Rising Tide

by Wayne Stinnett

  Savannah was the barefoot type anyway.

  Rusty just looked at her a moment. “Seemed like the thing to do, huh? You coulda just called 911 and let the water cops handle it.”

  Savannah shook her head. “That little boy needed help, Rusty. So, we helped.”

  He looked across the bar at me and shook his head. “I can understand you doing something dumb like that. You’re just a grunt. But why’d you make her jump, too?”

  I opened my mouth to speak, but Savannah beat me to it.

  “He doesn’t make me do anything,” she said.

  “That’s true,” I agreed, turning toward her. “In fact, I was a bit pissed that she did. But as it turned out, I needed her there.”

  “Is the boy gonna be okay?” he asked.

  Amy slipped past Rusty and picked up the TV remote, turning up the sound on the TV over the bar. The image on the screen was from a helicopter that had been covering the race. As the camera zoomed in, I watched myself leap the safety barrier, Savannah right behind me.

  “Earlier today, in the middle of the Seven Mile Bridge Race, two unidentified runners jumped off the bridge to rescue a boy who was adrift in a small boat. Authorities speculate that the boy is a Cuban refugee who’d been adrift for several days. A spokesperson at Fishermen’s Community Hospital said only that the boy is alive and will recover but will remain hospitalized for observation. More tonight at six. This is Camilla Crawford, ABC Action News, reporting.”

  “Sounds like he’ll be okay,” Amy said, answering Rusty’s question. “But didn’t you say the little boy didn’t speak Spanish?”

  “He only said a few words,” Savannah replied. “But he spoke English, and I didn’t detect any accent.”

  We were alone in the bar, but I leaned in conspiratorially. “I think they’re saying that because the kid had been beaten. They probably don’t want whoever did it to know he’s alive.”

  Rusty shook his head sadly. “Somebody beat him up, then set him adrift in a leaky boat to die. Animals.”

  There were other scenarios.

  “Maybe he got in the boat himself,” I said. “To get away. The doctors think his amnesia might be temporary. Until he comes out of it, nobody will know.”

  The door opened and Deputy Fife strolled in, followed closely by Detective Clark Andersen, who I’d met back in December.

  “Mr. and Mrs. McDermitt,” Fife said, approaching us. “This is—”

  “Detective Andersen,” I said, rising from my stool.

  I shook hands with them both and introduced the others.

  “Any word on the kid?” I asked.

  “He’ll pull through,” Andersen said. “I’ve been assigned the investigation.”

  “Like I told Deputy Fife, we don’t know anything more about him than you do.”

  Andersen shifted his feet, then looked over at Savannah for a second. He was uncomfortable. “The thing is, I want to ask you a favor.”

  Andersen had been the lead investigator when Cobie Murphy had gone missing before Thanksgiving. He didn’t progress much beyond finding her car and it was parked at the place where she worked—the first place they looked. Since she’d been found, he and I had talked a few times.

  “A favor?” Savannah asked.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, swallowing, and causing his Adam’s apple to bob. “We’re completely blind here. The victim can’t even tell us who he is, much less who did this to him. It could be almost anyone.”

  “What’s the favor?” I asked.

  “The doctor said he could be healthy enough to leave in just a few days. The kid’s already eating everything in sight. The temporary hospital isn’t set up for long term, non-emergency care and he doesn’t warrant being transferred to another hospital up island. Apparently, his amnesia is psychological and doesn’t have anything to do with being beat up.”

  Savannah’s hand went to her mouth as she gasped audibly. “Where would he go? He can’t be any more than five or six.”

  “The doctor said he’s closer to eight,” Andersen said. “He thinks the kid’s been treated badly for most of his life. He said he looks younger than his teeth show. That’s how they tell the age of a kid’s bod—um—he just thinks he’s older than he looks.”

  “Bless his little heart,” Savannah said softly.

  “The thing is,” Andersen began, “we don’t want him to go into foster care until we know for sure who he is.”

  Rusty leaned on the bar. “I wouldn’t want my worst enemy’s kid to go into South Florida’s foster system.”

