by Anne George
Sometime during the night, I came awake to hear Haley snoring slightly. Heavy breathing, she would call it. And though the elevator didn’t open, I lay awake for a long while and realized that I hadn’t told Haley that Fred was coming to Destin. I also realized that she hadn’t talked to Philip the night before. Whatever that meant.
Chapter 10
I awoke the next morning to the sounds of Haley trying to get dressed without making any noise. The dresser drawer creaked as she opened it; she dropped what may have been a shoe.
“What are you doing?” I mumbled.
“There’s a heavy fog. I’m going to go for a run.”
Fogs are a rarity in June along the Florida Panhandle. The humidity is there, but the temperature usually doesn’t drop below the dew point. When it does, and fog forms, it’s like a cool blanket that muffles sound. By eight or nine o’clock, it’s gone.
“If you’ll keep it to a brisk walk, I’ll go with you,” I said.
“I’m about ready. Why don’t I go run a little while and meet you back at the stile?”
That suited me. As much as I like walking in the fog, I also need a coffee jump start.
“What time is it?” I asked.
“About seven. Want a cup of coffee? I’ve already made it.”
“Bless you, my child.”
After Haley left, I pulled on a pair of baggy white shorts and a T-shirt I had bought at a garage sale, which proclaimed in large blue letters that I was a Happy Camper. Then I took my coffee into the living room and admired the fog, which was so thick it feathered onto the balcony. The beach was barely visible, and the water and fog were one.
Mary Alice wafted into the room in the pink peignoir that had almost blinded poor Fairchild. “What are you doing up so early?” she asked.
“Going walking in the fog. Haley’s already gone. You want some coffee?”
“I’ll get it. I didn’t sleep worth a damn last night. Did you?”
“Better than I thought I would.”
“I even got up and worked on my story some, the one about the manic-depressive man who marries all the lesbians. But I really couldn’t get into it. You know?”
“Hmmm.”
She went into the kitchen, poured herself a cup of coffee, and came back. “So I told myself, I said, Mary Alice Tate Sullivan Nachman Crane, you don’t know these people well enough, don’t know what makes them tick.”
“You don’t know a wheelchair repo man, either.”
“But I’ve had some pretty sad jobs. Some that would suck the very soul from you.”
“I don’t remember you having any sad, soul sucking jobs.”
“Well, I did. Like the summer I kept the Bishop kids.”
“All you did was baby-sit.”
“But I was seventeen. And the three-year-old would hold her breath until she passed out. Scared me to death the first few times she did it.” Mary Alice sat on the sofa and reached for the remote. “My whole seventeenth summer.”
“The three husbands being buried together would make an interesting story,” I said.
“That is nice, isn’t it? Ecumenical. A Catholic, a Jew, and an agnostic. I swear, though, it’s not a perfect situation. If one of them has a birthday and I take him flowers, I don’t want the others to feel left out so I have to buy them some, too.”
“Only fair.”
Sister looked at me suspiciously. I bent to tie my shoe.
“Are you going to be at the conference all day?” I asked.
“It finishes at lunchtime. Then there’s the reading tonight.”
“And Major Bissell’s hanging in there?”
“Actually, he’s pretty good. The story he brought to be critiqued was a mystery where they caught the killer because of a matchbook. They figured out he was left-handed because of the way the matches were pulled out. Think about it, Mouse, how you pull matches from a folder. Which side.”
“He was writing about what he knows.” I slipped on a nylon windbreaker. “Be careful going down 98 if the fog hasn’t lifted. You want us to wait for you to go to lunch?”
Sister shook her head no. “Some of us will probably eat down there.” She turned the volume up on “Today,” where Martha Stewart was busy demonstrating herbs that would grow happily on your kitchen windowsill. “This woman,” Sister grumbled, “obviously does not have a Bubba Cat.” Which made me think of my Woofer and miss him. He loved to walk in the fog, skittering from lampposts to trees as if the moisture had brought out all kinds of messages.
