by P J Parrish
Louis had a feeling the guy had spent some time in the backseat of a squad car. “No, I’m not.”
The guy pursed his lips. “Yeah, I saw him. He was in here yesterday asking about ferry service.”
“To where?”
The guy shrugged.
“Okay, so where do your ferries go?” Louis asked.
“Anywheres with a dock. Useppa, Cabbage Key, Cayo Costa, Bird Island, Safety Harbor.” The man leaned over the counter. “And me personally, I got a skiff that can take you a few places without docks. If you know what I mean.”
Louis knew exactly what the guy meant. His eyes drifted out the open door to the sun-silvered waters of Pine Island Sound. Even from here he could see about a half dozen small green islands and he knew there were dozens more. Some owned by the state, some private, some inhabited, some nothing more than tidal flats colonized by mangroves. But dense and isolated enough for a man to get lost in, especially if he wanted to.
“So did he take a ferry or not?” Louis asked.
“Seems I remember him buying a ticket, yeah.”
Louis was losing patience. “To where?”
The guy shrugged his bony shoulders again. “Cayo Costa. But I sure as hell wouldn’t want to go camping out there, man.”
“He had camping equipment with him?” Louis asked. When the guy nodded Louis went on, “Why do you say you wouldn’t want to go there?”
The guy looked at him like he was crazy. “It’s August, dude. The skeeters eat you alive unless you stay out near the gulf.”
Louis glanced at his watch. Nearly four. “Give me a ticket to the island.”
The guy eyed Louis’s khakis and polo shirt. “Kinda late to be going out there. There’s only one boat coming back at six.”
“I’ll take my chances,” Louis said, slapping some bills on the counter.
He was the only passenger on the ferry. As it chugged out into the open waters of Pine Island Sound, his thoughts came back to something that had been bothering him from the day he looked down at Jane Doe’s body lying twisted on that stinking little mangrove island.
Water...it touched everything here. Literally, water surrounded the barrier islands and streamed up the river and estuaries of the Fort Myers mainland. Figuratively, water touched the lives of the people, from the shrimp fishermen to the girls who sold suntan lotion on the beach. Water was probably the most important part of his new home’s makeup. Yet he knew almost nothing about it, or the whole outdoor thing really.
Neither did Frank Woods, if Diane knew what she was talking about. But something told him she didn’t.
The ferry let him off at a small dock on the east side of the island. He saw a sign with an arrow that said CAMPGROUND. He followed the path through the mangroves and came to a large clearing sheltered by high-arching Australian pines. There were some tent sites, picnic tables, and a few primitive-looking cabins. But not one person.
Louis stood there, listening to the wind in the pines. Shit, now what? He thought about what the Deadhead had said about no one wanting to camp this time of year. Maybe Frank had camped somewhere over on the gulf side of the island. He glanced at his watch. He had more than an hour until the ferry came back.
With a look up at the sun low in the western sky, he started toward it, down a path leading into a tunnel of brush and trees. Soon he was dripping with sweat and the mosquitoes were starting to swarm in the heavy motionless air. Sounds rose up around him in the gathering dusk. A strange cry of a bird somewhere above. A groan of some unknown creature below. He felt his heart quicken slightly and picked up his pace.
Bessie Levy came to his mind, something she had said as she motored him back to the Bokeelia dock.
A pelican had soared over the boat and she had pointed to it saying, “Look! Ain’t that beautiful?”
“It’s ugly, like one of those prehistoric birds,” Louis had said.
She had laughed at him. “Well, that’s what this place is. Pterodactyls on our docks, centrosauruses crawling out of the canals to eat little dogs. Florida is a prehistoric place, young man, where the sea is still close and the sky still burns at night. Here in this place, we humans are still very close to the moment we crawled out of the slime.”
He had looked at Bessie Levy, looked at her sitting there holding the tiller of her boat, face lifted to the sun and salt spray. He looked at her and saw an old woman unafraid of the seething, sodden mysteries of the natural world.
