Over Exposure Part 9

"You're an illusion," I said. "A figment of my imagination."

"Yeah, right. Dream on."

"What do you want with me?"

"My mother's gone now, in case you were wondering. She died a month before your mom went. That's what did Dad in. The double whammy of losing both his lovers. I'm not married. Never have been. So I don't have a family. No one knows about this place, but the two of us. Unless you told Nadine today."

"Dad told you about Nadine and me?"

"No," she said. "He pretended you didn't exist. But I figured it out. Tracked you down. It wasn't hard."

"You figured it out."

"I'm a woman. We're good at things like that. Seeing through our men."

I looked at the paper carton in her hand.

"So," she said. "Let's do his ashes. Then we'll decide who stays, who goes."

"What does that mean?"

"You know what it means, Logan. Only one of us is going to leave here."

I looked around for the pistol but it was no longer lying by my bedroll where I'd set it last night.

"Why?"

"Think about it. Are you willing to throw away your past? Revise your memories, spend the rest of your life adjusting to this new state of affairs. I know I'm not. I want Dad to myself. I want this place to myself. I want you gone."

I looked past her at the lagoon. At the morning light filtering through the dense green growth, the dazzle of sunlight on the water. For a moment I pictured Nadine back in Miami, waiting for me, wondering if I would return at all.

I thought of my own betrayal of her. The long years when she was second in line for my affection. How she must have longed for the larger part of me, the part I reserved for Dad. And I saw again the resigned look in her eyes as I left yesterday. Or was that a look of finality? A farewell to the man she had squandered her life on.

"You ready, Logan?" She was holding the carton above the water. "I was thinking I should sprinkle half of it and you sprinkle the rest."

I stepped closer to her and saw the pistol's rubber grip exposed at the edge of my sleeping bag.

"All right," I said. "You first then."

She gave me a look that was both wary and amused, one eyebrow c.o.c.ked just as Dad used to do.

She held the box over the water and tipped it, then swept it from one side of the platform to the other. A breeze sent the gray cloud swirling across the waters.

"Now you," she said, turning to me.

The smile on her lips grew solemn as she saw the gun in my hand.

"Ah, yes. The inevitable pistol."

"I don't want to do this," I said. "But you give me no choice."

"Of course," she said. "I'd do the same. I don't blame you. Not in the least."

"Where's your canoe? Where's your gear?"

She motioned to the waters beyond the bend in the lagoon.

"I have to do this. I have to."

"Of course you do."

I aimed at her left breast. She would fall backwards into the lagoon and be carried by the tide deeper into the mangroves. I would sink her canoe, then pack mine and paddle back to the main dock and drive home. Her body would decay and would never be found. I would do what I could to repair my marriage. I would make love to Nadine with a fervor I hadn't shown in years. I would start my life anew. I had seen death a thousand times. I had looked into the dazed eyes of the dying as they breathed their last. I could do this.

But her hand swung up and my father's dust blinded me. In a second she was on me, as strong as any woman I'd ever known. She chopped at my hand and the pistol clattered onto the deck. I stumbled backwards over my sleeping bag, clawing at the air in a sightless frenzy. She had her hands around my throat, and I got my hands around hers.

In a moment I felt the fibers giving way beneath my fingers and I heard the crackle of my own ligaments beneath her powerful grip. The dim light grew dimmer as I staggered to the side, pulling her with me in this awkward dance. The deck swayed and rocked and I heard the creaks of the old ropes that held it in place.

I gasped and heard her gasp. My knees sagged. Tiny sparklers fizzled. I smelled the sweet burn of apples and saw my father in his prime hiking beside my mother and me across a mountain orchard on one of our family vacations. The reel of my childhood began to flash, scenes of my father and me on boats and with bats and b.a.l.l.s in fields of play, swimming in a motel pool, riding a Ferris wheel, shooting beer cans off fence posts with a .22, falling asleep side by side beneath the Everglades stars. I felt the ache in my throat and watched blackness swell from the frame of my vision.

On Whitewater Bay, I paddled with even strokes, making it to the docks by noon. I loaded my car with the fishing gear, strapped the canoe on the roof rack, got behind the steering wheel and waited.

I watched the families come and go. Winnebagos and station wagons and SUV's. Men with their sons. Men with their daughters. Men with only their wives or girlfriends. Backing their fishing boats down the ramps, heading off for a day in the wilderness. I watched tourists park their rental cars and walk aimlessly around the parking lot. I watched birders with their binoculars combing the trees.

