Hell's Bay

by James W. Hall

  “It would,” I said. “It’d give us more than we have. Some leverage.”

  “If she knew we recognized her, we’d all be targets. She couldn’t let any of us go.”

  “We’re all targets now.”

  “You believe that?”

  “It’s crazy to think otherwise.”

  She gazed out at the white suds kicking up on the bay as if that potent landscape could fortify herself, help her summon the words.

  “Dad lied,” she said.

  I waited, saying nothing, held by the burn in her eyes.

  “Last week before we left home, we met with Carter Mosley.”

  “So he could give you the papers for me to sign.”

  “Yeah, but there’s more. We went over different scenarios. If you refused to sign. If you wanted to bargain, what changes might be acceptable. Carter needed to free up some cash in case you wanted to make a deal.”

  “That’s all?”

  “No,” she said. “Dad brought up the other thing. If you were to die.”

  “That didn’t strike you as odd?”

  “Of course it did. But Carter’s very analytical. He seemed to think it was a perfectly appropriate question.”

  “Okay, so what is it? If I die, what happens?”

  “You have next of kin? Wife, children?”

  “No.”

  “You have a will?”

  I shook my head.

  “Holland had it right. The land would revert to the corporation, which means it would fall into the lap of the board of directors.”

  “And who is that?”

  “Dad, me, Carter.”

  “That’s it, just three people? That’s a board of directors?”

  “It’s a family business. And it was four people until Grand-mother died.”

  “Where does Mosley stand on things?”

  “You mean Horse Creek? My big plan to save the world?”

  “Yeah, start there. Was he on board with that?”

  “He never took a stand. I was arguing for it, fleshing it out, making the case for what a good PR move it would be, how it was the ethical thing to do. We’re sitting around a big table, and Dad is mocking me, Grandmother asked a question now and then, Carter Mosley just listened. That’s his role. Advisory.”

  “But he has a vote.”

  “Yes. There were four votes, Carter, Dad, me, and Grandmother.”

  “Four equal votes?”

  “Theoretically. But whatever Grandmother wanted, game over.”

  “So with Abigail dead, Carter Mosley’s got the swing vote.”

  “True.”

  “Do I get a place at the table? Is that part of the will?”

  “Yes.”

  “So there it is. Mystery man comes out of left field, throws the cozy arrangement out of whack.”

  She nodded, looking out at the ashen bay.

  “Tell me, Mona. When you discovered you had a cousin, this guy Daniel Oliver Thorn, and you read through Abigail’s clippings, what’d you think? That I’d be for you or against you?”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “What was your guess?”

  “All right,” she said. ’You want the truth? From the stuff in Grandmother’s lockbox, you looked like a loser, some small-time fuck-up.”

  “Not too far off.”

  “But I’ve changed my mind.” Mona rubbed a finger across her lower lip, scraped off a dry flake. “I think you’re a reasonable guy. I think you’d do the right thing, given the chance.”

  “But when you arrived yesterday, you saw it differently. I was some asshole who’d take one look at this big gooey pie and demand my slice. That’s why you were pissed. You’d made up your mind about me.”

  “It’s how you seemed from a distance. A guy who didn’t have two nickels to rub together. Looking for a score.”

  “The two nickels part is right. I like it that way.”

  Her eyes held mine for a moment, then drifted toward the open water.

  “You trust Mosley?”

  “You saw him,” she said. “He’s okay, board-certified straight arrow.”

  “What I saw was a small man with a vise-grip for a hand-shake and a strong curiosity about me.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “He was taking my measure,” I said. “Trying to read me.”

  “Carter’s fine. He can’t admit it publicly, but he’s on my side.”

  “Billions of dollars? The legal advisor of a major corporation is going to throw away billions of dollars so a river doesn’t dry up? Doesn’t sound like any lawyer I ever met.”

  “I think I know Carter a little better than you.”

  “Why did John lie?”

  She shook her head. Not going there.

