It was a young man getting out of his white pickup truck who spotted the cowgirl. The young man stood for several moments staring down at her naked body; then he backed away slowly and screamed for help. A uniformed attendant in the parking garage stepped out of his booth as the young man shouted the news, and the parking attendant got on his phone.
Five minutes later, there were three dozen police officers in the lot and yellow crime tape stretched among several palm trees. There were TV crews, and a helicopter hovered high overhead.
But he wasn’t paying attention to the scene before him, because his eyes had fallen on the major local story of the day. A three-column piece about Gabriella Hernandez, well-known county activist, whose bullet-riddled body had been discovered late Friday afternoon by one of her two sons.
That’s not what had his attention, though. He didn’t give a shit about political activists. What he was reading over and over to himself were the next few sentences.
Found at the scene of the murder was a late-model Toyota Camry registered to Alexandra Rafferty, an employee of the Miami Police Department.
Spokesman for the Miami PD, Harry Antrim, responded with concern late Friday night. “I have no idea as to the whereabouts of Ms. Rafferty. And now her husband has disappeared, as well. Damn right I’m worried.” Mr. Antrim was referring to Stanley Rafferty, who turned up missing from his hospital room at Jackson Memorial, where he had been recovering from injuries suffered earlier in the week during the widely reported Brinks armored truck mishap.
When he finished the article, he carefully refolded the paper and set it on the passenger seat. He stared out at the policemen doing their work. The bright neutral sunshine of another day. Valves were opening inside him, bright stimulants trickling into his bloodstream. The hair on his arms was fully erect.
“Fuck,” he said beneath his breath. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
TWENTY
They had breakfast at a sausage and grits diner down the beach from Seaside, and when the rental office finally opened at nine, she and Lawton were standing at the door.
From the snazzy color brochure, Alex chose a two-bedroom cottage on East Ruskin Street, a Frisbee toss from the beach. It was called the Chattaway, and it was the cheapest rental in Seaside, owned by Chad and Molly Chatwick, a couple from New Orleans, who used it for only a month in the summer. Alex took it for a week.
She counted out fifteen one-hundred-dollar bills and the lady at the rental desk stiffened sharply at the sight of so much cash.
“We’re from Miami,” Alex said, as if that explained all types of ill-mannered behavior.
“Oh,” said the woman. “I see.”
Lawton was mercifully quiet through the whole transaction, in a deepening fog of bewilderment from the long sleep-disturbing drive, this unfathomable journey.
A young man in a golf cart directed them to the house, a one-story green-and-salmon bungalow with a white picket fence out front and a tin roof. There was a narrow drive along one side, where she parked the pickup. And the front yard was no larger than her Miami kitchen. A ten-by-fifteen plot with scrub oak and flowering goldenrod and beauty berry, the ground layered deep with pine mulch. From Lawton’s coffee-table book, Alex knew that sod was not allowed in Seaside, or lawn mowers or edgers. A controlled scruffiness required by code.
A screened-in porch covered the front of the house, and inside the glass front door, the living room was airy and cheerful with its white gauzy curtains, polished oak floors, and walls painted a safe ivory. The couch and chairs were covered in lavender denim and were littered with bright pillows. Several wicker chairs and tables had been painted an array of primary blues and yellows and reds, which gave the room the jittery energy of a kindergarten. The furnishings and the house itself were less than five years old, but all of it had been contrived to echo an older and more graceful era, while somehow staying insistently modern.
On the oak dining table sat a plastic-wrapped gift basket, compliments of the rental agency. Coffee beans, croissants, fresh fruit, and a small bottle of chardonnay, a Yuppie starter kit. A white high chair with hand-painted blue flowers was wedged into a corner near the pass-through to the kitchen. Everything struck Alex as unerringly tasteful, nothing like the ragtag feel of that long-ago beach house. No layer of sand on the floor, no cobwebs or rusty sinks or the tenacious scent of mildew.
