Fatal Reservations (29 page)

And in a flash it came to me that he owned a grocery cart like the one I’d seen resting against the cemetery fence—that in fact he kept his palm-weaving supplies and his finished hats in this cart. Or perhaps he didn’t own it, but he certainly made free use of it. And he could have used it to transport Cheryl Lynn’s body to what he’d thought would be her final resting place. And if he wasn’t an athlete now, he had been one in high school, when he played on the football team with Bart. According to my father, who knew these things and didn’t hesitate to remind me of them when he was feeling oldish, a man who played sports as a youth never loses his athletic ability. Even if his joints get a little creaky and his waistline thicker.

Which meant that it wouldn’t have been impossible
for him to vault over that fence, even with Cheryl Lynn’s body weighing him down.

I excused myself and slid past Brian and Maureen. I needed to visit the restroom anyway. Then I would take the opportunity to talk to Louis. If he confirmed that he had been involved in the murders, or even said anything slightly fishy, this room was crawling with cops.

All I had to do was shout.

27

It’s not so much that we lack food, I remembered Simone Weil suggesting, as that we won’t acknowledge that we’re hungry.

—
Pico Iyer, “Healthy Body, Unhealthy Mind,”
The New York Times

I hurried to the back corner of the room and exited the glass doors to the hallway that led to the back stairs and the bathrooms. But the area was empty, no sign of Louis. The door to the bathroom was closed. I certainly wasn’t going to go in after him, but maybe . . . I rapped on the wooden door. “Louis, may I speak with you for a moment?”

I heard the lock click.

“Louis, I need to talk to you about your relationship with Bart Frontgate and Cheryl Lynn Dickenson.”

“This is the men’s room, for christ’s sake. Leave me the F alone.”

I knocked again. “You knew them both since high school—is that right?”

“Go away,” he said. “Who do you think you are? The sheriff of Key West?”

I rattled the doorknob. If he would only say enough to point the finger, I could grab a cop from the meeting
and turn the situation over to them. I knocked and rattled again.

“What part of ‘men’ don’t you understand?” he shouted.

“Quite a bit, as it turns out,” I muttered to myself. But then I felt something poking my back and heard a low voice hiss, “Don’t make a move. Do not make a sound.” The man grabbed my left arm and twisted it behind me. “Come with me down the stairs and no one gets hurt.”

I craned my neck around: Edwin Mastin.

“What the hell?” I asked. Hard to take a fleshy restaurateur seriously.

“Do as I say,” he said, “or I’ll take you out right here.”

“Help! Louis!” I started to yell.

“Shut up!” Edwin yelped, clapping a hand over my mouth and jerking me along with him. I stumbled down the stairs ahead of him, and he pushed me out the back door into the parking lot behind the building.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked, once I could speak again. “Where you taking me?”

“If you hadn’t insisted on sticking your nose into things, this wouldn’t be happening,” he said as he looked wildly around. His gaze searched the few cars and bicycles in the lot and then the trellised-in overhang that separated the building’s air-conditioning equipment from the parking lot. A door into the space was ajar; a padlock dangled from the latch.

“Seriously,” I said. “What do you want?”

He paused to stare at me. “I wanted you to shut the hell up about these murders. Cheryl Lynn deserved to be avenged. And Victoria before her.”

“Cheryl Lynn? Did you kill her?”

“Of course not,” he said, shaking me and jabbing what I now saw was a small gun harder into my side ribs.

“Bart Frontgate, then?” I asked.

He did not answer, just pulled me along the west side of the building toward Greene Street, which I took as confirmation.

“I know that Bart and Cheryl Lynn were longtime friends,” I said, scrambling to get the conversation going so we could stop and talk instead of running through Key West with a gun. He looked disheveled and distraught, and now I did not trust that he wouldn’t hurt me, even if he didn’t mean to.

“They were not friends,” he said. “He killed her. And he had been killing her for years, anyway, with all the sickness he pulled her into.”

I struggled a little harder and Edwin yanked my arms behind my back so hard I nearly fainted from the pain. Just then Brian and his wife, Maureen, limped down the access ramp and headed toward their little car, a blue Jaguar. Edwin quickly stepped me over as Brian opened the car door, and waved the gun so they could see it.

