“Who are they?” she asked, nodding her head in their direction.
“Just a couple cops,” Colleen said, choking down a bite of her burger. The grease had congealed and the bun was soggy, but she busied herself chewing.
“They were flirting with you?” Vera asked enviously. “The tall one’s kind of cute, don’t you think?”
Colleen kept chewing, staring down at her plate as they passed. “Not interested,” she said finally.
Vera’s eyes followed the two as they pushed the plate-glass door open. “I forgot. You’re married to the sweetest guy on earth. Why would you be checking out a couple dudes in a bar?”
“Exactly.”
“Maybe you could introduce me,” Vera said slyly. “I love a guy in uniform.”
* * *
It was Friday, and the dentist’s office closed at noon. “Want me to give you a ride back to the office?” Vera asked, as they stood by her parked Toyota.
“Thanks, anyway, but I can walk,” Colleen said.
“Well, don’t have too much fun at that dinner party,” Vera said teasingly. “If you get bored, you can always come help me babysit my hellion nephews.”
It was the kind of sunshiney late-winter day that made you understand why snowbirds flocked to Florida.
She was in no hurry to get home, so she stopped to window-shop at Maas Brothers, studying the new spring fashions: candy-colored minidresses and cork-soled platform sandals. The dress with the spaghetti straps and yellow daisies? She wondered idly if it would make her hair look too brassy. They were supposed to be on a strict budget, saving to buy their own house. Allen tracked every penny they spent, entering each purchase or bill paid into his ledger. Right now, though, she just wanted a dress that hadn’t been sewn by her mom from a Simplicity pattern. Like that darling yellow daisy dress.
Something tickled her neck. She whirled around, startled. He ran the antennae of his police radio down her arm and she shivered.
“Oh hey,” she said haltingly, looking to see if his partner was nearby.
“Playing hooky from work?” He playfully slapped his nightstick in his open hand.
“The office closes at noon on Fridays.”
“You work for a doctor?”
“Dentist. I’m a dental hygienist.”
He nodded. “What happened to your friend?”
“She went home. I decided to walk back to the office. My car’s there.”
“Maybe I could give you a ride.” He gestured toward his cruiser, which was parked at the curb in a no-parking zone.
“Thanks anyway, but I need to walk off that cheeseburger I just ate.”
“You look just fine to me.” He ran the radio antennae slowly down her cheek. “You look so good, you oughtta be against the law.” He moved even closer now. “And I’m the law.”
She felt her face, neck and chest flush. She didn’t even know his name, for Pete’s sake.
“Okay, well, it’s good to see you again.”
“Jimmy.”
“Huh?”
“Jimmy Zilowicz. Everybody calls me Jimmy Zee.”
“Right. See you around, Jimmy Zee.”
He was still studying her. “How are things at home?”
“Like I said before, everything’s fine. Allen really felt terrible, you know, about what happened. He hasn’t had a drink since. Not even a beer.”
“If he stopped drinking, does that mean he beats you when he’s sober too?”
She pulled away from him. “It’s not what you think. Anyway, why are you following me? I haven’t done anything wrong.” She turned to go, but he put his hand on her shoulder.
“Something’s been bothering me ever since that night at the Dreamland. You know what that place is, don’t you?”
“No. I don’t,” she said coldly.
“It’s a hot sheet joint. A no-tell motel. I bet we get twenty, thirty calls a year to that place. Suspicion of prostitution, drunk and disorderly, like that. So what’s a nice young married couple doing shacked up at a place like the Dreamland?”
“None of your business.”
“You’re pissed at me? He’s the one you should be pissed at. Hang on here a minute. Don’t make me chase you down, okay?”
Colleen crossed her arms and waited. He reached in the open window of his cruiser and brought out a pad of paper and a pen.
“You’re giving me a ticket? For what? This is unbelievable.”
He scrawled something on the ticket, tore it off and handed it to her. “Not a ticket. My name and phone number. If he hurts you again? Call me. I guarantee, it’ll be the last time the son of a bitch does that.”