  Andersen looked over at Rusty. “That’s why I’m here.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  Andersen turned to face me, squaring his shoulders with his hands clasped in front, almost like what Pap would have called “hat in hand” or contrite, except Andersen didn’t have a hat.

  “I’d like to ask you if the boy might be able to stay with you,” he said. “I know you live off the grid up in the Contents, and I checked you out. The kid’ll be safer there than anywhere I know of.”

  “Wait just a sec—”

  “We’ll do it,” Savannah blurted out, cutting me off. “You can bring him up or we’ll come get him, whenever he’s ready.”

  “Savannah,” I said, looking over at her.

  When she turned my way, the look in her eyes froze any further words that were forming in my mouth.

  “He’ll stay with us, Jesse. And that’s all there is to it.”

  “But—”

  “Was there something I said that you didn’t understand?” she asked, fierce conviction in her words. “That little boy has been through enough. If he needs a place to stay or someone to help guide him, we can do it.”

  I started to open my mouth again, and she put a finger to my lips.

  “Hush now. It’s decided.”

  A smart man knows when he’s been beat. Savannah rarely insisted on anything. Though I knew doing this could bring trouble to us, there was no chance of my overriding her decision.

  I turned toward the detective. “Okay.”

  “This is completely unorthodox,” he said. “But I know what you’re capable of and this is the only idea I could come up with.”

  He looked over at Rusty and Amy. “This can’t go any further.”

  “It’ll have to,” Rusty said. “I’ll tell my wife but that’ll be as far as it goes. We don’t hide things from each other.”

  I shook my head. “It’ll go beyond that,” I said, turning to my wife. “If we do this, I’m asking Deuce to send a couple of guys down to stay with us.”

  “Tony for sure,” she said. “Obviously, Paul, and maybe Andrew?”

  I grinned at her and nodded. “GMTA.” Then I turned toward Andersen. “Men I trust and have worked with at Homeland Security.”

  Andersen looked at each of us in turn. “Let me have your number. I’ll call you when I know anything.”

  I handed him a Gaspar’s Revenge Charter Service card. One that I kept in my wallet. “My cell number’s on the back.”

  He took it and flipped it over. “It might not come to pass,” he said, putting the card in his wallet. “If the kid regains his memory, we might be able to find his parents.”

  “But you said he’d been abused most of his life,” Savannah said.

  “We can investigate that,” he replied. “But if his parents want him, it’ll be difficult not to return him. Being the victim of poverty isn’t abuse.”

  “We’ll do whatever is needed,” I said, putting my arm around my mama-bear wife. “He’ll be safe and well-cared for with us.”

  “I believe you,” Andersen said.

  Then the two cops turned and walked out.

  “We’d best be getting back,” I said. “Jimmy has a charter scheduled for tomorrow and we have to get El Cazador ready.”

  “Reef-fishing charter?” Rusty asked.

  “Yeah,” I replied, not sounding very enthusiastic. “Three guys from Atlanta.”

&
nbsp; “Jimmy can’t handle that himself?”

  “He can,” I replied. “Until about the second case of beer.”

  “That kind, huh?” Rusty said. “Happens every April. Where ya fishin’?”

  “G Marker,” I said. “It’s close enough they can swim to Big Pine if I decide to toss ’em overboard.”

  When Savannah and I returned to our island in the Content Keys, Jimmy had Cazador out from under the house and tied up to the south pier.

  “Everything okay?” I asked, as we tied up the little Grady in front of the much bigger thirty-two-foot Winter.

  Jimmy’s head appeared from where he was bent over the raised center console. “Yeah. All fine now. I just wanted to do a good engine inspection and cleaning. She hasn’t been out in a while.”

  He was right. Most of our charters were aboard Gaspar’s Revenge, my big forty-five-foot offshore machine. She was built for blue water fishing, going after mahi, tuna, or billfish in the Gulf Stream. El Cazador was a diesel-powered center console, with lots of room to walk around her decks from bow to stern—ideal for stationary reef fishing with larger groups. The downside was she had only a single engine, where the Revenge had two. Jimmy was always nervous about going offshore on one engine.

