Suspicion of Innocence

by Barbara Parker

  Irene picked up the mask, turned it around. "What an odd thing this is."

  "Did she ever show it to you?"

  "No, never. It's Native American, I can tell that much." Irene looked up. "Is this why you wanted to see Edith?"

  Edith Newell, the museum's director of education, had made a personal crusade of Florida history. She knew Indian artifacts better than most Indians did.

  Gail said, "Jimmy Panther says he lent the mask to Renee, but it might belong to the museum. Edith would know."

  Irene frowned. "Jimmy wouldn't steal from the museum."

  "Renee was working here as a volunteer and they were friends."

  "Gail, honestly! You think the worst of Renee, you always did." Irene put the mask back into the box.

  "I'm only trying to find out where it came from." She stopped speaking when an older couple crossed the lobby from upstairs, then passed the desk on their way outside. "I don't think the worst of Renee. I don't even know who she was."

  Irene looked at her strangely. Gail leaned over the partition to put the box on the desk.

  "I'm going upstairs to find Karen," she said.

  The stairs, covered in dark tweedy carpet and decorated with a polished brass handrail, went up to a landing, then up again, turning around a ten-foot-high Fresnel lens from an old lighthouse that had once stood on a reef near the Matecumbe Keys. The museum was so quiet today that Gail could hear the electric motor turning the pedestal under the heavy glass. A light had been placed inside for effect, and white beams swept in a slow circle.

  Halfway up she remembered Renee climbing these same stairs.

  It had been a year ago, perhaps less, a party to woo museum donors—live music on the plaza, hors d'oeuvres and champagne in the lobby. This stairwell was dark that night, except for the light sweeping around. Gail had noticed Renee unclipping the velvet rope that closed off the second floor. Renee climbing these stairs in a striped Miccosukee jacket and a miniskirt, flouncy black taffeta. A man following a few steps behind, tilting his head to see up her skirt. Renee laughing at him over her shoulder. The stairs turned and their bodies moved out of sight. Renee's size-five feet in their high ankle-strap sandals, toenails painted red. His light gray trouser legs behind her, catching up.

  Gail reached the top of the stairs. "Karen?" She could hear children's voices somewhere to her left.

  A ramp led past glass walls, a diorama of the wetlands: saw grass, stuffed birds, and reptiles. An alligator with slitted eyes that seemed to follow her. Gail felt a sudden chill. Renee had lain in the shallow water of the Everglades.

  At this hour the museum was nearly deserted. Gail could still hear the children ahead, but saw no one. She made her way past the archaeological dig, Tequesta Indians, Spanish conquest, a cannon hauled up from a shipwreck.

  She heard running and laughter. Karen had probably joined the children from St. Hugh's—Edith Newell's junior assistant tour guide.

  Gail hadn't told her yet about Dave.

  Driving through the rain on the way here, with Karen chattering away about something or other, Gail had thought of asking him to come back. She would go to him, take both his hands, and tell him . . . Tell him what? That she couldn't exist without him?

  From ahead came the thumping of children's shoes on a wooden ramp, voices getting fainter.

  Gail passed quickly through the early settlers' exhibit —the facade of a frame house, glass cases full of tools and dishes and clothing, as if someone had spilled an attic trunk. The path was darker here, the exhibits lit by spotlight.

  Ahead of her she saw a photograph, a grainy, life-size enlargement of a dozen people standing outside the first dry goods store on Flagler Street, before it was even named Flagler, back when it was still paved with limestone rock. A horse and wagon waited at one side. Most men wore collarless white shirts, another a straw hat, others had beards or mustaches. The women's blouses were buttoned to their chins. All stared straight into the camera, nobody moving, the sun cutting harsh shadows on their faces.

  In the front row stood Benjamin and Addie Strickland, her great-grandparents. A squinting young man and a dour girl of twenty who looked as though she had just bitten into a lime.

  Gail turned her head, glancing to her left. A wooden streetcar, painted dark red, its iron wheels jacked up so they barely touched the floor. There was a chain across the open door.

  She whirled back toward the photograph and laughed out loud.

