Even before she’d climbed out of the Peugeot, the door to the cabin opened.
In the light streaming from inside stood a slim, dark-haired woman in a severely cut blazer and skirt, probably a business suit. Carver couldn’t discern her features but suspected she was a knockout. She held herself with the unconscious poise and self-confidence of women who’d been venerated for their beauty since childhood.
Nurse Rule approached the woman and stood close to her. They tentatively touched hands. Nurse Rule, who was four inches the shorter of the two, raised her right hand and gently clasped the back of the slim woman’s neck, then drew her head down not so gently and kissed her on the mouth. There was something so blatantly possessive about the maneuver that it embarrassed Carver, made him feel like a voyeur. Which he guessed he was. Nurse Rule’s sex life-and the other woman’s-should be nobody else’s business.
The kiss lasted a long time. One of the women kicked out a leg and closed the door. It made no sound when it shut. A few seconds later one of them lowered the blinds.
Carver got out of the Olds and limped silently through the darkness to the blue Lincoln. He could smell the ocean and hear it crashing over and over behind the cabins. The temperature was still high, but the breeze off the sea was cool now.
Cars occasionally swished past out on the highway, and there were lights in two of the other cabins, but there was a sense of isolation about the motel. There was something lonely, something sad, about using it as the site of a furtive romantic rendezvous.
He committed the Lincoln’s license-plate number to memory, then on impulse he tried the gleaming passenger-side door. It opened and the interior of the car lit up brightly, startling him.
Carver looked over at the pool. The two swimmers were paying attention only to each other. He stooped low, his stiff leg almost beneath the car, and wedged his cane between the ground and the steel doorframe so it held in the button that allowed the interior lights to blink on when the door was open. The car was dark again.
The Lincoln had the new-car scent people always talked about; probably didn’t have more than a couple of thousand miles on it. In the moonlight, he opened the glove compartment and groped inside. Felt a pair of glasses-probably sunglasses-and some papers and a small box of tissues. A pen or pencil. A cheap plastic disposable lighter. He pulled out a few folded papers and studied them in the faint light.
They were service records made out to the Lincoln’s owner, Dr. Lee Macklin.
When Carver returned home he found Edwina sleeping deeply in their king-sized bed, with the ceiling fan slowly revolving and the window open. He was exhausted but he wasn’t quite ready to join her. After standing for a moment watching her sleep, he backed out of the bedroom and soundlessly closed the door.
Using the living-room phone, he called Desoto, who’d gone to bed and seemed irritated about being awakened at midnight.
“Need to ask a question,” Carver explained.
“One that couldn’t wait till morning, amigo?”
“Could have, but I’m curious.”
Desoto yawned. “ ’Bout what?”
“Ever see Dr. Macklin’s wife?”
Desoto didn’t answer for a moment. “Huh?”
“Dr. Macklin’s wife. Dr. Lee Macklin, the chief administrator out at Sunhaven. You told me he was married.”
“Married, yeah,” Desoto said. “But Dr. Macklin doesn’t have a wife. Thought you knew-Lee Macklin’s a woman.”
Carver was quiet for a while. “With a husband,” he said thoughtfully.
“Nothing odd about that. Other than the husband. He’s a former flower child, rumored to be into drugs. As a user, not a seller.”
Drugs. Florida. Carver wondered, if suddenly all illicit narcotics were made legal, would the state’s economy collapse?
He apologized for waking Desoto and hung up.
14
West Palm Drive was dark, but there was a light glowing in Birdie’s window. After his brief conversation with Desoto, Carver had immediately gone back to his car and driven here. It was 12:30 A.M. but he knew the young kept late hours. And this time of night-morning-it was unlikely he and Birdie would be disturbed. The respectable Mrs. Horton was probably fast asleep.
Carver parked the Olds a hundred feet beyond the rambling apartment building and made his way over the shadowed pavement to Birdie’s door.
West Palm could have used a few more streetlights. The main source of illumination on the deserted block was the yellowish floodlight peeking through a thick growth of bougainvillea clinging to the corner of the old apartment building. Moths circled about the dim light, occasionally flitting too close and bouncing off it with enough force for the tap of impact to carry to Carver. The dim bulb wasn’t exactly the flame that lured and devoured, but it would have to do. And it gave the moths a second chance to flirt with destruction. More than most people got.
Fearing the arrival of the protective and suspicious Mrs. Horton, Carver pressed the button alongside Birdie’s door and heard a sputtering buzzing from the depths of the apartment.
The door opened on a chain and Birdie peered out. She squinted up at Carver and recognition flared in her blue eyes. “Why, you’re Mr. Carver, from out at Sunhaven.” She said this as if it were quite amazing. Made him feel like Marley’s ghost in A Christmas Carol.
“I know it’s late, but I’d like to talk to you, Birdie.”
She frowned; it made her look at least twelve, the little dickens. “Nurse Rule pointed right at you and said to let her know if you came to Sunhaven again. I dunno if we oughta talk, Mr. Carver.”
“We’re not at Sunhaven.”
“Well, that’s a fact.”
“You do everything Nurse Rule tells you?”
“Heck, yeah. It’s my job.”
“Let me in, Birdie. Nurse Rule won’t find out. Nobody’ll find out. And my intentions are honorable.”
“I’m kinda uneasy letting strangers into my place this time of night, Mr. Carver. I mean, it’s not like you’re really a stranger, but still it don’t seem a fitting thing to do. I mean, I don’t know a blessed thing about you.”
“I know things about you, Birdie. But I won’t use them to harm you, I promise. I know about Indianapolis. Listen, all I want’s a conversation. Nothing more.”
She stared at him with eyes gone wide and then gone narrow and cold. The door eased all the way shut and he heard the muted rattle of the chain against wood. She opened the door all the way and stepped back to let Carver enter.
She was wearing a blue terrycloth robe with a sash yanked tight around a waist that couldn’t measure more than twenty inches. He was sure he hadn’t awakened her. She was barefoot and her red hair was mussed and still damp. Her freckled face was pale but it glowed. She looked and smelled fresh, as if she’d just stepped from the shower, or maybe been born only a few hours ago.
What he knew about her past couldn’t be true; a fifteen-year-old with her kind of wear should show scars. The things that had been done to her-Christ! Carver knew how Mrs. Horton felt; he also wanted to protect little Birdie, pat her on the head and tell her comforting lies about the world that had dumped so much shit on her. Carver reminded himself there was a fighter inside the frail figure before him. There had to be. Here she was, supporting herself and living out an independent existence when most girls her age were thinking about getting braces removed or whether some boy whose voice hadn’t changed had a crush on them.
She backpedaled to a worn-out, sprung gray sofa, as if doing a dance step, then bent gracefully sideways from the waist to toss an old National Enquirer on the floor. Carver caught a glimpse of headline: DI SECRETLY GIVES BIRTH TO CHILD WITH GOAT’S HEAD. Those things happened in the best of families.
Birdie hadn’t taken her young eyes from him. “Wanna sit down, Mr. Carver?” There was something intense and slightly irregular about the rhythm of her speech, as if she were pumped up from gulping half a dozen cups of coffee.