Southbound Page 9

  “You know, she’s been out of touch a bit,” Brad said, giving me one of those aw-shucks smiles that guys like him seemed to specialize in. “I know she’s taking her grandma’s death hard, so I wanted to help her--you know, be here for her.”

  So, you’re hoping that she’ll take you back because she’s emotional right now, I thought grimly.

  “You know, when I was helping her out with Diane, she didn’t mention having a fiancé,” I said. “Seems like if you were really concerned about how hard she was taking it, and really were as close with her as you say, you’d have come with her in the first place, right?”

  I crossed my arms over my chest and kept my eyes on Brad’s.

  “I had a lot of work going on,” Brad said, dropping his gaze from mine. “I mean, I know it’s not exactly a good reason--but I want to make it right.”

  “I think you want to go after a woman who has already told you ‘no,’” I said, shaking my head. “And I think you’re too grown a man for that bullshit.”

  Brad’s expression sharpened into a scowl. “What the hell do you know?”

  “I know that if you were really her fiancé, like you’re saying, you would know where she’s staying,” I explained. “And I know that if you were really engaged to her, you wouldn’t have to ask random strangers. I know that if I were engaged to someone, I wouldn’t leave them to take care of their grandmother’s last rites all on their own.”

  Brad looked like he wanted to act tough, but also like he didn’t really know how, and I wanted to laugh--but I also didn’t want to escalate the situation. Just get the message across to him, clearly and firmly, I reminded myself.

  “Look, obviously I know Aspen,” he said. “I want to talk to her--she should have someone she knows and cares about by her side.”

  I snorted and managed to keep from laughing again.

  “I’m not telling you anything about where she is,” I said. “More to the point, I’m going to recommend that you stay away from her. She doesn’t need you.”

  Brad’s scowl intensified and he stepped up to me, looking like he wanted to hit me.

  “You’re going to tell me or I’ll--I’ll go to the police,” Brad said.

  That time I couldn’t help myself—I laughed.

  “If you go to the police on this island, they’re going to laugh you out of the precinct,” I told him matter-of-factly. “And especially if you try to accuse me of something. Everyone in this town knows who I am, and if you try to concoct some bullshit story about me not giving you information on a woman who doesn’t want to see you, then they’re likely to charge you with harassment on top of it.” I held Brad’s gaze for a long moment. “I’d suggest you find a flight out of here as soon as possible. You’ve got no business with Aspen.”

  “Screw you, asshole,” he said, giving me a shove.

  I shook my head and pushed him--a little harder than he had me--and Roscoe barked at the same moment.

  “No, asshole,” I countered. “And you need to get out of my face. Go find somewhere to stay, get drunk on Duval Street, and take yourself home. You’re not getting anything out of me.”

  I stepped back, and Brad looked like he was going to try and press the issue for about two seconds. But he backed off and shook his head, still scowling at me. He turned away and went off down the street, in the opposite direction from my house. I watched him for a few moments and decided that I needed to tell Aspen that her ex-boyfriend had managed to get to town--preferably before he found her.

  I tried to think of where she might be.

  “Come on, Roscoe--let’s see what we can see,” I said, and Roscoe was on all four feet immediately, ready to follow me.

  I hoped I could get to Aspen before her ex-boyfriend did.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Aspen

  I had just finished taking pictures of Mile Marker 0 when I heard Gage calling my name. I turned around, looking at the people milling about the landmark, trying to spot him, and a moment later I did; he looked upset.

  Gage stopped at my side and gave me a quick smile, but one that didn’t quite meet his eyes. Clearly something was bothering him.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “I just ran into someone,” he said. “And I think you need to know about it.”

  My heart started beating faster and I remembered Catherine’s call from earlier in the day. How long has it been since you called him? Where was he when Catherine called you?

  I pushed away the idea that somehow Gage had met Brad out of my mind.

  “Diane? What, does she have an issue with me?” I tried to smile as bravely as my panicky-fluttering heart would allow.

  “I did run into Diane, but the only reason was because she had your ex with her,” Gage said, destroying all my hopes that it would be something less jarring.

  “Damnit, Brad,” I said, more to myself than to Gage.

  “You don’t sound shocked,” Gage observed.

  I shook my head. “I’m not,” I said. “I mean—I had some advance warning.”

  I explained about my friend Catherine’s call from earlier in the day, and how I’d hoped that I could just dodge Brad for a day or two and have him decide it wasn’t worth the trouble.

  “Well, I didn’t tell him anything,” Gage reassured me. “In fact, I told him that he had no business with you and that I wasn’t going to give him any information on you at all.”

  “Which is why I followed you,” another male voice said.

  I looked away from Gage and saw Brad. He was dressed appropriately for the weather in shorts and a white button-down shirt, but he had already started to sweat, and his skin was starting to take on a rosy tinge from the sun.

  “You followed me?” Gage put himself between me and Brad and for just a few seconds, I relished the fact that there was someone willing to directly stand up for me; I hadn’t been willing to think about it earlier, but the fact that someone had told Brad where I’d traveled to had felt like something of a betrayal.

