by Anne George
“Mrs. Weatherby’s million-dollar life insurance policy naming you the sole beneficiary.”
My mouth fell open. “Millicent took out a million-dollar life insurance policy? God, Fairchild, that must have cost a fortune.”
He sighed and looked down at the floor. “It’s not what it sounds like.”
“But you are the beneficiary, aren’t you, Mr. Weatherby?” Tim Blankenship asked.
“Of course I’m the beneficiary. This is some kind of deal the Blue Bay Ranch Corporation cooked up, this insurance thing. One of Jason Marley’s ideas. He’s the one you need to talk to.”
“We will, sir.” Tim Blankenship opened the door. “Y’all have a good day now.”
Chapter 7
When the door closed, I turned and looked at Fairchild.
“The insurance was a Blue Bay perk, Patricia Anne,” he said. “The corporation bought it and paid the premiums. The land was Millicent’s part of the corporation, you see, and she wanted to make sure I wouldn’t be left out if something happened to her.” Fairchild shook his head. “To tell you the truth, I didn’t pay much attention to it. Millicent was ten years younger than me, so it never occurred to me that I would collect it.”
I came back into the living room. “I believe you, Fairchild.”
“It looks bad, though, doesn’t it?”
“It won’t when they find out all the details.”
Fairchild sank down on one of the wicker rockers and put his face in his hands. “I wish she had just sold the land to Jason Marley; he offered her a good price for it. But she wanted to be in on the development, said she wanted to be sure they did as little damage as possible to the environment.” He looked up. “Who would have killed her, Patricia Anne?”
I shook my head that I couldn’t imagine. I sat down in the chair across from him and for a few minutes we were quiet, lost in our own thoughts. Finally Fairchild sighed and said he had better go next door and see what was going on.
“I’m surprised Laura Stamps hasn’t been over here looking for you,” I said.
He managed a grin. “She’s scared of Mary Alice.”
I grinned back. “Smart woman.”
“Thanks for the R and R.” He got up. “I needed it.”
“Mary Alice left me a note reminding me to rescue you.”
“She did?” He looked pleased.
I handed him the Post-it that was in my pocket. “I would have done it anyway.”
“Thanks.” He left the apartment looking much better than he had when he came in.
I fixed myself a sandwich and went to the balcony to eat it. I missed Fred and wanted to talk to him. I missed Woofer and wanted to talk to him, too.
“You look woebegone,” Mary Alice said behind me.
I jumped. “What are you doing home? The conference isn’t over for the day, is it?”
“It is for me. All they’re doing this afternoon is poetry.” She said poetry as if it were something ridiculous.
“I love poetry,” I said.
“I like some of it, too,” she admitted, plunking down in the chair beside me. “I like that woman’s poetry, you know, that book you gave me Christmas. She makes sense.”
“Mary Oliver?”
“Yeah. She’s not at the conference.”
“Too bad. Who is?”
“I don’t remember.” Sister held out a manila envelope. “We swapped short story manuscripts this morning and we’re to critique them and take them back tomorrow.”
“That sounds interesting. Did you see Major Bissell?’
“God yes, Mouse.” Sister rattled the manila envelope. “I hope this isn’t his story. Lord only knows what he’d write about. You know what he told me? Just came right out and told me while I was eating a doughnut and a kiwi?”
“What?”
“That Millicent’s throat wasn’t cut. He said it was torn, like some animal had ripped it right through the jugular and the carotid.”
“Dear God!”
“You should have heard him describe what the blood must have been like.”
“Don’t tell me.”
“Well, spurting and fountain were included.”
“Thank you for sharing that,” I said, putting my sandwich down.
“See?” Sister said. “I couldn’t finish my snack either, and they’d put out all kinds of good stuff during the break.” She looked down at the beach. “Where are Haley and Frances, and what’s been going on?”
I told her they were at the outlet mall, described my rescue of Fairchild, and related the visit of the two Florida Marine Patrol officers. I even managed to remember the details, as many as Fairchild had related, of the insurance policy.
