Читать книгу The Virgin And The Vengeful Groom - Dixie Browning, Dixie Browning - Страница 7

His bare, size-eleven feet propped on the railing, Curt let the long-neck bottle slip through his fingers to rest on the sandy porch floor. Gazing out over the Atlantic, he continued the word game a fellow patient had introduced him to in a certain Central American hospital.

Applicable words only. Even playing alone he stuck to the rules. He’d started over with the As once he’d settled here at Powers Point. After less than a week he was up to the R words. There was not a lot to do here.

Not a lot he could manage yet, at any rate.

Rest and relaxation.

Recuperation and recreation.

Nah. Scratch recreation, it didn’t apply.

Rebuild, restore…retire? At age thirty-six?

Well, hell—how about rotting, raving, royally pissed-off?

Too much like the Bs. Bored, bad, broken. And bitter. Yeah, that, too, but he was working on that one.

The Ps had come easy. Powers Point. Private. Privateer?

Could his old man have been a pirate? Being the descendent of several generations of seafarers about whom he knew next to nothing, Curt had to wonder. Powers Point was a pretty valuable chunk of real estate, at least, it was now that the island had turned into a tourist haven. What about a hundred years ago? Two hundred? Why would anyone settle in a place like this unless he valued privacy and needed easy access to the sea?

Private, privacy, privateer…

It was only a word game, he told himself. He would never even have thought of it if he hadn’t fallen heir to six sealed boxes a few months ago. After years of believing his father was dead, he had discovered that Matthew Curtis Powers had lived right here in Powers Point until a few years ago, when he’d entered a nursing home in Virginia, suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease. Curt could have passed his own father on the street and never known it. Never even recognized him. Just thinking about it made him want to strike out at something.

He’d been on twelve-hour notice before leaving on another mission when the lawyer had finally tracked him down to inform him of his father’s death. Stunned, he had accepted a deed and two keys—one for a house at a place he’d never even heard of at the time, Powers Point, and another one to a storage unit in Norfolk. He hadn’t had time to absorb the knowledge—barely had time to locate a storage place and stash the stuff. Six boxes of ledgers, logbooks, diaries and old newspapers, not to mention half a dozen old novels. He’d glanced at a few of the titles and seen enough to know that he wouldn’t be in any great hurry to read them.

The Virgin and the Vengeful Groom. Was that an example of his family’s taste in literature?

But then, what the hell did he know about his family’s taste in books or anything else? At a time when he’d been too young to know what was going on, his mother had taken him away and told him his father was dead. All those years he’d believed it, because he’d had no reason not to.

As for the boxes, he’d had little time to do more than scan the top layers, but even that had been enough to fuel his imagination. Later, lying in a series of hospital beds with nothing but time on his hands, stories his father had told him more than thirty years earlier had started coming back. Fragments. Images—things a kid might recall, never knowing if it came from a comic book or a television show or something real. Even now he wasn’t certain how much was real and how much was invented out of need. Like the memory of a ship named the Black Swan.

He’d just about decided it was a bunch of bull when those six boxes of papers had turned up. At least some of those papers were definitely ship related, triggering a few recollections of some female relative who had grown up aboard a ship and then written a few wildly imaginative stories.

In fact, once he’d set his mind to it, he’d begun to recall quite a few tales about a family—his own, a few generations back—that had gone to sea and stayed there, men, women and children alike.

The Powers of Powers Point. He hadn’t put much stock in any of the old tales as a kid. Probably more into space rangers at that age. But then, soon after that the family he’d taken for granted had disintegrated, and for the next few years he’d been too caught up in trying to understand things no kid could possibly understand to worry about his father’s old stories.

They were trying to come back, though. Bits and pieces—nothing particularly outstanding, but then, memories were notoriously unreliable. Ask five men about an event that had taken place a week ago and you’d get five different stories.

So, although he hadn’t put much stock in old memories, while he’d been lying flat on his back in a series of hospitals he’d had plenty of time to wonder. And, yeah, he had even wondered whether or not old Matthew might have indulged in a bit of skullduggery. Blackbeard had operated in these parts. Met his grisly end, in fact, on the next island south in the Outer Banks chain—Ocracoke.

