Читать книгу The Treasure Man - Pamela Browning, Pamela Browning - Страница 10

Chloe’s goal in taking up residence at the inn was twofold. The solitude would allow her to get her fledgling jewelry business off the ground, and she could stop solving other people’s problems. It was difficult, after years of accepting the roles that other people expected her to play in their lives, to disengage. Grandma Nell had understood.

“You can’t create space for new experiences and new people in your life if you’re giving all your energy to people who drag you down,” her grandmother had said. “It’s time for you to leave behind unproductive and outmoded situations, Chloe. Go to Sanluca. Stay awhile.”

The resounding message was that she needed to concentrate on herself for a change. After several rescue operations involving unsuitable men, Chloe couldn’t have agreed more.

Of course, there would always be room in her life for Butch, who woke her the morning after she arrived by jumping on her feet and nibbling at her toes. Hoping to get back to sleep, she yanked one foot away, then the other. This only caused the cat to settle on her chest, purring loudly as he kneaded sharp claws in and out of her shoulder.

“All right, I’m awake,” she told him grudgingly, treating him to a vigorous rub behind the ears before sliding out of bed and padding into the bathroom.

“How did you get in, anyway?” she asked, knowing that Ben must have opened the door for the cat. A glance at her watch told her that it was almost nine o’clock, late by her standards. Usually, when she was here, she was awake at dawn, since the rising sun’s rays easily penetrated the thin curtains of her room.

Butch meowed and pawed at her leg. “Okay, okay,” she said, lifting the toilet lid. Butch was toilet trained because she’d been relentless in her expectations. She took a dim view of scooping cat litter, and so did her grandmother, who had been skeptical about adopting a pet in the first place. Chloe had insisted that they keep Butch after he’d ventured out of the woods behind their house, skinny and scared. Now he weighed in at a hefty twenty pounds and was afraid of nothing.

Since Butch preferred privacy when he performed, Chloe wandered into the bedroom. She opened the windows to let in the breeze, marveling at the sight of the waves lapping on the shore. Though born and bred in the heart of Texas, she’d always felt a kinship with the sea.

Ben was sitting at the edge of the ocean, staring toward the horizon. She almost called to him, but something about the set of his shoulders gave her pause. She read discouragement in the way they slumped, and something else. Sadness? Sorrow? She wasn’t sure, but she sensed that he was weighed down by some indefinable burden. He seemed different from when she’d first met him. In those days, he’d been full of personality, convivial and gregarious. People had been naturally drawn to him, and he’d basked in his own popularity. The change in him tugged at her heart even as she cautioned herself that whatever Ben’s problems were, she wanted no part of them.

She returned to the bathroom, where Butch was now waiting at the edge of the sink for his morning drink of water. After turning on the tap for him, she flushed the toilet, a skill that the cat had unfortunately not mastered. After one lick at the dripping faucet, Butch gave a disdainful little brrrup!—his equivalent of “yuck”—and jumped down.

Chloe started a shopping list. Bottled water, she wrote at the top as her cell phone rang. The caller ID revealed that it was Naomi, who, until she’d married her husband, Ray, the summer of high-school graduation, had accompanied her to Sanluca during their childhood summer vacations.

Naomi wasted no time getting to the point. “Chloe, guess what Tara’s done now.”

“I couldn’t say right off,” Chloe said cautiously as possibilities sequenced through her mind. Her teenage niece had recently decided that she didn’t want to go back to high school in the fall. “Taken up skydiving? Joined a convent?” Chloe figured the only way to calm Naomi down was to make light of the situation.

“She’s run away from home, that’s what! Ray and I are frantic with worry. Tara finished her final exams and split. No one has a clue where she is.”

“Did she leave a note?”

“She propped a sweet little card on her pillow, telling us not to worry.”

“As if you wouldn’t.”

“As if,” Naomi agreed with a sigh.

“At least Tara took her exams,” Chloe pointed out.

“Why do you find this funny?” Naomi asked with remarkable forbearance. “We’re beside ourselves with worry.”

“Tara confided before I left Farish that she’d reformed. My guess is that she’s hiding at a friend’s house and they’re pigging out on hot-fudge sundaes. You used to do that when finals were over, remember?”

“We’re checking with all her friends, and in the old bunkhouses on some of their parents’ ranches, and every other possible place. The police don’t consider her disappearance a criminal matter because Tara left a note, went of her own accord and kids run away all the time. They believe she’ll be back. I’m not so sure, Chloe. Tara and I had a big argument a couple of days ago.”

