Where (2 page)

Davy didn't. He just grinned. “No bugs?”

“You heard me.”

Davy studied him: silk shirt, hundred-dollar jeans and four-hundred-dollar high-tops. Like he went into Barneys and said, “country” and this is what he got, never looked at the tags, just let them run his plastic, all condescending, thinking:
South Carolina? Hicks. This is good enough for them
.

Davy's grin spread.
Welcome to the boondocks, friend.
He held off answering until he had Steele gnawing the cuticles around his buffed fingernails. “Historic Charlton waterfront?”

“Someplace convenient to your office.”

So you did break in, you condescending fuck. Like I'll take you into the back room and show you everything.

They faced off like captains of opposing teams, hicks versus assholes. “Outside, no bugs? Then you'll want the Front Street Overlook.” Davy flashed his best hick grin.

Steele didn't bother to fake a smile. “Directions, please. I need to tell my phone.”

Like any app could track the network of causeways and bridges linking the barrier islands to town. He really is not from around here. Pissed, he started before Steele hit
record:
“OK, Lewis Cooder bridge off Kraven, take Route Six across Poynter's island to the Calhoun bridge to the causeway. It's a straight shot to the Bartlett Fork. Now, look sharp and watch the signs or you'll end up at the base on North Island, apologizing to the MPs on the gate. Got that?”

As if. Steele was all thumbs. Grinning, Davy went on. “Your next turn's at the three-foot-tall milestone, you can't miss it, big block letters. Take a right and you're headed for Charlton.” The milestone reads:
RIBAULT ROAD
. His family was in the first wave of Huguenots, so far back that people forget. “Charlton High's on your left, we used to. Never mind. Bear right at Pinckney Street. Big money built on the waterfront, it's all Tara and Belle Reve on the left, facing the bay. Look for the Overlook where the live-oaks thin out?”

“Wait!”

“Live-oaks, did you not Google us?” He was gratified to see Steele, all thwarted and fuming when all he has to do is get a damn map. Grinning, Davy dragged it out, “You know, all Spanish moss, like gorilla armpit hair? At the Tanner house, pull into the lot across the street.”

He had Steel barking with frustration. “Tanner house?”

“Man, it's on all the damn posters! Civil War hospital. They rolled all the crippled Yankee soldiers out on the porch to watch the sun come up.” Davy finished with his easy, trust-me grin. He laid back for a minute, wanting Steele to process what he said next.

“You wanted a place that can't be bugged.”

“Right. Privacy.” Steele fixed Davy with those dead-black eyes. “You'll need it.”

“Nope.” Nobody tells Dave Ribault what he needs without it costing. Fool Yankee, with his No Bugs.
I'll show you bugs.

Steele dropped the next words like bricks. “You don't know what you need.”

Raising the possibility that after last night he and Merrill …
Don't, Ribault. Be cool.
“I'll be under the Charlton Oak, big tree, big plaque. You get one half-hour, tops.” Then he walked right into it. “What time?”

Steele made a quick calculation: turned out it was get-even time. Given their schedules and whatever he has on his plate that he needs to keep private Steele said, “Early.”

“How early?”

“At 4:30,” the Northerner said with a
gotcha
grin. Then he drove in the last nail. “If you want everything you care about to be where you left it when you get home tomorrow…” he said, but did not finish. Son of a bitch walked away whistling through his teeth like Davy ought to know the tune and pick up on the words, but, shit.

He went to work pissed off, and drew and redrew a site plan because he couldn't make it come out
right.
It made him late getting back to Merrill's house so he stayed pissed off, and when he rolled into the driveway, his bad day personified was standing with Merrill at her front door, two heads bent under the yellow porch light. Close. Like they were colluding.

It's not that she's Davy's private property, but they are, by God,
together,
everybody knows that. He got out of the car locked and loaded, but by the time he crunched through the azaleas Merrill was inside and Steele was gone. He didn't ask and she didn't say, they just sat down to a late supper in front of the TV so nobody had to talk, but it ate him out like a mess of chiggers, burrowing under the skin. He'd do anything to make it stop: pace, eat, confront her, but he didn't know what.

