Neither of us spoke for a long time, as we walked in silence side by side.
“When my time comes, I want to be buried at sea,” Marsh Holt said at last, as we lingered in front of a Lincoln Road art gallery.
“Makes sense to me. I’ve been thinking about cremation,” I said. “Bright as fire for a moment, then ashes.”
My parting advice to Marsh Holt was not to dwell on his own pain. “You’re not alone. Everyone since Adam and Eve has suffered heartache and loss. If they haven’t yet, they will. You survive by doing what you do best. And when you’re really down, repeat to yourself: I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. Make it your mantra.”
The last thing he said to me was a quote from Thoreau: Listening to music makes one invincible.
I pecked Marsh Holt on the cheek and left him at the hotel. In the morning he would face the Coast Guard and the charter boat people. I hoped they would be kind.
I watched him walk into the hotel and then drove away, alone.
I had shamelessly passed along Lottie and Onnie’s inspirational advice, as though it was my own, advice I had ignored. But when I searched my heart for positive words of comfort it suddenly became valid.
No one else could understand our innermost feelings. Holt was right about that. Fate had thrown us together and I was grateful.
I labored over the story the next morning. The poignant material was a writer’s dream of star-crossed love. I knew he would read it, as would Vanessa’s parents and friends. I hoped it would become part of their history, a keepsake to fold into the family Bible. I called Marsh once to clarify a date. He sounded weary.
The Hansens had overnighted a professional portrait of Vanessa at the cello, her lovely long hair swept over an ivory shoulder, her profile pristine.
I was about to turn in my copy when everything changed.
CHAPTER NINE
The sea had burped up one of its secrets.
Vanessa Holt was no longer lost. U.S. Coast Guard Public Information Officer Skelly O’Rourke kept his word this time and called. The body of a woman had washed ashore on a remote out island.
Badly damaged by sea life and decomposition, the corpse had been positively identified by dental charts. She was being brought to Miami.
The changes necessary to my story included updated reaction from her family. Her father sobbed unabashedly, his wife wailed and wheezed in the background.
My own eyes swam when he thanked me “for all you did.”
I tried to call Marsh Holt at his hotel, but a frosty front desk clerk said he had asked not to be disturbed. Who could blame him?
He called me a short time later. “You heard the news?”
“Yes. Are you all right?”
“No. I’ll never be all right.”
I asked if he had anything he wished to add to the story, and he did: “Vanessa’s death is a terrible loss—to the world, to music, and to me. She can never be replaced.”
To me he said, “Thanks for your help during the worst time of my life, especially our talk last night. It meant a great deal.”
Lottie was right, I thought. Think of others, not yourself.
But it didn’t help my sleep that night. Instead of fire, the girlish face of the dead bride haunted my dreams. Her long hair streaming in the tide, eyes wide, arms outstretched, her torn wedding veil billowing around her on a windblown seabed. Her lips formed words and frantic phrases. I saw her eyes, heard her voice, and strained to listen, but I could not discern the words.
Awake before dawn, I considered my pep talk to Holt and what a hypocrite I had become. If you talk the talk you should walk the walk. I hadn’t attended church since McDonald’s funeral, and today was Easter Sunday. Onnie’s words had sounded comforting when I repeated them to Holt.
So I went to church. It was early enough to make the sunrise service on the beach. But after my vivid dreams, I had no desire to see water, yearning instead for the rock-solid brick-and-mortar of my church.
Easter, of course, is the holiday above all others to arrive early. Those who forgo church the rest of the year suddenly appear on Easter, herds and hordes of them. They fill the parking lots, the pews, and the collection plates, to a lesser degree, then vanish again until Christmas Eve.
I imagined them the rest of the year, propped on pillows, sipping Bloody Marys, curled up in bed with the Sunday newspapers.
I wore a loose blouse but had to fasten my skirt with an extra-large safety pin because I couldn’t close the waistband. Another pressing problem I needed to address. Soon.
