Authors: John Lawrence Reynolds
Whisper Death
A Joe McGuire Mystery
John Lawrence Reynolds
For Jim,
who ain't heavy.
And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea.
âGerard Manley Hopkins
Her name was Brenda but everyone called her Koko and she was spending the twenty-first summer of her life in paradise.
She leaned against the railing of the Abaco Cay ferry, the sun at her back. The sun would bless her with its warmth all through the day and leave in a blaze of molten gold at dusk.
Then the party would begin.
There were parties almost every night, gatherings of ferry crew members and summer resort staff and university students drifting through the Caribbean, followers of their private hedonistic quests. The site was usually an offshore sandbar. There would be driftwood for a fire and coolers filled with beer. Blankets spread on sand still warm from the heat of the day. Rock lobster in a boiling pot of water. Butter running down your chin. Guitar music riding on moonbeams. The Milky Way above you, wild flowers on an unending field of black. Bahamian boys, their buttocks rippling round and firm beneath their swimsuits. Cute guys introducing themselves, making you laugh. Smiles on their faces. Hair in their eyes. Condoms in their wallets.
The ferry shuddered at anchor, its diesel engines murmuring threats from below deck. On the far shore of the harbour, the brightly painted frame houses of New Plymouth, red, yellow and blue, shone like neon in the sun.
Koko yawned and tried not to stretch. The other deckhands were her age but she was the only female and they were not yet, would never be, as sophisticated as she. She was proud of her sun-bronzed body that made young men whistle and older men smile with a secret sadness, and when she arched her back and raised her arms above her head and yawned, the boys on the ferry would nudge each other and smirk at her breasts straining against the cotton fabric of her T-shirt.
June in the Bahamas. Oh Lord, send me down your sunshine.
She smiled at her good fortune. Another two months' work on a Bahamas ferry. Another two months of sailing through sunlight, partying under the moon and catching some sleep in her own cabin on the beach.
And when the summer was over, she would begin her senior college year. Koko closed her eyes and pictured herself strolling down worn pathways through woods bordering the university as the last warm days of summer drifted into a Pennsylvania autumn.
Followed by cold grey winter mornings that pinned you in your bed. They were coming too. But not yet, she told herself. Not for a long time yet.
The ferry tilted beneath her as the passengers came aboard.
Only four were taking the day's first twenty-minute voyage across the strait to Abaco Cay. This was the quiet time, when locals used the ferry like Manhattan stockbrokers riding commuter trains. Later in the day they would be replaced by tourists from Abaco Cay who had grown bored with the beach, arriving at the ferry dock with guide books and children in hand to chatter their way to New Plymouth and Green Turtle Cay and admire the scenery through the viewfinders of their cameras.
But now there were only local passengers, familiar commuters beginning another day spent serving the tourist trade. They were led by an overweight Bahamian woman carrying several stuffed shopping bags on the ends of her massive arms, whose body tilted left and right like a mechanical doll as she walked up the short gangplank. Next came the weightlifter from Florida who worked at the sports shop of the Abaco Cay resort and played guitar at beach parties, followed by the elderly Bahamian everyone knew as Cass. The old man, his skin bearing the patina of dark shoe polish, greeted the ferry captain with a lilting concerto of Bahamian patois and an impossibly wide smile.
The fourth passenger was a brooding middle-aged man carrying a leather bag swinging from a shoulder strap. He looked neither left nor right as he stepped aboard and settled on one of the open-air wooden benches near the stern, where he stared down at the water as though searching for something he had dropped overboard.
Koko had seen him before. Met him, talked to him. She walked to the rail to catch the line thrown aboard from the ferry ticket-seller, and began to coil the rope neatly at her feet.
The harbourside café on Green Turtle Cay, she recalled. Behind the bar, mixing drinks and rarely speaking.
The other crew members pulled the gangplank aboard, and the diesels awoke with a deep-throated growl. Soon the craft was clear of the harbour, its wake trailing behind like embroidery on the dark fabric of the water.
During early morning trips across the channel, Koko would stand at the rail joking with the other deckhands. Or climb the ladder to the bridge and beg a coffee from the elderly Bahamian captain, sipping it with her feet braced against the motion of the ferry, her eyes closed, her long blonde hair dancing in the wind.