He knew he could never be like her. He could face a psychopath waving a knife. But he could live a hundred years and still would always jump when he heard an animal cry in the dark.
Louis paused at a fork in the trail. He could just make out the small sign that read CEMETERY TRAIL. It seemed to go back inland. He could see the sky reddening above the tops of the trees. He decided to take the other path.
He walked more slowly now since the path was just a streak in the quickening dusk. The path narrowed into heavy brush and he had to push his way through. He brushed against something and jerked back, feeling a sharp sting.
“Shit,” he muttered, grabbing his arm.
He had been pricked by something, and a small bubble of blood was already visible. He looked at the short palm he had brushed against. It had five-inch thorns on the fronds. He clamped a hand over his bleeding arm and moved on.
He stopped abruptly. Something white loomed before him.
Jesus...bones?
They looked like giant animal bones sticking up from the sand. He crept forward and let out a breath.
Trees ...just dead trees. They looked like the sea grape trees in front of his cottage, but these were dead and bleached pure white, twisted and bent low by the wind and salt tides.
He stopped. The huge silence rushed in, and he heard the soft hiss of the tide on the beach. He was near the gulf. Then he saw something about a hundred yards ahead, beyond the naked white trees —- a faint light, moving slightly.
A lantern. It had to be Frank.
Louis started across the grove of dead trees, picking his way carefully over the exposed roots, crouching to move beneath the giant rib cages the trees formed over him. Finally, he made it to the other side. He stood dripping with sweat, his heart hammering. The lantern light had disappeared.
He felt a jab in the back and froze.
“Don’t move,” a voice said. “Put up your hands.”
Louis drew in a breath. “Frank? Frank Woods?”
“What are you doing here?”
When Louis didn’t answer, Frank jabbed him harder in the small of the back.
“Easy, man, put the rifle down,” Louis said.
Frank was silent but he hadn’t moved the barrel.
“I just want to talk, Frank, that’s all.”
“You’re bleeding,” Frank said.
Louis felt the gun barrel leave his back.
“Turn around,” Frank said.
Louis turned slowly, lowering his hands. Frank was standing there in the deep shadows. In his hand was a stick. Louis let out a breath. He could feel his own gun on his waist and debated pulling it, but decided against it.
“How’d you know I was here?” Frank demanded. Then he shook his head. “Never mind. That’s not important. Why are you following me?”
“Look, Woods —- ”
“You’ve been following me for days now. I want to know why. Who sent you?”
Louis couldn’t make out Frank’s face but he could hear the tension in his voice. The man was afraid of something.
“You got a camp somewhere?” Louis asked.
“Yeah, over on the beach.”
“Let’s go and talk.”
Frank hesitated then started away. Louis let him lead the way. They emerged from the brush onto a wide beach and Louis saw the lantern again. And then a small tent sitting between two dead mangrove trees.
“Wait here,” Frank said. He dipped inside the tent and emerged with a first-aid kit.
“What happened to your arm?�
�� Frank asked.
Louis had been holding his arm and when he let go, he was shocked to see a knot forming on his wrist. “Walked into a tree with thorns the size of stilettos,” he said.
Frank made a wry face. “Probably a date palm. If any of it’s still in your skin, it can get septic. It happened to me once. You’d better clean it up.”
He held out the kit. Louis took it and sat down on a piece of driftwood near the Coleman lantern. As Frank bent down to turn it up, Louis got his first good look at him. He was wearing old jeans and a worn denim shirt, an old fishing hat covering his hair. In the white glow of the Coleman lantern, Frank’s eyes were underscored with bruises of exhaustion. He looked nothing like the benign librarian of a few weeks ago. Now he looked like a haunted —- or hunted —- man.
Frank moved away and Louis concentrated on the puncture on his arm. It had swelled up to the size of an egg and he could feel his forearm stiffening. Probing at the wound, he couldn’t see any remnant of the thorn.
“Pour on some hydrogen peroxide,” Frank said.
