“I’m happy to be of service to the females in the Sullivan household,” he said. His hand abandoned Abaco and slid to the inside of my thigh.
Abaco whined softly and looked up at him with the eyes of a jealous woman. I reached for her ear and scratched her. “It’s okay, girl,” I said. “There’s enough of him to go around. I think.” I gave her a rough rub on her neck and then noticed something. “Hey, where’s her collar?”
“I took it off inside while you were talking to your grandmother and Molly. Your dog was so happy to be home, she’d decided to roll in something foul out in the yard. I had to clean her up a bit. She reeked.” His hand moved up my thigh, and I was determined not to show any reaction.
“Aw. You gave my dog a sponge bath. You are a handy guy to have around.”
“I aim to please,” he said and his hand took more precise aim, causing me to collapse into a coughing fit from inhaling a piece of fish.
Molly then monopolized B.J. and Catalina with talk about the baby while we ate. It seemed to me that all pregnant people ever talk about is babies, and I was sick of it. I did my best to tune them out once we all sat back full and tired, and the kids took off for one last round of capture the flag: the twins against Zale and Abaco. I was contemplating joining them when I remembered something from the Key West trip.
“Hey, Molly, guess who I ran into in Key West?”
“Ah, don’t make me guess. Tell me.”
“Here’s a hint. His nickname in high school was Glub.”
“Not Ben?”
“Yup. And you would never recognize him.”
“What do you mean?”
“No glasses, no braces, and not an ounce of fat on his hot body.”
“You’re joking.”
“I’m not. I swear. It was his voice and his eyes in this strange but very hot body. He’s captain of a schooner that does day charters down there. It was so weird how we just ran into each other on the dock.”
“Life is full of odd coincidences like that. He always had a thing for you, you know.”
“Ben?”
“Yeah. Big time.”
I turned to see if B.J. was listening. He had his back to me as he talked to Cat.
“Well, if I’d known back then that he’d turn out like this, I might have been a little more interested myself.”
Molly laughed. “I can’t imagine Ben Baker as a hot bod! I always thought he’d wind up a nerdy scientist.”
“Oh, and that reminds me, I also saw Arlen Sparks down there. Have you heard about his wife?”
It turned out that Molly did know and had been taking food over to help out, but most of the neighbors now felt that what they needed most of all was live-in help. I told Molly about Arlen losing his job and his benefits; that was something she didn’t know.
“He still gets up and leaves each day as though he’s going to work.” Molly said. “I wonder where he goes? He shouldn’t be leaving her alone.”
The subject that had been hanging over the meal, quiet and unspoken, was the death of Catalina’s husband. We were all thinking about it, but my friends didn’t know Cat well enough yet and they weren’t the kind of people who mumbled empty platitudes. I needn’t have worried, though: Cat brought it up herself. When the conversation lagged, she turned to me and said, “I thank you for making me so welcome here at your home and among your friends. You are like a big family. Nestor would have liked this. He always wanted a big family.”
Molly draped her arm over Catalina’s shoulders and told her again that she would not be raising her child alone—that we would all be there like a great crowd of doting aunties and uncles. Then Jeannie chimed in with her offers to help in any way, and B.J. reached over and took Cat’s hand.
It’s always the sympathy that gets to you. Catalina’s face started to crumple and her eyes shone with tears. “Seychelle, I don’t want to be a burden on you. I have the room at the crew house and the rent is paid through January. If I can ask one more favor, can you take me there tonight?”
“No way. Not tonight. We’re both too tired. You stay here with me tonight, get some sleep. I’ll take you over there tomorrow.”
“These two days on the boat, I have been wondering about the future for me and my baby. I don’t even know if I will be allowed to stay in this country now that I am no longer the wife of an American.”
“Jeannie here might be able to help you.” I stood up and pulled Jeannie to her feet from the redwood deck chair she’d been sitting in. I dragged her closer to Cat. “I’ll leave you two alone while I go inside to help B.J. with the dishes.”
B.J. looked startled for a minute, then jumped up and joined me in collecting armfuls of dirty plates and heading for the kitchen. Once we were safely inside, I dumped the dishes on the counter and collapsed on the couch. B.J. began running water in the sink.
“You don’t really have to do those now. I just needed to escape before I invited her to move in with me.”
“Yes, that would have been terrible.”
I sat up and looked at him. He was standing at the sink, his back to me, running the hot water, his shoulder-length black hair held back in a ponytail with a leather thong. He was wearing a long-sleeved white T-shirt and khaki cargo pants. The pants fit nice and snug on his butt. The sight made me think about Ben Baker, and I wondered what in the world I’d been thinking when I’d contemplated bedding Ben. I enjoyed the sight for several more seconds before I said, “B.J. Moana, are you making fun of me?”
He turned and smiled at me without showing any teeth, his lush lips pressed together tight. “You are perceptive.” He went back to his soapy water.
“You of all people know that I can’t stand to have someone living with me.”
“Indeed,” he said into the sink without even turning around.
“And being around someone who’s pregnant and always talking about babies is just a little more than I can take.”
“Clearly.”
