Dark Light df-13

by Randy Wayne White

  I had told them I followed Heller because I saw him steal what I thought was a box from Mildred Engle’s home on Gulf Drive. I’d ended up trying to save the man when I realized he couldn’t swim.

  “We know you’ve been through a lot,” one of the officers now said to me. “But…we found a body aboard the boat. He may have been headed out to dump it when you saw him fall over. Do you mind taking a look at it?”

  I minded. But I followed the officer, anyway, feeling sick.

  It was nearly 1 A.M. Storm winds gusted, no longer gale force. I had a towel around my shoulders. I felt exhausted.

  Unreal reality. I wished I was aboard No Mas, discussing inanities with Tomlinson.

  Instead, I stepped aboard the Viking. There were a half-dozen law enforcement people shielding the bag and the body from me. My presence, a civilian, caused them to lower their voices. The officer I was following held up a finger—it would be a minute or two before they were ready.

  I turned my back to the group and waited. The lights inside the boat were on, cabin door open. No one stopped me when I stepped inside and took a look.

  Three suitcases there, Heller’s name and Wisconsin address on one of the tags.

  Yes, he had been attempting to escape by water. But where?

  I didn’t give it much thought. I didn’t care.

  I had been aboard this vessel enough to notice that along with the suitcases, Heller had brought something else into the cabin. It was a trunk. The old steamship variety: wood and leather, with a brass lock.

  The lock was sprung. I opened the trunk.

  Inside were packets of letters, some sheet music, and old photos. I looked at one. Marlissa Dorn. Not a glamour shot, but taken when she was about the same age.

  A beautiful woman.

  The promissory notes were there, too. Some were in an envelope, others scattered throughout the trunk—rectangles of fragile brown paper signed by Marlissa and Frederick Roth. It was the box I’d seen him take from Southwind.

  I was confused. When had Heller loaded the bag containing Chestra’s body into the truck?

  I stepped outside. People standing around the body made room.

  I forced myself to look at the bag. It wasn’t Chestra.

  It was a man, his face unrecognizable because he’d been shot execution style in the back of the head—grotesque.

  I recognized the straw cowboy hat, though. Heller had called him Moe.

  The officer asked, “Any idea who it is, Doc?”

  I shook my head. If this was Moe, then Chestra was—oh God. I brushed past the cop, and sprinted toward my truck before he could ask anything else.

  Several minutes later, I skidded to a stop in Southwind’s driveway expecting the worst.

  C hestra!”

  The front door was closed but not bolted. I stepped inside, calling for her.

  “Chestra!”

  Behind me, the tree canopy flickered with light, bare limbs gray, black, bronze.

  I sprinted up the steps, still calling for her…then stopped at the head of the stairs…

  Chestra was at the piano, bent over the keyboard as if she’d fallen sleep. The piano’s candelabra was a pyramid of lighted candles. The balcony doors were closed, but curtains allowed moonlight. A white lace shawl covered her head. She looked frail, like an October leaf about to blow away.

  “Chestra.”

  She stirred. Slowly, then, the woman removed the shawl and looked at me. She had been holding a compress to her forehead, I realized.

  “Doc? Doc, thank God you’re not hurt. I was worried.”

  I walked to the piano. There was a bowl of ice and another cloth compress on the stand next to her. I knelt and put my hand on her shoulder. “Are you all right?”

  She had been crying, and I could see a plum-sized lump above her left eye.

  She used her hand to dismiss the subject. “Yes. But he did surprise me. I was terrified, of course, but I tried not to show it—remember my philosophy about men and wolves?”

  Never show fear. I remembered.

  “I inherited a little popgun of a pistol from Marlissa, and I managed to get it on him, but he wrestled it away before I could—”

  Shoot him?

  She didn’t finish. She looked at me. “What about you? Did you catch him?”

  “Yes.”

  Her tone became expectant, although she tried to mask it. “I hope you didn’t do something crazy—like kill him?” She looked at me suddenly, searching my face.

  I said, “Almost. But, no.”