  “Would John go this far, hire somebody to kill me? Erase a swing vote that just might go against him?”

  She clenched her jaw and closed her eyes briefly. It was all the answer I was going to get.

  “Maybe this woman’s a lone wolf,” Mona said. “She’s got her own agenda. Maybe Dad has nothing to do with any of this.”

  “No way she followed us from Islamorada last night without me noticing. Which means she had our location and came from another direction. Then there’s my name. I haven’t heard that in forty years. Now it’s twice in two days. She’s connected with John and you.”

  I settled back in front of the harness, the wild nest of wires. It could take hours to test every combination, this red with that red, this blue with that blue. A roulette wheel’s chance in hell I’d get it right before sunset.

  I turned back to Mona and watched her face carefully. “Rusty gave Mosley our GPS coordinates. He asked her for them.”

  “What?” She was squinting at me.

  “He said he might fly down and join us for a day or two at the end.”

  Her eyes cleared by slow degrees as if she were resurfacing from a long nap. A bite of anger tightened her face. If it was a display for my benefit, she was a better actress than she’d shown before. I didn’t trust her completely, but I was a few steps further along that path.

  “So Mosley knows precisely where we’re anchored. That leaves only a few choices: He could have told you or John and one of you passed on the information to the shooter, or Carter could have passed it on directly. Or some combination.”

  “Why would I want to kill you, a complete stranger?”

  “I might vote against something you’re passionate about.”

  “Passionate, yeah. But passionate enough to murder somebody? Come on.”

  I showed her the blandest face I could muster.

  “Wow.” She stared at the wires beneath the console. “Is this where you read me my Miranda rights?”

  “Out here, we’re a little beyond the reach of legal techni-calities.”

  “And you honestly think Dad and I could be in cahoots?”

  “I don’t think the two of you could agree which way was up.”

  “But in your mind I’m still a suspect.”

  I said no, not really, and it must have sounded convincing, for there was relief in her sigh. She stared out the window at the rising weather. Wind was beginning to moan around the sharp corners of the wheelhouse.

  I fiddled with the wires and tried a couple of combinations. Got nothing. I tried to focus on the snarl, but I could feel her watching me.

  I tried another grouping, then another. I was already losing count of which I’d tried and which remained untested. To do the job right, I’d need to tag them, label each combination, scribble down a record, to do more than this flailing.

  “Your mother,” she said, then halted, eyes roving the empty bay.

  “My mother what?”

  I tried another combination. Red with green with black. Nothing.

  She drew a deep breath and blew it out through puckered lips.

  “You ready to hear about her?”

  I made an effort to keep my eyes on the wires. Tried to sound indifferent
. “Why? What do you know about her?”

  “Only what Grandmother told me.”

  I used the pliers to clear the tips of two more wires.

  “Why was Abigail Bates talking to you about my mother?”

  “I suppose she knew one day we’d meet. She wanted me to pass it on.”

  “And how would she know that?”

  “The will with your name in it, and the news clippings in the lockbox kind of guaranteed it. Like she’s out there somewhere, still running the show.”

  I wasn’t certain of Mona’s motives for choosing that moment to tell me the tale of my past. To distract me, to reward me, or just to unburden herself. But after a moment or two, I no longer cared why.

  While I stripped the wire tips clean and twisted three more of them together, Mona told me about my mother, and eventually about my father, Quentin Thorn. Whatever chance I’d had of hot-wiring the ignition was gone.

