him, and in between I sort of had fun. Until the big surprise.”
“No, if you’d jumped into that relationship and really gotten to know CJ, you wouldn’t have been surprised. You were surprised because you didn’t bother finding out who he was.”
“What kind of psychobabble is that?”
“The voice of somebody who knows you. Like, this is Sherrie, remember? One of the few people you ever let in, and mostly because we were in college and partying too hard to hide anything.”
“I wish I was as deep and mysterious as you’re making me out to be, but I’m a ‘what you see is what you get’ kind of gal.”
“Right. So you say.” Sherrie paused. “Is there anything you need? Anything I can do from here?”
“You could find me another rich husband.”
“Do you really want one?”
“Make that a sugar daddy. I’ll do an Anna Nicole Smith.”
“You don’t have the boobs for it.”
“Wade could take care of that.”
“Over my dead body.”
“With CJ’s connections to the mob, that part could probably be arranged, too.”
“The girls and Wade send their love.”
Tracy made smooching noises into the phone.
In the last rays of twilight, the walk over to Herb’s seemed twice as long as it should have. As she drew closer, she could hear the sound of waves from the gulf side of the key. Her cottage was closer to the bay, and the view was blighted by mangroves and underbrush. Herb’s cottage faced in the same direction, but Alice’s peeked out at the gulf. Once the cottages were gone, and the vegetation was plowed under or tamed into submission, the owners of the luxury condos planned for this spot would have million-dollar views, which was a good thing, since they would be paying that much or more.
Tracy wasn’t a whiner, and she wasn’t a wallower. After life as she’d known it ended, she had taken hold of herself and put one foot in front of the other to get herself to this point. But now, as she approached Herb’s door, she wondered exactly what was in store for her future. She couldn’t dismiss the possibility that she was going to be living on Happiness Key until, like Herb, she was found dead in her bed.
No, that was silly. That was never going happen, because unless something changed quickly, she wasn’t going to have enough cash to hold on to the property. The taxes were enormous. She had enough money for another year, but if the land didn’t sell, she was in deep trouble.
But hey, that wasn’t the only thing she had to worry about. There was everything else, besides. Tracy supposed she had better take Lee Symington up on that introduction to the yacht club event planner.
Although the temperature was still well into the eighties, once she was standing on Herb’s front porch a shiver passed through her. She wished she had let the telephone ring, or skipped dinner. She had hoped to do this as the sun set, so she had enough light to guide her but not enough that her activities would be easily noted by her tenants. She was not insensitive, at least not completely. There was something crass about dragging the old guy’s mattress out to the road. It would probably look as if she couldn’t wait to clear out his house and rent it again. Find the body, carry the man’s stuff to the curb, dust off your capitalist hands and call in a classified.
Now she didn’t have to worry. Nobody would see her struggling with the mattress, because not only had the sun gone down, the last light had faded. No moon shone over the key, and an uncharacteristic silence had descended. She wasn’t easily spooked, but unlocking the door of a dead man and blithely walking in seemed like the sort of thing the victim in a slasher movie might do. A bad idea. But not as bad as waiting for next week’s trash pickup.
Inside, the light Janya had left burning in Herb’s bedroom was only a soft glow under the closed door and little help. She felt for and flipped a switch by the door, but nothing happened. Terrific. Herb probably had a lamp connected to it, but he had turned it off at the source. She waited for her eyes to adjust. There were a couple of streetlamps at the front of the property where the rental office for the beach cottages had once stood. But the oyster-shell roads themselves had no illumination except front porch lights.