Hot (26 page)

“Well, there’s no sense getting all overwrought about it after the fact.”

Carver gripped his cane and stood up. “You’re probably right.”

Wicke smiled dubiously at him. “Now, why are you telling me that, Carver?”

“Because I believe it.” He thanked Chief Wicke for his time and limped toward the door.

“Carver,” Wicke said behind him, “don’t get any ideas about looking over the body. Dr. Sam’s remains are already on the way to his family in Ohio.”

Carver opened the door, paused and looked back. “How come everybody dies here gets shipped north? Isn’t anybody ever buried on Key Montaigne?”

“We got sandy soil here,” Wicke said. “They come back up when the tide’s in.” He wasn’t smiling. Man could probably play good poker.

Carver said, “I sorta lean toward that male menopause theory.”

Wicke said something to him after he’d closed the door and was limping away, but he wasn’t sure what.

C
ARVER HAD STOPPED
for a few beers at the Key Lime Pie’s bar after leaving Chief Wicke, thinking he might overhear something significant about Dr. Sam’s death. But none of the natives was discussing it. Maybe they’d already talked themselves out on the subject, or maybe everyone knew who Carver was and thought it safest to stay silent, therefore uninvolved and still alive, unlike Dr. Sam.

When he returned to the cottage, he phoned Katia Marsh and asked her if she’d again arrange for him to talk with Millicent Bing.

“You’re too late,” Katia told him. “She’s gone.”

“Gone where?”

“From Key Montaigne, and she’s not coming back. She wouldn’t tell me where she was going. I assume it’s wherever Dr. Sam’s funeral’s going to be. I wanted to go to the funeral, but she told me it’d be better if I didn’t, that Dr. Sam’d want me to stay here and take care of the research center. And of course somebody
has
to do that; the exhibits require constant care.”

Carver wiped his hand over his perspiring forehead, touching the burned part of his nose with his wrist and causing instantaneous pain. “Don’t you have any idea where Dr. Sam’s going to be buried?”

“Someplace in the Midwest, I think.”

“Ohio?”

“It’d make sense. That’s where he was from. Both he and his wife, in fact. She’s from Columbus and he was from some little farming town. Can’t think of its name. So far from the ocean; maybe that’s why the sea fascinated him.”

“I heard he had a sister.”

“I don’t know. It’s possible. He never talked much about his family or early life. It seemed his life started when he went to college at Ohio State, then did postgrad work at the University of Michigan and Florida State.” Her voice took on a sad tone. “He was a pure scientist, Mr. Carver, a dedicated researcher. Why somebody like that—” Her voice broke, and he thought she was about to break into sobs, but after a moment she said, “Damnit! I’m sorry.”

He told her not to be, he understood. He wondered if he did. The relationship of Dr. Sam and Katia still wasn’t clear to him.

“I went to Millicent’s house to try and comfort her,” Katia said. “She told me good-bye. A truck was there and two men were loading it with boxes of possessions. Millicent said she’d arrange to have the furniture put in storage before listing the house with a real estate agent. She told me she never wanted to see Key Montaigne again.” Another pause, but not to compose herself. “She was grief-stricken, of course, but something else, too. I got the impression she was scared, Mr. Carver.”

“Of what?”

“I have no idea. But she was definitely unwilling to tell me where she was going.”

Carver knew whom Millicent Bing was afraid of, but he wasn’t sure of the reason for her fear. “You gonna be okay?” he asked Katia.

“Me? Sure. Florida State’s been in touch. Some of our grant money flowed through them. They assured me the research center would stay open. I might even be in charge, carry on Dr. Sam’s work with sharks. Nothing would please me more. We were learning so much . . .”

Carver left her to her future and hung up.

He sat by the phone for a while, thinking. If Millicent did travel to Ohio for Dr. Sam’s funeral, her fear might cause her to leave immediately afterward and he might never locate her.

He limped in to where Beth was slouched on the sofa watching the world going to hell on CNN news. “Wanna do something for me?” he asked. On the TV screen a missile screamed into an ancient radio-controlled aircraft and exploded.

She smiled at him and struck a suggestive pose with only the slightest shifting of her lean body, more a change of attitude than position. “I ever turn you down?”