  "Yes. So that's what she meant."

  Gail had seen Renee later at the benefit on the plaza— she remembered it now. The moon floated over the buildings downtown. A band from the islands played steel drums. Renee—a plastic glass of champagne in each hand—was picking her way through the crowd, her hips moving to the music. Gail thought she was probably stoned.

  Are both of those glasses for you? Gail asked.

  No, one's for him. Her hair swinging, Renee turned toward the man sitting at a small table. Dark eyes, closely trimmed beard, open collar.

  Renee said, Is he not delicioso?

  If you like chest hair. Is that the same man you took upstairs half an hour ago?

  Maybe. Renee's lips curved into a smile. I've always wanted to do it right in front of Benjamin Strickland.

  She had left Gail standing there glaring at the flouncy miniskirt twitching its way across the plaza. The man had stood up, pulled out a chair. On his face had clearly been written a post-coital, indolent sexuality.

  Now, remembering this, Gail frowned. He was familiar somehow. That lazy smile, the short black beard, dark eyes. She had seen him before. Or since. The eyes, of course. So like Anthony Quintana's. It was his cousin.

  "Carlos," she whispered. "Carlos Pedrosa." He had looked directly at her outside the funeral home, swinging his car keys around his forefinger.

  And Renee had brought him up here?

  As if drawn, Gail walked toward the streetcar, then unfastened the chain and climbed up the steps. The museum lights shone dimly through the open windows, on the two rows of wooden seats and the levers where the conductor had stood. A dented metal sign said, "Colored to the Rear."

  Gail went further in, the streetcar creaking softly. She swung around a pole and dropped into a seat. From ten yards away, across the aisle and through the windows on the other side, Benjamin Strickland and his tight-lipped wife, Addie, looked back at her.

  Renee had sat here, Gail imagined, in this first seat, the only one with any leg room. Carlos Pedrosa had glanced around, then climbed the stairs behind her.

  Gail heard a door slam somewhere and jumped. If anyone walked by she might duck down rather than explain. They wouldn't notice her in the darkness. She felt a rush of excitement, of pleasant fright.

  He would have sat beside Renee on this scratched wooden seat, put his arm across the back of it. Or around Renee, more likely. Looking at him on the plaza, Gail had thought he was not the sort of man to waste time.

  They might have heard music coming faintly from below. Faraway voices. Then the rustle of black taffeta. The soft rasp of a zipper. Shifting on the narrow seat, someone nearly falling off. Stifled laughter. Legs and mouths opening. A moan. The wood in the old streetcar creaking.

  Over his shoulder Renee would have seen the photograph.

  Gail looked at it now through the window. Great-grandfather Strickland, the sun glaring off his face, his shirt, the white limestone rock on Flagler Street.

  She stood up and reached for the metal handrail. The narrow streetcar was too dark, the museum so quiet she could hear her own breath. She swung herself down, then fastened the chain back across the entrance. She had been upstairs too long.

  Gail found Edith Newell at her desk in the basement of the museum. Open books and historical magazines lay every which way on her desk. The deer mask was propped up on a stack of them.

  Edith Newell had always reminded Gail of a wading bird—elbows stuck out at an angle, head bobbing on its long neck, her voice thin and piping. Over seventy a
nd never married, she still lived in a white frame house off Brickell Avenue in a stand of orchid trees, a glitzy condo on one side of her, a twenty-five-story bank building on the other. To the despair of developers, Edith had sworn to leave her property to the county for a park.

  Gail knocked on the open door of the tiny office. "Miss Newell?"

  Edith laid down a rectangular magnifying glass and motioned to Gail. "Hello, darling. Come in. I must say, this is extraordinary, what you've brought."

  Gail sat down. "I thought it might belong to the museum."

  "Oh, my, no. If it were a part of our collection, I would most assuredly know about it. I know everything we've got and this was never here. Your mother explained you found it at your sister's residence?"

  "Yes. You know Jimmy Panther, don't you?"

  "Indeed."

  "He says he lent it to my sister. That his grandmother made the mask."

  "His grandmother?" Edith drew the word out. "This isn't Miccosukee. The Miccosukees didn't do masks."

