Fatal Reservations (2 page)

—Kenneth Grahame,
The Wind in the Willows

1

Sometimes spaghetti likes to be alone.

—Joseph Tropiano and Stanley Tucci,
Big Night

The first time Miss Gloria almost died, she came out of the hospital rigid with fear.

The second time, just before Christmas, she came out fighting. In spite of having been jammed into a small space for hours, with hands and feet bound and mouth taped shut, she was determined to embrace life with all the risks that entailed. For weeks, she’d brushed off my concerns about conserving her energy, going out at night alone, and piloting her enormous Buick around the island instead of calling a cab. Good gravy, wasn’t she almost eighty-one years old? And besides that, she could barely see over the steering wheel.

I took a deep breath and lowered my voice so the entire marina wouldn’t hear us squabbling on the deck of her houseboat. “Your sons will have conniptions if they hear you’re driving again,” I said. “Lots of things can go wrong—the traffic is terrible this time of year—”

She gripped my wrist with her tiny fingers. “When you look at it without your blinders on, Hayley Snow,” she said, “isn’t life just one big series of close calls? We all have to go sometime,” she added with an impish tilt to her head. “And I’ve realized that I don’t want to go feeling any regrets. And I’d definitely regret spending the rest of my life acting like a scared old lady.” She grinned and patted my hand. “My training shift at the cemetery starts at three. You’re coming for a tour at four so I can practice, right? How about we compromise and you’ll drive me home? That way you can walk over to the cemetery, burn off a few calories, and earn points with your gym trainer,” she finished with a sly wink.

I sighed and nodded my agreement. I’d been had and we both knew it.

She hurried down the dock to her metallic green car and I buried myself in my work in order to avoid watching the big sedan back and fill. When she’d extracted the vehicle from its tight parking space, she careened across the Palm Avenue traffic, tires squealing and horn blaring.

I plugged my ears and tried not to look. I had my own problem to attend to: roughing out a plan for my latest restaurant review roundup, tentatively called “Paradise Lunched.” My new boss, Palamina Wells, was turning out to be a lot more hands-on than any of us working at
Key Zest
had expected when she assumed half ownership of the magazine in January. Instead of the cheerleader I’d anticipated, she was watching me like a pastry chef eyes salted caramel. Like I might turn on her at any moment.

“I know I’m giving a lot of suggestions right now. I’ll back off once I get a handle on things,” she’d told us in
a staff meeting yesterday. “In the meantime, let’s work on making our lead paragraphs truly memorable. Think tweetable, think Buzzfeedable, think Instagram envy. Let’s make them irresistibly viral, okay?”

Irresistibly viral felt like a lot to ask from an article on lunch.

At three thirty I put my overworked, underperforming first paragraph aside and told the cats I’d be back in an hour, lord willing that Miss Gloria allowed me to drive home. If the lord didn’t will that, I couldn’t promise anything.

By the time I fast-walked from Houseboat Row to the Frances Street entrance of the cemetery, I was sweaty and hot, which meant my face had to be its most unattractive tomato red. I took a selfie on my phone and texted it to my trainer, Leigh, as proof of my aerobic exertion. She had been on the money last week when she pointed out that my fitness program had lots of room for improvement. “Increasing your walking from zero miles per week to any positive number would be good,” she’d said, snapping her iPad shut with a flourish.

The Key West Cemetery sits in the center of the island on its highest point, where it was moved after the hurricane of 1846 washed the graves and bodies into the Atlantic Ocean. Because of the tight space on this island, many of the burials are now handled in aboveground crypts—which makes for an interesting and spooky landscape. That—along with some interesting inhabitants—makes the cemetery one of the biggest tourist attractions on the island.

I’d put off agreeing to this tour for as long as I could. It’s not that cemeteries scare me exactly. It’s that the idea of people dying makes me sad, especially people
like Miss Gloria, who’s probably closer to that transition than most of the people I know. I love her like a grandmother, only more so, because she’s a friend, so our relationship is free from the baggage that family relationships can hold. And now here she was, training to be a volunteer guide at the cemetery, where the radio station would play all dead people, all the time.

