The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady (37 page)

“It’s my nephew Travis’s birthday today. My sister, Gigi’s, having a party for him down at Alligator Point. They thought it would take my mind off things.”

“How nice,” Marylou said flatly. Would two pieces of cake be enough to kill this man? She certainly hoped so. “What about the hurricane?”

“Eh.” He shrugged her question away. “More waves for us!” He crouched down like a surfer, swaying on his board.

“I hope you like pineapple upside-down cake,” Marylou said.

“I love it. It’s my favorite kind of cake. How’d you know?”

Marylou shrugged. “Lucky guess.”

“I’m going to gobble it right up! Won’t you join me?”

Marylou protested and began moving toward the door.

“Mrs. Archer,” Buff said, fixing his face in a sincere mask. “I just want to thank you for standing by me. With everyone’s help, with my family’s support, and the Lord’s gracious love, I can beat this thing. Your help means so much. And your prayers. And this cake!” He took her hand in his warm paw and she let him hold it.

You’re warm now, sinner, but not for long. That was the Radioactive Lady talking.

“Paula said she’d consider moving back in with me. I really miss her and the girls.” His eyes teared up and she had the sudden urge to poke them, hard.

“Cake goes down better with milk!” Nance called out as she stepped out the door. “Milk and cake make everything better!”

* * *

Marylou hid in her house for a while, not allowing herself to think about what she’d done. She tried to watch a cooking show, but kept imagining the round girl chef pouring antifreeze into her polenta with porcini topping and her rotelle with broccoflower and albacore tuna. Finally, surging with restless energy, she clipped Buster’s leash on and dragged him outside where it was balmy and fresh as if all the oppressive stagnant air had been sucked up into the gray sky, where dark clouds were now scooting across in a businesslike manner.

Buff’s black SUV was parked in his driveway. He hadn’t made it to the birthday party after all! What a shame. She refused to imagine what might’ve been happening to him inside. So this was what it was like, she thought, to just not think about the consequences of what you’d done. Not really so hard after all! Wilson had done it for years. Keep moving, that seemed to help.

Vic’s secret wish had been granted. He’d wanted a hurricane and along came Grayson. He couldn’t enjoy it, though, because here he was, driving right through Grayson to retrieve Ava from Travis’s grandmother’s beach house.

The night before, Travis had come by their Friar’s Way house to pick Ava up and she’d gone off with him to Alligator Point, overnight bag in hand, over Caroline’s wild protests.

“His mother and grandmother and their friends will be there, not that it matters. It’s his birthday. He wants me there. I’m his girlfriend.” Ava lifted her chin proudly.

“But the storm, the storm!” Caroline wailed. “There’ll be way more flooding at the beach.”

“I’m going,” Ava said, and she went.

The next morning Nance woke them up at seven thirty, dropping by unannounced to take Wilson out to breakfast. She didn’t say a word to Vic about the little talk they’d had in his office after he’d caught Gigi cheating. In fact, she spoke only to Caroline and Wilson, which was fine with him. As Nance and Wilson drove off to their impromptu Cracker Barrel breakfast, Vic’s boss called to tell him that FTA was closed because of the hurricane. Vic started calling Ava not long after that to see if she was all right. Ava didn’t answer her phone, so by
nine thirty Vic was headed south along Highway 98, a two-lane road hemmed in on both sides by the Apalachicola National Forest. It was agonizing not being able to drive any faster than forty-five. For some perverse reason he pictured Ava floating away in the beach house or clinging to driftwood in the surging sea. Or her drowned body washing up on the beach. What kind of a man was he, thinking such thoughts, torturing himself by imagining the very thing he couldn’t bear? If anything happened to her because of this storm, he’d blame himself for wanting the damn thing in the first place.

