Elvis dropped the condom box on her toes and sat down obediently, waiting for Nikki to throw the box. “These aren’t mine.” What else could she say?
Elvis’s excitement was irresistible. “He’s not usually a fetcher.” Picking up the box, she chucked it toward the garbage can again, only to have Elvis take off joyfully.
“Your costume is…charming.”
She was just about to ask him if he was writing about her, but stopped before the words left her lips. “Privacy is important to me.” She returned his stare but it was hard to look mean in a costume.
“Obviously.” The wind blew his hair around his face. He needed a haircut. “Bad weather coming in.”
“Delivery Man
and
Weather Man.” She smiled at him and was surprised when he blushed. This sudden show of vulnerability touched something in her. Pete had a crush on Goldy. Must’ve been a good kiss after all. “Maybe it won’t last.” Was she talking about the weather?
Pete looked over to the trees which were jostling in the wind. “I thought you were leaving the lake.” He stepped back, put one hand in a pocket of his jeans, and grabbed the truck’s silver door handle with the other hand.
Nikki bought herself a moment by throwing the box for Elvis again. Pete was awfully eager to know her schedule. “I don’t know.” He almost sounded like he wanted her to leave.
“You here by yourself? It’s kind of remote location for one person.” He opened the truck door.
“I have friends coming soon.” She looked at her watch like they might be pulling in at any moment. “And of course I have my watchdog.” They both laughed at Elvis who, by now, had torn the box apart and was scattering condoms across the yard.
“How is he doing after getting rolled by my truck?” He dropped his hand from the truck door handle.
“He’s a survivor.”
“His barking is good protection. Even just for notification.”
Elvis looked at Pete and wagged his tail, abandoning the condoms for sniffs around Pete’s jeans. Elvis jumped up to Pete’s knees. “He doesn’t usually like strangers,” she said.
“Especially people who hit him with their truck, I bet.” Tiny lines fanned out from his turquoise eyes when he smiled, and Nikki imagined he didn’t wear colored contact lenses like celebrities. As he reached down to pet her dog, he chuckled. “I had bacon for breakfast, in town. He probably smells that.”
“Ah, he does like bacon.” So Pete was already in town when she saw him at the gas station.
“Let me know if you need anything, seeing you’re here by yourself and all.” He jumped inside the truck and backed away, leaving Nikki to wonder what he had that she might need. He’d write an article if she was feeling unpublicized? She couldn’t let her guard down yet.
****
He’d gone too far. It wasn’t helpful to get sidetracked, but Nikki was so damned cute. She’d gone from a hot rock star to the pretty lady next door. And she was entirely someone else in that costume. Pete laughed out loud at the thought of her in that wig. He was sure she didn’t have friends coming over like she said, but understood that she didn’t want him to think she was alone. That probably worked out better for him. Her being cautious and all. Especially because he’d kissed her.
He had thought she’d leave the lake if he came on too strong, but she was still here with no hint of going. And asking the sheriff about Goldy at the lake hadn’t flushed her out. Shit. He’d embarrassed himself by kissing her and didn’t get the end result he wanted. He’d have to stay away now. No more flirting with Goldy. Soon she’d leave and he’d become someone else.
Scanning the perimeter, he noted that something was different but couldn’t put his finger on what it was. Everything looked the same. He left the grocery bags in the truck, and silently crept to the side door of the house. With his ear to the door, he listened.
A faint murmur of voices came from inside. There’d been no sign of a vehicle on the property. Stealing along the side of the house, he peeked over the window ledge knowing he’d left the drapes open on this side. And there they were. Standing in the middle of the kitchen. Waiting for him. Three bodies looking drastically out of place in the rustic log house.
When he barged through the door, they looked like cornered rabbits and he knew at that moment it would be easy. Easier than the others.
****
Nikki positioned herself with a ham and cheese sandwich at her elbow and watched the scene in the film she was both looking forward to and dreading. The music she wrote for this part of the movie would determine the film’s entire score. It was the pivotal moment in the story and she hoped to draw a melody from it, a hook to haunt the entire film. The audience would walk out of the theatre humming it and when it played at the Academy Awards, the poignancy of the music would insure tears. Nikki had to make it memorable.
