“Well, then, you’ll forgive me, but I do need to ask … where were you?”
“I was home.”
“And were you alone or was there someone with you?”
I felt my ears turning red. “Yes.”
Her eyes narrowed slightly. “Yes, you—”
I cut her off. “Yes, there was someone with me, and no, I was not alone.”
“And you don’t by any chance happen to know where we might find someone in Levi’s family … his parents, or a sibling perhaps?”
“No. I’d think that would be a good question for his fiancée.”
She nodded and then leaned in slightly. “Just between you and me…” She looked over her shoulder and lowered her voice. “Sasquatch—I believe that’s what you called her—is a bit unstable.”
One of the deputies stepped up and whispered something in McKenzie’s ear. She nodded curtly and put her hand out. “Thanks for your time, Dixie. I think I’d better go have a talk with her now.”
I nodded mutely.
“In the meantime, I need to ask that you not talk about this to anyone, at least not until we’ve had a chance to locate the next of kin.”
Just then, a black and white van pulled in behind the row of cars. I figured it was probably the department’s new mobile forensics unit, which they’d been able to purchase recently thanks to an anonymous donation. A woman in dark navy pants and a white lab coat stepped out with a bulky black briefcase. It looked very official and high-tech, like something you might keep the nation’s nuclear codes in.
The woman was exquisitely beautiful, with jet-black hair pulled back in a tight ponytail, and almond-shaped eyes that were a deep obsidian-brown. She looked like a Chinese movie star, or—I’ll admit it—like a part-time model from one of those TV crime shows. As I made my way back to the Bronco, I heard her say, “Detective McKenzie? I’m Megan Granda.”
In a daze, I got behind the wheel and backed up slowly until the nose of the Bronco was pointed out, then I headed toward the stretch of grass along the shoulder of the dirt road. I was wondering if I’d be able to make it through without making everyone move their cars when I looked up in the rearview mirror to find Detective McKenzie trotting along behind me and waving a finger in the air. I slowed to a stop as she came around to the window.
“Dixie, sorry.” She put her hands on her hips and paused to catch her breath. “I just remembered one more thing. About this morning, are you absolutely certain it was Levi parked outside your driveway?”
I said, “I just assumed it was him because that’s usually about the time the paper arrives, and it definitely looked like his car…”
“But you’re not sure.”
I shook my head. “It was so dark and foggy.”
“It might help pinpoint the time of death…”
I don’t think the reality of what had happened had actually sunk in yet, because the idea that there was a “time of death” sent a tremor down my spine.
I said, “I wish I could say for sure, but he’s the only person on the island I can think of that would’ve had a good reason for being there, right?”
She turned and looked in the direction of the trailer. For a second I imagined all those cogs and wheels in her head spinning in slow, deliberate circles, then she turned and for the first time looked me directly in the eye.
“Define good.”
12
The whole way home, I left the windows in the Bronco rolled down, and eventually—I’m not sure when—my little fly friend escaped back into the wild. The warm breeze felt good blowing through my hair, and the sound the wind made as it rushed through the car helped dampen the melee of thoughts that were spinning around inside my head. I could barely hold on to one before another would swoop in and knock it out of the way.
I kept seeing Levi’s face, the way I remembered him from high school, the way he always smiled and gave me a wave whenever our paths crossed, but then the image of his body lying on the floor of the trailer would rush in, and then Sasquatch’s angry maw would appear, telling me to get the hell off her property, and then Dick Cheney’s scary eyes and gnashing teeth bearing down, and then Levi’s car outside my driveway and candles and curtains and red-toed Buddhas, all bouncing around in my brain like ping-pong balls in a front-load washing machine.
I shook my head and tried to clear it all away. It had probably been a bit of an understatement when I told Detective McKenzie I was in shock, because as soon as I turned out of Grand Pelican Commons and headed up Tamiami Trail, my whole body started shivering slightly, despite the fact that the sun was straight overhead and it was easily ninety degrees in the shade.
The copper pod trees along Midnight Pass Road were all blanketed with their yellow orchidlike blossoms, filling the air with the scent of crushed grapes, and following along in the clouds over the treetops to the west was a lone osprey, its wings spread wide, coasting on the breeze. For a while I pretended he was my own personal escort, assigned to make sure I got home safe and sound. It felt good to think I wasn’t alone.
Poor Levi.
I couldn’t get the image of his lifeless body out of my mind. In spite of our brief encounter outside Mrs. White’s ninth-grade history class (or maybe because of it) we hadn’t really talked that much in the years following. Every once in a while we’d wind up in the same class or study period, and one of his buddies on the baseball team was the brother of one of my best girlfriends, so we often found ourselves at the same parties or sitting together at football games, but that was about the extent of it. He was tall, blond, good-looking, and he always seemed like a nice enough kid, even if, as Judy had said, he did have a bit of a wild streak in him … but in the era before cell phones and computer games, every teenager with half a pulse went through a wild stage. There wasn’t much else to do in a sleepy beach town like Siesta Key.
