by Tom Lowe
I gave the letter to Dave. He put on his bifocals and read silently. The sound of chuckling gulls passing over the marina and the gurgle of a diesel cranking from a Hatteras leaving M dock were the only noises filling the air. Dave pushed back from the table, looked over his bifocals to me. “Curtis writes that he believes one of them is still alive, but he didn’t leave you with his name.”
“That information might be in the separate package he sent to the post office box.”
Dave took a large bite from his sandwich. He chewed slowly, his face pensive. He opened his tablet and said, “I went through Marianna, Florida, three or four years ago. Didn’t see the reform school Curtis mentions, but I did see a way of life that hasn’t changed much in decades.” He hit a few keys on the table, reading in silence and then clearing his throat. “Jackson County is about as Dixie as you can get. It’s the only county in Florida that borders both Alabama and Georgia. The last black man publically lynched in America was hung by a rope from an oak next to the Jackson County Courthouse, and they hung him after they’d beaten him to death.”
Nick sipped from his beer. “What the hell did he do to deserve that?”
“Allegedly raped and killed a woman.”
“Allegedly?” Nick used a toothpick to stab a piece of feta cheese on his plate.
“He never lived long enough to be tried for the crime. That happened in 1934. The Florida School for Boys was in business thirty-three years before the last public hanging in America. Sounds like the local demographics probably made for a rather shallow employee pool. That reform school operated one hundred and eleven years. The state closed it in 2011, ostensibly for budgetary reasons. This came after reports of child abuse through the years and a lawsuit filed by some men held there as children. A judge tossed it out because the accusations were far beyond the statute of limitations. And the state attorney said there wasn’t enough evidence to prove or disprove the allegations of child abuse.” Dave shook his head. “And more recently, Curtis writes that the police weren’t too interested in a cold case, this one the murder of a child.”
I nodded. “But it’s not a case until someone in law enforcement makes an effort to investigate and hunt for a body. And what if Curtis Garwood was right, what if there are more bodies of kids—boys buried in hidden graves somewhere on the property?”
Dave pursed his lips and exhaled. “Then, perhaps, it could be a lot of cases…maybe America’s killing fields—victims who were runaways, maybe considered by some as throwaways. Too bad Curtis waited so long, and now, at this late state, if he was a witness to Andy Cope’s murder, Curtis is dead, too. Not a lot you could do, Sean.”
Nick shook his head. “Yeah man, sounds like others have tried to do something. A judge tossed out one case. And the DA said he’s got nothing, one way or the other.”
I thought about Curtis’s letter. “Nick, do you remember when Curtis Garwood caught the fish…he stood on the transom just long enough to look that last fish, a wahoo in the eye, before releasing it?”
“Yeah, he seemed to stare at ‘em, kinda like he felt sorry for the fish.”
“When he was bringing the fish in, when he stood next to the transom on Jupiter, I noticed severe scarring on the back of his legs above the knees.”
“Now that you mention it, I remember it, too. It was hard not to notice. Man, I just figured he was burned bad in a fire.”
“A fire doesn’t leave deep crisscrossed scars like that. That type layering, most likely, was caused from repeated beatings.”
I pulled the brass key from my shirt pocket and set it on the table. “This key opens the post office box Curtis mentioned in his letter, and in that box is probably the last thing on earth Curtis Garwood ever mailed.”
Nick blew out a long breath. “Yeah, but do you really want to know what’s there?”
Dave leaned forward. “Sean, Curtis Garwood was a customer on your boat for one day. He’s dead. You’re under no obligation to accept a job he offered you before his death.”
“I know that. But he left a fee in that package, probably cash. I need to return it to his family.”
Nick grunted and stood. “What if there’s something in there that convinces you to hunt down a fifty-year-old ghost? I’d just write return to sender. I don’t care if the sender is dead.”
I lifted the key off the table, the sun over my shoulder reflecting from the brass surface, the hole drilled in the center like a dark unblinking Cyclops’ eye in the hot Florida sun.