Nearby pine trees swayed back and forth so far that it was hard to believe they didn’t snap. Pinecones and pine straw jounced off his windshield and then away. The sky before him was grayish green. Instead of driving into a storm, it was like he was bringing the hurricane across the Panhandle with him. Grayson had proved to be bizarrely unpredictable, with his four separate landings in Florida, his back-and-forthing, his swelling and shrinking—storm-hurricane, storm-hurricane. Now his path was depicted on TV as a yellow brick road lined with red propeller-shaped spinners zooming over the Panhandle toward Perry, fifty miles southeast of Tallahassee.

The Volvo’s wipers slashed back and forth on high, rain spattering the windshield with a loud tearing sound. He’d tried to listen to NPR to take his mind off Ava, but the rain was so loud he had to turn it up full blast to hear it. Convenience stores had lights on inside, but their parking lots were empty. All the traffic was headed the opposite way, up toward Tallahassee. His was the only car headed down to the big wa-wa, as Suzi used to call it. Angelo’s Seafood Restaurant was boarded up. On the Ochlockonee Bridge the wind slammed into the left side of the car like it wanted to push him into the water.

Alligator Point was a long skinny peninsula like a finger curving out into the water—the Gulf on one side and the Little Alligator Bay on the other. Vic felt even more vulnerable driving out onto the peninsula,
palm tree leaves turned inside out, tree trash flying. The KOA Campground was deserted. He struggled to keep the car on the road.

Travis’s grandmother’s house was one of the few old bungalows left on Alligator Point, which was now, like its snootier cousin, St. George Island, full of new stilted houses on steroids. There were a few vehicles parked near her house but in the center of the peninsula, mostly battered SUVs, Jeeps, and pickup trucks. Vic figured they’d parked there to stay clear of the water. He planned to be in the house only a minute, so he parked right in front.

When he stepped inside, Gigi called his name and rushed up to hug him like he was her long-lost cousin. “What’re
you
doing here?” she kept exclaiming.

Vic hugged her stiffly, aware of other people watching.

“I came for Ava,” he told Gigi. Everyone had to speak loudly over the storm. “We need to get home before the roads flood.”

“Oh, no, stay and have some lunch,” Gigi said. “It’s barely a cat. two!”

“It could get bigger.”

Ava, in a gauzy coral-colored dress, ran up to greet him, followed by Travis in his Sponge Bob bathing trunks and a sweatshirt. “Can I stay and have cake? Travis hasn’t opened his presents yet. I’m sorry I’m wearing Suzi’s dress. Please don’t tell her. Everyone here loves Elvis! There’s a three-legged dog on the beach and he won’t come in.”

Ava was having a fantastic time, that much was clear.

Vic grabbed her and hugged her and she forced herself to accept it, and he agreed that they could leave after cake.

Caroline had been flabbergasted that Gigi’s and Buff’s mother was having a party, after Buff’s name had been all over the papers for molesting children. How could she? But it made perfect sense, in a way. Old money. Stiff upper lip, and all that. She must be determined to pretend that nothing had happened, that her son would be somehow
pardoned, and that life should go on, even in the midst of a hurricane. The lady was as nutty as the Mad Hatter.

Present at the Mad Hatter’s birthday/hurricane party were a handful of people, some salty preppy types, some working class, all mostly older people who were probably, like Gigi’s mom, permanent residents of Alligator Point. They were all drinking, mostly beer, happy to have an excuse to tie one on, the sort of diehards who routinely ignored hurricane warnings, money or age or machismo allowing them to romanticize the notion of going down with the ship, which was, actually, the same sort of romanticizing Vic had been doing, wanting to
be in
a hurricane.

A group of men sat around a TV, watching the weather channel with the sound off, swapping hurricane stories in raucous voices. A dark, wizened man told about growing up in Miami and being sent out to pick avocados off the trees in the yard prior to the storm so the wind couldn’t hurl them through the windows. A man with a white beard relayed that, up in Georgia, Hurricane Floyd had ripped all the green pecans off his trees and flung them into his bathroom. Sixteen wheel-barrows worth.