26
The wind awakened her Sunday morning, howling, whipping palm fronds against the bedroom window screens. Drue jumped from the bed, ran to the living room and threw open the French doors leading to the deck.
She stood on the deck, dressed only in an oversize T-shirt. She tilted her face skyward, letting the wind whip her hair and the rain lash her face, feeling like a wild sea siren.
It was the first storm since she had moved into Coquina Cottage. Dark billowing clouds loomed over the surface of the Gulf, and she could hear waves crashing on the beach. She wrapped her arms around herself for warmth, but let the wind and the rain have its way.
Before, on the east coast, on a day like this, she would have thrown her gear in the Bronco and headed out to the beach for a day of kiteboarding. She’d always had a built-in anemometer to gauge wind speed. Today, she felt sure, it was blowing twelve knots, a rare late-spring event on the west coast of Florida.
When she was thoroughly soaked, she reluctantly went inside and showered. She wrapped her wet hair in a towel and sat at the table in the kitchen, sipping coffee from Papi’s mug.
Up until today, she’d deliberately avoided thinking about her old life. But today, with the wind howling, she picked up her phone, and for the first time since moving to St. Pete, logged onto Facebook and the Broward Board Babes page, scrolling through photos of billowing kites, sun-browned women in board shorts and bikini tops, group shots of her friends taken on the beach at Delray or Lighthouse Point.
She stopped scrolling at a photo of a couple, photographed in profile, in a tight embrace, she in a barely there bikini, he, bare-chested, tousle-haired. She recognized Trey instantly but had to enlarge the photo to see that the woman was Chelsee, a much younger woman who’d only joined the group six months earlier. Drue allowed herself a bitter smile. It hadn’t taken Trey long at all to find a newer, younger, uninjured version of herself. Drue 2.0.
She closed the app and put her phone down, reaching for her packet of index cards. She read through her notes again, spreading the cards out on the surface of the card table.
There were so many dead ends to the Jazmin Mayes case, she understood now why Zee, the firm’s investigator, had declared it a lost cause.
With her phone still in her hand, she reopened the Facebook app and typed Jazmin Mayes’s name into the search bar.
Jazmin, she discovered, lived on in the world of social media. Her profile photo showed a laughing young woman, her hair cut short and straightened, grinning flirtatiously into the camera. She had a small cleft in her narrow, pointed chin and wore large gold hoop earrings and a shoulder-baring pink top.
It was the first photo she’d seen of the girl, and noting the resemblance both to Yvonne but more so, Aliyah, Drue felt an overwhelming sense of sadness.
The most recent entry on Jazmin’s page was dated April 2018, posted by someone named JeezyD: “R.I.P. Jazmin. We will never forget the good times.”
Drue grabbed an index card and jotted down the name. There were several more entries posted on the same date. “Gone, never forgotten.” “Heaven has a new angel.” “Prayers for your family.” She wrote down all the names of the friends who’d posted memorials.
She paused when she came to a photo showing Jazmin and a Hispanic-looking man holding hands and standing in front of a palm tree, with
a swimming pool in the background. Could this be the new boyfriend Lutrisha had mentioned?
She shook her head in frustration, but kept scrolling through more posts and photos. There was Aliyah, dressed in a spangly blue and green mermaid costume, posed under a Christmas tree. Jazmin and Aliyah at Halloween, with the girl posed in the same mermaid costume, but this time with a flowing red wig, just like Ariel in the movie.
She paused again when she came to what was obviously a selfie of Jazmin and a friend. Someone had tagged the friend as Neesa Vincent. Score!
Drue tapped Neesa’s name to check her other social media posts, but Neesa had a private page. Undeterred, Drue typed out a direct message.
Hi. My name is Drue Campbell, and I am working to help your friend Jazmin’s mom get more information about her death. Please contact me.
She typed in her phone number and pressed Send.
The rain slowed but didn’t stop. Drue paced in front of the doors to the deck, anxious to be outside, doing something. Anything. She’d never been good at inactivity.
