Tampa Bay Noir

by Colette Bancroft

  The sun is low in the sky now. He must have been out a long time because it’s nearly dusk. His head is pounding and muffled voices come from nearby. He closes his eyes when everything comes back to him. The computer Elise used, the log-in information she stole, the money that’s gone. Hell, he’d even told her when the money was supposed to clear the bank, and while that was happening, she’d been leading him to his bedroom. Elise in bed with him. That meant someone else had to have been using the stolen log-in to clear out the account. His eyes fly open and he struggles to push himself up, not because he’s strapped down in any way, but because he’s dizzy and the motion of the boat is making his stomach swirl.

  “She didn’t do it alone,” Dale says, but no one hears. Again, louder this time: “She didn’t do it alone. Donna. It had to be Donna.”

  It’s the one with stringy hair. He tells Dale to shut the hell up and turns back to his work. He’s throwing something overboard. It splashes and then he throws something else. Dale has done enough fishing to recognize the smell. The guy is throwing buckets of fish guts into the water. He’s chumming.

  “Did you hear?” Dale says. “The two of them, together. They stole everything.”

  Someone cuts the motor but the boat continues to roll with the waves. Dale wraps one hand around the side that’s still aching.

  “That’s a damn fool way to try to save your hide,” Chum says, stepping up to Dale and blocking the last bit of sun bouncing off the boat’s white deck. “I was betting you’d blame your wife.”

  Dale shakes his head. “No,” he says, his chin puckering. Sweet Patty with the silky brown hair that fell past her shoulders and the hands that were always soft and warm. Patty who cooked yellow cornbread just the way he liked and was always there when he stumbled home from Smugglers. It had been her idea for Dale to sell the house to pay Chum back. She took what was in their savings and left the house to Dale and now she’s never coming back.

  “She’d never hurt me like that,” Dale says, his voice breaking before he can say anything else.

  Stretching out a hand, Chum helps Dale to his feet, but instead of letting go, Chum keeps hold of that hand and nudges the guy with the sunken chest.

  “I’m telling you,” Dale says, “it was both of them. Donna, she told me the girl did bookkeeping. She knew I needed someone. Jesus, they played me. And Donna knew about my house being sold. She did it. Had to have. Both of them played me.”

  The sunken-chest guy takes Dale’s wrist from Chum. He pulls so Dale’s arm is good and straight, and with a small knife and one smooth motion, he cuts Dale from wrist to elbow. Crying out, Dale tries to pull away, but the man holds tight. As if afraid his shoes will get stained, Chum steps back. Blood begins to drip onto the boat’s white deck.

  “Not too deep,” Chum says, steadying himself with a hand to the railing. “Don’t want him bleeding out first.”

  The same man grabs Dale’s other arm, cuts it in the same way, and then folds Dale’s arms to stem the bleeding.

  “Legs too?” the man asks.

  Chum nods, and as the man squats down, Dale stumbles backward but something stops him. It’s the stringy-haired guy. He wraps his arms around Dale’s chest and yells at him to stop moving.

  “Go easier if you stay still,” the sunken-chest man says, and one at a time, he slices the inside of each of Dale’s thighs.

  “We’re good to go!” Chum hollers, and sticks a cigar in his mouth.

  Dale is kicking and punching as they lift him. They swing him twice and let go. Chum is laughing. That’s the last thing Dale hears when he hits the water. Coughing and choking, he pops back to the surface. Before he sees them, he feels them. First it’s a bump to his leg, a glancing blow that could have been an undercurrent. But then he feels another. And then another. Like chum in the water.

  I GET THE SAME OLD FEELING

  by Karen Brown

  Davis Islands

  They moved into the house in September. The last time they’d been there, following behind a real estate agent’s clicking heels, the rooms had seemed open and friendly. Now the walls were marked by tree shadows, an uneasy flickering of light off the canal. Eva told her husband it wasn’t the same and he said it was too late, and gave her that look: part caution, part dismay. Didn’t he always want to please her, and was she never happy? Eva crossed the terrazzo floor and opened the doors to the patio and let the breeze move through the rooms. Small insects came in, bobbing off the kitchen counter, hovering slow and dazed like bits of dark ash.

