Bree stormed back to her office with Manny in her wake, only to find Nikki Austin getting out of a large, dark car in front of the shop. She was alone.
“Bree, I just wanted to see how you’re doing,” she said, and surprised her with a sincere hug that wasn’t just a touch and a jump back this time. “Josh and Mark are at a Rotary Club breakfast in town, so I took the car to pop over. The news coverage on your report is amazing!”
Especially amazing, Bree thought, with Josh giving interviews about it right and left. She said only, “I ought to be running for office. Everyone seems to know my face and name. Can you come in?”
“Actually, I was wondering—Josh, too—if you’d like to leave the media questions to the professionals and take us up on our offer to get away for a while.”
As Manny unlocked the front door and went in, Bree hesitated. Nikki’s arrival was like a sign she should pursue a visit with them, wasn’t it?
“That’s so kind, but I know you’re both busy.”
“Josh has a full docket today and won’t join us until this evening, but Mark’s going to fly me across the state in about—” she dug her cell phone out of her purse and glanced at the time on it “—an hour and a half. A change of scene might do you so much good.”
Bree knew this would upset Cole, but the opportunity was too ideal to pass up. She had to take risks, just as Cole was doing by hanging tight to Verdugo.
“I’d love to, especially if it’s just for the day and night.”
“We’ll be back here early afternoon tomorrow—for a rally at your and Josh’s old high school, no less. Rah, rah, Austin for senator! Listen, Briana, you’ll love sugarcane country, with its miles and miles of fields to get lost in. Believe me, there’s something about the place that makes sorrows easier to bear.”
* * *
“Looking good,” Dom Verdugo’s voice came from behind Cole. “That custom rosewood’s gonna add a lot of class.”
Ever since Bree had called and they’d argued about her going across the state, Cole had been furiously working on installing the paneling. He was so preoccupied that he hadn’t even heard footsteps. He’d been almost listening at keyholes earlier, so the fact he hadn’t noticed Verdugo’s approach upset him even more.
“Glad it suits you, and we’re still on for this deal,” Cole replied without looking at him. “You seemed pretty teed off after the commission meeting yesterday. I didn’t think you’d still be so optimistic that having a casino boat in Turtle Bay is going to go your way.”
“I have a talent for working things out.”
Cole finished nailing the baseboard, then stood and faced Verdugo. “So did whoever installed that all-new turtle grass meadow.”
Verdugo’s expression didn’t change. “Meaning?”
“You realize some will point the finger at you.”
“Let them. Nothing will stick, not when there’s a list long as my arm could have done it.”
Was that an admission of guilt? Cole wondered.
With a finger jabbing the air, Verdugo went on. “An entire coalition of store owners and builders are dying to develop this area, and this boat will bring in the tourists and dollars they need. No one can stop progress, not in South Florida. Besides, you think I’m the kind of guy who’d do something that blatant? Whose side you on, DeRoca?”
“I’m on Briana Devon’s side, and she’s distraught about her and her sister’s work, not to mention the loss of her sister.”
“I can understand that, sympathize. But tragedies happen, ones no one can explain, and don’t forget it.”
That sounded like a threat. Cole stared back at Verdugo, not letting his gaze waver.
“But, hey,” the older man said, producing some of his ever-present caramel popcorn as if from up his sleeve, “I came to tell you I sent out invitations to the local powers-that-be, including the Clear the Gulf Commission members and some political people, to take a cruise on this baby Friday evening. It’ll be a shakedown cruise, so to speak—no gambling, of course, but eats, drinks, live music. I want to explain the Fun ’n’ Sun’s clean-water system, how all refuse is handled on board and unloaded later ashore.”
“So you’d like the paneling done by then.”
“Only if it doesn’t push you. Actually, I’d like to invite you—bring Briana, too, if she’s up to it. It’ll be great PR for you, as well as me.”
* * *
“Which do you prefer doing, Mark?” Bree asked. “PR, piloting, or escorting the candidate and his wife?”
Mark Denton was flying Bree and Nikki across the state in a white, four-seat Cessna pontoon plane. Nikki said she had a speech to write and had put Bree in the copilot’s seat to enjoy the view for the one-hour flight. After they left the Naples suburbs with its tentacles of new housing projects reaching outward, the Everglades swept under them, the water reflecting the sky. Shortly after they’d crossed Alligator Alley, they had flown over the Seminole Indian Reservation, then fields of vegetables and citrus, and were now heading northeast toward Lake Okeechobee and cane country.
