Ten Thousand Islands

by Randy Wayne White

  I looked beyond the dinette table and stainless steel galley to the cushioned V-berth, and felt a sickening panic at what I saw there. A human figure lay motionless beneath a sheet. A pillowcase covered the head, as if draped for execution.

  There was a black swash of blood on the sheet. More blood on the pillowcase; heavy in the area where the face would have been.

  Where the hell was Ted?

  Because there was no other option, I swung down into the cabin. The moment my feet hit the deck, the door to the toilet came flying open. I didn’t react in time and felt a tremendous impact as someone clubbed me behind the neck. He clubbed me again, grunting with effort, and I went down on one knee. I got my elbow up and blocked the next blow, saw a pair of bare feet braced on the deck. I reached, yanked and rolled hard. Felt his body weight collapse on top of me. I wrestled myself into control, pulling my fist back to flatten the nose of Ted Bauerstock … but instead I was looking into the tear-streaked face of Nora Chung.

  I froze, my fist poised a few inches from her chin, as she whispered, “Doc? Doc! Oh, thank God! Thank God it’s you!”

  I got to my feet and pulled her up. She was wearing only a white bra and panties, blood on both. She’d used a fish billy to club me, and now I retrieved that, too. She was shaking, seemed on the verge of hysteria. I sat her in the settee booth and kissed her forehead, then cheek, trying to calm her.

  “Where’s Ted?”

  She made a gesture that asked for a little time to get herself under control. It appeared as if she might faint. “This can’t be real. Doc, are you sure this is real? Is this really happening? I can’t tell the difference anymore.”

  She was probably still suffering the effects of scopolamine. “Did he give you something? Did he make you drink something or give you a shot?”

  Nora’s expression became savage and she looked at the motionless figure beneath the sheet. “Him? You mean that son-of-a-bitching animal? He gave me a shot, yeah. He gave Della one, too, before he strangled her. Know what he did? He ate one of her eyes. I saw him. He made me watch. Like it was a grape. Then he raped me. And he kept on raping me. I had no choice, Doc. You have to tell the police. Lot of times they don’t believe women, but I had to do it. I had to make sure he could never hurt me again.”

  I patted her back for a moment, then went to the V-berth and pulled the pillowcase away. Ted Bauerstock lay there blinking up at me, recognizing me, his pupils gigantic. He still hadn’t moved and I had to lean to hear his weak voice as he gasped, “I’m paralyzed. The bitch stuck a needle in my neck. You’ve got to get me to a hospital.”

  I looked at Nora. She sat there tapping her fingers together, very nervous. Her speech became accelerated. “He thought I was unconscious. I grabbed the needle when he turned his back. After that … after that …” She began to cry. “… I’m not sure what happened after that.”

  I pulled the sheet down, looking at what she’d done to him, then covered him as Bauerstock whispered, “She’s going to jail for this. I’ll make sure of it. She’ll never have a free day.”

  I said, “Jail? Teddy, the lady ought to get a reward. Or a bounty. After what you’ve done?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I haven’t done anything wrong. I’m running for the senate—”

  I put my hand on his mouth, silencing him. I didn’t want to hear it. After a moment, I said, “You need to answer one question. If you expect me to help you, it’d better be the truth. Why did you kill Dorothy?”

  “I’m not answering anything. I need a doctor.”

  “No answers, no doctor. Why’d you murder that child?”

  The smile that grew out of his mouth was infuriating. “Honestly?”

  “If you’re capable.”

  “Because it felt good and … I like it. The power.”

  “That’s what I’ll tell the cops.”

  The smile widened. “No … won’t happen. They won’t believe you. They never have. They never will.”

  I said, “For them to believe you, Ted, they’ve got to hear you,” and I dropped the pillowcase over his face.

  When she’d calmed down, I said to Nora. “You’re safe now. You didn’t do anything wrong. Get your clothes on. Did Ted bring the wooden totem aboard?”

  She nodded. Her face was pale; wet with tears. She looked very fragile in the cabin light.

  “Find it and bring it with you.”

