Drop Dead Gorgeous

  “Sure.” He shrugged. “The Grove—I imagine my mom will let me.”

  Tina grinned. “Mine was a tough nut to crack at first. It’s kind of a touristy area, but it was a hangout when our moms were kids. Dad thinks it’s one big area of burned-out drug pushers.”

  “Is it?”

  She laughed. “A few. But it’s really okay. Mom used to come with me all the time, it was the only way she’d let me go. Now, as long as we’re in a group of at least five kids, she lets me. Just long enough for a movie and a hamburger—there’s a curfew down here, you know. She’ll be extra glad if I’m with you— you’re the tallest guy my own age I know. Mom always thinks that girls are in danger,” she said, and made a face.

  He laughed. “Let me clue you in—moms worry about sons too. My mother actually made a map of where I was and wasn’t allowed to be in New York. Give her a few days. I’m sure I’ll have one for down here, too.” His stomach suddenly growled, and he went dead still, looking at her, blushing.

  They both started to laugh together. “Sorry,” he mumbled. “Hey, where do you think we’ll wind up for dinner? I guess it’s pretty obvious—I’m starving.”

  “Do you like pasta?”

  “Sure.”

  “Good. Because I think we’re going to an Italian restaurant in Coconut Grove. You’ll get to see the place, and see what I mean about it. Hey—do you read Michael Shayne?”

  “Sure. He’s one of my favorite writers.”

  “Well, guess what? He was here. Signing at a bookstore about two blocks away from the restaurant.”

  “He was here? I thought the guy didn’t come out to meet his fans.”

  “I guess he’s making a few appearances with this new book,” Tina said. “Whatever— he was here!” She punched his arm lightly. “Score one for Miami!”

  He didn’t seem to notice the taunt. He was disturbed to realize he’d missed the signing. “He was here—but he’s gone now?” Brendan asked.

  “Who knows where he is—but I didn’t get to go, either. I was at a mandatory cheerleading session—you had to be there or be dead. But Michael Shayne left some signed copies at the bookstore, and I have a friend who works in the coffee shop there—he promised to see that a few got stashed away until I could get there. Like I was telling you, the Grove is cool anyway. We’ll eat, we’ll walk around— it will be great.”

  “Yeah.” He was looking at her, smiling in a way that made her feel warm. “Maybe it will be cool.” He squeezed her hand, got up, and headed for another box.

  She looked at her hand, grinning. She was falling in love.

  “Dead. Dead—how?” Lori asked.

  “Murdered,” Jan said, shaking her head as she stared at the paper. “She was at a South Beach club—the Stork—with friends, and then she left. Her car was left at the club, and her body was found dumped off Alligator Alley outside Fort Lauderdale. I guess someone tried to bury her, but she surfaced. That’s all the information the police are releasing right now,” Jan said.

  “How sad, how horrible!” Lori said.

  Jan shook her head again.

  “Had you seen her lately?” Lori asked.

  “Oh… a few times—over fifteen years,” Jan said. “She married, divorced, married, divorced. She split from the last guy about a year ago—I’ll bet the police are going to question him. He was kind of a character, I think. But then again, so was she.”

  “How so? I don’t remember.”

  “Well, she was kind of like Mandy. She could be outrageous. She was always nice, but she was written up once for dancing naked in a fountain, and she was arrested once on a DUI. I think she was kind of living life in the fast lane, you know, looking for something she couldn’t quite find. But,” Jan added wryly, “aren’t we all?”

  “It’s still terrible. I don’t care how fast she was living—no one deserves to be murdered,” Lori murmured. Suddenly, she remembered Eleanor clearly. She’d come to the rock pit with Mandy, that last day when they’d all been together. She could remember how she’d looked in her bikini, laughing, running off with Mandy toward the water. Then, later, with the rest of them…

  When Mandy had been dragged up and Sean had been bent over her, desperately trying CPR, except that the cops had been convinced that…

  “You’re right,” Jan said with a long sigh. “It’s sad and terrible, and I sure hope they get the guy. I didn’t mean that Eleanor deserved it or anything like that. It’s just that a fast lifestyle can get you into trouble with guys you don’t know, and these days it's kind of like anyone can be a homicidal maniac. Though, I admit, I used to like that club, but I guarantee you, I won’t be there for a while!”

