“I’m not finished yet, but I thought I’d let you know she’s a half mile away from the range of endpoints that are possible, given the place she reportedly started from.”
I undid my seat belt, climbed over the front seat into the back, and cranked down the first window I could reach. The air rushed in, dense and humid, and I felt the nausea subside by degree. Now sober, I asked, “What are you saying?” We were driving on Route 41, banked on one side by slash pines and on the other by snarls of prickly leaf vegetation.
“I ran the numerical, controlled for shallow water, surface drift, and gravitational force, and even with allowing for a significant margin of error, she ended up in the opposite direction. To end up where she was, from where he says she started out, she would have had to drift against the current. Either she swam there or she was put there, but she did not drift to that spot from the reef coordinates you gave me.”
Heat seeped out in waves from the blacktop, warping the air. Other cars were way ahead or way behind. I grabbed my pad and pen from the front seat and wrote everything he said down. Then I got off the phone and told Nicole to pull over. When she did, I jumped out of the car and stood still for a moment, trying to get my bearings.
With the nausea subsided and the smoke cleared, I saw the terrain of the Everglades surrounding us and realized I must have slept through this stretch on the way there. I walked down the road in the stifling heat. Without asking why I was walking or where I was going, Nicole just followed me slowly in the car. Florida as I knew it: miles of flat, dusty, brown ground and tall, mostly leafless sticks for trees. And then, with no prior warning, no gentle transformation of terrain, one arrives at the edge of a slow-moving river or a bed of tall grass, teeming with plant life and animal flurry. It’s not that these shockingly beautiful places are hiding so much as just peacefully, quietly coexisting with the banal and the hideously ugly. We were upon one of the many Everglades sloughs known best and most illustratively as liquid ground. This particular river, which I thought might be the Shark River Slough, connected the fresh water of Lake Okeechobee to the Gulf of Mexico and the Keys. It was all continuous and interdependent—and delicate. If one stood in this spot long enough, one could sense the earth breathing.
The sunlight bent through cypress trees and cast white light over the water and saw-grass surface. The current moved at a snail’s pace, up to and around an isolated mahogany “island.” The islands are mounds in the slough created centuries ago by coral cliffs abandoned by receding seawater, now calcified into limestone beds that provide havens for mighty oaks and majestic mahoganies. Many of the trees, like the one before us, were young, the more mature ones having been logged a long time ago for furniture. The contradictions—at once hard and soft, wet and dry, salt and fresh, still and moving—were overwhelming.
Nicole and I found a dry spot under a tree by the water, where a slight breeze swept over the grass. Nicole was worried about alligators and couldn’t relax. I, on the other hand, was having more trouble with the mosquitoes, which—I have always been convinced—prefer Jewish blood. A blue heron posed serenely in the distance.
“Talon is lying, Nicole. What my friend just explained to me is that there is no way Del’s body drifted from Lemon Reef to where she was found.”
“How? How does he know that?” Nicole crossed her arms defiantly. She crossed her legs, then uncrossed them, then reversed the process. She flicked her finger as if she were holding a cigarette. I noticed her facial tic, and the jerky hand and leg movements she worked hard to conceal by staying in perpetual motion.
“This guy that I asked to help me is an expert in that exact question. He has this method for studying bodies floating in currents.”
“How come the police don’t know what he knows?” She was listening to me and watching at the same time for alligators. She shook her head and said to herself, “They’re fucking fast, those suckers.”
“I think because the science is so new. It’s still experimental.” I swatted my neck, which made Nicole eye the car longingly.
“So she didn’t drift to where they found her. I doubt she swam there. He wouldn’t drag her there all the way from the reef, would he?”
Then it occurred to me. “She was already at the spot where they found her. That’s where she died.”
Nicole looked a little uneasy, her eyes shifting back and forth, grappling, always grappling with some invisible constraint or intrusion. “So what you’re thinking,” she said, “is that Tal killed her, and then he swam to the reef and made the trade?”
