Death by Marriage

by Blair Bancroft

  And then the massive gray rocks of the jetties were behind us, and something else big and gray loomed up almost close enough to touch. Chad’s houseboat. Mixed emotions flooded through me. Just when I needed him most, the drunken burn-out was probably passed out on the couch. And then I saw a bulky shadow on the sundeck. Chad stretched out on a lounge chair? I waved my sweater anyway. See me, see me. SOS. Hey, Chad! Not that the cops didn’t know we were in trouble, but still . . . I guess I couldn’t quite give up on the guy. And, besides, any port in a storm, right?

  The shadow never moved, but I caught a glimpse of a sneakered foot. Passed out on the sundeck instead of the couch. Great.

  My hand hit the edge of the porthole hard as Mutt the Hulk yanked me off the bed. No comfy Crystal cushion this time. I hit the deck hard, banging into a few other solid bits of wood on the way down. The Hulk stood over me, looking his fill. Unfortunately, he appeared more pleased—okay, more salacious—than angry. After a glance at my right hand—empty—I did a fast survey of the floor between the beds and the bunk I’d been kneeling on. Back up to the porthole, where no telltale bit of white now fluttered.

  “It’s gone,” Crystal whispered. The Hulk leered.

  “Get lost,” I told him, while telling myself my lacy bra covered as much as a bikini top. But I don’t think the Hulk saw it that way.

  “Later, babe,” he promised. “Maybe Betty’ll give you to me instead of dropping you overboard.”

  Overboard. That’s not what Marshall said. But my guess was that Virginia Mills’s real name was Betty, and she was boss, Marshall not much more than a convenient bit of charm.

  “You’ll never get past the drawbridge,” I told him. You’re trapped, bridge in front, cops behind.”

  The leer wavered. He backed out, locking the door behind him.

  “Fucking A, it’s full up!” Eric’s shout easily penetrated the door between the main cabin and the stateroom. Rainbow’s End shot ahead at flank speed, spraying water and a roiling wake that slapped both sides of the narrow waterway as we approached Needle Key’s south bridge. If all else failed, the eco-terrorists would get him for this.

  “It’s coming down, will we make it?” A high-pitched screech from Vanessa.

  Silence. I pictured the people in the main cabin holding their breaths as the bridge did its ponderous crawl down to flat and locked. If it had been on the way up when the cops signaled “close,” it would have had to complete its cycle, allowing whatever boat had signaled “open” to pass through before going into its closing routine. The distance from the jetty to the drawbridge was short, and Rainbow’s End was tearing through the water so fast I expected it to rise up on plane like a hovercraft any moment.

  Back at the porthole, I caught a glimpse of the old Coast Guard dock. We were there, the bridge dead ahead. I couldn’t see . . . and then I did. The great steel girders were just above us, at maybe a forty degree angle. Too close, too close. I heard the bridge gears grinding. Lower still. Crunch. Clang. The flying bridge buckled but didn’t give way. At least that’s how I interpreted the rending noises followed by shouts of jubilation coming from the main cabin.

  We were through. Behind us the drawbridge thudded into place directly in front of the police boat, Sea Tow, and whoever else had joined the blockade of the Golden Beach jetties. I could hear the laughter in the next room as Eric turned up the volume on the frantic radio calls for the drawbridge to open again and let them through. Rainbow’s End settled to a slightly more sedate pace, presumably so it wouldn’t attract attention as it passed some of the most expensive real estate in Sarasota County. The next drawbridge was less than six miles ahead. No way was Rainbow’s End going to make it as far as the next outlet to the Gulf, twelve or so miles and two more bridges past that. Maybe the Johnsons, or whoever they were, should stop laughing and start thinking.

  The door opened and the Matriarch walked in—her face triangular, with narrow eyes, a pointy chin, a mouth permanently set in a grim line, and ash blonde hair right out of a bottle,. All she needed was the long, crooked nose and a broomstick to make her Poster Witch of the Year. Letty might be twenty-some years older, but I suspected Marshall hadn’t minded courting a woman who was softer, prettier, and more pleasant in every way.

