The night before, Oliver texted me in the charming way teenagers communicate nowadays: “Ant Marian I no u hate erly but rember im ur favorite nefew.” It took me a few beats to translate the hieroglyphics.
He's my only nephew, and knows he'd be my favorite even if I had twenty. Partly thanks to my fellow teaching pro, Bobby, on whom I pinned my hopes for way too many years, I've never married and have no kids. This one, bestowed upon me and the world by my brother and his ex, has been a godsend—at least when he doesn't get me up before sunrise.
But I liked it, hitting balls on a September morning, dew still weeping down the grass, the sun gearing up to slay the fog.
Our driving range is nice, a long crescent of individual stalls, each separated from the next with low wooden slats. There's a second tier above. The upper deck is great as it gives golfers below shade in summer. Otherwise, I've never liked it up there—always feel a little off balance.
Naturally, Oliver was late.
There'd been a spritzing drizzle the night before, which accounted for the fog. Being up early reminded me of my youth, which still doesn't seem that long ago. In my twenties I won the ladies’ state amateur title twice in a row; also won the girls’ version of Oliver's junior tournament when I was his age.
This particular morning, all forty-nine years of me felt ageless. Despite hiccup-like hints of arthritis, my bones, cartilage, and synovial fluid were in happy sync.
I'm a teaching pro at the municipal range here, one of the million training centers in the Florida panhandle. We who ply this trade—those not employed by ritzy clubs—are a dime a dozen. Being the only female pro at Gulf Breeze, my worth's closer to a nickel a bushel.
There were six of us, all PGA certified—LPGA for me—though we sometimes suspected that the newest member of our cohort, Marcello, might have faked his credentials.
We vied for a limited pool of students. Victims, Bobby called them.
When the economy tanks, competition tightens. I'd hear Mr. Joe—our oldest, most girth-challenged colleague—tell a student who was looking for Bobby that he'd do much better if he switched to him, Mr. Joe, even though Joe gives his lessons sitting down and hasn't swung a club in years. Bobby plied his own less obvious methods to steal students from Mr. Joe, Marcello, and Jake and Riley, our two part-timers. Bobby never stole from me. That'd be like raiding a half-empty cookie jar. If anything, he steered clients my way. The less good-looking women, for instance.
Anyway, I was hitting some quality shots with my new hybrid club. Oliver's laugh sounded in the background, letting me know he'd soon appear. He was joking with Gray, who when business is hopping, mans the front desk, but since it wasn't, he wasn't.
And then I heard a ping. One of my shots struck metal. Despite the fog, the glint of a club's shaft caught my eye. It lay about as far out as I might be able to fling one. I slogged through the squishy grass to retrieve it.
Tubing the wet shaft through my hands, I could've sworn it was Bobby's favorite sand wedge. Why Bobby's wedge would be lying thirty yards out, I couldn't fathom. Why anyone's sand wedge would be lying out there, for that matter, was a minor mystery.
I brought the club back to my spot and hooked its head over the slatted barrier that separates one stall from another. Then I hugged Oliver while he made a lame excuse for being tardy.
He seemed several turns more tightly strung than usual. “I'm doing that reverse-pivot thing again, like I used to when I was a kid,” he said, rubbing his bangs out of his eyes with the back of his hand. “Yesterday's practice, I even missed the ball. Pretended it was a practice swing, but it wasn't. I looked like an amateur.”
I didn't bother pointing out that he was an amateur, and also still pretty much a kid. I'm in the encouragement game. You have to be positive, no matter how delusional the hacker you're working with might be. Oliver, full of raw talent, was only suffering a case of the yips.
“Think baseball,” I said. “Swing like a batter.”
“Yeah, that baseball drill.” He commenced swinging, as if a fastball had just zinged across the plate.
I shot a hand out to steady his head. “Feel the weight shift—that simple, natural shift. Now swing lower. Keep swinging like—” I was about to invoke a name in baseball, a hero who, sadly, is more famous for steroid use these days. I dropped a ball on the mat. “Aim at the blue flag.” It flapped a hundred yards out. “You'll need to make more of these short ones than anything else.”
Oliver launched a beaut, nearly hit the flagstick, then followed that with two more, one of which did.
