Skinny Dipping

by Connie Brockway

  “Okay, I’m in,” Mimi said in the spirit of cooperation.

  “Great,” Sarah said. “Just don’t tell Mary I introduced you. Mary”—Sarah’s grin was conspiratorial—“has a crush.”

  As opposed to Sarah, who had a boy toy.

  Sarah led the way to where the two men stood in conversation. They were closing in for the kill—the Charbonneau tendency to see things in hunting terms must be catching—when their prey must have sensed their approach and turned.

  Wow, was all Mimi could think. He’d been smooth before, but the tux and dress shirt had jettisoned him into the Rolls-Royce league. The Phantom line. His jawline shone, his eyes glittered, his white dress shirt glowed, even his manicured nails had a soft luster. And his hair, Mimi thought disbelievingly staring up at him, was perfect. Warren Zevon would have been proud.

  “Hi, Mimi,” Joe Tierney said. Yup. His voice was still the sexiest soft masculine purr she’d ever heard.

  His gaze flickered over her, quickly, no more than a second of assessment, but she saw the surprise in his eyes. So she let her gaze drift over him, too, only in a much more speculative manner.

  “Well, don’t you clean up nice?” she said.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Joe burst out laughing. Mimi had said exactly what he’d been thinking and she knew it. She looked lovely, womanly and relaxed. A floaty peacock blue dress followed her curves as though made for her, the color turning her tanned skin amber while around her throat hung a magnificent pearl and diamond necklace.

  Both the dress and the necklace surprised the hell out of him. He’d thought she was poor. Hadn’t she said something about not being able to afford a replacement for one of those shacks neighboring Prescott’s lake home? Maybe it was just the Olsons. Anyway, he’d still have pegged her as more of a madras caftan type, one who wore lots of handcrafted bead necklaces and parted her hair in the center for special occasions.

  “Aren’t you going to return the compliment?” she asked. Beside her, Sarah Werner and Congressman Popitch traded startled glances.

  He tipped his head and gave her a slow once-over. “I don’t know,” he said thoughtfully, “I rather miss the seaweeds.”

  “No, you don’t,” she chided him without criticism.

  Of course, she was right. Only for a minute there he’d forgotten. A chasm separated their lifestyles. His life was controlled, structured, and refined; hers was unstructured, unplanned, and messy. In fact…what was she doing here? The incongruity of seeing her at a party given by and for the Midwest’s most successful and conservative citizens struck him broadside. He’d been so caught up in the pleasure he felt on seeing her again, he hadn’t asked how it had occurred. And on closer inspection, she was simply a more polished version of the Fowl Lake bon vivant he’d met last September.

  In spite of the designer dress, she hadn’t bothered with high heels or stockings, and the only makeup she wore was lipstick. She’d wrestled her thick curly hair into a plait and coiled it at the nape of her neck, but a few mutinous tendrils, mostly silvery ones, had escaped and drifted like spider silk around her temples. He glanced at her hands, long fingered and light boned, the nails cut rather than filed, and unpolished. Maybe she was some sort of wacky trust-fund baby. He could look into the future and see her in another two decades; she’d be a full-fledged eccentric complete with waist-length gray hair and caftan, wearing a fortune in pearls around her neck as she Birkenstocked her way to the co-op.

  “I forgot your phone number,” he abruptly told her, though God alone knew why. She hadn’t asked and in fact looked surprised he’d mentioned it. She hadn’t expected him to call, he realized. This disconcerted him. Hadn’t she wanted him to call?

  “I tried looking you up in the phone book,” he went on. “Do you know how many M. Olsons there are in Minneapolis?”

  “Quite a few, I’d imagine,” she said, her smile giving nothing away.

  “You know Mimi, Mr. Tierney?” Sarah Werner, Tom Werner’s pretty young daughter asked, recalling Joe to the fact that he and Mimi were not alone. It was unlike Joe to forget his social skills.

  “I’ve had the pleasure. We met at a family gathering,” Joe answered. At Sarah’s inquisitive look he added, “Her family.”

  “Excuse me?” Sarah said.

  “He said ‘at her family gathering,’” Congressman Popitch repeated, pleased to be able to add something to the conversation.

  “But we’re Mimi’s family,” Sarah said. “She’s my sister.”