“Comes under the category of work,” he said, watching the debris of the plane flutter down from a lingering cloud of black smoke. The CNN correspondent, a pretty blond woman in combat fatigues, was saying. “. . . Pinpoint accuracy and complete destruction. Smart weapons, Bernie.”

“I only do it for love,” Beth told him with mock disdain.

“Detective work. I need you to find the phone number of a Sandy in Forest, Ohio. Last name might be Bing.”

“Relative of the late Dr. Sam?”

“Sister.”

“Shouldn’t be too hard,” she said, using the remote to switch off the TV. “Forest can’t be a very large place. When I find the number, want me to call it?”

“No, I better do that. But later. Right now I’m going over to Millicent Bing’s house while there’s still plenty of light.” He’d learned how quickly darkness could fall in the Keys.

“I gathered from your phone conversation that she’d left Key Montaigne,” Beth said.

Carver nodded. “Doesn’t matter. I won’t need anyone to show me around.”

Beth was moving toward the phone as he limped from the cottage into the early evening heat.

He parked the Olds as close as possible to the side of the Bing house, so it wouldn’t be noticeable from Shoreline.

The low sun angled beneath the palm fronds to warm the front porch as he brushed away a bee and tried using his honed expired Visa card to slip the lock. The only result was a kink in the plastic card. Carver made his way around to the back of the house, limping through tall grass that found its way beneath his pants cuffs and tickled his ankles. Each of his dragging steps raised a cloud of tiny insects.

One of the back windows was unlocked. He managed to inch it upward enough to get his fingers curled beneath its aluminum frame, then he slid it open far enough for his body to fit through. After dropping his cane inside the house, he draped his arms over the sill and used his powerful upper body to raise his impaired lower self and wriggled through the window to fall onto soft carpet.

He sat there leaning back on his palms, his stiff leg out in front of him.

The air-conditioning was turned off and the house was almost as hot as the sultry evening outside. Silent, too, except for the leaning palm tree’s fronds rattling over the tile roof as the wind blew. It sounded as if someone might be walking around up there with skeleton feet.

Carver levered himself to his own feet with his cane and looked around. He was in a small office: gray metal desk with black leather swivel chair, two-drawer oak file cabinet, table with a small copy machine on it, gray metal stand supporting a gray IBM typewriter, the old-fashioned kind with the manual carriage return. On the wall behind the desk was a framed photograph of Dr. Sam wearing swimming trunks and standing in front of Victor the shark, circling behind him on the other side of the aquarium glass. The camera had picked up very little reflection from the glass, and the photo was striking, almost as if the doctor were casually standing underwater only a few feet from the huge carnivore.

Already sweating, Carver limped over to the desk and opened the drawers. All four of them were empty except for a three-foot strand of soft rope in the left-hand bottom. Carver wondered if it was cut from the length of rope Dr. Sam had used to hang himself. There was a combination phone and answering machine on the desk. Its counter registered no messages. Carver lifted the receiver. The phone was dead. He went to the oak file cabinet and wasn’t surprised to find it as empty as the desk. The contents must have been in the boxes Millicent had shipped north. Carver examined the typewriter and saw that it contained no ribbon. He lifted the rubber flap of the copy machine to make sure nothing had been overlooked there. Sighing, he sat down in Dr. Sam’s desk chair, trying literally to put himself in the late researcher’s place, contemplating death as Dr. Sam himself must have before seeing it as an acceptable option.

After a while Carver decided he wasn’t gaining any insight, then left the office. In the hall he noticed a thermostat, switched it to Cool and rolled the setting back to seventy. Nothing happened. The utilities had been turned off.

Carver had been inside longer than he’d thought. The sun was dropping fast and the house’s interior was already dim. He’d better finish here soon as possible.

The rest of the house was much like the office. The essential furniture was there, chairs, end tables, pieces far too large to pack, even a few knickknacks. But the place was like a recently vacated hotel suite; all signs of its previous inhabitants had been removed.

