“If you’re serious,” I replied, “I’ll return with a long line of the manliest men who’d love to get a look at that body of yours. Dozens, probably hundreds. Me included.”
“Hah!”
“Don’t offer unless you mean it. There’re guys on these islands who’ve been lusting after you for years.”
“Really? That’s a shock, because I’ve been lusting after a few of them, too.”
I told her if that information got out, we’d have to build a new marina parking lot.
It’s understood that the partnership between Rhonda and JoAnn is more than business. They’ve been dedicated to one another for years; confident in the way strong couples are confident. Which is maybe why they seem to get a kick out of discussing their occasional bawdy interest in men.
That interest wasn’t always a ruse, either. As I knew.
Rhonda was laughing. “Good ol’ Doc. You always know the right thing to say to a woman.” She reached and opened a box of bandages. Began to sort through them. “That’s another reason you’ve gotta take care of yourself. The summer’s been shitty enough, we can’t afford to lose you. Fighting like some teenager.” She made an introspective noise of disgust. “After the storm, before the cops finally let us back on the island, JoAnn and me about got sick when we heard you’d stayed here, rode the damn thing out. Didn’t know if you were alive or dead. Tomlinson, too—there’s another man who’ll never grow up. Crazy coconut-headed fools, the both of you.”
Not quite accurate. Tomlinson hadn’t been at the marina when the winds began to build. He’d used the flood tide to pole and wade his sailboat into the same tidal river where the fishing guides had moored several of Dinkin’s Bay’s larger vessels, Tiger Lilly included. He’d tied a spiderweb of lines to the mangroves, burned incense, then roped himself to the ship’s helm and was meditating naked, he told me, when the eye passed over.
I was the only one watching as he sailed back into Dinkin’s Bay under full canvas, the sunset an eerie green as the hurricane pulled the last of its funnel clouds northward. No other vessel under way for a hundred miles. Few human beings on the island, none at Dinkin’s Bay. Standing on the broken decking of my roofless home, I considered the possibility that I might be hallucinating because of the recent concussion. Quite a vision; quite a night.
“You have a son to think about,” Rhonda reminded me primly. “A new daughter, too. People who care about you, and rely on you to stick around. Who worry about some of the stupid things you do.”
As she said that, into my mind appeared the image of an adolescent boy, playing baseball in the jungle. Then an infant bundled in pink, her face an undefined space. It was the daughter I’d never seen.
Rhonda had unwrapped a butterfly bandage and leaned in to apply it. I took her wrist, stopping her. “Why is it I get the impression you’ve practiced this little speech? And you’re not only talking about the fight. You’re putting a whole lot of mysterious implications between the lines—”
I paused when the cabin door opened and we watched JoAnn Smallwood step into the salon.
J oAnn is a shorter, bustier version of Rhonda; she looked businesslike in stockings, dark skirt, and blazer. She was carrying a sack of groceries in one arm and the marina’s resident cat, Crunch & Des, in the other. JoAnn and Rhonda exchanged looks as we exchanged greetings, and then JoAnn said, “You’re having that little talk with him?” Expecting it.
“Just getting started,” Rhonda said. She pushed my hand away and leaned toward me with the bandage.
Sounding like a tattletale sister, Rhonda said to JoAnn, “Guess who got into a fistfight? Got himself beat up. Look at how deep this gash is—thing needs stitches. Then he got clunked on the head today while they were diving that wreck—”
JoAnn said, “I heard. I heard,” letting the cat drop pad soft on the deck and taking groceries to the galley. Began to sort items on the teak cupboard. Cheese, tortillas, coffee, toilet paper, party hats, candles, tonic water, wine. Cat food, too. The expensive kind in caviar-sized tins.
Which explained why Crunch & Des hadn’t visited me at my stilt house for a while. A burly black cat with ragged ears and a white patch. It wasn’t the first time he’d been lured away by better food.
“I told him what you said about the woman you met on the beach.”
JoAnn replied to me, saying, “I hope it doesn’t seem like we’re being nosy, but—”
I interrupted, “Of course you’re being nosy. But it’s okay. Being nosy’s one of the perks of friendship.”
