The Seduction of Goody Two-Shoes

Chapter 7

About thirty miles south of Felipe Carillo Puerto, Ellie’s broken night’s sleep began to take its toll. She was dozing off intermittently, shaking her head and fighting it as hard as she could, when McCall suddenly yelled, “Wild turkeys-look out!”

Adrenaline slammed into her like a truck. Her head jerked up and her eyes snapped open, and she managed to utter one gasped word: “Where?” as the Volkswagen braked hard, then swerved sharply to the right. For several very busy moments the VW bumped and jounced along the narrow shoulder, managing to avoid rocks, shrubs, small trees and major potholes before coming to a bone-jarring halt, safely back on the paved road.

“Are you okay?” McCall asked. His tone was solicitous, but with a suspicious little croak of excitement.

Ellie felt a sudden urge to hit him. “I didn’t see them,” she wailed. “The turkeys! I didn’t even see them.”

McCall looked shocked. “How could you miss ’em? They were all over the road. What were you, asleep?”

“Yes! Maybe…I don’t know, I must have been. Why didn’t you wake me?”

“I thought I did.”

“No, I mean before you plowed into the middle of them.”

“How was I supposed to know you’d dozed off?” And he was laughing as he shifted gears and the VW sputtered to life once more. Ellie subsided in a disappointed if now wide-awake sulk.

A few hundred feet farther down the highway, the VW slowed…sputtered…gasped one last time…and died.

“What?” Ellie demanded, looking at McCall.

“I don’t know.” Frowning, he tried turning the ignition key. The starter coughed and growled like a bad-tempered tiger. “Feels like we just ran out of gas, but that’s…”

“We can’t be out of gas. We just filled up,” Ellie said, flatly stating the obvious. And after a moment, “Maybe something happened when we were bouncing around back there.”

“Maybe,” McCall grunted as he opened his door and stepped out of the car. “Come on, help me get it out of the road.”

With both of them pushing on the doorjambs and McCall steering one-handed, they managed to maneuver the VW more or less onto the shoulder. McCall opened the hood and took out a serious-looking metal toolbox which he carried around to the back of the Bug.

“I thought you said you could fix it,” Ellie said when she saw him standing there, scowling at the open engine compartment and absently swatting at mosquitos.

“Gotta find the problem first. Might be a ruptured fuel line…maybe the pump. If it’s the pump…only thing I can think of is to flag somebody down and hitch a ride to Los Limones, see if we can order a part. Car this old…I don’t know. Probably have to come from Merida…someplace with some good-sized salvage yards. Maybe take two…three days-”

He broke off, primarily because his audience had deserted him. And secondly because he suddenly had a sinking feeling in his stomach. Because Ellie was just then crawling into the Beetle’s front seat, where she had no business being. That was not good. Not good at all.

His worst fears were confirmed when she sang out happily, “Hey, I think I’ve found the problem.”

“What the hell do you mean, you found the problem?” McCall stalked around to the open passenger-side door just as she was squirming out from under the dash, looking flushed and radiant-and so damned delicious she’d have made his mouth water if he hadn’t been frustrated enough to spit nails.

“This is what-a ’58, ’59? Must be, because only the really old VWs had it. It was because they didn’t have fuel gauges then. There’s this little switch down here, see? So you can manually switch over to the reserve tank. Or, you can also shut it all the way off. That’s what happened-you must’ve hit it with your knee when we were bouncing all over the place back there. Try it now.”

Damn. He didn’t know whether to admire her or shoot her.

Mentally gnashing his teeth and silently using up every swearword he knew, McCall stomped around to the driver’s side and got in. He turned the key, and, of course, after only the usual amount of pumping, begging and growling, the engine fired.

“Don’t forget your toolbox,” Ellie said in a tone that tried too hard not to be smug.

“How come you know so much about a car that’s probably twenty years older than you are?” he grudgingly asked when he had his tools stowed and they were on their way again. “I never even thought of that fuel switch.” Well, okay, he was a liar. May that be the least of the sins I commit this week, he thought.

“I’m not that young,” Ellie cried, which in McCall’s opinion only proved she was. It had been his experience that only very young women objected to having their ages underestimated. “For heaven’s sake, I have a doctor’s-” She clamped it off there as a look of dismay flashed across her face, then looked away out the window and finished with a testy, “Just because I’m short, don’t underestimate me.”

“I’d never make that mistake,” McCall said fervently, meaning it-and also mightily intrigued by what she’d been about to say. A doctor’s…what? Permission slip? “But seriously-how come you knew about that switch?”

