Chapter 2
Carol Owen emerged from the bathroom in a cloud of steam, toweling herself briskly. As always, her long and leisurely shower had turned the bathroom into an atmospheric model of a tropical swamp. As often happened, she'd forgotten to switch off the air conditioning in the bedroom. The contrast was bracing. She thought about retreating into the steam to acclimatize herself, but she decided to plunge into the cold room and put up with a few minutes' discomfort. It served her right, and she believed in taking the consequences of her actions. She wrapped the towel tightly around her body and switched off the window unit.
"Next time, dope, turn it off first" she muttered.
She sat on the edge of the double bed and dislodged a cigarette from a box of Marlboros. She noticed that her hand shook. She knew it wasn't shaking from the cold. The long shower, intended to calm her nerves after this morning's unpleasant encounter, hadn't accomplished its purpose.
Fumbling with the matches, she got them wet. They wouldn't strike.
"Fuck this climate!" she cried.
She knew it was illogical to blame the climate of Lunalia, Florida, for getting her matches wet this time; but the climate had done enough to warrant even unjustified criticism. Matches wouldn't strike. Cigarettes got soggy. Ice cubes melted too fast, disrupting the tempo of her drinking. Books fell apart. Clothing and furniture sprouted fungus growths.
She pulled a fresh towel from the bureau and continued to dry herself as she prowled the hotel bedroom in search of a match. Starting with the climate, her litany of dissatisfaction continued. Unless you told them specifically not to do it, you got grits with your breakfast bacon and eggs. Grits, for chrissakes! And the water. It wasn't the cool, strong surge of the Atlantic she'd come to love from childhood summers at the Jersey shore. Most of the time the Gulf just lay there, waveless; green and beautiful, yes, but it felt like a tepid bathtub.
Then there were the natives. She sensed that their friendliness and charm was a carefully polished act, a strategy that let them indulge their insatiable curiosity about her personal life. She sensed an underlying hostility, as if they blamed her personally for the Civil War. All this tropical paradise needed to make it completely was a noisy army of Hawaiian-shifted tourists, but fortunately it was the off season.
The temperature in the room had risen perceptibly by the time she found a light. She returned to the window and put the air conditioner on its lowest setting.
She didn't know why people came here to retire, but they did, in droves. South of town, the mangrove swamps had been blitzed and bulldozed into lagoon developments, most of them little more than glorified trailer parks. The retirees who filled them had their choice of staying home and providing a blood-bank for the mosquito's, or else they could go out in the Gulf and sport with the sea urchins and jellyfish and stingrays and sharks. She'd even heard an alligator booming one night in the swamps. One of Florida's best-kept secrets, John said, was that those things really did eat people.
If she hadn't met John, she would have turned right around and gone home after taking One look at the real estate Charlie had left her. It consisted of six cottages across the causeway on Lunalia Beach, a couple of business properties in the town of Lunalia, and two hundred acres of swampland to the north and east of town. On paper, it was a small fortune. In fact, the rents barely met the costs of taxes and maintenance. The economic prospect of developing the swampland looked bleak at the moment; nor could she unload it for anything near its presumed value. John had advised her to hold on to it and wait for better days, and that had seemed like sound advice.
She had to smile, remembering how she'd met John Creighton. It had been one of those embarrassing moments. She'd gotten her directions confused, and she'd been giving his house the once-over on the assumption that it belonged to her. He'd invited her in to look around, and she'd done so. It was only after she'd been given a guided tour of the place that both of them realized the nature of the misunderstanding. By showing her around, he was just being polite-or humoring her, perhaps, thinking she was some kind of nut. She'd retreated in confusion, as hastily as possible.
The next day he'd shown up at her hotel, volunteering his services as an obviously much-needed guide. A local lawyer was supposed to be filling that function. He was a Sidney Green-street look-alive who'd offered her a paper cup full of Southern Comfort at their first meeting, and prying him loose from his office had proven an impossible task. So, after only a brief hesitation, she accepted John's offer.
