Before You: Sex on the Beach Read online

  Then again, I hadn’t been here all night. It depended on when Ty had seen her. And she probably hadn’t been an exact replica. When I saw her this morning, it hadn’t struck me that we looked alike.

  The girl on the sand had had very fair hair, almost platinum blond. Mine was darker, more like dishwater. And mine was shorter, only shoulder length. Hers had looked like it would come halfway down her back. And the hot pink dress on the sand had been a different shade than the one I’d been wearing, as well.

  Still, ‘a blonde in a pink dress’ could apply to both of us.

  I took a sip of the Sprite and wondered whether that meant anything. Did someone have a particular thing for blondes in pink dresses? Or a grudge against them?

  If so, I ought to be safe tonight. I was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt. And my drink tasted normal. The bartender had poured it for me himself, and it hadn’t left my hand since.

  Although as far as doping drinks went, who’d have better opportunity than the bartender?

  I glanced at him, moving around behind the bar, doing bartendery things. Did he seem like the kind of nutcase who would drug and rape girls?

  He was in his mid-thirties, or maybe closer to forty, and looked fairly normal. Not like he’d be dangerous at all. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt with the name of the bar on the back, and he had a goatee and a tattoo of Celtic knots around his wrist. I’d certainly seen scarier people. Talbott Jehosephat Windsor, just to name one.

  Then again, it’s usually the ones who don’t look dangerous that are, isn’t it? Unless you’re stupid, you avoid the ones who look like they could hurt you. It’s the ones who look harmless but aren’t that you have to watch out for.

  A movement in the corner of the room caught my eye, and I glanced in that direction. And felt my stomach drop onto the floor.

  There he was. Ty.

  And he wasn’t alone.

  IT WAS ridiculous that that should bother me. I’d met the guy all of twice. He’d turned me down both times. He’d even been nice about it. He clearly wasn’t interested, or if he was, he wasn’t interested in doing anything about it. The fact that he was here with another girl shouldn’t bother me.

  It did.

  A lot.

  And she wasn’t just any girl, either. If he’d gone out looking for someone who was the opposite of me in every way, he couldn’t have done a better job.

  This girl had everything I didn’t, and I don’t just mean Ty. Long, dark hair. A fabulous tan. Fat lips. Legs up to her armpits. The kind of body that didn’t quit. And if she had anything stamped across her forehead, it sure wasn’t ‘virgin.’ In fact, her tank top—short, tight, low cut, stretched to bursting point across a pair of honeydew-sized breasts—said it all.

  Save a virgin. Do me instead.

  My face twisted. This was what Ty wanted?

  It was no wonder he’d turned me down, was it? I couldn’t hope to compete.

  But on the other hand, did I really want to?

  I mean, she might have Ty, but would I trade a couple of days with him for all my dignity?

  Um... no. I actually wouldn’t. It would be a cold day in hell before I put on a T-shirt that said something that stupid. I could just imagine the expression on my mother’s and father’s faces if I’d come home wearing something like it.

  So yeah, if she was what Ty wanted—if he’d really rather have that tramp than me—then that was his loss and not mine. He obviously wasn’t worth my time and effort.

  But no matter how much I justified it, I couldn’t keep my stomach from twisting as I watched her stick her chest practically in his face and bat her eyelashes at him. Fake. They had to be. Nobody’s been blessed with assets like those.

  And I’m not just talking about the eyelashes here.

  And to add insult to injury, he was smiling down at her like he enjoyed the display.

  He even winked.

  I swiveled around on my chair again and put my back to them. My face in the mirror behind the bar looked like I’d bit into a lemon.

  “Here, sugar.” The bartender slid another glass in front of me. From the looks of it, it was more Sprite. Clear and bubbly. “On the house.”

  I couldn’t quite tell whether his tone was sympathetic or malicious, or maybe a mixture of both.

  “Thanks.” I pulled it closer, but didn’t drink. No sense in letting disappointment make me stupid, after all.

  After a moment, he grabbed my empty glass and walked off. I left the new glass on the counter and slid off the stool.