Of course, there was drinking, and a lot of kids smoked pot, especially the older ones, but if there were harder drugs than that being passed around, I never saw them. Levi and his friends would stay out partying and carousing in the streets until all hours of the night, giving their parents heart palpitations and early-onset baldness, and sometimes they’d congregate in the parking lot at the old Ringling Shopping Center, but basically all they did was drink beer and make a lot of noise until the cops would roll through and order them all home. I remember hearing that Levi had been hauled in for public intoxication shortly after graduation, he’d even spent a night in jail, but other than that, there was no indication he’d ever wind up in more serious trouble.
But now, I wondered. As for Levi’s money situation, he was clearly living hand-to-mouth. I don’t know how much a paper delivery boy makes these days, but newspapers everywhere are struggling to make ends meet, so I doubt it’s much more than minimum wage. Was it possible Levi had been forced to turn to more desperate means … drugs or petty burglary or something worse? It was a terrible thought, but why else would anyone want to kill him?
I suddenly realized I was sitting in the carport at my place with the engine idling, staring straight ahead like a zombie. I switched off the ignition and reached for my backpack, and just then I heard a car coming up the driveway. Right away I could tell by the sound of the wheels on the crushed shell who it was: Paco and my brother, Michael, in their four-wheel-drive pickup truck. Michael is a firefighter, just like our father before him. He’s big and blond and broad, with pure blue eyes that can melt the hearts of either sex in a matter of seconds.
Paco, on the other hand, is slim and tall, with long muscles and deep olive skin, the kind of good looks that make your toes flutter and your eyelashes curl, plus he rides a motorcycle, which in my book only adds to his overall hotness factor. Women all over the island have fantasized about turning Michael and Paco straight, but there’s little chance of that—they’ve been together almost fifteen years now. Paco is my brother-in-love.
Michael flashed me a toothy grin as they backed up to the edge of the deck. The fa
ct that they weren’t pulling in next to me meant only one thing: groceries.
“Hey, sexy,” Paco said as he stepped out and shut the door with a hip bump. “You’re just in time to help unload.”
Normally, the vision of the two of them pulling in with a truckload of goodies is enough to make me forget all the troubles in the world, especially since they both happen to be really good cooks, but it wasn’t working this time. I just stood there with my arms dangling helplessly at my sides.
I said, “Somebody killed Levi Radcliff.”
Just like that. I hadn’t meant to blurt it out so fast, but I couldn’t help myself. Michael had hopped out of the truck on the other side and was halfway around the front fender when he stopped dead in his tracks.
“What?”
I felt my eyes start to sting with tears. I said, “Somebody killed him. This morning. I was afraid something was wrong so I went over to his place at Grand Pelican. The door was open and he was on the floor in a pool of blood…”
I had to stop and screw the heels of my palms into my eye sockets to stave off the waterworks, but then the next thing I knew Michael’s big arms were folding around my shoulders. Instinctively, I tried to draw away, but he held on.
I said, “What are you doing?”
“I’m hugging you.”
I snuffled, drawing the back of my hand across my nose. “Yeah, I know that. But why?”
His voice was steady as he hugged me a little tighter. “You know exactly why.”
* * *
Long before any of us were twinkles in anyone’s eye, my grandfather, Jesse Napoleon Hemingway, found himself on a business trip in Florida. He was twenty-two years old, newly engaged, and it was the first time he’d ever stepped foot out of his hometown of Manhattan, Kansas. He’d been sent here to convince a group of local businessmen to invest in the latest craze: portable steel sandwich shops, those shiny prefab diners shaped like railroad cars that started sprouting up all over the country in the thirties and forties. They could be shipped anywhere there was a mom and a pop with some cash and a dream of opening their very own restaurant.
The way my grandmother told it, that Florida air must have gone straight to my grandfather’s head like a double shot of whiskey, because she never found out how many diners he sold on that trip—they never even discussed it. The day my grandfather returned home he presented her with the deed to a plot of land facing the ocean on the southern end of Siesta Key. My grandmother was none too pleased, especially since by her calculation they’d spent at least a hundred hours strolling hand in hand along the banks of nearby Walnut Creek, dreaming about their plans for the future, choosing names for their children, and discussing in which town (within a thirty-mile radius) they would build a home and spend the rest of their lives together.
In public, at least as a young woman, my grandmother was the model wife, quiet and demure—the way a young woman was expected to be in those days—but behind closed doors she let my grandfather know in no uncertain terms that there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell she was leaving Kansas, and if he wanted to go live in a spit of a sandbox on an island in the middle of nowhere like a hermit crab, he could plumb well do it by himself.
Luckily for me and my brother, my grandfather knew a thing or two about the art of persuasion, because if he hadn’t worked things out between them, not only would we not have inherited this house, we would never have even existed. Using every sales trick in the book, he finally convinced her to make the trip to Florida to see it for herself. They stood shoulder to shoulder at the water’s edge, holding their shoes in their hands as the waves lapped at their toes, and watched the sun set into the sea.
The sky turned colors my grandmother didn’t even know existed, and she always said it must have been divine intervention, because the beauty of that moment took her breath away. She knew it was God’s way of telling her she was finally home. Of course, it hadn’t hurt one bit that my grandfather had phoned ahead for the local sunset schedule. He had timed their arrival perfectly.
