Key West Heat

by Alice Orr

  “Jethro, you don’t have to be responsible for anything.”

  “You don’t understand. I know everything about you. I’ve been watching you all your life. I know about you back then. I know about you ever since. I even know everything that happened to you today.” He grabbed her shoulders. “You have to get your luck back.”

  He was gripping her shoulders tightly and shaking her. The time for trying to soothe him had passed.

  “Jethro, take your hands off me,” Taylor said in a strong voice much like the tone she had heard Winona use with him.

  He stopped shaking her but kept his grip on her shoulders.

  “Jethro, let go of me right now or I will call your mother and Early.”

  He jerked his hands away as if her skin had suddenly turned too hot to touch. He backed away toward the door. “Go to Madame Leopold. Get your luck back,” he said one more time. “It won’t be on my head if you don’t.”

  With that he yanked the door open and scrambled out of the room, his eyes darting everywhere at once as if there might be phantoms after him. Taylor bolted for the door and flipped the lock closed. She pressed her ear against the crack and listened to him scurry down the hall. She kept listening for several minutes longer, but he didn’t return. She had the feeling that threatening him with Winona had done the trick for now. Of course, Winona would have to be told what had happened. Jethro definitely had problems. Given what he’d just said, one of those problems might be an obsession with Taylor. She wasn’t about to ignore the possibility that he could be dangerous. She even had to think about whether or not he could be connected somehow with the strange and terrible things that had been happening to her lately.

  All of that would have to wait until tomorrow, no matter how crucial it might be. Taylor was completely used up for today. When her supper tray came, she managed only a bite or two of the tiny sandwiches Winona had prepared. Even the softly scented tea went untouched as Taylor collapsed into a very deep sleep.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The next morning, Taylor didn’t awaken to the usual multicolored dappling of sun through the stained-glass skylight. The sky was too dark and ominous for that. The storm that had held off the day before might very likely make an appearance today. The eerie still of yesterday’s barometric low had passed. The tops of the palm trees on Elizabeth Street thrashed back and forth like restless sentinels. There was no rain yet, but Taylor expected it would come. Back home, rainy-day mornings always made her want to stay in bed. She hardly ever did so, of course. This morning the temptation was stronger than ever. She certainly had been through enough these past few days to justify a late start. Jethro would probably be relieved to have her stay in one place for a while.

  Taylor sat straight up in bed. What had made her think of Jethro? And, why that particular thought?

  Something had been nagging at her, maybe even while she was sleeping, about her conversation with Jethro last night. In his agitation, he had blurted out that he knew everywhere she had been and everything she had done, or something like that. Now, she put that together with other snippets of previously half-realized perception—glimpses of a red sports car here and there out of the corner of her eye, Winona’s seeming to second-guess so much about Taylor’s doings since her arrival in the Keys. Conclusion: Jethro had been following her, maybe even reporting on her activities to his mother.

  Taylor could hardly believe what she was thinking. Was she turning paranoid? Had the chaos of Key West sent her off onto the lunatic fringe? Or, had her instincts and intuition been ground to the sharpest of points by the friction of her experiences here? Jethro did talk as if he might be obsessed with her. Taylor strained to remember exactly what he had told her last night when she was too exhausted to pay full attention to him and more interested in getting him out of her room than in whatever he might be saying. It seemed to her that he had been running on about watching her all of her life. That sounded like obsession to her. He certainly came across as wacky enough to be capable of that sort of thing. But how could he have been doing what he claimed—watching her since she was a child—unless he had very long-distance vision?

  Taylor all but leapt out of bed. She’d had enough of answerless questions. She would get to the bottom of these mysteries, and she’d do it today. First of all, however, she had to get Jethro off her trail. She might be new at the sleuth game, but she did know she had best do her sleuthing in secret. She also knew that she had to be clever. Jethro might be wacky, but he wasn’t necessarily stupid. She paced back and forth for a few moments between the rumpled bed and the glass doors onto the balcony. Then the idea came. She hurried to the bedside table and opened the drawer. The card was still where she had tossed it last night.

