High Tide (11 page)

“You want me to run away with you?”

“Basically, yes. I want you to help me fight this for as long as we can.”

“We're wanted by the police. We're fugitives.”

“Better that than to be put in a jail cell,” Ace said, then turned on his heel and walked out of the room.

For a moment Fiona sat on the stool and looked about the room with unseeing eyes. She didn't want to be here. For that matter, she hadn't wanted to go on the whole trip. For that matter …

But hindsight wasn't going to get her anywhere, was it? she thought.

“There are lambs and there are bulls,” her father used to say. “And bulls have
all
the fun.” So maybe she wasn't her father's daughter for nothing. He'd been the one to push her to take on Kimberly's account, and he'd been the one—

Fiona got off the stool and took a deep breath. Her head was filled with every movie she'd ever seen about prison, about jailbreaks, and filled with every bloody end that all movie and TV criminals seemed to come to.

With her head up and her shoulders back, she went into the bedroom, where Ace was packing a bag.

“Do you think your friend would mind if I took more of his clothes?” she said, but she couldn't keep the trembling out of her voice.

Eight
 

“I don't know. I don't know,” Fiona said as she put her hands over her ears. “I've told you everything there is to tell. I don't know any more.”

“But we haven't found the connection,” Ace said. “There must be something or someone who connects us.”

“Maybe Roy chose me for one reason and you for another. Maybe—”

“Then what connects you to him and me to him?”

“I don't know,” Fiona said, then turned on her heel and went outside to sit on the porch. They had been in the cabin all day long, and Ace had done nothing but ask her questions and try to make her come up with a reason why Roy Hudson should leave both of them all his money.

“Guilt,” Ace said early on. “I think he felt guilty for what
he'd done to us or to someone close to us. We just have to figure out what and who it was.”

But, try as they might, they couldn't come up with any tragic thing that had been done to them that could have been someone else's fault.

And heaven knows that they'd tried.

This morning Ace had said that they had to leave the house and go somewhere where no one could find them. At the time Fiona had been glad because the house was so barren that it had depressed her just being there. Little did she know that in comparison to where he was taking her, the house was a palace.

Where Ace was taking her was to his “childhood home.” The place where he'd grown up.

While she was packing, shoving the clothes of a man she'd never met into a suitcase, she didn't know what was waiting for them.

But one thing she'd already learned on this trip: they couldn't call a deli and have food sent up.

“So how do we eat?” she'd asked as she slipped three cotton shirts into the case.

Ace shrugged. “Off the land, I guess.”

Fiona wasn't going to go hysterical. She'd read
The Yearling
and had seen the movie
Cross Creek
. “Does that mean”—she swallowed—“fishing?”

Ace paused in packing long enough to glare at her. “If you think the two most-wanted people in America can walk into a grocery, I want to hear about it.” Then he looked her up and down, all six feet of her. “You especially are easily recognizable.”

Fiona knew that there was truth in his words, for all that he made her feel as though her height were a physical defect.
She bit her tongue to keep from saying that all women couldn't be overdeveloped dwarfs such as he seemed to like. Now was the time to think with her head and not her emotions.

“Are you going to pack?” Ace snapped at her. Ever since he'd seen the TV show that had destroyed his theory that lack of motive would clear them, he'd been a monster.

“I was thinking,” she said softly. “Two years ago Kimberly was in such a jam that she had to use a disguise to get herself out. She had to wear a fake mustache and men's clothes so she wouldn't be recognized.”

“What kind of friends do you have?” he asked.

She ignored his question as she looked toward the chest of drawers across from the bed. After a moment's searching she withdrew a black rayon scarf that was the size of a small tablecloth.

“Now what?” he snapped. “We don't have time—”

He broke off when he saw Fiona drape the scarf over her head, then pull it across her face. She was the picture of a veiled Muslim woman.

Ace stood there blinking for a few moments, then disappeared into the bathroom, reappeared with a large container of bronzing gel and started smearing the lotion on his face and hands. “You're not stupid, are you?” he said softly, and Fiona was glad the veiling hid the enormous grin on her face. She didn't know when a compliment had pleased her more.

After that Ace took over. Since the scarf could only be made to cover the upper half of her and they had no long black skirt, her trousers and old sneakers showed below. “We'll take my friend's car,” he said as he went into the
kitchen, Fiona behind him. He started pulling supplies out of the cupboards and putting them into paper bags. “We'll take what we can from here because we'll need to conserve all our money. How much do you have with you?” He began emptying a broom closet of cleaning supplies.

Incongruously, as she watched him, she thought, Wherever we're going doesn't have maid service. “About fifty dollars. I was going to use my NYCE card down here, but I never had a chance.”

“Great. I have about twenty for the same reason. It'll have to last us for”—he glanced up at her, then back down—“for as long as we can hold out. Are you ready?”

“I guess so,” she said, but instead of moving, she sat down on a barstool. “I have to admit that I'm—”

She was going to say that she was frightened, but Ace didn't give her a chance. Instead, he put his hand behind her head and gave her a hard, hard kiss. It wasn't a kiss of passion. It was a kiss of courage, and it told her that he was just as afraid as she was but that it would be better if neither of them actually said the word.

It worked. When Ace moved away, he stood there looking at her, and she knew that he was again asking her to decide what she wanted to do. He wasn't forcing her into this; he was letting her make up her mind of her own free will.

Standing, she put her shoulders back and took a deep breath. “Ready when you are, sahib.”

