Josie told Jeannie to drive downtown, onto Las Olas, heading east. Just after the shopping district, she told us to turn into the neighborhood on the right. After a couple of blocks, past a large church, she directed Jeannie toward an old vine-covered house I recognized. It was squeezed in between the larger, more luxurious estates, but on the other side of the house, it fronted on the river. I had motored past this house a hundred times in Gorda. Though I couldn’t see it when we got out of the car, I knew there was a beautiful classic wooden sailboat moored on the other side.
Gramma Josie took Pit and me by the hands and led us through a side gate that led through a small courtyard and on to the back of the house. Everything was overgrown and unkempt. Whoever lived in this house had really let it get away from them.
When we walked into the backyard, we saw a group of several chairs, but there was only a single woman sitting alone. She rose and turned when she heard us approach, and I was astonished to see that it was Mrs.Wheeler, who had tried to avoid me whenever I tried to speak to her. Now, she was frowning at the sight of us. Josie walked up to the woman and took her hand without saying a word. I thought maybe Josie had brought us there to thank her for her part in identifying Nick’s killer, but when I saw the way the women held hands, the way they communicated without having to use words, I suddenly realized that Faith Wheeler was the little white girl who had taught Josie how to speak English at the trading post.
Josie turned to Pit and me and said, “Seychelle, Pit, meet your grandmother.”
XXX
Of all the things that I had been thinking on the drive over and the walk around the house, that didn’t even come close to being something I’d considered. “What?” Pit and I said in unison.
Mrs. Wheeler stepped forward and offered us her hands palms up. We grasped her hands and tried to look enthusiastic. I wasn’t too sure about how Pit felt, but I felt like we had just fallen down the rabbit hole. She asked us to sit with her and listen, and it wasn’t like we could say no. Besides, I thought, glancing at B. J.’s smug expression, I was waiting to hear the punch line.
We all sat out on the old wood deck chairs. Zale and Molly sat side by side cross-legged in the grass.
“I’ve been watching you for a long time,” she said. “All your lives, really. You lived just up the river, but it was always a distance I couldn’t cross. My second husband thought maybe I should tell you all after Annie died, but I knew your father would never forgive me.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “We have a grandmother we’ve never met? Why? What happened?”
“It’s a long story, and it’s not one I’m particularly proud of.” Her veined hands fidgeted in her lap. She looked over in Josie’s direction. The old Indian woman was nodding' and rubbing her lips over her teeth. “I’ve imagined this day so many times. Now it’s here and I just don’t know where to begin.”
“We have so many questions,” I said. “Who are you, and why haven’t we ever met you before?”
“Okay,” she said. “Well, my name was Faith Hitchings when my daughter Annie was born right here in this house,” she began, and with those words, I suddenly realized it was true. This woman was my grandmother. “Your grandfather and I, we’d been trying to have a baby for years, but God does not always provide. When we finally did get pregnant, she was the most beautiful little baby girl you’d ever seen. But we soon learned that our Annie was a headstrong girl, too. We were so happy to have her, we indulged her. More often than not, she got her way. Her father died when she was in high school, and I spoiled her even more after that. When she was a grown girl and off in college down at the University of Miami, she came home one weekend and met a fella over at the Elbow Room.
“I thought he was a common boy, not good enough for her, and I told her so. We argued. She said she’d fallen in love with her sailor and wanted to marry him. I told her if she did that I would never speak to her again as long as she lived. They ran off to the Bahamas the next week and were married, and for once in my life, I kept my word to my child.”
At first I swallowed hard, unable to speak. Then I said, “Oh my God,” and shook my head from side to side. “Mom knew you lived right here and she never spoke to you? She never brought us to visit you?”
