“You know I can’t reveal what clients say,” she said with a smile. “And you of all people should be glad I can’t.”
“Know his secrets, do you?” Anna asked.
“Just the incriminating ones,” she said.
“The only ones worth knowing,” Anna said.
“Why don’t you go try to get some sleep,” I said to Carla. “I’ll take Jake’s money, and we can wait on anyone else who comes in.”
Anna nodded vigorously. “John can’t even make coffee, but I’m hell in the kitchen. Get some rest.”
“Y’all sure?”
“I insist.”
“Thanks,” she said. “Come get me if you need anything.”
Carla lived with Rudy in the back of the diner in a small area she normally tried to avoid, but by this time Rudy would be passed out in front of the TV, a long since emptied bottle of vodka on the floor beside his chair.
As Carla walked behind the counter, she took off her apron and hung it on a hook next to the back door. After saying something to Jake and pointing to the coffee pot, she turned back toward us. “And Anna.”
“Yeah?”
“John has something important he needs to tell you,” she said.
She then smiled at me and disappeared into the back.
“You do?” she said.
I shook my head. “She’s trying to be funny.”
We fell silent a moment. I drank my coffee. Anna sipped her water and made a face. “I always forget Rudy’s water comes straight from the tap.”
“But it’s the chlorine-laced sulfur that gives it flavor,” I said.
I slid my saucer and cup toward her.
She shook her head. “No thanks.”
“Try it,” I said. “Bitterness completely covers the sulfur and chlorine.”
She smiled.
I smiled.
We were still smiling when Jake and Fred walked over.
“I was just telling Jake the first thing I’m going to do when I’m sheriff is offer you a job,” Fred said in his deep, rich voice.
Beneath his thick silver hair, Fred Goodwin’s ice-blue eyes were intense and bloodshot, etched with lines nearly as red as his fleshy sun-kissed face.
“I told him you’d make a good dog catcher,” Jake said.
I looked over at Jake in mock surprise. “When did your opinion of me increase so much?”
“Guess it was the way you stopped that inmate from escaping,” he said.
“You think we’ll catch him?” Fred asked.
By far the oldest member of search and rescue, he was also the most polished, his suave manner making him well-suited for politics.
I was reminded of the thought I had earlier because of what Shane had said, and wanted to mention it to Jake, but not in front of Fred. I decided to wait and mention it to Dad later.
I nodded toward Jake. “We’ve got the best and the brightest working on it.”
“You’re right about that,” he said. “Well you folks have a good night.”
When they left and we were finally alone we both sighed simultaneously.
“How long you think it’ll be before the next shift arrives?” she asked.
“Not nearly long enough.”
She frowned and nodded. “As much as I’d like to delay what I need to say, just so we could stay like this a little longer, I better go ahead and say it.”
My heart started racing and I braced myself for what was coming. She sounded too ominous for it to be good.
I waited.
She took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I’ve been so unfair to you. I honestly didn’t realize just how unfair until recently.”
“By withholding sex?” I said.
She tried to smile, but couldn’t. That’s when I knew I was in real trouble.
“Sorry,” I said. “Defensive humor.”
She nodded, her expression one of understanding.
“You really haven’t been able to move on with your life because of me,” she said.
“That’s hardly your fault,” I said, my throat constricting, my voice dry and pinched.
“I haven’t wanted you to. And it’s not just that I haven’t encouraged you to. I’ve actually tried to prevent you from it. Waiting for … what? Something to happen to Chris? For you to give me an ultimatum?”
Whatever it was she was waiting for, I had been waiting for the same thing, and now she was telling me what I was waiting for wasn’t going to come.
“I’ve known all along what I was doing,” she said. “I just hadn’t realized until recently how spectacularly unfair it was of me.”
There was a finality to her words and the way she was saying them. She had come here to release me, to cut the unseen strings that bound me to her, to give me what she believed she had withheld from me. It didn’t matter that I didn’t want to be free. It didn’t matter that I never felt she was being the slightest bit unfair to me.
“What brought about this epiphany?” I asked.
“Does it matter?” she asked. “It’s true, isn’t it? I’ve imprisoned you.”
“I’ve imprisoned myself. But what was it?”
She shook her head.
“I want to know,” I said. “There’s got to be a reason for my release.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“For what?”
“I’m pregnant.”
Chapter Twenty-two
After the paper mill in Port St. Joe had closed and the largest private landholder in the state had become its biggest developer, the small community at the mouth of St. Joseph Bay began to change. With the pungent, acrid odor and thick smoky fog of the mill a thing of the past and land once reserved for slash pines released, wealthy people from Atlanta began to pay unimaginable sums of money for a sliver of sand close to the Gulf. The powers that be thought they had seen the future, and the future they saw was tourism.
Gift shops, restaurants, real estate offices, and banks began to pop up downtown, and as many of the tags on the cars were from Alabama and Georgia as from Florida—most of them luxury SUVs.