But this time she wandered back to the man with the leather bag whose eyes hadn't left the water. “You're the detective, aren't you?” she said, leaning against a pillar.
He looked at her briefly, then turned away to stare at the water again.
“Guess you don't remember me. I met you in the bar. Gee, must be almost a month ago now.” She reached a hand back to smooth her hair. “My name's Koko.” She grinned mischievously, “You said I had lousy taste in music.”
When he looked again, his eyes dropped down her T-shirt and cut-off jeans to her feet clad in snow-white sneakers, then back to meet her smile. “Not quite,” he said in a raspy voice. “I said you had
no
taste in music. There's a difference.”
“Guess you're too old to appreciate Twisted Sister.” She folded her arms and smirked at him. He reminded her of her father. Same age. Same distant attitude. Same way of trying to hide his feelings from her. But there was nothing dangerous about her father, and there was something dangerous about this man. She wondered if he had ever killed someone. He might have. He used to be a homicide detective, he had told her. From Boston. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Go ahead,” he muttered, without looking at her.
“You ever kill anybody?” she asked, sitting beside him.
His eyes were on the horizon where Abaco Cay lay ahead like a flat grey line separating a sketch of sky and water. She thought he hadn't heard her and she was about to repeat the question when he asked, “Have you?”
“Me?” She giggled. “Come on. Do I look like a killer?”
“Do I?”
She began to answer and hesitated. “Are you leaving?” she asked, looking at the leather bag at his feet.
He nodded silently.
“For good?”
“For good.”
“Going back up north?” And he nodded again. “Why? Why would you leave? This is the most beautiful place I've ever seen. The weather is incredible, the people are wonderful . . .”
He looked at her and smiled. Something happened to his eyes when he smiled. They softened and the knife-edges disappeared. She bit her lip. What was there about older men that suddenly seemed so fascinating to her? Last year they'd been just a bunch of old farts. Now they seemed . . . interesting. “It's time,” he was saying.
“Time for what?”
“Time to go back.”
She sat on the row of seats in front of him, twisting her body to face him. “When we talked at the Green Turtle bar . . . do you remember? I was wearing my red-checked halter and shorts? You were behind the bar, mixing drinks.” She smirked. “You made me a really great piña colada that night. Anyway, you said you were here for good. I'd only been here a week. I didn't know if I'd be able to stand it for the whole summer. You told me I'd love it. You said I'd never want to return after a couple of weeks.”
“Was I right?”
“Yeah! Sure, you were right. I mean, I have to go back to university in September. There's just no choice. I
have
to. But I figured you were here for keeps, the way you talked. And you had that great place up on the hill behind the bar.” She twisted to look back across the harbour at Green Turtle Cay but it was out of sight behind New Plymouth. “I'll bet you can see clear across to the mainland from there.”
He smiled again, and she studied his face with the curiosity of a young woman growing bored with boys. Blue eyes. Dark hair, with streams of grey leaking back from his temples. Tanned skin, except for a white scar that angled across his upper lip. “That was the problem,” he said, looking out at the water again. “It kept getting closer.”
She remembered arriving at the bar with some boring kids she'd met on Abaco Cay, three rich boys in a Chris-Craft and two girls who worked in the kitchen at Treasure Cay Hotel. All from Florida, all so impressed with themselves. It had been her day off and she hadn't seen Green Turtle Cay yet, except from the deck of the ferry, so they had set sail across the strait.
She loved the tiny island. Loved the small harbour, loved the dark coziness of the cafe and the conch fritters served hot and greasy from the kitchen, loved talking to the brooding man behind the bar who treated her like a woman. Almost no one else did. Other men acted as though she were a silly child or a fast lay, some bimbo playmate who'd just stepped out of a centrefold.
Koko grew entranced with the older man and ignored the others, and they left her there, the boys grumbling that she was no fun, the girls laughing and telling her she would have to hitchhike back to Abaco.
So Koko sat and talked with the man behind the bar who mixed drinks but who wasn't the regular bartender, who worked there only three evenings a week, “for a reason to come out of the sun.”
