by Ruthie Knox
“Probably, but that doesn’t matter.”
“It doesn’t?”
“So he got an impact statement. So what? You say, ‘Your experts were bogus, this development is going to threaten the fragile ecosystem of our Key deer, and I have these three other experts who agree with me. I’m going to sue your ass, and we’ll let the courts figure it out.’ ”
“I can’t sue him. I don’t have any money.”
“No, darling, that’s not the point. The point is the threat. The point is the wrench. We tie him up in hearings and experts and money, and meanwhile the court—or the state or whoever—says, ‘No demolition on this property. Not until it gets sorted out.’ And while that’s all happening we dig around, talk to all the other people who knew your grandma, and find out what this guy did to her, and we can use that to force him to quit. This is perfect.”
“It is?”
“It is. It’s so perfect, it’s like it fell from the sky. It’s like Susan gave it to us. Here’s your Key deer, darlings. Hit him where it hurts.”
“I don’t know, Mitz. I’m not sure anymore that I know what Grandma would want.”
“Sure you do. You two were peas in a pod.” Mitzi picked up the paddle and turned around. “We’re going back, and I’m going to do some research and make a few phone calls, and then you’re going to cut his balls off with this.”
She twisted to smile over her shoulder, and Ashley smiled back, because that was what she was supposed to be doing. Smiling.
This was the plan she’d been looking for.
But she felt kind of dirty.
She couldn’t help but wonder why Mitzi hadn’t known about the sale. Ashley had been afraid that Mitzi did know, but somehow it was worse that she didn’t, because why had Grandma left Mitzi out of this plan, when they were such good friends?
Maybe Mitzi was right, and Roman had somehow taken advantage. But try as she might, Ashley couldn’t believe he would do that.
Or maybe Ashley’s worst fears were true, and her grandmother just hadn’t cared what happened to Ashley after she was gone. Maybe she’d considered her job done once Ashley was raised, and she’d been trying to cut the apron strings, to force Ashley out into the world so she’d find a real life, a real job, and stop returning to Sunnyvale every winter.
The youngest snowbird in Florida, Grandma had called her once, and Ashley hadn’t been able to tell even then if it was a good or a bad thing.
And there was another possibility. The possibility that the answer to all these questions was in those boxes in the Airstream that Ashley couldn’t bring herself to open.
Maybe, maybe, maybe.
She didn’t know what any of it meant—the way her grandma had died, how she’d distributed her estate—any more than she knew how to change Roman’s mind. But she couldn’t help feeling that the two things were bound up together, somehow.
Mitzi paddled hard, cutting through the water with gusto. The Key deer revelation was clearly the most exciting thing to happen to her in weeks.
Ashley wasn’t excited, though. The thought of siccing a bunch of lawyers on Roman made her heart sink, and she could no longer be certain she’d picked the right ally in this fight.
It was just that if she couldn’t trust Mitzi to get her out of this, she’d have to trust herself.
CHAPTER FIVE
Cupped in his palm, Roman’s phone chirped a low-battery warning.
The alligator raised its head.
He took a step back and ran into the porch railing.
“Don’t worry about Flossie,” the man behind him said. “She just likes music.”
Roman spared him a glance. The man had wispy white hair, silky as the innards of a cracked-open milkweed pod. Khaki pants, untucked button-up shirt, glasses. He looked like a slightly nutty university professor, or the PR guy for some nature conservancy.
Roman had met him last night, but he couldn’t remember his name until he saw his feet.
Don.
Don doesn’t believe in shoes, Kirk had said.
Shoes are part of the social fabric, Roman replied. How can you not believe in shoes?
Kirk shrugged. Feel free to ask him.
Roman had learned his lesson about asking questions, though. The commune residents looked normal enough, but throw out one innocent question about whether the coffee was decaf and you found yourself on the receiving end of a lecture about the bleach content of coffee filters—which segued, improbably, into colonic cleansing, coffee-plantation labor abuse, the “bullshit” labeling of free-trade products, and, finally, obscure and truly disgusting African parasites.