Chloe’s heart sank. “I’m sorry to hear that. Care to tell me about it?” She’d hoped that Tara was sufficiently chastened after her latest transgression of hosting an unchaperoned party when her parents weren’t home. But then, Chloe knew about rebellion for rebellion’s sake. She’d been a difficult teenager herself.

“On Sunday, Tara wanted to wear this really horrible outfit to church. I mean, it was so short that it would have raised the eyebrows of every little old lady in the congregation, including Grandma. Especially Grandma. And no bra, and—”

“I don’t wear a bra sometimes.” Like maybe never, Chloe was thinking, if the weather didn’t cool off.

“You’re a grown woman, free to make your own decisions about how you dress. Tara’s still a kid. I told her that over my dead body would she leave the house in that getup, and she said that she hoped I wasn’t planning to assume room temperature any time soon, but she was going, like it or not. And I said she wasn’t, and she said I was a bitch, and—”

“She called you a bitch?”

“As well as other names I would rather not repeat. Then she stormed out of the house, wearing a dress no bigger than a sticky note. Ray and the twins and I waited for her to come home and were late for church because she never showed up. Or at least, she didn’t come home until we were gone. I didn’t figure out until late that night that she’d taken a duffel. She packed clothes, Chloe, and her teddy bear. She never goes anywhere without that bear.”

Chloe sighed. This sounded like an updated version of her own difficult adolescence, though she hadn’t had the comfort of a stuffed animal when, during Christmas vacation in her senior year of high school, she hitchhiked to visit a boyfriend who had recently moved to California.

“That’s awful, Naomi. You have my heartfelt sympathies,” Chloe told her.

“We’ve set off alarms in every direction. I’ve alerted Marilyn and her group in case she shows up in Dallas.” Marilyn, their cousin, and her husband, Donald, had five kids. Tara had been close to that branch of the family most of her life.

“You’ll call when you find her, won’t you?”

“Sure. Let’s hope it’s soon.”

“I’m sure it will be. She’s a good kid, Naomi.”

“I keep expecting her to walk through the front door—” Naomi broke off her sentence, a sob catching in her throat.

“I’m so sorry, Mimi.” Chloe was the only one allowed to call Naomi by her old childhood nickname.

“I’ll keep you posted. I wish I were in Florida with you. I worry about you being all alone there.”

“Well, don’t. Ben Derrick showed up.”

“Who?”

“You wouldn’t remember. You were already married to Ray the summer that Ben boarded at the inn and I was here.”

“He’s nice?”

“Also helpful.”

“Age?”

It took a moment for Chloe to figure this out. “Thirty-seven.”

She could picture her sister narrowing her eyes on the other end of the phone. “You haven’t taken up with him already, have you?”

Chloe let out an exasperated sigh. “I’ve been here less than twenty-four hours, Naomi. Surely you jest.”

“I am not in the mood for joking, Chloe. I’m falling apart. I can’t even pull myself together long enough to throw a load of laundry into the washing machine.”

“Do you want me to come home, Naomi? Help you out?” She waited with dread for her sister’s answer, knowing that she’d go if Naomi needed her.

“No, Chloe,” Naomi said. “We’ll get through this. But thanks.”

Chloe, all but heaving a giant sigh of relief, decided to broach a new topic. “How are Jennifer and Jodie?” she asked. Naomi and Ray’s twin daughters were ten years old and never gave them any trouble. So far, anyway.

“J and J are upset that Tara’s disappeared, like all of us.”

“Give them my love.”

“I will.”

“And Grandma Nell—is she adjusting to the assisted-living home? Or is she still trying to decide if she likes it?”

“Chloe,” Naomi said patiently. “Stop assuming responsibility for other people’s well-being. Our grandmother is doing fine. She’s made a new friend, and they watch their favorite TV program together every day. The friend’s family treats them to dinner at the country club. Grandma’s happy. Repeat after me. Grandma’s happy.”

“‘Grandma’s happy,’” Chloe recited as if by rote.

“You’ve got it. You’ve got it! Listen, Chloe, I’d better hang up in case Tara tries to call home on this line instead of our cell phones.”

“Okay. I’ll talk to you soon.”

“Love you,” said Naomi.

“Love you, too.”