  I touched my pockets as I went toward the steps. The gold medallion was in one. The syringe the old woman had given me was in the other. If I sold the medallion and the totem, the Egyptian cat and the rest of the artifacts, it would make a sizable scholarship fund. Or maybe donate everything to the museum. One way or another, keep the name Dorothy Copeland alive.

  Topside, I made sure my skiff was still in tow, then seated myself at Namesake’s helm. I touched the LCD window of the Cetrek autopilot. I saw that it was keeping us on a flawless heading of 312 degrees, directly at Coon Key Light, but at the very slow idle speed of only three knots.

  The yacht was equipped with a steering wheel, but also some kind of computer-type joy stick that I didn’t know how to operate. I disengaged the autopilot, turned the wheel and the yacht came around. I pointed her bow out to sea. Felt Nora come up beside me and lean her warm weight against my shoulder, as I listened to the robotic voice from the VHF radio say, “… Hurricane Charles continues to move northeasterly at a speed of eighteen knots, with sustained winds measured at a hundred thirty knots. Charles is expected to make landfall at ten A.M. tomorrow. Mandatory evacuation has been declared for Marco Island and the neighboring cities of …”

  I switched off the radio and said, “You remember how to run my boat?”

  She nodded.

  “I’m going to help you get aboard, then cut you loose. I want you to follow me until I get this boat up to speed, but not too close. Pay attention because I’m going to jump. I’ll blink this boat’s running lights twice to warn you, then go over the port side. It’ll be on your left. All you have to do is put my skiff in neutral. Don’t worry about finding me. I’ll swim to you. Can you do mat?”

  Nora’s voice had regained some strength, and I felt like hugging her when she said, “Of course I can do it. I’m not an invalid, for God’s sake. Don’t treat me like one.”

  I was experimenting with the autopilot, learning how it worked. I also had both radar screens on, watching the scanning arm show blobs of islands, nothing else. I figured out that the Doppler was also linked to the computer screen built into the console, and I accessed a perfect satellite picture of the storm: a red vortex less than three hundred miles away.

  That gave me an idea. I touched the cursor to the center of the hurricane, and punched the exact heading into the autopilot, 225 degrees. I clicked on Auto-track and then Engage. Waited for a moment, then felt the autopilot take control of the steering, running directly southwest toward the target I had designated.

  “What are you doing?”

  I said, “Teddy likes eyes? His computer’s got him headed for a big one.”

  A few minutes later, with Nora trailing me in the skiff, I throttled the Hinckley up to a jarring twenty knots. I made sure the servo-systems were vectoring properly. Then I jumped overboard into the black water.

  A little after 9:30 that night, Nora and I dragged ourselves through the wind, up the highest Indian mound of Dismal Key. We had flashlights, tent, mosquito netting, sandwiches and beer, each of us muling bags. We were soaked, exhausted.

  I’d tied my skiff in the mangroves with a spider webbing of lines to hold her. Even if the storm surge was more than fifteen feet or higher, we’d be safe and so would my boat.

  The walls of Al’s shack were still standing, the screen broken out of the windows. But I didn’t want to be inside a building, not in a wind that was expected to exceed a hundred miles an hour. It took me a while to find what I was looking for, but I finally did: a room-sized hole dug into the shell mound, the ironic hermit’s bomb
shelter. It wasn’t far from the key lime and avocado trees that grew there. The hole would provide windbreak enough that the tent would survive. Even if the tent didn’t, we would.

  That night, cuddled together to stay warm, Nora said into my ear, “I don’t know which part of it’s a dream, which of it’s real. It’s the drug. I can still feel it, but it’s wearing off. I can’t believe what I did to him.”

  I said, “I think you’re imagining things. What do you think you did?”

  After she told me, I pulled her closer and said, “You’re not the one. I did it. Your brain mistranslated. It happens all the time in dreams. When I ate those mushrooms, the same thing happened to me.”

  “Are you positive?”

  “I’ll swear to it. Besides, he deserved it.”

  She moved her face onto my chest. “I would love to believe that.”

  “Then do.”