  She nodded. “I don’t know why the fool didn’t shoot me. But it was the strangest thing, Doc. He had the gun, pointing right at me. Then there was a lightning flash, and…he got the queerest expression on his face. It was as if he’d been struck dumb.” The woman touched a gentle finger to her forehead. “He just stood there, staring, then he must have hit me. When I came to, I heard your truck leave. That’s why I called the police. I was worried you would follow him. And he was monstrous.”

  No wonder the cops reacted so quickly when they spotted my truck at the ferry landing.

  There was a box of tissues on the piano and she took one. She dabbed at her eyes, then blew her nose delicately, before standing and walking past me. She was bundled in a white robe, hair frazzled from the storm. “If you don’t mind, though, Doc, I’d prefer not to discuss it anymore. I’m not prepared for visitors, I’m afraid. And I have a lot to do.”

  Outside, lightning flared twice. It illuminated her face…abandoned it to shadows…then illuminated her face again. I took a step back, and shook my head, trying to clear what had to have been a hallucination.

  “Doc? You’re white as a ghost. Can I get you something?”

  I said, “No. But I need to sit down a minute.” I walked to the bar and poured soda water over ice, intentionally not looking at Chestra. In the strobing light, her face had changed…no, it had appeared to change. One moment she was old, an instant later she was young. Old…young…dark…light.

  Heller had stared at her instead of killing her. Had he experienced the same dizzying hallucination?

  “Men,” I heard her say. “Hard on the outside, but so soft on the inside. Sit there and rest, dear.”

  I plopped down in the chair near the piano. She patted my shoulder as she passed.

  I felt distanced from reality.

  Several hours had passed since I had sat aboard No Mas and taken a couple of puffs from a joint. I’d been in water that was dark and cold; I’d sobered. I was sober enough to realize the drug had affected me. But had it done this?

  The drug had scrambled my sense of time. It had also intensified various fixations, and I’m tunnel-visioned to begin with, prone to what shrinks call OCB. So it had skewed my judgment, too.

  Tomlinson covets varieties of cannabis that cause hallucinations. Could hallucinations be so emotionally authentic that they registered inside the brain as fact?

  Was that why Chestra was behaving so distant now—as if our time together in the gazebo was something I’d dreamed? Or…was it because I had called her Marlissa?

  I remembered Tomlinson telling me that she had ended their relationship when he’d done something similar…But, no, this was ridiculous. I was just tired and beat-up, that’s all.

  I noticed something for the first time. The hallway was a chaos of clothing, personal items, and suitcases. Either Heller had made a mess of the place, or…

  She saw my expression.

  “Yes, dear, I am packing to leave.”

  “What?”

  “That’s right. It’s time. Thanks to you and your friends, I found out the truth tonight about Frederick Roth. I had no idea it would be such an emotional experience. Marlissa has become more than a hobby, I’ve realized. In a way, I’m her…custodian. It broke my heart when I was told Freddy abandoned her. Doc”—the woman paused long enough to smile at me—“you made Marlissa’s memory…her story …romantic again. Thank you for that.”

 
I said, “You’re welcome. But does that mean you have to leave, go back to Manhattan?”

  “Let’s just say I’m going. Leave it at that.”

  I stood. “Do you need help?”

  She shook her head. “No, I want to be alone. With Freddy. I’m sure you understand.”

  No, I didn’t. I put my drink on the table as she opened the balcony doors. I followed her outside. She was reaching for the light switch when I caught her. I placed my hands on her shoulders.

  “Chestra. Why are you doing this?”

  As I pivoted her, she reached for the switch again and turned on the lights. There were two flood lamps above the balcony doors, megawattage for security. They produced harsh, unfiltered beams that had a surgical sterility.

  What she then did was intentional, like punishment. Chestra pulled me close, then tilted her face into the blinding rays, as if looking into the sun. She held the pose to make certain I had all the time I needed to see what she really looked like.

  My reaction was involuntary: I stepped back.

  This was not the woman I had lifted into my arms during the storm.

