Tagging, along, Harry said, "You know, or you suspect? There's a big difference."
He was still in his golf clothes, damp, smelling of the locker room, a clear, bubbly drink with a slice of lime in one hand. The polite applause of golf on the TV.
She lay her armload of gladiolus on the bed and turned to face him.
"Have you called the police in Kuching, spoken to anybody over there lately? Is anyone doing anything about this?"
"I've called several times."
"And?"
"And nothing. No progress. But that doesn't mean you're suddenly empowered to pin on a badge and go off rounding up suspects, Allison."
"Well, thanks, Harry, for your legal opinion. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to get dressed. I have a party tonight."
"Party? Jesus, what party?"
"I've asked you, Harry, I've pleaded with you to pull some of your famous strings with the State Department. Have our people in Malaysia put some pressure on the authorities over there. But I don't see you doing a thing, and no one over there is doing a thing either. No calls, no letters, nothing. Dead silence. So, Harry, I'm getting busy. I'm doing this myself. That's how it is. Legal, illegal, I don't give a damn."
"What's happening, Allison? This isn't you. You're acting so . . ."
"So what?"
"You're out of control. Wild-eyed."
"Am I, Harry? Wild-eyed and out of control. Is that what I am?"
"I think you need to see somebody. Talk to a professional."
"Maybe I like being wild-eyed. Maybe it's about time I went a little crazy. Maybe this is who I am, Harry. The real Allison."
He tried to turn away, but Allison ducked in front of him.
She peered into his eyes. Trying for a moment to recall the thing she'd seen there over twenty years ago. The twinkle, the wry spark that had been part of what convinced her she'd found a man as vibrant as her father. As full of fierce passions.
"I don't like it," Harry said quietly. "This isn't you."
"Oh, no, you're wrong. It is me."
He was staring back at her as though he, too, was searching her eyes, maybe looking for the sparkle that had aroused him long ago. The thing that made him, after thirty-eight years a bachelor, embrace the married life. Allison twenty, Harry thirty-eight. He'd been one of her father's many young friends. Part of his masculine entourage. Ivy League lawyers, outdoorsmen, poker players, bourbon drinkers, boaters, shooters of rifles and handguns.
Her father had been all those things to the end of his life. But little by little over the last ten years, Harry had abandoned it all. The boat was sold. Rods and reels corroding in the garage. The hunting rifles donated to auctions or given away. Those old tramping clothes thrown out. Decks of cards tucked in the unused drawers. He didn't even drink bourbon anymore. It was vodka now. Vodka gimlets, for god's sake.
Finally he took a deep breath, let go of her eyes. Looked away and then looked back. He seemed to gaze at her now from a great distance, as though he were on a ship departing for a remote continent.
"This is hard for me, too, you know. It's not your pain alone."
"I know, Harry. I know it's hard."
He licked his lips, eyes filling.
"Did you have a woman in Brunei?" she said it with a casual almost indifferent curiosity.
Harry winced but recovered quickly. Years of diplomacy. He cleared his throat and demanded to know what the hell she was talking about now.
"A woman, Harry. Did you have a lover on your first tour of Brunei?"
He rattled the ice in his drink. Looked down into it.
"If I did, Allison, that was before we were married. Years before. I hadn't even met you then."
"Was she still there on your second tour? I always wondered. Is that why we went to Brunei, Harry? You took your wife and two teenage daughters to the Far East so you could be with her again?"
"What the hell are you talking about? That was years ago. Years."
Allison picked up a white rose from the bed, held it to her nose. No scent at all. Like smelling a chunk of plastic.
"It all changed for us that year," she said. "Before that we loved each other. I mean, maybe it wasn't ever as passionate as we would have liked, but it was love. Before that year in Brunei."
He looked at her for a long, unflinching moment.
"It was love all right."
"But then we stopped. I mean, it takes a while to tell what's happened. It leaks away so slowly. You don't register it immediately. Oh, I realized something wasn't right in Brunei, but I couldn't name it. I was lonely and depressed, but I thought I was just homesick, or maybe there was something wrong with me, something psychological.
