Granny Bares It All Page 4

  Adrian got me a coffee, and we all sat down to chat.

  “So have you tried nudism before?” Zoe asked. She spoke like she came from New England.

  “Um, no. But I used to skinny dip with my friends when I was in high school. It felt so free, so natural. We’d sneak off to a lake deep in the woods where no one would see us and swim all day. We never told our parents. We’d bring our swimsuits along and dip them in the water before we headed back.”

  I made a good semblance of a laugh.

  Adrian nodded and smiled. “A lot of nudists have stories like that.”

  I already knew that. I’d stolen that tale from a nudist website. I’d never been skinny dipping.

  “So you’d like to recapture that feeling, eh?” Zoe asked. “That’s great. You’ll have a lot of fun here. Did you want an individual membership or a family membership?”

  “Oh, my husband has passed.”

  And is currently spinning in his grave, laughing hysterically.

  “What about your children and grandchildren?”

  “I don’t think they’d be interested.”

  “We have plenty of activities for kids.”

  I’d read that and wasn’t sure how I felt about it. It was beside the point anyway. I was here on a murder investigation.

  The half-naked couple explained the rules of the place, which thankfully included a ban on photography, and went through the activities they had. It did seem like a nice resort with plenty to do, and they stressed that there were lots of seniors, including “one fellow who has been baring it all since he got back from World War Two.” I love a man in uniform. Apparently I’d never see his.

  “So would you like to check out the facilities and meet some of the members?” Zoe asked.

  “Sure,” I said with as much enthusiasm as I could muster.

  “Great! Well, you’ll have to take your clothes off. It’s a clothing-free facility. There’s a changing room back there with a locker. Take the key with you. It has a strap to go around your wrist.”

  Zoe led me to the room. As we left, I noticed Adrian pulling off his pants.

  I thanked her, tried not to look at her husband (briefs, not boxers, a bad choice for him) and closed myself into the changing room.

  The room was small, little more than a closet, with a few lockers and a full-length mirror on one wall.

  I looked at myself in the mirror, really looked at myself. It wasn’t something I had done in a long time. I’d been in good physical health for most of my life and, I’m proud to say, pretty good looking. When I was younger, I had no shortage of suitors, especially from men who liked athletic women—soldiers, mercenaries, professional assassins, those sorts of people.

  That had been a long time ago, and I had aged. Nothing wrong with that, it happens to everyone. Considering my lifestyle, making it to seventy was tantamount to winning the lottery. I had nothing to complain about.

  But just look at me. I had put on some fat. My hair had gone gray. My hands looked like parchment. I had wrinkles on my face. I had wrinkles everywhere else too. I sagged in places that had once been springy and buoyant. Somehow going out with Octavian hadn’t made me self-conscious. He just wanted some company like I did, along with some flirting that barely rose above the schoolyard level. A peck on the cheek was all I gave him and all he expected.

  This was different. I was going to bare all in front of strangers.

  And yet I had to. Someone had been murdered. The murderer had tried to kill me, too, and would try again if they knew who I was. They had tried to kill Pearl as well. It didn’t matter that she had one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel; she was my friend and deserved to be safe.

  I took a deep breath and a final look in the mirror and started to undress.

  Six

  We walked out of the office—Adrian, Zoe and I—in our birthday suits. And boy, those birthdays were a long time ago. To avoid looking at Adrian, I spoke mostly with Zoe. It was surreal seeing her naked by my side while walking across a field in the sunlight, but the fact that she was a woman made it much easier.

  Only in a relative sense. I was tense, mortified. Here I was on the wrong side of seventy walking naked in broad daylight. I didn’t even walk naked at home. A trip from the shower to my bedroom was always done with a towel wrapped around me. Now my muscles tensed, and my hands tried to cover everything at once. I wanted to curl in on myself and had to force my body to take up a normal walking posture. If I didn’t fit in here, I’d never be able to solve the murder.

  “Let’s go to the activity center first,” Adrian suggested.

  “All right,” I replied, automatically turning to him as I spoke to him. Common courtesy, except that it made me see him. All of him. I did a good job maintaining eye contact. What unsettled me the most was how he was looking at me openly, unashamedly. He wasn’t staring or ogling, but he was seeing all of me. I felt myself flush.

  We headed up to the other building. Through a large window, I could see a young couple in their thirties, still relatively unlined and bouncy, playing Ping Pong. They laughed and joked like nothing was different about what they were doing than what I did at the park on weekends with my grandson.

  Of greater interest was a notice board out front. Tacked on it, among other announcements, was the newspaper story about Clarissa Monell.

  I feigned shock.

  “Oh dear. I heard about this. She went to my gym.”

  “Yes, what a tragedy!” Zoe said. “She was a beloved member. Clarissa came here for many years. Volunteered with a lot of activities around the resort and for the past couple of years was our volunteer coordinator. She worked as an accountant and did our taxes for free.”

  “Helped us out quite a bit with that,” Adrian put in.

  They gave each other a significant look—Zoe accusatory, Adrian apologetic. Had the naked man revealed too much?

