Hell's Bay

by James W. Hall

The two gentle spirits who adopted me, Kate Truman and Doctor Bill, never spoke of my parents. Trying to spare me, I assumed, from emotional pain. In my teens I spent hours in the courthouse digging through public records without luck. Years later I got my friend Sugarman to run a computer search on their names, but he came up empty. And none of the locals I questioned could provide anything about who Quentin and Elizabeth Thorn were or where they came from. So finally I was forced to invent.

  The history I crafted was that my parents, like so many refugees to the Keys, arrived in the islands to escape their pasts and reinvent themselves. I imagined that at the moment of their deaths they were at the awkward juncture when they’d succeeded in wiping out their previous identities but had not yet established new ones.

  Beyond that simple fiction I would not let my imagination go. If they had wanted to disappear, then who was I to ex-hume their remains?

  I accepted the idea that my parents, their backgrounds, the nature of their love affair, their private dreams, and their natural talents would remain a mystery. Though from time to time when I was praised for my accuracy in casting or disparaged for being such a dogged loner or admired for my surgical precision in fashioning wisps of fur, feather, bead, and thread into bonefish flies, I attributed those gifts as part of my birthright from two people I never knew. If I had sometimes been guilty of excessive introspection, my only defense was that by looking inward I was hoping to catch some glimpse of those two ghosts who were harbored in my veins.

  Behind me Mona wandered into the galley and sunk down on one of the couches that faced the satellite TV. The television was Rusty’s idea. It seemed bizarre to me that anyone would go to such expense and trouble to trek into one of the last wild places on the globe, then sit around and watch twenty-four-hour cable news instead of climbing up onto the houseboat roof to listen to the hushed wing beats of thousands of egrets and herons and wood storks heading back to their roosts and watch the sun melt into the watery horizon leaving behind eddies of reds, blues, and purples too gaudy for words.

  I made my case, but Rusty overruled me on the TV as she had on every issue. “People who will pay a thousand dollars a day to catch tarpon on a fly in some hideaway lake no-body’s ever fished before aren’t like you and me, Thorn. End of the day they want their extradry martini and stock-market update.”

  When Milligan finished stowing his gear in his forward stateroom, he returned to the galley. As he passed Mona, he patted his sullen daughter on the shoulder, then came over to me still wearing that knowing grin. He moved with the loose-limbed swagger of a barroom tough.

  Rusty had climbed up to the wheelhouse to make a cell-phone call to Annette Gordon to see if her flight had landed yet at Miami International. On the couch Mona pressed her chin to her chest, hunched deep in her funk. Since arriving she had not spoken a word. Nor had she brushed the snarls from her red hair.

  In an earthy, unfussy way, she was quite pretty, though she had the look of a woman who’d been told that far too often and no longer considered it a compliment. Her eyes were opaque blue. A sharp upward jag in her right eyebrow gave her the look of a steadfast skeptic—a woman not easily conned. The eyebrows were thick and a darker shade of red than her hair. Scattered across her forehead was a constellation of tiny freckles. Otherwise her skin was flawlessly sun-bronzed, a healthy flush in her cheeks. She wore no watch, no rings or any other jewelry, and her clothes were so lumpy and rumpled she might have slept in them for the last week.

  Her expression was fixed in the same harsh squint as it had been when she climbed aboard, an odd mix—part glare, part wince—as though Mona Milligan was hovering indecisively between defiance and desperation.

  Milligan slid into my line of sight, his eyes crafty, his head cocked a few degrees to the side like a man sizing up a sparring partner.

  “Surely you must be intrigued about how I know your name?”

  “I’m trying to contain myself,” I said.

  “So that’s your act, huh, the cool dude?”

  “I don’t have an act.”

  Milligan reached into his back pocket, withdrew a photograph, and with a small flourish he lay it on the bar next to me. Then he stepped back and waited with that smile deepening.

  I took a look, glanced back at him, then took a longer look.

  It was a faded black-and-white snapshot of two teenagers posing in front of an ancient Ford coupe. Behind the car was a section of the veranda of a dignified Victorian home. A handsome older couple sat on the porch swing, engaged in conversation and seemingly oblivious to the photographic record that would include them. There were big oaks shaggy with moss, and runty cabbage palms growing at the edges of the porch. Bougainvillea vines snaked along the eaves and framed the porch in wispy blooms. The place had the look of a plantation constructed far from any village or town, and the people were sun-hardened and squinty in the way of those who’ve labored in every kind of harsh weather Florida can provide.