Lifelong residents had sold their family homes, quadrupling their money, and moved to areas with more reasonable property tax rates. Man had come to the forest and money had come to town, and nothing would ever be the same for the land or the people of what once was the forgotten coast.
And then came the housing bubble bust, followed by the financial sector crash, then a full-on recession.
Everything had slowed, even stopped for a while, but now, several years later, there were signs of life again.
Next to the yachts and large fishing boats that filled the revitalized marina, Rachel Mills and I were in the Dockside Café sitting on high stools at a tall wooden table with a view of the bay. The window was open and through it blew the warm bay breeze and the soothing sounds of seagulls and sailboat riggings––all swirling around in a muffling din of waves and wind.
I had the fried shrimp basket with fries, she had the oysters with onion rings, and we both had sweet tea with lime.
Gazing at the setting sun sinking into the bay, she said, “No wonder people are paying small fortunes to have a place here.”
“Never thought I’d miss the paper mill,” I said.
“Don’t tell me you’re not in favor of progress.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Well?” she asked, her brows rising over her pale blue eyes.
“You said not to tell you.”
She smiled.
“I can tell you that most of what people are sold as progress, isn’t,” I said.
We were quiet a moment, our gazes drifting back out to the bay. A charter boat was pulling into the marina, its red-faced passengers windblown and weary.
Anna is pregnant.
I had tried so hard to put that out of my mind, to suppress it, hide it, bury it beneath even my subconscious, but nothing was working––at least not for very long.
Push it back down. No
w is not the time. Forget it. Let it go.
But that’s it. All hope is gone––even the last tiny sliver I was holding in reserve.
Her news had finally and completely ended us once and for all with a finality and certainty nothing else could.
“This is nice,” she said.
“Huh?” I said, coming back to the present moment, aware of sitting across from Rachel again.
“Thanks for bringing me,” she said. “Can’t believe we haven’t talked about the case.”
“We will.”
“When?”
“How about now?” I asked, pushing back my basket and thoughts of Anna.
She laughed. “Fine by me. I know I’m expected to put out.”
She ate one more onion ring and shoved her basket next to mine in the center of the table.
“Still no ID?”
She shook her head.
“That mean there’s not going to be one?”
“We could still get a hit. If we don’t have one by the first of next week, I’d say we’ll have to get it another way. We’ve already got people looking at missing persons reports. We’ll figure out who he is sooner or later.”
“Dad only had very preliminary autopsy results,” I said. “Got anything to add?”
“The victim had water in his lungs,” she said.
I thought about that. In itself it didn’t mean anything.
I said, “Cause of death the same?”
She shrugged. “ME says the water could have gotten in the lungs after he was dead or while sustaining his other injuries. Just no way to know for sure.”
I nodded.
Our waitress came back, picked up our baskets and napkins, refilled our teas, and dropped off the check.
“You think Jensen killed him?” she asked.
I shrugged.
“There’s just not enough in his file to go on,” she said. “And it’s always what’s not in there that tells us whether or not they’re even capable of it.”
“Well,” I said, glancing up at the clock, “if you’re not opposed to mixing a little business with pleasure, let’s go find out.”
Chapter Twenty-three
The Gulf/Franklin Center was an extension of Gulf Coast State College that saved students from Port St. Joe, Apalachicola, and Carrabelle from driving over an hour into Panama City to the main campus. Through the use of adjuncts, video, and professors willing to drive over, the center offered a wide variety of classes, though it would be difficult to complete a degree. Its two strongest programs were nursing and correctional officer training—professions in high demand in Florida and programs you could complete without traveling to the main campus.
When we arrived at the center the students milling about the entrances let me know we had arrived during one of their breaks. Without checking in at the office, we went straight into Tracy Jensen’s classroom and found her talking to a student. They were the only two people in the room.
The nervous student, who probably made straight As, was seeking clarification on a writing assignment. While we waited I glanced around the room. Based on the notes on the dry marker board, the introductory psyche class Tracy taught was covering psychological disorders and what the various approaches, such as humanistic, behavioral, and cognitive, said about their cause, diagnosis, and treatment. Both the front and back walls of the room were formed by folding partitions. Before rows of narrow tables and plastic chairs, a metal podium on wheels had a textbook opened on it.
The student could tell Tracy Jensen was distracted by our presence and quickly stumbled over her words as she nervously finished up.
“Can I help you?” Tracy asked the moment the student finished.
She was an extremely thin white woman with wispy blond hair and sunken cheeks. She wore a nice enough business suit but her well-worn shoes were poorly made and didn’t quite match the rest of her outfit.
“Is there somewhere we can talk?” I asked.
“I was just about to go get a Coke,” the student said, and made a quick exit.
“I’m in the middle of a class,” Tracy said. “What’s this about?”
“Your brother,” I said.
