The Orchid Keeper: A Sean O'Brien Novel

by Tom Lowe

  • • •

  Chester Miller thought about his rather odd experience deep into the glades. In decades of working to restore orchids in the glades and Big Cypress Preserve, he’d seen a lot of unusual occurrences. Most had to do with nature, the fragile ecosystem, and how man’s interjection changes the balance in plants and animals. He’d met his share of eccentric people and squatters traipsing through the wetlands on everything from airboats to swamp buggies. But, somehow, they all seemed to mesh and connect with the unique tapestry of the landscape.

  Today was different.

  The man appeared very out of place. It was more than a deer in the headlights. It was a juxtaposition of sight and sounds as the man drove an expensive automobile around a muddy bend in a trail like a bat trying to find its cave before sunrise.

  Chester thought about that image as he sautéed pieces of chicken breasts and sweet onions in a skillet on the propane stove, the cabin filling with the scent of carnalized onions and biscuits.

  Callie sat at a small table in the kitchen, sipping a glass of sweet tea, uploading orchid pictures to social media. Chester watched her as he stirred wild rice in a pot. He opened the oven and removed a dozen hot biscuits. “Dinner will be ready in a few minutes. You might want to wrap up your work as we can use the table to eat on, too.” He grinned.

  Callie turned back in her chair to him. “I can shut down in five seconds. Smells great. Where’d you learn to cook so well, Grandpa?”

  “Practice. After your grandmother died, I developed a whole list of new skills. Cooking was one. The honey for our biscuits tonight came from the beehives out back. So, I managed to merge biology and botany with culinary. It’s good to experience different things all your life. Take risks.” He chuckled, setting the food on two plates.

  “Grandpa, you said you didn’t see all the police cars and the helicopter flying over the preserve, right?”

  “Thought I heard something like a helicopter way out in the boonies, but I didn’t make the connection ‘till you mentioned you’d seen one. Wonder what they were looking for?”

  “Looks like they were searching for someone lost.”

  “Lost? Who? A child?”

  “I’m reading a news story now. Hold a sec …” After half a minute, Callie looked up from her phone screen. “It says that a man has been missing in the glades since yesterday. Sheriff’s deputies found his truck. Guy’s name is Joe Thaxton. He’s running for a seat in the state senate. He lives in Stuart, Florida, and was in the glades doing water samples. He has a degree in marine biology.”

  “Does it say what kind of truck they found out there?”

  “Hold on … I’ll read some more … yes. It says his truck was a 2019 Ford F-150. And it was locked. There’s been no sign of the man, though.”

  Chester set the plates on the table, his thoughts focused on what he’d seen in the glades. Callie said, “I hope they find him. It says he has a wife and young daughter. Are you okay, Grandpa? You look tired all of a sudden.”

  He nodded. “I am tired. Planting orchids in the glades can do that to a man my age. It’s not the planting part so much … it’s hiking through the elements to find the best places to replant. I hosed down my waders before you got back home. I had mud on ‘em up to my hips.” He poured sweet tea over ice in a Bell canning jar and sat down across the table from his granddaughter. “Callie, that truck you described. I saw it or one like it out in the glades.”

  She looked up from her food. “You did? Did you see any sign of the missing guy, Joe Thaxton?”

  “No but I did see something odd out there.”

  “What was it?”

  “A man.”

  “A man? That’s not too odd, depending where you were in the glades.”

  “It was for this fella. He was coming down a very muddy dirt trail in a fancy and expensive SUV. And he was in a hurry to get out of there. I got a glimpse of his face. He didn’t look like a typical hunter, woodsman, or even a nature-loving photographer.”

  “Then what did he look like?”

  “A man on a mission. Like someone who absolutely didn’t want to be there. I think I surprised him.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Just drove on by without so much of a glance or gesture toward me, and this was after I backed my truck off the trail to give him room to pass.”

  “Really? That is kind of discourteous behavior considering you two were probably the only humans for miles.”

  “I don’t think so. Less than a half-mile further in the glades I came up on the pickup truck you just described from the news story.”

