Sunset Bridge (32 page)

She stepped back and viewed them as a whole once again. About to give up, she turned away when the answer hit her. Whirling, she stared at the wall. And yes, one of the photographs did not belong here, was framed similarly but not exactly like the others, did not have a road or a bridge featured prominently. She stepped forward to view the mountain pool with a waterfall cascading into it, a lovely and, at first glance,
compatible nature scene. There was no photographer’s name in the corner.

The photograph looked familiar, but she couldn’t remember why. She tried to let her mind go blank. She had not seen it on a wall, and she didn’t think she had seen it here during her one and only visit. She imagined it in a frame on a table, and that didn’t seem right, either. In a gallery bin. No.

And then she remembered. Pages. Lots of pages. She had seen this photograph in a catalog. But why and where?

Stuck, she moved restlessly back and forth, staring at it until the answer appeared. The photograph had been in a catalog of security essentials. More than a year ago she had thumbed through it to find an appropriate gun safe for her service revolver. The photograph hid a small safe, and she had been intrigued by the graceful efficiency of such a thing. Two for the price of one, a pleasant photograph to adorn her living room, and a place to keep her gun.

Except that the price for the unit had reflected its dual purpose, and instead, since she and Felo lived on cops’ salaries, she had purchased a cheaper, utilitarian vault that she and Felo could share.

She moved toward it to be sure she was right. The safe jutted out just enough to set it apart. She thought she remembered that this model worked with a remote the owner could program with his own code. If the safe had been installed by Blake himself, she might be in business. He might well have used the same numbers that had gotten her into the house.

Excitement was building. She told herself that this, like everything else of importance in the house, had probably been emptied and the contents carted away. But she owed herself a chance to find out. She just had to find the remote.

She turned to begin.

Blake Armstrong, his expression murderous, was standing just a yard away, a table lamp in his hand.

Her eyes widened, and she took a step backward, but not quickly enough. Before she could lift a hand to protect herself, he smashed the lamp against the side of her head. The last thing Maggie heard as she fell to the floor was the wailing of the wind that had so thoroughly hidden his approach.

W
anda figured there were signs, then there were
signs
. Phyllis turning into a real hurricane wasn’t much of one, not by itself, but when Wanda noticed she was down to just three pies and both hands of her wall clock were sitting squarely on three, she pondered the coincidence. Then, when a man sporting a T-shirt with a picture of the late Dale Earnhart and his car—number three—arrived to put her three hurricane shutters in place, she knew it was time to head home to get Chase and her remaining boxes. She called Ken to tell him that his man had arrived and she was leaving, but the line crackled so badly she wasn’t sure he caught more than the gist.

She made it to her car without incident, although trash was skipping across the street, followed by heavier objects that hadn’t been properly secured. To avoid the worst of the rain she was wearing a bright orange slicker and vinyl boots with leopard spots, and she’d covered her hair with a rain scarf tied so tight she could feel the pulse pounding in her throat, like a bird beating its wings against a cage.

It took her two minutes just to get a break so she could pull into traffic. She wondered why all these morons had waited this long to go home or leave town. Of course, she was one of those morons, but what kind of excuse was that? By the time she got into the line heading across the bridge, all her patience was used up. There was no call for all these people to be heading to Palmetto Grove Key. She couldn’t see very far ahead, but judging from the snail’s pace of the traffic, everybody in southwest Florida had decided to sightsee. Maybe they all wanted a good look at the waves. Maybe they wanted to have a run at the surf.

By the time she was actually on the bridge, which almost felt as if it were swaying in the wind, she was no longer silently fuming. She had reverted to childhood, when she had constructed her own one-of-a-kind expletives to escape the wrath of her mother, who’d been all too handy with a bar of soap.

“Fiddling fraternizing frivolous flounders!” She gripped the steering wheel harder. “Seriously stupid simple-minded sheepsheads!”

She was working on “k’s”—one of the hardest, if memory served—when a bright light cut through the rain-fogged gloom to her left. She squinted and peered across three lanes of traffic.

She abandoned her strings of adjectives and went straight for the real thing. “Well, damn!”

There was activity on the pedestrian walkway, lights blinking, people moving back and forth. Nobody had to explain to her what was going on.

The man in charge had already explained.

She closed her eyes, which had no consequences, since traffic was now at a dead halt. She realized that there weren’t
really that many cars on the bridge. But the ones that were had almost stopped moving right at this spot so they could watch Derek Forbes and his band of merry men setting up to film the scene he had warned her about.

