“Shut up and get in,” he said. “Don’t you imagine I have a boat?”
I didn’t see another choice, so I climbed in.
“Now you get in the car,” he said to Brian. “You’re driving.”
The metal of the trunk slammed shut over me. I closed my eyes against a flood of claustrophobia and tried to focus on breathing evenly and listening for clues about where we were headed.
Through the sheet metal of the trunk back, I could hear the rumble of Edwin’s voice over the roar of the Jaguar engine. “Head toward Stock Island,” he said. “I’ll tell you where we’re going when we get there. Don’t try anything dramatic unless you want someone to die.”
Within minutes, I heard the sounds of traffic and the eight-o’clock foghorn, which told me we were crossing over the Palm Avenue bridge, passing Houseboat Row, and then turning left on Route One toward Stock Island.
“Turn right here,” said Edwin to Brian after several minutes. We bumped over a series of potholes and finally jerked to a halt.
“Pop the trunk and get the girl out, and then I want you in,” Edwin said.
As I climbed out, gulping for air, Brian’s face looked ashen; his jaw was clenched tightly against what I imagined to be his terror. We had parked near a boat ramp, where a collection of battered boats was tied to the docks. I couldn’t stand the idea of Brian spending the night cramped in the trunk of his car.
“Please don’t make him do this,” I said. “He had his knee replaced recently. And he has a heart condition,” I added, thinking that latter fabrication might call up more sympathy.
Edwin motioned to me to start walking toward the water. “Get in the trunk, old man,” he shouted to Brian. Brian crawled in with some difficulty, and the door slammed.
We struggled down a trail through some overgrown bushes, finally reaching the rickety dock. We started up the finger, passing a line of well-worn dinghies and rowboats fastened to the dock with frayed ropes. The air felt heavy and smelled of gasoline, motor oil, and decomposing fish.
“Get in the last boat and sit in the bow,” Edwin said shortly. “And don’t try anything stupid. I mean it, Hayley. I don’t want to hurt you, but I will if I have to.”
Imagining that I’d seen a crack in his facade, I asked, “But what is the plan, Edwin? Where are we going?”
No answer. He untied the knots in the ropes holding the boat to the dock, threw them into the aft, and hopped in. Keeping his gun in his left hand, he inserted a key and started the motor. We shot away from shore, threading through a trail of mangroves and out into the open water. Edwin’s phone rang. He extracted it from his back pocket, read the name on the screen, and cursed.
As we roared across the sound, my gaze searched the inside of the boat, looking for—what? There was no weapon that would stand up against his gun. Nor would I know how to drive the boat if he was not at the helm. But then I noticed rusty droplets toward the middle of the boat, only a foot away from where I was sitting; a splash of red gone gold stained the orange life vest pushed into the cubby. I stared at Edwin and he stared back.
“Yes,” he said. “I did kill him. But he deserved it. I only regret that I didn’t take care of him sooner.”
“Tell me about it,” I said, trying to sound empathetic, but fearing that I sounded like a wooden imitation of Eric. And besides, murder is murder in my book, whether deserved or not.
“He sucked Cheryl Lynn into so many terrible situations,” said Edwin. “And she would no longer listen to any reason.” The boat slowed down as he lost concentration, but then he roared faster again. Now he had to shout to be heard over the sound of the engine and the crashing waves.
“Start at the beginning,” I suggested. “Cheryl Lynn was your goddaughter—is that right?”
“She wasn’t legally anything to us. We just felt so bad for her—she had no family to speak of—” He let go of the tiller and dropped his head into his hands, and I wondered if he was crying. Without his direction, the boat sputtered and spun. “Cheryl Lynn moved to Key West from northern Florida when Victoria was a junior. She fell in with Bart and that hapless Louis, and my daughter, of course.”
I nodded, thinking of the football yearbook photo on my phone. The second laughing girl must have been Victoria Mastin.
“They were inseparable. And constantly in trouble, either at school or with the local police.” Edwin turned the boat motor off and we bobbed to a halt. “You would’ve done the same thing,” he said, a grim expression on his face, “had it been your girl. They took my boat and they went out drinking. Fishing, they told my wife. Four went out, but only three came back. My daughter drowned and it took two weeks to find her body.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said, feeling sick to my stomach to hear his grief. “What happened?”