Eddie Stamps from next door was sitting on the stile drinking a cup of coffee. The fog was so dense, I wasn’t sure it was him until I approached the steps.
“’Morning, Patricia Anne,” he said. “I saw your daughter a while ago. She said she was going running.”
“’Morning, Eddie. Which way did she go?”
“Toward the jetties.”
“If she’s not back in a little while, I’ll head that way.” I sat down beside him on the bench. “Rough news last night. How are you this morning?”
“Okay, I guess. I stayed with Fairchild again. He was still asleep when I walked down here. I need to get out some, thought I’d take the boat out this morning.” He gestured toward the water. “Looks like it’s going to be a while, though. Suits me; I like the fog. Laura hates it.”
“Laura said you went with Fairchild yesterday to make the arrangements for Millicent’s funeral.”
“It’s in the morning in De Funiak Springs, that little chapel on the lake. You know where it is?” He leaned over to pick a sandspur from his pants leg and then threw it behind the stile, into the sea oats. “Those things hurt like hell when you step on them.”
“Have you heard anything more about Emily?”
“No.” He ran his hand through his white hair. Beads of moisture flew backward. He looked at his wet hand in surprise and then wiped it against his khaki pants. “I’ll tell you what, though. I never would have figured Emily Peacock as a suicide.”
“She wasn’t depressed?”
“Depressed? Hell no. Happy as a lark. Said she and Jason Marley were planning on getting married this fall. Least that’s what she told Laura.”
“Really?” If it were true, it explained why Jason had been so upset the night before. What a horrible way to learn about the death of someone you loved! And then I remembered that Emily had been dead for two days with the door to her condo open. If they were engaged, how come Jason hadn’t been checking after not hearing from her for that long?
“Could they have broken up?” I asked Eddie. “Could that have been the reason she did it?” It sounded like a fairly logical explanation to me.
“Could have been, I suppose.” Eddie didn’t sound convinced. He squinted over my shoulder toward the building. “Is that Fairchild?”
I turned and saw a figure approaching through the fog. It was Fairchild, all right, dressed in a navy terry bathrobe that he lifted like a lady does an evening dress as he came up the stile steps. On his feet were flip-flops that seemed to be giving him more trouble than the long robe. Is there some law of nature that makes men incapable of walking in flip-flops?
“Good morning,” he said. “I am going swimming. Patricia Anne, if you are easily shocked, I suggest that you avert your eyes.” And with that warning, he stepped out of the flip-flops and shucked the robe, folding it neatly and laying it on the bench beside Eddie. Then, naked as a jaybird, he crossed the beach, walked into the water, which had to be chilly, and started swimming.
“Lord!” I said, remembering that Deputy Andrews had said Fairchild was a member of the Polar Bear Club.
Eddie laughed. “It’s the fog. Drove Millicent crazy.”
“He makes a habit of swimming nude in the fog?”
“Thinks no one will see him. He’s not an exhibitionist, just likes swimming in the buff.”
“But what about his blood pressure?” I looked toward the water where I could hardly see the swimmer. “Will he be all right?”
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“Sure. I’m glad to see him out there. Must mean he’s feeling better.”
I wasn’t convinced. “Maybe. But the doctor’s got to have him on all kinds of medication, I’m sure. And, to tell you the truth, if I were a man it would make me nervous as hell to be swimming out there naked with all those hungry fish.”
Eddie laughed again. “Fairchild hasn’t got a thing to be nervous about.”
How on God’s earth had I gotten into this anatomical discussion with this man I hardly knew? I got up and said I’d walk toward the jetties and meet Haley. Eddie said he’d wait for Fairchild, keep an eye on him.
What is it about fog that is so beautiful? Like snow, it brings its own mood, its own quietness. The blurring of the familiar demands that you notice things you usually take for granted. And at the beach, it is especially beautiful. The horizon disappears, and you can’t tell which is water and which is sky. Vapor swirls around you as you walk, and gulls huddle together on the sand as if the weight of the air were too much for their wings.
