[Christmas Key 01.0] There's Always a Catch Read online

  Holly pauses now in front of the refrigerator in her tidy white kitchen, staring at a photograph that’s stuck to the door with a magnet. In it, a two-year-old Holly—wearing nothing but diapers, tennis shoes, and sunscreen—stands in a patch of sunlight on the damp, recently-plowed earth that would soon become the start of what is now Main Street. Every time she opens her refrigerator, it reminds her what kind of magic is borne of love and imagination. It reminds her that having big dreams reaps big rewards. With a wistful feeling, she runs her fingers across the faded photo as she holds two lemons and two limes in a basket she’s made from the front of her t-shirt.

  Holly walks to the counter and lets the citrus fall from its makeshift holder; the lemons and limes drop from her shirt onto the butcher block, where they roll to a lumpy stop next to the backsplash.

  The blender chews up ice as Holly moves around barefoot, pulling a shot glass and two mismatched margarita glasses from her cupboard. Her favorite U2 CD is cranked up high, and Bono tears through the songs on The Joshua Tree as she sings along.

  Holly looks out the window over her sink, watching the late afternoon sun work its magic. As it does nearly every day during the summer, a gray, roiling storm had covered the island like a heavy blanket after lunch, whipping palm fronds to and fro and dumping rain like heaven’s roof had sprung a downspout. The hot sun returned just behind it to dry up the swampy puddles, and the amphibians croaked and skittered out of their hiding places. Now Holly watches the drips of water sparkling like gems on the tips of the palm fronds as she rinses off the fruit under her faucet.

  She’s living on the parcel of land that Frank and Jeanie Baxter had cleared nearly thirty years ago. It still feels like a jungle on that part of the island, with the tall trees and thick foliage that her grandparents had left all around the property. The Baxter land now holds a main house and a second home—built in the traditional Conch style—both single-story houses with louvered shutters and sloping metal roofs to reflect the hot tropical sun and to allow clean rain water to run off into metal cisterns. The outside of the houses are made of a mortar of sand, water, and lime, and the insides are constructed with tongue and groove wood on the floors, walls, and ceilings so that they’ll stand strong against Mother Nature should a hurricane tear across the island.

  Holly sets the washed lemons and limes back on the cutting board. She loves her property. She’d lived at the B&B full-time in her twenties until her grandparents’ passing, only moving back into Frank and Jeanie’s main house when she felt certain that it was the right thing to do. By then, Frank had rented out the guest house next door to Leo Buckhunter, so Holly’s only real option was to move back into the home she was raised in, and she’d immediately set about painting and decorating so that she could make it her own.

  Holly pours two thick, strong frozen margaritas into the glasses. It’s four o’clock, so Fiona is due to show up any minute, and Holly wants to greet her best friend at the door with a cocktail in hand.

  “Knock knock,” Dr. Fiona Potts calls out, pushing the front door open without waiting for an answer.

  “She has arrived,” Holly says dramatically, tipping her head in the direction of the lanai so that Fiona will follow. “And the drinks are served.”

  “Damn, you’re good.” Fiona tosses her straw purse onto the couch in Holly’s front room and kicks off her sandals. She takes the drink gratefully and follows Holly toward the back of the house.

  “Your wall is coming along nicely,” Fiona says, nodding at the half-done project on Holly’s lanai.

  “Yeah, I’ve had a couple of sleepless nights. It keeps me busy.” Holly flops into the chair across from her friend, admiring the wall that she’s been working on for the past year.

  After years of gathering unbroken shells from around the island, Holly decided to turn one side of her house into a mosaic of sorts. Now, whenever inspiration strikes, she holds the shells up to the wall of her house that’s covered by the lanai, piecing the husks of sea creatures together so that they fit like a puzzle. Sleepless nights often find her listening to CDs and mixing up small batches of mortar to glue the shells to her wall. When she’s totally done, the back of her house will look like a stretch of sand where the tide has washed out, leaving a bounty of shells behind.

  The women prop their bare feet up on footstools and sip their margaritas, watching the sunlight dance through the trees as Holly recounts her conversation with Mrs. Agnelli and the triplets.

