Michaela Thompson - Florida Panhandle 02 - Riptide (11 page)

The back door had an awning of white metal slats. He stood beneath it, breathing shallowly through his mouth. Almost there.

He left the back stoop and slid along the side of the house to the windows at the corner. The sills were little more than waist-high. The closer window was half-obscured by a camellia bush. The diver stepped over the lower branches, ducked, and carefully straightened his body. Now, his face was close, almost pressed against the window screen.

A mirror above a dresser shimmered on the far wall, like the surface of moonlit water. The bedroom door was closed. The foot of the bed, an expanse of gray, was on his right. A ceiling fan circled overhead. Louder than its drone was the sound of hoarse snoring.

The window screen was fastened with a simple hook-and-eye latch. He unclasped a diving knife from a sheath snapped to his belt loop. Maneuvering as gently as he could, he worked the blade between the sill and the screen. After only a few passes, the screen was unhooked. He refastened the knife in its sheath.

He waited a minute or two. The snoring continued. He pulled the screen out just far enough to allow himself to slip under it. Easily, he hoisted himself to the windowsill and lifted one foot and then the other over into the room. Standing next to the bedside table, he could see her now, a bundle of bedclothes, a few spikes of white hair, a curved nose. He couldn’t see her face.

Three steps and he was beside her. The fan stirred the air. He could smell perspiration and a medicinal odor, like mouthwash.

He allowed himself a moment to look around. There was a second pillow, lying on the floor beside the bed. He wouldn’t have to use the one she was lying on.

His fingers closed on the extra pillow. Soft. Real feathers, probably. Swiftly now, no more hesitating, he bent forward and pressed it against the old woman’s face.

She barely struggled. Sedated. Her arms and legs twitched in feeble protest, but there was no sound. As he pressed down, the diver got an image of a ship bucking in the waves, shuddering, foundering, succumbing to the sea at last. He removed the pillow, shook it out, then dropped it to the floor again.

Somewhere in the house, a toilet flushed.

The diver stood by the bed, rigid, listening. Within seconds, footsteps approached the door. In two steps, he was across the room, kneeling beside the dresser. He heard the knob turn, the door open. The ceiling fan whirred, drying the perspiration on his face. He heard a cough.

Another cough, another second or two, and the door closed. The footsteps receded. The diver waited several minutes before he stood. The motionless figure on the bed was in deep shadow. He strode to the window, swung his feet out, and lowered himself beside the camellia bush, pushing the unlatched screen closed behind him.

His senses were almost painfully acute. He knew how these glossy camellia leaves would taste, bitter and woody and bracing. He could feel the pressure of his feet on the ground, was aware of the hillock of fine dirt at the tree’s base, the knobby surface of a fallen twig.

When he pushed his way out of the bush, the air seemed to rush and engulf him, causing an almost painful pressure in his ears, clogging his nostrils with dust and vegetable matter, coating the back of his throat with a thin layer of salt. The dark lawn billowed around him, and before he could founder, he pushed off, surging forward.

Buddy Burke couldn’t sleep. Too much light. If it were dark, sweet black dark, Buddy would lie back on this pillow, thin and bad-smelling as it was, and be asleep in two seconds.

Buddy turned over, his back to the light, but he knew by now that didn’t work. He stared at the pockmarked surface of the wall. The wall surface reminded him of a bad case of acne. Buddy had found that idea kind of amusing when it first occurred to him. He didn’t find anything about this place amusing now.

His daughter, Kimmie Dee, wanted boots, had sat down and written him a letter to ask for them.
Daddy, can I have boots? Please. I don’t like Mr. S.
It just about killed Buddy to think about it. What the hell was Joy doing that Kimmie Dee couldn’t ask her own mother for boots? Joy hadn’t written the address on the letter, either. It was in a hand Buddy didn’t recognize.

Buddy sat up, swinging his bare feet to the concrete floor. He rested his elbows on his knees and hung his head. Whose fault was it all, anyway? It wasn’t Joy Burke’s fault. She hadn’t told Buddy to haul marijuana when he already had a couple of convictions and would have to go away for sure this time. That episode had been Buddy’s bright idea.

This line of work had been unlucky for Buddy. He could see that now, and he should have seen it before.