Nicole hit my arm to get my attention. I looked up and she gestured behind me with a lift of her chin. Standing off in the knee-high brush, the color of wheat, was a smooth-coated panther with liquid brown eyes and ready, sprung ears. She matched her background almost perfectly, making it hard to find her twice.
“Something like that. It seems risky, killing her and then doing the trade. He didn’t want her floating out there with other divers around.”
“Well, that’s why he hooked her to that chain.”
“Maybe.” I brought my knees to my chest and hugged them. “I think he made the trade and then went back and killed her. My only problem is timing. We know he made the trade at ten fifteen. Assuming it took fifteen minutes to swim from the reef back to the boat, he was back around ten thirty, which is when he said Del went into the water. He called the police from a landline at eleven oh five. That means he only had thirty-five minutes to kill Del, move the boat to Lemon Reef, swim to shore, and then get to the phone.” I was thinking out loud. “So the death had to be quick. She had no marks, and there were no drugs. There was no sign of a struggle. She wasn’t hit or strangled or even held underwater, that we can tell. She was alive when she went into the water and dead from a heart attack, with Talon having moved the boat and gotten himself to a shoreline phone, thirty-five minutes later. How is that possible?” Thinking further, I said, “We don’t have the full toxicology, so maybe it was a drug they haven’t detected yet.”
“How long was Del underwater?”
“No way to know exactly. They estimate between six and seven hours.”
Nicole raised her chin and grimaced slightly. Then she lit a cigarette, a ritual I now recognized as part of the perpetual-motion phenomenon. “Well, isn’t it over anyway, on the fact that she didn’t die where Talon said she did? Can’t we just tell the police Talon is lying, now that we can prove it?”
I watched the smoke from the cigarette rise, felt it trying to write something on the air. “It’s more than we had before,” I said gently. “But we don’t know if Jake’s findings will be admissible here, and I want to figure out how Talon killed her before I leave it to the state of Florida to make a case against him.” I looked for the panther, the heron, one of Nicole’s alligators, and found none of them. “Get me back to town,” I said. “I promised my mother I’d come over for dinner.”
Chapter Thirteen
Thursday
I woke up thinking about the box Del had described in the letter she sent to Sid and wondered what was in it. The thought was residue from a dream about Del, but I couldn’t remember now what the dream had been about. I rose slowly. Dinner at my parents’ had been uneventful, and I did feel better for having seen them. Norma showed me pictures from her last trip with Brian. Mel managed to look like he was participating in the conversation, his eyes on me while his ears labored in the direction of the television. He was a news junkie.
I was planning to go for a run with Katie, so I got dressed, then went to the closet and searched through my bag for my running sneakers. Then I tossed the bag back into the closet messily, on purpose, not closing the closet door. Gail’s guest room had pale peach and aquamarine walls, and wall-to-wall cream-colored carpet. The furniture around me—slick, black-and-chrome, modern—was accented with pastel pillows, ceramic fixtures, and a large mirror in a gold frame. I sat down on the bed adorned with a cream-colored satin duvet and panicked momentarily as I felt
its softness grab hold of me. The low ceiling pressed down on me, the shiny objects stood firm like miniature soldiers keeping guard, as the structure and decor of this square space conspired, I was suddenly convinced, to trap me in a Golden Girls rerun. I chafed at the aesthetic and fought an irrational wave of anger at Gail.
Then I talked myself down, reminded myself I should be happy for Gail. This condo was a triumph for her, the appliances and central air-conditioning and dedicated parking space and gardeners paid out of association dues, her daily proof she hadn’t let life outwit or overlook her. She kept a guest room, and she was now proudly and generously letting me stay in it. I returned to the bag, shook it into place on the closet floor, and shut the door. Still, I did hate the Georgia O’Keeffes; I wished there were just one Stevie Nicks poster here, not framed, but taped to the wall.
*
As I waited for Katie to arrive, I allowed myself to remember the October ’83 Stevie Nicks concert. We had seats on the lawn in the periphery of the stadium. Katie, Gail, Edie, and Susan passed a soccer ball around in one direction and a joint in the other. I was on a secret date with Del for my fifteenth birthday. We sat next to each other on a blanket in the grass, our legs extended, outer thighs touching. We were watching Stevie Nicks dance, her black gauze wrappings a flowing silhouette against the backlit stage, like a crow, wide winged against a full moon, the stark image intermittently rendered opaque by a floor of dry ice melting upward.
