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Chapter Five. The heat hit her like a blast furnace, and Cody automatically started fanning herself with the unread paperback she had nursed for most of her five-hour






The heat hit her like a blast furnace, and Cody automatically started fanning herself with the unread paperback she had nursed for most of her five-hour flight.

Trooping across the tarmac with a cluster of well-fed tourists in baggy pink shorts and florid cotton tops, she felt conspicuous in jeans and a long-sleeved checked shirt. It had been freezing when she left New Zealand.

This is the tropics, she reminded herself belatedly, where civil servants let it all hang out and honeymoon couples travel on group discount. She paused at the customs entrance while round-faced local women dropped sweet-smelling garlands over the heads of each passenger. A crew-cut German ordered his wife to photograph him with an arm around a voluptuous island woman. He could barely drag his eyes from her breasts to say the German version of cheese. Cody flinched at the spectacle.

Customs and Immigration was a cursory affair. Name, destination, rubber stamp, have a nice day, next! They didn’t bother with visas on the Cook Islands. You stayed thirty-one days, longer if you could pay.

Various bellhops and touts waving hotel signs clustered at the main exit, and Cody struggled to remember her travel agent’s instructions. The tourists were dispersing, herded into all manner of transport including an extraordinary number of Subarus. Stragglers like Cody fiddled with their luggage, looked at their watches and thumbed through their itineraries. Cody was supposed to find a man waving a sign saying MOON ISLAND. “Don’t worry if he’s late, ” the agent had said. “Time doesn’t mean much where you’re headed.”

Heat shimmered off the road and Cody’s pores oozed in sympathy. She wished she could just strip off her clothes and lie under a tree somewhere. Back home in Wellington, a hot day was when you had to take off your sweatshirt and even then you’d stash it in your car just in case. On record as the windiest city in the world, Wellington was notorious for its rapid weather shifts — one minute warm and balmy, the next a hailstorm. Its population, fancying themselves politically sensitive, tried to keep quiet about welcoming the Greenhouse Effect. But some optimists were already planting banana palms.

Cody wondered when she would see the place again. It felt weird having bought a one-way ticket out. How would she know when it was safe to return? She’d probably be picked up by Customs the second she got off the plane. She marveled that they hadn’t found her already. Rarotonga was, after all, a New Zealand territory.

Stretching limbs stiff from travel, she rolled up her sleeves and popped a couple of buttons at her neck. Her head was aching and sweat had plastered her hair to her brow. With tired fingers she smoothed the short, damp strands back off her forehead.

“Ms. Stanton? ” A man’s voice.

Cody swung around. The first thing she saw was a battered hand-painted sign that read MOON ISLAND, the second was a tall woman standing a few paces beyond it. She had dead straight white-blonde hair caught back in a fluorescent pink band, and skin so pale that Cody found herself gaping dumbly. An albino. She must be an albino. Don’t stare, she ordered herself the way mothers reprimand children for pointing at cripples.

“The name’s Mitchell.” The voice came closer. It sounded very British. “Bevan Mitchell. I’m your pilot.”

Cody refocused blankly on the sign and the man tucking it under one arm. He wore light cotton fatigues and a dilapidated straw hat. A cigarette drooped from a permanent groove in his bottom lip and a pair of aviator sunglasses swung from his breast pocket.

“My pilot? ” Cody repeated, subconsciously looking for a uniform.

“These your bags? ” He picked them up before she could answer. “Follow me.”

Cody looked back across his shoulder. The woman had gone, she noted with a faint shock of disappointment. Perhaps she was never really there at all, but was a ghost or mere figment of her imagination brought on by a lethal combination of heat and stress.

Assailed with doubt, she stumbled after the man. It was not too late. She could say she’d changed her mind, pay the cancellation fee, book herself on the next flight back home. As they skirted the terminal, she saw a police officer strolling purposefully toward the entrance and lowered her head.

“We’re over here, ” the pilot said, waving vaguely at a group of hangars.

Cody followed him across an expanse of tarmac, moisture gathering in the small of her back. Her clothing felt wet, clinging everywhere it connected with flesh. The acrid smell of jet fuel mixed with hot tar and ripe fruit in the shiftless air. Dumbstruck, she halted next to a crate of pineapples a few yards from their transport.

The plane was a four-seater twin-engine job. Postwar, but not by much. Cody shuddered at the sight of its delicately strutted wings with their thin silvery fabric cover. They were probably due to crumple from metal fatigue at any moment. Filled with gloom, she watched as the pilot stowed the fruit and her bags, and the body of the little biplane rattled and quivered.