"But eventually I figured it out. We'd stopped loving each other. You had your mistress in Brunei. All I had was the girls, and they were growing up, finding themselves, keeping me at arm's length. Sean with her sports; Winslow had photography. I didn't have you, and I was losing them. That's when I discovered the apes. A way to go on like nothing had happened. And that's what we've been doing since then. Seven years of going on."
"Why are you doing this, Allison? Why now?"
"I always hoped," she said. "I thought we'd find a way to get it back. What we had. But we haven't, have we? This is the way we are now. This is the only way it's going to be with us. Never any better than this."
He rattled his ice again. He licked his lips, looked at the wall behind her.
"So what party are you going to?" His voice was empty.
She conjured a weak smile.
"I'm crashing an orgy at Joshua Bond's."
"I should have known."
Allison set the white rose down, chose a yellow one. It had a syrupy scent that almost choked her.
"We did love each other, though. When the girls were young, that was love. Our version of love."
"It was," he said.
She looked at Harry, sucking down the last trickle of his drink, Adam's apple bobbing.
"Harry," she said.
"Yes?"
She forced a smile.
"Do you happen to know anything about flower arranging?"
He lowered his glass, looked at her for a second or two, then said no, he didn't know a goddamn thing about flower arranging.
"Damn," she said. "Neither do I."
She leaned close and kissed him on the cheek, tasted his golf sweat, inhaled the vodka fumes. And for half a second she was back there, the time before Brunei, on the fishing boat with Harry and the girls out in Biscayne Bay, watching Sean reeling in a barracuda. Allison's lips pressed against her husband's sun-scorched flesh, that same aura of sour sweat and whiskey, smelling so much like her own father, a thousand vivid incidents from her childhood collapsed into one, the fishing rod in her own hand then, her father, her mother, her whole family cheering as young Allison hauled in yet another fish. Her father's boozy kiss of praise.
***
Upstairs she showered, dried her hair, then dug through her closet until she found the dress she remembered, one she hadn't worn in years, tucked away near the back. A white embroidered sheath with a deep-dipping neckline, a sheer mesh bodice. Show them cleavage, they'll never notice your face.
She wriggled into it, got the zipper up; tight but wearable. She went through Winslow's bathroom drawers, found some makeup from a decade ago. Dark blue eye shadow, carmine blush, a lipstick brighter than the reddest of the gladiolus. She located a pair of reading glasses Winslow had worn in high school. Black and square, like something from the PX. Fuzzed up her vision, but they certainly changed the shape of her face.
In her bathroom mirror she examined herself critically.
Half hooker, half librarian.
Friends might do a double take, but they'd recognize her. And Harry would, of course. But would a man who'd seen her only twice, both times across a tense courtroom? Doubtful.
***
The address was in Pinecrest, a woodsy neighborhood south of Miami, everything at least an acre
. Allison loaded the car and was in the Bonds' neighborhood by five. She rang the bell at the gate, spoke into the box, told the female voice she was the flower lady.
"The who?"
"Flower Circus. Roses, tulips. Decorations for the party."
"Wait, please."
After three or four minutes' anxious delay, she watched the gates roll open. Allison drove up a hundred yards of white river rock, entering five acres of high-walled privacy. She parked next to the white-tiled Mediterranean monster of a house. Probably fifteen thousand square feet, all glass and stucco with jumbled angles. A scramble of windows and overhangs and cupolas and dormers. Chaos architecture.
A young Latina in a maid's black uniform opened the double front doors and told her to wait, she would go find Mrs. Bond.
Allison took a breath, tried to swallow away the lump of doubt that was building in her throat. She could hear an argument somewhere inside the house, a hoarse smoker's voice complaining to someone on the phone, or else a servant who was unable to answer back.
When Mrs. Bond appeared at the door, Allison took a half step back. She was a big woman, middle sixties, every inch as formidable as her husband. Thick-waisted, with a face as haphazardly designed as her house. Large, mannish mouth, a delicate nose, and dark, pretty eyes. She wore a black warm-up suit, which showed a lot more of her figure than was wise. But Allison sensed she was a woman proud of her bulk, enjoyed using it to intimidate her skinny foes.
