Some years before, boosted by luck and creative financing, helped mightily by a rare and temporary downturn in the market, Isabel had bought a tiny studio in Greenwich Village. On the top floor of a ramshackle brownstone, the place was all but devoid of storage space, wretchedly inconvenient, the kitchen a converted broom closet, but it had a skylight and oozed charm. It also, and this was the nub of the matter, was extremely expensive. Even in good times Isabel was house-poor, constantly strapped to make her payments. Now unemployed, she was in arrears.
When she was first cut loose, Isabel had eagerly descended the flights of stairs between her apartment and the mailboxes on the ground floor. In recent weeks, she had become less eager. She had learned that good news, of which she had had precious little, comes by telephone; bad news, of which she had had gracious plenty, comes by mail. She didn’t bother to check the box until 5:30 on the day the letter came.
The envelope was a businesslike white, the printed return address a law office in St. Elmo, Florida. The blurry gray postmark seemed to be coming toward Isabel through fog, the kind of fog that hung low and smelled like salt and then coalesced and trickled from the porch railing.
She put the letter from St. Elmo on the bottom of a stack of bills and brochures. A vibration had started in her head. By the time she had climbed to the third floor, it had formed into words: Merrìam is dead.
She closed the apartment door behind her and opened the envelope.
Dear Ms. Anders:
I am sorry to tell you that your aunt, Miss Merriam Anders, recently had an accident and is incapacitated. She is in the hospital here in St. Elmo. As her attorney, I am in the process of making arrangements for her future care.
I thought perhaps you would like to know.
Sincerely,
E. Clemons Davenant
Attorney-at-Law
Isabel dropped the letter and the other mail on her dining table. E. Clemons Davenant. Isabel thought she remembered him, sitting on the front porch with Merriam, a tall man with thinning white hair, wearing a seersucker suit and fanning himself with a straw hat.
Isabel had made an effort. She had sent Christmas cards, a note now and again, but she had gotten very little response. Some gulfs couldn’t be bridged.
Your aunt, Miss Merriam Anders, recently had an accident and is incapacitated. Isabel went and stood at the window. No doubt as a rebuke to Isabel, Mr. Davenant had been stingy with information.
Well, Isabel had been rebuked by people more expert at it than E. Clemons Davenant. Merriam herself, for one. Rebuking Isabel had been one of Merriam’s most frequent activities.
So Merriam wasn’t dead. It would have been easier if she were, Isabel caught herself thinking. After a brief flush of shame, she stood by the thought. It would have been easier. Below in the garden, birds fluttered in the privet. The sound of their quarrel drifted up through the open windows.
Isabel’s lover, Zan, was in town. That night, they went out for barbecue. Zan, the most European of Eurobusinessmen, loved everything he considered authentically American, and that included barbecue. He was the most pro-United States person Isabel had ever known. His uncritical fervor had led to many heated arguments during the years of their disjointed and improbable affair.
Zan’s job for a multinational conglomerate brought him to New York from his base in Paris for several days a month. He and Isabel had met when Zan took Isabel and his daughter, one of Isabel’s art school classmates, to a Yankees game. Although Zan was twenty-five years older and a couple of inches shorter than Isabel, their mutual attraction had been so explosive it had taken Isabel several years to wonder whether seeing a married man every now and then, and no other men at all, was a healthy format for her love life.
Naturally, she had decided it was not. She made efforts to meet more suitable men, and had some success, but Zan had staying power, and she was comfortable with him. Besides, he could never be hers. For Isabel, this had been an argument in his favor.
Zan was sixty now. His salt-and-pepper hair was completely white at the temples. Isabel was no longer consumed with lust at the sight of him, but she was almost always glad to see him. Lust could still blaze up, too, if the conditions were right.
This evening, they weren’t right. Isabel was thinking about Merriam and the letter from E. Clemons Davenant. Zan seemed distracted, too. They had eaten in relative silence. When Isabel finally asked Zan what was wrong he said, “Elena isn’t well.”
