“Children!” Suzie exploded. “You’d want to have children read something like that?”
“I read them as a child and I came out normal,” Fiona said, defending her father.
“If this is going to turn into a catfight, let me know. For some reason, I have an extreme aversion to cats.”
Fiona thought that was a very funny statement, but Suzie, who didn’t know him, didn’t understand and didn’t laugh.
“So you have the stories on floppy?” Ace asked.
“All of them. And The Five—well, I guess it’s The Four at the moment—are going to get into my apartment in New York tonight and get the disk. Jean will print it out and fax me the pages as soon as possible.”
“That’s wonderful,” Suzie said, smiling.
Ace reached across the table and took Fiona’s hand in his. “If your friends live all over the U.S., then that means they’ve stayed in New York since … since all this began. They’re staying until they know you’re safe.”
With her head down, Fiona nodded. She didn’t want to look into his eyes or she might start crying, but she didn’t let go of his hand.
“I think maybe friends like them are worth more than the reputation of a woman you never knew,” Ace said quietly.
“Right,” Suzie said cheerfully. “And that they’re willing to risk their own necks to break into your apartment, which must be under police quarantine, and risk getting involved in two brutal murders—three if you count Rose—as well, is a real show of friendship.”
At the end of that little assessment, both Ace and Fiona were looking at her with their mouths open.
When she’d recovered enough to speak, Fiona stood. “I have to call Jean and tell her not to go. It’s too dangerous.”
Ace pulled her down to the chair; then he went to get the cell phone. But when Fiona called her friend, she only got her answering machine. “Too late,” she said, looking at Ace. “They must have already gone. What is wrong with me that I didn’t think of this? If Jean gets caught, I’ll never forgive myself. I’ll—” Pulling her into his arms, Ace held her tightly. After a moment, Suzie stood up and went into the house.
“Don’t think about this,” he whispered, “because tonight I’m going to make love to you. I have wanted you from the first moment I saw you, and I have waited long enough. For one whole night we’re going to put all this aside and we’re just going to enjoy each other. There’s cold champagne in the fridge and the water in the tub will be very hot. Are you listening to me?”
She could only nod against his shoulder. Oh, yes, she was listening, listening with every cell in her body. “Tonight,” she whispered. “Tonight.”
Eighteen
Bad didn’t begin to describe the mood of Ace and Fiona the next morning as they got into the Jeep and headed for Kendrick Park. Fiona wanted to sit in the back with the bags they’d put in the car the night before, but Suzie insisted she sit back there, so the front seats were occupied by two people who weren’t speaking to each other.
After last night when he’d made his declaration of intention to make love to her, Fiona had been nothing but a quivering mass. It was embarrassing to be her age and certainly no virgin and yet suddenly find herself thinking about sex as though it were her first time. When she thought about it, she didn’t know when she’d started lusting after him. But then if she were honest with herself, it was probably at the airport when he came at her with the double row of teeth attached to his arm. There’d been something truly primitive in that situation, something very Tarzan and Jane, that appealed to her.
Of course since then, there had been the days spent in each other’s company. So, all in all, last night his hot words had done to her what no amount of touching had ever done. She could have ripped his clothes off and leaped on top of him right there beside the pool. Then in the pool. And in the kitchen. And in …
But there had been Suzie. For days and days there had just been the two of them, but now suddenly there was another person: Suzie in her tiny shorts with her bouncing blonde ponytail, with her high firm breasts that didn’t jiggle when she moved. Whether or not parts of her were real, the fact that she was actually there was certainly real enough.
“What’s your husband doing?” Ace had asked Suzie last night by the pool. “Won’t he be worried about you?”
“He’s having an affair with his secretary, and this is their day together,” Suzie said without blinking. “Besides, you’re not going to get rid of me. I deserve a cut of this.”
Before Fiona could explode, Ace put his hand on her arm. “If we did find these lions, we’d give them to a museum. No one is going to make a profit from this. All we want to do is clear our names.”
Suzie gave him a little smile. “You cut me out and I’ll tell the police you’re here and that another body is in your house.”
It was Fiona’s turn to calm Ace down. “In that case, we’d love to have you,” she said as sweetly as she could. “So maybe tonight you’d like to help us get rid of Rose’s body.” She hoped that this prospect would send Suzie running to the front door.
“Sure,” Suzie said with a smile. “How about acid in the bathtub? Or should we dismember the corpse and stuff it in a trunk?”
Ace gave Fiona a raised-eyebrow look as though to say, I told you so. “Speaking of trunks,” he said, “I think I’ll check the fax machine.”
“Me too,” Fiona said quickly as she looked at Suzie. “He can’t do anything if I’m not there to help him.” With that she ran into the house after Ace, and once they were in the dining room, where he was sorting map pages, she opened her mouth to speak, but he put his finger to his lips in warning.
What do we do to get rid of her? Fiona wrote on the back of one of the fax sheets that did not contain the correct map.
Make her number four? Ace wrote back.
“Very funny,” she said aloud as she took the pages from his hand and began to piece them together.
But then her hand touched his and instantly, electricity flashed between them.