At least it had served the purpose of occupying his mind while he waited for skin grafts to take, for broken bones to heal, for torn muscles to mend. Not to mention the time it took his body to rid itself of a variety of exotic bugs he’d caught while lying buried up to his ears in a stinking mud hole in a Central American jungle.

There wasn’t a whole lot he could do yet, physically, but as soon as he was up to making the trip to Norfolk, he fully intended to retrieve his legacy and learn a little more about his past. After years of being a rolling stone, he could afford to gather a bit of moss. That didn’t mean he was under any obligation to hang around, once he was back in shape.

Physically he was still a mess, but mentally he was pretty solid. Certain things were beginning to make sense to him now. Such as the way he had always felt like an alien in corn country, Oklahoma, after his mother had remarried. He’d been about eight then. His stepfather had been a decent enough guy, but they’d never been close.

Eventually Curt had joined the Navy and ended up seeing more of the world than he ever cared to see again. That was still up for grabs. His future. Meanwhile he was here in a place that bore his name, if not his imprint. Along the way he had loved and lost, as the old saying went. Loved not wisely but too well—another cliché. Alicia was a fast-fading memory he hadn’t even tried to recover.

Somewhere in one of those boxes might lie the explanation for why he’d always felt drawn to salt water. Why he’d ended up choosing a career as a Navy SEAL over his stepfather’s farm.

A mosquito landed on the tender flesh of a newly healed skin graft. He swore, slapped, and swore again. This recovery business was a pain in the—in various parts of his anatomy. Patience had never been one of his virtues. At least here he had time and privacy. The house itself was a gaunt, unpainted relic, sparsely furnished but, surprisingly enough, still solid. The outbuildings had weathered a few too many storms to be worth repairing, even if he’d had a use for them. Even if he’d planned on hanging around. As for the rest of his estate, it consisted of roughly a hundred-odd acres of blowing sand, stunted trees and muddy marsh that stunk to high heaven whenever the wind was off the sound.

Not to mention the small, private cemetery with half a dozen or so leaning tombstones. Most of the names had been sandblasted until few of them were even legible. One stood out. His father. Matthew Curtis Powers, born September 9, 1931, died, September 9, 1997. Ironic. He could think of better ways to celebrate a birthday.

Curt took a deep, cautious breath. Too deep and it hurt; too shallow and he got that suffocating feeling again. Nightmare stuff.

It’s over, man. You’re out of it.

Physically he was out of it. Mentally…he was getting there.

At least he had something to focus his mind on. That helped. The nightmares came less frequently now. Once he got involved in rediscovering the father he remembered only dimly—the man who had taught him to fish when he was barely old enough to hold a fishing pole and promised that one of these days they’d buy a boat and sail to the West Indies—he’d be well on the way to full recovery.

In a week or so he would drive to Norfolk and reclaim the rest of his inheritance. While he had no intention of hanging around any longer than necessary, it didn’t hurt for a guy to know something about his past—his roots.

Moving with the deceptive ease of someone afraid of jarring something loose, Curt made his way to the kitchen, squeaked open the rust-speckled refrigerator and scowled. “Well, hell,” he said plaintively.

No beer. Also, no bacon, no eggs—nothing but a chunk of green cheese that wasn’t supposed to be that color. No more leftover pizza—he’d finished that off for breakfast. He wasn’t exactly looking forward to making another supply run. Especially as he’d insisted on keeping his four-by-four instead of trading it in on something with an automatic transmission. The drive down from the hospital in Maryland had damn near killed him, but he’d stuck it out on the theory that if it hurt, it must be good for him. Once he’d opened the house up, aired it out and unloaded his few possessions, he had hauled south to the nearest village to hire a carpenter. While he was there, he’d stocked up on the necessities of life: beer, bacon and eggs and a variety of canned goods.

This time the drive wasn’t too bad. The usual beach traffic, but what the devil—he was in no hurry. He pulled in at the post office to collect the accumulation of junk mail, then drove on to the nearest supermarket. It was late August. The place was mobbed. As a rule he did his shopping before eight in the morning or after ten at night. If there was one thing that galled the hell out of him—and actually, there were several—it was having strangers stare at him as if he were some kind of freak. So he had a few scars—so what?