I slipped into my favorite pew with a good view of the choir. The delicate scent of lilies filled the church. There were hundreds of them, tall, serene, and graceful, some in pots, others in gigantic bowls mixed with yellow forsythia. They covered the huge cross behind the altar. The shadows of palm fronds outside reflected in the stained-glass windows, and the church was alight with a soft natural glow.
The pews and extra folding chairs set up in the back filled fast with pushy strangers.
“Never in my life did anyone ever shoot at me before,” an elegant middle-aged Grace Kelly type pouted to a well-dressed young man in the pew in front of me. My reporter’s instincts kicked in. Ears pricked up, I managed to catch the words “Jackson Memorial Hospital” and “courtroom,” as the Cameron Diaz look-alike behind me described a recent date to her companion; she liked him, but “He’s a gun runner.”
Glad I was there, for more than one reason, I didn’t know which way to lean. To my regret, trumpets sounded at that moment and a great swell of organ music obliterated their conversations. Beside me, a raven-haired model type with big blue eyes turned, watching for someone. She waved at a tall handsome black man who squeezed into our pew to join her. They were obviously a couple. I smiled. This church, Miami Beach’s oldest place of worship, built by pioneers, had changed in so many ways, like everything else in this city. I was so glad to be home. I didn’t realize how much I had missed it.
The words of the hymn resonated: Love’s redeeming work is done; fought the fight, the battle won. The sermon focused on live dreams, fresh starts, and new beginnings; the prayers dealt with how the lost may be restored. As the pastor primed the universal pump, I wished Marsh Holt had been there to hear it too. Why didn’t I invite him?
Later, scores of squealing children scrambled across the grassy lawn, filling their straw baskets during the annual Easter-egg hunt.
I had little chance to exchange more than Easter greetings with my pastor, who did take note of my no-longer-girlish figure. He smiled reassuringly, as though it was a good thing. As happy parents snapped pictures of their excited toddlers, I began to think so myself. Somehow, everything would work out.
Back at my apartment, I brewed myself a cup of herbal tea, then called his hotel to tell Marsh Holt what he had missed, and thank him, too, for our talk. I had nearly forgotten what important threads chance encounters can be in the great tapestry that is life.
Holt had already checked out, the clerk said. Must have left early for the airport, I thought, checking the kitchen clock. I saw him in my mind’s eye, a sad and solitary figure amid strangers, waiting to accompany his dead bride home. My eyes misted—not for me, this time, but for him. Too bad we had no chance to say goodbye. I wished him a good life and hoped I had been of help to him. Meeting him surely helped me.
I was still thinking about Holt, whom I would probably never see again, as I walked Bitsy along a path beside the rolling green-velvet golf course, amid warbling birds and the lush scent of flowers. A mounted police officer, helmeted and intimidating, materialized unexpectedly, cantering toward us on the green path. I gasped, startled, with my psyche still so wrapped around the Easter drama that for an instant I mistook him for a Roman soldier.
He waved, then bent low in the saddle to avoid the overhanging branches of a sea grape tree, as I stood transfixed, heart pounding.
CHAPTER TEN
I had no time to think about Mars
h Holt in the busy weeks that followed.
Another lost tourist, bewildered by Miami’s tangled streetscape, lost his rental car, his wallet, and his life when he stopped to ask the wrong resident for directions. The city’s brand-new fleet of high-priced garbage trucks began to spontaneously combust, and pet shops were plagued by shoplifters who stuffed expensive teacup puppies down their pants.
The Human Fly continued to confound and outrage both the cops and the Chamber of Commerce. In his most notorious caper to date, he scaled the face of a pricey South Beach hotel, climbed over a fifth-floor balcony, and crept into an unlocked room. There he encountered the latest hard-partying, super-thin young Hollywood star, who screamed long and loud as the Human Fly buzzed off into the night with her handbag and jewelry.
The star spent days spinning her tale of terror, in increasingly vivid detail, on every Hollywood tabloid show, as well as to Jay Leno, Larry King, Nancy Grace, and Greta Van Susteren. The negative national publicity fueled the ire of local politicians and members of the hotel and tourist industry who pressured police to hunt down and swat the Fly. So did editorial writers and TV commentators. But the Fly flew free.
