Wreckers' Key

by Christine Kling

  The sight of the photo struck at me like a hot iron in my gut. Closing my eyes, I fought down the memory and the nausea. “Geez,” I said. I held my hand out in front of me. “Stop right there. I can’t take it. You know that. If you want me, I’ll be in the kitchen.” I walked straight through the living room.

  I found my nephew standing in front of the refrigerator staring at the contents. I pointed a finger over my shoulder in the direction of the living room. “Is it always like that around here?”

  “Pretty much,” he said without moving from his spot in front of the door.

  “Doesn’t it gross you out? I just can’t understand what they think they’re doing. Do you get it?” I asked, looking over his shoulder, hoping to find something to snack on. He didn’t answer my question. We stood side by side staring at the little plastic tubs of sprouts and hummus, packages of some very dense-looking, dark bread, and

  Baggies filled with an assortment of fruits and vegetables. “This is pitiful. Zale, you are seriously junk-food-deprived.”

  “You’ve got that right.”

  “Maybe we should freak out your mom and order a meat lover’s pizza.”

  “Naw, I think they’re doing some stir-fry thing tonight. It’s not too bad.”

  They this, they that. I’d thought I was past being jealous of Molly in a lover’s sense. But now she and B.J. had entered into this buddy phase. They were always studying together, cooking together, hanging out together. Was I being naive to think it meant nothing?

  “Zale, I just don’t know about you. You actually eat their cooking? All this healthy food just might stunt your growth.”

  He looked over his shoulder at me and screwed up one side of his face into an ugly grimace. “I just want to be a real boy,” he said in a goofy falsetto, then he grabbed two apples out of the crisper bin, tossed me one, and strolled out of the kitchen, his long legs taking him around the corner in an instant. I tried to reach him to pinch his ear, but he was too quick for me.

  In the year since I’d first met Zale, he had grown nearly three inches in height. Now, as a fourteen-year-old, his voice was starting to change and he seemed to be all arms and legs, but he had a confidence and a sense of humor that made him seem much more mature than other teens his age. Pit and Zale had both shown a love of sailing early on, but for Pit it had started with surfing and then windsurfing. For Zale, it was competitive dinghy sailing, and he took it all much more seriously than my brother ever had. Qualifying for the Laser National Championship series up in North Carolina might have had something to do with that, too.

  I took my apple and went out to Molly’s screened-in back porch. A flock of wild parrots were circling overhead, screeching and squawking, sounding like a chorus of squeaky hinges. A gray squirrel was playing hide-and-seek with me, peering first around one side of the trunk of the huge oak tree, then disappearing and popping up on the other side a few seconds later. Late afternoon sunlight was casting a golden aura over the scene, making Molly’s backyard look like a magical place from a fairy tale.

  When we’d first moved to this neighborhood here in Shady Banks, my family and Molly’s used to enjoy summer-evening cookouts in this backyard. It was mostly families that consisted of parents and children who lived in the modest sixty-year-old cinder-block houses on the street. Molly’s family sometimes included her Gramma Josie, but in the Sullivan household, we’d been told all our grandparents were dead.

  I’d learned recently that it had been my grandmother Faith who had worked behind the scenes to find the waterfront house my family lived in and make sure it was available at a price my parents could afford. My mother, Annie, never knew. She wouldn’t have accepted help from her mother. They’d argued when she’d married Red and never spoken again, and of course once my mother died it was too late for Grams to apologize to Red. So we three kids grew up thinking our grandparents were all dead—until last year.

  I was slowly getting to know Faith Wheeler. Even now, after almost a year, I was still working on getting comfortable with the way my family had grown. My brother Pit was trying to transition from friendly uncle to father, while I was spending one night a week eating dinner at my grandmother’s house. And I was learning about the family’s long line of mothers who had pretty much struck out in the mothering department. There wasn’t a reason in the world to think I’d be any different.

  I liked the extended family I had now—Grams, Zale, my brothers, Molly, Jeannie, B.J. And I didn’t have to give birth to have this family.

