SHADOW OVER CEDAR KEY (3 page)

Above his St. Bernard eyes, the officer raised his brows, but he nodded. “Right.”

For the first time there was an appeal in the investigator’s voice. “It’s kinda urgent. My client’s in the hospital. Finding her niece, that’s her last wish. So far I got zippo. I’ll check with the chief when he gets back tomorrow. Until then, I still got one lead.”

Brandy sidled closer and peered down at the eight by ten. It showed a slim young woman with delicate bone structure seated on a white bench, dark hair to her shoulders, dark, solemn eyes, arms crossed, a faint lift to her lips. She wore a white, lacy dress—maybe a bridal gown, Brandy thought—and on her left hand a large diamond with brilliant smaller ones descending on each side.

The officer scooped up the photograph and slipped it into a manila folder. “We’ll check it out.”

As the investigator turned away from the counter, Brandy stepped between him and the door. “Mr. Rossi, I’m from the
Gainesville Tribune.
We’re interested in your search. Cedar Key’s in our region.”

Rossi scowled. “News sure gets around, don’t it? I got no information for reporters.”

Brandy was surprised. He had, after all, placed the ad. She had expected him to welcome the paper’s help. Still, she smiled agreeably. “We could publicize your search. Lots of readers don’t look at the classifieds.”

“We don’t want publicity, M’am.”

Behind her the door opened. A secretary hurried in with two Styro-foam cups of coffee. As Brandy moved aside, Rossi stalked out onto the porch. He stopped on the steps and when she caught up with him, he was pulling a pack of cigarettes out of his breast pocket. He was not much taller than she, but his body was solid and his posture confident. He bent down and a light flickered under his cigarette. Then he straightened up, inhaled, and gazed at the quiet street under its haphazard clumps of cabbage palms. “Thought this was some kinda beach resort.”

Brandy shook her head. “It’s not. That’s its charm.” Later, she would remember how he looked at that moment—the cheap sports coat and polyester pants, the creased forehead and alert stare—a wary alien on a quest, bewildered by the muted rhythm of Cedar Key.

From her purse she took a card with her name, bureau address, and phone number. “I’m staying at the same hotel. Call me if you change your mind.”

Although he shook his head, he thrust the card into his pocket before climbing into a two door blue Chevrolet with a Gainesville airport sticker. In her car a few minutes later she noted its description in her notebook, along with the facts she’d learned about the missing woman, and poked a few loose papers back into the binder. Brandy remembered how methodical, brief, and neatly printed John’s lists were, but she wrote down everything—books to read, people to talk to, ideas for feature stories, phrases that struck her fancy, facts from interviews.

Rossi was hiding a good deal, she decided, as she rounded the corner of Second Avenue. That meant there must be a dramatic angle to the story. She would question anyone she could find who was in Cedar Key in 1972.

The art gallery was the only tenant in a green frame building across the street from the Cedar Key Historical Museum. As she parked she could see through high windows into a shadowy room hung with watercolors. A bell jangled when she stepped inside and stood before somber splashes of browns and pale greens.

In a frame on one wall a cormorant clung to a piece of driftwood, a black shape against an ashen sky. Next to it cabbage palms leaned above a dark river as an osprey plunged for the kill. On an easel in the foreground a horned owl soared above a tall mound pocked with moonlit shells. While Brandy absorbed Marcia Waters’ predatory vision, the artist herself emerged from a back room. She was pulling on a nubby black sweater—a rawboned woman, quite tall, with a thin, sun-browned face. She tucked a wisp of white hair into the bun at the nape of her neck and faced Brandy, eyebrows lifted.

Brandy smiled. “Mr. MacGill at the Island Hotel sent me. I’m Brandy O’Bannon from the
Gainesville Tribune.
I’m working on a couple of Cedar Key stories. He said you could board our golden retriever.”

Marcia Waters opened the door onto the sidewalk. “I believe my daughter promised Mr. MacGill. She charges ten dollars a night. The fact is, we have quite a menagerie already. I keep a private bird sanctuary.

Brandy picked up a handout about the artist from a wall stand and followed her outside. “Do you always work on nature studies?” she asked as Mrs. Waters locked the door.

The artist glanced back, her face somber. “It’s my way of preserving what’s left of old Florida.”