In the meantime, here Buddy was. He was serving thirty months, which meant eight or nine months in real time. Joy had cried and hung on his neck like she couldn’t live without him for one night, let alone eight months. Now, she wouldn’t even buy their daughter a pair of boots.

Anger was working in Buddy, making his hands shake. Because it wasn’t just the boots. The boots were number one, but Buddy hadn’t forgotten item number two:
I don’t like Mr. S.

Not having that many interesting activities to take up his time, Buddy had racked his brain over Mr. S. The initial didn’t fit any of the men he could think of who had a good reason to be around Kimmie Dee. It didn’t fit Buddy’s no-account lawyer, or Kimmie Dee’s school principal, or any friends Buddy could think of. Kimmie Dee was a smart girl— Buddy was as proud of her as he could be— and she wouldn’t write that for no reason. So Buddy was thinking a good deal about Mr. S.

Buddy scratched his jawline. He didn’t hear much from Joy these days. She hadn’t been to visit in a while. Which was probably good, because if she showed up right now, Buddy would be tempted to whip her ass.

After a while, Buddy lay down again. He didn’t close his eyes, but stared up at the pattern the light made on the ceiling of his cell. He wouldn’t, he couldn’t let this pass.

“Heart gave out. It happens,” said Dr. McIntosh. Outside, the ambulance pulled away from Bernice’s front yard, taking Merriam’s body to the funeral home.

“She seemed stronger. She was getting better,” Isabel protested. But Merriam was dead, and that was that. Unfinished business would be left unfinished; instead of a final rounding-out, there remained rough edges, forever jagged and unpolished.

“It happens,” Dr. McIntosh repeated. He walked out on the front porch and lit a cigarette. On the living room sofa, Bernice Chatham wept, her broad shoulders jiggling. Isabel was dry-eyed. To romanticize her relationship with Merriam now that Merriam was gone would have been hypocrisy. Yet she felt as if something had gone terribly wrong.

“You have to consider her age,” said Clem Davenant. Clem, looking ravaged, was wandering restlessly around Bernice’s living room. Bernice had called the doctor and Clem; Clem had called Isabel. Clem crossed the floor once again and said, “I’m going to get myself a glass of water, Bernice.”

Bernice, her face buried in a handkerchief, did not reply. Isabel followed him to the kitchen. She said, “You don’t have to stay, Clem.”

He filled a glass from the tap, drank, leaned on the sink. “It’s all right.”

“I know this is disturbing for you.”

She saw the cords in his neck move. He said, “Isabel, if I can’t perform my duties in life, I might as well lie down and not get up, all right?”

Startled by his vehemence, she said, “I just thought—”

“She was my client, and in some ways my responsibility, and I’m here because I’m going to do right by her.”

Isabel started back to the living room. Halfway there, she heard him call after her, “Sorry. Sorry.”

Dr. McIntosh had returned, and Bernice was talking to him in a choked voice. This was at least the third time Isabel had heard her version of events. “I went to get her up for breakfast, poor soul,” Bernice was saying. “I shut her door at night because I was afraid she’d wander. I knocked and poked my head in and said, ‘Time for breakfast, sugar!’ and then when she didn’t move at all…” Her voice trailed off and her face went back into the handkerchief.

Isabel walked down the short hall to Merriam’s bedroom. The ceiling fan whirled. The bedclothes on the narrow bed were disarranged, the pillows on the floor. On the bedside table, along with Merriam’s pill bottles, were her glasses and the well-worn black Bible Isabel had memorized verses from as a child.

She should get Merriam’s things together. She opened the closet and took out Merriam’s suitcase. Bernice’s voice drifted from the living room: “I thought she was stirring around in there last night, but I looked in and she was quiet. I used to worry so much, because you couldn’t tell what she would do, and—”

Isabel closed the closet door. The task of gathering Merriam’s possessions suddenly seemed beyond her. She put the suitcase down and walked to the window. Beyond the burgeoning leaves of a camellia bush, the green lawn glistened with dew. Across the way was Bernice’s open garage.

In a minute, Isabel would start filling the suitcase. Clem would know what Merriam had wanted done with her effects. For the first time, it occurred to Isabel that she didn’t know what would happen to the house and property. Or the trailer. She could find herself evicted shortly.
My goods and chattels are none of yours,
Merriam had written.

Isabel was going to pick up the suitcase, open it, and start folding Merriam’s clothes.