She realized more. One, that she should have warned Ken and asked him to talk Derek out of this latest escapade. Two, that she should have tried to talk him out of it herself. Three, that, as usual, she’d been so overwhelmed by the man, she hadn’t thought about the ramifications of anything he’d told her. Four, that a man who lived that close to the edge was always in danger of tumbling over it. And in addition to that possibility, this time, by slowing traffic when people needed to evacuate, he was endangering the lives of Palmetto Grove’s citizens.

There was nothing she could do now. She couldn’t talk him out of doing the shoot. The most anyone could hope for was that Derek would realize he was causing a traffic jam and abandon his plan. When the car in front of her began to move again, she stepped on the gas and followed suit. The best thing she could do was get off the bridge, so others could cross behind her.

Once she passed through the traffic light, the trip to Happiness Key went quickly. Randall’s was closed, and the store’s parking lot nearly empty of cars. She passed a couple of SUVs towing boats toward the bridge, most likely hoping to find higher ground and safer storage. She knew Alice and Olivia were already battened down at Shell Horizon with Roger Goldsworthy, because Alice had called to tell her not to worry. Now she wondered about the rest of her friends.

She slowed as she passed Janya’s house and saw, with some surprise, that lights were on inside and Janya’s old sedan was still parked in front. She passed Tracy’s house and saw neither
lights nor a car, and figured her landlady had done all she could to secure the cottages and was on her way to higher ground. On a whim she drove to the end of the tiny development to Maggie’s house and saw that here, too, the place looked abandoned. She hoped Maggie was halfway to the camp and more than halfway to a real reunion.

The packing went quickly. She’d already stuffed boxes with important memorabilia, and in less than twenty minutes she managed to get them all tightly squeezed into the trunk of her car, sheltered now under the carport, which helped, at least a little, to keep her dry as she worked. The phone rang once, but by the time she picked it up, the caller had hung up.

Chase, who had been cooped up too long, scrambled outside as she made her final trip to carry his bed and supplies to the car. Without asking permission, the dog took off down the road. She wasn’t worried that he wouldn’t return. Chase was a greyhound, after all, and running was what he did best. But she
was
worried that with the rain falling harder, an approaching car might not see him in time to brake. She called to him, but he was already long gone, in the direction of Janya’s house. She decided she would lock up the house, then follow in her car and hope she could coax him into the backseat so they could leave for town.

When she got near Janya’s, she saw her friend, but not the dog. Janya was trudging toward Wanda’s, no children in sight.

Wanda slammed on her brakes and put down the passenger-side window as Janya approached the car, spray pelting her face. “What are you doing out here?”

“I phoned you.”

“I couldn’t get to it in time. What’s wrong?”

“We were preparing to leave.” Janya was half shouting,
because thunder was booming in the background now. “Rishi took his car and most of our possessions. I was to follow with the children when they woke from their naps. But I tried to back the car closer to the door to load it, and it will not start. The battery, I think. It has been slow to start all week. I have been watching now for almost an hour for someone to come by and help.”

Wanda leaned over to open the door. “Did you call Rishi?”

“I cannot get him to answer. He is not good about remembering to turn on his cell phone, and the phone at his office just rings and rings. I doubt that he is yet worried about us.”

Janya slid inside as Wanda asked, “Where are the kids?”

“Still napping, but I have to get right back. They are due to wake soon.”

“Have you seen that fool dog of mine?” Wanda asked.

“He is on my porch.”

“We’ll get him, the kids and your stuff, and go. It’ll be tight, but we’ll do our best.”

“I should not leave my car at the house.”

“We can’t jump it in this weather. We’ll drown. And the way it’s parked, I can’t get behind you to push it with mine.”

“Perhaps the key will not flood.”

“It’ll be fine. Phyllis won’t amount to much.” Wanda didn’t know if that was true. She just knew they had no choice.

“Thank you for stopping. No one else came by.”

Wanda was in the act of nodding when she realized what Janya had said. “In the past hour? You didn’t see Tracy or Maggie?”

“No, and I was watching carefully.”

Wanda thought that was strange. “You didn’t notice Maggie earlier? Of course, why would you? You were busy packing.”

“I was carrying things to the car. I looked up the road but saw no one at home.”

Wanda supposed her friend had just missed the others, that they had passed as she was tending the children or packing boxes. But would either woman leave without checking to be sure Janya was on her way to safety? It seemed unlikely. They were all too close for that. The possibility that Maggie hadn’t come home began to nag at her. If Maggie hadn’t been home yet, where was she?

“We’ll keep an eye out for them while we get your stuff moved to my car,” Wanda said. “They’ll probably pass right by us.”

“I would feel better just knowing,” Janya said.

Wanda was afraid that sentiment was mutual.

