SHADOW OVER CEDAR KEY

by Ann Cook

  “A timber road. It must go to the pavement,” Brandy called. The buggy twisted around hammocks, under live oak branches, the heavy wheels grinding deep into sandy ruts. A clump of Spanish moss blew across the windshield. Brandy slowed, and Cara climbed over the gear shift, swept the hood clear.

  “My money’s on Moose, not the ‘gator,” Brandy said above the roar of engine, wind, and rain. “He has the gun. He’ll go back to his boat, call his friend. They’ll cut us off.”

  She rounded another hairpin curve, through the gathering dark saw a trough in the road, tried to swerve around it, and mired the front wheels. She gunned the buggy backward and tried to rock out. Sand and debris flew up, but the wheels spun deeper.

  “Just as well,” Brandy said. “We can’t stay on the road. They’d find us in a minute. Buggy probably doesn’t go more than thirty miles an hour.” She opened the soaked bag and drew out the boots. “Put on the rain gear—it’ll be some protection—and the boots. We’ll hike north, toward the road that connects the main highway to the town of Suwannee. Before it’s completely dark, maybe we can turn toward town. It’s our best chance for help.” With our luck, she thought, we’ll probably stumble on the Shell Mount ghost instead.

  The sky was a seething, charcoal mass, lit by a sulfurous yellow. Here the flat-topped cypress had thinned and they tramped, heads lowered, through stands of slash pine, cabbage palms, and red maples. Rain stung their faces, leaves and twigs fell in showers around them. Wind pushed against them from the west. Their boots squished, left huge sandy tracks that Brandy hoped the rain would wash away. When she stepped on a small pine limb, she picked it up.

  “This’ll do to poke under shrubbery when we stop.” Cara’s eyes widened. She knew why. To scare away rattlesnakes. Ahead to the left through the growing darkness and rain, Brandy saw two lights moving steadily closer, away from the Gulf. Soon she heard the drone of a car engine. They must be near the paved road to the town of Suwannee. Quickly she pulled Cara beside her, thrust the stick into a thicket of palmettos, then drew Cara closer. Water spattered up from the asphalt as the car neared.

  “We can’t take a chance. Might be Moose’s friend.” They squatted and watched the car vanish through the rain. At least they knew roughly where they were. “We’ll push a little farther, parallel to the road. On the map it’s straight. But we’ve got to find a safe place to stop, get ready for the big blow.” Brandy had lost all track of time, but there was no way to look at her watch, even if it had survived in the plastic pouch.

  “I’m thinking of rattlers,” Cara said through her teeth. “How about climbing up in a live oak?”

  “Can’t risk it.” Brandy raised her voice above the wail of the wind. “First things to go down in a hurricane. We need a low spot, someplace to flatten out.” She’d never heard of lightning during a hurricane, but she didn’t want to be near tall trees. They came upon an open field, then one reforested with slash pines, and finally reached a slight rise where a clump of young cabbage palms bent forward in the gale.

  “Here,” Brandy called. “Behind this little hill.” She couldn’t walk any farther. Shuddering, she prodded the grasses and tall weeds around the palms with her stick. Then they dropped, gasping, onto the sodden grass. As blackness descended, they huddled together in the pocket of earth, engulfed in the sharp smell of wet soil. Brandy could scarcely make out the swaying white trunks above them. Somewhere near, a pine snapped in two, its top crashing to the ground. Brandy opened the dripping bag and rooted in the bottom for the plastic pouch. So far Cara had borne up well, driven by terrors even greater than her fear of the storm. But until it passed, she had to take care of them both. One step at a time.

  Fumbling with the opening strip of a cracker pack, she handed Cara a handful of crumbs, a distraction from the descending blackness. “Where’s the Shell Mound ghost’s light when we need it?” Brandy asked, trying to raise a smile from Cara.

  From the west swelled a gigantic roar. Brandy pulled the line out of the bag, circled it around Cara’s waist and her own, and lashed them to the trunk of a short cabbage palm.