Ace laughed. “I think that's Hindi, not Arabic.”

“Whatever. Let's go.”

Their disguise worked. In the garage, Ace took the dark blue Chevrolet of the house's owner and left the Jeep behind.
Fiona draped the black scarf over her upper half and used a pin she'd found in the bathroom to hold the veil in place.

As soon as they pulled out of the garage, Ace said, “Damn! I meant to put on more of that bronzing stuff. I want to be as dark as possible.”

For a few moments Fiona watched him as he fumbled with the bottle and the steering wheel; then she took the bottle from him and put lotion on his face. He had nice skin, and the warmth of his body flowed down her fingertips, up her arm, and seemed to land on her lips.

After a moment, he glanced at her out of the corner of his eyes, and she said, “Turning you on?” in such a way that he laughed.

“Not quite. Ow! Watch the fingernails.”

“Sorry,” she said; then when she felt Ace's face go rigid, she stopped and looked at what he was staring at.

There was a roadblock in front of them, six state police cars, and at least a dozen men with rifles in their hands.

Fiona sat back down on her seat.

“What would your friend Kimberly do now?” Ace asked quietly.

“Brazen it out,” Fiona said, then looked at him. “Unless you want to throw open the car doors and make a run for it.”

Ace looked at her as though she were stupid, for there was no cover along the sides of the road. If they ran, they'd be mowed down in seconds … Which, of course, was her point.

“Brazen it is,” he said, then inched the car forward.

A big blond state trooper looked into the car. “You folks just passin' through?”

“My English is no so good,” Ace said to the man; then he heard Fiona's sharp intake of breath and realized he was doing a bad Italian accent. But what did an Arabic accent sound like?

“Ooooh,”
Fiona groaned, and both men looked at her.

To Ace's great delight, he saw that Fiona's belly had increased by a foot and a half. Obviously, she'd shoved her backpack up under the tail end of her veil. And the bulge hid her trouser-clad legs.

“My wife is not well,” Ace said. “The baby will be born soon.”

Fiona leaned toward the window and batted her lashes at the man. “In my country we have heard that American policemen can deliver babies. This is true?”

The man stepped back so suddenly he almost tripped; then he banged the top of the car twice. “Out of here,” he said, and Ace lost no time driving through the roadblock.

Ten minutes later Ace pulled off the main highway and stopped at a small grocery with a large produce stand next to it. Fiona waited in the car while he purchased three bags full of fresh produce, then went into the store and came out with more bags of unknown contents.

It was during this time, while sitting alone in the car under a shady tree, that she was able to catch her breath and think. And the first thing she thought was: He's not what he seems.

For the last few days she had been under so much stress, so much turmoil, that her senses had gone into hiding and she hadn't thought about what she was seeing or feeling.
But now, watching Ace choose fruit from the outdoor stand, the words screamed in her head: He's not what he seems.

From the first she'd prejudged him based solely on his name—Ace. She'd assumed he was a redneck or—what was it they called them in Florida?—a cracker. Where he lived, in that run-down place on a derelict bird farm, seemed to fit her prejudgment of him, but, try as she might, she couldn't seem to fit him into that cracker pattern.

First of all, there was his education. How many rednecks had advanced degrees in ornithology? For that matter, how many did anything with birds except shoot and eat them? But Ace watched one TV show after another about birds, birds, and more birds.

And then there was his accent. It was slight, but now and then he pronounced a word in that rare, distinctive New England accent. Maybe he originally came from Rhode Island or Boston or Maine, she thought. Wherever, he hadn't always lived in backwater Florida.

Besides his words, there were his movements and the way he wore clothes. She had a feeling that he could sleep in his clothes and get up looking smooth and unrumpled. And bed head would never dare afflict that thick black hair of his.

As she watched Ace pick up fat red tomatoes and smell them before putting them into a bag, she thought, What redneck cooked for a woman? And when he paused and looked up into a tree, she knew he'd sighted some bird.

So who was this man she'd turned her life over to? she wondered. He was poor, that was true, she'd seen that, yet he had relatives he could fax to do detective work. He drove
like he was a professional race car driver, yet his apartment had been filled with books.

The only thing Fiona was absolutely sure of was that he wasn't what he seemed and he was not telling her the whole story. In fact, now that she thought of it, he was telling her next to nothing. He was demanding that Fiona tell him lots and lots about herself, but in return he was keeping himself a secret.

As she watched him go into the store, she thought, Two can play this game. If he was going to keep secrets, so could she. First of all, she sure as hell was not going to explain Kimberly to him. And second, she was going to use any method she could think of to find out as much about him as she could. Remember, she thought, knowledge is power.

When Ace got back into the car, he told her that the police had been there, but no one thought that the two murderers would be able to get through the roadblocks. “They think we've gone south to Miami,” Ace said as he swung back onto the road. “It seems that the police received three anonymous tips that we'd been seen that far south.”

“So they won't be looking for us here?”

“Not for a while yet, and I'd be willing to bet that the tippers were named Taggert.”

“Are they relatives or birds?”

“Cousins,” Ace said with a quick grin as he got back on the highway, only this time they were heading back the way they came.

“Please tell me we're
not
following whatever bird you saw back there.”

“Blue-gray gnatcatcher,” he said. “I'd like to see the nest—it's held together with spider silk—but, no, I just
wanted to make sure that no one was following us. If the policeman tells anyone about the woman about to give birth, someone else might be suspicious.”