“I hate them, they hate me, we’re a dysfunctional family,” Ronnie sang softly in parody of the “Barney” theme song. She kept her head turned away from him and her eyes closed, knowing her pose would irritate him almost as much as her answer.
“Funny.”
Ronnie almost smiled. This was too delicious to miss. She opened her eyes and sat up facing him, her feet swinging down to rest on the hot concrete. As she moved, her bikini top all but dropped off her shoulders. She saved it just in the nick of time, catching the straps as they slid down her arms.
From beneath lazily drooping lashes, she watched his face.
His gaze was all over her, eating her up as it swept her body from shoulders to toes. It slid back up over
her smoothly waxed legs and flat stomach to fix on her breasts. The scarlet cups of her bikini top had slipped down the creamy slopes to a point that was scant millimeters short of being pornographic. In fact it just barely covered her nipples.
“Oops,” Ronnie said, meeting his gaze with mockery in her own. Hooking her thumbs in the straps, she very slowly eased them back onto her shoulders.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” His voice was low, so that John the pool man should not hear. His eyes glittered at her; his mouth looked grim.
“Enjoying the sun,” Ronnie replied nonchalantly, without bothering to lower her voice.
“Why not just lie out here naked?” There was a savage undertone to his voice that Ronnie enjoyed.
“Sometimes,” she answered with a small smile as she clipped her bikini top together in back, “I do.”
Standing up, she slid her feet into high-heeled red mules and waved to John.
“See you next week,” she called, and started toward the pool house.
“You have a nice day, Mrs. Honneker,” John called back.
Tom was behind her all the way. She could feel his fulminating glare on her back as she walked. He was getting an eyeful, she knew. The bikini bottom was no more than two small triangles of scarlet spandex tied together at the sides, and the top, in back, was a scarlet string.
It was the teeniest bikini she possessed. She had worn it today with Tom in mind.
Handle this
, she thought, and put a little extra wiggle into her walk.
The pool house was a former guest house that had been converted some ten years before. It consisted of a bedroom, kitchenette, bathroom with a large stall shower, and a living room that Ronnie had had outfitted into a minigym. All her exercise equipment was there, from her treadmill to her stair-stepper to her Nautilus. One wall was covered with a huge mirror, and a large, multicolored gym mat lay open on the floor.
Ronnie slid open the sliding glass door that led into her exercise room, not bothering to shut it behind her. Goose bumps rose instantly on her flesh as she walked into the air-conditioning. Behind her, Tom slid the door closed.
“Do you like having workmen drool over you like that?” From the tone of his voice, it seemed he had progressed from annoyance to outright anger.
“Like what?” Ronnie headed for the bathroom without bothering to throw him so much as a glance.
“Like he was watching a stripper at a peep show.” He was right behind her.
“Did John do that?”
“If John is the man cleaning your swimming pool, you’re damned right he did. He was practically salivating when I came on the scene.”
“What are you doing here, anyway?” Ronnie pretended ignorance.
“I told you I’d be here at one to go over some things. You have an interview with
Ladies’ Home Journal
at two o’clock, remember?” He sounded as if he were gritting his teeth.
“Oh, that,” Ronnie said sweetly, reaching the bathroom
and turning around to smile at him. “I canceled that.”
She shut the bathroom door in his face.
“What?” The outraged exclamation was clearly audible even through the closed door, but she pretended not to hear.
Twenty minutes later, when she emerged, he was sitting in the wicker
papasan
chair in one corner of her exercise room leafing through the pages of an oversized magazine—was it W? Yes, it was. Ronnie almost smiled as she saw him reduced to entertaining himself with a fashion journal. From his expression as he glanced up, he was totally fed up. With the magazine, with the situation, and with her.
“Are you still here?” She walked through the exercise room to the kitchenette. Having showered and changed, she was wearing tennis whites: a tiny pleated skirt that just covered her bottom, a sleeveless polo shirt, tennis shoes, and socks. Her red hair was caught in a white bow at the nape of her neck.
