Paradise Burning (14 page)

It was all a wild goose chase. A
self-inflicted snipe hunt. The explanation for the mystery maiden
on the bank of the Calusa at sunrise was going to be totally
mundane. A molehill she’d blown into a mountain.

But she had to know, had to find out. Mandy
gritted her teeth and rowed.

Stroke. Stroke
.
She was concentrating so hard she wasn’t aware she’d arrived until
an overhanging bush scraped her cheek. Shipping her oars, she
grabbed the offending branch and pulled the small boat in until it
was parallel with the riverbank. Scrambling to the bow, Mandy slung
the boat’s lightweight anchor around the base of the bush. (If she
tossed it into the water, she reasoned, it would probably become so
tangled in the exposed underwater roots at the river’s edge that
she’d end up having to swim the alligator-infested river to get
home.)

She’d done it. She’d actually crossed
the river, and the girl . . . Mandy looked up
. Oh, my!
Her mystery girl was lovely enough to
satisfy all of her imagination’s fantasies. Young, with straight
silver blond hair falling to her waist and framing a piquant face
from which two bright blue eyes shone like beacons, their natural
beauty enhanced by makeup so skillful the young woman appeared to
have stepped off the screen of a high-budget fantasy film. Mandy
couldn’t see a figure beneath the girl’s voluminous white caftan,
but she suspected it was as perfect as the rest of her. No, not
quite, Mandy amended. The elaborate eye makeup was slightly
smudged, as if the girl had been crying. Or had had a long, hard
night. Close up, the ethereal creature on the fallen palm trunk
looked as vulnerable, lost, and alone as Mandy had pictured her.
Surely not. She was creating a fair maiden beset by dragons from
nothing more than a overly fertile imagination. And perhaps the
need to be a hero, to solve a puzzle without AKA. And to keep from
thinking about a husband who was best seen through a lens,
darkly.

Grabbing the overhanging bush, Mandy hauled
herself hand over hand up the slippery riverbank. The young woman
was still sitting on the tree trunk, regarding Mandy with eyes
which, though watchful, were alight with curiosity. In fact, a
pulsating excitement radiated from her, almost as if she too
recognized this moment was more than the casual meeting of two
strangers.

Mandy ventured a smile. “Hi,” she said,
adding a small self-conscious wave of her hand.

“
Hi.” The girl’s voice was soft. She
didn’t smile.

“
My name’s Mandy. I live at the
campground over there. I hope you don’t mind my
trespassing.”

A faint frown creased the young woman’s
forehead. The blue eyes clouded. “
Izvenityeh, pazahlsta
,” she murmured.
“
Ya nee
poneemayoo.
”

“
You’re Russian!” Mandy exclaimed, her
mind racing vainly through her Russian vocabulary. She could read
some Russian, mostly technical words, but she had had little
occasion to speak it. No more than a basic handful of words
responded to her frantic search. “
Izvenityeh meenya
,” she countered.
“
Ya zabivala
feesyo
.”

The girl beamed, as if Mandy had given
her diamonds instead of begging to be excused for forgetting her
Russian. “
Vee gavarityeh
pa-russki!
”

“
No, no, no,” Mandy protested with a
grin. “I read a little, not speak well,” she managed in Russian.
“Do you speak English?”

The girl held her thumb and forefinger
a half an inch apart. “
Neemnozhkah
,” she said with an apologetic shrug.
Then added in English, “American TV. I watch. Learn a
little.”

“
That’s great.” Mandy was relieved. On
closer observation, she could see that her mystery girl was not as
young as she had first appeared. Mid-twenties, Mandy guessed.
Delicate bone structure, but with far more character in her face
than the fairy tale princess she had conjured from mist and
imagination. The girl’s eye makeup
was
smudged, but at the moment Mandy could see no
sign of tears. “May I sit?” she inquired.

“
Ah,
da
.” When Mandy was seated on the tree trunk, the
Russian girl pointed to herself. “Nadezhda Semyonova. Nadya,” she
pronounced carefully.

