Clearwater Journals

by Al Rennie

I looked at the flashing red button again. Probably Frankie Donner, wanting me to chaperone a bunch of Ohio tourist fishermen who thought fishing in a northern lake was like fishing the gulf. But Frankie seldom called before seven or after nine at night. Maybe it was the dumb kid I’d left on condo duty phoning to ask me how to close the gate. But when I pushed the button, it wasn’t Frankie or the kid.

  “If this is the residence of a Mr. Joe Holiday, please call me. This is Mrs. Ida May Thornberry. I have a very urgent and important message for you.”

  The voice was somewhat familiar, but for a few seconds I could not recall who Ida May Thornberry was. Then it hit me. She was the pleasant old librarian who had been such a big help piecing together the newspaper reports about the death of Victoria Doulton. I was dead tired. I wanted to go to bed. No, I needed to go to bed. For some reason, even though Ida May had asked me to call, she had not left her phone number. On her message, she had sounded pretty upset. I’m not certain that I ever was given a phone book, and I couldn’t find Mrs. Reilly’s anywhere. I decided to run around to the library before it closed. “I can grab a bite to eat at Subway on my way back home,” I muttered to myself. “Two birds—one stone! Then I can sleep.”

  It took me no more than five minutes to hike it around to the small library. The place was almost empty. The sandalwood aroma had faded. Ida May was the only one there. She was busy returning books to their proper places on the shelves. I walked over and said ‘hi’. She very nearly fell off the short stepladder that she was using to reach the top shelves. She looked down at me with a flash of recognition and descended the ladder as quickly as she could. She took a fast glance around the library. There was still no one else there.

  “Two rather husky young men with very crude manners and exceptionally bad attitudes were in here looking for you earlier this morning Joe,” she whispered to me conspiratorially. The experience had left her quite upset.

  My heart did a short flip-flop. The oddball woman resident at the condos, Mrs. Pitney, on Sand Key, had said two young guys were looking at the cars in the parking lot late last night or very early this morning.

  “I remembered what you told me before you left the library the last time you were here. I didn’t tell them that you had been here. In fact, I pretended that I had never heard your name. But, I don’t know if they believed me,” Ida May went on. “They were not at all nice. To tell you the truth, Joe, they really frightened me. I felt as if I should call the police, and I almost did.”

  “Would you recognize these two guys if I showed you a picture of each of them?” I asked. Billy Ray and his buddy, Sammy probably both had their pictures on file at police headquarters—maybe even at the post office. “I might be able to get photographs of them from a friend of mine who works on the police force.”

  “Yes, I believe that I would. In fact, I know that I would. Do you have any idea why they might have been looking for you?”

  This was serious, but I couldn’t worry the old woman any more than she was. “I’ve probably won the Publisher’s Clearing House million dollar prize, and they want to make sure I get the money,” I quipped.

  Apparently, Mrs. Thornberry didn’t share my sarcastic sense of humour. She looked confused. “They really didn’t look like the kind of men who were going to give you a million dollars.” Then, a sly smile of recognition crossed her wrinkled face. “Oh. Mr. Holiday, you’re pulling my leg.”

  “I guess I am,” I said with a little laugh. “In fact, Mrs. Thornberry, I don’t have a clue why men like you describe would be looking for me,” I lied. “It’s probably a big mistake that I’ll get sorted out in the morning.”

  “If they come in again, is mum still the word?”

  “Mum is definitely still the word, and thank you again Mrs. Thornberry. I really don’t think they will be back to bother you, but if they do drop by, I believe that it would be prudent to consider them to be very dangerous men. Please phone the police immediately.”

  I had lost my appetite. I forgot about stopping at Subway. I forgot two birds—one stone. I walked back to my room thinking about how Mia’s attack and these two guys looking for me might be connected. Langdon’s warning on my answering machine that I might be next took on a whole new meaning. I even reconsidered if Mia had been tortured to find out where I lived. Something about it sounded right. Maybe they had been searching for a Jaguar with Ontario license plates. What I did know was that I didn’t want to stay at Mrs. Reilly’s or put my Jaguar back on the road while it still had the home plates on it—better to error on the side of prudence. My mind was turning to mush. I honestly could not recall a time in the last few years when I had felt so tired.

  I went into the Hilton and looked for their ATM machine. I found it just off the main lobby in the hallway leading to the elevators. I took two hundred dollars out of my dwindling checking account and took another two hundred from my VISA credit card. I put that with the forty and change I had left after from the day before. I was building a plan to get whoever had attacked Mia. It seemed that I was already the bait. Why not use that?

  I left the Hilton and walked up Mandalay until I found a bad imitation of a Radio Shack called The Electronics Hut. As I was looking at a brand new Nokia pre-pay cellular phone with 165 minutes for $69.99, a young guy in droopy red shorts and a Shaq basketball shirt over a white T-shirt drifted slowly towards me. He looked a bit like a twelve-year old glue-sniffing kid that I had pulled out of the bag when I was a cop back home.

  “You looking for a cheap cell?” this kid hissed quietly out of the side of his mouth. He took a quick glance around the store to see if anyone was watching us. I felt ridiculous, but I took a quick peek around the store as well. He was contagious. We were the only two in the place. That seemed a bit odd. If the guy had been trying any harder to sound like one of those cheap hustlers wearing a stained tan trench coat selling Rolex watches for twenty dollars, I don’t know how he would have managed it.

  “Yeah, something like that,” I replied. I was too tired to fire back—not really, but I would love a really big friggin’ elephant gun. “You work here?”

  “I own here,” he replied with a silly gapped-toothed grin. “I got a slightly used cell I can let you have for $29.50—taxes in.”

  “How many minutes?”

  “How many you need?”

  “Two phones and a couple of hours on both of them,” I replied.

  “No sweat. Let me get them for you. And I’ll throw in a free lesson.”

  “How hard can it be to use a phone?” I asked.

  The kid smiled and disappeared behind the counter.

  “Oh yeah, I’ll need one of those small voice activated tape recorders.”

  No problem. I got a little Sony that works like a charm. It’s a bit more expensive, but worth every cent. You should hear the clarity and volume on it.”

  “How much?”

  “We’ll work it out. Don’t worry.”

  “Move over Donald Trump.”

  I Go into Hiding