The last plaintive strains of “My Darling Clementine” faded and the audience broke into applause. Isabel was nervous. She craned to see the skinny figure in the red leotard and white boots at the foot of the steps leading to the stage.
The man with the harmonica took his last bow. When the clapping ended, the master of ceremonies moved to the mike and began to talk about “a little lady whose bravery has impressed us all, and who needs no introduction.” Kimmie Dee was climbing the steps. She stood at the back of the platform until he said her name, then stepped forward smartly. She stood in position, waiting for the music to begin.
THE END
To Victoria Dearing,
Once my neighbor
Always my friend
Acknowledgments
For invaluable assistance in writing this book, I am indebted to: Virginia Barber; Alan Friedman; Sheriff Al Harrison, of Gulf County, Florida; Herman Jones; Frances Kiernan; Sergeant David King, of the Marine Patrol; Captain Jimmy Lumley; Jerry Milanich, of the Florida State Museum of Natural History; Jim Miller, of the Bureau of Archaeological Research of the Museum of Florida History; Isadore Seltzer; and Dan Wharton, of the Bronx Zoo/ Wildlife Conservation Park.
They are not responsible for my mistakes or for the use I have made of the material they so generously provided me.
The French fairy tale “The Children from the Sea” can be found in French Folktales (Pantheon Books).
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Also by Michaela Thompson
PAPER PHOENIX
FAULT TREE
VENETIAN MASK
The Georgia Maxwell Series
MAGIC MIRROR
A TEMPORARY GHOST
The Florida Panhandle Mysteries
HURRICANE SEASON
RIPTIDE
HEAT LIGHTNING
About the Author
MICHAELA THOMPSON is the author of seven mystery novels, all of them originally published under the name Mickey Friedman. She grew up on the Gulf Coast in the Northwest Florida Panhandle, the locale described in Hurricane Season, and still spends a significant amount of time there. She has worked as a newspaper reporter and a freelance journalist, and has contributed mystery short stories to a number of anthologies. She lives in New York City.
Praise for Michaela Thompson and HURRICANE SEASON:
“[Michaela Thompson] knows how to create that sense of place, which is so important to any novel but particularly to crime fiction; her characters are believable men and women in a real world, her mystery is credible, and in Lily Trulock she has created a middle-aged heroine who is both original and sympathetic.”
—P.D. James
“Sterling dialogue, drily comic atmosphere, but a pulse of grim reality too: Miss Marple meets Eudora Welty (with a trace of Erskine Caldwell)…”
—Kirkus
“With the kind of realism that stems from William Faulkner, the author skillfully portrays her inbred, suspicious, nasty people… [Michaela Thompson] writes with unusual confidence, particularly in her account of a gritty love affair…she has written a murder mystery that happens only two or three times a year.”
—New York Times
HEAT LIGHTNING
A Florida Panhandle Mystery
By
Michaela Thompson
booksBnimble Publishing
New Orleans, La.
Heat Lightning
Copyright 2017 by Michaela Thompson
All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
ISBN: 978-0-9973630-5-0
First booksBnimble Publishing electronic publication: 2017
www.booksbnimble.com
heat lightning: A flash or flashes of light seen near the horizon, especially on warm evenings, believed to be the reflection of distant lightning on high clouds.
1975
It was a suffocating summer night. The waves on St. Elmo Beach slipped listlessly over the sand, and the moon was obscured by haze. There was little traffic on the dark, two-lane highway that hugged the coast.
Across the road from the beach, a beacon of activity in the languid scene, the red neon sign of the Gulf Dream Lounge cast a glow over the crowded oyster-shell parking lot. Anyone walking into the Gulf Dream would be immersed in the smell of spilled beer and sweat, the babble of raised, possibly drunken, voices, and the sound of “Delta Dawn” playing at full volume on the jukebox. The place was packed, with every table taken and no elbow room at the bar. Down a dim hall, in a back room, the regular weekly poker game was in session. It was a typical summer night.
Behind the Lounge, a short distance up a side road, was a row of rundown stucco cottages. Flat roofed and vaguely Spanish in style, they were connected by a concrete walkway. Scrubby cabbage palms overlooked a bumpy asphalt parking lot. A sign identified these cottages as the Gulf Dream Villas.
In one of the villas, a man and a woman were clinging to one another with a feverish, thoughtless desperation. In the dark, humid room the air conditioner rumbled to little avail.
“You shouldn’t have come,” the woman said, her voice muffled by the man’s chest. “Daddy saw my husband in town today. If he comes looking—”
“I had to see you,” the man murmured. “You can tell, can’t you? I couldn’t wait.”
“Me neither.” The woman sounded almost tearful. “But if Coby finds out, he’ll do something. And he’s mean.”
“Does he know where you’re living?” She rocked her head against him. Negative. In a rush of breath, she said, “He asked Daddy, but Daddy wouldn’t tell him.
“Daddy’s going to get a gun. He says that bastard isn’t going to lay a hand on his daughter or his grandkids.”
