Sanibel Flats

by Randy Wayne White

  "Boy, I missed you." Then led him into the house, holding his hand. She was shaking.

  "Are you okay?"

  She swung down on the couch beside him, her hand coming to rest on his thigh. "I am now. I missed you, that's all." She was wearing faded jeans and a white T-shirt—braless, too, which made Ford take a breath because he could see her in the soft light of the lamp beside the couch. She said, "I feel like such a jerk going off and leaving you last night. You had something you wanted to talk about, and I could tell it was important, but I just left . . . and you're my best friend. For some stupid party so Benny could push my paintings."

  "You didn't have fun?"

  "A lot of smiling and nodding and everyone so superior, talking about Rauschenberg's latest breakthrough and the next political fund-raiser—my God, what happened to your face?" She was touching the scratch marks on his cheek tenderly, concerned . . . her own face becoming blurry to Ford's eyes at close range: Lombard filmed through a filter; a genuinely classic face.

  "I took a spill at the marina. Tripped on the dock."

  She kissed his cheek, then his lips, too, very softly. That was a new one. "You big clumsy lug. Yesterday it was vultures, today the dock. You need someone to look after you."

  "Took the skin right off, huh?" Like a little boy with a scrape.

  "I've got some antibiotic cream in the bathroom—" She was already standing. "You're sure you don't need it? Then some wine. Last night a very fat, rich man gave me a twenty-year-old Chardonnay that is supposed to be wonderful. He said he bought a case at auction, and I'd hate to even guess what it cost him."

  "Wine," said Ford. "That would be nice." He would have preferred Old Milwaukee to old Chardonnay, but why be ungracious?

  She went into the kitchen, patting each cat on the way. Ford stood, hands in the pockets of his khaki shorts, heard Jessica call for music and touched the digital buttons of the stereo until he found public radio: Dvorak, maybe, with a lot of timpani. Then he studied the paintings. Over the fireplace was a big print by Chrzanoska, a sole-eyed woman with a pearl headpiece, holding a cat over her bare breasts. There was something haunting in the woman's eyes, something that reminded him of Jessica . . . and he found it touching that she did not display her own work as prominently. Some of her watercolors were on the side walls: wading birds feeding at low tide; an old man in a wooden skiff; storm clouds approaching a lone mangrove island, everything frozen in an eerie bruised light. There was a canvas on the easel, too, something new, and he peeked beneath the paper dust guard to see a man wading the flats. The man wore only brief khaki shorts, his thigh muscles flexing as he lifted his leg to take a step, very wide shoulders, body hair covering the rib cage. An impressionistic treatment, but anatomically suggestive in certain details and oddly sexual. Only the hands, face, and some of the background hadn't been finished.

  "You weren't supposed to see that. Not yet." Jessica stood holding the wineglasses, uneasy. He had never seen her embarrassed before. It changed her face; gave it a nice color. She said, "It's not done. I wanted to wait, get my courage up because . . . it's you."

  "Me? I don't have a face."

  "It's not done yet, silly."

  "That's the way I look when I go collecting? And I thought I wore boots."

  "Ah, Doc, please don't chide me . . . and don't smirk like that." She bumped him with her shoulder as she handed him his wine. "I've been trying to make myself paint what I feel, not what I see. I got into such a rut; that's what coming to Sanibel was all about. I don't know that I was ever really good, but I was successful; my first shows got great reviews. I'm just trying to find that thread again, the honesty that's in me. It's a hard thing to get back, honesty. Once you've lost it, it's damn hard to recover . . . and you've heard this speech way too much, over and over from me."

  He had heard it. Jessica had been in New York only for a year before being embraced by some powerful critics who heralded her as the Renaissance stylist of American impressionistic gothic—whatever that meant; Ford didn't know. They said she was breaking old ground in a new way, and for a couple of years she could do no wrong. But then she fell from grace. In the eyes of the critics, everything she did was wrong and, worse, she had invested badly, spent lavishly; ended up in debt with a bunch of paintings that wouldn't sell. She had borrowed from her agent until her agent dropped her, and that should have been the low point, but it wasn't. For the next year she lived in a Greenwich Village flat sleeping all day, avoiding work at night, doing drugs in hip discos and fighting depression. She wasn't quite twenty-five. But then she somehow caught herself. She got a low job on some marketing firm's ladder, worked hard, lived cheaply, and paid off the debts. And saved enough to rent this working retreat on the island.

