SHADOW OVER CEDAR KEY

by Ann Cook

  He scowled up at the sky. “Mind, I do feel sorry for Marcia. She’s that upset. She’d bring tears to a glass eye.” He parked beside a car rental counter and helped Brandy unload her suitcase and lap top. “Marcia’s a fine woman, even if she keeps too tight a grip on Cara.”

  “You two have a lot in common, I’d think.”

  His nod was a trifle wistful. “Been a lonely life since the wife’s gone.”

  Brandy grasped the lap top and the bag with her notebook. She didn’t want to feel too much empathy for MacGill or Marcia Waters.

  Everyone was a suspect. “Where’s the drug store?” she asked. “That’s a good place for me to start my search.”

  “Biggest strip center in Chiefland, north of the center of town on 19.”

  She thought of the long drive MacGill had made from Cedar Key and smiled at him. “I really appreciate this.” Then she thought again of the clipping. “One other thing. Whatever happened to that column I gave you, the one about historic preservation in Lake County?”

  He thrust out his lower lip, concentrating. “Can’t say. Thought it was still on the bulletin board.”

  Brandy’s smile died. “It’s not,” she said.

  * * * *

  The jaundiced looking young woman at the camera counter suffered from a cold, and she was not eager to talk. She glanced up with suspicion when Brandy identified herself as a reporter. “Miss Waters’ mother was in here this morning. I told her all I know.” Sniffling, she held a tissue to her reddened nose. “I wasn’t paying no special attention. Miss Waters comes in here a lot. How I know where she is?”

  Brandy’s voice was calm. She did not want to raise the clerk’s anxiety level. “I’m looking for Cara Waters because we’re working together on a story. I don’t plan to use your name. Anyway, I’m with the Gainesville paper.”

  Relaxing a bit, the girl stuffed the tissue back into her pocket and looked down. “She wasn’t here but a minute.”

  “Before people pay for their pictures, sometimes they check to see if a roll came out. Do you remember if Miss Waters looked at the photographs you gave her?”

  The clerk rolled her eyes up to the left and compressed her lips, trying to recall. “I can see her standing there...No, she didn’t. She just paid and walked out.”

  “Anything special you can remember about her leaving?”

  Again the eyes went up. “There was a man came in. He spoke to her. I remember that. They left about the same time.”

  Brandy held her breath. “This could be important. Do you remember anything at all about that man?”

  At first the girl shook her head. “Ordinary looking guy. Well,” she amended after a second, “kinda fattish, tall.”

  “Can you remember how he was dressed?”

  “Nothing special. Didn’t have on work clothes.” She squinted, concentrating. “Had a kinda ugly face, really, a lotta dark hair, pretty long.”

  Brandy handed the girl one of her cards. “You’ve been a big help. If you think of anything else, call me.” She leaned closer. “Don’t tell anyone but a law enforcement officer about the man you saw speak to Miss Waters, all right?”

  The girl nodded, sniffled, and re-applied her tissue.

  From a newspaper dispenser on the sidewalk, Brandy bought the Gainesville paper and scanned the weather news. A small hurricane now, winds eighty miles an hour, moving slowly. At the present rate, if it didn’t stall again or take an unexpected turn, it could pass on up the Gulf tonight, most likely make landfall near Apalachicola. Brandy sat in the car for several minutes, her notebook in her lap, recording the details Strong had given her on the phone, and the few from the drug store interview.

  Then she looked at her most recent To Do list: Ask Cara about argument. Call Strong. Call Marcia. She crossed out two and three, waited with pencil poised, then started a new list: 1. Unknown man may be with Cara. (Clerk would recognize most locals.) 2. Cara may have picture of someone digging grave. 3. May be in danger from that man 4. Connected to attack on me?

  She added a fourth item on the To Do list: search for station wagon. No point in looking in Cedar Key. That area had been thoroughly covered. She would need to question people near Chiefland, perhaps people in isolated areas. She thought of the caretaker at the Shell Mound campground, of the bleak farm house where she’d telephoned the Sheriff s Office, of the woman who ran the shabby little store on the Suwannee at Fowler’s Bluff, all only a few miles away. Other such places existed along the lonely roads of Levy County.