The man sighed. In a somber whisper he said, “You want me to go, then?”
“No!” Her voice broke. “I don’t want you to go. It’ll be all right. Don’t go, baby. Stay with me. Please, please stay.”
1975
On a hot summer morning in 1975, Alice Rhodes didn’t show up at her job at the air base. Fifteen minutes into the work day another secretary, Patsy Orr, tapped her colleague Merle Evans on the shoulder. Merle glanced up, saw that it was Patsy, and her face hardened a little. Patsy had that effect on people. “Alice hasn’t come in yet,” Patsy said in a low voice.
Merle, her paperwork spread out, glanced over at Alice’s empty desk. “I guess not,” she said.
Patsy’s eyes loomed large, magnified by the lenses of her harlequin glasses. “What if something’s wrong?” she said. Her hands were trembling. She clasped them in front of her copious bosom and waited for the dismissal that would surely come.
Merle checked her watch. She said, “Patsy, she’s eleven minutes late. Maybe her car broke down.” She turned back to her work.
Patsy hovered for a few seconds before returning to her desk. She waited another half hour before approaching Merle again. When Merle looked up, Patsy said, “Merle, I had a dream about her.”
Merle lowered her eyes to her work. “About who?”
“Alice. I had a dream, and now—”
Merle turned fully around and looked Patsy in the eye. “I have got to get this done, Patsy. You’re going to have to excuse me.”
In the end, it was two hours into the work day before the Colonel told Patsy and Merle, the only other secretaries who commuted to the base from St. Elmo, to drive over to St. Elmo Beach a
nd check on Alice Rhodes. He himself had tried calling, and there was no answer at Alice’s apartment. Still, alerting the police didn’t make sense at this stage of the game. He preferred to keep the situation within his control until he learned what was going on.
Patsy and Merle took Merle’s car. Leaving the base, they drove east through dense pine woods that lined the two lane highway. Merle, in the driver’s seat, was silent, her eyes on the road. At last Patsy said, “I did have a dream, Merle. About Alice.”
Merle made a sound like, “Huh.”
Patsy went on, “I dreamed I was walking up to her apartment at Gulf Dream Villas. You know her front window? The big one?”
Merle didn’t answer.
“Well, in my dream the curtain was closed, but when I was walking up toward the front door a man pulled the curtain back and looked out. He looked right at me, and his eyes were strange, and he had a funny look on his face.” Patsy shivered and rubbed her arms. “When he saw me, he dropped the curtain. It was so real, Merle.” Her voice quavered.
“It was a dream, Patsy.”
“Well, yes it was.” Patsy nodded several times. “It scared me so bad I told Alice the next day at lunch. I couldn’t get it out of my head. I said, ‘Alice, you got to be careful.’”
“And what did she say?”
“She laughed. She patted my arm and she said, ‘Don’t you worry about me, Patsy. I’m always careful.’ ”
“Well, there it is. She said it herself.”
“I know, but—” Patsy extracted a tissue from her bag and blew her nose.
Merle took her eyes off the road briefly to glance over at Patsy. She said, “Patsy, you and I don’t know the half of what Alice Rhodes gets up to.”
Patsy blinked. “What do you mean?” The question had a defensive tone.
“She’s not a girl. She’s thirty-five if she’s a day. And I know she’s pretty and sweet, and she smiles at everybody. But you know what? When her husband Coby took off, she gave her two children to her parents to raise. Just like that. And she moved right out of town to the beach and got her own place.” Merle gave a little huff of breath, and her hands tightened on the wheel.
“She told me all about that,” Patsy said. “Coby took off. She had to get a job to support the children. She got hired at the air base, and she needed a place to live close enough to drive over there and back every day, and she needed somebody to look after the children. She felt bad about it, Merle.”
“Maybe she did,” Merle said. “But that didn’t stop her from having a good time when she felt like it. We know ourselves that she’s been dating the airmen. And she’s been seen at the Gulf Dream Lounge more than once, and when she’s there she’s always got company.”
“She has always been real nice to me,” Patsy said. “One time, she gave me a lipstick that was almost brand new because she said it was the wrong shade for her.”
Merle didn’t answer. The pine forest was thinning, and the roadside signs warned of a reduction in the speed limit. Soon, the beach came into view on the right-hand side: St. Elmo Bay gleaming deep blue in the blinding sun, dunes covered with sea oats and other rough grasses.
They continued along the highway past modest cottages, a filling station or two, a fishing pier. The Gulf Dream Lounge was coming up on their left-hand side. The crushed-shell parking lot was deserted, and the place looked desolate in the morning light. Just before they reached it, Merle turned left on a side road and drove up a gentle rise to a line of yellow stucco cottages. A sign at the entrance to the parking lot said Gulf Dream Villas. Merle said, “She’s in number two, isn’t she?”
“That’s right. Looks like her car’s there,” Patsy said.
“Well, maybe she’s there.” Merle pulled up and parked under the palms.
“Maybe she’s sick,” Patsy said.