  Hurricane Charles hit the next morning. Stick your head out the window of a car doing sixty, then imagine what it would be like to try the same thing at a hundred-twenty. Once and just once, I poked my head up above ground level. It was like being sprayed with an industrial sand blaster. Lips and cheeks flutter; the eyes blur. I got a momentary glance at boiling storm clouds. High overhead, I saw a full-grown Australian pine go tumbling past. The tree had to be a couple hundred feet or more in the air. Mostly what we did was hold tight to one another, soaked and cold from driving rain, our eyes closed in the freight train rush of wind.

  The sound is what surprised me most. The sound of wind was deafening, numbing.

  Then, at a little after eleven, it stopped; everything stopped. The wind, the noise all gone. I crawled out of our threadbare tent and looked through broken trees. In the eye of a hurricane, there exists an illustrative calm, as if to underscore the energy of the storm just passed, the power of the storm to come.

  I looked down into a bay that had been drained of water. Along with beer bottles and the lapstrake of ruined boats was a litter of pottery shards, whole bowls and shell tools: the detritus of a people who’d survived storms on this island for thousands of years.

  Then I looked up into the sky, pausing to study the unexpected cirrus formations. The clouds formed concentric circles within concentric circles. At the center of the smallest circle was a starburst cross of sunlight that illuminated ice crystals in the high ionosphere.

  I took the gold medallion from my pocket, handed it to Nora. She looked from the sky to the medallion, then back to the sky. She was nodding. “I think so. Yes. I can see it. The designs, they’re like a storm etching. But how could Dorothy have known? Someone with that kind of gift, I wish I could have met her.”

  To the west, drifting above Ten Thousand Islands, was the ghost of a crescent moon.

  I said, “Me, too.”

  Epilogue

  On Friday, a little more than a week after Hurricane Charles joined the ranks of Donna, Andrew, Floyd and other killer storms that have hit the Florida coast, I sat in the reading chair by the north window of my stilt house, next to my telescope and shortwave radio.

  I was listening to the pretty lady say, “Know what we should do, Ford? Load the boat with enough supplies for two weeks, and sail down the coast to the Keys. Do it up right. Jars of caviar. Cases of beer and wine packed in ice. We’ll make a survey of deserted islands. Find some private little coves to anchor. Bake ourselves in the sun during the day. Look at the stars at night until we feel dozey. Do lots of swimming and running. I’ve got a new red thong bikini that you won’t believe. In fact”—her smile was well known and good to see—“in fact, I won’t need to wear much of anything most the time.”

  I’d begun to reply when I felt the familiar vibration of big feet slapping on the walkway outside. I’d been sorting my mail as I listened to the lady, had finally gotten around to the big, unopened stack. At a marina, the week following a brush from a major hurricane is a busy week, indeed. I was placing bills in one pile, correspondence in another. Now I put the stack aside and stood. I looked through the window to see Tomlinson approaching. He was wearing a new blue Hawaiian shirt—it had surfboards all over it—and he was carrying what looked to be a rolled-up newspaper.

  Coincidentally, I’d just opened a letter addressed to me in Tomlinson’s unmistakable hand. The postmark was dated September twenty-first, which made no sense. He’d left for Key Largo on the day of the fall equinox, September twenty-third. Why would he put something on paper when all he had to do was boat over and tell me what he wanted to say?

  I glanced at the first paragraph:

  Dear Doc. I write to you from the future because, skeptic that you are, it will be years before you are sufficiently enlightened to understand why, very soon, I hope to introduce you to the mushroom goddess. She is the only path back to your own lost love….

  More New Age ramblings. That was all I needed to see. I folded the letter, dropped it on the table for later, then went out the door to intercept Tomlinson. I paused on the way to stoop and give the lady a kiss on top the head, felt her give me a pat on the backside in reply.

  “Doc, you read the paper today?” Tomlinson was already talking as he came up the steps to the top platform.

  I waved him into the lab as I said, “I never read the papers. You know that.”

  As he brushed past me, taking a seat at the stainless steel dissecting table, I could smell the strong odor of patchouli and the must of cannabis. “The cops finally sent divers down. They found the bodies, just like you said. You were the anonymous source they mention, right?”