  I realized I was staring at Adrian again, felt myself flush, and turned away.

  To cover up my embarrassment, I asked, “So the two of you own this place?”

  “Yep. Bought it twenty-one years ago,” Zoe said, putting an arm around her husband. That brought him into my line of sight, and I turned to read the other notices on the board. There was a hike scheduled for tomorrow, plus a cookout on the weekend. There was also a memorial service for Clarissa Monell scheduled for tomorrow evening.

  Bingo. I needed to go to that.

  “I need to check on something down by the lake,” Adrian said, and headed off in the other direction.

  Fine by me. That took some of the pressure off, plus it gave me a chance to question Zoe alone.

  She led me into the activity room. Several people played cards, Ping Pong, chess, and shuffleboard. They were of all ages from late twenties to people as old as I was.

  Zoe introduced me to everyone. It was agonizing. I felt tense, exposed, and couldn’t quite figure out where to direct my gaze. I decided eye contact was the safest, but if the conversation lasted more than a few seconds, it felt like I was trying to stare the other person down. The worst of it all was that I could see myself behaving awkwardly. The fact that everyone else acted so nonchalant made it worse. I stood out like a sore thumb.

  “I’m surprised there are so many people here on a weekday,” I said as we walked around the pool behind the rec center. A couple of people lay sunning themselves, all of themselves, while some more frolicked in the water.

  “The retirees who live in the area come most every day when the weather is good. Others take the day off from work or come on their lunch break. There’s nothing like taking an hour off in the middle of a busy work week and eating a bag lunch down at the lake.”

  “I see.”

  “Oh, wait until you see the crowd on the weekends. All the families come, as well as the younger people who can’t get away from work.”

  “So kids don’t have a problem with this?”

  I couldn’t believe I asked that, because it came out as
a challenge. I was trying to fit in, lie low. This didn’t help. It just came out, though.

  Zoe didn’t seem offended at all.

  “Oh, kids are some of our most avid members,” she said in a way that made it sound like she answered that question a lot. “You mentioned you raised children, so you know how hard it is to keep them in clothing. Come bath time, they’re running all over the house naked, happy to be free of clothes. It’s the same here.”

  I had a flashback to six-year-old Frederick doing just that. Innocent silliness, and in the privacy of our home.

  “Aren’t the parents worried, about, um …”

  Zoe got serious. “Predators? We keep a close eye on all the children and encourage the parents to do the same. Any single male who wants to sign up must have a background check.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Let’s go down to the lake. I think you’ll like it,” my hostess suggested.

  Oh great, and see Adrian again. Well, I’d seen plenty of naked men in the past twenty minutes. The problem with Adrian was that he was chatty and knew my name and email address.

  As we were about to leave, I spotted another noticeboard. It was quite large and covered with clippings from newspapers and magazines. I went over and saw all the articles were about nudism, and all were written by Adrian Fletcher.

  “My husband has been an outspoken advocate for our lifestyle all his life. This is barely a tenth of what he’s written.”

  “Adrian is amazing,” a man said without looking up from his chess game.

  “A real leader,” another said. Everyone within earshot nodded.

  “Shall we go down to the lake now?” Zoe asked.

  Let’s not and say we did, I thought. Instead, I let myself be led out of the activity building.

  “You’ll get used to it,” Zoe said as we headed down the hill.

  “Oh, I’m all right.”

  She shook her head and smiled. “You’re nervous. It’s perfectly natural. You’ll get over it quickly enough. I bet you’re already more relaxed than when you first took your clothes off, aren’t you?”

  I thought about it for a moment and had to concede that was true.

  “It’s strange,” I said. “Walking with you here isn’t so bad, even if we are out in the middle of a field. Being around the men is a bit uncomfortable, though.”

  More than a bit, I added silently.

  Zoe looked at me slyly. “I bet if I were a gorgeous twenty-something, you’d feel uncomfortable too.”

  “You’re quite good looking.”

  Zoe laughed. “I am to my husband, not to the rest of society. I’m short and overweight. But so what? I’ve always been like this. It’s my natural body shape. I used to worry about it constantly, go on fad diets and exercise myself to exhaustion. I was always comparing myself to other women, even after I married Adrian. He adores me, but I didn’t adore myself. Now I love my body.”

  “What changed?”

  “Nudism. When you come out to a place like this, you notice that everyone has lumps and bumps and weird scars or body parts that are too small or too big. You stop worrying about it. After a while, you don’t even really see it.”

  I didn’t have a response to that. I couldn’t decide whether she really meant it or was trying to fool herself. All this seemed so strange, and more than a bit artificial. I simply couldn’t believe that these people were all wandering around naked and not getting some sort of sexual thrill out of it.

  On the other hand, I saw young and old interacting more here than they did in the regular world. And I didn’t see anyone gawking. Every woman develops a Gawking Sensor by age twelve, both for herself and for other women, and mine hadn’t gone off since I’d gotten here.

  We came to the lakeshore. It was a small lake fed by a little creek. A pier jutted out into the water. A woman dove off the end and swam away from us with powerful strokes. A few others lounged around on beach towels spread out on the verdant grass.

