“I don’t want to know how many people know where we are,” she said, peering over his shoulder as he began to unwrap the package.
“No one who isn’t named Montgomery or Taggert,” he said, as though that explained everything. “Passports?” he said, holding up the two blue booklets.
“And a set of keys,” Fiona said, taking the package from him, “and a letter. Dear Miss Burkenhalter,” she began to read. “Your father once did a great favor for me, a favor so great that I wouldn’t be alive today if it weren’t for him. I know what you are looking for. I know who you are looking for. You will find what you want at the Blue Orchid.”
Fiona looked up at Ace. “That’s all. There’s no signature, no identification at all. Do you think the Blue Orchid is a nightclub? Are we to meet someone there?”
Ace closed the passports he was studying and looked at her.
“Oh, no,” Fiona said, backing up. “I don’t like that look. Last time you looked at me like that, we ended up in a swamp.”
Ace gave her a bit of a smile. “The Blue Orchid is a beautiful gated community about fifty miles north of here.”
“Yeah?” she said, narrowing her eyes at him. “What’s the catch? Alligators in the pool? Or, knowing you, it’s vultures on the roofs.”
“Nothing wrong with the place at all. It’s quite nice. Of course I haven’t actually seen it, but I’ve heard that it’s …”
When he trailed off, she was sure there was something wrong. She snatched the passports from him and looked at them. At first she saw nothing wrong with either of them. They were for two people named Gerri and Reid Hazlett. “Who are these people?” she asked. “Are we to meet them at this Blue Orchid?”
“Look at the photo of the woman,” Ace said softly.
When Fiona first looked at the photo, she didn’t get the connection. It was a picture of Ava Gardner as she was in her fifties, not looking as most people remembered her when she was the star of movies. “Who is this Gerri Hazlett?” Fiona asked, but as she said the words she knew.
Still holding the passport, she sat down hard on the sofa. “We’re to go in disguise, aren’t we? And our disguise is that we’re old, isn’t it?”
“ ’Fraid so,” Ace said. “We get new names and new ages. The Blue Orchid is a retirement community. There’s lots of them down here. No one’s allowed to live there who’s under fifty.”
Fiona looked as if she wanted to weep. “Why is it that on TV when a woman’s in disguise, she gets to dress in tiny skirts and wear great dangly earrings? I go in disguise and I get knitting needles and a rocking chair.”
“It’s not that bad. You’ll be about my mother’s age, and she has no idea how to knit.”
“Very funny. And what kind of name is ‘Gerri’?”
“I’m more curious as to what your father did for whoever it was who sent us these. These passports are big-time illegal.”
Fiona’s head came up. “When does Raphael premiere on national TV?”
“In about a week, I think, why?”
“Because a whole lot of people are going to recognize themselves on TV.”
At that Ace sat down beside her. “And when they do, they’re going to know that there’s only one innocent person on earth who knows the whole story. Only one person who can turn them in without being part of the dirty story.”
Fiona looked at him. “A person who is innocent no longer. That one person is now wanted for murder. And if she’s convicted, who’s going to listen to her from prison?”
“Bingo,” Ace said; then he leaned forward and picked up the set of keys from the coffee table. “Well, Mrs. Hazlett, you ready to join the old folks in shuffleboard and canasta?”
Fiona whimpered. “I hope Roy Hudson is where he deserves to be,” she said with feeling.
“All this because it rained on a fishing trip,” Ace said as he stood, then held out his hand to help her up. “Come on, Ma, let’s get crankin’.”
“Get me my rheumatiz’ med’cine, Pa, and we better stock up on prune juice.”
“We’ll get some gray dye for your hair and—”
“We make my hair gray when you shave your head bald.”
“Ah. Well, in that case, I think we can say you dye your gray black.”
“And I’ll pass around the name of your wigmaker.”
“You do know, don’t you, that sometimes women of your generation actually cook.”