  Gradually my hands sank into my lap, and I sat staring at the nest of wires as I listened to Mona. She told the story expertly as if she’d spent a long time honing it, filtering out the trivia, all the tempting digressions that any story offers. Her voice warmed and grew heavier than I’d heard it before, a husky directness that gave the tale a melancholy hue.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  My mother, Elizabeth Milligan, was known as Liz. She was a quiet, withdrawn kid, a reader of books. In her early childhood, during the darkest years of the Depression, she began disappearing for hours in the woods and far-flung fields near her family’s ranch house. She wrote plays and poems and stories. She drew elaborate sketches of imaginary kingdoms with dragons and fairies and knights. While her father indulged these diversions, Abigail grew ever more impatient with her daughter’s flightiness, and when the girl turned ten, her mother started to impose strict rules on Liz’s daily routines. Abigail came up with a list of chores that grew ever longer, meant to ground the girl in the fundamentals of farm life, force her to confront the hard facts of subsistence living.

  By any standard the Milligan family was the wealthiest in the county, probably among the most affluent in that part of Florida. But they lived with sober simplicity, forgoing modern appliances, making their own clothes, and running their cattle operation with the minimum of hired help. Abigail was the driving force behind this rigorous ascetic life.

  In what became the last year of her life, Abigail confessed to Mona that she’d fought a lifelong battle with anxiety and despair, a condition that now might be moderated by medications. But back then, with the shadow of the stock market crash still hovering over the shaky economy, gas rationing, food shortages, troops massing across Europe, and America lapsing into sterile isolationism, Abigail’s despondency seemed a reasonable reaction.

  Within the family she imposed a ruthless campaign of selfdenial. Work and more work. Grinding days, a strict focus on thrift. Sweets and books and fairy-tale frivolity were outlawed, shows of affection were restrained. A quick cold kiss good-night. Now and then a lifeless pat on the back.

  Though Liz’s father was more tolerant and open, he remained loyal to his wife’s regime and never challenged her in front of the children. Maybe on the sly there was a hug or kiss for Liz. Abigail suspected there were hours when she was working with the herd or immersed in bookkeeping when Charles indulged Liz with a session of pleasure reading or drawing. But when Abigail was present, the rules were enforced.

  Though she had every reason to be one, Liz was no rebel. She was diligent and reliable and an excellent student in school. Yet Abigail forever found fault with her performance. No job she completed, from washing dishes to cleaning the stalls, was without defect.

  When Liz was twelve, the Thorn family arrived from south Georgia and settled in an abandoned farmhouse a mile down the road. They kept to themselves, stayed indoors with the windows shuttered up through most of the daylight hours. None of the children attended school. Broken couches crowded their porch. Oil drums, piles of scrap metal, the rusty hulks of cars, and old bathtubs, sinks, and assorted plumbing fixtures soon littered their yard. Two thick-necked dogs were chained to the trees, one that howled all night like a famished wolf. The Thorn family, by Abigail’s gauge, was a cut below white trash.

  The eldest son was named Quentin, and he quickly earned a reputation as a gifted shade-tree mechanic. Ineligible for the military because of two missing fingers on his right hand, he was his family’s sole breadwinner. His skill with machinery was so notable that Abigail eventually yielded to temptation and engaged him to repair their tractors, keep their tillers up and running, and tune their cars and trucks on the cheap.

  There was talk that Quentin’s father was running from a federal beef. A bank holdup, or counterfeiting. From time to time, Quentin’s old man would vanish for a week or two, and those occasions always coincided with the arrival of some man with a fresh haircut, a dark suit, and polished shoes who rode up and down the back roads in a new Ford. A few days after the agent left, Quentin’s father would reappear. That’s how the law worked in those parts. No love lost between backwoods sheriffs and federal outsiders.

  Then the A-bomb leveled Hiroshima. Confetti snowed from the American sky. Liz turned eighteen and graduated high school. First in her class, valedictorian. Abigail’s view was that Liz’s schooling was now complete and she would assume more responsibility for the family’s growing business. The war had been good to the Bates family. Cattle prices soared. Bates Inc. branched into fertilizer production, and Abigail began acquiring adjacent citrus groves. What land she could not purchase outright, she secured the mineral rights to. Amid this flurry, Liz was expected to assume responsibility for the day-to-day operations of the ranch to free her parents to concentrate on their expanding enterprise.