  Now the real test would come. She put her lips against Cara’s wet ear and shouted, “Dante passed through all the circles of hell safely. We will, too.” Water streamed by, puddled at their feet. They flung their arms around each other, closed their eyes, felt the ground shake. The shrieking wind tried to tear them apart or knock them against the palm trunk. They heard the wood creak and bend. The howling and gnawing lasted until Brandy thought they could not endure more, would surely break like the long limbs of the live oak.

  And then, suddenly, the wind stopped, the drenching rain became a patter. Ceased. Brandy looked up and saw a patch of clear sky, the glow of the rain-washed moon.

  “It’s over!” Cara sat up, struggling against the cord. With wonder, Brandy saw a dark quick shape spring from a nearby thicket, eyes like coils of fire, a tawny flash of bobcat, too busy to worry about humans. Brandy laid a restraining hand on Cara’s arm. “Wait. Could be the eye is passing over.” She had heard of the calm in the center of a hurricane’s deadly rotating winds. By the faint light, she shook her watch out of the pouch and peered at it. Eleven o’clock. In the eerie stillness the cabbage palms righted themselves, the pine branches fell silent.

  But Brandy could sense the coming change. A movement in the air, a quivering among the palm fronds and palmettos, a rolling cloud. She unsnapped her slicker, slipped her right arm out, and threw the plastic around Cara’s shivering body. And then the hurricane struck again—total blackness, raging wind, the drumbeat of torrential rain. She tucked in all the ends of the rain slickers as best she could, wrapped her arm around Cara’s rigid shoulders, and gripped the line. The plastic lifted, fought to break free, but the line held. Brandy rested her head against the rocking trunk and prayed.

  Sometime during the long night, she dozed. First she was in the vestibule of hell, being blown along with sinners who would not commit to moral rightness. Then her dream changed. She was covered with water, two year old Cara in her arms, sandbags falling around them down cistern walls.

  Once she thought she heard John call her name, and a thrill ran through her. He would come out of the darkness and find her. But when she tried to go to him, she woke to the roar of wind and water.

  CHAPTER 19

  Dawn came with the dying wind, a smoky glow under thick clouds in the east. Gusts still shook the palm fronds and ruffled the tall grass. Beside the road lay a huge oak, its roots a knotted tangle in the air. Brandy untied the line and shook Cara gently by the shoulder. “We’d better hit the road, the sooner the quicker.”

  Cara raised her head, wonder in her eyes. “We survived.” She held up the plastic tote bag. “I saved this.” Faint color now tinged her cheeks. The stiffness had gone from her mouth.

  Brandy smiled for the first time and slipped on her watch. Six o’clock. Separated from the road by marsh grasses and a wide ditch, they passed under a line of pines, scrub oaks, and an occasional soggy maple. Gradually the sun rose at their backs, screened by clouds. One car flashed by, going toward Suwannee, but they hid, afraid to hail it. Any car might carry Moose’s partner.

  In two hours they skirted a fallen restaurant billboard, slogged through a heavily forested area, then a burned field. At intervals dirt roads branched off toward the river. Next came hardware store and fish camp signs, a few manufactured homes, a trailer without a roof. But no cars or people. No signs of life. Brandy took an irrational comfort from the slender white steeple of a tiny church.

  Ahead rose a water tower, then cabbage palms and a few cottages on a network of brimming canals that forked toward the river. To the north lay a marsh of saw grass and needlerush and a distant stilt house, to the left a road that crossed a small concrete bridge. A hand-lettered board with an arrow read “Lazy River Marina. Dawn to Dusk. Open now.”

  Cara halted. “Le
t’s see if the sign’s really true. I’ve got to sit down.” Brandy looked again at her watch. Ten o’clock. Beyond the bridge she could see the high metal roof of a boat hangar, shut off by a locked gate. They shuffled to the bridge and collapsed on its low concrete side. Brandy pulled off the boots she had taken from Moose’s boat and set them at the edge of the bridge.

  “We shouldn’t need boots now.”

  With a sigh, Cara removed hers while Brandy turned to examine a structure at the river’s edge beside the metal boat hangar, a smaller frame building with open shelves for dry storage, a few boats in the slots. In front stood a seedy looking store on concrete blocks. Water ran level with the back steps and flooded the area around a lone pick-up truck. In the weeds inside a chain link fence lay the broken hull of an old fishing boat. The gate to the store was open, and when Brandy stood and peered more closely, she saw that a door beside a boarded window was open, too. Above it a second sign announced the Lazy River Marina. Brandy read aloud, “Storage and Service Seven Days a Week.”