Isabel sat back. Elena was Zan’s wife, and Zan almost never mentioned her. If he was telling her Elena wasn’t well, Elena had more than a head cold. “I’m sorry.”
Zan bent over his coffee cup. “It’s serious, I’m afraid.”
“I’m sorry,” Isabel repeated.
Steam from Zan’s coffee swirled toward his face. He looked careworn and old. “It isn’t good for me to leave her,” he said. “I’ve had to ask for a transfer— a job that won’t require me to travel.”
There it was. Although she had always known it wouldn’t last forever, and indeed never wanted it to, Isabel had a moment of raw panic when she wanted to grab and cling, to beg Zan to tell her what she was going to do, having already lost her job and now losing him.
She conquered the urge. Zan was holding her hand, saying how much their relationship had meant to him. She responded warmly, with similar sentiments. In a surprisingly short time, there was nothing left to say. Soon they were walking up Bleecker Street toward Isabel’s apartment.
Isabel had told Zan about the letter. Zan was endlessly fascinated by Isabel’s childhood years at Cape St. Elmo with Merriam. He had claimed to want to visit the northwest Florida panhandle some day, listening eagerly to her descriptions of swamps and pine woods, wide white beaches and barrier islands. “Will you go to Florida to visit your aunt?” he now asked.
“I hadn’t thought about it. We didn’t exactly part on good terms,” Isabel said.
Zan, in his way, was a great believer in family ties. “I thought perhaps since she’s ill—”
“To go would be hypocritical,” Isabel said. “She never tried to communicate with me. Why should I pretend?”
He put his arm around her shoulders. “I’m sorry you’re upset.”
“I’m not upset.”
They walked on. The sidewalk glowed dully under the streetlights. “I can’t even afford the airfare,” Isabel said after a minute. “Even if I could, there’s no reason for me to go.”
Back in her apartment, Isabel poured two glasses of cognac. She and Zan slipped their shoes off. This had been their routine for years. Tonight, the comforting ritual was suffused with sadness. Isabel sat on her end of the sofa, her feet tucked under her.
“Any luck finding a job?” Zan asked.
She shook her head.
He asked a few questions about her financial situation. She answered reluctantly. Outside, a car alarm whooped.
Zan sipped his cognac. “I can help you, Isabel.”
“Help me how?”
“Money. I can lend you money. I can make the payments on this apartment, if you like, until you’re able to take them over again.”
A broad road was opening in front of her. If Isabel traveled it, everything would be changed. “No, thanks, Zan.”
“Please think it over first. I’d be happy to do it.”
“No, thanks. Really.” Isabel put down her glass. “I’ve got a plan,” she said. She did have a plan. She’d just this minute thought of it. “I’ll find a tenant. I’ll sublet this place and go live cheaper somewhere else for a while.”
Zan nodded. “Live cheaper? Where?”
“I don’t know.” She waved a hand, indicating the rest of the known world. “Out of the city. Maybe upstate.”
“Maybe Florida?”
Isabel stiffened. “I told you,” she began, and he laughed. They dropped the subject and made love.
2
At dusk on an early June evening, Harry Mercer pulled his pickup into Beach Texaco, on
the corner where the state highway dead-ended into Cape St. Elmo Road. Leaving the truck to be gassed up, he walked into Margene’s MiniMart to get a soft drink and some peanuts. Moths and bugs danced around the lights on the poles at the filling station.
Margene was sitting on a stool at the counter, leafing through USA Today. On his way back to the refrigerator case, Harry waved and called, “Hey, hon.”
“Harry.” Margene turned a page. She was liberally freckled and on the hefty side.
When Harry returned with his Coke and put it on the counter with the peanuts, he said, “So tell me the latest. What’s going on?”
Margene, who always knew the local gossip, rolled her eyes, thinking. “You heard about the Marine Patrolman. Darryl Kelly.”
“The one that disappeared? Sure.”