They collided in her kitchen in the middle of the night and faced off like gladiators— why?

He thinks he snarled,
What was that with you and Rawson Steele?
and they had words. She cried,
That's what I'm trying to find out,
which should have diffused it— if he'd just let it go, but he couldn't, so push came to shove the way it does with them: her strong mind, his will. By the end he was raging,
Dammit, I moved all the way out here just to be with you
and Merrill said if that's the way he felt about it, he should damn well put up or shut up and God help him, he doesn't know which. It was stone dark when he slipped out of bed today with all that between them, and nothing resolved. He could care less whether Steele's stupid meeting comes off, but the fight stuck to his hide like a burr under a saddle and rubbed him raw. OK, he fled the scene of the crime. He left Kraven island long before Boogie Hood shuffled out of the back room to start the coffee, raised the Rolos and turned on the light in front of Weisbuch's store.

Now

Driving to town in the dark, he broods. Why this frontal assault on Kraven island, and his girl Merrill in particular? What, exactly, is driving Rawson Steele?

It's so early that no birds fly. The only sign of life in the sky above the Inland Waterway is a transport plane taking off from the base at North Island. Even the bugs seething in the marsh grass along the causeways are still. He should have but didn't leave some kind of note for Merrill, she won't mind, they don't take each other for granted, they're not on that kind of footing, but after last night … At the end it got ugly, both of them hurt and angry, tearing up the night.

Oh shit.
Oh, shit.

Anger twists in his belly like a mess of gators seething in the marsh. He wrenches the car off the road at the Overlook and pulls into the parking lot. Four
A.M.
Good. He's first. Fine. Go out on the breakwater and watch the morning come up. Make the bastard wait. From the breakwater, he'll see Steele's car coming before the fool figures out where to park. Given the lay of the land, he'll have to stand up with a big, hick wave before Steele even knows that his mark or his quarry, nemesis or whatever, got here first.

Davy will write his first line based on the look of Steele as he approaches, gauge his intentions by the way he walks. See if he gassed up that Lexus or hotwired another car. Make him wait until he's gnawed his fingers raw, and make him wait some more. If he so much as looks like he's fixing to leave, keep him in place with one phone call: “Bridge is up, be there soon.” String it out, Ribault. String it out. Eventually his mark will get sick of pacing and sit down under the famous Charlton Oak. Being as he's not from around here, he'll lean against that big, speckled trunk and start messing with his smartphone, Davy thinks, everybody does.

That's when I drop down to the fisherman's ledge and come back around on him, so it looks like I just drove in.
He'll give Steele his patented sweet, apologetic grin, show his empty hands and go, “Hey. Don't get up.” By that time the Northerner's pants will be alive with redbugs: chiggers gnawing through his thong or burrowing deep inside the butt-crack of those high-end jeans. At this or any other hour the little fuckers snap to and swarm out of the bark or up from the Spanish moss the second they smell fresh meat.

It's a pleasure to think about them having whatever urgent conversation Steele planned while he's all distracted and crazy because he can't let Merrill Poulnot's lover, her
partner
see him scratching his butt.

There is a shift in the air— an atmospheric tremor, as though something tremendous just stirred and came to life, but he is too angry to mark the difference.

Whatever was about to happen just happened, but Davy doesn't know it yet.

Instead, his heart is running on ahead. He has to get done here and rush home before Merrill even thinks about waking up. He has to make things right. The more Davy mulls it, the more he thinks her ultimatum is directly caused by this fucking Steele, an observation he is too messed up to parse. Where is the fucker, anyway? If it gets to be five
A.M.
and he hasn't showed, the hell with him. They're done. He'll wait until the last trawler passes, guys he knew in high school fixing to cast their nets out there just like their fathers did. When he studied architecture and set up shop on Charlton Street, he had great dreams. Instead it's a constant tug-of-war between his vision and predators like Steele, and if he envies the shrimpers a little bit? Well, yeah. So cool, spending your days out on the open water, nothing to think about; cast the nets and drift until sunset, haul in your catch.