It was the first and only time we made a public claim, high on pot and emboldened by the smoke and mirrors of a flamboyant stage queen and the music and lyrics of “Landslide.” Edie, Susan, Katie, and Gail knocked the soccer ball around on the lawn behind us, too stoned to notice us, or us too stoned to care. Jason Schwartz was with them, trying to keep Katie interested in him beyond her thirty-second limit. I was loving Del, loving the moment, and allowing sex to be the nearby and ever-more-poignant promise it always was for me when I was with her in public. The night heat was so intense it made the loose tank tops we wore feel thick. I watched a single bead of sweat form under Del’s arm, then trail down and disappear into the indent at the edge of her rib cage where the upward slope of her breasts began. My eyes traced the lift of her shirt to the point—her nipple—peaked like a cliff at the edge of a steep incline.
It started when Del, not trusting I would let myself get high, took hits from the joint we were sharing, covered my mouth with hers, and injected me with smoke. We ended up kissing without fully intending to, and then caught ourselves. But the feeling of fooling around in front of other people had gotten us both pretty roused. Now, eyes fixed on Stevie, Del tossed her hair so it fell loosely and evenly around her face and said, “Which panties are you wearing?” It was more a demand than a question, as if she had a right to know.
I whispered in her ear, said each word slowly. “Blue. Silky.” A daring smile. “Bikini.” I’d worn her favorite pair for our date. Del breathed in through clamped teeth. I was surprised and thrilled when she casually placed her thigh over mine. I watched her maneuver her short skirt to do it. Staring at her upper thigh, I glanced around to see if anyone we knew was watching, then slid my hand up her skirt, worked my fingers under her panties, and touched her. She was swollen and soaked. My mouth near her ear, I more breathed than said, “Damn!” I thought we were just teasing each other. It was something we did more and more in public—cop feels, steal glances, pass love notes in class to see who could make the other blush first and then most. I couldn’t believe it that night when Del pushed my hand in farther and kissed me in the way I knew her to mean it.
Because Del wanted to keep us a secret, I had resisted for nearly a year the overwhelming urge to tell everyone I knew I was fucking her. This public display of us was something I wanted desperately, but I hesitated nonetheless. I thought it was the drugs bringing her out that night. I feared she would regret our having done this when their effect wore off—that her shame would cause her to withdraw from me or to punish us in some way.
“Are you sure?” I asked, my gaze dropping from her eyes to her mouth. We had gotten good at sex by then, and the halting felt unnatural, but I was offering Del a chance to catch herself, snap to reason, remember our status, abandon her Rubiconic impulse. Del smiled a little, nodded, and pulling her side of the blanket with her for cover, slid onto me. Two bodies, one motion, hidden only by nighttime shadows and the blanket we had been sitting on. My fingers cramming into her; Del moving onto me, her mouth on my mouth, her palms pressing on my tits, her fingers seizing my nipples. Hair loose, tongues tangled, the rhythm and force of her coming on me, the smell, taste, feel, and sound of her everywhere—like breathing underwater.
*
I don’t know why some of us made it and some of us didn’t. She shouldn’t have not. Del—sun-soaked, water soluble, as graceful traversing warring clans in school or working the register at the motel dive-shop as she was abandoning a volleyball game for a plunge in the ocean—Del knew bubbles travel upward. Brian, being his big-brotherly self, made certain of it when he taught Del and me to scuba dive. When diving, Brian said repeatedly, should you lose your way, become disoriented and confused about which direction is up and which direction is down, just follow the bubbles. Bubbles always travel upward. This one fact was supposed to bring us both home safely.
*
“Still feel like coming here was the right thing to do?” Katie asked. We had been jogging side by side in silence for a long distance.
“I don’t know.”