Antsy, Sherri would have called her. Drue opened the guest bedroom door. Her kiteboarding gear took up most of the space in the room. Between her kites, boards, control bar, lines, harness, spreader, bar boots and wet suits, the gear had easily cost her upward of $7,000. Money she’d earned waitressing in crappy beach bars or working in surf shops. She ran her hand over one of her favorite boards, the Slingshot Karenina. Just another dust catcher now, she thought.
Her phone rang and she was surprised to see that the caller was Yvonne Howington.
“Look here, Drue,” Yvonne started. “I was thinking about all those questions you were asking me about Jazmin’s friends, so I got out the box of cards people sent after her funeral. I’d forgotten how many there were. I guess I didn’t know just how many friends that girl had. And I found a little card signed by somebody called Jorge Morales. I’m thinking maybe that was the boy my Jazmin was going out with.”
“That’s great, Yvonne. I did talk to somebody who knew Jazmin from the hotel and they told me her boyfriend’s first name was Jorge, but they didn’t know his last name. That gives me something to go on.”
“Maybe so,” Yvonne said. “Also, Aliyah would like to speak to you.”
“Hello?” The little girl’s voice was so soft it was nearly inaudible.
“Hi, Aliyah,” Drue said.
“I really like my coloring book,” Aliyah said. “And the glitter markers.”
“You know, I thought maybe you were a fan of Ariel,” Drue said.
“Uh-huh. I’m gonna be a mermaid when I grow up,” she confided.
“I love that idea,” Drue said. “Do you like to swim when you go to the beach?”
“I don’t know how to swim,” Aliyah said. “Mama said Jorge would teach me, because he had a pool at his apartment, but I haven’t seen Jorge in a long time. And Grandmama is afraid of the water.”
“Tell you what, Aliyah,” Drue said. “Someday soon, I will take you to my friend’s pool at Sunset Beach, and I will teach you how to swim, so you can be a mermaid.”
“You promise?” the little girl asked.
“I promise,” Drue repeated.
She heard Yvonne’s voice in the background. “Don’t be bothering that lady with stuff like that now.”
Then Yvonne was on the phone again. “You’ll call me when you find something out, right?”
“I will. And I really would like to teach Aliyah how to swim.”
“We’ll see,” Yvonne said.
* * *
After the rain finally subsided, Drue took her beach chair down to the water’s edge. Dark clouds lingered, so it was unexpectedly, blessedly cooler. The rain had chased away all but the most dogged beachgoers, so as the sun sank lower in the western sky, she felt she almost had the beach to herself.
After thirty minutes, the clouds miraculously parted, and the sun emerged as a fiery tangerine orb, tingeng the purple-edged clouds with streaks of pink and coral. Twenty yards out, a pair of dolphins dipped and rolled in the surf, so close to shore she heard the snorting sound they made when they breached the water’s surface.
Finally, her quarry appeared, picking its way carefully along the water’s edge, head lowered, laser-focused on its own fishing expedition. She’d been stalking the blue heron for a week, trying to snap the perfect photo.
The bird wasn’t shy, in fact, it seemed oblivious to her presence, but every time she had it perfectly positioned, in silhouette against the setting sun, it always decided to take wing and fly away.
Not today, she vowed. She pulled her cell phone from her beach bag and stood, careful not to make any sudden movements, which might startle her prey. She crept forward, keeping an eye on the waning sun, estimating she had maybe five minutes.
The heron’s stilt-like legs propelled it through the shallow blue-green water. A pair of sandpipers skimmed along behind it, darting in and out of the surf, eventually tiring of the game and moving on.
In the meantime, Drue stood waiting in a half-crouch, her trigger finger poised over the phone’s shutter button. “Come on, come on,” she whispered.
The bird inched forward at a leisurely pace. Finally, it stopped, directly in front of the setting sun, its head raised, poised in what looked like a deliberate pose. She held her breath and clicked three quick frames, catching the elegant creature in profile against the dying light of the day.
She expected it to fly off then, but the heron turned slightly, then continued on down the beach as the light turned lilac and the sand turned gray.