  Her whole being trembled with joy. “We’ve found another human being. There’ll be a phone and a safe place to wait.”

  Cara raked her fingers through her stringy hair and glanced down at her muddy jeans. “Think what we must look like.”

  “The least of our worries.”

  As they skirted the smaller hangar, Brandy glanced up and recognized a familiar boat, a walk-around with a console amidships and the name “Fisherman’s Fling” on the prow. She remembered that Blade Bullen, AKA Nathan Hunt, fished this area, that he’d been coming to

  Suwannee to store his boat before the storm. Her heart lifted. Maybe they would find a familiar face.

  They trudged up wooden steps between corner pilings and into a wide entrance area, its walls posted with marine charts. Before them stretched a long, dank room crammed with displays of fishing lures and rods, cans of oil, sweatshirts, bathing suits, shorts, and tee shirts. Everything reeked of mildew. Beside a cluttered counter near the front, a black Labrador retriever sprang to his feet and barked. But the man pulling duct tape from a plate glass window turned and gave them a huge smile.

  “L-land, l-look what the cat dragged in! My God, w-where you girls been?” He dropped the tape and came forward, a stocky, middle-aged man with a gap between his front teeth and a slight stutter.

  Cara saw a straight chair beside a stack of plastic foam minnow buckets and sank into it. Brandy clutched the counter. “We were caught in the hurricane. We need to use your phone to call the Levy County Sheriff s Office.”

  “L-lands, girl. Of course. L-lucky the phone’s back on. I’ll make the call for you. You look hungry. Let me get you something to eat. You still wet?”

  While the lab, calm now, sniffed her leg, Brandy glanced down at her damp and wrinkled shirt and jeans.

  “I’m the owner here. Got a little office in the b-back of the store. It’s got a couch and some hot coffee. You g-girls go right in there. Clean up and take a load off your feet. You l-look bushed. I’ll call now. T-tell them to come get you.”

  Scuttling toward the rear door, he showed them a small room with a desk, a battered leather couch and chair, a window covered with plywood, and wonder of wonders, an adjoining bathroom. “Just give me your n-names.”

  Giddy with gratitude, Brandy paused in the office doorway. “Cara Waters and Brandy O’Bannon. They’re probably out looking for us now.”

  “Sure thing. L-lands, glad I stayed last night. Worried about my c-customers’ boats, you know. It was bad, but I reckon they mostly c-came through all right. C-customers will be along any minute to check. Be right back. Soon’s I make the call, I’ll rustle up some sandwiches been in the cooler.”

  He retreated to a corner of the counter and picked up the phone. “S-sherifFs Office? Lazy River Marina in Suwannee. Yeah, okay. Say, I g-got two drowned looking gals here, but they’s all right. O’Bannon and Waters, I believe they said they names was. Yeah, you can c-come get them. I’m gonna give them some grub and let them clean up a bit here. Yeah. S-soon’s you can make it.”

  Brandy was sprawled on the couch with a hot cup of foul-tasting coffee when he came back with the sandwiches. “You wouldn’t have a comb, would you?” She had taken a fleeting and horrified look in the cracked mirror above the sink.

  “Well, now, I’ll look. K-keep a few supplies for c-customers. I found these.” He handed her two tee-shirts that said “Shark Mania” and two women’s cotton shorts of uncertain size. “Y’all can pay me back l-later. At least them’s dry. I got a c-customer coming in now. Picky about his boat.”

  Brandy accepted the clothes with thanks and heard the door click shut behind him. While Cara changed in the rest room, Brandy pulled off her sticky jeans and shirt and struggled into the fresh outfit. Both top and shorts sagged. After Cara emerged, trying to straighten her wild, dark hair with her fingers, they hunched together on the couch, bone-weary, devouring the stale bread and baloney.

  “I’ve got to call John,” Brandy said. She wondered if he had learned about the overturned skiff. Maybe divers were already searching the river. She was overwhelmed by the need to hear his voice, even that bland tone on the answering machine.