  “The photograph,” Mona said. “Your mother and my dad standing in front of that new car. That was her graduation day.”

  I nodded. The wires before me had turned to mist.

  “Her daddy bought Liz the car without Grandmother’s knowledge and she was pissed. Very pissed. It was an outrageous extravagance by her measure.”

  “And the next day Liz was gone,” I said.

  “How did you know?”

  “I knew.”

  “What? You read that in the photo? In your mother’s face?”

  “Go on,” I said. “Finish your story.”

  Liz and Quentin had become lovers a year before that photo was taken. Though Abigail had no suspicion of the affair, she later assumed that her husband must have known, and maybe even John. And it was likely the two of them conspired in Liz’s escape, each for his own reason.

  Hours after that photo was taken, the lovers disappeared. Years would pass before Abigail uttered her daughter’s name. She never wasted a tear, never permitted a mention of her, and never forgave her husband for buying that car.

  She would have drawn her last breath without knowing what became of Liz were it not for Charles preceding her in death. When he passed away, a half-dozen notes and postcards tied up in red ribbon were discovered hidden inside his shotgun case. Liz had addressed the letters to her father’s office in downtown Summerland.

  Liz and Quentin had landed in Key Largo. Quentin had found work repairing marine engines. They rented a tiny house with a view of Tarpon Basin, and within a year Liz was pregnant. She loved the place, the water, the light, the fresh ocean scents. They were saving for a boat.

  The tone of the letters was restrained, apologetic, almost formal. They seemed to be written with the knowledge that one day Abigail would read them and grade them by her severe standards. Then abruptly the letters ceased.

  “They died in a car crash,” I told Mona. “Quentin and Liz.”

  She nodded solemnly as if that was one option she’d considered.

  “I’d just been born and they were hurrying back from the hospital to Key Largo. Drunk driver ran them off the road. Somehow I survived.”

  She was silent for a few moments, her nails against the console tapping out s
ome grim Morse code.

  “You remind me of her.”

  “Abigail?”

  She nodded.

  “There’s something going on inside—hard, stubborn parts grinding against each other. Sand in your gears. I don’t know. Gruff on the outside, but something else underneath. Something you work hard to keep hidden.”

  “You got a license to do this kind of thing?”

  She kneeled down beside me, reached out, and ran a fingertip along the line of my jaw, from hinge to tip.

  “The bone structure, too. You’re one of them.”

  “And luckily you’re not.”

  She smiled.

  “Luckily I’m not.” Then the smile weakened. “An interloper, that’s me. A stray brought in from the rain.”

  “What do you know about your own parents?”

  “Not a damn thing. Five foster families, Tampa, St. Pete, Bradenton. I was nine when Christine Milligan showed up and took me away. Two years after I had moved in with John and her, I’d just turned eleven, Christine decided she couldn’t hack the parent thing. One night she tucked me in, pecked me on the forehead, wished me luck, and flew. From that point, Dad went through the motions, but it was Grandmother who raised me.”

  “She treat you any better than Liz?”

  “Yeah, I got a long leash. She let me screw up. Just stood back and gave me something she hadn’t been able to give your mother.”

  “Got to love her for that.”

  Her eyes muddied and she blinked them clear, then straightened her shoulders, sniffed, and backhanded her nose.

  “She wasn’t a bad woman. She had her own demons. Grew up in the shadow of domineering men. Those old pioneer roughnecks. Badasses.”

  “Lots of demons in this family,” I said.

  “I think that’s why your grandfather never got in touch with the couple who raised you. He didn’t want Abigail to botch another generation.”

  She eased down and settled onto the deck beside me. She brought her hip flush with mine. I inhaled her aroma again, fresh plums, wood smoke, leather baking in the sun, a jasmine bloom breaking open. She turned her face to me.

  I reached up and ran a finger around the rim of her right ear, tucked away a strand of hair that had fallen across her cheek. My touch closed her eyes.