He’d been forced to conclude that the only thing these people didn’t waste energy yammering about was the enormous alligator occupying the patch of grass just off the porch, between the dining hall and the swamp.
Roman had a lot of questions about the alligator.
He didn’t ask them.
“What kind of music does she like?” he asked, and then wondered what was the matter with him.
Heberto would ignore the man. Some people aren’t worth your time, he would say. With your education, your experience, you’re worth five hundred dollars an hour to talk to, easy. You have to ask yourself, is talking to this man worth five hundred dollars of your money?
Roman glanced at Don’s feet.
It wasn’t that he disagreed with Heberto. But old habits were hard to break. His foster father, Patrick, had believed everyone was worth listening to. Rapists and murderers, wife-beaters, alcoholics. It had made Patrick a pillar of the community—this insistence that everyone had value, every lost soul deserved an advocate.
Everyone but Roman.
“Her favorite’s Big Band,” Don said. “Aaron Everson’s been trying to get her into hiphop.”
Roman said “Hmm” and brushed invisible crumbs off the lapel of his suit jacket.
His phone flashed with the arrival of a new text from his PA. Roman fired back a response, shifting a bit so he could keep an eye on the alligator without accidentally allowing Don’s feet into his peripheral vision.
Their bottoms were the dull gray of hooves. Roman had glimpsed them at the drum circle last night, then wished for a way to un-glimpse them. Almost scarier than the alligator, those feet.
“She likes show tunes, too,” Don commented.
“Hmm.”
“One time we had a swing dance in the dining hall, and she came right up on the porch and looked in the window. I think she even smiled. Mitzi says gators always look like they’re smiling, though, so it’s hard to tell.”
“Hmm,” Roman said again, and tried not to think about what it would take to turn Don’s feet back into feet again.
Woodworking tools, most likely. A metal rasp.
“—gimpy leg, so Andy thought, ‘Why don’t we do our circle of healing on Flossie?’ And we brought all the drums out here and put them around—”
Roman tried to concentrate on what Don was telling him, but listening just made him yearn to escape. When he’d called the tow-truck place this morning, the owner-operator had declared himself “real busy” and asked Roman to call back after lunch. Then he’d hung up.
Was 12:05 too soon to call back?
And where the hell was Ashley? What was she playing at? What would happen to their truce when he left?
“—wouldn’t believe the way she acted once that tambora drum came into the picture. First, she started lifting her feet, two at a time, like the ground was hot. My partner, Shari, said it was like Flossie had a demon inside her that needed out. But Shari’s people were revivalist types, so she saw a lot of that stuff at the tent revivals when she was a kid. Not with gators, of course—”
The phone chirped another low-battery warning. Flossie took three quick steps toward the porch, and Roman clutched at the railing. Everything in his field of vision sharpened. The smell of warm, yeasty buttered rolls and swamp decay seemed to intensify.
His palms tingled.
&nb
sp; “Just like that!” Don said. “She was dancing forward and backward just like that, and we were drumming up a storm—really good drumming, with all these layers interwoven, and kind of mystical, where you could fall into the rhythm and get lost there. So—”
“She’s not dancing backward,” Roman said.
“What do you mean?”
“You said forward and backward, but she didn’t dance backward. She just lunged.” At me. And then I jumped like an idiot.
In the ten years he’d been living in Florida, he’d never gotten used to alligators. Not that he ran into them much in Miami, but even the idea of them made his skin crawl. Probably a legacy of his landlocked upbringing—he just couldn’t accept ancient reptilian dinosaur monsters skulking around in the murk.
Though Flossie here didn’t need to skulk. She could pick off a hippie anytime she pleased.
And yet the hippies seemed blithely unconcerned, chowing down on salad and casserole while Roman’s brain flashed neon-red words like APEX PREDATOR in large capitals across the space behind his eyes and made him dizzy.
