Whiskey Straight Up Page 7
The same instant that I hit the icy water, my waistline popped. A small airbag blossomed, setting me upright like a bobber on a fishing line. Simultaneously, the cold seared my legs and lower back. I gasped. Even if I didn’t go under the ice, I would be numb in no time.
Way back in high school, I had taken an ice survival class: “What to Do If You Break Through.” It was part of some Community Winter Safety Course my mother had made me attend because she was worried about my snowmobiling with boys. Naturally, at age seventeen I hadn’t paid attention. In fact, I had developed a seriously distracting crush on the instructor, who doubled in summertime as our local lifeguard.
Now I needed to summon back the basics. I knew that not panicking was Rule Number One. That was the first step in any crisis. So I drew a deep breath and said aloud, “Stay calm.”
Gil’s body brushed against me and then slipped under the ice. The last thing I saw were the pointy toes of his snakeskin boots.
“Oh God!” I cried out. But I managed not to freak. And, miraculously, I remembered the next step: “Pull yourself back onto the ice in the direction you came from.”
That meant placing my hands and arms on the slippery surface and kicking my legs for propulsion. The effort would keep the blood pumping, too, as the frigid water seized my muscles.
Even if the ice continued to break beneath me, the point was to keep pushing myself in the same direction. To keep at it until I was lying flat on the ice.
So I pressed myself against the splintering, blood-covered surface, pumping with all my might the nearly dead weight of my legs. As the surface beneath me cracked apart, I managed to keep creeping forward, inch by inch, gulping air as I worked. The inflated fanny pack forced me into an awkwardly curved but still mostly horizontal position. Ahead was the open door of the shanty, my first destination.
With one huge final push, I propelled myself through it, into the bracing open air. I paused, panting hard, my heart thudding in my ears. Although I was mostly numb, I knew my whole body was clear of the shanty and now lay exposed on the ice. Slowly, I started rolling and kept on rolling, over and over, away from the shelter.
Another ominous crack, this one from behind me. I stopped. The ice under my body remained solid. Cautiously, I rolled a few more times before letting myself look back. The ice shanty was tipping into a now immense hole.
I sat up slowly. Gil’s Stetson floated alongside the partially submerged shelter.
“Help!” I shouted. Or so I wished. My voice wouldn’t work. I tried again. Only the smallest croak emerged. I tried to stand up. At first my legs didn’t work, either, but after a moment, I struggled to my knees and then to my feet. The top half of me was shaking violently. The bottom half was numb, so numb I wondered if it was still mine. Somehow, finally, I pushed one leaden foot in front of the other.
“Help!” I tried again, trapped inside a nightmare where I couldn’t scream and couldn’t run.
Don’t panic, keep breathing, I reminded myself as I shuffled dully toward Fishburg. If I could just reach those two guys in that shanty--. I fixed my eyes on my destination and forced myself forward, inch by inch.
Suddenly a man appeared among the ice-fishing shelters. His face was too far off for me to read, but his body language suggested that he saw me. He seemed to be staring in my direction.
I strained to wave my quaking hands. It took so much energy. Too much energy. Since when was waving so hard?
He waved back and then stopped, his arm paused in mid-arc. What happened next gave me the greatest of hopes: the man started toward me.
I wanted to keep going, but I was tired. Very tired. And so weak. Although I paused for only a moment, I lost my momentum. I was sleepy now. Too sleepy to continue. Weak, too. My knees buckled; the ice came up to meet me.
“Get up,” I moaned.
But I couldn’t. I couldn’t even open my eyes. A little nap was all I needed. Just a small, short sleep to restore my strength.
“Hello!” The male voice was close to my ears. “Hang on. Y’all are going to be just fine.”
He was rolling me over onto my side. I willed my eyelids to open, and they did, part way. Could it be? The smile floating before me belonged to the father of Avery’s twins.
“Hello,” I whispered, or tried to. Maybe I just smiled back. I closed my eyes again, letting it all go.
Chapter Twelve
“Whiskey, wake up.”
