The Blood Red Indian Summer (8 page)

“What didn’t, June?”

“That she felt all wrong, smelled all wrong. I turned on the bedside light and it was
Bonita
who was naked in bed with me, her big blue eyes gleaming…” He shot a guilty look at Mitch. “Has anything like that ever happened to you?”

“You mean waking up inside of the wrong woman? No, I’ve been Jewish my whole life. Not to mention a very light sleeper. You’re telling me you honestly couldn’t tell the difference between the two of them?”

June let out a distraught sigh. “Maybe I did know. Maybe I was just beyond the point of caring. It’s not something I want to think about too much. But I can’t sugarcoat it, Mitch. I had freaky sex with my stepmother. I-I jumped out of bed, totally wigged out. Bonita was, like, ‘Chill out, hon, we’re cool.’ She was real drunk. And unbelievably horny. Told me my dad hasn’t been able to get it up for months. Not since they took away his Hummer franchise.”

“So there
is
a connection.”

“Bonita
thanked
me, Mitch. She said she can’t step out on him because people would find out. It’s awful hard to hide an affair in Dorset.”

“It’s impossible,” said Mitch, whose own relationship with Des had become hot news all over town before either of them knew what hit them.

“Next morning I couldn’t look my dad in the eye. Or Bonita. And for damned sure not Callie, who is such a genuine, sensitive person. She’ll never understand. I figure our relationship’s toast if she finds out. I moved out of my room and onto the
Calliope
that day so I wouldn’t be right down the hall from Bonita. Callie had a late class that night. Didn’t come over. I locked the
Calliope
down good and tight and went to bed early. I thought I’d be safe out there. I was wrong. At three o’clock in the morning Bonita’s out on deck pounding on the hatch cover and calling out my name. I let her in so she wouldn’t wake up my dad. Right away she was all over me again. I stopped her. I said that what happened last night was never, ever going to happen again. Bonita is … gorgeous. And she can be real persuasive. I totally wanted her again even though I knew it was wrong. I wanted her so bad that I went nuts and shoved her the hell off me. She cracked her head on the corner of a bookcase. Then she started screaming at me so loud she woke up my dad. Lights came on all over the house. She ran back inside and intercepted him. Made up some lame story about hitting her head in the kitchen. Told him she’d been awake because she was afraid there’d be a drive-by shooting next door. Just a bunch of paranoid, racist crap. But he totally bought it because he’s wired that way.” June broke off, swallowing. “This can’t go on, Mitch. Any day now the crazy bitch will lose it and tell him what really happened. I humiliated her. You don’t do that to Bonita. And she’ll mess up my thing with Callie for sure. I totally love that girl. I want to spend the rest of my life with her. But we’ve got to get out of this place right away or it’ll destroy us. Destroy Bonita, too.”

“Destroy her how?”

“My dad will beat the crap out of her. He used to beat up my mom. That’s why she left him.”

“I thought Bonita split them apart.”

“Everyone does. But my mom told me their marriage was over long before Bonita came along—because of his temper. He has no control over himself, Mitch. Like father, like son.”

Mitch kept his eyes on the road. “You’re not your father, June.”

“Yeah, I am,” he said bitterly. “Deep down inside I’m no good. I want to do what’s right. Go far, far away with Callie. I just don’t know if it’ll ever be the same between us after this. People who love each other don’t keep secrets. But what am I supposed to tell her—that my stepmother sort of raped me and that I sort of went along with it because she’s a real bunny in the sack?”

“Yeah, I don’t think I’d phrase it quite that way.”

“Mitch, you’ve been married. You know women better than I do. Will you give me an honest answer if I ask you something?”

“I’ll certainly try.”

“What would you do right now if you were me?”

*   *   *

“So what
would
you do?”

“Me? I’d grab Callie and sail the hell out of that nuthouse as fast as the wind would take me.”

“But that’s running away, doughboy.”

“You bet your sweet
tuchos
it is.”

The sky over Long Island Sound was bathed in a pinkish glow as they walked Big Sister’s narrow beach together at sunset. The air was still insanely warm for late October. According to the Weather Channel’s ace storm tracker, Jim Cantore, a storm front would bring thunderstorms tomorrow night along with much colder temperatures. For now, it felt like August as they strolled along barefoot in shorts and T-shirts, sipping Bass Ales and holding hands. Mitch relished these precious moments with his lady love. And he never took them—or her—for granted.

