Carolina Isle

  “I’m not telling you anything, but I think he’s right about our staying here in this house. We should guard the body. If Phyllis wants to get something out of the freezer for dinner, we need to be here to stop her.”

  Ariel whirled on him. “Are you saying that we should stay here in this house all day and just wait?”

  “Isn’t that what R.J. said to do? He is—”

  “A businessman from New York,” Ariel said. “What does he know?” She held up the two one-hundred-dollar bills R.J. had left with the note. “Do you think this was all the money he had? Did he give us all of it and keep none for himself?”

  David made himself more comfortable on the couch, as though he meant to spend the day there. “I guess he thinks he can earn money anywhere, so he doesn’t need what he had secreted away. Remember that he and Sara are workers. You and I are …” He shrugged as though there was no description for them.

  “Worthless. Are you saying that you and I are worthless?”

  “Not at all. I’m sure that if anyone wanted to host a party, you’d be very valuable. But the fact that everyone on this island seems to hate us—”

  “Do they? Or have they been told to stay away from us?”

  “Same difference.”

  Ariel sat down on the end of the couch. The tips of David’s feet were under her thigh, but he didn’t move. He’d never seen her so upset. “Money!” she said in disgust. “Do you realize that money is the cause of all my problems?”

  David frowned. “Do you and Miss Pommy have money problems?”

  “Yes!” Ariel said. “She has it all and I have none. If I just had my own money, I could live my own life.” She stood up and David wiggled his toes. “She’s raised me to be as helpless as a footbound woman. My education, such as it is, has carefully prepared me for nothing whatever. I can set a table with twelve pieces of silverware by each plate. Did you know that I have never eaten a banana out of its peel in my life? Knife and fork only. Usually all fruit is cut up for me.”

  David was looking at her with interest. He didn’t know Ariel knew there was another way to eat a banana—or knew there was another way of life other than her own.

  “What can I do in life except marry some man and plan his dinner parties?”

  “I think there should be more of that in the world,” David said softly.

  “Oh, do shut up! You’re always thinking about your own future and what you want from a woman. Perfect wife; perfect parties. David, you are the most perfect person I’ve ever met.”

  “Me?” he said in disbelief. “You’re so perfect—”

  Ariel cut him off. “I want to do something. Be someone.”

  He sat up on the couch. “Excuse me for being stupid, but how does marrying R. J. Brompton achieve that?”

  “He’s strong. He’s independent. He’d tell my mother to get off my back, then he’d go to work and let me do what I want to do in my own life.”

  “Which is?” David asked with interest.

  Ariel sat back down on the couch. “That’s just it. I have no idea what I want to do.”

  “You could always earn some money for the next two days, so when you see Brompton next time you could throw his bills in his face. Unless we’re arrested for murder,” he added as an afterthought.

  “All my life I’ve lived in fear of my mother. She controls what I wear, what I eat, even who I marry, but right now, when I think of that body in the freezer, I wish she’d show up here. I think I’d run to her and throw my arms around her.”

  “And what do you think Miss Pommy would do when your mascara messed up her outfit? She’d be furious if she couldn’t get the makeup off her clothes.”

  “Makeup? Are you kidding? I don’t have any makeup on.”

  “Could have fooled me, but then you always look great.” David touched her forearm, his fingers beginning to climb upward.

  Suddenly, Ariel stood up. “Remember when we were in the pub? Remember that I told Sara I was going to make old Phyllis dress her age?”

  “I think she does dress her mental age.”

  Putting her hands on her hips, Ariel looked down at him. “That woman wants a man.”

  “I think she has a few of them.”

  “No, not like that. Think with something besides your lower extremities. She wants a husband, but what kind of ‘husband’ is she going to get wearing what she does?”

  “Bikers. Teenage boys.”

  “Right. Exactly.”

  David smiled. “I saw half a dozen women looking at you since we’ve been here.”

  “No, not me, at Sara. She has on the good clothes.” She looked down at her simple cotton slacks and cotton knit shirt. “These are reproductions of Sara’s clothes, but still …”

  “The clothes don’t matter. It’s you they were looking at. Ariel, you don’t realize what a presence you have, what style, how different you are from other women.”

