High Tide Read online

  “Go on, out with it. It couldn’t be that bad. Start with where and when you were born, and go on with it from there.” He had his hands in a plastic bucket, and he was about to attack the filthy kitchen cabinets.

  When she still didn’t speak, he looked at her. “Come on, think about Kimberly. Think how much you want to get back to her and have lunch or whatever it is you two do.”

  For a moment, Fiona had to turn away. New York and Kimberly and her job, Jeremy and The Five, were so clear to her that she could almost touch them. How had she gone from so much happiness to … to this in just a few days?

  “Indulging in self-pity?” Ace asked softly, one eyebrow raised. “Remember that the sooner we find out who’s behind this the sooner we can both go home.”

  Fiona hit the floor with the broom and moved a fat clump of debris. “My mother died soon after my birth, leaving me to be raised by my father, except that he was a cartographer and moved around a lot.”

  Once she started, she got into telling her life’s story. And Ace could certainly listen. At first he seemed so absorbed in what he was doing that she wasn’t sure he was hearing her, so twice she contradicted herself. Both times he instantly caught the errors, then told her to go on. Each time she had to hide her smile. It was flattering to have someone listen so intently to something that was so personal.

  All in all, she’d had an uneventful life, certainly not one that had prepared her for finding a dead man on top of her, or for living in a two room shack while hiding from the police.

  She told him that after her mother’s death, she’d been sent to live with an ancient aunt and uncle. They were very boring, seldom allowing her to run and play, instead wanting her to sit quietly and color or play with paper dolls. With her head cocked to one side, she looked at him. He had a rusty hammer and a couple of nails and was now refastening the side of the clean cabinet. “I played with dolls a lot,” she said.

  Without looking at her, he nodded but said nothing.

  For a moment, Fiona just looked at him. He had a knee on the bottom cabinet, the other leg stretched back with a foot on a chair. He was reaching up to the top of the upper cabinets, so that his long body was stretched out, his muscles straining against his shirt. For a moment, her mouth went dry and her hands tightened on the broom handle until the thing threatened to break.

  “Dolls, right,” he said without looking down but encouraging her to continue.

  “Yes, dolls,” she said and made herself return to sweeping. She told him that at six her father sent her to boarding school, and she had loved it. On the first day she met four other little girls who were the same age as she. “We called ourselves The Five, and we’ve been best friends ever since,” Fiona said but refused to allow herself to think about that. What kind of hell of worry must they be going through now, with Fiona falsely accused and in hiding?

  “What about your father?” Ace asked as he stepped back to the floor. “Ever see him?”

  “Oh, yes,” Fiona said, and her adoration of her father came through in her voice. “I know that a therapist would probably tell me I was neglected by him, but I never felt so. He was perfect.”

  Her pace increased and happiness flowed through her as she talked about her father. For several minutes she forgot about where she was and why as she told about her father, John Findlay Burkenhalter. He visited her three times a year, and each visit was more exciting than the last. He always showed up bearing fabulous gifts for her and her four friends. “He took us to circuses and fairs and ice cream parlors. Once he took us to a department store and had a woman make up our faces when we were just twelve; then he bought all the makeup for us.”

  When Ace made no comment to this, she sighed. “You have to be a girl to understand that. The fathers of all the other girls in the school were always telling their daughters no. It was as though the fathers didn’t want the girls to grow up. No lipstick, no short skirts, no anything.”

  Ace was looking at her in impatience. Right, she thought, she was to recount facts, not make this into an essay contest.

  “That’s it,” she said. “I went to college, majored in business, graduated, had a few jobs in New York; then eight years ago I started work at Davidson Toys.”

  “With Kimberly,” he said thoughtfully.

  “I didn’t meet Kimberly until I’d been at Davidson Toys for a year and a half.”

  “Do you think Kimberly could be the connection between you and Roy?”

  “Not hardly,” Fiona said, then stepped back to look at the room. She had removed enough debris to fill half a New York elevator.

  But, obviously, no compliment was going to come from him. Instead, he was deep in thought.

  “Did you ever go to Texas? Even as a kid?”

  “Never,” Fiona said. “Could you point me toward the, uh, you know.”

  “Out back,” he said without much concern. “But watch where you walk.”

  She didn’t want to think about what danger there could be as she tiptoed out the door. There was an overgrown path cut through the plants, and she followed it, expecting at any moment to be jumped on by some creature that no civilized person had ever seen before.

  But her trip was uneventful, and when she returned to the cabin, Ace had taken a toaster oven from the back of the car.

  “Your friend is going to hate you when he returns to his house and finds all his things gone. You didn’t by chance pack sheets and towels, did you?”

  “Two sets of each,” he said, and for just a second his eyes met hers, but she looked away. She had no idea what the sleeping accommodations were.

  “So what’s for dinner? I’m starving.”

  “Shrimp, which you get to peel while I talk.”

  At that Fiona let out a groan, a genuine groan about the shrimp but a pretend groan about hearing his life story. So now maybe she’d find out some truth, and not his Beverly Hillbilly act.

  But Ace didn’t tell much about himself. He was one of four children, he told her, and a bit of a misfit in a gregarious family. When he was seven, his mother’s odd, quiet younger brother broke his leg and came to stay with Ace’s family.

  “We formed a bond,” Ace said as he peeled oranges for the sauce. “When I was eight, I spent my first summer with my uncle here in this place. By the time I was ten, I was living here full-time.” As he said the words, he looked about the horrible old house with love.

  She had to turn away to hide her grim expression. He may have lived here, but there was more to his life than this ramshackle old cabin. But he wasn’t volunteering that info, was he?

  “What about school?” Fiona asked as she slipped her fingernail under the thin membrane of a shrimp.

  “Here, let me show you,” Ace said impatiently as he bent over her, then put his arms around her as he showed her how to peel the shrimp.

  For a moment Fiona held her breath. His chin was on her hair and his big, tanned hands were covering her own much smaller, much whiter hands. It was the situation, she thought. She was alone in a paradise wilderness … Well, maybe not a paradise, but they were certainly alone … And Ace was a fantastically good looking man, so it was to be expected that she’d feel some attraction to him.

  To get herself under control, for a second she closed her eyes and remembered New York and her office and her cool, clean apartment. She’d had it professionally decorated, and it was beautiful, and now she could see it vividly. But when would she get back to it?

  Abruptly, his hands stopped on hers. Obviously, he was as affected by her nearness as she was by his.

  With her heart pounding, she turned her face to look at him, knowing that her lips would be very near his. She’d said that unusual circumstances make for unusual—

  But he wasn’t looking at her. Instead, he had that faraway look that she knew meant he was listening. Did he hear a car? Distant police sirens? Was danger imminent?

  It was then that she heard a bird call in the distance and knew that that was what had h