Sunset Beach(56)

“Thanks anyway, but I need to walk off that cheeseburger I just ate.”

“You look just fine to me.” He ran the radio antennae slowly down her cheek. “You look so good, you oughtta be against the law.” He moved even closer now. “And I’m the law.”

She felt her face, neck and chest flush. She didn’t even know his name, for Pete’s sake.

“Okay, well, it’s good to see you again.”

“Jimmy.”

“Huh?”

“Jimmy Zilowicz. Everybody calls me Jimmy Zee.”

“Right. See you around, Jimmy Zee.”

He was still studying her. “How are things at home?”

“Like I said before, everything’s fine. Allen really felt terrible, you know, about what happened. He hasn’t had a drink since. Not even a beer.”

“If he stopped drinking, does that mean he beats you when he’s sober too?”

She pulled away from him. “It’s not what you think. Anyway, why are you following me? I haven’t done anything wrong.” She turned to go, but he put his hand on her shoulder.

“Something’s been bothering me ever since that night at the Dreamland. You know what that place is, don’t you?”

“No. I don’t,” she said coldly.

“It’s a hot sheet joint. A no-tell motel. I bet we get twenty, thirty calls a year to that place. Suspicion of prostitution, drunk and disorderly, like that. So what’s a nice young married couple doing shacked up at a place like the Dreamland?”

“None of your business.”

“You’re pissed at me? He’s the one you should be pissed at. Hang on here a minute. Don’t make me chase you down, okay?”

Colleen crossed her arms and waited. He reached in the open window of his cruiser and brought out a pad of paper and a pen.

“You’re giving me a ticket? For what? This is unbelievable.”

He scrawled something on the ticket, tore it off and handed it to her. “Not a ticket. My name and phone number. If he hurts you again? Call me. I guarantee, it’ll be the last time the son of a bitch does that.”





26


The wind awakened her Sunday morning, howling, whipping palm fronds against the bedroom window screens. Drue jumped from the bed, ran to the living room and threw open the French doors leading to the deck.

She stood on the deck, dressed only in an oversize T-shirt. She tilted her face skyward, letting the wind whip her hair and the rain lash her face, feeling like a wild sea siren.

It was the first storm since she had moved into Coquina Cottage. Dark billowing clouds loomed over the surface of the Gulf, and she could hear waves crashing on the beach. She wrapped her arms around herself for warmth, but let the wind and the rain have its way.

Before, on the east coast, on a day like this, she would have thrown her gear in the Bronco and headed out to the beach for a day of kiteboarding. She’d always had a built-in anemometer to gauge wind speed. Today, she felt sure, it was blowing twelve knots, a rare late-spring event on the west coast of Florida.

When she was thoroughly soaked, she reluctantly went inside and showered. She wrapped her wet hair in a towel and sat at the table in the kitchen, sipping coffee from Papi’s mug.

Up until today, she’d deliberately avoided thinking about her old life. But today, with the wind howling, she picked up her phone, and for the first time since moving to St. Pete, logged onto Facebook and the Broward Board Babes page, scrolling through photos of billowing kites, sun-browned women in board shorts and bikini tops, group shots of her friends taken on the beach at Delray or Lighthouse Point.

She stopped scrolling at a photo of a couple, photographed in profile, in a tight embrace, she in a barely there bikini, he, bare-chested, tousle-haired. She recognized Trey instantly but had to enlarge the photo to see that the woman was Chelsee, a much younger woman who’d only joined the group six months earlier. Drue allowed herself a bitter smile. It hadn’t taken Trey long at all to find a newer, younger, uninjured version of herself. Drue 2.0.

She closed the app and put her phone down, reaching for her packet of index cards. She read through her notes again, spreading the cards out on the surface of the card table.

There were so many dead ends to the Jazmin Mayes case, she understood now why Zee, the firm’s investigator, had declared it a lost cause.

With her phone still in her hand, she reopened the Facebook app and typed Jazmin Mayes’s name into the search bar.

Jazmin, she discovered, lived on in the world of social media. Her profile photo showed a laughing young woman, her hair cut short and straightened, grinning flirtatiously into the camera. She had a small cleft in her narrow, pointed chin and wore large gold hoop earrings and a shoulder-baring pink top.

It was the first photo she’d seen of the girl, and noting the resemblance both to Yvonne but more so, Aliyah, Drue felt an overwhelming sense of sadness.

The most recent entry on Jazmin’s page was dated April 2018, posted by someone named JeezyD: “R.I.P. Jazmin. We will never forget the good times.”

Drue grabbed an index card and jotted down the name. There were several more entries posted on the same date. “Gone, never forgotten.” “Heaven has a new angel.” “Prayers for your family.” She wrote down all the names of the friends who’d posted memorials.