  “Really?” she asked softly. “I’ve not been to places that other women have. I’ve always been cooped up with Mother.”

  “And who is more stylish than Miss Pommy?”

  “No one,” Ariel said. She looked at David. “Do you think that what I know is worth something?”

  “I think you could run a modeling agency in New York City. Or be editor in chief at Vogue.”

  She smiled. “What about on King’s Isle, North Carolina?”

  “I think the lines would be out the door. Just imagine the gossip you’d hear!” David had meant the comment as a joke, but the minute he said it, they looked at each other.

  “What do you think I could find out?” she whispered.

  “Anything. Everything. You could get the women to tell you what’s really going on.” He’d gone from laughing to serious. “Ariel, honey, exactly what can you do? Could you do one of those drugstore makeovers?”

  “I don’t know. I never thought about it before, but a lot of times when I see a woman I think about what she could wear or how she could do her hair to make her look better. Take Britney, for instance.”

  “Who?”

  “Britney. The woman you love. The one you stayed in Arundel for, remember?”

  David gave a little laugh. “Yeah, love of my life. Britney. What about her?”

  “She could be pretty if she tied her hair back and quit drawing that black liner on a quarter inch outside her eyes. And her mascara clumps too much. If she—”

  Ariel stopped talking because David put his hand to the back of her head and pulled her mouth to his. It was the first time he’d kissed her in any way except brotherly. It was a hard, firm kiss that let her know that he wasn’t her brother.

  When he broke off, he stood up, his back to her, and stretched. “I think I’ll take a shower, and when I get out, we’re going to see about getting this started.” He didn’t glance back at her until he was at the bathroom door. When he saw that Ariel was still sitting there, a shocked look on her face, he smiled. Sink or swim, he had decided to let her know how he felt about her.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “YOU PROMISE, RIGHT?” PHYLLIS SAID, looking at herself in the mirror. She had on half the makeup she usually wore, and was wearing a man’s shirt and trousers that, to her mind, looked too big. But she had to admit that she looked … different. Classy, almost.

  “I swear it,” Ariel said. “R. J. Brompton will put you up in New York for one week and he’ll introduce you to at least four eligible men. What happens after that is up to you.”

  “And Saks?”

  “A five-thousand-dollar shopping spree.”

  “With a stylist,” Phyllis said.

  Behind her, Ariel made her hands into claws, but smiled and nodded when Phyllis looked at her again.

  “I don’t know …” Phyllis said, looking back at the mirror. “I’m not sure how people would take it if I helped you.”

  “I understand,” Ariel said, straightening Phyllis’s cosmetics. She’d had to pound on the bedroom door to waken the woman from
her drunken sleep, and Phyllis hadn’t understood a word Ariel was saying to her. “You want to do what to me?” Phyllis had asked. In the end, David had had to pull the woman from the bed and set her in front of her mirrored dressing table.

  “He is gorgeous,” Phyllis whispered to Ariel as she was putting brown eyeshadow on her. “Is all of him beautiful?”

  Ariel glanced up at David and for the first time in her life, she felt jealousy. How many women had he been to bed with? she wondered, then shook her head, annoyed with herself. “I have no idea,” Ariel answered, trying to concentrate on the eyeshadow. Only once before had she applied makeup on a person and that had been a maid who was going out to dinner with her boyfriend of three years. When she returned with an engagement ring, Ariel felt as if she’d helped.

  “You’ve never torn his clothes off?” Phyllis asked.

  Ariel wanted to set the woman on her ear, to give her a look that said she should keep her lusting to herself, but she knew she was going to have to swallow her pride if she wanted to find out anything. “If a woman tried that, David would fight her.” Ariel had meant that David was a man of honor, but it didn’t sound like that.

  “You mean he’s gay?”

  Ariel smiled. “As pink tea roses.”

  “Maybe I could change him.”

  “Believe me, a lot of women have tried. You should talk to Britney. She’s tried for years, but …”

  “Failed?”

