Isabel was still wondering why Merriam had called Kimmie Dee Burke by Isabel’s name. She wanted to talk with Kimmie Dee again. Since the girl was in the habit of visiting Merriam, she must live close by. After Isabel doctored her scratch, she decided to take a walk and look at the names on neighboring mailboxes.
Finding Kimmie Dee Burke proved absurdly simple. Across the road from Isabel’s driveway, straggling through the dunes toward the Beachcomber, was a line of stucco cottages. The name Burke was on the closest mailbox. The house was a flat-roofed bungalow like the others, painted a fading turquoise. Squatting under the carport near the screened back door, stirring in a red plastic bucket with a toy shovel, was Kimmie Dee Burke. A diapered toddler stood beside her, looking on.
Isabel walked a few steps up the driveway. “Kimmie Dee?” she called.
The girl looked up. Isabel couldn’t read her expression. “Has Miss Merriam come home yet?” she asked.
“No. No, she hasn’t.” Closer now, Isabel could see that the bucket was half full of wet sand. Several circular patties of sand had been deposited on the concrete. “Are you making mud pies?” she asked.
Kimmie Dee looked incredulous. “Mud pies? No!”
Isabel pointed to the blobs of sand. “I thought those were mud pies.”
Kimmie Dee snorted. “They’re sand cakes.”
So much for chitchat. The toddler crowed loudly. “That’s my brother, Toby,” said Kimmie Dee. Toby plunged a chubby hand into the bucket, pulled out a fistful of sand, and flung it at Isabel.
Isabel sidestepped and pushed on. “I wanted to ask about something you told me. You said Merriam called you Isabel.”
Now the girl did look uncomfortable. “That’s right.”
“Well, I wanted to know— when did she call you that? What did she say?”
After a slight hesitation, Kimmie Dee said dismissively, “She was just mixed up.” She picked up the shovel. With a sweetness Isabel could not believe was customary, she said, “Now we’ll make sand cakes for you, Toby.”
Merriam was mixed-up, and the question wasn’t crucial, but it felt crucial. Isabel said, “If you could tell me when she did it. Tell me what she said.”
Kimmie Dee sighed. “Miss Merriam would get mixed up and say, ‘Here’s your banana, Isabel,’ or ‘That’s a mighty pretty drawing, Isabel,’ and I’d say, ‘I’m Kimmie Dee!’ and we would laugh. That’s all.”
That wasn’t all. Isabel could tell by looking at the girl’s face. She didn’t want to push much harder, though. “There wasn’t any other time?”
Kimmie Dee shook her head. Her hair fell along her cheeks.
“All right, then.” Isabel half-turned to leave.
“Just that day,” Kimmie Dee said.
Isabel stopped. “That day? What day?”
“The day I saw her down yonder.” Kimmie Dee pointed in the general direction of the lighthouse. “The day she got sick.”
Isabel tried to remember what Clem and Dr. McIntosh had told her about Merriam’s accident. Merriam was found wandering on the beach, dazed and incoherent. Nobody ever said who found her. “Were you the first one to see her?”
Kimmie Dee nodded. “Yes’m. I had been practicing my routine, and I saw her. She was holding her head. Walking funny. I said to her, ‘What’s wrong, Miss Merriam?’ and she looked at me like she didn’t see me at all. And that’s when she called me Isabel.”
Isabel’s throat was tight. “What did she say?”
Kimmie Dee squirmed, as if trying to wriggle away from the memory. “She said, ‘Help me, Isabel! Help me, Isabel!’ ” She shivered. “I tried to tell her I wasn’t Isabel.”
Isabel stared down the beach at the lighthouse. Help me, Isabel. Kimmie Dee went back to stirring the wet sand. Toby, meanwhile, had pulverized several sand cakes and was depositing their remains in his wispy brown hair.
Isabel smelled cigarette smoke. Standing inside the screened back door of the Burke house, a cigarette in his hand, a man stood watching her.
She was embarrassed, as if she had been caught intruding. She said, “Hello.”
“Hidy.” The man was about fifty, with graying blond hair and a weathered face. He wore an open-necked shirt that exposed white chest hairs. On his wrist was a complicated-looking black watch.