He wasn't a native-thank God-but he knew the area well. He could reel off amusing anecdotes about the pirates and conquistadores, the Seminoles and swamp-crackers who had called this part of the world home at one time or another. More to the point, he could read the tax maps in the County Clerk's office and talk knowledgeably about drainage and sewage and zoning laws and the latest environmental legislation covering developments. A stint on a newspaper had given him a working knowledge of local government, and he was always collecting odd bits of information, never knowing when he might be able to use it in a novel. He was no expert, certainly, but he always seemed to know who to ask and what to ask them when an expert was needed. She found herself depending on him.
More than that-she found herself opening up, cracking through the shell that had calcified around her since Charlie's death. She tried to tell herself that it wasn't a sexual thing, just a platonic friendship with an older man. But John was thirty-nine, and if Charlie hadn't been shot down in Vietnam he'd be only a year younger than that now.
But he didn't apply the pressure that younger men did. With him, dinner and a show seemed to be an end in itself, rather than an unpleasant but necessary preliminary to a roll in the hay. He, sent her flowers. He sent her letters-and that was odd, getting letters from someone who lived less than three miles from her hotel, but John had a thing about telephones and he had also had a passion for writing letters. It struck her as a novel and charming means of communication.
Men who tried to rush her into bed-and most men seemed like that nowadays-had chilled her. She'd begun to suspect that there was something seriously wrong with her, that Charlie's death had traumatized her far more than she was willing to admit. She'd always been shy and awkward with men. Charlie had been the first and only man to arouse her-until she'd met John.
She found herself making advances to him. It was she who initiated contact, the touching of hands, the meaningful meeting of eyes. The first time they'd kissed-well, she'd had to just about entice him into it.
The first explanation that came readily to mind, one that she tried hard to reject, was that John was queer. He had a daughter, of course, but that proved nothing. She just couldn't believe that he was a homosexual, however. She got nothing but thoroughly masculine vibrations from him. She usually sensed a lack of interest, sometimes even a contempt, in homosexuals, but John just didn't project that.
Then he, in turn, opened up. He'd told her about his two marriages-about how they'd ended so suddenly and disastrously. His first wife had died six years ago in Yucatan, miles from any doctor, apparently the victim of some swift and deadly tropical disease. Two years ago, his second wife had died just as abruptly and unexpectedly as the first. Her fatal illness had been diagnosed as encephalitis.
Both women had been young, beautiful, radiantly healthy. John had loved each of them, and both of them had been snatched away from him without warning. He didn't articulate it in such terms, but at least on a subconscious level he believed that he was cursed; that anyone he dared to love would be taken away from him. That was what was holding him back from her.
Carol took this as a challenge. She set out to make him love her. She had to admit to herself that she already loved him. It wasn't easy. John had other hangups-her money, for instance. He'd been shocked to learn that her assets totaled more than two million dollars. He had a horror of becoming-as he'd once described it in a bitter moment-"a rich woman's lapdog" before he'd made his own fortune through literature. He refused to let her pay for anything. He sulked when she sent him gifts he considered expensive.
It was sometimes a source of irritation to her, but more often she found his attitude charming-and refreshing, too, in contrast with the assorted fortune-hunters she'd been fending off during most of her adult life. Even the fat lawyer, Alvin Montgomery, had chuckled his way through a lot of coy remarks about lovely young widows in need of advice and protection, remarks that fell just short of a proposal of marriage, during their very first meeting.
Dry now, she hung her towels in the bathroom and caught a glimpse of herself in the full-length mirror that lined the inside of the door. Sudden glimpses of herself in mirrors never failed to startle her. She'd grown so accustomed to being a skinny, gawky beanpole that she'd never quite assimilated in her mind the change that had come over her at the age of eighteen. In her mind's eye she was still lank and awkward, and the reality sometimes caught her by surprise.
Now, at twenty-four, the only reminder of her teenage rawboned-look was her face. She thought it looked haggard, with the eyes set a little too deeply, the cheeks hollowed. Men said it was beautiful. One, a literary type, had once told her that it looked as if she'd been feeding on her own beauty, but she suspected he'd cribbed that from some book. He'd been the sort who would have. Her nose was straight and classical, but she thought it was a shade too long; she thought her lips were a little too full. Men disagreed on both counts.