She studied the scene on her computer, playing the piano as it progressed. Nothing came that reflected the emotion needed. She had to put herself in the main character’s place, to feel the horror of the woman who’d been asked to give her child to another woman to save her town’s decimation. The childless wife of the Nazi commander had made a deal with her husband to spare the people of the town if the prisoner woman gave them her baby. She had to.
Thinking about Quinn, Nikki remembered how sweet she’d been as a baby. One of the hardest things she’d ever done in her life was to leave her child in a nanny’s care for days on end, in order to fulfill her obligations as Goldy. Poor Quinny had had such a rotten mother. No wonder her child had experimented with drugs at the age of fifteen, gone to rehab at sixteen, and had her own sponsor at AA at the age of seventeen. Thank God she’d been sober and drug-free for the last nineteen months.
Nikki found herself sympathizing with the anguish of the heroine. From deep within, the pain of the mother’s choice gripped her heart and twisted it until notes poured out of her and filled the room with emotion. As she played, she found something lingering on the edge of her mind. She repeated it and continued, playing the eight bars over and over then built on it, filling in notes where necessary. Working it over, adding notes, slowing it down, repeating passages. Finally she hit the record button to lay down a rough track of what she hoped would be the base of the melody. After years of writing, Nikki no longer questioned how she found the music. Notes arrived from somewhere she couldn’t explain and, as they surfaced, she played them.
Finished for now, she laid her head down on the cool, polished surface of the Steinway, her tears pooling where they fell beside her face. In her half-slump, Nikki’s hand went to her belly. She wanted this baby with everything she had in her heart. These tears had nothing to do with the music she’d just written, they were filled with the knowledge that her child would be the heart of who she was and nothing would take that away from her. Not this time. Burn had given her one child and they’d agreed that was it. Goldy’s focus on work had been necessary to too many people back then for her to have “a brood of kids running around,” he’d said.
Nikki walked down the grassy lawn to the dock, watching the moon’s ascension from the mountain tops across the lake. Without conscious thought, she stripped down to nothing and dove into the blackness of the bay. Daily temperatures were still summery warm and the water’s contrasting coolness was blissful.
Her legs kicked silently below the surface to take her out to the deeper water. Glancing back at the pile of clothes on the end of the dock, it looked like her body had mysteriously disintegrated to leave only a pair of shorts, a shirt and underwear. Her hands cut the surface as she swam to the center of the bay, slightly drunk on the haunting tune that lingered in her head. Rolling onto her back, she stared at the stars, her breasts bobbing on the dark surface of the lake. They were tender now. Soon, other changes would present themselves and she’d feel more confident about the longevity of the pregnancy.
She moved closer to shore. Her bare body felt unencumbered, rolling from front to back and around several times. Her breasts hit the cooler air on the surface and a sexual thrill shot through her body. She recalled making love with Burn near the dock. Never again. Her sex life would now only involve fantasies about men who might possibly love her, not ever knowing she was Goldy.
“You were a singer?” they’d say. “I didn’t know.” Her fantasy man never had black hair past his shoulders, no tattoos, never wore leather and chains or heavy eye makeup. Funny thing was, without all that, Burn was actually a sweet-looking man—beautifully boyish, just out of the shower. It was his curse that he worried constantly that everyone didn’t love him enough.
Swimming to the shallows, Nikki pondered the conundrum of Pete Bayer. Physically he was so different from Burn, more likely to know how to swing an axe, drive a racing car, rock climb, and survive in the wilderness. Pete was probably the type to sleep in the nude, enjoying the coolness of sheets on his skin, not the type to keep his clothes on during sex like her movie-star crush. Judging from the way Pete kissed her, she guessed he’d be aggressive in bed. He had those sleepy-looking blue eyes, that gravelly voice, the strong torso, and those arms that caught her before she fell at the grocery store.