  Callie licked her lips, sipped her tea, and looked at her grandfather. “Do you think the guy you saw did something bad to the missing man, Joe Thaxton?”

  “I don’t know … but I do know that I feel obligated to call the sheriff. Maybe what I have to say can help them.”

  Callie said nothing. She searched her grandfather’s face, looking deep into his pale blue eyes, seeking something that wasn’t there—an assurance that all would be well. He smiled. “First things first, young lady … we bow our heads in prayer and be grateful for the food on our table and for the two of us having our time here together. You’ll be leaving soon to return to college. And I’d prefer not to think about that at the moment.”

  FIFTY-ONE

  Sammy Tiger was legendary when it came to the hunt. For more than thirty years, he’d been supplying local restaurants with fresh frog legs, catfish, and gator meat. At the Gator Café, fried frog legs were a delicacy and one of the most popular appetizers—second to gator tail bites. Sammy, sixty-five-years old, and a full-blooded Seminole, pulled a ten-foot, flat-bottom boat behind his Jeep Renegade. He drove at night into the swamps bordering the reservation and Collier County.

  He navigated through muddy trails into his favorite places to hunt for bullfrogs. He parked and got out of the Jeep. Sammy wore a black, wide-brimmed bolero cowboy-style hat, loose blue jeans, long-sleeve shirt buttoned at the top of the collar. His hair, dark as a crow’s feather, hung to his shoulders. Tonight, he quickly pulled it back in a ponytail.

  He glanced up at dark clouds moving in front of the moon. His round face was saddle leather brown, puffy eyes were guarded, observant, taking in everything. His powers of observation made him an extraordinary hunter.

  Sammy could taste the promise of rain in the air. He knew the frogs could taste it, too. This was one of the best times for frog gigging. Right before a rain. The frogs would be out in full force, singing their baritone grunts, waiting for the fat raindrops to fall, soaking their world and refreshing the swamps with a baptism from mother nature.

  He decided to use the boat later. He pulled his waders from the back of the Jeep, slipped them on over his jeans, adjusting the suspenders. He’d spend the first half-hour wading in the back water, holding a three-pronged, long-poled gig in one hand, a 454 Ruger pistol clipped to his belt. He carried a burlap sack in the other hand. He’d use his boat in another area he’d visit tonight, a place where the water was, in places, over his head.

  Sammy took off his hat and strapped on an LED headlight, the lamp resting on the center of his forehead. He turned the light on, returned the hat to his head and started wading through knee-deep water under massive cypress trees heavy with Spanish moss. He moved slowly, listening for the frogs, careful not to make any noise as he walked through the swamp. But, with each step, the mud under the water burped up gases. He could smell the slight odor of sulfur and plant decay. The breeze carried the scent of spawning fish on shallow beds.

  He heard the first croak. A deep-throated bullfrog somewhere along the bank. Sammy walked slowly, feeling fallen limbs under his waders. His light moved across the water and shoreline. He listened again for the croaking. It came louder as the first drops of rain softly fell. Frogs were one of the few creatures that called the hunter to them. Still, it took a sharp aim with the gig to stick a frog from a boat or standing in waist-deep water.

&nb
sp; He spotted a large frog sitting on mangrove roots. He steadied the light in the frog’s eyes, the creature’s face bright green, like freshly washed celery. Its body larger than Sammy’s hand. He lifted the pole, the sharp prongs less than three feet from the frog. Sammy waited a moment for the frog to exhale a loud croak and then he struck, pushing the three prongs through the frog’s body. In less than five seconds, he’d dropped the frog into the burlap sack. He continued the hunt, the dying frogs thumping against Sammy’s left hip where the sack rested. Within ten seconds, there was no more movement.

  Sammy walked another twenty feet in the center of the slough. He saw the red reflection from the eyes of an alligator. He looked at the width between the gator’s eyes. The wider the space, the longer and bigger the gator. Even from fifty feet, he could tell the alligator was not that large—under six feet. No problem. Should a larger one, especially those more than ten feet in length, become aggressive, a round from the Ruger between its eyes would end it quickly. That had happened only three times in all the years hunting in the swamps. For the most part, the gators preferred raccoons, rabbits, snakes, and turtles.