  Her husband left for work, agreeing to drop the children at their new school. It was better if she didn’t take them at first—her littlest would cling to her and make a scene at the drop-off line. The doorbell signaled a delivery or another neighbor stopping to introduce herself bearing a willow basket of muffins or a box of locally confected toffee. They all said the same thing: “You didn’t tear it down!” Eva wasn’t sure whether they were pleased or disgruntled—the exclamation kept vague, waiting for her response. “Not yet,” she might say. Or, “Never!”

  She opened the door to a man she knew she should remember. He stood on the front walkway bewildered, blinking, his hands stuffed into his pants pockets.

  “Eva Langford?” he said.

  Eva laughed, and his expression dulled. “Dr. Harcourt?”

  Her old college professor. He was gray now, his same eyes peeking out of an aged face, the same clothing—jeans, corduroy jacket, Converse sneakers. He took a step back, as if finding her there was a trick of some sort. “What are you doing here?” he said.

  They went back and forth this way, an awkward reunion. She explained they’d moved in last week, that her husband’s company had reassigned him to Tampa.

  “Of all places,” she said. “It’s Eva Kinsey now.”

  “This was my mother’s house,” Jim Harcourt said.

  And Eva remembered a day she spent with him—sex at his condo and then the drive around town in his Alfa Romeo with the top down, drinking beer, winding through a suburban neighborhood—had it been this very Davis Islands neighborhood?

  They’d driven curving roads under oaks and magnolias, seed pods fluttering into her hair, into her lap, and he’d pointed out houses of horrors.

  A low-slung ranch, its lawn a swath of dead grass: “This is where my friend was run over and killed by his brother. High on cocaine. Family station wagon.”

  A Spanish Mediterranean with green-striped awnings like a candy shop: “Allan Tinker, decapitated in a waterskiing accident.”

  A two-story contemporary, its stucco crumbling: “There’s a plexiglass floor upstairs above the pool. One or two ODs at parties. Heard they took the bodies somewhere it would look like suicide. One of them even survived.”

  A 1960s mid-century modern, all windows and architecturally sharp landscaping: “Speaking of suicide. Woman was found by the neighbor boy in the kitchen. Former beauty queen. Tampa’s Valley of the Dolls.”

  Dr. Harcourt had grinned, pointed his long finger, his hair blown back by the wind. Eva had only half believed him. “Not really,” she said, enjoying the bubble of fear. “You’re making this up.”

  He had Barry White’s Can’t Get Enough playing. The car’s leather seats were soft and sun-warmed. He’d given her a Valium earlier and she still felt the effects, the wind cottony in her mouth, her arms and legs leaden.

  Like the insects bobbing now, just out of her line of sight.

  “Jesus, how long has it been?” he said. He brushed an old man’s hand through his hair.

  Eva said it was fifteen years at least. She’d been a freshman then. “I have two children now.”

  At the time they’d known each other, Dr. Harcourt had children, a wife. Once, driving in the Alfa Romeo, he’d told her to duck, and she’d slid down in the narrow bucket seat and curled herself up below the glove box. “Look at you,” he’d said, surprised, her tiny body the provider of feats for him.

  Eva sensed he’d come now to the door for
her. Even though he claimed this was his mother’s house, she still doubted him after all these years.

  “Did you want to see the house? I’m still unpacking.”

  He put both of his hands up. “I wondered if the place was sold,” he said. “I couldn’t impose.”

  But she insisted. “Did you grow up here?”

  Dr. Harcourt stepped uneasily over the threshold. Eva led the way into the living room, but when she looked back he was still there in the entry. “I lived here for a little while,” he called to her. Slowly, he came forward and stood across from her. “This is—” He took in the boxes stacked against the wall, the shining floors, the new sofa still wrapped in its plastic.

  Eva told him the former owner had taken up all the carpets and polished the terrazzo.

  “They reconfigured it some,” he said, cautiously. “There used to be a wall there.”

