“She’s as heterosexual as you or I. She’s middle-of-the-road white bread Americana at heart. And she’s keeping a secret.”
“And Em, the great sleuth, can smell a secret,” she said sarcastically.
“I don’t know this pattern. It’s a new one. I just know there’s a pattern to it. It’s staring me in the face, and I can’t figure it out.”
Faye closed her eyes and sighed. “Describe what you see.”
“I see … a man who has a strong—no, overweening—sense of loyalty and secrecy. And he’s the man with a thousand faces, an actor. Those two parts of him fly at each other. Where’d he learn to morph like that? And he’s forty years old and didn’t tell me it was his birthday. And he’s never been married, or if he has, he’s sure covered it well. No kids, or does he have a love child stuffed away somewhere?”
Faye stuck out a hand. “Hold it. Stop. You’re really around the bend here. And you said a moment ago that you thought he put that thing in the sand himself. And you’re calling Tom paranoid?”
I pulled my shoulders up around me, my skin beginning to crawl. “I don’t know. It’s a feeling. Jack’s loyal all right, but it’s as if … he molds easily. Parts of him are like putty.”
Faye laughed derisively. “So you’re saying that you think he might be some kind of double agent maybe, who doesn’t have control over what he’s doing?”
“No … that’s not it.”
“You think he’s evil.”
“No!”
“Make up your mind. You think he’s capable of bringing a weapon onto American soil that can bringing down a space shuttle.”
“No, I don’t think he’d do that. Not the Jack I know. But the Jack who was here two days ago was not the Jack I know.”
“Ah. Now we’re getting down to it.”
“What in hell’s name had him so upset, Faye? He wouldn’t even respond to me, and then he grabbed me so roughly it scared me. It hurt. Since then, I’ve had to think through everything I know about him, and I’ve realized that it’s a pretty short list of facts.”
“Do you think he’s capable of firing a rocket at a space shuttle, or not?”
I was pulled up with my knees under my chin now, like a little girl. “I don’t think so. But someone put it there.”
Faye leaned toward me and stroked my hair. “Yes, someone put it there. Someone pretty crazy. But I don’t think Jack’s crazy. Do you?”
I could not answer her question.
I borrowed a Mercedes and drove back over to the USGS. At the desk, I asked for Miles Guffey. I was going on raw instinct now, homing in on the path—any path—that might yield information.
“He’s gone on a trip,” said the receptionist.
“Oh. Well, how about Waltrine Sweet?”
“Left with him.”
“Oh. Is Dr. Rodríguez in?”
“She went home. It’s her daughter’s birthday. She told me to tell you you should drop by if you wanted to.” She handed me a slip of paper with an address and a little map.
Olivia Rodríguez Garcia was making rice fritters stuffed with cheese (granitos) and a sort of fried coconut dough (arepas de coco) for her ten-year-old daughter and half a dozen of her girlfriends. The girls laughed and cooed over the crunchy treats, licking the oil from their fingers, threatening to rub it on each other’s party clothes.
Olivia offered me some. “Try. You’ve got to love them,” she said, pursing her dark lips into a rosebud of culinary ecstasy.
I bit into a rice fritter. My teeth broke through the crust and into the hidden cheese. My mouth watered. I suddenly realized I had not had lunch.
“Good, hmm?”
“Good.”
She fixed her dark eyes on me. “So, Miles and Waltrine have gone on a little trip, eh?”
There was something in her tone I didn’t like. If I’d had hackles on the back of my neck, they would have stood up. “Yes. Is that why you invited me to your daughter’s party?”
“Try unas arepas. Some people like them with honey. Miles has taken an unexpected leave. Sorry. This must be an inconvenience for you.” She raised her eyebrows and shoulders, as if to say, What can you expect?
“Do you know where he went? Or how long he will be gone?”
“I have a suspicion he is going somewhere on his boat. That sample you brought him seemed to excite him.” She shrugged her shoulders. “I am not privy to his plans. This is how it is with him. He is not a team player. I have a center to run. Our projections for the coming year are due tomorrow, and he has given me nothing.”
