Читать книгу The Wicked Redhead - Beatriz Williams - Страница 12

TOWN IS Cocoa, a collection of mostly wooden buildings sprawled along the edge of what Mrs. Fitzwilliam calls the Indian River, and is really some kind of inlet from the ocean itself. Maybe a river feeds it, I don’t know. Anyway, you reach this squirt of a town by means of a pair of long, flat bridges directly west from the barrier strip of Cocoa Beach, leapfrogging an island they call Merritt, which I confess I have no recollection of crossing the night before.

“You were likely asleep,” Mrs. Fitzwilliam says. “I’ve never seen such an exhausted pair as the two of you last night. Not since the war, anyway.”

“The war? Did you nurse?”

“No. I drove an ambulance on the Western Front. Well, a number of ambulances. They had a tendency to break down often.”

She tosses this off gaily, like she’s describing some kind of picnic expedition. Shifts the automobile into another gear—it’s a fine blue Packard roadster, immaculate cloth seats, a real nice piece of tin—while the draft loosens her scarf from its moorings to spread out behind us like a white flag of surrender. Air smells of salt and muck and burning oil. I narrow my eyes against the afternoon sun and say, “I guess that explains the way you drive.”

“Oh? Just how do I drive?”

“Like you mean it.”

She laughs and steers us into Cocoa, pulling up outside a large brick building that proclaims itself home of the Phantom Shipping Company.

“Who’s the phantom?” I ask.

She sets the brake and leaps free of the seat with breathtaking agility for a woman with so much baby inside her.

“Me,” she says.