  Taylor dialed Madame Leopold. An answering machine responded. Taylor wasn’t surprised by that at this early hour. When the message about Madame’s powers of foretelling and so forth had ended, Taylor said, “Madame Leopold, I was referred to you by Jethro Starling. I have a proposition for you that could be both challenging and lucrative, if we can come to terms.”

  The receiver was picked up on the other end before Taylor could continue. The transaction that followed was relatively brief and very much to the point. When Jethro came to Madame Leopold for his morning appointment, only an hour or so from now, he would be told that his luck had mysteriously deserted him for today and that he must lie low, preferably closeted in his room, until tomorrow. Madame was certain he would be more than ready to take that advice when she was through with him, and Taylor was able to pay for that assurance with a major credit card.

  Taylor was less definite about what she would do next. She didn’t really have a plan. She suspected that a plan might be hard to come up with, at least in long-range terms. “Just do whatever comes next,” she told herself. That sounded as though it could be one of Aunt Pearl’s one-liners, but it wasn’t. Pearl would never have said anything so open-ended. Maybe Taylor was starting to come up with some one-liners of her own. She almost smiled at that possibility as she went about getting dressed in an outfit she thought would be practical for nosing around—jeans, a T-shirt and sneakers. It occurred to her that the sneakers would also be good for a getaway in case she needed to make one. She was tying the laces extra tight, and hoping that precaution wouldn’t prove necessary, when there was a quick rap on her bedroom door and Winona came rushing in without waiting for an answer.

  “Something terrible has happened,” she said.

  She was gasping for breath in what Taylor recognized as near panic. “Come over here and sit down.” She led the obviously distraught woman to the bed and eased her onto the disarrayed comforter. “Take a few deep breaths till you calm down,” Taylor said, feeling as if she had become the therapist for the moment and Winona, the patient. Winona’s hand trembled beneath Taylor’s soothing touch, but her advice was taken. After a half dozen long, ragged inhalations the trembling had stilled some. “Now tell me what has happened,” Taylor said.

  “The man who claims he is your father and may well be. What did you say his name was?”

  “Lewt Walgreen.” Taylor wondered if she would need to do some deep breathing herself after she heard what Winona had to say. “He’s in jail.”

  “He got out somehow. Just a while ago, when Early was on his way to get the morning papers, he was attacked by this Walgreen. If Early hadn’t fought back, he would have been killed.”

  “What happened to Walgreen?” Taylor had to ask.

  “He got away.”

  Winona crumpled into a heap of wrinkled white dressing gown on Taylor’s bed. It was then that Taylor took note of Winona’s appearance. First of all, her hair wasn’t covered. Taylor was surprised to see so much gray among the tangled strands of jet black. Winona was also not wearing her usual meticulous makeup. The morning was still gray and dull through the skylight above them. Nonetheless, Taylor could see Winona well enough to note how much older she looked without camouflage. This was without doubt not an
image she allowed to be seen very often, if ever. Her agitation at the moment must be so extreme that she was for once mindless of appearances. For the first time, it occurred to Taylor to wonder what the relationship between Early and Winona might actually be.

  “I must go to him,” Winona said, darting up from the bed. “Will you come with me?”

  Taylor was about to agree. Then she remembered her own priorities. “I’ll stay here and keep watch over things on this end, in case anyone calls or whatever.” She heard how lame that sounded and hoped Winona was too rattled to notice.

  “Yes, you do that,” she said absently as she hurried to the door where she turned, as if as an afterthought. “Jethro. I forgot about Jethro. He’s off to visit that charlatan crystal-ball reader of his. When he comes back, tell him what has happened.”

  “I promise,” Taylor said, knowing she might be lying. I’ll tell him what I need him to know, she thought, adding another one-liner to her repertoire.