I stared at her, wondering if I was looking at someone stirring up trouble, or just a very, very frustrated administrator trying to deal with a very, very loose cannon. “I think I’ll drive over to his house and see if he’s left yet,” I said, and excused myself.
Olivia Rodríguez Garcia did not say good-bye. She was too busy staring out the window, no doubt wondering how to spin this one at USGS headquarters.
Three P.M. found me at Miles Guffey’s house, racing up the driveway to avoid the afternoon downpour but getting soaked to the skin anyway. My hair instantly lay plastered to my forehead. Both the bad and the good news was that I couldn’t park closer to the door because both Waltrine Sweet’s and Miles Guffey’s cars were there ahead of me.
Gaining the entryway, I pressed the doorbell. Nobody answered. Deciding that my so-called colleagues must be around back somewhere where they couldn’t hear the bell, and that they were damned well going to receive me whether they wanted to or not, I dashed around the side of the house, trying to stay underneath the eaves. For my trouble, I got further soaked as rainwater sluiced off the roof, along the palm fronds, and down my collar.
I was thwarted in my circumnavigation of the house by a tall wrought-iron fence, but from the gate I could see Miles and Waltrine out by the dock, loading gear onto the boat. Strange time for a boat ride, I decided. Pamela’s pet schnauzer cocked an ear inquisitively my way and began to yap ferociously. Miles looked up from his task, smiled uncertainly, then came and opened the gate. “C’mon, hurry!” he said, as if I were in a mood to dawdle. “It’s raining puddles!”
We sprinted to the dock and jumped in underneath the cover of the upper decking. Miles led me around to the back of the saloon and in through a set of double doors and handed me a towel.
“Hi,” I said miscellaneously.
“What brings y’all to the Dingo?” Miles asked.
“The what?”
“This little pile of pleasure be the trawler Sea Dingo. My wife’s parents gave it to us. They’re Aussies that made their money selling Land Rovers, so this is the Sea Dingo, get it? I guess you’d a’ had to been there. I get y’all a drink?”
“No thanks,” I said. “I won’t be staying long.”
Waltrine was stuffing junk food into the lockers, somewhat crushing a king-sized bag of Nacho Cheesier Doritos in the process. She moved on to cramming a chest freezer full of steaks. It looked like they were packing for a long voyage.
The Sea Dingo was a cabin cruiser, at least forty feet long, plenty beamy, had a full galley with freezer, fridge, microwave, sinks, range, and ovens, and down a half-flight of stairs I could see a tight hallway leading off to two bunk rooms and two separate bathrooms, or should I say, “heads.” Up a half-flight of steps, I saw the wheel and an array of radios, radar, and sonar equipment. Catching me ogling the layout, Miles said, “There’s even a washer and dryer. Central air. Pretty cushy, huh.”
“Where are you off to?” I inquired, taking the direct approach.
Miles stretched ever so casually. “Oh, just a little pleasure cruise, eh, Waltrine?”
“Sure, boss.” She bent back to her stowage. She was now cramming fresh greens and salsa into the refrigeration unit.
I said, “I’m going to be blunt. I came down here to maybe work on your project and now you’re taking off somewhere. Funny thing is you didn’t mention to me earlier today that you had plans to go anywhere.
So I gotta ask: Does this have anything to do with those sediment samples I brought in this morning?”
Miles looked at Waltrine and Waltrine looked at Miles. “Not so far as I know,” he said. “You know sumpin’ I don’t, Waltrine?”
“No, boss.”
Yeah, and Mickey Mouse is ambassador to Portugal. “Well, then, where you off to?”
Miles gave me one of his goofy grins. “Oh, just going gunk-holin’ is all.” He broke into a cackling laugh. “Y’all can get on with Olivia Rodréíguez about the project, get y’se’f set up with some nice samples to run. We’ll be back in a week or so, I imagine.”
“Or not.” Waltrine spoke with her head inside the refrigerator. “We didn’t get no funding, so we figgered to just go piss up a rope,” she said.