  I looked down into the Winter’s engine bay, which occupied most of the space below the console. The whole console was hinged at the helm area and the console and T-top were in the raised position.

  “Looks brand-new,” I said. “What time did you say we were picking the charter up?”

  “Sunrise,” he replied. “At the Rusty Anchor.”

  “Where are they staying?”

  “Old Wooden Bridge Marina,” Jimmy replied. He’d worked for me for a long time and knew what I wanted to know. “I talked to Old Jason last night, man,” he continued. “Just to check in on what’s where offshore. You know how he likes to gossip.”

  I did. Old Jason wasn’t old. But he was older than another guide by the same name, and he was a good source of information about the goings-on in the northern part of Big Pine, as well as what was happening offshore.

  “He told me he met our clients this morning,” Jimmy continued, “after they apparently tore up Key West last night.”

  “Having second thoughts?” I asked.

  I was particular about who I took out. We didn’t charter because we had to. Everything we owned was paid for, free and clear. I just didn’t like being around unpleasant people. And when you were miles from shore on a small boat with unpleasant people, it got damned crowded.

  “Nah. Nothing like that,” he said, lowering the console. “Dink and Ash put them on a big tarpon run yesterday afternoon. Dink said the three guys were rowdy and boisterous, but not a problem.”

  “I’m going to go up and put together something for lunch,” Savannah said. “Any requests?”

  Jimmy and I looked at each other, then back at Savannah. She turned before we could say anything.

  “Lobster salad it is,” she said, turning, and heading up the steps.

  “With melted garlic butter on the side!” I called out.

  She tossed her hair over one shoulder and looked down at me. “Not happening. Too much cholesterol.”

  I turned back toward Jimmy and shrugged. “At least it’s lobster.”

  “We’re both kinda lucky, man. Know what I mean?”

  “Yeah,” I replied, as Savannah reached the top of the steps and disappeared into our house. “In a lot of ways.”

  He stepped up on the dock as Finn came down the steps. “Neither one of us is getting any younger, man. And our ladies will see to it that we live a damned long time.”

  Jimmy was more than a decade younger than me and had been with a woman named Naomi for quite some time now. She was Sid’s niece and a part-time model. Like Savannah, Naomi kept Jimmy on a healthy diet and had even gotten him to cut down on smoking pot.

  Not that either of us were gluttonous slobs before they came along—we ate mostly seafood and I’d had an aquaculture garden for many years. We worked hard for exercise and were fit and healthy, for the most part. But Jimmy was right; we weren’t getting any younger.

  Finn came trotting toward me, his big head bobbing and his tail smacking his flanks. He melted on top of my feet, nudging my hand for an ear scratch.

  “Where’s Woden?” I asked, as I rubbed the fur on Finn’s neck and head.

  “Last I saw him,” Jimmy said, “he was lying in the sun out on the end of the north pier. How’d the race go?”

  “I guess we’re not the only ones growing old,” I offered. “We didn’t finish the race.”

  “Huh? You and Savannah are great runners, man.”

  “We jumped off the bridge,” I replied, then went on to tell him about the boy in the boat and the visit by Detective Andersen.

  “So, the little guy’s gonna come and stay here?”

  “Maybe,” I replied. “We’ll just have to wait and see.”

  “We have two bedrooms,” Jimmy offered. “Be no problem for him to shack up with us, man.”

  “I hadn’t even thought about where he’s gonna stay,” I said, as we went up the steps to the deck.

  Naomi was just coming out of the house when we reached the top.

  “Savannah told me what happened,” she said. “I was just coming to get you guys. She wants to move the little bed from our spare room into your living room after lunch, Jesse.”

  The three of us went inside. Savannah had the table set and was at the stove, heating up small chunks of lobster tail left over from the previous night to add to a big salad bowl of greens and tomatoes.

  “We don’t have to take Jimmy and Naomi’s spare bed,” I told her. “We can pull one of the bunks out of the bunkhouse. It’s time to turn it into something else anyway.”