  "She said what?" Fiona pulls her feet from the chair and sits up, laughing. She has both hands wrapped around her drink, and the spaghetti strap of her summer dress slides off one shoulder, revealing a constellation of freckles that spill down into the front of her décolletage like falling stars.

  "I know, right? VINEGAR!" Holly tips her drink back and lets the frozen margarita slide down her throat, brain-freeze be damned.

  "That woman kills me. I swear she’s the only elderly patient I’ve ever had who can out-curse a whole biker gang. And it’s not just your average four-letter words she’s dropping. She’s creative, and she usually hits her mark." Fiona is the island's only full-time physician and, as Holly's closest friend, she occasionally shares the non-confidential information about things that happen in her office with their neighbors.

  "It was a hoot. The stuff she says is totally outrageous. I hope I'm half as funny when I'm her age.”

  “We should all be so lucky.” Fiona tips her margarita toward Holly before bringing the glass to her lips again. “Hey,” she says, shifting topics. “What’s going on with you and Jake? I’ve heard rumors.”

  “Such as?" Holly’s face is a mask of innocence; she knows that tongues wag all over the island where she and Jake are concerned.

  “Like he pulled you over on Main Street and the passion between you was as thick as molasses. I heard that there was so much steam that it was almost pornographic.”

  “Oh my God—stop!” Holly wails, waving a hand at her and grimacing. “Please tell me it was Bonnie who told you that and not someone else.”

  “Really. It’s the word around town.” Fiona smiles devilishly. “And I also heard that he came up to you at the village council meeting and you two were making bedroom eyes while he checked out your see-through dress.”

  “Oh, lord.”

  “So it’s not true?”

  “That I wore a see-through dress? Yeah, unfortunately that happened—but not intentionally.”

  “Ha. Who cares about the dress. It probably earned you a couple of extra votes, you calculating little minx. But I meant the eye-smoldering between you and Officer Studly—is that part true?”

  “Well, hopefully the dress thing got me a few votes—at least that would make the embarrassment worth it. As for Jake, I don’t know…he thinks we have a thing, and I think we don’t. At this point, all I know for sure is that we’re still broken up—”

  “In spite of the fact that you basically clubbed him over the head and dragged him back here the night that Joe Sacamano burned through his entire repertoire of Eagles hits at the Ho Ho?”

  “That was bad, wasn’t it?” Holly admits reluctantly.

  “I don’t know if it was bad. I’m not judging that.”

  “Mixed messages, though?”

  “Well, yeah. A little.”

  Holly sighs. “It’s just…it’s hard sometimes. It’s not like I can rebound with someone else and be done with him, you know?”

  “I hear that. Your options are certainly not plentiful here.” Fiona traces rings on the table from the condensation left by her margarita glass. “But you know what I admire about you?”

  “What?” Holly chuckles.

  “You’re this weird combination of a planner and a doer.”

  “A doer?”

  “You know—you have long-term plans and goals, but you always do what feels right in the moment.”

  “Like sleeping with my ex because I drank too much rum and because I love ‘Hotel California’?”
r />   “I guess, yeah, but that’s not a bad thing.” Fiona shakes her head. “It’s really not.”

  Holly considers this. “I think it’s probably the only way to survive out here. The planning is for survival, and the doing is because you’re able to really live in the moment in an environment like this.”

  “God,” Fiona says, looking out into the late afternoon sunlight beyond the lanai. “I love it here. It’s changed my life, Hol. Completely.”

  “Damn straight. Christmas Key is the cat’s pajamas,” Holly says with a wink. Going to college on the mainland with antiquated terms in her pocket like cat’s pajamas, tizzy, nincompoop, and hoodwinked had made Holly a bit of a novelty act at frat parties, and the first time one of her sorority sisters got drunk and Holly accused her of having an “attack of the collywobbles” they’d all laughed and tossed pillows at her in the dorm room. Silly Holly and her old people talk. But the college boys had quickly realized that a girl who’d grown up on an island—running around in nothing but a bathing suit; a girl with a working knowledge of beer and rum, and a far more interesting life than the rest of her sorority sisters—was someone worth having around. And yet she’d returned to Christmas Key as single as the day she left.

