I’d already told the sergeant I thought I’d seen someone running away. “Maybe it’s not suicide,” I said.
Marrano’s dubious expression made it clear he’d already made up his mind. “From what I’ve seen, everything points to suicide. I’m not saying you dreamed up this mystery man, but you know the conditions are less than ideal, and you admit your imagination may have been playing tricks on you.” Marrano cut his eyes away from me dismissively and stared into the woods.
“I was pretty shook up,” I agreed, “but it sure looked like someone running into the woods.”
Marrano returned his gaze to me and nodded the way a pre-occupied father might after hearing his four-year-old tell a fanciful story about an imaginary friend. “Looked like someone? Maybe it was Henderson’s ghost.”
My jaw muscles tightened and I barked out, “Why the hell would I make up something like that?”
“Hey, I didn’t mean to upset you.” Marrano flipped to the page in his notebook where he’d written my earlier statement. “Let’s go over it again. You say you were heading to your car to call the police when you thought you heard a sound like someone running and maybe you saw a guy run into the woods?”
“That’s right.” I’d walked him through it twice already, showing him the path the man took.
“How far away were you?”
I shifted my eyes toward the path leading from the lighthouse to the parking lot. “About twenty yards.”
“Uh huh. Then you ran after him, slipped and fell. And he just disappeared into the woods back there.”
“Yeah.”
“And you can’t describe him.”
“I told you it happened so quickly I only got a glimpse of him. Dark clothes, maybe a ball cap.”
Marrano looked up from his notes. “Here’s what we know for sure. It’s darker than crap back there. It’s raining like a sunnuvabitch, and you were probably still in a state of shock from Henderson nearly hammering you into the ground.”
“So you think I imagined it?”
“I’m saying the mind can play funny tricks on us.” He peered into the dark again, gesturing with his chin toward the spot where I’d seen the man run away. “The thing is that we didn’t find any foot prints and no sign of anyone else up on the observation deck.”
I was too tired to spend the night arguing about it. “Do you need anything else from me?”
Marrano tucked his notebook into an inside pocket of his rain jacket. “I’ll tell you what, Mitchell. Why don’t you sit down while I take care of a few things? Then we’ll go to my office. Maybe you’ll remember something else by then.”
He walked toward the two men who had just arrived wearing yellow rain suits with Crime Scene Unit stenciled on the back. I watched while Marrano reviewed the scene with them, pointing to the top of the lighthouse and then to the misshapen heap beneath the blue tarp that used to be Clayton Henderson.
***
Nearly an hour later, Marrano steered me into the interrogation room at the SAPD. I was still wet, and the temperature in the room had to be in the mid-sixties. I began shivering, and Marrano excused himself. I glanced around the sterile, little room at the observation window and back to the table top. The words Life sucks were carved in the corner of the table next to my elbow. Fitting, I thought.
Marrano returned with a cup of coffee and a dry SAPD windbreaker. “Here, this should help. I can’t vouch for the coffee, though, probably’s been sitting there a while.”
“Thanks.” I tasted it and made a face.
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you. There’s something—”
A sharp rap on the door interrupted him.
“Come on in,” Marrano called.
Detective Horgan entered the room carrying a large manila envelope. He was wearing latex gloves. They huddled for a moment, their voices low, before Marrano turned to me. “Detective Horgan’s just returned from Henderson’s house. He found something I think you should see.”
Horgan opened the envelope and with a gloved hand pulled out a slim book with a teal dust jacket.
“A Flash of Silence,” I said. “Henderson must have a thousand copies of that book lying around his house. He even gave me one.”
“We found it on the foyer table opened to this page.” Marrano nodded toward Horgan, and the detective opened the book to the title poem.
Giving it a brief glance, I said, “Okay. That’s kind of his trademark poem. No big deal.” “Take another look,” Marrano said.
The second stanza of the poem had been circled in pencil, and in the margin were the words, no more ticks of the clock left for me—good bye.
“What do you think of that?”
