Suspicion of Betrayal by Barbara Parker Page B

it looked the same now, with its brick facade and row of white columns across the front. The aluminum awning windows from the sixties had never been changed, and the Florida room still had its polished terrazzo floor. On Sunday mornings after church, Irene would sit on the porch by the pool, work the crossword puzzle, sneak a cigarette, and have her juice with champagne. She could look out past the seawall, past the little islands in the bay and see the skyline of Miami Beach in the distance. Pelicans and seagulls glided by. Boats hummed up and down the intra-coastal waterway like heavy bees. The air was perfumed with orange jasmine and gardenia.
    Gail had not lived here since going away to college at eighteen, but the word home always brought her these images. For Karen the house in South Miami was still home, and for Anthony it was his grandparents' mansion on Malagueña Avenue. Gail wondered how long it would take before the three of them felt a similar affection for the house on Clematis Street.
    Irene took off her hat and fanned her face. "You know, I think the phone company has a service for tracing calls. But if it goes back to a pay phone, you still wouldn't know who did it, would you?"
    "What's so weird is that there's just this disembodied voice that isn't even human, and he doesn't seem to want anything. I hung up quickly each time, so he didn't have a chance to say much. I wonder what he'd say if I stayed on the line."
    "Don't give him the satisfaction."
    "I almost want to listen so I could know why. It makes me feel so powerless. This person invaded my home, scared the hell out of me, and there is nothing I can do about it."
    "Hang up, that's what you can do."
    Gail followed her mother on the mildewy keystone that made a path to the side yard, where she grew her orchids. Hazy shafts of light came through the trees. Irene twisted the adjustment on the nozzle to mist an immense dendrobium with a cluster of stems four feet long. It had grown in that particular live oak tree as long as Gail could remember, and every spring it produced a half dozen spikes of white blossoms touched with pale yellow.
    She had come to her mother's house to review plans for the wedding, but the files were still waiting in a box in the living room. Gail sat down on the concrete bench and petted the cat, who flopped over and exposed his belly for more.
    "Mother, come with me to pick out a wedding dress. Anthony's cousins recommended a shop in Coral Gables." At the hospital today she had talked to Elena about it. Gail had felt bad for rebuffing the suggestion before, and worse for not having accompanied the rest of the family to the hospital the night Pedrosa collapsed. She added, "I need someone on my side, or else I'll spend too much."
    "Well, don't expect me to put on the brakes. You should buy something that will knock his socks off."
    The cat pushed its nose against Gail's hand, and she gave it a good scratching, feeling its throat rumble with purrs.
    The spray went slowly across the row of miniature orchids hanging on the wood fence in little clay pots. "Darling, would you like to have my mother's earrings? You know—something old, something new. And this is the old part, not the borrowed. I want you to keep them."
    The earrings were curves of diamonds set in platinum. Gail's grandfather, John Strickland, had gone all the way to New York by train in the thirties to buy them at Tiffany's for the woman he loved. Her father had refused to let her marry this young man with no prospects.
    Gail said, "I have lusted for those earrings for years! But no, I can't keep them. They're yours."
    "I never wear them. They're more classical, anjj they never suited me." Pointing the hose at an immense staghorn fern, she asked Gail when she planned to go shopping. "Not Tuesday, I hope. I have a meeting with the florist. But I could rearrange it. So just tell me when."
    Gail had forgotten about the florist. "How much money do you have left out of