She heard the sliding glass door to the annex grinding along its track. It was located under her bedroom window, and a glance outside told her that Ben was no longer sitting and staring morosely out to sea. While she dressed, she heard the Jeep’s engine roar to life as Ben left. Briefly, she wondered where he was going, but she didn’t have time to mull it over. She had work to do.

Downstairs, she threw all the windows open and hauled the wicker rockers outside to the front porch, where last night’s rain had washed everything fresh and clean. A row of red hibiscus bushes bordered the porch, their flowers as big as saucers, and overhead, in a nearby palmetto tree, a mockingbird’s white feathers flashed as it flitted to and fro. Beyond the rolling dunes, the sea was glassy and calm. This day, like every day in summer, would be scorchingly hot. The sun was already blazing down on the sand.

Unfortunately, the Frangipani Inn wasn’t air-conditioned. Tayloe had been adamant that the winds off the ocean cooled it enough; she’d insisted that if the natural breezes had been good enough for her grandparents, they were good enough for her. Chloe wasn’t so sure. Sea breeze or not, air-conditioning seemed like a really good idea in this hot and steamy climate.

Once she’d opened the house, she tackled the dirty dishes in the sink, then measured the small study off the library, where she intended to set up her workshop. The space was cluttered with an old treadle sewing machine, a box of dusty jelly jars and various other debris. She’d place a workbench at one end of the long, narrow room A telephone outlet behind Tayloe’s old desk would make it convenient to connect to the Internet. Between the workshop and the kitchen, a large closet, formerly a butler’s pantry, would house her jewelry-making supplies. The closet contained a safe, where she’d keep the precious and semiprecious gems she used in her one-of-a-kind designs.

All that decided, she was finishing off a slice of peanut butter toast when someone began hammering on the front door.

Through the sidelight, Chloe spotted a tattered white sailor hat with the brim pulled low. She threw the door open to Zephyr Wills, one of the most senior of Sanluca’s senior citizens. Known as the Turtle Lady, she felt that it was her obligation to safeguard the big loggerhead turtles that nested up and down the coast.

“Chloe!” Zephyr cried, her round wizened face crinkling into a broad smile. She was under five feet tall and as frail as a bird. “Gwynne told me you were driving all the way from Texas, gal. What’s the matter—you tired of cowboys?”

“And how,” Chloe said with feeling.

“Well, no wonder. All those sweaty horses, all that nasty dust. I knew a cowboy once, but never mind about that right now. Thought you’d never open the door. With Tayloe and Gwynne, I always walked right in. Didn’t think you’d care for that, though.”

“I, um, wouldn’t have expected it,” Chloe admitted.

The Turtle Lady wore her customary white long-sleeved shirt, which she donned every day for protection from the hot sun. Chloe could have sworn that Zephyr’s plaid shorts were twenty years old, which was almost as long as Chloe had been vacationing at the Frangipani Inn. Zephyr carried a ruffled parasol; it was her trademark.

“Come for a walk with me, Chloe. We’ll check out the latest nests.”

Zephyr had always liked company on her morning nest-hunting expeditions. Tayloe was usually willing to oblige; Gwynne, too.

“I’d love to,” Chloe told her, nudging Butch back inside with her foot.

“Get a hat. You don’t want to have a sunstroke. Is your cat coming with us?

“No, he doesn’t much like the beach.”

“That’s just as well. No telling what trouble he could get into out there.”

Chloe found a hat on the rack inside the door and skipped down the steps with a kind of heady anticipation. In her girlhood, she had listened with fascination to Zephyr’s explanation of the habits of loggerhead turtles. During their summer breeding season, female turtles lumbered onto land to lay eggs in a shallow nest in the sand. Then they returned to the ocean, never to see their own offspring, which hatched in a matter of weeks and clambered down the beach to the ocean, subject to predators and often so confused by the lights on land that they headed the wrong way. Zephyr considered it her mission in life to make sure the babies found the sea, and she sent them off with a little blessing and prayer for their safety.

Due to the nearby coral reefs being constantly ground to bits by wave action, the sand on this beach was famously pink. The ocean at this hour was still a deep cerulean blue, but as the day progressed and the sun climbed higher, its color would change to a cool, inviting turquoise. An onshore breeze, picking up now, fluttered the brim of Chloe’s hat and ruffled her hair. As they walked, Zephyr cast inquisitive glances at her from under the parasol.

“You used to be a redhead,” Zephyr stated. “What happened?”