“So how’re the maps coming?” Suzie said from the doorway. “Got everything pieced together yet?”
“Just about,” Ace said through clenched teeth, then stood between Suzie and the sheet of maps spread on the table so she couldn’t see anything. But Suzie didn’t seem to want to see them and soon wandered into the living room, where she could see but not necessarily hear everything.
We have to do something about Rose, Ace wrote. We can’t leave her here when we leave in the morning. Any ideas?
This is out of my experience. What would you do if she were a bird?
Put her back into the nest so her mother could find her.
After Ace wrote that, he and Fiona looked at each other; then they smiled. “We’ll take her home,” Fiona whispered. “Let Lennie deal with her.”
What followed after that, Fiona didn’t like to remember. She and Ace spent a couple of hours piecing together the maps that Ace’s little girl relatives kept sending through the fax machine. “Don’t they have regular bedtimes?” Fiona snapped at eleven-thirty when she was yawning. The events of the day had pretty much worn her out, and she wanted nothing more than to …
She looked across the table at Ace. She wanted nothing more than to climb into bed with this delicious man and …
As he often did, he seemed to be reading her thoughts as he reached across the table and took her hand; then his fingers began inching up her arm.
But then Suzie sneezed and the spell was broken.
At twelve-thirty P.M., Ace decided that it was dark enough and quiet enough to take Rose down the street and leave her in her own house. He tried to persuade Suzie that she should remain behind; in fact, he tried to get Fiona to stay behind too, but neither woman would listen to him. And Fiona was ready to murder Suzie when the blonde woman reached out and grabbed the front of Ace’s trousers.
“Keys,” she said, turning to Fiona. “He has the car keys with him. He was going to le
ave us.”
When Fiona looked at Ace, she saw his face redden. He was a little boy caught in an act of naughtiness.
It was Suzie who grabbed the stack of papers just coming in from the fax and tore them in half. “Half for you and half for me,” she said, then gave a torn stack to Fiona.
Fiona didn’t say a word, but she and Ace knew that the real map had come through the machine a couple of hours ago and that now a copy of it was nestled against Ace’s heart.
Ace gave Suzie a scowl of anger, as though she’d just foiled him in some dastardly deed; then as he turned away, he winked at Fiona before heading up the stairs. When he returned twenty minutes later, he had a fat roll of beach towels over his shoulder, tied in four places with silk neckties.
At the foot of the stairs, he nodded to Fiona to open the door; then he checked that no one was about.
Once she saw the big roll and knew what was inside of it, Fiona’s fear returned.
“Don’t give out on me now,” Ace said, close to her. “Did you bring the gloves?”
She nodded. He’d told her to get the yellow rubber gloves that were stored under the sink so they wouldn’t leave fingerprints when they had to break into Rose’s house.
They had to walk down the sidewalks of the Blue Orchid because to try to walk across the minuscule back lawns would mean having to navigate around swimming pools in the dark, and they couldn’t risk that. But they saw no one; there wasn’t a light on in any house, neither outside nor inside, which in itself was eerie.
“Wouldn’t someone have left a porch light on?” Fiona whispered, clinging to Ace’s arm, even though he was straining under his heavy burden.
“Do you think they’re all watching us?” Suzie whispered, clinging to his other arm.
“You’re on their side, so you tell me,” he hissed down at her.
“Me?” Suzie said, looking around her as though she expected an army to jump out at her. “I’m on Smokey’s side. He wanted to find the treasure so he could make his daughter proud of him.”
Leaning around the back of Ace, Fiona said, “My father said that? That’s what he wanted? Did he tell you about me?”
“Honey, you were all he ever talked about. Not to the others, of course, but to me and Lav, when we were all in bed—uh, I mean, when we were together having a glass of wine or something, he’d tell me about you.”
“You and my father—”
“Could you two please stop talking?” Ace snapped. “We’re here.” With that he bent and put his heavy burden on the ground. “Stay here,” he said to the two women just before he disappeared into the darkness at the side of the house.
Fiona and Suzie looked at each other over the corpse on the ground, then took off running after Ace. Fiona slammed into him first; then Suzie hit her hard in the back.
Ace gave a muffled, “Damnation!” then turned back to the women and steadied them. Silently, he motioned for them to remain where they were, but one look at their faces in the moonlight and he gave a great sigh. With resignation, he put his finger to his lips, then waved his arm for them to follow him.
At the back door he crouched over the lock, then put on the gloves Fiona handed him and began to fiddle with it.
It was Suzie, bringing up the rear, who reached over the heads of the two of them, turned the knob, and opened the unlocked door.
The house was empty. There wasn’t a stick of furniture anywhere, not a picture on the wall. In the bright moonlight it was easy to see that the place had even been cleaned so that it looked as though no one had ever lived in the house.
“So now what do we do, Mr. Hot Shot?” Suzie said, hands on hips and glaring at Ace as though he had caused all their problems.
“How would I know? My doctorate is in ornithology, not murder.”
“What I want to know is how they moved everything so quickly and so quietly,” Fiona said. “When I moved my apartment, it took three days for them to pack everything, and I can tell you that I don’t own a houseful of furniture. Maybe—Oh!!!” she gasped.