“If you’ll eat it, I’ll cook it.”
“I just became a retired cook. What about you? What did you used to do? No one will believe you were a housewife.”
“Actress?”
Ace looked at her.
“Okay, how about fashion designer for a small clothing company operating out of the Midwest?”
Ace laughed. “Not bad. And what about …”
The sun set and they were still talking. They ordered dinner and talked through that, laughing over the new lives they were creating for themselves. And their laughter was much needed to relieve the tension of the previous days, their mad flights, bullets whizzing about them.
It was only at night when they finally parted, him to the living room to sleep, her to the bedroom, that Fiona thought again about how little she knew about him. Tonight they had created two whole people, having a good time making up a story about how they’d met and married only recently. “That’ll explain why we know so little about each other,” Ace had said.
“Of course we’d know more about each other if you didn’t leave the room every time I ask you something about yourself.”
“I thought women were sick of men who did nothing but talk about themselves.”
“Women are sick of men who don’t share, and that means whether they talk all of the time or none of it,” she shot back at him.
But her gibe didn’t make Ace reveal anything about himself.
So now, when she went to bed, she had a feeling of loneliness that was deeper than the situation. What was wrong with her? she thought. She should be thinking about how to get herself out of this problem, not lying there wondering what Ace was doing. Did he have a blanket? The air-conditioning was turned up quite high, and he’d need a blanket. What about a pillow?
She put the pillow over her head and chanted, “Jeremy. Jeremy. Jeremy,” until she finally went to sleep.
Fifteen
“If I eat one more bran muffin, I’ll be sick,” Fiona said. “What do you think these people do, judge the things by weight? If you drop it and it goes through the floor, that’s the best recipe?”
“Only if the floor is brick,” Ace said, deadpan as he looked across the breakfast bar at her.
It was early on Sunday morning, and they had been in the house in the retirement community for three whole days. And neither of them had ever been so exhausted in their lives.
From the moment they walked through the front door, they were inundated with invitations. At first they’d been gleeful. “We’ll find out everything now,” Fiona had said the first night, and Ace had smiled in agreement. Both of them had imagined a community of elderly people whose memories needed prodding, but they were both confident that they were up to the task. They agreed that the problem was going to be making their neighbors believe that she and Ace were old enough to live in the fifty-plus community.
But the first woman who’d seen Fiona had said, “Wow, you look great. Who’s your surgeon?”
Fiona had stood there gaping at the woman, unable to say a word, for she had the body of a twenty-year-old. She was wearing tiny red shorts and a T-shirt barely large enough to cover an infant, much less her large, firm breasts. Her blonde hair was pulled back into a thick ponytail, and Fiona couldn’t see a line on her perfect skin. She was jogging in place as she talked. “Let me know if you want to work out,” she said, looking Fiona up and down and obviously thinking she was too soft. “Maybe I can give you some pointers.”
“Uh, sure,” Fiona mumbled. “Maybe next week.”
Behind her,
Ace snorted. It looked as though all their talk of disguises had been for no purpose. Thanks to plastic surgery and fierce workouts, some of the people in the Blue Orchid looked younger than they did.
They had only one week before the national airing of the Raphael show, and during that week they had to find out all they could about what had happened back in 1978, when Fiona was eleven.
But now they’d been here for three days, and they’d found out nothing that helped them solve the mystery.
“Do you think they all went to Woodstock?” Fiona asked as Ace turned the omelettes. The house that was theirs was bright and cheerful, and in a mere three days Fiona had almost come to think of the place as “home.” It had been one of the model houses for the community and had been professionally decorated, completely furnished down to dishes and a fully equipped office. It was a bit too much black-and-white for Fiona’s taste, but it was a wonderfully comfortable house, and she could almost imagine living there permanently.