  I was almost to the door when Ty looked up and spotted me.

  And worse than that, didn’t just spot me, but spotted me looking at him.

  Because, idiot that I was, I just couldn’t not look at him one last time before I walked out.

  And when I saw that he’d seen me, I didn’t look away and walk out the door.

  No, I looked back at him, caught and held by those incredibly green eyes. I’m sure he could see exactly how upset I was. Even if I’d tried my best to tell myself I didn’t care.

  And then, like an idiot, I stood there, staring stupidly at him. He was the one who looked away first, back to Ms. Do Me.

  And that’s when I turned around and went out the door.

  I HADN’T gone more than half a block before I heard footsteps behind me. “Cassie!”

  I didn’t have to look over my shoulder. I recognized the voice. I pumped my arms and walked faster.

  “Cassie! Wait up!”

  “I don’t want to talk to you,” I said, when he come up on the side of me. “Go back to what’s-her-name.”

  He fell into step next to me and stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Charisma. Her name is Charisma.”

  Of course it was. I snorted.

  “Or at least that’s what she told me.” He was smiling, I could hear it in his voice. “She’s a drama major at Syracuse. I think it’s her stage name.”

  No kidding. “She’s a bit obvious,” I said, “don’t you think?”

  And not just in giving herself pseudonyms.

  Speaking of T-shirts—not that I had been—Ty’s was white today. With black letters. I don’t need sex. The government fucks me every day.

  I wondered how his dad, the cop—presumably a government employee—felt about that. The same way my parents would have felt about Charisma’s Save a Virgin shirt, probably.

  “It isn’t what you think,” he told me.

  “What isn’t?”

  I knew I shouldn’t be talking to him. I should tell him to get lost and go back to the hotel by myself. He’d looked much too chummy with Charisma—or whatever her real name was. Hopefully something like Gladys. Or Edna. Maybe even Hortense.

  But I couldn’t. Now that he was here, walking next to me, smiling at me with those green eyes and that dimple... I didn’t have it in me to tell him to leave me alone.

  I could hear Mackenzie’s voice in my head. You have it bad, Cass.

  Yes, I did. And for a guy who obviously didn’t care whether I lived or died.

  Although actually, that wasn’t true. He cared enough that he’d walked me home last night. And this morning.

  He cared enough that he was walking me home now, too. Enough that he’d left Charisma when he saw me.

  Maybe it would be OK to be a little bit encouraged by that. Even if he didn’t want to sleep with me.

  “She’s down here with a couple of friends,” Ty continued. “One of them was the girl we found on the beach this morning.”

  That got my attention, anyway.

  I turned to him, my eyes wide. “How do you know?”

  He hesitated a second. “I realized I’d seen her before. Last night.”

  “You said that this morning. To Detective Fuentes.”

  “Charisma,” Ty said. “I realized I’d seen Charisma before. Last night. And I thought that the blonde in the pink dress was with her.”

  “And was she?”

  He nodded. “Her name’s Elizabeth
.”

  “Another drama student?”

  “English Lit,” Ty said.

  Like me. Great.

  “I don’t suppose you know whether she’s woken up and told anyone anything? Like, who did it?”

  He shook his head. “Charisma said Elizabeth doesn’t remember anything. She was in the bar last night, and she woke up in the hospital this morning. And that’s it. She doesn’t remember anything that happened in between.”

  “Drugs, then.”

  He nodded. “Watch what you put in your mouth.”

  I shot him a look. But the double entendre didn’t seem to have occurred to him, and since we were talking about something fairly serious, it was probably better not to point it out.

  “I already am,” I said.

  “Tell your friends, too. Don’t leave drinks unattended. Don’t accept drinks from strangers.”

  “Like the drink you offered to buy me last night?”

  He grinned. “Yeah. Like that one. Although if you think back, you may remember I didn’t actually get you one.”

  No, he hadn’t. “The bartender gave me a Sprite on the house,” I confessed. “Just now. I was too worried to drink it.”