“Uh, well, magenta and bronze and green and a color called Desert Dream, which I’ve settled on, finally. I want to look like a normal person for a change.” She wore her hair in a straight bob slightly longer than chin length, having dispensed with the spiky style she’d tried last year.

“You always were kind of different,” Zephyr ventured. “Gwynne was predictable, Naomi was sedate, but you were always turning cartwheels down the beach or ripping off all your clothes and jumping in the water.”

Chloe laughed. “I doubt if I’ll be doing any nude swimming around here now. There are lots more people on the beach these days.”

“We have the new wilderness preserve to thank for that,” Zephyr told her. “Lost Galleons Park, they call it, after the 1715 Spanish fleet that wrecked on the reefs while transporting gold and silver from the New World to Spain. Strange juxtaposition if you ask me—galleons in the New World and space launches right up the coast trying to find other new worlds. We’re going to have a space-shuttle launch later this summer. You going to be around?”

“I’m sure I will. I like the name Lost Galleons Park.”

“Ha! It’s a descriptive name, but I wish they’d named the park after the turtles. Someone at the state capitol must have decided treasure is more important than loggerheads, though I don’t see how.”

“So much of the economy around here derives from the search for treasure,” Chloe said. “Sanluca owes a lot to those sunken ships.”

“Oh, it’s ‘treasure this and treasure that,’” Zephyr agreed. “Since I was knee-high to a sandpiper, those old ships have been the sole local industry.”

“Gwynne told me the Frangipani Inn will become part of the park complex eventually.”

“The house and its land will be absorbed into the system once Gwynne and her mother die. That’s the way Tayloe wanted it. Can’t say if it’s a good idea of not. Bunch of tourists browsing through that grand old house! The park people intend to use it for a museum or some such.”

“That’s better than tearing it down and building a condominium,” Chloe said with conviction. She regretted that concrete-and-glass condo buildings had sprung up along much of the Florida coastline. The tall towers blocked the very thing that people had moved here to enjoy—abundant sunshine.

“Ben, now, he’d agree with us about condos,” Zephyr said.

Chloe kept planting one foot in front of the other. “You’ve seen him lately, I take it.”

“I ran into him on the beach last night before the storm. First met him years ago when he first came to Sanluca from a little town in the Glades. I already knew his mama and daddy from a time when I lived out there. I hadn’t seen him in a long while. Hardly had a chance to talk with him before the wind and rain came up. Bad storm, that. Knocked a bunch of mangoes off the tree at my house. Look over there now and you’ll see the latest turtle clutch.”

Chloe shaded her eyes from the sun when she spied the orange flag signaling a turtle nest. Zephyr gestured at the mesh net, about two feet high, that she’d placed around the nest to keep raccoons, possums and other land predators from disturbing the eggs. “Last night, I was watching the mama turtle and waiting for her to finish when Ben came along with his metal detector,” Zephyr said. “The man startled me, I’ll grant him that. I was paying attention to the eggs dropping into the sand when up walks someone I didn’t recognize at first. Never saw Ben Derrick with a beard before.”

“It’s not quite a beard, only the beginning of one.”

“You ask me, he’s going for the whole megillah. You should talk him out of it.”

“Like he’d pay any attention,” Chloe retorted as they headed back toward the inn. “I hardly know him.” She wished her friend would talk more about Ben, but she was disappointed when instead, Zephyr changed the subject.

“Say, about that cat of yours. You’ll need to put a bell on him if he’s to run loose. Prevent him from sneaking up on the shore birds,” she said.

“He’ll have enough to do with keeping the mice at bay in the inn.”

“Never saw a cat that didn’t stalk birds.”

“Butch is different.” She decided against telling Zephyr that Butch was toilet trained. Zephyr probably wouldn’t believe it anyway.

They started up the boardwalk, which meant that if Chloe was going to learn anything more about Ben, she’d better get Zephyr talking. “Ben’s been away from Sanluca a long time, I guess,” she prodded.

“Couple of years. Had to leave after he got fired from Sea Search. Not that I pay much attention to what people say, when all’s said and done. People say too much. That’s why I like animals a lot more.”

Keeping Zephyr on the topic was hard. “Ben was fired?” Chloe asked. This was electrifying information; she’d had no idea.

“That’s all I’ll mention, though he’s lucky to be alive after that accident.”

“What accident?”

“Not on that motorcycle of his, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“He drives a Jeep now.”

“It was a diving accident. He surfaced from one of the shipwreck sites too fast. They get the bends, divers do, if they don’t take time to decompress on the way up.”

