Gone (24 page)

TWENTY-SEVEN

A
CCORDING TO MY MOTHER, WHO IS OFTEN WRONG, THE
first full moon in July is called the Thunder Moon by modern Seminoles, a name passed down from pyramid builders who lived on our islands during the time of the Maya.

“Summer squalls!” she explained as if the reason was obvious. “If you expect to enjoy your date tonight, better wear something waterproof—
not
a cocktail dress that shows off what most respectable women keep covered. Including their bullet scars!”

Three dots beneath a Band-Aid did not constitute scars in my experience, so I continued to sip my coffee on this early Friday morning and pretended to listen.

“Who’s the new suitor? That pretty lawyer woman who got you off the hook with the police, I bet. Shoot a man in his privates—even one from Ohio or Texas—most islanders would be on death row. I saw the way she looked at you the other night. Chumming up to me like it was my birthday, but it’s you she wants to pull the straps and ribbons off of!”

Impressed by Loretta’s witchy powers yet again, I raised my eyebrows, then repeated what I’d said several times in the last three weeks. “Self-defense, Mamma. Instead of arresting me, a sheriff’s captain even hinted around about offering me a job. So don’t worry your head about death row. Same with Olivia Seasons. Didn’t you think she was a sweet girl?”

I tried to keep my tone positive and airy. No need to provide the woman with ammunition by admitting it would be weeks before we were officially cleared—a worry that kept me awake nights—or that Olivia, after brightening enough to attend Chapel By The Sea and go shopping, had lapsed into a depression that required medical treatment.
“Guilt,”
the girl had admitted to me, even though it was her kidnappers—both still in critical condition at Tampa Burn Center—who had to worry about the electric chair.

Loretta had seen me pack the little black cocktail dress, though, and wouldn’t drop the subject. “You’re gunning for someone tonight,” she accused, delighted by the double meaning. “Must be Jake’s fishing client, Lawrence what’s-his-name. I told you he made a pass at your own aunt, which, of course, didn’t faze you. But did I mention he might have offered money? Your Aunt Hannah never traded her body for pay—far as I can
prove
,
anyway. That’s why I can’t help noticing my own daughter, who was raised in the church, is suddenly rich as Croesus—”

I let the woman talk, numb to her tricky method of asking how I could now afford full-time nursing, a hired van to take her to the Edison Mall once a week, plus a few improvements to the house and dock.

“It’s called a bonus, Loretta,” I interrupted finally. “It’s what a professional investigator gets paid when she does a good job. You can thank me later for having the porch painted, the wiring fixed, and hiring Ralph Woodring to dredge the dock. Next Sunday, you can thank Olivia, too.”

True, I’d had our dock basin deepened for my own benefit—and the benefit of the most beautiful boat I’d ever been granted the right to use, let alone live aboard. But the money was mine to spend as I saw fit, which included a nice bonus from Lawrence Seasons, plus an unexpected present from Olivia.

Her gift had come in the form of a manila envelope, which contained what remained of Olivia’s private checking account. Even before the Coast Guard helicopter had arrived, she’d thrust it into my hands, insisting I keep the envelope but open it later. To me, thirteen thousand cash is a lot of money, although my millionaire friend would dismiss it as “nothing.”

Soon, I would be asking myself why a wealthy heiress would kneel at a mini-fridge to retrieve an amount she considered insignificant. To make room for a device to detonate propane, was the obvious answer, even though police hadn’t thought beyond a cigarette. Last night, Olivia had been strong enough for me to finally ask another question investigators had not:

“What did Eugene see, Olivia, when he opened that door to get a beer?”

It felt good when the girl entrusted me—only me—with the truth, although I was still surprised by her careful answer.

“A candle will burn for more than twenty minutes in a sealed refrigerator. A friend of yours timed it.”

I was less surprised by the act itself. The Bible verse that had inspired Olivia wasn’t the 91st Psalm, as I’d recommended. She had memorized a tougher verse from the Book of Kings and even recited it as we drifted in the Gulf, the lights of the Coast Guard helicopter finally in sight:

“You have done more evil to your slaves than all who lived before . . . I, the LORD, will burn you up as one burns trash until it is gone . . . then you will be eaten by dogs, as those who die in the field will be eaten by vultures.”

Olivia and I were friends, good friends, and becoming closer, but it would be a while—after a mojito or two, perhaps—before I could allow myself the irreverence of suggesting that “dog” had been a misprint in the Holy Scripture.

As mother talked, she was lounging in her La-Z-Boy next to the fireplace where, even on a July morning, the owl andirons blinked at me as warmly as they had when I was a girl on winter nights. While I finished my coffee, she cranked the chair’s handle, got to her feet, and marched to the window as if to prove something.

“No clouds yet. What time’s your date? By six we’ll have wind, she’ll be pouring by seven—and don’t say I didn’t warn you!”

Loretta spoke in such a wistful way, I had to smile. “I hope it
does
rain!” I replied and meant it. The reason had to do with Marion Ford, who had invited me to look through his telescope after dinner. It was our third date in three weeks—if you counted an afternoon spent fly-casting for tarpon, another slogging through the mudflats. And I did even if he didn’t. So far, the biologist had been fun, attentive, easy to be with, respectful, and
very
proper, but that’s all.

I appreciate good manners in a man, but his passion for improper behavior had become a more interesting quality, which I could now admit. After three formal dates—
sort of
—and several phone conversations—brief as they were—we’d both proven our respectability. Now I was willing to risk Marion Ford’s transgressions—
if
he could be maneuvered into trying.

