Cry Uncle (26 page)

***

THE BEACH WASN’T too crowded, although Pamela
suspected that by afternoon it would be packed. She staked out an
area in the shade of a palm tree, spreading the blanket and using
her sandals, the towels and the tote to hold the corners down.
Lizard grabbed her bucket and shovel and raced down to the water’s
edge, eager to build her replica of the “Versatile Palace.”

Pamela arranged herself comfortably on the
blanket and sighed contentedly. The air was laced with the scent of
salt and the gleeful squeals of children splashing at the water’s
edge. The sun glazed the sand, imbuing it with a gentle
shimmer.

Lying in the shelter of the palm tree,
absorbing the therapeutic warmth and the soothing sounds of
youthful laughter and the surf, Pamela could almost forget that
anything was amiss in her life. An uncommunicative husband? A
murder trial? A temporarily sidelined career? Who cared? She had
the beach, the sea, a good novel and the company of a little girl
who could obviously entertain herself without constant adult
supervision. On a morning like this, it was possible to believe
everything was going to work out okay.

The heat tranquilized Pamela. Above her, the
caws and mews of the sea gulls sounded like a lullaby. The words of
her book blurred; she closed her eyes and felt the tension drain
out of her. Giddy shrieks amid the thudding surf nibbled at the
frayed edges of her consciousness.

A long moment passed, and she opened her eyes
and searched the shoreline. A shot of pink sprang from the foaming
waves, then vanished, then sprang up again, arms wheeling, hair
dripping.

Pamela frowned. Hadn’t Lizard been wearing a
lime-green swim suit?

There it was, lying on the sand. The pink
creature bounded out of the waves, darted along the water’s edge,
and plunged in with another cheerful shout.

Pamela sprang to her feet and sprinted to the
water’s edge in time to see Lizard soar out of the water again,
stark naked.

She snatched the swimsuit off the sand and
charged into the water, ignoring the shock of its coldness.
“Lizard! Elizabeth! Get over here now!” she roared, fear and fury
battling inside her. The chilly water lapped her knees as she
forged deeper and grabbed hold of Lizard’s slippery arm. “Put this
on!” she commanded, then cast a quick look around to see how many
people might have seen the nude little girl.

Lizard stared up at Pamela and blinked with
phony innocence. “How come?”

“
Because I said so!” Pamela
retorted.

“
So what? Birdie
says—”

“
I don’t care what Birdie
says!” Pamela reached down and grabbed Lizard’s foot, determined to
shove it through the leg hole in her swimsuit. Lizard tumbled
backward with a shivery splash that sprayed water all over
Pamela.

Lizard obviously found Pamela’s outraged
sputtering hilarious. She leaped back up, giggling and dancing out
of Pamela’s reach.

“
Get over here!” Pamela
chased her through the water and out onto the beach, scrambling
across the sand after the naked child, who continued to flap her
arms and shriek with laughter. If onlookers hadn’t noticed Lizard
before, they certainly noticed her now.

Pamela’s long legs compensated for her lack
of speed. After a minute she caught up to Lizard, snagged her
around her wet belly, hauled her off the sand and lugged her back
to the blanket, where she wrapped her in a towel. “Don’t you ever,
ever do that again!” she chided.

“
How come?”

“
Because.” Pamela dried her
in brisk, frantic strokes, then yanked the swimsuit onto
her.
Because I said so
wasn’t going to work a second time. “Because you’re not
supposed to be undressed in public,” she explained.

“
Birds don’t wear clothes,”
Lizard pointed out.

“
Birds wear feathers.”
Anticipating Lizard’s argument, she continued, “And no, you can’t
wear feathers. Birds are different than people.”

“
But Birdie said if you
strip to your essence you can be as free as the birds. You can fly
in your spirit...or something like that.”

Scowling, Pamela smoothed the straps across
Lizard’s shoulders. “Do you know what essence means?”

Lizard shrugged, the motion jarring one of
the straps out of place. Pamela nudged it back. “I think it means,
kinda like your skin or something.”