She’d taken a handkerchief out of her pocket and was twisting and pulling at it in her lap. She nodded. “Annie and Red lived in an apartment when you children were little, but I knew from realtor friends of mine that they were looking for a house on a canal. I bought the house and had the realtor offer it to them at a steal of a price. They never knew it was me—never would have bought it if they’d known, and once Josie’s daughter moved there too – from then on I’d get news about you all from Josie or from a few other friends I had who knew about my family. I’ve always watched you on the river ever since you were both such little things scrambling all over that boat of your daddy’s. I knew the sound of Gorda's engine, and whenever she passed, I’d watch from behind the curtains.”
“Is this the house you grew up in?” I asked.
“Yes, my daddy had this house built for us in 1920. Josie wasn’t allowed to come here when we were girls, but later, after mother died, Josie visited whenever her family came to town. It was after the war when your mother was born. Things were different then. Fort Lauderdale was booming. Your grandfather bought that boat,” she indicated the little yawl with the varnished trunk cabin and teak decks, “and we used to go on lovely sails with Annie, when she was young. In fact, we named the boat for our daughter. Would you like to see her?”
“Sure,” I said.
“You go on ahead,” she said. Make yourself at home. I’m afraid I’m not as comfortable on deck as I once was.”
As we walked across the grass, Pit said, “This is too much for one day.”
“I know. But think about Mom. Think about her relationship with Dad. This explains a lot about her. I’ve certainly read enough about depression through the years to know that she didn’t need to have a reason for her sadness. But it was always hard to feel that. I always felt we just hadn’t done enough to make her happy. There’s something about knowing this that makes me feel better. We weren’t the ones making her so sad.”
Pit climbed aboard first, but B. J. turned to me and wrapped his arms around me. He kissed me on the lips. “Happy birthday, Seychelle,” he said.
I hadn’t thought of it until that moment. It was Monday and I was thirty years old.
“It’s not a surprise party,” he said.
“You. You arranged this?”
“You said you wanted something memorable. It was Josie’s idea. She told me that your grandmother was alive. She had promised Faith years ago that she would never tell you. Even so, lately, she tried to tell you a couple of times, but you weren’t ready yet to hear it. She told me if I arranged it, she wouldn’t feel like she had broken her promise to Faith.”
“I still can’t get used to it.”
“None of us knew you were going to get kidnapped and nearly killed in the middle of it all, but somehow Josie always knew you were going to be ready for this day. She never lost faith.”
XXXI
With the helm lashed and the sails balanced, Annie sailed as true a course as any vessel with an autopilot. B. J. was out on deck, sitting with his back to the mast in the shadow of the mainsail, reading one of several fat philosophy books he had brought along on the trip. I was down in the galley, digging through the stores I’d carefully packed in the icebox, trying to find the shrimp that I knew I had bought. Tonight was going to be an evening to remember. I was going to cook B. J.’s dinner.
When I found the shrimp, I pulled out the package and closed the heavy lid to the box. I climbed two steps up the ladder to glance around the horizon and check for traffic, a habit I kept up even when B. J. was on deck. I knew he could get into a book and be lost for hours.
The wind was light out of the east-southeast, typical for late April, and we were sailing close-hauled jus
t offshore from Key Biscayne. The Cape Florida Light was a couple of miles ahead off the starboard quarter. We’d turn at the light and sail through Stiltsville, heading for an anchorage off Elliot Key, our first night’s anchorage on this trip down the Keys. We were allowing ourselves two weeks and hoping to get down as far as the Dry Tortugas, but in the way of sailors, we’d take each day as it came. Part of me felt a need to return to Elliot to seek some kind of closure, to probe at what was still an open wound. Janet was headed to trial, but I still heard the voices of the dying in my dreams.
In the months since my birthday, my brothers and I had begun to know our grandmother. She was not a warm woman, and as an old-time Methodist, she disapproved of much of what we did. Maddy had thought Pit and I were playing a joke on him when we went down to his house that week and sprang the news on him. But Faith invited the whole family over for dinner the next week, including Maddy’s wife, Jane, and his kids, Freddie and Annie, and Zale came along with his mom and Gramma Josie. Faith tried to look like she enjoyed all the noise and bedlam, but I could tell she wasn’t used to having people in her house.