A flurry of confused thoughts flickered through my mind. Maybe he wrote it in a fit of depression. Maybe it was an idea for another poem. Maybe he didn’t write it. “I don’t know. Are you sure it’s his handwriting?”
Horgan and Marrano exchanged glances before the detective answered, “We’ll have to do more tests, of course, but it sure looks like his writing.”
Turning to Horgan, Marrano said, “Thanks, George. I’ll take it from here.”
Horgan returned the book to the envelope, and after he left, Marrano sat in the chair opposite me. He was quiet for a long time, probably waiting for my reaction. When I didn’t say anything, he finally spoke, “You and Henderson were friends, weren’t you?”
“Friends? No, I wouldn’t say that. I met him at Poe’s house a few weeks ago for the first time. They were good friends. Poe and Henderson. Since then I spoke to him twice trying to learn more about Poe’s involvement with this Matanzas Bay project and your brother’s death. That’s about it.”
“You know, as a cop I have to go to these educational workshops from time to time and read stuff about behavioral problems.”
“Is this where I get the mental health lecture?”
Marrano rubbed his eyes and I could see exhaustion on his face. “Hear me out, you might learn something. Suicide’s the eighth leading cause of death in this country and it’s highest in old people.”
“Henderson didn’t strike me as someone who was thinking of killing himself.”
“How many times have you heard friends or relatives say, ‘we didn’t have any idea so-and-so would do something like this?’ That’s the sad part, most of the time they don’t know until it’s too late.”
I remembered what Watts told me about the old man’s mood swings, and how something seemed to be bothering him.
“One other thing that plays into this is alcoholism. Henderson was a boozer, wasn’t he?”
“Yeah, he might have been,” I agreed, “but I don’t think—”
“The suicide rate among alcoholics is three or four times the average.” He let that sink in for a moment before adding, “Everything points to suicide—his state of mind, his drinking, his age. Hell, he even left a suicide note. And he had his own key to the lighthouse.”
This was a side of Marrano I hadn’t seen before. Serious, concerned. “I admit it makes a lot of sense.”
“So maybe your eyes were playing tricks on you and you only thought you saw someone running away.”
The events of the past few hours had taken their toll on me. I felt like an oxygen-deprived diver drifting toward sleep, wanting nothing more than to close my eyes and forget about everything else. With great effort, I replayed the lighthouse scene in my head. The shock of Henderson plunging to the ground. His broken and bleeding body washed by the downpour while I searched for ghosts amidst the lightning strikes. Perhaps Marrano was right and I imagined the whole thing.
I sipped the bitter coffee before saying, “I don’t know, maybe you’re right.”
“Are you aware of anything else that might push him to take his life?”
I’d already told him about dropping by Henderson’s house earlier in the week. I gave him all the details of our final discussion, leaving out Henderson’s tirade about the Marrano family. Now I considered whether to t
ell the sergeant about Henderson’s early history, the death of his wife, and the abandonment of his twins. But besmirching the dead poet’s reputation seemed petty and pointless.
“Not really. You seem to have dug up all the usual suspects—old age, depression, alcoholism.”
Marrano gazed at me then down at his notes. “What about his call to you? Do you think it might have been a cry for help? Maybe he wanted you to talk him out of it.”
That idea had flashed through my head more than once. I wondered what would have happened if I’d arrived an hour earlier. “Could be,” I said, feeling goose bumps shuttle across my shoulders and down my arms. “Any more coffee?” I pushed the empty cup toward him.
I waited another five minutes before the sergeant returned with two steaming cups. “I made some fresh,” he said, and handed me one of the cups.
I sipped it cautiously. It tasted like it may have been brewed this morning instead of last week. Looking up, I noticed Marrano staring at me.
“I think we can put this thing to bed. Henderson, for whatever reason, obviously jumped.”
I started to protest, but he ignored me. “I want to give you the benefit of the doubt, but your story about a third person just doesn’t hold water. There’s no way it’s anything but a suicide.”