  The woman smiled, still holding the pose, forcing me to look at her again. Something familiar was in her smile—the diamond glitter of her eyes? Yes.

  “Don’t you agree, Doc? It’s time for me to be gone.”

  Chestra expected me to turn away. I didn’t. I’d seen what she looked like in bright light, but I also knew how she felt and reacted when lights were dim. We had more in common than I had realized.

  Instead, I put a finger to her chin and rotated her face toward mine. I held her there while my other hand found the wall, then the switch. The spotlights blinked off.

  In the fresh darkness, the moon was huge, pale as a winter sun. She tried to pull away, but I wouldn’t allow it. I touched my lips to hers.

  She smiled, and placed her hand on the side of my face. “Good-bye, Doc.”

  Then she led me down the stairs to the front door.

  After it closed behind me, I walked to the beach, alone. Wind pushed moonlight off the Gulf of Mexico, and I stood in the dark, listening, as the piano began, first tentative, then with more certainty, her voice matching the cadence of waves.

  Never mind…

  The sun is on the sea

  In my mind

  Waves wash over me

  We’ll never know

  All that we possess

  ’Til the end of time

  We can only guess…

  EPILOGUE

  By the first week of October, the weather cleared, becoming typical of Florida autumns: tropic blue mornings, cool nights with stars, jasmine beneath a hunter’s moon. Beaches were silver. At night, palms were moon-glazed.

  After two weeks without wind, the Gulf of Mexico also began to clear. By October 15th, a Saturday, Jeth, Tomlinson, Arlis Futch, and I decided water visibility had sufficiently improved to make our second dive on the wreck Dark Light. Chestra was still funding the project, taking care of legalities through her uncle’s lawyer. She had agreed that we were entitled to the majority of what we salvaged, minus all personal items that may have belonged to Frederick Roth.

  In death, with Chestra standing sentinel, Marlissa Dorn remained faithful to her lover—something she’d been unable to manage in life. Penitence, perhaps, for a beautiful woman’s imperfections.

  The storm had blown away all but one of our marker buoys, so we began all over. Dropped a half-dozen new buoys to outline the wreck, then followed the same search plan as before, three divers swimming circles, an orderly pattern by use of a rope.

  The visibility was poor. I could see only five or six feet before objects disappeared in the murk. But it was markedly better than before.

  We found more interesting objects from a classic American era—a time of torch singers, inventors, immigrants, and industrial aristocrats. A time when common people lived heroic lives and battled epic evils.

  We found bottles. Part of an Edison phonograph. A brass-handled walking stick.

  We also found a couple of objects so valuable that Jeth howled underwater when he saw what I had dug from the sand: two gold bars. Small, about the size of miniature loaves of bread. Heavy.

  Gold does not tarnish in salt water, so they looked as freshly made as the day they were struck with their mint ID:

  DEUTSCHE REICHSBANK

  1 KILO

  FEINGOLD 999.9

  The bars were also stamped with a square-winged eagle, its talon clutching a swastika.

  Later, we would calculate the value of a kilo of gold at current prices. Each bar was worth more than thirty thousand dollars. As historical objects, it was possible they were worth more. It was something to research.

  Jeth and his pregnant wife, my dear friend Janet, were both ecstatic.

  If, as Tomlinson said, there were dark spirits lingering among Dark Light’s ruins, they did not bump us. However, I did see a canoe-sized bull shark glide by, then vanish in the gloom. It was a male, easily identified because of the claspers near its anal fin. Bull sharks are responsible for more attacks on divers than great whites, so I called an end to the dive just to be on the safe side. Also, I had dealt with a shark of similar size in my past. Very similar. The resemblance frightened me.

  Sharks do not track people over months, over years. Like storms, they are not energized by intent. There is cause but no design. My reaction proved I am not untainted by irrational thoughts and superstitions.

  “You’re starting to trust your intuition,” Tomlinson said when I mentioned the shark. “You are opening up; beginning a very far-out, creative, reflective period of your life.”

