“You’d never know it,” I lied.
“We salvaged whatever we could, and we rebuilt the bridges and laid down macadam for automobiles to ride on, and made the Overseas Railway into the Overseas Highway.”
“You helped build the highway?” I asked, actually intrigued by his story.
“That’s right. Right after I finished my business on Hawthorn Island,” he said dramatically again, and it was all I could do to not say ‘it’s about time you got to the meat, buddy.’
“Two days after the storm was over, Eliot Hawthorn sent word down through the Sheriff’s department to round up five good men, take a boat to the Island and survey the damage. I did, and found nothing but disaster. The mansion had been leveled, the gardens stripped bare. Most of the palms had been toppled too, and the beach had eroded so far in at one point that the water met the foundation of the house. The boathouse was gone too. All that remained was the limestone foundation and a few splintered boards. I wired back the damages to Hawthorn, and he sent word back to get a crew together, as many men as I needed, to plow the island clean, spread it over with four of five feet of good, heavy topsoil and plant as many trees, bushes and ferns as could fit. He planned to donate the Island to the government Parks and Recreation, to be saved as a sanctuary in the name of his wife.”
“And what about the skeleton?” I asked, now more impatient than ever.
“Yes, the skeleton,” he said, and relit his pipe...
+++
On Friday the sixth of September, 1935 Reams got together a team of fourteen men, loaded a barge with tools and a diesel-powered frontend loader, and set out to Hawthorn Island. The men were hot, the men were exhausted, the men had seen so much death and destruction in the past few days that they were sick nearly to death themselves. But when Eliot Hawthorn was signing the checks, the checks were always fat, and they knew it. So the men traveled the hour-long ride from Islamorada to the Island, to carry out Eliot Hawthorn’s requests. Their job description was simple: Clear the Island, remove every last piece of debris, fill in the mansion’s foundation with gravel, and cover the entire Island with at least four feet of good topsoil. Then plant as many bushes, shrubs, trees, grass and flowers as could fit and leave the Island forever. Nothing was to be kept. Hawthorn made it very clear that he had taken everything of value (to him) with him when he left. Any salvage was to become the property of Reams, to be doled out or soled as he saw fit. Eliot wanted nothing to do with Island, or his past life again.
They began by picking through the wreckage, trying to get an idea of the scope of work ahead of them and looking for items that might be salvageable. Almost nothing was. Some cast iron cookware from the commercial-sized kitchen remained as it was too heavy to wash away, but the kitchen itself was gone, save for a twisted, stainless steel counter that got itself wrapped around one of the only surviving palm trunks. A water-logged steamer trunk held the soggy remnants of the Hawthorn’s wedding tuxedo and dress. Among the hundreds of 78 RPM records that littered the gardens and beaches, most cracked or warped from the sun, Reams found a single playable Duke Ellington Columbia with The Mooch on one side. A few pieces of costume jewelry turned up here and there. And an Enfield rifle, wet but still in good condition. That was nearly the extent of the salvage. Hundreds of dishes, cups, glasses, and serving pieces were smashed and shattered as far as the eye could see. Faded clothes covered everything. Paintings, furniture, electric cords and books all twisted together into crumpled heaps. The water around the Island was littered with the same bits of junk, flotsam that hadn’t made it to any shore as of yet.
But it wasn’t until late afternoon that the worst of the ‘detritus’ had been found.
“Captain Reams, over here!” yelled one of the men from the North shore. He was waving his hands wildly in an attempt to get the Captain’s attention. Reams dropped the broken framed photo of Vivian Hawthorn, and walked over to the man.
The afternoon sun was hotter than Reams ever remembered it. It beat down on him hard, burning his face and arms. Somehow the broiling heat of the sun was like an omen, a warning to stay away from the beachhead, to go back to the shade of the make-shift tent shelter. But he pressed on, almost knowing what he’d find before he got there.