“
Listen to me.” Pamela kept
her hands on Lizard’s shoulders, holding the girl in place. “It’s a
sad fact of life, Lizard, but you can’t go running around naked in
public. There are a lot of sick people in this world.”

“
What do you mean, sick?
Like, they have chicken pox?”

“
No. It’s more like they’re
sick in the head.” Pamela took a slow breath and sorted her
thoughts. In her wildest dreams, she would never have imagined she
would have to have this discussion with a little girl—someone
else’s little girl, at that. It was the sort of task a childless
professional woman shouldn’t have to face. Pamela had never studied
the subject; she hadn’t read instructional articles or pamphlets on
it.

Someone else should have
told Lizard these things. Birdie, or Joe, or Joe’s mother,
or
someone
. No
child should reach the age of five without knowing about
perverts.

Apparently, the other adults in Lizard’s life
had failed to warn her. Pamela was just going to have to muddle
through on her own. “Some sick-in-the-head people might want to
touch your private parts,” she said carefully. “You know what your
private parts are, don’t you?”

“
What I keep under my
bed?”

“
No. The private parts of
your body. The parts that are supposed to be covered by your
bathing suit.”

“
You mean, like my
butt?”

Pamela sighed. Why bother with discretion?
“Yes, Lizard. Like your butt.”

“
Why would anyone want to
touch my butt?”

“
Because they’re
sick.”

“
Do they think touching my
butt’ll make them better?”

Pamela sighed again. “It doesn’t really
matter what they think, because they’re sick in the head. In any
case, Lizard, I want you to promise me you won’t go running around
nude anymore.”

“
Even in the
bath?”

“
In public, Lizard. That’s
what we’re talking about. No nudity in public.”

Lizard looked peeved. Her eyes narrowed and
frown lines pleated her brow. “What if Uncle Joe says I can?” she
tested.

“
If he says you
can...”
I’ll kill him
, Pamela concluded silently. He didn’t have the right to say
anything on this subject. He’d relinquished his rights when he’d
decided to meet with his distributor at the Shipwreck instead of
coming to the beach with his family. “If he says you can, you can,”
she said. “But I’m sure he’ll say you can’t.”

Lizard stuck out her lower lip in a plump
little pout. “I bet he says I can. I’m gonna go build a castle. And
you can’t help.” She stomped off in a snit.

Pamela permitted herself one final sigh that
ended in a shudder. She would rather have Lizard angry at her than
running around in her birthday suit. Her gaze glued to Lizard, she
felt some of her tension fade, but not all. One part of her
remained tight with rage—rage that Joe hadn’t taught Lizard how to
protect herself.

Damn it. This had nothing to do with Mona
Whitley and the courts. It had nothing to do with persuading the
authorities that Lizard belonged in Key West. This wasn’t a game, a
staged performance. This was real life. When Pamela thought about
all the weirdoes in the world, and all the terrible things that
could have happened to Lizard, she wanted to weep.

She wasn’t going to weep. What she was going
to do was give that husband of hers a piece of her mind about his
responsibilities as a family man.

***

IT HAD ALL SEEMED so simple when Mary DiNardi
first raised the idea. You get married, you make a pretty family
picture for the judge, you keep Lizard. No emotions, no
involvement, just a straightforward deal, as neat and fair as the
contracts he drew up with his distributor.

He’d even picked a woman who didn’t turn him
on—except that she did. He’d picked a woman who had as good a
reason to stick with him as he had to stick with her—unless she was
simply a crazy lady. Was it any wonder that he wanted to keep as
far from her as possible?

“
Go home,” Kitty scolded
him. “You look like hell.”

How she could see what he looked like in the
murky light of the bar was beyond him. “You used to think I was
cute,” he shot back.

“
You used to look like you
got a few hours of sleep every night. Go home.”

He glanced toward the steering wheel on the
wall. Nearly midnight—the busiest time at the Shipwreck. “The bar’s
too crowded.”