“She doesn’t know if they’re even going to allow her to stay in the United States at this point. But the worst thing of all is that she wants me to help her by looking into Nestor’s accident and at this point, frankly, I don’t want to get involved. I haven’t got the time. I mean, I might be about to lose my own career here. I have my own lawsuit to worry about.”
“That’s right.”
“Dammit, B.J., I hate it when you agree with me all the time.”
“I know.”
I rolled my eyes at his backside. “So what do you want me to do?”
At that moment Jeannie came strolling through the open front door, and she caught my last question. “Man, how do you do it? She’s cranky as all get-out to the rest of us, won’t even offer aid to a poor pregnant widow, and you, she’s asking you what in the world she can do for you.”
“Jeannie, that’s not fair,” I said. “She’s staying here with me tonight. And I’ve been with her through all this in Key West. But for Pete’s sake, where does it end?”
“Why don’t you ask her?”
I couldn’t say anything to that. I knew that it wouldn’t ever end for Catalina. Losing a loved one to an unnatural death is something from which you don’t ever quite recover. Both my parents were now dead. Red, my father, died from complications from melanoma, and though he hadn’t yet made it to that average life span the insurance guys now have on their actuarial tables, he had died from something brought on by nature. My mother, however, died at the hand of a human being, even if that hand was her own. It wasn’t some omnipotent natural force that had reached out for her. She chose to walk out into the sea that day, and I had blown my chance to stop her. That kind of thing never ends.
“What I didn’t say in my phone message to B.J. is that she’s convinced somebody killed Nestor and tried to make it look like an accident.”
“Why?” Jeannie asked.
“Nestor thought that the initial wreck of the Power Play was suspicious. He was running on instruments, and according to
him the instruments malfunctioned. He thought somebody had monkeyed with them. He claimed Ted Berger was having financial difficulties, which could have been improved with a little insurance money. Nestor had been talking about trying to get someone to come look at the boat to prove the instruments had been tampered with, and it’s possible Berger overheard him.”
B.J. walked over, drying his hands on a dish towel, and sat next to me on the couch. “That’s not much in the way of evidence. It’s normal for her to want to lash out, to blame someone besides her husband.”
“There’s more. Catalina knows more about windsurfing than I do, and she claims that the placement of the body was suspicious. She says if he had been thrown into the mast and knocked unconscious, he wouldn’t have ended up lying on top of the sail with some of the rigging lines actually wrapped around one wrist. She says it reeked of a setup. She wanted the cops to look more closely at the head wound but before we could convince them to run those tests, Berger paid to have the body cremated.”
“How could he do that?” Jeannie asked.
“Well, Cat told the cops she couldn’t afford to deal with the body right away. Next thing she knew, Berger had stepped in saying he would take care of it as a kindness to the widow of his former employee. They took him up on it. I guess the city of Key West thought they were going to get stuck with the tab for burying him in a pauper’s grave and they grabbed at Berger’s offer.”
“She should sue them.”
“It won’t give her another chance to get at the evidence. It’s gone. Nestor’s ashes are out in Gorda's wheelhouse.”
“Poor kid,” Jeannie said.
“Yeah, I know. But don’t say that to her. She’s one brave woman. You should have seen her chewing out those Key West cops and those poor folks at that funeral home. She’s in her last month with that baby and she is determined to snoop around and find out what happened to her husband. Then she went and talked to this reporter and was quoted in the paper saying that there were suspicious circumstances surrounding her husband’s death. The next day a truck almost ran her down on the streets of Key West.” I lifted the long sleeves of my T-shirt to show the scabs on my arms. “If I hadn’t pulled her clear, she and her baby would have been roadkill. She’s going to get both of them killed if we don’t stop her.”
“We?” She shook her head. “So how do you intend to do that?”
“I guess I’ve got to give her what she’s been asking for since the day he was killed. I’ve got to promise her I’ll ask around for her.”
B.J. kissed me on the cheek. “What took you so long?”
XIV
The next morning Catalina was still under the covers of my hide-a-bed when I came stumbling out of the bedroom in the size XXL T-shirt I wore as a nightgown. I’d reluctantly sent B.J. off to drive Grams home the night before, knowing that Catalina didn’t need anything else to make her feel awkward and alone. My cottage was just too small to afford any kind of privacy when I had visitors.
I opened the front door to let Abaco out then filled my teakettle, set it on the burner, opened the refrigerator, and stared at the mostly empty interior. Unless I could figure out a way to make breakfast out of soy sauce and sweet pickle relish, we’d better figure on eating out. I closed the door and started rummaging for some coffee for me and herb tea for the pregnant lady. The coffee I had, the tea B.J. had left for mornings he woke up here.
With a steaming mug in each hand, I sat on the edge of the bed. “Good morning.”
She pulled the covers off her head, saw the tea, and struggled to roll up into a sitting position. “Thank you,” she said when I handed her the mug.
“You know, you could just about use that belly of yours as a TV tray.”
Her lips turned up in one corner.
“You sleep okay?”
She took a quick sip of the hot fluid and nodded.
“Now I know you’re lying. I’ve slept on this damn thing before, or tried to. There’s some kind of bar running right down the middle, and the mattress is only a couple of inches thick.”
