Firefly Island (6 page)

I forced a smile, told the first lie of my marriage. “Of course not.” I tried to picture getting into Daniel's Jeep, heading for Texas with the U-Haul filled with wedding gifts, as well as Grandma Louisa's Fostoria crystal and other things we didn't want to send in the shipping container. The beating in my chest grew wilder, more erratic. The slithering coil of fear squeezed tighter.

“Guess we'd better get packin' then, Kemosabe,” he said, with the gleeful abandon of a twelve-year-old kid on his way to Boy Scout camp.

“Guess we'd better,” I agreed. We'd said our good-byes last night, on the theory that leaving the house before the whole crew woke up would make things easier.

Within thirty minutes, we were dressed, the suitcases were packed, and we were ready to scoop Nick out of the bed, spirit him into the Jeep, and shout, “Wagons ho!”

Unfortunately, the Great Chief had set her alarm clock for a very early hour and mustered from their beds every member of the tribe. A conglomeration of sisters, in-laws, nieces, and nephews were waiting, bleary-eyed after last night's celebration. Mom had made quiche.

She waved off Daniel's assertion that Nick wouldn't be fit company if we woke him for breakfast. “Oh, he'll be fine,” she insisted, with the casual hand swipe that typically accompanied statements like,
It didn't cost that much,
or
I know you're in the middle of your work day, but guess what happened at bridge club this morning . . .

When my mother had her mind set on something, there was no fighting it.

We roused Nick. He was cranky. Conversation around the breakfast table was drowsy and bland. My eldest sister's husband, a columnist for an Annapolis newspaper, filled me in on the sordid history of Jack West. “You know that his second wife and her ten-year-old son vanished under mysterious circumstances, right? The Mexican authorities never solved the disappearance. Two people, just gone without a trace from the family vacation home in Bocas Del Gallo. Poof.” Illustrating with his hands, he leaned close, his eyes meeting mine meaningfully as my mother and sisters chatted about variations of quiche. Daniel was busy trying to placate Nick with fresh fruit in strawberry sauce.

“They didn't exonerate Jack West, either,” my brother-in-law continued. “West skipped the country before charges could be pressed. No sign of the wife and the ten-year-old stepson, even after twenty years. No bodies. Didn't turn up somewhere else in the world living under assumed identities. Nothing. They just vanished off the face of the earth.” He glanced surreptitiously at my eldest sister, Carol, from whom he was undoubtedly keeping this information. This wasn't
the sort of bombshell Carol would handle well. “Keep your eyes peeled down there.”

I blinked, swallowing a lump that had nothing to do with the horse pill prescribed by the dentist. “Geez, Corbin.”

“I don't mean to kill the wedding bliss,” he whispered out the side of his mouth. “I just thought you ought to know, that's all. It was a big story, back when it happened. From time to time, some news show or other picks it up again—he
is
Jack West, after all. He's a curiosity. But, hey, it's not like he's been in any
other
trouble. Well, there was that prosecution for the financial thing, but they couldn't get the charges to stick.”

“Oh, that makes me feel a whole lot better. Thanks.” I set down my fork, having suddenly lost my appetite. At the end of the table, Daniel caught my gaze, shrugging toward the door. Over the past weeks, he'd read every story he could find about Jack West. He undoubtedly knew about the vanished second wife and stepson. It bothered me that he hadn't told me about it.

“It's . . . interesting,” Corbin whispered, scooping up a last forkful of quiche. “Let me know if you hear or see anything strange, that's all.” My favorite brother-in-law was always looking for the story that would reel in a Pulitzer and a job at the
New York Times
, the holy grail of reporting, in his view. “I'm sure you don't have anything to worry about—in terms of personal safety, I mean. The man undoubtedly has plenty of people working for him on that ranch. None of
them
have disappeared, I guess.”

“Oh, that's reassuring.” Nothing about this move felt right. It was tying my insides in slipknots.

Corbin patted my hand. “I shouldn't have said anything. . . .” The sentence seemed to trail off unfinished, the words definitely not meaning what they said. “Forget that I
brought it up. I was just . . . pawing into the story a little the other day. I didn't come up with anything.”

“Are you going to keep pawing into it?”

He shrugged, falsely casual, then he cut a nervous glance toward Carol, who was giving us the fish eye. “Oh . . . I'll have an ear to the ground. Listen, don't tell Carol about any of this. She's already upset that you're moving away, and you know how your sister can be.”