“What is it?” Ace said anxiously.
“My rent was due yesterday. I’ll be evicted if it isn’t paid.”
Ace gave a sigh of disgust. “Let’s get out of here.”
“I agree,” Suzie said. “This place is giving me the creeps.”
The two women stayed outside, looking about them, jumping every time the breeze rustled the tree leaves, while Ace carried the towel-wrapped body into the house, then shut the door behind him.
Silently and very quickly, they walked back to their house.
Ace double bolted the front door then leaned against it. “I suggest that we all get a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow we need to leave early for our picnic,” he said, saying the last for the benefit of the listeners—whoever they were.
Everyone agreed with that idea even though there wasn’t much of the night left and all of them had never felt less like sleeping in their lives.
But then there was the question of who was to sleep where. Ace didn’t trust Suzie not to do something underhanded during the night, so he didn’t want her in a room alone all night. Therefore, it made sense that Fiona and Suzie would sleep in Fiona’s room, while Ace had his own room. But he took one look at his bed, the covers still pulled back from where Rose had been, and he knew he didn’t want to sleep in that room.
Had it been under different circumstances, Fiona would have made a few gibes at his nervousness, but she didn’t want to be alone with Suzie. Right now Fiona was wondering just how big a part Suzie really did play all those years ago when the men had failed to find the lions.
In the end, all three of them climbed into one bed, Suzie in the middle. And Suzie was the only one who did any sleeping.
“You don’t have to go tomorrow,” Ace whispered across Suzie’s sleeping form. “You could stay here and wait.”
“And end up like Rose?” Fiona whispered back.
“I could take you to”—he took a deep breath—“to Jeremy.”
“And you could go to Lisa,” she said; then both of them were silent. It seemed like another life when they had known those people. When Fiona thought about it, she couldn’t even seem to remember Kimberly very well anymore. What seemed real to her was Ace and his birds and his park and what she’d come to know over the last several days.
“I’m not proud of what I’ve done to her,” Ace said. “She’s a nice person and she loves me.”
And I don’t? Fiona wanted to say, but she wasn’t going to let herself think that, much less say it. They were under great stress, and who knew how they’d feel about each other when their lives were back to normal?
“When you get back to New York, do you think you’ll ever want to return to Florida or do you think you’ll hate the place too much?” he asked softly.
Fiona was saved from answering by Suzie. “Could you two stop talking for a couple of hours so one of us could get some sleep?”
Fiona didn’t say anything more, but she didn’t sleep. Sometimes it took something horrible happening to make a person look at her life. If someone had asked her three months ago, she would have said that she was the happiest person on earth, utterly content with what she had. But now she looked back at that life and knew she could never go back to it. There was something missing in a life that revolved around money. And try as she might to tell herself that there was a higher purpose in a doll that was reissued twice a year, now it seemed that Ace was right and she had dedicated herself to making money for an already rich company.
And in the end, she hadn’t been important. She’d thought that her life was Kimberly, but now the company obviously hadn’t gone under because Fiona Burkenhalter wasn’t there to decide what to do with Kimberly. In fact, if Fiona were truthful with herself, she was sure that there were several people who could take Kimberly further than she would have been able to.
“High tide,” she whispered into the darkness.
“What?” Ace said from the other side
of Suzie.
“I feel like one of those heroines in a Gothic romance. You know, she goes out for a walk, and even though she’s grown up by the sea, she ‘forgets’ that the tide is about to come in, so she gets caught in high tide.”
“Oh,” Ace said flatly. “Does she get out?”
“Of course. And in the end she finds out that getting caught in high tide was the best thing that ever happened to her.”
“Somehow I don’t think that being accused of murder is going to be the highlight of your life.”
Fiona took a deep breath. “Maybe not, but, like all those heroines, I think that I’ve learned something.” And maybe it was that admission that released something in her so she could fall asleep, because the next thing she knew, Ace was waking her with kisses. It took her a moment to realize that they were in bed together, alone, and that he was at last going to make love to her.
Deliciously, she put her head back and kept her eyes closed as his kisses trailed down her neck, as his hand ran up her bare arm, then went down again until he found her breast. She brought her leg up between his and felt that he was ready for her.
Never in her life had she wanted anything as much as she wanted this man. She opened her mouth under his and felt his tongue slide into her mouth. With all the strength of her legs, she pushed him back and climbed on top of him.
“Oh, baby,” he murmured, his hands running all over the back of her and down her body.
“It came!” Suzie said loudly from the door.
Ace and Fiona didn’t so much as pause in kissing as he rolled her onto her back.
Suzie, seemingly oblivious of what was going on, sat down on the bed beside them. “The story came,” she said, then took a sip from her coffee mug. “Fiona, I guess your friends were able to break into your apartment after all. Wow, that was really brave of them to risk so much. They must really think a lot of you. Do they?”
Fiona wasn’t hearing too much at the moment, but some part of her was beginning to draw back from Ace’s kisses.
“Do they?” Suzie asked louder.