She flashed him a uniquely feminine look, lashes lowered, pleased with herself again. “Old VWs are very popular with us Save-the-Whales types, you know.” Practically purring with satisfaction, she gave her head a toss, and he was so distracted by the way the wind played with her cinnamon curls he allowed the VW to wander briefly onto the shoulder again. “I once rode all the way from Portland to the tip of Baja in one that was probably older than this. It was a convertible. Hardly anything was left of the top and you could see the road going by through the floorboards. There aren’t too many service stations in some parts of Baja, either, so you’d better know some basic auto mechanics.”

“And you do?” Just my luck, he thought sourly. Of all the women in this world, he had to hook up with Tillie Tune-up. “They teach you that back on the farm?”

“Well, it’s something you just sort of learn, actually, when you grow up on a farm. At least we-my brother and I-did. My mom made sure of that. At least the basics-things like how to change your own oil and tires and stuff.”

“Your mom?” He snapped her a look, thinking about his own fifties-style mother with her bright red nail polish and soft hands, leaning in admiring feminine helplessness over her mechanic husband’s shoulder while he checked the oil in her car. Ellie, he suddenly noticed, had almost boyish hands, freckled as her face, with short, unpolished nails. “Not your dad?”

She gave a light, gurgling laugh, full of amused affection. “My dad’s a newspaper columnist-Mike Lanagan, maybe you’ve heard of him? I don’t know, maybe he knew something about fixing cars once, but these days the most complicated piece of equipment he deals with is his new all-in-one-printer-scanner-fax machine.”

“Mike Lanagan.” McCall never knew how he kept his face blank, his voice neutral, utterly without inflection. Because it had suddenly dawned on him. Jeez. Mike Lanagan. Newspaper columnist. No wonder that name sounded so familiar. He took his time lighting a cigarette, and by the time he’d finished that task he was able to say in a normal, no more than mildly interested tone, “Newsweek, right?”

“Right!” She turned her head to beam at him, like a little girl delighted that he’d correctly answered her riddle.

McCall stared resolutely at the road ahead, not trusting himself to look at her. He cleared his throat and said carefully, “I thought he was based in Chicago. Doesn’t he also write for one of their big dailies?”

“Yeah, he does. When my brother and I were growing up he used to spend a lot of time in Chicago, but nowadays, with modems and stuff, he mostly works at home. Which is nice for my mom. Dad, too, I guess. He’s writing a book-nobody’s allowed to know what’s in it except Mom, but supposedly it’s about his early days as a journalist in Chicago, and how he and Mom met…”

“Yeah? How did they meet? A Chicago journalist and an Iowa farmer…”

“Are you sure you’re interested? It’s kind of a long story.”

McCall waved a hand at the ribbon of road walled in by jungle ahead of them and said dryly, “We’ve got a long way to go.” That’s the ticket, he thought. Keep her talking. Then maybe she won’t notice how rattled you are.

“It’s a pretty exciting story, actually,” said Ellie, shifting around in her seat in an eager, preparatory way. “First, Dad almost got killed by some hit men, because of this story he was working on. So he thought he’d better get out of Chicago for a while, but then he got lost in a thunderstorm and drove his car into a ditch, and that’s how he wound up in my mom’s barn…”

It probably was an exciting story, but McCall barely heard it. He just kept hearing the name Mike Lanagan, over and over again in his mind. Jeez, he thought, of all the women in the world I pick to get mixed up with…first Goody Two-Shoes, then Tillie Tune-up, and now…Mike Lanagan’s daughter.

Lucy came in for lunch red-cheeked and blowing on her hands. “Whoo-that storm’s coming in fast,” she said to her husband, who was sitting at the kitchen table waiting for her. “You know, I think it might even snow. I sure hope it doesn’t. Hope it holds off until after tomorrow, at least. Makes it so tough for the trick-’r-treaters.” She paused, noticing the manila file folder. “What’s that you’ve got?”

Mike shoved it forward a few inches with a forefinger, then brought it back. “It’s that file I was looking for-the one on Quinn McCall.”

“Quinn McCall? Who’s-”

“I told you I remembered a McCall. Did a whole series of columns on him a few years back. Seven, to be exact.” He tilted his head and made a small, appreciative sound. “He’s not a man you forget.”

Lucy had picked up the file and was flipping through it. She looked up, frowning and skeptical. “Oh, Mike, you can’t think Ellie’s McCall is this same person. Out of all the McCalls there must be in this world? That would be just too…I mean, coincidences like that don’t happen, except in books.”