Sister was amazed. “Millicent had a million dollar life insurance policy?”
“A perk of the Blue Bay Ranch Corporation, so Fairchild says. But he’s the beneficiary.”
“You know, Mouse, I remember when Tod Abernathy bought that land over on the bay. You probably do, too. We thought he’d lost his mind spending a thousand dollars or some such amount on that worthless property. I thought Millicent was going to divorce him. And now it’s Blue Bay Ranch.”
“Beats all. Fairchild said Millicent wouldn’t sell the property outright because she wanted to have a say-so in its development. She didn’t want the environment disturbed.”
“You know, that could be why someone killed her.” Sister saw the look on my face. “I’m serious. She could have found out they were breaking some environmental law, maybe the wetland thing, and was going to squeal on them.”
“Tell that to the lieutenant colonel tomorrow.”
“Lieutenant Major. In the meantime, let’s ride over there and see what those ranches look like. It’s just what I’ve always wanted, a ranch on the beach.”
“You want to wait on Haley and Frances?”
Mary Alice shook her head. “They wouldn’t be interested.”
“Haley said she wanted to see it.”
“We can go back any time. We’re just scouting.”
I had grown accustomed to the seatbelt on Mary Alice’s Jaguar, so when it grasped me I wasn’t surprised. In fact, it gave me a sense of being pampered. “You’re safe now, ma’am,” the clasp proclaimed. And then Mary Alice peeled out of the parking lot.
“Slow down,” I screeched.
“My Lord, Patricia Anne, I’m barely moving.” Which was true when she said it, because by this time we were headed down Highway 98. Mary Alice has maxed out on the number of speeding tickets she can receive on 98 in a three-year period without having to go to driving school. It is, she claims, the fault of the Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Department, who actually enforce the ridiculous thirty-mile-per-hour speed limit with unsportsmanlike shenanigans such as popping out from behind billboards and the Greek Orthodox church to nab innocent speeders.
So we drove sedately down 98, past the Mid-Bay Bridge to a huge billboard that proclaimed the entrance to Blue Bay Ranch was one-quarter mile on the left. The billboard, which did not have a policeman behind it today, featured a bikiniclad girl (much girl, small bikini) in cowboy boots, lassoing a sea horse.
“That’s just downright tacky,” I said, studying the sign.
“I know,” Sister agreed. “I saw it on the way to the conference. They’ve got a pretty entrance, though.”
Soon I noticed a split-rail fence wending through the stunted palmettos and saw-briars. “To keep the sea horses in, I suppose.” I pointed toward the fence.
I thought it was funny, but Sister didn’t even smile, just clicked on her left turn signal and pulled into the double driveway that made a “U” in front of an honest-to-God log cabin with a sign announcing it was the visitors’ center. A small parking lot was on the side of the building, and I expected Mary Alice to stop there. Instead, she headed out one of the roads that angled from the “U” like antennae toward the bay. A man stepped from a guard house at the entrance to the road and she slowed.
“Ma’am,” he said pol
itely, “do you have a visitor’s pass?”
“No,” Sister said. “We’re not visiting, just looking.” And she drove on.
“I don’t think that’s what he meant,” I said, nervously looking back at the guard standing in the middle of the road scratching his head.
“Then he should say what he means.”
“I suppose so.” What was the worst thing they could do to us? Run us out? I relaxed and looked around.
Other than the road, not much clearing had been done. Red flags and stakes with numbers on them marked the boundaries of lots. Tall pines leaned away from the Gulf, pushed constantly by the prevailing winds. Between them were the typical vegetation of the coastal piney woods and a lot of Sold signs.
“I’ll bet there are rattlesnakes in here big as a tractor tire,” I said.
“Looks about like it did when Tod Abernathy bought it,” Sister said. “Any money Millicent got offered for it, she should have taken.”
And then the road branched. We were almost to the bay when Sister said, “Look, Mouse. Can you believe that?”