  Joe couldn’t disguise his surprise. He couldn’t imagine anyone less likely to be associated with the conservative, slightly stuffy, socially prominent Werners.

  “Half sister. Same mother. Hello, Walt,” Mimi said, turning to Congressman Popitch.

  Solange? Solange was the driving force behind Tom Werner. A woman with a mind like a steel trap and a will, Joe was convinced, that could be subverted only by black magic. It had been Solange who’d convinced Tom to sell BioMedTech. He couldn’t see Mimi insisting on anything. She hadn’t even raised her voice in protest when her beloved lake shacks were being put on the auction block. This was interesting—

  What was he thinking? He didn’t want to be interested in Mimi Olson. She was a Bohemian nutcase in a family of Bohemian nutcases, since she clearly hewed to her Olson relatives more than her mother’s. What did he want with a nutcase? Besides the obvious, he admitted, as his gaze touched discreetly on the small, curvy figure the slippery-looking material slithered over. Besides, he added sanctimoniously, she was also Tom Werner’s stepdaughter, which made her, by his own rules, off-limits. There, he thought, convinced.

  Now the only question that remained was why he’d had to convince himself to stay away from Mimi Olson when he hadn’t had to do so with Delia Bunn, a woman who in every respect fit his criteria for a “really attractive woman.”

  A sudden commotion on the other side of the room, near the big arched windows overlooking the lake, drew their attention. Sarah stretched herself on her tiptoes, looking over heads. “Oh, dear. Poor Mother.”

  “What’s going on?” Mimi asked.

  “It’s Grandmother. She—she’s dancing. Excuse me.” She hurried into the press.

  “So, you’re Werner’s stepdaughter,” Joe said to Mimi. She’d been looking after Sarah but now returned her attention to him.

  She gave a light guffaw. “No one has ever referred to me as Tom’s stepdaughter. Even Tom. Do they, Walt?”

  “I doubt it,” Congressman Popitch agreed.

  A muffled crash came from across the room. Mimi turned toward it. Around them, people had gone from interested to embarrassed and were now trying to cover up the sounds of whatever was happening with overanimated conversation, their eyes determinedly averted from the other side of the room.

  “How do they refer to you, then?” Joe asked.

  “Hm?” She wasn’t paying attention. She bit her lower lip, clearly struggling with some dilemma. “Would you excuse me?” she abruptly asked.

  “By all means,” he said. “Promise you’ll come back later?”

  “Sure.” She gave him an odd half smile, then nodded at the congressman. “Keep fighting the good fight, Walt,” she said and headed into the crowd.

  “You’d never guess she shared any of the same DNA with the other Werner women, would you? Couldn’t be more unlike her half sisters,” Congressman Popitch said, watching Mimi disappear. He shook his head. “Talk about a loose cannon.”

  Joe angled his head inquiringly. “You know Mimi Olson well?”

  Popitch snorted. “Not really. But who does? Can you imagine? Here she’s born with every advantage. She’s cute, Solange claims she’s a genius—and I use the word ‘claims’ advisedly—Tom’s as connected as they come and unaccountably fond of her, Solange is rich in her own right—you’ve heard of Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow depilatory? That’s Solange’s family”—here Walt leaned in and after a quick look around whispered—“and Mimi doesn’t have those unfo
rtunate Werner legs, if you know what I mean?”

  Joe, even on brief acquaintance with the Werners, did.

  “Yet what does she do for a living? Cons lonely folk into thinking she’s talking to their dead loved ones. Course, Solange tries to keep that on the lowdown, but it’s not a secret. What a waste.” Popitch sighed.

  Joe found himself nodding in agreement, but what he was really thinking was that he was intrigued. All over again.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Mimi wove her way through the people, her feelings mixed. Perhaps Sarah’s subsonic sisterly SOS had been timely. Joe Tierney was entirely too attractive and Mimi might end up doing something impulsive. Mimi was not impulsive; she was laid-back. Indulging your impulses meant acting on them, and being laid-back meant acting on as little as possible, especially on those things that had high stakes. Which was why Mimi didn’t have too many casual relationships with men (or any other sort, for that matter). The last time Mimi had allowed herself to scratch an itch in relation to a man, she’d scratched herself straight into pregnancy.