  “Yeah, I figured that if I followed you for long enough, you’d lead me to Aspen,” Brad said proudly. “I didn’t think it would be right away, though.”

  “She doesn’t want to see you or talk to you, as far as I can tell,” Gage told my former boyfriend.

  “She can tell me that herself, after she hears me out,” Brad countered.

  “There’s nothing for me to hear you out about,” I said, before Gage could get more involved in the situation. I stepped to the side and met Brad’s gaze steadily. “I dumped you because you were cheating on me, and I thought I made it perfectly clear to you that I didn’t want anything to do with you.”

  “You didn’t even have a discussion with me about it!” Brad scowled at me. “You just decided that we were over and didn’t even bother to listen, and then when your grandmother died, you wouldn’t even let me offer my condolences to you.”

  “You gave up the right to do any of that when you made the choice to cheat on me,” I told him. “If you had wanted a chance to give me condolences when Grandma died, you should have thought of that before you hooked up with Veronica!”

  “Who’s Veronica?” Gage had heard the story about how I’d caught Brad cheating on me, but I hadn’t been all that specific as to who Brad had been cheating with.

  “One of my coworkers,” I said. “Someone I had thought was a friend.” I had thought I was over it, but seeing Brad again dredged up the whole betrayal.

  “You cheated on her with one of her friends? Dude,” Gage said, shaking his head. “Why in hell would you think she’d ever want to talk to you again?”

  “You didn’t even take a second to think about why I cheated,” Brad said, pointing at me.

  The anger and the stress all built up inside of me to a head, and I was so amazed at the words that left Brad’s mouth that all I could do was stare at him and laugh.

  “Are you kidding me right now?” I laughed again. “In what world does it even matter why you cheated?
You cheated on me! You cheated on me with one of my friends! That ended the relationship. You had every chance in the world to talk to me about whatever problems you might have had with me before you cheated. But you gave up that chance when you decided to fuck my friend.”

  “You were constantly blowing me off.” Brad moved closer to me, and I felt Gage shifting, at my side, ready to prevent any kind of physical altercation, although I was pretty sure there wouldn’t be one. “You were too busy for me all the time, and you put me behind your stupid degree.”

  “If you had that problem with me, you should have addressed it,” I told him firmly. “And you have no right to harass me here in Key West, you asshole.”

  “I had to come here,” Brad insisted. “You never even gave me a chance!”

  “I can’t believe that you’re so self-absorbed that you actually think you have any kind of moral high ground here!” I laughed bitterly.

  Brad stepped forward and opened his mouth to say something else, but Gage held up a hand.

  “I think you need to back off and leave her alone,” Gage said quietly.

  “Oh, of course you do,” Brad said, smirking at him. He turned his attention back onto me. “No wonder you’re being unreasonable like this--you’ve already found yourself a big-money replacement.”

  I stared at him, too shocked to even laugh. “What?”

  “Obviously the only reason you’re not interested in listening to me is because moneybags here is funding you,” Brad said, nodding in Gage’s direction.

  “First of all,” I said, trying to gain some measure of calm; Brad’s accusation lit a fire inside of me that had already started to blow up. “I have my own money from liquidating my grandmother’s estate. Second of all, if I were penniless and still back home--hell, if I was on the streets and you’d won the lottery yesterday--I wouldn’t be interested in hearing anything from you ever again in my life.”

  Brad’s mouth fell open and he stared at me.

  “I think you’ve exhausted every argument you might have had for talking to her, man,” Gage said.

  “If you ever cared about me, even a little bit--even at all--then you need to get the hell out of my life, Brad,” I said. “You need to move on, and let me move on too.”

  For a second or two longer, he looked like he would try and argue the point.

  “Screw it,” he said finally, and turned away from both me and Gage. He walked off down the street, away from the Mile Marker, and I found myself leaning against Gage from sheer relief that it was finally over.

  “I’m sorry about that,” Gage said. “I should have been paying attention--I probably would have noticed him following me, if I had.”

  “It’s not your fault,” I told him. “You aren’t to blame for his bad decisions.”

  I looked around and saw that my argument had attracted a little audience--but fortunately they were dispersing now that the drama seemed to be over. I caught more than one woman giving me an approving glance for telling my ex off.

  “I still feel responsible, at least a little bit,” Gage said, and he touched my shoulder, wrapping his free arm around me. It felt good--warm, safe, comfortable, in a way that I never would have expected.

  “I’m just glad that he seems to have finally gotten the message,” I said with a sigh.

  “Why don’t we get a drink for you, and maybe some early dinner to go with it?” Gage gave my shoulder a squeeze, and I smiled.

  “I definitely could use a drink,” I said. I didn’t want to leave the half-hug that Gage had wrapped around me, but I knew that I should. I stood up straight and looked around. “Where should we go?”

  “Let’s start with the Green Parrot,” he suggested. “It’s close, and it’s been in business since 1890--your grandmother might even have gone there, if she was a drinking woman.”

  “I think I saw it mentioned, actually,” I said with a smile. “I have some notes--that would be a good place to check on them, in the shade where it’s nice and cool, and with a good drink.”