"And now what?"
"I'm Gretchen," Allison said. "With Flower Circus." She motioned at her Cherokee and said, "Roses, tulips, glads. Like you ordered."
"The party's off. We don't need you."
"Off?"
"Off. You know, darling — kaput. No party. You can go now, enjoy your weekend."
"And what am I supposed to do with all these flowers?"
Mrs. Bond considered the question, pulling a gold cigarette case from her pants pocket. She tapped out a cigarette, then extracted a lighter the size of a half-dollar from the same pocket, and performed an intricate ritual that culminated in a long exhalation of smoke in Allison's direction.
"It seems to me," Allison said, "at a moment like this, your anniversary party called off, anger floating through the house, it's the perfect moment to surround yourself with flowers."
Mrs. Bond coughed out a raspy laugh. Then she observed Allison through the thick haze of smoke. She put the cigarette back to her lips and sucked the thing so hard, she might have been drawing on five cigarettes at once.
"Anger floating through my house?" she said in her braying New York voice, letting the smoke seep out around her words. "Wherever did you get an idea like that, darling?"
"I heard you on the phone."
Mrs. Bond thought for a moment, eyes thawing as she recalled.
"Oh, that. That's how we talk, my husband and I. There's no anger. He just got a better offer at the last minute, an invitation he's been after for a while, so we had to cancel the party. We'll try again next month."
"Still," Allison said. "I have all those roses, poppies, gladiolus."
"Well, aren't we persistent."
"Just wait till you smell them. Delicious."
"All right, all right. Come inside. I'll have Mercedes find some vases. Wouldn't hurt to sling some color around the old joint, I suppose. But let's try to get it done before Joshua gets home. He hates projects going on. Just wants his martini and neck rub. The TV on loud."
"I have that same husband," Allison said.
***
Mildred Bond watched as Allison arranged two vases of gladiolus. Working with Mercedes' pinking shears, she set the flowers in tiers, their pretty faces heading forward, backed by sprigs of baby's breath and two small palm fronds, nipping and tucking with great focus. But the arrangement was a botch. Clashing angles, chaotic mixtures of color and shape. Even Allison could see how wretched it looked.
"Have you been in the flower business long?"
"Years," Allison said, smiling, but feeling the sweat run cold down her ribs. "Why? Don't you like it?"
She stepped aside and Mildred hummed her disapproval.
"Oh," Allison said. "It's the new Japanese influence. It takes a while for the Western eye to catch on. Looks very jumbled at first, but believe me, Mrs. Bond, this is quite stylish, very chic. We do all of Gloria Estefan's arrangements. I'm at Madonna's house every other week. It's very New York au courant. Cutting edge."
"I thought you said it was Japanese."
"Japanese filtered through the New York style."
"Who are you trying to kid?"
"All right then," Allison said. "If you want, I can do a traditional arrangement. But I thought, living in a house like this, the fresh, modern architectural mode you've chosen, you would want to be as up-to-date in your flower decoration."
The woman peered at Allison for a moment, then stared dubiously at the flowers, moved the vase around for a different slant. She made a quiet hum.
"Well," she said. "I do try to stay up. But it's very hard. Things change so fast."
"It grows on you," Allison said. "A little brash at first, chaotic. But each trivial snip has a purpose. I can explain it to you if you like. The doctrine behind the arrangement."
"Maybe later," Mildred said. "And I'd also be interested in hearing about Madonna, what goes on over there."
"Of course. Whenever you want."
Mrs. Bond took another look at the flowers and left Allison alone in the large chrome kitchen with one parting blast of smoke and a see-you-later, I-have-things-to-do-now.
Mercedes ran out of vases with half the flowers left. She headed off to the garage storeroom to look for more, leaving Allison in the library. She could hear water running somewhere upstairs, which she took to be the protracted showering of Mrs. Joshua Bond.