  Jessica said, "You don't like it, do you?"

  Ford looked at the canvas again. There was the man striding through shallow water, a wedge of mangroves and the bay behind him. A squall was coming, pushing a burnished green light, and the water was a roiled green with wind feathers in random streaks. It had taken great precision for her to capture that mood of randomness, that sense of the inexorable, yet she had controlled it so that the coming squall dominated the bay, but not the man. The view was from the man's side: revealing, powerful .. . somehow a little troubling, too, but not lurid. Ford said, "No ... I like it, Jessi. I like it a lot. Am I really that hairy—"

  "Oh, you men—as if that matters at all. And you're smirking again."

  "I've never seen myself on canvas before."

  "Why should I be so embarrassed about this? I just wanted to try and do something different, something strong. Show the male form in an attitude that wasn't cheap or glitzy. I'm an artist, for Christ's sake, and there should be no taboos—quit that smirking!" She was laughing, the tension gone. "Drink your wine and shut up. No, don't shut up. Tell me what was so important yesterday; the thing that made me feel like such a shit for going off and leaving you."

  Ford said, "You said you had something to tell me."

  "I do. But not now." She was sitting on the couch, looking over the lip of her wineglass. "It'll keep."

  Ford said, "Did you know a man named Rafe Hollins?" then watched her carefully as she stared into his eyes for a moment before saying "No; no, I don't think so—should I?"

  "I found your name in his address book. There was a telephone number, too, but with a New York area code."

  It was an old number, disconnected. Ford had tried it.

  She puzzled over that, sipping at her wine, then said, "Wait—is he a pilot?"

  "He was."

  She was nodding. "Okay; right. I know who you mean. A couple of years ago, when I was thinking of moving down here, I wanted to fly over the area in a small plane, really get an idea of where the best places to live might be. I called the municipal airport to see about a charter, and I ended up in one of those small helicopters they use to spray crops. I think the pilot's name was Rafe; kind of an odd name—I don't remember his last name—and he flew me around all morning. He didn't have to charge much, he said, because it was a company helicopter or something. Big guy; very nice looking in a cowboy sort of way, but a little too loud for my taste. And he did things to try and scare me. Flew very low; made sharp turns. I guess he thought it would impress me. It didn't."

  Ford said, "That was Rafe. Did you ever see him again?"

  Jessica said, "No." Then: "Why were you looking through his address book?"

  "Yesterday afternoon I found his body on a little island south of here—"

  "His body? You mean he was dead?"

  "As in very dead. I wasn't sure it was Rafe at first. Vultures had been working on the body for a while, so it was hard to tell—"

  Jessica had her hand to her mouth, incredulous. "That's why you came here in such a mess! And you were bitten! My God, Doc, don't be so nonchalant. Tell me what happened!"

  So he told her about Hollins. Told her about high school, the phone call and finding him on the island, finding the gems;
some of the rest of it, but keeping it simple while Jessica listened, making sad faces. "My God, that's awful. Just terrible. But are you really sure it was him?"

  "I am now. I thought maybe Rafe had killed someone accidentally; someone he was supposed to do business with and, in a panic, tried to cover it up by planting his own wallet on the corpse. It would have been a dumb thing to try, but people often do dumb things when they're scared. It was Rafe, though. If he wasn't dead, he'd have gotten in touch with me by now. He needed me to help get his son back."

  "What are you going to do, Doc?" Jessica was on her feet, looking for the wine bottle, truly upset.

  Ford said, "There's not much I can do about Rafe. For some reason, someone in Everglades County wants his death to appear as a suicide. They may have had a hand in the murder, but I don't see sufficient motive. Rafe went through a nasty divorce, and a local judge got involved with his ex-wife, but they'd already taken his son and his money; why would they want his life? It's more likely someone on Sandy Key decided that Rafe was unimportant enough to sweep under the carpet, avoid all the bad publicity, and then they could still look for the murderer on the sly. That's what I hope happened."

