LITMIR.BIZ

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      Three

      By evening the clouds had moved in again. The wind howled like a roomful of tomcats, but at least the rain held off. Frances gulped down two more aspirin, eyed the sacks of staples still waiting to be put away and decided that if her sinuses didn’t stop giving her fits, she was going to trade them in on a new set. Evidently, salt air and ocean breezes weren’t quite the panacea they were cracked up to be.

      And another thing—she’d always heard that being on the water was a terrific appetizer. One more old wives’ tale shot to blazes. Her stomach kept telling her it was hungry, but when she offered to feed it, it rebelled on her. Nice going for a professional dietician. She couldn’t even tempt her own palate.

      Maybe her headache had put her off her feed. The trouble was she needed to get started on proofing the copy she’d brought with her for Fancy’s Kitchen, her monthly cooking column—the last column she would write before her resignation took effect—and she couldn’t even bring herself to do that.

      As for working on Fancy’s Fat-Free Favorites, her collection of low-fat recipes, she was already two weeks past her deadline. If she didn’t wrap it up and get it into her editor’s hands soon, the market would be flooded with low-fat cookbooks and her publisher would find a loophole in her contract and make her return her modest advance.

      Her extremely modest advance. And she needed the money. She’d received a third on signing the contract, with another third promised once the final manuscript was approved, and the last to be paid on publication. She’d been so thrilled when they’d accepted her proposal—she’d only sent it in because her editor at the magazine had pushed her to do it. He’d liked the idea of having a published author doing his food column, and Frances had liked the idea of anything that would take her mind off her dismal home life.

      And now here she was, with nothing but time on her hands—no carping demands, no whining complaints, no dirty dishes, unmade beds and un-run errands waiting for her attention the minute she stepped through the front door. No reason at all not to dig in and get the job done, other than that she felt like the very devil.

      Maybe she could sell her publisher on another idea—Fancy’s Recipes From Hell.

      By evening she hadn’t seen a single soul. Evidently, she and Flint-Face were the only two people on the island. Not a particularly happy thought. What was his name, anyway? Racetrack? Railway? Bridgeman?

      Whatever.

      Frances had never been particularly gregarious—actually, she’d never had time to consider whether she was or wasn’t—but she wasn’t exactly a hermit, either. The eldest of five children, she was used to being surrounded by people. Her mother had died when she was seventeen, and Frances had been forced to curtail her own modest social life, postpone her plans to enroll at the university and settle for day classes at the local community college for the first few years.

      Not that she’d regretted it for a single moment. At least, not after her initial disappointment. Home had always been a noisy, cheerful place, constantly overrun with family, friends and friends of friends.

      Some of them very special friends, she thought in a rare mood of nostalgia as she stirred herself a cup of cocoa, set it aside untouched and drifted across to stare out the dark window. Twice—once when she was eighteen and again when she was twenty-one—she had come that close to getting engaged. By that time, her father, a research scientist involved in a lifelong love affair with the parasitic plants of various tropical regions, had more or less abandoned them.

      Oh, financially they’d been secure enough, except for the threat of ever-rising property taxes. The house had been paid for, Frances had always been an excellent manager, and they’d all found after-school jobs as soon as they’d gotten old enough. But as long as her father had remained out of the country—and he’d shown no signs of coming back home—they’d remained her responsibility. A package deal, as she’d laughingly told Paul, a fellow day student who had been on the verge of proposing at the time.

      He hadn’t. Instead, he’d started going out with her best friend, Carol, and when Carol had discovered she was pregnant, Paul had suddenly found it necessary to check out a job offer on the West Coast. He had never written, never called, never returned. Frances had been with Carol when her baby was born. She’d done her best to console her after she’d put it up for adoption, still feeling guilty for having introduced her to Paul in the first place, but secretly relieved at having escaped herself.

      Three years later she had felt obliged to warn another contender. The children were older by then. She’d finally been able to transfer her few transferable credits to the university, but she was still the acting head of the family. So she’d told Adam about her absentee father and seventeen-year-old Debbie and sixteen-year-old Reba and the twins, Bill and Dennis, because Adam was mature enough to appreciate family responsibility. He was entirely different from Paul. A lawyer with political interests, he was older, more serious, and besides, they were head over heels in love, which was why he’d been able to talk her into moving out of the dormitory and into his apartment.

      Duly warned, Adam had decided that, while he was still more than willing to share his apartment—and incidentally, his bed—it would be a bad career move at this point in his life to saddle himself with a family.

      Frances remembered smiling until she thought her face would break, furious with herself for being so blind. Twice she had fallen in love. Twice she had given her trust. Both times she’d been dropped at the first hurdle, her confidence in her own judgment badly shaken.

      Learning to trust again hadn’t been easy, but four years later, as a newly graduated nutritionist employed at a small private hospital, she had met Kenneth Jones. The first thing that had impressed her was the fact that he seemed so devoted to his parents. Her own family by that time had outgrown the dependent stage, but she’d been forced by circumstances into a position of responsibility for too many years. It had become a habit.

      Her father, had he still been alive, would have appreciated Kenneth, she thought with bitter amusement. She hadn’t known until it was far too late how much her late husband had in common with the parasitic plants Dr. Smith had spent the last years of his life studying.

      “Oh, this is depressing!” she muttered. Why in the world was she wasting time wallowing in past misery?

      Refocusing her mind on her current misery, Frances swallowed a few gulps of the lukewarm cocoa and forced down a slice of toast. Her stomach threatened rebellion. Change of water, she told herself. Or too much greasy junk food on the trip down. There were times when she devoutly wished she didn’t know beans about food. There came a time in every woman’s life when she desperately needed to indulge herself in something utterly wicked, even if it was no more than an overdose of saturated fat, refined sugar, bleached flour and a bushel basketful of assorted chemicals.

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