Michaela Thompson - Florida Panhandle 02 - Riptide

by Michaela Thompson

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Isabel hunched forward, staring at the blue-and-white bottle. She had been trying to draw the bottle all morning.

  It should have been easy, a beginner’s exercise. The bottle was square. At the top, the corners modulated into rounded, sloping shoulders culminating in a short neck. It was a simple, unpretentious shape, yet she had been unable to capture it. Her attempts were so awkward they would have been an embarrassment in a beginning drawing class.

  Isabel wanted to believe that if she could produce a clean sketch of the bottle, it would help her decide what to do next. If everything else had been equal, she would simply report to the authorities that someone had broken and entered the house and seemed to be squatting in there. But she was positive that Harry was involved somehow. And who knows, maybe Clem Davenant was too. And come to that, what about Merriam’s bottle? How did that figure in? The minute she reported anything, Isabel would start a train of events that would end – where? If she could only see clearly— but she couldn’t. Too many images arose, clouding her vision.

  Clem and Edward, with their archaeology project, their calculations of winds and tides and latitude and longitude, must have located the shipwreck without realizing it. They had just begun to explore a projected site when Edward had his catastrophic accident. Harry and his deckhand came to the rescue, and the deckhand dove to retrieve their equipment. He must have seen something then, enough to interest them in exploring further. After that day, Clem had worse problems. He wasn’t likely to lay claim to the Esperanza.

  Isabel gave up trying to draw the bottle.

  Her eyes moved to the photograph above it, the sepia-toned portrait of her grandfather, John James. He gazed into the distance with bulbous, unseeing eyes, a man whose essence was mystery, a man who handed his daughter Merriam a Chinese porcelain bottle and vanished without a trace.

  Isabel began to see John James’s disappearance as the force that had driven them all these years. The extravagant, burdensome house stood as his monument. He was the deity Merriam had set up her altar to. John James was a myth.

  Or was he? Isabel put the pencil behind her ear and told herself to get real. John James Anders was not a myth. His disappearance had not taken place in a misty ancient age, but in 1922. Even if you saw it as symbolic, there were facts involved.

  She considered those facts as recounted by Merriam: There was a terrible storm. A tramp called River Pete took shelter with the family. The baby had colic. John James and River Pete cleared out fallen trees. John James checked the foundation of the house. Over his wife’s protests, he decided to take his boat to St. Elmo. Merriam walked him to the landing and he gave her the porcelain bottle and a letter for her mother. Merriam lost the letter on the way home. John James never came back.

  The story was as smooth and self-contained as an egg— no handles, no rough corners.

  Isabel tossed her sketchbook aside, went to the refrigerator, and poured herself a glass of iced tea. She had started keeping a pitcher made, the way Merriam used to. If Isabel kept her mind on John James, she wouldn’t have to think about Harry. She wouldn’t have to wonder whether Merriam had discovered what Harry was up to, and what Harry might have done about that.

  Divers wore hoods sometimes with their wet suits. Harry was a diver. She didn’t want to go on from there and ask herself whether Harry was the man wearing the hood, the figure who had terrified Merriam.

  John James’s story was complete. Isabel had had the images in her head since she was a girl. She finished her tea and put her glass down, mulling over each element of the tale. River Pete, the tramp. He was just a peripheral character and she had never thought much about him, but she found herself wondering what had happened to River Pete.

  River Pete had lived on the beach in a shack that blew away in the storm. He did odd jobs at a store, Pursey’s store. He and John James sometimes went hunting or fishing together. River Pete had helped John James clear the fallen trees. His final appearance in the tale came when Merriam saw him at the pump by the back door, where he was washing mud off his hands and beard.

  River Pete might have known something about the bottle. He was there that day. He might have known where John James got a piece of porcelain from the Esperanza.

  He might’ve, but he would be long dead by now. Isabel didn’t know whether he’d stayed in the area. She didn’t even know his last name. It was a shame she’d never asked Merriam.

  There might be other old-timers around who remembered him. People who would know, at least, whether he’d stayed around, or had children. River Pete had worked at a store, so he would have been a familiar face.

