Michaela Thompson - Florida Panhandle 02 - Riptide

by Michaela Thompson

  When he pushed his way out of the bush, the air seemed to rush and engulf him, causing an almost painful pressure in his ears, clogging his nostrils with dust and vegetable matter, coating the back of his throat with a thin layer of salt. The dark lawn billowed around him, and before he could founder, he pushed off, surging forward.

  PART TWO

  FIFTEEN

  Buddy Burke couldn’t sleep. Too much light. If it were dark, sweet black dark, Buddy would lie back on this pillow, thin and bad-smelling as it was, and be asleep in two seconds.

  Buddy turned over, his back to the light, but he knew by now that didn’t work. He stared at the pockmarked surface of the wall. The wall surface reminded him of a bad case of acne. Buddy had found that idea kind of amusing when it first occurred to him. He didn’t find anything about this place amusing now.

  His daughter, Kimmie Dee, wanted boots, had sat down and written him a letter to ask for them. Daddy, can I have boots? Please. I don’t like Mr. S. It just about killed Buddy to think about it. What the hell was Joy doing that Kimmie Dee couldn’t ask her own mother for boots? Joy hadn’t written the address on the letter, either. It was in a hand Buddy didn’t recognize.

  Buddy sat up, swinging his bare feet to the concrete floor. He rested his elbows on his knees and hung his head. Whose fault was it all, anyway? It wasn’t Joy Burke’s fault. She hadn’t told Buddy to haul marijuana when he already had a couple of convictions and would have to go away for sure this time. That episode had been Buddy’s bright idea.

  This line of work had been unlucky for Buddy. He could see that now, and he should have seen it before.

  In the meantime, here Buddy was. He was serving thirty months, which meant eight or nine months in real time. Joy had cried and hung on his neck like she couldn’t live without him for one night, let alone eight months. Now, she wouldn’t even buy their daughter a pair of boots.

  Anger was working in Buddy, making his hands shake. Because it wasn’t just the boots. The boots were number one, but Buddy hadn’t forgotten item number two: I don’t like Mr. S.

  Not having that many interesting activities to take up his time, Buddy had racked his brain over Mr. S. The initial didn’t fit any of the men he could think of who had a good reason to be around Kimmie Dee. It didn’t fit Buddy’s no-account lawyer, or Kimmie Dee’s school principal, or any friends Buddy could think of. Kimmie Dee was a smart girl— Buddy was as proud of her as he could be— and she wouldn’t write that for no reason. So Buddy was thinking a good deal about Mr. S.

  Buddy scratched his jawline. He didn’t hear much from Joy these days. She hadn’t been to visit in a while. Which was probably good, because if she showed up right now, Buddy would be tempted to whip her ass.

  After a while, Buddy lay down again. He didn’t close his eyes, but stared up at the pattern the light made on the ceiling of his cell. He wouldn’t, he couldn’t let this pass.

  SIXTEEN

  “Heart gave out. It happens,” said Dr. McIntosh. Outside, the ambulance pulled away from Bernice’s front yard, taking Merriam’s body to the funeral home.

  “She seemed stronger. She was getting better,” Isabel protested. But Merriam was dead, and that was that. Unfinished business would be left unfinished; instead of a final rounding-out, there remained rough edges, forever jagged and unpolished.

  “It happens,” Dr. McIntosh repeated. He walked out on the front porch and lit a cigarette. On the living room sofa, Bernice Chatham wept, her broad shoulders jiggling. Isabel was dry-eyed. To romanticize her relationship with Merriam now that Merriam was gone would have been hypocrisy. Yet she felt as if something had gone terribly wrong.

  “You have to consider her age,” said Clem Davenant. Clem, looking ravaged, was wandering restlessly around Bernice’s living room. Bernice had called the doctor and Clem; Clem had called Isabel. Clem crossed the floor once again and said, “I’m going to get myself a glass of water, Bernice.”

  Bernice, her face buried in a handkerchief, did not reply. Isabel followed him to the kitchen. She said, “You don’t have to stay, Clem.”

  He filled a glass from the tap, drank, leaned on the sink. “It’s all right.”

  “I know this is disturbing for you.”