  Adrian stood talking to one of the sunbathers, hands on hips, a scowl on his face. As soon as he saw us, his manner changed completely. He grinned and waved. The woman he’d been talking to got up and waded out into the water.

  “This lake sure is lovely,” I said. “I think this is my favorite place here.”

  While I was saying this, I kept an eye on Adrian. He glanced at the woman he had been speaking with, a flicker of annoyance passing over his features, then he composed himself and walked over to us.

  “So what do you think?” he asked.

  I faked a smile. “I think I’d like a year’s membership.”

  “Great! Hey everyone, this is Barbara, and she’s our newest member.”

  Everyone turned to me. I felt like sinking through the ground, clothing myself in soil and grass.

  “Hi, Barbara!” several people said at once.

  People came over and shook my hand and introduced themselves. This was good, because I was getting to know potential suspects. This was bad, because I was suddenly touching naked people and they were touching me.

  I’m really not a prude, but this was too much.

  Zoe put her arm around my shoulder.

  “You’ve committed even though you’re nervous. That shows courage.”

  Oh, my little naked Zoe. If you only knew what things my courage has accomplished.

  And yet, why was doing this so much more disturbing than taking fire from a group of hostiles? Once in El Salvador, I’d been caught out in the open, paddling down a river in a canoe, when a group of rebels hidden in the jungle on the shore started firing at me. I was certainly more exposed then than I was now.

  But in a way I wasn’t. There’s a certain honesty to war. Those rebels were quite clear in their intentions, and my rocket-propelled grenade quickly informed them of my own intentions. Here, on the other hand, I couldn’t read the signals. I didn’t know what these people’s motivations were. Why would a middle-aged businessman leave work early to take off his clothes and romp around the countryside with people of all ages? Why would a married couple in their sixties do the same? And why, on God’s green Earth, would people bring their children to such a place?

  I believed Zoe’s utopian ideas to a point. People did seem comfortable with their bodies here, even people as old as me. This wasn’t a sex club. There was no shortage of those in the city. And this wasn’t about seeing naked children; otherwise no one would be here on a school day. This was something different, something more subtle. What, I wasn’t quite sure.

  But I got the feeling that if I figured that out, I might get closer to solving Clarissa’s murder.

  I left Sunnydale Nature Resort with a mixture of relief and confusion. My purse was stuffed with promotional material about the resort and the nudist movement in general. And it was a movement. There were several national organizations and a few hundred nudist resorts, campgrounds, and hotels across the country. I had pamphlets titled “The ABCs of Nudism,” “Nudism for all Ages,” and “Political Naturism: How We Can Bring Peace to the World Through a Clothing-Free Lifestyle.”

  The last one was my favorite. Imagine telling an Islamist terrorist that if he took his clothes off, he wouldn’t have to blow himself up! I guessed that was true to a point. A suicide vest counts as clothing, after all.

  My next step was to read all this stuff and do some more Internet research before I went to the memorial service. My membership got me onto an online forum for Sunnydale Nature Resort. That could prove useful.

  I had to stop by the supermarket before going back home to get some laundry detergent, which I had forgotten on my last shopping trip because of the excitement of seeing the murder, and then visit Pearl to make sure she didn’t need anything. That got me locked into a two-hour conversation about nothing in particular, and so when I finally got back home, the sun had set and my front porch was dark.

  As soon as I pulled into the driveway, parked my rental car behind my own car, and switched off the engine, I knew something was
wrong.

  Seven

  Over the years, I’d developed a gut instinct for danger. It had saved my life more times than I could count, and I’d learn to respect this feeling.

  So I ducked beneath the dashboard and pulled the pepper spray from my purse. My 9mm automatic was in my bedside table in the house, as dangerous as a feather duster for all the good it would do me right now.

  For half a minute, I stayed where I was, ears perked. I heard nothing. I heard the wind through the leaves, the annoying yap-yap dog next door barking incessantly, the engine of a distant car, the faint sound of a television in one of the neighboring houses, but nothing important. My mind spun into overdrive, trying to figure out what had jerked me into this hyperawareness.

  I got out the passenger side, just to be unpredictable, and kept low as I gripped my pepper spray and moved to the door.

  Then I noticed what had set the warning bells off. It was my welcome mat. The mat was poorly made. The Chinese factory had made the bottom too slick, and it kept slipping away from the door. Why anyone would put a slick bottom on a welcome mat is beyond me. Things just aren’t made as well as they used to be. I’d been meaning to replace it because it was a nuisance having to push it flush against the door again every time I stepped on it and dislodged it. I distinctly remembered it sliding beneath my feet as I left the house to go to the nudist camp. I remembered saying, “Barbara, if you don’t change this welcome mat it’s going to be the death of you.”

  Now it was dislodged again, lying at an angle with one corner a good two inches from the door. I had put it back in its place this afternoon. I’d bet my life on it.

  Someone had been here.

  I didn’t subscribe to the newspaper, and my mailbox was by the sidewalk. There was no reason for someone to come onto my porch.