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For Krystyna Skarbek, and Eileen Nearne, and Iris Origo … and all the courageous women the world forgot
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’ve said it before, and it bears repeating: Random ideas kicking around in an author’s head don’t become published novels without the contribution of many willing hands. So I’m very grateful to St. Martin’s Press for allowing me a page to express my appreciation to all the people who helped me with research for this novel, and supported me with their loyalty and encouragement.
In New Jersey: A big thank-you, once again and always, to my old friend Sgt. David Conte of the Bayonne Police Department.
In Everglades City, Florida: My thanks go out to Steve Markley and his sidekick Otis McMillen, of Captain Steve’s Swamp Buggy and Airboat Adventures; to Petra Gegenbach, owner of Right Choice Supermarket; and to “Chris,” a National Parks Service officer at the Big Cypress Welcome Center. None of you had any prior warning before I showed up in your lives, but you all gave freely of your time and shared your depths of knowledge about Everglades City and Big Cypress National Preserve. For that I am truly grateful. If I got anything wrong in the novel that follows these comments, that’s my mistake, not yours.
In Clewiston, Florida: Thank you, Harry Patel, owner/manager of the Executive Royal Inn, for allowing me to roam your property, take photographs, and interview you about your business.
(Here I should mention that I was not able to access each and every pertinent location during my research trips to Florida. Consequently, my descriptions of, for example, the interior facilities at the Collier County Sheriff’s substation at Everglades City, and the U.S. Customs Service’s offices in Miami, are the product of my imagination. But that’s the whole point of fiction, right?)
Elsewhere in North America, at an undisclosed location: Let me express, once again, my admiration and my deepest gratitude to J.S., former federal undercover agent, whose true identity must remain “in the wind.” Thank you again, my friend. One day your story will be told.
In Caltanissetta, Sicily: Once again, amore e rispetto to Silvia Sillitti, Bruno Fantauzza, and Professor Enrico Curcuruto, a trio of indomitable, fascinating, and endlessly generous Sicilians who have taken my wife, Melody, and me into their hearts. Every day we spend away from Sicily, and away from you, is a day we regret. And a very special thank-you to Enrico, who took us on a memorable geological tour—deep underground in the Realmonte salt mine.
I also thank my agent, Kim Witherspoon at InkWell Management, and, of course, my editor, Daniela Rapp, a veritable font of wisdom, who long ago earned my profound respect.
Finally, and this will come as no surprise to anyone who knows us, my deepest admiration and devotion are reserved for my dear wife, Melody. As one of our friends once said, in a tone of profound wonder: “Amazing! Between the two of you, you actually make a whole person.”
How do I argue with that?
One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning.
—James Russell Lowell
FEBRUARY 2015
The woman awoke in pain.
She was lying on her side.
Her head was pounding, and something hard and sharp was pressing remorselessly against her back.
She raised her head. Her cheek felt sticky wet.
Half-conscious, she felt behind her. Her torso was jammed against buckled, deformed metal.
Her eyelids were sealed shut. She rubbed at them until one finally opened, then the other. Even then, as the woman struggled to free herself, her eyes could barely make out a blurred image of her surroundings. It was only by the light of a dying sun that she was able to detect the gap in the van’s buckled rear doors.
Half-blind, she crawled out of the wreck.
In a fog of disorientation, blood streaming from a laceration in her scalp, she rose unsteadily to her feet.
Where am I?
As the woman’s confused brain processed that seminal question, the growing recognition that she didn’t know the answer imparted a terrifying sense of isolation. Even more frightening, the question felt like the first thought she had ever had.
As if she had just been born.
That can’t be right! How would I know about the concept of birth?
Abruptly, the source of light shifted. The fading sunset paled against a more intense intrusion. It came, bright with danger, from somewhere behind her tottering form. Distracted from her panicked speculations, she shuffled around in time to feel a sudden blast of heat. Flames leaped upward from the wrecked vehicle. No … now she saw there were two vehicles. A WWII-era jeep was crushed against the front of the van. A man’s twisted body lay across the jeep’s hood.
She stumbled backward, almost fell, regained her balance, and fled.
Behind her, the wreckage exploded in a ball of flame.
After several seconds, she stopped, aware of fresh pain. She looked down. Her feet were torn and bleeding. She’d been running barefoot on crushed rock.
Where are my shoes?
She sat and studied her bleeding feet.
Puzzled, she plucked at the shreds of pale adhesive that clung to the cuffs of her slacks. She pulled at her shirt.
Why don’t I recognize these clothes?
Her exploring fingers touched something protruding from her left forearm. She felt a jolt of pain. She slid the object out of her flesh.
A needle?
A sulfurous swamp-like smell assailed her nostrils. She looked around, studying the tangle of cypress and myrtle that crowded in on each side of the narrow, graveled track.