She looked good, and she knew it. Tennis clothes became her.
“What do you mean, you canceled
Ladies’ Home Journal?
” He stood in the entrance to the galley-sized kitchenette scowling at her. The doorway was narrow, and his shoulders practically filled the available space. He looked tall and big standing there, and as formidable as it was possible for a man in a seersucker suit to look.
Ronnie extracted a carton of skim milk from the refrigerator and poured about a cupful into the blender on the nearby counter. Replacing the milk and closing the refrigerator door, she glanced around at him.
“I canceled it. As in, called them up and told them not to come.” Ronnie sliced half a banana into the milk.
“You called
Ladies’ Home Journal
and told them not to come?” He sounded as if such a thing was beyond belief.
“Well, actually I had Thea do it,” Ronnie temporized, slicing strawberries on top of the banana.
“You had Thea—” He stopped momentarily, as if words failed him. When he continued, his voice had a controlled edge. “It wasn’t easy getting
Ladies’ Home Journal
interested in interviewing you, you know. All kinds of celebrities vie to be in their magazine. But I called in some old favors and got them to agree to come out here today. With the right spin the article could have done the campaign—
you
—a lot of good. But you canceled it.”
“That’s right, I did,” Ronnie agreed affably. Scooping half a dozen ice cubes out of the bin in the freezer and dropping them into the blender, she put the lid on and flipped the switch. For a moment the whirr of the blades precluded conversation.
“Did you ever hear the saying about cutting off your nose to spite your face?” Tom asked when she could hear him. He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned one shoulder against the door jamb. The color of the tie made his eyes seem as blue as the pool outside. She thought, as she had before, that he had beautiful eyes—even when they were scowling at her, as they were at the moment.
Noticing the beauty of his eyes did nothing to improve her disposition.
“Meaning?” Arching an ostensibly uninterested eyebrow
at him, Ronnie poured the frothy pink concoction she had made into a glass and took a sip.
“Meaning that by canceling the interview, you hurt yourself, not me.”
“I told you I wouldn’t work with you anymore.” Ronnie took another sip. “I meant it.”
She met his gaze, and they exchanged measuring glances.
“ ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,’ ” he quoted softly.
Ronnie’s face darkened. Her hand tightened on the glass she was holding.
“You’re just full of old sayings today, aren’t you?” she asked with, a glittering faux smile. Before she could say anything more, she was interrupted by the sound of the sliding glass door opening in the other room.
“Ronnie?” a man’s voice called questioningly.
“I’m in here,” Ronnie called back. Then, to Tom, “If you’ll excuse me, I have a tennis game.”
Setting the still nearly full glass in the sink, she walked toward him, head held high. He moved aside to let her pass.
Michael Blount stood in the exercise room, tall and black-haired and charmingly lanky in white tennis shorts and a polo shirt, his racket in his hand. He smiled when he saw her.
“Hi, Michael,” she said, returning his smile with a dazzling one of her own.
“Ready?” he asked, glancing beyond her at Tom with obvious curiosity.
“Yes.” She walked past him and out the door without bothering to introduce the two men, and Michael followed her.
“Who’s that guy?” Michael asked when they were outside, in clear reference to Tom.
“Just one of Lewis’s many flunkies,” Ronnie replied with careless unconcern, being pretty certain that Tom, who stood in the open doorway frowning after them, could still hear her. “Nobody important. How’s your knee?”
Chapter
20
Monday, August 4th
5:00
P.M
.
“M
OM, WHERE ARE WE
going?
”
“You’ll see.”
Actually that was a good question, Marla thought. They’d been driving north for hours, up Route 49 to Jackson, where they’d stopped at a McDonald’s for lunch and some downtime for Lissy in one of those plastic playground things they all had now. Then they’d gotten back in the car and headed up I-55. Marla had no specific destination in mind. Every instinct she possessed just screamed at her to flee.