“I’m Isabel Anders. I’m staying across the road at my aunt’s place.”
“Ted Stiles.” The man turned and called, “Joy! You got company!”
Isabel glanced at Kimmie Dee. The girl seemed intent on her sand cakes.
A woman with tousled bleached hair appeared beside Ted Stiles. She had an attractive, sulky face and a well-formed body shown off by pink-and-white-checked shorts and a matching halter top. She came out the screen door, looked at Toby, and said, “My God, Kimmie Dee! Look at the mess you let him make.”
Ted Stiles said, “Joy, this is— um—”
“Isabel Anders.”
“Isabel Anders. Looks like she already met Kimmie Dee.”
Joy Burke said, “Hi,” and returned to Kimmie Dee. “Turn on the hose this minute and rinse him off. You know better than that.”
Stiles said, “Would you like a beer or something, Isabel?”
“No, thanks.” Isabel felt a need to explain what she was doing there. To Joy Burke, she said, “I’m Merriam Anders’s niece. I was just talking to Kimmie Dee about Merriam’s accident.”
“Oh, yeah,” Joy Burke said. “Give me a cigarette, would you, Ted?” When the cigarette had been donated and a light provided, Joy said, “Kimmie Dee found her. She sneaks out early in the morning to practice her baton. I’ve told her not to. She’ll get a whipping for it one day.”
The prediction didn’t seem to faze Kimmie Dee, who had turned on the hose as requested and was dribbling water over a delighted Toby. “I’m going to be in the talent contest July Fourth,” the girl said.
“Hush up. The lady doesn’t care about that.” Joy Burke expelled smoke. “Kimmie Dee came running in all upset and got me. Poor Miss Merriam wasn’t making any sense at all. I called the ambulance and they took her off.”
Stiles, leaning in the doorway, said, “May I ask what you all are talking about?”
Joy Burke smiled at him, teasing. “Nosy, aren’t you?”
Stiles grinned, but Isabel didn’t think he was amused. “Yes, I’m real nosy.”
Isabel said, “My aunt had a serious accident. The doctor thinks she fell and hit her head. Kimmie Dee found her wandering on the beach.”
“You don’t say,” Stiles said. “When was this, exactly?”
“About two weeks ago.”
“She in the hospital?”
“She is now. She’s going to be released before long, I think.”
Kimmie Dee’s head turned quickly toward Isabel as Joy said, “Really? She’s coming home?”
Isabel shook her head. “She isn’t well enough to come home right now. She’s going to stay with a nurse in town. A woman named Bernice Chatham.”
“Poor thing,” said Joy.
Stiles picked at his bottom lip as if removing tobacco, although he was smoking a filter tip. “You never told me this, Joy.”
Joy simpered, “I don’t tell you every little thing.” To Isabel she said, “Miss Merriam was off her head, hollering and all. It was terrible.”
Ted Stiles seemed fascinated. “Hollering what?”
“Oh, craziness.”
“What craziness?” Stiles persisted.
“I don’t remember, Teddy! A bunch of words like Help and Don’t.”
“She said, ‘Help me, Isabel’ to me,” Kimmie Dee offered.
“Huh,” Stiles said. He took a long drag on his cigarette.
“I don’t really remember,” Joy said. She yawned and stretched. The tops of her tanned breasts strained at the halter.
Isabel said she had to leave, and Joy Burke did not urge her to stay. She started up the driveway toward the road, but before she got there a voice cried, “Isabel!” She turned to s
ee Kimmie Dee running after her, bare feet slapping the pavement.
“I want to tell you,” the girl gasped, out of breath.
So there was more, after all. “Tell me what?”
“That Mr. Stiles? Ted Stiles?”
“Yes?”
“He is not my daddy.” Kimmie Dee shook her head adamantly. She repeated, “He is not my daddy.”
“I understand,” said Isabel, but there was a lot she didn’t understand at all.
7
Peering through a torn window shade in an upstairs bedroom of the old Anders house, Harry Mercer watched Isabel walk toward the trailer. From this distance, she looked just the way she used to— tall, almost gawky-looking. Flyaway dark hair that was always coming loose from the elastic band or barrette.