  Fiona watches a gecko scurry up the wall of the lanai. “What would I do without you, Hol? How would I ever survive here if there was no Holly Baxter to make me margaritas and keep me company?”

  Holly shrugs at her, smiling.

  A drop of water falls from the eave of the lanai and lands on Fiona’s foot. They sit quietly for a moment, listening to the summer sounds of tree frogs and insects. The cicadas buzz from their hiding spots, their ever-present chatter like rotating sprinkler heads in the distance.

  “You’d probably drink alone at night and take up pinochle so that you could join the ladies who play on Sundays.”

  Fiona reaches over and gives Holly’s bare thigh a light slap. “You know what I mean.”

  Over their first drink together, shortly after Fiona’s arrival, she’d admitted to Holly that when she arrived on Christmas Key and saw nothing but a handful of gray-haired Baby Boomers and septuagenarians driving golf carts up and down Main Street, her gut reaction was to get back on the boat, tell the program director that there’d been a mistake, and go directly back to civilization. But the lure of having a chunk of her student loans paid off by the government for putting in two years as the only doctor in an underserved location forced her to put one gladiator-sandaled foot in front of the other and move down the dock. The deckhand from the small ferry finished unloading her bags from the boat’s hold and deposited them at her feet unceremoniously.

  “Good luck,” he’d said with a salute, jumping back onto the boat and unhooking the rope from the dock.

  Fiona wheeled her suitcases along the sidewalk, sweating profusely and smiling at the friendly people who waved and stared. A trio of cheerful identical faces greeted her almost instantly, and each of the triplets hugged her warmly before walking her the rest of the way down Main Street, gold bracelets clinking in the sunlight as they’d pointed out people and businesses and shared all of the important island gossip. This kindness, she told Holly over that first drink, had been the only reason that she’d allowed the boat to disappear towards the horizon without her on it.

  And then, standing in front of a two-story building with turquoise-painted Key West shutters shading its long rectangular windows, was Holly, waiting to greet the island’s new doctor. She waited there in front of the matching turquoise front door of Poinsettia Plaza, eager to show Fiona into her office and help her get settled. They took to one another instantly, and the following year was a blur of laughter, white sand, margaritas, and friendship.

  “For the record, I’m glad you’re here,” Holly says, “or I wouldn’t have anyone to invite over for cocktail hour. It would just be me and Buckhunter out here in the back forty together.” Holly raises her empty glass at shirtless, leather-skinned Leo Buckhunter as he drags a hose across the grass of his own backyard. “Hey, Buckhunter, you do know it just rained, right?” she shouts, leaning towards the lanai’s screen. “You don’t need to water the grass.”

  He stops short, gives her a sarcastic look, and goes on dragging his hose.

  “You’re welcome!” Holly calls after him.

  “You’re such a smartass,” Fiona hisses, smiling at Buckhunter and waving. “He’s so mysterious. And he knows how to mix a mean mojito,” she adds, watching his upper-body muscles ripple as he yanks at the hose.

  “Well, he does own a bar,” Holly points out, tipping her head to one side and assessing him through her friend’s eyes. She honestly doesn’t see it: Buckhunter is just Buckhunter to her, no matter how she slices and dices him. He’s rangy and sun-burnished, a tad long in the tooth for her taste, and dangerous in the way that bartenders who can take home a different woman from a bar each night are. To Holly, he comes across as an outlaw with a past. She likes him well enough as a neighbor and as a friend, but she prefers her men a little younger and a lot less enigmatic.

  Buckhunter takes the cigar from between his lips and stops to look at Holly, eyes narrowed. “I’m not watering my grass, darlin’. I’m using my hose to wash off your golf cart—Marco just dropped by and left you a present.” He tugs at the hose again.

  “What?” Holly stands up and sets her empty margarita glass on the table next to Fiona’s. The women hurry through the house and out the front door, feet still bare as they step onto the dirt driveway in front of the house. Sure enough, the hot pink hood of Holly’s cart is streaked with white bird droppings.