“Four all togethah,” the tall man who called him over said, wiping the sweat from his dark brow. “Least-ways that’s all we done found so far. Ain’t no recognizin’ them either, Captain, they’re too far gone from the heat.”
Reams looked down at the body in front of him. It was a woman, that was evident by the vague shape of her body and the heeled shoes. She was laying on her face where the beach met the garden, wrapped in what was once her clothes. Four days in the sun hadn’t been good to her. Neither had the crabs and maggots.
“Do we dare turn her over, Mr. Bryant?” Reams asked the man. The man just shook his head. “Can’t be any worse than we’ve seen so far,” he said to Bryant, and together they gently turned the body over.
They immediately wished they hadn’t.
“Oh my Lord in heaven, have pity on her soul,” Bryant said, then turned and vomited on the sand.
Reams felt the hot bile churn in his gut too, but managed to keep it down by looking away quickly. He found a piece of cloth and threw it over the woman’s face without looking.
“My God, Bryant, her face. I’ve never seen…”
“I know it, Captain. Let’s not dwell on the subject, if you catch my drift, ’k?”
“Yeah, I catch ya. Are the others this bad?”
“No suh, not nearly as bad. Two men, I think, they bloated up and burst days ago and are damn near nothing but bone now from the crabs and birds, over tangled up in them there bushes over there. Just bone, not so bad as this. One other, don’t know if it be a man or a lady, floatin’ out by the edge of the water there. That one’s pretty bad, but still not so bad as this.”
Reams took a deep breath. The smell of death came with it and before he could stop it he wrenched. He washed his mouth out with water from the surf, and standing up-wind inhaled big gulps of fresh, clean Gulf air. Then he turned to Bryant and said, “Get three or four of the men to line the bodies up about fifty yards from the shore, then cover them over with lye and sand.”
“Don’t you’all wanna bury them, Cap? Bad enough they’s never going be claimed by their families. We should at least give them a Christian burial, I say.”
“We will Mr. Bryant, we will. After all this is cleared away we’ll be bringing in some good, heavy dirt and a load of plants and trees to cover over the Island. They’ll be buried then, deal?”
“Yes suh, I suppose that’s the best we can do, under the circumstances.”
“Ain’t no point in bringing them back to the Key,” Reams said quietly, “ain’t nobody going to be able to recognize them anyhow, I’d imagine. Just be giving false hope to some people already hurt too bad.”
“I’m with you, Cap. I’ll get the men.”
“Good,” Reams said, and as Bryant walked back to the camp, Reams said a little prayer, thanking God for saving him from such a horrible fate.
+++
“So what did you do after that?” I asked the Captain as he paused to re-pack his pipe. “Did you ever tell anyone about the bodies?”
“Not a living soul,” he said. A match ignited and the odor of cherry mixed with sulfur filled the small shack. “Not even my wife at the time. That is until a few years ago, when we were swappin’ stories of the Great Storm at a tavern. We meaning myself, and a few of the boys that helped me on the Island, and ole Lem. That’s how he knew to send you to me, I’d imagine.”
I sat back in my own squeaky chair, satisfied the mystery was solved, but a little disappointed that it was that simple. Bodies washed up in the storm. The timeframe fit, the depth of Earth fit, even the heeled shoe he noticed was evidently the same heeled shoe that we found on the skeleton. Her face had probably been smashed up against a log or some coral. Case solved, class dismissed.
&nbs
p; Jessica looked very sad, as if she’d known the victims herself. She’d sat quietly until then, and her soft voice seemed alien in the smoky, dank shack. “Captain Reams, tell me…why was the girl…her body, why was she so much worse than the others you found? You left that part out of your story.”
“I did? Well now, to tell the truth I’d rather not say, young Miss. It was…well it was quite a gruesome sight, as you might imagine.”
I was thinking about the skeleton, and the smashed skull. I didn’t say a word.
Jessica said, “It’s ok Captain, I think I can handle it. I’ve seen a few bad things in my day, and if your story hasn’t made me sick yet, I don’t think anything will.”