  As he walked, the water become shallower. It was now just below the knee and there were less frogs. He decided to get out of the slough and walk along dry ground to another area less than fifty yards south.

  As he approached the bank, a cottonmouth water moccasin slithered from the mud into the water. Its body was as thick as his forearm. Under the bright light, Sammy watched it swim by him, a few feet away. He knew if he tried to gig the snake and missed, it would become aggressive and attack. Its fangs couldn’t penetrate his thigh skin through the thick waders, but he preferred not to challenge the snake.

  Sammy stepped out of the water, turned the light off, the weight of the dead frogs pulling against the shoulder strap attached to the burlap sack. He walked south, heading to one of his favorite spots to gig frogs. He’d gone less than one-hundred feet when lightning splintered through the dark clouds. In the light from the flash, he spotted something on the ground near old live oaks and lofty Everglades palms. Sammy could tell that the object wasn’t supposed to be there. It was incongruous, out of place with the land and trees.

  He reached under his waders, touching the grip of the Ruger. But something told him he would be in no need of the gun. The object on the ground was too still, too peculiar in the way it lay out in the open to be a threat. Sammy came closer, and even in the dark, he could tell that the object was a man. Maybe the man was injured.

  Sammy walked faster, the waders slowing him down. Lightning popped again, and in the bright white light, he could tell that the man was dead. Sammy stood next to the body, turned on the flashlight. The man had died lying on his back, eyes open, staring at the heavens. Soft rain fell on the body, the water dripping down the dead man’s face giving the appearance of tears falling to the ground beneath the boughs of old oaks and cypress trees.

  Sammy remembered the tribal elders telling him his great grandfathers hid in this area, behind the trees and palmetto bushes when the army soldiers rode by on horses, hunting them after the final Seminole war, the remaining members of the tribe forced to flee deep into the River of Grass.

  FIFTY-TWO

  I fell asleep thinking about the time I met Sam Otter, the most revered Seminole medicine man alive. His creased and weathered face was the color of bourbon, prominent nose, deep-set eyes like black marbles, white hair in braids. It was last year when my friend Joe Billie took me to Sam Otter’s home on the reservation. The old man and his wife lived on two acres. Behind their small, concrete block home were two chickee structures. One open-air, palm fronds on the roof, a black, wrought iron caldron simmering chicken stew over a fire.

  The other chickee hut was walled with knotty pine lumber pulled from a gnarled barn. It was in here where the old man kept hundreds of unlabeled canning jars on shelves. The jars were filled with twigs, pieces of root, grasses, tree bark, bits of flowers, stems, mushrooms, and dark mud. He was known as the healer to the Seminoles in Florida and Oklahoma.

  I remember Sam Otter packing his bamboo pipe with ingredients from five of the canning jars. He led Joe and I through his garden filled with fist-sized tomatoes and tall, green corn. There was a pen for two hogs, the chickens ran loose, and Cracker the dog—part wolf, shepherd and yellow lab, followed us from about fifty yards away where Sam stopped near the base, of the largest cypress tree I’d ever seen. It towered more than 150 feet in the air, and at its base the diameter was larger than the width of a mid-sized car. Sam lit the pipe, chanted in the Seminole language and blew smoke directly into our faces. Joe looked at me, smiled and said, “Just breathe in, Sean. It is an honor that he is doing this for us. It will help bring clarity of thought.”

  The old man stared directly at me, took a long drag from the pipe and blew thick smoke into my face. I remember the smoke smelling like holly, burnt moss, pinesap, pond muck and tobacco.

  I saw a dead man’s face under a burst of lightning.

  Rain pelting his ashen skin. His eyes locked on the heavens.

  I sat up in my bed. I was home, in my river cabin, Max curled in a ball at the foot of the bed. Rain falling on our tin roof. It had been a restless night. Max and I had left Ponce Marina and driven back to the river cabin after talking with Dave and Nick, sharing the information Cory Gilson had given me about finding Joe Thaxton’s backpack and drone control. Sleep in the old cabin tonight was restless, mixed with potholes that jarred me awake each time I tried to dodge them.