  She glanced again at the thickening sky and remembered Cara’s phobia. How would she react if she were helpless again in the path of the hurricane?

  CHAPTER 17

  Brandy slipped a Florida map out of the pocket flap of her notebook and figured time and distances. Now it was two. In an hour and a half, even allowing for brief interviews, she could make a sweep of the Shell Mound campground, the road past Fowler’s Bluff, duck down a few dirt roads, and still be home to greet John.

  She drove away with hopes high. No one had really searched yet. Marcia had accepted the notion, like the police, that Cara had simply moved away. But soon Brandy’s optimism faded. The roads around Otter Creek yielded no clues and Brandy’s first stop was a disappointment. The caretaker near Shell Mound had no information. He had not heard from Cara since she asked to leave her car in the campground Friday night, had seen no sign of the station wagon among the few campers and fishermen. Brandy’s excursions among the scattered houses on nearby side roads were equally unproductive. By the time she reached Fowler’s Bluff the clouds were piling higher in the west and a whiff of rain hung in the air.

  She pulled the rental car under the long limbs of a live oak and trotted up the steps of the clapboard store. Behind a counter stacked with hunting and fishing guides, tide tables, and a rack of chips and nuts, the manager was listening to a radio and stuffing a flashlight and some soft drink cans into a tote bag. She didn’t pause when Brandy asked about Cara’s 1980 station wagon.

  “Just a few fishermen at the cabins over the weekend. Last of them cleared out this morning.” A friendly, wide-lipped face looked up. “No station wagons.” She was a tall, skinny woman in a shapeless cotton dress, hair stringing down over one eye, tone apologetic. “Most generally, I’d be proud to pass the time of day, but I’m fixing to leave myself. Radio says they’s hurricane winds out in the Gulf, and they turned this-a-way a coupla hours ago. Locking up soon and going to my sister’s in Chiefland.”

  Brandy glanced out the dirty window at the choppy waters of the Suwannee. Tied to the pier, a skiff with an outboard kicker rose and fell with the waves. Perhaps three hundred yards across the river a thick, unbroken band of trees lined the shore. The county map showed mile upon mile of the Lower Suwannee National Wildlife Refuge along both riverbanks.

  Her memory reverted to Saturday morning—a houseboat chugging down the channel, a fat man on deck. A tall man. A man with dark, bushy hair. “A houseboat went by here last Saturday. Seen anything more of it?”

  The woman rubbed her chin, frowning. “I recollect it ain’t come back. Most generally, the fella ties up at a little bitty island about a mile down river. On the north side, before you get to Little Turkey Island. Probably better shelter there than near the Gulf. We’re twelve miles up river, but we’ll still get some flooding.”

  Brandy opened her purse. “My friend may have gone for a ride with him. Could I rent your boat for about an hour, run down there and pick her up?”

  The frown deepened. “Pretty rough out there already. Be getting rougher.”

  Brandy slid a twenty dollar bill onto the counter. “It’d just take me about an hour.” She looked down at the slack suit she’d worn on the plane. “I’d like to use your rest room and change first.”

  The woman’s plain face still looked doubtful, but she picked up the
bill. “Better hurry, then. I aim to be gone in an hour.”

  Once in her jeans and jacket, Brandy settled herself on the skiff’s rear seat, zipped her camera into the roomy plastic bag, stowed it in the stern along with the boat’s line, and pushed away from the pier. When she yanked the starter rope, the kicker coughed a few times, then sputtered into life. Gripping the tiller, she guided the skiff away from the dock and jolted across the waves down river.

  Her plan was simple. Find and observe the houseboat. Obviously, more than one big stranger with bushy black hair could be in the Chiefland area, but if she saw any sign of Cara, she would get a picture. Her cover story was simple. She was a reporter winding up a feature article about life on the Suwannee.

