Dying to Retire (2 page)

“Probably a child,” Seth growled. “Can’t even see his head over all these people. I’m not riding with any crazy teenager, I’ll tell you that right now.”

I stood on tiptoe to see who our benefactor was, and when there was a break in the crowd, I waved to the sign holder. He was a wizened gentleman, barely five feet tall, with tufts of white hair fringing his bald pate and framing his jug ears. He wore a green T-shirt, khaki shorts, and purple-and-gray sneakers. When he spotted me, he scuttled over to where we stood, his lips parted in a big grin over the whitest teeth I’d seen since Tina Treyz’s youngest child wore a Bugs Bunny mask for Halloween.

“Mrs. Fletcher, it’s a pleasure. I’m Sam, Sam Lewis,” he said, pumping my hand. He had a surprisingly strong grip.

I introduced him to Maureen, Mort, and Seth, and watched the surprise reflected on each of their faces as Sam briefly crushed their fingers.

“When you get your bags, meet me outside. Car’s in a no-parking zone and I’ve gotta move it before they tow me. Look for the pink Caddy.”

He snapped a baseball hat onto his head and disappeared back into the crowd. I had no idea how long he’d been waiting, and hoped for all our sakes that his car was still there. It was another half hour before we’d assembled all the bags and showed the matching luggage receipts to the guards. Outside again, we had little time to adjust to the warmth and humidity before Sam pulled to the curb, hopped out of his car, and opened the trunk.

Sam’s Cadillac was a vintage model with huge fins trimmed in chrome. Seth walked around it, admiring the highly polished surface. “Nice vehicle you got here,” he told Sam. “Haven’t seen one of these in years.”

“She’s a beauty, isn’t she?” Sam said, running a gnarled hand over the sleek pink fender. “Got it from old friend in South Beach about five years ago. They took his license away from him, poor guy. First they said he couldn’t drive at night. Then they said he couldn’t drive in the day.” Sam shook his head.

“Get in a lot of accidents, did he?” Seth asked.

“Never got into an accident at all,” Sam replied, “but I hear he left a lot of them in his wake. Police got tired of pulling him over for driving too slowly. They grounded him permanently. And he was only eighty-seven, a youngster.” He winked. “Tough luck for him, but good luck for me.”

Mort hauled his heavy suitcase to the back of the car, his face red from the effort. He and Maureen had vowed to take only one piece of luggage on this trip, but it was a big one, and didn’t have wheels. Sam rushed to pull the suitcase from Mort’s hand.

“That’s okay, Sam. I’ve got it,” Mort said. “This one’s a backbreaker.” He wrestled the suitcase into the trunk, stepped back, and dusted off his hands.

Maureen’s eyebrows disappeared under her bangs as she looked up. “I told him we should use two bags,” she muttered just loud enough for her husband to hear.

Sam took my rolling bag, nestled it next to Mort’s, and swung Seth’s suitcase on top. The trunk of the car could have taken double our load. We pressed Seth to take the front passenger seat, and after he cranked a bit about wanting to be a gentleman and letting me sit there, he complied. We were on our way.

Sam’s method of driving was a bit unnerving. He could barely see over the steering wheel and drove very slowly until the traffic light up ahead turned red. Then he pressed his foot down on the accelerator to catch up with the cars stopped at the light, jamming on the brakes at the last minute.

“You must be tired after comin’ all this way to pick us up,” Seth said to him. “Would you like me to spell you awhile? I can drive and you can give me directions.”

“Are you kidding? Driving this boat is the most fun I have all day,” Sam said, pounding on the dashboard affectionately. “You just sit back and relax and I’ll show you the sights.”

Fortunately for us, once out of the airport, heavy city traffic kept Sam from racing between lights, and we did as he said, sitting back to take in our new surroundings.