FOUR
Jesse Taylor hadn’t been back in decades, but yet he felt the urge to vomit. The sheer visuals he saw made him nauseous. He drove slowly down the road on the perimeter of the old reform school, renamed the Dozier School for Boys, the late afternoon sun popping through the tall pines. The razor-wire fence seemed to border the property for miles, the brick buildings behind the fence giving the deceptive look of a boarding school tucked away in an idyllic pastoral setting.
Jesse drove with his windows down, the smell of pinesap and honeysuckles in the warm Florida breeze. Yet, he could remember only the smell of other things here, the acrid odor of urine-soaked cots because the boys were too badly beaten to walk to the bathrooms, and the stench of sweat, blood and dried tears on the filthy pillow in the small building called the White House. Instinctively, Jesse reached for his pistol in the center console. He shook his head and mumbled, “They’re all gone…the bastards have left the building.”
He drove past the entrance to the property, intent on driving State Road 276 toward Marianna a few miles away. But then Jesse looked to his right, down the long entrance drive. A lone pickup truck was parked near a guardhouse, the gate behind it pulled across the driveway. Jesse slowed, breaking as he passed the entrance. He made a U-turn in the road and drove back to the main entrance, and then turned into the drive. He felt his stomach tightening the closer he came to the fence. His heart beat faster, palms moist, his mind racing back to the day he was brought here in the backseat of a deputy sheriff’s car. It was a Ford, no air conditioning, the spongy seat cushion material sticking through parts of the seat, the smell of the deputy’s aftershave in the car.
He blew air out of his cheeks and slowed to a stop as a tall man in his early sixties, clipboard in one hand, phone in the other, stepped from the guardhouse. He walked with a slight limp over to Jesse’s car. “Private property here. What’s your business?”
Jesse half smiled. “I’m not much of a businessman. Just headin’ into town, thought I’d stop to see this place. I know it’s closed. Didn’t know whether it might be open for inspection.”
“Why do you ask?”
“I heard the place was for sale.”
“Thought you said you weren’t a businessman. I need some ID.”
“On second thought, I really don’t want to go in there.” Jesse looked at the man’s nametag: J. Hines. He remembered the name from a Hines family in Jackson County. “Are you Johnny Hines? Little Johnny Hines?”
“Who are you?”
“You’re all grown up. I’m the guy who used to give your older brother, Frank, a noogie on his towhead. I’m Jesse Taylor.”
Johnny Hines’ eyes opened wide, a vein pulsed in his neck. “I remember you. You were locked up here one time.”
“So were a lot of kids.”
“We heard you were messed up in Vietnam. Didn’t you spend some time in a hospital? We heard it was a psych ward.”
“In those days, nobody knew a whole helluva lot about the ghosts of war.”
The guard wasn’t sure what to say. He put the clipboard beneath his armpit and touched the tip of his nose with a finger, the fingernail chewed down. “Why you back in town?”
“That’s one fine chamber of commerce greeting. What ever happened to your brother, Frank?”
“He retired from United Trucking. Lives outside of Panama City.”
Jesse nodded. “And I’m bettin’ you worked here at the old school at one point.”
“Di
d sixteen years before they shut it down. How’d you know?”
Jesse stared at him for a moment. He grinned. “Lucky guess, I guess. Was Hack Johnson still around when you worked here?”
“No, he’d already gone.”
“I imagine he’s probably dead by now, old age and whatnot.”
The guard said nothing for a few seconds. “He’s long since retired.”
“Which means the old bastard is still alive, right?”
“Why’d you come back, Jesse? After all these years, you here for a funeral or something?”
“Something like that. What if I came back to say hello to old acquaintances like you?” Jesse lit a cigarette, blowing smoke out his open window, the guard straightening. “See you around, Johnny. If you run in to Frank, tell him the first round of pool is on me.” Jesse started forward, making a U-turn in the wide driveway and heading back to the road. He looked in his review mirror and watched as Johnny Hines wrote down his tag number and then punched the keys on his phone.
A man with a deep, southern accent answered after two rings. “What’s up?”
“Amos, it’s Johnny at the gate to the school. Is Hack there?”