She was making coffee. It was the kind Ace liked, with three different types of beans, a teaspoon of each ground together. “Where’s your … ?” she said absently, then looked to where Ace had directed his glance. He’d known that she was looking for his coffee mug, a big one with a big handle, not the pretty, dainty cups that came with the house.
“According to them, they were all there,” Ace said with a sigh as he slid her omelette onto a plate. It was just the way she liked it, with more green pepper than onion and not as much black pepper as he liked.
“Do you think they’re liars?” she asked as she took the bagels out of the toaster: sesame seed for her, poppy for him, little butter for her, half a stick for him.
“Truthfully, I don’t think they remember. I think they were all stoned.” As he put the two plates on the table, he gave her a one-sided grin.
“What have you done?” she asked, her eyes twinkling. “Come on, tell me.”
“Nothing,” he answered, teasing, but as he backed away from her, she could see that he had something behind his back.
“What is it?” she asked, moving toward him.
“Nothing,” he said, smiling, backing up more. “Nothing at all. Only …”
“Only what?”
“What did you try to get at the store but couldn’t?”
“Nothing,” she said, puzzled. “They have everything.” Just outside the gates of the community was a small grocery that had every exotic foodstuff you could imagine. You could get all the ingredients for Thai cuisine as well as Indian, but they didn’t carry Velveeta.
Suddenly, Fiona’s eyes widened. “You didn’t. You couldn’t have,” she said. “They said it wasn’t made anymore.”
“True, but maybe I have some connections,” Ace said then stepped back until he was against the kitchen counter.
“Let me see.” She moved toward him as Ace lifted a short, fat jar above her head. “It is!” she squealed, then reached for the jar, but he twisted about and tossed the jar to his other hand.
“If you break that, I’ll kill you,” she said, pivoting, reaching again. The first night they were there a neighbor had served them the hated bran muffins but with an exquisite apple-plum marmalade. Fiona had liked it so much that she had nearly eaten the entire jar. The neighbor had told her that the little store carried it, but when Fiona had asked at the store, she was told that the manufacturer no longer made that particular flavor.
But here Ace had a jar that he was waving above her head. But not out of reach of Fiona’s long arms. She stretched, grabbed his wrist, and pulled. When one hand couldn’t bring his arm down, she latched on to his wrist with the other hand too. Then, to steady herself, she wrapped one leg about his and put all her effort into getting the jar from him.
Ace was laughing as Fiona was struggling against him.
“Oh, my, I can tell that you two really are newlyweds,” came a voice from the sliding glass doors that led from the kitchen to the pool.
As though they were naughty children caught in the act, both Ace and Fiona stopped their wrestle and turned to look at the woman. She was named Rose Childers, and she and her husband lived four doors away. On the first night they’d asked Ace and Fiona to “wife swap.” They called themselves “swingers.” “We’re the last of a dying breed,” Rose had said.
Ace had mumbled, “Let’s hope so,” and Fiona had kicked him under the table.
But now here Rose was standing in their kitchen, no knock, just opening the door and letting herself in. “Don’t mind me,” she’d say when she walked into someone’s house. “I used to live in a commune, and we never had locked doors. If we walked into something, you know, private, we usually just joined in.” After this oft-repeated statement, she’d laugh so hard she’d roll herself into a ball—a ball that usually found itself next to Ace.
“Don’t mind me,” Rose said. “I just came to ask if Lennie and I could use your pool today. Ours is on the blink again, and the pool people can’t come fix it until tomorrow.”
Straightening up, reluctantly moving away from each other, Ace set the jar of marmalade down on the counter, and Fiona walked to the table. She wanted to tell this awful woman to go away, but she and Ace were in too tenuous a situation to offend anyone. In spite of their fake names, they both knew that there were people in the community who knew who they were. But then there were a couple of people that Ace said he recognized from somewhere. Fiona had a feeling that she and Ace weren’t the only couple who never walked outside the gates of the compound.