  “Are you Marshall’s wife,” I got in before she could open her mouth, “or maybe his mother?” Low blow, but I enjoyed her reaction. The witch didn’t like it at all.

  “You know what happens to the superfluous?” she hissed. “They’re expendable. Gone. Dead,” she added in case I’d missed the point. I heard Letty gasp. Or maybe it was Crystal. “But the boys seem to think they’ve earned the right to play a bit first.”

  Though nausea threatened to close my throat, I interrupted her threats. “What’s Vanessa to you? Daughter? Eric’s woman? What?”

  “Never give up, do you? Miss Nosy Parker in the flesh.” She put her back to the companionway, shaking her head. “Nessa is family, some sort of cousin. So are Burt and Don. Eric and Johnny are mine, real chips off the old block.”

  I could attest to that. She’d probably taught them to shoot before they could read.

  “Eric and Nessa?” I prodded.

  “Shacked up years ago. Don’t much go for marriage licenses in our family.” She gave me an evil grin. “Except the ones that are good for lots and lots of cash, that is. Great institution, marriage, as long as the old Croesuses don’t live long.”

  Letty whimpered. Crystal hugged her, murmuring words of hope. Some hope, I thought glumly, but if rape kept us alive until help arrived . . .

  Bile rose in my throat. Remember, I scolded myself, Scott is out there, and Boone. And by now, surely, the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Department, complete with helicopter and more patrol boats. I just had to find a way to keep us alive until they caught up. And through whatever happened after that.

  “What’s your real name?” I asked. “I doubt it’s Johnson.”

  “Betty Williams. We’re the Williams family,” she returned proudly. “Known from one end of the country to the other. Cream of the cons, that’s us. Slip in, slip out. No one knows we’re there until it’s all over.”

  “Not this time.”

  She gave me a look that would have fried Medusa and all her snakes. “Thought you outsmarted us, didn’t you, bitch? Well, I got news for you. The Williamses always get away. We’ve had a few close calls before. This time’s no different. We’ll get out of here and get the old woman’s money too. And the boys can have a field day with you and fatso. Johnny’s always liked the Rubenesque type.”

  I reminded myself this was a good thing. Otherwise we’d already be dead. The Matriarch wouldn’t have given up the family name to anyone who was likely to live to tell the tale.

  Rubenesque. I was surprised this woman who’d lived her life off the grid even knew the word. Crystal was still hugging Letty, her shoulders heaving hard enough to make the peonies wave like lilies of the field. Damn! It was all my fault. I’d pushed and pushed and plunged us all into danger.

  “Why did Eric kill Alexis Lippincott?” I asked. “That’s what caused your plans to fall apart, not me.”

  “Because he’s a fool,” Betty Williams snapped. “My son, the idiot. Trying to milk a D.C. lobbyist. You ever hear of a lobbyist that wasn’t fly to every trick in the book? Pushed her too hard and she threatened to call the cops.”

  Eric wasn’t the only one who was stupid. My overweening curiosity had demanded I ask the question when, if I’d thought about it, I really didn’t want an honest answer. Betty Williams could have lied. She hadn’t. Which meant bye-bye Gwyn, bye-bye Crystal. We weren’t going to be witnesses at Letty’s wedding.

  Rainbow’s End suddenly slowed to a near crawl. My heart somersaulted into hope. Another blockade? The county helicopter had found us?

  But I saw no flashing lights, heard no whirring rotors. Only the low thrum of our engines, cut back almost to idle. Betty Williams’s eyes gleamed with triumph. What on earth . . .? />
  A sharp right turn sent us all scrabbling for support. I righted myself, leaped for the porthole. We were leaving the Intracoastal, turning into a river lined with softly glowing lights from McMansions and their small private docks. As far as I could tell, Jeb was running without lights, which meant we would soon disappear into the gloom of shallow water and lurking mangroves, leaving the chase boats to run up the Intracoastal until they reached the next bridge and realized they’d been had. Did Jeb plan to double back, or keep going until he found a place to offload us all? If this was the river I thought it was, we might be able to get within easy walking distance of the Tamiami Trail, where the Williams family undoubtedly had cohorts who would pick them up.

  If we didn’t run aground long before we got there.