  He smiled. “I think anything Barry gives you is probably OK. He’s been running Captain Crow’s for years.”

  Maybe so. Then again— “If the girl—Elizabeth—was doped there, it doesn’t hurt to be careful.”

  “No,” Ty agreed, his dimple disappearing, “it doesn’t.”

  We walked a few yards in silence. Just like yesterday—just like when I came this way thirty or forty minutes ago—the streets were full of people. Students on spring break, a few other tourist types, locals taking advantage of the hoopla, and cops.

  “I’m going sightseeing tomorrow,” I told Ty.

  He glanced at me. “Yeah?”

  “I’m tired of sitting by the pool and working on my tan. So I’m going to see the Hemingway House and the Little Truman House and the state park with the fort, and maybe take a ghost tour.”

  He smiled again. “Those are fun.”

  “Have you been on one?”

  He shook his head. “Not here. But I come from the Jacksonville area. St. Augustine is there, and it’s the oldest city in the U.S. It’s full of ghosts, and it has great ghost tours.”

  “I’ve never been to St. Augustine,” I admitted.

  “You should go sometime. It’s like this, but not so crazy. No nightlife to speak of. Just a lot of history and really nice beaches.”

  “That sounds nice.” What would be even nicer was if he offered to show me around his hometown sometime.

  He didn’t, though. I added, “You’re welcome to come on the tour with me tomorrow. If you don’t have plans. We can hunt for ghosts together.”

  “Oh.” He looked surprised, and then guilty. “I’m not sure...”

  “It’s OK. Forget I asked.”

  We walked forward in silence.

  “Tell you what,” Ty said, “if you have twenty minutes, we can hunt for ghosts together right now.”

  I squinted at him, not entirely sure what he was getting at.

  “The old Key West Cemetery is just a block away. It’s full of dead people.”

  “Is it haunted?”

  Ty shrugged. “We can walk through and see. It won’t take long. It’s practically on the way.”

  I hesitated, and he winked at me. “I’ll hold your hand if you get scared.”

  “Deal.” Who was I to turn down an opportunity to hold hands?

  In my mind, Mackenzie was shaking her head. That’s really pathetic, Cassie.

  “I know,” I muttered. “I know.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” I smiled up at him. “Lead the way.”

  THE ENTRANCE to the Key West Cemetery was between two white pillars flanked on either side by a wrought iron fence. A blue marker near the gate said it was established in 1847, after a hurricane damaged the previous cemetery located near Higgs Beach. And that was all I had time to read before Ty tugged on my arm. “C’mon.”

  “If you’re that eager to get back to Charisma,” I said, twitching my arm out of his grasp, “you can just leave me here on my own. I’m perfectly safe. There was a cop right outside the entrance when I walked by earlier.”

  He glanced over his shoulder. “What are you talking about? There was no cop outside.”

  “Earlier. When I was on my way to Captain Crow’s.”

  “That doesn’t mean he’s here now,” Ty said. “They move around, you know. C’mon. Things to do, people to see. Dead people.”

  He let loose with a very unconvincing muah-ha-ha sort of evil laugh, and finished up with a grin, his eyes and teeth glinting in the darkness.

  “Fine.” I let him pull me along, down the path between the gravestones and crypts, gleaming palely in the dark.

  At home, cemeteries were flat. The gravestones were sunk into the ground so the caretakers could simply drive the lawnmower right over them. I guess it made tending the grass easy.

  This was a different kind of cemetery. It wasn’t flat at all. Nor was it organized in neat rows. All the gravestones stood up—even if some of them leaned like drunken college students on spring break. But there were tall monuments, and the ground was littered with what looked like sarcophagi.

  As we walked along, Ty pointed to things. “This is the memorial for the sailors who died when the USS Maine went down in Havana in 1898. That brick building over there belongs to the Mitchell family. That tall gray stone back there is a memorial to William Curry. He was Florida’s first millionaire. And this—” He stopped in front of a stone, “is the final resting place of General Abraham Lincoln Sawyer.”