“
Amanda Armitage. Mandy.” Mandy opened
her mouth to continue, then snapped it closed, totally frustrated
by her rusty Russian vocabulary.

“
Ochen
preeatna
, Man-dee,” Nadya said, holding out her hand.
Solemnly, the girls shook hands, then found themselves enveloped in
frustrated silence. “We need a dictionary,” Mandy ventured in
Russian. “
Slovar
.”

“
Ah,
da
!” the girl replied with a vigorous nod of her
head.

“
Where do you live?” Mandy asked in
English, embellishing the question with a broad wave of her hand to
indicate the area around the river.”

It was as if the Iron Curtain had returned to
slam down over the young woman’s sunny face. After a long silence,
Nadya pointed north. “House. There,” she said. Her face remained
shuttered as she dropped her gaze, seemingly in deep contemplation
of her thin-soled slippers, which had never been intended for
walking in the woods.

“
Where did you live in Russia?” Mandy
asked.

That question took two repetitions and more
broad hand-waving before the young woman cried, “Ah! Small, very
small town. Not far Yekatarinburg.”

“
In the Ural mountains.” Mandy
nodded.

“
Da.
” Nadya, a
smile once again lighting her lovely face, was obviously pleased by
their minimal communication, snail-paced though it was.

Mandy’s excitement was mounting, though
why she was so certain there was a mystery here she couldn’t have
said.
Woman’s intuition
, Peter
would have scoffed. And she would have countered by taunting him
about men’s
gut reaction
. An
inelegant term, but just another way of describing that sixth sense
humans ignored at their peril.

“
Why did you come to America?” Mandy
asked in halting Russian.

Nadya’s pale blond hair fell over her face
and drooped onto the ground as she suddenly bent her head down to
her knees. Awkwardly, Mandy reached out and touched the young
woman’s shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she apologized. “Is that a bad
question?”

Nadya peeked through her curtain of
hair, scanning the jungle to the north of the cleaning. What little
Mandy could see of her face was pale, her eyes wide. A shudder
shook her.
“Plahoy
,” Nadya
whispered. “
Ochen plahoy!
”
Bad. Very bad. “I must go. Karim will be angry.”

The Russian girl shot to her feet, then
paused, a shimmering white still-life from
Swan Lake
. “
Das
veedanya
, Mandee,” Nadya said, the farewell soft and
precise. “It good, very good, to speak with you.”

“
Wait!” Mandy cried as the girl ran
toward the dense tangle to the north. “When will you be back? Who
is Karim?”

But Nadya was gone. Swallowed whole by the
Florida jungle.

Later, as Mandy sat at her oars, taking a
last look at the spot where the girl had disappeared, she realized
that one thing was quite easy to analyze. She had no difficulty
putting a face to the man called Karim. Dark. Sculptured. Proud.
Seething with pent-up energy. Karim had to be her Iranian soldier.
She was certain of it.

This, Mandy promised herself, was a puzzle
she was going to solve. Grim-faced and determined, she dug in her
oars and headed back downriver.

Arms crossed, former Major Karim Shirazi of
the Army of Iran leaned against the one of the peeling 4x4 beams
that framed the steps to the back porch of the sprawling old house.
He eyed the narrow path that wound through the woods with resigned
patience punctuated by a quiver of anticipation. His lips curled
into a hint of a smile. Major Shirazi had made sure all the
occupants of the house knew the area around them was teeming with
wildlife, most particularly rattlesnakes, wild boar, and large
spiders. He had also emphasized the river was full of alligators
that moved very fast, in water or on the land, and had very sharp
teeth.

Armed with graphic sketches he himself had
made, the major had repeated the words slowly and clearly. In
Russian, English, and Spanish. He had even held his drawings of
snapping teeth and wicked fangs close to the women’s frightened
faces, then waved his arms in a broad circle around the house. They
must have understood, for since then few of the silly creatures
would even venture out onto the porch for fresh air.

