He found his cane and gained his feet, dragging his towel up with him. “We going out to eat?”
“I got some biscuits ready to go in the oven,” she told him. “We can eat in this morning.”
She’d surprised him again. She wasn’t one to use the kitchen for much other than rinsing her hands.
“Biscuits?”
“Biscuits. Like your Aunt Jemima used to bake.”
“Why the spurt of domesticity?” he asked. “Cause I felt like some biscuits,” she said, straight-faced.
He followed her up the beach toward the cottage. She was walking slower than usual so he could keep pace, her heels kicking up small rooster tails of sand. He loved walking behind her, watching the beautiful undulating flow of her lean body as she strode with confidence and elegance. It was difficult to imagine her in a kitchen wearing an apron, busying about and tending to biscuits.
“Did you make those biscuits from scratch?” he asked.
She didn’t answer.
He thought for a moment of twisting up his towel and flicking her in the buttocks.
Then he decided that would be a bad idea.
She was domestic only up to a point.
When Carver phoned Burnair and Crosley he was told that Maggie wasn’t expected in that day. He asked to talk to Beverly Denton, who said that Maggie had called in sick that morning.
His stomach still churning from Beth’s biscuits, he drove A1A toward Maggie’s cottage.
He didn’t really believe there had to be a connection between the man photographing the redhead and her John, and Maggie’s being photographed with Charlie Post. Adultery, photographs, and divorce had been close partners since the invention of the camera. But he wanted to talk with Maggie about Post’s being roughed up when he’d attempted to see her.
Or maybe he simply wanted to talk with Maggie.
She opened the door right away when he knocked. She must have just returned from the beach; she was wearing a black one-piece swimsuit cut high on the thighs, and there was a sheen of perspiration on her tan face and the swell of her breasts. She smiled when she saw it was Carver, knocking him slightly off balance. He’d imagined she might reward his persistence by throwing something at him.
“You are determined about that conversation we’re supposed to have,” she said. Her eyes were a deep and nondescript color in the dim light of the cottage, pulling at him so that he had to look away for a second.
“Obsessed, even,” he said. “Apparently you bring that out in people.”
“Some people. The ones who need to be obsessed.”
She stepped aside and made room for him to enter.
The cottage was cool, not so dim now that he was inside. She didn’t ask him to sit down, but she still wore her slight smile as she stood facing him. She was obviously aware that she fascinated him; it was a familiar phenomenon for her.
“It’s a new swimming suit,” she said, backing away a few steps and turning, modeling so he could see her from every angle. She was one of those women whose compactness lent the impression of full perfection. Her smile was wider as she stopped turning and faced him. “Well, how do I look?”
“Like a flavor.”
The smile burst into a short, musical laugh.
“I called you at Burnair and Crosley,” he said. “They told me you’d called in sick.”
“It passed,” she said. She ran a hand absently along a well-turned forearm, then was perfectly still for a second in an exquisitely graceful pose, like something Michelangelo might have created if he’d worked with warm flesh instead of stone. “The sun heals everything if only you give it time.”
“Maybe it’s the time that heals.”
“No, it takes the heat of the sun to purge body and soul.”
Carver found himself staring at her cleavage above the bra of her black suit. He quickly looked into her eyes and saw amusement there, and a kind of cruel pleasure. She was a woman who understood the power of her sex, what she possessed that she might give or withhold.
“I saw Charlie Post yesterday,” he said, trying to get to business. “He looked a bit rough after his beating.”
“Beating?” Parallel frown lines of concern appeared above the bridge of her nose, then disappeared. “Charlie was beaten?”
“Not long after trying to see you.”
Maggie hitched up the top of her swimming suit as if it might be about to fall from her breasts, but she didn’t move to tie the string designed to loop around her neck for support. “It isn’t a good idea for Charlie and me to see each other again. I think even Charlie would tell you that.”
“He’s more convinced of it now,” Carver said.
“Is he all right?”
“He’ll heal. Time and the sun and all that.”
“Who did it to him?”
“A large man driving a big black luxury car.”
She made a show of trying to think, actually looking up and off to the left, as if her memory were suspended there like a balloon. “I don’t know anybody like that. At least anybody who beats up people. Poor Charlie. He’s a prince of a guy, and he doesn’t deserve all the trouble he’s had. I mean, that wife of his. Ex-wife. My God, what a curse she turned out to be.”
“Charlie would agree. He doesn’t feel the same way about you, though.”
“But I was a curse nonetheless. I mean, it was his affair with me that really sent May off the deep end so she divorced him.”
“It would have happened sooner or later.”
“Sure. But it doesn’t feel good to be the one who made it happen sooner.”
“What do you know about Nightlinks?” Carver asked.
Her expression remained one of concern for Charlie, but she glanced off and up to the left again at her hovering memory. “You asked me that before and I said I knew nothing. What is Nightlinks, anyway?”
“An escort service.”
“Well, I never heard-Wait a minute, you don’t think Charlie and I met through an escort service, do you?”
“I don’t know. How did you meet?”
“In a more conventional and respectable manner.” She walked to a small credenza, moving slowly and deliberately, knowing he was watching. That he couldn’t not watch. The confidence of beautiful women within the context of their familiar worlds always amazed him. They moved through the waters of attraction and seduction with the ease of bright tropical fish.
Striking a too-casual pose with one hip jutting out, she poured herself a glass of white wine. Then she looked over at Carver as if just remembering he was there. “Would you like a drink?”
“No. Too early.”
“Well,” she said a little sadly, “it’s too late for me. Would you like anything else?” She made it sound innocent, but there was a glitter in her eyes that reflected something deep within. Eve in the apple orchard.
“Maybe it’s too late for that, too,” he said.
“But only maybe.” She placed her stemmed glass on the credenza and walked boldly over to him. She kissed him on the lips, leaning into him with her breasts. She smelled fresh and damp and eager. Stepping back, but with a hand on his arm where Beth had playfully punched him this morning, she said, “Am I a flavor you like?”
“Can’t deny it,” he said, and ran the backs of his knuckles gently, weightlessly, down the line of her cheek.
“Then don’t deny yourself anything,” she said, smiling dreamily.
“I can’t mix pleasure with business.”
“That’s one of those old saws that’re hardly ever true.”
“True this time, though.”
“Then forget about business.”
“Is that what you’re trying to get me to do?”
She moved away from him, not bothering to conceal her annoyance. “You’ve got me wrong, Fred. It is Fred, isn’t it?”
“Sometimes it’s Fred. Sometimes it’s Fool. And I don’t have you at all,” he said, hearing the lament in his voice.