Miles’ laughter ripped up into near-hysteric giggles. “They’s called ‘lines’ on a boat, darlin’. Go piss up a line. And the maps is charts, rhymes with farts.” He took a sip of his drink.
I studied the two of them. Their spirits were somewhere between high and dangerously giddy, and at the same time, weirdly somber. Here they were, the two remaining principal investigators of a project in which the third principal investigator had been last seen flying over the rail of a cruise liner at the urging of someone with muscle. Uh-huh, this was just a little old pleasure cruise alright. I said, “Well, it sure is a nice boat. Mind if I look around?”
“Help y’se’f,” Miles replied.
I stepped upstairs into the pilothouse. The place was a mess of loose charts and equipment, with electrical lines snaking all over the place. Miles Guffey was, plain and simply, such a slob that if there was something in there that was going to tell me anything about the purpose or destination of this voyage, it could be staring me in the face and I would likely miss it. But, being a geologist, and thereby by birthright a map junkie, my eye was drawn to the chart desk. There, on top of a disarrayed stack of books, the remains of a rather ancient-looking ham sandwich and a hand puppet designed to look like a giant cockroach, sat a book of charts that was open to a familiar-looking bit of geography. I stepped up closer. Sure enough, it was the Berry Islands. I turned and walked back down the steps. I had seen all I needed to see.
Back at Nancy’s, I found Faye in the guesthouse, packing her bags.
“Are you going somewhere?” I asked.
“We are going to the Everglades,” she said. “Just as we planned. I am not going to wait here for Tom. He has my cell number, and he can phone me if he condescends to do so.”
“You look tired, Faye, and God knows I am. Can’t this wait until tomorrow?”
“No.” She handed me a sealed envelope. “This is for you. Tom said to give it to you only if things went completely wrong, but I figure this qualifies.”
I turned the envelope over and read the address. It was my name, written in Jack’s handwriting.
It had stopped raining for the moment, so I moved outside onto the pool deck to share the moment with the chameleons and the dripping palms. I settled into a bench, oblivious to its wetness, and tore open the envelope. It contained a folded piece of lined paper and a second envelope. I unfolded the single sheet of paper and began to read.
It was dated two days before, the day I had found him so distraught and disheveled in the guesthouse. “My darling Em,” it began.
I’m sorry I have to take off like this again without getting a chance to say hello, not to mention good-bye. But Tom says you’re seeing some man at the USGS about dust. I’m truly sorry how things went. I had such plans for us, such hopes. But if you’re reading this, things didn’t go well for me. I have an important request. Would you please go down to the Everglades, to the address below, and look for a woman named Winifred Egret. She’s looking after someone for me. Everything’s taken care of financially, and this someone is in good hands, but I wanted you to meet her one day, because she’s essential to me and so are you. I hope it’s no imposition. Give Winifred and her people the enclosed letter, and she’ll know it’s okay to let you in. I love you, Em, more than you could possibly know. You’re the one I was always looking for, rest assured of that. There have been others along the path, but you were the destination. How ironic that dust should get in the way of our building our common ground together.
It was signed, simply, “Jack,” and gave an address that was more like a set of directions. It started out, “Alligator Alley (I-75) to Route 833, turn north.” The inner envelope was sealed. On it he had written, “Winifred Egret.”
I sat for quite a while, trying to take in this one additional fragment of the man I had fallen in love with. Like everything else I had learned about him in recent days, it was incomplete, something thrown together in a hurry instead of being taken slowly and allowed to mature unhindered. But I was beginning to suspect such romantic, glancing communications were the key to Jack Sampler, and that his was a life strung between long-range wishes and the exigencies of the moment.
At length, I got up and walked back to the guesthouse, back to Faye. I moved slowly, as though through a long and drugged sleep. “Okay,” I told her. “I guess we’re going to the Everglades.”