  “Damn it!” Holly fumes, fists on her hips as she scans the palm trees around her house for signs of Marco.

  “Such is the price of having a parrot as a pet,” Buckhunter says, squeezing the trigger on the hose nozzle. A hard stream of water shoots out and he aims it at the golf cart. The water rinses off the Marco droppings with a few flicks of his hard, tattooed wrist. “There you go, milady.” Buckhunter lets go of the hose handle and the flow of water halts abruptly. “Just like new.”

  “Yeah, thanks for catching that, Buckhunter. I hate it when Marco nails my cart and then it dries up in the sun and I have to scrape it off later.”

  “No problem.” His clear blue eyes cut away from Holly and land on Fiona. “Hey, Doc,” he says, finally greeting her. “You done giving enemas and taking blood pressure for the day?”

  “Yep. I’ve survived another day of Preparation H and angina, and now I’m just having a drink with the mayor here.” Fiona flips her loose, strawberry-blonde hair over one round, freckled shoulder.

  Even if she doesn’t personally see the allure, Holly knows that Fiona is just a tiny bit smitten by her aloof, weather-worn neighbor. And she gets it. After all, one woman’s dangerous and undesirable is another woman’s cryptic and complicated.

  “Want to join us?” Fiona offers.

  Holly sighs inwardly. She doesn’t mind sharing her margaritas with Buckhunter, it’s more that she has mixed, unresolved feelings about him living right next to her, on family property. She doesn’t mean to feel that way, but his proximity sometimes gets under her skin. She’s never really understood why her grandpa rented the guest house adjacent to the main one to Buckhunter. Frank Baxter never gave any real explanation as to why he was sharing the family property with this stranger, and now there was no way for her to find out.

  But Buckhunter is handy enough as a neighbor—washing bird droppings off of her cart, taking Pucci for long walks on the beach—and he even came over with lanterns and flashlights when a tropical storm knocked their power out for three days last summer. Her grandpa’s only proclamation on Buckhunter had been that he was someone she could trust in his absence, but what on earth made him think that Leo Buckhunter was any sort of replacement for the grandfather she’d loved and counted on her whole life? Why should she trust a total stranger? Holly had to admit that Buckhunter had been good to her, and she’d never once caught him ch
ecking her out; she never felt like he was interested in her at all, even when she ran around her yard with her melons in her hands. And in a weird way, her grandpa was right: while she loves pestering Buckhunter in a good-natured, eye-rolling way, she does trust him, and she trusts that he’ll be there if she needs anything.

  “I’d love to join this little powwow of the island’s biggest movers and shakers, but my work starts when the sun hits about this spot in the sky,” he says, pointing at the horizon. Buckhunter chews on the tip of his fat cigar, moving it to the other side of his mouth. “I need to be over to the bar around five-thirty to make sure that happy hour is in full swing, and then I pull my shift until the wee hours. So no drinking for this guy—at least not before work.” He starts gathering the hose in big loops that wind around his sharp elbow as he walks back across the yard. “But feel free to drop by this evening if you ladies are hungry or in need of a beer,” Buckhunter calls over one shoulder, leaving the sweet smell of cigar smoke in his wake.

  Holly searches the trees above for signs of Marco. “Where is that damn bird? I’m about to turn him into a feather pillow.” She whistles up into the trees.

  “I doubt you’ll make much headway there; that bird runs this island.” Fiona trails her around the property, arms folded as they look through the foliage for the aging parrot. “It’s like he’s the King of Christmas Key or something.”

  “He kind of is,” Holly agrees, spotting Marco’s rainbow of feathers in her purple orchid tree. “Marco!” She holds out her arm. The bird glances at her suspiciously with one eye, obviously trying to decide whether or not he wants to bother with human interaction. Marco has rightly earned the reputation of a bird who thinks he’s a cat. He drifts around Christmas Key as he sees fit, finding companionship wherever and whenever it strikes his fancy, but his true loyalty to humans extends to just one person.

  “Should we take him back to Cap?” Fiona asks, watching her friend as she summons the bird out of the tree.