  "But there has to be someone you can call; someone who can find out for sure if he was murdered or committed suicide—"

  "He was murdered. There's no doubt about it."

  She said, "I know he was your close friend, Doc. But that doesn't mean he couldn't have gotten very sick; sick enough to take his own life." The gentle voice of reason, reminding him.

  "You think I'm making an emotional judgment. I'm not. Take the suicide note. It said: I just can't take it no more; something like that. Illiterate; real hicky in big, rough block letters. Well, that's a role Rafe liked to play: the backwoods redneck role. Talked real slow, real southern, like he was dumb as dirt. But he only did it around people he didn't know very well, and always for a reason. He liked to use it to bait the self-important ones, the snobs. He'd start asking dumb questions, and these people would kind of look at him like a bucket of meat, and he'd keep asking questions, getting sharper and sharper but still with the hick accent, until he had made them look like complete asses. Rafe was a very bright guy. Articulate on paper. I went to high school with him."

  "That's the only reason you think he was murdered? The way the suicide note was written?"

  "No. But the note's part of it. It tells me Rafe didn't write the note. And it tells me quite a bit about who did. Whoever wrote the note didnt know Rafe very well, but they knew him—and probably on a business or professional level. Why else would he have played the redneck role other than to use it to some kind of advantage? In their conversation or conversations, Rafe wanted the person to think he was dumb. And they believed the act enough to try and mimic him on paper. So that leaves us with some reasonable suppositions: The person who wrote the note was involved with Rafe in some kind of business dealing. He was probably an American originally from the north, probably articulate, probably egotistical—all necessary for Rafe to make his redneck routine work."

  Jessica was looking at him. "My God," she said. "The logical mind."

  Ford was warming to the subject, arranging it in his mind as he talked. "Whoever wrote the note was the murderer or one of the murderers. That's the working hypothesis. Match it with some of the other things I saw on the island, and you come up with an even clearer picture. It was probably two men. They didn't known much about boats or knots, so they had to come in a very small boat—the kind that doesn't carry more than two people. The water's so shallow, they wouldn't have made it to the island otherwise. They beached at the same cove Rafe beached his boat; they weren't comfortable in the woods, and stuck around for a while after Rafe was dead, probably looking for something. The emeralds, maybe, but that's an assumption. They didn't find what they were looking for Thursday, the day they killed him, so they came back yesterday for another look. A big golden-silk spider had a web across the path from the cove, and someone had walked through it. Rafe was tall enough to hit it, but he wouldn't have—he grew up in the woods. The man who walked through the web was coming from or going to his boat; probably going, because he was preoccupied, wasn't watching. It only takes a golden-silk spider about three hours to completely rebuild its web, and the spider was a little more than half done when I got there.

  "Another thing: Rafe thought he had no reason to fear the killer or killers. If they arrived before he did, he would have seen their boat in the cove. If they came afterward, he would have seen them coming across the bay. So they were probably there on a business deal. He wasn't taking social calls. And they were probably buying, not selling.''

  "Sherlock Holmes," she said. "You're almost scary, Ford. You know the color of the man's eyes? What he had for breakfast?" She was half serious. "You think they were there to buy the emeralds."

  Ford said, "If they were, it knocks down an earlier assumption: that Rafe had taken the emeralds from the men who ultimately kidnapped his son. He wouldn't sell something he thought he needed to trade for his son. But it doesn't matter what they were there to buy and it doesn't matter what else I know. The death certificate says death by hanging. Even if the coroner took the time to find out what really killed Rafe—and I doubt if he did—the autopsy report will support the death certificate. The body has been cremated, so the killer is in the clear. If there's no body, there's no way to refute the autopsy."

  "But couldn't the police test the ashes some way? You hear all about those police labs; they can tell everything from a little piece of carpet fiber, tiny things like that."