“Then I’ll tell you what I think. I think there’s something strange about that woman, if it’s the same one. Slender, very elegant—even at night on a beach—but something…dated about the way she dresses. Even the way she talked. Some of the phrases she used. I’d guess her to be in her late sixties, so maybe that explains—”
I said, “Mildred Engle isn’t that old. It must have been someone else,” but knew she was talking about Chestra.
It allowed JoAnn to be less guarded. “I hope so. A woman who won’t risk meeting a man’s female friends? That’s a danger signal. Always trust a woman’s instincts when it comes to other women. The one I met is cold. The kind of coldness that’s hiding something. So I’m glad it wasn’t the same woman.”
Her tone said she suspected it was.
They still weren’t done with me. This wasn’t just about Chestra, or the fight. What was on their minds?
I listened to JoAnn talk about how hot it was and that they needed to get a new air conditioner, the old one was so noisy, before she finally started getting to it. “Maybe we shoulda tried to talk some sense into him earlier, huh? Maybe he’da thought twice before getting mixed up in a brawl.”
“Probably should’ve,” Rhonda said. “Someone needs to find out why our old buddy seems to have a death wish.”
I removed the washcloth from my forehead and sat up. “Death wish? Okay, ladies, what’s this about?”
Rhonda said, “It’s about you staying in that rickety old piling house of yours when everyone else in their right mind evacuated the island. And it’s about—”
“Hold it,” I said, and began to explain that I’d been on a trip, returned late, didn’t realize how bad the storm would be. But she cut me off, saying, “It’s not just the hurricane, Doc. And it’s not just you getting into a brawl—”
“It was worse than just a brawl,” JoAnn put in, “a lot worse,” her tone saying she had additional information.
“It’s about the risks you’ve been taking,” Rhonda continued. “At least, risks that some of us around the marina think you’re taking. We’re not stupid. We pay attention to what goes on in this weird little fishbowl of ours and some of us are worried. Worried about you.”
I became more focused. Uneasy. Wasn’t certain that I needed to respond cautiously but did. “Risks?” I said. “I don’t know what you mean.”
The women exchanged looks again, Rhonda’s expression telling JoAnn to take over.
“Let me go down the list,” JoAnn said. “A couple months back, you went for a cruise on the Queen Elizabeth. A guy like you on a cruise ship. Wearing a tuxedo, shopping in tourist dumps like Jamaica? No way. Then you come back with a big bruise on your neck like someone smacked you with a sledgehammer—”
“The Queen Mary 2,” I corrected her. “There’s nothing risky about that because she didn’t stop in Jamaica. No one in their right mind intentionally visits Jamaica. Not me, not the Queen Mary. I took Ransom because she needed a break. Ask her, she’ll tell you.”
My Bahamian cousin, Ransom Gatrell.
“That’s my point,” JoAnn said. “We did ask her and she didn’t tell us. Hardly said a word. You didn’t, either, the both of you hush-hush, like you didn’t want to talk about it. That woman, you’re closer than brother and sister. She’ll say whatever you tell her to say. But wait. I’m not done.
“A month or so before that, you took off to God knows where. South America, you said.
But your tan was nearly gone when you got home, so I don’t know where in the tropics that would be.
“A few months before, you came back from a trip with a big gauze bandage taped over the meaty part of your right side.” She raised her voice when I tried to interrupt. “Don’t deny it, I saw the dang thing. I was out for a walk and watched you taking a shower.”
My outdoor shower has no curtain, but it’s located at the back of my stilt house, out of sight unless someone’s willing to stand in the mangroves off Tarpon Bay Road. Or arrive by boat, like Arlis.
“You watched me shower?”
“Only five minutes or so, yeah.” In reply to my expression, she added, “Doc, almost every woman on this island has seen you showering at one time or another. Some nights, we could sell popcorn. As if you didn’t know—but don’t change the subject. Point is, you came back injured. Again. Maybe a gunshot wound, that was one of the rumors.”
“A gunshot?” I was shaking my head, smiling. “Unbelievable. I didn’t realize my pals had such good imaginations. No…I was diving off St. Martin. A biologist friend wanted my opinion on something, and I got sliced up by a chunk of coral. You can see the scar, if you want.”