Her examination wasn't entirely critical. There were things about her looks that she liked. Her eyes, for instance, were an unusual shade of light green that she was quite pleased with. In sunlight, they seemed translucent. Her hair, too, was a natural shade of fiery red that she wouldn't have traded for any other.
Fortunately, she hadn't been cursed with the kind of skin that usually went with such hair. She tanned easily and evenly, and during the two months of her stay in Florida, her skin had assumed a deep shade of gold that made the contrast of her hair and eyes even more arresting than usual. The outlines of a skimpy bikini showed a pale cream across her breasts and loins.
She wished she had the guts to get rid of those white stripes before her honeymoon. Big stretches of Lunalia Beach were virtually deserted at this time of year. If she wanted total and unquestionable privacy, she could rent an outboard runabout and find some little island in the bay that nobody would stumble across in a million years. Still she was reluctant. She'd never managed to overcome the modesty that had been drilled into her by a strict Catholic upbringing, even though she'd consciously rejected most of those teachings.
It would have been easier to get in some nude sunbathing sessions if she had a girlfriend, but she just didn't know any women in Lunalia Beach. Even if she did know them, she couldn't imagine any of the natives or retirees joining in such sessions.
She made a mental correction: she knew one girl, Melody Creighton. Melody would be the ideal companion for such a junket, too, because-to put it as charitably as possible-Melody's attitude toward modesty was casual. She thought nothing of going around the house half-naked, apparently unconscious of the fact that she had become, physically, a fully developed woman. Her father, so like the caricature of the absent-minded genius in many ways, didn't even seem to notice. The girl needed a mother badly.
Carol didn't know if she was really prepared to fill that role. Despite the difference in their ages, she felt that Melody was almost a contemporary. That was understandable. John and his daughter had moved around a lot during her formative years. She'd never settled long enough in one place to make friends her own age. Her principal companion was her father. She was a precocious girl, mentally and physically mature beyond her years; and when she compared her intelligent, urbane, witty, talented, charming father with the kids her own age-well, they were bound to suffer in comparison, and so she made no effort to make friends with them. Carol had more than once observed her freezing out a boy on the telephone.
Melody's sophisticated outlook and her dependence on her father were understandable, but that didn't dissuade Carol from regarding the relationship as-to put it more bluntly than she really wanted to-unhealthy. All girls had sexual urges, however deviously repressed, for their fathers. With Melody, the urge would naturally be stronger, the repression more devious, the potential psychological problems more shattering.
Considering all these things, it would be impossible-certainly beyond her capability-to come on with Melody like a full-fledged stepmother. She would have to accept the girl's status as a quasi-contemporary in the family and try to win her confidence as a friend. On that basis, maybe the sunbathing idea wasn't a bad one.
Somehow, she'd already gotten off on the wrong foot with John's daughter. Most of it was due to jealousy, of course; subconsciously or not, Melody didn't want some woman barging in to disrupt the status quo and share her beloved daddy with her. Only she didn't call him Daddy, she called him John, which served to underline her curious situation, to Carol's way of thinking.
Someone less willing than Carol was to meet Melody half-way would have said that the kid was spoiled rotten. Carol rejected such simplistic terminology. There was a problem there, definitely, but it had to be unraveled carefully. Maybe she could do it. Maybe, if they had a long talk about it, she could bring John around to seeing that a problem existed and enlist his help. But whatever she did, she had to gain Melody's confidence, if not her friendship or respect. An actively hostile Melody could turn her marriage into a nightmare.
She looked again at those white strips in the mirror. They were ugly. She would have to get rid of them before-the honeymoon. She used that word, but the image that came unbidden to her mind was something far more graphic than the word. For a moment she could feel his naked body pressing against her, feel his arms around her, feel his cock sliding inward ... She gasped. She felt a spasm almost like a pain in her loins. She'd never before felt so actively, aggressively, hungrily sexual, and the feeling had swept over her like a sudden and unexpected wave.
"I want to fuck you, John," she whispered aloud. "I want to fuck you like I've never wanted it before."
She succeeded in shocking herself. She felt ineffably wicked, like a naughty little schoolgirl experimenting with a newly acquired word.