It was a fairy-tale house, the only problem being that the imaginative architect had incorporated every fairy tale from Rapunzel and her tower to what looked suspiciously like a big shoe, but which must have been some kind of garden room. Painted a shrimp pink and trimmed in white gingerbread, the house perched on the edge of Choctawhatchee Bay.
“It looks like about five houses squashed together,” Mary Alice said, slowing so we could get a good look.
“It looks embarrassed.”
“And there’s a blue one.”
Five houses had been completed or were close to completion, five enormous houses, all rainbow colored, all mirrored in the bay. These, I realized, were situated on what was the prime location in Blue Bay Ranch. A couple of them already had piers and boat houses, but only the pink house seemed totally finished and occupied. A concrete block seawall prevented erosion by pushing the bay’s tides down the beach for others to worry about.
“Lord have mercy,” Sister said. “Who would ever have thought.”
“Boggles the mind,” I said. “Millicent was really in on something big, wasn’t she?”
“Yes, she was. Bless her heart.”
“This doesn’t look like one of those community developments, though. You know, with the sidewalks and all.”
“Let’s stop by the visitors’ center and get some brochures on our way out.” Sister was forced to turn around in a pale lavender house’s driveway since the road was blocked by a bulldozer, and we headed back the way we had come. As we passed the guard shack, she let the window down and called “Thank you.” The man inside actually waved.
“Act like we’re interested in buying some property,” she said. “They’ll jump on us like chickens on a June bug. You can find out all kinds of stuff that way.”
“What kind of stuff is it we want to find out?”
“Well, personally, I want to know how much that pink house cost. Those folks got taken to the cleaners, I’ll bet you.” Sister pulled into the parking lot and we got out of the car. “I think this log cabin is cute, don’t you? Those rocking chairs across the front?”
“I don’t understand it.”
“What’s to understand? You sit on the porch and rock.”
“I mean I don’t understand this whole ranch bit. Did you ever hear of a ranch where the Intra-coastal Waterway runs right by the bunkhouse?” But I was speaking to Mary Alice’s back as she disappeared into the log cabin.
We didn’t have to act as if we were interested in property in order to have the sales staff jump on us like chickens on a June bug. They had spotted the Jaguar as it pulled into the parking lot. The first woman to get to Sister was skinny, in her forties, and had greenish-blond hair, something that happens sometimes in Florida given the amount of sun and chlorine people are exposed to. Her name tag read Lolita.
“Hello, hello,” she smiled. “I’m Lolita Brown. Welcome to Blue Bay Ranch where your own personal rainbow ends.”
Mary Alice looked at her. “My personal rainbow ends here?”
“She means the places cost a pot of gold,” I said.
“Hush, Patricia Anne. That’s not what she means at all, is it, Lolita?”
“Of course not.” And then Lolita did something that made me decide that if I ever won the lottery and bought a place at Blue Bay, it would be from her. She grinned and said, “Well, maybe a little pot.”
We introduced ourselves and declined the guided tour she offered. At her insistence, we admired the huge map on the wall that showed the configuration of all the building sites, denoting the ones that were sold with a pale pink, magic markered x. The prices were also marked on each lot, increasing in price as they neared the water.
I pushed my bifocals up and looked at the numbers. “Two hundred and twenty thousand dollars for a lot?” I gasped.
“Close to the bay with a view of the bridge,” Lolita explained. “As you can see, there aren’t many of them left.”
“And the ones on the bay?” Sister asked.
“Are all sold. Many of them are already built on.”
“We rode around there,” Sister admitted. “I especially liked the pink house.”
Lolita beamed. “That belongs to Mr. Jason Marley, the chairman of Blue Bay. It’s a beauty, isn’t it?”
“I’ve never seen anything quite like it,” Sister said truthfully. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance he’ll be selling anytime soon?”