Which was close to the truth. I’d been cut—but not by coral. A knife.
I said it again, “A gunshot wound? Boy oh boy,” then waited. Made an effort to appear relaxed, indifferent. I was worried that JoAnn and Rhonda had correlated the dates: When I left. When I returned. And that they had associated my visit to St. Martin with an incident that occurred while I was there. A small item in the national news: the unexplained disappearance of Omar Muhammad, prospective head of Abu Nidal, a fundamentalist terrorist organization.
Muhammad had vanished while snorkeling on a shallow reef off St. Martin. His body was never found.
I relaxed a little when JoAnn pressed ahead, saying, “Then there was the time you said you had to go to Key West for a few weeks, but I know damn well you went to Colombia or someplace like that, because Sandy Phillips mentioned she saw you at Miami International, the TACA gate, and…”
“We also know how Tomlinson makes his living,” Rhonda cut in severely. “That’s what we’re getting at. I don’t know why he didn’t stick with his Internet meditation school, Ransom did such a great job setting that up. He was making plenty of money. Bought the Harley, and the cool minivan. But now he’s back to importing and selling what everyone knows he’s always imported and sold, and, well…Doc—”
“Doc,” JoAnn said, “we love Tomlinson. You know that. But if that crazy old hippie has somehow talked you into helping him smuggle marijuana and God knows what else…sending you off to foreign countries to do the dangerous stuff while he hangs out here getting stoned and working on his tan—” The woman paused and looked at me. “Why are you laughing, Doc? What’s so damn funny?”
After several more seconds, Rhonda said, “Doc. Stop it. We’re not joking. Today, you show up with a fancy new yacht you say you got as salvage. We’re not dumb. That’s the sort of thing men buy with drug money. Now you’ve got Jeth involved?”
JoAnn said, “We know a lot of people are hurting since the hurricane. If you need cash, we can turn you on to some good investments. But smuggling is poison, and it’s bad for Dinkin’s Bay—”
Thin-lipped, Rhonda said, “He’s not listening. I don’t know why we’re bothering.”
I couldn’t talk. I was laughing that hard.
33
I knocked on Chestra’s door. No answer. Placed my ear near the window and heard music, the piano. I tested the knob. Unlocked. Considered sticking my head in and calling her name but decided I didn’t know the woman well enough.
Instead, I took a business card from my billfold, and wrote, “We’re in the salvage business. Back at 9. MDF,” and wedged it at eye level inside the doorjamb.
I’d ridden Tomlinson’s gaudy beach bike, which was now propped against a gumbo-limbo tree. From the basket, I took my foul-weather jacket and walked to the beach.
I’d spent the day on the water, but weather changes quickly in the subtropics and I wanted to have a look at the Gulf. At the lab, I’d listened to NOAA weather while connecting the flask-sized object and the gun-sized object to the electrolytic reduction circuit. The other artifacts—the German coins and the diamond swastika—were already cleaner, more detailed. The cigarette lighter wasn’t much improved—the engraving only slightly more legible. Yes, the first letter was an M.
Marlissa?
As I worked, the computerized voice of NOAA told me that hurricanes near Grand Cayman and Cuba were gaining mass, moving slowly toward the Gulf. The low-pressure system off Nicaragua was spinning eastward toward open ocean.
The hurricane most likely to effect Sanibel had formed a week earlier near the Windward Islands as an unnamed tropical depression. It moved southeast near Grenada, then arched to the west-northwest toward Jamaica with maximum winds of forty m.p.h., vacuuming heat off the Caribbean Sea. The storm was now approaching the western tip of Cuba with sustained winds of more than one hundred m.p.h., and would gain strength once over water.
Only a month after being cross-haired by a category 4 hurricane, Southwest Florida residents were still panicky. The storm that hit us had had steady winds of 145 m.p.h., with gusts of more than 170 m.p.h. This new hurricane was following a similar path, and I knew that lines at supermarkets and gas pumps would be long tonight. By tomorrow afternoon, northbound lanes would be clogged with vehicles evacuating to Georgia and the Carolinas.