Miami in February is a joy to New Englanders whose winter experience revolves around snow, ice, and cold, and more snow, ice, and cold. As we neared the coast, the balmy air wafted in through the partially opened windows—we’d convinced Sam to lower the air-conditioning—and we breathed in the sweet, briny aroma of salt water and sun-softened earth, admiring the passing landscape of tall palm trees, flowering bougainvillea, and pastel buildings. At first we had only glimpses of blue, but when we reached Biscayne Bay, the sun-sparkled water stretched out before us. Familiar sounds accosted us—the lines of sailing boats docked in the harbor jangling musically against the masts. Familiar sights drew our eyes—the white triangles of sails and other boat shapes moving on the water. Yet it was all new and different. It was the same Atlantic waters that washed the rocky coast of Maine we’d left that morning, but here the blue was turquoise, not slate; the air was warm, not frigid. I felt a combination of pure excitement and deep relaxation flow into me.

“Thought I’d give you a bit of the scenic route,” Sam chirped from the driver’s seat. “Now I’ll take you home.”

We drove south on Route 1 and then west, moving inland, then southeast again, passing a succession of strip malls and housing developments, emerging onto a flat plain of scrub vegetation that was not nearly as beautiful as the carefully tended tropical gardens in and around Miami. Sam’s driving seemed to smooth out as the distance between traffic signals lengthened, or perhaps I was just too tired to let it affect me. I was weary from the early-morning start to make our flights, and that, coupled with the mild weather and vibrations from the big car, lulled me to sleep. I awoke when the Cadillac bounced over thick ridges set in the road to slow vehicles. Ahead was a huge archway set into a white coral wall. A sign that spanned the arch read, WELCOME TO FOREVERGLADES. The development was a series of two-story pink buildings, set at angles to each other, each grouping of three forming a courtyard within which a grassy sweep was broken by a pattern of walkways, park benches, and numbered signs. The road through the development was curved, perhaps to break up the hard edges and straight lines of the buildings, or maybe to take advantage of the slight hill from the top of which we could see the blue waters of the intercoastal waterway. We passed a large white building, a fenced swimming pool, and a set of three tennis courts.

“That’s the rec hall,” Sam explained. “It’s got a good-sized gym, classrooms, meeting rooms, a computer center, and a big kitchen. They offer lots of classes, and we even have formal dances. That’s where our Residents’ Committee meets.”

He pulled into a parking spot alongside one of the courtyards. “If we’d kept going,” he said, pointing farther down the road, “we’d come to the village. Everything you need, market, post office, hardware store, beauty shop, pharmacy—even a pizza parlor. We got all the comforts.” He opened the car door, got out, and went around to unlock the trunk.

The rest of us climbed out slowly, our muscles cramped from having sat for so long.

Sam had the luggage on the sidewalk before we could assist him.

“Thanks for picking us up, Sam,” I said. “What do we owe you for the ride?”

“Was no trouble at all. You’re friends of Portia’s. Here for the funeral, right? I can’t charge you for that.”

“Were you a friend of hers?” Seth asked.

“I knew her pretty well, but she was closer with my wife, Minnie.” He looked down at his sneakers.

“Do you know where the funeral service will take place?” I asked.

“I know where. I just don’t know when,” he answered. “There’s a chapel in the village. You can walk there from here.”

“Well, would your wife know when the funeral is?” Maureen asked.

Sam took off his baseball cap and rubbed a hand over his face. He seemed to be weighing his words. “They haven’t set a date for the funeral yet.”

“Why not?” Mort asked.

“Something’s wrong, isn’t it?” I said.

“I guess you could say so.”

“Well, out with it, man,” Seth said. “What is it?”

“There’s a little problem.”

“What problem is that, Sam?” I asked.

“The police haven’t released the body yet.”

“I’m sorry, Jessica. I know I should have mentioned something, but Clarence was so sure we’d have Portia back for the funeral that I thought it could wait till you got here.”

Helen Davison was a beautifully dressed African-American woman. She wore a slim black skirt and a purple, raglan-sleeved blouse, the color of which complemented her café-au-lait skin. Her gray hair was pulled back into a chignon at the base of her neck, a tidy but severe look for someone whose profession was styling hair.

We were standing in what had been Portia’s—now Clarence’s—apartment, where an informal gathering was taking place.

“This is like a wake without the body,” Seth had proclaimed when we’d walked in early on the evening after our arrival in Florida.

There were two dozen people there, sitting on Portia’s pink-and-green flowered sofa and coordinating Bergere chairs, or standing in small groups in the L-shaped living room, which had a lovely view of the bay. A woman with long curly black hair, dressed in a gauzy skirt and peasant blouse, ferried casseroles, coffee, and plates of homemade baked goods from the kitchen to a table in the alcove that served as a dining area.