Motorists awoke and found their cars coated by a thin film of red dust. Daytime skies turned milky white with hazy blood-red sunsets. Along the African coast storms had scooped up red sand and passed it off to the wind currents that stream west. Whipped by Africa’s desert winds, the monster cloud of red dust swirled across the Atlantic and settled over Miami, where the full moon hung fat and low, a sinister silver dollar tarnished by Sahara dust in the eastern sky. Patients suffering from asthma, hay fever, emphysema, and other respiratory problems packed local emergency rooms.
And U.S. Coast Guard Public Information Officer Skelly O’Rourke redeemed himself for prior broken promises by tipping me to an in-progress high-speed pursuit of suspected smugglers near the Marquesas, a barren swath of islands forty miles off Key West.
Shortly before dawn, radar aboard a Coast Guard cutter had detected a dangerously overloaded boat moving north from Cuba. A smaller Coast Guard vessel approached and signaled them to stop. Instead, those aboard tried to ram the Coast Guard boat and fled, jeopardizing their endangered cargo.
Nobody outruns the Coast Guard. They have planes, choppers, high-speed boats, radar, manpower, really big guns, and long memories. But the fleeing suspects were desperate people. Ruthless smugglers charge up to $10,000 a head to spirit an estimated two thousand illegal migrants a year to Florida under cover of darkness.
When sighted by the Coast Guard, some resort to murder. They throw the evidence, their passengers, overboard or drop them too far offshore to swim safely to dry land. Scores of migrants pay their money and lose their lives every year.
With the chase under way, Lottie and I scrambled aboard a seaplane at Watson Island and headed south to the scene.
We spotted them from a distance, trailing great rooster tails of wake across the deep blue. Lottie captured aerial shots of the speeding boats and the Coast Guard choppers in pursuit. Several of the thirty-six migrants aboard the smugglers’ vessel either tumbled or were deliberately thrown overboard during the maneuvers.
The Coast Guard could not save them all. The thrilling chase concluded with the suspects’ capture. When the smugglers ignored warning shots across their bow, special shotgun shells were fired to disable the vessel’s engines. Many of the remaining refugees jumped into the sea, flailing, and resisting attempts to rescue them.
The price they were willing to pay to escape the island touched my heart and made me think of my father. All these years later, I thought, the dictator still lives and Cubans still die.
Peering through binoculars, as Lottie snapped pictures, I felt an odd sense of déjà vu and thought for the first time in weeks of Marsh Holt, who had escorted his bride’s body on their sad journey home to Boston. End of story, I thought. But now, as I watched another tragic high-seas drama unfold, Holt was on my mind.
Then I realized why.
Later, as we met the Coast Guard boat that towed the seized vessel to the Miami Beach Coast Guard station on the MacArthur Causeway, I was sure.
“Lottie,” I whispered, as we watched from behind a security fence, “look at the smugglers’ boat.”
She lowered her camera, stared, then focused her telephoto lens for a closer look. “It’s a Grand Banks forty-footer. It looks just like—” She turned to me. “But it can’t be. How could it?”
“It is, Lottie. Look at that custom rail. The transom.”
She’d seen this vessel before. So had I, in the honeymoon photos of Marsh and Vanessa Holt. The smugglers’ vessel was the Calypso Dancer. I was sure. The name and the registration number had been scratched off, another engine added, but there was no mistaking its identity.
My mind raced.
Lottie frowned. “I thought it was sleeping with the fishes at seven hundred fathoms.”
“That’s what everybody thought. How weird is this?”
Guardsmen were securing the seized vessel. “Shoot as many angles as you can, Lottie.”
The whirs and clicks from her camera were all I heard for the next several minutes. The smugglers were marched ashore in handcuffs. Then their passengers were brought ashore, to cheers and applause from spectators already gathered behind the fence.
Migrants interdicted at sea are swiftly returned to Cuba, under the U.S. Government’s wet-foot/dry-foot policy. Those who reach American soil can stay, but those who don’t go back at once.
To bring them ashore like this was unprecedented, the irony bittersweet. Because some refugees had died, the others were allowed to reach shore to testify against the smugglers in court.