Thank God she’d had the foresight to park her car two blocks over from the hotel. Well, foresight wasn’t really the word. Fear described her motivation better, fear that whoever had searched the apartment would come looking for her and would know her car on sight and would spot it on the street near the hotel and put two and two together and know where to find her. At the time, such convoluted reasoning had seemed like rampant paranoia. Now it loomed as the precaution that had saved her and Lissy’s life.
After seeing the man on the street, she had grabbed
Lissy’s hand and her purse and run out the door. The elevator had been occupied—was he already on his way up?—so they’d run down the fire stairs. Everything in the room had been left exactly as it was: TV playing, lights on, Cheerios all over the floor where they had been spilled when Marla had yanked Lissy from the bed.
She knew she had terrified her daughter, hissing at her to shut up when the child had started to protest, and was made to run like the devil himself was after the both of them.
Which, Marla thought, described exactly how she’d felt.
The venom in her tone had turned her little girl’s face white, and made her eyes go wide on her mother’s face. Remembering, Marla felt bad about that. But at least she had gotten them safely away.
In answer to Lissy’s queries, once they were safely in the car and away, she had answered briefly, “Bill collectors.”
Lissy understood that. There were always bill collectors.
Marla hadn’t wanted to tell her child the truth: that she was convinced that the bald man in the street was chasing them to kill them.
She didn’t know how she knew it, but she did. She could sense it with every survival instinct she possessed.
If he had been able to find them in the Curzan Hotel, a fleabag out-of-the-way place if there ever was one, he must be good. He would be able to follow their trail now too. There was no longer any doubt that he knew she existed, though Marla didn’t know how. He
must know her name, and lots of things about her. Maybe what she looked like, from her driver’s-license picture. That’s what people who were looking for people did, wasn’t it? Went through the Bureau of Motor Vehicles for a copy of the person’s driver’s license? He probably knew what kind of car she had too. He might even be able to trace her credit cards.
Marla blanched as she realized that she had made a withdrawal from an ATM only half a block down the street from the Curzan late the previous afternoon. Had he found them through that?
Panic threatened to swamp her. They had no place to go. There was no place that was safe. They had no money. She was now afraid to draw on the little that was left in her account.
She was going to have to go to the police. But they would take Lissy away from her, and she couldn’t bear that.
Still, it was better than having the child, or herself, or, as seemed most likely, them both, wind up dead.
He was probably following them right now
.
“Mom, I’ve got to pee.”
Marla glanced at her daughter. “We’ll stop soon,” she promised.
“Where are we
going?
”
Lissy didn’t usually whine, but this had been a trying day.
“We’re taking a little trip,” Marla said, knowing that she was going to have to come up with a destination pretty soon. “Just the two of us. Isn’t that nice?”
“Did you write another bad check, Mom?” Lissy gave her a stern look, as if she were the parent and Marla was the child.
“No!” Marla said, indignant.
“Then why are we running away?”
“We’re not running away. We’re—going to see somebody.”
“Who?”
Marla looked at her daughter with a mixture of admiration and exasperation. Lissy might be a kid, but she was nobody’s fool.
They flashed by a green road sign that read, Pope, 50 miles. Marla had a sudden inspiration.
Maybe there was help for them, after all.
“An old friend of mine,” she said haughtily to her daughter, and drove with more confidence than before.
“Who?”
“Just hold your horses, Miss Smarty-pants, and you’ll see.”
“Mom, we don’t even have a toothbrush. You left all our things back there at the hotel.”
“We’ll manage.”
“I have to
pee.
”
In the end Lissy got to use the rest room when Marla pulled into a tiny convenience store in Pope. While Lissy went inside, she sat in the car in front of the pay phone at the edge of the parking lot, thumbing through the phone book, looking for the familiar name.
She found the name she was looking for, slid a quarter into the slot, and dialed, keeping a nervous eye out all the while.
Please, please, let him be home
, she prayed.
A man’s voice answered.
“Jerry?” Her voice was shaky.
“Yeah.”
“This is Marla.”
“Marla who?”
“You remember, Marla from Biloxi? Beautiful Models?”