I recognized the voice. It wasn’t the one I wanted to hear, but it came again, anyway.
“Open your eyes, Whiskey. I know you can hear me.”
I opened one eye. Odette was next to me. She didn’t look worried, so I opened the other eye.
“You’re not him,” I said.
“No, and you’re not quite yourself, either. Him who?”
“Avery’s ex. He saved me.”
“Actually, you saved yourself. He arrived in time to help you ashore.”
When I tried to sit up, I realized I had a tube in my arm. I also had a lot of blankets piled on me and a heater aimed at me.
“Am I in the hospital?”
“How perceptive,” Odette yawned. “Coastal Medical Center, to be precise. The EMTs didn’t like your hypothermia, so they brought you here.”
I sank back and tried to sort out my jumbled memories.
“Gil’s dead,” I said.
“What?” Suddenly Odette was interested.
“He was in the shanty that went through the ice. The shanty outside of Fishburg.”
“Gil was fishing?”
“No, Gil was dead. I saw no sign that he’d been fishing.”
That was true, and it only now clicked in my head. I replayed the moment when I’d entered the shanty: There had been no fishing equipment inside. Just Gil and blood and splintering ice.
“Nash Grant didn’t mention a body,” Odette said.
“That’s because Nash Grant never saw it. Gil went under the ice before I even got out of the water.” The horror hit me as hard as a snow plow, and I started shaking again.
“Do you need another blanket?” Odette asked.
“I need Jenx,” I said through chattering teeth.
By the time the police chief arrived, I had stopped shaking and was able to sip a warm, sweet beverage through a bent straw.
“You’re sure he was dead,” Jenx said, her pen poised over her notebook.
“Positive. If he’d been alive, he would have insulted me. And his eyes—.” I shuddered. “I’m sure he was dead.”
“Could you tell how he died?”
I replayed the pictures in my head.
“His chest was bloody—where his coat was open.”
“Did it look like a bullet wound?”
“It looked like . . . like a slash. His shirt was torn. There was so much blood. It was everywhere.”
Jenx said, “You mean, like he’d been stabbed?”
Should I tell her about my weird encounter with Roy Vickers, his jacket splattered, his sleeve drenched with blood? If only I had dreamed that moment, but I knew I hadn’t.
“You need to find Roy,” I said, my throat tight.
“Why? Did he see something?”
“I saw something. His jacket was covered with blood. And he was coming from the direction of Gil’s shanty.”
“Did he explain the blood?”
“He said he helped a guy unhook a fish.”
“Must have been some fish.”
“Sturgeon, maybe?” I suggested.
“Whiskey—.”
“I know. It looks bad.”
“Odette said Roy threatened Gil at the Goh Cup this morning.”
“Roy was defending me.”
“Yeah, well, it looks like you shouldn’t have hired the guy.”
“We don’t know that, Jenx!”
“Correction: we haven’t confirmed that. Yet.”
She scribbled in her notebook, and then flipped the page. “Odette also said you might have seen Chester.”
“From up in a helicopter you could be sure?”
“The only thing I’m not sure about is who he was with. Someone in a long fur coat.”
“There are at least fifty of those around town,” Jenx said, “not counting the wealthy tourists.”
“Well, one of those coats has Chester! Can’t you get some kind of wardrobe subpoena? Send Officers Brady and Roscoe door to door?”
Jenx gave me such a dirty look that I pulled the blankets over my head.
“Did I say I was done with you?” She yanked the covers away.
“If I can’t play sick in the hospital, then why am I here? My insurance won’t even pay for this. Have some pity for the self-employed!”
Jenx tossed the blankets back over my face and left. I drifted off to sleep.
When I woke, a nurse was checking my vital signs.
“You’re recovering well,” she said. “But they’ll want to keep you at least twenty-four hours. With hypothermia, there’s a risk of cardiac complications.”
“I’ve got a business to run,” I protested. “And a kid to find!”
“You lost your kid?”
“Worse: I lost someone else’s. Is Chief Jenkins still around?”