Alex chose the front bedroom for herself. Close to the street, a better vantage point to monitor her father and any traffic that might pass by. While Lawton showered, she took off her running shoes and fanny pack, then began to search for a nook to stash the duffel of money. She settled finally on a floppy woven basket that was perched on a cabinet high above the kitchen sink. She dumped the banded bricks of cash into the straw basket one by one until they reached the brim; then she hoisted the basket back to its place. She stacked the half a dozen remaining bricks next to the ice-cube trays in the freezer.
“This isn’t the same place we stayed before,” Lawton said. He was standing naked in the living room, dripping onto one of the colorful rag rugs.
“That’s right, Dad. But this will do fine, don’t you think? The beach is the same. Anyway, we don’t need to stay in exactly the same house.”
“We don’t?”
“No, that’s not important. Don’t you like this place? It’s so clean and sunny.”
“I’m tired,” he said. “I need to lie down and sleep. I’m getting very old.”
“That’s fine. You can sleep all you want. Later on, we’ll walk on the beach and watch the sunset. We’ll explore the area, see what’s changed.”
“Everything’s changed,” he said. “Everything’s different from how it was.”
“Some of it’s different, sure. But you like Seaside, don’t you? This place we’re staying.”
“I should be at Harbor House. I’m going to get an unexcused absence.”
“I’ll write you a note, Dad. They’ll understand. They can get along without you for a few days. We’re here now. Let’s enjoy our vacation.”
“Is this a hideout?”
“We’re on vacation, Dad. We’re having a holiday.”
“Elaine Dillashaw is baking chocolate chip macadamia cookies. If I’m not there to get them, she’ll give them to that goddamn George Murphy instead.”
“We need to find you a towel, Dad. You’re getting the floor wet.”
“Look at me.” He reached down and lifted his flaccid penis, then let it drop. “Look at this old worthless flap of flesh.”
“Come on, Dad. You need to rest. We both do.”
“I wasn’t always this way. I was a virile young man once. You remember?”
“Yes,” she said. “You were very dashing. All the women thought so.”
“They did, didn’t they? I could have had any of them. But I chose you.”
“You chose Grace, Dad. My mother, Grace.”
“Grace?”
“Let’s put you to bed. Come on now. Enough talk.”
She got him into the clean sheets, turned on the ceiling fan, lowered the blinds. It was nearly ten o’clock, the temperature outside not more than seventy. At least fifteen degrees cooler and with a lot more oxygen in every breath than that subtropical broth six hundred miles to the south. The sound of the surf was a distant drone; a freshening breeze from the north seemed to be spiced with the crisp hint of evergreen, pure mountain lakes and glaciers. It would be at least another month before that autumn air penetrated all the way down the peninsula to Miami. A day’s drive, a different season. A different America.
She sat on the edge of Lawton’s bed and he smiled at her, a mischievous light in his grin.
“It’s nice here,” he said. “Just like the book.”
“Yes,” she said. “Just like the book.”
She returned his smile, stroked the dry, loose skin on the back of his hand. After a minute or two, she watched his eyes sag and finally fall shut. When his breath deepened and began to flutter through his n
ose, she rose and quietly shut his door.
She found a spool of string in the kitchen pantry, and then picked out a heavy serving ladle from the silverware drawer. She lashed one end of the string to Lawton’s doorknob and played out the line as she walked into her own bedroom. Pulling the cord taut, she tied the other end to the ladle and positioned it on the edge of her own bedside table. As good an alarm as she could rig on such short notice.
Her eyes strayed to the bedside table and she stared for several moments at her leather fanny pouch lying there. Finally, she sighed and picked up the pack and unzipped it. She withdrew the four photos and spread them on the wicker side table, then took out the small half globe of glass she carried in a protective felt pouch, a magnifier the size of a lime cut in half.
She placed the glass on the Gasper and rubbed her eyes clear. Then she began to inch the glass from right to left, ever so slowly, rising up the woman’s body from her curled toes, past her thin ankles, the small scythe-shaped scar on her right shin, a drop of blood near her knee.