“Maybe someone encouraged him to jump.”
“We’ll see what the coroner says.” He stood and I did the same. Leaving the coffee cup and the windbreaker in the room, I followed Marrano down the narrow hallway past dark and empty offices toward the front entrance. Before we got there, he stopped and leaned against the wall.
“Listen,” he said, looking down at the coffee cup still in his hand. “I may have come on a bit strong the other day with my comments about Serena.” He avoided my eyes, his face a blank screen.
“You think?” I snapped, reliving the sting of his racist remark. After hours of listening to Marrano do everything but call me a liar, now I had to listen to his half-assed apology. “I wouldn’t expect anything less from a redneck cop whose grandfather was a Klan leader.”
His conciliatory attitude evaporated, and his eyes narrowed. “Yeah, we’re all a bunch of bigots, aren’t we?” His face had colored, crimson highlights tinting his cheeks.
I recalled Walter Howard’s sad story. The pain and humiliation he suffered at the hands of Bat Marrano. Pain that haunted him to this day. Two boys watched the beating; one of them even took the first whack at Howard’s knee. It may have happened forty years ago, but Marrano needed to know actions had consequences.
“I don’t know if you’re all bigots,” I told him, watching to see how he reacted to my next statement. “By the way, I met Serena’s uncle last week.”
He didn’t reply so I went on. “Walter Howard, the old NAACP president who was beaten by the Klan back in the sixties.”
“It must be serious between you two if she’s introducing you to her family, but why should I care?”
“You’ve lived in St. Augustine all your life and I thought you might have made Mr. Howard’s acquaintance at some time. Maybe years ago during all that civil rights stuff back in the sixties.”
“Can’t say that I have, hoss. I would have been a little kid back then.”
I let it hang there while he sipped his coffee. “Yes, that’s what I thought. Besides, why would Bat Marrano’s grandson hobnob with a civil rights leader?”
TWENTY-NINE
Back at my apartment, I stepped into the shower, hoping to wash away the weariness and painful visions parading through my head. I rolled into bed bone-tired wanting nothing more than a good night’s sleep. About the time my head hit the pillow Dudley jumped on the bed, placed his paws on my chest and meowed in my face.
Dudley is a smallish gray and white cat I brought home from a case that took me to California last year. He sat patiently staring into my face as if waiting for me to answer some unasked question. When the only answer he got was a grunt, Dudley meowed again and gave my arm a headbutt. I knew he wanted me to move, make room for him to spread out. The queen-sized bed had enough space for a herd of cats to my right, but this cat preferred to sleep on my left side, and he wouldn’t let me rest unless I complied. It was like having a wife, but with none of the fringe benefits.
I scratched Dudley’s head and lightly rubbed along his jaw line. He closed his yellowish-green eyes, momentarily lost in feline bliss while his purring motor cranked into high gear. I let him lick my fingers a few times before shifting over to give him space to snuggle beside me.
The story of how Dudley came to be living with me is complex and almost too incredible to believe. The funny thing, though, is that I’d never owned a cat before. Dogs were my thing. I had two or three of them growing up in Connecticut, and Bogie, my yellow lab, has been with me for eight years.
After I rescued the cat, I named him Dudley after Andrew’s big Maine Coon. Andrew came along as a surprise package to my parents who were both in their mid-forties at the time. My sister, Marlie, seemed a bit embarrassed by mom’s pregnancy, but as the only boy in the family I thought it might be nice to have a younger brother.
Dad’s law practice kept him working long hours and weekends when I was growing up. He didn’t have a lot of time for me, but I understood and had my own life with my own friends. Andrew was a different story. Dad seemed to reconnect with his own childhood with Andrew, finding time in his busy schedule to attend many of his soccer games and swim meets.
My own hedonistic lifestyle didn’t leave much room for jealousy. I was a junior in high school the year Andrew turned eight, quarterback on my football team, and working my way through the cheerleading squad. Let’s say I had different priorities. Besides, Andrew’s winning personality, quick wit and 1,000-watt smile made it nearly impossible to dislike the kid.