“Of course, it all depends on who you ask. Bart Gates denied anything to do with her death. Cheryl Lynn told me later that they’d been playing some kind of card game. The loser drank a shot. Victoria got terribly sick and leaned over the boat to throw up. And fell in. Cheryl couldn’t help her; she couldn’t swim. Forty-five minutes later, Bart radioed for help, but my daughter was long gone when the Coast Guard arrived at the scene. And later, when the police interviewed them, the boys claimed they tried everything—life preservers, oars, everything. But they were too drunk to rescue her. And too stupid to call for help when it might have made a difference.”
The cords in his neck pulsed as he talked, and his face colored a frightening combination of white and splotchy red. “The police report confirmed that Louis and Cheryl Lynn had blood alcohol levels twice the legal limit that night. Bart’s was over the limit, too, but not like that.”
“You felt Bart was responsible for your daughter’s drowning,” I said softly. “You’ve been angry for many years. But why murder him now?”
His face darkened. I adjusted the words quickly. “I mean, why punish him now? Why wait twenty years?”
“I watched him destroying Cheryl Lynn bit by bit over the past few years. I offered to send her to a rehab facility—help her get clean, try to understand this latest absurdity, her need to steal other people’s things. The last time we talked, I told her she had to get away from Bart, that I believed he was responsible for my daughter’s death.” He rubbed his upper arm, the place where Cheryl Lynn’s tattoo had been inked.
“‘I used to disregard regret, but there are some things that I can’t forget,’” I said slowly.
“Cheryl laughed in my face and said, ‘You’re just figuring out now that he let her drown?’ And I never saw her again. Until the cemetery …” His jaw worked furiously and his eyes glistened.
“Oh my gosh,” I said. “I am so, so sorry. It’s all almost too much to bear, isn’t it? Both of them lost in terrible circumstances.”
I gave him a moment to gather himself, while my own brain whirred with this new information.
“Wait, I’m confused,” I said. “Who do you think murdered Cheryl Lynn?”
His face dropped to his hands and he smothered a sob. He looked up, his cheeks tracked with wet. “He did. Bart. Honest to god, I didn’t bring him out here with the intention of killing him. I wanted to warn him off Cheryl Lynn. Tell him we intended to do whatever it took to protect her.”
“How did you get him to this dock?”
A pained expression on his face, he said, “We offered him money. Money always talked with Bart.” He ran his hand along the length of his neck. “We stood on the dock.” He pointed to shore. “He’d been drinking, of course. He started juggling those stupid forks, talking trash about Cheryl. Saying that she had threatened to go to the cops, have him prosecuted for letting Victoria drown.”
“Why speak up after all those years of silence?” I asked.
“Bart said she was strung out all the time and crazy. So he had to take care of her. He said her death would be no loss to humanity. And then he described how he had often imagined choking her and disposing of her body in the cemetery. I bec
ame incensed, lost my cool, and grabbed a fork away from him.” He swabbed his face with his sleeve, looked away over the glimmer of lights from Key West. “We struggled. It was him or me.” He clutched his neck again. “I must have hit an artery.”
“And then he fell overboard?” I frowned. “And you just let him drown?”
“No, no. We weren’t on the boat. He died because of the stab wound. It was an accident. But he bled like crazy and I panicked, couldn’t think what to do. So I dragged him aboard and then dropped him back in the sea once we got out into open water. Unfortunately, the body floated ashore faster than I ever imagined.”
Edwin fell silent and I pictured the way he must have justified Bart’s death as penance for his daughter’s.
“Then I came ashore and went to Cheryl Lynn’s house to tell her she had to get help. I didn’t believe Bart would have killed her. I hoped he was jerking my chain. When I got inside I saw his things everywhere. He must have been staying with her. And I panicked, thinking that she would be blamed for his death.” He choked back a sob, took a moment to collect himself.
“And then your goofy friend Lorenzo came up the path. I hid in the closet and saw him find the fork on the counter.”
“Not the fork you’d used in the stabbing?”