There was a decommissioned lighthouse out on Big Sister, the second tallest in New England. Forty or so acres of woods. And four houses besides Mitch’s antique post-and-beam caretaker’s cottage—all of them belonging to the Peck family. It was the Pecks who’d founded Dorset back in the 1600s. A rickety wooden causeway connected the private island to the mainland at the Peck’s Point Nature Preserve.

“So is that what you told June to do?” Des asked him.

“No, I’d never tell some young guy to quit the family business and take off. Who am I to tell him that? Although it’s pretty clear that he does need to get out from under his father’s—”

“Wife?”

“I was going to say thumb. But if you want to talk dirty…”

“I don’t.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Positive. Move it along, mister.”

“He asked me if I thought he should tell Callie. I said that when the time was right to tell her, he’d know. And he would tell her. He’d want to because they’d be a serious, committed couple by then and he’d want her to know everything. I’m not sure whether that was sound, mature advice or just something I picked up from watching
Gidget Goes Hawaiian
. But it was the best I could do. Hell, I’m driving along with the guy in this shiny new truck and he drops this on me. Do you think I need a new truck?”

“She’ll never understand. She’ll forgive him—
maybe
. But never understand.”

Mitch glanced over at her as she strode along next to him, her smooth skin glowing in the pink sunset. “What would you have told him?”

“I have no idea. And you don’t need a new truck. You already have the world’s greatest truck.”

“It doesn’t have air conditioning.”

“Open a window.”

“It doesn’t have heat.”

“Wear a jacket.”

“It won’t go faster than fifty-five.”

“Good. You shouldn’t.”

“Yeah, that’s kind of what I thought.”

Des sipped her beer and said, “I thought I sensed something between June and Bonita this morning. The way she looked at him. And the way he
didn’t
look at her. I can’t believe she actually played the race card just to cover her skanky ass. She’s a thoroughly reprehensible person. And Justy’s no dreamboat either.”

“He used to beat up on June’s mom, according to June. It’s only a matter of time before he starts in on Bonita—if he hasn’t already.”

“Really nice bunch of people. It’s a heartwarming story.”

“Welcome to Dorset, where life is beautiful all of the time.”

“Do you believe June’s version of the story?”

“Which part?”

“The part where he woke up inside of another woman and didn’t know it. Because
you’d
know if you were making love to someone and it wasn’t me, wouldn’t you? I’d sure know if it wasn’t you.”

“Well, that’s not a fair comparison. You’ve grown accustomed to incredibly high standards in terms of technique, attention to detail, girth … Okay, ow, that hurt.”

“I’m serious, Mitch. Do you believe him?”

“No, I don’t. I believe he’s spinning the truth about what happened so that he can live with himself. ‘This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.’” On her blank stare, he explained, “That’s from
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
, a very good picture John Ford made toward the end of his career. Lee Marvin slays in it.”

“Do you realize that sometimes I have no idea what you’re talking about?”

“But sometimes you do. How cool is that?”

“Justy and Bob Paffin persuaded me to pay a ‘courtesy’ call on our newest, blackest resident this morning.”

“Oh, yeah? What’s Da Beast really like?”

“There’s no short answer to that. He’s bright, self-aware and intuitive. He has a sense of humor. But he can go rage monster almost instantly—and then thirty seconds later be totally calm again.”

“Are we talking steroids here?”

“Real? I have no idea. I just know it’s hard to tell who Tyrone Grantham is from one minute to the next. Maybe that’s how Tyrone likes it. He dictates the flow by keeping the people around him off balance. He has an extended family staying there. Some very decent people. His younger brother, Rondell, has an MBA from Wharton. His wife, Jamella, is nobody’s fool. And her kid sister, Kinitra, has a set of pipes on her like you wouldn’t believe. The girl’s a major singing talent. But I ran a check on his cousin Clarence, who fancies himself a recording engineer, and it turns out he got kicked out of Clemson for stealing stereos from dorm rooms. Not only lost his basketball scholarship but got sentenced to a hundred hours of community service plus a year of probation. And the girls’ father, Calvin, has spent half of his adult life in lock-up down in Houston. You name it, Calvin’s done it—car theft, armed assault, pimping, dealing. It was the girls’ mother who raised them. She worked as a cashier at a Walmart. Got shot to death in the parking lot two years ago. The shooter was never apprehended. And the girls have been on their own ever since. When Jamella took up with the famous Tyrone Grantham, Calvin suddenly resurfaced. Tyrone’s letting him stay there with them, but he’s a punk, as the boys’ mother, Chantal, so eloquently put it. And she would know. Back home in South Central L.A. she was picked up a gazillion times for prostitution and drug possession.”

