Sunset Beach

by Mary Kay Andrews

  * * *

  At noon, Drue changed into a tankini and walked out onto the deck. She could feel the heat of the sand beneath the rubber soles of her flip-flops as she made her way along the dune path to the beach. She dropped her towel and shoes and waded through the shallow water until it was up to her neck. The Gulf was warmer than she’d remembered. She floated on her back and forced herself to just breathe, letting the gentle waves pull her back toward the shore before paddling back out and washing ashore a dozen times.

  For a moment, she wondered when the last time was that she’d actually felt the balm of salt water on her skin. And then she remembered. It was the day of the accident.

  Hundreds of people were scattered across the beach today, huddling under umbrellas or stretched out on blankets and chairs. Music drifted through the air as she sat on the hard-packed wet sand, her legs stretched out in front of her.

  Drue guessed that an hour passed before she walked back to the house. Papi had rigged up an outdoor shower stall on the side of the shed, enclosing it with wooden shutters he’d found on somebody’s trash pile. She struggled out of the swimsuit, slinging it over the top of the stall, then stood under the showerhead and let the shockingly cold water sluice over her body. She dried off, then wrapped the towel around her body and went back to work.

  * * *

  The kitchen had been Nonni’s kingdom. She’d painted the walls a soft, buttery yellow, and the wooden cabinets, hand-built by Papi, were white enamel, with chrome knobs and pulls.

  The Formica countertops were yellow with mica flecks, and the linoleum tile floor was a green and white checkerboard pattern.

  Now, of course, everything was coated in years of grease and dirt. She opened every cupboard and drawer and scrubbed them inside and out, sweeping away the dried corpses of a village of cockroaches.

  Grease spatters flecked the walls and the boxy old white range. She used an entire bottle of spray cleaner and two rolls of paper towels to scrape off the accumulated layers of grunge.

  The unmistakable roar of a motorcycle engine pierced the afternoon quiet. She ran to the front window and peered out in time to see her father dismount from a gleaming red Harley-Davidson. “What the…?”

  Drue met him in the driveway.

  “Nice bike.”

  Brice pulled off his helmet and tucked it under his arm. “This was my birthday present.”

  “Wendy bought you a Hawg for your birthday? Is she the beneficiary on your life insurance?”

  He ran his fingers through his hair. “For your information, Wendy hates the Harley. This was my present to myself. For outliving all the other bastards.”

  “Never would have pegged you as a biker,” Drue said.

  “There’s a lot you don’t know about me,” Brice said. He unzipped a hard-shelled saddlebag on the back of the bike and lifted out a six-pack of beer, which he handed to her.

  “That stands to reason, since you haven’t been a part of my life since I was fifteen,” she shot back.

  “Christ!” Brice exploded. “Did you ever stop and ask yourself why that was?”

  Drue shrugged. “You and Joan made it pretty clear at the time that you wanted me out of your hair. So I got out. I moved back to Lauderdale. And that was that. Birthday and Christmas cards, sure, but let’s not forget that until the day you showed up out of the blue for Mom’s funeral, you pretty much ghosted me.”

  “Did your mom ever mention I never once missed a child support payment? And that every year, without a court order, I upped the payment because I thought that was fair?”

  “No.”

  “Did she tell you about all the times I offered to buy you a plane ticket to St. Pete?”

  “She told me, but what was the point? You could have come to Lauderdale to visit me, but you never did.”

  “I was working,” Brice said. “Building a law practice.”

  “So you could take Kayson and Kyler skiing in Breckenridge, and buy Joan a boob job,” Drue said.

  “You can’t resist taking cheap shots at me, can you?” he asked.

  “Not when you make it so incredibly easy.”

  She walked into the kitchen and stashed the beer in the fridge.

  He turned to look at her. “So, do you want some help or would you prefer to keep laying your guilt trip on me? Your call.”

  Drue sighed. Bickering with Brice would get her nowhere. He was never going to understand her feelings of abandonment, so maybe it was time for her to let it go. “Okay, sure. I could use some help.”

