by Karen Harper
“You mean with Mark Stirling’s death?”
Colleen startled, and Claire feared at first she’d overstepped—or had learned what she didn’t want to know. Standing in the doorway to her kitchen, Colleen nodded and wiped her eyes with an already damp handkerchief she pulled from the pocket of her slacks. “He was a very nice person. Scottish heritage but loved the Irish gifts here, bought some for friends.”
Friends, Claire thought. Mark Stirling had friends? But it was Colleen’s words, He was a very nice person, that really floored her. No one else had said that about the man. But it was spoken so sincerely that Claire couldn’t believe Colleen could have been angry with Mark. But shouldn’t she have been, since Mark was harassing her husband with articles on illegal shark fishing?
“Oh, that’s right, I did see an ad in his paper for your shop,” Claire said in the awkward silence.
“Yes. Nice ads. Smashing, really. He insisted on paying me for the items he bought and charged me a nominal fee for the ads.”
Would she admit that, Claire wondered, if there had been something illicit going on?
“I’ll get the tea,” Colleen said, suddenly seeming to pull herself together. Her expression changed, went from soft and vulnerable to hard and determined. Almost steely eyed.
An interesting transformation: Which persona was this woman, really?
“Come on in with me then. There’s a nice little nook in the kitchen or we can take ourselves out back, and I haven’t forgotten the ring. Lovely to have the company, really.”
The kitchen was immaculate with lace curtains, and the copper kettle boiled all too quickly. Just when Claire was going to try to get Colleen to expand on her opinion of Mark Stirling, the woman said, “Don’t be miffed now that I’ve turned down your kind offer of lunch on the yacht. I hate to bring this up as I’m sure you and your husband must concentrate on this current murder case. But I read that Nick Markwood and his firm defended another accused man. You see, I’d rather not visit the Sylph, because I knew the woman who was strangled there and, since your husband defended that man who owns the yacht and he walked free, Sondra’s case has never been solved.”
Claire stared at her, wordless for once.
“And,” Colleen added, as she poured the boiling water in the pot, “that’s so sad, so very sad, when a murderer walks free, and no one even knows who he—or she—is.”
“Who—how did you know Sondra McMillan?” Claire asked. Her heart was beating hard. Her hand shook so that it rattled her teacup in the saucer, so she put her other hand on it to keep it quiet.
“She shopped here. Her Irish roots ran deep. Her problem was she was beautiful and newly divorced. Emotionally needy, I dare say.”
“But being beautiful—most wouldn’t see that as a problem. But I must admit I read about the trial and saw her picture.”
“The yacht was on Marco Island then, not here, as I’m sure you read—or your husband told you,” she said. “Her ex-husband had an ironclad alibi. He was living out West and was at work.” She poured a bit of milk in her tea. And stirred. And stirred.
Claire recalled Nick had told her that Fin had made a joke about Mark Stirling’s name and the fact he always stirred up trouble. She suddenly feared she’d stepped into a spider’s web and she wasn’t sure who was spinning it.
21
Waiting for Nick to get back from his fishing trip, Claire hunkered down in her stateroom office to research more about the Sondra McMillan murder. She told herself not to feel guilty that she wasn’t working on their Mangrove Murder case again. Hadn’t she exhausted herself over it, both online and off? And Heck had—well, researched the heck out of it too. She couldn’t fight her interest in the shipboard murder any more than she could help her fascination with Colleen.
The words Breaking News streaked across Claire’s laptop screen as she got to the website and page she wanted. Hunched over her laptop, she watched an archived Nancy Grace show on YouTube about the Unsolved Yacht Murder. One segment had interviews, and one was called Verdict Watch while the jury was sequestered.
Nick was featured on one segment. She watched it carefully. After the trial, he explained why his client, Dylan Carnahan, was acquitted and should have been. She supposed Nick could convince anyone of anything. Another later segment had the headline Carnahan Should Be Retried: Is There A Mystery Murderer Or Did He Get Off Scot-Free?