“I took up flying fairly late,” Mark answered her question. “Media and public relations were my first love.”
As before, Bree thought that for a man in his position, he didn’t seem glib or especially friendly. But his real talent might be in writing speeches and press releases.
“Family?” she asked.
“Married to my work for now.”
Though she made a point of staring out the windows ahead and beside her, Bree tried to study the man. His well-shaped head was covered with dark stubble; with his buzz cut, he reminded her of a marine. Slashes of brown eyebrows arched over brown eyes, now hidden by his aviator sunglasses, which reflected Bree whenever he looked her way. His nose was a bit crooked where it must have once been broken. Usually, he spoke without seeming to move his thin-lipped mouth. She had the feeling he didn’t like her, but maybe he just thought the Austins should be sticking to business and not entertaining some bereaved friend.
Despite the drone of the engine, Bree knew that Nikki, sitting directly behind her, could hear what they said, for she occasionally chimed in. Now she leaned forward between their seats to say, “Mark’s going to pilot the Austin machine clear to the White House someday.”
“Graduate to flying Air Force One?” Bree asked, trying to go along with the joke. But she remembered Josh had told her Nikki was ambitious, her hopes set on going to Washington with him and climbing the power ladder.
“I thought maybe press secretary,” Mark said, sounding entirely serious. “One who doesn’t just parrot the party line but helps to make policy. What do you think, future First Lady?” he asked Nikki, and she playfully punched his shoulder. “Hey, that’s Clewiston, America’s Sweetest Town beyond, but this is the start of the Grann sugarcane fields,” he said, pointing as he began to take the plane lower. Descending through the blue, blue sky and skimming over the waving green plants reminded Bree of diving the depths of some lovely underwater spot—not, unfortunately, off the coast of Naples.
She had seen sugarcane before but had paid little attention to it. The plants were tall and green with woolly beige plumes, but that was all she recalled. Now, she was in awe. Field after field of cane, swaying in the breeze, stretched for miles through rich, black soil. Train tracks glittered in the sun, ones she knew must lead loaded rail cars to the sugar refineries.
“Are those big machines harvesters?” she asked about the metal monsters parked near a tin-roofed shed.
“That and cane choppers, and you want to stay way clear of those,” Mark said. “Most of the harvest starts in about two weeks, but some of it’s ready now. Got to satisfy America’s sweet tooth. Grand Sugar, which Nikki’s father owns, is the third biggest sugar supplier in the nation after U.S. Sugar and Crystal. And beyond, on the horizon, Lake O,” he said, sounding conversational now, as if he was loosening up a bit. “It’s so close to the Grann property that we just land on the water, taxi to their dock and take a Humvee waiting there.”
“I’ve never seen Okeechobee from the air,” Bree said, marveling at the stretch of blue water that ran through the Glades to the gulf. She wondered if people ever scuba dived in Okeechobee. “What does that name mean?” she asked.
“Seminole for big water.”
“Makes sense to me.”
It was also starting to make sense to her that the wealth of King Sugar, as she’d heard it called, had a very long reach in the state. Not only to satisfy America’s sweet tooth, as Mark had mentioned, but, as Cole had said, to fill political coffers. And maybe even reach deep into the gulf to erase evidence that would help prove pollution from these cane fields played a part in poisoning gulf water.
* * *
Bree stared in awe when Nikki and Josh’s home came into view at the end of a lane, lined with live oaks, about a mile from her father’s plantation home, which they’d already passed.
“It’s beautiful,” she told Nikki, who sat beside her in the backseat of the Humvee Mark drove. “Tara from Gone With The Wind!”
“Just don’t be looking for Rhett Butler inside,” Nikki said with a laugh. “You know, I always hated that movie for its unhappy ending. That stupid woman loved the wrong man.”
“That’s what I always thought about it,” Mark put in, “but then, despite the fact that it takes place right in the middle of the Civil War, it’s really a woman’s movie.”
Rolling her eyes at that, Nikki said, “Actually, I patterned this house, a wedding present from my father, after one Josh and I saw on our honeymoon in New Orleans. But to make it look right, I had to import live oaks and Spanish moss and get rid of a lot of palms and all those air plants that usually cling to trees around here.”