So he walked kind of funny. So what?

Kids were the worst. They’d stare at him, half scared, half fascinated. As if he were a carnival display or something instead of a guy who’d happened to get in the way of a few pounds of miscellaneous scrap metal. “You ain’t seen nothing, kid,” he was tempted to growl. “Wait till I take off my pants.”

But of course, he never did. His own mama, bless her frivolous, lying soul, had taught him a few manners before he’d left the nest.

Bracing himself not to use the shopping cart as a walker, he started with the As and tossed in a couple of apples. Next, he grabbed a few cans of beans, some corned beef, bread and beer. Enough of the Bs. He moved through the alphabet to cookies, candy, cheese and coffee, then located the eggs. His unwritten list was another of the mental exercises designed to keep his brain from atrophying. By the time he’d done pickles and preserves, he’d had enough. Skipping ahead to the Vs, he opted for a copy of today’s Virginian Pilot instead of vegetables. He had canned beans and pickles, after all.

Three days after she’d brought them home, Lily still hadn’t got around to finding putting-places for the contents of a single box. She was too caught up in exploring her treasure trove. Organizing could wait. Imagine, a diary written more than a hundred years ago. For all she knew, she was the first person to read it since the woman named Bess had made the last entry.

“Okay, Bessie, where did we leave off?” she murmured. “We were hiding from that jerk who had locked up your crew, right?” Propping her feet on one of the boxes, she opened the diary she’d been reading. The stuff was gold, pure gold. Diaries, travel journals—and she hadn’t even started on the novels yet. Six boxes full of who-knew-what wonderful material. It was better than winning the lottery.

The handwriting was better formed than her own, but it was still hard to read. Now and then Lily had to look up a word in the dictionary. Even so, it was amazing how a woman of the twenty-first century could slip into the skin of a woman from another era. Bess Powers had grown up in an unorthodox way and gone on to do her own thing.

So had Lily. They had both overcome amazing odds to make something of themselves—Bess in an age when women were supposed to be seen and not heard, to wear corsets and bustles and high-top shoes.

She’d even smoked cigars. Lily didn’t smoke. She didn’t drink. She didn’t even take aspirin for headaches or cramps; however, she occasionally allowed herself to over-indulge in junk food.

“You’d have loved subs, Bessie. With peppers and onions and provolone and oil and vinegar—we’d have royally pigged out.”

Bess had eaten raw fish aboard ship and something called salt horse, which might be horse, or it might be kangaroo, for all Lily knew. Neither animal sounded particularly appetizing. She had picked and eaten fruits that Lily couldn’t even pronounce, much less visualize. Lily wanted to believe she would have done it, too, in Bess’s place, because the more she read, the more convinced she was that she and Bess Powers were two of a kind, separated by a century, give or take a few years.

It was almost as if fate had guided her that day. She had gone to the storage unit to leave a box of books—author’s copies of her first three paperbacks, plus a few foreign copies. Doris, her housekeeper, threatened to burn the things the next time she tripped over them, but there was simply no more room on her crowded bookshelves. That was when she’d noticed the auction. A few people were bidding on the contents of three units on which the rental payments had fallen too far behind. Standard procedure, she’d been told when she’d asked what was going on. “But that’s awful,” she’d said at the time, even as she edged closer to get a look at what was on the block.

The boxes had been opened. Nothing but old books and some old newspapers—the others only glanced and turned their attention back to the two chairs, three bicycles and a suitcase of winter clothing.

For reasons that hadn’t made sense at the time, and hardly did even now, Lily had felt defensive on behalf of the papers. Poor things, no one had wanted them. Lily knew what it was like to be shunned. Sensible or not, she’d gone all defensive and put in a bid on the lot. At least she could give the things a decent burial. Burn them or something. Maybe even try to locate the owner.

Feeling self-righteous, she had taken a second look and discovered among the ancient newspapers what appeared to be travel journals or logbooks, a few old novels, the covers all mildewed, and several diaries, the locks no longer effective as the leather straps had more or less disintegrated. That was when she’d first felt it—that all-but-imperceptible quiver of excitement that always came when she hit on the seed of a solid plot. Sometimes it was the people, sometimes the conflict—this time it was a woman named Bess, who had written diaries.