He shook his head impatiently. “I threw that overboard, of course. But this was bloody, one of the implements from his ridiculous meat-juggling act. Lorenzo must have been worried about her, too; he washed the fork off and put it away in her drawer. When he went upstairs, I got the idea of diverting the cops toward him. So I wrapped the fork in the cloth from his tarot table and threw it in the Dumpster.” He paused, his face and shoulders frozen. “I phoned in an anonymous tip. I’m sorry for the trouble to Lorenzo, but I was trying to protect Cheryl Lynn the way I couldn’t protect my daughter. I simply didn’t believe she’d already been murdered.”
As Edwin talked, the boat had bobbed closer to the dock. Suddenly a big wave washed in from a yacht speeding by in the distance. Our little motorboat rocked precariously, and the rusty water on the floor sloshed from stem to stern. I bolted up, but as I prepared to dive overboard, he lunged for me. He knocked me off my feet and slammed my hip into the gunwale of the boat. I somersaulted backward into the cold water, hearing the sharp report of gunshots as I kicked away.
Moments later, he was in the water, too. He grabbed my legs and I scissored furiously, determined to fight to the bitter end. I broke through the surface to gasp for air. He knifed through the water beside me, and I slapped at his face, choking and sputtering.
“For god’s sake, Hayley, it’s me.” Bransford. As the adrenaline drained from my body, I went limp, rubbery with exhaustion.
Bransford half carried, half dragged me through the weeds in the shallow water, and I reached for the arms of the cops who crouched on the dock. They pulled me up, and Bransford levered himself out of the water. Only yards away, Edwin Mastin was handcuffed, shoved in the back of a cruiser, and whisked off.
“There’s a man locked in the trunk of a blue Jaguar,” I said.
“We already found him. We’ve got it,” Bransford said.
I clutched my hands together so he couldn’t see them shaking. “Thank you. I don’t know what would have happened—” My whole body began to shake, rivulets of water running from hair to T-shirt to sneakers. One of the cops grabbed a silver space blanket from his cruiser’s trunk and draped it over my shoulders.
“I know what would’ve happened,” Bransford said through clenched teeth. “You would’ve been killed, left somewhere like yesterday’s carcass. Like Cheryl Lynn Dickenson or Bart Frontgate, only a smaller package.”
“Yesterday’s carcass?” A white-hot fury bubbled up. “Why do you have to be so mean?”
“You bring out the worst in me,” he said. “I see you lurch off into something so stupid with danger that it boggles my mind. I can’t think how to get this across to you: It’s not your job to catch criminals. It’s my job. It’s the police department’s job. It kills me to see you in harm’s way, but I don’t seem to have any effect on you.” He reached for me and reeled me in toward him, then kissed me with a fierceness that drove everything else out of my mind. Then he pushed me away.
“I’m not up for an on-again, off-again situation,” I stammered, weak in the knees, mind whirling. “Been there, done that.”
“This time I plan to date you until you beg for mercy.”
“I need to take things really slow,” I said. “I almost died here, remember?”
He grabbed me by the elbows and kissed me again until my legs felt like rubber erasers and my whole body hummed. Once I had pulled away, his eyes widened and I tried to focus on the cleft in his chin and ignore the wicked smirk.
“Meet me and Ziggy at the dog park at eight a.m. tomorrow?”
Eight a.m. was a lot earlier than I liked to get up and out. Especially after a night like this. “Make it eight thirty.”
“Seven thirty, then,” he said.
“Sure,” I heard myself say.
28
Nothing reveals itself so dramatically as an egg gone bad.
—Barbara Ross
By the time the cruiser dropped me off at Houseboat Row, Lieutenant Torrence was delivering Lorenzo. “Oh my gosh, am I glad to see you!” I threw my arms around him.
“And likewise,” he said, hugging me back.
We tromped up the finger to the houseboat. The little white kitty was out on the deck with Sparky and Evinrude. She seemed to do a double take when she saw Lorenzo. Then she darted over, scrambled up his leg to his torso, scampered across his shoulders, and bolted back down the other side.
Miss Gloria and I burst out laughing. “I think she’s glad to see you.”