An uneasy prickle skimmed the back of my neck. “You'll let me know if you find out anything though, right?”

“Sure, sure,” Corbin agreed, suddenly anxious to disengage.

Breakfast was soon over. When we rose from the table, one of my teenage nieces became emotional because I wouldn't be there to see her in her prom dress. My mother started crying, too. Then Carol started crying, Trudy broke down, and my two middle sisters, Merryl and Missy, joined the weep fest. Brothers-in-law scattered in all directions, anxious to exit the pool of female emotion. Daniel's parents, having been phoned by my mother, showed up for one last good-bye. Nick suddenly decided that he wanted to go home with them. Daniel's mother clutched him so tightly, I thought she might break him. Daniel's father, a big man with an even bigger heart, got watery-eyed.

Nick threw a fit when he saw the Jeep, and strapping him into his car seat was like trying to put a spider in a straitjacket. I'd never seen that side of Nick before. I was used to handing all out-of-control kids to their mothers when things got difficult. I had no idea what to do, except stand there looking like a helpless idiot while Daniel engaged in the wrestling match and tried not to look aggravated in front of everyone.

We drove away with Nick screaming, kicking, wailing, and reaching toward the window as if he were being hauled
off by kidnappers. Daniel gripped the steering wheel with both hands, his muscles stiff, his jaw tense, the playful smile nowhere to be seen.

Ten minutes out my parents' door, we hit rush-hour traffic. Forty-five minutes passed as we inched our way toward the open road. By the time we made it, Nick had cried himself into oblivion. I quickly joined him in sleep, curling my body toward the window and trying to push Corbin's warnings from my mind.

To keep your marriage brimming,
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever you're wrong, admit it;
Whenever you're right, shut up.

—
Ogden Nash
(Left by Herb and Charlie Hampton, telling the young folks how it's done)

O
n day three of the U-Haul honeymoon, we crossed Louisiana and passed into Texas. Texas was experiencing a May heat wave, and the air-conditioner on the Jeep was all but out of commission—not what you want to discover when you've been traveling through Arkansas with a carsick kid in the back. Daniel and I had our very first marital head-butting session over whether to stop at a car wash and shampoo the smell out of the backseat. Daniel didn't want to discuss anything that had to do with stopping. We were already behind schedule, and there was no way we would make it to our new home in the early afternoon, as planned.

Tucked safely in the console were Jack West's instructions as to how we were to find the place. Eerily, we hadn't heard from the man in over a week. I hadn't looked at the sheet of notebook paper where Daniel had written the directions. I was afraid to. I doubted there was anything on there like,
Turn just past the shopping mall
or
Go one block beyond Starbucks.

Aside from that, there was the whole question of Daniel's
new boss being an accused murderer, which I hadn't even brought up, because things in the car were tense enough already.

In a map-dot town in East Texas, we stopped for gas at an old station with a rusty Gulf Oil sign swinging gently in the breeze. The station owner, Baby Ray, promised he could fix the Jeep's lackluster air-conditioning system right up. “Hoo-eee! You're gonna need it,” he added. “It's hotter than who'd-a-thought-it down there already. My cousin has his headquarters over that way—leads game hunts and fishin' trips all over the state of Texas, though. Took a fella down the Trinity River last week, and the fella got a fourteen-foot alligator. Now that's some good eats, and . . .”

Baby Ray was my first refresher course in the taffy-like consistency of Southern language. It reminded me of childhood visits to Grandma Louisa's house in Charleston, where summers were sticky-hot and the livin' was slow and easy. Words rolled off Baby Ray's tongue laced with colorful metaphors like, “Don't that just put the socks on the rooster?
”
and “When we fried that thang up, I was full as a tick on a back porch hound, I'll tell you what . . .” As he talked, Freon continued pumping into the Jeep.

Meanwhile, I was thinking,
Somewhere around here, alligator-hunting people capture giant alligators, man-eating ones. We'll be living on the shores of Moses Lake. Surely there are no alligators in Moses Lake. Right?

When it was time to go, Nick didn't really want to leave Baby Ray behind. Ray patted him on the head and gave him a lollypop with greasy fingerprints on the wrapper. After we got in the car, I opened it with a wet wipe and swiped off the stick.

