At her receptionist’s desk in the lobby outside, Cynthia Huellen worked the shorter hotel list, interrupting herself only to answer incoming calls. From where Cynthia sat, her splendid legs crossed, she could see through the long lobby windows to the street outside. Rain drilled the sidewalks, ran in the gutters, flooded the roadways. She had never seen so much rain in her life. She had been born and raised in Calusa, and she was now twenty-five years old, and never in her life had she seen such steady, torrential, incessant, interminable, shitty rain. Cynthia was a sun person. Usually, there was not a day that went by that did not find Cynthia sunning on a beach or a boat. But her tan was beginning to fade. She noticed this as she reached for the phone. Looked at her hand holding the phone. The back of it. Her tan was most definitely fading. She consulted the hotel list again, and was beginning to dial the number for the Crescent Edge Beach Club on Sabal Key when an incoming-call light flashed on her panel. She tapped a button.
“Summerville and Hope, good morning,” she said.
“Matthew Hope, please.”
“May I say who’s calling?”
“Hello?” Matthew said.
“Matthew?”
“Yes, Marcie.”
“It’s Marcie.”
“Yes, how are you?”
Marcie Franklin, who — until the middle of last month, at least — had considered Matthew the neatest thing ever; Marcie was thirty-three years old, but she sometimes sounded like a teenager. She had sounded like a teenager when she’d breathlessly revealed that she had just met and fallen madly in love with a sixty-year-old humanities professor at New College in Sarasota, and that this was why, although she’d tremendously enjoyed her brief (December 24 — January 13, but who was counting?) relationship with Matthew, she now felt they had to end it, okay?
Once upon a time, long ago — this past New Year’s Eve, as a matter of fact — Marcie had told him she loved him.
He wasn’t quite sure he’d believed her.
She had also told him he was devastatingly handsome.
That was nice of her, too.
At an even six feet tall and a hundred and eighty pounds, with dark hair and brown eyes, Matthew considered himself an average-looking man in a world more and more populated with spectacularly good-looking men. He went to Nautilus three times a week and most of the workout machines he used were set at ninety pounds. He was a B-level tennis player at best, with a lousy backhand and an even worse serve. He owned a nineteen-foot Grady-White bow-rider named Kicks, which he’d never once taken out into the Gulf. He was thirty-eight years old and slowing down, man, slowing down.
But in Marcie’s eyes…
He’d been faster than a speeding bullet, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound…
In Marcie’s eyes.
Marcie’s emerald-green eyes.
A memory now.
Just as the voice on the phone was almost a memory.
“Matthew,” she said, “the reason I’m calling, Jason doesn’t know about you and me…”
“Jason?”
“My fiancé.”
“Oh.”
He was already her fiancé. Terrific.
“He doesn’t know about us, the relationship we shared, and I was hoping, if you’re going to be at the Poseidon Ball this Saturday night, that you won’t reveal by word or gesture that you and I had known each other in anything more than a casual way. However briefly. Or, even, you know, look at me as if you knew me better than I would like Jason to think you knew me.”
“Marcie, I certainly would never reveal to your fiancé that you and I had known each other intimately.”
“Right. No lingering glances, Matthew, or covert touches, or…”
“I wouldn’t even ask you to dance.”
“I wish you wouldn’t.”
“I wouldn’t.”
“Good. I’m sorry, Matthew, but he’s very jealous.”
“I understand. Thank you for calling, Marcie.”
“And don’t come sit at our table to chat,” Marcie said.
“Would I do that?”
“Because he’s got antennae, Matthew.”
“Is he a cockroach?” Matthew asked.
“I’m telling you he can detect signals.”
“No sitting, no chatting, no looking, no touching, no dancing, I’ve got it,” Matthew said. “I never knew you at all, right?”
“Well, you don’t have to go that far, but…”
“Marcie… I won’t be at the ball.”
“What?”
“I won’t be there, Marcie. You can relax.”
“But you said…”
“No, Marcie. You have nothing to worry about. I’ll be sitting home all by myself this Saturday night, all alone…”
“Oh, stop it, Matthew.”
“Sipping martinis and staring out at the rain…”
“Goodbye, Matthew, I have to run.”
“Goodbye, Marcie,” he said, and hung up.
He sat scowling at the receiver, realizing all at once that he was still extremely angry with her for having dropped him so perfunctorily.
I love you, Matthew Hope, she had said.
New Year’s Eve.
I love you, Matthew Hope.
Bullshit, he thought.
Leona Summerville walked and moved like a panther in heat.
Getting out of her Jaguar in the George Brothers parking lot, she exposed enough leg to attract the attention of four teenage boys trying to load a crated washing machine into the back of a pickup truck. One of the boys shouted, “Hey, Mama!” and another called, “What’s your name, honey?”
Leona smiled.
As she was entering the revolving doors to the department store, a man came through from the other side, and then went around yet another time, following her back into the store. The man stood shaking his head in amazement, hands on his hips, watching Leona as she swiveled her way across the store toward the escalator. As Warren came through the doors, the man turned to him and said, “Mmmm-mmmm,” and still shaking his head, left the store. Warren moved swiftly across the store, stepped onto the escalator while Leona was still on it, glanced upward, and then turned away in embarrassment when he realized he could see her panties under the short skirt she was wearing.
She got off the escalator on the second floor, and he followed her into the lingerie department — what George Brothers here in downtown Calusa called Intimate Apparel, this on a sign with a mauve background and avocado-green script lettering. Leona walked directly under the sign and past a female mannequin wearing a black bra, a black garter belt, a pair of black net stockings, and a pair of black panties cut high on the thigh and unfortunately showing the joining of the mannequin’s legs and torso, which made her look like a reassembled double amputee.
Intimate Apparel.
A great many people had difficulty spelling the word “apparel.” You asked them to spell it without looking at it, they came up with the oddest combinations of p’s and I’s. Not Warren. “Apparel” was a word that had come up frequently while he was typing up reports for the St. Louis PD.; superior officers always wanted to know what kind of damn apparel a person had been wearing.
Leona was wearing a pale blue denim miniskirt with a partially unzipped, big brass zipper on the left thigh. The skirt, together with high-heeled white sandals, gave her a long, barelegged, girlish look. A cutoff white T-shirt made her look like a woman with exuberant breasts and erect nipples, maybe because she wasn’t wearing any bra under it.