Encouraged by both the strength of the drinks and his quiet manner, she was soon describing her life to him, outlining her plans for the future. He was such a contrast with the young Bahamians and the other students living in the dormitory on Abaco. Oh, they were fun to dance with and talk to, trading stories about crazy friends and stupid parents. But she was outgrowing them. Anyone could see that. The bartender who used to be a detective, he had seen it. She could tell.
When the bar closed, she waited outside for him. Sitting on the dock in the moonlight, he mentioned his cabin on the crest of the hill overlooking the harbour. He'll invite me there, she told herself. Come up and listen to some music, he'll say. Just for a few minutes, as though we were the same age instead of there being twenty years difference between us.
But he didn't invite her. And when she boarded the last ferry of the night to ride back to Abaco, he remained on the dock watching her depart, a still, dark figure in softer darkness, before treading up the hill to his cabin. Perhaps she should have invited herself up. But she hadn't. Maybe it was a good thing. Maybe being infatuated with an older man at this stage in her life would be risky.
A short blast on the whistle announced that they were approaching Abaco. Koko stood up and touched his arm. “Well, have a nice trip,” she said. “And thanks for the advice.”
He frowned at her. “What advice?”
“The advice you gave me that night. Sitting on the dock together. We were talking, I don't know how it started, about religion and morals and stuff. I mean, you wouldn't
believe
all the crap my parents dumped on me before I left. Not that
they
ever followed it. Anyway, you said you had learned only three things for sure about life.”
“You remember what they were?” he asked.
“You bet.” She rolled her eyes and counted on her fingers. “One, never play cards with a man named âDoc.' Two, never eat at a place called âMom's.' And three,” giggling and looking away briefly, “never sleep with anybody whose problems are worse than your own.”
He nodded and smiled that warm smile. “Better than truth and beauty,” he said. “Hold on to them.”
When they reached Abaco she stood at the bow and watched him enter one of the battered taxis waiting at the dock. He didn't turn back to wave, but the weightlifter from Florida who was
really
stuck on himself did, and she raised her arms above her head to stretch and thrust her chest forward, her butt back. The two male deckhands standing at the rail nudged each other and whistled. The weightlifter stopped in his tracks, his eyes wide. She lowered her arms and grinned like a mischievous child. Show's over boys, she told them silently, looking away and knowing they were still watching her.
Her grin faded. She bit her bottom lip and frowned.
New passengers for the trip from Abaco to New Plymouth began straggling down the path to the ferry.
Yes, she answered him in silence. Yes, you do look like a killer.
“Feel like you're home yet?”
Veronica Schantz smiled affectionately at McGuire from across her battered kitchen table. She pushed the plate of cookies closer but he held up a hand to fend them off.
“Soon as I walked in the door,” he replied. He was sprawled sideways in the chair, his legs stretched in front of him and one arm across the back. Here, in the early days of a Boston summer, his tan looked even darker than on the Abaco ferry that morning.
“You are going to stay?” she said, more an order than a question. “It'll take me two minutes to fix up the back bedroom. Ollie will be terribly hurt if you check into a hotel and don't stay here.”
McGuire smiled and nodded. “For a few days,” he said. “Until I track down my furniture and find an apartment somewhere. Figure out what I'm going to do.”
“Take your time, Joseph. Take your time.” She looked at her watch. “Ollie will be awake soon. He's going to be so happy to see you.” Then, leaning across the table, she whispered, “Joe, what happened down there? When you wrote to say you'd quit the force, we thought we'd never see you again. Something happened to bring you back. What was it?”
McGuire studied the face of his friend's wife. It was a face he loved, framed in cotton-white hair, the eyes flooded with sadness and wisdom and damn-it-all-anyway resilience. “Nothing happened,” he told her. “It was just time to come back, that's all.”
“I don't believe you.” She leaned back and tried to look angry, failing miserably. “Probably some woman you fell in love with and couldn't have all to yourself. Or more likely some woman falling in love with you. That's the kind of thing you'd run away from.” The furrows in her brow melted away. “What happened to Janet?” she asked. “I know she's back here. Is that why you returned? For her?”