– 26 –
As Faye drove us south over the high vault of the Skyway Bridge, crossing Tampa Bay from the southern tip of the St. Petersburg peninsula, I found myself scanning the wide expanse of glinting water, casting idly about for the Sea Dingo. I couldn’t see it. I had been in Florida less than four days, but the place was so flat that already anything that raised me up and wasn’t an elevator got my attention. From the acrobatic center of the span, built high enough to accommodate the largest of ships in full sail, boats as small as Sea Dingo appeared like tiny toys, indistinguishable from one another. The landward sky was a symphony of clouds, layer upon layer of shapes and sizes, but the scene was lost on me, except to note, quite clinically, that the sky over the Gulf of Mexico was surprisingly clear. That gives Miles clear passage, I decided.
I no longer cared where Miles Guffey was going. My world was shattered. His cruise seemed to be happening somewhere else, in a separate reality. I did not speak until hours later, when we swept south of Fort Myers, and Faye started asking what I wanted for dinner.
“Nothing,” I said.
“We’re a pair.”
“Mm.” My mind was on Faye’s cell phone, which was riding on a charging jack on the dashboard to keep it topped up. Reception had been excellent so far, absolute flatness being a virtue with such things. But Tom had not called. I had tried him a couple of times, but had gotten no answer.
Faye said, “I’m going to head on down the Tamiami Trail to Everglade City. There are some little bed-and-breakfast inns there, and we can see if the stone crab is in season. Tomorrow we’ll rent a canoe and paddle out into the Ten Thousand Islands. They’re mangrove shoals. Some are shell middens built up by the Indians that used to live here. Caloosas, I think. Or whoever was here before the Seminoles. Then the next day, we can drive down to Flamingo and look across at the keys. And then—”
“What’s out there in the dark?” I asked.
“Swamp,” said Faye. “A thousand themes and variations on wild plants growing right out of water. It’s beautiful, once you get to know it, and get over how dangerous it is for a human. If you walked out there, you’d be panther meat, if the mosquitoes didn’t drain your blood first, and the first nick you get is an infection that could kill you. A person gets disoriented in the tangle of vegetation. When the lightning sets it on fire, it burns with a rage, because the white man has drained the swamp enough to expose the peat. And yet the white man in all his wisdom has bladed roads all through this darkness and sold it to every sap up there in snow country that has a dream of easy living. Go figure.”
“So there’s a bunch of snowbirds out there? Why don’t we see their lights?”
“They never moved there. There’s no way to live there, not really, not unless the damned developers get a whole lot more aggressive. No, there’s nothing there but t
he damned roads. So, on to Everglades City.”
Darkness. It was whispering to me, calling me into its heart. I said, “Jack’s letter said something about Alligator Alley. That’s part of this Interstate highway, right?” I opened a map and put my finger on it. “Yeah. Right here. It crosses the Everglades north of the … what is this … Tamiami Trail. I want to go there.”
“Oh, so you’re going to share Jack’s letter with me, then?”
“He wants me to go look someone up for him.”
“Who?”
“Winifred somebody.”
Faye tossed her hands in the air, something she could easily do on such long, straight stretches of road. “Sure, sure. Why not? Get to know the locals; that always works for me. What the fuck. Alligator Alley it is.”
After another twenty minutes, the road curved eastward. You notice these things when you’re in a place that’s so flat that the roads don’t even have to dodge the slightest hills. The edge of the road lay in pitch-dark shadow.
Faye said, “We don’t want to go into that ditch.”
“What ditch?”
“Down here, there’s always a ditch beside the road. And we don’t want to go into it.”
“I’ll bite. Why not?”
“Because there are alligators in it.”
“Oh. Good. Now you tell me.”
“Down here ditch means water, and water means alligators. They go together like gin and tonic and a little bitty twist of lime, which I would be guzzling right now if I was not carrying an underage passenger.” She patted her tummy. “Just you and me, kid.”
“Tom’s going to be fine, Faye. He’s a big boy. He knows how to look after himself.”
“Screw Tom. More important, Em, where are we going to stay tonight?”
“I don’t know. Some motel, right?”
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