"Fuck," she whispered again. "I want you to slip your cock into me and fuck me."
She stared at herself. Her eyelids were lowered, her lips were slightly parted, she looked like a caricature of a woman in heat. She giggled at her mirrored image, but even that did nothing to ease the reality of the tingling sensations in her body. Her nipples had become hard and erect. She slid her hands up her body to fondle them, making them even harder. They looked wizened and brown against the smooth cream of her untanned breasts.
Why the hell didn't she tell him? Why didn't she call him up right this minute and repeat those words-well, maybe not those words exactly, but repeat the gist of them into his ear. She giggled again at the thought of making an obscene telephone call to her fiancé.
She had no real moral qualms about making love to him before they were married. It was just that waiting had seemed the proper thing to do. And there had been no overwhelming physical compulsion. John had tried to get her into bed, but he hadn't seemed noticeably upset when she'd declined. She'd been nervous and tense, and she'd had a nebulous, not very closely examined notion that she didn't want to spoil things, that she didn't want to be unfaithful to Charlie's memory by going to bed with a man she wasn't married to.
Now, suddenly, alone in her hotel room, she felt just such an overwhelming, physical compulsion. She wanted John. She wanted him now. Melody would be in school at this hour. She could throw something on and be there in ten minutes to surprise him-really surprise him,, she reflected.
That would be fun, but he might not be there, and she'd feel like an utter fool if she drove out there, impelled by passion, and found an empty house. Maybe he was working. Sometimes, pulled out of his study with his work still on his mind, he hardly seemed to recognize her. She couldn't, of course, suggest that he come here. Despite its incredible name-the Hotel Hooker-Lunalia's only formal hotel wasn't the sort of place for an afternoon assignation.
Again she felt deliciously wicked as she lay on the bed and reached for the telephone. Whenever the phone caught her in the shower, some irrational habit of modesty made her grab a towel or a robe to cover herself before answering it. Now she was flouting that ingrained quirk. She was going to lie here naked and talk to a man. Not just any man, either, but the one who was going to be fucking her within an hour from now.
She reached for the phone and propped herself on her elbow to dial. The phone rang five times. Six. Seven. God damn it! Maybe he thought it was his editor. But if he thought that she was going to bother him, he would have taken the phone off the hook. Or a bill collector. No. He must be out, swimming perhaps. She would give it ten rings. Nine.
"Hello?" said a voice already weary with boredom before the conversation had begun: Melody's.
"What are you doing home from school?" Carol blurted.
She could have kicked herself. It was a rude thing to say; more than that, she hadn't been able to keep a tone of disappointment and vexation from her voice. Lamely, Carol added: " ... I mean, I didn't expect to hear your voice."
"I'm sick. I think it's something I ate," Melody said. "I'm in bed now, as a matter of fact."
She didn't sound sick. She sounded now as if she were in on some huge joke. But at least she was in a good mood, and it was seldom that Carol found her in one.
"I suppose you want to speak to John," Melody continued. "He just got in."
Carol toyed with the notion that John was tickling her while she tried to talk on the telephone: that's what it sounded like. But that would have been out of character. She'd never seen them engage in any such horseplay. Their physical contact was limited to an occasional chaste kiss, both father and daughter leaning forward from the waist as if afraid of bringing their bodies in contact. They did hold hands a lot, though, and Carol had always found that charming and a little quaint.
"Wait," Carol said. "I wanted to talk to you, too."
"Oh?" Her tone became guarded.
"Yes. I wondered if we could go swimming together. Sort of a picnic, you know. Just you and me. We ought to start to get to know each other a little better, don't you think?"
More giggles. Damn it, he must be tickling her! Or maybe she was teasing him, trying to keep the phone away from him. Carol had the unpleasant feeling that she was intruding, that secrets were being kept from her, that she was the odd one out.
When Melody didn't answer, Carol continued: "Sounds like you're having one hell of a time out there."
Melody whooped with laughter. Carol had never heard her make such an exuberant, unrestrained sound-for the first time, she sounded like the fifteen-year-old that she was.
"You really ought to be here, Carol," Melody said.