“They can die,” Chloe said, remembering how Gwynne had explained it to her one summer, complete with facial grimaces and elaborate descriptions of how a diver’s blood could boil and their hearts could burst. Now that she was grown-up, Chloe suspected that Gwynne had embellished her story for effect, but the bends—or DCS, which stood for decompression sickness—was still nothing to fool with.

“Dumb thing, that,” Zephyr said. “Ben not taking care of himself, I mean. Losing his job. By the way, I’ve got some of those windfall mangoes in my car. Thought you might like a few to eat. I’ll get them for you.”

“Great,” Chloe said with little enthusiasm as Zephyr left her to go to the parking lot. She wondered why Ben had surfaced too fast from a dive. As an experienced diver, he would have known better.

Zephyr returned with the mangoes, and Chloe invited her inside for a while.

“Nope, I’ve got to get back home. Maybe some other time. I’m glad you’re here, Chloe. The inn has been vacant too long.”

“The whole place needs tidying up,” Chloe confessed, “but I’m too busy right now setting up my workshop. Maybe I’ll get around to cleaning in a few days.” Privately, she doubted she’d have time.

“You want that big place clean you should hire locals to do it. Too many people are without jobs these days. Citrus harvest is in the winter, and in the summer the packing houses are closed. Teenagers especially need work,” Zephyr said. She gestured down the boardwalk, where a group of girls and boys were horsing around, slapping one another with damp towels and shrieking. “They get up to no good if they don’t have enough to do for three months. Ben may know someone. Maybe even those kids.”

“Perhaps I’ll ask him,” Chloe said, and left it at that.

THE FIRST THING Ben did when he left the inn the morning after his arrival was to stop by Keefe’s Dive Shop, where local divers congregated and bought equipment as well as supplies. Dave Keefe, the genial owner who had outfitted Ben with scuba gear years ago when he’d first come to town, greeted him effusively.

“Ben, I’m glad to see you,” he said, after clapping Ben on the back and shaking his hand. “You’ve been gone too long. What are you doing with yourself these days?”

“Trying to earn a living. I don’t work for Sea Search anymore.”

A shadow passed over Dave’s face. “I heard.”

“The thing is, Dave, I’m still a certified scuba instructor. I’d like to pick up a class or two. It would help me make ends meet.”

Seeming thoughtful, Dave circled back behind the counter. “I can help you out,” he said slowly. “I’m teaching a group of beginners, but I’d like some time off. Would you consider taking over? The class is on Thursday evenings, seven to ten, in the pool out back. I teach the basic stuff.”

“You’ve got a deal,” Ben said, his hopes rising. Maybe reestablishing himself around here wouldn’t be so difficult to after all.

“See you next Thursday? I’ll introduce you to the students and bug out right away.”

“Sure.”

Dave rummaged on a shelf under the counter. “Here’s the scuba manual. I can’t teach you much about diving, but you should be familiar with questions the students will ask.”

“No problem,” Ben assured him.

His spirits were high as he drove down Loquat Street, which passed for the main drag in Sanluca. The town’s appellation was a corruption of San Luca, which was the name of the spring-fed river that drained into the Intracoastal Waterway, known in these parts as Spaniard’s Lagoon. Back in the days when Florida belonged to Spain, the lagoon, protected by several barrier islands and accessible from the ocean through a natural inlet, had been a popular safe anchorage for ships that plied the shore.

A sign at the edge of town welcomed visitors: Sanluca, it proclaimed. Home Of Sea Search, Inc., And Not Much Else. Underneath, in smaller letters, it said, Proudly Undeveloped. True, because on Florida’s east coast, to find any place that hadn’t been overbuilt, straining schools, social services and infrastructure, was rare. Sanluca had avoided that fate because the town was small in area and most of it had been set aside as a nature preserve.

Besides Dave’s dive shop, Sanluca’s business district encompassed a post office, a gas station, a combined art gallery and gift shop, a small treasure museum and the Sand Bar, which was a local hangout at the city marina. For nostalgia’s sake and in celebration of landing the teaching job, Ben acted on impulse and stopped in at the Sand Bar to order a burger, medium rare, with cheese and onions.

“Want a beer?” asked Joe Devane, the beefy bushy-haired bartender. He and Ben went back a long way, to the first year Ben worked at Sea Search.