“Mystery murderer—that’s a good one,” Claire muttered as she took notes on a legal pad by hand. “Maybe Nancy Grace can send a reporter down here to find Mark Stirling’s mystery murderer.”
She looked up a moment to rest her eyes and saw the back of Bronco’s head outside the cabin window as he bent over something on deck. Lexi was taking a nap so he wasn’t helping to watch her. The child was really getting too old for long daily naps, but she ran herself ragged—like her mother. And she was always physically and emotionally exhausted after Jace brought her back. Nita had some time to herself right now, but Claire didn’t know where she was.
Until, that is, she stood to stretch and glance out through the window. Nita was in Bronco’s arms, the two madly kissing one another.
“Breaking news, indeed,” Claire whispered. Isn’t that all they needed? Yet, hadn’t she herself fallen in love with someone she was working with? Her first instinct was to phone Nick to confer, but she didn’t want him lecturing Nita or Bronco. What if they quit? Poor Bronco not long ago had lost a woman he loved, which had caused a volatile reaction. As big as he was, he had a real problem with self-esteem and controlling his emotions. She felt sorry for him, and she and Lexi valued Nita, but this wasn’t good, was it?
She saw the two of them parting with a fond backward glance, so she sat down and returned to Nancy Grace’s next segment. Claire knew she should be spending her time getting more background on Fin and Colleen Taylor as well as Ada Cypress, but this Sondra McMillan murder haunted her. Now Nita and Bronco had upset her too, making it hard to concentrate.
This six-minute segment had the title Carnahan Should Be Retried. In it Nancy Grace was admitting, in her usual dramatic style—she probably would have loved the Mark Stirling brand of journalism—that Sondra McMillan might have been up to something underhanded, since “just maybe” she hadn’t been invited onto the yacht. “But she didn’t deserve to die!” Nancy insisted. “So what if she’d dated a series of men? There might be no direct proof one of them was Carnahan, or that any of them hurt her, but she didn’t deserve to die!”
Forget having Colleen Taylor to lunch here, Claire thought, and forget Nancy Grace’s sensational subjects and style. She’d get Nick to invite Dylan Carnahan here, so she could chat him up.
This short video, which looked as if it had been taken in the courtroom, showed a blown-up poster of the lounge of the Sylph. Claire gasped. The long couch was the same one she and Nick used. The position of the dead woman’s body was outlined on the floor, though the corpse was gone in the photo. The blood on the area rug—it was bare tile now—made a terrible stain, like a Rorschach inkblot test, as if demanding, “What do you see here?”
“What indeed? But if she was strangled,” Claire asked aloud, “why the blood?”
She went back to reading local newspaper articles on the murder from various media websites. Amazing! Mark Stirling had a byline for the Naples paper from which he’d been let go shortly after. So he had covered the Carnahan trial.
She read the article. Nick must have hated this coverage, if he’d seen it. Mark Stirling’s article was slanted to make Sondra sound absolutely guileless and helpless, and he intimated Dylan had invited her on board, despite what Dylan had testified. Stirling made Sondra sound as if some of the loose woman reports were lies.
And, oh, it was Dylan Carnahan’s blood on the floor. He’d claimed, when he’d found her there, that he’d cut himself trying to slice off the li
gature someone had put around her neck. He had no idea who she was, but he’d pressed his mouth to hers, so, yes, he had traces of her lipstick on his mouth from trying to breathe life back into her. Finally, he’d called 9-1-1.
Next on this segment came a video of people leaving the courtroom in Naples after the trial. Nick, with Carnahan, and, evidently, two of his team, were in the background.
But also walking out of the courtroom was a middle-aged Seminole man with—it had to be!—Ada Cypress.
* * *
After the fishing trip, Nick had gone back onshore to talk to Haze and Maggie again. Both of them were scared that an arrest was imminent. When he returned to the yacht, he and Claire sat on deck with goblets of wine before an early dinner. The sun was still fairly high, but they were exhausted. Claire told him about her research on Sondra McMillan’s murder, including that Mark had covered the trial. Nick said he tried not to read the papers, because they just distracted him.
