“I’ll leave a pitcher of iced tea on the coffee table where you can reach it,” he told her. “Here, take your pills. Is there anything else I can do to make you more comfortable?”
She was hungry and she wanted something hard and tough to chew, for she felt an overwhelming urge to bite and tear at something that couldn’t bite back, but she told him crossly not to fuss over her, just to go, and so he leveled a look at her that made her feel slightly ashamed of herself, and he left.
It had been too hot to sleep. The breeze, even here on the second floor, had dropped to practically nothing and she could hear the steady drone and drip of a window air-conditioner downstairs. Richy’s mother, Ada, managed to sleep days only with the air-condi-tioner, a pair of ear plugs and dark shades at her windows, but her air-conditioner, like most other appliances in the apartment, broke down at least once a month. Maybe she’d be better off finding herself another place to stay, Willy thought irritably as she struggled with a sticking ice tray.
Suddenly the walls seemed to close in on her. Thoughts of her infinitesimal savings, her lack of employment, her father’s probable reaction when he learned of her present circumstances, not to mention the mess she had got herself in as far as her foolish heart was concerned, all proved too much to cope with in the uninspiring confines of her shabby room. May as well give the antibiotic something to get its teeth into, she thought grimly, lurching into the bedroom to change into her bikini.
It was a good thing it was too early for Kiel to be back from work. She could imagine what he’d say after her having pleaded invalidism. Dismissing the thought from her mind, she spread her beach towel out on the sand just above the level of the tideline and lowered herself gingerly, taking care to keep her injured foot on the side away from the water. At least if the waves washed over her head, she could hold her bandage up and keep it dry, she thought with a partial return to her normal irreverent sense of humor.
The sun felt marvelous soaking through her skin and the thought of an even greater crop of freckles didn’t faze her in the least. She dozed when the soothing susurrus of the surf relaxed her for the first time since yesterday. When she opened her eyes again, instead of the cerulean dome overhead, she looked up into a brass bowl that shaded to copper on the western side. She was actually beginning to feel chilly, believe it or not, and she sat up and considered the easiest way to get to her feet without grinding wet sand into her bandage.
“Hi. I thought I’d come out and join you now that the sun’s not so hot. A girl can’t be too careful of her complexion, can she? But, of course, you don’t have to worry, poor thing.”
Twisting her head, she saw Melanie Fredericks drop a velvety towel to the sand beside her and lower herself gracefully.
So much for her precarious peace of mind. Willy settled back into place, bracing herself to think of something pleasant to say when she’d like to have the nerve to ignore the girl and walk away.
“Hello, Melanie. Did you have a good time sightseeing today?”
That brought on a sly, sidelong glance that Willy was in no mood to try and interpret. “Oh, I had an interesting day, all right,” drawled the little brunette. “Claudia and I went to her apartment and spent the afternoon talking.”
Well, bully for you, Willy thought sourly. She could think of lots more pleasant things to do than to spend an afternoon talking with either of them. Visit the dentist, maybe, or figure her income tax.
“Don’t you want to know what we talked about?”
“Not particularly,” Willy retorted, turning over on her face and pretending to be sleepy again.
“Oh, you should have been there. You’d have been awfully interested, Willy. What a peculiar name for a girl. . . Willy. Do you like it?”
Irritably, Willy told her that her friends called her Wilhelmina.
“We talked about mutual friends . . . yours, mine and Claudia’s,” the girl said, pausing expectantly afterward.
Willy rolled over and sat up again. “All right,” she sighed, “I can see you’re dying to tell me something, so why don’t you spit it out!”
“Oh, you
are
crude, aren’t you? Claudia said you weren’t her sort, and Randy— But of course, Randy would have an entirely different opinion, wouldn’t he?”
Inside her, several blocks of ice shifted and settled into a pattern she didn’t like, didn’t care for at all. “Randy?” she repeated cautiously.
“Randy Collier. You know him?”