She was waiting for me at the gate, positively vibrating with excitement. “How much time do we have?” she asked. “I’ve learned so much, I’d like to tell you all of it.”

I laughed. “I have to be at the city commission meeting by six o’clock sharp. And I definitely need something to eat before—the commissioners have a reputation for running hot and late. So let’s say half an hour?”

She straightened her shoulders, the serious expression on her lined face at odds with her cheerful yellow sweatshirt, which featured sweet bunnies nibbling on flowers. “In that case, maybe we’ll start in the Catholic part of the cemetery, since it’s closest.” She pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose. The hinge at the left temple, still held together with silver duct tape, caught on a clump of white hair. She had gotten the lens replaced after it was crushed in the scuffle last December, but she refused to spring for new frames. “I like old things,” she’d said, laughing. “They go with me.”

She waved me forward. “So we’ll start on the right. Then we can work our way around the edges and I won’t forget where we left off.”

“How long are the tours you’ll be giving once you’re finished with your training?” I mopped my face with
my sleeve and paused in the scanty shade of a coconut palm.

“It depends if it’s a special event. In that case, I could be here two hours. But most tourists don’t have that kind of attention span. They want to see the gravestone that says, ‘I told you I was sick.’ And maybe the double-murder-suicide grave.”

“The double-murder-suicide?”

“Yes.” She nodded enthusiastically. “He shot her and then killed himself. And the poor woman is stuck in the same grave site with him for eternity. What’s up with that?”

“Somebody with a sick sense of humor made that decision,” I said. “Though Eric always says you never know what’s going on in a marriage unless you’re living in that space. I guess it’s possible that she drove him to it?” My childhood friend Eric is a psychologist and, besides that, the most sensible man I know.

She cleared her throat and started to speak in a serious public-radio kind of voice. “Okay, in this right-hand corner that runs along Frances and Angela streets you will find the Catholic cemetery.” Miss Gloria wove through the mossy stones, pointing out the plot for the Gato family, prominent in cigar-manufacturing days; the English family plot, honoring school principal James English and his father, Nelson, Key West’s first and only African American postmaster; and a gravestone reading
DEVOTED FAN OF SINGER
J
ULIO
I
GLESIAS
.

She adjusted her damaged glasses again. “I hope you’ll find something more personal to say than that when my time comes.”

“Definitely,” I said. “Miss Gloria, spark plug,
wonderful roommate, and mother of fabulous sons. But that’s too wordy. How about—‘She was up for anything’?”

I glanced at my watch, hoping to change the subject. “It looks like we have time for one more.”

“Oh, I have to show you this one, then,” she said, and led me to the grave of Mario Sanchez, an artist who had recorded scenes of early Key West in his folk-art woodcut painting. “His artwork’s shot up in value. Can you imagine, I had the chance to buy one of his pieces, twenty years ago,” she said. “But my husband thought two hundred dollars was out of our price range.” She looked up at the sky and shook her fist. “Honey, you weren’t right about everything. Those paintings are selling for close to a hundred grand now.”

Then she hustled up ahead of me. “Here’s one more—isn’t it amazing? Their monument looks like a collapsed wedding cake.”

Tiers of cement pocked by dark patches of mildew crumbled from their redbrick base. “It was beautiful,” I said. “Too bad it’s falling into disrepair.”

She waved at two plots side by side, separated by a spiky metal fence. “Apparently these two families were feuding. Maybe they bought the plot before they started to fight? But anyway, now they’re stuck next to each other for eternity with only this fence to separate them.”

As we headed out of the graveyard to her car, Miss Gloria darted ahead of me so she could slide into the driver’s seat. She waved me to the passenger’s side. “Since I’m thinking of driving more often, maybe it’s a good idea if you check out my technique.”

Crossing my fingers behind my back, I got into the
car and fastened my seat belt. Then I gripped the handle above the door with my right hand and the seat with my left. She looked over at me and laughed.