Fuck Steele, with his “I'll explain later.” The light is changing and he has things to do. Get home, take Merrill by the hands and not let go until they've ended this, he tells himself, without knowing what
this
is.

Then sirens tear up the sunrise, the blat and confusion of some new emergency. Warning?
Warning.

Trouble out there somewhere.

He is up and running too fast for thought to catch up, shaken, worried and wondering.

Where?

 

2

Merrill Poulnot

Yesterday morning

Nobody saw this coming.

Waking up in our usual lives on Kraven island yesterday, who knew? Lying there with Davy, doing everything we loved to do, I didn't have a clue. When we're linked, we're one body; when we're apart, we're like twins separated at birth— if one of us is hurt, the other flinches, but now …

Who knew? How could anybody know?

Look at us the way we were, lounging in the sweet morning air, lazy islanders getting up to go about our business: Davy and me lying close, the hundred other souls stirring around us hitting the snooze alarm, putting off the usual things— making coffee, putting out the dog. We were so
ordinary.

Yesterday.

Yesterday I was troubled by certain things, but nothing that hasn't worried me every day since I moved out on Father and left my little brother there with him.
Ned won't have the same problem,
I told myself;
boys don't,
but I felt shitty about it. He was only six. I put sweet old Patrice in place to make sure of it, she was with us before Neddy was born, before Mother left us in the middle of the night. I ran away to save my life. I had to separate, rent a room and find a job, get into college— with funding— and come back strong enough to turn three lives around. I started with mine.

“Patrice will take care of you.” I gave Neddy a phone. I showed him how to use it, walked him through a list of things to do in case of this, in case of that, thinking,
Thank God he's not a girl.
He was so grown up, reciting the list, all smart and proud. I promised to come see him every day, and I did.
Patrice will know what happens before it happens,
I told myself;
Patrice will take care of him,
and she did, and I checked on them daily. I went to junior college in Charlton so I could get back to the house every night, and by the time I went to State, Ned was tough enough to handle Father— and we had Patrice. We talked every night. On the phone with people you love, you can tell whether they're lying or not. It's in that vibe, or hesitation: some offbeat note in the voice.

Neddy doesn't lie, and Patrice can't. Every time I came home I looked for evidence:
One mark on my kid brother and I come down on him with the full force of the law.
I thought,
Child Services.
I thought,
The courts won't care who Father is or who his people were, when I graduate, Neddy will come to live with me.
I thought once I had the job, got this house, the court would let Ned decide, but I was wrong. I'm too young, I'm living with a man, we're not married, bad influence. QED. Meanwhile Father's at Trinity every Sunday, front row, kneeling on the spot where the first Poulnots knelt down to pray: solid citizen, the last in a long, long line of Hampton Poulnots. Until he stepped down for reasons he won't talk about, he was a judge.

I love my brother, but given what came down after Mother left, I can't be there at night. Instead I go every day, assess the situation. Make mental notes, one of those things I can't tell Davy about, or won't,
never let the people hear you grind your teeth
. Yesterday I found Father at the kitchen table with his
TELL IT TO THE JUDGE
coffee mug and his oatmeal, everyday Father, making the smile he uses when he knows he is being watched, sweet old man, wouldn't hurt a fly.

“Where's Neddy?”

He looks up:
Oh, it's you.
“What?”

Things have always been bad between us. “Ned. You know, Edward Poulnot, your only son?”

“At that damn computer, he's always at that damn confuser— I mean computer. If he's playing those games I'll go up and…”

“Don't.”

The rest of the sentence goes:
Tan his hide.
My father, the retired judge, leader of men, back-benched at town meetings, contains the rage, but I know.