SHADOW OVER CEDAR KEY (22 page)

Brandy’s mind raced to the Rossi killing. “I’ve always thought the private eye was shot because he was about to uncover the earlier murder. Last night you said you had the gun might’ve shot Rossi.”

“Ballistics is running tests. The weapon was buried in the hotel basement. Belongs to MacGill.” He paused. “’Course this is all off the record. I oughtn’t to be talking so free to a reporter, young lady.”

“Trust me. I promised none of this goes in print until you’ve given your okay. Have you talked to the sport with the alias, Blade Bullen?”

“Says he’s having woman trouble. Using the phony name to give some gal the slip. Says he comes to Cedar Key a lot to fish, and it’s just coincidence he ran into Rossi. Says he got interested in Rossi’s story and hung around because his step-mother disappeared with his half-sister about the same time. Allows as how he was curious.”

“Do you believe in coincidences?”

“They do happen. But I told him to stick around. Ran a rap sheet. He’s been in a few scrapes. DWI, first time marijuana possession, little stuff.”

When the detective hung up, Brandy felt cheated. No Bible quotation. Maybe the Good Book didn’t have much to say about coincidences. She retrieved her laptop from a storage locker and had dragged her suitcase to the curb, when she spotted a trim, familiar figure hurrying toward her—Angus MacGill, harried and apologetic.

“Sorry, lass. I’m a wee bit late. Clerk reminded me your flight was due about noon today. We don’t know where Cara went. I was afraid she mightn’t get here.” Breathless, he stooped to help with her suitcase. “Nice trip? Any trouble on the way?”

A harmless pleasantry? She wondered if he expected her still to be in New York, nursing a split head. The clipping had been on display in his hotel, and his gun was being tested for Rossi’s murder. She reverted to her chief worry. “I’m awfully puzzled about Cara. When was she last seen?”

He pointed with his free hand toward his Ford and they started toward it. “She picked up her pictures at the store in Chiefland. Marcia established that. Seems strange she’d leave before you got back, though. Cara was dead keen on your going to New York. Expected some kind of miracle. You find out much?”

Brandy decided to take a leaf from Frank Bullen’s book. “Nothing definite.”

He opened the passenger door for her. “Where to?”

Brandy frowned. She couldn’t go back to her bureau office, not without knowing about Cara. Even if Cara had unaccountably lost interest, where was Brandy’s story without her? There was John to think of, but he couldn’t possibly come home until well after five. “I’d like to see what I can turn up myself. The Sheriff s Office doesn’t have a reason to look for her. Not yet, anyway.” Quickly she calculated her time. “Mr. MacGill, I truly appreciate your coming to meet me. But I’m going to take a detour. I’m going to rent a car here at the airport and snoop around a bit before I drive home.”

From the driver’s seat, his blue eyes studied her. To Brandy he looked older than he had last Friday, the square face more drawn, the bright gaze more anxious. “Suit yourself, lass. I’ve got to get back to the hotel. The storm’s been upgraded. It’s moving north again in the Gulf. Need to batten down the hatches.” He shook his head. “Marcia’s already checked with all Cara’s friends. No one’s seen her or the station wagon since yesterday morning. Seems like she just got fed up and chucked it all. Told me she had a job near the university, was going to take some classes, but Marcia’s called every photo studio in Gainesville. Fine Arts Department at the university never heard of her. Doggett’s even made some unofficial inquiries around town. Cara’s by no means in Cedar Key.”

He scowled up at the sky. “Mind, I do feel sorry for Marcia. She’s that upset. She’d bring tears to a glass eye.” He parked beside a car rental counter and helped Brandy unload her suitcase and lap top. “Marcia’s a fine woman, even if she keeps too tight a grip on Cara.”

“You two have a lot in common, I’d think.”

His nod was a trifle wistful. “Been a lonely life since the wife’s gone.”

Brandy grasped the lap top and the bag with her notebook. She didn’t want to feel too much empathy for MacGill or Marcia Waters.

Everyone was a suspect. “Where’s the drug store?” she asked. “That’s a good place for me to start my search.”

“Biggest strip center in Chiefland, north of the center of town on 19.”

She thought of the long drive MacGill had made from Cedar Key and smiled at him. “I really appreciate this.” Then she thought again of the clipping. “One other thing. Whatever happened to that column I gave you, the one about historic preservation in Lake County?”