Diaries that Lily was increasingly certain she’d been meant to find all these years later, because she and Bess were kindred spirits. Oh, yes they were, and if that sounded spooky, so be it. She didn’t have to admit to anything, all she’d had to do was pay for the stuff, drag it to her car, squeeze it in and get it home and up to her third-floor apartment.

Which she had ultimately done, her appetite whetted by the promise of mystery, tragedy, possibly even romance….

The boxes had been heavy, her car was small. Enter the second coincidence, or as Lily preferred to think of it, the second omen. She was of two minds when it came to publicity. Personally, she hated it. As Lily O’Malley, bestselling novelist, she had learned to tolerate it, although even the best publicity was not without dangers. Occasionally a fan grew somewhat…obsessive.

She’d been struggling to load the boxes on a dolly to get them to her car when she’d sensed someone behind her. Braced instinctively for trouble, she heard the man say, “Hey, aren’t you Lily O’Malley? My wife reads everything you write. I thought I recognized you from your picture inside the back cover.”

She eyed him warily. He was wearing an Atlanta Braves cap. The press pass clipped to his pocket looked legitimate, but with what had been happening to her this past week—the phone calls and the awful things she’d found in her underwear drawer—she didn’t dare take chances. If this guy turned out to be her stalker, she would just as soon confront him here in a public place, where one loud scream would bring help.

On the other hand, if he really was a reporter, she would rather not be discovered wearing her oldest grungies. Hardly the image her publisher liked her to present.

Never show fear, she reminded herself. Cardinal rule. “And you are?” she demanded in her most imperious tone.

“Bill DeSalvo, Virginian Pilot. Whatcha got here, books?”

He looked harmless, but then, so had Ted Bundy. “Nothing at all valuable—mostly old papers. Actually, I’m really not sure yet.”

“Bought yourself a pig in a poke, huh?”

“You have a way with words,” she said dryly. After hearing his voice, she was pretty sure he was not the one. In fact, he was a fellow writer. So she ventured a smile, but a quick one. Not a particularly warm one.

“Let me give you a hand with that stuff.” By the time he’d helped her lift the last box and squeeze it into her open sports car, she had gleaned quite a bit of information. She knew, for instance, that his wife read a chapter over her breakfast every morning and three chapters before she fell asleep each night, which didn’t say a whole lot for their marriage.

DeSalvo learned that the boxes contained old logbooks, a few moldy novels and the journals of a woman who seemed to have spent some time at sea. He also learned that Lily’s latest title, Blood Will Tell, was due to hit the stands within days and that she would be appearing at a local bookstore. And yes, of course she’d be delighted to sign a book for his wife.

Asked where she got her ideas, she nodded to the boxes. “Who knows? I might have just bought six boxes of ideas.”

The young man jotted down a few notes. “You mean you do this kind of thing all the time, looking for inspiration?”

By then Lily had learned that DeSalvo was brand-new at his job, and that running into a celebrity was a big break. Flattered in spite of herself, she told him about the time she’d paid eighty-five dollars for the diary of a nineteenth-century prostitute only to find that it was a combination account book and recipe book. “All I learned was that bay leaves keep weevils out of cornmeal and that the diarist earned a grand total of two dollars a night, six nights a week and paid someone named Leandra ten dollars a month.”

“For what, bed, board and clean sheets?”

“Probably.”

It was then that she’d noticed the photographer he’d waved over. “D’you mind?” the young journalist asked, and she brushed back her hair and tried to look as glamorous as possible, wearing the ancient white shirt and baggy slacks she’d put on to deal with the accumulation of books Doris kept threatening to burn.

And now here she was, piling up still more stuff to trip over. Pack rats didn’t need housekeepers, they needed warehouses and bulldozers.

“Hope you find something in there worth all the trouble,” the young reporter had said when she’d climbed behind the wheel.

“Or at any rate something more intriguing than budgets and household hints,” she returned, laughing. This time the flash caught her with her mouth open and her hair blowing across her face. Oh, well. Any publicity was supposed to be better than none at all. “There’s bound to be something here. A bit of mystery, a bit of romance—who knows what I’ll find?”

