Hell's Bay (6 page)

Minutes later she was heading across the light chop toward our vessel. Standing next to Rusty was a tall man with wide shoulders. From a couple of phone conversations with the gentleman, Rusty had learned only that Milligan and his daughter lived upstate on the Gulf coast, that he was an avid fisherman and had found Rusty's houseboat venture on an Internet search. His personal check in the full amount arrived a few weeks back and cleared just fine, and his reservation was set.

The other couple who would share the houseboat for the week were arriving later in the day. Shortly after Milligan booked his trip, Rusty got a call from Annette Gordon, a writer for
Out There
magazine doing a feature on luxury adventure vacations. She was in her late twenties, a New Yorker, and was bringing along one of the magazine's staff photographers, a guy named Holland Green. Rusty was thrilled. Great free promotion. Annette hadn't even asked for a reduced rate. She'd done travel writing all over the world: New Zealand, South America, the Seychelles, Tibet. Rusty thought she sounded low-maintenance, the kind who made it her goal to slip into the background.

As Rusty cut the wheel to dodge a final sandbar, Milligan raised a hand in greeting and I waved back. He looked to be in his middle sixties and just past six feet tall, and even from thirty yards away I could tell he had the shoulders-back, flat-belly physique of a man of high confidence. He wore a red golf shirt that showed off his broad shoulders and the kind of swollen arms I've always associated with one who dug a great many postholes as a boy, strength he'd earned through backbreaking labor in the sun.

Rusty slowed and the boat dropped off plane. Perched on the padded ice chest in front of the console was Mona Milligan. She wore a white fleecy sweatshirt and black jeans, and her auburn hair ran wild in the breeze, tossing like a warning flag as the boat muttered toward the stern platform where I waited.

I tied off the bow line, then leaned over the loading platform to help our first two guests aboard.

Mona looked at my outstretched hand, then met my eyes and held them as she took hold of a bow rail and hauled her-self aboard without assistance. Milligan shrugged an apology to me then held out a big paw. I heaved him up, and while he still held my hand, he gave it a firm how-do-you-do.

“Good to meet you, Daniel. Or do they call you Oliver?”

As his words registered, a cold weight shifted within my chest. The man looked at me steadily with a slender smile as though we shared a delicious secret. If I'd followed my instincts, I would' ve shoved him backward into the choppy sea and hauled the anchor and set out toward the horizon, leaving him to swim the half mile back to shore.

“What's wrong, Daniel? You look ill.” A goading tone.

The blood tightened in my veins.

“My name is Thorn,” I said.

“Whatever you like,” he said, holding to his smile.

As Rusty handed Milligan his duffel and the rest of his gear, I gave him a careful look. Plainly he was an outdoors-man from the melanoma-be-damned school, for the flesh around the open collar of his shirt was as charred as a steak forgotten on the grill. His mustache was barbered so primly it gave his rugged features an air that was faintly unsavory. An echo of Clark Gable as a riverboat gambler. A man who could damn well deal from the bottom of the deck if the spirit moved him.

Rusty gave me a chastising glance and pushed past me to show the Milligans to their staterooms. My bad manners were already disheartening her. I stood on the rear deck and took careful breaths while I stared out to sea.

It was true my given name was Daniel Oliver. Son of Elizabeth and Quentin Thorn. Born in a hospital in Home-stead, Florida, rushed home by my parents in the first twenty-four hours of my life so by local custom I would be officially pronounced a Conch—a title bestowed on those lucky enough to be born in the Florida Keys.

A Conch I was, a Conch I remained. Hard shell, gristly meat, trundling across the floors of silent seas.

Though everyone knew me as Thorn, more than once in private I'd spoken the words
Daniel Oliver
aloud to see how they sounded on my lips. It was a name with some special meaning to my parents, but it was a cipher I'd not broken. I would never know its origin, for my father and mother died in a car crash on the way home from the hospital, a collision that through some supernatural physics their baby boy survived.

The two gentle spirits who adopted me, Kate Truman and Doctor Bill, never spoke of my parents. Trying to spare me, I assumed, from emotional pain. In my teens I spent hours in the courthouse digging through public records without luck. Years later I got my friend Sugarman to run a computer search on their names, but he came up empty. And none of the locals I questioned could provide anything about who Quentin and Elizabeth Thorn were or where they came from. So finally I was forced to invent.