“No, a glass of water will do,” Ben told him, reacquainting himself with the Sand Bar’s decor, which consisted of fishnet draped around dried starfish hung on the wall. An old ship’s wheel was mounted above the pool table, and outside was a thatched hut where you could belly up to the bar and listen to pickup jazz sessions at night.

Joe slid a glass across to Ben, leaving a slick, wet trail on the polished wood. Ben drained the drink in almost one gulp. It was easy to get dehydrated in this tropical climate. The sun baked the moisture right out of a person’s skin.

“You working for Andy McGehee again?” Joe asked.

Ben shrugged. “I’ve talked to him about it. He’s full up. Got enough divers, he says.” He wasn’t surprised at Joe’s question. At the Sand Bar, local treasure hunters talked casually and often about the business.

“There’re always one or two divers who quit in the course of a summer. He’ll hire you.”

“Maybe. In the meantime, I’m going to be teaching a scuba class for Dave Keefe.”

“That’s great, but don’t give up on Andy. He was in here the other day with some of the guys on his crew. They were talking about last year’s hurricane and how it uncovered new sections of the wrecks offshore.”

“Couldn’t help but do that,” Ben agreed. A good storm was a treasure hunter’s dream.

“He’ll need all the divers he can get.”

“Yeah, well,” Ben said. He understood Andy’s unwillingness to hire him after he’d let him go during what Ben privately thought of as the bad time. Andy was probably unconvinced that Ben had since shaped up, and that was understandable.

“Are you staying around here somewhere?” Joe asked. There weren’t many options, even in the off-season. The Sanluca Motel was a dilapidated scratcher with ten dimly lit rooms where people rarely wanted to spend more than one night. The nearest real hotel was twelve miles away and charged for one night’s lodging twice what most locals earned in a day. The other alternative was an RV park where the owner, old Ducky Hester of the gnarled teeth and bodacious BO, might let someone stay for a night or two in the trailer of an owner who only occupied it in the winter; Ducky pocketed the money with the owner none the wiser. Ben considered himself lucky to have run into Chloe Timberlake last night, and even luckier that she was allowing him to stay in the apartment at the Frangipani Inn.

“I’m living at Tayloe and Gwynne’s place,” he said.

“I heard they closed up the inn and moved away.”

Ben shrugged. “Tayloe’s niece is looking after things,” he said.

“That’s good. For you, I mean.”

Ben nodded and took a long drink of water as Joe moved away to greet another customer.

His hamburger was done perfectly, and Ben soon became aware that the waitress, who wore a halter top and sported a silver ring in her navel, was sending soulful looks in his direction. When she slapped the check on the table, she sidled a little closer than necessary. “Joe says you’re hoping to sign on with Sea Search,” she said. He made himself focus on a large white pelican, one of a flock that roosted on the pilings around the place.

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s the plan.”

“My brother works for Andy McGehee. I could put in a good word for you.”

The pelican flew away, flapping its wings as it soared awkwardly above the lagoon. “Sure,” he said easily. “If you want.” He waited for her to reel in whatever strings were attached.

“Okay, I’ll mention it. You’re Ben, right?”

“Ben Derrick,” he said.

“I’m Liss,” she said. “Liss Alderman.”

He vaguely remembered a young guy named Alderman. The kid had hung around the city docks a lot, and in fact, Tommy Alderman had still been in high school back when Ben had worked for Andy McGehee.

“Nice to meet you,” Ben said. He didn’t mention that he’d met Tommy. That would only encourage her.

“Same here.” Liss favored him with a blindingly white smile and flounced away, twitching her derriere. Damn, but she was young. Only twenty-two or so, and that was too much of an age difference. He didn’t dare bring women around to the inn anyway, since his landlady might object.

Not that Chloe was interested in him, though she’d warmed up considerably after he played Bwana of the Jungle and wiped out a couple of palmetto bugs. He smiled, recollecting how she’d flown into his arms when the mouse ran over her foot. She’d reacted like a scared schoolgirl, like his thirteen-year-old daughter, for Pete’s sake.

That thought sobered him quickly, and a mantle of sadness settled over him. After two years, he should have stopped obsessing about what had happened. About how it was all his fault.

He tossed money on the table, gave Joe a salute of sorts, and, head down, hurried to his Jeep. Better to stay busy doing something, anything, than to start thinking. Booze used to work, but he’d given it up after drinking had almost scuttled what was left of his life deeper than any of those old shipwrecks out on the reef. But, finally, he was sober again. The trick would be to stay that way. Some trick.