  Eva asked him if he wanted to look around. She remembered how it had ended with him—how cold and unthinking she’d been. She felt sorry for him now, and she reached out a hand to clasp his arm. But Dr. Harcourt’s shoulders tightened in his corduroy coat, and he told her it was nice to see her, welcome back, but he had to go.

  * * *

  That evening her boys had baseball practice. Eva took a photo of them in their too-large caps, the gloves grotesque claws at the ends of their small arms. She was going to unpack some more, she told her husband, set up the house. She watched them drive off, and then she went for a walk. Dr. Harcourt had told her the neighborhood was designed by a man named D.P. Davis in the 1920s as an exclusive resort with hotels and a golf course and luxury Mediterranean Revival–style residences. The islands were man-made, built on top of swamp and mudflats at the mouth of the Hillsborough River. The old stucco houses had been replaced here and there with mid-century ranches, but those were now being threatened by mansions—two- and three-story places, with three-car garages and paved driveways. Eva’s house was one of the remaining 1950s ranches—one that at the time of its construction would have signaled affluence, with its geometric iron gate, a courtyard, and walls of glass. Large birds of paradise filled the front beds, and banyan trees grew along the side of the house. “A tropical paradise,” the agent had said. “Room for a pool.”

  The night was balmy, as if they might get a bit of fall weather—although she told her husband not to expect it. She’d only gone to college in Tampa for a year. Of her time here, she claimed dim memories. “My clothes stuck to my skin,” she said. “It always smelled of magnolia and river muck.” She never graduated. Her parents had made her come home, and she had no choice. She had no way to support herself in Tampa and wasn’t in the best shape at the time to find work.

  Later, in bed, she told her husband funny stories about the neighbors that visited while she’d been unpacking. She didn’t tell him about Dr. Harcourt.

  “Why did they all assume we planned to tear down the house?” she said.

  Her husband, turned away from her in bed, was half-asleep, a signal for her to stop talking. He grunted. “It’s just what everyone is doing,” he said. “Tell them we like the house’s style.”

  Eva got up from bed and went down the hallway. She stood in the place where Dr. Harcourt had stood that morning. Beyond the sliding glass doors, the sprinklers hissed. The canal seemed oily and dark. Dr. Harcourt had told her about a husband who’d accidentally killed his wife in an argument. He’d stood her in a galvanized bucket and poured in concrete and dumped her in the bay. He’d been caught, somehow. He’d served his time and gotten out of prison and spent his last years working as a salesman in the mall, selling men’s suits.

  Maybe this had been a house on Dr. Harcourt’s tour and that was why everyone thought they’d tear it down. She returned to bed, but could not sleep for the bright slice of moonlight that cut the room in half, like a torn photograph.

  Eva wanted the story of the house. She’d seen Dr. Harcourt’s haunted expression, his jittery movements when he stepped through the doorway onto the cool terrazzo. The way he fled—that was the only way to describe his leaving. If the house had ghosts she wanted to be prepared for them. If they were angry or distraught, if their lives had been cut short, if they’d been the victims of their own or others’ violence—surely these things would alter the atmosphere of the rooms.

  She located his e-mail address at the college and sent him a note.

  * * *

  Two days later, Eva swatted at the small flies she’d let in. She followed through the motions of unpacking that her husband expected—stacking plates on cupboard shelves she’d wiped clean of dust, the bits of spices spilled from their jars, a piece of macaroni, dried and yellow like an old toenail. On one shelf, she’d encountered a small piece of broken glass, and it had imbedded itself in the pad of her middle finger and she could not remove it. Each time she touched anything, the glass announced itself there below the surface. That afternoon, for no reason at all, she felt trapped, held by the house, terror making her heart race. If only she knew what had sent Dr. Harcourt to her door, she might face it down. Maybe it was only a fleeting, sorrowful memory of a lost parent.

  She didn’t want her husband to know about her past. That time in her life, the brief year of college—she’d kept that private all this time. She could not confess details that would surely alter his perception of her. The revelation might even cause a breach in their marriage. Too much time had passed, and she could not adequately account for her silence, her secrecy.

  That had been one of the vows he’d written when they married: We will keep nothing from each other, no secrets between us, something, something. She could not remember it all now.