Louis found the small plastic bottle and poured it over his arm.
“Is it bubbling?”
“Yeah.”
“You’ll live then.”
Frank came back toward the light, pulling off his fishing hat, letting loose a bush of gray hair, again far different from the trimmed look Louis had seen in the library. Frank crouched by the fire and added some new branches from the small pile nearby. Louis noticed the fire had been made in a pit scooped out of the sand and lined with shells.
“You’ve been watching me,” Frank said. “Why?”
Louis looked up at Frank but said nothing.
“You are a private investigator, Mr. Kincaid,” Frank said. “I knew that when you came in to get your library card. People hire private investigators to do things. Who hired you?”
“Your daughter,” Louis said as he twisted the cap back on the bottle.
Frank’s expression stiffened. “Diane hired you?”
Louis nodded.
Frank stood up and took a few steps toward the tent, then stared out at the gulf. The sun was gone, leaving only a bruise of purple on the horizon. Louis glanced around the campsite for Frank’s rifle but didn’t see it.
“She’s worried about you,” Louis said.
“She worries too much.”
“She’s your daughter.”
Frank glanced at him then looked back out at the water.
Louis heard a whine in his ear and then the sting of a mosquito at his neck. There wasn’t a hint of a breeze coming off the gulf tonight, nothing to keep the mosquitoes from swarming out from the nearby mangroves. Louis turned his arm toward the lantern to get a look at his watch. Almost seven. The last ferry had left. No way to get off this damn island tonight.
“Daughters,” Frank said softly.
Louis looked up at Frank’s back.
“Most men want sons,” Frank said. “You know, someone who looks like them, acts like them. They want sons so they can see themselves young again and fool themselves into thinking they aren’t going to die.”
Frank turned but didn’t look at Louis. “Daughters are different. They aren’t you. They are what you could have maybe been.”
He met Louis’s eyes. “You got kids?”
Louis shook his head slowly.
“There’s something about a daughter that makes a man do strange things,” Frank said. He looked away again.
“I need to ask you some questions,” Louis said.
“Does my daughter think I’m getting senile?”
“No.”
“Then why did she hire you?”
“She found some newspaper clippings in your desk drawer. One is about the unidentified body found on Monkey Island last week and the other is about a missing girl, from 1953.” Louis could see a tension in Frank’s jaw and a vein moving in his neck. He couldn’t tell if Frank was upset about this revelation or just about the fact that his daughter had gone through his desk.
Frank reached to his pocket and Louis tensed. But Frank just withdrew a pack of cigarettes and some matches. He cupped a match to light the cigarette, took a long slow drag, and let it out in a tired sigh.
“I thought I recognized the dead woman, that’s all,” he said. “I was wrong. I forgot to throw it away.”
“What about Emma Fielding, the missing girl from 1953? Why did you keep that article?”
“I knew her in high school.”
“Do you know what happened to her?”
“No.”
“Where was high school?”
“Sarasota.”
Louis heard a noise in the brush and jumped.
“Don’t worry, it’s probably just a snake,” Frank said. “Or maybe a boar. There’s a bunch of them running around wild on this island.”
Louis rubbed his burning arm, his eyes still on the brush.
“That can last for days,” Frank said, nodding toward the puncture.
“There’s one more thing, Woods,” Louis said. “There’s a ring at your house. A white coral ring, just like the one the dead woman was wearing.”
Frank’s eyes narrowed as he drew hard on the cigarette.
“Talk to me, Woods.”
Frank’s face grew slack as he took the cigarette out of his mouth. “My daughter thinks I killed those women, doesn’t she?”
Louis drew out his Glock with his stiff right hand, shifting it to his left. He held it sideways, ready but relaxed.
“Yes, she does. She wants you to come with me to the police. That’s why she hired me. She was afraid you would panic if you were just confronted.”
Frank looked over at him and saw the gun. “You don’t have the authority to arrest me, Mr. Kincaid.”