  Isabel went to the phone table and found the St. Elmo and Vicinity directory. Pursey’s store. Merriam had mentioned the store in other reminiscences. As far as Isabel knew, it didn’t exist anymore. She had the impression it had been the place nearest Cape St. Elmo to buy supplies.

  She leafed through the directory. Each community was listed separately. No Purseys in St. Elmo, none on Cape St. Elmo, none in Westpoint. She riffled through the P’s in the rest of the book. Nothing, nothing, nothing, noth— jackpot. Not one, not two, but three Purseys— J.G., N.K., and L.B.— listed at Deep Creek.

  Deep Creek, to Isabel’s faint recollection, was a tiny community on the edge of the river swamp, at least twenty-five miles away. She probably couldn’t find it without a map.

  She drummed her fingers on the open page. J. G. Pursey, N. K. Pursey, L. B. Pursey. An embarrassment of riches.

  Thinking hard, she was startled when the phone rang. She heard Harry’s voice, and her fingers tightened on the receiver.

  “I was hoping I’d catch you,” he said. She heard conversation and music in the background. “Can I stop by tonight?”

  “No. No, you can’t.” She wasn’t ready to see Harry.

  “Listen, Isabel—”

  “No, Harry.”

  She pressed the button to break the connection. She ran her finger down the page to the telephone number of J. G. Pursey.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Buddy Burke sat on a stump at the edge of a field. Twilight was descending.

  Another night on the road, and Buddy was so hungry he couldn’t keep track of anything besides his hunger. Buddy had done various stupid things since he’d escaped, and he’d done some of them because he was too hungry to think straight.

  Like throwing away the motorcycle. The thought of it brought tears to Buddy’s eyes. That bike had gotten him past Alma before it ran out of gas. If he had been himself he would have checked the gauge, but he hadn’t been himself, and when the cycle ran out of gas, Buddy got mad. So what he did was wheel it across the shoulder and push it down the culvert, all the time yelling, “Run out of gas, you son of a bitch!”

  Losing (Buddy preferred to call it losing) the cycle had taken the heart out of Buddy, but he had continued walking through the woods, miles and miles of woods. He lost any sense of where he was. He had intended to head for the coast, but here he was at a field, and no coast anywhere around.

  Buddy needed food, not the bits of this and that— candy bars and peanut butter crackers and jerky sticks— he’d been stealing and eating. He stood up and plunged his hand in the pocket of his new jeans. He had gotten the jeans this afternoon, taken them off a clothesline. He’d needed to change clothes so he wouldn’t fit whatever description they’d put out. He had buried his other pants, piling pine straw on the place to hide the dug-up earth.

  Buddy found a couple of wrinkled-up dollar bills in his pocket, and a few coins. He walked toward the road, keeping to the woods at the perimeter of the field. It was just about dark. Several cars were coming. Buddy stepped to the roadside and stuck out his thumb.

  The cars passed him by. In the lull that followed, Buddy had time to wonder whether hitching right now was a good idea, but only in a vague way. When the next headlights approached, he stuck his thumb out again.

  The car stopped. Buddy felt a spasm in his chest. “All
right, then,” he muttered, and ran to open the door.

  The driver was a middle-aged woman. She wore a blouse with a bow at the neck and square glasses, and her dark hair had been teased and sprayed into immobility. At first glance, she resembled Buddy’s Aunt Grace. “Guess you do need a ride, standing in the dark. What are you doing out here?” she said.

  Buddy didn’t even have to think hard. “Truck broke down. I got to go into— into town and get a part.” What town? Buddy had no idea.

  “Into Brewton?” the blessed lady, so much like Aunt Grace, said.

  “Yes, ma’am. Brewton.” Buddy slid down in the seat. Brewton. He hadn’t strayed as far off the trail as he’d feared.

  “That’s where I’m going. I’ll drop you at the filling station.”

  ‘Thank you, ma’am.” The air conditioner was on. The seat was soft. Buddy’s eyes started to close.

  “Tell me something,” the lady said.

  Buddy roused himself. “Yes, ma’am?”

  “It’s kind of a personal question.”

  Buddy tried to assemble an explanation, an apology really, for his body odor. Working hard all day, no place to take a shower. “What’s that?”

  The lady’s face was serious. “Have you accepted Jesus as your Savior and Lord?”