  “You’re going to stay home and be an angel?”

  “For a while. Well, I’m going to stay home— or away from clubs and nights out on the town. Maybe I’ll give Brad a call and see what he’s up to for the next few weekends.”

  Despite the circumstances, Lori grinned. “Ah! Knowing what kind of monsters are out there makes the old husband look good, eh?” Lori arched a brow at Jan.

  “Well, he’s an ex-husband, remember. But a woman does have her needs, so maybe I will be nice to him for a while now,” she murmured. “Scary stuff.”

  A shriek from downstairs caused them both to freeze and stare at one another. Lori pelted to the door and down the stairs, Jan at her heels. Her heart was hammering as she wondered what could have happened.

  She jammed to a stop at the bottom of the stairs; Jan crashed into her.

  Tina was sitting on the sofa while Brendan was going through a box of CDs, Tina shrieking with laughter. She looked at Lori and her mother with surprise, then apologized quickly.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, he was just telling me that he loves the Monkees! The Monkees, can you imagine?”

  Lori sagged against the stairs.

  Brendan looked up at his mother. She was relieved to see that he was happy, enjoying Tina. What wasn’t to enjoy? The girl was as pretty as could be and nice as well.

  “She’s got no taste, Mom. Sorry, Mrs. Jackson.”

  “The Monkees?” Jan said, sniffing and staring at Lori in defense of her daughter. “And I go by my maiden name, Hunt, Brendan, except you can just call me Jan.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Brendan said politely. “Mom, I’m really starved,” he added. “Are we possibly going to get something to eat sometime soon?”

  “Of course,” Lori said, looking at Jan. It seemed a little absurd now that Tina’s shrieks of laughter had sent them into such a wild panic. They looked at one another somewhat sheepishly, in silent agreement that in front of the kids they would put the murder of an old acquaintance behind them. Even if it made both of them feel uneasy as hell.

  “Yeah, dinner, my treat,” Jan said, looking from Lori to Brendan, and back to Lori again. She forced a grin as she cheerfully added, “I did make a nice commission on this place!”

  “Hey, fine, you can treat. Where are we going?” Lori asked.

  “Coconut Grove. A great little Italian place, new since you’ve been here.” Lori noticed that Tina elbowed Brendan—she had obviously known where they were going, and she wasn’t displeased.

  “Hey,” Jan continued, “I’m treating, but I think we should take both cars. You and Brendan might want to hang around awhile, and I have to pick up a contract if the old geezer gets around to signing it. Things have changed, though, in the past fifteen years. Wait till you see how much!”

  “All right. Let me just go up and grab my purse,” Lori said absently.

  Jan followed her upstairs. “Lori?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You’re acting weird. Are you all right with this?”

  Lori took her purse off the bed and headed back to the doorway, frowning. “I’m not acting weird.”

  “You looked white when I was talking about dinner.”

  “Oh… well, I guess I couldn’t stop thinking about Eleanor.”

  “I know, but it’s not like either of us wa
s really still friends with her. You hadn’t seen her in fifteen years, and I’d seen her maybe three or four times.”

  “Still…”

  “Lori, we just can’t take everything to heart. You always hurt for everybody else all the time, but you should have learned by now, you just can’t do that. Life’s a bitch.”

  “And then you die yourself?” Lori queried, using the cliché dryly.

  “Right. Bad things happen. Lots of kids we went to school with are dead. Petey Fitzhugh finally passed away from his hemophilia. Larry Gonzalez died at twenty-seven from cancer. That’s the way it goes.”

  “Ellie was murdered,” Lori reminded her.

  They stared at one another. Lori thought that maybe they were both about to say, “So was Mandy!”

  But neither of them said the words. They hung there on the air between them, like a miasma. But then, way back when, the kids would never have thought that Mandy had been murdered that day; it was the cops who believed that she had been, the D.A.’s office who had come up with the charges.