Drue collapsed back into her chair, pulling up the three photos, silently marveling at the beauty of what she’d just witnessed, at the same time amused at her own ridiculous sense of achievement. God, she scoffed. She’d turned into a total tourist cliché in her own hometown. Soon she’d be clipping coupons and eating dinner at five o’clock.
For now, she settled back in her chair. She was watching for the green flash, the moment just before sunset, but she couldn’t stop thinking about Jazmin Mayes and Yvonne. And Aliyah, the mermaid who didn’t know how to swim.
27
Breakfast for supper had been a long-standing Sunday-night staple of her childhood years. As an adult, she now realized her mother’s menu was dictated by economy—eggs and cereal and toast being much cheaper than chicken or steak. But at the time, Sherri made it seem exotic, as though pancakes, or more often, Pop-Tarts, were a delicacy to be reserved for special occasions. Like Sunday nights. Since she’d moved into Coquina Cottage it was a tradition Drue had unconsciously revived.
She stood at the stove, absentmindedly shaking salt and pepper into a bowl of scrambled eggs before pouring the mixture into her grandmother’s cast-iron skillet. The bacon was cooling on folded-up paper towels on the countertop.
Drue stared out the kitchen window, thinking about her last week’s dinner with Brice. Had she imagined his startled reaction when she’d brought up the name of Colleen Boardman Hicks? There had to be a reason her mother had kept that file of clippings about the “missing local beauty.” Was there something sinister there? She thought back to what her mother had said about Brice over the years, which really was surprisingly little, now that she thought about it.
Once, shortly after she’d moved back to Lauderdale after that disastrous year with Brice and Joan, she’d worked up the nerve to ask Sherri what had prompted their divorce.
“He’s a chaser,” Sherri had said in her matter-of-fact way. “Your dad is always looking out for that next best thing—a job, a house, a woman. He’ll never be satisfied with what he’s got. And that includes a wife. Do yourself a favor, Drue. Don’t ever marry a chaser.”
Had Colleen Boardman Hicks been one of the women Brice had pursued?
It had started to rain again and she could hear the wind whipping the branches of the Australian pines that separated the cottage from the beach. At least, she thought, the rain would cool things down inside the house.
She turned off the burner and slid the contents of the skillet onto her plate, adding the bacon and two slices of toast.
She sat at the card table and ate, finally pushing her plate aside and picking up the file folder, where she’d shoved her stack of index cards. One of the cards had a single word scrawled across it—BOYFRIEND—followed by a series of question marks.
At least she had a name to search for now, thanks to Yvonne.
Her cell phone rang and she reached for it.
“Dad?”
“Hey kid. How was your weekend?”
Drue was tongue-tied for a moment. Brice wasn’t in the habit of making wellness checks on his daughter.
“Okay. Ben and Jonah came over and got my car running again, so that was a win.”
“I’m glad,” he said. “So, uh, our dinner didn’t end so hot the other night, did it?”
“Guess not,” Drue said.
He cleared his throat. “I talked to Wendy, and asked her to ease up on you a little bit.”
“I’ll bet that went over like a lead balloon,” Drue said.
“You know, you could try a little harder to get along with her,” Brice said. “Like it or not, we’re family. And we work together. Okay?”
“Terrific!” Drue said. “We’ll all hold hands and sing ‘Kumbaya’ at the next staff meeting.”
Dead silence on the other end of the phone. “Christ!” Brice said. Then he hung up.
28
July 1976
Her orange Camaro was easy to spot in the Boyd Hill Nature Trail parking lot, even though she’d parked at the far end of the lot, under the thick shade of a clump of moss-draped scrub oaks. It was a hot, sticky Monday morning. Not even eight o’clock. He pulled the cruiser nose out next to her car, the one she said her asshole husband had given her for her twenty-first birthday. For her twenty-sixth birthday, which had been six weeks ago, he’d given her a dislocated shoulder.
She lowered her window and looked over. “Thanks for coming. I’m sorry, but I didn’t know what else to do.”
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