So now he’d seen her. Big deal.
“Who is she?” Scooter asked, his voice pitched low.
Barely moving his lips, Harry said, “Her name’s Isabel Anders. She’s the old woman’s niece.”
“Fabulous.” Scooter’s hiss seemed to fill every corner of the room.
Isabel glanced up at the house, and Harry’s stomach lurched. He stepped back from the window. Although he was sure she hadn’t seen him, he felt as if their eyes had met. She used to know when he was looking at her, feel it all the way across the school lunchroom, but that was a long time ago.
“What’s she doing here?” Scooter asked.
“She must have come to see about the old lady.”
Scooter made a sound of disgust. Harry looked out again. He watched Isabel continue to the trailer and go inside.
The air was stifling and only murky light penetrated the shades. The room was unfurnished. Scattered around the floor were an ice chest, a plastic tackle box closed with a combination lock, a red gasoline can, and a wadded-up sleeping bag. Along one wall makeshift shelves, constructed from concrete blocks and unfinished boards, held an assortment of objects: bottles of chemicals, a collection of brass nails, a length of corroded chain, a battered pewter pitcher, several small rust-encrusted cannonballs, a white enamel dishpan.
Harry hated to admit it, but when he and Scooter first got into the house, he had walked around the whole place, running his hand over the banister rail, opening the kitchen cabinets. As many times as he had made love to Isabel, he had never been in the house where she lived. Miss Merriam wouldn’t let her have company or go anywhere except school and church.
Scooter had sat down on the floor. He looked up at Harry, his eyes narrowed. “How long will she be here?”
Harry raised his shoulders.
“Great,” Scooter said.
Pretty soon, Harry knew, Scooter would work it out to be Harry’s fault. Harry said, “Don’t blame me. I didn’t invite her.” He wanted to be rid of her at least as much as Scooter did. More.
“She could screw us up, Harry.” Scooter’s tone was casual, but Harry wasn’t fooled.
“Not unless we let her. And we aren’t going to let her.” Harry was not about to let Isabel Anders mess him up again.
“I could take care of her. Easy.”
“Sure you could.”
“I could. No problem.”
Harry caught the challenging look Scooter gave him. He ignored it and walked to the bedroom door. It opened on the landing, which was ringed with closed doors. Harry went to the door at the head of the stairs, which was the bathroom. He opened it a crack and peered in. “Did you feed Sis?” he called softly to Scooter.
“Yesterday. Frogs.”
Harry peered at the big tub. Through the chicken-wire screen over the top, he could see part of the water pan and a curve of Sis’s greenish brown coils. She seemed quiet, drowsing. She got active sometimes, slithering up and down the length of the tub. That mostly happened when she got hungry.
Scooter and Harry had trapped Sis, a cottonmouth moccasin, out back near the slough and carried her to the house in the extra ice chest. It had been a crazy thing to do, which fit in with Harry’s recent mood. He watched a minute longer, then closed the door. When he returned to the bedroom, Scooter had opened the tackle box and was crouched on his knees in front of it, fingering the coins.
It made Harry uncomfortable to see Scooter doing that. He didn’t like the sight of Scooter’s long fingers moving over those gleaming surfaces. He averted his eyes and said, “I heard the forecast. Rain.”
Scooter’s expression was remote. He didn’t answer.
Rain was good news. Bad weather meant no dive parties. It also meant Harry and Scooter could go out to the wreck with less chance of snoopers spotting them and wondering what they were up to. There was a trade-off, though. In bad weather, visibility was terrible. There was more chance of getting tangled up in the lines, and the water was rough and you had to fight the surge. You were likely to get thrown into things if you weren’t careful, and you could get scraped badly. None of it was what you’d call fun.
Still— Harry crossed the room and picked up the enamel dishpan from the shelf. He took it back to the window and knelt down where the most light came in.
The dishpan was half full of fragments of blue-and-white porcelain. Some of the pieces were big enough to reveal a pattern of flowering branches and birds in flight.
Harry picked up a rounded piece of a bowl. He remembered finding this one, thinking it might be whole, and fanning the sand away gently while his breath rattled through the tube. It was only half a bowl, though— broken, like the rest.
