Under Cover of Daylight (13 page)

Father Monahan was staring at her. Her mother watched the blank TV.

“He kidnapped Daddy, drove him down to Lake Surprise, and killed him,” she told the priest. “That night nineteen years ago.”

“See what I told you,” her mother said to the priest. “It’s gotten worse. Worse and worse.”

“Sarah.” Father Monahan set his glass aside. “Would you come by? Come by and see me? I know you have your doubts about the church, its power in your life. But we could talk. Just normal adults, talking.”

“He came here late one night,” Sarah told Father Monahan. “Dragged my daddy off, and he killed him. He did that, and I saw him. And I know who it is.”

Her mother said, “She punishes me with this obsession, going off down there. I don’t know how I’ve stood it for so long.”

“Sarah,” Father Monahan said, “if we can help ... spiritually or otherwise ...”

Sarah picked at the seam of her work shirt sleeve. Standing there in front of these two, trying to get a grip on this little thread. Silence inflating the room, overinflating it. Sarah thinking, Yes, that’s what it would take at this point, Jimmy Stewart’s guardian angel, who led him on the tour of his hometown. That’s would it would take, her own assigned angel to come into this and give her peace. To show her how shallow and dismal all these people’s lives would have been if she had never lived.

But she knew that was wrong. If there’d been no Sarah, nothing would have turned out any differently. The world would be exactly as it was anyway. As corrupt, as forgetful. She was as anonymous as if she had never lived. She’d had exactly zero effect on anyone’s life. Except. Except, God help her if it was true, she might have had some effect on Kate’s.

“There are worldly ways I can help,” the priest said. “Things a man in my position can do that no one else can. You would be surprised to know the men of power in this community who heed my counsel.”

“Have another sip of brandy, Bryan,” her mother said as Sarah was turning, walking across the floor, getting the hell out of there.

T
HORN FELL ASLEEP NEAR DAWN
and an hour later jerked awake, in the middle of some dream about being chased, or chasing, he couldn’t remember. He was sweating, and his heart was in overdrive. And then he looked around, saw where he was, still at Kate’s house, still in his old bedroom.

He drove back to his house, showered, dressed, caught up in a manic current. He was pacing the porch of the funeral home when Sally Spencer showed up at nine. She got down from her van, looking at him as if she weren’t sure which side of sanity he was on.

“I’m OK,” he said to her, raising his hands, showing her his palms. “I’m OK.”

She unlocked the front door and led him to her office, put her purse into the desk drawer, and sat down. She was wearing a yellow dress, had her hair up today. They looked at each other for a minute or two. He could tell she saw something in his face she didn’t trust.

“It’s not my place, Thorn. It’s a police thing now. Talk to Sugarman.”

“Was she raped, Sally?”

“I told you, it’s not my place to say anything.”

“I saw her pants. She was raped, wasn’t she, Sally?”

Sally thought about it for a moment more and nodded yes.

They sat that way, Thorn feeling the blood massing in his throat. Angry at her because there wasn’t anyone else around. Because she’d chosen such a shitty business. Because she was a woman and women got raped.

They sat looking at each other. Thorn held on to the arms of the chair. It wasn’t going to go away. He knew that. There had been Dallas, and now there was this. He could scream at Sally now, he could tear down all her plaques; but it was going to be there afterward, and after a long while it would still be there. Riding there below the surface.

Together they decided on cremation. Sally would drive the body to Miami today. Spend the day up there and bring home the remains tonight. She called them cremains. Thorn almost got angry again. Almost told her what he thought. Even if none of it was her fault, even if she was being sympathetic, open, kind. She shouldn’t have called it cremains.

Thorn said no, he didn’t want to see the body again.

Afterward he drove to the Caribbean Club, a bikers’ and construction workers’ bar with a water view. He ordered a beer. Drank it while he looked out at the bay, at a couple of Windsurfers sailing across the bumpy water.

Thorn ordered another beer, and when the bartender brought it, the man said they’d heard about Kate; as a matter of fact, they’d all just been talking about her. Thorn didn’t like how the guy’s voice sounded. Or how he exchanged smirks with the guy sitting beside Thorn.

“Yeah?” said Thorn. “So?”

“So nothing,” the pale bartender said.

“Hey,” Thorn called as the bartender was walking away, “hey, how come nobody in here but me is wearing a shirt?”