  I heard footfalls behind me and then felt fingertips slide over my shoulders, his firm chest pressed against the back of my head. He kneaded the muscles on either side of my neck, and though I know it should have made me feel more relaxed, given my current circumstances, it made every little nerve ending in my body start screaming for sex. It was as though every place where his body touched mine, pure heat flowed from him. He bent down and kissed my ear, and I bolted out of the chair.

  “Jesus, B.J., unless you think it’s a good idea to tear our clothes off right here, you’d better slow down and—” When I turned around he was laughing.

  “You are funny, Sullivan.”

  “I hate it when you laugh at me.”

  “I know. Do you want to talk about what’s bothering you?” He was leaning against one of the frames that supported the screened-in porch. I noticed the light dusting of black hairs on his forearms, the clean white half moons on his fingernails, the promise of strength in the breadth of his chest. At that moment, talking wasn’t really what I wanted to do with the man. I wanted to be the one sitting on the couch with him, snuggling, not Molly.

  “No.”

  “Why not? You don’t think I’ll understand?”

  “No, that’s not it. You always understand. You understand too much sometimes. Let me keep some secrets.”

  “Okay. No secret talk, just business. Remember when you asked me a couple of weeks ago to help you with a tow this week?”

  “Yeah. Wednesday, I need a deckhand for that sailboat.”

  “This new class Molly and I are starting. We’re supposed to go to a meeting Wednesday morning. I’ll still go if you need me, but it would be better for me if you could find somebody else.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’ll find somebody. Go to your birthing babies thing.”

  “Thanks.” He turned to go inside.

  “B.J.,” I called out, and he turned back to face me from the doorway. “I don’t really understand what’s going on with you and Molly. What’s this midwife thing really all about?”

  “She asked me to take these classes with her and I said yes.”

  “But why?”

  He sighed and looked out into the backyard. “For me, it’s about karma. Every spiritual view has in its moral code something similar to the First Commandment or Buddha’s First Precept—‘I undertake to abstain from killing living beings.’ There was a time when I was in my teens, back in LA, when I didn’t live by that code. I had some bad friends back then and I hurt some people. Some of my actions generated a boatload of bad karma. If by helping Molly and by learning to ease life into this world I can generate a bit of good karma, then that’s the right path for me.” He turned to me and smiled. “This isn’t making much sense to you, is it?”

  “I’m trying to understand. In all the time we’ve been together, I never knew that you had a stage when you were a bad kid. How bad is bad?” I looked at the size of him, how he filled the doorway to the kitchen. “You didn’t kill anybody, did you?” I said it half jokingly, but he didn’t smile.

  “No, but I learned how. I trained and I did hurt people. The guys I hung out with were all Asians, and we were into martial arts. I guess, in a way, we were a gang. We didn’t have a name, but we could do more damage with our hands than some guys did with knives. I don’t like to think about those days. I continue to practice aikido for the spiritual quality of the art, not the martial side. I do my woodworking on boats and now I’m doing this wi
th a friend—studying to deliver babies. Because she asked me to. Because she needs me.”

  “And you don’t think I need you?”

  He laughed. “You need me for something else. Not for babies. Not now. But here, now, I have a chance to be a part of this giving of life and I’m enjoying it.”

  I wanted to understand him, but I knew that this was about more than karma. “Do you really want a baby of your own that much?”

  He paused before he spoke, and his eyes answered my question. “Yes, I do.”

  “And it’s okay with you that I really don’t?”

  “Yeah,” he said. He turned around and then called back over his shoulder, “For now it is,” as he walked back through the kitchen to join Molly in the living room.

  It was dark when I pulled into the drive at the Larsens’ place, and when I turned off the engine, I just sat for a while in the front seat of the Jeep. I could hear Abaco whining on the other side of the gate. She recognized the roar of Lightnin’s engine and she didn’t understand why I wasn’t moving. I didn’t either.

