Judy’s hypnotic trance had her speaking in the third person, a technique Donna LeMonte had used on Jessica on frequent occasions, as it supposedly helped patients separate themselves from the moment.
Coffee in hand, fatigue setting in already at 3 p.m., Jessica was listening to the taped session unfold for the fourth time, without benefit of high technology, merely by using her own internal Internet:
They were all at the Magic Wand, a bar and grill built out over the river where it met the ocean at the tip of the South Miami Beach strip.
Judy frowned in a pretense of anger, repeating the name Patric, mocking Tammy in a half-kidding, half-angry manner, “Patric without the K, Patric without the K,” until it became a boozy chant. Cynthia dug back into her chair and consoled herself with her third Bloody Mary, looking and feeling grumpy. Judy remained standing for a time to watch her exuberant friend Tammy rush after her pickup, literally skipping out to the harbor boats along the planked dock, where she disappeared among the enormous floating city, her form lost to the angles and edges, the rigging and white sails and tall masts which comfortably bobbed in a lullaby of noise created by ocean breeze and swells, turning the poles and ropes into giant chimes there where the Intracoastal Waterway met the incoming ocean tide.
Judy then breathed a great sigh of resignation, turned to Cynthia and asked, “What’s the name of the boat?”
“ What boat?”
“ Cynthia! The one Tammy’s going on. What did she say the name of the boat was?”
“ Oh, I dunno… and I don’t care,” Cynthia said, lounging unladylike in her deck chair.
Judy suddenly called out after Tammy, both curious and a little unsure of her friend’s wisdom at going off with the stranger this second time, however handsome, virile or loaded he might be. Earlier, he had taken Tammy Sue to a nearby restaurant, plying her with wine and shellfish.
“ Forget it,” said Cynthia. “She’s long gone. I thought when he came back here, that he was going to… that he might… that maybe they were… you know…”
“ No, I don’t know,” Judy replied, staling across at her boozed-up friend. “Know what?”
“ Ask us to join ‘em.”
“ Join ‘em for what?”
“ Judy, you’re so mired in your middle-class mind.”
“ God, no… not even drunk, Cyn-”
“ He’s such a hunk, though…”
“ You’re serious. You were going to suggest that we all three do him, weren’t you?”
“ No! Yes! No, maybe… I didn’t suggest it. His eyes suggested it. Did you see the way he was undressing me and you while he had Tammy on his arm?”
“ God, you, Cyn… You would do it, wouldn’t you?”
“ Well, I didn’t say I would, no.”
“ A three-way! God, Cyn, you’re awful.”
Cynthia flailed her drunken hands in the air. “I just thought that maybe Tammy’d have the decency to invite us to join them, so we could get to, you know, know him, too.”
“ Hell, I’ve taught Tammy better’n that, Cyn.”
Cynthia only frowned and waved her now-empty glass.
Judy suggested, “Let’s go have a look at the boat while they’re pulling away. Get the call numbers, you know, just in case.”
“ Call numbers? Planes have call numbers, not boats.”
“ Boats have identifying numbers, too. It’s the law.”
“ I didn’t know that.”
“ Well, you grew up in Indiana. I wouldn’t expect you to know.”
“ But we can’t go traipsing after them.”
“ Just out to the end of the dock is all. Tammy told me the guy wants to take her to the Caribbean.”
“ Tonight?”
“ Well, no… I don’t think tonight, but sometime.”
“ Damn, he gets better and better all the time. Where in the Caribbean?”
“ I think she said the Caribbean… isn’t the Cayman Islands in the Caribbean Sea?”
“ Geography’s not my best subject; never was,” replied Cynthia.
“ So suppose she says yes and they just, you know, disappear for two weeks on that gorgeous sailing ship? What’re we going to tell Tammy’s parents when they call?”
“ God, they’d flip, wouldn’t they? I’d pay to see that.”
“ So, come on. Let’s at least go see the boat off.”
“ But it won’t look right. She’ll think we’re jealous.”
“ Goddamnit, Cynthia, we are jealous.”
“ Yeah, but she doesn’t have to know it.”
“ Cynthia, Cynthia… she already knows that much.”
“ But to give her the satisfaction? No way!”
“ Well, I’m going to watch them shove off.”
“ Not before you dig deep into your pockets.”
“ What?”
“ This’s your round of drinks, remember?” Cynthia waved the empty again, this time like a flag.
“ Oh, yeah… sure…”
Judy Templar located the necessary cash and tip, dropped it on the table and started away. She returned, however, for one last-ditch effort to get Cynthia to tag along. “You coming?”
“ Naw… Think I’ll just sit here.”
“ Come on, Cyn… We’ll just pretend to be looking at the boats. She won’t know any different. She’s too preoccupied with Paaaaatric-without-the-K anyway. Come on, Cyn… Cyn…”
“ Oh, all right, all right. Stop your whining. God…” They’d gotten up to go toward the dock when two young men not quite their ages intercepted them, asking if they’d care to dance. Judy whispered a bit of feminine philosophy in Cyn’s ear, saying, “What is it about a place like this? It never fails that in a place like this, the losers always find us. Are we wearing signs on our backs or what?”
One of the band members hit a bad note and it brought Judy’s attention full circle to the musicians and the fact that some people were dancing.
Cynthia wondered what her friend had just said even as she whispered back, “What is it about places like this that attract boys too young to drink and too cash-poor to buy me a drink?”
Both of them giggled, trying to mask their amusement with their hands and failing miserably to do so. Then they each grew more serious and stared at the other for the right answer to their would-be suitors.
Finally, Judy Templar said, “I’m sorry. I’m just going for a walk.”
Cynthia said, “I’ll dance.”
That left one of the boys tagging along in Judy’s footsteps toward the boats. He introduced himself as Todd Simon, said his father ran the local True Value hardware, said he went to nearby Sea Breeze High School, said he was graduating come June, enrolling at Florida State in Tallahassee in the fall, and said he thought she was “about” the prettiest girl he’d ever met.
But Judy only half listened, searching as she was for the boat that Tammy had gotten aboard. She scanned left and right, and when she finally zeroed in on it, she found that it had already been expertly maneuvered beyond the docks, and that it was now far out into the river-so far, in fact, that she couldn’t make out the name at the stern or the numbers below the bow.
A wicked thought flitted through her brain now: how she might disrupt Tammy’s romantic evening so easily by reporting the boat to the harbor patrol or even the Coast Guard, telling them she thought Patric was drunk when he pulled out of port and that maybe they should just have a look. If she had the name and numbers off the boat, it would be a simple enough joke to pull off, but she would have a tough time describing the boat without the details. Still, it was a stunning sailing vessel; not too many like her in the harbor, and if Judy worked fast…
As she stared out at the boat, lit now with lights that made it appear enchanted, she felt another wave of distrust of the man who’d whisked Tammy off, and she felt an uncomfortable, indescribable and grim sense of
