Baja Florida

by Bob Morris

  We had at least another hour before the Trifecta arrived, so Boggy and I walked around.

  We passed half a dozen churches, an elementary school where kids were playing dodgeball on the playground, a couple of cemeteries, five places that rented golf carts to tourists, the Alton Lowe Museum, four restaurants, three grocery stores, two hardware stores, a bank that was open only on Tuesday and Friday afternoons, and the Plymouth Rock liquor store, which was notable for the fact that it also served chicken souse for breakfast and sold real estate, your basic full-service establishment.

  We walked out on Government Dock and took in the view. A group of young boys were jumping off the end of the dock, turning flips on the way down. A group of young girls were pretending not to watch, giggling among themselves.

  Boats were tied off at mooring buoys just inside the harbor. Nice boats. Cruisers and charters like the Trifecta. When it finally arrived this was where it would be.

  We walked around some more and wound up where everyone who visits New Plymouth eventually winds up—Miss Emily’s Blue Bee Bar. The sign outside proudly proclaimed it the “Original Home of the Goombay Smash.”

  Emily Cooper passed away years ago and, being a good Christian woman, swore she never tasted the concoction that launched a zillion hangovers. The secret recipe resided with her daughter Violet. She was behind the bar.

  “Hello, dahlin’,” Violet said. “Haven’t seen you here in too long now. Where you been keeping yourself?”

  She gave me a hug. She gave Boggy one, too. We did some catching up.

  Violet poured us each a plastic cup of the house specialty. Even with all the fruit juice and the froufrou, the rum, which there were three kinds of, went directly to that part of the prefrontal cortex that elevates higher thinking.

  We found a table and sat down.

  I got out my cell phone. I’d forgotten to charge it the night before. It was running low on juice and I was keeping it turned off unless I really needed it. Plus, roaming fees in the Bahamas are brutal.

  I switched on the phone and was rewarded with an assortment of beeps and blips that let me know I was way behind on the human contact front.

  A message from Mickey Ryser saying I should give him a call. A message from Barbara saying I should give her a call, too. I was still sorting through all the messages when the screen lit up with an incoming call and I clicked over to that.

  A man’s voice…

  “Zack Chasteen?”

  “You got me.”

  “Abel Delgado. You called?”

  “I did. We need to talk.”

  “So talk.”

  “Face-to-face, Delgado. Where are you?”

  “Listen, Chasteen, I already know about you. I talked to my wife. She said you’d bothered her.”

  “I paid your wife a visit, Delgado. I did not bother her. And I don’t believe she would tell you otherwise.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Tell you the truth, if she was bothered by anyone it was you.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Just a personal observation,” I said. “I’ve observed something else, too.”

  “What?”

  “That you’ve been negligent in returning the calls of your client, Mickey Ryser.”

  “I just got off the phone with Ryser.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “That’s between me and him.”

  “Not anymore it’s not. Mickey’s an old friend. He paid you good money to find his daughter. What have you done to earn it? Besides stick up a few posters around Marsh Harbour?”

  Nothing from the other end of the line.

  “You get any response from those posters, Delgado? Because if you have any idea where Jen Ryser is, then you need tell me right now. Anything you know, I want to know it, too.”

  More nothing from the other end of the line.

  “You still with me, Delgado?”

  “Yeah, I’m with you,” he said. “You bother my wife again and I’ll have your ass.”

  “Why wait?”

  “Huh?”

  “I said why wait? You can have my ass as soon as you want it. But, fair warning, my ass is part of a package deal that contains all the rest of me. So you’ll have your work cut out for you. Also, I might as well tell you that I am not above a head butt. And if it gets down to the short hairs, then I have been known to bite.”

  A long pause from Delgado, then…

  “You talk big, Chasteen.”

  “I am big.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Wherever two or more are gathered together in my name…”

  It got nothing from him. A great line like that, wasted.

  “At this moment, I’m sitting at Miss Emily’s Blue Bee Bar willfully trying to restrain myself from asking Violet for a second goombay smash. You better pray to God I don’t have another one because I get even bigger and meaner with rum in me.”

  “Huh?”

  “Let me make this easy, Delgado. Where are you?”

  “Marsh Harbour. You know where that is?”

  “Indeed I do. Exactly where in Marsh Harbour?”

  “The Mariner’s Inn,” he said. “At the bar.”

  “Imagine that.”

  “Imagine what?”

  “Imagine I’ll be meeting you there, Delgado. Say, eight o’clock tonight. I’ll bring my ass. You bring yours. We’ll see who leaves with what.”

  They brought her food and asked her questions. They wanted to know about the money.

  “When are the deposits made?”

  “The tenth of each month.”

  “Always the same amount?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does anyone have access to the account besides you?”

  “No.”

  They asked a few questions about her mother and the rest of her family. Was there anyone she checked in with on a regular basis? Anyone who would get worried if they didn’t hear from her?