Dudley sighed as though understanding he was no longer the center of attention. He butted my arm again until I lifted it and allowed him to squeeze in next to me. Andrew named his cat Dudley after the cartoon character Dudley Do-Right of the Mounties on the old Rocky and Bullwinkle show. I stroked Dudley’s soft fur and thought about my brother and the events leading up to his death. Reflexively, I raised a hand to my throat and felt the cool silver chain. Running two fingers along the links, I touched the smooth surface of the medallion, traced the arc of its back from the blunt point at one end to the fanned tail.
Andrew’s swim team was named the Dolphins, and the sponsor, a local jewelry store, gave each of the swimmers a bracelet with a sterling silver dolphin after they won the conference title. Andrew wore the bracelet proudly for a few months before putting it aside after his friends teased him, saying it made him look like a sissy.
I found the bracelet after Andrew died and took it without telling my parents. Before I went off to the Gulf War I had the dolphin added to a silver chain. It’s remained around my neck ever since as a constant reminder of my brother.
“Sorry to disturb you,” I said aloud to the cat, and slid over to the other side of the bed. Dudley eased back on his haunches, eyeing me suspiciously. “Don’t worry, I’ll be back.”
I turned on the lamp and pulled a small photo album with a red, green and black plaid cover out of the drawer of the bedside table. I sat with my legs hanging over the bed, the album cradled in two hands like a holy scroll, and willed myself to open it. Dudley left the warm spot on the other side of the bed and padded over to me. He sat by my side, back straight, eyes moist and golden in the lamp light.
While Dudley watched, I opened the album to a picture of my brother and me in front of my first car. Andrew Mitchell held his cat in his arms. I stood next to him in the photograph, one hand resting casually on his shoulder while Andrew’s head craned up at me, a huge smile on his face.
I remember my mother had received a new Canon SLR for her birthday and was irritating everyone with her zeal to record our family’s every waking moment. That day, I was in the driveway washing my treasured Trans Am, which I’d recently bought secondhand from
a friend. It was a warm Saturday afternoon in May, and I was shirtless, wearing a pair of old shorts and holding a soapy sponge in one hand. I recall mom took forever to get the f-stops right and frame each shot as if she was on assignment for Life Magazine. While she fiddled with the camera, Andrew ran from the house carrying the unhappy Maine Coon. He slid in beside me and I placed a wet hand on his shoulder. He smiled up at me just as mom snapped the shutter.
Looking at that picture of Andrew, sunlight splashed across his face, there was no hint of the traumatic events that would irretrievably alter our family. The photo was a cruel reminder that life deals the cards blindly. To anyone else, there is nothing exceptional in the family photo, just an eight-year-old boy holding a cat and looking admirably at his big brother. But if you knew Andrew, you’d see the sweetness in his face, the intelligence in his eyes, the potential that comes with good genes and social and financial advantages, and an inner strength that was obvious even at his young age.
As he smiled at me, his eyes had a light of expectation in them; filled with the knowledge his big brother would always be there to protect him. Two months later, Andrew was dead.
***
Quint pulled Jillian LeBlanc as close to him as the sport seats in his 1980 Pontiac Trans Am allowed. They were parked in the driveway of her parents’ Tudor-style mansion after taking in the summer’s big hit, Back to the Future. While they kissed, Quint’s hand found her knee and slowly inched north toward the promised land.
The Mitchells and the LeBlancs were close family friends when Jillian and Quint were younger, even taking a few vacations together, but the families had eventually drifted apart. Jillian and Quint discovered one another again near the end of the school year, both of them rising seniors. They’d been dating for less than a month, but to his growing frustration, Jillian successfully managed to keep him at arms length—away from the hot zones, as she put it. Now her right hand clamped down on his just as he was within reach of his goal. She pushed him back with surprising strength for a girl whose idea of exercise was carrying shopping bags from the mall to her car.
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