  The night could have ended differently, more like I had originally planned. I could have had B.J. follow me home to share my bed. But I wanted to be his first choice, not the person whose needs could be met after Molly’s. I had pushed him away all evening, and with B.J. being who he was, he didn’t miss the signals. He didn’t say anything except good night when I decided to go.

  I slammed my open palms on the steering wheel. “Dammit.”

  Catalina and her swollen belly, Molly and her midwifery, B.J. and his baby dreams. I was surrounded by reminders. Childbirth might be normal and natural to ninety-nine percent of the population, but not to me. I couldn’t handle it. Motherhood. Ha! Some people were born with certain genetic defects. I was born maternity-impaired. You only had to look at my history.

  Abaco danced her wiggling doggy-joy dance down the walkway in front of me as I made my way back to my cottage. It wasn’t until I opened the front door and turned on the light switch that I became aware of an impression that I’d been feeling all the way down the walkway. Something was wrong.

  At first, I couldn’t put my finger on it. I stood frozen in the doorway looking around the cottage trying to see what was out of place. Abaco sat down in the center of the room, cocked her head, and looked at me as though asking me what was up.

  “I don’t know, girl. There’s something—” I stepped over to her and reached down to scratch her ear. I understood when I felt the leather under my fingers.

  Abaco was wearing her collar.

  Had B.J. come over while I was gone all day? Surely he would have said something at Molly’s if he had. I walked out into the kitchen and looked around. The two mugs were upside down in the dish drainer. I hadn’t washed them. Had Catalina done it this morning before we left? I couldn’t remember. I crossed into my bedroom, flicked on the wall switch to turn on the bedside lamp, and Molly’s stir-fry almost paid me another visit. I distinctly remembered leaving my covers in an unruly mound, but now the spread on my bed was pulled so smooth you could bounce a quarter on it.

  XVI

  The offices of Berger Communications were located in the 110 Tower across from the courthouse in downtown Fort Lauderdale. Parking was always impossible around there, so Monday morning I was standing on the seawall lowering my Boston Whaler into the river when Perry Greene came by in his towboat Little Bitt pulling what looked like a forty-five-foot cruising sailboat.

  “Morning, beautiful,” he shouted over the roar of his engine. As usual his boat had black soot streaks down the sides and a heap of old lines and fenders and crap piled in the aft cockpit. It was getting to the point that Perry and I were almost the only one-boat owner-operators in the South Florida corporate world of towing and salvage. I wasn’t thrilled to have anything in common with the fellow who, at that moment, stood up from the helmsman’s seat and bent over to check on the clearance on the starboard side of his tow, flashing me with the sight of a good two inches of butt crack in the process.

  The Whaler splashed into the water. I was reaching out to tie off the lines when I noticed that Perry had stepped away from the helm and turned his back on the forward progress of his vessel. He pointed first at himself, then at me, and then he started thrusting his hips forward and back, his hands balled up in fists, his tongue lolling out the corner of his mouth in what I assumed was his imitation of ecstasy.

  I pursed my lips, attempted to raise one eyebrow, and pointed upriver. I laughed out loud when Perry turned around and saw that Little Bitt was lined up for a head-on collision with the Carrie B., a 112-foot replica of a paddle wheeler bringing her first load of sightseers downriver. He nearly gave himself a hernia trying to get back to the helm to steer his boat out of the way of the Carrie B.'s broad bow, her laughing captain blowing the whistle as he passed.

  Behind me Abaco whined, asking if she could go along on this river ride. “Not today, girl. I’ll take you down to the beach for a swim later, okay?” She gave me a look that told me I’d been neglecting her.

  The outboard started up at the first turn of the key, and I kept the boat speed slow to enjoy the beautiful winter morning—and to prevent any danger of catching up to Perry. I wondered if he had heard about the symposium that afternoon over at the fishing museum. Perry was more of a fringe player in the towing and salvage business, but he’d been around quite a few years now, and he had his customers who were loyal to his cut-rate prices.