She waved and backed out of the parking slot, muttering under her breath, “Just don’t you dare refer to my books as bodice rippers.”

“The hell you say!” Curt’s feet hit the deck with a jarring force that caused him to wince, swear and catch his breath. He had read and reread the piece in the Pilot. It was the picture of a laughing woman that had first caught his attention. Something about the way her windblown hair swirled around a face that was more intriguing than pretty—the way her shirt was lovingly plastered over small, high breasts. It was only when he’d read through the two short columns the second time that something struck a nerve. Storage unit? Six boxes? Papers, ledgers, journals and a few musty old novels?

“When asked where she got her ideas, the novelist replied that ideas were everywhere. ‘Glimpses of strangers. Snatches of overheard conversation. A few lines in a newspaper. Ideas are never the problem, what’s hard to find is the time to do them all justice.”’

Ideas, hell, the woman was a common thief! Unless he was very much mistaken, those boxes piled in the back seat of her toy car were his own personal property!

Not that he was into material possessions, other than his dive gear and his wheels. Naturally, those were top of the line. If creature comforts had been a priority, he would never have holed up in a place like Powers Point. He was into solitude. Solitude, singlehood and simplified living.

But dammit, what was his was his! Just because he happened to miss a couple of rent payments on a dinky little storage locker, that didn’t give those jerks the right to auction his stuff off to the highest bidder. It wasn’t as if he’d had nothing better to do than keep up with such trivial details. He’d gone all the way to hell and back serving the interests of his country. Fighting terrorists, arms dealers and drug dealers, who were more and more often turning out to be one and the same, hardly fell into the category of a nine-to-five job.

He didn’t care what was in those boxes, his father had wanted him to have them, and he was damned well going to have them, and Miss Lily O’Malley could get her ideas from the city landfill as far as he was concerned.

It took three days to locate the woman. The drive to Norfolk took longer than it should because he’d had to get out every fifty miles or so to work the kinks out of his carcass. First thing he did was find a motel, check in and stand under a hot shower until his eyelids began to droop. After that he dried off and ordered in a pizza. He fell asleep with a half-eaten pizza before him and an open phone book, roused just enough to fall into bed and slept for ten hours.

Most of the next day was spent in tracking down a woman who obviously didn’t want to be found. The phone company was no help at all. Gave him a hard time, in fact. When he’d pressed he’d been told that the woman had been having trouble with crank calls and that he could talk to the police if he insisted. He’d declined the offer.

Next he tried the storage company, but the birdbrain in the office spouted the company line. Skip three months and you’re dead meat. Company policy.

He refrained from telling her what she could do with her company policy and tackled the newspaper office, with no better luck. City directory? Sorry. He was an officer in the United States Navy? Big deal. They had naval officers running out their ears here in the Norfolk area.

Curt still had a few sources of information not available to the general public, but as national security was not at issue, he wasn’t about to pull rank over a bunch of old papers and the works of some nineteenth-century hack writer.

It was at a public library that he finally got his first lead. Lily O’Malley would be appearing at a local bookstore to sign copies of her newest book between the hours of twelve and two the next afternoon.

Bingo.

Thanks to a friendly, informative librarian, he also learned that the lady had earned herself a nice collection of awards and was on the way to building a reputation writing something called romantic suspense. What he couldn’t figure out was why a successful contemporary writer would fork over even a few bucks for the scribblings of an obscure nineteenth-century spinster who, according to what little family legend he could recall, had made a career of distorting the truth.

At the bookstore he spent ten minutes checking out the site, pretending an interest in astrology while he watched a table being set up, complete with lace cover, flowers, posters and a stack of books a foot high and five feet long. If they were expecting to sell that many copies, he’d better move the hell out of the way or get crushed in the stampede.

Nobody stared at the shiny new skin on the side of his neck, or if they did, they were discreet about it. He’d worn khakis and a black T-shirt, something to blend in with the Saturday-afternoon crowd. His hair had grown shaggy since he’d left the hospital. The gray seemed more pronounced, but all in all, there was nothing about him that should spook a lady writer.