  The teenage boy had smirking eyes, and his body was as thin and hard as a cypress rail. He’d thrown his arm across the shoulder of the fair-haired girl in a flowered sundress. She had wide shoulders, long slender arms. One hand was lifted up to keep her dense blond hair from blowing across her face. She was a striking girl whose large mouth and bony face gave her a sensuous though slightly mannish aura.

  As I stared at her, I heard static growing in my ears, and my throat felt as though it was splitting open. Though I had never seen the woman before, with absolute certainty I recognized her. Her eyes, cheeks, lips, and nose were nearly identical to the ones I saw every morning in my mirror as I shaved.

  “Elizabeth Milligan Thorn,” the man said. “My sister, your mother.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  “That guy’s your uncle?”

  “So it appears.”

  “Well, you’re being pretty blasé about the whole thing.”

  “Stick around. I’m about to dance on the table.”

  Sugarman poured the rest of his beer into the tall glass and glanced again at Milligan, who stood with the others twenty yards away on the beach. We were sitting outside on the rear porch of the Green Flash Lounge at Morada Bay. Rusty’s choice. Upscale joint for her upscale clients. One last meal on land before we set off.

  Not the usual Keys tacky nautical décor of glass floats suspended in fishing nets and phony portholes bolted to the walls. The Green Flash was all dark mahogany and heavy leather chesterfield sofas, bookshelves crammed with leather volumes, and plush Oriental carpets spread on the maple floor. Behind the bar were fifty different brands of vodka and a slick bartender who could recite something fancy about each of them. Cigars from around the world were on sale from a locked glass counter. Another Keys establishment trading on the manly fairy dust of Hemingway.

  Behind Sugarman the Florida Bay spread out to the western horizon as flat and motionless as a slab of burnished silver. The red disk of sun had dissolved halfway behind the distant mangrove islands and was sending flares of green and blue into the cloudless heavens. Drinks in hand, tourists lounged in the pink-and-pastel-striped Adirondack chairs, watching the dwindling light while they dug their toes into the perfect, imported sand.

  I drew the photo from my shirt pocket and lay it in front of Sugar.

  Sugarman was my oldest buddy. Former deputy sheriff, now a private investigator working out of an office next to the HairPort up in Key Largo. As a kid, Sugar was deserted by his Jamaican father and Scandinavian mom. All they’d left him was his striking good looks. Quiet, arresting eyes, narrow lips. Most women gave him a second glance, often a lingering third. Behind the sensuous facade, there was something noble in his bearing. He was solid and uncomplicated, blue-collar to the bone, a man of such firm and well-calibrated ethics that even hard-core sinners like me could sense the sharp ping of virtue radiating from him.

  “Damn strong resemblance. I’d say it could be your mother, yeah.”

  I nodded. I had no doubt it was.

  “She w
as a looker. A little countrified, but an eye-catching woman.”

  “I noticed.”

  “He laid this on you and you didn’t ask him any questions, nothing?”

  “He said he’d tracked me down. Wanted to get to know me, maybe offer me an opportunity.”

  “What kind of opportunity?”

  “He didn’t say and I didn’t ask.”

  “You didn’t ask?”

  “He was trying to get a rise out of me. I didn’t feel like obliging him.”

  “Christ, Thorn. You can be so damn pigheaded.”

  “I’m spending seven days on a houseboat with the guy. I figure we’ll get around to it.”

  Out on the powdery sand, Rusty was making the introductions among Annette Gordon, Holland Green, and Mona and John Milligan. Everybody shaking hands, Milligan joking with the two young people, drawing a laugh from Annette, a gaunt young woman with a brown halo of curls. She was tricked out in an off-white angling outfit so superbly under-stated it was probably made to order at some Park Avenue haberdashery.

  With a camera slung around his neck, Holland was dumpy, mid-thirties, wearing slappy rubber flip-flops, machinetorn jeans, black oily hair to his shoulders.

