Black River (10 page)

O’Brien knocked. Silence coming from the trailer. There was the chortle of two ravens flying over the pines in the indigo blue sky, the birds making a half circle high above O’Brien before heading toward the river. An acorn dropped from an oak and bounced off the trailer’s roof. In the distance, rifle shot echoed across the river somewhere in the Ocala National Forest.

“What brings you to my place in the woods?”

O’Brien turned around and smiled. Joe Billie, six-two, notched brown face with a hawk nose, could look O’Brien directly in the eye. And he did. He wore faded jeans, black T-shirt and a wide-brim, fawn-colored hat. In his left hand he carried a paperback novel. Billie grinned and squatted as Max ran up to him, her tail wagging, eyes bouncing. He lifted her up in one large brown hand. He held her against his wide chest and said, “I will never forget the time Max had her first encounter with that big rattlesnake. She showed no fear.”

O’Brien smiled. “I believe she thought the rattle was a toy.”

“She’ll know better next time.”

“How’ve you been, Joe?”

“Okay. You?”

“Good.”

“I rarely see you when things are good, Sean.” Billie smiled.

“You’re not an easy man to find, good or challenging times.”

“I’ve been building a few chickee huts for outdoor bars and restaurants. That work takes me into the ‘glades where I harvest palm fronds for the thatched roofs. The fronds are getting harder to find.”

“I have something that’s hard for me to find.” O’Brien stepped closer to Billie and opened the file folder. He lifted out the photo of the woman standing next to the river. “This picture was taken around the time of the Civil War. Do you recognize that place on the river?”

Billie shifted Max to his left hand and held the photo with the right hand. He stared at the image, his dark eyes alternating between the woman in the photo and the river in the background. “The lady is beautiful. Who is she?”

“I’m not sure. A painting was made from this picture. An elderly man hired me to find the painting.” O’Brien told Billie some of the story and added, “I have no idea what the secret of the river may be, but if I find that spot on the river I might have a better clue. Any idea where I might find it.”

“I recognize the area. It’s changed a lot since that picture was taken.”

“Can you give me directions?”

“Yes. At that point, the river is wide and deep. After the third Seminole War with the U.S. government, things kinda came to a draw as the Civil War broke out in North Florida. The army forgot about the Seminoles, having driven most into the ‘glades. A few still managed to live in and around the river. Some of the elders spoke of their grandfathers seeing a bizarre incident one night on the river. I don’t know if it’s the secret of the river. I do know where it happened.”

“Where?”

Billie looked at the picture. “Here…where the woman is standing. It’s a bluff overlooking the river. That’s the place where something very bad, very dark, happened.” He handed the photo to O’Brien.

“What happened, and how do I find this place?”

“You don’t. At least not quickly.” Billie glanced toward his canoe. “I’ll take you there, and the best way is to journey by water. Then I’ll tell you what happened on the river, and I’ll point out how I recognized the place…most people wouldn’t.”

A
fter sunrise, Kim Davis slipped on a sweatshirt, pulled up her jeans, then opened her front door to step out onto the porch. She was barefoot, the concrete cool on her soles. She walked toward her mailbox and stopped in her tracks. The mailbox, mounted vertically on a wooden beam, was wide open. Sticking out of the opening was a blood red rose.

Kim lifted the rose out of the box. A note, attached by a white string, was written in what appeared to be font from a manual typewriter. Kim could hear a dog barking from the next street. Her temples were pounding, adrenaline flowing. She glanced around her yard. It was there in the grass. She held her breath for a second.

Footprints.

They were scarcely visible in the wet dew. But the prints were there. Leading from the porch to the far end of her driveway. Kim walked back inside her home, shutting the door with force, locking the bolt lock. She read the note:
Dear, Miss Kim, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. But this rose has more than a similar scent. Its changing color represents Confederate blood. It is a beautiful flower, as you are a beautiful woman
.

Kim stepped rearward a few feet, her back touching the wall in her living room. She stood there, breathing fast through her nostrils. Light from the sunrise poured through the glass pane window at the top of the door, striking the rose she held in her hand. Kim lowered her eyes, the rose suddenly
looked inflamed, as if it was smoldering in her grip. She felt a chill, goose bumps popping up on her arms. For an eerie moment, Kim Davis thought she could see inside the petals, see the molecules moving, the lifeblood of dead soldiers flowing through the deep red petals.

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, slowly releasing the air in her lungs. She whispered. “Focus. I’ve dealt with my share of freaks before…he’s just one more in the lineup. Now it’s time to get the hell out of my life.”

Kim walked into her kitchen, tossed the rose and note on the table, picked up her phone and dialed Sean O’Brien. It went immediately to his voice-mail. At the beep, she said, “Sean, hey, it’s Kim. During the night, I received a special delivery. One single rose with a creepy note delivered to my mailbox. I don’t know for sure who did it. But I have an idea, and it could be related to the Civil War, just like that painting you’re trying to find for the old man. Honest to God, I hate to say this…but deep inside me, my gut is telling me that, somehow, they could be related. Please call me as soon as you get this.”

T
he first thing O’Brien noticed was the inconspicuous, the silence. Joe Billie sat in the rear of the canoe, paddling so quietly that O’Brien looked back twice to see how he did it. Even in the aluminum canoe, Billie made no noise. No sound of the paddle against the canoe. No sound of the oar pushing against the river current. O’Brien wasn’t concerned about a stealth approach, dipping his paddle in the dark water, pulling straight back—the twirling whirlpools of water burping up a slight
whoosh
sound.

