picked up her small handbag and the room key on her way to the door. She took a few steps toward the front stairway then thought better of it. She had a feeling that, despite April Jane’s casual manner, she kept a close watch over things around here and would be far too interested in the reason for Taylor’s going out alone so late. She used the back stairs to avoid that interest. The back door had a release bar across it. That meant it could be opened from the inside only. Taylor would have to take the front entrance back in. She could see herself tiptoeing barefoot up the stairs like a teenager out past curfew. The thought made her smile, but that smile disappeared as soon as she stepped outside and the door clicked shut behind her.
The back door did not open onto a street or a well-lit path as she’d thought it would. Instead, a pattern of flat stones led from the stoop through an overhang of foliage with no visible light along the way. Taylor moved cautiously down the steps to the stone walk and the entrance to the overgrown pathway. She could see that the foliage actually arched over the path for some distance to the street beyond. The light from the opposite entrance was just bright enough to reveal that much. There must be a wood or wire trellis structure that kept the greenery from filling in the opening altogether.
A shudder ran through her. She had been suddenly reminded of her dreams. There was a tunnel much like this in one of them, made up of long, undulating fronds that reached out to grab her as she ran through. She still trembled at the remembered sense of great danger lurking among those wild, grasping, green things. Taylor’s experience with the dark car had made her skittish already. She would have preferred not to be reminded of her nightmares right now. She told herself that there was no person lying in wait along this passageway or she would be able to make out their shape even in the dim light. She couldn’t be accosted from the side because of the trellis and the thickness of the shrubbery.
But what about non-persons? Wasn’t this the tropics, after all? Weren’t snakes and other creepy-crawly things common to this part of the world? She took a deep breath against that possibility. Another deep breath and Taylor was into the tunnel, which smelled faintly of leaf mold. She hurried but would not allow herself to run. Her heart tripped at the sound of her own footsteps and the attention they might arouse among whatever beings lurked within the green wall that surrounded her.
“Stay where you know the territory and the territory knows you.” Aunt Pearl’s words rang in Taylor’s head as haunting accompaniment to her hurried steps. She could almost feel Aunt Pearl keeping pace and whispering, “I told you so. I told you so. I told you so.”
Taylor didn’t take a full breath again until she was out of the passage. She didn’t slow her pace until she was standing beneath a street lamp where she was forced to stop for a moment to get her bearings. She had studied a Key West street map on the way down here in the plane. She knew precisely where the guesthouse was located in relation to the place she was now headed. Her exit through the backyards had taken her one block closer to her destination. She took a few more deep breaths to slow the tripping of her heart then set out along the cracked pavement toward Duval Street.
Small, modest houses lined the block on both sides. She was alone on the street—no people, no vehicles parked in possible ambush, no leafy nightmare creatures in evidence. Duval Street was famous for its noisy nightlife, but all was quiet here. She had deliberately chosen an address near the center of things but still at some distance from the hubbub of Mallory Square, with its sunset worshippers and late-night revels. Her guesthouse was only a few blocks from the southernmost point on the island, which the brochures all bragged of as also being the southernmost point in the entire United States. Almost not in the same country with the rest of us, Taylor thought, and wasn’t sure how she felt about that. She was reminded yet again of being out of her element.
The tropical air caught in her heavy hair. She could feel it there like a gossamer web among the strands. She raked her fingers through it and felt the coolness of that web and the fullness of the waves made suddenly untamable by this place. She pulled the strap of her handbag from her shoulder and began fishing inside for a wide-toothed comb that might bring the honey-colored mass under control. She was still poking around in her purse when she felt a movement behind her.
“What’s an angel like you doin’ out here on her own?”
He must have come out of one of the shop doorways that bordered the street. She was on Duval now. The shops were all closed along here, and there was no one else on the street, at least not near enough to be of help if she needed it. He was tall and very thin. His clothes hung loosely on him. His shirt was open several buttons at the neck, and his pants fit more like pajamas than trousers. She thought he might be wearing sandals from the sound of his shuffling along the pavement, but she couldn’t see his feet in the shadowy night.
She began walking fast away from him, down Duval Street toward the bright neon and the sound of music ahead. She could see that the lighted shop fronts were closer on the opposite side. She would cross the street when she got there, maybe step inside one of the open boutiques till she was sure she wasn’t being followed any longer. She could hear him, still laughing softly behind her. She glanced back over her shoulder.
“Fluff out your wings and fly away, angel,” he said. “There ain’t no heaven hereabouts.”
Chapter Two
“Desiree,” he breathed.
Des Maxwell was behind the false mirror over the Beachcomber’s long, teakwood bar. This observation post had been here when he bought the place. He’d thought about getting rid of it. He didn’t like keeping tabs on people when they didn’t know he was doing it. Instead, he told everybody who worked for him that from back here he had a clear view of everything, including the cash register. He figured that would keep most of them honest. There’s no such thing as being too careful in the bar business.
You can’t be too careful about a lot of things. Like letting yourself get blindsided the way he just did when she walked in and sat down. Of course, he knew she wasn’t Desiree. He’d seen Taylor Bissett’s photograph at Netta’s house, and Desiree had been dead almost twenty-four years now. That was just about time enough for him to get used to how much she had meant to him and how much of his life had died with her—like the only chance he’d ever had of anything even close to a family. Now, as he stared through the one-way glass at the woman who was the vision of her mother, he knew there hadn’t been time enough to get over his loss after all.
Des had half expected the daughter to show up here someday. Then again, he’d half expected her not to. Either way, she’d caught him by surprise tonight. It had never occurred to him that in real life she would look almost identical to her mother. Not even the photograph had convinced him of that. Nothing could have convinced him that anybody could look so much like Desiree. Nobody ever had. He pressed closer to the glass. The hair, especially, was as he remembered, and the skin he knew would be moist and cool in the night air, the way Desiree was cool while being warm and caring at the same time. He couldn’t tell if Desiree’s daughter might be warm and caring too. She was certainly beautiful. She was also subdued and aloof in that white dress, at least a world away from the halter tops and jeans cut off high enough to show some back cheek along the bar. She didn’t flash her body around that way any more than her mother would have done.
Still, there was something different about her, some way she wasn’t Desiree. Des couldn’t put his finger on it. He felt he needed to know what that difference was. He had to set her apart from Desiree, especially considering what a lot of people suspected about that night twenty-four years ago, and the fire. Taylor was only a kid then, younger than he was by several years. Even if what they said about her and the fire was true, she couldn’t have really understood what she was doing. Knowing that hadn’t kept him from wishing a thousand times that he’d done what he first meant to do that night