  She saw the cords in his neck move. He said, “Isabel, if I can’t perform my duties in life, I might as well lie down and not get up, all right?”

  Startled by his vehemence, she said, “I just thought—”

  “She was my client, and in some ways my responsibility, and I’m here because I’m going to do right by her.”

  Isabel started back to the living room. Halfway there, she heard him call after her, “Sorry. Sorry.”

  Dr. McIntosh had returned, and Bernice was talking to him in a choked voice. This was at least the third time Isabel had heard her version of events. “I went to get her up for breakfast, poor soul,” Bernice was saying. “I shut her door at night because I was afraid she’d wander. I knocked and poked my head in and said, ‘Time for breakfast, sugar!’ and then when she didn’t move at all…” Her voice trailed off and her face went back into the handkerchief.

  Isabel walked down the short hall to Merriam’s bedroom. The ceiling fan whirled. The bedclothes on the narrow bed were disarranged, the pillows on the floor. On the bedside table, along with Merriam’s pill bottles, were her glasses and the well-worn black Bible Isabel had memorized verses from as a child.

  She should get Merriam’s things together. She opened the closet and took out Merriam’s suitcase. Bernice’s voice drifted from the living room: “I thought she was stirring around in there last night, but I looked in and she was quiet. I used to worry so much, because you couldn’t tell what she would do, and—”

  Isabel closed the closet door. The task of gathering Merriam’s possessions suddenly seemed beyond her. She put the suitcase down and walked to the window. Beyond the burgeoning leaves of a camellia bush, the green lawn glistened with dew. Across the way was Bernice’s open garage.

  In a minute, Isabel would start filling the suitcase. Clem would know what Merriam had wanted done with her effects. For the first time, it occurred to Isabel that she didn’t know what would happen to the house and property. Or the trailer. She could find herself evicted shortly. My goods and chattels are none of yours, Merriam had written.

  Isabel was going to pick up the suitcase, open it, and start folding Merriam’s clothes.

  The window screen was unlatched.

  She felt a spurt of annoyance at Bernice. There Bernice sat in the living room, crying, and she hadn’t even made sure the room was minimally secure. Merriam could have leaned against the screen and fallen out. Isabel pushed it. It opened quietly and easily.

  She was closing it when she noticed a splintered place on the windowsill, a three-inch scrape in the white paint in line with the metal eye of the latch. Isabel fingered the scar. A few small splinters stuck out. It was not discolored by weathering or worn smooth by use and time. She checked the bottom of the black-painted screen frame and found a corresponding scrape, deep enough so the pale wood showed through.

  “I wondered where you went,” Clem said from the doorway.

  She was startled. She let go of the screen, which fell closed with a gentle bump.

  “I’m sorry I was rude,” he went on. He joined her at the window. “What are you doing?”

  “The screen was unlatched.” She pushed it open again, demonstrating. “I was thinking Bernice should have been more careful.”

  He inspected it. “Miss Merriam might have done it herself, somehow.”

  “Maybe.” She wiggled the hook. It slid easily in and out of the metal eye. Below the level of the sill, she saw a broken twig on the camellia bush. Several fresh green leaves lay on the carpet of pine needles on the ground around the roots. Could somebody have broken in? The idea seemed bizarre.

  Clem said, “Miss Merriam had her funeral all planned, you know. She picked out the casket and paid for it, bought the cemetery pl
ot. She even selected the hymns— ‘Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing’ and ‘Jesus, Keep Me Near the Cross’.”

  “She believed in being thorough.”

  His lips twitched. “Too bad she can’t preach her own sermon. What do you think she’d say?”

  Isabel surveyed the bedside table, the battered Bible. “If you’d asked me before I came back here, I’d have been able to answer. I would have said she’d be the image of self-righteousness. Now, I have no idea. There was more to her than I thought.”

  “I shouldn’t have asked. It doesn’t do any good to play these games.” Clem moved away from the window. “You can make up answers that seem so real, and then it comes to you that everything you’ve imagined is garbage.”

  His voice was harsh. Isabel said, “Clem, listen. I don’t want you to—”

  He held a hand up. “No. No. Bear with me. I’m shaky all right, but don’t take offense. I want to do what I can to help you through this.”

  “All right. Thanks,” she said, and some of the tension left his face.