“You heard they found his arm. Part of his arm.”
Of course Harry Mercer knew about that. “Fisherman over at Westpoint found part of the arm in a shark’s belly, is what I heard,” he said. “And they knew it was Kelly’s, because of some kind of plaid cloth he was wearing.”
“Slit that shark open, there was the arm,” Margene confirmed.
“Never did find his boat, though,” Harry said. “They reckon he came up on a floating log or something, tore up the bottom. It sank, he went in the bay, and that was that.”
“That’s about it,” Margene said. Her eyes strayed back toward USA Today, still open on the counter. She licked her finger, turned a page, and said, “I bet you remember Isabel Anders.”
Harry had been digging for money in the pocket of his khakis. He stopped digging. “Hell, yes.”
“Was she in your class at school? I was trying to think.”
Harry pretended that he, too, was trying to think. “Year behind.”
“I thought it was something like that.” Margene punched numbers into the cash register. “That’s a dollar twenty-nine.”
Harry paid. He popped the top of his drink and said, “What about her?”
Margene had gone back to USA Today. “Who? Isabel?”
“Who else are we talking about?”
Margene looked up and said, “She was in here today.” She folded her arms.
Harry blinked, but mastered any further indication of surprise. “Naw,” he said.
Margene nodded. “She was. Buying groceries. Cereal, milk, bananas—”
“Are you sure it was her?”
“Am I sure? I asked her. I said, ‘Isn’t that you, Isabel?’ ”
“She said yes?”
“Sure she said yes. It was her.”
“Did she know you?”
“No. I was a few years behind you all in school.”
Harry took a swallow of Coke and bit open the top of his cellophane peanut bag. Once he got it open, he shook out a handful of nuts and tossed them in his mouth. “Humpf,” he said, chewing.
“She looked different, but I knew.”
Harry swallowed. Harry had deeply tanned skin and sun-bleached brown curls. He looked like what he was, an outdoorsman gone soft in the stomach. He wore deck shoes without socks, a knit shirt. “How different?”
Margene raised her eyebrows. “Way too skinny, and white as a ghost. No tan at all.”
“She never did have a tan.” He took another swallow. “She say where she was staying?”
“She didn’t say, but she headed off toward the Cape. She was driving Miss Merriam’s old Ford.” Not much got by Margene.
“No kidding.” Harry stifled a burp. “I’ll be damned.”
“Yep.” Margene turned another page. “Reckon she’s down here seeing about Miss Merriam. From what I heard, the poor old thing’s in pitiful shape.”
“Took a bad knock on the head, is what I heard,” Harry said. “Fell or something.”
“Bless her heart,” Margene said automatically. “But you know, I don’t think Isabel and Miss Merriam ever got along too good, did they? Didn’t Isabel run off with a boy from the air base? Back in high school? You probably remember all that, don’t you, Harry?”
“That was a long time ago, Margie.” Harry raised a hand in farewell. “I got to go. See you.”
Harry walked slowly back toward Beach Texaco, feeling the heat from the parking lot warming the soles of his shoes. He finished his drink, tossed the can in the oil drum the station used as a recycling bin, and paid for his gas. When he pulled away from the pumps he sat for a while as if considering something before finally turning right on Cape St. Elmo Road.
Night hadn’t quite fallen, but it was dark enough for headlights. In a few minutes, Harry was out of town. The smell of salt water filled the truck. On his left were rolling dunes covered with sea oats, and beyond the dunes, waves curled and broke.
After a few miles, Harry reached the Beachcomber Boatel and Restaurant, a long dock with gas pumps and boat slips attached to a two-story frame building. The roof of the building was ringed with blinking multicolored lights.
Beyond the Beachcomber, civilization thinned to an uneven row of widely separated cottages on the beach side and woods on the other. Amid the tangle of palmetto, scrub oak, and pine, an occasional magnolia was visible, with pale blossoms luminous in the dusk. Up ahead, the Cape St. Elmo lighthouse flashed rhythmically.