Daniel rolled his eyes. “He's a
boy
.” As if somehow that made the consumption of toxic petroleum products okay. He
smirked playfully at me and flipped on the air-conditioner as we rolled out of town, leaving Baby Ray behind.

Thirty miles down the road the Jeep's compressor froze up, promptly choking the life out of the engine. We spent the afternoon sweltering with the windows open, while searching for another mechanic who might be working on Sunday.

Daniel was mad, then irate. I'd never seen him like that—red-faced, tight-lipped, a little muscle twitching in his jawline. He looked violent and dangerous. Nowhere in my basket of preconceived marital worries had I imagined that Daniel, my Daniel, might have a side like this hidden beneath the surface. Before long, even Nick was upset. I climbed into the backseat and helped him start a book on CD. Daniel complained about the noise. I clenched my teeth, wet-mopped my skin and Nick's with a rag, and tried to keep from throwing any more tinder on the situation.

By the time we finally found a mechanic and had the Freon level properly recalibrated, my stomach was roiling and the sun was slowly sinking on the horizon. All three of us were exhausted, smelly, and teetering near the breaking point.

“Maybe we should just grab a hotel room, have a nice dinner, and go the rest of the way tomorrow,” I suggested as we drove along a narrow two-lane, snaking our way through hills thick with live oak and cedar. The idea of arriving at our future home at night scared me. If there
were
monster gators, I didn't want them sneaking up on me in the dark.

Aside from that, I didn't even have the faintest mental picture of the place. Daniel had asked Jack West for information about the house, and Jack's only response had been,
It's just yer regular ranch house
.

Ever since then, I'd had an unsteady feeling about what “just your regular ranch house” might be like. On Google all I'd found was a fuzzy satellite image—massive lake, miles of
undisturbed country, a tiny cluster of buildings shrouded by old-growth trees. A mystery, like everything else about Jack West and this job.

“We need to push on and get there tonight,” Daniel insisted. “Besides, we shouldn't blow money on another hotel. We've already spent too much, thanks to Baby Ray.” He sneered when he said it, the twitch in his jaw returning.

I sighed, admonishing myself to let it go. “Want me to drive for a while?” I was hoping Daniel would nod off, then wake up in a better mood. This don't-look-at-me-don't-talk-to-me persona was unsettling. It reminded me that, like the mail-order brides in days of old, I was married to a man I barely knew, and headed into the mysterious frontier hundreds of miles from all that was familiar.

We made a quick stop, and I took over the pilot's chair. Daniel was asleep in less than ten minutes. Nick eventually crashed, too, and I sank into the quiet of my own thoughts, strumming a tune of self-assurances to calm my ruffled spirit. I was a DC girl. If I could survive in the city, I could survive here. I wasn't some fragile little hothouse flower. I'd lived in six foreign capitols. I was . . .

Something large and shadowy bounded across the ditch and walked into the road. I jerked my attention back to the driving. A dog . . . no . . . deer. A deer. Adrenaline zinged through my body, hot like a lightning strike. I gripped the steering wheel, hit the brakes, felt the Jeep begin to slide, the trailer protesting the sudden change in momentum, skidding side to side.

Daniel bolted upright, blinking in confusion. Nick's car seat buckled forward against the seat belt, then snapped back with a pop. Daniel grabbed the dashboard. “What in the . . .”

Possible endings raced through my mind, rapid fire—
overturning and rolling into the ditch, flying end-over-end, the trailer crashing through the tailgate, hitting Nick, the Jeep flying headlong into a tree. My parents getting the news . . .

And then, just as quickly as it had sauntered into the road, the deer calmly moved to the opposite lane, leaving room for our vehicle to slide past before finally coming to a rest, the trailer cocked sideways across the center line.

We sat in momentary silence, not a vehicle or a street lamp in sight, stressed pieces of metal in the car's undercarriage letting out soft crackles and pings, as if it were catching a breath along with the rest of us.

“Is a doe-deer like at Grampy's house, Tante M!” Nick twisted to see out the side window. “And a baby one, too!” He pointed as a smaller deer scampered across the pavement to join the first one, unaware that tragedy had been only an instant away.

“Man, that was lucky.” Daniel blew out a puff of tension, his hand resting on my arm, where the muscles were still trembling.

“Uh-huh.” In the fringes of the headlights, I noticed a small white cross in the ditch—the kind that people plant at the site of a tragic accident. It simply read,
Blessing
, with no further explanation. Suddenly that seemed to fit the moment. Not a random stroke of good fortune, a blessing. A reminder that time was too precious to be spent fighting.