  Hulking just beyond the circle was Rusty’s older brother, Teeter. Rusty never volunteered the information, and I never asked the name of his disability. He was six-four and heavy-set. His forehead was abnormally broad and his eyes dull and downcast. On the rare occasions when he spoke it was usually no more than a brief mumble. Besides having highly developed computer skills, Teeter was a chef of some renown in the Upper Keys. He had a genius for delicate sauces and eccentric combinations of spices. His yellowtail Matecumbe had earned him a write-up in the Miami paper, which set off a bidding war between two of Key Largo’s best eateries for his services.

  But Teeter had informed Rusty that he was sick of restaurants. The bickering, the competition, the steamy, obscene stress. So he’d defected from kitchen work and would be assuming culinary duties on the Mothership. He’d also accepted the role of chambermaid and security guard. Each morning when the anglers and guides headed off for the fishing grounds, it would be Teeter’s job to clean and straighten the staterooms, wipe down the sinks and showers, make the beds, vacuum, and otherwise stand watch over the empty vessel.

  He and I had an awkward relationship. Whenever Teeter was around, he was continually casting looks my way, just as he was doing at that moment from out on the beach. I wasn’t sure what his fixation was about, but I’d steeled myself for spending an entire week in close proximity with him, and was pretty sure I’d have to confront him about the behavior if it continued.

  “What’d you do to piss that girl off?” Sugarman nodded toward Mona.

  “Didn’t have a chance. She arrived that way.”

  “And the kids? That’s a majorly weird couple.”

  “Rusty says they’re not an item. Annette’s a travel writer, doing a story for Out There. The guy’s shooting photos.”

  “Going to make Rusty famous.”

  “She’s hoping.”

  I watched the light sweeten around us, a last bloom of orange on the horizon. Out over the Gulf some delicate pink clouds tangled their tentacles like mating octopi. A sky that was never still, never lost its power to amaze.

  I finished the last of my beer, raised my hand to Tricia Murray, who was waiting on us, and pointed at my glass and Sugar’s to save her a trip.

  “I don’t like this, Sugar. The guy drops the snapshot in front of me, steps back, and gives me a shit-eating grin.”

  “Granted, it’s weird. But consider the bright side: You’ll learn who you are, who your parents were. What’s wrong with that?”

  “I already know who I am.”

  Tricia brought the beers and fresh frosty glasses and took away the empties. Annette and John Milligan seemed to be hitting it off, laughing at each other’s jokes. Holland was shooting film of two local hotties stretched out on lounge chairs in matching thongs. They were drinking margaritas and pretending to ignore Holland, who was a yard away, kneeling and bending at off-kilter angles, focused mainly on their long, tanned legs.

  Mona stared out at the last shreds of sunset while Rusty threw anxious looks my way as if I was committing another egregious etiquette error by not coming over and joining in.

  “The guy’s dicking with me.”

  “Oh, come on, Thorn. You’re working yourself up.”

  “If it was you, Sugar, is that the way you’d handle this? Zoom in out of the blue, no warning, spring it on a nephew you’ve never met? Hey, guess who I am? Your freaking uncle. I got an opportunity for you. It’s a gotcha thing. A bully-boy trick.”

  “Overreacting, Thorn. Making a big deal over nothing.”

  “Would you do it like that, Sugar?”

  He shook his head and glanced back at the purpling sky.

  “Some people like surprises. Maybe he thought you’d throw your arms around him, give him a big hug.”

  “I didn’t read it that way.”

  “Oh, man.” Sugar sipped his beer, set it down, wiped his lips with his napkin. “Your whole life, you never met any of your own flesh and blood. It’s this big missing piece. Then, bam, it happens, and listen to you. You take one look at the guy—your uncle, your mother’s little brother—you’re around him all of five minutes and you got him pegged as a villain.”

  I had no answer for that. He was right. My instincts were on red alert. I’d made a career out of reclusiveness, but at all too frequent intervals I’d been dragged into the world by violent men, treacherous women, but most often by my own impetuous folly. More than one innocent life had been damaged or lost because of me. I’d done plenty I wasn’t proud of and only a few things I was. Lately I’d reached the point where I was having trouble telling the difference.