Mike’s smile was wry. “No, actually, they don’t happen in books, at least not fiction, because people wouldn’t believe it. The fact is, they happen in real life all the time. The difference is, if it’s true, people have to believe it. Then they say, in awe, ‘My goodness, isn’t it a small world!”’

“Gwen always believed in Providence,” Lucy mused. Her smile, as she gazed at the man she’d been happily married to for…oh, so many years, was perhaps a tad misty. “You know she always said it was Providence made you take refuge in my barn-”

“-the very day your hired man quit,” Mike chimed in with her, laughing. “I know, I know.”

The laughter died, and his eyes grew thoughtful again. “I just keep remembering the last thing Quinn McCall ever said to me. It was after the last interview, the tape recorders were turned off, and we were packing up, saying goodbye. I asked him what he was going to do with himself, now that it was all over.”

“And?” Lucy prompted. “What did he say?”

“He said, ‘I’m gonna find me a beach. A long, long way from here.”’

They came to the hotel on the shores of Lago Bacalar late in the afternoon. They’d missed the turnoff specified in their instructions on the first pass and were halfway to Chetumal before they realized they’d gone too far. Then they’d had to ask directions twice before they found it, to McCall’s obvious irritation.

It had amused Ellie, actually, to discover that her new partner had such a tender ego-and oh, how that incident with the car had ticked him off, her knowing about that switch and being the one to find and fix the VW’s problem. Somehow, though, that common male malady only made him seem more human. Less…mysterious. In an odd way, more likeable. Maybe.

“Yes, Señor and Señora Burnside, your room has been reserved for you,” the desk clerk assured them, in the cordial but haughty manner of hotel desk clerks the world over. “And will you be staying more than one night?”

Ellie shot a quick glance at McCall, who was gazing around the lobby as if he hadn’t heard a word. She felt her cheeks grow warm. Dammit, why hadn’t she thought of this? Why hadn’t he? Clearing her throat, she stepped closer to the counter and inquired in a low voice, “Excuse me, but do you have any vacant rooms? My husband-”

The desk clerk looked alarmed. “Yes, señora, we do have rooms, but surely-”

“We have friends who may possibly be joining us later,” McCall interrupted in a voice as smooth as silk. “They weren’t certain what day they’d be arriving. Just checking…”

Ellie turned her head to stare at him. He was smiling at the desk clerk, showing more teeth than she’d have guessed he possessed, and carefully not looking at Ellie.

The desk clerk returned the smile-fleetingly. “Ah yes-I see. This time of year there should be no problem. Later, after the Day of the Dead…that is our busy time. Right now…plenty of rooms. Will you be paying with your credit card, Señor Burnside?”

McCall turned his smile on Ellie with a breezy, “Pay the man, dear.”

As she handed over the credit card that had been issued to her and her partner by the United States Government, her mind was racing jerkily to and fro-like a rabbit in a cage, she thought. Trapped. Nowhere to go.

Why didn’t I think of this? Spend the night in the same room with him? Impossible. No way. But he’s right, we can’t ask for two rooms. How would it look? We’re supposed to be married.

Funny thing was, it had never bothered her to share a room with Ken. Anyway, not like this. Of course, she and Ken had always had separate beds…

“Excuse me,” she said as she calmly and without a visible tremor signed Rose Ellen Burnside on the registration slip, “is that one bed or two?”

“One bed,” said the desk clerk with obvious satisfaction. “Queen size.”

Ellie nodded and became very involved, suddenly, with the task of putting the credit card back in her wallet, and the wallet back in her purse.

“Will that be all right, señora?”

“Yes, that’s fine.” But her mind was doing the frightened rabbit thing again. Impossible. A king…maybe. But a queen? No way. She could feel McCall close beside her, casually turned a little toward her so that his Panama hat, squashed under one arm, brushed against her shoulder. She could feel the heat from his body. Smell his scent-like hers, mostly insect repellent. She could feel her own pulse thumping in the hollow at the base of her throat. One of us will just have to sleep on the floor. I will…

The desk clerk had turned away to look for their room key. In desperation, Ellie gazed upward, as if somehow the answer to her dilemma might be found written on the wall above the registration desk.

And-lo and behold, there it was. A sign, neatly hand-lettered in both Spanish and English. The English part read: Hammocks Available on Request.