They paddled for more than an hour up the St. Johns, the river becoming wider each mile. Max sat in the center of the canoe, her eyes following the flight of ospreys diving for fish. She watched as an alligator, half the length of the canoe, swam unhurried across the river. The big alligator’s eyes, nostrils, and part of its thick back breaking the dark surface. Max uttered a low growl when an emerald-green dragonfly alighted on one edge of the canoe.

Joe Billie stopped paddling for a moment. He lifted his wide-brim hat off his head and ran one hand through his long, dark hair. The air was still, humidly rising like an invisible steam from the river and black water creeks that merged and joined the river’s passage to the sea. Billie smiled at Max and said, “That dragonfly is the best hunter out here. Much better than the gator.”

“How so?” O’Brien asked.

“The dragonfly has four wings. Each can move independently. It can fly in any direction, including upside down. The dragonfly attacks its prey from
behind, in midflight. The insect it catches never is aware it was stalked until the dragonfly begins tearing the insect’s face off.”

O’Brien squinted in the sun. “Let’s be glad they aren’t four feet long.”

Billie grinned, putting his hat back on his head. “Ever notice how many women wear dragonfly jewelry?”

“I’ve seen a few wear them as lapel pins.”

“Those aren’t so bad, but when a woman wears dragonfly earrings, that’s when I try not to think how tasty an earlobe might be to a real dragonfly.”

O’Brien laughed.

At that moment, the dragonfly rotated its large saucer eyes and flew across the river, less than three feet directly above the alligator. One predator leaving a slight wake. The other leaving no trail. O’Brien said, “You have to wonder who’s been here the longest, the gator or the dragonfly. Both, no doubt, have a lineage to the dinosaurs.”

Billie used his paddle to point. “See that jetty, the bluff with the big cypress tree?”

“I see it.”

“I believe that’s where the woman in the picture stood.”

O’Brien slipped the photograph from the folder. He held it up and studied the shoreline. “Let’s take a look. We can walk around the area and look back over the river. That’ll give us—or at least me, a better perspective.”

Billie dipped his paddle back into the water. O’Brien did the same. Both men were quiet the ten minutes it took them to cross the river. When the bow of the canoe slid under cypress limbs and nudged onto the riverbank, O’Brien jumped to the shore and pulled the canoe farther out of the current. Two white herons, stalking fish in the shallow water, took flight, beating their wings, sailing across the river. Max hopped from the canoe onto soft sand, Billie following. They walked up a slope, past a huge cypress tree, into a small clearing covered in lush ferns and wild red roses. Near the edge of the clearing hundreds of gnats hovered in flight above the ferns. The air smelled of wet moss, black mud, and fish.

O’Brien held up the picture. He walked about thirty feet inland and then turned around, again holding the picture. “More than 160 years later…the woman in this photo stood right about here. The trees and foliage have changed, that cypress tree was small, but the river is basically the same. I can
almost see her standing in front of us, her back to the river. Photography was new, so she might have been a little hesitant.” He glanced down at the woman in the photo, and then studied the landscape. “She may have been hesitant, but she didn’t look nervous. This spot is beautiful…and so was she. I wonder where she’s buried.”

Billie shook his head. He watched two roseate spoonbills slowly walk around knotty brown cypress knees protruding from the river at the shoreline, the birds pink feathers a stark contrast to tea-colored water. “Sean, this most likely is the area where she stood alive…see the width and the bluff…but it wouldn’t mean she died here. Why are you interested in her grave?”

“Just trying to put the puzzle pieces together.” O’Brien looked across the wide expanse of river, the forlorn call of a train whistle in the distance. “She may have taken the secret of the river to her grave. You mentioned something your ancestors spoke about on the river. You said it was bizarre, very dark. What was it?”

Billie stood next to O’Brien and pointed to the far shoreline, almost a mile wide. “Over there. Pretty much opposite where we are standing. The elders spoke of a great sailing ship that went under the river. But it didn’t go all the way under. They watched, hidden in the bushes, as the soldiers sank it. The ones in the gray coats. They didn’t blow it up. They bored holes in the hull. ”

“Confederates?”

“Maybe. The ancestors said that night the river ran red with blood. The blue coats and gray coats were fighting all night. Gunboats everywhere. Smaller boats going down. Bombs exploding. Men screaming and swimming for their lives. Many were injured. They tried swimming to shore. In those days the gators were larger and a lot more of them in the river. The elders heard the crunch of bones, screams of men being eaten alive.”

“Causalities of war that never made it into the history books.”

Billie nodded. “Bad as all that was, the thing I remember hearing as a kid, spoken from the lips of a very old medicine man at the time, was what happened to one man captured by the blue coats.”

“What?”

“It might have had something to do with that huge sailboat that was sunk. The soldiers caught this guy and later that night they hung him from
the highest mast that was sticking out of the water like a big cross. They say it looked like the soldier was crucified rather than just hung.”

“How so?”

“Because they used a hook, a boat anchor. Tied his hands behind his back and ran the hook through his shoulder. Then let him hang from the tallest mast, swaying in the breeze, and dying. A foot over the river. An easy leap for the gators. It was ugly. The remaining band of Seminoles slipped further into the Ocala Forest to let the whites fight it out. The elders retold that story for generations.”