I laughed a little at that, and so did the Captain. Jessica smiled. She was probably right; I’d seen some nasty things in my time, murders, car accidents, even a guy who fell into the subway and got fried on the third rail before the train hit him. But nothing quite like this.
“Alright Miss, but iff’n you have nightmares, don’t blame old Reams, deal?”
Jessica suddenly turned very serious. Her eyes man, her eyes said it all, but I just didn’t hear it. “It’s a deal, Captain. Tell us.”
Captain Reams sat back again, the familiar squeak of his chair setting the mood. He puffed on the pipe, looked up at the ceiling; then he closed his eyes and with what seemed like a lot of pain said the words that sealed it up tight.
“She’d been out on the beach, in the hot sun for four days. The heat does things to a body, here in the tropics. Skin does a sort of dance between drying up brown and getting all mushy and waterlogged. Critters go to work inside the corpse, flies lay eggs and eggs turn to maggots. They eat a body from the inside out, you see, and at first they release gasses that bloat up a body…sometimes to the point the skin bursts. Then the gasses escape, and the corpse rots fast in the hot sun. The smell attracts more pests, namely crabs and birds. They pick at it, claw at it, eat at it too. But sometimes a corpse is too gruesome even for the animals to chow on it. Such as it was with her. Her body had blown up, then collapsed back down. Ribs, bones could be seen through her skin in places, and in some places her fat had turned almost to goo. But it was her face…that was the worst of her, and even though I only saw for a second, I’ll never forget that face.” He took the pipe out of his mouth and finished off the rest of his beer before continuing. “The face was gone. Looked like it’d been caved in with a brick or something. Her eye sockets were just black holes, her nose was a gaping hole that met her mouth. Teeth just sort of hung in places, and her jaw was wrenched open, like she’d been caught in a death-scream. The skin was black as night, and puffed up like a balloon where it wasn’t eaten away. And in that second I looked, something slithered out of her eye and made its way back into her mouth.”
He shuddered at that. His face twisted, and he shook his head hard trying to lose the image. When he opened his eyes, they were red and tearful. To my left Jessica sat quietly, just listening. She showed no more emotion than sorrow for the horror of it all, but whether she wanted me to see it or not, she was trembling. Her face twitched, her hands shook slightly in her lap. Most people might not have caught it, but I was trained a long time to pick up on little things like that. I had no idea what it meant, but it was there.
“I guess that’s all then.” I said to the Captain. He let out a heavy sigh before answering.
“Not just quite,” he said. “There’s one more thing. As I said, we buried the bodies over with lye and sand, and a few days later when all the junk was cleared out and hauled back to the mainland, we came back with several barges full of sand, dirt and plants. We covered over the Island with the sand and dirt, and planted as much as we could. The whole project set Hawthorn back about twenty grand, but he was happy. I was happy too, because I made a cool two G’s myself. And I was done with the Island. Or so I thought. Two years later I got a wire from Mr. Hawthorn. That’s when he decided to come back, to make the Island into a hotel. My guts twisted up when I read that wire, Mr. Riggins. He wanted to come in with bulldozers and whatnot, and he wanted me to handle the excavation crew and direct the construction company on where the old foundation was. Now, you have to imagine the last thing I wanted was for anyone to find those bodies, so I had to be extra careful where I told them to dig. As it was, I left a marker on the site where we buried them, just in case something like that were ever to happen.”
“What kind of marker?”
“Two trees, small palms criss-crossed. They were still there when I went back two years later. Far as I know they’re still there today.”
“They are,” Jessica said, “Just on the edge of the northern garden.”
“That’s where we found the skeleton,” I said, “right at the edge of the garden.”