At two o'clock she arrived. She wore shorts and a red T-shirt and tennis shoes. She hauled her canoe from the water, carried it to a VW van and fixed it in place. She sat inside her van for a while, then started it and drove away.

I followed her out the entrance drive, then spent the next half hour shadowing her back to Florida City, staying a good half mile back. When she turned south on the Interstate, I turned north. I didn't need to know anything more. She wouldn't return to the Lost Lagoon and neither would I. We had spoiled it for each other, contaminated the place with our savagery.

It was an hour back to the house. I left the canoe on top of the car and sprinted to the front door. I swung it open, ran inside. I called out Nadine's name. Called it out again and again as I searched.

I found her sleeping in the guest room. The TV was on the Weather Channel and a man in a suit was promising more days of sun.

"You're back," Nadine said, as I staggered into the room. "What happened? You look terrible. What happened, Logan?"

I dropped to my knees beside the bed and held her. At first her embrace was stiff and uncertain, but in a moment it softened as though there were no sins she couldn't forgive, no limits to her mercy.

"Your eyes, Logan. What happened to your eyes?"

"It's nothing," I said. "I was crying. That's all. Just crying."

I rubbed at my swollen eyes until my vision finally cleared.

SIX LOVE.

In the delicate crosshairs of Roger's telescopic sight, Gigi Janeway stood at her open window, only the thin mesh of window screen and a hundred yards of humid, bug-dense summer air separating them. With the golden lights of her room blazing behind her, her body seemed to glow.

Gigi still wore her white tennis dress with the blue bows on the sleeves and she was brushing her long auburn hair. For years Roger had observed her close-up each afternoon when he came to retrieve his daughter, Julie, from tennis practice. Since the age of six, Gigi had been Julie's nemesis, and Roger had made a careful study of this girl who caused his daughter such torment.

By now he was intimately familiar with the scent of sour peppermint that Gigi's clammy flesh gave off. And he could picture exactly the glint of long blond hairs coating her forearms and lately he'd noticed the razor line at mid-thigh, just above the hem of her pleated tennis skirt, the rigidly precise border where she stopped shaving her legs. He knew her half dozen habitual facial expressions, from the subtle smirk she made when one of her inferiors blew an easy shot, to the hawkish squint that furrowed her forehead when she fell behind and had to summon an extra quotient of concentration.

Gigi looked out at the dark and for a half-second seemed to stare directly at Roger Shelton where he stood, tense and uncertain, the coa.r.s.e bark of the pine pressed hard against left his cheek, the smooth stock of his deer rifle flat against the other. He was five yards beyond the halo of the neighborhood security lights, in the shadows of the dense stand of pines that bordered Deepwood Estates, the exclusive community where Arthur Janeway, owner of the largest Cadillac dealership in Florida, resided. Arthur was a corpulent man who held a cold disdain for second-raters of every type, which most certainly included Roger Shelton, a common salesman on one of Janeway's used car lots.

Arthur's wife, Bettina, was from Dusseldorf. Gaunt and thin-lipped, with the cigarette roughened voice, the white-blonde hair, and the pale icy detachment of Greta Garbo in her prime. Ages ago, while still a bachelor, Roger had stumbled into Bettina during her first week in Sand Hills. New to America and deeply disoriented, she had briefly mistaken Roger for someone with a promising future and had dallied with him for two nights at a motel on the fringe of town. On the third night when she failed to appear, Roger Shelton went searching and located her at the Hotel Flamingo's wood paneled bar. On the stool next to her, Arthur Janeway was touching a flame to her cigarette. She turned and saw Roger in the doorway and the lungful of smoke that bloomed from her lips was directed at him with dismissive finality. When she turned back to Arthur, she gave a long, guttural laugh to some sly remark of his. In reply, Arthur reached up and touched a finger to one of her chiseled cheekbones. For several moments Roger stared from the doorway as Bettina pressed her baton, firmly and a.s.suredly, into the hand of the swifter runner.

As he was turning to go, Molly Weatherstone appeared beside him in the doorway of the Hotel Flamingo bar. She wore a shimmering black c.o.c.ktail dress and spiky heels. Roger managed a distracted h.e.l.lo but she didn't reply. Her furious gaze was fixed on the back of Arthur Janeway's head.

"You too, huh?" Roger said. "What'd he do, stand you up?"

After absorbing the scene for a moment more, Molly stalked across the room, bent to Arthur's ear and spoke a few short, sibilant words then swung around and marched out of the bar.

Less than a month later Bettina and Arthur Janeway eloped to Las Vegas. It was only days after that when Roger and Molly, consummated their own hasty romance with a civil ceremony at the Sand Hills courthouse. And though over the years, their marriage had proved sound enough, Roger always wondered if their bond had not been forged on the flimsy foundation of spite.

