Ladies' Night by Andrews, Kay (popular books of all time .TXT) 📕

Grace stayed back a few car lengths but made the same turn. She kept on Cortez Drive, passing the turnoff for the Sandbox in the fishing village, crossing the bridge over the Intracoastal Waterway and into Bradenton Beach. At the light at Gulf Drive, the Lexus signaled to make a left turn.

“Well, he’s definitely not going to Anna Maria,” she said, following as the black car turned south.

The moon was nearly full, and as they followed the road paralleling the ocean, they could catch occasional glimpses of silvery water through the thick fringe of Australian pines and sea grapes lining the road in the intermittent patches of undeveloped land.

Grace smiled, as she always did when passing the sign for Coquina Beach. “That was our beach, growing up,” she said. “How about you, which beach did your family go to?”

“Holmes Beach, mostly,” Wyatt said. “Once I could drive, though, I was too cool for school. A bunch of us used to hang out at Siesta Key, where the rich girls were—or so we thought.”

As they drove, the landscape changed from sparsely developed to the manicured civility of Longboat Key. High-rise condo complexes hugged the shores of the gulf on the right and the bay on the left, and imposing stucco homes painted in sherbet hues were set back behind hedges and gates. Grace slowed when she saw the Lexus’s brake lights and then turn signal.

She waited until it made the left turn into a sprawling development called Lido Bay. “Should I keep following him, you think?” She glanced over at Wyatt. “If it’s Stackpole, I really don’t want him to notice us.”

“Up to you,” Wyatt said. “I don’t want to get us in trouble either, but I’d like to know if it really is Stackpole.”

He looked out the window at the homes lining the neatly landscaped street. All the homes were done in a similar hybrid Tuscan/Spanish-mission style, with stucco walls painted in pinks, peach, apricot, and buff, with red barrel-tile roofs. “Nice real estate,” Wyatt said. “Wonder what these homes sell for?”

“Hmm, four or five years ago they were probably selling for seven hundred to eight hundred thousand dollars,” Grace said. “The ones on canals or directly on the bay used to go for over a million. Now? You could probably move in here to a perfectly lovely home for under three hundred thousand.”

“If I had three hundred thousand, I wouldn’t want to live here,” Wyatt said. “Too cookie cutter for my taste. Huge houses all jammed in here together on these little-bitty lots. Anyway, that’s never gonna happen.”

The Lexus made a wide left turn, and, as Grace started to follow, its brake lights went on. “Better slow down,” Wyatt said. “Maybe turn off your lights. We don’t want him to see us.”

Grace pulled to the curb four houses down from the driveway where the Lexus turned in and, as suggested, cut her headlights.

“Come on, Cedric,” Wyatt quietly urged. “Get out of the car and let us see your pretty face.”

“Damn!”

As they watched, the garage door slowly, soundlessly rolled up, and the Lexus pulled in, with the garage door rolling down right behind it.

Grace burst out laughing, and after a moment Wyatt laughed, too. “Well, that was certainly anticlimatic,” she said, turning around and driving out of the subdivision.

He was still sizing up the real estate. “Even with the real estate market in the toilet, that subdivision was pretty high cotton,” he mused. “Wonder what kind of money a judge makes in Florida?”

“Don’t know,” Grace said. “But remember, Camryn said his wife’s family is loaded. So maybe it’s her money. Or maybe he does well in the stock market. Or he’s cornered the market for black-market Oxycodone.”

He gave her a startled look.

“Just kidding,” she said. “Remember, we don’t even know if that really was Stackpole. It could be anybody. It could even be Paula’s husband, if she has one.”

“Don’t think so,” Wyatt said. “Remember, we checked her driver’s license. Paula lives on Anna Maria. Not Longboat.”

“I’d love to know what that fight was about,” Grace said, after a moment. “Paula seemed so different tonight, and then, wham, something really upset her apple cart.”

She reached down and scratched Sweetie’s silky brown ears. The dog hopped across the console to Wyatt’s lap and scratched at his door, whining.

“Uh-oh,” Grace said. “I think somebody needs a pit stop.”

“Why don’t you pull over up here at Coquina Beach,” he suggested. “It’s a nice night, and I haven’t been to the beach since all this crap started with Callie. We can take her for a walk, if you want.”

She raised an eyebrow. “You know dogs aren’t allowed on the beach, right?”

“I won’t tell if you won’t,” he said. “Besides, Sweetie’s been such a good girl, she deserves a little treat, right Sweetie?”

The dog’s tail beat a tattoo on the window.

“I swear she knows her name already,” Grace said.

She parked the car beneath one of the towering Australian pines and clipped a leash to Sweetie’s new pink collar, extracting a plastic bag from her tote bag.

*   *   *

Grace slipped off her shoes and Wyatt did the same with his flip-flops, and they left them, side by side, in the soft white sand at the parking-lot edge. After Sweetie had taken care of business and Grace had disposed of the plastic bag, they took the boardwalk over the dunes, past gently waving fronds of sea oats.

The tide was out, and the moon bathed the beach with a silvered pearlescent sheen. The ocean surface was as calm as a puddle after a summer storm, lapping gently at the edge of the shore. Only the faint breeze rippled the water.

Sweetie paused and looked startled when her feet first touched the damp sand, then sat on her rump and gave Grace a quizzical look.

“Come on, girl,” Grace said, tugging gently at the leash. “Let’s walk.”

“I’ll bet she’s never been to the beach before,” Wyatt said.

Grace tugged again, and finally the little dog stood and began trotting toward the water.