  No, she told them. She had no brothers, no sisters. There was an aunt and an uncle and assorted cousins, most of them living in Raleigh, but she was seldom in touch with them, hadn’t spoken to them since her mother’s funeral, except to go over some matters about her estate. And her best friends, the people she cared most about, they’d all been with her on the boat.

  Immediately, she regretted telling them the truth. She should have told them she was extremely close to Molly’s family, that she was supposed to call them at least every other day, that they were probably beside themselves with worry now and had alerted the police. But she didn’t think of it until it was too late. She wasn’t accustomed to lying.

  It was her father who interested them the most.

  “I really don’t know that much about him,” she said. “I haven’t seen him in more than twenty years. I can’t even remember what he looks like. We’ve just spoken on the phone. And only three times.”

  “He owns a private island with a big house. Got his own plane. The guy must be loaded.”

  “I really wouldn’t know.”

  “You know anything about the setup on that island? How many people he’s got working for him there? Security, that kind of thing?”

  “No idea.”

  “How did he make all his money?”

  “I’ve got no idea about that either.”

  “Are you in his will?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You said he was dying.”

  “He told me on the phone that he’d been sick. I assumed the worse.”

  “He’s gotta be getting ready to kick. Why else would he be getting in touch with you after all these years, huh? Because if he had really wanted to see you he could have done that long before now. Right?”

  She didn’t say anything. But she thought: Yes, if my father had really wanted to see me he would have done it long ago.

  She heard them talking low among themselves, but couldn’t make out any of it.

  She thought: I should have
been nicer to my father on the phone. I should have flown straight there to see him when he called. I shouldn’t have been so noncommittal, leaving him hanging like that, wondering when I would show up. Or if I would show up. I should have at least shown a little enthusiasm. But Molly had barely ever spoken about him. I didn’t even know his name until I was thirteen. And I had no desire to seek him out—Molly had squelched any notion of that. Still, he’s my father. I should have…

  She felt a hand on her leg. It was him, shaking her.

  “Jen? Answer me, dammit, I’m asking you a question.”

  “What? Sorry, I didn’t hear you.”

  “Who is this guy?”

  “What guy?”

  “This guy, Abel Delgado.”

  19

  It was just after 5:00 p.m. when the Trifecta dropped anchor at Green Turtle Cay, a hundred yards out from Government Dock. A few minutes later, several people piled into its dinghy and began heading our way.

  I couldn’t be sure that Karen Breakell was on the dinghy. She was the cook, the only female crew member according to the dockmaster at Blue Sky Marina. Maybe she’d stayed on the boat to get dinner ready. In which case I’d have to sweet-talk someone into taking us on the dinghy out to her. I had used up all my sweet talk on Abel Delgado. I was hoping to catch a break.

  The dinghy tied off on the dock. Six people in it.

  Four of them were quite obviously the party who had chartered the boat—two men, two women; the men in flowery shirts, the women in Lilly Pulitzer.

  A young man in a semi-official captain’s outfit—khaki shorts, white shirt tucked in, deck shoes—helped them onto the dock.

  That left the young woman who was the last to step out of the dinghy. Same outfit as the young man. Blond, tall, lean, and well put together. Or long and leggity, in Cutiespeak.

  She brought up the rear of the group. I approached her.

  “Karen Breakell?”

  She stopped.

  “Yes, that’s me.”

  “I’d like to talk to you about Jen Ryser.”

  Her brown eyes widened, a hand went to her mouth.

  “Jen? Is she OK? Did something happen?”

  “We just need to locate her, that’s all.”

  “What’s wrong? Who are you?”

  I introduced Boggy and myself. I told her that I was an old friend of Jen’s father and that he had asked me to help track her down. The rest of her party stopped at the end of the dock, waiting for her. She told them to go on and she would catch up with them.

  “We’ll be at Sundowner’s,” the young man said, pointing toward a bar that sat along the waterfront.

  Karen Breakell wore the look of someone who had spent much of her young life around boats. Her hair was honeyed and sun-streaked. Her skin wasn’t the shiny, surface bronze of a quickie vacation tan, but the deep and creamy brown that speaks of long hours spent not only in the sun but soaking up its reflection off the water, the way it burnishes the nether parts—behind the ears, beneath the brow, between the fingers—despite all diligence with sunscreen. I could just make out the first spidery lines around her eyes, the ones that come from squinting against the glare of a white-bright day. Hers was a pretty and open face, one that would wear a smile well. But she wasn’t smiling as she studied me. The jury was still out about me and my motives.

  She wore a good watch and she checked it.

  “I need to get to the grocery store before it closes. Get some things for dinner,” she said. “We’re only here for an hour and then we’re heading back to Marsh Harbour.”

  “Thought you weren’t due back until tomorrow.”

  “Change of plans. The clients decided they want to fly home first thing in the morning. So I’m going to pick up some steaks and cook them dinner while we cruise back to the marina.”

  “This shouldn’t take long,” I said.

  “I really don’t know what I can do to help you find Jen. It’s been nearly a week since I last saw her. I thought she would have been at her father’s place by now.”

  “So she was definitely planning to go there?”