He forced himself to loosen his grip on the railing.
Don noticed. “You’re not afraid of her, are you?”
“No.”
“She’s just a baby!”
The alligator staring at him from a spot just beyond the porch steps—eyes alert, jaw hanging slightly open, poised to attack—had to weigh upwards of three hundred pounds. Roman didn’t know a lot about alligators, but he knew they came out of eggs.
It had been a long time since that gnarly creature fit in an egg.
“She could rip off my leg in about eight seconds.”
“Yeah, but Flossie wouldn’t,” Don said. “We practically raised her.”
“What, from birth?”
“She washed up, what, ten years ago, Kirk?” Don asked.
“Yeah, ten or so. She was just little then.”
“You fed her scraps and all that?” Roman started to relax.
“Well, no,” Kirk hedged. “We’re not allowed to do that. This is all part of the wildlife preserve, see, so we have to be strictly hands-off with the animals.”
“So in what sense did you raise Flossie?”
“She’s always hanging around, watching us,” Don said. “She likes us.”
Roman met the alligator’s beady black eye again. If Flossie liked him, she had a strange way of showing it.
His phone chirped three times fast, signaling the death of the battery.
Flossie moved onto the porch with terrifying speed.
Throwing himself backward, Roman tripped over one of Don’s horny feet and fell down, landing hard on his ass.
“Jesus Christ!”
Ashley knew that voice.
Roman. Angry Roman.
She rushed out onto the deck, where she encountered the improbable sight of Roman sprawled on the planks, brandishing his iPhone at a snapping, capering Flossie.
“Nice,” Mitzi said breathlessly behind her.
“She won’t really bite him, will she?” Ashley asked.
“I don’t think so. She never has before. I think she’s trying to play with him.”
“Yeah, well, the thing is, Roman doesn’t play.”
He scrabbled as Flossie stalked him and everyone offered advice he gave no sign of hearing.
“Stand up, if you want her to keep off you.”
“Give her that phone. That’s all she wants, and you’ll just get brain cancer from it. I read this article—”
“—not supposed to be on the porch. That ranger will have a fit if he knows she’s been up here again, and he’ll give us all a lecture about—”
“—throw your arms around her neck, she’ll give you a ride on her back.”
“See if you can make the music again.” This from Don. “I bet she’ll smile for you.”
Roman crab-crawled backward another few feet, launched himself to standing, and flung his phone at the alligator’s head.
It hit her squarely between the eyes.
She blinked.
Ashley leaned over, grabbed a beach ball from beneath the porch, and waved it at the alligator. “Flossie?” she called. “You want to play, baby girl?”
Flossie tracked the ball with her head. Ashley tossed it onto the lawn, where it rolled downhill and into the swamp.
The alligator turned slowly and lumbered down the steps after it.
Ashley dared a glance at Roman. He’d planted his hands on his hips, spreading his suit jacket and revealing his half-untucked shirt, more open than usual at the collar. A button must have lost traction.
His color was high, his chest rapidly rising and falling.
Their eyes locked, and everything he felt seemed to pound inside her. His fury. His humiliation. All the chemicals in his bloodstream wordlessly dumped into hers, and she thought he might do anything next—bellow, or kick the picnic table, or tell everyone on the porch off at once, inventing swearwords Ashley had never heard before. Poisonous, taboo words to match his eyes and the tattoo of his heart.
He raised his hands, as though he were about to grab her and … and—she didn’t know what. She didn’t know, but the possibility was electrifying. Just to see Roman lose it so completely. To see him prove he was alive, as vulnerable and stupid and prone to emotional storm surges as she was.
“A ball?” His voice dripped with sarcasm, but he couldn’t control the rising pitch. The crack in it. “You threw the alligator a fucking ball?”
“She likes to play fetch.”
Roman pointed across the porch at Kirk. “He said Flossie was wild. That they’re not allowed to tame her because she lives in the refuge.”
