Cutting Loose in Paradise

by Mary Jane Ryals

  “Yeah, we’ve seen them come and go, haven’t we, AJ? I’m seeing what you mean. Remember when they had to cart ole Axman off in a straight jacket?” I laughed, remembering watching Axman get hauled off during P.E. class. I leaned into AJ’s left side, working at the plot of hair on top of his head, trimming. “Ole Axman hasn’t changed a bit! He still thinks everybody’s out to get him. Madonna tells me when somebody says something he doesn’t like, he threatens to go get his ax and take ’em out. The man wouldn’t hurt a mosquito in winter, but he can sure talk. So did Cooter call the mental ward on Mary?”

  “Nah. That was Mac,” he said. “I sure don’t know how he got involved. I think there’s hanky panky going on there, but every time I try to talk to Cooter about it, he don’t listen. He ain’t the smartest brother I got.” I took out the trimmers to clean up around his ears.

  “AJ, do you think Trina killed herself?” I said.

  “What?” he said, then rubbed a few hairs off his nose. “You think somebody killed her?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Just wondering.”

  “I don’t know. She and Fletch, they had a history their own selves. Fought all the time. She didn’t like his business dealings. She used to come over here and say, ‘AJ, you’re the only honest one in that family.’ She did my books and all, you know.” He shrugged. “You never know about someone though. She kept to herself a lot. Didn’t ever seem to belong here anyway. Came here young and seemed a little desperate. Latched onto Fletch right away.” This didn’t sound like the Trina I had known. “I don’t think Fletch would kill his wife.”

  It struck me as strange for a brother to say “I don’t think Fletch would kill his wife.” I’d finished the cut and started shaving his neck. “What about Mac? Do you think that poisoning was accidental or what?”

  I took off the purple-sheened blue cape, shook some talc onto a soft boar brush, and swept off his neck. “He’s got some enemies.”

  “Like who?” I said.

  He shrugged. “I just heard about it in the Rusty Rim. He done some damage down in Miami or some funny name place in Mexico, something Wah-cah-cah? I heard those people’s still chasing after him. Heard he owes them some money.”

  “What do you know about that?” I said.

  “You’re asking a lot of questions,” he said.

  I shrugged, moving to the right side of his head. “Sorry. Curiosity, I guess, AJ. You know how it is around here. We’ve never had any weird suicides or poisonings around here. We always thought it was a safe little island. Hell, I just started locking the doors last week.”

  “Girl, you got a bad memory. Remember Dorman, died out near the Panther Pit? Over drugs, they say. Looked like hit and run.”

  “I was off at school then,” I said. “I’d forgotten about all that.”

  “You know five people have died over the past few years, and all of them lived out on the county road?” he said. He cocked his head and looked at me. Not as if he knew anything, just contemplating it.

  “Cancer,” I said. “Mainly.”

  “Not old Dorman,” he said. “That cat got run over.”

  “Well, they’re so weird anyway, a bunch of recluses, and all those guys had long hair, never ever bathed. Oh, that hair bothered me. So stringy, and looked like it’d never been touched by shampoo.” I felt bad as soon as I said it. They were human, and no one deserves to be run over by a car that I know.

  But he laughed and I combed out his hair, stepped back, and gave him a thumbs-up. AJ raised his eyebrows, more concerned about the county road intrigue than his appearance, it seemed. “Yeah, they’s something else, all right. But, you know, his daddy got run over the year before him, remember?” he said. “Near the same place, walking home down the county road. Now the land’s for sale.” I thought down the list. One neighbor died, supposedly of drowning in the swamp, drunk. Another died of lung cancer in the hospital. Another of a strange rare cancer. My head was spinning.

  “What’s the connection?” I said.

  He shrugged. “Hell if I know.” He smiled. “Probably ain’t one.” He handed me a fifty.

  “I can’t take that,” I said, packing up the stylist bag. “You’re a working man, and who knows when anybody will buy Florida seafood again.”