Among the people perched on brown metal folding chairs, brought in for the occasion and lined up along one wall, were identical twin brothers. I gauged them to be in their late thirties. Dressed alike in royal blue T-shirts over khaki trousers, they also wore Day-Glo-orange baseball caps, which matched their wide suspenders, and thick leather belts. Each balanced on his lap a plate with three cookies, two chocolate and one peanut butter. They were talking with a man who looked like a bodybuilder in an ill-fitting white button-down shirt and red bow tie.

“What exactly happened, Helen?” I asked. “I understand an autopsy was performed. Do you know the results?”

“I don’t.”

“What is it the police are looking for?”

“I only know they found Portia near the boardwalk that runs along the edge of the bay.”

“She wrote to me that she used to walk there every evening,” Maureen said.

“That’s right. It’s only a quarter mile from here. That’s why she was so opposed to a development going in, because it would block access to the water for our residents. But that’s another story. Apparently she never made it home that night.”

“Didn’t her husband notice when she failed to return?” I asked.

Helen shook her head. “Clarence had just gotten home after a week up north. He said he’d gone to bed early and didn’t miss her till the morning. By that time she was gone.”

“Oh, how awful,” Maureen said.

Helen blinked back tears. “I only pray she went quickly and didn’t lie there in the sand, cold and frightened, waiting for someone to come.”

“But when I spoke to you on the phone, you said she died from a heart attack.”

“That’s what we all assumed, Jessica. Everyone knew Portia had a weak heart. We were all concerned about her. She was, too. Lord knows how many supplements that woman swallowed, handfuls at a time. ‘Boosting my cardiac health,’ she used to say.”

Seth, who had come away from the table with a sampling of goodies on a plate, overheard Helen’s comment. “She would have been better off just taking the medicine I prescribed for her,” he said, joining our conversation, “and leaving all that other junk out of her system.” He bit down on a brownie.

I introduced him to Helen.

“It’s nice to meet you,” she said. “Were you Portia’s doctor back in Maine?”

“Ayuh,” he said, wiping his mouth with a napkin. “For thirty-five years. But she’s never been known to listen, so all my advice went out the window. Always ordering shark bones and snake oil from those fly-by-night pill catalogues like they’d know more than a physician who’s spent years studying what was healthy and what wasn’t.”

“I happen to think you’re right,” Helen said, “but most of the people here would disagree. The local pharmacy makes a fortune on its supplements. They have a whole section of the shop devoted to them.”

“Just quackery, if you ask me,” Seth said, and wandered back to the table.

“Helen, you don’t think Portia might have accidentally poisoned herself, do you?” I asked.

“I truly doubt it. She was very well-informed about supplements. She used to attend all the talks on complementary medicine offered by our Resident Wisdom lecture series.”

“What’s that?”

“We’re not close to many cultural opportunities down here—Miami’s just far enough away to be inconvenient—so we have to make our own entertainment. Our residents are pretty knowledgeable on a lot of topics—we come from all over—so we take advantage of our natural resource, and that’s us. Resident Wisdom. We’re the residents.”

“We do that in Cabot Cove, too,” Maureen said. “We have our own theater and local orchestra. Not as fancy as Boston, of course, but I think it’s pretty good.”

Helen laughed. “We don’t have a theater or an orchestra, at least not yet. It’s mostly lectures and the occasional field trip. But it gets us out of the house, and gives those of us who don’t golf something productive to do.”

“Still, you’re very wise to come up with such a wonderful idea,” I said.

“Portia was one of the ones who started the program. And she roped Clarence into helping out.”

We looked over to where Clarence was talking to two women. He was a handsome man with sharp features, tall, thin, slightly stoop-shouldered, gray hair cut very short to camouflage its sparseness.

“He looks like a nice fellow,” Maureen said. “How did she meet him?”

Helen shrugged and said in a low voice, “I don’t know him very well, only what I’ve picked up at my beauty shop. I heard he had a gaggle of women after him when he moved down here—he’s nice-looking, and he still drives. No money to speak of, but at least he had the good taste to marry Portia. He could have chosen any number of others, I understand.”