“It was okay. The bed would not have mattered. I cannot turn off my mind.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean.”
“It was not an accident, Seychelle. I do not know how I will do it, but I will find the proof that my husband was killed.”
“Catalina, you aren’t one person anymore. Look at you. You can’t go running around chasing after supposed killers.”
She put down her mug and heaved her body upright. She crossed barefoot to the window and looked out at the sun-filled yard. She was wearing one of my night T-shirts, the cotton fabric stretched tight around her belly. Her navel made a small bump like the stem on a fat tomato. “I used to look out at the world and see esperanza, hope. I do not want to raise my child in a world where a man is killed and no one cares.”
“That’s not true. I care.”
“You care that he is dead, but you do not even believe that he was killed.”
I nodded. “True, I can’t go that far, not yet.” Cat opened her mouth to disagree and I held up my hand. “But I agree with you that something is wrong. I’m afraid, though, that it might be something even bigger than Ted Berger.”
“I think you are wrong,” she said, crossing her arms over her breasts.
“Geez, Cat. I didn’t think I’d ever meet anybody who was just as stubborn and hardheaded as me. I was wrong. I thought you’d be happy about me volunteering to help you. Listen. I’ll take a look at Berger, but you’ve got to promise me that you won’t do anything on your own. I want you to stay home, rest, and keep that kid healthy.”
She came over to where I was sitting on the bed and took my hand in both of hers. “Thank you. Really. I appreciate your help and your hospitality. Tonight, though, I will not bother you anymore. I will go back to the crew house.”
“You keep acting like that’s a solution for you, Catalina, but the last day of the month is only two days off. I’ve been thinking about where you might go, and I’ve got an idea. This just might work out for you and for an old friend of mine. You’re a nurse, right?”
I pulled my 1972 Jeep onto the swale in front of the Sparkses’ house on my old street. An old boyfriend had nicknamed my ride Lightnin’, in reference to her speed, or lack of it, but even though she was working on her second hundred thousand miles on her second engine, she started when I turned the key; that was all I asked of my vehicle. I’d owned her for almost ten years, since my days as a lifeguard on Fort Lauderdale Beach, and some owner before me had stuck a plastic Jesus statue on the dash that had watched over me all these years. Since my relationship with religion was something along the lines of Don’t ask, don’t tell, I wasn’t going to credit J. C. with keeping my car running, but I wasn’t about to remove him, either.
Ever since I’d reconnected with Molly last year, I’d been spending more time in Shady Banks, my old neighborhood, but I hadn’t noticed before how run-down the Sparkses’ yard looked. Gardening had been her thing and their house was usually the showpiece of the block, but now weeds grew in the flower beds and the bushes were ragged with long tendrils of new growth.
Catalina and I had gone to Lester’s Diner for breakfast, then I’d dropped her off at the crew house with a promise to come back and bring her up to date on my plans. After that, I’d stopped at a bakery for a cake. It was now approaching eleven o’clock, and I assumed this was an hour I could go calling on a Sunday morning.
I would not have thought Arlen could look worse than he had in Key West, but when he opened the door the bags under his eyes were the size of walnuts and his hair hung long on one side of his head—he hadn’t even bothered to comb it over. His pants and shirt looked so wrinkled, he might have slept in them.
“Hi,” I said. “I just thought I’d stop by to see how your wife is doing. Is there any chance she’s feeling like a visitor?”
“Come in,” he said, stepping back and ushering me into their living room.
“
I brought a cake for Mrs. Sparks. I remember how she always used to bake for us, and well, I don’t bake, but I can buy.”
He stood in the middle of the living room staring at my bakery box. His face was blank. It was like he was trying to process what it was.
“Mr. Sparks? Your wife. May I go see her?”
His eyes slid up to my face, but he didn’t say anything.
“Your wife? Mrs. Sparks?”
He still didn’t say a word. He just turned and walked down the hall that was off to the right of the front door. He stopped outside an open door and waved me in.
She was sitting up in one of those hospital beds that you can rent and bring into your home. People didn’t usually do that unless their loved ones were not expected to get out of those beds. She looked tiny, like a little paper doll in a big white envelope. Her eyes were closed, and thin black wires trailed out of her ears. At first, I thought they might be some kind of medical paraphernalia, but then Arlen went to the bed and touched her shoulder and her eyes popped open. She reached up and pulled the ear buds out of her ears.
“Oh my goodness. Seychelle!” She fumbled in the covers on the bed and lifted up a small box. It was a cassette player. She pushed a button on the machine and it made a loud clack in the otherwise quiet room. Her voice had been little more than a whisper.
“Hi, Mrs. Sparks. I brought you a cake.” Next to her bed was a long narrow table on wheels just like they have in hospitals; I set the box on the end. “It’s angel food, just like you used to bake for us.”
It was the strangest thing I thought of when I got closer to her. Under her eyes were hollows the same size as the bags under her husband’s eyes, and I wondered if they could fit together when they kissed. It was a stupid thing to think, because it was pretty obvious there hadn’t been much kissing in this house for a while. She wore a red scarf on her head, and the bright color made her skin look the color of dried putty.
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