A sort of phony Tara, Bree thought. If she’d gone to all that trouble with tiny details, Nikki Austin, like Amelia, was a control freak of the first, and worst, order.
As they pulled up, Bree saw that the big-pillared porch was a sort of false facade, too, for the house wasn’t as large as it looked. With a promise to show her around after she rested, Nikki escorted Bree up the sweeping central staircase to the guest suite and left her alone.
Bree put her small overnight bag on the padded bench at the foot of the big four-poster bed and stared out the window. The view, probably the same on all four sides, overlooked miles of densely planted, twelve-foot-tall sugarcane, which began just across the small lawn and narrow garden. In a way, it made her feel claustrophobic. The sugarcane had waves like the sea, but even from this height, she felt enclosed rather than enraptured.
On the oak table by the bay window awaited a silver tray with a pitcher of iced tea, surrounded by small cut-glass bowls with packets of Grand Sugar, lime and lemon slices and extra ice. On a flat crystal plate, with a yellow hibiscus bloom in the center, was an array of exotically hued hard candies. Ah, the lifestyles of the rich and famous, she thought, and wondered if the allure of any of this could have turned Daria’s head while Josh flip-flopped her heart. But the money behind everything here was from Nikki’s family, not Josh’s. Even if he’d tried to leave his wife for Daria...no, she was being ridiculous.
But that secret teeth-whitening appointment. Nikki Austin had teeth that almost glistened. Did Daria feel the need to compete with her rival’s beauty? What about those extra cosmetics in her drawer? Did Daria discover the only way she could win out over the stunning, wealthy, married Nikki was by having Josh’s baby? And, if so, how was Bree ever going to get the truth of a secret liaison out of Josh?
* * *
To Bree’s surprise, Nikki’s father drove over in a golf cart to join them for a late lunch. He spoke again of her loss, asking if there was anything they could do to help ease her pain and grief.
“Nikki’s been very kind and helpful—Josh, too,” she assured him.
Despite the fact it was delightfully cool with the air-conditioning inside the house, the three of them sat out on the warm, screened-in back veranda and were served cold raspberry soup and crab salad by a middle-aged, Haitian-born housekeeper-cook named Lindy who spoke with a French accent. The table was set with linen and silver; the centerpiece was a charming combination of blue plumbago blossoms floating in a dish that had hard candies in the bottom, which Bree thought at first were marbles.
As Cory Grann played host in Josh’s absence, Bree could certainly understand how Marla Sherborne had become involved with him, even though he must have started out as enemy number one to her beliefs and political platform. The wealthy widower was not only conversational and handsome, he focused his complete attention on anyone he spoke to, whether it was the housekeeper, Bree or his daughter. But it didn’t take Bree long to wonder if she’d been brought here for a purpose, just as she’d come for one.
“Big sugar’s been blamed for years for everything that goes wrong in the Glades, and now we’re also the major whipping boy for gulf pollution,” Cory Grann said, somehow working that into their conversation and looking intently at her.
“Which is ridiculous,” Nikki put in, “since the cane farmers no longer use heavy fertilizers and toxic pesticides. There’s big cattle farming north of Lake O, and they seldom go after them.”
Cory nodded. “Lee and Collier county officials should stop blaming us for their poor river and gulf water health and tackle pollution sources in their own backyards. Same with the ecofr—folks,” Cory amended. She was sure he was going to call them ecofreaks, as some of their opponents did. “It’s just that we’re an easy target for anything that goes wrong. And it’s very difficult and dangerous to be a target,” he added with a decisive nod at her.
Bree felt a slight shiver race up her spine, but she tried not to react visibly. Were those words a subtle threat, disguised by all this luxury, kindness and politeness?
“I know you’ve converted Senator Sherborne,” she said.
“Marla knows how much money we’ve donated for cleanup.” He leaned slightly closer across the table. “And for this state’s other green causes.”
Bree had read that big sugar had donated twenty-two million dollars to various Florida election campaigns and to fund lobbyists, as well as to sponsor some down-home television ads that were pro-sugar. Despite their lack of nutritional value, what would Americans do without their sweet fixes? She and Daria had always loved candy.
And then it hit her that, more than once, Daria had brought candy home she’d said she’d bought, and it was just like the citrus-flavored, brightly colored hard balls displayed in nearly every room of Josh Austin’s house.
Yes, as pretty and sweet as everything seemed here, she was certain these people meant to play hardball with her.