After rethinking his initial plan to confront and demand, he opted for diplomacy. A brief, polite explanation, followed by an offer to repay whatever she’d laid out, after which he would collect his property and leave.

“I hate this, I really do,” Lily told herself as she shoved her lucky roller ball pen in her purse, dropped her purse in her tote and let herself out the door. No matter how many signings she did, she always got butterflies. What if nobody came? What if she had to sit there for two hours, trying to appear friendly and approachable when she felt like hiding in the rest room? What if no one showed up? What if they did, but not one single book sold?

It could happen. Once, in the early days of her career, before all the mergers had done away with the small distributors, she had spent two hellish hours in a huge discount store at 6:00 p.m. on a Friday, before towering stacks of her third paperback novel. Four sales reps, all young, all built like football players, had lined up behind her, arms crossed over their chests. Not a single person approached her table. When she’d taken a rest room break halfway through the ordeal, she’d overheard one woman wondering who she was and another one saying, “I don’t know, but she must be important, she’s got all those bodyguards with her.”

After all the those slimy phone calls she’d been getting from some creep who got his jollies by talking dirty to women, not to mention the fact that someone—the same creep, she was sure of it—had actually been inside her apartment, she almost wished she did have a few bodyguards. Not that she couldn’t handle herself in a pinch, but all the same… Deep breath, Lily. You can do this. You’ve done it a dozen times before. This is only one teeny little bookstore, not a five-city tour.

It was still hard to believe—sometimes, even now, she had to pinch herself—but people took her at face value. The bookstore manager had baked cookies and brought a lace tablecloth from her own home. Lily was so touched she felt like weeping. Nerves did that to her, and her own had been stretched to the breaking point. Her best friend, who was also her agent, had urged her to get out of town until the police could do their job. Instead, she had done as they suggested and changed her unlisted number, changed the lock on her door and had a chain installed.

That had hurt. One of the things she loved most about her apartment was that it was in such a safe neighborhood, half the time when residents visited someone else in the building, they left their doors unlocked. And while she had never quite gone that far, she’d never felt threatened. Until now.

At least here in broad daylight, in a busy mall bookstore, she should be safe.

There were already several people glancing this way, looking as if they might be coming over. The woman with two children—the teenage girls with the pierced eyebrows. The man in the black T-shirt…

Mercy. She would willingly go back to “clinch covers” if he would agree to pose. What was there about dangerous-looking men? she wondered. Men with dark, slashing eyebrows, shaggy, sun-streaked hair, unsmiling mouths and lean, hawkish features?

Hawkish features? Lily, my girl, you sound like a writer.

Then there was the way he moved, as if he had ball bearing joints. She could imagine a dancer moving that way, or a hunter silently gliding through the forest. Odds were this man was no dancer. There was no shotgun in evidence, which meant he probably wasn’t on safari, either. He could be one of those foreign correspondents who put on a battle jacket to stand before a camera and read a script, or he could be—

Oh, God, he was—he was coming over here.

What if he was the one?

Ohmigod, ohmigod, ohmigod.

He’s not going to hurt you here, not out in public!

Where was the security guard? Every mall had security guards, because stuff happened. There were creeps everywhere.

Uncapping her pen, she gripped it in her right fist and lowered her hand to her lap. Smile, Lily, smile! Don’t let him know you’re afraid, bluff! You can do it, you’re an old hand at bluff and run. Besides, even if he turned out to be her crank caller, the policewoman had told her that nine times out of ten, crank callers were harmless. Pathetic losers who couldn’t interact with women except anonymously.

The last thing this man looked was harmless.

He was staring at her. Now he was moving in her direction. Years of soft living had taken its toll, because she was suddenly having trouble breathing. Surely someone was looking this way—someone would notice if he started anything? The store manager—

“Miss O’Malley? I believe you have something that belongs to me,” he said in a voice that could best be described as chocolate-covered gravel.

It didn’t sound like the voice she’d heard on the phone, but voices could be disguised.

Her mouth was so dry she couldn’t have spit if her pants were on fire, but she forced herself to look him in the eye. Coolly, graciously she said, “I beg your pardon?”