After that, we all went over to visit her on our own. Pit worked on the Annie when he was in town, which tended to be lots more often these days. He always brought Zale with him. Maddy brought in a yard crew and relandscaped the house, which Faith said she appreciated, but she wrinkled her nose sometimes when we sat out on the deck at her house, me with my beer and her with a gin and tonic, and watched the boats go by.
It was on my second or third visit that Faith started insisting that I should take the Annie out on a cruise. She told me it hurt her to see the boat sit there growing barnacles all the time. Pit was down in Antigua and Maddy didn’t know a thing about sailboats, she said, so it was up to me. So I’d talked to B. J. about it, we’d compared our calendars, gone for sea trials, bought our stores, and here we were.
I wanted to try to make shrimp scampi for dinner. B. J. had promised me he would bring several cookbooks on the trip, so I crossed to the main salon to look through the books he had stored in the bookshelf behind the settee. There were lots of fat tomes with unpronounceable authors’ names, and several ratty paperback novels that looked like they dated back to the seventies. I didn’t see anything that resembled a cookbook. I began to pull out books to see what was stored behind the front volumes, and stuck behind a copy of Slocum’s Sailing Alone Around the World, I found a slim leather photo album.
I could tell from the mildew on the leather that the album had been on the boat for a while. I pulled it out and made my way to the companionway ladder. The light in the dark wood cabin was far too dim to examine this treasure. After another quick glance around the horizon, checking our relationship to the sportfisherman overtaking us on the seaward side, I settled in and opened the album.
At first I was disappointed. I didn’t recognize any of the people in the black-and-white photos. I thought it was possible that some of them were photos of Faith, but she had changed so much through the years that I couldn’t be sure. It was only at the very end of the album, where there were a few loose color snapshots, that I saw a face I recognized.
It was my mother, about ten years old, and in the first photo she was standing with a beautiful woman next to a tree. They were wearing very dated swimsuits from the late forties or early fifties, and they both had one hand raised grasping a rough, knotted rope suspended from the tree. They weren’t looking at the camera. They were looking at each other and laughing as though one of them had just told a very good joke. In the next photo, my mother was flying through the air, her mouth open wide, her dark hair splayed in the wind. The photographer had caught her at just the moment when she’d let go of the rope and her legs and arms were spread wide. She was going to land in one heck of a belly flop.
“Hey, whatcha got there?” B. J. asked as he climbed down into the cockpit and sat next to me.
“It’s an old album I found. Look at this one of my mom.” I handed him the snapshot. “And this one. I think that’s Faith with her.”
“Yeah. These are great. Look at the swimsuits.”
“Look how happy they were together. They were so young. So free. Is it getting old that changes us so much?”
“It does for some people.”
“I know what that girl’s feeling in this picture, swinging from that rope, being afraid to just let go.”
A flock of pelicans flying in a perfect V formation glided past just a few feet above the swells.
“B. J., how does it happen that people who love each other so much can get mad over some stupid thing and never speak to each other again? How did my mother let that happen with her own mother?”
“The same way you and Molly did.”
I sighed and looked at the photo of the girl screaming with joy as she flew through the air. “You know, sometimes it really scares me how much I’m like her.”
“But you’re also different. You are the age now that your mother was when she turned her back on her family. Instead of shrinking, your family is growing. Instead of holding on to hurt and allowing it to end your friendship, you’re learning to let go.”
I turned and tucked an arm around his bare chest and pulled him to me. Our kiss was long and deep. And like every time we touched, he fired up all the thousands of sparkly little nerves in my body. But there was an ease and a peace that I hadn’t known before. Yeah, Molly Pontus had flirted with B. J., just like a hundred other beautiful women did each day, and for some crazy reason, here he was in the cockpit of this boat sailing with me to the Keys. Maybe, just maybe, I could begin to believe he would stay.