  "After cremation—man or animal—the only thing you can test for in the lab is metal content in the bones. The metallic poisons, like arsenic, aren't destroyed by fire. I doubt if Rafe was poisoned, but, if he was, they wouldn't have used arsenic. Arsenic tastes bad. It has to be given in small doses over a long period of time."

  "You're an expert of poisons, too?"

  "No, but seventy-five percent of the aquarium fish bought and sold in the U.S. are originally stunned and caught through the use of poisons. All over the world they're killing the reefs by dumping cyanide just so collectors in this country can fill their tanks with pretty tropicals. It's come up in my work before; I know a little."

  "So there really is nothing you can do—about your friend, I mean."

  "I could get some kind of investigation going into the odd procedures of Everglades County, but it wouldn't clear Rafe. Plus it would just take away from the time I need to find a way to free Rafe's son. When I ran into him that time in Costa Rica, Rafe was looking for work. I gave him the names of some people. I thought they might help him. So, directly or indirectly, I played a part. I helped get him involved with the people who kidnapped his son."

  Jessica said, "You can't blame yourself for that, Doc."

  Ford looked at her for a moment. "Why would I blame myself? I meant that I'm one of the early links in a long chain; the one best suited to trace the events that followed. I've already contacted a guy I know in Masagua. He's on the National Security Affair's field staff—they're the ones who recommend what the CIA should or should not be doing. It's this guy's job to cultivate contacts, make surveys, assemble data; like a combination librarian and investigative reporter. The NSA sets up their people with cover jobs—they have him publishing a small

  English-language newspaper—and he pokes around the country, filing reports. He's looking for Jake right now. If the NSA guy can get him, I'll sell the emeralds and set up some kind of trust fund for the boy . . . maybe make sure he doesn't go back to his drunken mother."

  "They're that valuable?"

  "There are two; each about the size of a bird's egg. "

  She stiffened a little, showing her concern. "Tell me you're not keeping them at your place, Ford. You're too smart to keep something so dangerous."

  "No one knows I have the emeralds. Besides, I put them in a place no one would ever look—down the mouths of some preserved sharks. In my lab." Ford
took a drink of wine. All that talking, and he wanted a beer. He got up and went to the refrigerator.

  As he came back, Jessica was saying it was so damn sad such bad things could happen to people; really feeling it, her head on Ford's shoulder, and he could smell the shampoo scent of her hair. The poor little boy out there all alone. His father dead and a mother that probably didn't care—her arms around Ford now, holding him. Then she was kissing his neck, squeezing him, touching her lips to his cheeks, and it was becoming something else, no longer grief. Ford pulled away. "Whoa, what's going on here, lady?"

  Jessica looked up, eyes moist but smiling. "Sometimes you're such a bastard for details; getting everything straight."

  "I thought we had an agreement."

  She said, "Our experiment. That's why I called you." Her fingers were on his thigh, then his abdomen, touching softly, drawing designs. "I want it to end tonight." Like a little girl, not looking at him.

  Ford let her fall against his chest, slid his hands along her ribs brushing the firm weight of her breasts . . . thought of the painting, and almost said something silly to lighten the mood.

  He did not.

  * * *

  There would be no need for CBS, Ford was thinking, not if every woman in the world looked just like this.

  No need for television, lawyers, Playboy, toupees, Doonesbury, war, or Dr. Ruth Westheimer. The end of competition and contrivances: A good dose of natural selection, that's what the world needed. Jessica's brass bed was on the second floor. A quarter moon floated above the bay and the window was swollen with filtered light. Jessica lay naked on the sheets. Her hair was wild upon the pillow, lean legs as if carved from marble, nipples still erect, breasts pale white, full, rounded beneath their own weight, pubic hair iridescent in the moonglow, an amber tangle as if illuminated by internal light. Bioluminescence, it made him think of that.

  Ford had his head upon her chest, looking toward her toes, toward the window. He could feel her breathing, feel her heart beat. He was looking down the soft curvature of her stomach, seeing muscle cordage and ribs flex with each breath, and he was thinking there was a finite number of times he would be with this woman and there ought to be a way to lock onto a moment such as this, to preserve it, but there wasn't. Never would be.