“I swear it won’t be that bad.” She put the key in the ignition, turned the car on, and revved up the big engine. We jolted away from the curb on Olivia Street and headed up toward White. At the intersection, cars, bicycles, and scooters roared by in both directions. The town definitely felt busier than usual, but with Miss Gloria at the wheel, all my senses were heightened. She turned on the radio and scooched up the volume so I could barely hear myself worry.

“I’m going to take a right here,” she yelled over the Beach Boys singing “Fun, Fun, Fun,” “because I’m afraid turning left will make you too anxious.”

“You could be correct,” I said with a pained smile.

She drove the few blocks from White to Truman without incident and pulled into the left-turn lane. “See now,” she said, craning her neck around to look at me. “I’m putting on my directional signal. And my hearing is perfectly good, so I’m not going to leave it on after I turn like the other old people do.” She cackled out loud, but I kept looking straight ahead through the windshield, praying she’d get the message and do the same.

“Green arrow!” Miss Gloria sang out, more to herself than to me. She piloted the Buick like a boxy Carnival Cruise ship from the left-turn lane onto Truman Avenue and lurched across the intersection to the right lane. “What are you working on today?” she asked.

I tried to ungrit my teeth and relax my jaw. “It’s an article on lunch,” I said. “I’m planning to include Firefly, and maybe Azur and The Café.”

“What about Edel’s bistro?” she asked. “Aren’t they serving lunch?”

“Everyone knows Edel and I are well acquainted after all that publicity,” I said. “I’m going to give her place a rest for a couple months.” Edel Waugh had opened a bistro on the Old Town harbor last December. A fire and a murder had almost tanked the restaurant—I’d been a little too involved in that situation to be considered a disinterested party when it came to restaurant reviews. “Besides, she’s gotten so popular lately, it’s hard to get a table.”

“Jesus Lord!” Miss Gloria yelped and leaned on the horn as a Key West police car cut in front of us. She slammed on the brakes and rolled down her window. “Where did you get your license, Kmart?”

“That’s a cop car,” I muttered. “Roll up the darn window and keep driving.”

“I don’t care who it is. He’s driving like a horny high school student late for his date.”

I goggled at her in amazement. As we reached the intersection of Truman and Palm avenues, where another left turn led to our marina, I noticed the flashing of blue lights from the water.

“The cops,” said Miss Gloria. “Let’s pull over and see what’s happening.”

Before I could protest, she had hurtled up onto the sidewalk, thrown the car into park, and scrambled out. A tangle of orange construction webbing floated in the brackish water closest to the new roadway, dotted with assorted trash and a lump of something bigger. Three or four policemen stood on the sidewalk looking down, seeming to discuss how to drag the whole mess ashore.
One of them glanced up and then hurried toward us, scowling.

“Get back in the car and keep moving, ladies. This isn’t a sideshow. And you’re blocking traffic, ma’am.” He looked pointedly at my roommate.

“Let’s go,” I said, herding Miss Gloria to her sedan. “You can watch them from the back deck with the binoculars.”

“I swear, Hayley,” she said, twisting around to look again. “I think they’ve snagged a body.”

2

When I hear politicians say, “We need to protect restaurants,” I ask: “What other business do you need to protect? Do you protect Wendy’s from Burger King?”

—
Matt Geller (in David Sax, “Blaring the Horn for Food Trucks,”
The New York Times
)

Our former back-door neighbors on the next finger over had finally had their old tub dragged away when the renters trashed it beyond repair, which left our view open to the garden spot (not) that is Roosevelt Boulevard leading into Key West. While I dressed for the city commission meeting and warmed up some of last night’s chicken enchiladas, Miss Gloria hollered in with the play-by-play from the deck.

In addition to the two sets of flashing blue lights we’d seen as we drove by, two more police cars and then a rescue vehicle arrived at the corner. Traffic had backed up in both directions, all the way out to our marina’s entrance off Palm Avenue. Miss Gloria spent
ten minutes trying to adjust our elderly binoculars, then finally begged me to buzz her over on my scooter so we could rubberneck along with the rest of the locals and tourists and homeless. All the flotsam and jetsam that added up to the population of Key West seemed to be out looking. I was curious, too, but the possibility of seeing another waterlogged body made me utterly queasy.