  I stifled a yawn and shook my head to try to clear the sleep from my brain. I hadn’t slept well. With all I’d been through the last couple of years, I had installed new locks on the front door of the cottage as well as an inside chain. After checking all the windows and closing all the blinds, though, I still lay staring at the ceiling and listening much of the night. A stranger had been in my house, and that idea had shattered my ability to relax.

  I tied the Whaler up to the seawall now in front of the Downtowner, my favorite riverfront restaurant and bar, and ran a lock and cable through a cleat. With the Broward County Jail not more than a hundred yards away, the location tended to attract some interesting individuals, and I supported the concept of keeping honest people honest— and keeping the dishonest people the hell away.

  The offices of Berger Communications occupied the entire ninth floor, so when I exited the elevator, I approached a receptionist seated at a low desk behind an enormous flower arrangement of orchids and bromeliads.

  “May I help you?” she asked in a voice that suggested she could have had a career recording voice-overs for Disney.

  “I’m here to see Ted Berger.”

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  “No, but I’m sure if you tell him I’m here, he’ll see me.” While the look on her face said she’d bet a month’s salary against it, she said, “And your name is?”

  She wrote it down on a lined notepad on her desk. “If you’ll just take a seat. Mr. Berger is on the phone right now, but I will let him know you’re here as soon as he’s available.”

  I strolled over to the seating area intending to settle onto the couch, but stopped for a bit to look at the pictures on the wall behind the furniture. Ted himself was featured in every single photo. Many of them were team shots of women hockey players gathered around Ted, and in each one he wore a different garish, loud Hawaiian shirt.

  “Your boss sure does seem to like photos of himself.”

  “Mr. Berger is Berger Communications.”

  “I see. So it’s just marketing, not egomania?”

  She laughed. “Well, maybe it’s just a little of both.” She picked up the phone and spoke quietly into the handset. A few minutes later, the door behind her opened and Ted Berger came out wearing a shirt with blinding orange flowers, a color that surely had never appeared in nature.

  “Come on into my office. I’ve only got a couple of minutes.” He ushered me through the door into a huge modern office with windows that looked out across the treetops to the oce
an beyond. His desk had three different computers, one laptop and two with large flat-screen monitors. He pointed to one of the chairs opposite his, and I sat on the buttery leather. “I want to thank you for getting the Power Play up here right on schedule. I wish the folks at the boatyard could move as fast. They’re telling me a month, minimum.”

  “The yards here get pretty backed up at this time of year. I just thought I’d stop by and present you with this invoice.” I reached into my shoulder bag and withdrew the envelope I had prepared that morning. I placed it on the blotter under one of the monitors. “I realize I could have just left it with your secretary out there, but I’ve had something on my mind and I wanted to ask you about it.”

  “What is it?”

  “That afternoon down in Key West when you stopped by in your boat and asked me to help you in the search—” I paused, not exactly sure how to go about asking my question.

  “Yeah, what about it?” He sat up straighter and ran a hand through his white hair.

  Great. Now he was acting guilty. I figured it would be easy enough to ask him about the photos because I didn’t really believe he killed Nestor. But here he was tapping a pen on his desk, clearing his throat, and acting like he wished I’d get the hell out of his office.

  He stuck out his arm and looked at his watch. “As I told you, I don’t have much time. What is it you wanted to speak to me about?”

  “I have a friend. He has a charter schooner in Key West. He and I went out to dinner, and a friend brought over some photos from the Wreckers’ Race. I was very surprised to see your yacht tender pulled up on the beach in a couple of the shots because you told me—”

  “Ah, yes. That I had been out fishing Bluefish Channel.”

  “Right. And see, if you had been out at Sand Key during the race, even considering the speed you’d make with that big outboard, I just don’t see how you could have been fishing out there barely half an hour after the race was over. And since Nestor’s death was peculiar with him being a windsurfing champ and all, I just wanted to ask why you lied.” There. I’d said it. I supposed there was the remotest chance that he did kill Nestor, but I felt certain he wouldn’t hurt me there in his office with the secretary on the other side of the door. “Have you ever been married, Seychelle?”