Only Nadya Semyonova had not been suitably
terrified. Of all the girls, she alone followed the narrow trail to
the small clearing along the bank of the ugly brown river. Karim
did not like jungles. The mountains were his home. Soaring, clean,
their heights were as bare as the desert which was also part of his
homeland. But endless miles of dull flat land that sprouted
phalanxes of box houses or masses of impenetrable greenery made him
feel caged in, claustrophobic. Sometimes, in the heavy humid air,
he thought he could not breathe.

So he did not begrudge the girl from
the Ural Mountains an occasional opportunity to tug on her leash.
Besides—the tilt of Karim’s thin lips expanded into a full-blown,
if feral, smile—the consequences of Nadya’s moments of freedom were
so personally satisfying. Unlike the keepers of the
harim
, he was not required to be a
eunuch.

Major Shirazi came off the column, snapping
to attention as a flicker of white caught his eye. Today Nadya had
been gone a long time. He should be angry. Glowering. He must never
let her see the rush of pleasure, the pulse of anticipation as he
thought of the forfeit to come. For Nadya would pay for her few
moments of freedom. As she always did. With the only coin she
had.

Karim settled back against the column,
re-crossed his arms and waited, his stoic face revealing no sign of
the impatience he felt. Impatience and excitement. Already he was
growing hard. For Nadya Semyonova’s coin was very sweet indeed.

“
Take my recorder next time,” Peter
advised later that morning, as he and Mandy sat in matching swivel
chairs in front of identical computers, set under the two broad
banks of windows that gave the corner office its superb view. “Have
your mystery girl record her story. We’ll get Brad Blue to
translate.”

“
Brad Blue?”

“
The developer of Amber Run. Remember,
I told you his grandfather owns most of the land on the far side of
the river, and Brad’s wife Claire runs the Model Center. She’s a
New Englander—Connecticut, I think. You’ll like her.”

Mandy, obviously zeroed in on her current
focus point, ignored the pleasant potential of a new friend. “You
say her husband speaks Russian?”

Inwardly, Peter sighed. His wife, the AKA
terrier, sinking her teeth into a subject and harrying it until she
found an answer. So much for trying to turn the moment into a pitch
for home and family.

Peter leaned back in his chair, stretching
his long legs out until they were within a foot of Mandy’s. She
eyed them as if they were a couple of RPG launchers poised to fire.
Great, just great.

“
The way the story goes,” Peter said,
“is that Brad’s mother—Wade Whitlaw’s daughter—was disowned when
she married a Russian defector who was working as a cow
hunter—that’s Florida for cowboy—at the Whitlaw ranch. Brad was
brought up bilingual on a modest-sized vegetable farm. Local gossip
also says he went to work for the government, which put his
language and other skills to good use before he retired about three
years ago, supposedly due to an excess of bullet holes. To squeeze
things down to the proverbial nutshell, Brad inherited the Amber
Run land from his grandmother, Wade Whitlaw’s wife, as well as the
veggie farm from his parents. There was a reconciliation of sorts
with the old man when Brad married Claire a little over a year ago,
but I hear Wade Whitlaw still gnashes his teeth every time he sees
houses going up on land where he used to graze cattle.”

“
I can’t say as I blame him,” Mandy
remarked before hearing the echo of Eleanor’s arrogance in her
judgmental tone. Who was Mandy Armitage to judge other people’s
lives when she’d done so poorly with her own? “I’m sorry, she added
hastily. ”This is the most attractive, well laid out housing
development I’ve ever seen, but what happens when there’s no
natural Florida left?”

“
As long as there are old codgers like
Wade Whitlaw, there’s hope. And he has a son and a grandson,
considerably younger than Brad, who agree with him. The Whitlaw
Ranch has been growing beef for six generations and the next two
look pretty secure as well. But you can’t really blame the
landowners who sell out,” Peter added, playing his favorite role of
devil’s advocate. “Why struggle to raise beef if you can retire for
life on what some big-time developer is willing to pay?”

Mandy waved her hand toward the view. “I
suppose it costs a lot more to leave things as natural as
this.”

“
Way more.”