Gigi Janeway, the girl in Roger Shelton's wavering sights was Arthur and Bettina's cherished princess. Fourteen years old. A bony girl with pale gray eyes and a world cla.s.s two-handed backhand, a good kick serve and a killer instinct around the net. As Roger watched through the telescopic sight, Gigi Janeway drew the brush through her coa.r.s.e brown hair with the same mindlessly mechanical motion she employed on the court. Every stroke exactly like the last. Not a quiver of difference between the first backhand crosscourt of the afternoon and the five hundredth stroke that came two hours later. Her game was fearsomely robotic. She swung her racket like a scythe through the golden wheat of other men's daughters. Harvesting their vulnerabilities, their mind-wandering lapses, their muscular frailties. Gigi moved forward and forward again in an ever-widening swath, mowing down girl after girl with pitiless perfection.

Roger could see the shelf of trophies on the wall behind her. Not the small runner-up plaques Julie had managed to collect. But the big, gaudy, golden vessels of the triumphant. It was not simply to ama.s.s these trophies that drove Roger's daughter Julie to dash herself over and over and over against the impervious wall of Gigi Janeway's tennis game. Roger's daughter was guided by an artistic temperament. Capricious and creative and capable of flights of giddy inspiration, Julie played the game with volatile abandon. She was a poet on those strict and unforgiving courts. Lithe and inventive, mesmerizing in her finest moments, she had a dazzling array of shots and angles and paces and spins that sent the ball skidding away from her opponent's racket as if charmed.

On other days, however, when Julie's juices were not flowing, when the muse deserted her, she simply crumpled under the fractional weight of air. She could be sluggish and erratically self-destructive and painful to watch. Sometimes she fell into a daze of slow-motion awkwardness, eyes unlocked from the moment, stumbling about on the green clay as if she no longer cared about the game of tennis or about anything else on earth.

At her finest moments, Julie exposed Gigi for the mindless automaton that she was, yo-yoing her from side to side and up and back, twisting and turning the girl until she had to be dizzy, using her vast array of spins and speeds to search out the tiny c.h.i.n.ks in Gigi's heavy armor. But those glorious moments came and went like fragile wisps of starlight. Julie had so far been unable to sustain her quicksilver magic for an entire match against Gigi's inexhaustible onslaught.

In the small town of Sand Hills, in the tennis crazy county of Palm Cove, Gigi was the unfailing winner and Julie was the eternal runner-up. A girl with more talent and flair than a hundred Gigi's, though lacking in Gigi's single-minded focus, her stubborn, animal appet.i.te for conquest.

If simply winning her matches against Julie had been enough for Gigi Janeway, Roger would not be standing in the woods at that moment, aiming his deer rifle at the girl. But like her rapacious father, Gigi seemed to hunger for more than victory. Nothing less than total domination appeared to satisfy her. Every match against Julie was a blood-letting so vicious and so total that their acc.u.mulated affect was to drain the reservoirs of Julie's very spirit. Between matches, each word Gigi spoke to Julie had a belittling purpose. Every act, each haughty look or whispered remark to a fellow player tormented Julie, mocked her, undermined her faith in her abilities and reminded her of her inferior station in Sand Hills, Florida, where her father was merely an unremarkable salesman.

On too many nights, Julie lay in her sleepless bed and stared into her father's eyes pleading for Roger to tell her what she might do to alter her fate.

Roger had no answer. But he knew that Gigi Janeway and she alone blocked the way of his daughter. Her talent thwarted, skills obstructed, her very personality was being permanently stunted. No matter how hard she worked, no matter the peaks of athletic grace she reached, her efforts were forever mocked by Gigi Janeway. Just as his own career had been arrested by men like Gigi's father who were willing to be more aggressive, more relentlessly ruthless and hardnosed than Roger.

Out on the glaring pavement of the used car lot Roger had known his own moments of artistic grace. Closing deals in half an hour with penny-pinching old fools from the beachfront condos. There were days when he'd summoned his silver tongue and not even the devil himself could have withstood his sales pitch. He held the single day sales record of five used cars. However, he also held the record for the longest stretches without a sale. It was, Roger believed, all a function of the ebb and flow of the artistic temperament. But men like Arthur Janeway didn't appreciate transcendent qualities. Janeway, like his daughter, was unapologetically cold-blooded, relying on his superior focus, and his boundless stamina to wear down and eventually crush his compet.i.tion. He got what he wanted by wanting it more than anyone else.