Where am I?
She strained to remember.
WHO AM I?
The whoosh of leaping flames drew her attention back to the scene behind her.
She stared, confused.
What’s burning?
Then she heard a noise … a sliding, crunching sound, approaching fast.
Seconds later, her rapidly improving eyes were blinded by the heartless glare of headlights.
LISA
1
MARCH 2015
Lisa awoke with a ripple of anticipation.
She’d been waiting for this day ever since Roland had finally agreed to let her join him on his bimonthly supply run into town.
She’d been increasing the pressure for the last two weeks, and he’d finally relented.
“Okaaay! Okay! But we’ll have to do it on a Sunday morning.”
“Why Sunday?”
He’d explained that most of Everglades City’s townsfolk would either be at home, or in church, or out fishing. “Not so many people around to upset you.”
Ever since early February, when Lisa had wandered away from their homestead in the Big Cypress backcountry—ever since he’d finally found her, sick and bleeding on a remote stretch of back road, with no memory of where she was, or who she was—Roland Lewis had been completely obsessed about never letting her out of his sight. And obses
sed, as well, about keeping the outside world where it belonged:
Outside.
No visitors, no TV, no internet, no newspapers—nothing could be allowed into their lives that might unsettle Lisa in her delicate state. And, just to keep her safe, and to protect her from any lapses, he had locked her in a secure room whenever he went to town. He called it their “safe room.” It had a cot, and a chair, a rusting pole lamp, a pee bucket … and no windows.
Yeah, it was a bit like a cell, but for a good purpose.
After this last incident—after her injuries had started to heal and she’d calmed down enough to listen—Roland had explained the purpose of the room. They had designed it together, he said, after an earlier episode when she’d wandered away in a disoriented state. A “foog state,” he’d called it. He claimed he’d looked up the word, but she didn’t know where because the only book in the cabin was a workshop manual for his pickup. After a while, it came to her that he must have meant “fugue state.” She’d forgotten her name and everything she’d ever done, but for some reason she’d retained her vocabulary, and it seemed to be better than his.
That earlier time when she’d wandered off, he said, he’d found her sloshing around in an alligator-infested strand two miles from their compound. “After ya recovered, you were really scared it would happen again. That safe room was your idea.”
Somehow Lisa couldn’t imagine herself asking to be locked up. But then, she didn’t really remember what kind of a person “herself” was.
And probably the safe room had been a good idea because, before they’d finished building it, “that crazy foog thing,” as Roland called it, had happened again. He said that was in early February and now it was late March, so it had been almost two months and her memory still hadn’t returned.
It did seem like everything Roland did was for her own protection, and she knew she should be grateful. But lately she’d had the persistent feeling that something didn’t quite mesh. It wasn’t just her missing memory.
It was something bigger than that.
He’d told her they’d been together for three years, that they’d planned to get married before everything went to hell. A little over a year ago, he said, she’d had her first spell. She lost her memory, didn’t know her own name, didn’t remember him. Then her memory came back. Then it happened again, and it lasted a little longer. “Ya’d lose your memory,” he said, “and then it’d come back, then go again. Really crazy. The docs said you was mental, wanted to put ya in the nuthouse. Couldn’t let ’em do that, so I brought ya out here.”
Lisa didn’t know what to make of it. Whenever she stared at her image in the black-streaked mirror above the sink in the cabin’s grimy bathroom, she’d get a prickly feeling that a stranger was staring back.
Someone she couldn’t quite bring into focus.
And then there was the other thing.
As Roland led her to the truck, grumbling because he wouldn’t be able to stop for a beer at Joanie’s diner, his iron grip on her hand reminded her of that other thing.
Reminded her that sometimes sex with him could get a bit rough. He would zone out … almost like, in his mind, he was just getting a quick screw from a hooker, not making love to the fiancée he had saved from an asylum.
And then there was that last time, two weeks ago.
They were on the cot in the safe room. He was on top of her, pounding away, when something snapped in her head and she’d started fighting back and he’d smacked her. Hard.
It had only happened that one time.
But it had happened.
He’d smacked her and something inside her head had commanded her to fight back, to make him pay for that humiliating blow. But self-preservation told her she simply owed him too much, that she’d be completely lost without him, so she’d suppressed the urge.
He’d apologized later, saying he thought she was drifting again and he’d only hit her in the hope it would bring her back to her senses. In the hope, as he said, that it would stop her from “fooging” so he wouldn’t have to teach her who she was all over again.
He’d played that card too many times.
Lisa’s inchoate thoughts and sensations had been nudging her toward a single conclusion:
I’m his prisoner.
After that incident, she had carefully adopted the role of the submissive sweetheart, all the while manipulating Roland into letting her join him on today’s excursion. She’d already decided that—amnesia or not—if he didn’t agree to take her, she was going to make a run for it. The problem with that plan was that she had no idea where she was, and no idea of which direction to run.
