Burn

reputation and might even get me jailed, and I don’t have the slightest idea why. Do you realize how that feels?”

“I can imagine.”

“I doubt it. I don’t think anybody can know unless they’re the target. After what she did last week, I was afraid it would somehow get into the papers. I’ve not only got my reputation to consider, but my business could be affected if any of this madness becomes public knowledge. I can tell you I don’t shop at Newton’s Market anymore, not after the way they stared at me at the checkout counter the last time I went in there.”

“She did something last week at Newton’s Market?”

“I stopped in there to pick up some groceries, then I drove home and was just finishing putting them away when the doorbell rang. It was the police. Marla Cloy had filed a complaint. She claimed I threatened her in Newton’s parking lot with a knife when she was loading her groceries in the trunk of her car.”

“The police arrest you?”

“No. They couldn’t. There were no witnesses to this alleged crime. Marla Cloy told them I’d made sure to stay near a parked van where I’d be shielded from view, and I’d held the knife down low out of sight. She said I told her I’d been watching her and I was going to kill her and there was nothing she could do about it. She must have put on a real convincing act, the way the cops were looking at me, as if I was scum and they wanted to shoot me down right there.”

“Maybe you read that into it.”

“I don’t think so, Mr. Carver. These days when a woman makes an accusation against a man, everyone believes her,”

“Sometimes,” Carver conceded.

“I’ve been notified her attorney’s asked the court for a restraining order to keep me away from her under penalty of law. The court will probably comply, making me seem even more like a monster.”

“Not many requests for restraining orders are refused,” Carver said. “From the law’s point of view, it’s a better-safe-than-sorry way of operating.”

“I’m not obsessed with Marla Cloy,” Brant said with barely suppressed rage. “I know absolutely nothing about her and I don’t want to harm her.”

Carver knew what Brant did want, but he preferred to hear it from Brant. To some extent, Brant was right. Carver had listened to him and wasn’t sure he believed him; sympathy automatically gravitated toward the woman.

But he’d made Carver curious.

“I can’t get any help from the police,” Brant said, “and if I probe around myself for the truth, it will only be interpreted as further harassment and will make things worse for me. So I came to you. I want you to look into this and find out who Marla Cloy is and why she’s falsely accusing me.” Pain and outrage flared again in his guileless blue eyes. “I want to know why someone would do something this vicious and ruinous to a complete stranger.”

“Maybe you’re not complete strangers.”

“Then what are we to each other?”

Carver decided it was a question worth answering.

2

“I’ve got no answers,” Beth Jackson said after Carver had told her about Brant’s visit to his office.

They’d finished lunch in his beach cottage north of town, and now they sat in the shade on the plank porch, gazing out at the sea and drinking expensive gourmet coffee that smelled good to Carver but tasted like ordinary coffee.

Beth was wearing a white halter and yellow shorts and headband. The colors looked strikingly pale against her dark skin. Her long, bare legs were crossed and a white leather sandal dangled precariously from the big toe of her right foot. Carver’s cane was resting against the arm of his chair, and his bad leg was propped up on the porch rail. Beyond the rail and the tan crescent of beach, the sea rolled and gulls screamed and circled gracefully above something dark and indefinable floating a long way from shore.

“I think I believe his story,” Carver said.

“You would, being a man.”

Carver didn’t like her saying that. He wasn’t a knee-jerk male chauvinist. Not anymore. “It’s not impossible that a woman would take advantage of the political climate and falsely accuse a man of stalking her.”

“Why would she do that?”

“Could be a lot of motives.”

“Brant said she doesn’t even know him.”

“No,” Carver corrected, “he said he didn’t know her.”

“A difference without a distinction,” Beth said. “He told you he thought they were strangers.” She stared out at the ocean, the sun highlighting her prominent cheekbones, her dark features that hinted at nobility. Crow’s-feet had formed faintly around the corners of her brown eyes. She looked like a high-fashion model put out of work by character lines.

Carver took a sip of coffee, savoring what the package said was its chocolate-cinnamon aroma. “Your reaction might be exactly what Marla Cloy is counting on. She wants to be seen as the typical helpless female victim being threatened and stalked by the typical compulsive male sexual psychopath.”

“There are a lot of female victims and male psychopaths out there, Fred.”

Carver couldn’t deny that. “What would you do if a strange man was stalking you?” he asked.

She glanced over at him with a dark ferocity that let him know she understood the game he was playing. She didn’t view herself as a victim and she didn’t see why so many women cast themselves in that role. She’d said so and written it in Burrow, the local alternative-press newspaper that employed her. Carver was on dangerous ground, using her own words to snare her.

“I’d swiftly deball the bastard,” she said calmly. “But then, maybe this Marla Cloy is an old-fashioned girl who doesn’t like the sight of blood.”

Carver thought he’d change the subject. “What are you working on?” he asked. She’d been sitting on the porch, hunched over her Toshiba laptop computer, when he’d parked beside the cottage.

“Story about how the Everglades is going all to hell ecologically, and the rest of Florida’s going with it if we don’t do something soon.”

“Plenty of interest in that,” Carver said.

“Gonna be one giant Disney World if people don’t act.”

“Good for tourism.” Carver couldn’t resist the jab.

“So long as the tourists don’t mind bringing bottled water.”

“Was the Everglades article Jeff Smith’s idea?” Smith was Beth’s editor at Burrow.

“Smith’s been fired,” she said. “Clive’s doing most of the editing himself these days.” Clive was Clive Jones, Burrow’s publisher and managing editor. “Burrow is downsizing, as Clive puts it.” Beth tossed the remains of her coffee out over the porch rail. The sun caught it in the instant before it was claimed by gravity and transformed it into a glistening amber arc that hung in the air as if time were momentarily suspended. Splash! “That doesn’t keep him from spending half the day riding around on his Yamaha motorcycle, though.”

“He’s the boss,” Carver said. “That’s life.”

“Humph!” Beth said. “Life’s what happens to you while you’re making plans.” She stood up slowly, a tall, tall woman against the blue ocean. “There’s some chance I’m gonna be downsized, Fred.”

“Hard to imagine.”

Whatever the gulls had been circling had disappeared, and they’d flown in to shore to strut in the fringes of the foamy white wash of the surf.