Daniel squeezed my hand and kissed me on the cheek, as if he were thinking the same thing. “I'll take over the driving, if you want. Moses Lake can't be much farther.”

I didn't offer any argument. I'd seen my life flash before my eyes in the last three minutes. My fiercely independent streak was ready to curl up in a corner and lick its trembling paws. I was happy to go back to being a co-pilot.

We switched places, Daniel limping stiffly around the back
of the car and me dragging my tired body around the front, and we were off again.

“Last leg,” Daniel promised as the trailer righted itself behind us. “I'm ready to get there and get out of this car.” He laid his hand on the console, palm up, and I slid my fingers into his, then leaned back against the headrest.

“That sounds so good,” I murmured. “When we do get there, I vote we just grab the air mattress, Nick's sleeping bag, and the sack with the pillows and blankets. Everything else can wait until morning.”

Daniel nodded. “Yeah.”

We drove along in silence for a few miles, until finally Daniel lifted my hand and brought it to his lips, kissing my fingers. “I love a woman who can handle a U-Haul, by the way.”

My sticky, road-weary skin came alive with goose bumps, and the apprehension that had been haunting me drifted out the window. “Now you're trying to flatter me.”

“Is it working?”

“Maybe.” I smiled at him, filled with the returning warmth of adoration.

“My guess—in a half hour or less, we'll be pulling into our driveway,” he offered.

The words
our driveway
were just settling over me, a warm and sweet-smelling bubble bath, when Daniel hit the brakes, snapping me forward against my seat belt.

“There's another one.” Leaning close to the window, he peered into the night, pointing.

I turned just in time to see a deer amble into the road and stop.

“Is a doe-deer! 'Nudder one!” Nick announced gleefully.

“You've got to be kidding.” I felt my mouth hanging slack. “You think it's the same deer? Maybe it's, like, messing with us.”

“Can't be.” Daniel shifted his hands on the steering wheel,
and we proceeded slowly forward on what would forever be known as
The Night of the Kamikazi Deer
.

Sometime later, after having passed through one small town and watched every four-legged wild animal in the county cross the road, we topped a hill and spotted what had to be Moses Lake. Around us, the moon cast a faint glow against waxy live oak leaves as we wound into the valley. Some sort of massive bird swooped across the car, then sailed over the dark expanse of water, following the moon's glistening path toward the horizon.

“Wow,” I whispered, watching branches play a hide-and-seek game with stars and moon and water. Lights glittered on the lake's surface here and there, seeming to float free in the blackness—boats, I supposed. Houseboats, perhaps. I hadn't thought of the lake as being big enough that people might live on it, but Daniel had mentioned that the ranch included miles of lakeshore. I guessed it made sense that the lake would be huge.

An unexpected tingle rushed over my skin as we descended a small hill into the utter darkness, Moses Lake dipping out of sight. An aura of romance and danger simmered through me like a trail of smoke, scented with an intriguing fragrance I couldn't quite place. For the past month, Kaylyn had been sending me bits of mystery and lore pertaining to Moses Lake, and now all of it was churning in my head. I felt the history of the place slipping over me, drawing me into a mix of past and present. Comanche hunting ground, pioneer settlement, site of a secret gathering of Civil War dissenters determined to join forces with the Mexican army and cause the South to rise again. Location of a mysterious frontier settlement where all the residents had vanished one winter. To this day, no one knew what had happened to them.

Though the river had been here since time immemorial,
the lake was man-made, a product of the Corps of Engineers during the building boom of the fifties. The water's surface hid what was left of towns, farms, homes, and an old Spanish mission run by monks who came to the area with dreams of enlightenment, but eventually abandoned their vision.

“This is it. This is our road,” Daniel said, turning off the highway. Gravel rumbled beneath the Jeep's tires, and when we'd bumped and bounced our way to the top of the next hill, I could no longer see lights in the distance. Except for the glow of the moon, everything around us was impossibly black, the thickly wooded hills filled with shadows that shifted as we drove. Tiny pinpoints of eyes glittered in the fringes of the headlights here and there. I didn't want to think about what those might belong to.

Were Baby Ray's giant alligators out there somewhere, just waiting for a chance to avenge the cousin who'd been hunted down and fried up into gator nuggets?