  "Could it be Seminole?"

  Edith Newell's eyes, magnified behind thick glasses, fixed on Gail. She smiled patiently. "No, dear. The Seminoles and Miccosukees are like brothers, both from the Creek Nation in Georgia and Alabama. Their ancestors migrated into Florida in the eighteenth century. Most of them signed the Fort Dade peace treaty in 1837 during the Seminole War. The Miccosukees are the ones who didn't want to. They went into the Everglades to hide and the Army finally gave up looking for them. This mask certainly predates that period."

  "Oh," said Gail.

  "Now as to what tribe made this mask—" Edith knitted her fingers together. She had big hands, knuckles the size of walnuts, having wielded pickaxes and machetes in her time. "Tequesta," she announced. "If it isn't a forgery—and I don't think it is—this is a Tequesta mask, but of a unique type."

  She flopped a book around so Gail could see it. One page was taken up with color photographs of half a dozen wooden masks. Gail recognized a catlike face, a bird, others that made no sense to her. Most of them were cracked, the wood dark and crumbling at the edges.

  Edith said, "These are prehistoric masks from the Key Marco site on the southwest coast. They're all carved of cypress. Notice the style. The crescent on the forehead? The big ears? Similar to the mask you brought me. However—" Edith lightly touched it, a caress. "This is of another material entirely—fired clay."

  Gail looked at the deer mask as if she might see something different this time. "Tequesta? Didn't they die out?"

  "Good. I see you aren't completely ignorant. The Tequestas were never numerous or vital. They were extinct by the middle of the seventeen hundreds."

  "So the mask could be fairly old?"

  "Old? My dear, the ones in that picture date back two to three thousand years." Edith Newell's thin voice rose higher. "The Tequesta hunted and fished. They built chickees—you know, those palmetto frond huts—but next to nothing remains. Everything rots so quickly in this climate. We've found projectile points they traded from Indians further north. Beads. Fragments of clay pots, but none intact. Cups or knives made of conch shells. But only a few masks. Very few. Most of them have fallen to dust. So when you bring me this—"

  Laughing a little, Edith bounced on the seat of her chair. "What a find. The historians will go mad over it."

  Gail stared at her for a moment. She had never seen Edith behave this way. Her wispy gray hair seemed to stand on end.

  She said, "Miss Newell, Jimmy Panther once told my sister his people were murdered by the Spanish. Could he have meant the Tequestas? If they're extinct—"

  "Oh, yes. I've heard that story. He claims to be the last descendant of the Tequestas. Rubbish." Edith settled back in her chair. She smiled. "I'll tell you about Jimmy Panther. His grandfather was white. Did you know that?"

  "No."

  "Oh, yes. By the name of Gibb. He ran a rum boat to Cuba for Al Capone during Prohibition. If it were up to me," Edith said, "I'd make Jimmy prove ownership before we hand the mask back to him."

  "How could we? It certainly isn't ours."

  "You found it in your sister's house."

  "In an old box with a shipping label to the gift shop where he keeps his airboat. And Renee never had an interest in Indian artifacts."

  "Well, what would Jimmy do if we let him have it?" Edith asked crossly. "Sell it to a collector, probably, and we'd never see it again."

  "Is it valuable?"

  Edith considered. "Since there's a ban on the importation of pre-Columbian art from Latin America, that runs the price up a bit. A cypress mask in good condition would go for four or five thousand dollars, if you could buy one at all. This mask could easily be triple that."

  "I had no idea it was worth so much."

  "Money," Edith snapped. "As if that were the only thing that mattered. I could weep. No, I don't speak of you, dear. Your roots go down deeply here. All those people pouring in. Thousands of them. They don't care about tradition. Bulldoze it all. They don't give a hoot as long as they can live in brand-new air-conditioned houses and drive their cars on brand-new roads until every last blade of grass is paved over and every drop of water is sucked out of the ground."

  She tilted her head to look at Gail straight through her glasses. "You won't give the mask back to Jimmy Panther, will you?"

  "He expects me to bring it to him tomorrow afternoon."