Chinese porcelain. Who would imagine Harry knowing about porcelain? But he had gotten interested.
K’ang-hsi, this kind was called. K’ang-hsi was the Chinese emperor when this porcelain was made and shipped out from Canton and finally came to rest on the shoals off Cape St. Elmo. Around the early 1700s, it would have been.
Canton to Manila, they sailed. Manila to Acapulco, then overland to Veracruz. The plan would have been to sail from Veracruz to Havana and then on to Spain. But a storm blew them off course, more than likely, and the Cape St. Elmo shoals finished them, and all the pretty porcelain ended up in the drink.
There it lay for more than two centuries, it and all the rest, at the mercy of salt water and sand.
Harry wished, God how he wished, he had found the wreck himself. Harry wasn’t a treasure hunter. Not then. Harry was a dive captain, trying to make house payments and support a family. He wouldn’t have known an eight reales silver piece if he’d found one in his jockstrap.
The experience took hold of you. It wasn’t only the possibility of getting rich or keeping it all secret so the state and the archaeologists didn’t push in. It was being down there and finding something— and because you found it, you started to love it.
Harry remembered his first gold doubloon. Gold doesn’t tarnish. It shines like new, and you know it’s been shining for years, beautiful, unspoiled. You see that glimmer, and right away your body goes chilly and you say to yourself that it can’t be real gold, but in fact nothing else looks the same. When Harry pulled that coin out of the sand, he thought he would never be able to let go of it. Dumb as it seemed, he wanted to hug and kiss it.
This was what he had needed so badly all his life, even when he didn’t know he needed it. He wouldn’t let anything spoil it, now that he knew.
8
“There’s no reason I know of for anybody to hang around the house,” said Clem Davenant. “Where did you say the gasoline can was?”
“On the front step. It was there one day, and then I noticed it was gone.” Isabel could feel the effort he was making to show interest.
Clem studied his uneaten french fries. “Sometimes the teenagers get up to things. They may have been hanging around there after Miss Merriam went to the hospital.”
Maybe he was right. Isabel drank the last of her iced tea.
The café had emptied out by this time, and the waitress was desultorily clearing tables. Outside, the sky was dark. Intermittent rain spattered the plate-glass windows.
Merriam was leaving the hos
pital this afternoon, moving to Bernice Chatham’s for custodial care. Clem had taken Isabel to meet Bernice this morning. Bernice had struck Isabel as not overly bright, but her small house was clean and she seemed capable. “About the best we can do in St. Elmo,” Clem had said with a trace of apology. Then he had suggested that they have lunch before picking up Merriam.
Isabel didn’t want to leave without bringing up her most important concern. Taking a deep breath she said, “I’ve been wondering what actually happened to Merriam.”
The look he gave her was uncharacteristically keen. “Dr. McIntosh told me she fell.”
“He assumes she fell because she had a concussion, but as far as I’ve heard, nobody saw her fall.”
He had been fiddling with a french fry. He put it down. “What do you imagine happened, then?”
His blue gaze made her uncomfortable. “I don’t know. It worries me to see her so violently upset. She’s totally out of control.”
“The doctor says it isn’t unusual for her to be disoriented.”
“Disoriented, yes. But she seems terrified.”
“Terrified,” he repeated. His eyes wavered. “Yes, she does.”
“She never used to be afraid of anything.”
To her surprise, he laughed. The sound was brief and bitter. “I guess fear is something we can all learn.” He signaled for the check.
They drove toward the hospital in silence. Rain was now falling in earnest and the bay was choppy. Isabel watched the sweeping downpour obscure the horizon.
Clem said, “Nobody really knows what happened.”
“To Merriam, you mean? I guess not.”
“It can be so fast, so confusing, and before you know it, something terrible has taken place. Something irrevocable.”
His hands were tight on the steering wheel. He wasn’t talking about Merriam, was he? He seemed to have veered to the subject of his son’s fatal accident. Isabel tried to get the conversation back on track. “Maybe Merriam will get better. Be able to tell us what happened.”
The Complete Mystery Collection Page 122