  “And you’re a working woman, ain’t you? Accused of a crime? Kids to feed? You’d do it for me, wouldn’t you? Besides, I got my papers I’m filling out to send to BP. They ain’t gonna like how much I’m losing this year,” he said, holding his hand up to say Don’t give it back. If he’d been accused, like I was, of poisoning someone, I’d pay him every chance I could under the table to help him out. I’d pay him twice what it cost, too. This was also a matter of pride. He wanted to help. So I shook his hand, and put my left hand over our handshake.

  “Yes, I’d do it for you, AJ. Thanks. You take care, okay?”

  “LaRue?” AJ said. I turned around.

  “Watch out around here, okay? Don’t be asking too many questions.” I stood stock-still and resisted another question. I nodded and waved as I headed out the front door. He locked it behind me.

  “HOOK WRECK,” Madonna said. She sounded slightly bored as she answered the phone. Early afternoon’s sun burned on the water’s surface, blazing into everything on the island. But her boredom was faked, as she was now playing her part.

  I swung the car up into the graveyard where moss dripped from the trees, and magnolias down near the water buffered the wind and sun. I put the Saturn in park as I worked my plan out with Madonna on the cell. Laura’s kayak was tied to the top of my car. “Hey, girl,” I said. “He there?” I’d asked her to lure Fletch into the bar a couple of hours before school let out so I could snoop in his house.

  “Yep. We open at noon, and don’t close for another fourteen hours after that,” she said. This meant Fletch sat at the bar close enough to hear the conversation.

  “Okay, I’m only going to need about an hour and a half, two hours. Just keep him there long enough for me to check the house,” I said, fingering the key I had stolen, now in my jeans pocket. “Slow dance with him if you have to.”

  “Sure, come on by. But I don’t dance with no strangers,” she said.

  “You will be richly rewarded,” I said in an Eastern European accent to represent gypsies or fairy tales or something hokey in cartoons. Acting goofy was a way to stave off the fear.

  “Okay. I’m sure,” she said. “Talk to you soon.”

  I drove the car over to Trina’s grave. At the front of the granite stone stood a three-foot-tall cross of Styrofoam with silver mums attached. Unlike Mary, I loved the arrangement. It seemed to celebrate life. Resilience. The card attached to the Styrofoam, though slightly frayed in the island weather, said “In memory of Trina E. from Eunice M.” Who the hell was Eunice M.? I copied the message verbatim onto a corner of an old bank receipt.

  The envelope said Busy Bee Florist and featured a picture of a bright-eyed bee. The address was up in Wellborn. I jotted that down on the receipt. Who was Trina E., I wondered? Was that her maiden name? How would this person know something like that? I drove out of the serene graveyard, down past Gulf Drive, and headed beyond the old fort. Nine different peoples had warred over its spot over four or five centuries. Several of those were Indians, as Grandma loved to remind me. Billy Bowlegs for one, a hero of hers. I parked under a three-hundred-year-old oak forty feet wide near the old yellow house. Once owned by a retired professor, now dead, the house was vacant.

  Luckily, there was a scruffy beach where I could launch. I untied the kayak stacked on life preservers, threw the ropes and preservers in the trunk and locked the car. I pushed the kayak, shishing through sand, to the brackish waters where the Gulf met the river. The cold water shocked my flip-flopped feet, but the down jacket and wool scarf helped. The water sloshed rough, but once in the boat, earth’s gravity lifted. I caught the incoming tide, but the wind came from the other direction. Not an easy run, and yellow was a conspicuous kayak color for
someone wanting to sneak into a house. Yet no one was around.

  The water lapped in more lazily along the river, and mullet jumped in the water nearby. A dolphin rolled up for air about a house lot away. Approaching Trina’s house, I could smell the rich scent of decaying leaves. A bundle of pied-billed grebes peeped and rolled backwards into the water. The shade dappled the ground of Trina’s yard. She had picked this spot to build her house years ago. On the Gulf, the river, and the woods. A careful accountant’s planning. I knew more than ever that the plot against her had been real. Someone this in love with the world would not commit suicide.

  A heavy silence lay over the yard and house. The elegant windows of the cedar home on stilts looked like empty eyes. Trina’s car sat in the driveway under the house. Fletch’s truck was gone, of course. I’d waited for the high tide when a boater could easily climb up the dock and enter from the water. A cormorant flew off a post of the dark dock. I flung the flip-flops into the bushes, put on a pair of hair-dyeing gloves, then headed through the back yard.