“ ’Cause it’s the fucking Keys, man,” said the guy beside him, a Hun with his metal SS helmet on the bar in front of him. His belly covering his belt. “Ain’t you heard, white boy? Isn’t no fucking law down here.”

“ ’Cept the law of the fucking jungle,” his pal said, leaning forward, trying to look crazy mean at Thorn. He was a little guy with a squashed pit bull face. He was still wearing his black cycle helmet.

A skinny man with a ponytail and a vest exposing his bony chest drifted across from the pool table, cue stick ready.

“Yeah?” Thorn said. “Law of the jungle, huh?”

“Sure as shit is,” said the Hun. He took his elbows off the bar, leaned toward Thorn, gassed him with his beer breath. Grinned, and called back to his buddies, “Let’s have another goddamn toast! To whoever croaked the rat lady. If a fucking rat can’t make it on its own, it should be extinct.”

“To extinction!” his little pal said. “To the law of the fucking jungle.”

Thorn took hold of his Budweiser by its long neck and backhanded the Hun with it across the eyes. Stepped quickly behind him and put his hand on the back of the little guy’s helmet and spiked his face into the bar. The guy with the cue stick took a batter’s stance, edging toward Thorn, choking way up on the cue. Thorn tossed the German helmet underhanded at him, and he swung at it, and Thorn stepped in, did a punter’s quick kick into the guy’s crotch. Got a reasonable hang time. The bartender had ducked out of sight.

Out in the lot Thorn thought briefly of dominoing their Harleys. But no, hell, he didn’t want to get guys like that riled up. No telling what they’d do.

He drove slowly, south down U.S. 1, trying to hold back the quiver that had worked into his hands. Every exhalation a sigh. Saying “goddamn” to himself, stringing them together, a dozen goddamns.

That four-lane highway ran like a spine through the center of the island. There were spots where the island was so narrow you could stand in the center of the road and lob a rock to either the ocean or the Florida Bay. Hear it plop.

Right now it all looked wretched to Thorn. There were just a few survivors of the old days, wood-frame houses with tin roofs and cisterns and cupolas, stranded between the Pizza Huts and skin diving shops and the shell stores that had mounds of queen conchs piled out front. A haze from deep-fat fryers hung over the cluster of franchise restaurants. Even the steady sea breezes couldn’t seem to wash the air of that smell.

There was no town of Key Largo, no grid of streets, no courthouse square, no park with statues. Not even any sidewalks. Just this hot four-lane strip of road with a rutted bicycle path running along its edge. Gas stations, mobile home parks, auto body shops, mom-and-pop motels, and bait stores with sailfish painted on their outside walls, billboard after billboard urging drivers forward through the tackiness to Key West.

There was still an occasional empty lot, an open space that gave a sudden panorama of the Florida Bay or Atlantic. A flash of fifteen shades of blue and green water, then more cinderblock buildings selling flood insurance and hamburgers.

The island widened in several areas to a few hundred yards, where neighborhoods of concrete-block stilt houses had been built. But there was no need for a Key Largo architectural preservation league, no historical society. What the hurricane of ’35 hadn’t scraped away, the bulldozers were working on.

Everywhere there were shadows where there had never been shadows before. The oldest things still standing for a hundred miles around were the people. And all but a handful of them were new arrivals, retirees so used to the shopping centers and vast parking lots back home, in fact, so proud of their malls, so quick to describe to the Conchs what luxuries the rest of America was enjoying that defectors had been showing up everywhere.

Even some of Kate’s oldest friends had begun to desert her. Kmarts, not wood rats. Tired after all these years of driving up to Miami to do any serious shopping. Tired of being pioneers. Thorn thought for that moment of turning the Cadillac north and driving till the car gave out. Living there, wherever it turned out to be. Better to live where hope was long gone than stay here and see it all unravel, stage by stage.

But he drove home, sat in the Cadillac for a while, then walked out to the end of his dock. Just stood there, breathing, not looking at anything. It was ten when Sarah finally arrived.

Thorn stayed out on the dock and watched her get out of her red Trans Am. Watched how she was walking, how she was dressed, how her hair was. Was this how drug smugglers looked? He couldn’t tell anything. She had on brown corduroy jeans, a dark short-sleeved blouse, tennis shoes. Sunglasses. Her walk, her hair said nothing.