It was a process she’d re-enacted dozens of times, but in that carefree room, in that sharp and uncorrupted light, the photograph was more obscene than it had ever been before, more grimly distinct.
Alex continued to slide the magnifier up the young woman’s slightly spread legs to her shaved pubic patch, her narrow waist and tiny navel. The breasts were flattened, the nipples dark and small, like her own. And finally, she came to the gash at the woman’s throat, a ragged C, a quick twist of the killer’s hand. The wound was virtually identical to the other three.
She kept the glass still on the woman’s face. This one a brunette with shoulder-length straight hair, bangs. Her eyes open, a depthless blue. Dark eyebrows, long lashes. And the bruise on her left cheek where he’d struck her right-handed. Alexandra held on the bruise, squinted. She rotated the photograph so the intense ocean light was focused cleanly on it. She leaned in close.
The bruise was smaller than she’d noticed before, smaller than an average fist. Not more than two knuckles wide.
She pushed the photo aside and laid the Floater in its place. She waited till a cloud had moved past the sun, then held the glass to the woman’s pale skin and found the same bruise in the same location, the same miniature size. Two knuckles wide. She checked out the other two and they were the same. Bruises she’d seen before, another case or another context entirely. She couldn’t recall.
She stood up and paced the room. If she were back at work, she would go down to storage, prowl through her old files, take as much time as she needed to search the stacks of photos until she found the one she was trying to remember.
She couldn’t think, couldn’t concentrate. Her thoughts were foggy and scattered from the sleepless drive. She’d have to store the bruise away for now, something to let her unconscious gnaw on, another reason she needed to call Dan Romano.
Alex showered and shampooed her hair, wrapped herself in a towel. She gathered her shorts and blouse and underwear and her father’s jumpsuit and carried them out to the tiny washer she’d seen in the kitchen. When she got it chugging, she went back to her room, lay down on her sheets.
She listened to the scrape of branches against a windowpane and a mockingbird running through its borrowed repertoire in the narrow yard between their house and the cottage next door. She drew in a long breath of that rich North Florida air.
It was as if a cathedral bell were tolling deep inside her. This place was getting to her already, as though every breath were laden with soul-stirring pheromones, those potent chemicals secreted by the trees and the rolling surf, seeping up from the pores of the earth until the air was irresistible, resonating with memories. All of it coming back with such force and vividness—her last golden month of childhood, those indulgent hours with her parents, the world a safe and generous place, beach and sea, the rolling scrubby hills, lagoons, pelicans and gulls coasting on the breeze, that sweet, healthy aroma of pine-planked cottages baking in the sun.
Alex lay back against the pillows, looked over at the drawing of a hundred pink flamingos gathered around an Everglades lagoon. It was an Audubon lithograph she’d seen dozens of times before, composed and hand-painted by the great naturalist in the previous century, when flamingos in Florida were as abundant as buffalo on the plains. It took her a moment to realize what was so unsettling about the print. It was the flamingos. They were not pink at all, but had been colorized a vivid blue, only the tips of their wings left unaltered. Some clever decorator’s visual joke, a reminder of art’s contrivance, that the past and present were forever intermingled, forever modifying each other. A principle that Seaside itself was founded on, the nostalgic shell game it was playing.
Alex closed her eyes, felt the pressure subsiding from her veins. She began to measure her breaths, following each inhalation all the way down to her lungs and all the way back out again. The yoga discipline she’d practiced for years at the beginning and conclusion of every karate class, usually better than a double jolt of café cubano for clearing the mind. Though today it was just deepening her drowsiness.
She needed to think, needed to formulate a plan, decide exactly how much she would confide in Dan Romano. But at that moment, she was far too weary. Too tired for remorse or worry or for plotting her counterstrike. Too exhausted to do anything but drop away into a dark and bottomless river of sleep.