  Trina and Fletch hadn’t put in security yet. Until now, our community had hung on to the idea that we were safe. Fishing gear leaned against the house. An ice chest, several poles. I tried the back porch door with the key. The door squawked open. I could hear a clock ticking as I ducked in. The white carpet in the living room felt thick as sea foam. I tiptoed through the living room and stopped cold when I saw the photograph of the boy—the boy in the picture on the boat. The kid who stood with Trina when she couldn’t have been more than about eighteen. Who was he? I almost recognized him. She held his hand, and she looked a little lost, as teenagers often do. Confident and lost together. Exactly how I’d describe Taylor.

  I walked into the kitchen. Spic and span except for a pile of dirty dishes in the sink, probably left by Fletch over the past two weeks. It looked like an accountant’s kitchen. The pots hung by size from the ceiling. A sampler that said, “God Bless Our Home.” Another sign said, “God grant me the Courage to change the things I can, the Patience to accept the things I cannot, and the Wisdom to know the difference.” Not the inspirational message of someone who’d off themselves. But both truisms seemed ironic now.

  I stole into her office. Not a sign of blood anywhere. White carpet, no blood stains. A ledger sat open and a pencil lay in the crease of the book. A shiver went through me. Her CD’s lay stacked in a CD rack, alphabetized by artist. One CD sat in the computer as though waiting to be played. I pushed the mouse. Nothing. The computer wasn’t on, of course. I turned on the computer and the screen. There on the screen was another photo of that child, the second child, the mystery child from the photo we took from the boat. This was not their son who had drowned. This was someone else. Who?

  I began to open drawers. In the top drawer was a sealed envelope addressed in Trina’s hand to ECOL, the company Jackson had mentioned to me that was buying up land. I shoved it into my jeans pocket. I looked for other things in the drawers, but began to feel a strangeness in the house, a presence. I felt my good luck was coming to an end. I heard a faint thud.

  Then the front door sucked quietly open and closed like a whisper. I heard someone walking down the front steps. I jumped behind the desk and waited. Nothing. Not a sound. Then I heard a car start up next door. I ran to the front window. A turquoise Ford. Had someone been following me? My stomach turned over. Still, I memorized the numbers on the license plate, Magnolia County tag. I wrote them down, then walked back to the desk and shuffled the papers around on Trina’s typing stand. At the very back of the stack sat a calendar. I opened to November 6, the day Trina died.

  She’d listed an appointment with the dentist at 1 p.m. in Wellborn, and the word “Cove” at 3 p.m. Suicidal people don’t go to the dentist before they do the drastic deed, I guessed as I stole out the back door, returning the key to the fountain statue. Who else had a key? What did they want?

  As I walked across the yard, I noticed the tide had risen, a more chilling wind blew, and the water was getting choppy. The sky had grown overcast with gray clouds behind a few silvery cumulus in front, typical north Florida winter weather. Cove, what could Trina have meant by “Cove?” I ran back to my flip-flops in the piney backyard, rumbled down the dock, and climbed into the kayak. The water had risen a whole step up toward the dock. I untied and paddled quickly away towards the old professor’s house as if I were a stealthy Indian.

  CHAPTER 18

  THAT NIGHT, I lay on our green sofa, reading a story in the Chronicler by Laura in a rare moment of quiet—Daisy had walked with Taylor down to the city dock. She wanted to look at the shape of the moon for her school project on planets. I’d argued that I should go, but they acted like I was crazy.

  I was now on the verge of worrying about them, so I texted Taylor. He texted back, “Relax. Back in a few.”

  Laura’s news story had sucked me in. She’d showed discretion by avoiding news of Trina Lutz’s death or Mac’s poisoning. As far as anyone knew officially, Trina’s death was a non-issue, and the cops were on the case of the poisoning.

  Even though Laura would call this a fluff piece, she loved them, because she could sneak in stories about folks in the area who’d never normally get publicity. This story covered Norma Redding, who had built her own facility to care for sick and injured wildlife. Norma’d given up her IBM job to come out to the sticks of the county to save wild animals.

