Randy White - Seduced

She went into greater detail. As hard as I tried, some of the terminology she used was indecipherable. “I don’t understand any of this,” I said after a while. “I can’t believe you and Mr. Gentry have been kind enough to guide me through the process this far.”

“Kindness begets kindness, my dear,” Dr. Gentry said. “But don’t forget, we’re businesspeople, too. If you can find that early Spanish seed stock, and if the DNA sequencing is even slightly different, we could really be on to something quite substantial, Hannah. There are a lot more ifs regarding their resistance to disease, but let’s save that for later and talk about something serious. How is Roberta, our young mother, getting along?”

There is no excuse for boredom if you live on a boat or own anything that floats bigger than a canoe. Maintenance, if not given daily attention, is guaranteed to become an annual disaster. I spent early Sunday afternoon battling a leak in the Marlow’s stuffing box, which was okay because it was mindless work. It gave me time to run through a list of people who might have hired Larry Luckheim to shadow me or to search for wild oranges.

Not a single client could I name.

He was lying, I decided, but I had no doubt he’d been tailing me for a while. Before the weather had turned foul, I’d spent two days gunkholing local islands and collecting samples of feral citrus and their leaves, plus bark scrapings. On an island off the Estero River, I had also found two prime little seedling trees-juveniles, they were called in the trade. These items all had to be bagged, labeled, and logged just so, as Roberta had demonstrated. The procedure required my full attention, so it was possible that Larry had tailed me, or at least gotten a peek at what I was doing. If true, his motives for lying were cloudy at best, but that was to be expected from a forty-some-year-old man who didn’t shave, and probably didn’t bathe, but who took tango lessons.

I dropped the subject and fixed the leak.

Missing church had left me with a residual feeling of sloth. On Sunday afternoons, the public pool on Pine Island clears two lanes for serious swimmers. Finishing first at high school regionals in the hundred-meter freestyle didn’t qualify me as serious, but I do enjoy a hard swim. The wind had swung northwest, the harbinger of a coming cold front. According to NOAA weather, the temperature would plummet into the low forties tonight, and the breeze already had an icy edge. There was also a bandage on my left bicep, and a laceration the nurse had told me not to get wet. I decided to swim anyway. To doubly ensure discipline, I jotted my workout in pencil and pasted the paper it was on on the tile when I was in the pool.

Warm-up laps are the best for letting the mind wander. After six hundred yards, Larry’s threats had been replaced by thoughts of Kermit Bigalow; images of his kindly smile and fatherly attention to his daughter, Sarah. Of course I would speak to him if he stopped by my boat at seven. I hadn’t actually consented, so maybe he would, maybe he wouldn’t. But, if he did, how would I handle it? The news about Mr. Chatham’s will could not be shared; I had promised Sabin Martinez. Even if I hadn’t, it would be an awkward topic. I would soon inherit a portion of the very citrus operation from which he’d been fired, so how would I respond when the subject came up?

No… Kermit hadn’t said “fired.” He’d said that Lonnie had forced him off the property by padlocking his house. What a terrible thing to do to a man and wife with a ten-year-old daughter. Childhood was tough enough without the added hurt of legalities and changing homes.

On my flip turn, my legs snapped around with precision. Feet found the wall in synch. I pushed off… glided, while my legs imitated the thrusting strokes of a dolphin. When I surfaced, the easy flow of thoughts resumed.

Loretta floated into my mind. With her came a weighty sadness. All those years she had lied to me, her own daughter, yet her only regret was that she had sometimes heeded her moral conscience along with the commandments of her faith.

A part of me was indignant, a part of me understood. I could not deny a secret empathy for two people in love who had dealt as best they could with life’s obligations and a tragic run of bad timing.

The longing in my mother’s words came back: I don’t regret a single moment I spent with Harney Chatham… only the times I said no out of conscience. All those lost hours of happiness we could have shared!

Inevitably, my situation with Kermit took advantage of what I knew was a sly ingress. I heard his voice saying,… it’s the feeling I got when I first saw you… I’ve never done anything like this before… If things were different at home, maybe…

Kermit’s wife hated Florida. She hated bugs, and boats, and the water. Sarah had told me that.

After another flip turn, and a long dolphining glide, Kermit was repeating to me, in a whisper, You are so damn beautiful, and not in the typical… way…

This cleared my head for a moment, because I knew better. If I were beautiful, I would not be wearing a black, plus-size Speedo to disguise the extra weight I carried in too many wrong places. Nor would I have spent last night-yet another Saturday-alone on my boat, researching the history of rootstock and the citrus industry.

Why did I even care? I had kissed a married man… and had let it go too far. So what! At this instant, all around the world, people were probably kissing like mad, indifferent to silly rules about when to kiss and why, particularly in Europe (or so I’d read), where men and women, married or not, kissed as a matter of common courtesy-even on the streets, where everyone could see. No wonder Loretta and Mr. Chatham had snuck off to Paris to kiss themselves crazy without all the damn guilt they’d suffered here in the prudish boondocks of Florida.

After eight hundred yards, I stopped, adjusted my goggles, and consulted my workout sheet.

“Beautiful day, even if it is getting chilly,” a lifeguard said on his way to the office. “I hear a big cold front’s coming.”

“They might think it’s a beautiful day in France,” I replied with a surliness that was undeserved. After that, I began a series of middle-distance reps, but started much too fast. Soon I was plodding along-this time, my mind on Sarah. The ten-year-old who drew sad stick figures was now homeless to boot. Of course, I would discuss whatever business her father had on his mind. The poor man was desperate to care for his family after being locked out of the home that had been provided them by…

Locked out.

The term jolted me. It echoed and banged around in my head until the particulars fell into place. Only then did I remember Kermit saying he had been locked out of the house, and his office, too.

I snapped a flip turn and sprinted to the wall as my final lap. I gathered my belongings, pulled a towel around me for warmth, and hurried to the locker room to change. It is rare for me to quit in the middle of a workout, but I suddenly knew-no, I suspected-who had mentioned my name while hiring an unstable fishing guide to search for oranges.

If Lonnie Chatham had locked Kermit out of his office, she now had possession of his files! Quite possibly they included his notes regarding a theory about the original Spanish rootstock.

From my SUV, I called Kermit but got voice mail. “Give me a call back,” I said. “I should be home by seven-if that’s still in your plans.”

It was a bold stroke that made me bolder. I called Reggie. He was at his cottage, he said, waxing the Lincoln. “Every Sunday afternoon, if I’m not driving, it’s what I do. Why you ask?”