“
Nothing the rest of us
can’t handle. Go home, Joe—and do us all a favor this time: don’t
stay up all night making whoopee with Pamela. Get some
sleep.”

Making whoopee. Real funny. “I’ll leave in an
hour.”

“
You’ll leave right now, or
Brick’ll escort you out. Right, Brick?”

Brick grunted. Joe eyed his fellow bartender
with resignation. Besides making the best tequila sunrises on the
island, another reason Joe had hired Brick was because he was built
like a linebacker on the Dolphins, which enabled him to double as a
bouncer when things got too rowdy. Joe didn’t doubt that Brick
could “escort” him from the premises—either by tossing him over one
brawny shoulder or by dragging him out by his feet.

“
All right,” he relented.
“I’m outta here.”

Driving home, he admitted to himself that he
really was exhausted. His fatigue wasn’t just a result of the
nocturnal restlessness caused by knowing a woman—an available woman
with snow-blond hair and the sexiest shoulders this side of the
Continental Divide—was lying alone in a bed at the opposite end of
the hall from him. It was also an outgrowth of living with
doubt.

He’d trusted Pamela once. He wanted to trust
her again. But he wasn’t sure how, short of investigating her
mental health records. And what would he do if he found out she was
clinically paranoid? If he gave her the boot after less than a
month of marriage, the courts sure wouldn’t consider Lizard’s home
life stable.

He’d gotten himself into jams before. Jams
with women, on occasion. Given all the women he knew, he’d have had
to be God Himself not to have screwed up at least a few times. But
he’d never gotten mixed up with marriage. And he’d never had so
much at stake.

A light was glowing in the living room window
when he pulled into the driveway. Pamela usually left the hallway
light on for him, as well as the light above the front door. It
wasn’t like her to forget to turn off the other lights.

Fatigue weighed him down as he climbed out of
his car, trudged up the front walk and let himself into the house.
His neck was stiff, his back aching. Tonight he was going to put
his distrust and desire on hold and get some serious, uninterrupted
shut-eye. Whatever lay ahead, he needed his strength to confront
it.

What lay ahead, it turned out, was Pamela. He
had barely closed the door behind himself when she charged at him
from the living room. She was wide awake, so full of energy he
recoiled a step as she advanced toward him. “We’ve got to talk,
Jonas. This is really important. And so help me, if you try to
avoid me—”

“
Hey, hey.” He held up his
hands to stop her. He’d just come home. He wasn’t expecting to see
her; he wasn’t used to seeing her. He was tired, he was sore...and
she was a vision of beauty.

She must have been out in the sun all day.
Her cheeks and the tip of her nose were pink, her arms and
legs—exposed by her shorts and tank top—more of a golden hue. Her
hair seemed a few shades lighter than it had been that morning, her
lashes and eyebrows bleached to platinum above her silver-bright
eyes.

“
This is important, Jonas,”
she said.

“
Fine. It’s important.” He
sidled past her, heading for the kitchen. If it was all that
important, he might need a beer to get him through it.

“
It’s about
Lizard.”

Thank God it wasn’t about him and Pamela. He
paused and turned. “What about her?”

“
Did you know she likes to
run naked on the beach?”

Actually, he hadn’t known that. But what the
hell? She was a kid. A remarkably uninhibited one. “Naked,
huh.”

“
From her head to her
toes.”

“
Well.” He continued down
the hall to the kitchen, Pamela hot on his trail. Without turning,
he pulled a couple of beers from the fridge, extended one to her,
and then set it on the table when she didn’t take it. He twisted
the cap off the other bottle and took a swig.

She crowded him against the counter, her
hands fisted and her eyes ablaze. “Damn it, Joe! Don’t you realize
what a terrible thing this is?”

“
Terrible thing?” He’d
suspected Pamela of having a prudish streak—after all, she’d passed
up the opportunity to make love with him. But hell, a little kid
running around bare-ass on the beach was no big deal. “Come on,
Pam. She’s five years old.”

“
Old enough to keep her body
covered.”

“
For God’s sake. So she ran
around naked. It’s no big deal. You know how kids are.”