High Tide

  “Go on, out with it. It couldn’t be that bad. Start with where and when you were born, and go on with it from there.” He had his hands in a plastic bucket, and he was about to attack the filthy kitchen cabinets.

  When she still didn’t speak, he looked at her. “Come on, think about Kimberly. Think how much you want to get back to her and have lunch or whatever it is you two do.”

  For a moment, Fiona had to turn away. New York and Kimberly and her job, Jeremy and The Five, were so clear to her that she could almost touch them. How had she gone from so much happiness to … to this in just a few days?

  “Indulging in self-pity?” Ace asked softly, one eyebrow raised. “Remember that the sooner we find out who’s behind this the sooner we can both go home.”

  Fiona hit the floor with the broom and moved a fat clump of debris. “My mother died soon after my birth, leaving me to be raised by my father, except that he was a cartographer and moved around a lot.”

  Once she started, she got into telling her life’s story. And Ace could certainly listen. At first he seemed so absorbed in what he was doing that she wasn’t sure he was hearing her, so twice she contradicted herself. Both times he instantly caught the errors, then told her to go on. Each time she had to hide her smile. It was flattering to have someone listen so intently to something that was so personal.

  All in all, she’d had an uneventful life, certainly not one that had prepared her for finding a dead man on top of her, or for living in a two room shack while hiding from the police.

  She told him that after her mother’s death, she’d been sent to live with an ancient aunt and uncle. They were very boring, seldom allowing her to run and play, instead wanting her to sit quietly and color or play with paper dolls. With her head cocked to one side, she looked at him. He had a rusty hammer and a couple of nails and was now refastening the side of the clean cabinet. “I played with dolls a lot,” she said.

  Without looking at her, he nodded but said nothing.

  For a moment, Fiona just looked at him. He had a knee on the bottom cabinet, the other leg stretched back with a foot on a chair. He was reaching up to the top of the upper cabinets, so that his long body was stretched out, his muscles straining against his shirt. For a moment, her mouth went dry and her hands tightened on the broom handle until the thing threatened to break.

  “Dolls, right,” he said without looking down but encouraging her to continue.

  “Yes, dolls,” she said and made herself return to sweeping. She told him that at six her father sent her to boarding school, and she had loved it. On the first day she met four other little girls who were the same age as she. “We called ourselves The Five, and we’ve been best friends ever since,” Fiona said but refused to allow herself to think about that. What kind of hell of worry must they be going through now, with Fiona falsely accused and in hiding?

  “What about your father?” Ace asked as he stepped back to the floor. “Ever see him?”

  “Oh, yes,” Fiona said, and her adoration of her father came through in her voice. “I know that a therapist would probably tell me I was neglected by him, but I never felt so. He was perfect.”

  Her pace increased and happiness flowed through her as she talked about her father. For several minutes she forgot about where she was and why as she told about her father, John Findlay Burkenhalter. He visited her three times a year, and each visit was more exciting than the last. He always showed up bearing fabulous gifts for her and her four friends. “He took us to circuses and fairs and ice cream parlors. Once he took us to a department store and had a woman make up our faces when we were just twelve; then he bought all the makeup for us.”

  When Ace made no comment to this, she sighed. “You have to be a girl to understand that. The fathers of all the other girls in the school were always telling their daughters no. It was as though the fathers didn’t want the girls to grow up. No lipstick, no short skirts, no anything.”

  Ace was looking at her in impatience. Right, she thought, she was to recount facts, not make this into an essay contest.

  “That’s it,” she said. “I went to college, majored in business, graduated, had a few jobs in New York; then eight years ago I started work at Davidson Toys.”

  “With Kimberly,” he said thoughtfully.

  “I didn’t meet Kimberly until I’d been at Davidson Toys for a year and a half.”

  “Do you think Kimberly could be the connection between you and Roy?”

  “Not hardly,” Fiona said, then stepped back to look at the room. She had removed enough debris to fill half a New York elevator.

  But, obviously, no compliment was going to come from him. Instead, he was deep in thought.

  “Did you ever go to Texas? Even as a kid?”

  “Never,” Fiona said. “Could you point me toward the, uh, you know.”

  “Out back,” he said without much concern. “But watch where you walk.”

  She didn’t want to think about what danger there could be as she tiptoed out the door. There was an overgrown path cut through the plants, and she followed it, expecting at any moment to be jumped on by some creature that no civilized person had ever seen before.

  But her trip was uneventful, and when she returned to the cabin, Ace had taken a toaster oven from the back of the car.

  “Your friend is going to hate you when he returns to his house and finds all his things gone. You didn’t by chance pack sheets and towels, did you?”

  “Two sets of each,” he said, and for just a second his eyes met hers, but she looked away. She had no idea what the sleeping accommodations were.

  “So what’s for dinner? I’m starving.”

  “Shrimp, which you get to peel while I talk.”

  At that Fiona let out a groan, a genuine groan about the shrimp but a pretend groan about hearing his life story. So now maybe she’d find out some truth, and not his Beverly Hillbilly act.