Miss Gloria herded us inside to the living room. “I’ll make some tea,” she said. “And we’ve got Hayley’s amazing baklava. And your mother called. She wants to hear everything when you get a minute. Sam’s got all kinds of research for you on copyright infringement, though I don’t suppose you need that anymore. And Janet’s booked her ticket back down in ten days because Sam insisted. As for you, mister,” she said to Lorenzo, “we really hope you’ll stay the night.”
“I appreciate that invitation so much, I do,” he said, stroking little Lola, who was now splayed across his lap like a limp dishrag. “I have so much to process. And after that jail bunk, I can’t wait to sleep in my own bed.”
I took a steaming-hot shower and then joined them at the kitchen table, with a glass of wine and a big hunk of honey-drenched pastry, to explain the night’s events. “Detective Bransford”—I knew I was blushing as I said his name, but I couldn’t help it—“said he saw me leave the meeting. When I didn’t come back, he went out and ran into Louis, who told him what happened with Edwin. Then they found Maureen screaming bloody murder in the storage shed, and they were able to track her husband’s car with his cell phone’s GPS.”
“That Edwin wasn’t much of a criminal, was he?” asked Miss Gloria.
I shook my head sadly. “He was so desperate about the news of Cheryl Lynn. And his own daughter.” I reached for Lorenzo’s hand. “I’m sorry about your friend.”
“At least there’s some closure,” he said sadly.
Miss Gloria piped up after a minute of heavy silence. “He has some good news, too. He got a phone call while you were in the shower.”
“Sort of,” said Lorenzo with a grimace. “A group of the performers called to ask me to stand in as president of the gang at Sunset. I can’t say I want the job, but it’s nice to be recognized.”
*
The next morning I woke up as the dawn light crept in, fed the cats, and made coffee for Miss Gloria. We all felt a little lost without the adorable white kitten Lola underfoot in the kitchen. On the one hand, it was an utter relief to have Lorenzo out of jail and back at his New Town home. I planned to go down to the Sunset Celebration later this evening to make sure he was back in his usual place on the square.
/>
For the cats, the loss of Lola was more visceral. They batted at each other, scurried around my ankles, and leaped onto the kitchen table, knocking silverware, the saltshaker, and a little bowl of sugar to the floor.
“Get out—go outside and play,” I said, shooing them out with a broom. “Don’t you know life is a series of adaptations?”
Miss Gloria came out of her bedroom, giggling. “Aren’t we waxing philosophical this morning?” she asked. “How do you feel?”
“I feel fine,” I said rubbing the side of my hip. “My leg’s a little sore where I hit the side of the boat, but considering the shape I could’ve been in—”
“I don’t even want to think about it,” she said.
I didn’t say that inside I felt numb. Frozen in time and space. Bransford’s words and my reactions sat like a little frozen Tupperware of goodies in the back of my freezer mind, waiting to be unpacked. I ate a quick bowl of granola and headed off to Key Zest. When I hadn’t been able to sleep the night before, I’d gotten back out of bed and written the piece on the cemetery that I’d promised to Wally and Palamina. I talked about how things circle about but eventually stay the same. How every thinking person should visit the graveyard from time to time to learn lessons from our ancestors—to remember that the things we sometimes judge to be critical to our hectic lives turn out not to be so important after all. And to remind ourselves that our time here is limited. And so very precious.
Wally was already in the office; I tried to sneak by him, but it didn’t work. “How are you feeling?” he asked, poking his head out of his door.
“I’m fine,” I said mustering a grin. “Everything is fine.”
“Let me get you some coffee,” he said, coming out of his office. He patted Danielle’s desk chair. “Sit for a minute. I can’t believe you even sent that article last night after all that happened. And it was excellent. Some of your best work. Palamina will think so, too. And I loved your lunch article, especially the opening.” He read it aloud. “‘Some folks treat lunch like a highway rest stop—keep their expectations low and visit quickly, so they won’t be disappointed. But here at Key Zest we wonder why every meal shouldn’t be the best it can be.’”
Fatal Reservations : A Key West Food Critic Mystery (9780698192003) Page 23