  Her real task was to reconnoiter and return before the gusts of wind began carrying rain. On the return trip the waves, if not the current, would be running toward Fowler’s Bluff. Her hair whipped around her face, the little boat slapped up and down, bucking the waves, and she often needed both hands to keep it on course.

  She had almost decided to start back, that the sky was too dark, the island too far, when she rounded a sweeping curve and saw the houseboat to her right. The stern rocked near the western end, about a hundred yards from the north shore, a mass of pond cypress, river birch, and water oak, thick with undergrowth. Brandy eased back on the throttle, maneuvered closer, and peered upward. No one was on deck. Not surprising, given the weather. She steered closer. A small jalousie window near the stern would mark the bathroom, or head. Next to it should be a bedroom. A moment later she caught her breath.

  Outlined against the closed side window was a woman’s slim form. Backing around, Brandy cut into the protected strait between the opposite end of the island and the mainland, pointed the skiff’s bow toward a barren spit, throttled back again, and as the boat nosed up onto the tiny beach, killed the engine and leapt out with the bow line.

  In a few minutes she had fastened a clove hitch around the slender trunk of a young cypress.

  A splash startled her, and she whirled to see the ridged back of a large alligator slither into the water behind her. She shuddered. Mid-October, she thought, most ‘gators are already dormant. She drew a long breath and paused, remembering other warnings she knew: Keep an eye out for rattlers and water moccasins, too. They get nervous before an approaching storm. She tucked the cuffs of her jeans into her socks. Then slinging the tote bag with her camera and the extra line over her arm, she edged past a wax myrtle shrub and a spiky tangle of saw palmettos, until she could see the hull of the houseboat, tapered like a fishing vessel. At its bow stood a wheel house with tall, three-sided windows. A sturdy metal rail encircled the boat, beginning at a wide forward deck, running beside a narrow walkway on each side, and ending on the stern, where a dinghy lay bottom up. A thinner rail looped around the cramped top deck.

  Someone had once spruced up the hull with a decorative blue band, but now the entire rig looked unkempt and in need of painting. The place where Brandy had seen the figure was in the lower section. She crouched among waxy white myrtle berries as a massive man in a tee shirt emerged from the wheel house and stumbled out on deck. His stomach bulged over his belt. Heavy black hair blew around his low forehead and across his wide nose and mouth. In one ham-fist he carried a roll of duct tape. He looked toward the clouds, shook his head, and zigzagged to the front window. The boat wasn’t yet rolling enough, Brandy decided, to account for his gait. Maybe he was drinking. Up went a length of gray tape. Of course, she thought, he’s getting ready for the storm. He had two anchors overboard already, fore and aft, and a thick rope sagged from the trunk of a pond cypress.

  Brandy watched him tape the three windows on the outside, then lurch back through the door. Before it closed, he took something out of his pocket, held it against the front window glass beneath the outside tape, and plastered tape over it on the inside. She waited while he slouched down behind the helm and lifted a bottle to his mouth. He did not strike her as the sort who would welcome a reporter.

  Being careful not to step on any twigs, she worked her way through the underbrush to the boat’s stern, waded out, tossed the line over the metal railing, and secured it with a bowline. Then holding fast, she pulled herself up onto the deck. There she dropped the line, lifted the Nikon out of the bag, hung the strap around her neck, and switched it on.

  Now for the hard part. The woman might not be Cara, but surely taking a picture of the oaf’s girlfriend wouldn’t be a crime. She stepped around the dinghy and inched down the catwalk toward the window. Even before she reached it, she heard a sound like sobbing. Finally, by putting her nose against the pane, she could see into the room. Below the window stood a cheap looking cabinet and across from it, bunk beds. On the lower one lay a slim form. As Brandy watched, the woman stirred, raised one arm, then sat up, shivering, her head bent forward. Brandy recognized the cascade of long, dark hair. She raised the camera. Best to get proof, signal to Cara, and come back for help.