Yes, I really ought to-but not with you around, kiddo, she thought. Her plans for the afternoon, if she could call them plans, had been blown out the window by Melody's unexpected presence. The only possible alternative was going with John to one of the motels out on the highway, and that prospect seemed dreary and sordid. She didn't want to do it like that, her first time with John, not at some shack up motel.
"You don't sound sick at all," Carol observed. She wanted to bring an end to this stupid conversation, but at the same time she didn't want to break off the only prolonged contact she'd ever achieved with the elusive and aloof Melody. It was an exasperating situation, and she tried hard not to let her exasperation show.
"Oh, I'm getting better," Melody said- sighed, actually. "I'm getting steadily better. Isn't that right, John?"
Another private joke; this time she thought she heard John's laughter in the background. She fought down her rising annoyance. Of course they had private jokes. They always would. She couldn't allow herself to be jealous.
"Listen, Melody, I'm sorry if I interrupted something-"
"No, you didn't, Carol, honestly, you didn't interrupt anything."
"-but how about that picnic I mentioned?"
"Just the two of us, huh, getting acquainted?" Melody said, and Carol was alert for any hint of mockery in her tone; but her fear was dispelled when Melody went on, "That sounds great. Can we do it tomorrow?"
"Why-sure. Of course. But if you aren't feeling well-"
"I feel terrific, Carol. You have no idea."
Carol could only absorb that without comment. It occurred to her that tomorrow was a school day, too, but she decided not to mention it. Now that she'd at last begun to establish some kind of rapport with the girl, it was no time to revert to adult stuffiness.
"I bet you want to talk to John, now. He's right here."
"Yes, I-"
"Hi, baby," John interrupted.
"What's going on there, John? It sounds like you're having a pillow fight or something."
"Something."
He seldom held up his end of a telephone conversation. Carol heard background noises that she couldn't identify, but she guessed that Melody was still in the room with him. That inhibited her from speaking about what was really on her mind-what had been on her mind. She'd cooled off considerably since her conversation with Melody had begun. Abstractedly, she started to reach for a robe to cover her nakedness. Then she remembered her little game. Cooled off or not, she would talk to him like this, nude.
"What's on your mind?" he asked. "I was lonely."
"Well Come on over," he said, but she didn't detect any real enthusiasm in his voice.
"What I wanted ... "
"What is it, Carol?"
"Oh ... nothing. I guess I'm just upset today, John," she said. She remembered the incident that had upset her this morning. It no longer bothered her nearly as much as it had, but it gave her the chance to take her mind off her more immediate problem. "This crazy little cop stopped me this morning, while I was driving-"
"Yeah, Beau Boulton. Short for Beaufort. Sheriff's deputy."
"What are you, psychic?"
"Your description was perfect: a crazy little cop. He's upset a lot of people in the county."
"He was so ... creepy. I mean, it was all 'Yes, Ma'am' and 'No, Ma'am,' and. 'If'n you'd be so kind, Ma'am'-and all the time he was undressing me with his eyes. He made me feel-cheap, and unclean, just with his insinuating voice. I was shaking when I got back to the hotel."
"Don't let Beau get on your nerves. He won't really bother you unless you're black or poor, preferably both."
"This whole place is getting on my nerves, John. This afternoon, I ... " Her voice trailed off. That would have been just dandy: telling him about her sudden onset of desire for him as a symptom of her general nervousness.
He didn't seem to notice her dangling sentence. He went on: "Beau stands about five-six and weighs one-forty, but there's not a bigger man in the county when he puts on that gun and badge. At least, that's how Beau feels about it. He gave me the treatment once, too. I gathered that he doesn't like people who even read books, let alone those who write them."
Carol smiled. The horrible little man in the opaque sunglasses no longer seemed like something that had strutted out of a nightmare, but just another local character. There were plenty of those, God knew.
"I'm sorry I bothered you, John. I've probably taken you away from your work."
"Hardly. Why don't you come over?"
"I-no, I think I'll rest this afternoon. Take a nap. Maybe later, this evening."
"Fine. Just come out."
She began to drowse. Halfway between awake and asleep it occurred to her that the telephone was in John's bedroom, not Melody's, but the significance of that fact, if any, eluded her.