  * * *

  By five o’clock, they’d managed to pull up all the carpet in both bedrooms and haul it out to the trash.

  “It’s beer-thirty,” Brice announced, reaching into the fridge. He popped the bottle cap on the countertop and handed her an ice-cold bottle.

  She took a long swig, burped and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

  “God, that tastes good. And I don’t even really like beer,” Drue said. “Thanks. I was beginning to get pretty overwhelmed.”

  Brice took a long swig from his own bottle. “I should have hired a cleaning crew to come in before you moved in. So that’s on me.”

  She shrugged and looked around the kitchen; the linoleum floor was still damp from her degreasing effort and the chipped Formica countertops newly shone. “I still can’t really believe the place is mine. I think of all the Saturday mornings right here in this kitchen, with Nonni fixing pancakes, and Papi making his Cuban coffee…”

  “I remember Alberto’s coffee. It was like drinking mud,” Brice said. A faraway expression came over his face as he looked around.

  “You know, your mom and I lived here for a while.”

  “Really? When was that?”

  “Mid-seventies. After I got back from Vietnam. I was on the police force, and Sherri was working for a real estate outfit. Alberto hadn’t retired yet and they were just using this as a weekend place, so he rented it to us for peanuts. It was all we could afford.”

  He sighed. “We had some good times in this place.”

  Before Drue could ask him when things had changed, a faint chirping noise began emanating from his jeans. “Uh-oh.” He pulled out his cell phone. “I gotta get home and get showered. Promised Wendy I’d take her out to dinner tonight.”

  “Dinner last night, brunch earlier, dinner out tonight? Does she know how to cook?”

  “That’s not fair,” Brice said, his amiable mood gone. “Why all the hostility toward Wendy?”

  “Ask her.”

  “It seems to me that you’re the one with the attitude,” Brice said. “She’s gone out of her way to be nice to you.”

  “Riiiighhhht,” Drue said, swabbing at the sink with a sponge to avoid meeting the hurt look on his face. “Just forget I said anything. Bad joke.”

  He drained the rest of his beer and threw the bottle into the trash. “Drue? If you and Wendy are going to continue to work together, you two need to call a truce with this bullshit. Whatever happened all those years ago, it’s all in the past. Time to get over yourself and move on.”

  She set her half-finished beer on the countertop. “Great advice in theory. Maybe you should suggest the same thing to her.”

  He sighed and threw his hands in the air. “I give up. I’ll see you Monday.”

  9

  After Brice left, she resumed cleaning. A late afternoon squall brought heavy rain and a welcome drop in the temperature. When she went into the kitchen she noticed a puddle of water on her newly cleaned floor.

  Drue looked up at the ceiling. A large wet blotch the size of a dinner plate had formed in the plaster, and as she stared at it, another drop of water fell on her forehead.

  Another roof leak! She sighed heavily and walked into the narrow hallway, reaching up for the cord that dangled from the ceiling and yanking, hard, until the pull-down attic stairs unfolded with a loud squeak from rust and disuse. She went back to the kitchen and fetched the heavy flashlight she’d unearthed from
Papi’s shed, switching it on to make sure that the new batteries she’d installed were working.

  As she climbed the ladder she felt a growing sense of dread. She’d never liked dark places. She’d never lived in any other place in Florida that even had an attic. Or a basement. The attic at Coquina Cottage she knew only from her grandfather’s occasional forays, when he’d climb up to set and retrieve rat traps, prompted only by Nonni’s insistence that she’d heard ominous scratching sounds in the kitchen coming from overhead.

  “Okay, rats,” she called loudly, right before she reached the top rung of the ladder. “I’m coming up, so you better get gone.”

  She listened carefully, ready to beat a hasty retreat at the first suspicious squeak. But all she heard was the steady, ominous drip of water coming from the roof. She popped her head through the attic floor and swung the flashlight in a wide arc. The attic was almost unbearably hot, and dank-smelling.