The window screen was unlatched.

She felt a spurt of annoyance at Bernice. There Bernice sat in the living room, crying, and she hadn’t even made sure the room was minimally secure. Merriam could have leaned against the screen and fallen out. Isabel pushed it. It opened quietly and easily.

She was closing it when she noticed a splintered place on the windowsill, a three-inch scrape in the white paint in line with the metal eye of the latch. Isabel fingered the scar. A few small splinters stuck out. It was not discolored by weathering or worn smooth by use and time. She checked the bottom of the black-painted screen frame and found a corresponding scrape, deep enough so the pale wood showed through.

“I wondered where you went,” Clem said from the doorway.

She was startled. She let go of the screen, which fell closed with a gentle bump.

“I’m sorry I was rude,” he went on. He joined her at the window. “What are you doing?”

“The screen was unlatched.” She pushed it open again, demonstrating. “I was thinking Bernice should have been more careful.”

He inspected it. “Miss Merriam might have done it herself, somehow.”

“Maybe.” She wiggled the hook. It slid easily in and out of the metal eye. Below the level of the sill, she saw a broken twig on the camellia bush. Several fresh green leaves lay on the carpet of pine needles on the ground around the roots. Could somebody have broken in? The idea seemed bizarre.

Clem said, “Miss Merriam had her funeral all planned, you know. She picked out the casket and paid for it, bought the cemetery plot. She even selected the hymns— ‘Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing’ and ‘Jesus, Keep Me Near the Cross’.”

“She believed in being thorough.”

His lips twitched. “Too bad she can’t preach her own sermon. What do you think she’d say?”

Isabel surveyed the bedside table, the battered Bible. “If you’d asked me before I came back here, I’d have been able to answer. I would have said she’d be the image of self-righteousness. Now, I have no idea. There was more to her than I thought.”

“I shouldn’t have asked. It doesn’t do any good to play these games.” Clem moved away from the window. “You can make up answers that seem so real, and then it comes to you that everything you’ve imagined is garbage.”

His voice was harsh. Isabel said, “Clem, listen. I don’t want you to—”

He held a hand up. “No. No. Bear with me. I’m shaky all right, but don’t take offense. I want to do what I can to help you through this.”

“All right. Thanks,” she said, and some of the tension left his face.

When the doctor left not long afterward, Isabel walked with him to his car. She said, “Dr. McIntosh, are you going to do any further… investigation into what killed Merriam?”

He shot her a sidelong glance. “An autopsy, you mean? No need.”

She was treading on delicate ground. “I wondered, with all the drugs she was taking, whether—”

“No sign of drug overdose.”

“There’s no reason to think it wasn’t natural causes?”

The doctor stopped walking. He said, “What are you driving at, Isabel?”

All at once, she was blurting it out. “I never understood how she got that concussion. It seemed very odd. And now, when she was actually getting better, to have her die like this—”

Dr. McIntosh’s ruddy face got redder. “I think you’ve been living in New York too long,” he said with acerbity. “If you’re suggesting that Merriam was murdered, certainly it’s possible, if somebody had a mind to do it. The point is, there’s no good reason to believe that’s what happened, and why would anybody have a mind to do it?”

“I don’t know why.”

“Indeed you don’t. Merriam Anders was my patient for fifty years or more, Isabel. It strikes me that if you’d paid more attention to her when she was alive, you wouldn’t feel the need to make up stories about how she died.”

The remark hit home. It seemed all too likely that Dr. McIntosh was right.

Dr. McIntosh stalked to his car without saying good-bye. Clem appeared on the porch. “Bernice is straightening the room. Let’s go have coffee, all right? There are things we have to discuss.”

Merriam’s room looked very bare. A grim Bernice had stripped the bed and held the linens in her arms in a crumpled bundle. “Thank you for everything, Bernice,” Isabel said.

Bernice wiped her eyes. “She was a handful, bless her heart.”

“I know she was.”

“I did my best. I’ll bet she was already gone when I looked in on her during the night. I couldn’t have done nothing.”

Clem took Isabel to a rundown waterfront café where they had coffee and doughnuts on a sunny deck. Pepper plants in tin cans were set out on the railings. He said, “I expect you’ll get people coming by and bringing food. Make sure you’ve got space in the refrigerator. When Edward died—” he shook his head.