He pointed the gun at Brian but spoke to Maureen in a scary, low voice. “Ma’am, you get inside that trellis and you need to lie facedown, or I’ll shoot your husband.”

“Oh, come on,” I said. “Don’t get these people involved.” He clicked off the safety on his gun and pointed it at Brian again.

Maureen squeaked, “Please don’t hurt him.” She took a few steps back into the shadows of the storage abutting the brick building, dropped to her knees, and
then sprawled facedown in the gravel. Her shoulders shook with weeping as he locked the padlock.

“Pop the trunk,” he said to Brian. The trunk of the little Jag flew open, revealing a small space lined with a blue plaid blanket. “Get in,” he said to me. “Now.”

“You know there’s no way to get off this island unless you drive up the Keys,” I said.

Of course he knew this, but I was stalling, hoping that a plan would pop into my mind. Or that Louis would come to his senses. Or that someone else might have noticed me leaving or had heard me yelling and alerted the cops.

“Once Maureen gets the police out here, they’ll be crawling like flies on roadkill up and down the whole string of islands. You’ll never get away with this,” I said, cringing at my roadkill metaphor.

“Shut up and get in,” he said. “Don’t you imagine I have a boat?”

I didn’t see another choice, so I climbed in.

“Now you get in the car,” he said to Brian. “You’re driving.”

The metal of the trunk slammed shut over me. I closed my eyes against a flood of claustrophobia and tried to focus on breathing evenly and listening for clues about where we were headed.

Through the sheet metal of the trunk back, I could hear the rumble of Edwin’s voice over the roar of the Jaguar engine. “Head toward Stock Island,” he said. “I’ll tell you where we’re going when we get there. Don’t try anything dramatic unless you want someone to die.”

Within minutes, I heard the sounds of traffic and the eight-o’clock foghorn, which told me we were crossing
over the Palm Avenue bridge, passing Houseboat Row, and then turning left on Route One toward Stock Island.

“Turn right here,” said Edwin to Brian after several minutes. We bumped over a series of potholes and finally jerked to a halt.

“Pop the trunk and get the girl out, and then I want you in,” Edwin said.

As I climbed out, gulping for air, Brian’s face looked ashen; his jaw was clenched tightly against what I imagined to be his terror. We had parked near a boat ramp, where a collection of battered boats was tied to the docks. I couldn’t stand the idea of Brian spending the night cramped in the trunk of his car.

“Please don’t make him do this,” I said. “He had his knee replaced recently. And he has a heart condition,” I added, thinking that latter fabrication might call up more sympathy.

Edwin motioned to me to start walking toward the water. “Get in the trunk, old man,” he shouted to Brian. Brian crawled in with some difficulty, and the door slammed.

We struggled down a trail through some overgrown bushes, finally reaching the rickety dock. We started up the finger, passing a line of well-worn dinghies and rowboats fastened to the dock with frayed ropes. The air felt heavy and smelled of gasoline, motor oil, and decomposing fish.

“Get in the last boat and sit in the bow,” Edwin said shortly. “And don’t try anything stupid. I mean it, Hayley. I don’t want to hurt you, but I will if I have to.”

Imagining that I’d seen a crack in his facade, I asked, “But what is the plan, Edwin? Where are we going?”

No answer. He untied the knots in the ropes holding the boat to the dock, threw them into the aft, and hopped in. Keeping his gun in his left hand, he inserted a key and started the motor. We shot away from shore, threading through a trail of mangroves and out into the open water. Edwin’s phone rang. He extracted it from his back pocket, read the name on the screen, and cursed.

As we roared across the sound, my gaze searched the inside of the boat, looking for—what? There was no weapon that would stand up against his gun. Nor would I know how to drive the boat if he was not at the helm. But then I noticed rusty droplets toward the middle of the boat, only a foot away from where I was sitting; a splash of red gone gold stained the orange life vest pushed into the cubby. I stared at Edwin and he stared back.

“Yes,” he said. “I did kill him. But he deserved it. I only regret that I didn’t take care of him sooner.”

“Tell me about it,” I said, trying to sound empathetic, but fearing that I sounded like a wooden imitation of Eric. And besides, murder is murder in my book, whether deserved or not.