  But Ace didn’t tell much about himself. He was one of four children, he told her, and a bit of a misfit in a gregarious family. When he was seven, his mother’s odd, quiet younger brother broke his leg and came to stay with Ace’s family.

  “We formed a bond,” Ace said as he peeled oranges for the sauce. “When I was eight, I spent my first summer with my uncle here in this place. By the time I was ten, I was living here full-time.” As he said the words, he looked about the horrible old house with love.

  She had to turn away to hide her grim expression. He may have lived here, but there was more to his life than this ramshackle old cabin. But he wasn’t volunteering that info, was he?

  “What about school?” Fiona asked as she slipped her fingernail under the thin membrane of a shrimp.

  “Here, let me show you,” Ace said impatiently as he bent over her, then put his arms around her as he showed her how to peel the shrimp.

  For a moment Fiona held her breath. His chin was on her hair and his big, tanned hands were covering her own much smaller, much whiter hands. It was the situation, she thought. She was alone in a paradise wilderness … Well, maybe not a paradise, but they were certainly alone … And Ace was a fantastically good looking man, so it was to be expected that she’d feel some attraction to him.

  To get herself under control, for a second she closed her eyes and remembered New York and her office and her cool, clean apartment. She’d had it professionally decorated, and it was beautiful, and now she could see it vividly. But when would she get back to it?

  Abruptly, his hands stopped on hers. Obviously, he was as affected by her nearness as she was by his.

  With her heart pounding, she turned her face to look at him, knowing that her lips would be very near his. She’d said that unusual circumstances make for unusual—

  But he wasn’t looking at her. Instead, he had that faraway look that she knew meant he was listening. Did he hear a car? Distant police sirens? Was danger imminent?

  It was then that she heard a bird call in the distance and knew that that was what had h
is attention.

  “Ow!” he said when the knife blade scraped his thumb.

  “Let me see it,” she said as she grabbed his hand. “The skin isn’t even broken.”

  Moving away from her, Ace sucked his thumb. “I should remember about you and knives,” he said, then frowned when Fiona smiled at him.

  “When you get through suffering, you want to go on with your story?” She was smiling to cover her annoyance. She’d been attracted to him, but his only interest was—

  Stepping back, he wiped his hands on a paper towel, then turned back to the now-clean kitchen sink.

  “My uncle Gil had a Ph.D. in ornithology, so I was home-schooled until I was thirteen; then we moved closer to the main road so I could go to high school.”

  “Where you played soccer and fell for the lovely Lisa.”

  “Actually, I met her later, when I was lecturing at her college.”

  Then Lisa is much younger than he is, she thought, but she didn’t say so. “Ah, college. Imagine growing up here yet going to college. You wouldn’t think someone who lived in this place could afford college. Or even that such a person would want to go on to higher education.”

  Ace took a long while before he answered, as though he were thinking about every word before he said it and considering just how much he wanted to reveal. “I put myself through college by running a tour boat for bored, rich people. And after my uncle died and left me Kendrick Park, I tried to make a go of it. I was doing all right until the ’gator got destroyed.” He said this without the least animosity in his voice, and he didn’t mention that she had done the destroying.

  “I’ll pay for your plastic alligator,” she said quietly. “I have some money in an IRA plan, and I can mortgage my apartment. How much did your green glass monster cost?” she said, trying to make light of the situation.

  He turned away from her. “Women don’t pay for things.”

  “What?” Fiona asked, not sure of what she was hearing.

  He turned back around. “I said that women don’t pay for things. Not my things, anyway. This is getting us nowhere. Have you finished with those shrimp yet? Do you think you could assemble a salad? Can you see any connection between us?”

  She threw up her hands in defeat. “You are a throwback to a Neanderthal, you know that? And, yes, I finished the damned shrimp, and the only connection I can see between us is that we were raised by people other than our parents.”

  “What about the salad?”

  She didn’t bother to answer him, just held out her hand for him to give her a knife and ingredients. She chopped vegetables on paper towels, and for a while they were silent.

  “All right,” Ace said finally. “Let’s compare notes about who was where when. The news said that you and I had been in three hotels at the same time. Where did you go last year?”

  It took Fiona a while to remember all the places she’d been in a whole year because she traveled a lot—always on business that had to do with Kimberly. “That’s why this trip to Florida was so strange,” she said. “I have nothing to do with anything at Davidson except Kimberly. Just Kimberly. What do I know about some kids’ show in Texas? Why did that man demand that I go with him?”

  “You sure it was you and no one else? He asked for you by name?”

  “Yes. And you?”

  “The same. But it made sense in my case because Roy said he was thinking about donating money to Kendrick Park.”

  “He should have mentioned that you’d get the money over his dead body,” Fiona said with a grimace.

  Ace didn’t laugh. “As for travel, I made five short trips in the last eighteen months, and three of them had to do with raising money. I hate the blasted trips because they take me away from the park, and the birds need me more than the fund-raisers do.”

  “So why not hire a PR person so you can stay at the park?”

  When Ace didn’t answer, she looked up from the carrot she was chopping. He had his back to her, his head was down, and he was studiously mixing something in a bowl.