  “Mom!” Brendan called.

  It was a mournful sound. The kid was starving. Jan was right. She couldn’t bleed for every evil thing that happened in the universe.

  “He must be really hungry—we didn’t go shopping yet. I’ve got milk, coffee, orange juice, and sodas, and that’s it. Let’s get going.”

  “Right, let’s get going,” Jan agreed.

  “Except—” Lori murmured.

  “Except?”

  “Except, are we safe?” she murmured softly.

  Jan sighed. “Honey, where we’re going is wall-to-wall tourists. Great. You don’t want to move down here and get paranoid right away! I even let Tina hang around the Grove with her friends on weekends, as long as they stick to the main drag. Lots of cops on the streets all the time. Ellie was snatched from a South Beach club where she was probably trying to pick up guys.”

  “I guess I’m just spooked,” Lori said. But as they exited the house, she thought that a good alarm system was going to be her first investment.

  Spooked. That was it. She’d lived in greater Miami, London, and New York. All big cities. Places you learned to be street-smart, places where murder did happen far too frequently. There wasn’t anything astonishing about a murder in Miami.

  Except that…

  The victim had been an old friend of hers.

  Old friend, yes, old friend, someone she hadn’t seen in fifteen years. She had to let it go…

  She didn’t think that she could, but then, getting out was good. Driving down familiar streets that weren’t quite so familiar anymore took Lori’s mind from what had happened to Ellie.

  Things had changed. Coconut Grove had gotten busy—really busy, even on a Monday night.

  The area had always been trendy; it remained so with artsy shops mixed in with larger, popular chain stores. She couldn’t get over all the new construction in the area, the multitude of cars—and people. Tour buses were parked on Main Street in front of a Planet Hollywood. She might have been back in New York, there were so many languages being spoken.

  The Italian restaurant Jan had chosen was small and apparently very good because it was full. Music played from another place across the street, car horns honked as people tried to get through the congested streets, and as they waited for their table, they had to speak up to be heard by one another. Once they were seated, Jan introduced Lori to everyone who worked in the restaurant who happened to pass them by. This turned out to be good, because Jan’s beeper went off almost immediately and she disappeared to make a phone call, then returned and apologized, but prepared to leave them.

  “Tina, I’ll take you home,” Jan said.

  “Mom can take her,” Brendan protested.

  “If she doesn’t mind,” Tina said sweetly.

  “But, Tina, you told me you had lots of homework and a million things to do after dinner tonight—”

  “I think I’ll be okay if I stay out a little later,” Tina said, flushing slightly.

  Lori quickly lowered her head, hiding her smile. Tina had been afraid that Brendan Corcoran might be a weird kid, or a dork, and naturally—at her mother’s insistence—she had agreed to come and welcome him and be polite. Then she had discovered that he was cute and charming.

  “I’ll be happy to get her home, and we won’t be late,” Lori assured Jan. “Look at everything you’ve done for me.”

  “I sold you a house.”

  “And sat around for furniture to be delivered and cable installed and all kinds of hideously mundane things!” Lori reminded her.

  “All right, then. Ciao, guys!” Jan said, and breezed on out.

  The food was delicious, the service was superb, but by the time they had finished eating, Lori had acquired a pounding headache. Tina was telling Brendan about the various shops in the two malls and about some of the different places down Main Street and off into the side roads.

  “Hey,” she protested, “I know you two would probably like to walk around a bit, and I’m sorry, but honestly, I’m really exhausted.”

  “Can I just run into the big bookstore at the Mayfair?” Brendan asked, hazel eyes anxiously on hers. “Tina says that Michael Shayne was down here, and he left autographed copies of his latest at the store.”

  “We can come back—”

  “They won’t last,” Brendan said, staring at her.

  She sighed. She was vaguely familiar with the name. She loved to read when she had the time, though Michael Shayne was a little on the gruesome side for her. Still, she was glad that Brendan liked to read so much, and she always encouraged his interest in books. “All right. Go on down and—”

  “There’s a coffee bar in the bookstore. Maybe we could have ten minutes and you could meet us there?” Tina asked hopefully.