“I wouldn’t think so. He loves that place even though he’s a widower and needs all that room like he needs a hole in his head.” Lolita sighed a little wistfully. “Here,” she said, going over to a desk and handing us several brochures, “take these home and look them over. I don’t think you could go wrong here at Blue Bay.”
We thanked her and left, promising that we would be back for the guided tour. I looked down at the first brochure. On the cover, the girl in the bikini lassoed the seahorse. Tacky.
“Well, what do you think?” Mary Alice asked as we got into the car.
“I think it’s tacky,” I said.
“I mean about Blue Bay Ranch.”
I thought for a moment. “It’s like they can’t decide what they want to be. The split-rail fence and log cabin and even those houses on the bay. How would you describe them?”
“Colorful comes to mind.” She turned onto Highway 98. “And I thought it was interesting that the pink one belonged to Jason Marley. Think about it, Mouse. You saw those numbers on that map that showed how much the lots cost. Whose property is it?”
“Millicent’s. But I’m sure the property was her contribution to the Blue Bay Ranch Corporation.”
“And where was Millicent living?”
“Gulf Towers.”
“In the same condo that she and Tod Abernathy bought twenty years ago, still working as resident manager to pay the assessment fees.”
“Maybe she didn’t want one of those pink houses.”
“She probably didn’t, knowing Millicent. But I’d be willing to bet you her death had something to do with what’s going on over there. We’re talking millions, Mouse.”
“Reckon Fairchild knew the extent of Millicent’s estate?”
Mary Alice shrugged. “I doubt it. I doubt Millicent really believed it, that land going from a joke when Tod bought it for a thousand dollars to being worth a bundle. I just hope she realized it was valuable enough to get some good legal advice.”
We passed the miniature golf course, the Wal-Mart, the new bungee jump where people were actually lined up to pay twenty-five dollars to jump from a tower attached to rubber bands.
“What are we doing to our beaches?” I asked.
“Nothing hurricanes won’t take care of eventually.” With that, Sister turned into Gulf Towers.
“I’m going to go check on Fairchild,” she said, turning left as we got off the elevator at the sixth floor.
“I’ll see where Haley and Fr
ances are.” I went into our apartment and saw that it was empty. A glance from the balcony showed me they were at the beach. I put on my bathing suit, slathered Factor 45 sunscreen all over me, and went to join them.
“Hey, Mama,” Haley said, looking up from her book as I approached. “Where’ve you been?”
“Your Aunt Sister and I went over to Blue Bay Ranch to look around. It has to be seen to be believed.”
“I wanted to go,” Haley said.
“Me, too.” Frances looked slightly pink.
“You better get under the umbrella,” I said, handing her the sunscreen. “We’ll take y’all back tomorrow.”
“What’s it like?” Haley asked.
I tried to explain the split-rail fence, the log cabin, the brightly colored houses that seemed to have been designed by architects who were familiar with every school of design and were determined to show it.
“Sounds cute,” Frances said.
I looked to see if she meant it. She seemed to. “How long have y’all been out here in the sun?” I asked.
“A while.” Haley closed the book she was reading. “We saw Sophie Berliner.”
I sat down in the shade of the umbrella. “Here at the beach?”
Haley nodded. “Had to be her. Fit your description exactly, complete with the black gauze outfit. I know she was burning up.”
“Making a statement.” Frances settled into the shade beside me.
“Anyway,” Haley continued, “she came over the stile like some kind of crow, sort of creeping along.”
“And the lifeguard came to attention,” Frances added. “Like someone had poked him with a stick.”
“We found out why when she got to the water. She shucked off that black gauze and had on a bathing suit that was almost nonexistant. And the kid’s got a shape like you wouldn’t believe, Mama.”
“She’s only a child, Haley!” I protested.
Haley and Frances both laughed. “Some child!” Haley said. “I’ll bet pacemakers were popping on all over the beach.”
“How about that,” I said. “You should have seen the skinny Lolita who showed us the layout of Blue Bay. Sounds like they should swap names.”