At a press conference, Coast Guard spokesman Skelly O’Rourke said that the accused smugglers, two Cuban Americans from Hialeah, claimed that during a fishing trip weeks earlier they had found the boat adrift with no one aboard. They salvaged it, they said, souped it up, and seized the opportunity, using it to scoop up family members from Cuba and bring them to Miami. They denied being professional smugglers.
How they came into possession of the boat was the least of their troubles. The accused smugglers would be charged with murder in the deaths of a four-year-old boy who tumbled overboard and drowned during the pursuit and an elderly woman who suffered fatal head injuries when being buffeted about on the smugglers’ speeding boat in rough seas.
More carloads of Miami’s Cuban Americans arrived as word of the tragedy spread. Some were seeking relatives who may have been aboard; others came to protest U.S. immigration policy, Coast Guard tactics, and the Castro regime. Some threatened to block MacArthur Causeway, a major thoroughfare between Miami and Miami Beach.
I gathered quotes from a number of them and then rushed back to the newsroom to call Marsh Holt in Boston. His number was disconnected. Not surprising. It was for the apartment where the couple planned to reside after the honeymoon; it would be too painful for him to stay there.
I called the Hansens.
“Every day it becomes more real that she’s gone, and she’s not coming back,” her father said. Mourners had filled the cathedral for Vanessa’s funeral, he told me. They played a Bach cantata.
I said I was trying to reach Marsh.
He reacted angrily. “Don’t talk to me about him.”
“What’s wrong?”
The son they never had had departed shortly after the funeral. “Didn’t say a thing. Not even goodbye. Left town—for good, I guess. He’s gone. No forwarding address.”
His wife breathed heavily on the extension. “It’s not Marsh’s fault,” she argued, sympathetic and congested. “He was too heartbroken to stay in the same city where they met and fell in love. I understand. He couldn’t take it. I’m worried about him. His heart is broken.” Her words resonated with motherly concern.
They had no idea where he’d gone. But they thought Vanessa’s maid of honor and best friend, Sally, might know. The two were like sisters. They gave me he
r number.
Sally had no idea where Marsh had gone or where he’d come from. He’d blown into town with few ties and little baggage, she said. Vanessa did mention once that Marsh had worked in Chicago with a man named Ron Fullerton. Sally remembered the name because she had an uncle named Fullerton; no relation. Vanessa told her the two men had talked by telephone and had seemed relieved, Sally said, by his contact with an old colleague. Marsh Holt had swept her friend off her feet, but Vanessa was an intelligent and cautious young woman. She had been a bit concerned, as was Sally, about his apparent lack of friends, relatives, and history.
“I thought she should wait until she got the chance to meet people he’d known all his life,” Sally said. “I mean, he’s clearly no crook or ex-con, but they just didn’t know each other long enough. He’s hot, and funny, and really sweet, but he was like a man without a past. I used to joke that he must be in the Witness Protection Program. Even if he had no immediate family, there had to be friends, neighbors, fellow workers, ex-girlfriends. But there weren’t. It was like he dropped out of a UFO.”
“How long did they know each other?”
“He proposed four weeks after they met. Really romantic but too quick. The wedding was six weeks later. Too soon, if you ask me. But Nessa was crazy about him. She said, ‘When you know it’s right, why wait?’”
“I didn’t realize they’d known each other such a short time.” I tried to remember exactly what Holt had told me about their courtship.
“I thought they took the plunge too soon,” Sally said sadly. “But we’ll never know now, will we? I miss her every day.”
I called Skelly O’Rourke at the Coast Guard to say I suspected that the smugglers’ vessel was the Calypso Dancer. He’d pass it along, he said, but had a ready explanation if it was true. The Boston bridegroom was no seasoned boater and the tragedy took place on a dark night during a sudden squall. He’d been swept away as he struggled to survive in huge swells. When he turned to look and couldn’t see the boat, he probably assumed it had sunk. More likely the Calypso Dancer had just drifted out of his line of vision. “You can’t see anything out there under those conditions,” he said.
Love Kills Page 10
