Suspicion of Innocence (22 page)

As she hung up it occurred to her that Bob had found her excuse flimsy.
He
would have made arrangements. He wouldn't have blown off an entire day because his kid had a cold. "To hell with it," Gail muttered to herself, surprised at how little she cared what he thought.

Her legs shaking, she sat down at the table and rested her cheek on one hand.

The deer mask was still there. She turned her head to look at it. Slender face. Empty, rounded eyes, staring back at her.

The clouds had rolled in before noon, and by two o'clock Marilyn's minivan had appeared in the driveway. It was pouring, a spring deluge. Gail had packed Karen up into the car, along with the box containing the deer mask. It was now tucked securely under her arm.

Holding a black umbrella in the other hand, Gail guided Karen up a flight of steps on Flagler Street to the plaza of the cultural center. The wide, red-tiled plaza connected library, art gallery, and historical museum. From beyond the encompassing wall she could see the courthouse, its pointed top shrouded in low-hanging clouds.

The sky was the color of dirty gray cotton, more mist than rain. Karen ran out from under the umbrella, her image reflecting in the wet tiles. She skipped, spun, then came down flat-footed in a shallow puddle, laughing.

"Karen!"

Just outside the museum Gail shifted the box so she could fold her umbrella. Karen pulled open the door. The dark-tinted glass wall and doors were fogged with condensation, the air inside chilly.

Karen saw Irene first. She was sitting at the information booth, the only person in the lobby. "Hi, Gramma."

Irene wore her Miccosukee jacket, standard for museum volunteers. Its sleeves were too long and Irene had rolled them up on her thin wrists. She leaned over the polished wood partition far enough to reach Karen. "Well, look who's here. Hello, bunny." She patted her head. "My, your hair is damp. Do you want a sweater?" "No way."

Gail put the grocery bag next to a stack of brochures. "I didn't know you were back at the museum."

"And here I thought you had come all this way to see me," Irene scolded.

"Of course we're glad to see you." Gail kissed her cheek. "Did you finish at Renee's?"

Irene gave a quick shake of her head. "I couldn't go, just couldn't do it I woke up this morning and just lay there staring at the ceiling. I called Dr. Price and he said I should do something, anything. So here I am. My legs ache like the dickens, but there's only an hour until we close, so I suppose I can make it."

"You're glad to be back, though."

"Oh, well. I suppose I should be. People have been very kind."

Karen was spinning around on one toe, the rubber sole of her sneaker screeching on the tile floor. "Karen, stop that."

She did. "Can I go in the gift shop and look around?"

"No. Wait here," Gail said, then spoke to Irene. "When I called they said Edith Newell was working today."

Irene nodded. "She's doing a tour upstairs. Some children from St. Hugh."

"Mom. Can I go upstairs?" "No."

"Oh, Gail, for heaven's sake. Let her go. You're too strict. She'll be no trouble at all. And she certainly won't get lost."

"Can I, Mom?"

Gail finally nodded. "Okay. But don't touch anything."

“I know, I know." Karen skipped across the lobby, then disappeared up the carpeted stairs.

Irene looked after her, then said, "Why don't you all come over for dinner? I haven't felt much like eating lately but if I had someone to cook for. . . . Unless you and Dave already have plans."

Gail couldn't think of anything to say except, "Dave does have plans, but I'll bring Karen."

"Well, don't come if you have things to do. I know how busy you are."

"Irene, please."

"You sounded like you didn't really want to, that's all."

"No, it's fine. I want to." Gail propped her umbrella against the booth and put the box on the counter. "Tell me what you think about this." She pulled the mask out of its nest of bubble wrap. "It's a deer mask. I found it when I was at Renee's apartment with Sergeant Britton."

Irene picked up the mask, turned it around. "What an odd thing this is."

"Did she ever show it to you?"

"No, never. It's Native American, I can tell that much." Irene looked up. "Is this why you wanted to see Edith?"

Edith Newell, the museum's director of education, had made a personal crusade of Florida history. She knew Indian artifacts better than most Indians did.

Gail said, "Jimmy Panther says he lent the mask to Renee, but it might belong to the museum. Edith would know."

Irene frowned. "Jimmy wouldn't steal from the museum."

"Renee was working here as a volunteer and they were friends."

"Gail, honestly! You think the worst of Renee, you always did." Irene put the mask back into the box.

"I'm only trying to find out where it came from." She stopped speaking when an older couple crossed the lobby from upstairs, then passed the desk on their way outside. "I don't think the worst of Renee. I don't even know who she was."

Irene looked at her strangely. Gail leaned over the partition to put the box on the desk.

"I'm going upstairs to find Karen," she said.

The stairs, covered in dark tweedy carpet and decorated with a polished brass handrail, went up to a landing, then up again, turning around a ten-foot-high Fresnel lens from an old lighthouse that had once stood on a reef near the Matecumbe Keys. The museum was so quiet today that Gail could hear the electric motor turning the pedestal under the heavy glass. A light had been placed inside for effect, and white beams swept in a slow circle.

Halfway up she remembered Renee climbing these same stairs.

It had been a year ago, perhaps less, a party to woo museum donors—live music on the plaza, hors d'oeuvres and champagne in the lobby. This stairwell was dark that night, except for the light sweeping around. Gail had noticed Renee unclipping the velvet rope that closed off the second floor. Renee climbing these stairs in a striped Miccosukee jacket and a miniskirt, flouncy black taffeta. A man following a few steps behind, tilting his head to see up her skirt. Renee laughing at him over her shoulder. The stairs turned and their bodies moved out of sight. Renee's size-five feet in their high ankle-strap sandals, toenails painted red. His light gray trouser legs behind her, catching up.