Brandy looked at the brochure. “You’ve lived in Cedar Key since the 1940’s. Maybe you could help me with my two local stories.”

Mrs. Waters snapped her head up. “That depends. We respect people’s privacy here.” She strode to a battered van at the curb. “Follow me. The house isn’t far.”

As Brandy nosed her car out behind the van, she thought again of John waiting for her at the hotel, and felt like a gymnast on a balance beam, teetering between job and marriage. A working weekend had seemed like a brilliant strategy: she would ferret out a difficult story, maybe two, while keeping her husband safely at her side.

These past few weeks, while she spent days on a color story in Ocala, two more in Tallahassee, and grueling overtime at the bureau, had she lost her husband to his intern? When he felt neglected, Tiffany Moore always found time for him. Even after hours, even on weekends. And this was only the first year of her three-year apprenticeship.

Frowning, Brandy drove past white frame houses, turned northwest beside a tall Victorian home with a filigreed porch railing, and rounded a bay labeled Goose Cove on the map. She did not want to think now about Tiffany Moore, her mini skirts, her tight curls, or her low voice when she asked for John on the telephone. This weekend Brandy would focus all the charm she could muster on John. She had brought a snug dress that flattered her curves and seductively high heels.

Through the windshield she watched late afternoon shadows settle over the hushed street and its canopy of Spanish moss. She couldn’t concentrate only on John. She had to interview someone about the Shell Mound ghost and locate, with or without the investigator’s help, the mother and daughter who came to Cedar Key twenty years ago, and then vanished.

CHAPTER 2
 

Mrs. Waters drew up before a one story cottage flanked by cabbage palms, a narrow porch, and a bamboo fence. While the artist held open the gate, the retriever pulled Brandy in a red-gold blur across the front lawn, under the limb of a live oak into the back yard, and stopped on a gravel path between beds of black-eyed Susans, elderberry, and wax myrtle. In the corner of the garden a small fountain splashed in a tiny pond beside a wire enclosure.

While Meg stood wagging her cream-colored plume of a tail, the artist stopped, and gave her a business-like pat. “My daughter’s probably finished feeding the birds. I expect she’ll take care of your dog next.”

For a moment Brandy knelt and put her arms around Meg’s golden ruff. “You’d sniff out the missing woman if you had the chance,” she murmured. “Never mind. At Shell Mound I hear there’s a doggy spirit,

^ “

too.

Rising, she followed the older woman through a back door into a studio lined with wooden cabinets, some slotted for pictures, and shelves stacked with tubes of paint. Brandy stopped at a drawing board under a bank of windows to study a completed water color of a horned owl. From a gnarled branch it stared into the moonlight, a huge bird with ear tufts like demon horns and hooked claws. Brandy was struck by the round eyes in the flattened face, by the hypnotic effect of the stale yellow irises and the stony pupils.

The artist looked at the picture with a slight smile. “A killing machine. Sometimes nature’s like that. People, too. Cara and I took some excellent night photographs of the owl. We even managed to make a tape of the owl’s hooting. It nests near Shell Mound.” She slipped into a paint-splattered smock and rolled up the sleeves, revealing sinewy arms and wrists.

Brandy welcomed the opening. “I’m researching the legend of Shell Mound for a Halloween feature. You must’ve heard of a round light that’s supposed to appear there. Sometimes a girl with a dog.”

Mrs. Waters snorted. “Poppycock, of course. Something in the local paper about it yesterday. Fact is, the round light’s probably illegal hunters, knocking around the woods at night.”

Beside the door the artist picked up three framed watercolors, all storm scenes that had been turned to the wall, and led Brandy through a pair of French doors into a simply furnished living room with a fireplace in one corner and watercolors on every wall—Gulf scenes, crimson sumac, white ibis with curved beaks.

Brandy paused before the mantel. On it two small, oval portraits, one faded with age, faced each other in connecting silver frames, photographs of dark-haired little girls. Across the room on a small table a studio portrait of a young woman in a graduation gown gazed back with brown, liquid eyes, hands on a camera in her lap.

The stiffness in the artist’s face softened as she followed Brandy’s gaze. “My daughter, Cara. She plans to carry on my work with the bird sanctuary. I’m an old woman, and it’s a big job. She’s also a help with nature photos. Familiar with the whole area. She’d know more about the Shell Mound tale.”