  “Completely.” David is going to kill me, Ariel thought, but she was smiling. However, without the promise of David’s “services,” so to speak, she’d had to think up something else to get Phyllis Vancurren to help them. Ariel had made one promise after another.

  “So you’ll call them?” Ariel asked as she was applying a heated curling iron to Phyllis’s overpermed, overdyed hair.

  “No telephones,” Phyllis said, holding up a hand mirror and examining the makeup Ariel had applied. “Cable cut, remember?”

  “I forgot for a moment. But you do have a way to get information around town, don’t you?”

  “You’re trying to get me to tell you things, aren’t you?”

  “I’m trying to earn enough money to feed David and me,” Ariel said, her lips clenched. “He won’t say so, but he’s scared out of his mind, and I have to do something. I can’t tell you how glad I’ll be to turn him over to his mother as soon as we get back to Arundel. That woman pampers him to no end. She never lets him do anything at all.” Forgive me, she thought, making a silent apology to David. If there was any person who wasn’t pampered, it was David. All her life, Ariel had seen David doing things for his mother that only grown-ups did. He paid the household bills and she’d often seen him in the bank talking to the manager about his mother’s great masses of money.

  “Did you hear me?” Phyllis asked.

  “No, sorry. I was lost in thought. There, that looks good.” She had taken about four inches of height from Phyllis’s hair.

  “You don’t think this makes me look older?”

  Ariel almost said, You are older, but she didn’t. “I think it makes you look more intelligent. Looking like this will attract a better class of man than you would have before.” It was an honest statement and Phyllis heard it that way.

  “So can you set it up?” Ariel asked, trying not to sound desperate. “I really do need to try to earn some money for David and me.”

  “What about R.J. and that girl? What was her name?”

  “Sara. They went off somewhere else.”

  Phyllis turned quickly to look at Ariel. “They’d better not leave the island!”

  “How can they?” Ariel asked calmly, but her heart was beating fast. What if R.J. and Sara found a way off the island? “What would happen to them if they did leave?”

  “Nothing good,” Phyllis said, turning back and seeming to decide that she’d said too much. “I can help you get information out. The kids around town can take messages.”

  “Can they put a flyer in the mailboxes? I mean, if I can persuade the shops in town to participate, that is.”

  “You don’t have to worry about that. Business around here is so bad that most people will do anything to make a buck.”

  “They should find treasure like Mr. Nezbit did,” Ariel said, then waited to see what Phyllis would say.

  “Fenny’s gold,” Phyllis said, smiling into the mirror. “It’s what everybody here talks about after they’ve had a couple of beers.”

  “But no one’s found it?”

  “Not even close. Except …”

  “Except what?”

  “I think Gideon knows more than he’s telling. Even I couldn’t get it out of him.”

  “And you’ve tried?”

  Phyllis laughed. “Honey, that boy and I have rocked that old bed of mine so many times…. Let’s just say that he keeps what he knows to himself.”

  “Who is Gideon?”

  “Fenny’s son. Or maybe he is. Gideon says he isn’t. But Fenny and Eula say he is. I never saw her pregnant, but she said she didn’t show all that much and she had a home birth.” This made Phyllis laugh hard, but Ariel couldn’t tell what the joke was.

  “So David can use your computer, print out flyers, and someone will deliver them around town?”

  “Sure,” Phyllis said, patting her hair.

  “But won’t they get angry?”

  “Who?”

  “Whoever is in charge of this town?”

  Phyllis looked in the mirror at Ariel. “Don’t worry about the hearing on Monday. Brompton can afford what he’ll be charged.”

  “I’m sure he can,” Ariel said softly as she backed away. “I’d better go tell David that … about this.” Tell him he’s gay, she thought, and she couldn’t help smiling.

  “Let me do this,” Ariel said. “Please.”

  David narrowed his eyes at her. “And what are you going to tell them? That I’ll be your wash girl?”

  “Maybe you could help find matching accessories.”

  “You keep on laughing and I’ll tell them you live in a trailer out on seventeen.”