  Distrust and wariness had become a reflex. In the last year the condition seemed to worsen. At the first sign of trouble, I found myself flinching and turning away. Anything could set it off—a defiant look sent my way across a crowded bar, or a woman’s comeon smile. I’d duck my head and hustle back to my burrow, pick up my fly-tying gear, and disappear into the refuge of work. Whole weeks passed without human contact. Until Rusty challenged me that night in July, it suited me fine.

  Sugarman claimed it was some version of post-traumatic stress. I’d passed some watershed and was sliding into a new state of mind. One too many catastrophes, too many innocent friends or lovers caught in the crossfire. Now I was shell-shocked down at some cellular level.

  Whatever its name, I had grown sick of it. Sick of hiding out, stiff-arming all human contact. So I’d heaved the boulder away from my cave door, staggered out into the sunshine, signed on to be sociable, a certified hale-fellow-well-met. Then John Milligan climbed aboard, laid the photo on the bar, and, Christ Almighty, the whole shitty cycle was starting again.

  A short while later we exited the Green Flash Lounge and moved upstairs to Pierre’s, the fanciest eatery on the island. As the group waited to be seated, a man appeared in the doorway behind us and Milligan swung around to greet him, then introduced him one by one to the rest of our party.

  His name was Carter Mosley, the pilot who’d flown the Milligans down from Sarasota. A short man, not more than five-two, he stood very erect. After he shook hands with each of us, Mosley’s pale blue eyes landed on my face and he took a moment to study its angles as if trying to fix me in his memory.

  Mosley was silver-haired, mid-fifties, with a reserved smile and those alert eyes. He wore a sky-blue jumpsuit, a black T-shirt visible beneath. His face was unlined and, for such a small-boned man, his handshake was crushing.

  “I can’t stay,” he replied to Rusty’s invitation to join us for dinner. “Got a mountain of paperwork on my desk. Just wanted to say hello, and wish y’all good luck on your fishing adventure. I’ll be back in a week to pick you up.”

  “Carter’s the family’s legal eagle,” John said, patting the small man on the b
ack. “Old and dear friend.”

  As Mosley made his exit, he gave me one more searching glance. Milligan ushered him out into the twilight, and they had a word on the landing before Mosley left.

  The rest of the night sailed by with dishes of hickory-smoked free-range buffalo rib-eye with foie gras yuca cake and soy-lacquered sea bass and three bottles of a tasty red wine that Annette knew a good bit about. She’d visited the vineyard on assignment, met the owner. Told an amusing story about the guy. Everyone joined in the laughter except Mona. She moved the food around on her plate and looked up from time to time to frown at whoever was speaking.

  Through most of the main course, Annette took charge, going one by one around the table and shining the spotlight of her attention on each of us. For a while she focused on Rusty and got her to confess that this whole houseboat enterprise had been such a long-deferred dream that she was having trouble believing it was all finally coming true. Plus she was nervous as hell that everything should go smoothly. When she was done, murmurs of reassurance passed around the table.

  Then Milligan got his turn and told a brief, self-mocking story about taking up golf, beaning his caddy twice in one week, then buying him a hard hat. When Annette focused on Teeter, he mumbled something about a new recipe for scal-lops he’d invented, then looked directly at me as if I could save him somehow, and when I made a helpless shrug, Teeter shut his mouth and dropped his head, mortified by the attention he was receiving.

  As we waited for dessert, Annette Gordon swung to Sugar.

  “I understand you’re a private eye.”

  Annette was half the age of most of us at the table but seemed perfectly at ease directing the show. She had the casual moxie of a big-city girl who thrived in far more sophis-ticated circles.

  “Sam Spade was a private eye,” Sugar said. “My world is a little duller.”

  Annette prodded until Sugar gave in and told them about his latest case.

  For several weeks this past fall, he’d trailed Julie Ship-man, the runaway daughter of a Delta pilot. Julie was six-teen, had stolen her daddy’s Porsche, and made it to Atlanta, where the trail went cold. Sugar shoe-leathered the city for weeks, finally found a strip club where the girl had worked, and got the name of a bouncer who’d seduced Julie and whisked her off to Seattle for the dreamy life of a call girl. It took only two days in Seattle before Sugar located the agency she’d hired on with. He called and requested her by her description. Julie showed up in his hotel in a miniskirt with a bruise on her cheek—ready to perform.