When we pulled apart, I saw we were abeam of the lighthouse. It was time to make our turn if we were going to make Elliot by nightfall. The sails were trimmed perfectly and we were making a good five knots through the water. The sky was starting to pale and the night promised to be warm and clear. There was nothing between us and the Dry Tortugas.
“I’d really hate to mess with these sails,” I said. “What do you say we just let her go?”
THE END
Thank you for purchasing and reading
BITTER END
If you enjoyed the book, please consider posting a review on the site where you purchased it. And tell your friends!
Christine is always pleased to hear from readers, and she welcomes comments and feedback.
[email protected]
Bonus Material
Read the first chapter from
WRECKERS’ KEY (Seychelle Sullivan #4)
Wreckers’ Key
I
“We hit the reef so hard, I’m surprised no one was killed,” Nestor said. “I keep dreaming about it, you know? Hearing the sound of the hull crunching across the coral and then Kent’s screams when his arm broke.” He rubbed his hand across his eyes like he was trying to wipe away the vision. “This situation scares me, Seychelle. My whole career’s on the line here.”
I couldn’t disagree. When you put a multimillion-dollar yacht on the reef on her maiden voyage, your reputation as a captain is toast. I was there to help with the salvage of the boat, but I wasn’t sure what I could do to salvage Nestor’s career.
Catalina Frias reached across the table, took her husband’s hand, and focused her large brown eyes on his face. She didn’t say anything for several seconds, but there was a sense of intimacy in that moment that was stronger than if she’d grabbed him and planted a wet one on him. “Hey, we are going to get through this, mi amor, okay?” Her soft voice was accented, but her English was perfect. She squeezed his hand, her other arm resting across the top of the belly that bulged beneath her pretty print maternity top.
I was sitting with the two of them at an outdoor table at the Two Friends Patio Restaurant on Front Street. I’d arrived in Key West late the afternoon before on my forty-six-foot aluminum tug Gorda, and when I called Nestor on the VHF, I told him I was too tired to come ashore after a four-day trip down from Lauderdale with only my dog as crew. I
just wanted to drop the hook and collapse in my bunk, so we’d agreed to meet in the morning for Sunday brunch. Now here I was, sitting under a lush trellis of bougainvillea pushing scrambled eggs and sausage around my plate, my appetite gone.
“Nestor, this is the first time I’ve taken Gorda this far from home. I wouldn’t do this for just anybody, you know.”
When he smiled that boyish smile so full of gratitude, my heart ached for him. He was in a hell of a spot.
“Gracias, amiga. I can’t lose this job,” he said, the backs of his fingers caressing his wife’s belly. “Not now, with the baby coming in just a few weeks.”
I’d known Nestor much longer than his wife had, and I loved him like a brother. There was a time when maybe that love could have gone another way, but the attraction that might have been had turned into an abiding friendship. He really was one of the good guys. He’d showed up on the docks just before Red died, and afterward, when I started running Gorda on my own and several of the captains were bad-mouthing the only female captain in the towing business, he always stood up for me. I’d watched him work his way up the waterfront, going from being a captain on the Water Taxi to running the charter fishing boat My Way, until now, finally, he’d gotten his big break about four months ago, as the captain of a luxury power yacht. The Power Play was a newly commissioned Sunseeker 94 owned by a local resident millionaire, Ted Berger. Berger had made his money in dot-com-related businesses, and when he’d sold out, he’d bought several South Florida TV stations and sports teams.
“Do you think Berger’s going to can you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. He hasn’t said anything yet. Seychelle, this was the first passage I’d made as captain. Other than a couple of sea trials to work on the engines, we hadn’t really taken her out yet. He told me when he hired me to commission the yacht that he wanted her down here in Key West for Race Week, but then he decided to install new flat-screen TVs in all the staterooms, then a new sound system, and we were late getting out of the yard. The festivities down here had already started, and the boss was itching to come down and party. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have been going so fast in a squall.”
Bitter End (Seychelle Sullivan #3) Page 29