  I walked with Gage up Whitehead Street, thinking about how glad I was that he’d been here for my confrontation with Brad.

  The Green Parrot was a gorgeous old bar, and as soon as we were inside I could picture its history: people from various periods of American history lounging around--most of them men--having a drink to cool off from the heat of the day. Gage ordered us the featured drink, which was a watermelon punch with tequila in it, and we sat down with my notes.

  “So, what have you gotten around to so far?” he asked.

  I looked over my list of places, poring over the details I’d scribbled to locate certain ones--of course, some of the information was extremely dated, since the only thing I had to go on was Grandma’s journal entries. Most of her friends’ homes and a handful of other places she’d gone just weren’t important enough to be landmarks.

  “I’ve found a couple of her friends’ houses, but a lot of them seem to have been either bought up and converted, or destroyed, or something similar,” I explained, half-showing Gage my list. “Of course, we saw the Hemingway house, and now I’ve been to Mile Marker 0, and some places that have become landmarks--but there’s a lot to go over. Grandma was into visiting and hanging out with people.”

  I grinned, thinking to myself that my grandmother would have pointed out to me--if she’d been there with me--that back then, they didn’t even have the internet; they had to visit each other to be social.

  The waitress brought our drinks to us. The watermelon-tequila punch tasted absolutely delicious and at the same time, the aftertaste told me it was also deadly-potent. I told myself not to have more than two at the most.

  Gage said, “Maybe I can help you locate some of the spots. Have you found the really important one yet?”

  I shook my head. Happy hour was beginning and people were starting to come into the bar a little more steadily.

  “No, I haven’t been able to track it down, yet,” I said. It would have been difficult even without the way property seemed to constantly be changing hands in the Keys; Grandma might have known exactly where the spot was where she’d met my grandfather, but her journal hadn’t given me enough clues to be able to identify it. She hadn’t even mentioned any real landmarks that I could refer to or research. I knew it was on one of the beaches, but since Key West was an island, there were a lot of those.

  “Well, what do you know about the spot? If you can narrow it down a bit, we can check things out, do a tour maybe,” Gage suggested.

  “I kind of feel like I want to find it on my own,” I said. “I know it probably sounds ridiculous. But she didn’t intend on meeting my grandfather there. She just kind of...did.”

  We talked for a while about the places that I’d already been to, about the different landmarks, and Gage finally got me to show him some of the notes I’d made, copying down the information from my grandmother’s journals in her own words along with any updated details I could find. After two drinks we moved on to La Trattoria around the corner on Duval street, and I found myself opening up to the idea of Gage helping me more.

  “You’re letting me pay for this meal--just so you know in advance,” Gage said, even as I handed my notes to him, along with the map I’d sketched.

  “Are we really going to argue about this?” I smiled at him, feeling a bit tipsy--but much better about the situation with Brad.

  “We aren’t going to argue, because you’re going to let me pay,” Gage said, returning my smile. I wanted to insist, but I could tell he meant it; and after he’d gone out on a limb for me, defending me to Brad and standing by me, I had an even better feeling about Gage than I had since he’d salvaged the situation between me and Diane. I was more comfortable with him than I had been with any other man in months--ever since I’d found out about Brad cheating on me.

  “Okay, fine,” I said, gesturing that I was giving up. We ordered our meals, and Gage began to dig into my notes as I helped myself to antipasto and water to cut som
e of the alcohol I’d had at the Green Parrot.

  “I think I can help you track down a few of these places,” Gage said, putting my notebook aside as our food came. “The one that’s most important--that one is going to be tricky. She didn’t give you much to go on, did she?” I shook my head.

  “Not much at all,” I admitted. “I’m not even sure it’s somewhere I can find--it’s a particular beach, but there’s a lot of beaches here.”

  “We’ll see if we can narrow it down by the stuff she references,” Gage suggested. “And to do that, we’ll go to some of the other places she talks about.” I felt a little flutter in my chest that I couldn’t quite explain, even to myself.

  “We’ll go?” I asked.

  “If it’s okay with you. I know a lot about Key West history, if you haven’t noticed,” he pointed out as he began to dig into his hogfish with creamy crab sauce. “And I know most everyone around here, so I might be able to get some private property owners to let us look at their places.”

  I had to admit, as much as I’d wanted to do my investigations alone, there were certain things that I wanted a partner for; and on top of that, I wasn’t sure that Brad had left the island, or when he would. It would be good to have Gage with me, and probably Roscoe too.

  “Then I look forward to investigating with you,” I said, raising my glass. I clinked it against Gage’s and met his smile with one of my own. It would actually be a relief not to have to rely on just my own research skills to find the spot I needed for Grandma’s final wish.

  But the question did still loom over me: where was I going to go once I’d completed it?

  Chapter Fifteen

  Gage

  I woke up the next morning with a message on my phone from the lawyer—the purchase was set to go, all the permits approved. I only had to sign the final set of paperwork on the deed to the property and confirm the transfer of money for the purchase, and it was mine.

  This would be a fantastic day.