Allison ducked her head out of the library, saw no one in the foyer or the long hallway. She judged she had twenty minutes, possibly more, before Mildred could towel off, redo her face and hair, and return downstairs. Time enough to prowl.
Carrying a handful of roses, she tried five rooms before locating Joshua Bond's office. With her heart tapping an unsteady rhythm, Allison shut the door behind her and headed for his desk.
It took her only a minute to discover that all his drawers were empty. Not even a speck of lint, a random paper clip. As though the large mahogany desk had only just arrived, still virginal. Nothing on the top, and no file cabinet. Three walls covered with fine oak shelving, the bookcases crammed with hardcovers, spines unblemished. Thousands and thousands of unread novels. The other wall held his photo gallery, an array of safari shots, Joshua Bond's leather jackboots on the necks of innumerable beasts, holding up his rifle du jour. Other photos showed Bond gripping fish or fowl by tail or throat. A few hundred kills on these walls alone.
Bond was unchanging over the years: a shaved head, handlebar mustache. Six-two, six-three, well over two hundred pounds. A thick-necked, deep-chested man, like the bass singer in a barbershop quartet, or one of those antique footballers who'd played the game in leather helmets. A man's man, dressing that way, grooming that way, sending every signal he could that Joshua Bond was a conqueror, a savage competitor who could, by God, overpower whatever the world could throw in his path.
And in the corner of the room was his glass-encased rifle rack. A dozen shotguns and big-scoped carbines. One of them might very well be the murder weapon, brought home, cleaned, dusted. Bond was the kind of man who would insist on using only his own rifles, the kind who'd find a way to transport weapons across international borders.
Allison shivered, put her hand on the edge of the rifle case, tested its balance. She tried to contain her anger. Here in the man's office, she wanted only to overturn things, rip down each of those trophy photographs, smash them all. Haul away an armload of rifles for ballistics testing. But no, she had to stay on track, be calm, not settle for petty sabotage, use this moment to achieve a larger injury.
Muffled voices sou
nded far off in the house. Perhaps another phone call, or maybe Mercedes discussing something with the lawn man.
Allison set the roses on his desk, took off Winslow's glasses, rubbed the focus back into her eyes. She circled the room, touching the bookshelves, the dictionary stand, the leaves of a silk plant, her heart sounding an alarm in her chest.
It was starting to look like she was wasting her time here, putting herself in jeopardy for absolutely no reason. This didn't even seem to be a functioning office. It was nothing more than a theatrical backdrop, a room full of props, an obligatory studio for a man who took no significant work home. She could imagine what Jeff Aronson, her attorney, would say if she were discovered in that room. I'm having a hard enough time fending off this tortuous suit, Allison, without you adding a goddamn breaking and entering charge to the stew.
With her back to the door, Allison made one more careful circuit of the room, ticking off each item. She heard the voices again; this time she could tell clearly it was a man speaking, and the husky voice of Mrs. Bond answering.
And then Allison noticed it, a small black metal case, pebbled aluminum, no larger than a dictionary, sitting discreetly on one of the bookshelves behind the desk. A laptop computer, its lid shut, with two wires running from its rear.
She hurried over, flipped up the screen, found the switch in the rear and flicked it. As the machine whirred and cycled through its opening messages, she heard Mrs. Bond's voice calling out. Hello, hello. Flower lady.
Allison stared at the door for a moment; no lock, no dead bolt. She turned her eyes back to the machine. No expert with computers, she'd killed time once or twice fiddling with her own machine, exploring the half dozen programs that resided in its brain. But she'd acquired only scant knowledge beyond the one word-processing program she used to compose her newsletters.
Now she watched Bond's colorful screen settle into its opening menu. Quickly Allison ran her finger down a short list of directories. Work Orders, Customer/Vendor File, Orders and Quotes. Inventory Entry. She started at the beginning. Used the arrow key to move to Work Orders, hit enter, and the screen went instantly to a submenu. A list several columns wide filled the screen. Some kind of shorthand, computer garbage she couldn't read. Randomly she chose one from the list.
Gone Wild (Thorn Series Book 4) Page 8