Then she broke it to him about Bronco and Nita. No more keeping things to herself, she vowed. They were a real team now.
“Oh, no,” he said. “Bronco and Nita? Isn’t that all we need? I think I should talk to him and you talk to her. Not to say we don’t approve, but just to keep it quiet and controlled. I think we know how instant attractions work. I just hope Heck wouldn’t object, since he’s the one who brought Nita to us. Because she’s his cousin and with his protective macho ethic, I don’t want him to get involved, but I’ll have to mention it—tell him it’s okay with us—within reason.”
“Reason? If people are madly in love? But all right. We need both of them, and they’re good people, good with Lexi.”
“And things have been working out so well, at least with them watching Lexi and the yacht. The worst thing Bronco’s done since he’s been here is hang a picture of him standing over a dead gator on the wall in his cabin next to the one of a fourteen-foot python he killed, but maybe that will act as a deterrent to keep Nita out of his room.” His grin was really a grimace, and he shook his head. Claire reached out to lightly grasp the nape of his neck and stroked his skin with her thumb.
With a sigh, Nick went on, “How he sleeps with that stuff on the wall is beyond me, and—I just thought of something. He uses a bangstick to dispense gators, and that always leaves a stellate—star-shaped wound.”
“Like the one in Mark’s forehead? But there can’t be a connection. The autopsy stated it was a bullet wound.”
“I know. Entry and exit wounds, but a bangstick could too. Just a coincidence, but...”
They recited together, “In crime investigation, there are no coincidences not worth looking into.”
Nick said, “I hate for us to have to be so paranoid about everyone and everything. Knowing Clayton Ames does that to you. And your seeing Ada Cypress leaving the courtroom is one thing you can pursue, but a Bronco and Mark Stirling connection? No way. Bronco’s been out chasing snakes in the Glades, not the human ones around here. I’ll go talk to him, though, just about being discreet with Nita,” he said, draining the rest of his wine. “You can mention it to her later. Be right back.”
But he wasn’t right back and when he rejoined her, Nick was upset. Even more upset than he’d been about her obsession with the old Carnahan-McMillan murder case, though he’d agreed to have Dylan invited to his own yacht soon.
“What happened?” she asked, getting up from her deck chair to join him at the ship’s rail.
“He took it bad. Thought I didn’t trust him. Also, Heck had already told him to keep his hands off Nita—then he didn’t.”
“Oh, no. Since Bronco lost his last love and exploded...”
“Yeah. He’s really shook up, so I better go talk to him again. You want to come along, back me up?”
“Yes, I’ll go too. That’s all we need, either of them upset and quitting. Ah, the problems of the bosses of the world.”
“Except for Clayton Ames who just eliminates his problems—literally. Let’s go talk to Bronco then to Nita.”
But as they headed down the deck, Nita came running at them, crying.
“He’s gone! He said goodbye, that he was a curse.”
“Gone where?” Nick asked, hitting his fist on the railing.
“Grabbed some of his stuff. Back to working alone in the Glades, he said, where he can’t hurt no one, where he be trusted.”
With Claire and Nita after him, Nick ran around to the dockside of the ship just in time to see Bronco’s truck roar out of the parking lot, despite the fact he was pulling his small Airstream trailer.
Nick swore. “I’m going after him. If he gets all the way to his Everglades snake station, he told me where it is, not far off the highway, I’m afraid he’ll do something crazy—again.”
“Nita,” Claire said, “take care of Lexi. Feed her if we’re gone too long. I’m going too. I’ve calmed him down before when he was upset. We’ll bring him back, and all four of us will talk this over.”
“I’m very scared he will hurt himself!” Nita shouted after them as Nick dug out his car keys and they ran for the gangway. “You be careful driving fast so you not hurt too!”
* * *
“I can’t believe he got out of here so fast,” Claire told Nick as they drove out of Goodland and didn’t see the Airstream ahead on the road. “We’ll just have to hope he told Nita where he was really going. He’d have to drive this way. We’ll catch up with him on the Trail. So where is this so-called snake station?”