She began shaking her head immediately, anger flaring in her pinched face. “I don’t want to—”
“I’m the chaplain of PCI,” I said. “And I just—”
“Did they kill him?” she asked. “Is he dead?”
“No,” I said. “Who’s ‘they’?”
“Why’re you here?”
“I’m trying to find out why he ran,” I said, “where he might go, and how to get him back without anyone getting hurt.”
“You’ve got to know that even if I knew something I wouldn’t tell you, but the truth is I don’t know.”
The students beginning to trickle back into the room were a mixture of middle-aged women and college-aged coeds. With the exception of a few who had obviously come from work, they were all dressed very casually—shorts, T-shirts, and flip-flops, many of the young girls with extremely short shorts made of soft material that looked like pajama bottoms.
“You know more than we do,” I said.
“Obviously,” she said.
I looked over at Rachel and smiled.
“I mean I know enough not to barge into the middle of a professor’s lecture,” she said.
“Oh, we know that,” I said. “We came during one of your breaks.”
“I can’t do this right now,” she said. “You’ll have to excuse me.”
“Why don’t you show a video and step out into the hall with us for a minute?”
She glanced at the TV, then back at me, her eyes narrowed. Retrieving the remote from within the podium, she pointed it toward the TV and pressed a button.
“Go ahead and start the video,” she said to the class. “I’ll be back in just a moment. I’m going to leave the lights on so you can take notes. The test will include all the material on the video so make sure you get it.”
She walked out into the hallway. We followed.
“You say you want to help Michael,” she said when she had closed the door, “but it’s a little late for that now. Where were you when he needed you before all this happened?”
“He’s your best chance of getting back your brother without him getting hurt,” Rachel said, nodding toward me.
“What did he need help with?” I asked.
The doors at the end of the hallway opened and a tall, thin black man in a light blue sports shirt with his name and GCSC stitched on it came in. He held a bottle of cleaning solution in one hand and a rag in the other.
“I’m not going to do this here,” she whispered.
The man entered the classroom closest to us and turned on the lights, leaving the door open behind him.
“Has he contacted you?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I’m not saying anything else. I’m going back into my classroom and if you interrupt me again I’ll call campus security and have you removed.”
I knew there was no way a campus this size had security, but when she turned and walked into her classroom I didn’t try to stop her.
“That went well,” Rachel said.
I shrugged. “About as well as I expected. Come on.”
“Where we going now?”
“Across the campus to talk to her mother.”
Chapter Twenty-four
Unlike Tracy Jensen, her mother, Wanda, was warm and friendly. We found her cleaning the large classroom used by the nursing program. In addition to the usual tables, chairs, and podium, it had built-in cabinets and drawers for supplies, a sink, and room on the side for two hospital beds. Simulating a hospital room, the beds were separated by a curtain and held resuscitation dummies hooked to empty IVs.
Like the tall, thin African-American man from the other building, Wanda wore a light blue sports shirt with GCSC and her name embroidered on it. The shirt was untucked, its tail resting on the navy blue jogging bottoms covering her large backside and
thighs. She was on her hands and knees scraping something off the floor when we walked in.
When she glanced back at us she smiled, and stood, which took a while and required the use of a nearby table and chair.
“Lot easier to get down,” she said.
I thought about the book on the fabric of the universe I had been listening to, and how it had described gravity as warps and wrinkles in space-time like a wooden floor with water damage.
“Gravity gets the best of all of us,” I said.
“Yeah but some of us have more mass than others,” she said. “Still, drop me and my anorexic daughter off the Empire State Building, we’d hit the ground at the same time.”
I must have looked a little surprised, because she smiled and said, “I’m reading a book on the fabric of the cosmos to my husband. He’s legally blind but loves books like that, so he’s giving me an education.”
“I’m reading the same book,” I said. “Well, listening to it.”
“Do you understand it?” she asked.
“Only some,” I said.
She smiled. “I know. Used to think I was somewhat smart until I started reading all this bucket stuff.”
I smiled. I loved being surprised. It was refreshing.
“Bucket?” Rachel asked.
“Something about if there were nothing in the universe—no planets, stars, or people—would the contents of a spinning bucket feel any effects.”
Rachel looked confused.
“Is the universe a something or a nothing,” I explained.
Wanda smiled.
“If you take all the letters out of the alphabet,” I said, “would there still be an alphabet?”
Rachel shook her head.
“Once you get it all figured out,” I said to Wanda, “you can explain it to me. I’m John Jordan, by the way. I’m—”
“I know. Your daddy’s the sheriff of Potter County and you’re the chaplain at the prison.”
I nodded. “This is Rachel Mills from FDLE. We’re trying to find Michael.”
She shook her head and I thought she was about to shut down, but she said, “I don’t know what that boy was thinking. Just about to get out and he does a damn fool thing like that.”
“There had to be a good reason,” I said. “Any idea what it might be?”
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