Ashley raised one shoulder, then let it drop. “They’re not supposed to. But that doesn’t mean they haven’t.”
“So I was never in any danger.”
“Of course not.”
She watched the knowledge soak in. Watched him pull his dignity back on. Tuck in his shirt. “You were all laughing at me.” He said it quietly.
“No, Roman—”
“Did you enjoy that, Ashley? Was it as good as the drum circle, seeing the uptight Miami guy lose his shit over a pet alligator?”
“God, Roman, no. I wouldn’t do that. Listen, the thing about Flossie is, we all kind of forget that she’s an alligator, because she’s—”
He wasn’t listening. He’d blanked his face, turned his back, and as she spoke, he slid open the door and disappeared inside the dining hall.
“Damn it,” Ashley said.
“He really doesn’t like alligators,” Don said helplessly.
“No one likes alligators, Don,” Ashley said. “They kill people.”
“Not Flossie, though.”
“No. Not Flossie.”
Roman didn’t know Flossie—hadn’t grown up visiting the commune, seeing the animal gain length and weight but never fearing her because she was Flossie, the eight-inch-long baby who’d been stranded on the lawn after a bad storm, and who’d taken to the commune residents as much as they took to her.
Roman saw her for what she was. Hundreds of pounds of teeth and muscle, born to stalk and kill.
“Bet he has nightmares about gators for a year,” Mitzi said at her elbow.
“Would you blame him?”
Mitzi gripped Ashley’s biceps and gave her arm a shake. “Don’t start feeling sorry for him.”
She didn’t feel sorry for Roman. Empathy was not the same as pity. She felt like an asshole.
“I need to talk to him.”
“And tell him what?”
“I don’t know. I’ll figure it out.”
“Don’t mess this up, Ash. This is your chance. He’s already shaky—now you go for the jugular.”
Ashley pulled her arm out of Mitzi’s grip, seeing her intensity, her near-frenzy, in a way she never had before.
The word Grandma always used about Mitzi was single-minded. She had a certainty, a strength of purpose, which Ashley fiercely
admired because she didn’t possess it herself.
But Mitzi could be blind about things, too. She’d been blind about Kirk for ten years—scorning his devotion and sleeping around, always looking for the right guy when she already had him.
She could be rude, too, in her self-centeredness. That sex marathon last night—that had been rude. And taking Ashley out in the swamp while Roman was in the shower … not a move Grandma would have approved of.
Grandma would have made sure Roman’s car had been towed by now. She’d have located a cutting torch and fed him and found him a fresh toothbrush, and if Ashley had argued with her, she would have said that hospitality was non-negotiable.
But Grandma wasn’t here.
“I’ll do my best,” Ashley said.
She leaned down, scooped up Roman’s phone, and set out after him.
She found him in his car. Sitting in the driver’s seat, hands in his lap, face completely empty.
Ashley opened the passenger door and levered herself up. The car was insanely hot—a hundred degrees or more. She began to sweat instantly, but she pulled the door shut anyway. “Roman?”
“What?”
Completely toneless. He was really upset.
“I’m sorry.”
“Apology accepted.”
“I should have warned you about the alligator. And I shouldn’t have gone off with Mitzi while you were in the shower. That was rude. And last night—”
“It’s fine.”
“It’s really not fine.”
He turned to look at her. “We’re not friends, Ashley. I don’t have friends. It’s fine.”
Nothing about him looked sad when he said it—not his eyes, not his face, not his beautiful mouth or his overabundant eyebrows. That was the part that made her want to cry.
She handed him his phone.
He opened the console between their seats, extracted a cord, and inserted it into the phone, then plugged the other end into the lighter. The wire curled and flopped unattractively in the gap between the phone and the console. Roman frowned at it, then looked away.
With his right hand, he dug deep into his pants pocket. Suddenly, air began blasting from the vent in front of her, making her jump.
“Remote starter,” he said.