Panic triggers herd instincts. Government agencies, fearing post-storm criticism, are quick to overreact. It was a statistical improbability that another hurricane would make landfall near Sanibel. There was no reason to evacuate yet thousands would flee. It was more dangerous, in fact, on the road than to be battened down at home.
The dynamics of wind, heat, and water are indifferent to human thought, irrational or otherwise. But this storm now had a name. It was an entity that evoked fear. The instinct to appease by sacrifice, hording, or flight is ancient.
Traffic was already backed up on the island—which is why I’d come by bicycle. The causeway that connects Sanibel to the mainland had been damaged by the hurricane, so the Department of Transportation was closing it every other hour for repairs. Only emergency vehicles were allowed to cross between midnight and 6 A.M.
Islanders were running in advance.
Not Mildred Engle, though. She was unconcerned, content to play the piano while the world panicked around her.
A woman who loved storms.
I walked to the beach, feeling the thunderous resonance of waves. A tropical cyclone was breathing out there, siphoning heat, and exhaling a water-dense southwest wind.
As I walked, I reviewed details of our dive. What remained among the wreckage of the motor yacht Dark Light? Gold? I’d convinced myself I was imagining things. Gold on a family-owned boat that was being used by Civil Defense for coastal patrols? That was as improbable as…well, as finding a diamond-studded swastika and death’s-head.
Maybe there was gold out there.
Something strange happened that long-ago autumn night, in 1944. What? Key parts of the puzzle were missing.
I stepped into the tree line, sand pliant beneath my jogging shoes, and stopped at the edge of the Southwind estate. The upstairs light was on, balcony doors open. Curtains moved in the wind like shadows dancing. I continued toward the house until I could hear Chestra at the piano. I recognized “In the Still of the Night.”
I turned toward the horizon. The moon was masked by turquoise clouds. The sea was Arctic silver; ice ridges on an oleaginous plain. Inside me, music found tempo in waves as I tried to imagine what had happened the night Dark Light went down. I needed plausible data to assemble workable scenarios.
I thought the whole thing through; tried to keep it orderly.
Supposition: Unaware of an approaching hurricane, two people boarded a thirty-eight-foot Matthews, and ran a 240-degree course off Sa
nibel Lighthouse. They were investigating a report of suspicious lights sighted offshore, possibly a German U-boat. Coincidentally, there was also one or more boats in the area containing Cuban fishermen—several of their bodies washed ashore the next morning.
Conclusion: If lights were spotted, they belonged to Cuban fishing boats, or an unidentified vessel, a U-boat, or a combination of the three.
Supposition 2: Dark Light sank during the storm.
Observation: The boat went down quickly. Its remains were only a degree or two off the original heading. A vessel floundering in a storm commonly drifts miles before sinking.
Probability: Dark Light sank because of a circumstance or event that was abrupt, not cumulative.
Supposition 3: Aboard Dark Light were Marlissa Dorn and Frederick Roth, secret lovers. They also had at least minor business dealings. Dorn loaned Roth money to buy real estate. Both emigrated from Nazi Germany, so may have come into possession of Nazi medals that were: 1) awards for government service, or 2) acquired independently, perhaps because of their monetary value.
Probabilities: 1) Dorn and/or Roth were awarded, or acquired, the medals found at the wreck site. 2) The medals were placed on board by someone else. 3) Another person or persons came aboard Dark Light that night.
Supposition 4: The body of Marlissa Dorn washed ashore the day after the storm. Roth’s body was never found.
Conclusion: Dorn died during the storm. Roth may or may not have died during the storm. If he did not die, he wasn’t aboard Dark Light when it sank, or he found refuge aboard a vessel capable of surviving 140 m.p.h. winds in open sea.
Probability: A submarine.
Valid so far?
No.
The data was flawed; at least one of the conclusions implausible.
I stretched, and looked toward the house. Chestra was now playing the poignant melody that I recognized but still couldn’t match with a title. I reminded myself to ask again. I also had a more important question: Was she sure her godmother’s body was found on the beach near Lighthouse Point?
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