The Styx (9 page)

The manager finally stood and stepped back to give the site a more thoughtful survey, noting the near total destruction of anything flammable, including the four walls of the nearby shack. He took a folding knife from his pocket, approached the corner of the lean-to and took a deep carving from the wood and examined it. As he suspected, the wood, probably salvaged from some shipwreck or washed up on the beach from a floundering barge, was Dade County Pine, a wood known to be so hard and strong that it was nearly impossible to drive an iron nail through it. The wood’s properties also made it impervious to only the hottest of flame, and it had indeed sheltered the dead man’s body instead of hastening its total consummation by fire.

“Does anyone recognize this poor soul?” Pearson finally asked aloud, looking specifically at the livery supervisor and young Martin and then at his own assistant. “Percival? Step up here and take a look.”

The assistant hesitated at the request and only jerked his knee as if his foot was railroad spiked into the dirt.

“For God’s sake, son, it isn’t diseased, it’s only dead,” Pearson said, and the younger man finally did manage to take a closer look but only shook his head in the negative and then backed off.

“Has anyone gone across the lake to inform the sheriff?” Pearson then said, again looking only at the white people in attendance.

“Uh, I believe, sir, everyone was waiting on you, sir,” Mr. Carroll said.

“Well, I am not the coroner, Mr. Carroll. I am only a hotel manager. I suggest you go fetch Sheriff Cox and let him do his job, and as for the rest of you, we have guests at The Poinciana and Breakers who need not know anything of this.” He finally eyeballed the Negro members of the group. “And should I find that those vacationers have heard of the details of this incident then I will surely know from whose mouths those details came.”

All of the workers were now nodding their bowed heads under their manager’s baleful eye and starting to take small, nearly imperceptible steps away from the space as if Pearson was wrong about the diseased nature of the scene.

“Meantime, I do commend you, Mizz Fluery, for your impromptu scheduling in the face of this adversity, but we do have a hotel to run.

“And Mr. Carroll, I do suggest that after summoning Sheriff Cox, you make sure that nothing, and I do mean nothing, changes here before he arrives.”

The manager then turned on his heel and stepped over to Miss McAdams, offering her his crooked arm.

“You, Miss, may return with me in my carriage,” he said, with a look that was not meant to be challenged.

The ride to the hotel was made in silence. Pearson and Marjory McAdams sat in back, looking out opposite sides of the carriage while the manager’s assistant sat up with the driver. When they reached the turn to the Breakers’ entrance, the assistant glanced over his shoulder for instruction. With a flip of his wrist Pearson indicated they veer right to The Royal Poinciana. Before protesting that her accommodations were in the beachside hotel, Marjory caught herself and kept her lips sealed. She’d been in trouble before when she was discovered doing something “untoward” and knew it was useless to react to anyone other than her father.

She sat back in the carriage with her hands folded in her lap and stared out at the meticulous landscaping of hotel grounds. It was now nearing noontime and the temperature had risen to the midseventies. The breeze from the ocean had also increased, and a scent of salt tinged the air. Couples were out walking along the wide, crushed-stone avenue, parasols raised against the sun. Others were bicycling toward the ocean. It was a quaint policy that no other vehicles were allowed on Flagler’s hotel properties, certainly not the motorized kind that some of the wealthy guests from the north had recently been infatuated with. When Flagler’s train pulled across the lake bridge to deliver his guests to what was now the largest resort hotel in the world, the noise of machines was something the oil tycoon’s influential friends would not be bothered by. As an accommodation, guests moving about the island could be ushered any distance in the hotel’s “Afromobiles.” This contraption married a bicycle to a large wicker chair inside which guests could ride while a valet peddled from behind, taking them to any destination or simply for an hour’s ride about the property. These conveyances were publicized as Afromobiles because most of the valets were Negro men.

As they passed three of these, Marjory looked carefully at the drivers, trying to discern from the look on their faces whether they knew what they had lost in the fire or were concerned over where they would sleep tonight. But their looks were as passive and unemotional as if they themselves were some part of the machinery they propelled. Marjory turned her eye to the rows of coconut palms that gracefully lined the avenue. Only the tuned ear heard the dead fronds in the tops, dried and scratching in the wind. She counted them, trying to distract herself from imagining the destination Mr. Pearson had in mind and in order to keep her mouth from getting her deeper into trouble. Instead, she speculated on who might identify the body now lying in the Styx, awaiting the sheriff, whose reputation preceded him as a man who was iron-handed when it came to keeping the sometimes boisterous rail workers in line during their off hours on the mainland and also making sure nothing that contained a whiff of illegality or violence should cross Lake Worth onto Palm Beach Island’s fantasy getaway. She’d met the sheriff once, at a social luncheon, and he struck her as someone as false and vulgar as the cheap cologne he wore at midday.

When they finally pulled into a turnabout at the rear of the massive Poinciana, a livery boy took the horses by their bridles and a valet helped Marjory and Pearson down. In the side yards off to the north, Marjory could see a small gathering of ladies and gentlemen watching what could only be Roseann Birch, in full Victorian skirt and in full swing, hammering a golf ball out into an open field from a tee specifically built for the driving range. Roseann, a stout and irrepressible woman in her fifties, was the wife of an extremely rich banker in New York City, and Marjory had seen her harrumph and flick off any man who questioned her desire or participation in any activity at the hotel, be it golf, tennis, competitive swimming in the salt water pool or even skeet shooting.