Checking the propellers he called to her, “In you get, old girl.”

“Crime doesn’t pay, ” Cody muttered and heaved herself up into the tiniest cabin she had ever seen.

The interior was a battered shell crammed with parcels and boxes. She occupied one of two dwarf-sized bucket seats in the back and wondered where to put her legs. A crate of bananas occupied the floor between her seat and the pilot’s. Gingerly she squeezed her feet down one side and twisted sideways in the rock-hard seat.

“Watch your head, ” she heard a moment later, and a second passenger appeared.

Astonished, Cody changed position to create more room. It was her. The ghost. Don’t stare. She quickly looked elsewhere.

The pilot secured the hatch and took his seat, instructing, “Belt up, ladies.”

Cody groped for the ancient straps. It seemed a pointless precaution given the circumstances. They were probably going to be killed anyway, that’s if they ever got off the ground.

“Here, let me.” A pair of hands interrupted her fumbling, clicked the belt shut and adjusted the strap length to fit snugly across her lap. Cody blushed at the bizarre intimacy of the action. It was totally innocent, of course, a helpful gesture on the part of a more experienced passenger. Her whole body tensed nonetheless.

“Thanks, ” she blurted with a nervous laugh.

“Have you flown much in smaller airplanes? ” the ghost asked her conversationally. It was a low, slightly husky voice, with an accent that sounded American but hinted at England.

She would sing divinely, Cody decided, trying not to be weirdly fascinated by her looks. “As a matter of fact, this is my first time, ” she admitted.

“Really? ” The stranger took off her dark glasses and blinked into the harsh glare beyond the plane. The light made her pupils shrink, revealing irises of a pale lavender hue that seemed quite unreal. “Well, there’s a first time for everything, ” she added lightly. “And if memory serves me, it will probably turn out to be an anticlimax.”

Cody felt her pulse leap. It was innuendo. No, it was nothing. She was confused. The cockpit was hot and airless, cramped and sticky. She’d recently broken up with her lover. She was sexually frustrated. She looked up and met the woman’s eyes, struck all over again by their extraordinary lavender color, a subtle hint of pink beneath the irises. Now you see it, now you don’t.

Her eyebrows and lashes were dark, no doubt thanks to a beautician, she decided. They were a shock against her absolute fairness, drawing attention to those astonishing eyes. And what was that perfume? It was like nothing Cody had ever smelled, warm and delicious, a hint of vanilla and something else, one of those heady tropical flowers. They were sitting so close it was almost impossible to avoid breathing her in. Distracted, Cody wriggled in her seat.

“Are you nervous? ” she was asked very softly.

“I guess I am.” Again their eyes met but Cody dropped hers quickly, startled at what appeared to be a very definite bedroom stare.

The engines roared, or more accurately, coughed into life, and their pilot screwed around to them with a cheerful grin.

“Tally ho! Hold on to your hats, girls.”

The din was awesome, the fumes nauseating. Breathe, Cody told herself as they bounced and spluttered up the runway. Her teeth chattered and her stomach lurched. This was madness, she decided as they gathered speed. She wished she could just give the money back and slink home. What on earth had possessed her to trade her nice safe routine existence for a life of crime? She could easily have found another job, and given time, she would get over Margaret. It’s not as if she still loved her. How could you love a woman who had treated you so badly?

Cody could almost hear her mother, One day you’re going to regret your impulsiveness, my girl, and I hope I’m there to see it. Look at me now, she wanted to shout. Instead she stole a peep through the murky little window beside her and gasped, “We’re up in the air! ”

The other occupants seemed entertained by this.

“God’s running a special on miracles this week, ” Bevan Mitchell called over his shoulder, and it was as though the little De Havilland relaxed all of a sudden, completely at home in the wide sky. The shuddering died down, and the dull thud of the propellers sounded reassuringly constant as they lolloped away from Rarotonga.

After sufficient time had elapsed for Cody to recover from the “anticlimax” of take-off, her companion struck up conversation, asking “Have you been to the Cook Islands before? ”

Cody shook her head. “Have you? ”

“I arrived last week. It’s my first time here.” The ghost slipped on her dark glasses once more, and Cody was ashamed to feel relief. Those lavender eyes were way too unnerving. “My name is Annabel, by the way. Annabel Worth.”

“I’m Cody Stanton.”

“Cody? ” Annabel rolled the name about experimentally and Cody imagined hearing her whisper it, cry it as they…

Shocked, she banished the image. Shame on you. Her mother’s voice. And your sheets still warm from Margaret.

“Cody, short for Cordelia, ” she explained, clearing her throat and dragging her attention away from the woman’s mouth.

