High Tide Read online

  “I don’t want to know how many people know where we are,” she said, peering over his shoulder as he began to unwrap the package.

  “No one who isn’t named Montgomery or Taggert,” he said, as though that explained everything. “Passports?” he said, holding up the two blue booklets.

  “And a set of keys,” Fiona said, taking the package from him, “and a letter. Dear Miss Burkenhalter,” she began to read. “Your father once did a great favor for me, a favor so great that I wouldn’t be alive today if it weren’t for him. I know what you are looking for. I know who you are looking for. You will find what you want at the Blue Orchid.”

  Fiona looked up at Ace. “That’s all. There’s no signature, no identification at all. Do you think the Blue Orchid is a nightclub? Are we to meet someone there?”

  Ace closed the passports he was studying and looked at her.

  “Oh, no,” Fiona said, backing up. “I don’t like that look. Last time you looked at me like that, we ended up in a swamp.”

  Ace gave her a bit of a smile. “The Blue Orchid is a beautiful gated community about fifty miles north of here.”

  “Yeah?” she said, narrowing her eyes at him. “What’s the catch? Alligators in the pool? Or, knowing you, it’s vultures on the roofs.”

  “Nothing wrong with the place at all. It’s quite nice. Of course I haven’t actually seen it, but I’ve heard that it’s …”

  When he trailed off, she was sure there was something wrong. She snatched the passports from him and looked at them. At first she saw nothing wrong with either of them. They were for two people named Gerri and Reid Hazlett. “Who are these people?” she asked. “Are we to meet them at this Blue Orchid?”

  “Look at the photo of the woman,” Ace said softly.

  When Fiona first looked at the photo, she didn’t get the connection. It was a picture of Ava Gardner as she was in her fifties, not looking as most people remembered her when she was the star of movies. “Who is this Gerri Hazlett?” Fiona asked, but as she said the words she knew.

  Still holding the passport, she sat down hard on the sofa. “We’re to go in disguise, aren’t we? And our disguise is that we’re old, isn’t it?”

  “ ’Fraid so,” Ace said. “We get new names and new ages. The Blue Orchid is a retirement community. There’s lots of them down here. No one’s allowed to live there who’s under fifty.”

  Fiona looked as if she wanted to weep. “Why is it that on TV when a woman’s in disguise, she gets to dress in tiny skirts and wear great dangly earrings? I go in disguise and I get knitting needles and a rocking chair.”

  “It’s not that bad. You’ll be about my mother’s age, and she has no idea how to knit.”

  “Very funny. And what kind of name is ‘Gerri’?”

  “I’m more curious as to what your father did for whoever it was who sent us these. These passports are big-time illegal.”

  Fiona’s head came up. “When does Raphael premiere on national TV?”

  “In about a week, I think, why?”

  “Because a whole lot of people are going to recognize themselves on TV.”

  At that Ace sat down beside her. “And when they do, they’re going to know that there’s only one innocent person on earth who knows the whole story. Only one person who can turn them in without being part of the dirty story.”

  Fiona looked at him. “A person who is innocent no longer. That one person is now wanted for murder. And if she’s convicted, who’s going to listen to her from prison?”

  “Bingo,” Ace said; then he leaned forward and picked up the set of keys from the coffee table. “Well, Mrs. Hazlett, you ready to join the old folks in shuffleboard and canasta?”

  Fiona whimpered. “I hope Roy Hudson is where he deserves to be,” she said with feeling.

  “All this because it rained on a fishing trip,” Ace said as he stood, then held out his hand to help her up. “Come on, Ma, let’s get crankin’.”

  “Get me my rheumatiz’ med’cine, Pa, and we better stock up on prune juice.”

  “We’ll get some gray dye for your hair and—”

  “We make my hair gray when you shave your head bald.”

  “Ah. Well, in that case, I think we can say you dye your gray black.”

  “And I’ll pass around the name of your wigmaker.”

  “You do know, don’t you, that sometimes women of your generation actually cook.”

  “If you’ll eat it, I’ll cook it.”

  “I just became a retired cook. What about you? What did you used to do? No one will believe you were a housewife.”

  “Actress?”

  Ace looked at her.

  “Okay, how about fashion designer for a small clothing company operating out of the Midwest?”

  Ace laughed. “Not bad. And what about …”

  The sun set and they were still talking. They ordered dinner and talked through that, laughing over the new lives they were creating for themselves. And their laughter was much needed to relieve the tension of the previous days, their mad flights, bullets whizzing about them.

  It was only at night when they finally parted, him to the living room to sleep, her to the bedroom, that Fiona thought again about how little she knew about him. Tonight they had created two whole people, having a good time making up a story about how they’d met and married only recently. “That’ll explain why we know so little about each other,” Ace had said.

  “Of course we’d know more about each other if you didn’t leave the room every time I ask you something about yourself.”

  “I thought women were sick of men who did nothing but talk about themselves.”

  “Women are sick of men who don’t share, and that means whether they talk all of the time or none of it,” she shot back at him.

  But her gibe didn’t make Ace reveal anything about himself.

  So now, when she went to bed, she had a feeling of loneliness that was deeper than the situation. What was wrong with her? she thought. She should be thinking about how to get herself out of this problem, not lying there wondering what Ace was doing. Did he have a blanket? The air-conditioning was turned up quite high, and he’d need a blanket. What about a pillow?

  She put the pillow over her head and chanted, “Jeremy. Jeremy. Jeremy,” until she finally went to sleep.

  Fifteen

  “If I eat one more bran muffin, I’ll be sick,” Fiona said. “What do you think these people do, judge the things by weight? If you drop it and it goes through the floor, that’s the best recipe?”

  “Only if the floor is brick,” Ace said, deadpan as he looked across the breakfast bar at her.

  It was early on Sunday morning, and they had been in the house in the retirement community for three whole days. And neither of them had ever been so exhausted in their lives.

  From the moment they walked through the front door, they were inundated with invitations. At first they’d been gleeful. “We’ll find out everything now,” Fiona had said the first night, and Ace had smiled in agreement. Both of them had imagined a community of elderly people whose memories needed prodding, but they were both confident that they were up to the task. They agreed that the problem was going to be making their neighbors believe that she and Ace were old enough to live in the fifty-plus community.

  But the first woman who’d seen Fiona had said, “Wow, you look great. Who’s your surgeon?”

  Fiona had stood there gaping at the woman, unable to say a word, for she had the body of a twenty-year-old. She was wearing tiny red shorts and a T-shirt barely large enough to cover an infant, much less her large, firm breasts. Her blonde hair was pulled back into a thick ponytail, and Fiona couldn’t see a line on her perfect skin. She was jogging in place as she talked. “Let me know if you want to work out,” she said, looking Fiona up and down and obviously thinking she was too soft. “Maybe I can give you some pointers.”

  “Uh, sure,” Fiona mumbled. “Maybe next week.”

  Behind her,