Gail reached the top of the stairs. "Karen?" She could hear children's voices somewhere to her left.

A ramp led past glass walls, a diorama of the wetlands: saw grass, stuffed birds, and reptiles. An alligator with slitted eyes that seemed to follow her. Gail felt a sudden chill. Renee had lain in the shallow water of the Everglades.

At this hour the museum was nearly deserted. Gail could still hear the children ahead, but saw no one. She made her way past the archaeological dig, Tequesta Indians, Spanish conquest, a cannon hauled up from a shipwreck.

She heard running and laughter. Karen had probably joined the children from St. Hugh's—Edith Newell's junior assistant tour guide.

Gail hadn't told her yet about Dave.

Driving through the rain on the way here, with Karen chattering away about something or other, Gail had thought of asking him to come back. She would go to him, take both his hands, and tell him . . . Tell him what? That she couldn't exist without him?

From ahead came the thumping of children's shoes on a wooden ramp, voices getting fainter.

Gail passed quickly through the early settlers' exhibit —the facade of a frame house, glass cases full of tools and dishes and clothing, as if someone had spilled an attic trunk. The path was darker here, the exhibits lit by spotlight.

Ahead of her she saw a photograph, a grainy, life-size enlargement of a dozen people standing outside the first dry goods store on Flagler Street, before it was even named Flagler, back when it was still paved with limestone rock. A horse and wagon waited at one side. Most men wore collarless white shirts, another a straw hat, others had beards or mustaches. The women's blouses were buttoned to their chins. All stared straight into the camera, nobody moving, the sun cutting harsh shadows on their faces.

In the front row stood Benjamin and Addie Strickland, her great-grandparents. A squinting young man and a dour girl of twenty who looked as though she had just bitten into a lime.

Gail turned her head, glancing to her left. A wooden streetcar, painted dark red, its iron wheels jacked up so they barely touched the floor. There was a chain across the open door.

She whirled back toward the photograph and laughed out loud.

"Yes. So that's what she meant."

Gail had seen Renee later at the benefit on the plaza— she remembered it now. The moon floated over the buildings downtown. A band from the islands played steel drums. Renee—a plastic glass of champagne in each hand—was picking her way through the crowd, her hips moving to the music. Gail thought she was probably stoned.

Are both of those glasses for you?
Gail asked.

No, one's for him.
Her hair swinging, Renee turned toward the man sitting at a small table. Dark eyes, closely trimmed beard, open collar.

Renee said,
Is he not delicioso?

If you like chest hair. Is that the same man you took upstairs half an hour ago?

Maybe.
Renee's lips curved into a smile.
I've always wanted to do it right in front of Benjamin Strickland.

She had left Gail standing there glaring at the flouncy miniskirt twitching its way across the plaza. The man had stood up, pulled out a chair. On his face had clearly been written a post-coital, indolent sexuality.
 

Now, remembering this, Gail frowned. He was familiar somehow. That lazy smile, the short black beard, dark eyes. She had seen him before. Or since. The eyes, of course. So like Anthony Quintana's. It was his cousin.

"Carlos," she whispered. "Carlos Pedrosa." He had looked directly at her outside the funeral home, swinging his car keys around his forefinger.

And Renee had brought him
up here?

As if drawn, Gail walked toward the streetcar, then unfastened the chain and climbed up the steps. The museum lights shone dimly through the open windows, on the two rows of wooden seats and the levers where the conductor had stood. A dented metal sign said, "Colored to the Rear."

Gail went further in, the streetcar creaking softly. She swung around a pole and dropped into a seat. From ten yards away, across the aisle and through the windows on the other side, Benjamin Strickland and his tight-lipped wife, Addie, looked back at her.

Renee had sat here, Gail imagined, in this first seat, the only one with any leg room. Carlos Pedrosa had glanced around, then climbed the stairs behind her.

Gail heard a door slam somewhere and jumped. If anyone walked by she might duck down rather than explain. They wouldn't notice her in the darkness. She felt a rush of excitement, of pleasant fright.

He would have sat beside Renee on this scratched wooden seat, put his arm across the back of it. Or around Renee, more likely. Looking at him on the plaza, Gail had thought he was not the sort of man to waste time.

They might have heard music coming faintly from below. Faraway voices. Then the rustle of black taffeta. The soft rasp of a zipper. Shifting on the narrow seat, someone nearly falling off. Stifled laughter. Legs and mouths opening. A moan. The wood in the old streetcar creaking.

Over his shoulder Renee would have seen the photograph.

Gail looked at it now through the window. Great-grandfather Strickland, the sun glaring off his face, his shirt, the white limestone rock on Flagler Street.

She stood up and reached for the metal handrail. The narrow streetcar was too dark, the museum so quiet she could hear her own breath. She swung herself down, then fastened the chain back across the entrance. She had been upstairs too long.

Gail found Edith Newell at her desk in the basement of the museum. Open books and historical magazines lay every which way on her desk. The deer mask was propped up on a stack of them.

Edith Newell had always reminded Gail of a wading bird—elbows stuck out at an angle, head bobbing on its long neck, her voice thin and piping. Over seventy and never married, she still lived in a white frame house off Brickell Avenue in a stand of orchid trees, a glitzy condo on one side of her, a twenty-five-story bank building on the other. To the despair of developers, Edith had sworn to leave her property to the county for a park.

Gail knocked on the open door of the tiny office. "Miss Newell?"

Edith laid down a rectangular magnifying glass and motioned to Gail. "Hello, darling. Come in. I must say, this is extraordinary, what you've brought."

Gail sat down. "I thought it might belong to the museum."

"Oh, my, no. If it were a part of our collection, I would most assuredly know about it. I know everything we've got and this was never here. Your mother explained you found it at your sister's residence?"