When Harry reached a nearly obscured track leading off to the right, he pulled onto the shoulder and turned off his engine. Moving over in his seat, he craned out the passenger window. He could barely see the dark bulk of the old Anders place through the cabbage palms bordering the overgrown drive.
Harry got out of the truck and walked down the drive, the palms overhead rustling in the hot breeze. The big house loomed in front of him. Off to one side, some twenty-five or thirty yards away, sat a small mobile home. Light shone through its curtained windows. An old Ford was pulled up nearby.
Harry stood with his hands in his back pockets, looking at the trailer. Every now and then a shadow moved behind the curtains. After a while, he returned to his truck and drove away.
3
The palms woke Isabel at dawn. She sat up straight, listening to the sound that was both alien and dreadfully familiar.
The palms along the drive. She had forgotten the racket they made in the wind. The rustling was so loud, it almost drowned out the ineffectual churning of the air conditioner.
Isabel leaned back against the carved oak headboard of Merriam’s bed. The air in the bedroom was tepid and stale. The room was almost filled by the massive bedstead and matching dresser with its tarnished mirror. These two pieces were the only furniture Isabel recognized from the house. The living room suite, rattan with tropical print cushions, must have been included with the trailer.
Merriam had never told Isabel she had moved out of the house.
Isabel got up, picking her way around her suitcase. She had not yet figured out how to unpack, since every drawer and closet shelf was jammed with the detritus of the Anders family history. There were starched linen tablecloths, old shotguns, crocheted runners, photo albums, cutwork baby garments.
In the shower, lukewarm water slid over her body from a nearly corroded showerhead. Headachy and unrefreshed, she pulled on shorts and a shirt and went to the kitchen to make coffee. The dented aluminum coffeepot she had found there could well be the same one she remembered from her childhood.
Here she was. New York and her life there might as well be on another planet. She had sublet her apartment, said farewell to her friends and good-bye to Zan. She was back at Cape St. Elmo, a place she had hoped never to see again.
She wasn’t sure why she had changed her mind. Being able to live cheaply was, she recognized, a wan excuse for this major upheaval. She wasn’t convinced she owed Merriam anything, and it was too late in her life to start bowing to convention. Still, she had found herself determined to come.
Isabel wandered around the tiny, shadowy living room, waiting for the coffee to drip. Although cluttered, and dusty from lack of occupancy, the place had been perfectly clean when she arrived
. Knowing Merriam’s ways, Isabel would have expected no less. The magazines were neatly stacked on a shelf under an end table, the standard-issue seascape on the wall hung straight. There was a portable radio but no television set. Merriam had always considered television an unnecessary, possibly even sinful, indulgence.
Yes, the place was much as Isabel might have imagined, including the shrine in the corner.
What else could you call it but a shrine? The photograph hanging on the wall, sepia-toned in its heavy frame, was one Isabel remembered well. It depicted a dark-haired man, handsome but running to jowls. He was staring out of the picture, a surprised expression in his bulging dark eyes. The man was John James Anders, Merriam’s father and Isabel’s grandfather.
Isabel felt Merriam’s fingers digging into her shoulder, anchoring her in front of the portrait. She heard Merriam’s voice: “You know who this is?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Of course Isabel knew. They had been through the catechism before.
“Who is it, then?”
“My grandfather.”
The fingers tightened. “What was his name?”
“John James Anders.”
The sainted John James, dead before his time. His photograph had had the place of honor in the front parlor of the big house. Now it dominated this tacky little room. Beneath it, sitting on a tall, spindly-legged flower stand, was a porcelain bottle. The bottle was square, about six inches high, with an airy blue pattern of flowering branches and flying birds on a white background. In the old days, it sat on the mantel under John James’s portrait. Isabel used to dust it very carefully every Saturday.
The bottle was part of John James’s shrine. Merriam told the story like an incantation.
The Complete Mystery Collection Page 119