  “It’s easier to get to,” she replied, hurriedly dumping the lobster bites into a strainer, “and it doesn’t have to come apart. We can move it after lunch.”

  “Slow down,” I told her, taking the strainer from her hand as it dripped coconut oil on the deck. “We have a couple of days, at least.”

  When she turned to face me, I could see that her eyes were red and rimmed with tears. “We can’t let them send that boy back to his parents.”

  There’d been signs over the last nine months since Flo’d gone off to college—signs I should have paid better attention to. Savannah had been nervous at times, worried. She and our daughter had been inseparable for eighteen years, living on a boat, moving from port to anchorage, just the two of them. She was a fantastic mother; of that I had no doubt.

  Was she experiencing withdrawal over not having a child to look after and care for?

  I moved her to the table and sat her down in a chair, then knelt in front of her. “He’s still at Fishermen’s,” I said. “We can bring him up here as soon as the doc says he’s okay enough. But legally, if his parents want him back, there isn’t much the police can do.”

  “There has to be, Jesse. That little boy has been starved and abused all his life.”

  “We don’t know that,” I said. “Yes, he suffered a beating. But the malnourishment could have just been in the last year or two. It might not even have been his parents who did it. Remember how frail Cobie looked when we brought her home?”

  She nodded and started to say something, but I put a finger to her lips this time. “We don’t have to rush,” I told her, moving my hand to her cheek, and cupping it. “Jimmy and I will go to the bunkhouse and take one of the bunks apart. Maybe all of them. We can have one of the uppers here before nightfall.”

  She leaned into my hand and the tears started as she fell into my arms. “I just can’t get the thought out of my head of what he might have had to endure.”

  Naomi moved beside us and put an arm around Savannah. “Or he can just stay with me and Jimmy and have his own room.”

  Savannah nodded, wiping her eyes with my shirt. Then she looked up at me. “Yeah, I know you’re right. I don’t know what came o
ver me.”

  “I do,” I said. “Flo hasn’t been home in over a month.”

  “Let’s eat,” she said, nodding and going back to the little kitchen area.

  The four of us sat down and ate quickly. There was always something to do on the island, and adding another chore was just something we took in stride.

  Later, as Jimmy and I were taking one of the bunkbeds apart in what for twenty years had been a “bunkhouse for fishermen,” he stopped and looked out the window.

  “Is something wrong with Savannah?” he asked.

  I shrugged, though he had his back to me. “Women sometimes have anxiety after giving birth—postpartum depression, they call it. Maybe it’s some sort of separation anxiety from Flo going off to school in Gainesville.”

  He turned and started taking the slats out of the bed. “Empty nest? Yeah, man, that makes sense. She seems to have lost her direction lately. Like a boat without a rudder.”

  Together, we lifted the frame of the upper bunk off the lower one and set it down.

  “You noticed it too?” I asked, leaning against the frame. “For years, she’s had the double stress of raising a child alone and living on a boat. After long periods in a high-stress environment, I think people get used to it some, adapt, and then, when the pressure’s gone, they go into a slump. I’m just not real sure what to do about it.”

  “Dude, you fix things when they break,” Jimmy said. “It’s what you do. Hell, it’s what most men do. But she ain’t broke, man. So, you can’t fix her.”

  “What’s that leave?” I wondered out loud.

  “Maybe she just needs a project,” he said. “Something to give her direction.”

  I shook my head. “I hope bringing the kid here doesn’t make things worse.”

  “Think we can get the frame through the door without taking it apart?” Jimmy asked.

  “Should be able to,” I said, pushing off the frame. “We’ll need to turn it sideways and keep it level as I go down the steps backward.”

  Who would beat up a little kid after starving them? I wondered, as we lifted the frame and maneuvered it to the door.

  The cops didn’t have much to go on. The boy couldn’t tell them anything. All they knew was that there’d been a tarp on the boat that was made in a shop in my hometown. I decided that I’d give a friend a call who lived near there and see if he knew about any missing kids.