Of course, Kate twisted in her seat and looked straight at him. When she finally caught the guy’s attention, Kate frenetically waved, like she was ushering in the winning car at the Daytona 500.
“Kate, stop!” Liz said, then slapped her friend on the wrist. “Could you be more obvious?” Oh no. Liz had just given Kate a dare.
Kate stood, grabbed Liz’s shoulder, and pulled her back from the table, chair and all. “Stand up. Let’s go meet that raven-haired, dark-eyed, scowling man of your dreams!”
“Say what? You mean man of your dreams, Kate Fields.”
By the time they got to the table, both Pops and the man were gone.
Just as well. Who needs complications. The next chapter of Liz’s life would be all about serenity.
Chapter 3
Liz helped Pierre in the kitchen with the cleanup. It was usually Iris’s job, but she was MIA. Aunt Amelia had even checked the housekeeper’s rooms. Iris had come to work at the hotel four months ago and had rooms on the second floor. The housekeeper was stiff and proper, almost emotionless, and she performed the mechanics of cleaning the hotel with military precision. She wore rubber-soled work shoes that always made it easy for her to appear silently in a room like a ballerina-toed cat burglar, causing Liz to startle on more than one occasion.
After they were finished, Liz sent Pierre off to bed, took off her apron, and hung it on the hook by the door. As she was ready to leave for home, the intercom buzzed and a light lit up next to the Oceana Suite. Liz pushed the button on the panel, and Aunt Amelia’s acting voice boomed over the intercom. “Dar-r-rling Lizzy, could you please be a peach and gather the valises in the lobby? Mrs. Worth’s husband has arrived and I still can’t locate Iris.”
She heard laughter in the background and a man’s voice telling Aunt Amelia that he could get the luggage himself, and then his wife saying, “Don’t be absurd, David! Let the girl grab them.” Liz recognized the voice as Regina Harrington-Worth’s, their new celebrity guest who’d been sitting at dinner with the caged blue-eyed pet.
Liz went to the lobby and grabbed David’s valises, aka suitcases, and hauled them up the spiral staircase to the second floor. At the top of the landing, Liz paused for a breather. Captain Netherton must have heard her drop the heaviest of the two and opened the door to his suite. He held a pipe in his hand and looked like the actor from the late-sixties television show The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, with his VanDyke beard and mustache, tall, lean frame, and erect posture.
Through osmosis from her thespian great-aunt, Liz was a sixties television aficionado. After Liz’s grandfather’s death, Aunt Amelia moved from Burbank to take over the responsibility of the hotel. The first thing she’d done was to turn the old card room next to the library into her “viewing” room—a theater that also passed as a shrine to Amelia Eden Holt’s early days of television glory. Liz had grown up watching a myriad of sixties shows with her great-aunt. From her earliest memory, Liz and Aunt Amelia would typecast hotel guests as characters from one of Aunt Amelia’s shows. On Liz’s first day home from New York, before Aunt Amelia had had the chance to christen Captain Netherton with his alias, Liz had yelled out, “Captain Daniel Gregg!” Then they’d both leapt in the air for a community high five. Liz knew from that day on, Aunt Amelia’s jocularity would be the perfect balm to banish Liz’s dark, woe-is-me thoughts.
Captain Netherton stepped out of his suite and laid his pipe on the hall table, then reached inside and grabbed his cane. He walked toward the suitcase Liz had dropped. “Elizabeth, dear. Let me help you with that.”
“Please call me Liz. Where’s your better half? As if I don’t know.”
He smiled. “You got it. Killer’s with his lover, Caro, in Betty’s suite. He spends more time with Caro than he does with me.”
Carolyn Keene, nicknamed Caro, was Betty’s black and white cat, who had an adorable white milk mustache. Aunt Amelia told Liz that the dog/cat love affair had started the day Captain Netherton came to the Indialantic. The Great Dane and Caro both had black fur with white tuxedo fronts. Caro could be found sleeping in Killer’s humongous arms most afternoons on the second-floor veranda that overlooked the back garden.
Captain Netherton picked up the designer-emblemed suitcase.
Liz said, “Thank you, kind sir.”
“My pleasure, Liz. What’s in this thing? Gold bullion? Point the way, fair maiden.”
“We don’t have far, just next door to the Oceana Suite,” Liz said, with a laugh. “But I still appreciate your help.”
He had a limp, but seemed strong enough to carry the suitcase in one hand and use his cane in the other.
“Ahh, Mrs. Regina Harrington-Worth. You wouldn’t happen to know if she’s still married, would you? There’s lots of buzz at the Eau Galle Yacht Club that she was seen dancing at some social event with a star polo player from the Vero Beach Polo Club.”
Recalling what she’d overheard on the intercom, Liz said, “Yes, Captain Netherton, as a matter of fact, there still seems to be a Mr. Worth.”
“‘Captain’ is sufficient, young lady. You can drop the ‘Netherton’.”
Liz might have only been home for a short while, but she’d seen the effect Captain Netherton had on octogenarians Betty Lawson and Aunt Amelia. Liz had even witnessed a shared intimate moment next to the dumbwaiter between Iris and the captain. He must be twenty years the housekeeper’s senior, and now he was asking about the fifty-something Regina. It seemed the captain was an equal-opportunity lothario.
Captain Netherton placed the suitcase in front of the largest guest suite in the hotel and went in search of Killer. There couldn’t be too many places a dog his size could hide. Perhaps Betty had shanghaied the Great Dane as an excuse to steal