“It suits you —the Cody form that is. So many names seem to be mismatches.”

“I think you look like an Annabel.”

“It’s funny, it never felt quite right to me when I was a child. But I suppose one grows accustomed to things.”

“I never grew accustomed to Cordelia.”

Annabel laughed. “I guess you wouldn’t.”

What exactly did that mean? Cody wondered. Was Annabel letting her know she’d been spotted? Or was she just making conversation to pass the time? “How far is Moon Island? ”

“It’s about an hour and a half from here. If you want to sleep, I’ll wake you when we get closer.”

“Maybe I will, ” Cody said, knowing it was highly unlikely with this woman’s warm fragrant body jammed against hers. All the same, she didn’t want her companion feeling obliged to continue small talk that was probably boring her to death. Closing her eyes, she turned slightly onto her side and made a show of dozing off.

To her astonishment she really was asleep when she felt a hand brush her arm much later. “Look.” Annabel pointed past their pilot. “There it is. Moon Island.”

Across a hazy expanse of blue, Cody made out a steamy dark green blob banded with cream. Encircling it, the ocean pooled pale, bright turquoise. The travel agent wasn’t kidding—Moon Island really was in the middle of nowhere. Her stomach lurched yet again as the tiny plane abruptly dropped a few hundred feet.

“Sorry about that, ” Bevan said cheerfully. “Just testing her reflexes.”

“I think we can survive without the aerobatics, ” Annabel said with a familiarity that caused Cody’s brow to pucker slightly.

These two obviously weren’t strangers, she concluded with a slight knot in her stomach. Were they lovers? She stole a look at Annabel and almost protested out loud at the idea. Irrational, of course. It was nothing to do with her whom this woman slept with. How typical. The first woman she’s fancied since the Margaret drama turns out to be straight. Very convenient. It was so much safer to lust after the unattainable.

Swallowing a sigh, she peered boldly out her window as the plane banked to the right. The sea looked close, Van Gogh blue, and suitably shark-infested. The island ahead seemed almost mirage-like, rising sweetly out of the ocean like a glimpse of paradise. As they drew closer, Cody saw the glow of a coral reef beneath the water, a white beach curving around a thatch of palm trees. It was beautiful, breathtaking. Suddenly a reckless optimism chased the negative thoughts from her head. If such a place could exist on the same earth as cold, windy Wellington, surely anything was possible.

Bevan’s voice intruded on her thoughts. “We’re coming in now.” They promptly lurched into a steep nosedive, and the shuddering and rattling started all over again.

“Don’t worry, ” Annabel told her. “I do this most days and I’m still alive.”

Cody tried to smile but her teeth were clenched. Willing herself not to faint, she clasped her hands together and refused to permit her life to flash before her. If she was about to be killed, she wanted at least to think about something cheerful.

“We’re nearly there, ” the soft voice said. “That’s Passion Bay below us.”

Cody felt warm breath on her cheek, smelled that impossible fragrance. She braved a peek past the pilot. Palm trees. All she could see were palm trees. The plane seemed to stall then, dropping out of the sky like a slaughtered bird.

“Oh, God, ” she whispered, falling back on the patriarchy now that the chips were down. There was a pronounced thud, and she clutched her seat as they swayed and jolted to a merciful standstill.

As soon as Bevan Mitchell gave the okay, Annabel was out of her seat. She opened the hatch and sprang lithely to the ground. But Cody’s legs were trembling so much she didn’t think she could move. Pretending to fumble in her satchel, she drew a few deep breaths and waited for her shattered nerves to regroup. After what seemed an embarrassingly long pause, she managed to disembark.

“So...” Annabel turned, hands on hips, and smiled full blast. “How was that for you? ”

Leaning back against a wing, Cody managed not to blush. More innuendo. Was it lesbian innuendo or mere wishful thinking on her part? Maybe Annabel and the pilot were not lovers after all. Maybe they were just friends. But Annabel could still be straight. She was probably married. Married and bored.

Cody sized her up. She wore a pale pink long-sleeved T-shirt and baggy knee-length white shorts. Her body was athletic, muscles clearly defined. Aerobics, Cody decided; her face was free of that slightly harassed expression joggers wore.

She was waiting for a reply and Cody wondered what her eyes were asking behind those all-concealing lenses. “For me? ” Cody very deliberately ran her tongue across her lips and casually flicked open the next few buttons of her shirt. “I guess you could say the earth moved.”

Grinning, she imagined the stranger naked, hot; imagined sliding against her, stroking her hair. This time she let herself fantasize.

 


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