  “Oh yeah, for sure. She was excited about it. Or maybe excited isn’t the right word. Because she was nervous, too. I mean, it has been so long since Jen’s seen him. What, twenty years or so?”

  “Something like that,” I said. “You and Jen are close friends?”

  “Real close. We shared a house for the past two years. On the sailing team together and everything. Jen’s great. I just wish that…”

  She shrugged, let it hang.

  “What happened at Miner Cay, Karen?”

  She shot me a look.

  “So you heard about that?”

  “We were there earlier today. You and your friends made quite an impression with the locals.”

  She shook her head, blew out some air.

  “We’d all been drinking a little too much.”

  “So I heard.”

  “I probably shouldn’t have done what I did, but I’d had it with Torrey. I just couldn’t take being on the boat with that woman for another second.”

  “That’s Torrey Kealing?”

  “Yeah, her. That saying about oil and water? How they don’t mix? That was us.”

  “But didn’t you know that before you got on the boat with her? I mean, you must have had a few weeks to plan the trip, gotten a chance to feel things out beforehand, know if there might be issues with other people.”

  “Oh, we’d been planning the trip for more than a year. And everyone got along just fine. But Torrey wasn’t part of the original group. She didn’t come along until right at the end. After the whole thing with Coach Tony and Liz.”

  “Coach Tony?”

  “Yeah, Tony Telan. The coach of our sailing team. More than just a coach, really. A friend, too. I mean, he’s just a couple of years older than us. He’s in graduate school. And he’s like this super-experienced sailor. Did a solo transatlantic when he was just seventeen. Been up and down the Ca rib be an. Knows everything there is to know about boats. He was supposed to come with us. He and Liz. That’s his girlfriend. She sails, too. But a couple of weeks before we were supposed to leave, their house caught on fire. They lost almost everything. Even their dog. After that, they decided they better not come with us. So that left just me and Jen and Pete and Will. We were thinking about calling the whole thing off.”

  I recalled the names I’d written down on my note pad in Walker’s Cay.

  “Pete Crumrine and Will Moody.”

  “Uh-huh. Jen and I have known them since we were all freshmen. Nice guys. Pete is going to law school in the fall. At Georgia. And Will is staying in Charleston, going to medical school. Pete and I went out a couple of times when we were sophomores, but we decided we worked better as friends. Jen and Will, though, they had this kinda thing…”

  “They were seeing each other?”

  “Let’s say they were hanging out a lot together, you know? Spending more time, just the two of them. I was hoping it would go somewhere. Jen deserves to find someone nice. She hasn’t exactly had the best luck with men.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know, bad choices, I guess. She’s one of those girls, I don’t know exactly how to describe it, but she always had to be with a guy, you know what I mean? She couldn’t just be Jen. We used to talk about it sometimes. Me, when I break up with a guy I sometimes go months before I’m with another guy. I don’t mind it. Tell you the truth, I kind of enjoy it that way. Guys can sometimes be so…”

  “So guyish,” I said.

  She laughed.

  “Totally,” she said. “But Jen, the moment she broke it off with one guy it was like she couldn’t stop until she’d connected with someone else. I’m not saying she was like, you know, promiscuous. It wasn’t anything like that. It was more like she needed to be with a guy in order to define herself. Lucky for Jen she never had any trouble finding guys. She’s pretty. She’s smart.”

  “A
nd she’s rich.”

  “Which can create its own problems,” Karen said. “Lots of the guys Jen attracts, they’re users. It’s not like Jen flaunts her money. I mean, she has nice things. Very nice things. Nice clothes, nice car.”

  “Nice boat.”

  “An unbelievable boat,” Karen said. “And the house we shared, she owned it. But she was never in your face about all the money, you know? Like, here’s an example…

  “Last year, the sailing team qualified for the nationals out in San Diego. It was going to cost something like eighty thousand dollars for everyone to go, what with getting the boats hauled out there, room and board and transportation for thirty-two people. The college said it could only pay half of that, the team would have to raise the rest. So we had car washes and bake sales and we begged our parents, all the usual stuff. Two weeks before nationals we were still fifteen thousand dollars short. We thought, Well, that’s that. We aren’t going. And then Coach Tony held a team meeting and announced that an anonymous benefactor had come forward and donated the rest of the money we needed.”

  “It was Jen?”

  “She denied it when I asked her about it,” Karen said. “But, yeah, it had to be her. I mean, who else? Either her or her mother.”

  “How did Jen take it when her mother died?”

  “Hard, real hard. Jen and her mom, they were more like sisters than mother and daughter, you know? Jen called her by her name, Molly, not Mom or something like that. They were just really, really close. I mean, I love my mother, but with the two of them it was something else. They must have spoken on the phone four or five times a day. Girl talk, everything. They didn’t have any secrets. Buying the boat, the cruise, the whole thing was their idea. The two of them came up with it originally and then put together the rest of the crew. Molly was supposed to come with us. But…” She stopped, shrugged. “I think that’s why Jen jumped at the chance to visit her father. She’s had this big hole in her heart since Molly died and she was hoping maybe he could fill it.”