“Look, Melanie, you have something on your mind. I’m in no mood to play games, so I suggest you either get to the point or go back inside and leave me in peace. My patience isn’t all that good at the moment.” “Well, the point is, Wilhelmina, dear, that you’re the woman who broke up my engagement. Now that I see you for myself, I wonder what all the fuss was about. I mean, really, it’s not as if you were any big threat or anything. Kiel might just as well not have bothered.”
A slow sort of paralysis crept over her mind and she could only stare at the preening little creature in the ice-blue one-piece bathing suit that fit like a second skin, emphasizing the very features it covered. “Kiel might just as well not have bothered with what?” she repeated with a sense of dread.
“Well, after all, Randy is his half-brother, and when Randy called from Norfolk General and told us he was lying there with a broken leg and all sorts of miserable things, Kiel went rushing off to see him. I mean, what else could he do, especially as we hadn’t heard a thing from him in ages.” Melanie eyed her expectantly, but Willy was determined not to probe. She waited, dreading what she’d hear next, but when it came, it was worse than anything she could have imagined.
“You see, Randy and I were all set to be married, and then, when we got this letter that said he was making a fool of himself over some greedy little office worker who only went out with men of a certain income level for what she could get out of them, why I was all broken up. I declare, I wept buckets! Simply buckets full, and I told Kielly, and he and Daddy decided he’d better go see what was going on, so,” she continued with hardly a pause for air, “Kielly went to the hospital and Randy told him there was this girl who worked at the office next door and she had made a sort of— Well, you know how a girl can do when she’s, you know, interested in a man. Well, anyway, poor Randy told her he was engaged and all, but she wouldn’t leave him alone and when she threatened to write to his fiancée— that was me,” she added ingenuously, “and tell her this whole mess o’ lies, well, Randy got all upset and first thing he knew, he was upside down in a ditch.”
The air left Willy’s lungs in a burst and she closed her eyes. Random impressions whirled dizzyingly in her head and she tried to reach up and catch them and deal with them. How much of what Melanie said was the truth and how much a malicious prank on the part of her and Claudia? Somehow, she couldn’t see the older girl playing tricks, no matter how she disliked her, but writing a letter that would damage Willy’s position with Randy? Yes, she could easily see her doing something like that.
“Well?” Melanie prompted now, watching her from those perfectly guileless blue eyes.
“Well, what?”
“Don’t you have anything to say for yourself?”
Willy moved her shoulders in a gesture of resignation. “What can i say? If you believe that of your fiancé, then you’ll be only too glad he escaped my vicious clutches, won’t you? When’s the wedding?” Randy and Melanie. Now that she knew, it seemed perfect. The trouble was, where did Kiel come into this?
And with that thought, the crux of the matter hit her like a sledgehammer. Kiel had been courting her deliberately! He had set out to meet her. The car, the sherry—had Randy told him how much she enjoyed cooking and about her enthusiasm for good cars? Lord, even that added up to the picture of a mercenary female out for a good time! Something inside her crumpled and she got to her knees and dragged herself up as if she were a hundred years old.
“What’s the matter, Willy? Don’t tell me you’ve had enough sunshine?” Melanie taunted softly, stretching herself like a kitten.
Not bothering to answer, Willy scooped up her towel and turned toward the dune, deliberately grinding her cut foot into the sand as if the pain might erase the far worse pain of the past few minutes. She didn’t pause when Melanie called after her, but her chin rose a fraction as she continued her escape.
“Just don’t get any ideas about the way Kiel’s been pretending to be nice to you, honey. He knew all along who you were, he just wanted me to see for myself what sort of a woman you were, one who’d chase any man who looked at her if he had enough money. He doesn’t want me to blame poor old Randy, but it really doesn’t matter, now. You see, I’ve already decided to have Kiel instead.” She had raised her voice for the last few words, for Willy’s progress was more rapid than she might have expected, and the sound of that sugary drawl, sounding slightly shrill as it carried out over the late-afternoon quietness, lingered in Willy’s ears for hours, robbing her of an appetite, destroying any chance she might have had for a night’s rest.
The phone rang several times, and in desperation, she got dressed and hobbled downstairs to her car. She could handle the clutch and the brakes better than she could any mealymouthed excuses from Kiel Faulkner, she decided grimly as she drove herself toward Oregon Inlet.