  “This river is too shallow,” I said. “We’ll never make it.”

  “Mud and sand. Brannigan says we will, even if we have to plow a channel.” The Matriarch gave us one of those robot-like handwaves: so long, it’s been good to know you, good-bye. Her face reflected the satisfaction of a snake digesting a juicy young rabbit. She’d come to see us for the sheer pleasure of torturing us with what was to come. She’d enjoyed it.

  Unless I did something fast, our day was going to end in rape and murder.

  Chapter 22

  “You know, my dears,” Letty said as I gazed mournfully at mansions and mangroves as we moved steadily east, away from the Intracoastal, “my father always had boats. Bigger than this one, of course, but I’m not unfamiliar with the architecture.”

  I cocked an eye behind me and saw that Crystal was looking just as I doubtful as I felt. Letty was losing it. Not that I could blame her. Our situation was dicey, to say the least.

  “Gwyn dear, listen, please.”

  Schooling my face to a careful neutral, I turned away from the porthole and faced Letty and Crystal, who were once again seated side by side on the opposite berth.

  “This is the master stateroom,” Letty continued, sounding like a kindergarten teacher addressing her class on the first day of school. “Owners always want their privacy, which usually includes a small patio on the aft deck.”

  Like Chad’s, I thought, only his was far from small. Was Letty on to something?

  “Since they wouldn’t want to go outside and shimmy their way along the catwalk, there should be an opening from here to the aft deck. If you check that panel between the beds, Gwyn, I believe you’ll find it’s a pocket door, concealing a more substantial door to the outside. Which would, of course, be locked from the inside, not the outside.”

  I followed Letty’s gaze. I’d never seen a piece of paneling that looked more solid.

  “Try it,” Crystal urged. “I mean, what can we lose? Well, are you just going to sit there, Gwynie? Get up and take a look!”

  “We’d been warned, rather nastily, not to turn on the lights, which had suited me just fine while I pressed my nose to the open porthole. But now . . . I needed light—but if I found the switch, the light would shine under the companionway door. They’d know. So I had to locate Letty’s alleged sliding panel in Stygian gloom. I stood up, running my hands slowly over the narrow strips of wood that formed a panel between the two berths. No sign of a crack, crevice, latch, push button, or handle. The wood resisted all my efforts. Silly. You fell for an old woman’s childhood fantasy.

  But with two hopeful faces fixed on me, giving up was impossible. I tugged, I pulled. Still nothing. No, not quite. On my last passage over the paneling, I thought I’d heard something flop. Like a loose strip of wood. Heart pounding, I felt my way back across the central portion of the panel. There! My breath hitched, my throat went dry. A definite crack in the wood, horizontal, instead of vertical. I pushed, felt it give, fractionally. I moved my fingers down, pushed again. No luck. I moved my fingers up, two or three inches left of my first try and pushed again. A single strip of wood tilted up and out, forming a handle.

  Fumbling in the dark, I grabbed it with both hands before it could flop back into place. This time when I tugged, the panel slid open without protest, revealing a glass door leading onto an aft deck with a small round table and two canvas captain’s chairs. Beyond that, Rainbow’s End cast a silvery wake as she moved forward at little better than No Wake speed. I could almost feel Jeb’s fear that we could run aground any moment.

  “Go!” Letty urged, “both of you. Get out of here before it’s too late.”

  “We can’t leave you! We all go,” I said.

  “Can’t swim,” Crystal said.

  “And I’m too old,” Letty declared. “Besides, Betty’s hooligans aren’t interested in an old woman, and they won’t kill me until after they find a preacher who needs money badly enough to marry Marshall and me, willy-nilly. And by that time, you’ll have told the good guys where we are, Gwyn, and Crystal and I will be rescued forthwith.”

  Letty was right and I knew it. But now that the moment had come, fear ballooned up like an evil genie released from a bottle. Mom listed a house in this neighborhood she couldn’t sell for ten cents on the dollar, because it was necessary to disclose that the crawl space under it was Grand Central Station for local water moccasins. And in addition to evading poisonous snakes, there would be alligators, a disturbingly mucky bottom and the necessity of crawling over a maze of octopus-like mangrove roots before I reached solid land.