So now they were faced with a day of Rose and Lennie using their pool. Maybe if the two old hippies didn’t always swim in the nude, it wouldn’t be so bad. But the thought of a day spent fending off the advances of two naked leeches was turning Fiona’s stomach.
“Sure, Rose. We’d be glad to have you here,” Ace said cheerfully, and Fiona looked at him to see if he’d lost his mind. She very well knew that Ace couldn’t stand the woman. “Truth is, the little lady and I are going out today.”
“Out?” Rose said sharply. “I thought you two couldn’t—I mean, what’s out there that you can’t get in here?”
“Mothers,” Fiona said quickly. “Uh, I mean, my mother.”
Ace took Fiona’s upper arms, her back to his front, and started leading her out of the kitchen. “My wife’s mother is ill.”
“I thought you were an orphan.”
“Oh, no,” Fiona said airily. They were almost to the front door now. “I said that if I didn’t visit my mother soon, I was going to be declared an orphan. You know how that is, don’t you?” Rose said that long ago she’d given birth to three children, but she had no idea where they were now.
Ace picked up the car keys from the narrow table in the foyer, opened the door behind him, stepped out, pulling Fiona with him. Once outside, they started to run like schoolchildren about to get caught playing hooky. And once they were in the Jeep, they started laughing. When they reached the entrance gates, they laughed harder.
“We’re going to get caught,” Fiona said. “We can’t leave. We can’t—Oh, the hell with it! That place is as much a prison as prison is. ‘And do you remember the year 1978? My father said that was his favorite year. Maybe you knew my father? Smokey?’” Fiona mimicked herself. “Maybe we should give a square dance and make an announcement that we’re on the run from the police and—”
“Hootenanny,” Ace said. “Not a square dance, a hootenanny.”
“Oh, right. And do we serve marijuana brownies?”
“I think the guy in the pink house makes LSD in his basement.”
“And the police are after us,” she said sarcastically, then looked out the window at the open highway they were on. “By the way, speaking of police and roadblocks and illegal acts, where are we going?”
“Where do you want to go?” he asked softly.
“Truth?”
“The whole truth,” he said, smiling at her.
Fiona turned away so she couldn’t see that smile. Maybe the
y hadn’t found out anything about who had killed Roy Hudson, but in the last three days she and Ace had found out a lot about each other. By necessity, they had had to stop bickering between themselves and work together to find clues to what had happened and what was going on now.
For three days, they had accepted nearly every invitation extended to them, and they had encouraged the people to talk about the “old days.” Unfortunately, this seemed to open floodgates, and in a mere three days, she and Ace had unintentionally started a sixties revival—and everyone knew that what people remembered as happening in the sixties had actually happened in the seventies.
So Fiona and Ace, as Gerri and Reid Hazlett, had been bombarded with hippie nostalgia. There had been home movies, music (if she heard “can’t get no satisfaction” one more time she was going to set fire to their headbands), food (which seemed to consist mainly of bran muffins), and reminiscences. Lots of stories were told with dreamy eyes about a time that the participants seemed to remember as ideal.
But, as far as Ace and Fiona could ascertain, not one of their neighbors had been in Florida in 1978. But then there were lapses in memory. “I was stoned that year and don’t remember too much,” was a common reply to their queries.
And at night, finally alone in the cozy little house, she and Ace had discussed what they’d heard and been told. They compared notes about people and discussed what they did and did not believe.
“I thought she was lying too,” Fiona would say, agreeing with Ace.
It only took one day before they started finding out how alike their perceptions of people were. “Me too!” they often said, again in agreement.
So now, when Ace asked her where she wanted to go, all she could think of to say was, With you. Anywhere you go, that’s where I want to go too.
But she didn’t say that.
“Let me guess,” he said, looking at her out of the corner of his eye. “Have your hair done? Nails? Waxing?”
“Ha!” she said. “Obviously you don’t know anything about me. Not the real me.” There was a bit of a whine in her voice, and she could have kicked herself for it.