I had just started down the beach when I saw Haley coming toward me. She was running along the edge of the tide where the sand was packed tightly and (granted, I’m her mother; I’m partial) looked like a nymph just emerging from the water. The illusion was shattered, though, when she stopped in front of me, breathing hard, and asked if that wasn’t a man out there swimming bare-assed.
“It’s Fairchild. He thinks no one can see him in the fog,” I explained.
“’Morning, Fairchild!” Haley shouted. “Take your Vasotec?” The figure in the water raised his arm in a wave.
I grinned. “Don’t do him that way.”
“Are you kidding? I think it’s great. It’ll relax him. If more men would do that, we wouldn’t be unclogging so many arteries in our operating room.”
Which reminded me. “Your papa’s coming down tonight.” We had started walking toward the Redneck Riviera.
“Why am I not surprised? Coming to the rescue.”
“Which is pretty nice after forty years of marriage, Haley.”
“But, Mama, you’re a capable, intelligent woman. It’s patronizing.”
“Of course it is.” I chose not to admit that I had called him blubbering. Someday I would get it straight in my own mind how much I wanted Fred to look after me. In the meantime I said, “It’s his way of showing love. Mine is letting him do it.”
Haley laughed, which didn’t surprise me. Lord, I had sounded pompous. But the way I look at it, a marriage is a separate entity from the couple who forms it. And whatever it becomes is always a surprise.
We huffed on down the beach, reached the Redneck, and turned around automatically. The fog was beginning to burn off and a few people jogged toward us now, making me wonder if Fairchild had made his exit from the water yet.
I stopped, leaned over, and rubbed my right calf. “Wait a minute. I’m getting a cramp.”
Haley jogged a circle around me while I sat on the damp sand and kneaded the muscle. “You need to take some calcium.”
“I do take calcium. Go on. I’ll be there in a minute.”
“I’ll wait.” Haley bent and stretched and then sat down beside me. A round patch of sunlight, a perfect spotlight, brushed down the beach toward us. Several appeared on the water. “There goes the fog,” she said. “Look at the sky.”
I did; blue holes were scattered across it.
When we got back to the seawall, rinsed the sand from our feet, and climbed the stile steps, there was no sign of Eddie or Fairchild. The sun was out and the lifeguard was putting up the beach umbrellas. For some reason, I remembered what Eddie had said about Emily and Jason Marley, that they were going to be married, and told Haley.
“Do you think it’s true?” she asked. “He certainly was upset last night.”
“I don’t know. She’d been dead for two days right in her apartment. I wonder why he wasn’t trying to find her, especially to tell her about Millicent’s death.”
“Maybe he was trying. She was supposed to be out of town.”
“Ask me, he wasn’t trying very hard.”
“True.” Haley looked under the bench for a missing sandal. “You know what I wonder?” She came up with the miscreant hooked around her finger. “I wonder how that Blue Bay Ranch thing is set up. If it’s like Berry said, then Jason Marley came out with a bundle when those women died.”
“What are you saying?”
“That he would have had a motive, God knows, to kill them.”
“You sound like your Aunt Sister, Haley. You’re forgetting it was a murder and a suicide.”
“Who says?”
I thought about this for a moment. Mary Alice and I had both just jumped to the conclusion that Emily had killed Millicent because of the “Forgive me” note. But what reason would she have possibly had? They were good friends.
“Nobody says,” I admitted. “It just seems to fit. The note and all.”
“Why?”
I tried to think of an answer. “God knows. That’s probably one of the things the police are trying to figure out.”
“Hey, y’all!” We looked up and saw Frances waving from the balcony. Next door to her, Fairchild leaned against the bannister in his navy robe and looked down at us, too. Smoke from the fat cigar he was puffing on floated in the air like the fog had earlier.
Laura Stamps was posting the information about Millicent’s funeral on the bulletin board beside the elevator when we came into the lobby. “Did you hear about this?” she asked us.