“’Bye, Ben,” Liss called through one of the open windows.

He waved halfheartedly in her direction, wondering what days she didn’t work. No need to come back if she was going to put the moves on him.

He’d managed to avoid Chloe this morning. If his luck held, she’d be out when he got back to the Frangipani Inn. That way, he wouldn’t have to talk to her. Not that she was hard to talk to, really. He even liked her, sort of. He almost remembered her from the year when his life had changed, the year when he’d married Emily.

Marrying Emily had taught him not to get close to anyone. He’d abandoned that precept when Ashley was alive, but those circumstances had been different. Ashley had been his adored daughter, and it had been easy to give her his heart.

Never again. He didn’t want to love anyone that much. Saying goodbye was always so painful. And sometimes goodbyes happened whether you expected them or not.

“BEN!” CHLOE CALLED.

Ben stuck his head out of the closet where he was installing a new heating element in the annex water heater. He’d hoped he’d be through in here and could make himself scarce before Chloe stopped pushing and dragging things around Tayloe’s old study. He’d heard her at it when he returned home after lunch, and he’d called out an offer to help, which she’d turned down. Well, he had enough to do, and he wished Chloe hadn’t chosen this moment to pay a visit.

“Back here,” he replied. “In the annex.”

Chloe appeared in the hall from the kitchen, her hair piled on top of her head and damp tendrils trailing down her neck. She was wearing a sleeveless tie-dyed T-shirt cut off above her waist, and a pair of the shortest shorts he’d ever seen. Last night he hadn’t paid much attention to her, except for that remark about his being hot. Well, she hadn’t meant him—he was pretty sure of that by the way she’d slunk off to her room afterward—but now, well, she was the hot one. He made himself pull his gaze away from the swell of her breasts under that tight-fitting shirt.

“What’s wrong with the water heater?” she asked.

“The thermostat. Not too difficult to repair, but it gets hot in the closet.” There was that word again. Hot. It had popped out without his thinking about it. Embarrassed, he wedged himself back into the stifling space.

“We could open these windows wider,” she said, walking past him and heading for his bedroom. He didn’t like her trespassing on what he now considered his territory; it was only a bedroom, a living area and a small kitchen, but he’d spread his meager possessions throughout, and it would be his home for a while. He hoped.

“Euwww, there’s a lizard in here.” Chloe made tracks back toward the kitchen.

“He won’t hurt you,” Ben said curtly. “In fact, he’ll help keep the insect population down.”

“Well, I guess a lizard’s not so bad. I was used to them in Texas. Didn’t you spray insecticide in this apartment?”

“Nah, I don’t like the smell of it. Me and my lizard buddy will make out fine. Say, could you see if there’s a rubber gasket lying around anywhere? I’m missing one.”

“Here it is.” She handed it to him, which meant that she had to step inside the closet, which meant he got a close-up view of most of her.

She had a freckle in the white of her eye, an adjunct to the liberal dusting of freckles on her upturned nose. This fascinating combination caused him to stare at her a tad longer than made her comfortable, if fidgeting was any indication.

“The fridge in the apartment works okay?” she asked. She lifted a straggle of pale hair off her face.

“Sure. I put bottles of water in there earlier. Help yourself.”

“Got any beer?”

“Nope. Sorry.”

“That’s okay.” She wore multiple earrings, which jingled as she went to the kitchen, and he heard the sound of her opening and closing the refrigerator door. “Can I bring you anything?”

“I’ll be through in here in a minute.” He cast a glance out of the closet and saw her sauntering to the glass door. He liked the way she looked silhouetted against the sand dunes outside, all legs and pout. Not a perturbed pout, just one that occurred naturally when she was thinking. What would she be thinking at the moment? He had no idea.

He edged his way out of the closet and mopped his brow with a rag. She turned toward him. “I’ve arranged for the phone to be hooked up, and the water-softener folks are sending a man out as soon as possible.”

“Good, since I’ve never owned a cell phone and hope I never will,” he replied. “Plus bottled water can get pricey after a while.”

“Also, Ben, keep track of your expenses for the water heater and everything else that you do. I’ll see that you’re reimbursed, but whether it’ll be me who does the reimbursing, I don’t know. I’ll have to ask Gwynne.”

“You talk to her much?” He brushed past Chloe into the kitchen. Her hair was the prettiest shade of blond, shimmery like sunbeams. It wasn’t her natural color—he remembered her as a redhead. Not that it mattered. She was one of those women who was born to be blond. In the sun streaming through the window, her skin, damp with perspiration, gleamed.