The history I crafted was that my parents, like so many refugees to the Keys, arrived in the islands to escape their pasts and reinvent themselves. I imagined that at the moment of their deaths they were at the awkward juncture when they'd succeeded in wiping out their previous identities but had not yet established new ones.

Beyond that simple fiction I would not let my imagination go. If they had wanted to disappear, then who was I to ex-hume their remains?

I accepted the idea that my parents, their backgrounds, the nature of their love affair, their private dreams, and their natural talents would remain a mystery. Though from time to time when I was praised for my accuracy in casting or disparaged for being such a dogged loner or admired for my surgical precision in fashioning wisps of fur, feather, bead, and thread into bonefish flies, I attributed those gifts as part of my birthright from two people I never knew. If I had sometimes been guilty of excessive introspection, my only defense was that by looking inward I was hoping to catch some glimpse of those two ghosts who were harbored in my veins.

Behind me Mona wandered into the galley and sunk down on one of the couches that faced the satellite TV. The television was Rusty's idea. It seemed bizarre to me that anyone would go to such expense and trouble to trek into one of the last wild places on the globe, then sit around and watch twenty-four-hour cable news instead of climbing up onto the houseboat roof to listen to the hushed wing beats of thousands of egrets and herons and wood storks heading back to their roosts and watch the sun melt into the watery horizon leaving behind eddies of reds, blues, and purples too gaudy for words.

I made my case, but Rusty overruled me on the TV as she had on every issue. “People who will pay a thousand dollars a day to catch tarpon on a fly in some hideaway lake no-body's ever fished before aren't like you and me, Thorn. End of the day they want their extradry martini and stock-market update.”

When Milligan finished stowing his gear in his forward stateroom, he returned to the galley. As he passed Mona, he patted his sullen daughter on the shoulder, then came over to me still wearing that knowing grin. He moved with the loose-limbed swagger of a barroom tough.

Rusty had climbed up to the wheelhouse to make a cell-phone call to Annette Gordon to see if her flight had landed yet at Miami International. On the couch Mona pressed her chin to her chest, hunched deep in her funk. Since arriving she had not spoken a word. Nor had she brushed the snarls from her red hair.

In an earthy, unfussy way, she was quite pretty, though she had the look of a woman who'd been told that far too often and no longer considered it a compliment. Her eyes were opaque blue. A sharp upward jag in her right eyebrow gave her the look of a steadfast skeptic—a woman not easily conned. The eyebrows were thick and a darker shade of red than her hair. Scattered across her forehead was a constellation of tiny freckles. Otherwise her skin was flawlessly sun-bronzed, a healthy flush in her cheeks. She wore no watch, no rings or any other jewelry, and her clothes were so lumpy and rumpled she might have slept in them for the last week.

Her expression was fixed in the same harsh squint as it had been when she climbed aboard, an odd mix—part glare, part wince—as though Mona Milligan was hovering indecisively between defiance and desperation.

Milligan slid into my line of sight, his eyes crafty, his head cocked a few degrees to the side like a man sizing up a sparring partner.

“Surely you must be intrigued about how I know your name?”

“I'm trying to contain myself,” I said.

“So that's your act, huh, the cool dude?”

“I don't have an act.”

Milligan reached into his back pocket, withdrew a photograph, and with a small flourish he lay it on the bar next to me. Then he stepped back and waited with that smile deepening.

I took a look, glanced back at him, then took a longer look.

It was a faded black-and-white snapshot of two teenagers posing in front of an ancient Ford coupe. Behind the car was a section of the veranda of a dignified Victorian home. A handsome older couple sat on the porch swing, engaged in conversation and seemingly oblivious to the photographic record that would include them. There were big oaks shaggy with moss, and runty cabbage palms growing at the edges of the porch. Bougainvillea vines snaked along the eaves and framed the porch in wispy blooms. The place had the look of a plantation constructed far from any village or town, and the people were sun-hardened and squinty in the way of those who've labored in every kind of harsh weather Florida can provide.