  As Winona scurried out of the door, Taylor couldn’t help but feel guilty. Early had been her loyal friend almost all of her life. Winona had shown Taylor nothing but tolerance and kindness during these past few trying days. Now she was deserting them both in their own trying moment. She told herself that Early was all right. Winona had said that, hadn’t she? Taylor reassured herself that Early in particular would approve of what she was planning. “Do what has to be done,” she had heard him say more than once. Early had some one-liners of his own.

  * * *

  IN ANOTHER PART of the island, Des walked along his terrace. The rising wind told him there was definitely a storm on the way. He felt that same escalating tempest in his life. He usually liked to think he had more control over the personal front than he did over the weather. He wasn’t so sure about that today. He had already been out at dawn pacing the town pier, watching the seagulls rise and fall on the harbor gusts above and bob atop the swells of dark water below. Menace rode the air with the gulls. Des had always loved everything about storms—anticipating their arrival in the tension of the roiling sea, waiting out the blast as it threatened to rip the world up by its roots and toss it into oblivion.

  But Des didn’t like this storm. He dreaded its coming and the devastation he feared it could bring. The harbor would be empty this morning. The party catamarans and glass-bottom boats would stay lashed to the docks, their tourist cargo left behind to find other amusements until the barometer rose again. Even the old salt who rowed his skiff out every afternoon with his mongrel dog standing watch in the bow would stick to the wharf with his pipe and his grumbling. No one who had a lick of sense or savvy would risk the waters of the Keys today.

  Des wished he could put into his own safe slip of harbor and keep his head down till the worst was over. He had resigned himself to the impossibility of that even before the phone rang with one of his police-department buddies on the line and a message Des knew could not be good.

  * * *

  TAYLOR HAD CREPT downstairs after Winona left. Jethro was still out. If the cook was around, she would stick to the kitchen and her own business as she always did. Winona’s office door was generally shut and probably locked. Taylor hadn’t thought far enough ahead to know what she would do about that. She supposed she would have to improvise. Luckily, Winona had dashed out in such disarray to be at Early’s side that the door was left not only unlocked but ajar. Taylor slipped inside and closed it quietly behind her.

  The consulting room was decorated in restful colors and lots of large cushions probably designed to make the patient feel protected and safe to speak freely. Taylor could almost remember this room and feeling that way here as a child. She didn’t linger to press that memory further. What she wanted was not here among these sedate furnishings and shaded lamps. Winona would be most likely to keep the confidential records in her inner office. Taylor headed for that door.

  Winona’s office was so neat and well organized it was hard to imagine that anyone had ever worked here. Even the items on the polished dark cherry-wood desktop were lined up in perfect trim to one another. Taylor wasn’t really surprised to find such a precise arrangement. She’d half expected it. Winona would be likely to want every detail in order. That would be particularly true of her files, or so Taylor hoped. Sure enough. Some poking around revealed a sliding panel in the wall above a carved credenza. Behind that slide she found the journals, all in the same gray-green linen hardbound volumes as the one Winona had read from that morning on the back veranda.

  Taylor easily located the volume she was looking for in its proper chronological place. She sat down in the high-backed desk chair. The cushion was just the right firmness and very roomy, but Taylor found no comfort there—not after she located the first entry for her case as a child and began to read.

  Her eyes hurried over the words. She gave small gasps of disbelief as she read along. Her hand shot to her mouth to hold back a sob. Her eyes welled with tears as she realized what had been done to her vulnerable child-self. She might have started over at the first entry to make absolutely certain she had seen those shocking words, but she didn’t need to do that. Something deeper than memory told her she was not misinterpreting these pages. What Winona had written here, in the phrasing of one very proud of her accomplishments, had been the truth of Taylor’s young life after her mother’s death. Taylor didn’t actually recall the details of the sessions described, but she recognized them as having happened to her all the same.