“From Eddie,” I said.
She looked at the notice. “I added that instead of flowers, memorials be made to the Wildlife Rescue Service. Fairchild says that’s what she would have wanted, and I agree.”
“That’s very nice.”
Laura stuck the card of thumbtacks back in her pocket and got on the elevator with us. “I still can’t believe it. Millicent and Emily both.”
“Do you think there’s any chance it was a murder-suicide?” Haley reached over and punched the button for the sixth floor; the door closed with a slight clang.
“I don’t know,” Laura said. “It’s got me so upset, though, that I think tomorrow after the funeral we’re going to Houston to visit my sister. There’s nothing going on over at the new house that can’t wait.”
“Do you think Emily’s funeral will be here in Destin?” I asked.
The door opened at the sixth floor, and we stepped out.
“I have no idea.” Laura turned to go to her apartment and then turned back to say, “But I can tell you good and damn well mine won’t be!” She went in and shut her door.
“Lord! She really is upset!” I said.
“Beat up, too,” Haley said.
“What?” I fished the key from my pocket.
“You didn’t see anything, Mama? You didn’t see the bruises on the back of both her arms?”
I shook my head no.
“You could see them when she was tacking up the notice; her sleeves were pulled up. And then there’s one on her forehead, too.”
I unlocked the door. “She bruised herself over at the house. Hit her head on a kitchen cabinet.”
“The bruise on her head could have come from walking into a door or falling; the bruises on the back of her arms, though, are consistent with someone having grabbed her. Hard.”
“Damn,” I said, remembering my dream of someone being forced onto the elevator. Could it have been real, not a dream? Could it have been Laura? I was about to remind Haley of the dream when Frances called, “Why are y’all standing in the door?”
“Because I can’t walk and put two and two together at the same time,” I said.
“Well, long as you haven’t found another body. I’m fixing to scramble me an egg. You want one?”
“Sure,” Haley said. I declined and went out on the balcony. Haley followed me in a moment.
“I’m sorry, Mama,” she said. “I shouldn’t have said what I did about Laura. You were already
upset.”
“No, darling. It’s fine. I’m just wondering if this has been going on all the time, and your Aunt Sister and I have missed it. I’m assuming it’s Eddie.”
“Laura has bruises, Mama. We can’t assume anything from that. Even the ones on her arm could have an innocent explanation. Maybe someone grabbed her to keep her from falling.”
“I hope so.” I thought about little, skinny Laura with her sun-damaged skin and hair. What did we really know about her and her life? “Remember I told you I dreamed about someone being forced on the elevator? Maybe it wasn’t a dream.”
“But nobody else heard anything, Mama.”
“Your egg’s ready, Haley,” Frances called.
“Go get your breakfast, honey,” I said. “I’m okay.”
And I was. Just very sad.
In a few minutes she was back. “Here’s the protector of the turtles, the defender of the nests.”
Sophie Berliner giggled as she followed Haley onto the balcony. She was wearing her usual black robe which, the more we got to know the child, didn’t seem so strange.
“How did last night go?” I asked. “See any turtles?”
“Two. We marked two nests.” She and Haley sat down at the table, Haley with her eggs, Sophie with orange juice. “My dad thinks one of them is too close to the water so we may move it back farther in the dunes. We have to get someone from the Wildlife Service to help us, though. It has to be done just right.”
“But won’t the mama turtle get upset if it’s moved?”
Sophie gave me a look that I can only describe as disgusted. “She lays her eggs and leaves, Mrs. Hollowell. Turtles don’t sit around on their eggs like chickens do.”
“Sounds like the perfect setup,” Haley said. “Just lay the eggs and leave.”
“Well, they’re okay unless rattlesnakes or ghost crabs get them,” Sophie said.
Haley took a large bite of scrambled eggs. Had she no shame? “Ummm, good. You want some, Mama?”
I shook my head no. “Rattlesnakes? There are rattlesnakes on the beach?”