Roger was certain all Julie needed was the smallest of boosts. What father could turn away from such need? Truly, all he wished to do was wing the girl in the golden window, a non-fatal wound that would keep her sidelined for a month or two, long enough for Julie to replenish her confidence and gather the momentum she needed.

Framed by honeyed light, Gigi stood in her window and dared Roger to shoot. Dared him to still the shudder in his arms and summon the courage that had eluded him for months.

He watched as Gigi took hold of a clump of her hair and brought it close to her face and inspected it. He watched her pluck a split end and flick it toward the screen. A casual gesture that was a perfect echo for the way she mercilessly brushed aside her flawed opponents. Then he watched with fascination as she released her hair and lifted the hairbrush to her moutha"turning it into a microphone, tipping her head to the side as if searching for a more flattering angle in the lights of center court Wimbledon. Having completed the entire fortnight without the loss of a set, Gigi had dispatched her final opponent and now curtseyed before the Duke and d.u.c.h.ess and explained to the enraptured crowd how she had managed this stunning victory at such a young age. Lucky sperm, Roger imagined her to say. Lucky sperm swam up my mother's thingy and infected her with me and gave me the endless stamina and the narrow focus and the ability to be unbored by hours of unvarying, repet.i.tion. I am not worthy of this trophy, she would say. The deserving one is Julie Shelton back in Sand Hills, Florida, a girl who went farther than anyone would have expected given the fact she had such unlucky sperm. Julie Shelton, a beautiful loser. This is for you unlucky Julie. This is for you, you pathetic girl, who never found the guts and gristle and monotonous meanness to succeed.

Through his sight Roger Shelton watched as Gigi dropped the hairbrush and came to sudden attention . Her smile went rigid as if someone had plucked the harp string that joined her cerebellum with the million unbearable nerves of her body. And then Gigi's mouth went slack and with one final puff of energy those ruthless blue eyes fixed on Roger's and all around his hiding place the woods glowed with Gigi Janeway's outrage. In her last moment of consciousness, a pout took control of her lips as if she were suffering an unaccustomed disappointment, some treasure withheld, some bauble s.n.a.t.c.hed from her grasp.

Roger lowered the rifle and listened to the echo of the blast swallowed by the thick, damp air, the surf roar of traffic, the high keening of crickets and mosquitoes, and the m.u.f.fled television laughter leaking from behind insulated walls and all that machine driven air.

He was to learn later that no one had heard the shot. No witnesses came forward with descriptions of a man dressed in camouflage. Apparently Roger had moved back to his car with perfect anonymity. In the following days, police investigators searched the nearby woods but failed to locate his nest in the trees or any other sign of him. The Sand Hills police were utterly baffled. Their theory was that Gigi had been struck by a stray slug from someone target practicing in the woods. Arthur and Bettina pled for help from state authorities or the FBI but they were denied. A month after the incident the furor had subsided.

What Roger learned of Gigi's condition came from the newspaper stories and the scuttleb.u.t.t around the used car lot. For seven weeks Gigi Janeway lay in a coma. When she woke, she remembered little of her previous life. The most mundane physical movements were now monumental challenges. For a while, every breath was a test, every eye blink an accomplishment. Her muscle memory had been totally erased. It would be a year before she could walk without crutches. Two before she might even grip a tennis racket again.

Indeed, it was almost two years to the day of her shooting, when Roger witnessed Gigi's return to the courts at the Sand Hills Racket Club. Her spastic swing, her heavy trudge, her immediate weariness was a cruel parody of her former game. Roger took no pleasure in her misery. But the acid drip of guilt he felt was neutralized by the welling pleasure and satisfaction as he watched his own daughter thrive. With a single tightening of his finger, Roger had liberated Julie and had given a totally justifiable rebuke to the imperious Janeway family.

The week before Christmas, on the clay courts of Flamingo Park on Miami Beach, Julie was serving at 40-5 in the second set. This was the final match of the most prestigious junior tournament in the world. The best players from Europe and South America and Australia had a.s.sembled and Julie had roared through her draw to the finals, knocking off two seeded players in the process. After winning the first set, she was up a service break in the second. As the match progressed her serve seemed to be gaining strength. Now it was skittering into the corners, and occasionally blasting directly at her dark-haired opponent with such vicious pace that the poor Spanish girl's heavy thighs were pocked with bruises.

Roger wanted to signal Julie to ease off. She was losing the sympathy of the crowd. There were already a few whistles, some murmuring around him about the tall lean American's lack of sportsmanship. But the referee sitting in the chair at the net had already given Julie one warning for sneaking looks at her father's hand signals. Another warning and she'd be penalized a game. Though she was well ahead, such a small interruption in her concentration might just be enough to tip the momentum back to the Spaniard.