  Maybe gang rape wasn’t so bad, after all.

  Not if followed by certain death.

  And, besides, I had two people to save besides myself.

  “Now!” Gwyn dear,” Letty urged. “That awful woman could come back at any moment.”

  Letty was right, but if I survived the water moccasins, the alligators, and the mangroves, I had a sudden vision of pounding on the door of a multi-million dollar waterfront mansion in a sopping skirt that clung to me like a second skin and a skimpy white bra. Humiliating maybe, but I’d definitely look the part of a genuine disaster. They might leave me on the doorstep to freeze, but I was pretty sure they’d call 911.

  Then I remembered what those twin diesels did to Martin. Any leap off the boat would have to be a good one so I wasn’t sucked in by the powerful engines. And I didn’t dare dive—who knew how deep the water was even a scant few feet outside the channel?

  If I get through this, no more sleuthing forever and ever. But I had my fingers crossed, and my guardian angel was probably laughing.

  Well, too darn bad.

  I kicked off my two-inch heels, stripped off my knee-hi’s. Gave both women a hug. “I’ll get you out of here, I promise,” I whispered, hoping they couldn’t feel my fear. I slipped the latch on the glass door with no problem, and then I was out, sliding along the stateroom wall to the side of the river nearest land. I peeked around the corner, down the length of the boat. Not a soul in sight. Evidently, all the bad guys and gals were still in the main cabin.

  Thrum, thrum, thrum. The sound of twin diesels turning deadly, flesh-shredding props. I gazed at the low railing around the deck and felt my legs turn to jelly as I wondered how I could clear the boat from a standing start and not simply drop straight over the side and end up like Martin.

  Move it!

  I told my inner voice to shut up. I had to think this through or be chopped liver. I carried the small table to the railing, bracing it with a canvas chair on each side. Gingerly, I used one of the chairs to climb up on the table, expecting it to collapse under me at any moment with a clatter that could be heard all the way to the main salon. But I made it. No time to think—balancing on the table top was like dancing on a high wire, and I was definitely not cut out for the circus.

  I pushed off, throwing myself as far out as I could. The cold hit me like an ice bath and sent me rocketing away from the port side at a swim speed that might have qualified for the Olympics. Amazing what sheer terror can do.

  I was right about the muck. When I experienced the euphoria of seeing Rainbow’s End disappearing around a bend in the river without so much as a shout of alar
m, I put my feet down. Yuck! The mud was so perfectly awful, I laid flat out and breast-stroked my way to the mangroves, which were just as slimy as I’d feared, with nasty little shoots rising up out of the muck to pierce my bare feet.

  As I lay there, nose to nose with a whole carpet of black mangrove shoots rising from the mud like spikes on the mat of some Indian fakir, I heard an alligator roar. Snap. Crunch. Some poor turtle was no more. And worse, the alligator was feeding close by. Hopefully, the turtle was supper and not just an appetizer until he could find something larger.

  Heedless of the mangrove spikes, I scrambled to my feet, trying not to splash. To an alligator, splashing signaled food. And it wasn’t going to be me.

  I peered over the mangrove swamp, looking toward the lights of the closest house. Only ten or fifteen feet of dense mangrove growth and then lovely green grass. I seized a handful of shiny green mangrove to steady myself and placed my right foot on a curved root. Dear God, did I see something slithering off a root only a foot away? I froze, scanning the water for a ripple, a small head . . . But it was too dark., the blasted snake could be anywhere. Including being just another figment of Gwyn Halliday’s overactive imagination.

  I could see lights in windows not fifty feet away. I could do this. I was almost there. I hauled my left foot up, white-knuckling the flimsy upper branches of the mangrove as I tried to balance both feet on a mature mangrove root shaped like one arm of an octopus trying to walk on mud. I swayed in place, terrified, sure I heard the alligator lumbering through the shallow water behind me.

  “Gwyn!”

  I slipped, plunging back into the muck. My left foot hit one of the miserable little black mangrove daggers, and I collapsed into about a foot of water, crying out as much from horror as from pain. They’d come back, they’d found me. I’d failed. The three of us were doomed.