“Yeah, but he don’t come to the phone. You know that.”
“Give him a message. A guy just stopped here at the gate.”
“What guy?”
“Name’s Jesse Taylor. Born and raised in Jackson County. He joined the Army to leave this place. Came from a trailer trash mama who died with a needle in her arm. He spent time in Dozier before the name was changed. He asked me if Hack was still alive.”
“So, what’s he got, an old grudge?”
“I don’t know. I do know he was a Green Beret at one time. Got captured in Vietnam. We’d heard he’d somehow strangled one of his guards, took his weapon away and shot his way outta those bamboo cells and managed to find his way through the jungle back to the American forces. They say he wound up in a Army psych ward for a year or so.”
“Why you tellin’ me this shit, Johnny. You think this sicko is gonna hurt my grandpa?”
“Because your grandpa pays me to tell him.”
FIVE
I thought about what I tried not to think about. I stood on a ladder propped up against my ramshackle cabin on the St. Johns River, forty miles west of Ponce Inlet, replacing some of the corrugated tin over my screened back porch, which faced the river. I wanted to bury myself in physical work—to sweat, to keep busy doing what I often did to restore a 65-five-year-old home that I’d bought in foreclosure after the death of my wife, Sherri. I’d replaced rotten wood, fixed plumbing, painted, remodeled the living room, kitchen and generally given the old place a new look without diminishing its rustic charm.
I glanced down at Max who sniffed the grass and pine straw near the base of the ladder. “Step back, Max. I need to drop some of this roofing.” She looked up at me, tilting her head, as a lizard bolted from a cabbage palm next to the house, running to a cord of wood that I’d recently chopped. Max gave chase, and I dropped a piece of old tin from the section I’d just replaced.
We’d moved here from Miami after Sherri died from ovarian cancer. Max was Sherri’s last gift to me. And so now it was the two of us—me at 6.2 and 205 pounds. Max standing on short dachshund legs and weighing in at ten pounds. We were the odd couple—together by fortuitous design. My wife had been a wise woman.
I climbed down from the ladder. In the back of my thoughts, the murky image of Curtis Garwood’s package stuffed in a dark post office box hung like an mysterious piñata just on the edge of my sight. It had been three days since I read his letter, plenty of time to reflect on the day he had chartered my boat, Jupiter. I’d been trying to recall and restore bits of conversation that might give me better insight into what Curtis had gone through as a boy—how he’d persevered.
“Come on, Max. Let’s take a break.” I sipped from a bottle of water, sweat dripping off my face, shirtless, wearing a pair of faded shorts. Humidity thick. Temperature in the upper nineties. “Let’s go down to the water, see if we can catch a breeze.” She snorted, running ahead of me toward our dock.
The old house sat in the center of almost three acres, on a bluff, overlooking the river. The highest section of the property was an ancient shell mound built centuries ago by the native people, the Timucua. It was constructed from tons of oyster and clamshells on the highest section of the property. Some of these old mounds were simply trash dumps. Others were sacred burial grounds. A Seminole Indian friend of mine says the mound, one hundred feet from my cabin, was used for ceremonial purposes.
Three large live oaks, thick limbs cloaked in beards of Spanish moss, stood sentry in my backyard. We walked under the boughs, a mourning dove chanting in the adjacent woods. My dock, most of the old boards I’d replaced, jutted eighty-feet into the river. To my left, the St. Johns formed an oxbow, the slow-moving black water nudging off a cypress-covered jetty. The river was 310 miles long. My cabin was near the halfway point between the headwaters and the Atlantic Ocean east of Jacksonville. It was the only major river in America that flowed north.
Across the river was the Ocala National Forest, more than 800 square miles of thick woods, swamps, and luminescent springs bubbling up from the earth. The spring water came from a hallowed source, percolating for years through vast underground limestone caverns, aquifers restoring rainwater into nature’s untouched holy water.