At least this way she’d have a guide.
2
Roland opened the passenger door of his old F-150 pickup and made a show of helping her in. As far as she could remember, this was only the second time she’d ridden in the truck. The first time was when he had found her sitting on a gravel back road, bleeding and confused.
He climbed in, started the engine, jammed it into gear, and wheeled across the patchy lawn, making a wide circle around the faded clapboard cabin they called home. The building’s tar-papered roof had been extended on one side to provide rain cover for a rough plank deck that sat on pilings next to a narrow channel of algae-choked swamp. Roland had told her, with no trace of irony, that their little waterway was called Clearwater Strand. There was an old canoe lying upside down on the deck, but Lisa had never known him to use it.
A few hundred yards of rutted driveway brought them to a chained metal gate. Roland got out, unlocked the padlock, released the chain, and swung the gate wide. After driving through, he got out and reversed the process, double-wrapping the chain and snapping the lock in place. Craning to look out the rear window as they drove away, Lisa could just make out a handwritten warning sign wired to the gate.
PRIVATE PROPERTY
NO TREPASING
NO DUMPING FISHING HUNTING
She thought she should at least recognize that misspelled sign from the night Roland brought her home, but she had no memory of it.
I must have been really out of it.
Idly, she asked, “How much property do we have?”
“Twenty acres.” Roland swung the truck onto a gravel road.
“What’s this road called?”
“Parks guys call it Loop Road.”
“We live in a park?”
“Yeah. When the feds made it a park, part ’a the deal was they hadta leave us Gladesmen alone.”
“How far is it to town?”
“Thirty miles.” His pale eyes cut across to her. “Too many questions, girl! Just concentrate on staying calm. And when we get to the market, stay close to me and don’t talk to no one.”
Lisa covered her prickling suspicions by asking mildly, “Why?”
“I already told ya! If someone figures out who you are, the word could get back to those quacks who want you locked up in the bughouse.”
Lisa managed a compliant nod.
The drive was uneventful. The graveled surface of the Loop Road eventually turned into pavement, and after a few more miles, it intersected a main highway. Roland made a left, heading west. Lisa sat in silence, taking in the passing scenery as if for the first time. She knew she must have seen it all before, must have driven these roads before, but nothing looked familiar. They passed signs: MONUMENT LAKE CAMPGROUND … BURNS LAKE CAMPGROUND … BIG CYPRESS SWAMP WELCOME CENTER …
She remembered none of them.
Finally, after another left, they rolled past a multicolored mural that proclaimed:
WELCOME TO EVERGLADES CITY
ESTABLISHED 1923
They crossed a bridge, with waterways and float houses on both sides. There were motels and cafes and gas stations, interspersed with gaudy signs advertising airboat rides and alligator shows. To Lisa, these everyday scenes all carried an air of unreality, as if she had plunged headlong into someone else’s life, with no memory of her own.
&n
bsp; After a few more turns and jogs, they arrived in front of a yellow building adorned with red lettering: RIGHT CHOICE SUPERMARKET.
Entering the store through its automatic double doors, Lisa stopped short. What had been an unprepossessing block building on the outside, signaling, at best, a dingy minimart within, turned out to be anything but. Spotless and well-lit, the market featured up-to-date cashier checkouts, polished inlaid flooring, and broad aisles leading to an impressive meat department that spanned the entire rear section of the store. And everywhere—above the meats, over the frozen food coolers, wherever wall space permitted—were enormous, wildly colorful photographs of dark watercourses, mystical stands of mangrove, and dramatic examples of exotic Everglades wildlife.
As Lisa’s protector had hoped, the store was almost empty. In fact, the sole customer in sight was a woman paying for her groceries at the only staffed checkout. Roland grabbed a shopping cart and headed for the meat section, with Lisa trailing behind. As he bent over the cooler, digging through packages of ground beef—his usual cheap and easy standby, as Lisa had learned—she devoted herself to looking around, drinking in the scene, hoping against hope that something might seem familiar.
Her eyes were drawn to a certain product at the end of the aisle behind them.
Nutella.
She had a sudden compelling feeling that she’d eaten Nutella as a child—a deep memory, just out of reach. A memory that carried with it the sensation of an older woman.
“Roland! Look!”
“What?”
She grabbed his sleeve and tugged him toward the display. “Nutella! I think I used to like this when I was a kid! I must have told you that, right?”
He eyed her carefully. “Yeah. Maybe you did.”
His vagueness unsettled her.
They rolled up and down the deserted aisles, filling the cart. Roland seemed to be working from a list in his head. Or, Lisa thought as she watched him make selections, maybe no list at all. Maybe he just bought the same things every time out of habit.
Killing Pace Page 1