  Norma had told Laura that a plethora of birds got injured with fishing line, which they’d thought was live bait. The line would get wrapped around wings, which caused injury and death. She pointed out that the area just an hour west of St. Annes had been overfished before the oil catastrophe. This led to more birds diving for fish hooks. Laura had quoted Mac as saying this was a tragedy for our birds, and we needed to come up with bird-friendly lures. Mac, I discovered reading the paper, headed the Save the Wildlife Club in St. Annes.

  That’s when the phone rang. I answered it with an I’m-tired-who’s-this? voice.

  “Hey, LaRue, how’re the kids?” It was Jackson. I sat up, remembering Laura had called Rocky to get a security light put over the storefront window.

  “Oh, hey. Can we skip the chitchat? What did you find out about the coroner who signed the death certificate? Or local doctor, let’s guess, filling in for the coroner.” I’d push him first.

  “Very strange,” he said. “And sloppy. Unprofessional.”

  “Welcome to the Undiscovered Coast of Florida,” I said, standing up, walking to the porch to peer out and look for my kids. “The Redneck Riviera, the Panhandle, where nothing gets done right today that can get done wrong tomorrow. Or say, maybe they took lessons from oil companies.”

  He ignored my rant. “Both the coroner and the assistant coroner were on an overnight deep-sea fishing trip when the body came in on Monday evening. This according to the office secretary. Not that she knows. She wasn’t in. The body arrived during the night. The coroner’s office did call in a local doctor. I didn’t realize earlier because the secretary hadn’t told me then that the doctor was also along on the trip.”

  “Wait. What?” I couldn’t see my kids and was considering bundling up to search for them. “You’re saying the coroner, the coroner’s assistant, and the doctor were all on the same deep-sea fishing trip?”

  “Right—the pro, his stand-in, and the stand-in’s stand-in. Supposedly the doctor’s assistant assigned another doctor to look in and sign off on the body. This according to the secretary,” he said, taking a breath.

  “Who wasn’t on the friggin’ fishing trip?” I said, sighing, walking back to my warm bed. If the kids didn’t show up in ten minutes, I would go after them, crazy or not.

  “She gave me the name, but I can’t find this person anywhere. Nobody seems to know who this is. The doctor said he’d authorized the assistant to sign off on routine business. He thought normal procedure had been followed. Seems someone just showed up out of the blue and signed.”

  “What? What’s the name?�
�� I said.

  “He signed the form with the Gainesville backup of the backup doctor’s name. An Indian name. Dr. Singh,” he said. “The secretary at the coroner’s office said no one else was there, that Singh had the key, and they don’t know anything else. I’d swear this signature looks kind of girlish.”

  “Girlish,” I said, sneering.

  “Well, you’ll say I’m stereotyping, but it looks, well, rounded letters, extra neat writing, you know.”

  “Can you bring it to me to look at?” I asked. “I just want to see it.”

  “Okay,” he said. I relaxed. He was working on this case after all. I’d thought he would say he couldn’t get back to the island, too busy, blah blah blah. “Amazing how these small counties can be so laissez-faire. Had a friend in central Florida who found a woman who’d been dead a week with six dogs in her house. No one knew, and a neighbor went and found her. The cops didn’t even show up for a couple of days after that. And the body sat in the funeral home for three weeks waiting for someone to claim—”

  “Okay, that’s creepy. I don’t want to think about shit like that,” I said, breathless. “Anyway, I found another picture of that kid who was in the photo on the boat,” I said.

  “All right, Scrapbook Queen, what’d you find?”

  “Don’t make fun of me,” I said, pulling the covers up to my chin. I’d text Tay again when I got off the phone with Jackson. “You forget that relationships are why people kill.”

  “Are you implying that you’ll kill me?’ he joked.

  “No. I’m saying you don’t understand that what people say, who’s in their pictures, what gossips tell you, that that’s as important as blood on knives.”

  “Huh,” he said, neutral. “Tell that to a court of law. So where’d you find the new photo?”