“I don’t want you to try anything stupid either.”
“I’m not a stupid man.”
“I know that.”
“I’m not a killing man, either.”
“Then we can just go talk to the police and you can tell them what you know about the ring.”
“I can’t do that. You’ll have to shoot me or drag me. And that won’t be easy with that arm of yours. Besides, neither one of us is going anywhere tonight.”
Frank knelt and prodded the fire. The fire spat out a stream of sparks. Frank’s eyes followed them up into the black sky.
“When’s the first ferry back?” Louis asked.
“Eight.”
“We’re going to be on it.”
Frank’s eyes went to the Glock then up to Louis’s face. “All right,” he said softly. “I’ll do it for Diane’s sake.” He nodded toward the gun. “You can put that away. You won’t need it.”
Louis didn’t move. It was quiet except for the snap of the fire and the waves on the beach.
“The mosquitoes are getting bad,” Frank said. “I’m getting in the tent.” He rose slowly. “I’m not supposed to have a fire out here so if you keep it going, keep it low. And if you smoke, be careful with matches.”
Frank took one last drag from his cigarette. Then taking it from his lips, he calmly used his forefinger and thumb to snub out the glowing tip. He put the butt in his pocket.
“I’m sorry. It’s a one-man tent,” he said.
“I’ll be fine right here,” Louis said.
Frank hesitated then nodded slowly. “I’ve got a blanket you can use. And some Deets for the mosquitoes. You’re going to need it.”
He turned and crawled into his tent. Louis waited, listening to him rummaging through something. His gaze drifted to the fire, which was quickly dwindling. He rubbed his sore arm, thinking again of what Diane had said about her father, that he had never spent a night outdoors in his life. But it was obvious Frank Woods was a man who was not only comfortable outdoors but knew something about it.
The mosquitoes were a steady whine in his ears. It took him a moment to realize it was the only sound he could hear.
He stood and walked to the tent. “Woods?”
/> No answer. Not a sound. “Frank?”
Louis flipped back the flap of the tent and peered inside. It was empty.
Louis scrambled inside and pressed a hand against the back of the tent. It gave way, sliced open down the middle of the nylon. Louis held it open and stared into the thick, black brush.
Frank Woods was gone.
Louis withdrew and stood up quickly, straining to see in the darkness. The fire was about gone. There was nothing left but the white-hot glow of the lantern.
Louis snatched up the lantern and trudged up to the mangroves, whirling the lantern toward the black trees. The mangroves came alive, their roots glowing eerily bright against the deep shadows.
“Goddamn it,” he said.
There was no way he was going into that brush. There was no way he was going anywhere until morning. He slowly backed up, until he was near the dying fire. His eyes swept over the dark brush. Every nerve in his body felt as if it were on fire. He turned up the lantern and sat down.
“Goddamn it to hell,” he whispered.
CHAPTER 14
It was only ten a.m. but Louis could feel the damp heat blanket his body as soon as he stepped out of the Mustang’s air-conditioning. His own smell rose up to him, sweat from the night spent in the tent on Cayo Costa.
The longest night in his life. A night spent crouched in the tent, slapping at mosquitoes and jumping every time something moved outside. He was back at the dock by seven-thirty, waiting for the ferry —- and Frank Woods —- to show up. But there was no sign of Frank, and Louis had no choice but to board and go back without him.
Back at Sutter’s Marina, he called the library to see if Woods had come to work. The woman who answered said he was scheduled to work but had not shown up yet. Louis had headed right over to Fort Myers. He wanted to see Horton and get this over with.
As he started across the street to the station, Louis rubbed a hand over his stubbled jaw. Shit, it was probably just the stink of fear he was smelling. How the hell was he going to tell Horton he had let Frank Woods get away?
Louis slowed his pace near the entrance. There was a woman newscaster doing a live remote next to a WINK van, her blond hair-helmet glowing in the bright sun. Louis recognized her from the evening news and tried to place the name. Heather something...