“Wow, you're magic, Aunt Marian.” He turned to deliver a high-five, knowing I'm not into knuckle-crunches.
That's the moment Bobby's body chose to plunk smack dab in front of us. Thump, flop, it went, denting the wet mix of grass and mud.
I looked up at the concrete ceiling above and screamed—felt like my head was about to blow off. Oliver let out a stunned yelp.
That fast, I knew it was Bobby. He'd landed sideways, his back to us, but I recognized the wispy V of graying brown hair at the nape of his neck. More, I recognized the blue-checked windshirt, my gift last Christmas.
Next thing, I was on my knees in the muck, pushing on Bobby's chest with both hands.
He was dead—arms and legs stiff, posed in a weird corkscrew—but I kept pushing, trying.
An unknown quantity of time elapsed. Two cops materialized, followed by two EMTs. I felt sure those EMTs, employing their lifesaving skills, would revive Bobby. Instead, sooner than I thought reasonable, they stretchered him into a vehicle I couldn't place. Not a gleaming white ambulance with fat red and blue running stripes, but a narrow, mud-colored van—the coroner's wagon, I learned. Its rude motor had been churning in the parking lot behind us long enough to arouse my anger.
As the van slowly withdrew, I wanted to launch hand grenades at it to make its live occupants realize they needed to give Bobby another chance, but the two men in blue left behind, with faces so nondescript I thought of them as identical twins, were intent on questioning me.
“How do you know the deceased?” one asked.
I thought he'd said diseased, and that made me remember that Bobby once told me he'd had whooping cough as a child.
Oliver was no longer there. I vaguely recall that he'd tried to comfort me. Later, I heard he'd made his tee time for the tournament. I was glad, but I did wish for a familiar face, all the same. It was just me and these two clowns in blue who wore wide belts with all kinds of gizmos hanging off them.
“Robert Beechum,” one of them said. “You know him?”
“Bobby's a pro here, like me.” I became aware of what I must look like, my capris soaked and muddy at the knees. I picked up the wedge I'd found earlier and said, “Then, this must be Bobby's after all.”
“Can you explain that remark?” the other one said. The way he eyed the club in my hand, you'd think I'd just stolen the crown jewels.
“I found this on the range when I got here. It looks like Bobby's sand wedge, but that doesn't make sense.”
“That's evidence there, in your hand.” He held his arms out like a man who's trying to keep a lunatic from jumping off a cliff. “If you would, very carefully, lean that against the wall where you found it.”
Though that wasn't where I'd found it, I followed directions. I stared at the concrete ceiling above. “Has anyone checked upstairs?” I asked. “Bobby fell? Or did someone push him?”
Neither answered.
I must have been shaking pretty bad because, one on each side, supporting my elbows, they ushered me inside the clubhouse. Gray, his face as gray as his beard and his name, shuffled over and draped his ancient flannel sweat jacket over my shoulders. Soon we were snug in Mackal's office—that's Gulf Breeze's manager. The identical twin cops steered me to a chair and left.
Next thing—it seemed like forever, but also like a very short time, if you know what I mean—a tall, thin woman dressed in a dusty gold pantsuit entered. She pulled
Mackal's chair from behind his desk and rolled it close to mine. Her blouse had a flappy silk bow at the neck, patterned with irregular brownish yellow spots that made me think of a giraffe's coat. Her long neck, jutting above that bow and toward me, nearly bridged the distance between us.
The boss, Mackal, wouldn't like this, I thought. A huge, imposing guy, he wears broad-brimmed hats, Western shirts, and mirrored sunglasses as if, loping in from West Texas, he'd been born into that costume. Boots go without saying. His office is his sanctuary. That's the only moment I cracked a smile, imagining Mackal's face if he just happened to walk in.
Detective Candy Finn caught sight of my grin. That didn't work in my favor.
Anyone with a name like Candy, I can't take seriously. She informed me with great pomp and circumstance that she was the investigator on this case.
“Case,” I said.
“The death of Robert Meechum.”
“I need to talk to Gray,” I said. “Ask if Bobby came in before me. Did he come early, and fall from up there?”