“Oh, look, dear,” she said in a sweet girlish voice that was nothing like her own, and with a breathlessness that was more relief than excitement, “they have hammocks! I used to love hammocks when I was a little girl.” Turning toward McCall, she twined herself around his arm and purred, “Let’s get one, shall we, darling? Just for fun?”

Was it her imagination, or did his breathing catch-just a little? At any rate, his voice, when he spoke, was thick with gravel-though admittedly, that wasn’t unusual for McCall.

“Sure, why not? Anything you want, dear.” His teeth were showing again. She couldn’t see his eyes.

The clerk disappeared through a door behind the desk and came back with a tightly rolled webby bundle, which he placed on the counter. “There you are, señor…señora. You will find hooks on your veranda. And there is a message for you, Señor Burnside.” He handed McCall a sealed white envelope. Ellie could hardly keep herself from snatching it out of his hands. “Perhaps it is from your friends…”

“Perhaps,” said McCall as he tucked the envelope in his shirt pocket.

The desk clerk gave them the key and directions to their room, which turned out to be not in the main hotel but one of a string of tiny cottages arranged along a path overlooking the lakeshore. McCall passed the key to Ellie and tucked the bundled hammock under one arm. They thanked the hovering desk clerk, who beamed at them as they turned to go and said something in Spanish that Ellie didn’t quite understand.

“What did he say?” she muttered as soon as they were out of earshot, glancing up at McCall. His face was curiously deadpan. “It definitely wasn’t ‘Enjoy your stay.’ I understood feliz and luna, but what’s miel?”

His lips twitched slightly, and it was a moment before he answered, in a voice as determinedly devoid of expression as his face. “It means honey. He was wishing us happiness on our honeymoon.”

“Oh,” said Ellie, and her heart did an odd little stumble-step. She gnawed her lip and frowned at the ground, trying hard to think of something to say. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt this self-conscious…walking close beside McCall, not touching him but aware of every breath and muscle twitch, his heat and scent melting into her very pores. Both of them carefully not looking at each other and her feeling as though the eyes of the entire world were watching them, even though not a soul was in sight. “I’m sorry,” she finally said on a shaken exhalation. “I should have thought of this.”

You should have thought of a lot of things, McCall thought grimly but didn’t say. Before you elected a complete stranger to stand in for your absent husband. Before you dragged me into your life…your mess. Before you kissed me…

He cleared his throat and said aloud, “Couldn’t be helped. Look-this is a remote part of the world. Everybody around here’s probably related-hell, for all you know, that desk clerk could be the head smuggler’s brother-in-law. We’re supposed to be husband and wife-how’s it gonna look if we’d asked for separate rooms?”

“Well,” said Ellie, getting a staunch, determined look he was beginning to recognize, “I’ll sleep in the hammock. It’s the least I can do.”

She wouldn’t get any argument from him there. So why was he arguing? He wondered about that as he heard himself say, “Come on, you’ll get eaten alive by mosquitos.”

“Maybe we can rig up some netting. Besides, I’ll douse myself with plenty of repellent. Don’t worry about me.” And she gave her head an intrepid little toss as she jerked open the door to the VW and plunked herself inside.

“Sister, you’re the last person I’m worried about,” he muttered, going around to the driver’s side and easing in under the wheel.

But why did that always get to him-that arrogant, overconfident little way she had that made him want to either kick her in the butt or gather her into his arms and shield and protect her? Maybe because he knew it for what it was? Because he’d worn it often enough himself in a past life…the mask of bravado people wear to hide the fact that they’re really scared to death…and bound and determined to go ahead anyway.

Some people might have said that was the definition of courage. As far as McCall was concerned, it was just plain stupidity.

Neither of them said anything more as he drove the VW to a parking space as close as he could get to their cottage. The silence held while he was hauling their overnighters out of the back seat, along with Ellie’s purse and a big cloth beach bag that held her sun visor, flashlights, insect repellent, bottles of water, and of course, a dozen or so bars of chocolate. It persisted while Ellie stood in the VW’s open doorway with her elbows resting on the roof, one hand holding down her wind-ruffled hair as she gazed out across the lake…and while McCall tried every way he knew how not to look at her, or notice how rich and warm the colors of her skin and hair were against the cool greens of the jungle, the vivid blues of water and sky.

Then he heard a soft sound, a deeply inhaled breath. “Mmm…you can smell the sea,” she murmured.

“Huh,” he said, scowling at the overnighter he’d just wrestled out of the car. “Wind must be just right. Probably that tropical storm moving in.”