Brandy turned to see a slim young woman emerge from the hall in jeans and a canvas apron. Along her high cheekbones and slender neck, dark hair fell like a curtain. Large eyes and a height on no more than five feet gave her an elfin look.

“I managed to cut all the monofilament line off the pelican you brought in yesterday,” she said to her mother, and then gave Brandy a shy glance.

The artist nodded, pleased. “We left Brandy O’Bannon’s dog Meg in the yard.” She turned to Brandy. “My daughter, Cara. You’ll see her again in the hotel dining room tonight.”

Cara spoke up. “I love dogs. I’ll take good care of her.” She held out a hand to Brandy, her expression a little anxious. “You’re the newspaper woman from Gainesville? I asked Mr. MacGill to recommend me for dog sitting. I wanted to talk to you.”

Brandy smiled as they shook hands. “I’m on my way back to the hotel. I’d be glad to give you a lift.”

Cara whirled toward the hall, calling over her shoulder to Marcia, “Truck will bring me home. I’ll put out some dog food and be changed in a minute.”

Mrs. Waters set a watercolor of a hurricane scene she had carried from the studio beside the front door. Brandy was startled at the ferocity of the image. A mammoth black wave rose from seething waters, its crest deathly white. Below it crouched the frail buildings of a town.

“The storm surge of 1896,” the artist said.

Brandy sensed an opening for her other story. “This reminds be of another question. A private investigator in town is looking for a woman and child who dropped out of sight here in June of 1972, just before a hurricane. He says it’s important to find them, but the woman must be using another name. Any idea who that might be?”

For a fraction of a second Mrs. Waters hesitated, then looked down and shook her head. “There were no strangers who stayed in Cedar Key after Hurricane Agnes, and no fatalities. The man’s mistaken.”

Brandy had heard about the protectiveness of small town natives, and this woman would be stubborn. As they stepped outside and stood on the cleanly swept porch, Brandy smiled. “I hope nature doesn’t take another swipe at Cedar Key while we’re here. October’s still the hurricane season.”

The other woman did not smile back. Instead her tall, spare figure turned to face the island’s jagged western shore. “Nature has reason to punish this town,” she said. “The cedars, gone. The oyster beds pillaged. Still, sometimes nature rewards those who pay her back.”

“The environmentalists?”

“And perhaps the painters.” Mrs. Waters looked at Brandy, her gray eyes troubled. “Fact is, if the tropical storm near Cuba heads this way, we’ll evacuate. You’d need to find another place for your dog.”

Behind them the door opened. Cara appeared in a white uniform and burgundy apron and glided after Brandy down the front steps.

“I’d like to ask some questions about the Shell Mound ghost,” Brandy said when they reached her car. Cara tucked her skirt beneath her and slid into the passenger seat. “Your mother told me about your nature photographs there, and your work in the bird sanctuary.”

As Brandy pulled into the street, Cara turned toward her, a pained glint in her eyes. Brandy was conscious of the fragile bones in her face, the sensitive mouth. “Mother told you I plan to carry on her work. The truth is, I don’t want to spend my life in Cedar Key. I want to be a professional photographer. I’ve learned all I can from books and magazines. I need college courses. Mother doesn’t understand that.”

The yearning in Cara’s voice sent Brandy’s memories reeling into the past. She was seventeen again and with her own mother at the dining room table, surrounded by her mother’s literature and grammar texts, her tidy stack of term papers, her red pen, her precise lesson plans. She listened to her mother repeat in a voice that could slice meat,
“Get your degree in English, get certified to teach. You’ll have security.”

And her own argument.
“I don’t want to teach about language. I want to use it.”
Brandy gave Cara a quick, sympathetic look.

“Maybe I could be a newspaper photographer,” Cara was saying. “I’m pretty good and I learn fast.”

Brandy swung the car past the concrete block high school. Beyond it, she could see mud flats barbed with oyster beds. “Start with a job that’s less ambitious. Maybe an apprenticeship at a photography studio in Gainesville. Then you could take some university courses, work your way up. Have you told your mother how you feel?”

Cara’s young face clouded. “I don’t want to hurt her feelings, but the truth is, Marcia’s not my real mother. She just likes me to call her that. She’s my foster mother. My foster dad might’ve listened, but he died five years ago. Without me, Marcia would be alone. She won’t hear of my leaving. I’ve had to respect that.”