  Suddenly, enlightenment hit Fiona. “They’re women,” she said under her breath. “The people donating the money are women, and they demand that you and you alone talk to them about the money.”

  Ace didn’t say anything, so she got up from the chair and walked to the counter to look at him. His face was deep red.

  Fiona gave a ladylike laugh; then she threw back her head and really laughed. “What puzzles you about Roy isn’t that he asked for you in person but that he was a man.”

  Turning his head to one side, Ace gave her a sheepish grin. “It was a bit unusual.”

  Still laughing, she sat back down at the table and continued chopping. “So tell me, Rapunzel, did you hide out here in the outback with your uncle to get away from the girls?”

  “You have a smart mouth on you,” he said; but he was smiling. “This is getting us nowhere, and the day is fading fast. Look under the third floorboard from the wall behind you and get out the candles.”

  “Sure thing, Abner,” she said. “And where do you keep the chawin’ tobaccy?”

  “If I remember correctly, it’s near the Bordeaux hidden under the sixth floorboard. Or is it the Chardonnay under six and the port is under eight?”

  “Get me a crowbar, Pa,” she said, and Ace’s smile changed to laughter.

  “Sit down and we’ll eat. We have work to do if we’re going to figure this out.”

  Ten minutes later they were seated on the two unbroken chairs and eating shrimp marinated in fresh orange juice, then broiled in the toaster oven, and a green salad that was a meal in itself. The year listed on the wine’s damp, moldy label showed that the wine had grown years older than when Ace’s uncle had put it under the floor, and it was delicious.

  But as Ace and Fiona ate by candlelight and tried to figure out what connected them to each other and why Roy Hudson would make them his heirs, outside, someone was watching them.

  Nine

  At nightfall both of them were still sitting at the table finishing the bottle of wine. Unspoken between them was the fact that they had found nothing that would link them together. They had talked all through dinner but could discover not even one small thing that could link them.

  “Why?” Fiona asked, tipping her wineglass back and finishing it. “I can’t figure anything out. Why would Roy Hudson leave his money to me?”

  “Or me,” Ace said thoughtfully. In the store he’d bought a newspaper, and by candlelight he had read it aloud to her. Both of them had yelped when Ace read that Hudson’s will had been made out four years previously. Four whole years!

  Ace said he had a hunch that the connection between them was from longer ago than four years, so he’d asked Fiona to tell him more about her childhood.

  She had told him all she could think of that might be pertinent. In spite of their lengthy separations due to her father’s endless travel, they exchanged letters every week. “And I had every one of them until last summer,” she said. “Someone broke into my apartment building, came down from the roof, and went into three apartments. Mine was one of them. One of the things the creep stole was a box of letters from my father. I don’t know what he thought was in the box, but what he got was letters written to an eleven-year-old with a broken leg. Those letters meant nothing to anyone except me.”

  Ace looked at his empty wineglass. “We know something. You and I know something that we don’t know we know.”

  “And how do we find out what it is?” Fiona said angrily. “And what if we never figure out what it is that we know? Do we hide out in this shack forever? The police are bound to find us sooner or later; then we’ll go on trial for … for murder!”

  Through these last days she’d tried not to think about the reality of the situation she was in right now but—

  “Quiet!” Ace said as he blew out the two candles, leaving them sitting in absolute blackness.

  “What are you doing?” she hissed.

  “I heard
someone.”

  “How can you hear anything over that noise?” she said, referring to the calls of the birds and heaven only knew what other animals that were outside. But Ace didn’t answer, and as she listened, she heard him move quietly about the cabin, and his stealth sent the hairs on the back of her neck rising.

  Her heart was in her throat as she listened. Any moment she expected a bullhorn to sound and to hear a voice saying that she was to come out with her hands up. “I don’t want to play this game anymore,” she whispered.

  “Sssssh!” Ace said, and she could tell that he was by the window.

  The next moment something touched her shoulder, and when she started to scream, a big hand covered her mouth instantly. Instinctively, she began to fight as she was pulled upward out of the chair.

  “Will you hold still?” Ace said into her ear. “And stop wiggling.”

  To remind him that he still had his hand over her mouth, she kicked backward with her heel, and when she heard a grunt of pain, he released her.

  “You are the most violent woman I have ever encountered,” he said, his mouth close to her ear. “If I take your hand and lead you into the bedroom, are you going to hurt me?”

  “It depends on what you plan to do with me in the bedroom,” she whispered back to him.

  For a moment Ace was silent, as though he was trying to figure out what she meant; then he gave a little guffaw of laughter. “That’s my girl,” he said softly. “If you can make jokes, you’re okay.”

  He put his hand on her shoulder, then felt all the way down her arm to her hand. When he took it, Fiona said, “I’m glad you didn’t ask to hold my foot.”

  “Be quiet,” he ordered, “and stay close by me.”

  Obediently, she followed him into the bedroom, their soft-soled shoes barely making a sound on the worn wooden floor.

  When they were in the bedroom, Ace put his lips close to her ear. “Look, I’d like to be a hero and stay awake and on guard all night, but I’ve got to get some sleep.”