  It was a little after midnight when the rain started, and thunder jolted me from dark dreams. I lay awake, listening to rain playing against the tin roof, thinking about Joe Thaxton somewhere in the glades. Was rain pouring down there? Was he holed up at the base of a large tree to keep the water off his body? Was he even there? And if so, was he alive?

  At 5:00, I got up, showered and put on a pot of coffee. An hour later, at the crack of dawn, Max and I walked down my long yard to the dock. I carried a blue ceramic mug filled with black coffee, steam rising. The morning cool and clean after the heavy rain, a crisp scent in recharged air, glossy droplets clinging to pine needles and leaves.

  A week earlier, I’d bought four small orange trees in large black plastic pots. I planned to spend part of the day digging holes and planting each tree. Maybe in a couple of years, I could pick fresh oranges and squeeze them for juice during slate gray mornings like this one. A little liquid sunshine when nature refused to provide the real thing.

  We walked to the end of the dock, and I sat on the wooden bench facing east. The surface of the river was flat, a dark mirror reflecting darker skies. I lifted Max up beside me. She rested her chin against my thigh. There would be no sunrise to watch this morning. Steely overcast rainclouds covered the horizon in all directions.

  I sipped the hot coffee, the steam floating up from the mug seemed to be the only movement around us. It was as if the birds didn’t feel an urgency to rise. No sign of fish breaking the surface of the river. Nature was subdued, needing a real reason to get out of bed. A light rain returned. I sipped my coffee and watched dimples pop on the wide surface of the river, listening to a pileated woodpecker drilling into the trunk of a dead cypress. I thought about Jessica Thaxton and what range of emotions she was no doubt feeling. Somehow, the pewter gray dawn was the perfect backdrop for a pale morning of mystery.

  A raindrop hit Max between her eyes. With her chin still resting on my leg, she looked up at me. If I could read her mind, she was probably asking why I didn’t think to bring an umbrella. When I was first training her to approach the door when she needed to go outside, I often brought an umbrella with us in Florida’s rainy season. Dachshunds can be picky where they pee. Max can be downright finicky, often walking in semi-circles until she finds the right spot with all the correct ambiance and smells.

  A movement on the surface of the river caught her eye. Max stood on the bench watching a young alligator, no more than three feet in leng
th, swim near the end of our dock. The gator used its tail to leisurely propel it toward the far side of the river, the Ocala National Forest. A white curlew flew to the top of a palm tree and belted out a wake-up call for this section of the river to hear.

  Within seconds, an osprey appeared from nowhere and hit the river with a loud smack, the bird’s talons sinking into the back of a garfish. We could hear the osprey’s wings beat the damp air, the fish wriggling, water dripping from his tail. Ten seconds later, the osprey flew to the top of a bald cypress tree, breakfast at its feet.

  The harmony of nature was interrupted when my phone buzzed. Max glanced up at me. Through cause and effect, she learned that the phone was usually a source of intrusion. I looked at the caller ID. It was Wynona, and it wasn’t yet seven in the morning. Probably not a good sign. “Good morning,” I said.

  “I wish it was a good morning, but it’s not.” She sounded tired.

  “What happened?”

  “Remember me telling you how long it’d been since there was a murder on the rez?”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “As of an hour ago, that’s ended. Joe Thaxton’s body was found on the rez, right over the boundary line. He’d been shot once.”

  “You’re sure he was murdered?”

  “He was shot in the back. I’d say that’s probably a good sign that he was murdered. Sean, I have to take a call. I’ll call you as soon as I can.”

  FIFTY-THREE

  Wynona parked her unmarked car and approached the body with respect and professional curiosity. She wore her dark hair up, blue blazer over a white shirt, jeans and flat shoes. A half-dozen members of the tribal police department were already there, along with two senior deputies with the Collier County Sheriff’s Office, their green uniforms standing out from the blue uniforms that the tribal police wore.