The heat was intense, the sun brilliant. The women got out of the car and moved toward cottage number two. Merle opened the screen and gave the front door a brisk knock.
The door moved inward. Merle looked over her shoulder at Patsy, hovering behind. “It isn’t even latched,” she said. More tentatively now, she gave the door a push. “Alice?” she called. “It’s Merle and Patsy.”
The two women walked into a small entry that opened on a living room. And there, in the diffuse light that filtered through the front curtain, they saw Alice Rhodes lying on the carpet. She was on her side, naked, unmoving, a tumble of yellow hair covering her bloody face.
Merle stepped back, bumping into Patsy. “Oh, no,” she said. “Oh, no.” She started to cry.
“I dreamed it,” Patsy said, her voice shaking. “I told you I dreamed it, Merle.” She walked past Merle and walked past Alice’s body to the telephone table in the hall. She picked up the phone to call the police.
Part I
1
About half an hour after sundown, when the afterglow had faded and the sky was darkening fast, a man walked along the edge of the vacant lot behind the house where Vickie Ann and Jim lived. He crossed the alley and lingered in the shadow of the garage for a while, as if waiting for the darkness to thicken. Arms folded, he watched the sky turn a uniform dark gray. In the fast-waning light, he walked around the corner and slipped into the open door of the garage.
The interior was dim, the meager light from a window on the back wall revealing the outlines of an assortment of junk— furniture, lamps, stacks of newspapers, rolled-up rugs, cardboard boxes stacked unevenly. There was a rusted lawn mower, a refrigerator with no door, an old sewing machine.
The man looked out toward the back yard and the house. There was a light burning on the sun porch, but the glass louvers were closed. He took a tentative step forward, as if trying to decide whether to approach the house or not.
A voice from the back of the garage said, “Hey, Daddy.”
The man turned. He craned his neck toward the sound, but in the back corner where the voice had come from, it was too dark to distinguish anything. He cleared his throat and said, “Is that you, Vickie Ann?”
“Yes, sir. It’s me.”
“Well, come on out, then, why don’t you?” said Coby Rhodes.
A shape detached itself from the jumble in the back corner, and Vickie Ann stepped into the more open space of the interior. “I wondered if you’d come again. I thought you might,” she said.
“What do you mean, ‘again’?” said Coby.
“You’ve been here before. Daddy Jim— my grandpa— saw you.”
“You call him ‘Daddy’?” Coby said.
“Daddy Jim.”
“He ain’t your daddy, honey. You only got one daddy, and that’s me. All right?”
“Yes, sir.”
Coby took a look at Vickie Ann. He said, “You grew up fine, didn’t you? How old are you now?”
“Forty-three.”
“Naw! Really? We got some catching up to do, don’t we?”
Vickie Ann didn’t answer. After a moment she said, “Why have you been coming around here?”
“Why do you think?” Coby said. “I’ve got a daughter, don’t I? I came to see you, see how you were getting along.”
“But— you didn’t come for a long time,” Vickie Ann said. “Years and years. Didn’t you ever think about me?”
“Of course I thought about you,” Coby said. “I wanted to come back, Vickie. But I had so many things to take care of, and it wasn’t easy for me to get away. And your grandma and grandpa didn’t like me at all. There was no reason for it, but they flat-out hated me, seemed like.”
“My grandpa said you stole money from him.”
“What?” Coby shook his head sorrowfully. “That is so wrong. That is not true at all. You don’t have to believe me, but I will tell you that Jim Tuttle hated me from the minute he set eyes on me, and he poisoned Alice against me, and he poisoned Donnie against me, and now it sure looks like he’s poisoned you.”
Vickie Ann took a step closer. “He hasn’t poisoned me against you, Daddy. But h
e doesn’t like you. And he keeps saying you killed Mama.”
“Oh, my God. No,” said Coby. He sank down and sat on a cardboard box. “I am innocent of that. I never killed Alice. Don’t you and Jim know the case is closed? They identified the killer, and it’s not me.”
“I know it,” Vickie Ann said, “but Daddy Jim— Grandpa— won’t believe it. He gets confused.”
“Yeah, well, he dern sure does,” Coby said. He looked up at her. “You believe me, though. Don’t you, baby?”
“Yes, sir.”
“That’s all that matters to me,” Coby said. “That’s what I came to hear. That I’ve got a clean slate with my very own daughter.”
Vickie Ann blotted her eyes with her knuckles. “Yes. You do,” she said. “I’m glad you came to see me.”
“Well, sure I did, baby. Soon as I ever could. Once the murder case was finally put to rest, I could come back a little easier. You know old Jim tried to pin it on me way back then, and even now I don’t want to show my face around here too much.” After a pause, he said, “Listen, Vickie. I want to ask you— are the bank accounts—”
“A lady called me,” Vickie Ann said.
“That’s nice. Now listen—”
“She wants to talk to me about Mama getting murdered.”
Coby was still for a moment. He said, “Who might that lady be?”
“Her name is Clara Trent.”
The Complete Mystery Collection Page 139
