Prudence Couldn't Swim Read Online Free Page B

be my debut in mucky-muckville. Up to then the only friend I’d made in the neighborhood was Toodles, that cat from next door. Sometimes I left her an open can of tuna on the back porch.
    The setting was a hotel garden in the exclusive village of Montclair, just a few miles down the road from us. Robson went the whole nine yards. He hired a sixties band, put up marquees, and covered dozens of linen tablecloths with vegetable dips, bowls of fresh fruit salad, and meatless pizzas. He added a few bottles of appropriate red wine, since, as he told me, “medical research has proven its efficacy in reducing cardiac disorders.”
    Prudence wore a strapless white satin gown with a slit up the leg just high enough to reveal the lace of her purple panties. It all cost me $923. She added purple stiletto heels and matching eye shadow for emphasis. While she pranced off with a string of admirers to do the twist, jerk, and mashed potatoes, frustrated men regaled me with tales of their moribund sex life. In the latter stages of the evening, a seriously lit-up Dr. Robson, toasted my “exquisite taste in female partners.”
    â€œUnlike most of us,” he said gazing at my nether regions, “your sex life does not appear to be material for historians only.”
    I did nothing to dispel his assumptions about my relationship with Prudence. I let him go on assuming the tool of my marital trade resembled a gigantic gaffing hook.
    I rode the good doctor’s waves of praise, culminating my performance with a slow dance to the band’s cover of “Michelle.” My hand rested just a millimeter above the buttocks of “my belle” until the final note. While Robson and his friends fantasized, I went home to platonic small talk and futile hopes our relationship would change. I loved Prudence or Deirdre or whoever she was in my own little private way.
    Despite my feelings I didn’t know much about her at all. One night she arrived home very late after a three-day absence. She drunkenly implied that she wasn’t British at all, that she was an “African Princess” named “Tarisai.”
    â€œThat means ‘look’ in my language,” she said. “I’m Princess Tarisai.”
    Then she told me her last name, that long one that began with “m.” I asked her to repeat it three times but I still couldn’t pronounce it.
    The next morning she denied it all, again telling tales of growing up in the south of London.
    â€œMy name is Deirdre Lamming,” she said. “Mum always called me Prudence. She came from Jamaica, said that was the name of an auntie who looked like me.”
    Then Prudence told me she had a conviction for possession of marijuana in Britain, that’s why she needed a passport in another name.
    â€œThe Americans don’t let in drug users,” she said.
    When I asked her if she was a drug user she laughed and said she got caught holding a bag of weed for a friend. I never knew what to believe. As a con woman, she was flawless, except for that one mistake that landed her in my pool.

CHAPTER 3
    T ry as I might, I couldn’t find a key to Prudence’s room anywhere. Red Eye came over the next morning with his lock picks. After thirty seconds the doorknob turned.
    â€œEasy as opening a Top Ramen,” he said.
    There wasn’t much to see inside the room. The bed was made, covered with a bright blue comforter. Three matching blue pillows were lined up precisely against the wall at the head of the bed.
    The closet held just two pairs of jeans and a brown skirt. Prudence had a vast wardrobe. I had the receipts to prove it. Did she have another husband somewhere? I ruffled through the nightstand: a bottle of lotion, some cheap perfume, and a scrap of paper with the words, “Mandisa, Tuesday at 2.” The dot over the
i
was a huge circle. Strange. Prudence once mentioned a friend named “Mandy,” said she was a night