With no conscious decision on her part, she found herself in Hatteras. She pulled up into the parking lot at the base of the lighthouse and sat there, her arms resting across the steering wheel, and she realized with a shaky laugh that her chin had been jutting out so far, so long, that her neck muscles were tired. She also made the discovery that she was starving.
An hour and a half later, she sat in her motel room and dialed an outside line. She was replete with a seafood dinner, none of which she even tasted, but at least it had momentarily put an end to that awful hollow feeling inside her. She had been lucky in the matter of a room, coming on a cancellation before any other tired and homeless transient pulled up.
“Hello, Ada? It’s me, Willy,” she said when the familiar brogue came on the other end.
“Good Lord, Willy, where in the world have you got to? There’s been all sorts of bother the past hour or two over you.”
Kiel. It could only be Kiel, trying to explain away his behavior, although she hardly saw why he bothered, now that she knew. Certainly he and his little Melanie could pack up and get back to wherever it was they came from—Atlanta, Bar Harbor. “What’s wrong, Ada? I’m at Hatteras, and the reason I called, I left—”
“Hatteras!” The exclamation stabbed her ear and she held the receiver away. “Willy, that man across the way’s been beatin’ my door off the hinges wantin’ to know what happened to you, an’ I told him plain out I didn’t know, because I didn’t, but then that other fellow came, and—”
“Matt? Matthew Rumark, my boss?”
“Matthew? No, it was some good-looking dude, older than Matt, but still—you know what I mean—the sort I’d follow if he so much as frowned at me. Drove a fancy car, sort of heavy and foreign-looking and—”
Jasper. It could only be Jasper. “Did he say what he wanted, Ada?” she asked cautiously.
“Nope. Just asked if I knew where you were and when you’d be back, and I told him you was as likely to be out all night as not. Give him something to chew on. Doesn’t pay to let ’em think they have you where they want you, not even silver-plated ones like this gent.”
She sighed. “Thanks, Ada,” she said, hanging up the phone absently. So Jasper had not revealed his relationship to her. He probably thought he was bending over to be fair, allowing her to play at being a poor working girl up to the last minute, she thought bitterly. Well, he could just cool his heels for a spell. She had this room until tomorrow afternoon at least, and she’d just sit tight and work out her next steps before confronting her father. He’d still be there when she finally showed up, making hourly calls or maybe even having the place staked out.
So let him worry a bit. It might arouse some long-dormant paternal streak in him—not that she was at all sure she wanted
that!
She lay in bed staring at the ceiling for a long time, trying to chart a course through a sea of imponderables. She never even thought of the fact that she had forgotten to ask Ada to go up and close her windows if it rained.
And then, with a streak of innate honesty, she admitted to herself that she didn’t care if it flooded the whole place; she had only wanted to be told that Kiel had asked after her.
Chapter Nine
Awakening to see the curtains standing straight out from the windows, it occurred to Willy that if her father had been looking for proof that she wasn’t capable of looking after herself, she had handed him a platterful. It was blowing a fitful rain from the northeast and she was here without so much as a change of clothes, much less a sweater or a raincoat. For that matter, she probably didn’t even have her checkbook with her. What a shiny crowning touch to her career as an independent operator, to have to call on her father to come bail her out.
Deciding there was no point in remaining cooped up here in her motel room until checkout time, she quickly pulled on yesterday’s jeans and shirt and did the best she could with neither toothbrush nor hairbrush. At least there was no vast, intimidating lobby to cross, wondering if she could make it without either stumbling over a potted palm or tripping on a rug. She had never been the most self-assured of adolescents, and sometimes she wondered if she had improved all that much since, in spite of all the very expensive schooling that seemed to make her only more self-conscious.
She drove slowly through the village, seeing places she had walked with Kiel only a few days ago, and making a rude noise at her maudlin sentimentality, she swerved into the parking lot of a supermarket, where she bought herself a bottle of grapefruit juice and a hunk of cheese, with a box of crackers that was already going stale as soon as she opened it. She hadn’t even counted her money, but there was no point in being more extravagant than she had to be. At least not until she had paid her tab at the motel.