"She's killing her," Molly whispered. She beamed with motherly delight.

Roger Shelton's wife, Molly, was as thin and jumpy as a whippet. She kept her sandy hair chopped short and her skin had been forever ruined by countless hours in the sun and now was crisped to the hue and texture of the wrappings of a cheap cigar. She was an indefatigable doubles player, a woman who thought nothing of playing ten grueling sets in a day.

"I know, I know," Roger said. "Two more games. Just two more."

Roger sat still and suffered the crowd's restlessness and loss of support for his daughter. Julie had begun to employ an ugly strategy, drawing the Spaniard to the net with vicious dropshots and rather than lobbing over her to exploit her ponderous gait, again and again Julie drove the ball directly at the sluggish girl and more than once the ball found meat.

Finally Julie was a game from victory. The Orange Bowl trophy gleamed on a nearby table. Such a win would kick the door wide open for her tennis future. Endors.e.m.e.nt requests would begin to tumble in the mail slot, media attention would escalate, all the best agents would be calling. Already in the last year she had been attracting ever increasing attention. Tall and blonde with shockingly blue eyes and an easy smile, gorgeously muscled legs and a voluptuous figure so different from her mother's hipless, flat-chested anatomy and from Roger's rail thin body. Known as "The Stick" for all his high school years, Roger found it amazing that he and Molly had produced such a plush beauty. In the last year a dozen websites had sprung up in cybers.p.a.ce devoted to the worship of Julie Shelton. Fourteen year old boys posted photos of her lunging for net shots, her pleated skirt kicking up just enough to show a swatch of white panties. And it wasn't just an adolescent following either. Throughout her matches, Roger had to endure the soft groans of yearning all about him, a grumble of l.u.s.t for his little girl. At first he'd wanted to search out each lecher and wrench him from his seat and toss him over the edge of the bleachers. A satisfaction he could not grant himself, however, for, like it or not, Julie's s.e.xual aura would count as much in her future success as her victories on the courts.

She was serving for the match, for the Orange Bowl t.i.tle, a win which would etch her name beside the great ones of the game, Billie Jean, Chrissie, Martina, Stephie. Roger shifted on the bleacher seat, about to rise to his feet and head down to give her a hug, when he saw from three rows away Arthur Janeway glaring at him. In a white warm-up suit, Gigi Janeway sat serenely next to him, her gaze fixed on the final moments of the match. On the far side of her ravaged daughter, Bettina was hunched forward, hollow-eyed and ashen. As if she felt the touch of his anxious stare, she turned her head slowly and locked her bitter gaze on Roger.

Shocked and befuddled, Roger raised a hand and gave the Janeways a ludicrous wave. Neither of them acknowledged the gesture, but continued to observe him coldly.

"Where are you going?" Molly asked as Roger rose. "She's still serving. You're going to distract her."

But Roger was already in motion. Thudding down the bleacher aisle, leaving a murmur of displeasure in his wake, he pushed past two wolfish teenagers in red sweatsuits, the Hungarian contingent, excused himself and hurried into the shadows beneath the bleachers.

His breath was still hot in his throat when he felt the presence behind him.

"You can't get away from me."

Roger swung around and b.u.mped his shoulder into the deep chest of Arthur Janeway.

Janeway was a few inches taller and outweighed Roger by fifty pounds. Since Gigi's injury, he'd virtually disappeared from the dealership. Indeed, this was the first time Roger had seen him in months. The man had lost his steak and martini paunch and his florid face, and the rigors of his grief had hardened his thickset body and turned his cheeks the color of frozen iron.

Roger tried to force some compa.s.sion into his smile.

"h.e.l.lo, Arthur. It's good to see you. How is everything?"

Janeway eased his bulk close to Roger. He drew down a breath and blew it out so fiercely it was as if the very taste of air disgusted him.

"I know what you did, Shelton. I know everything."

Roger floundered for a half-second, then found a salesman's smile somewhere down in the hollow depths of his chest.

"You mean that Olds Ciera fiasco? Yeah, yeah. I low-balled it a little, but I had the wholesale numbers jumbled. Don't worry, Arthur, I'll get it back on the next deal."

"I'm not talking about a f.u.c.king Oldsmobile, Shelton. You know exactly what I'm talking about."

Roger watched as Bettina helped Gigi down the last steps of the bleachers then halted and surveyed the grounds until she caught sight of the two of them.