She grabbed her clothes from the dock and walked through the water toward the beach. The shirt slipped over her head easily and fell past her shoulders and down to her hips. Walking bare-assed out of the water in the dark, Nikki headed for the towel on the lounge chair but stopped when a muffled yell came from the house across the bay. Her initial thought was that Pete had climaxed during sex but realized she’d only been fantasizing about him. She wrapped the towel around her waist.
Elvis’s yipping from the cottage drowned out every sound now that he’d spotted Nikki. When she opened the door, another noise called from across the bay. This time it was not a man’s voice. It was softer, higher, like a whoop. She hadn’t thought that Pete Bayer might be entertaining a woman.
Moving to the dock’s edge, she sat facing the Dickersons’ house. Spying was what other people had done to her for two decades, and she chided herself for this cartoonish, snoopy version of herself. Still, she waited to listen. Just in case. But nothing else punctuated the night air. No laughing, no yelling, no screams of sexual satisfaction.
Too cold to stay longer, she returned to the house, set the security alarm and trudged up the stairs to bed, feeling rejected and old. People were probably having sex next door while she was swimming naked by herself.
Skimming across the water at full throttle, the feeling of speed was both scary and exhilarating for Nikki. She’d been staring at the insides of her eyelids a lot lately. Napping, sometimes twice a day, had become the norm but soon the second trimester would allow her more energy. She’d have to break the news of her pregnancy to Quinn before the obvious look of pregnancy arrived. But what words would soften the news of her mother getting knocked up on a one-night stand? Anything said, sounded cheap.
Rounding the bottom of the lake, Nikki cruised lazily back up the opposite side, only fifty feet from shore. The privilege of staring at everyone else’s empty cottages was new to her. She usually hid from prying eyes on shore. But this was September and few people remained. Hardly anyone had a place on the side with no roads. And except for the town at the south end, no one visited the northern part of the lake in the winter. When the snow flew, the trails and old logging roads would be impassable.
When she was level with Half Moon Bay, Nikki turned the boat and headed for home. Skimming the surface at a low speed, the boat stopped, waves washing up the sides from the sudden halt.
Elvis fell from his perch on the chair and Nikki lunged to make sure he hadn’t hurt himself. Once satisfied her dog was fine, she said a silent prayer to the goddess of motors and turned the key with no success.
Damn. She knew nothing about boats. She’d wait and try again.
Elvis watched her. “S’okay, Elvis. Mommy meant to take a break in the middle of Louisa Lake.” She plunked down in the captain’s chair and exhaled loudly. Elvis wagged his tail and flew to his perch at the bow. One, two, three…Nikki counted to twenty and looked around. No other boats in sight. When she turned the key again, the silence baffled her.
She opened the engine compartment. Maybe there was an obvious problem, like a dead rat or a fish or something blocking the thingy that helps the boat start.
But she saw nothing unusual even though everything in an engine compartment was grossly unusual to her. She tried the key one more time with no success, and, as she checked her pockets, Nikki remembered her cell phone was back on the kitchen counter. Dammit all. The boat was closer to Dickerson’s property facing the backside of her neighbor’s peninsula, which was so overgrown with shrubs and blackberry bushes that a stranded boat would be invisible from the house.
Then she noticed the stern line still attached to the cleat, trailing into the water. It had probably been flapping behind the boat for twenty minutes before the propeller caught it. She looked over the side. The rope was pulled tighter than a drum—definitely wound around the propeller. She hit the button to raise the propeller but it wouldn’t budge. There wasn’t a knife, scissors or anything sharp on board to cut the rope.
“Elvis, can you gnaw through this if I send you over?” He tilted his head at mommy’s ridiculous words. Dammit. She’d have to go in and investigate. The phrase “up a creek without a paddle” came to mind. Remembering a paddle in the floor hatch, she pulled it out and checked the distance to the closest shore. The only way to avoid paddling was if someone came out to tow her. Ten minutes earlier, Nikki had been happy to be the only boat on the lake. Now she cursed her isolation.