Tracy was used to heavy traffic. In California she’d been stuck on the Ventura and Santa Monica freeways so frequently that she had routinely traveled with meditation tapes, rice cakes and bottled water in her car. Unfortunately, she had none of those with her this afternoon as she waited for traffic to start moving across the bridge to Palmetto Grove Key. Sunset Bridge, as Marsh had called it.

Marsh.

She flipped open her glove compartment in a futile search for something to eat. She had been so upset after their encounter that she had forgotten to eat the lunch she’d brought from home, and it was still sitting on her desk at the center.

Marsh.

The glove compartment yielded nothing but a packaged oatmeal-raisin cookie from a kid’s meal that Bay hadn’t wanted—stowed there more months ago than she cared to think about. Bay disliked raisins to the point of phobia, and
felt the same way about mushrooms. Otherwise, food was his friend. Marsh had done a great job of introducing his son to different cuisines and flavors.

And there was that name again.

She opened the cookie and sniffed; then, too hungry to be fastidious, she nibbled at one edge. When the cookie yielded, she ate it in three bites.

No rice cakes and no meditation tapes, nothing to help set her mind free to float unimpeded by coarse human emotion. She couldn’t remember feeling this sad, this pathetically dejected and
re
jected, in her entire life. Not even when she had discovered that the pampered life she’d lived in Bel-Air was over. And now, with nothing else to occupy her, she was forced to face the truth.

She had done this to herself.

She was in love with Marsh Egan, totally, devastatingly in love. And yes, that was clearly over the top, but there it was. She had been in love with him for months—before the pregnancy, before their reconciliation last summer—in love with a man who would never have caught her eye when she was still obsessed with money and celebrity, and incapable of noting the real worth of any human being. In love with a redneck attorney with a bratty son she also, unfortunately, adored. In love with the head of an environmental organization that was never going to change the world but might possibly change a tiny corner of it.

Of course, for most of her life she had thought she was better than tiny corners, that she was a woman destined to live large, destined for the best of what life had to offer. And now, because of her own inability to realize the truth, her inability to step forward and take a risk and tell Marsh she loved him, she had sacrificed all hope for happiness. Tiny-corner
happiness. Big-picture happiness. Yes-we’re-different-but-who-cares happiness.

She had pushed him away so fiercely that now he was talking family court and custody agreements. She had pushed him away so finally that the small things they’d shared, things on which they might have built a lasting relationship, were gone for good. Whatever Marsh had felt for her—and really, did she know what that had or hadn’t been?—now he felt nothing but anger.

She understood much too clearly what had brought her to this place. A childhood where love was absent and values were something you picked up at the annual sale at your favorite Rodeo Drive boutique. Marriage to a man she had chosen because of his income and social standing. But that was then. And now?

Now she was a better person, but clearly she was scarred.

She had never learned to search her heart. She had never learned to speak the truth. She had taken baby steps in both directions since moving to Happiness Key, but maybe Marsh had come into her life too soon. Before she had made enough progress. Before she had learned to put aside pride, to take chances with a heart that had been too frequently wounded.

Sick of self-examination—which really was
not
her style or any kind of an upper—she edged to the left to see if she could spot whatever was holding up traffic. Despite the rain, she had a clear view of a line of cars stretching at least a city block, although after that, it seemed spottier. If she was right, that meant eventually traffic would move again. As she started to pull back into line, a door opened, maybe eight vehicles ahead of her, maybe more, and a man got out of what might be a pickup, since he appeared to hop down. He dashed across traffic to the pedestrian walkway and disappeared, not such a
daring feat, since traffic in all lanes was, at best, crawling and, at a certain spot, had stopped entirely.

She leaned forward and wiped her windshield with her palm, peering harder at the road ahead. Nothing happened for a few minutes, and she wondered if she had imagined seeing someone. Then she saw the same man dash back across to his pickup.

Marsh.

Now she was seeing the guy everywhere. But hadn’t that looked like him? Hadn’t he been wearing a rust-colored T-shirt when he confronted her at the center? She pulled a little farther left for a clearer view. Couldn’t that be his pickup? Same basic shape? Same nondescript blue?

As if to make sure she wouldn’t know, the rain began to fall harder and wind rattled the car. The car ahead of her moved forward, and she pulled back to the right and did the same. It would make sense that Marsh would head over to Palmetto Grove Key. Perhaps he was doing exactly what she was, going back to load his car before his final evacuation. But why had he run for the pedestrian walkway? What could have possessed him? Was he warning somebody to get off before a gust of wind sent them sailing over the railing?

She inched forward again, several car lengths this time, until finally she could see what the fuss was about. Way ahead of her, but clear enough even in the rain, a film crew was set up on the walkway. Cars in the closest lanes were completely stopped and watching, although she heard honking behind them.