  The first thing the flashlight revealed was a faded blue plastic child’s wading pool. “What the hell?” she muttered. But when she looked overhead, she realized the pool’s purpose. Somebody, maybe the last tenant, had decided to utilize the pool as a catch basin for earlier roof leaks. The pool held maybe a half-inch of murky brown water, and another pool of rain had begun to puddle on the rough wooden floor an inch away. A new leak. And a new headache for the new homeowner.

  Drue pulled herself up to a standing position, wincing at the strain on her knee. She played the flashlight over the roof, spotting at least three slow drips of rain. She tugged the wading pool over a few inches, and was rewarded with the sound of raindrops splashing into the pool. Problem solved. For now. Until there was another heavy rain, or at the end of summer, the potential for a hurricane.

  Aside from the wading pool, the attic was mostly empty. There was an old sewing machine base that she remembered from her childhood, and a funny split-level metal dollhouse that she’d never seen before, along with several outdated suitcases that looked like they’d last been used in the sixties. Pushed up under the roof gables was a row of worn wooden crates, some still bearing faded fruit labels. She lifted the lid of one of the crates, revealing a cache of old books, their covers faded and spotted with what looked suspiciously like roach eggs. She closed the lid with a shudder and moved on to the next crate, which was filled with stacks of tiny, carefully folded baby clothes in shades of pale pink and yellow. They were too old to have been Drue’s, and anyway, Sherri had never been the type for keepsakes, so these must have been Sherri’s own baby things, lovingly tucked away by Nonni.

  Shoved into the crawl space behind the fruit boxes was a cardboard banker’s box with SHERRI’S PAPERS written in red Magic Marker, in her mother’s familiar scrawl. As Drue pulled it toward her, the sides collapsed under the weight of its contents.

  Packets of rubber-banded canceled checks, old bills marked “paid” and two file folders spilled onto the rough-hewn attic floorboards. The first folder had IMPORTANT PAPERS written on the tab.

  Drue smiled as she leafed through the miscellany of Sherri’s life: an unframed high school “Certificate of Achievement” for stenography, and fastened together with a paper clip, faded photocopies of Sherri Ann Sanchez’s birth certificate, her first Florida driver’s license, both Drue’s grandparents’ death certificates, copies of Sherri’s social security card, Drue’s parents’ marriage certificate, and at the bottom of the stack of papers, their divorce decree, dated November 27, 1988.

  Drue ran her finger over the black-and-white print, marveling that the official dissolution of a family could not only be reduced to a single page, but that it would end up here—in the attic of her grandparents’ house, along with a handful of other documents that her mother had deemed important but not important enough to keep close by.

  The second folder contained a dozen or so yellowed newspaper clippings from the St. Petersburg Times, all of them apparently about the mysterious disappearance of an attractive local woman whom the press had dubbed “missing local beauty.” Drue’s interest was piqued by the fact that the missing woman, twenty-six-year-old Colleen Boardman Hicks, had vanished after shopping and dining at a local department store, Maas Brothers, which had once stood only a few blocks from the present-day law offices of Campbell, Coxe and Kramner.

  She carefully set both folders near the attic stairs so she wouldn’t forget to take them when she went back downstairs.

  The third crate had a label scrawled in Sherri’s familiar handwriting. BRICE’S CRAP. Drue laughed out loud. The box was full of books and papers. Law books, loose-leaf notebooks and half a dozen composition books, all bearing the name Brice Campbell on the inside covers. She rifled idly through the contents of the crate, stopping when she found a thick black binder. A typed adhesive label on the front had faded, but the type was still legible.

  COLLEEN BOARDMAN HICKS—Missing Persons. 8-20-76.

  This had to be the same “missing local beauty” whose disappearance had been chronicled in the old newspaper clippings.

  Drue leafed through the three-inch-thick binder. There were page after page of typed police reports, handwritten notes and carbon copies of more reports. A pocket on the inside back cover of the binder held yellowing black-and-white photographs.

  She stared down at the binder. She knew virtually nothing about police procedures, but the book she was holding looked a lot like official police business. But what was it doing here, in her grandparents’ attic?

  When she heard a faint scrabbling sound coming from the far end of the attic, she tucked the folders and the binder under her arm and scrambled down the ladder as fast as she could go.