“Are you going somewhere?”
His mother stood in the doorway of the storage room. The belt of her housecoat was undone and the robe had fallen open, exposing her gray moth-eaten pubes and the loose folds of skin where once her breasts had been.
“I’m taking a little vacation,” he said. “Going upstate for a few days.”
He slid the third and final plastic pouch of blood into the cooler, settled it deeper into the ice.
“I hate to be a bother, but I’m thirsty. I’ m out of liquor again.”
“Don’t whine,” he said. “I brought it.”
She wet her lips and staggered forward, gave him a wretched smile.
“You’re a good son,” she said, reaching out a nervous hand. “You’ve always been good to me. Looking out for my welfare. You’re the one I could always count on. The only one.”
Brushing her hand away, he jostled past her and carried the cooler into the living room and set it by the front door.
“Here it is,” he said. He squatted down, opened the cooler, and drew out the quart of Smimoff. “But don’t try, to con me with this ‘good son’ shit. It’s too late for that, old woman.”
“But it’s true,” she said. “You’re my youngest, my darling sweet-faced baby.”
-“Fuck that.”
She moved toward him in her stiff-jointed gait. Arthritis or gout, he wasn’t sure. She hadn’t been to a doctor in years. Hadn’t been out of this house.
“You were the favorite of all my children. You were.”
“You worthless old liar, you ignored me from the second I was born. Went off with your booze and your gloom, and you only looked up long enough to scowl.”
“No, no. I loved you, I did. You were my baby, my sweet, gentle baby boy.”
“It won’t work,” he said. “Give it up. There’s not a goddamn thing you can say now, no apologies. I was five years old, crying out for you, standing right in front of you, and you never noticed. You were too busy cracking more ice out of the tray, making yourself another whiskey sour. You can’t go back and fix it now. It’s done. It’s history. You fucked me up, and now you’re suffering the consequences. That’s how it works. Karma kickback.”
“I had some rough times, too,” she said. “My life hasn’t been easy.”
Her gaze wandered the desolate room. Tears gathered in her eyes.
“Spare me the weepy bullshit.”
“You wouldn’t do this if your father were still alive.”
That stopped him for a moment. -
“Your father would get out his strop and he’d—”
“H
e’d what, Mother? He’d beat the shit out of me? He’d whip my bottom till it bled, till I couldn’t cry anymore? Is that what you were thinking about?”
“Why am I here, son? Why are you doing this to me, my sweet boy?”
“It’s called vengeance, Mom. Also known as justice.”
“But you’re so good. So sweet. This isn’t right, son. And what you’re doing with these women, that’s wrong, too. Very wrong. You know that, don’t you?”
Stretching out a hand, she started toward him, but he dodged her and headed to the front room, where her mattress lay in the middle of the bare floor. The air stank of urine and rotting dog food. In the bathroom, the toilet seat was gone, the porcelain stained orange and black. Roaches roamed the walls. He stood before the toilet and stared down into the bowl, at the few inches of brown water.
The family Bible sat on the lid of the porcelain tank like a fat, heavy brick. Its black leather cover was curled back from years of humidity. Its flimsy pages were the only toilet paper he allowed her.
He twisted the cap off the vodka, held the bottle above the toilet.
“No!” she screamed, and lunged for him, but he shoved her frail body aside and she collapsed to the floor. She sat up, studied him from deep inside her hazy eyes.
He tipped the bottle, let it splash into the bowl.
“You’re cruel,” she said without emotion. “A cruel, cruel boy.”
“It’s not my fault. I’m just carrying on family tradition.”
“Your father was an unhappy man. But you’re better than that, son. Much better. You’re a good boy.”
“Sure I am.” He grinned at her. “I’m a fucking saint.”
“You are. You’ve always been good. Such a bright, sensitive child. I always knew you’d make something of yourself. Be somebody important.”
“Oh, I’m important all right. I’m front-page news.”
Body Language Page 20