“No, but somebody’s here to see you. I think his name is Nash.”
My heart leaped, so I figured it was still working.
“Is there a mirror?” I asked the nurse. She winked and produced one from her pocket. I wished she hadn’t; my face was ghostly white and my usually messy hair was a mare’s nest. The kindly nurse produced a comb, but we couldn’t get it through my tangles. In fact, it got stuck in there. The nurse went off to find scissors. Nash Grant appeared.
“You have a comb sticking out of your head,” he drawled. “But I suppose you know that.”
I nodded. “The surgery’s scheduled for tomorrow.”
He laughed, and I liked the sound of it.
“Thanks for helping me get to shore.”
“It was the least I could do, considering you’d already handled the hard part. How’d you get yourself out of that freezing water?”
“One inch at a time.”
Up close, the man was gorgeous. He had coppery eyes flecked with green, high cheekbones, and thick walnut-colored hair. Plus that sexy southern accent. And he smelled as good as he had when he brushed past me at Mother Tucker’s.
“I’m Nash Grant,” he said, extending a hand.
“Whiskey Mattimoe.”
“You’re the grandma!”
“Pardon?”
“I’m the father of Avery’s twins. I understand you’re their grandma.”
Somehow I’d never thought of it that way. The concept gagged me.
“Water?” Nash said, helpfully pouring a fresh glass.
“I’m Avery’s stepmother,” I said. “Her father was older than me. A lot older.”
“That’s obvious. And I’m a lot older than Avery. Fifteen years.”
“That’s how much older Leo was than me,” I said.
“But it worked? Your marriage, I mean?”
“Yes. But we didn’t start out making babies. We were friends first and then lovers.” Before I could put another foot in my mouth, I forced myself to drink the whole glass of water.
“Avery and I were impetuous,” Nash conceded. “And we’re not in love. But I’m prepared to be responsible. Tonight, I meet my son and daughter.”
“You haven’t seen them yet?”
“Only in pictures.”
I handed him back the empty glass.
“What were you doing in Fishburg?”
Nash looked confused.
“Out among the ice shanties,” I clarified. “Why weren’t you with Avery back at the Jamboree?”
“Avery wasn’t at the Jamboree.”
“I saw her. She was talking with my ex-husband.”
Nash shook his head. “Avery’s spending the day with the twins. She said I could come by tonight. So I decided to spend the day soaking up local color. When I saw the ice-fishing huts, I had to check them out. I’m a consultant for a company that makes build-it-yourself shanty kits.”
“What do they consult you about?”
“How to sell more of them. I teach advertising at the University of Florida. And do a little consulting on the side.”
He grinned. If he was half as good at consulting as he was at flirting, Nash Grant should be rich.
“With your accent, I don’t suppose you grew up ice-fishing,” I ventured.
“True enough. Biloxi boys play field sports in winter. I preferred baseball myself.”
“I played softball when I was a kid. Still do, occasionally, though volleyball was my high-school sport of choice.”
Nash nodded approvingly. “Avery said you were athletic.”
As in “Whiskey’s more athletic than attractive,” probably. I wondered what else Avery had said about me.
Before I could ask, there was a knock at my door, and my first husband said, “Who knew that ice-survival course from eleventh grade would finally pay off?”
“That and the flotation fanny pack I lifted from the helicopter,” I replied. “Jeb Halloran, meet Nash Grant.”
“We already did,” Nash said, acting every bit the Southern gentleman as he rose to shake Jeb’s hand.
“Good to see you again,” Jeb told him.
“When did you two meet?” I asked.
The men exchanged glances as if reminding each other of a Masonic secret.
“Uh—today,” Jeb said. “At the Jamboree.”
“Did Avery introduce you?”
“Like I said, Avery wasn’t there,” Nash replied.
I focused on Jeb. “Didn’t I see you talking with Avery?”
“When?”
“This afternoon. At the Jamboree.”
“Not me,” said Jeb. He and Nash simultaneously cleared their throats.
“What’s going on here?” I demanded.
“Nothing,” they replied.