She kept her head turned away. “Gwynne doesn’t answer her phone.”

While he washed his hands at the kitchen sink, Chloe wandered over to a shelf built into the wall. “What’s all this?” she asked with interest.

“A collection of artifacts that I’ve recovered over the course of my career.” He didn’t add that they were small and could be transported easily when moving around a lot. They were his connection with his chosen line of work, the only remembrance he’d kept of his past life before the bad time.

“I’ve never seen anything like that statuette,” she said.

“It’s a clay dog, probably a toy made by descendants of the Mayans in Mexico. That’s a silver bosun’s whistle beside it, and a pewter shoe buckle in the front. All those objects date from the 1700s.”

“This must be a wine bottle,” she said, studying it.

“Not too many bottles survived in perfect condition like that one,” he told her.

“And this?” She gestured at a slim gold ring intricately carved and set with three emeralds.

“Recovered from a wreck of a merchant ship in the keys. It was so beautiful I’ve never wanted to sell it. See, the emeralds aren’t cut with the precision we’ve grown to expect in modern times. They’re rough, without many facets. That only adds to the charm as far as I’m concerned.” He’d planned to give the ring to Ashley when she was older, and now it made him sad.

He went abruptly to the refrigerator, twisted off the top of a bottle of water and drank deeply.

“It’s beautiful,” Chloe said, still appraising the ring. “Artistically crafted.”

He surmised that since she designed jewelry, the ring was of particular interest to her, but he didn’t want to discuss it anymore.

“I could use a swim about now,” he said. It was a remark meant to distract, not necessarily to produce results.

“Race you to the beach.”

In a matter of seconds, Chloe had wriggled out of her shirt. Her breasts were covered—if you could call it that—by a wisp of a bikini bra in a delicate shell-pink. It was almost the exact shade of her skin, and he did a double take before he figured out that it wasn’t her underwear but a swimsuit.

Next, she stepped out of her shorts, revealing an even briefer excuse for a bikini bottom.

“Let’s go!” she said.

“I—well, I have to put on swim trunks.”

“Okay, meet you down there.” She set the empty water bottle on the table beside a chair and headed out the sliding glass door, leaving him agog in her wake.

Nothing shy about Chloe Timberlake, that was certain. He wondered if she was as easygoing about the rest of her life, like making love, for instance.

Why this occurred to him he couldn’t imagine, though he supposed that her near-naked body might have something to do with it. His memories of her when she was a kid were spotty at best, but he was sure that she hadn’t been this well-endowed, her breasts high and firm, her derriere rounded in the right places.

He pulled on his trunks in record time, grabbed a towel and followed her. The sky above was laced with slow-moving clouds, and the sun-baked sand burned his bare feet. As he jogged out of the dunes, he spotted Chloe lolling in the shallows close to shore where last night’s wave action had scooped out a tidal pool right below the high-tide line.

“Hi,” Chloe said, interrupting his reverie. “Come on in. I’d forgotten how this is like having our own little swimming pool right down here on the beach.”

He waded in. The water was too warm, more like the temperature of a bathtub than the ocean, and it was translucent, so that every shell and rock on the bottom was clear.

“I know what I want,” Chloe said, leaping to her feet and scrambling out of the water. That swimsuit of hers was almost transparent; the outlines of her nipples were visible. He glanced away, his mouth suddenly dry.

“I’ll be right back,” she said. She ran up the beach and disappeared into the dunes.

I know what I want, she’d said. He tried to stop thinking about what he wanted, which was, let’s be honest here, a tumble with her.

Once, he wouldn’t have put it in those terms. Each woman he’d met before the bad time was new territory to be explored, and he didn’t only consider their bodies. No, he’d always been vitally interested in what went on in their heads. He’d been fascinated with the dimensions of women’s minds, how they brought different perspectives to life than men, how they never failed to surprise and delight him. There had been many women after Ashley’s mother, from whom he’d been divorced shortly after their daughter was born.

All the women after Emily had enriched his life immeasurably, but he’d never remarried. He’d flitted here and there like a butterfly, alighting in one place for a while and then moving on to something that promised to be sweeter but often wasn’t. He wouldn’t ever do that again. It was a way of life requiring optimism, a quality that was missing in his makeup these days.

So why was he feeling positively hopeful as Chloe Timberlake reappeared on the path?