  Whoa. Buddy settled on what he considered to be, under the circumstances, the only possible response. “I tell you what,” he said. “I have. I surely have.”

  The lady seemed disappointed. “Fully and completely? Without doubt and fear?”

  “Well… mostly,” Buddy said. He didn’t want to get put out of the car because he was already saved.

  Mollified, the lady said, “Doubts do come, don’t they? What doubts do you have?”

  Buddy rubbed the bristles on his face. He wondered what he had done to deserve this. “It’s awful hard to be good sometimes,” he said after some thought.

  “Yes!” That set her off. She went on to tell Buddy, giving chapter and verse, why it was so hard to be good. Buddy, heavy-lidded, nodded every now and then. Before she’d had a chance to check back with him about his other doubts and fears, they were entering the city limits of Brewton.

  Buddy was saying, “Thanks” as the lady pulled up at the gas station, but she interrupted him by leaning on the horn and yelling out the window, “Oscar! Oscar!”

  Buddy was rigid. “Don’t bother to call him,” he said as he opened the door.

  “Oscar!”

  A swarthy man emerged from the station. The lady said, “Oscar, this young man needs a part from you. A part for his truck.”

  Buddy was out on the concrete by now. “What do you need?” Oscar was asking while the lady looked on with interest.

  Buddy couldn’t think. “I got to— I got to” —his mouth had dried up— “call my brother. Find out exactly what.” Buddy looked down the block. He could see a Dairy Queen. “They got a phone down there?”

  “We got one here,” Oscar said. He looked as if he thought Buddy might be an escaped convict.

  “I’ll be back,” Buddy said. He bent and waved good-bye to the lady, then turned and walked energetically toward the Dairy Queen. Let them call the sheriff. At least he’d have time for a burger first.

  It took every cent, but he got his burger. As he ate it he walked on, past the Brewton city limits. A few houses were clustered along the road not far past the outskirts of town. A pickup sat in the driveway of one of the houses, and by the porch light Buddy could see a shotgun on the rack in its cab.

  Now that he’d eaten, Buddy wasn’t as afraid as he’d been before. He sidled up to the truck. No dogs barked. He pressed gently on the door handle and felt it give as the door opened. Reaching into the cab, he extracted the gun from the rack and slid back out of the truck. He leaned against the door until it clicked shut again.

  It’s awful hard to be good sometimes. Carrying the stolen gun, Buddy left Brewton behind him.

  PART THREE

  TWENTY-SIX

  Isabel drove along the state road, scanning the horizon for a fire tower. The young man she’d talked to on the phone, one of the Purseys, had told her, “Turn at the fire tower and keep going for about ten miles. You won’t have trouble getting here unless there’s a good rain tonight.”

  The young Pursey, whose name she never got, had answered the N. K. Pursey’s phone. He had seemed unfazed by— or, more likely, uninterested in— her story of trying to track down information about River Pete, a Pursey employee many years ago. When she finished, he said cheerfully, “You say that was back when the store was at Cape St. Elmo?”

  “Yes.”

  “You ought to talk to Donna. Donna’s the one keeps up with all that.”

  So Isabel was on her way to talk to Donna. She pictured Donna Pursey as a blue-haired matron who spent her days studying genealogical charts and family trees.

  And why was Isabel doing this? Taking off on a fool’s errand into the countryside, ten miles past the fire tower? Was she really so hesitant to call the law on Harry Mercer and expose whatever underhanded illegal activities he was carrying on in Merriam’s house? Was she afraid to ask whether he might have hurt or even killed Merriam?

  There was the rub. Isabel still couldn’t believe Harry would have attacked Merriam. He had disliked Merriam, even hated her, years ago. But then, so had Isabel. Now, Isabel felt nothing but sadness and a sense of missed opportunity where Merriam was concerned. And she could believe many bad things about Harry Mercer, but she had known him pretty well and she just couldn’t see him attacking Merriam. She was having a lot of trouble facing the fact that she could be wrong about that. So, she had to admit it, she was running away.

  The road was lined with cattail-choked ditches. A flock of blackbirds wheeled and settled on a field of half-grown corn.