  “Next door to Britney?”

  “With Brit. As her lover.”

  Ariel laughed. “I had no idea you had a cruel streak in you.”

  “That’s because you don’t know anything about me. I think I’ll go over to the hardware store and see if the men know about something other than chain saws.”

  “I bet they’d love to hear you pontificate on saving the wetlands.”

  David gave a reluctant smile. “Maybe I’ll wait on that. So what am I supposed to do to help you make these women into beauty queens?”

  “Not beautiful, just to be the best they can be, remember?”

  “Yeah, I wrote the flyer.”

  “You really think I can do this?” Ariel whispered.

  He smiled at her. “Yes, you can. No more doubts now.”

  It wasn’t easy for him to stand behind Ariel as she gently knocked on the door of the house of the woman who owned the only dress shop on King’s Isle. The dress store was next door to the beauty shop, which was owned by her sister, and both shops didn’t open until 10:00 A.M. It wasn’t even eight o’clock yet.

  When no one answered, Ariel stepped back. “Maybe they’re not up yet. Maybe we should come back later.”

  David reached over her head and knocked on the door loud enough to wake the neighbors. Minutes later, a middle-aged woman wearing an old bathrobe opened the door and squinted against the daylight. “Yeah?” she said.

  David started to speak, but then closed his mouth and gave Ariel a little shove forward. She didn’t have much experience talking to people she hadn’t known all her life. Or been introduced to properly.

  “I’d like to talk to you about a business arrangement,” Ariel said cautiously.

  “We can’t help you,” the woman said, and started to shut the door.

  Ariel put her foot in the doorway, then looked at the woman. “I just redid Phyllis Vancurren?
??s face and hair. She looks her age now and elegant enough to find herself a husband off the island.”

  The woman blinked at her a few times. “You’re either a magician or a liar.”

  “No,” Ariel said, “I just have my clothes made in New York and I’ve had enough makeup sessions I could work at the Estée Lauder counter. We need money and I’d like to offer makeovers to the women of this town. Clothes, shoes, cosmetics, and hair. I’d get twenty percent of everything they buy.”

  Behind her, David smiled—and was impressed.

  “I’ll get in trouble for this, but come in.”

  “If we aren’t put in jail for life I’m going to kill you,” David said so just Ariel could hear. “Do you have any idea what these women are doing to me?”

  Ariel knew, since the women had delighted in telling her everything. “If he can stand that,” they said, “then he is gay.” Ariel was split between laughing and leaving the dye on too long. As it was, she was too busy to do much of anything other than try to keep up.

  There were double doors between the beauty salon and the dress shop and they’d been thrown open so the women could go from one room to the next. Ariel had been in the middle of them, for the most part saying no. “That’s not for you. Try the blue one. No, no, no! Not that belt!” At first she’d been almost timid, and she’d worked hard to be diplomatic. But by eleven o’clock, she’d stopped being polite. The women weren’t being courteous, so why should she be? They were shoving and grabbing and pushing ahead of one another in the queue, and in general acting like what they were: starving for fashion and beauty.

  To accommodate so many, Ariel stopped doing things herself. She’d started applying the cosmetics herself, and had even done the foil highlights on one woman’s hair, but after an hour, she began directing and the women hurried to obey. Cosmetics, hair, clothes were all being done at once, while Ariel barked orders. “She doesn’t need more blonde! Her hair’s been bleached white as it is. And look at her eyebrows! Somebody get me a weed whacker!” Instead of being insulted, the women laughed and pushed harder to get closer to Ariel. “I brought all sixty-one of my handbags and I thought you could tell me which ones I should keep.” Ariel looked into a black plastic bag full of purses that were stiff with age and gray with mildew, but she recognized gems from the forties and fifties. “Get some saddle soap and some colorless shoe polish,” Ariel said, “then sit in that corner and clean those bags up. When you’re done, put them on that table and I’ll sell them for you. I get twenty-five percent.” The woman blinked a couple of times, then ran out the door to go to the hardware store to get the supplies.