  She smiled. It was a Monday night, a school night—for other kids, even if Brendan wasn’t starting right away. There probably wouldn’t be too many kids hanging around now, but she sensed that maybe Tina knew a few of her friends might be in the area seeing movies, shopping—or hanging out at the hamburger joint on Main Street. “You can have fifteen minutes, how’s that? But really, Brendan—”

  “Fifteen minutes. We’ll be ready,” Brendan promised.

  The kids left. Lori discovered that Jan had paid the bill before taking off, so she thanked the staff and left. Threading her way through the surprisingly crowded streets, she headed toward the Mayfair and the bookstore. The mall was big, encompassing a hotel and dozens of shops with a courtyard between split sections of the edifice. The restaurant had been closer to Cocowalk, a second mall in the area. The night was nice, though, and walking along, she realized the scope of the place. Greater Miami, encompassing all the little municipalities, was big and densely populated. Somewhere around three million people. Constantly changing and growing. She hadn’t seen a soul or a single thing she actually recognized. She’d come home, but home was different. She could relax.

  Yeah, home was different. Eleanor had been murdered.

  Suddenly, as she walked, the street and shop lights around her went out. She heard shouts, cars crashing into fender benders, alarms ringing.

  An area blackout, don’t panic! common sense told her. She heard a policeman cursing, and auxiliary lights began blinking on here and there.

  Yet she suddenly felt a sense of alarm. Brendan. If anything happened to Brendan, she would die. She began to run.

  In the shadows cast by a pale moon, she turned into the courtyard area of the mall, jogging swiftly up a few steps just in time to plow into another human being coming from the opposite direction. Their impact was such that she staggered back, nearly falling. Strong arms reached out for her in the gloom, steadying her. She didn’t fall. Neither could she move.

  Clouds moved over the moon. It was darker than ever.

  It occurred to her that Coconut Grove could be a rough place. This guy was big, powerful. In the distance she could hear shouting. Nearby, there seemed to be
nothing, and no one.

  They were alone, surrounded by darkness. Fool! she charged herself. Don’t panic!

  A deep male voice startled her. “Hey, are you all right? Damn, lady, what’s the rush, where’s the fire?”

  The man was both honestly concerned—and irritated. Rightly so, she decided. His grip on her was very firm and steadying. He hadn’t accosted her; she had plowed into him. Maternal instinct had sent her running like a maniac.

  “Oh, God, I’m sorry. My fault. I’m really sorry.” He was still holding her. “Excuse me. My son—never mind, I’m sorry, if you’ll just excuse me, I—”

  She broke off, feeling herself break into a cold sweat. She knew him. Shock made her shake. She wondered why her reflexes had taken so long to warn her that she recognized his voice. It had changed. A little. Not much.

  Naturally, the brief blackout chose that moment to come to an end. The lights in Coconut Grove suddenly came back on— brilliantly so.

  Yes, it was him.

  He had changed.

  Of course he had changed. She hadn’t seen him in nearly fifteen years.

  A little. Not much. His shoulders had broadened; his physique had filled out. His dark hair was a little longer, and the character lines on his face were definitely etched in more deeply. He was tall, lithe, well muscled, ruggedly attractive. All the promise in the boy had been fulfilled in the man.

  The darkness, the impact, had blinded her at first. And still, for some reason she didn’t trust her eyes. He had gone away. Fifteen years ago. She hadn’t known that he had come back. No one had warned her, no one had told her.

  “Sean?” she said, sounding as if she were strangling over the name. She cleared her throat. “Sean?”

  “Lori…”

  He was taken every bit as much by surprise. His eyes were naked, startled. Alive with dark emotion.

  Then they narrowed.

  And his husky, masculine voice grew harsh. “What the hell are you doing back here?” Startled by the hostility in his voice, she stared at him mutely, aware that he honestly seemed more surprised to see her than even she was to see him. His eyes were so dark in the shadows that they appeared black rather than blue, ebony hued with anger. His hands were still gripping her shoulders, and his fingers were tense, biting into her flesh. “I asked you what the hell you were doing back here?”