Free Gaudi Afternoon by Barbara Wilson Page B

you had the feeling that was her idea.
    â€œWhat happened, honey?” Hamilton asked her. He crouched down to her level and put his brown hands on her small shoulders.
    She sighed and scuffed her foot in the dry earth. “Frankie came up and told me that if I’d go with her I’d get some ice cream. She said we’d go off and get ice cream for everybody and come back and surprise Ben and April. I said okay and we started to go off but then Ben saw us and started screaming, so Frankie took off.”
    Delilah looked at Ben. “How come Frankie is here in Spain? Did he come to visit us?”
    â€œYes, Delilah. He came to visit us,” Ben said. She looked exhausted and worried.
    â€œWhy did you scream at him?”
    â€œUhmm, I guess because it looked like you might be going away without telling us where you were going. We didn’t mean to scare him.”
    â€œMaybe she just wanted to see Delilah,” suggested Hamilton. “After all, she’s her father.”
    â€œHe sees Delilah regularly in San Francisco. There’s no reason he had to follow us on our vacation.”
    I was having some trouble following the pronouns. To Hamilton Frankie was a she, to Ben a he; Delilah used both depending on who she was talking to.
    â€œAnd just where do you fit in?” April asked me suddenly. She was as intensely attractive as I remembered her. Her eyelids were dusky violet and her lips a natural rose. Crystal pendants and embroidered cloth bags hung around her neck and down into the brown cleavage visible under her silky blue shirt, and she gave off a scent that conjured up rich dark Biblical words like frankincense and myrrh.
    â€œWell, I got a call from Frankie in London where I live saying she… he knew a friend of mine and wanted my help finding her… his ex-husband, Ben, and she’d pay my expenses and a fee for finding him… her. Frankie didn’t say anything about a child. Of course he… she didn’t say she was transsexual.” I gave up on the pronouns. “Frankie said Frankie was married, had been married to a gay man named Ben, who was very wealthy and had just left town. The family needed some papers signed. That’s why Frankie was looking for Ben. I thought Hamilton was Ben actually. You have to admit, Ben’s not exactly a common name for a woman.”
    â€œShort for Bernadette,” she sighed.
    â€œWell, all I can say is I’m sorry if I’ve made more problems for you.”
    â€œYou’ve lost your Irish accent,” Hamilton noted with a frown.
    â€œSo you were working for Frankie, and he paid you to find me,” said Ben.
    â€œFrankie paid part of my fee,” I allowed, with the sinking feeling that I was probably never going to see the rest of it. “How was I to know? It sounded plausible, at least at the beginning. I never expected anything like this. I never heard of anything like this. Have I been away from the States too long?”
    April said, “Hamilton, maybe Delilah would like to take a walk.”
    â€œYes!” said Delilah.
    They set off back down the slope of Max Ernst pillars, Hamilton with a slight avuncular stoop that suggested he was used to children, Delilah skipping in her dress.
    I turned to Ben. Up close this woman was even more brawnily daunting. Her biceps bulged, her deltoids distended, her pectorals protruded underneath her sleeveless tee-shirt and vest. I supposed that April, as a masseuse, was attracted to such a display of well-defined musculature. It must be of great physiological interest.
    â€œI don’t know what to do,” she said. “It can’t go on like this. He’s determined to kidnap Delilah, I know he is.”
    The three of us sat down on a stone bench, and Ben took April’s round arm into her lap. She seemed unable to keep her hands off her girlfriend.
    â€œDo you know any of the background of all this?” Ben asked. “Did