  In short order, Life had once more alerted her of the need to keep her distance. Especially when it came to people who breezed in and out of her life. She preferred to do the breezing, a fact of which Mary’s nasty little remark about her father’s disappearance had reminded her. ’Twas better to breeze than to be breezed upon.

  As soon as Mimi saw Grandmother Werner, she recognized the well from which the Werner cankles had sprung. She also recognized that Grandmother Werner was high. The woman, stout as a beer stein and with a froth of white hair to boot, slouched in her chair, her head thrown back, her eyes open but unfocused. A collar of diamonds dug deep into the fold of her neck, and her hands were laced across her round stomach, each finger cuffed by multitudinous rings.

  Sarah sat in a chair pulled up next to her grandmother, smiling tremulously in answer to the sidelong glances shot in their direction. As soon as she saw Mimi, she went limp with relief as if she thought Mimi was an expert on stoned old ladies. Okay, Mimi thought, an image of Naomi Olson springing to mind, she did have some experience, but she was no expert.

  “Where’s your dad?” Mimi asked as she drew near. “Where’s Mary?”

  “She went to find Dad,” Sarah whispered through her smile. “Grandmother thinks Mary is Mom. She called Mary a bad name.”

  “So?”

  “Everyone was listening,” Sarah said.

  Poor Sarah, still young enough to feel like the cynosure of every eye. She sat down in the chair on the other side of the old woman, scooting it close so she and Sarah could talk over the old lady without being heard. “What happened?”

  “Mary said Grandmother was acting oddly when she arrived but has just gotten steadily worse. She insisted on dancing with one of the servers.”

  “That’s because she’s as high as a kite, Sarah,” Mimi said, casting an eloquent look at the glassy-eyed, smiling old woman.

  Sarah paled visibly. “Oh, God.”

  “Don’t tell me you didn’t know she was using drugs,” Mimi said disbelievingly. “You did occasionally look around all those years you spent in college, didn’t you?”

  “I swear I didn’t know,” Sarah denied hotly. “She’s always been difficult about Mom. This summer she was diagnosed with diabetic neuropathy and in the hospital they gave her morphine. I know it’s a terribly painful condition and since she’s returned home she’s complained about how the prescriptions don’t work. And recently she started getting…odd. I thought she had incipient Alzheimer’s or some other form of dementia. I never put two and two together. Why would they give her those sorts of drugs?”

  “I’d say she’s doing her own pain management,” Mimi said, not without kindness. She glanced at Grandmother Werner, who was chuckling quietly, muttering something to someone only she could see. Her fingertips drummed a rhythm on her plump knees.

  “She’s always been so aloof, and, well, a little superior. She detests ‘scenes.’ And now she creates them almost daily.” Sarah gave a little hiccuped sob. “What do you think we should do?”

  We? She should be on the other side of the room flirting shamelessly with Joe Tierney and deciding whether to make all his Fowl Lake beach fantasies come true. This was all plainly none of her business. For the love of God, she was meeting the old lady for the first time.

  “What if she starts dancing again?” Sarah asked.

  “Ask her if you can lead?”

  “This isn’t funny, Mimi,” Sarah said. “When she came back from the bathroom, she accosted a server and insisted he dance with her. Everyone’s looking at us. I don’t know what to do.”

  Mimi glanced around. No one was watching them. Since Grandmother Werner had slipped happily into la-la land they’d returned to their conversations. “As far as anyone here knows, your grandmother was overcome with the joy of the occasion and now she’s calmed down. So, why don’t you just enjoy the rest of the—”

  “Who’re you?”

  Both Mimi and Sarah, leaning forward so they could converse over Mother Werner’s slouched form, turned their heads. Mother Werner peered blearily down at them.

  “Who,” she repeated, looking directly at Mimi, “are you?”

  “Mimi.”

  “Mimi.” Sarah’s grandmother squinted, trying to place her. A glint of recognition lightened her cloudy eyes. “The Frog’s by-blow?”

  On the other side, Sarah gasped. “Grandmother!”

  Mimi looked askance at her. “Frog?”

  “She’s taken to calling Mother a Frog,” Sarah said, casting anxious looks around.

  “It’s not an ethnic slur, simply a comment on her physical resemblance,” the evil old lady purred.