“Jeb Halloran, who were you talking to just before one o’clock?”
“You know I don’t wear a watch.”
“But you wear a brain, don’t you? Can’t you remember who you saw at the Jamboree?”
“I saw lots of people, Whiskey. I sold sixty-three CDs! Tomorrow I hope to sell twice as many, if the weather doesn’t get any worse. My Celtic Collection’s a local hit.”
“If you don’t mind my asking, how do you advertise?” said Nash.
At which point, I once again pulled the blankets over my head. It must have been five minutes before they noticed. Then they moved their conversation outside. As he left the room, I sneaked a peek at Nash Grant’s ass. Very nice. But to be fair, so was Jeb’s.
It was Nash, though, who made me feel as if my IV drip contained an intoxicant.
“Grandma,” indeed.
Chapter Thirteen
I must have eaten something for dinner, but hospital food is about as memorable as it is tasty. All I could recall was a delicious dream: Nash Grant, Jeb Halloran, and David Newquist were tag-teaming the dog-and-baby-sitting duties at Vestige. And this was the best part: their job descriptions included giving me Day Spa treatments. Nash was shampooing my hair, Jeb was massaging my back, and Dr. David was clipping my claws, I mean nails.
I could have spent the whole night, if not longer, inside that fantasy. Unfortunately, I was rudely awakened by a commotion in the hall outside my room. It took a moment—a very disappointing moment—to realize where I was, and that there were no attractive men attending me.
A nurse I hadn’t yet met entered my room in that stealthy way night nurses do.
“What’s up?” I asked, and she jumped in alarm.
“Sorry,” I said. “Did you think I was dead?”
“I thought you were sleeping. I hoped you were sleeping.” She sighed. “Everything takes longer when we have to talk to the patients.”
She explained that
an ice storm had started a few hours earlier, followed by scattered power outages. When the grid to Coastal Medical Center went down, they had switched to emergency generators.
“Since you’re not on life support, it won’t much affect you,” said the nurse. “Except that your meals will be cold.”
“Aren’t they, anyway?”
“I’m going to remove your IV before we get busy. . . .”
“Do you have to? Whatever’s in there is good stuff.” I yawned, wishing to drift back to my Alternate Version of Vestige. Then it dawned on me that an ice storm spelled disaster for the Jamboree.
“Will the weather be better tomorrow?” I asked.
“It’s already tomorrow,” the nurse said, activating the glow-in-the-dark face of her watch for my benefit. It read 4:17.
“Uh-oh. Doesn’t look good for the tourist trade.”
“You can say that again. Most roads are closed. I won’t be able to leave till they’re plowed, or it thaws, whichever comes first. Why rush home, anyhow? We got no heat. At least here it’s warm.”
I nodded. Then Chester popped into my head. Chances are he was not only in trouble but also in the cold. And in the dark.
“I’ve got to get out of here!” I blurted.
The nurse, a large woman close to retirement age, laughed. “Honey, that’s what they all say!”
“But I’ve really got to get out of here! I’ve got a lost kid to go find!”
“Yeah, the nurse from last shift said you mentioned that. We figured you were disoriented from the hypothermia. She marked it on your chart.”
“I’m not confused,” I said, sitting up. “I know exactly what’s going on! Well, maybe not exactly, or I could tell Jenx where to find Chester. But I’m not confused! Where’s the phone?”
“Phones aren’t working,” the nurse said flatly. “And you need to lie back down.”
“I’ll bet cell phones are working.” I reached toward the bedside stand for mine.
“No cell phone use allowed,” she barked. Dark though the room was, I thought I saw her scoop my cell phone into her pocket.
“You can’t take that!” I said.
“Take what? You need to close your eyes and get some rest. Unless you want me to recommend a complete psychiatric work-up.”
I knew then that I’d seen the last of Nice Nurse. From now on she would manage me by coercion. I recognized the strategy; it was the only way I could handle Abra. So I shut my eyes, pulled the blankets over my face, and tried to recapture my three-man Day Spa.