  “Of course.”

  I was also the anonymous source who’d told authorities to search Ronrico Key for the remains of Frank Rossi. If there were remains to be found after the monkeys got through with him. I did it for his relatives, not for him.

  Tomlinson shook the newspaper. “Then you ought to read this. They got a whole piece about it in here. And still no sign of Ted or Ivan. The boat, nothing. Vanished. Both their estates flattened, all those animals roaming the ’Glades. At least it’s stopped them from developing that island, the one with the Indian mounds. For now, anyway.” He looked at me with his wise and haunted blue eyes. “You hear about the two park rangers attacked by hyenas? Man, Florida is some wild state. Just keeps getting crazier and crazier.”

  I held my hand up, palm out. “I don’t have time right now. There’s a lady in there waiting on me. All I asked you to do was talk to Dieter, find out how Nora’s doing.”

  Dieter Rasmussen had arranged for Nora to spend two weeks of treatment at a state-of-the-art rape and trauma retreat that was among the finest in the south.

  “He said she’s doing great. Getting stronger every day. They don’t let them call out the first week, so she should be able to call you on Monday or maybe Tuesday. Hey, Doc—” Tomlinson turned his eyes to the floor, then cupped his forehead in his hand. “I need to keep saying this till you know I mean it. I want to apologize again.”

  “You already have, and that’s enough. Forget about it.”

  “I can’t, man. I feel like crap. I was so wrong about Ted. I feel responsible and guilty as hell. My intuition is almost always right. I was sure he was a good man.”

  “It was the drugs. I told you before all this started. They’re screwing up your judgment. You’ve cut back, right?”

  He smiled, then began to chuckle; a warm, weary chuckle as if amused by himself. “Oh, sure, you bet. But I’m still drinking beer. You coming to the Cotillion?”

  Through the lab’s big windows, I could see Jeth and Mack lugging a big Igloo cooler out to the docks, getting ready for the traditional Friday, end-of-the-week party.

  As I held open the door for Tomlinson, I said, “I wouldn’t miss it. I told JoAnn I might actually try dancing. Who knows? Maybe I will.”

  I went back into my house to find the pretty lady standing, waiting for me. Dr. Kathleen Rhodes, tall, chestnut-haired and articulate, and without football player. The two hadn’t lasted long, just as O’Rourke
had said, and when Pete had told her how pitiful I’d looked in his office, she’d decided that maybe I’d learned something, after all. And she was right: I had.

  She took me into her arms, holding me, then turned her face in a way so that she would be easy to kiss. But I did not. I hated what I was going to say next, but I knew if anyone was going to understand, it would be Kathleen.

  Instead, I took her by the shoulders and steered her back to her chair. “Kathleen, I am flattered beyond words that you drove all this way just to surprise me. And I would like to get together again. But not now. Not for a while. For one thing, I have a friend who’s … who’s been sick, and I need to be here in case she calls. Plus, I had Tomlinson release all my fish before the storm hit. So now, I’ve got to restock my aquarium, and that’s going to take weeks. It’s weird, but—” I stopped, wondering if I should tell her. Then decided, what the hell, why not. “The weird thing is, I didn’t realize how attached I’d become to those animals. My bull sharks, especially the immature tarpon. They’re just fish, I know, and I’m not speaking of any great emotional investment, but still—”

  The woman stood and touched her finger to my lips, silencing me. She had a nice smile on her face and gorgeous brown eyes. She was shaking her head as if perplexed but pleased, as she said, “Ford, you’ve changed. There’s something very different about you.”

  “I don’t know what that would be, Kath.”

  “For one thing, look at you. You’re wearing a Hawaiian shirt with a hula dancer on the back. Never in a thousand years would I expect to find you wearing something like that. That’s just not you.”

  “It’s Cotillion night, big party. Plus, we’re going to ’Tween Waters, sit around the pool bar and talk to the guides. I borrowed it from Tomlinson.”

  The woman stepped toward me and touched her hand to my chest. “And this. You don’t wear jewelry. Marion Ford wearing gold around his neck? You told me you despised jewelry.”