  She had clicked the camera and was tapping gently on the glass, when to her right, she heard labored breathing. In nightmarish slow motion she turned. The bulky figure was lumbering down the walkway toward her from the bow. To run or to brazen it out? For a nano-sec-ond she hesitated, and while she was deciding to make a break for the line, the man lunged forward, one huge hand grabbed her, an arm closed around her neck. She could not make a sound, could only smell the liquor and the sweat.

  “What the hell you think you doing?”

  He dragged her, struggling, backward to the front deck and into the wheel house, where he relaxed the arm choking her so that she could breathe, could squeak out her pitiful explanation. “A reporter. Writing a story about life on the river. Looking for people to photograph and interview.” She glanced wildly around, saw the wheel and console, a table with a bottle of tequila and another of vodka, a shabby couch, a galley with a butane stove, a small refrigerator, dish cabinets, a fire extinguisher bracketed to the wall.

  “How stupid you think I am, sister?” Twisting her head against his shoulder and the ropy muscles of his neck, he yanked the bag from her arm. She heard the Nikon hit the floor. “Shit, a reporter wouldn’t be sneaking up on a boat, wouldn’t be out when a freakin’ hurricane’s coming in!”

  He jerked her by the arm into the tiny galley, and with his free hand pulled back a panel above a counter, picked up a hand held transmitter, and pushed a few buttons. “Moose. Yeah. Guess what I got? Some bitch, nosing around the boat. Says she’s a reporter.”

  After a minute, he grinned. “Reckon she’s the same one. Yeah, I can. Gonna be rough tonight. Coming in around nine o’clock. Yeah, yeah. Taped the windows. Gonna move the boat out a little, gotta be able to swing away from the island. Don’t wanna get beached.” A moody silence followed while his arm tightened again around her neck. “Yeah,” he said at last. “When the freakin’ storm’s over. We’ll do it then.”

  His voice fell, took on a wheedling tone. “I told you I got it. Reckon it’s worth a lot, ole’ buddy. I just need my fair share. Yeah, yeah, we’ll talk tomorrow.” Her fingers stretched, touched the red cylinder.

  “Hey!” He dropped the transmitter, grabbed both her arms, and whipped them behind her. His voice took on its familiar rasp. “No funny business, sister. And can the bullshit. We know who you are. Looks like ole’ Moose got two guests tonight.” He dragged her beyond the galley toward a wooden door with one small glass panel. “You go in here with your buddy.”

  Holding her arms immobile with one hand, he retrieved a key from a peg on the wall and unlocked the pocket door. Then he shoved her into a darkened passageway, tossed the unzipped plastic bag after her, and slammed the door. The key turned in the lock.

  When Brandy was next fully aware, she had sprawled at the foot of two steps, her face pressed against a damp carpet rank with mildew, with Cara kneeling beside her. “Oh, God, Brandy. What have I gotten you i
nto?”

  Brandy raised herself on her elbows, her head splitting. “We’re in this together.” Her voice shook and she paused a second. “First, tell me how you got here.”

  Cara helped her up and they sat side by side on the bunk. Wiping her eyes with her skirt, Cara blurted the story of the blue teddy bear, the shock of finding it in Marcia’s closet. She had meant to leave for good, to find a place in Gainesville. She knew that’s what everyone would think she’d done. She knew now that she was wrong, that she never meant, deep down, to hurt Marcia.

  After the drug store, she remembered the chloroform, and coming to, sick. Then she was hoisted into the swamp buggy, still with the man called Moose. They jostled along a two-track road that ended at the river. He had hauled her aboard yesterday afternoon, and later he’d brought her canned soup. So far he’d stayed on the other side of the door. “But he’s drinking, Brandy, saying nasty things. I’m scared to death of him!” Cara’s voice sank to a whisper. Her dark eyes widened. “And there’s going to be a hurricane. I don’t think I can stand it.”

  Brandy put her arm around Cara’s thin shoulders. During the storm, she had to force herself to be the strong one. “Let’s take inventory,” she said, her voice calm. “At least we know more than we did. We know you belonged to the woman at the Otter Creek café.” She stood, her hand pressed against her bruised forehead, and looked at the tightly closed panes. “But knowing that won’t help us much unless we can get out of here.”