Detective Candy's eyelids fluttered, as if to say, surely you must know this was no accident. I couldn't help thinking her lashes were truly functioning as they might in the wild, to fan away gnats.
“You mean, someone pushed him? Those two cops, I asked them, did they bother to run upstairs, see if anyone was up there with Bobby? They wouldn't answer.”
She gave me the patient smile of a major goddess. “The cops, as you put it, are more used to asking questions than answering them. Now, I have a few.” She tilted back in Mackal's chair and pursed her lips, working them up and down in a way that was supposed to signal contemplation, but which put me more in mind of a giraffe chewing its cud.
When she asked about the exact nature of my relationship with Bobby, I saw no need to hide the fact that we'd been on-and-off lovers. If I didn't say it, someone else would. Someone like Marcello, for instance—our PGA question mark.
I even admitted that Bobby had dumped me for what I vowed was the last time, only two weeks ago.
On the other hand, I didn't feel the need to tell her that Bobby, two bottles of Rolling Rock beer scissored between the fingers of one hand, invited me up to the top deck the very night he dumped me.
He wasn't intentionally insensitive. Bobby just had a very broad streak of yellow, not to mention dumbness, down the middle of his back. Somehow he thought that sitting up top with his legs dangling over the edge as he chugged the brew, would make a nice, comforting scene to inform me that, yet again, he'd fallen for another woman, and that this time, as a few times before, it was the real thing.
Apparently, he thought the upper deck would provide a nice setting even though years earlier, he'd also deemed it the ideal romantic spot to declare a proposal of marriage to me. Unfortunately—or fortunately, as my dad saw it back then—five days later he became enraptured with the trophy wife of a megabucks husband who'd hired Bobby to turn this slicing, hooking, clueless bit of fluff into a golfing whiz.
I saw no need to reveal these juicy tidbits to Detective Finn. As I reviewed the years in my head, I became aware of a broad streak of dumbness in myself. Still, I'd loved Bobby. Though vowing never to go back to him after this latest affair fizzled, I also knew I'd miss him like hell.
“You seem to be hinting that I killed him,” I said, since all of Finn's questions were pointing that way.
Her blinking lashes fanned a few more invisible gnats.
I said, “Well, you can cross me off the list. I was coaching my nephew, Oliver, at the time.”
She answered breezily, “Beecham was already in rigor. You—home alone all last evening—you're still in the mix. We won't have a TOD until the report comes in. Till then, cheers, Ms. Larkin. For now, you're free to go.”
I stared, then squeezed my eyes shut. “You mean Bobby died before I got here, before he fell?”
I hiked my shoulders in disbelief. “How does a body just happen to fall off the top deck, hours later? I mean, how does it choose the perfect moment to drop right in front of me, when . . .”
Candy patted my back as if to say, run along little chick—we'll nail you later.
I squirmed away, trying to evade her touch, to let her know that answer didn't cover it.
She blinked at me with fake compassion. “You were in the right place at the wrong time. He was in rigor. Then something—a breeze?—loosened his hold on those slats.”
I felt more in shock then than when the actual event occurred. Bobby's killer had done the deed and left. Through the night Bobby had hung half on, half off the platform. Later, at the very time I was teaching Oliver, his body decided to keel over, take the plunge in front of us.
Just like Bobby. Always with the practical jokes.
When I emerged from Mackal's office, the full contingent of golf instructors was gathered in the hall, awaiting their own interviews. For a fleeting moment I caught a glint of suspicion in Marcello's eyes, our beloved Argentinian of the dubious PGA credentials. But then he and the others crowded around me, expressing their sorrow at Bobby's passing. They clearly understood how hard this sudden death was.
Just then Mackal strode in. His brow furrowed at the sight of us. Working up a dismissive if vaguely wondering glance, he lifted his shades onto his forehead, then opened his office door. The language that ensued broke the tense mood in the hall.
Next thing, it was Mackal backing out—that big man, almost on tippy-toe. Candy Finn won the battle of his office, and clued him in that not even he, Mackal, was above suspicion.
That night, when I finally crawled into bed, it hit me full force. Bobby was gone.