She turned her back on the car and the lake and lifted her face to the sun, which retaliated by making a coppery halo of her hair. Wind stirred through orange and mango, oak and banana leaves, and a flock of small green birds-parrots of some kind-flitted, chattering, from tree to tree. McCall caught the scent of orange blossoms.

“It’s so beautiful here,” she said softly, as if to herself. “It would be a lovely place for a honeymoon.”

It wasn’t so much the words, as the way she looked when she said them. A kind of wistful innocence, McCall thought, like a young girl gazing at bridal gowns. He didn’t know what it was about it that made his throat tighten up, what made anger flare hot behind his eyes…or what made him pounce almost without thought, like a cat smacking a paw down on a hapless mouse.

“One to a customer,” he said in a rough, rude tone, and then, firing her a challenging stare, “Where’d you go for yours, Mrs. Burnside?”

He didn’t know what he’d expected to accomplish by asking that, except perhaps to punish himself by stirring up the little worm of jealousy that kept popping up so unexpectedly from dark cupboards in his subconscious mind. What he did not expect was the look that flitted across her face. Blank, pale panic, as if she had no idea whatsoever how to answer him.

And then… “Lake Tahoe!” she blurted it out angrily, almost defiantly. And he absolutely knew it was a lie.

“Really? Lake Tahoe…” he said in a calm, musing tone, aware suddenly that his pulse had quickened and that it was taking all his concentration to keep his breathing from doing the same. “I know it very well. Where, exactly?”

“None of your business,” she snapped, then shot it right back at him. “Where’d you go on yours?”

She was standing very close to him, drawn up to her full height, such as it was, head thrown back so she could look him straight in the eyes. He gazed down at her, refusing to let himself dwell on how lush and lovely her mouth was. Suddenly feeling old and indefinably sad.

“What business is it of yours?” he said with sneering cruelty. “By my calculations you were probably in kindergarten at the time.”

She inhaled sharply through her nose. “You know, McCall, I’m getting really tired of these little digs about my age. I’m twenty-eight years old. And you’re what…thirty-five?”

“Forty,” he admitted gloomily.

She let a couple of long, slow beats go by while her eyes shimmered into his and a sweet flush ripened under her freckles. He felt his own eyes burn and heat crawl beneath his skin, as if he’d been out in the sun too long.

“I don’t know very many twelve-year-old fathers,” she said in a soft-rough voice like a kitten’s purr. Then she turned a shoulder toward him and walked away up the graveled path.

As he seemed to find himself doing so often, he stood there and just watched her, watched her going away from him, looking, in her shorts, T-shirt and Nikes, every inch the teenager he knew she wasn’t. She was a full-grown woman with a strong will and a mind of her own-bull-headed and lion-hearted, a terrifying combination-a fact he’d known all along, he now realized. He knew, too, with a frightening little sense of loneliness and loss, that he’d tried so hard to convince himself otherwise in order to make it easier to accept that he couldn’t have her. Now here he was, thrown into forced intimacy with her, and only his conscience and a moral code she didn’t seem to share to keep him from doing something shameful.

To keep him from doing…what? Seducing her?

The fear inside him grew as he acknowledged the thought, and realized it had been there in his mind for a while now. Disgraceful, but…what if he could? Married or not-and how could he know or judge what kind of marriage hers was?-she was susceptible to him in that particular way. He knew it. He could feel it.

The fact was, for reasons he couldn’t begin to understand she seemed hell-bent on committing God knew how many felonies and dragging him right along with her. And for the life of him he couldn’t figure out a way to stop her. He knew for darn sure he wasn’t going to be able to talk her out of it, and if he pulled out she was just going to go ahead on her own, and how was he going to live with himself if something happened to her? Physical force might work-hog-tying her, maybe, or locking her in a closet-but then what? What proof did he have that he was doing it for her own good? He could very well wind up in jail himself, on kidnapping charges, no less.

Seduce her? It seemed a long shot, at best, but maybe…just maybe, if he could get her all soft and vulnerable and acquiescent in his bed, he might be able to talk some sense into her…get her to listen to reason. Get her to listen to him, and forget that absent husband of hers and this crazy suicidal plan he’d gotten her mixed up in. It could work…couldn’t it?

Forget it, McCall. All you’re trying to do is justify doing what you want to do anyhow. But it’s still not right. And it’s not who you are. Forget about it.

But as he hitched his load and set off after her, all his senses were still on red alert and tuned to her wavelength, and his body was humming in ways it hadn’t in…so many years, aching and tingling like long-frozen tissues coming back to life.