I drank the hot Miami air, realizing that, no true San Franciscan after all, I thrived on it. I thought about Sid. As my body welcomed the wet heat, my mind flashed suddenly on images of Thomas, a baffled boy long acquainted with the limits of bodily control, being beaten incontinent and then out of existence. And of a mother being brought to this scene or left to imagine it. And the rest: the scheming and manipulation, wheeling and dealing that must have taken place behind the scenes to end up with one stupid, seemingly innocent, nineteen-year-old boy of color taking the fall.
“Seeing Sid in prison was so hard. I could still see the little boy in him.” We ran on, the repetitive, rhythmic sound of sneakers against sidewalk and synchronized breath-filled strides following us or anticipating us.
I revealed this next bit of information reluctantly, unsure as to whether it was just more of the same sex-hype lies that had plagued Del throughout her entire adolescence. “Sid says Talon was into watching Del, videotaping her having sex with other guys. It was a control thing. He thinks that’s probably what we’re gonna find in that box. Why she would want us to find that, I have no idea.”
Katie laughed a little. “I wouldn’t mind watching those.”
Whoa! Not the response I was expecting from Katie. For one thing, it was blatantly homoerotic—unconscious, perhaps, but nonetheless blatant. And it stung because I knew what she meant. I understood too well the pleasure we all could take in Del’s humiliation.
“Don’t get mad at me for saying this, but guys were always talking about how, you know, good she was.” Katie smiled slyly. “I’m just curious. That’s all.”
I nodded, trying to fashion a quick response that would somehow redeem us both. “You mean you want to study her technique?”
Katie laughed. “Well, when you put it that way…”
I shook my head. “I can’t believe we’re having this conversation.”
She looked at me sideways and with suspicion. “You’re not even a little bit curious, Jenna? You’re not a little bit tempted to watch them, just to see her like that?”
*
When it came time to leave the Stevie Nicks concert, we checked in with each other and realized no one had made a plan for us to get home.
Gail said, “Don’t leave it to Katie.” The rest of us laughed.
Katie rolled her eyes with annoyance over the amount of attention her recent solution of giving blow jobs for rides was getting. “I only did that twice.”
And
rew Torie, one of the rich kids at our school, appeared out of nowhere, his timing, as always, impeccable. He stared unabashedly at Del, her long hair catching the moonlight like silk, her tank top askew, hanging loosely from her thin neck and shoulders. She was revved, sweaty, a little disarrayed from having just been fucked. He knew Del was stoned, could smell sex on her, and—true to his vulturesque ways—circled in wait.
“Andrew will give us a ride home,” Del announced.
I shook my head. “My brother will come and get us.” I looked at Del firmly, hoping to sway her in my direction.
“It’s fine, Jenna. Andrew’s right here.” She leaned in and whispered, “I don’t want Brian to see us stoned.”
Andrew dangled gold keys from his fingers, flashed the Mercedes symbol to which they were connected like it was a backstage pass to life. “Got my dad’s car.” Then he shrugged at his sidekick, Donald Magowsky, and they both began to walk away. He was playing chicken with Del. She fell in behind him.
Katie looked at me and said sarcastically, “His dad’s car.” She watched Del leaving, shrugged her shoulders as if to persuade us to just go along with the plan. The rest of us followed Katie following Del following Andrew toward the exit. Somehow Donald ended up in the driver’s seat of Andrew’s father’s Mercedes. Katie grabbed the front passenger seat. Gail climbed into the backseat by the window. Andrew pushed Del into the middle of the backseat and slid himself in next to her, closing the door behind him. That left the rear floor of the station wagon for the rest of us.
As we drove along, I watched Andrew creep in on Del, putting his arm over the back of the seat behind her like a bad junior high school movie date. I began to eye the tire iron on the floor beside me. Del glanced back at me and smiled reassuringly. Edie and Susan watched me watching Andrew, both of them slightly stiff and suddenly dead sober. Andrew hooked his elbow around Del’s neck and let his hand fall to where I could no longer see it. I watched Andrew intently, my hand moving slowly until it butted against the cold metal.
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