“Just off Loop Road at the edge of Big Cypress National Preserve. I guess there’s an old picnic table there and a place to put his trailer. The Burmese pythons some idiot let loose are breeding. Those snakes lay up to one hundred eggs at a time. The US Fish and Wildlife Commission had assigned him that area, and I guess he’ll want that job back now. Some Florida animals are endangered, but the pythons will end up endangering humans down here if they’re not controlled. That includes the areas right at their back door, like the Miccosukee Seminole reservation to the northeast.”
“Yeah, well, I almost always feel endangered out there,” she admitted. “The Glades have everything from snakes, bears, panthers and gators—not to mention voracious mosquitoes. I heard someone say if the Everglades aren’t saved, they could become the Neverglades.”
He gave a little snort. “Don’t worry. I know this area fairly well from when Dad and I used to camp. We’ll spot Bronco before we get that far in.”
But they didn’t see him or catch up to him. He must have been driving like a maniac, Claire thought. Or had he pulled off for gas or food and they’d passed him, so he was behind them? The red sun sank slowly behind them like a bloodshot eye in their rearview mirror. Nick went just slightly over the speed limit.
They turned off Route 41 and drove even deeper into the Everglades on a one-lane dirt road. On both sides, cattails nodded in the wind, and tea-colored water ran through the sloughs and stood in the saw grass prairies as far as the eye could see. Pine island hammocks rose from the saw grass, and strangler figs gripped palmettos up to their blue-green fronds of spiky fans. Clumps of gray, ghostly looking slash pines looked absolutely dead. It was impossible to tell if Bronco was behind them since a cloud of their own dust pursued them.
“Nick, we have to turn back.”
“As soon as we get to his off-road place, if he’s not there,” Nick promised. “According to what he told me, it’s only two more miles in. He parks the trailer there, goes out on foot with poles and nets.”
“What if he’s irrational or violent? We’ll have to let him go—from the yacht.”
“Claire, don’t you see? You of all people, so good at psyching people out?” Nick demanded, leaning forward and gripping the steering wheel harder.
She was shocked at his tone and the tears in his eyes. And then her scrambled thoughts and fears collided.
“You mean he might be suicidal?”
“He didn’t strike out at anyone, did he? Not like before. He’s turned his losses, his frustrations and fears inward. Even if we don’t take him back on board, we have to bring him back, get him some help if it comes to that. If only someone had done that for my dad. Okay, I’m going to slow down because his pull-off place has to be near here, on the left, barely off this road.”
She glanced back again instead of straining to look ahead. The dust cloud still trailed them up the road. Her stomach went into free fall: Where could they even turn around here? She shouldn’t have come, but she couldn’t let Nick go alone, and she wanted to help Bronco—again.
She heard Nick, whom she’d never seen cry, sniff hard. She reached over to squeeze his shoulder. “I—Nick, I’m sorry. I didn’t get all that at first, and I understand about your dad. Bronco’s been so stable, so kind and dedicated on the yacht, and I don’t think Nita would be taken in by someone she didn’t trust. She seems level-headed, really, but she did lose her young husband not long ago, which could make anyone vulnerable.”
Crazy, but she thought of her salesman father being gone so much and how her mother retreated into other people’s fictional lives and loves by burying herself in books. She thought of Sondra McMillan’s divorce and the implications she’d become promiscuous. She remembered how Jace used to be gone so much, flying the Pacific and Asia routes he loved, her own divorce and how she’d buried herself in work to set up her small consulting business Clear Path. And she thought of the woman she considered her new friend, Colleen Taylor, whose husband was busy all the time, and who might have loved Mark Stirling. Desperate women who had lost their men and fought back in their own ways...
“Claire! There it is! I think we just passed it. I’m going to back up, but I didn’t see the trailer. Maybe we beat him here.”
Thank heavens, they had the windows up. The dust cloud behind them caught up in the wind and cloaked their view, swallowing the car and the ghostly slash pines that lined this section of the road. For a moment, Nick didn’t move the car. The dust seemed slightly pink as the sun sank lower in the west behind them. When the cloud settled a bit, he began to back up.