  * * *

  Downstairs, she typed “Colleen Boardman Hicks” into her phone’s search bar. The screen filled with dozens of citations.

  She clicked on the most recent article, published six months earlier in the Tampa Bay Times.

  FORTY-YEAR-OLD MYSTERY REMAINS UNSOLVED. She skimmed the article, which confirmed that Colleen Hicks had never been found.

  Colleen Boardman Hicks was a vivacious blond 26-year-old newlywed. She had a loving husband, successful career, and strong local ties. Then, one evening in 1976, after a day of shopping and dinner with a friend, she vanished, seemingly into thin air.

  Now, more than forty years later, officials say they are no closer to solving the puzzle of the bay area’s most enduring mystery than they were on the day she was discovered missing.

  In fact, Ralph Pflieger, a now-retired St. Petersburg Police detective who was involved with the Colleen Hicks investigation in the late 1970s, says the case has gotten murkier with the passing of time.

  “For a while there, every five years or so, me or one of the other detectives would pick it up again, chase down some leads, talk to some potential witnesses. But we never really got anywhere. And then, not long after I retired, when I asked about the Hicks case file, a buddy of mine said it had gone missing,” Pfleiger said.

  “I couldn’t believe it. Back then, we didn’t have computers. All our work was typed or handwritten. The interviews, the evidence logs, the detective’s notes, all of that, years and years of investigative work, was in that file. And it’s gone just as sure as Colleen Hicks is gone.”

  Drue looked down at the dusty black binder sitting on the floor beside her. Was this the missing file?

  10

  “Drue?” Wendy stood beside her cubicle, looking uncharacteristically frazzled. Her Hermès scarf was haphazardly knotted around her shoulders and her eyeliner was smudged. “I need you out in reception. Right now.”

  Drue finished the referral form she’d been working on. “Why?”

  “Because I’m your supervisor and I asked you to, that’s why,” Wendy snapped, turning on her heel. “And bring your headset.”

  Drue gave a martyr’s sigh and trailed Wendy out to the reception area.

  “You’re covering reception today. It shouldn’t be that busy. Brice is OOO, so he doesn’t have any appointments until this
afternoon.”

  “OOO?”

  “Out of office,” Wendy said.

  “So, where’s Geoff?”

  “He called in sick. Impacted wisdom tooth.”

  “Why me?” Drue asked. “Why not Jonah? Or Ben? Or Marianne or one of the other paralegals? Or the girls in accounting?”

  “Because I asked you,” Wendy said. “The others are busy.” For the first time she stopped to take in Drue’s outfit, which today consisted of her usual skinny jeans and a navy-blue-and-white-striped T-shirt.

  “Don’t you own any dresses? Or something that even vaguely resembles what a grown woman wears in a professional setting?” Wendy asked.

  “I’ve got a dress I wear for funerals,” Drue said defensively. “And why do you care what I wear? I never interact with any of our clients in person. I’m stuck in the bullpen all day. So I wear what’s comfortable. Is that a problem for you?”

  Wendy rolled her eyes. “I just think you should take a little more pride in your appearance. You’re a cute girl, Drue, or you would be if you’d ever put on some makeup and fix your hair.”

  Drue sat at the reception desk. “I’m not auditioning for The Bachelorette, you know. And since I’ve never heard you take issue with anything the guys wear to work, I consider your remarks about my personal appearance to be sexual discrimination. Possibly harassment too.”

  “Whatever. Just sit here, okay? You can still take whatever calls are routed to you, and use Geoff’s desktop. If we get any walk-ins, just run through the intake forms, same as you do on the Justice Line. Sign for any package deliveries. Got it?”

  “I guess.”

  “You can call me if there’s anything urgent, but things should be fairly quiet,” Wendy said.

  * * *

  The morning was largely a bust. The Justice Line was humming, but none of the calls yielded a single signed-up case. Drue sighed. The week was shaping up to be a big fat zero. She ate lunch at her desk: a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, carrot sticks and a bag of green grapes.