The teenage boy had smirking eyes, and his body was as thin and hard as a cypress rail. He'd thrown his arm across the shoulder of the fair-haired girl in a flowered sundress. She had wide shoulders, long slender arms. One hand was lifted up to keep her dense blond hair from blowing across her face. She was a striking girl whose large mouth and bony face gave her a sensuous though slightly mannish aura.

As I stared at her, I heard static growing in my ears, and my throat felt as though it was splitting open. Though I had never seen the woman before, with absolute certainty I recognized her. Her eyes, cheeks, lips, and nose were nearly identical to the ones I saw every morning in my mirror as I shaved.

“Elizabeth Milligan Thorn,” the man said. “My sister, your mother.”

 

 

 

 

“That guy's your uncle?”

“So it appears.”

“Well, you're being pretty blasé about the whole thing.”

“Stick around. I'm about to dance on the table.”

Sugarman poured the rest of his beer into the tall glass and glanced again at Milligan, who stood with the others twenty yards away on the beach. We were sitting outside on the rear porch of the Green Flash Lounge at Morada Bay. Rusty's choice. Upscale joint for her upscale clients. One last meal on land before we set off.

Not the usual Keys tacky nautical décor of glass floats suspended in fishing nets and phony portholes bolted to the walls. The Green Flash was all dark mahogany and heavy leather chesterfield sofas, bookshelves crammed with leather volumes, and plush Oriental carpets spread on the maple floor. Behind the bar were fifty different brands of vodka and a slick bartender who could recite something fancy about each of them. Cigars from around the world were on sale from a locked glass counter. Another Keys establishment trading on the manly fairy dust of Hemingway.

Behind Sugarman the Florida Bay spread out to the western horizon as flat and motionless as a slab of burnished silver. The red disk of sun had dissolved halfway behind the distant mangrove islands and was sending flares of green and blue into the cloudless heavens. Drinks in hand, tourists lounged in the pink-and-pastel-striped Adirondack chairs, watching the dwindling light while they dug their toes into the perfect, imported sand.

I drew the photo from my shirt pocket and lay it in front of Sugar.

Sugarman was my oldest buddy. Former deputy sheriff, now a private investigator working out of an office next to the HairPort up in Key Largo. As a kid, Sugar was deserted by his Jamaican father and Scandinavian mom. All they'd left him was his striking good looks. Quiet, arresting eyes, narrow lips. Most women gave him a second glance, often a lingering third. Behind the sensuous facade, there was something noble in his bearing. He was solid and uncomplicated, blue-collar to the bone, a man of such firm and well-calibrated ethics that even hard-core sinners like me could sense the sharp ping of virtue radiating from him.

“Damn strong resemblance. I'd say it could be your mother, yeah.”

I nodded. I had no doubt it was.

“She was a looker. A little countrified, but an eye-catching woman.”

“I noticed.”

“He laid this on you and you didn't ask him any questions, nothing?”

“He said he'd tracked me down. Wanted to get to know me, maybe offer me an opportunity.”

“What kind of opportunity?”

“He didn't say and I didn't ask.”

“You didn't ask?”

“He was trying to get a rise out of me. I didn't feel like obliging him.”

“Christ, Thorn. You can be so damn pigheaded.”

“I'm spending seven days on a houseboat with the guy. I figure we'll get around to it.”

Out on the powdery sand, Rusty was making the introductions among Annette Gordon, Holland Green, and Mona and John Milligan. Everybody shaking hands, Milligan joking with the two young people, drawing a laugh from Annette, a gaunt young woman with a brown halo of curls. She was tricked out in an off-white angling outfit so superbly under-stated it was probably made to order at some Park Avenue haberdashery.

With a camera slung around his neck, Holland was dumpy, mid-thirties, wearing slappy rubber flip-flops, machinetorn jeans, black oily hair to his shoulders.

Hulking just beyond the circle was Rusty's older brother, Teeter. Rusty never volunteered the information, and I never asked the name of his disability. He was six-four and heavy-set. His forehead was abnormally broad and his eyes dull and downcast. On the rare occasions when he spoke it was usually no more than a brief mumble. Besides having highly developed computer skills, Teeter was a chef of some renown in the Upper Keys. He had a genius for delicate sauces and eccentric combinations of spices. His yellowtail Matecumbe had earned him a write-up in the Miami paper, which set off a bidding war between two of Key Largo's best eateries for his services.