He thrust out his lower lip, concentrating. “Can’t say. Thought it was still on the bulletin board.”

Brandy’s smile died. “It’s not,” she said.

* * * *

The jaundiced looking young woman at the camera counter suffered from a cold, and she was not eager to talk. She glanced up with suspicion when Brandy identified herself as a reporter. “Miss Waters’ mother was in here this morning. I told her all I know.” Sniffling, she held a tissue to her reddened nose. “I wasn’t paying no special attention. Miss Waters comes in here a lot. How I know where she is?”

Brandy’s voice was calm. She did not want to raise the clerk’s anxiety level. “I’m looking for Cara Waters because we’re working together on a story. I don’t plan to use your name. Anyway, I’m with the Gainesville paper.”

Relaxing a bit, the girl stuffed the tissue back into her pocket and looked down. “She wasn’t here but a minute.”

“Before people pay for their pictures, sometimes they check to see if a roll came out. Do you remember if Miss Waters looked at the photographs you gave her?”

The clerk rolled her eyes up to the left and compressed her lips, trying to recall. “I can see her standing there...No, she didn’t. She just paid and walked out.”

“Anything special you can remember about her leaving?”

Again the eyes went up. “There was a man came in. He spoke to her. I remember that. They left about the same time.”

Brandy held her breath. “This could be important. Do you remember anything at all about that man?”

At first the girl shook her head. “Ordinary looking guy. Well,” she amended after a second, “kinda fattish, tall.”

“Can you remember how he was dressed?”

“Nothing special. Didn’t have on work clothes.” She squinted, concentrating. “Had a kinda ugly face, really, a lotta dark hair, pretty long.”

Brandy handed the girl one of her cards. “You’ve been a big help. If you think of anything else, call me.” She leaned closer. “Don’t tell anyone but a law enforcement officer about the man you saw speak to Miss Waters, all right?”

The girl nodded, sniffled, and re-applied her tissue.

From a newspaper dispenser on the sidewalk, Brandy bought the Gainesville paper and scanned the weather news. A small hurricane now, winds eighty miles an hour, moving slowly. At the present rate, if it didn’t stall again or take an unexpected turn, it could pass on up the Gulf tonight, most likely make landfall near Apalachicola. Brandy sat in the car for several minutes, her notebook in her lap, recording the details Strong had given her on the phone, and the few from the drug store interview.

Then she looked at her most recent
To Do
list: Ask Cara about argument. Call Strong. Call Marcia. She crossed out two and three, waited with pencil poised, then started a new list: 1. Unknown man may be with Cara. (Clerk would recognize most locals.) 2. Cara may have picture of someone digging grave. 3. May be in danger from that man 4. Connected to attack on me?

She added a fourth item on the
To Do
list: search for station wagon. No point in looking in Cedar Key. That area had been thoroughly covered. She would need to question people near Chiefland, perhaps people in isolated areas. She thought of the caretaker at the Shell Mound campground, of the bleak farm house where she’d telephoned the Sheriff s Office, of the woman who ran the shabby little store on the Suwannee at Fowler’s Bluff, all only a few miles away. Other such places existed along the lonely roads of Levy County.

She glanced again at the thickening sky and remembered Cara’s phobia. How would she react if she were helpless again in the path of the hurricane?

CHAPTER 17
 

Brandy slipped a Florida map out of the pocket flap of her notebook and figured time and distances. Now it was two. In an hour and a half, even allowing for brief interviews, she could make a sweep of the Shell Mound campground, the road past Fowler’s Bluff, duck down a few dirt roads, and still be home to greet John.

She drove away with hopes high. No one had really searched yet. Marcia had accepted the notion, like the police, that Cara had simply moved away. But soon Brandy’s optimism faded. The roads around Otter Creek yielded no clues and Brandy’s first stop was a disappointment. The caretaker near Shell Mound had no information. He had not heard from Cara since she asked to leave her car in the campground Friday night, had seen no sign of the station wagon among the few campers and fishermen. Brandy’s excursions among the scattered houses on nearby side roads were equally unproductive. By the time she reached Fowler’s Bluff the clouds were piling higher in the west and a whiff of rain hung in the air.

She pulled the rental car under the long limbs of a live oak and trotted up the steps of the clapboard store. Behind a counter stacked with hunting and fishing guides, tide tables, and a rack of chips and nuts, the manager was listening to a radio and stuffing a flashlight and some soft drink cans into a tote bag. She didn’t pause when Brandy asked about Cara’s 1980 station wagon.