I stood at the edge of my dock, looked at the wind across the dark water, looked for signs of knobby eyes breaking the surface. My Indian friend, Joe Billie, had given me a lesson on swimming with alligators. Don’t swim in a lake or river if the wind’s causing the water to be the slightest bit choppy. Today, the water was flat calm. No wind. No gators in sight. I turned to Max, who stood right beside me. “What do you think? You spot a gator anywhere?” She looked up at me from scanning the river, her head making a short dachshund nod.
“Okay, I’ll do a fifteen second swim to cool off.” I set my phone on the wooden bench I’d built, turned and went headfirst off my dock, slicing through the river with little sound, the water cooler the deeper I swam. It was twenty feet deep at the end of my dock. I touched the sandy belly of the river with one hand, turned and swam to the surface. I kept noise to an absolute minimum, treading water quietly, the cries of an osprey overhead, the smell of blooming heather in the air.
I floated on my back for a moment, Florida in the summertime down by the river. And then Max started barking. Nothing calls a gator to dinner faster than a barking dog, especially a small barking dog. I was about twenty-five feet off the end of the dock. I looked around, and there it was. Maybe at seventy-five feet away. Next to a bald cypress tree. I looked at the unblinking eyes imbedded in knotty hide—just above the surface.
Judging from the space between the eyes, I figured the gator was a big one, maybe ten feet. I had twenty-five feet to the dock ladder. The gator had seventy-five feet to me. And he or she had a large tail. I swam, clearing the distance in seconds. I grabbed the rungs to the ladder and pulled up to the dock, standing next to Max, water dripping from my body, the gator nowhere in sight.
I turned to Max. “Thanks for ringing the dinner bell with your bark. On second thought, maybe you were sounding the alarm for me.” She wagged her tail and looked toward the area where the gator had been. I picked Max up and sat down on the bench, scratching her behind the ears.
I checked my phone. One missed call, and it was from Dave. I played his message: “Sean, if you get this, call me as soon as you can. You have a visitor, and it’s related to the letter Curtis Garwood sent you. He sent it to someone else, too, and she’s here at the marina asking for you.”
SIX
Jesse Taylor hoped he’d be there, but he wouldn’t bet the farm on it. Jesse could detect from the phone call that Harold Reeves was only meeting him because of their history together as kids. Both had been robbed from a natural transition, a coming of age, from boy to man. Maybe Harold would show up at the W
affle House. If not, that would speak volumes in a small town of less than ten thousand people. And it would mean that Jesse was going to start from scratch to find old men long overdue to be prosecuted, or the graves of those who died in their care.
Jesse locked the door to his room at the Heartland Motel, a chalky-white, single story, ragged structure that had a lot of tread wear since it was built in the 1950s. He left behind the chemical bleach smell in his room and walked across the parking lot, which was peppered with cracks and water-filled potholes. He stopped to light a cigarette, looking down at his reflection from the black water inside one pothole, mosquito larvae wriggling at the surface. He had forty-five minutes before his meeting with Harold at the restaurant, a few blocks from the motel.
He walked to the corner on Lafayette Street and headed right, stopping at a crossing, waiting for the light to turn green. A Marianna Police Department cruiser eased up to the intersection, stopping, the officer’s eyes hidden behind dark glasses, but Jesse knew the patrolman was watching him. Jesse lit a cigarette and crossed the road, his eyes trained on the sidewalk in front of him. The patrol car drove by slowly, the officer turning left.
The Jackson County Courthouse was to his right. Old live oaks stood on the grounds, the limbs casting dark shadows over concrete shrines to the Civil War. Jesse knew the exact tree that the mob had hung Claude Neal from in 1934. A year before Jesse’s father had beaten his mother senseless, the old bastard had proudly pointed it out to him, like the tree was a monument. No wonder I never amounted to much. Maybe I can still right a wrong or two.
Jesse sat on a bench, watching people coming and going from the building, attorneys carrying briefcases bulging with files. People carrying human baggage, often stuffed with shame or hurt. Looking for some way out of a bad situation. But it was here where Jesse’s situation went from bad to horrible. He stared at the exterior of the building, remembering the day he was sentenced here. The outside of the courthouse had been updated, but it was the inside where Jesse’s life was forever changed.