She came out on the dock, stood in front of him, and asked him how he was, and he said OK. He said he needed a drink.

“Think I should come along?”

After a while of looking at her, he replied that he did, he thought she should come along. He let her take his hand as they walked to her car.

Thorn told her to drive to Vacation Island. It was the resort Kate and Dr. Bill had bought a share of thirty years before. For years there had only been a few frame cottages. It had been a convenient place for the Truman family to dock their boat, a place to go on weekends to get out of the house. Sugarman’s foster mother, a white woman Kate’s age, had been one of the owners and had brought Sugarman every weekend to fish and boat and snorkel with the other children,

Sarah parked and waited while Thorn sat, looking out the windshield.

“Why here?” she asked.

“I need to do something,” Thorn said.

Thorn led her around the island, pointing out where the cottages had once been, the boat ramp, the volleyball field, the croquet course. The long picnic tables and stone barbecue pit where the five or six families had gathered and cooked their fish and potatoes and had sung their songs.

One of the partners in Vacation Island had been a lawyer, and it’d been his idea to build a small motel off at one end, something that wouldn’t be much trouble, would generate a little cash. A place for relatives to stay when they visited. Tax advantages.

The rest of it happened so gradually no one ever objected. Some mangroves uprooted here, a little fill added over there. Another building. Some clearing of shrub. Thorn would always remember one exquisite fall day, the first cool weather of the year, breaking into the seventies. He had walked past a furious volleyball game out to his skiff and had not seen a person he knew. The invasion complete, outnumbered at last.

Now Vacation Island was completely public. Boat slips, three bars, a four-story motel, two casual restaurants, one fancy, a snack bar, and a row of specialty boutiques. It had also become in the last few years, to Kate’s dismay, a popular local trolling spot for singles.

He led Sarah behind a bikini boutique to a shed of weathered gray pine. The planks on its side warped, its corrugated tin roof rusted over. It was the last structure remaining from those days. Ten years before, when Thorn had given up guiding tourists across the flats, he’d stored his skiff and battered Evinrude there.

Thorn found the key on his key ring. He opened the padlock and swung the heavy double doors open and stood looking into the shadowy room. The motor was mounted on a sawhorse in the middle of the shed. Thorn went across to it and set his hand on the cover.

“I got to get this going,” he said to her.

Standing with the sunlight behind her, making a fine nimbus around her hair, she nodded that she understood.

First, he cleaned and oiled the tools he’d left behind in the workbench, and then he tore apart the thirty-horse motor. He scraped corrosion off the power heads with a putty knife. He sent Sarah out for replacement seals and gaskets. He disassembled the carburetor, soaked its parts in gasoline, and rebuilt it. All the rubber rings were rotted. It needed new points, plugs. When Sarah returned with the gaskets, he sent her out again for another list of parts. The cylinders were OK, a little scarred, but OK. He polished the rings.

Later Sarah stood in the doorway of the shed, watching him work, bringing him a fresh beer every half hour. He drained a trickle of black oil out of the lower unit, flushed it out. The gears were still rust-free, flywheel still moved.

Around six o’clock he wrestled the engine onto the skiff and hauled it on the trailer by hand to the docks. With Sarah and a few of the mates from the deep-sea yachts watching, Thorn poured a sip of gasoline into the carburetor and cranked the Evinrude. On the fifth crank it caught and belched blue smoke, and the propeller began to swim lazily through the water. A couple of the mates clapped.

“Good work, Thorn!” one of them called out.

Thorn stood up in the skiff, breathing fast, staring around him.

“You all right?” asked Sarah.

He said he was. But he could see from her face and in the eyes of the others that no one believed that. He looked down slowly at his right hand. It was clenched in the shape of a stiff claw, as though he were still gripping his wrench.

“Maybe a drink would help,” he said. “Four drinks.”

“It’s been known to.”

“Ten drinks,” Thorn said.

They went to the Tiki Bar on the top floor of the motel. Sarah ordered iced tea. Budweiser for Thorn. She asked him for whatever facts he had, and he told her everything: the dope on board; the rape; the fact that Kate had been yellowtailing. He watched her for signs and saw nothing. Afterward she went silent, just sat there watching Thorn in his greasy clothes, accepting condolences from the bartender, waitresses, just drinking her iced tea.