Cry Uncle by Judith Arnold Read Free Book Online Page A

incompatible? What if he
expected her to pick up after him, and cook for him, and iron his
shirts, and perform all the other mundane homemaking chores she
loathed? Even if he didn’t expect her to be a real wife, he might
expect her to be a housewife, a prospect that made facing Mick
Morrow almost palatable in comparison.
    She ordered herself to calm down. Nothing had
been forged in concrete. She was going to visit Joe’s home and meet
his niece, that was all. She was going to pay a social call on the
proprietor of a bar and his ax-murderer niece.
    Allowing herself a fatalistic smile, she
turned on the air conditioner and cursed as fiery air blasted from
the vents. In a minute it cooled down, and after a final glance at
her map, she steered out of the parking lot.
    In the week she’d lived in Key West, she’d
grown reasonably familiar with Duval Street, which ran through the
heart of Old Town and seemed to be the commercial center of the
island. The sidewalks were crammed with souvenir shops,
restaurants, bars, art galleries, T-shirt boutiques, bars,
pharmacies, and more bars. Perhaps the overabundance of liquor
merchants was in some way related to the island’s population of men
who thought they were Ernest Hemingway.
    Stranger than the stores, though, was the
landscape itself. Pamela had visited Southern California plenty of
times; she knew what palm trees were. But here they didn’t seem
like lonely oases sprouting in the desert. Key West was the
tropics, everything lush and green and voluptuous—and humid. Hot
and humid.
    She followed Kitty’s directions and navigated
into a residential area of cozy, pretty houses. The neighborhood
seemed too homey for someone like Joe, although as an adoptive
father to an orphaned girl he must have a domestic side to him. She
recalled what he’d said last night about abruptly finding himself
the primary caretaker of a two-year-old who ate only pink food and
sobbed for her parents. There was clearly more to Jonas Brenner
than frayed jeans and an earring.
    At last she found his address, a sprawling
white bungalow-style house on a plant-choked lot. The wide front
porch overlooked a shaggy lawn interspersed with a variety of palm
species. Flowering bougainvillea crawled up the trellis-like
underpinnings of the porch. Slouching wooden chairs sat empty
beneath the broad overhang.
    Halfway up the pebbled driveway Pamela
stopped her car and climbed out. Some sort of tropical bird,
camouflaged by the foliage, cawed a greeting.
    She wasn’t sure what she’d expected, but
whatever it had been, this was better. The house had been recently
painted. The roof was in good repair. A child’s bicycle lay on its
side next to the slate front walk. The front door stood open, the
screen door veiling the interior of the house from her view.
    She could imagine herself living in a house
like this. It was certainly big enough, and charming. Although the
landscaping was as much in need of a trim as Joe’s hair, it was
lovely. Yes, she could imagine it...
    An arrow whizzed past her head. She shrieked
and flattened herself against the notched bark of a royal palm,
clinging to the rough surface until her trembling stopped. It took
most of her courage to glance at the missile, which lay on the
grass a few feet away.
    Red plastic, with a suction cup at the
end.
    Another arrow flew toward her from a cluster
of bushes at the side of the house. This one missed her by several
yards. She pushed away from the palm and glowered at the
bushes.
    A girl emerged from the shrubbery. She stood
about three and a half feet tall, with brownish-red hair braided
into two narrow plaits on either side of her face and hanging loose
in the back. Gull feathers were woven into the braids. The child
had dark eyes, a smudge of a nose, a pouting mouth and rings of
grime circling her neck. She wore a yellow T-shirt with bright
purple letters across it reading “Life’s a Beach,” and a hula skirt
constructed out of shreds of green