  When the doctor left not long afterward, Isabel walked with him to his car. She said, “Dr. McIntosh, are you going to do any further… investigation into what killed Merriam?”

  He shot her a sidelong glance. “An autopsy, you mean? No need.”

  She was treading on delicate ground. “I wondered, with all the drugs she was taking, whether—”

  “No sign of drug overdose.”

  “There’s no reason to think it wasn’t natural causes?”

  The doctor stopped walking. He said, “What are you driving at, Isabel?”

  All at once, she was blurting it out. “I never understood how she got that concussion. It seemed very odd. And now, when she was actually getting better, to have her die like this—”

  Dr. McIntosh’s ruddy face got redder. “I think you’ve been living in New York too long,” he said with acerbity. “If you’re suggesting that Merriam was murdered, certainly it’s possible, if somebody had a mind to do it. The point is, there’s no good reason to believe that’s what happened, and why would anybody have a mind to do it?”

  “I don’t know why.”

  “Indeed you don’t. Merriam Anders was my patient for fifty years or more, Isabel. It strikes me that if you’d paid more attention to her when she was alive, you wouldn’t feel the need to make up stories about how she died.”

  The remark hit home. It seemed all too likely that Dr. McIntosh was right.

  Dr. McIntosh stalked to his car without saying good-bye. Clem appeared on the porch. “Bernice is straightening the room. Let’s go have coffee, all right? There are things we have to discuss.”

  Merriam’s room looked very bare. A grim Bernice had stripped the bed and held the linens in her arms in a crumpled bundle. “Thank you for everything, Bernice,” Isabel said.

  Bernice wiped her eyes. “She was a handful, bless her heart.”

  “I know she was.”

  “I did my best. I’ll bet she was already gone when I looked in on her during the night. I couldn’t have done nothing.”

  Clem took Isabel to a rundown waterfront café where they had coffee and doughnuts on a sunny deck. Pepper plants in tin cans were set out on the railings. He said, “I expect you’ll get people coming by and bringing food. Make sure you’ve got space in the refrigerator. When Edward died—” he shook his head.

  Isabel said, “Tell me about Edward.”

  He drew a long breath. “That’s tough to do.”

  “I know, but he’s on your mind.”

  He put down his mug and contemplated the bay. “Edward was my only child. He was nearly thirteen years old when he died. He was a very, very smart kid. All the tests, everything. Off the charts. But for some reason that wasn’t enough for me. I wanted him to do something physical, some kind of sport, instead of sitting in a room reading all the time. Although, when I look back on it, not many kids get killed sitting in rooms reading, do they?”

  “Clem—”

  “Let me tell it, Okay?” He was looking past her, squinting into the morning glare. “I always liked to swim. For years, I’d been a recreational scuba diver. Edward liked to swim, too, so I urged him to get certified and we’d go diving together. And he did, and we did.”

  Clem pushed his chair back. He stood and went to lean on a nearby railing. After a moment he continued: “I keep telling myself Edward liked diving, that he didn’t do it just for me, but the fact remains that it was my idea. The other fact remains— when the time came, I couldn’t save him.”

  “What happened?”

  “One of those things.” He bit off the words. “We were diving one day. We’d cooked up kind of a historical research project, and—”

  “Historical research?”

  “Underwater archaeology, you might call it.” He waved it away. “It was a dumb idea. Anyway, we were diving. The water was murky. I lost sight of Edward for a minute. He’d dislodged some debris on the bottom and gotten pinned down. He panicked. By the time I realized what was happening, he’d spit out his mouthpiece. I tried to get him free, but it was confusing down there, and he was scared, struggling. It was over practically before I knew it. I dragged him to the surface, got him in the boat. I radioed for help and did mouth-to-mouth, but it was too late.”

  He picked a red pepper off the plant beside him, inspected it, tossed it in the water. “Sometimes I dream I’m still giving him mouth-to-mouth,” he said. “I wake up hyperventilating.”

  Isabel didn’t know what to say. She wouldn’t assure him that someday it would be all right. She didn’t see how it ever could be.

  Echoing her thought, he said, “Eve wants me to carry on, be the way I was before. I can’t.”

  “She wants you not to blame yourself.”