  “Gotcha.”

  Mother Werner’s eyes narrowed to little slits. “I remember. You are the product of her first misalliance. The Frog claims it was a legal union. As if being a cheap divorcée was any better than simply being a cheap floozy.”

  At the mental image of Solange dressed in satin hot pants and a tube top and teetering atop four-inch Lucite stilettos, Mimi laughed.

  The corners of Mother Werner’s thin lips twitched upward and disappeared. “Your mother must have been wed at fifteen. How old are you? Fifty?”

  Mimi stopped laughing. “Forty-one.”

  “You look older. You should use sunscreen. A good exfoliation might help. Try the spa. It’s decent for a shipboard venture. My husband is there now. I should go find the old bastard before he starts pinching the poor masseuse’s bum,” she said, bracing her hands on the arms of the chair and preparing to heave upward.

  “What’s her name?” Mimi quickly asked Sarah.

  “‘Her’ name,” the old lady said darkly, “is Mrs. Werner.”

  Apparently, the old gal wasn’t all that doped up.

  “Christian name.”

  “Imogene,” Sarah said softly. “And Grandfather has been dead for thirty years.”

  Imogene rewarded this betrayal by making a disgusted sound. “Bah.”

  “Thank you, Imogene—may I call you Imogene?” Mimi asked calmly. So the bum-pinching husband was dead, eh? They were in her territory now. She mentally rubbed her hands together. “Your husband asked me to tell you he’d be with you soon enough.”

  Sarah shot Mimi a startled look.

  Imogene studied Mimi sharply a moment before releasing her grip on the chair arms. “I suppose there’s no hurry,” she finally said. She settled like a bag of wet sand in the chair. “How long have we been on board now? I can’t recall…” Her eyelids fluttered shut and she was out.

  “Where would she get the sort of drugs that make you fantasize like that?” Sarah asked.

  Maybe Baby Precocious wasn’t so precocious after all.

  “My stockbroker,” Imogene said, eyes still closed, and chuckled. “At least he knows where his bread is buttered. The damn quack is too lily-livered to risk his precious medical license.”

  “I can’t believe that,” Sara
h whispered helplessly. “Her stockbroker is almost as old as she is.”

  “I’ve got it!” Imogene’s eyes had snapped open and she was staring with unconcealed relish at Mimi. “Why, you’re that table-rapper, aren’t you? I’m right, aren’t I?”

  “Got me,” Mimi said without rancor.

  “Ha! Well, I hope your little show is a bit more professional than that oily ciscebo,” Imogene said, glowering at one of the male servers. “The lout stepped all over my feet. And he calls himself a dancer. Remind me to speak to the ship’s purser about him. Insolent. Didn’t even finish our dance.” She closed her eyes once more.

  “I’m sorry, Mimi,” Sarah said miserably, her pale cheeks a tender blush shade Bobbi Brown would have died to re-create. “I haven’t even thanked you for coming over. You’ve been so—” she looked up and Mimi was horrified to see unshed tears shimmering in her eyes—“so wonderfully uncritical.”

  Christ. What was with Sarah making with the maudlin? It was weird. Sarah wasn’t emotional. At least, not that Mimi recalled. She wondered whether Sarah’s new sex life could really account for such a drastic personality change. Maybe she’d hit her head recently. “Don’t blubber.”

  “I’m sorry.” She sniffed. “Dad or Mother should be back any second now. You should rejoin Joe Tierney. I think he likes you, and Grandmother’s not your responsibility.”

  No. She wasn’t. Which, Mimi well knew, made it easier for her than for Sarah. Because Sarah loved the old witch and seeing her like this was painful for her. It wasn’t painful for Mimi.

  Sarah had knit her fingers together and was studying them. Quickly, Mimi tallied her options here: Go and find Joe GQ or stay here with Granny Werner.

  Sarah looked up and smiled bravely.

  Ah, crap. Joe GQ had probably moved on to greener pastures by now, anyway.

  “Look, Sarah,” she said. “These are your parents’ friends. You ought to be the one out there making nice on their behalf. I wasn’t so keen on mingling, anyway, and you know I’m not self-sacrificing so I’m telling you the truth. So, go on. I’ll stay here with Imogene. Besides, she’s dying to expose me as a fraud.”