Powder Burn - Carl Hiaasen [5]
Out in the Amazon vastness, Ecuador had oil and, with it, sudden national wealth, instant inflation, unprecedented international status and membership in OPEC. Would Señor Meadows consider designing a building to house the oil ministry in Quito? A skyscraper, por favor, something majestic and symbolic of the new Ecuador. Meadows hadn’t decided. He hadn’t liked the pretentious, nouveau riche army officers who had approached him, but he was intrigued with the challenge: how to design a skyscraper consistent with the colonial heritage of mountain Quito and yet strong enough to resist the earthquakes there were nearly as common as revolutions in the Ecuadorean Andes? Before he made up his mind, he would do some homework.…
He had just decided the rain would catch him on the way home, and turned to ask the librarian for a bag to protect the books, when he was intercepted by one of the most beautiful creatures he had ever seen.
She stood squarely in his path, a half smile on her face, a twinkle in green eyes that seemed a mirror of Meadows’s own. Her blond hair was cut to the shoulder. She wore a plaid pinafore, white socks and white patent leather shoes.
“Hello,” she said.
“Hi.”
“My name is Jessica Tilden and I am five years old.”
“Oh. My name is Chris Meadows and I am thirty-six years old. How do you do?”
“Are you famous?”
“No, of course not. Who says I’m famous?”
“My mommy.”
“Well, she probably means well, but she’s mistaken.”
Jessica Tilden thought that one over. Clearly she would have more to say. Meadows couldn’t take his eyes off the little girl. There was something there in that pixyish, semimocking, I’m-not-through-with-you-yet expression. Something familiar.
“Don’t you know it’s not polite to lie to little girls?”
The voice came from over Meadows’s shoulder. It sent a shiver down his spine, a pounding in his chest. He felt lightheaded, weak, vulnerable. Meadows turned.
“Hi, Sandy,” he said softly.
“Hello, Chris.”
Jessica was her mother’s daughter, no mistake about it. Except that her mother’s eyes were a bottomless blue and she wore a knee-length white cotton dress and sandals. The last time he had seen her she had worn a bikini and the blue eyes had sparkled with tears.
They shook hands, there in the library. The ultimate absurdity, to shake hands among strangers with someone you once loved. Meadows didn’t know what else to do.
“Your palms are all wet, Chris.”
“I’m sweating. I came on the bike.”
“Yes, I saw it outside; that’s why we came in.”
“Gee, Sandy, it’s been…”
“Almost six years.”
“If she is Jessica Tilden, then you are…”
“Mrs. Harold Tilden of Syracuse, New York.”
“Syracuse. Yes, well, I’ve been there. Nice town.” It was not a nice town. It was an awful town; no architecture, no life, no sun, and he didn’t give a damn about Syracuse anyway.
“How are things with you?” she asked with that gentle, private smile.
“I can’t complain.”
“The house?”
“Fine.”
“The boat?”
“New engine, same boat.”
“The coffee grinder?”
Oh, stay away from that, Sandy; that is too close to home. In the mornings, when the sun ricocheted off the bay into the bedroom, it had been his custom to get up and make coffee, beginning with shade-grown Costa Rican beans a friend shipped him from San José. He was a fetishist, she teased. Anyone who abandoned her alone and languorous on a big bed in the morning sunshine to make coffee had to be. And a fool to boot, she liked to say.
“The grinder broke. I threw it away,” Meadows lied.
“Oh? Somehow, Chris, I can’t imagine you without your trusty grinder. Or is it that there is someone to make your coffee?”
“No,” he said quickly. “I make it myself still.”
Meadows struggled unsuccessfully to regain his poise.
“You…you haven’t changed much, I mean not a bit at all. How have you been? All that time.”
“It went so fast.” She blurted