra. She turned sullenly away from the burning pontoon, now being covered with all manner of sodden bed dressing, and struggled up out of the water to Birgie’s side.
“It wasn’t going to get close enough to set anything on fire,” she grumbled. “I had it anchored offshore.”
Birgie couldn’t say she was surprised. Naomi might be colorful, but she wasn’t incautious.
“Should I tell them?” Naomi asked.
Birgie considered. The crowd on the beach had shifted its dynamic from spectators at a funeral pyre to active participants at a five-alarm fire. They’d apparently decided to concentrate their efforts on sinking the pontoon under as many sodden blankets, sheets, towels, and even one mattress, as they could pile on it.
“Nah,” Birgie finally advised. “Let ’em be. They’re having fun.”
They were, too. Now that it was apparent that the forest wasn’t going to catch fire, and only a few wisps of black smoke were left curling up from the pontoon, the fire fight had become a water fight. People were dunking each other, the kids were splashing, and someone had broken into the Chez Ducky water pistol armory and pulled out the guns.
Mimi had sunk down to her knees on the sand, her arms limp in her lap as she stared at the pontoon. Her shoulders slumped with relief. As Birgie watched, the handsome guy who’d stripped the sheet from Naomi came up to Mimi and said something. She smiled up at him. He reached his hand out and she took it. For a heartbeat they froze; then he was pulling her to her feet and letting go of her hand. It didn’t matter. Birgie, who’d had half a dozen lovers, knew what she’d seen.
Sparks. Real sparks, too. Not just sex sparks—though God knew, those weren’t anything to turn your nose up at.
“Will you look at that?” Naomi murmured. She was watching the pair, too.
“Yup,” Birgie said. After being someone’s sister-in-law for fifty-some years, some communication didn’t need speech. “Know who he is?”
“Johanna said Mimi was toting around some good-looking man named Joe.”
“Joe,” Birgie said nostalgically. “I had a boyfriend named Joe once—”
“That crazy old woman.”
Birgie and Naomi looked around to see Naomi’s daughter-in-law Debbie stomping through the sand toward Naomi’s son, and Debbie’s husband, Bill. Little spits of sand punctuated each one of her angry steps.
“She could have burned this place to the ground!” Debbie declared angrily. A few of those closest looked away uncomfortably. “You’ve got to do something about her, Bill. Before one of these fool antics of hers results in a lawsuit.”
Birgie looked at Naomi. Naomi shrugged.
Debbie looked really shaken. And really mad.
“Now, Debbie. She’s my mother—”
“And I’m your wife, and those”—Debbie pointed at a pair of boys wrestling in the surf—“are your sons. And she put us in danger. When are you going to grow a spine and do what needs to be done?”
“Why don’t you just shut up, Debbie?” Mimi’s voice rose above the hubbub. Birgie looked around and saw Mimi hobbling toward Debbie. Joe was gone. Mimi’s expression was stony. Almost…angry. And her tone was…imperious.
It was about time someone had told Debbie to shut up, Birgie thought. Past time. It was only amazing that it had been Mimi who’d done the telling. Mimi never took the lead. She was never imperious. She always claimed she was too lazy to command anything, but Birgie had always suspected the real reason was that she didn’t want to care so much about something or someone that she’d felt compelled to act. She hadn’t cared about anything very much since her dad had disappeared.
Birgie applauded. Gerry joined in. Then Johanna and then someone else. Not everyone clapped, but enough people did that Debbie knew where she stood in relation to Naomi. Her face suffused with color.
“Well, excuse me for not wanting anyone to get hurt,” she sniffed and stomped off, nose high.
Naomi, inured to Debbie’s pain-in-the-assness by seventeen years as her mother-in-law, sighed. “Poor Bill.”
Chapter Nine
As soon as he got back to the rental car, Joe pulled off his waterlogged loafers and tossed them into the backseat. He felt a little as though he’d just popped back up out of the rabbit’s hole.
No forty-year-old women of Joe’s acquaintance would go skinny-dipping in a lake at the same time a picnic was under way a few hundred feet away. Nor would they run naked through the woods. And if bizarre circumstances should force them to do so, they’d definitely be at least a little nonplussed by the experience.
As soon as Mimi Olson had gotten the ratty stadium blanket over her, every bit of embarrassment had evaporated. It hadn’t returned, not even when she’d shown up wearing a kiddy beach robe. Nor when she’d blithely informed him that she spoke to ghosts for a living. On a ghost hotline.
Mimi Olson, he had come to the sad conclusion, was quirky.
That should have been it for Joe, whose few interactions with quirky women had led to no particular desire for more. In his experience, “quirky” peop
le were either “affected” or possibly “mentally lacking.” But he decided that Mimi Olson deserved special dispensation. She was obviously the product of her upbringing—as evidenced by her family’s peculiar pontoon-burning ritual. Small wonder Mimi was a little odd.
Hell, spend enough time with the Olsons and anyone would be odd. Why, he’d been drawn into odd behavior after just a short time in their company. Should anyone have told him this morning that by afternoon he would be standing fully clad knee-deep in a boggy lake ripping a sheet off an old lady, he would have laid very large odds against it.
He stripped off his sodden socks and wrung the sandy lake water out of them.
Besides, Mimi wasn’t just quirky. He’d been impressed by the lucid, unsentimental argument she’d forwarded in favor of keeping Chez Ducky in the family. Joe found lucid thinking incredibly sexy. It was one of the chief reasons he’d been attracted to Karen.
He’d met Karen as a senior at Miami Ohio, where she’d just started her freshman year. They’d sat next to each other in an advanced stats class. She’d shown him her class notes and he’d fallen like a ton of bricks. Her notes were a paean to organization and precise detail. Soon they were studying together, then sleeping together.
He knew his frat brothers couldn’t figure out what the attraction was on either part, but he knew exactly why he’d fallen for Karen. He’d been the only child of a variously employed couple dedicated to melodrama. For a kid whose home life was in perennial disarray, nothing was as beautiful as meticulousness, order, and reason. Karen was the high priestess of all these traits.
Joe reached down and turned his pant cuffs inside out, upending a pile of sand onto the ground.
No one could have been more surprised than him when Karen had agreed to marry him after they’d gotten pregnant, but Karen, a devout Catholic, wanted to keep the baby. What should have been a Nobel Prize–winning career had been derailed. Joe had landed a good job straight out of college and threw himself into work, determined to earn enough money to send Karen, who’d selflessly opted to stay at home with Prescott, back to college. Soon Joe was making a name for himself as the go-to guy. Unfortunately, that invariably meant “going-to” another city, another state, another country, sometimes for weeks, often for months.
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