I clutched my pillow as if it might turn into his warm, familiar body—and then, I couldn't help it—I laughed. A scared, tired, drawn-out laugh he might have shared, if he only knew about all the crap I'd gone through that day on his account. Bobby had a keen love of the absurd.
For all of his infidelities, I loved him. Sure, maybe he deserved a kick in the pants on a regular basis, but not this deadly blow to the head.
That was the coroner's conclusion, I heard the next day. One perfectly launched bop to the temple with Bobby's own sand wedge, which the killer then flung from the top tier into the outer space of a black night. I pictured the club cartwheeling in the short grass, then lying still, waiting for morning when one of my balls was destined to ping off its dew-laden shaft.
I couldn't sleep that first night. Who was Bobby's new girlfriend anyway?—a question I hadn't brought up with Candy Finn. Was she a student, or someone he'd met on the outside? Perhaps he realized he'd made a mistake. Invited her up to the top tier to dump her, as he'd dumped me, and she, being an unbalanced type who couldn't take rejection—she'd clobbered him with his own sand wedge. Or maybe she had a jealous boyfriend or husband who'd dragged Bobby up there after hours. All these possibilities roiled in my head.
When I woke after what seemed like years of tossing and turning, I remembered I had a nine o'clock lesson waiting. Two more would come before lunch. After lunch, if no one stood me up, I'd be busy until three. Then, once school let out, my juniors would descend on me—a group of fifteen high-strung highschoolers I teach two days a week.
I could cancel everybody, but the bills that drop through my mail slot aren't interested in personal griefs or sleepless nights.
At the range, everything had changed, right down to the ordinary workings of gravity. Balls popped off even the best students’ clubs at weird angles. Some who'd heard about Bobby acted as if nothing had happened; others expressed sorrow; a disgusting few seemed avid for details.
Gray hugged me first thing. Our oldest full-timer, Mr. Joe, though disapproving of my presence there on principle—I'm female and he thinks women are so hopeless they should be barred from the sport—sent a few gruff but caring words my way. Even Marcello, who usually only teased me about my hair or my skinny bones, spared a few moments to pin me with his beautiful liquid brown eyes and say with his signature romantic eloquence that al
though Bobby had been my sorry-assed lover not long ago, his own heart bled for me like the world's greatest river.
Still, for the rest of the day I sensed that when any of us passed each other, our eyes didn't quite meet. The part-timers too. It was as if instead of feeling we'd lost a comrade, they were embarrassed to admit that the thing wasn't as clean as that.
Bobby was well liked. No matter, we were competitors. Someone killed him. Could that person be one of us?
I wondered if the others thought me guilty. I admit, I wondered if a fellow instructor could have done it for filthy lucre. Not Mr. Joe. He was too slow of foot, too mired in his own cobwebbed, semimisogynistic head. But what about Marcello? It seemed to me he had the most to gain.
And gain he did. In the next two weeks, Marcello picked up more of Bobby's ex-students than the rest of us put together. He won the lion's share of Bobby's young guys, the ones who think they can shoot the moon, and a big chunk of his middle-aged duffers, and of course, nearly all of Bobby's female golfers, at least the ones who weren't so hormonally challenged as to be dead to Marcello's masculine charm.
Four of Bobby's older men gravitated to Mr. Joe, and for him, that addition was a big bonus. The two part-timers gained a few also. I ended up with three older women, one geeky guy, and a pretty good younger fellow who told me that Bobby always said I was a great teacher. I have to admit, that bit of posthumous praise coming from Bobby felt good.
But Marcello troubled me. Though Mr. Joe was the one who questioned his PGA pedigree the most, grumbling about false advertising and how the boss should check his standing in the PGA, I believe Joe kept his mutterings out of Marcello's hearing. Bobby, on the other hand, had the bad habit of joking about Marcello's status right to his face.
Bobby wasn't being vicious. He wasn't even much keyed into the issue. He was just the kind of guy who loved to discover fresh subject matter for a teasing.
Later, when Bobby heard that Marcello was not only from Argentina, but was also half German, he invented a new round of jokes, hinting at his blood ties to famous Nazi war criminals who'd migrated to that South American sanctuary. Though Marcello would laugh along, I sensed a pained smoldering in his eyes.
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