  Taylor supposed the technique would be called mind control or conditioning—or maybe there was some more scientific term that amounted to the same thing. For a full year after the Stormley fire, when Taylor was six and then seven years old, she had undergone a series of treatments which Winona described here as “experimental.” These methods had been designed to venture further and obliterate the years leading up to the fire as well as all recollection of the treatment period after it. She’d had plans to replace these eradicated memories with others of her own choosing, but Taylor had been taken away to the north before that more difficult phase of her bizarre therapy could be pursued far enough to take effect.

  It was in reading Winona’s notations regarding those intended replacement memories that Taylor experienced her greatest shock. She could hardly stand to take in the meaning of the words, even though they brought with them a kind of relief. She had closed the journal and was stumbling, half-blinded by tears, toward the door when it opened in front of her. Early and Winona stared at Taylor, who had stopped stork-still on the handwoven Chinese carpet, clutching the faded volume to her breast. She stared back at them for a moment before the words came tumbling forth.

  “You tried to make me believe I had killed my own mother. Burned her to death alive. You meant to plant that in my mind. You didn’t manage it, but that was what you intended. Wasn’t it?”

  Winona showed no response to Taylor’s words or to the anguish in her voice. Taylor didn’t care. She was saying the words for herself, to hear their incredible sound and know they were real. In the echo of that reality, another awareness clicked into place.

  “You did manage to make other people believe it, didn’t you?” she went on. “You took examples of my natural childish exuberance and twisted them to appear disturbed and unhealthy. You even got people to believe I was sick enough to start that fire. How did you do that without anybody knowing what you were up to?”

  Winona’s unpainted lips were very thin. She moved them into a chilling smile. “Suggestion at its most effective requires great subtlety. Only a drop of venom may taint the whole. What is gossip, after all, but manipulation of the public mind? The challenge was elementary, barely engaging for me at the time, though necessary.”

  Taylor felt a shudder run through her. She could hardly stand to keep on talking to this woman, but there was more that needed to be learned.

  “Your mind-control treatment of me, why didn’t it wear off after a while? How did you keep me from remembering the truth all these years?”
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  “You underestimate my talents, my dear. My initial suggestions were very strong. Also, the process was begun when your mind was young and most susceptible. Your Aunt Pearl had only to supplement those suggestions on a fairly regular basis with minor twilight-hypnosis techniques.”

  “My aunt was part of this deception?”

  “Yes, of course. The long-term result would not have been possible without her cooperation.”

  Taylor gulped back tears.

  “You need not fret, child. The doting aunties sincerely believed themselves to be protecting you from the horrible truth. They were truly convinced you had set the fire at Stormley. They thought you guilty of matricide. They would have done anything to spare you the burden of that knowledge. They were in a very suggestible frame of mind themselves at the time, thanks yet again to my powers of suggestion.”

  Winona’s voice had not varied from its cool, even tone all during that hideous revelation.

  “You really are a monster,” Taylor breathed.

  “Only narrow minds such as your own would see me that way, my dear. Those of true intellect would call me a genius, as they shall surely do one day when the results of my work can be published.”

  Taylor glanced down at the journal still clasped in her arms. “That’s why you wrote it all down, isn’t it? You want the world to know what you’re capable of. You were even willing to make a written record of your crimes to accomplish that. When did you plan to have it all come out? After your death or before?”

  “Unfortunately, practical considerations require the former.”

  “Okay. That’s enough talk for now.” Early thrust himself past Winona. “Whatever happens, you won’t be around to see it,” he said to Taylor.

  He wrenched the journal from her grasp and seized her arm in an iron grip. Winona stepped aside as he pulled Taylor through the doorway. Winona followed them across the consulting room to the central hallway, then out of the back door onto the rear veranda. Taylor’s feet skittered beneath her as Early’s powerful physical strength carried her along, practically on tiptoe, over the lawn to the double garage beyond the garden. Winona moved, still cool and serene, in their wake. Taylor considered questioning Early about his motives for being involved in this, but she had already surmised the answer. He was as much Winona’s minion as the aunts had been, though obviously not as innocently. There was the Bissett money and life-style, which had been so generously shared with him while Pearl was alive, and even more so through her bequest to him after her death.