High Tide (22 page)

“Oh, no,” Fiona said. “You're not going to do this to me. The story was made up; it was stolen by Roy Hudson, and that's why he was murdered.”

“In that scenario, only
you
have a reason to kill him, since the stories were your father's alone, and you wanted to prevent Hudson from making money on them.”

“If I was to inherit, it would have been in my best interest to have them make lots of money.”

“So you waited until
Raphael
went national; then you offed Roy and now you stand to inherit.”

“But why would I have killed him so publicly?” she half shouted, the logic of his words making her angry.

“I didn't say you were smart, just greedy.”

When Fiona lifted a spoon to throw at him, he gave her a knowing smirk and said, “I knew you couldn't take it. Want me to call the police and turn us in?”

Fiona started to make a comeback to him, but suddenly she was deflated. “You do realize, don't you, that, actually, we aren't any further along than we were before? Roy Hudson stole stories my father made up or maybe my father actually lived them.”

“If these are true stories, then I don't think the participants would want them shown on national TV. Someone is bound to recognize the people involved.”

“Great. I just hope the bad guys are recognized before we get the gas chamber,” she said.

“Didn't you say that your apartment was robbed and someone took letters your father wrote you?”

“Aren't you clever to remember that?” she said, one side of her mouth turned down.

“The
Raffles
letters?” he asked.

“The
Raffles
letters,” she answered.

Before Ace could make another comment, the telephone rang and he picked it up. “Yes. Sure, why not?” he said, then hung up and looked at Fiona. “That was my cousin Frank and he said he's sending up something that he thinks we should see.” As Ace said the last words, the doorbell rang. He answered the door, and
in moments he was back with a thin parcel in his hands.

“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.