One fellow, who was drinking a Bloody Mary and appeared to be pregnant, told about how a few years ago, here on Alligator Point, during Hurricane George he’d passed out on his sofa, dead to the world, after a hurricane party like this one, his arm dangling down off the side. In the middle of the night he’d woken up with his hand underwater. He’d managed to get out of the house and tried to drive away from Alligator Point but had ended up wrecking his brand-new El Camino in front of the campground and abandoning it. “Time I got back there, couple days later, somebody’d stripped my car bare, made a skeeter out of it.” He cackled, and his listeners roared appreciatively.

Okay, maybe Vic had been too judgmental. Another way to view this situation was that these people were relaxed, and they’d been through
more storms than Vic had, so what the hell? Why not join them? Ava and Travis had disappeared, so he went by himself into the kitchen, where two matrons in wrap skirts were unloading plastic bags of frozen food, stuff they’d removed from their own freezers and brought to the party so it could get eaten up before the power went out. He helped himself to one of the charred steaks that had been grilled in the garage, speared a baked potato, and scooped up some coleslaw, plopping it all on a plastic plate, and grabbed a beer. He sat down on the living room couch to eat.

Gigi nestled beside him, swigging a fresh beer. She wore a black-and-white striped tank top and white flouncy skirt, freckles dusting her nose, her mane of hair pulled back in an appealingly messy ponytail. Gigi herself was an appealing mess. Had he thought that his attraction to her would simply disappear? He found himself wanting to confide in her, to talk to her about the whole Buff thing, tell her how angry and disgusted and sick about it he was but also wanting to make clear that he wasn’t mad at
her, only her brother;
and he wanted to tell her he’d decided not to tell his boss about her cheating, but people kept coming up and interrupting them, asking Gigi to introduce him.

The people also kept bringing him beers and he kept drinking them. At one point he escaped to use the bathroom, and on his way back out Gigi’s mother caught him. “Vic, so good to meet you,” said Maude Coffey, a tanned woman in a raspberry-colored sundress and a streaky helmet of hair. She could have been anywhere from sixty-five to eighty-five. “Gigi’s told us so much about you.”

Vic mumbled something and glanced around the room for Gigi, but he couldn’t see her anywhere in the mix of tropically arrayed, blissfully oblivious guests.

The wind raged and rain pelted sideways against the house, now accompanied by a bass line of thunder, making it hard to hear Maude, who spoke in a quiet, hoarse voice. “He’s got a court date coming up in two weeks. Matt Sandy’s defending him, but I’m worried.”

It took Vic a while to figure out that
he
was Buff, her son. Why was she telling this to Vic, of all people? “Matt Sandy,” Vic said. “He gets all the drug dealers off.”

“The therapists call it ‘sexual addiction.’ He’s been in treatment twice, but so far it just hasn’t taken. Guess we haven’t found the right program.” Blinking back tears, she grabbed hold of Vic’s arm. “He’s not a bad person. He truly isn’t.”

Vic took a deep breath. “You might’ve warned the members of his congregation,” he said in what he hoped was a reasonable tone. “How come he’s not on some registered sex offender list? We like to keep track of those in our neighborhood.”

Maude fixed him with her lavender eyes, now damp and slightly reddened. “He’s never been in legal trouble before. Nobody’s ever pressed charges.” She must have read the expression on Vic’s face. “I’m sorry for the girls, too, of course I am, but is taking him to court going to undo what happened? What about his own family? Buffy’s making himself sick over this. He was too sick to come celebrate Travis’s birthday.”

“Sick is the least of what Buffy ought to be,” Vic said. “Prison’s too good for the son of a bitch.”

Maude’s mouth gaped open and Vic backed away from her.

Time to go.

He found Ava and Travis in the sunroom on the back of the house, sitting side by side in beach chairs, holding hands and watching the storm between strips of duct tape somebody had crisscrossed over the windows.

Vic crossed the sunroom, over to a large red cooler on the floor. He opened the cooler and dug out a bottle of Beck’s, then he kicked aside the beach towels lined up against the space under the door. Here was his chance to really
be in a hurricane
.

“Where are you going?” Ava asked him.

“Sir, it’s not safe out there. The wind is gusting at fifty knots.”