  Cara looked down, sheepish. “I ought to try to reach Marcia.”

  “MacGill said she was frantic with worry.” Brandy turned the knob, but the door did not open. Maybe it was stuck. No, through the crack she could see the bolt. She felt a stirring of anxiety. “Why would the guy lock the door from the outside? We’d do the locking.” It was an old door with a sizable key hole. “Must be a dead bolt on the other side.” Lowering her hands, Cara stopped eating and stared at the door. With growing panic, Brandy rattled the knob. “Hey, let us out!” She realized they did not even known the proprietor’s name.

  Silence. She pounded on the door with her fist. At last they heard footsteps growing louder, then halt before the door. Their host bent down with a self-satisfied chuckle and put his lips close to the key hole. “Soon’s the storm passed, I had a c-call from a buddy. Wasn’t hard to figure out where you g-gal’s would head. Now t-take a close l-look.” There was a pause. He was backing up. “Got me a right handy little piece here.” Brandy could see the black nozzle of a revolver. “J-just as soon use it on y’all, if I hear another peep. Stay quiet, you won’t get hurt. G-got one customer out front. If he hears a thing, y’all are dead meat.”

  Brandy slumped down on the couch. “Oh, God, we walked right into a trap. Twinkle-tongue suckered us in here with those damn handwritten signs. He didn’t call the Sheriff’s Office. He called Moose. He’s part of the drug ring. I’ve known some wonderful people who stutter, but he sure isn’t one of them.”

  Cara stifled a sob. “Maybe his customer heard us.”

  “Not likely. He’s been out by the dock.”

  Brandy shuffled to the door and squinted again through the key hole. At the front of the room she could see a plate glass door open. The marina owner came in and turned to talk to someone else. Behind the squat shape of the proprietor loomed a tall, slim figure. She held her breath.

  “If the river calms down enough, I’m taking the boat out this afternoon,” the man said. “I told the Sheriff s Office my father and I would join the search.” The voice sounded familiar. When the stout owner disappeared to the right of the doorway, Brandy clearly saw Blade Bullen standing in profile before the counter.

  Frantic, she turned to Cara. “A note! Find a piece of paper. Look on the desk!”

  Cara rummaged through the top drawer and pulled out a legal-sized envelope. Fingers shaking, she scrawled a line in pencil and handed it to Brandy. It read “Help! Look in the marina office. Kidnapped!” She signed it “Cara.”

  The younger Bullen still lingered at the counter, his wallet in his hand. Brandy slipped the envelope under the door, gave it a mighty push. Through the key hole she could see i
t slide across the floor. The wind from the open back door caught it, sent it skittering farther. Cara knelt beside her.

  “He’s the guy who’s probably your half-brother,” Brandy whispered. Bullen turned, took a step toward a display of lures, and stepped on the envelope. When he moved, another gust blew it against the chair. The black lab raised his head and watched it flip over, face down.

  A heavy weight settled in Brandy’s stomach. Cara crawled up on the couch and covered her face with her hands. They heard the front door bang shut. “Blade Bullen’s planning to look for us—you, mainly,” Brandy said. “That’s ironic.” She stood and dusted off the baggy new shorts. “Frank Bullen—I think he’s your father—must be coming to Cedar Key.”

  She sat next to Cara, her mind washed clean of ideas, too tired to think anymore. “You know what the last circle of Dante’s hell is?” she asked at last.

  Numbly, Cara shook her head.

  “The circle of deceit. The one sin that only man commits. Fitting, isn t it?

  Cara’s brown eyes looked up, wet. “And how did Dante and his guide get away?”

  Brandy thought for a minute. “They climbed down,” she said. “They climbed down Satan’s flank.”

  Cara stared at the plywood nailed across the window frame on the outside. “We can’t wait here like fish in a barrel for Moose.” Brandy looked at her drawn, purposeful face and remembered the young woman who had gone alone into the night time forest to photograph a ghost. The hurricane had passed. She was strong again. Maybe from now on. “Help me move the couch over by the window,” Cara said.

  That done, Brandy could see the seat was about level with the sill. She managed to open the latch of the double hung sash and force up the lower pane.