  “Correct. But whose fault was it, if it wasn’t mine?” He straightened. “I’m sorry for talking about my troubles. You’re the bereaved one now.”

  “I asked you.”

  “And I’ve told you.” He looked around for the waiter. “We’d better get back. Can you stop by the office in the next couple of days? The will is pretty straightforward, but there are some papers to sign.”

  “The will?”

  He gave her a quizzical look. “Miss Merriam’s will.”

  My goods and chattels are none of yours. “Merriam disinherited me. Years ago.”

  He mused briefly. “Oh yeah, I guess she did, back when my father was still handling her affairs. That didn’t last more than a couple of years. No, she left everything to you. It’s all yours, no strings attached.”

  ***

  Isabel turned in under the cabbage palms and bumped down the driveway. The house— her house— sat among the scrub and weeds, bedraggled and forlorn. She was going to have to deal with the place after all.

  But not right now. Right now she had a duty to perform. She parked the car and walked back to the beach. She found Kimmie Dee near the water’s edge.

  “I have something to tell you, Kimmie Dee,” she said.

  Kimmie Dee followed Isabel to a blackened driftwood log and perched next to her. Isabel said, “I have sad news. Merriam died this morning. You were her friend, and I wanted you to know.”

  The girl’s head drooped. She said, “You mean really dead? Not just real sick?”

  “No. She’s dead.”

  Kimmie Dee scooped up handfuls of loose sand and dribbled them over her bare feet. After a while, she said, “Was she scared?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Miss Merriam used to tell me she wasn’t scared to go. She said when the call came, she’d be ready.”

  That sounded like Merriam. Isabel said, “Well, the call came and she went.”

  Overhead, gulls wheeled and cried. Kimmie Dee’s feet were nearly covered with sand. “You’re sure she wasn’t scared?” The point seemed to bother her.

  “There’s no reason to think so.”

  Kimmie Dee wiggled her toes and most of the sand slid away
. “I guess he didn’t get her, then, because she was sure scared of him,” she said.

  Isabel wasn’t sure she’d understood. “Who didn’t get her?”

  “The man in the hood didn’t get Miss Merriam.”

  Isabel had been picking at the crumbling wood of the log. Her fingers stopped moving. “What are you talking about, Kimmie Dee?”

  “That day. She was scared of the man in the hood. She told me to watch out.”

  “You mean the day you found her on the beach? The day she got sick?”

  “Yes.”

  The surface of the log was spongy, dry wood flaking off in her hand. “Why didn’t you mention the man in the hood before?”

  “Because I’m scared of him, too.” Kimmie Dee stretched toward Isabel’s ear and whispered, “I’ve got his picture.”

  Isabel waited until she thought she could sound casual. “You have a picture of the man in the hood?”

  “Yes. In my room.”

  “Do you think— would you mind getting it, so I can see?”

  “Okay.” She jumped up and ran, sand spurting out behind her. Isabel kept her eyes on the diminishing figure with its flying hair. Something had happened to Merriam, after all. Something real. The event was hidden, its outlines obscured, but it was there.

  When the girl came back, she was carrying a large floppy book. “Here it is,” she said.

  Isabel took the book. It was a Halloween coloring book with a lurid cover depicting a monster emerging from a crypt. The title was Ghouls, Goblins, ’n’ Ghosts. She leafed through it. A halfhearted attempt had been made to color some of the monsters and haunted houses, but most of the pages were untouched. “Here it is,” said Kimmie Dee. She pointed to a picture of a skeleton wearing a hooded robe and carrying a lantern, standing among tombstones in an overgrown graveyard. “That’s him,” Kimmie Dee said. “The man in the hood. That’s the one she was scared of, isn’t it?”

  So much for easy answers. A hearty voice behind them said, “What are you two doing? Having a coloring party?”

  Isabel felt Kimmie Dee, sitting beside her, stiffen. She turned and saw Ted Stiles standing over them, looking with interest at the coloring book open on Isabel’s knees. He was wearing his usual black slacks and white shirt, with the large many-dialed black watch on his wrist and a package of Marlboros showing through his breast pocket. His black leather shoes were hardly appropriate for a stroll on the beach, and Isabel assumed he had followed Kimmie Dee from the house.