“Just a few fishermen at the cabins over the weekend. Last of them cleared out this morning.” A friendly, wide-lipped face looked up. “No station wagons.” She was a tall, skinny woman in a shapeless cotton dress, hair stringing down over one eye, tone apologetic. “Most generally, I’d be proud to pass the time of day, but I’m fixing to leave myself. Radio says they’s hurricane winds out in the Gulf, and they turned this-a-way a coupla hours ago. Locking up soon and going to my sister’s in Chiefland.”

Brandy glanced out the dirty window at the choppy waters of the Suwannee. Tied to the pier, a skiff with an outboard kicker rose and fell with the waves. Perhaps three hundred yards across the river a thick, unbroken band of trees lined the shore. The county map showed mile upon mile of the Lower Suwannee National Wildlife Refuge along both riverbanks.

Her memory reverted to Saturday morning—a houseboat chugging down the channel, a fat man on deck. A tall man. A man with dark, bushy hair. “A houseboat went by here last Saturday. Seen anything more of it?”

The woman rubbed her chin, frowning. “I recollect it ain’t come back. Most generally, the fella ties up at a little bitty island about a mile down river. On the north side, before you get to Little Turkey Island. Probably better shelter there than near the Gulf. We’re twelve miles up river, but we’ll still get some flooding.”

Brandy opened her purse. “My friend may have gone for a ride with him. Could I rent your boat for about an hour, run down there and pick her up?”

The frown deepened. “Pretty rough out there already. Be getting rougher.”

Brandy slid a twenty dollar bill onto the counter. “It’d just take me about an hour.” She looked down at the slack suit she’d worn on the plane. “I’d like to use your rest room and change first.”

The woman’s plain face still looked doubtful, but she picked up the bill. “Better hurry, then. I aim to be gone in an hour.”

Once in her jeans and jacket, Brandy settled herself on the skiff’s rear seat, zipped her camera into the roomy plastic bag, stowed it in the stern along with the boat’s line, and pushed away from the pier. When she yanked the starter rope, the kicker coughed a few times, then sputtered into life. Gripping the tiller, she guided the skiff away from the dock and jolted across the waves down river.

Her plan was simple. Find and observe the houseboat. Obviously, more than one big stranger with bushy black hair could be in the Chiefland area, but if she saw any sign of Cara, she would get a picture. Her cover story was simple. She was a reporter winding up a feature article about life on the Suwannee.

Her real task was to reconnoiter and return before the gusts of wind began carrying rain. On the return trip the waves, if not the current, would be running toward Fowler’s Bluff. Her hair whipped around her face, the little boat slapped up and down, bucking the waves, and she often needed both hands to keep it on course.

She had almost decided to start back, that the sky was too dark, the island too far, when she rounded a sweeping curve and saw the houseboat to her right. The stern rocked near the western end, about a hundred yards from the north shore, a mass of pond cypress, river birch, and water oak, thick with undergrowth. Brandy eased back on the throttle, maneuvered closer, and peered upward. No one was on deck. Not surprising, given the weather. She steered closer. A small jalousie window near the stern would mark the bathroom, or head. Next to it should be a bedroom. A moment later she caught her breath.

Outlined against the closed side window was a woman’s slim form. Backing around, Brandy cut into the protected strait between the opposite end of the island and the mainland, pointed the skiff’s bow toward a barren spit, throttled back again, and as the boat nosed up onto the tiny beach, killed the engine and leapt out with the bow line.

In a few minutes she had fastened a clove hitch around the slender trunk of a young cypress.

A splash startled her, and she whirled to see the ridged back of a large alligator slither into the water behind her. She shuddered. Mid-October, she thought, most ‘gators are already dormant. She drew a long breath and paused, remembering other warnings she knew: Keep an eye out for rattlers and water moccasins, too. They get nervous before an approaching storm. She tucked the cuffs of her jeans into her socks. Then slinging the tote bag with her camera and the extra line over her arm, she edged past a wax myrtle shrub and a spiky tangle of saw palmettos, until she could see the hull of the houseboat, tapered like a fishing vessel. At its bow stood a wheel house with tall, three-sided windows. A sturdy metal rail encircled the boat, beginning at a wide forward deck, running beside a narrow walkway on each side, and ending on the stern, where a dinghy lay bottom up. A thinner rail looped around the cramped top deck.