  I blinked at it. That’s what it said, all right. Abe L. Sawyer, 1862-1939.

  “Obviously not the same Abe Lincoln who was president during the Civil War.”

  Ty shook his head. “Old Abe here was a little person.”

  “A...” I lowered my voice, conscious of the un-PC term I was about to use, “midget?”

  He nodded. “A circus performer. His final wish was to be buried in a man-size tomb.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope. It’s the kind of thing you remember.”

  Yes, it was.

  We moved on, over ground that felt so spongy I halfway expected it to give way and spill us both into someone’s grave. Many of the tombs had big cracks in them, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if a skeletal hand had reached out and grabbed for my ankle.

  “Scared yet?” Ty wanted to know.

  “Not scared. A little uneasy, maybe.”

  “Wanna hold my hand now?”

  “Yes, please.” I slipped my fingers into his. They were reassuringly warm and dry.

  Ty pointed out the final resting place of the man who supervised the building of the Key West lighthouse, and the first missionary to Cuba. And then there was the guy whose gravestone said he’d been a good citizen for 65 years; not as major an accomplishment as you might think when he turned out to have lived to be 108.

  “Good God,” I said, “what an epitaph!”

  Ty grinned. “Wait until you see this next one.”

  He kept walking. “Back there somewhere—” He waved vaguely with his free hand, “is the tomb of Sloppy Joe Russell. Have you noticed there’s a place on Duval called Sloppy Joe’s Bar?”

  “Sure.” It was a Key West fixture. I had seen pictures of it when I’d done research before we ever set foot on the plane last week.

  “Sloppy Joe was a friend of Ernest Hemingway. They went deep-sea fishing together. Rumor has it that Sloppy Joe was the model for Freddy in To Have and Have Not, and after he died, parts of the original manuscript were found at the bar.”

  “Wow.” I put Sloppy Joe’s on my mental list of places to see tomorrow. “But that isn’t what you’re going to show me?”

  He shook his head. “It’s around here somewhere...”

  We had wound up in fron
t of a large, black archway with the words B’nai Zion carved on it. “The Jewish cemetery,” Ty said. “What we’re looking for is over here.”

  He tugged me in the other direction, and I found myself standing in front of a crypt with a tablet. “There,” Ty said triumphantly.

  I peered at it, and then peered closer. “Oh, my God. Does that really say ‘I told you I was sick’?”

  “Yep.” He grinned. “This woman—I think her name was Pearl—was the town hypochondriac. There’s one around here somewhere that says, ‘Devoted fan of Julio Iglesias,’ too. And one that says, ‘If you’re reading this, you desperately need a hobby.’ ”

  “Wow.”

  “And I’ve heard rumors that there used to be one that said, ‘At least I know where he’s sleeping tonight,’ but I’ve never been able to find it. But it’s a cool place.” He looked around with satisfaction.

  It was. I might come back tomorrow, in the light, when I could see everything better.

  “No ghosts, though,” I pointed out.

  Ty shook his head. “Sorry. There are plenty of ghosts in Key West, but I guess none of them are here tonight.”

  “I met a guy earlier who said he was Someone Jehosephat Windsor,” I said. “I mean, he was the tour guide. He was pretending to be this Jehosephat Windsor. But he said Jehosephat haunts some place called the East Martello Fort. Some sort of museum?”

  Ty nodded as we strolled hand in hand down the path between the monuments. “Now that’s a creepy place. I was there once, and I wouldn’t have minded a hand to hold. I think I probably held my mother’s.”

  I smiled. “What was so creepy about it?”

  “Not old Jehosephat, or his hearse. As a matter of fact...” He stopped and looked around, and then pointed. “See that, over there? That’s the Otto family plot. There are three Yorkshire terriers and a pet deer buried there, along with members of the Otto family.”

  “OK,” I said.

  “They had a kid named Robert Eugene Otto. And Robert Eugene had a doll, also named Robert. And Robert the Doll is in the East Martello Fort.”

  I tilted my head. “Why?”

  “You ever see the movie Chucky?”