Now, I live in the one-bedroom apartment over the carport that was built for visiting relatives from back home—it’s small but it suits me just fine—and Michael and Paco live in the main house.
While Paco unloaded the groceries and Michael put on a pot of coffee, I slumped down on one of the barstools in the kitchen and laid my head down on the big butcher-block island. I told them everything that had happened … well, almost everything. I left Dick Cheney out of the story. At that point, I still wasn’t sure whether I’d fainted or not, and there was no point getting them all worked up about a home invasion or an assault with a deadly Buddha if in reality the whole thing had just been a little light-headedness on my part.
“Hold on a second.” Michael slid a cup of coffee toward me with one hand while he dropped a single sugar cube down in it with the other. “What do you mean—”
I interrupted, “Michael, I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You don’t even know what I’m going to say!”
“Yes, I do. You’re going to say, ‘What do you mean, light-headed?’”
He blinked. “Well?”
I laid my cheek back down on the table. “Ugh. I don’t know. I just blacked out for a second, and then the next thing I knew I was flat on my stomach.”
I looked up at Paco just in time to see the faint smile on his lips fade. He was looking at the bump on top of my head.
“So you hit your head when you fell?”
I nodded. “Yeah, it hurt like hell but it’s feeling better now.”
He frowned slightly as he folded up a paper bag and pushed it down in the storage bin under the sink, mumbling, “You should probably get that looked at.”
Michael sat down in the stool opposite me. “Dixie, I still don’t get it. You find out somebody didn’t get their morning paper, so you race over to Levi’s house?”
I said, “Not somebody. A whole bunch of people. Nearly half the people in the diner said their paper never came, and you know Levi, he hasn’t missed a day of work in twenty years.”
“Okay, but still, I don’t understand how you knew something was wrong. You said yourself you thought he was having car trouble. Wouldn’t that explain it right there? I mean, it just doesn’t add up.”
I turned to Paco for help. I can usually count on him to take my side in these kinds of things. He knows as well as I do that Michael tends to worry too much, but he just shrugged. “Do you want to tell him, or should I?”
I said, “Tell him what?”
He cocked his head to the side and grimaced slightly. “Sorry, kid.”
“Okay, first of all, don’t call me ‘kid,’ and second of all, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
I could feel my cheeks getting hot. Paco is an undercover agent with the Sarasota Investigations Bureau, which means he helps catch drug dealers and smugglers and all kinds of assorted bad guys. Technically I’m not supposed to know, but I figured it out a long time ago and now it’s just a house rule that we don’t talk about it. Sometimes he disappears for days or even weeks, during which time Michael and I walk around on eggshells chewing our fingernails. It’s a dangerous job. He’s fluent in at least five languages (including Korean), and his IQ is probably higher than my checking account balance.
In other words, he’s smart.
As Paco and I stared each other down, Michael was looking back and forth between us like a spectator at a tennis game. “Okay, what’s going on?”
I rolled my eyes. “I give up. You tell him, if you think you know so much.”
He sat down next to Michael and put one hand on his shoulder, as if to steady him. “Somebody broke into the Kellers’ house and hit her over the head. That’s why she blacked out.”
I bolted upright as Michael’s jaw fell open and we both said, “What?”
Michael said, “Dixie, what the hell?”
I said, “Paco, you really think so?”
He nodded. “And I
was just reading in the paper, there’s been a string of break-ins on the island the past few weeks. They’ve been targeting vacant houses.”
Michael sawed both his hands in the air like a referee on a football field. “Whoa, whoa, whoa! What the hell are you guys talking about?”
Paco shrugged. “I can tell by that bump. When people faint, they usually just keel straight over, so lots of times they’ll have a bloody nose, or an injury to the back or the side of the head.” He turned to me. “I don’t know how you could’ve hit the very top of your head unless you were doing somersaults or backflips when you fainted.”
Michael’s eyes narrowed. He pursed his lips to one side and with a slow, sarcastic edge to his voice said, “Dixie, were you doing somersaults or backflips when you fainted?”
I looked at Paco and then back at Michael, and then reached up and gingerly touched my walnut-sized bump.
I said, “Huh.”
13
It’s probably only a couple hundred feet, but the walk from Michael and Paco’s kitchen to my front door felt like a hundred miles, mainly because my head was spinning all over again—not because I was dizzy, but because I was completely lost in thought as I ambled across the courtyard.
Paco had admitted he was really only making an educated guess about how I got my bump, but he’d also said he was beginning to recognize all the little telltale signs I exhibit when I’m not telling the entire truth … something I sometimes do to protect Michael. Being my older brother hasn’t always been a bed of roses, and he’s got a light sprinkling of gray hair on his head to prove it.
I made a mental note to figure out exactly which telltale signs Paco was referring to, but for now I knew he was on to something: When I woke up and found myself on the floor of the Kellers’ laundry room, I was flat out on my stomach with my cheek smashed into the floor, which Paco said would indicate that I’d fallen straight forward. But if that was the case, why was there a bump on the very top of my head and not a gash on my cheek? Or a black eye? Or, at the very least, a bloody nose?
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