“And that would make sense, I’d imagine. I was very careful about avoidin’ that spot, and convinced them to leave the trees since they’d grown so strangely. And they did. And all was good, and Mr. Hawthorn hired me on once again, this time as Captain of his fleet of boats and water taxies. It was a good time for me, I made good money and got to work on fine boats, until the summer of 1950. It was then that Mr. Hawthorn’s new wife passed on. And the night she died, something very strange happened. I was doing my nightly walk-around of the Island, checking to make sure all the boats and rentals and all were back up on the beach, when I saw the oddest thing.” He got that distant, staring into space look again in his eyes, and continued very softly. “That night I saw a woman, dressed in white and wearing a large summer hat walking in the garden near the two crossed trees. I began to walk towards her, as I seemed to feel she needed me for some reason. But as I drew up closer, she seemed to…to fade, become sort of clear-like. I kept walking towards her and when I got to be about five feet away she turned and faced me. I heard her voice speak, but her mouth didn’t move. In fact, she didn’t have much of a face at all. The voice came, and she…well she just sort of disappeared, dissolved into thin air.”
Neither Jessica nor I said a thing. We just sat there waiting for him to talk. When he didn’t I prodded him.
“Are you saying you saw a ghost, Captain?”
“Not really sure what it was I saw, Mr. Riggins. Don’t much believe in ghosts. In fact, I firmly believe it was my mind playin’ tricks on me, on account of what she said.”
“What did she say,” Jessica asked. Her voice cracked and gave her away.
“She said, ‘Release me.’ Then disappeared. I quit the next day. Haven’t set foot on the Island since.”
+++
We said goodbye and thanks to Captain Reams, jumped in the Chevy and took off south down the Overseas Highway. The ride was quiet. Jessica watched the scenery go by, I watched the road ahead. A few minutes into the drive, I pulled over at a little roadside stand advertising orange juice for ten cents. What I really needed was to use the phone.
“You’re stopping for orange juice?” Jessica asked, her voice sounding distant, dreamlike.
“You like orange juice, don’t you? Besides, I have to make a couple of calls.”
“Ok,” she said, still sort of distant. “I’ll get the juice while you make the calls.”
She got out of the car in a sort of slow motion and started for the counter. I handed her a quarter without a word. She smiled, and continued up to the stand as I made my way over to the pay phone on the telephone pole.
When the first dime dropped, I asked for Melinda Hawthorn at Tiki Island Resort. She wasn’t in her office, so I dropped another dime and asked for Sheriff Jackson, Monroe County. He was in and took my call.
“Hi ya’ll doing, Detective Riggins?” came the husky voice over the wire. “Dig up anything?”
“Yeah, a bit,” I said, and gave him the story.
“Not too surprised,” he said dully, “Sort of figured that might be it. There’s a lot of stories like that in the Keys. You say there are four buried there?”
“Yeah, that’s what Reams said. One woman, three men. You sti
ll going to get the Tallahassee boys in on this?”
“Don’t see much point. Probably best to just cover the remains over and put up a memorial. I think that’s what Mr. Hawthorn would probably prefer. I’ll talk to him tonight and see.”
“Sounds good to me,” I said, then without much pause added, “Sheriff, you ever have any trouble with Chief Roberts down in Key West?”
A loud laugh came over the line, and I smiled. “You mean old Lemon Head? Nah, he’s mostly harmless. Sneaky, and he’s got some muscle working for him but mostly harmless. Why, you cross his path?”
“He brained me with a sap, tied me in a chair and wanted to know why I was asking questions about Hawthorn. I’d say that’s a little more than harmless.”
“He did that?” the Sheriff asked sounding very surprised. “I guess he’s knocking things up a notch down there. You ok?”
“I am now. I managed to bust out of the chair and teach him a lesson. I knocked him around pretty bad, until he gave up. I told him if he didn’t stay away from me I’d get him indicted on corruption charges. I assume he is corrupt, correct?”
“He is. But I don’t like it that he put the hurt on you. He must know you were working with me somehow. And he’s always tryin’ to buck me, from way back. You want me to give him a call, tell him to lay off?”
Murder on Tiki Island: A Noir Paranormal Mystery In The Florida Keys (Detective Bill Riggins Mysteries) Page 15