Diana Palmer - Mystery Man

“Hey!” he called.

She glared at him.

“Want to go fishing for sea serpents?” he asked.

Her eyebrows lifted. She smiled, and her whole face changed. She jumped up and bounced down the steps toward him. She was blond and blue-eyed with a fair complexion.

“You’re kidding, right?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Ever seen anyone catch a sea serpent around here?”

“Not since we got off the plane,” she said.

“Great!” He grinned at her, making his freckles stand out.

“Great?”

“If nobody’s caught it, it’s still out there!” he whispered, gesturing toward the ocean. “Just think of the residuals from it. We could sell it to one of the grocery store tabloids and clean up!”

Her eyes brightened. “What a neat idea.”

“Sure it is.” He sighed. “If only I knew how to make one.”

“A mop,” she ventured. “A dead fish. Parts of some organ meat. A few feathers. A garden hose, some shears and some gray paint.”

A kindred soul. He was in heaven. “You’re a genius!”

She grinned back. “My dad really is a genius. He taught me everything I know.” She sighed. “But if we create a hoax, I’ll be grounded for the rest of my life. So I guess I’ll pass, but…”

He made a face. “I know what you mean. I’d never live it down. My parents would send me to military school.”

“Would they, really?”

“They threaten me with it every time I get into trouble. I don’t mind boarding school, but I hate uniforms!”

“Me, too, unless they’re baseball uniforms. This year is it, this is the third time, this is the charm. This time,” she assured him, “the Braves are going to go all the way!”

He gave her a long, thoughtful look. “Well, we’ll see.”

“You a Braves fan?” she asked.

He hadn’t ever cared much for baseball, but it seemed important to her. “Sure,” he said.

She chuckled. “My name is Karie.”

“I’m Kurt.”

“Nice to meet you.”

“Same here.”

They walked along the beach for a minute or two. He stopped and looked back up the deserted stretch of land. “Know where to find a mop?” he asked after a minute.

Blissfully unaware that her young brother had just doubled his potential for disaster, Janine filled her computer screen with what she hoped was going to be the bare bones of a new mystery. Some books almost wrote themselves. Others were on a par with pulling teeth. This looked like one of those. Her mind was tired. It wanted to shape clouds into white horses and ocean waves into pirate ships.

“What I need,” she said with a sigh, “is a good dose of fantasy.”

Sadly there wasn’t anything on television that she wanted to watch. Most of it, she couldn’t understand, because it was in Spanish.

She turned the set off. The one misery of this trip was missing her favorite weekly science fiction series. Not that she didn’t like all the characters on it; she did. But her favorite was an arrogant, sometimes very devious alien commander. The bad guy. She seemed to be spending all her productive time lately sighing over him instead of doing the work that she got paid to do. That was one reason she’d agreed to come to Cancñaun with her parents and Kurt, to get away from the make-believe man who was ruining her writing career.

“Enough of this!” she muttered to herself. “Good heavens, you’d think I was back in grammar school, idolizing teachers!”

She got up and paced the room. She ate some cookies. She typed a little into the computer. Eventually the sun started going down and she noticed that she was short one twelve-year-old boy.

She looked at her watch. Surely he hadn’t gotten the time confused? It was earlier here than in Bloomington, Indiana, where Kurt lived with their parents. Had he mistaken the time, perhaps forgotten to reset his watch? Janine frowned, hoping that she hadn’t forgotten to set her own. It would be an hour behind Kurt’s, because her apartment in Chicago was in a different time zone from Kurt and her parents’ in Indiana.

He was in a foreign country and he didn’t speak any more Spanish than she did. Their parents’ facility for languages had escaped them, for the most part. Janine spoke German with some fluency, but not much Spanish. And while English was widely spoken here in the hotels and tourist spots, on the street it was a different story. Many of the local people in Cancñaun still spoke Mayan and considered Spanish, not English, a second language.

She turned off her computer—it was useless trying to work when she was worried, anyway—and went out to the beach. She found the distinctive tread of Kurt’s sneakers and followed them in the damp sand where the tide hadn’t yet reached. The sun was low on the horizon and the wind was up. There were dark clouds all around. She never forgot the danger of hurricanes here, and even if it was late September, that didn’t mean a hurricane was no longer a possibility.

She shaded her eyes against the glare of the sun, because she was walking west across the beach, stopping when Kurt’s sneakers were joined by another, smaller pair, with no discernible tread. She knelt down, scowling as she studied the track. She’d worked as a private eye for a couple of years, but any novice would figure out that these were the footprints of a girl, she thought. The girl Kurt had mentioned, perhaps, the one who lived next door. In fact, she was almost in front of that beach house now.

The roar of the waves had muffled the sound of approaching footsteps. One minute, she was staring down at the tracks. The next, she was looking at a large and highly polished pair of black dress shoes. Tapered neatly around them were the hem of expensive slacks. The legs seemed to go up forever. Far above them, glaring down at her, were pale blue eyes under a jutting brow in a long, lean face. The lips were thin. The top one was long and narrow, the lower one had only a hint of fullness. The cheekbones were high and the nose was long and straight. The hairline was just slightly receding around straight brown hair.

Two enormous lean hands were balled into fists, resting on the hips of the newcomer.

“May I ask what you’re doing on my beach?” he asked in a voice like raspy velvet.

She stood up, a little clumsy. How odd, that a total stranger should make her knees weak.

“I’m tracking my…” she began.

“Tracking?” he scoffed, as if he thought she were lying. His blue eyes narrowed. He looked oddly dangerous, as if he never smiled, as if he could move like lightning and would at the least provocation.

Her heart was racing. “His name is Kurt and he’s only twelve,” she said. “He’s redheaded and so high.” She made a mark in the air with her flat hand.

“That one,” he murmured coolly. “Yes, I’ve seen him prowling around. Where’s my daughter?”

Her eyebrows rose. “You have a daughter? Imagine that! Is she carved out of stone, too?”

His firm, square chin lifted and he looked even more threatening. “She’s missing. I told her not to leave the house.”

“If she’s with Kurt, she’s perfectly safe,” she began, about to mention that he’d been stranded once in the middle of Paris by their forgetful parents, and had found his way home to their hotel on the west bank. Not only had he maneuvered around a foreign city, but he’d also sold some of the science fiction cards he always carried with him to earn cab fare, and he’d arrived with twenty dollars in his pocket. Kurt was resourceful.

But long before she could manage any of that, the man moved a step closer and cocked his head. “Do you know where they are?”

“No, but I’m sure…”

“You may let your son run loose like a delinquent, but my daughter knows better,” he said contemptuously. His eyes ran over her working attire with something less than admiration. She had on torn, raveled cutoffs that came almost to her knee. With them she was wearing old, worn-out sandals and a torn shirt that didn’t even hint at the lovely curves beneath it. Her short hair was windblown. She wasn’t even wearing makeup. She could imagine how she looked. What had he said—her son?