In the master bedroom Carver slid open a mirrored closet door and found that Dr. Sam’s clothes had been removed as well as Millicent’s. There was some indication of previous occupancy here, however. A wire hanger on the floor. Another wedged where it had fallen into an old pair of rubber boots. In a dusty corner lay some wadded panty hose. Carver ran his hand over the closet shelf, hoping something there had been overlooked, but found nothing but a dog leash. It was leather and looked almost new. He tossed it back up on the shelf and was about to leave the house when he remembered another door off the hall. A third bedroom. In the fading golden light he limped to the door and opened it.

The room was small and contained no furniture other than a straight-backed antique wooden chair of the sort designed by puritans to entertain nonbelievers. The window faced west, so this room was brighter than the main bedroom. Carver checked its closet and found it empty. Even its shelf had been removed. He was about to close the door when he noticed two thick steel eye hooks mounted on the back closet wall. A few inches beneath them the paint had been scraped from the plaster. Near the floor were similar scraped areas, and two more eye hooks.

Carver shut the closet door and looked around the room carefully. There were no marks from picture frames or decorative hangings on the pale beige walls, but a few feet from the ceiling were areas of scratched paint, and several round holes about a quarter inch in diameter, approximately the diameter of the eye hooks in the closet. Carver noticed plaster dust on the brown carpet beneath the holes. Something had recently been unscrewed from the walls. He found similar round holes, and more white dusting of plaster, down low along the baseboard. In this room there were numerous stains on the carpet that weren’t in evidence anywhere else in the house, a few stains on the walls. Considering it contained no furniture, the room showed a lot of wear.

Carver limped back to the master bedroom and looked around for similar holes and plaster dust, but found none. Then he examined the brass headboard of the king-sized bed.

He remembered a Key Montaigne phone directory on top of the oak file cabinets in the office. He got it and looked up Katia Marsh. Her number was listed for an address on Kale Avenue in Fishback. He tore the page from the directory and stuffed it into a pocket, then he got out of the dim and stifling house, leaving by the front door and letting its lock click loudly and decisively behind him. Millicent Bing must have heard that same sound, her past locking shut as she walked away from it. No going back; a new life lay ahead, ready or not.

He drove down Shoreline and turned the Olds into the research center driveway. Dusk was dying, and a gigantic tropical moon had taken over the sky. There were no lights showing in the low, angular building, and the
Fair Wind
rode darkly at her moorings.

Carver sat for a moment with both hands on the steering wheel, staring out at the ocean fading from green to black, breathing in the scent of the sea brought to him by the warm breeze wafting in through the car’s open windows. Around him nocturnal insects had begun their constant and cacophonous scream that might last till dawn. Down near the shore tall palm trees were swaying their fronds like lean, elegant women tossing their hair to dry it in the wind. He didn’t like the suspicion that was taking root in his mind. It only served to make matters more complicated and mystifying. Or maybe simply less related.

He drove from the parking lot and aimed the moonlit hood of the Olds toward Fishback.

K
ALE AVENUE WAS
a narrow street that ran off of Main two blocks down from the Key Lime Pie. Katia’s address turned out to be a huge gray Victorian home that had been converted to apartments. The darkly shadowed face of the three-story house was almost invisible behind banana and oleander trees.

Carver limped up onto the wide front porch. Two old women were perched on a long bench that was probably an ancient church pew, but neither of them looked at Carver. On the porch ceiling a paddle fan with a schoolhouse light slung below it slowly rotated, creating a slight breeze and enough illumination for Carver to study the bank of brass mailboxes and find Katia’s apartment number. Dozens of moths circled the light beneath the fan, their frantic arcing and darting causing faint shadows to flit over the porch. He opened a screen door and climbed a narrow flight of stairs to the second floor, found a door marked 2-C, and turned a brass crank that made a rasping noise inside the apartment. He stood waiting. Someone was cooking Italian somewhere in the house. The garlicky aroma prodded Carver’s appetite.

Floorboards creaked, and light in the door’s fish-eye peephole rolled like a wild pupil, then was steady. He knew Katia was studying his distorted image in the hall.

Then the door opened and she smiled out at him. She was wearing a faded pink robe and was barefoot. He saw that her toenails were painted bright red. Her features seemed puffy and her hair was mussed, as if she’d been sleeping, but her blue eyes were alert. “Mr. Carver!” she said in a surprised voice, as if he were an unexpected gift.