The sky was turning from pink to violet. The darkness came fast this late in the year.

“Stewart Plotka was out front trying to drum up publicity for his lawsuit,” Des went on as they started back toward Mitch’s cottage. “Just for the hell of it I phoned the Nassau County P.D. detective who investigated that Dave & Buster’s fracas. He told me they declined to pursue criminal charges against Tyrone because the waitresses and customers all backed up what Tyrone and Jamella said—which was that Plotka approached their table and started shouting and screaming at Tyrone. When Tyrone stood up, Plotka went into a tizzy and tripped over a chair. Plotka claims he broke his eyeglasses when he fell and suffered severe eye and hand injuries. But no one saw that happen. No ambulance was called to the scene. And Plotka’s ‘doctor’ lost his license to practice medicine in the state of New York five years ago. What he has is a license to practice chiropractic medicine in Nevada. Where
I
could get a license to practice. The Nassau P.D. detective thinks the man’s just looking for a payday. That lawyer of his, Andrea Halperin, is famous for squeezing go-away money out of celebrities.”

“You’re saying Plotka’s a creep who has no case and yet the NFL suspended Tyrone Grantham anyway. They were just looking for an excuse, weren’t they?”

Des nodded. “They’re tired of his act.”

“So am I. When I was growing up in New York City in the eighties, I had three huge sports heroes—Dwight Gooden, Darryl Strawberry and Lawrence Taylor. All three of them turned out to be drugged-out bums. I was utterly crushed. Never, ever got over it. Kids need heroes who they can count on. Not that professional athletes
are
heroes. But you have to be older before you can recognize who the real heroes in this world are.”

“Such as?…”

“My dad. He showed up every single day at Boys and Girls High to teach those kids algebra. Not a lot of them made it. But some of them did. And it was because he was
there
. And then he came home every night and was
there
for me. He never ditched my mom for a younger babe. He paid his bills on time. That’s my idea of a hero—my dad. Your dad, too, don’t you think?”

Her only response was taut silence.

“How
is
your dad?”

“Well, I almost blew his head off this morning.”

“Accidentally or on purpose?”

“Don’t even go there. He’d driving me nuts. He haunts my hallways all night long. He’s gloomy, listless…” She glanced at her watch. “At this very minute I guarantee you he’s sitting in my living room with his jacket on staring at a rerun of
NCIS
for about the fifteenth time.”

“Okay, I’ll grant you he’s no Mr. Sardonicus.”

“Mister who?”

“Wait, are you telling me you’ve never seen
Mr. Sardonicus
with Oscar Homolka? It’s a William Castle shlocko classic. I can’t believe you’ve never seen
Mr. Sardonicus
with Oscar Homolka. That settles it—this year’s Halloween viewing will be highlighted by a special midnight screening of
Mr. Sardonicus
with Oscar Homolka.”

“Are you really, truly into this movie or do you just like saying the name Oscar Homolka?”

“Both,” he confessed. “Why is it that I can’t lie to you?”

“Because you know I’ll shoot you if you do.”

“Right, right. I knew there was a good reason.”

They took the narrow sandy path back toward his snug little antique cottage. As they neared the house, Quirt, Mitch’s lean outdoor hunter, darted across the garden and collided headfirst with Mitch’s shin. Just the cat’s way of telling Mitch he was hungry. Mitch let him inside and Quirt headed straight for the kibble bowl. Clemmie, who rarely ventured out, was taking a power nap in her easy chair.

The little house had exposed chestnut posts and beams, a stone fireplace and oak plank floors. It was basically just one big room—with windows that looked out at the water in three different directions. There was a kitchen and a bathroom. A sleeping loft that was up a steep, narrow staircase. He’d furnished the place with whatever he could find. The moth-eaten loveseat and easy chairs had been in his neighbor’s barn. The coffee table was an ancient rowboat with an old storm window over it. His desk a mahogany door that he’d dragged home from the dump and set atop sawhorses. Mitch’s sky blue Fender Stratocaster and monster stack of amps took up one corner of the living room. Books and DVDs were piled pretty much everywhere else.