  Time diffused some things. And others it highlighted, a spotlight cast about a dark room full of shelves disappearing into the rafters of an impossibly high ceiling, the memories stacked on the shelves in labeled boxes like a museum warehouse. She imagined her husband’s face crumpling with disappointment, but she could not predict what he might do or say after.

  * * *

  Later that morning, Dr. Harcourt returned. She found him at her door in his signature clothing—the jeans, the Converse, the corduroy jacket.

  “Let’s start over,” he said. “I was incredibly rude running off the other day.”

  Eva set down a basket of her sons’ dirty clothes. She said she understood. “It’s hard to go back to places from the past.”

  Dr. Harcourt agreed, eagerly, his eyes brightening. “Some of it’s a blur, and then the rest is so real and vivid. For instance, I remember you so well.”

  Eva crossed her arms over her chest. She wore her pajamas—a T-shirt and a pair of loose cotton pants. “And this house?” she said. “Is this part of the vivid past?”

  She saw his smile falter, but his eyes stayed on hers. “The house.”

  It was as if he did not want to look past her into its depths.

  “Let’s go for coffee,” he said. “And then I promise you a tour. How’s that?”

  When she was a college student it had been the Alfa Romeo he used to lure her in. She’d seen him getting into it one muggy afternoon as she crossed the faculty lot and called out to him asking for a ride. It had been a joke, but she knew now he’d seen her real desire to leave campus and its pressure of school and roommates behind, and he’d played along. Now, it was the house. As much as she tried to pretend the story of the house didn’t matter, somehow he knew it did.

  His car, parked at the curb, was a silver Prius. She got in and tucked her skirt under her legs.

  “This takes me back,” he said, turning the key in the ignition. She half expected the old R&B songs, but the radio was silent.

  They didn’t drive far—just along one of the curving roads to the small shopping plaza. Eva and her husband had taken the boys to the nearby Mexican restaurant. The coffee bar had chairs set up outside, but Dr. Harcourt held the glass door for her, and she slipped into the dim interior.

  “Coffee or beer?” he said, pulling out a chair
for her.

  Along the wall were bottles of wine, taps for beer behind a counter. “Beer, for old time’s sake,” she said.

  Dr. Harcourt ordered two pilsners. It was ten a.m. Eva imagined her boys at their school tables, their pencils shaping letters on worksheets. Her husband downtown presiding over a meeting. She should have asked Dr. Harcourt about his wife and children, but she didn’t want to know. She drank the beer and said, “So?”

  Dr. Harcourt took a long sip, set his glass on the tabletop. “Patience,” he said.

  “Patient Griselda,” she said. They’d read Boccaccio’s awful story in his class.

  Griselda’s husband saves her from poverty by marriage. He believes all women to be faithless and wicked and he tests her by taking her children away and claiming they are dead. He banishes her to her father’s small impoverished hut under the pretense of marrying another woman. Dr. Harcourt had been obsessed with the story. They’d even read Perrault’s fairy tale written about her. At the time, Eva had not cared about the story’s intent as a guide for young women and wives. She had not ever thought she’d be a wife, a mother.

  She pressed her finger against the tabletop and felt the sting of the glass beneath the skin. The beer made her woozy.

  “Do you think I’m not a faithful wife?”

  “You are who you always were,” he said, cryptically.

  A bell on the door rang and Eva glanced up. She didn’t know any of the neighbors yet—barely remembered their welcoming faces at her door—but this woman might have been one of them, the way she eyed Eva with a faint smile. Eva understood it mattered who she was seen with now.

  Dr. Harcourt slipped from his chair and returned with two new glasses of beer. Eva tried to protest but he set the tall glass beside her, and she found herself finishing her first, reaching for the second. He leaned back in his chair and crossed his ankles.

  “The house,” he said. “And my mother.”

  He told her his mother was no Griselda. She was everything the husband in the tale feared—faithless and conniving. He ran his hand over his cheek as he talked, as if trying to rub off a smear of lipstick. She was a bank teller, or a receptionist, or a ladies clothing store clerk, he couldn’t remember which. “A lowly sort, when my father met her,” he said. “It was 1958.”