  She saw the fire tower up ahead. At the intersection, there was a wooden sign— DEEP CREEK— with an arrow. Smaller signs said, LOTS AVAILABLE and BOAT LANDING. She turned off on the secondary road.

  As she continued, the terrain became swampier. The hot air rushing in the car window had a brackish smell.

  When she passed a few small cabins, she began looking for the house where she’d been told to meet Donna. Its major identifying feature, according to the young man who’d given her directions, was a fence made of whitewashed truck tires.

  A few miles farther along, she caught sight of the fence. The tires, half-buried, made a scalloped border around a rambling frame house set back under chinaberry trees. When she pulled up and got out of the car, a boy in a baseball cap appeared on the screened porch. “You the one looking for Donna?” he shouted. “She said to tell you she’s down at the landing.” He pointed to an extension of the road, a narrow track under a canopy of oaks. “Leave your car here, if you want.”

  Isabel walked along the dusty, rutted trail. She smelled rotting vegetation and heard a dog barking. She emerged from beneath the trees into a basin of red clay opening on a dark brown creek. Cars with boat trailers ringed the basin, and several boats were in the water, moored to a makeshift dock.

  Across the basin, an open-sided pavilion made of unpainted lumber sheltered a ragged sofa, folding chairs, a trestle table with a camp stove, and a blackened coffeepot. DEEP CREEK LANDING SPORTSMAN’S PARADISE was painted in crude letters on the roof of the pavilion. Back on higher ground stood a concrete-block building with a metal sign— DEEP CREEK LANDING GENERAL STORE— over the door.

  The place was deserted except for a black dog with a plume of a tail standing on the bank and a figure in overalls sitting in one of the moored boats tinkering with an outboard motor. As Isabel approached, the tinkering figure looked up and called, “Hey there! You Isabel Anders?”

  It was, Isabel realized, a woman, with straight dark hair raggedly cut off at shoulder length. Under the overalls, she wore a white T-shirt with flapping sleeves. She stood and wiped her hands on a rag, which she replaced in her pocket, leaving the end trailing out. She was gaunt-faced, probably in her
mid-fifties, and when she stood and jumped from the boat to the clay bank, Isabel saw she was at least six feet tall.

  “Donna Pursey,” the woman said, offering a smudged hand, and Isabel’s vision of the blue-haired matron with the family trees vanished. As the black dog yipped and danced around them, Donna jerked her head toward the boat. “Got to get it running right before I take off up the river.” She gestured at the pavilion. “Want coffee? Won’t take but a second to heat it up.”

  The coffee was strong, and bitter as bile. A boat came along the creek, motor chugging, and the dog ran to the bank and barked as it passed. Donna said, “Joey— that’s my nephew— told me you want to know something about the store Granddaddy used to have down at Cape St. Elmo.”

  “I’m trying to trace someone who used to do odd jobs there. Back in the twenties.”

  Donna cradled her tin mug. “The twenties? There was hardly anybody there back in those days. Cape St. Elmo got too built-up for us after a while, though. One day in 1955 Daddy said, ‘That’s it,’ and moved out here. Our store used to be where Margene’s MiniMart is now.” She leaned forward. “Now, what was it you wanted?”

  Isabel wondered if she should be taking Donna’s time. “I don’t know much about the person I’m trying to trace. Not even his last name.”

  Donna shrugged. “I’ll do what I can to help you. I’m the only one keeps up with the stories. They want to know something, they ask Donna. I ought to write it down, but I never do.” She chuckled. “I tell them, ‘What are y’all going to do when you can’t ask Donna?’ I ought to write it, but I’m a whole lot better at fishing than I am at writing.”

  The black dog came and rested his head on Isabel’s knee, gazing at her with adoring brown eyes. She settled back on the musty sofa. Her second swallow of coffee went down more easily than the first.

  Donna said, “See, I used to be so bad, beating up my brothers, getting in trouble, that they’d punish me by making me stay in the store with Grandma and Granddaddy instead of going out to play. I got so I liked it, sitting there listening to their tales. So then I’d get in more trouble, so I’d get to stay at the store with them. Lordy, I could get in the most mischief. One time—” She laughed and shook her head. “Never mind. What did you want to know?”