The biologist had a way about him. His low voice vibrated through my rib cage when he spoke. The spark of our elbows bumping hummed in my abdomen for hours. Quiet as he was, Marion Ford had something boiling inside him. Rage or passion, darkness or light, I had yet to find out, but my bawdy aunt’s journal had hinted at both, as I’d discovered by rereading it the night before. I’d also learned from her writing that the biologist and his strange hippie friend both had a fondness for storms. Maybe a good soaking was just the thing to loosen Marion Ford’s behavior.

That’s why Loretta had failed to dampen my spirits on this summer morning by threatening my evening with a Thunder Moon that brought rain.

Instead of stumping her, though, my optimism about bad weather only provided another opening to show off the powers God has granted Loretta after damaging her brain with a stroke.

“I bet you do hope it storms!” she cackled. “A real frog choker. One of those Gulfstream thunder-boomers that causes men to puff up, throw the covers back, and a single woman to jump. A skimpy black dress and lightning. I’d call that an unfair way to trap an innocent man”—my mother turned to smile at me—“if I didn’t know what a good girl my sweet Hannah is.”

Because the last part sounded more like the mother who’d raised me, I had to clear my throat while I checked my watch. It was morning twilight, birds outside twittering, impatient for the heat of sunrise. I had a full day ahead of me. While Loretta continued to ramble, I stood and took my cup to the kitchen.

Lawrence Seasons and Martha Calder-Shaun were expecting me by ten a.m. to sign insurance papers and to discuss an LLC for my investigation agency—a business I’d agreed to continue as long as I could still book charters on the side. Since having a private talk with Martha, I no longer felt uneasy around the woman. In fact, I liked her better. I had been right to suspect she knew more about
Sybarite
than she’d admitted but wrong about her knowing—or warning—Ricky Meeks.

“Sure, I considered doing the Key West cruise,” Martha had explained. “Sounds like it could be a lot of fun—with the right people. But I had nothing to add
factually
when you brought it up. You disapprove on some kind of moral grounds? That’s your problem, kiddo, not mine. But it’s not illegal—and why risk pissing off Larry?”

The woman was plainspoken, a trait I admire, which is why I had offered to give her fly-casting lessons during her next visit to the islands. In return, she’d agreed to give up on seducing me.

“It would’ve turned into a brawl, anyway,” the attorney had smiled, and then added something rude about both of us battling to be on top.

Something I still felt uneasy about, though, was posing in Darren’s studio. Around one p.m., I would be having lunch with the photographer and Nathan to talk about scheduling what Darren referred to as “your first sitting.” Whether there would be a second sitting, let alone a first, was something I didn’t mind discussing if it made Nathan happy. But there was too much happening in my life to make a decision today.

Plus, I didn’t have time to pose. At five, I was supposed to be at Elka Whitney’s house for drinks and a movie. An old one that the breakfast cereal heiress had selected after one of our nightly phone sessions:
Double Indemnity
, starring Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck. Elka had been uncommonly sweet to me after hearing some of what had happened on Drake Key, so we had shared movies and conversation often during the last three weeks. That would give me just enough time to shower and change before meeting the biologist at his lab. Sunset and moonrise are simultaneous, as they always are on a full moon, so Marion had told me to be at Dinkin’s Bay, where his lab was located, around eight.

While I moved around the old house, collecting my things, Loretta remained at the window, a new subject on her mind.

“They still talk to me at night, you know. Mothers crying, a famous Indian king bawling for revenge. Who else they got to comfort them, now you’ve gotten rich?” She was referring to the centuries of people her new neighbors had displaced with a septic tank, so I listened more closely. After all, a smart man—strange as he was—had taken my mother’s claims seriously. As a daughter, it would have been rude not to show similar respect.

“Have you taken a look at the Mausoleum lately?” Loretta asked me.

I stopped what I was doing and glanced over. Locals usually referred to the concrete structure as “the Walmart” or “The Bunker,” as if Nazis had built the thing.

“Tomlinson called it that,” I remembered, then walked to join my mother at the window. “He still stops by?”

“Tomlin-who? Oh . . . you mean
Tommy
. Tommy Scarecrow, that’s his Indian name. Him, me, and Billie Egret, we’ve done three ceremonies to purify what those stupid fools have done. Build a big fire in the ceremonial plaza, chant, and smoke the pipe. Billie, he’s teaching me the Green Corn Dance. In return, I tell him secrets the ancient king says in my ear at night. The king gives me orders sometimes.”

Smoke?
The news hit me harder than her claim of conversing with dead royalty. My mother had never smoked in her life. Could the contents of that ceremonial pipe explain why she had been so spunky of late? According to some things I’d heard about Tomlinson, it was possible. Before I could ask, though, she made enough room at the window for me to view the structure that had decapitated three thousand years of Florida history. The concrete walls had been too dark to see when I’d arrived that morning. Now I could.

“My Lord,” I moaned. “Not again, Loretta!” Instead of Day-Glo orange, she had used a brush and the same color of citrus yellow I had paid painters to use on the porch.

“You try refusing a dead Indian king!” the woman pouted, but then took the offensive. “Besides, Scarecrow held the ladder for me, so it was safe. Tommy’s got backbone! He’s the one you should be wearing skimpy dresses to impress. That man’s as smart and sweet as they come—plus he’s got ways of making a woman smile.”

My bawdy Aunt Hannah had felt the same about Tomlinson, from what I’d read in her journal. But I’d also read interesting details about my date, Dr. Ford, that made me want to reply something tart.

So I did. But not before hugging my mother close and steering her to the porch to get a clear view of the dock. “I’ve stopped settling for second best,” I explained, meaning Tomlinson, then nodded toward the water. “Why would I?”

Moored to the dock, the hull of my new home glowed midnight blue in the fresh sunlight, floating weightless as an orchid, as free as a swan.