  I told him I hoped not. There was too much work to do around the lab.

  My reaction was the same when he offered me a lighted joint on the boat trip back to Dinkin’s Bay. I refused, then told him to never bring the stuff aboard a working vessel that I was aboard.

  He smiled, and said, “Lighten up, man. I can see you’re undecided.”

  A joke, but I wasn’t undecided. It was something I would not try again. The experience was powerfully linked with Mildred Chestra Engle. It had blurred the evening. Even now, I wasn’t certain what was real, what wasn’t. Like the appearance of a familiar shark, there were implications that frightened me.

  One unambiguous reality was a note Chestra mailed to the marina, postmarked Manhattan. It arrived five days after she left.

  Doc, dear man, I am embarrassed that I left so quickly, and also by my behavior. At my age, my God! I had more than my usual one chartreuse & soda that night, which is the only way I can explain it, plus there was that magnificent storm! I hope you will forgive me.

  Fondly, Chessie

  P.S. I shouldn’t ask your forgiveness—I forgot your kind reminder: There are only two things women are never forgiven. Everything else, there’s no need to ask. MCE

  O n Tuesday, the eighteenth, we were readying the Viking for our third dive on the wreck when we got a phone call from Arlis saying he couldn’t join us.

  The previous night, someone had torched Indian Harbor Marina, its docks, fuel depot, and office. “It was one hell of a fire, lots of explosions, but nobody hurt,” Arlis told me. Then added, after a pause, “That’s what I heard, anyway.”

  Detectives wanted to question him, he said. He would be busy most of the day.

  Indian Harbor had become well known to law enforcement types in the last few weeks. Javier had died there. His killer, a marina employee named Matthew “Moe” Klabundee, had been murdered there. Bernard Heller was in jail without hope of a bond because two more bodies had been found on the property. Women who had been packed in drums, then buried. Investigators had found a lot of damning evidence in Heller’s residence that indicated he might be responsible for other crimes around the country.

  A vicious little boy lived behind the man’s blue eyes.

  When I read about Heller in the newspaper, I reflected on the night I held the struggling man beneath black w
ater. Another few seconds was all I needed. A few seconds: the difference between perfect and imperfect timing.

  We couldn’t find a replacement for Arlis, but we made the dive, anyway.

  Two more bars of gold. Same markings.

  Frederick Roth, and Dark Light, had not been inexpensive.

  Maybe there was more. We hoped. We hunted. There wasn’t.

  O ctober 19th, a Wednesday, was too windy to dive—fine with me, because there was a decent collecting tide at 2:27 P.M. and that’s how I spent the afternoon. Wading knee-deep water, searching sandbars, throwing the cast net.

  By sunset, I was tired but felt great. Finally, a good working day on an island that was getting back to normal after one of the worst hurricanes in its history.

  As I made notes in my log, and marked another day off the lab’s calendar, I realized today was the anniversary of another terrible storm—the autumn storm of 1944. It seemed all the more reason to enjoy small, everyday niceties. So when Tomlinson invited me aboard No Mas for a sunset beer, I accepted.

  I had not mentioned Chestra for weeks. Nor had I discussed the scar tissue on her right shoulder. Had he seen it, or touched those small, distinctive marks?

  It was not an easy decision. We had an unspoken rule about discussing women with whom we have been intimate. The agreement endorsed a code of chivalry that seems romantic—worse, irrational—to some, but I like it, anyway. I like it enough that it’s become part of my personal scaffolding.

  So I did not bring up the subject of the lady’s shoulder. It was a relief to me, in a way. I knew that Tomlinson would insist on debating the tired old topic of good and evil—how could I not believe those two forces existed? Or not believe that a beautiful young woman could be forever scarred by the touch of an evil man named Adolf?

  Even to discuss such a thing was absurd. It was as absurd, I had to remind myself, as my cannabis-induced fantasy that I had held Marlissa Dorn naked in my arms.

  Instead, Tomlinson and I discussed familiar topics and exchanged local gossip. Inanities are fun, profundities are a pain in the butt.