“He sucked Cheryl Lynn into so many terrible situations,” said Edwin. “And she would no longer listen to any reason.” The boat slowed down as he lost concentration, but then he roared faster again. Now he had to shout to be heard over the sound of the engine and the crashing waves.

“Start at the beginning,” I suggested. “Cheryl Lynn was your goddaughter—is that right?”

“She wasn’t legally anything to us. We just felt so bad for her—she had no family to speak of—” He let go of the tiller and dropped his head into his hands, and I
wondered if he was crying. Without his direction, the boat sputtered and spun. “Cheryl Lynn moved to Key West from northern Florida when Victoria was a junior. She fell in with Bart and that hapless Louis, and my daughter, of course.”

I nodded, thinking of the football yearbook photo on my phone. The second laughing girl must have been Victoria Mastin.

“They were inseparable. And constantly in trouble, either at school or with the local police.” Edwin turned the boat motor off and we bobbed to a halt. “You would’ve done the same thing,” he said, a grim expression on his face, “had it been your girl. They took my boat and they went out drinking. Fishing, they told my wife. Four went out, but only three came back. My daughter drowned and it took two weeks to find her body.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said, feeling sick to my stomach to hear his grief. “What happened?”

“Of course, it all depends on who you ask. Bart Gates denied anything to do with her death. Cheryl Lynn told me later that they’d been playing some kind of card game. The loser drank a shot. Victoria got terribly sick and leaned over the boat to throw up. And fell in. Cheryl couldn’t help her; she couldn’t swim. Forty-five minutes later, Bart radioed for help, but my daughter was long gone when the Coast Guard arrived at the scene. And later, when the police interviewed them, the boys claimed they tried everything—life preservers, oars, everything. But they were too drunk to rescue her. And too stupid to call for help when it might have made a difference.”

The cords in his neck pulsed as he talked, and his face colored a frightening combination of white and
splotchy red. “The police report confirmed that Louis and Cheryl Lynn had blood alcohol levels twice the legal limit that night. Bart’s was over the limit, too, but not like that.”

“You felt Bart was responsible for your daughter’s drowning,” I said softly. “You’ve been angry for many years. But why murder him now?”

His face darkened. I adjusted the words quickly. “I mean, why punish him now? Why wait twenty years?”

“I watched him destroying Cheryl Lynn bit by bit over the past few years. I offered to send her to a rehab facility—help her get clean, try to understand this latest absurdity, her need to steal other people’s things. The last time we talked, I told her she had to get away from Bart, that I believed he was responsible for my daughter’s death.” He rubbed his upper arm, the place where Cheryl Lynn’s tattoo had been inked.

“‘I used to disregard regret, but there are some things that I can’t forget,’” I said slowly.

“Cheryl laughed in my face and said, ‘You’re just figuring out now that he let her drown?’ And I never saw her again. Until the cemetery . . .” His jaw worked furiously and his eyes glistened.

“Oh my gosh,” I said. “I am so, so sorry. It’s all almost too much to bear, isn’t it? Both of them lost in terrible circumstances.”

I gave him a moment to gather himself, while my own brain whirred with this new information.

“Wait, I’m confused,” I said. “Who do you think murdered Cheryl Lynn?”

His face dropped to his hands and he smothered a sob. He looked up, his cheeks tracked with wet. “He did. Bart. Honest to god, I didn’t bring him out here with the intention of killing him. I wanted to warn him
off Cheryl Lynn. Tell him we intended to do whatever it took to protect her.”

“How did you get him to this dock?”

A pained expression on his face, he said, “We offered him money. Money always talked with Bart.” He ran his hand along the length of his neck. “We stood on the dock.” He pointed to shore. “He’d been drinking, of course. He started juggling those stupid forks, talking trash about Cheryl. Saying that she had threatened to go to the cops, have him prosecuted for letting Victoria drown.”

“Why speak up after all those years of silence?” I asked.

“Bart said she was strung out all the time and crazy. So he had to take care of her. He said her death would be no loss to humanity. And then he described how he had often imagined choking her and disposing of her body in the cemetery. I became incensed, lost my cool, and grabbed a fork away from him.” He swabbed his face with his sleeve, looked away over the glimmer of lights from Key West. “We struggled. It was him or me.” He clutched his neck again. “I must have hit an artery.”