  "Oh, no."

  "I could put him off for a while," Gail said, "but he has more right to it than we do."

  Edith held up a forefinger. "Here's what. Let me send it off to an archaeologist friend of mine at the University of Florida. I'll make sure it isn't broken, don't worry about that. He knows every important primitive artifact ever found in this state. If this mask is genuine, he'll know who it belongs to."

  "What if he's never seen it?"

  "Then I'll ask your mother to talk to Jimmy. He likes Irene. Maybe she can persuade him to sell it to the museum for a reasonable price. God knows we don't have much money to spare. The county would rather spend millions of dollars for a Grand Prix racecar track."

  "Miss Newell, if I let you keep the mask for a while, you must promise me something."

  She looked warily at Gail. "And that is?"

  "Don't tell anyone about this. Renee was involved somehow. Let me find out what it means."

  "Done." Edith mimed locking her lips and tossing the key. "I won't say a word."

  "And make your friend promise too."

  "Yes, dear."

  Gail turned "the mask around, shadows from the reading lamp playing over the crescent on the deer's forehead and the painted lines around its eyes. Fifteen thousand dollars' worth of clay? It had nearly smashed to bits on her kitchen floor this morning. Renee had kept it cushioned in a heavy box and hidden on the top shelf of her closet. She must have known its value.

  Gail would have to explain to Jimmy Panther why she wasn't going to bring it back tomorrow. Maybe she could strike a deal: the Tequesta mask if he told her the truth about what Renee was doing with it. Or better, how Renee had become friends with the part-white Miccosukee grandson of a Prohibition rumrunner.

  Irene crossed the kitchen to get the ice cream out of the freezer. "No. Dave's going to come back, you'll see. He can't throw away eleven years just like that."

  "Yes, he can," Gail said. She reached into the cabinet for two bowls—one for Irene, one for Karen, who was still stretched out on the living room carpet in front of the television with the orange striped cat. Applause and laughter from a game show drifted down the hall.

  "Then let him be by himself awhile," Irene said. "Men like their freedom, especially at that age. But they come home if you handle it right. He's a responsible man. Talk to him."

  "I'm not sure I want to talk to him," Gail said.

  "Don't you care what happens? Your marriage is falling apart and you stand there calm as can be."

  "Mother, please. Let's not get into a debate. I just thought you should know." The bi
g gray cat—Muffin— twined around Gail's ankle and she gently shoved it aside.

  "That's the price you pay." Irene dug into the ice cream with a scoop. "A woman can't let her husband think she wears the pants in a marriage, I don't care what the feminists say." She let the scoop of fudge ripple fall into a bowl.

  "I am what I am," Gail said wearily.

  "What you are," Irene replied, "is a mother with a daughter to think about. You might have to raise her alone. I did it with two daughters, and it's no bed of roses, let me tell you."

  The cat leaped to the counter, sniffing at the carton. Irene pushed him away with her elbow. "Naughty kitty. Down."

  Gail said, "Don't give Karen too much. It's nearly dark. We should go before it starts to rain again."

  Irene appeared not to have heard. "I could have remarried. I was asked three different times."

  "Why didn't you, then?"

  After a moment, she said, "I didn't love any of them. Romantic notion, wasn't it? I didn't need to worry about money. I had Ben to help out with discipline from time to time, so I didn't feel the need to find a substitute father for you girls. Probably a mistake, I can see that now. You girls needed a man's influence in the home. Renee did, anyway. I didn't know what to do with Renee except let her have her way. She was like me when I was young, and I couldn't bear to say no to her. You were the one I leaned on."

  "Did you?" Gail held out two spoons from the silverware drawer.

  Irene didn't take them. She put her hands over her face. "I've failed you, too."

  "Mother, I'm fine. For heaven's sake."

  "All right. All right, I've stopped." She fanned her eyes. "Yes, you're fine. You're strong. You don't need people so much, not your husband, not even your mother. I used to worry about that but I guess it can be a virtue if you want to survive in this world."

  She dropped a curl of ice cream on a saucer, which she set on the floor. "Muff, Muff, good kitty kitty."