“Men are simply boys with toys. The only deadly sports I stay away from are politics and real estate,” she was famously known as saying aloud in mixed social settings, usually followed by a single-breath downing of a mint julep and an eye that challenged any man to match her estimable ability to consume alcohol.

Marjory followed Pearson’s lead up the marbled stairs. As they crossed the expanse of the hotel’s grand lobby Pearson’s heels clacked over the inlaid Italian tile and every employee and nearly every guest tipped their heads in deference to the manager and half again as many made notice of Marjory. The men that she knew through introductions by her father indeed made it a point to touch the brims off their boaters and greet her by name as they passed. She greeted them by name if she remembered and by a subtle smile if she did not. Some of the newer guests were gaping up at the ornate frescos on the ceilings or at the arrangements of bright orange bird-of-paradise flowers shooting erotically from their boat-shaped cocoons and accented with their deep-blue tongues. The new arrivals always tickled Marjory in their awe of Florida’s surprises, unique regardless of the guests’ moneyed stations or wealth of travel experience.

At the front desk Pearson simply laid his hand on the polished onyx countertop and a sheave of telegraphs and messages were placed into his palm. He moved on without glancing at them. Even though the manager had still not vocally indicated their destination, a bit rude by most standards, Marjory refused to ask, but she could tell by the direction through the hotel and past the open lounges that they were headed toward Pearson’s office.

At the oak door of the manager’s suite, Pearson acted the gentleman, opening it and allowing her to enter first. He employed no secretary, passed through the outer office without breaking stride, again opened the door to his inner sanctum for Marjory, but stopped his assistant with a single glance and closed the door behind him. Marjory glanced back at the gesture and set her jaw. In mixed company, most especially a man with an unrelated woman, a door closed in private was an unusual occurrence.

“Please, sit, Miss McAdams,” Pearson said, moving around to the business side of his massive desk. Marjory remained standing, turning away to face the fireplace. The hearth was cold and whisked clean of any ash. It was winter, but rarely did the temperature fall low enough for a fire, especially not in an office that would only be used during the daytime. She glanced at the photographs and framed certificates that lined the mantel. They all had to do with the building of the Royal Poinciana. None held any hint of the personal Mr. Pearson.

“I have here, Miss McAdams, a telegram from your father.”

She turned at the pronouncement.

Pearson slid the typed paper across his desk, the surface of which was immaculately clean and without a single other object on its polished surface.

“He has asked that you remain in your suite at the beach hotel and await his arrival tomorrow on the afternoon train. He asks also that you refrain from any further contact with the situation in the Styx and not to speak of it to any of the other guests.”

Marjory stepped across the room and laid her fingertips on the stiff paper of the telegram. She knew that the Florida East Coast rail stations each had telegraph offices and that messages were delivered twice daily, a staple for the businessmen clientele at the hotel, who were convinced they could not be out of touch with their various holdings in New York and elsewhere during their travels.

She picked up the telegram and without reading it slipped the paper into her pocket.

“Are you in the habit of reading everyone’s correspondence before delivering it, Mr. Pearson?” she said, knowing she was on thin ice with the manager. But maybe that’s what one does in Florida where there is no ice, she thought, dismissing the gravity of her disrespectful tone.

Instead of becoming angry, Pearson showed no emotion.

“Yes,” he said, and Marjory swore she saw the slightest sign of a grin at the corner of his mouth.

The statement caught her speechless. The brazen possibilities, as well as the potential opportunities of such actions by the manager, only began to form in her head.

“I shall make sure that my father is aware of the policy,” was the only retort she could form.

“I’m sure the information will be moot,” Pearson said. “As it is he who instructed me to the policy when I was hired for this position.”

Unlike with her father and many of his friends, Marjory couldn’t tell whether this man was lying. He kept his gray eyes as blank and unreadable as a washed slate.

“You may go,” he finally said.

She formed a vitriolic response behind her tongue, but held it. She spun on one heel and walked ever so carefully toward the door but stopped and again faced the desk.

“Did you recognize him, Mr. Pearson?” she said. “The dead man?”

The manager raised his head and looked up through his eyebrows, but hesitated for only a beat.

“You were there, Miss McAdams, when I asked if anyone recognized the unfortunate soul.”

“Yes,” she said. “You asked if anyone else recognized him, Mr. Pearson. But you didn’t say whether you did.”

There was now a twitch in the manager’s cheek. She had perhaps gone too far.

“You may go,” he repeated.

Marjory pinched both sides of her skirt and performed a slight curtsey.

“Yes, sir,” she said, and stepped out of the office. Only later did she wonder where the southern accent of her “Yeas sir” had come from. She was sure that it came across as if she were a slave obeying the demands of the plantation owner. She would be in even deeper trouble with her father if that indiscretion was also communicated.

Marjory made her way outside onto the hotel’s wide colonnade, a broad, covered porch lined with rocking chairs that overlooked the emerald-green yards. There were a few women in the chairs, dressed in their Victorian finery, chatting side-by-side or simply working their embroidery in their laps while enjoying the breeze. Two men in seersucker suits, straw boaters and the white shoes typical of dressed-down vacationers smoked cigars and talked in low voices near one of the white columns. But most of the hotel guests were in the distance in the Coconut Grove, seated at linen-covered tables under the shade of the palms. The hotel orchestra was playing. Marjory could make out the strains of a Sousa march, “The Belle of Chicago” or “The Bride Elect,” she could never tell the difference. She moved to an isolated spot along the rail and took the telegraph from her pocket.