Bitter End (Seychelle Sullivan #3) (7 page)

Zale’s eyebrows drew together, wrinkling his forehead, and he stared at the CD player. When the next song started, and the simple, clear guitar notes floated out of the sound system, the boy looked up and nodded at B. J. “Red Hot Chili Peppers,” he said as he started bouncing his index finger on his jeans-covered leg. Then he lifted his hand and pointed at the CD player. “ ‘Under the Bridge,’ ” he said just before the vocals started.

B. J. nodded and the two of them sat there, eyes narrowed and heads barely bobbing as we drove the new high span over the Seventeenth Street Causeway that gave us a view of the growing high-rises over in the city’s center. I could count seven construction cranes on the horizon. The makeshift offices had been the first little boxes to go up on the construction sites behind the big signs, artists’ renderings of condos with a river view starting at $700,000.00. Where did they expect to find the people to fill these steel towers? I thought of the Pontus offices, their model tower project encased in Plexiglas, and the protesters down below us. Now with Nick gone, would the momentum still be there to add two more? The Chili Peppers sang of loneliness in the city, and I wondered if each of us was hearing a different song.

The crunching sound of tires on stone woke me from a daydream. The three of us in B. J.’s truck had not spoken a word on the drive across town to River Bend Boatyard. I’d been thinking about the time I had tried to teach Molly how to row a dinghy. We were probably no more than seven years old, and we’d taken my dad’s pram out into the middle of the canal. I was crouched in the stern and Molly was on the seat at the oars, but she couldn’t get them both to bite at the same time and we were going in circles. I couldn’t help laughing, and she was getting furious with me. She splashed me with an oar, then I picked up the old milk-jug bailer and soaked her a good one in return. Soon we were giggling so hard Molly fell off the thwart seat, and we both kicked our feet up in the air. At that point Red looked out the window to check on us in the canal and saw a dinghy with two pairs of waggling legs. He came roaring out to see what all the foolishness was about, made us tie the dinghy up properly, and beached me for a week. That’s what he called it when I wasn’t allowed aboard any boats, and it was punishment in the extreme.

“Time to get to work,” B. J. said when he’d parked the El Camino in front of the boatyard office.

As we walked through the dozens of boats propped up in the yard, I hoped we could avoid seeing the
Mykonos
, but when
Gorda
came into view, right where I’d left her on the outside dock, I saw the fat stern of the Hatteras between us and her. Rather than move her around the basin to the other side where the long-term jobs were stored, they’d propped her up right outside the big work shed, between two large sailboats. I felt Zale stiffen beside me, and I knew he had seen her, too. Both props and shafts had already been removed. But even from this distance, I could see the dark shadow on the enclosure around the flybridge. No one had bothered to clean off the plastic—or maybe they weren’t allowed to go up on the bridge, as the boat and her decks were still draped with yellow crime scene tape.

I made a show of looking at my watch. “Hey, we’d better get a move on,” I said. “The tide’s turned, and I’d like to get this ketch downriver before dark. Come on, guys.”

Zale looked back over his shoulder once, just before climbing aboard
Gorda
. He was a smart kid. I figured he knew what he was looking at.

One of the things about B. J. and me is that we’ve worked together so long we hardly have to say anything on a job. Which is a good thing because on that chilly afternoon, none of us felt like talking. We ran
Gorda
across the river from one boatyard to the other and docked at Summerfield. I went up to the office to do the paperwork, and B. J. stayed back to rig the ketch and get her ready for the trip downriver. Once we got under way, Zale positioned himself up on the bow of the tug. B. J. was aboard our tow, and I was stuck in the wheelhouse. In the twisting confines of the New River, I couldn’t leave the helm for a minute.

The trip down the New River from Summerfield Boatworks to Bahia Mar Marina generally took less than an hour, but this afternoon it felt much longer. Though the day had grown warmer around midday, as the sun dipped low in the west at only 5:00 on this February afternoon, the wind blowing off the water seemed to bite right through our clothes.

Just past the high-rise condo canyon that downtown Fort Lauderdale had become, we entered the section of river with the really pricey waterfront homes. Many of the original homes had been built between 1920 and 1950, and they were small Florida bungalows with barrel-tile roofs and jalousie windows. In the past decade the nouveau riche stars and dot-commers had started buying them up, tearing them down, and building minimansions in their places, with faux Spanish styling or cheesy attempts at New England-style architecture complete with widow’s walks. Amid the new construction, you could still spot the well-maintained older homes nestled back amid oak trees older than the town, homes that maintained the old Florida charm with porches and little chimneys that often puffed wood smoke on cold winter days like this.

Just as interesting as the homes were the boats docked along the riverbanks. From hailing ports like Cannes, Grand Cayman, and Recife, most of the yachts were huge custom powerboats valued in the millions. One of my favorites, though, was a perfectly maintained 1920s yawl with a white trunk cabin and gleaming varnished masts. She was docked in front of a house of the same vintage. The boat’s name,
Annie
, my mother’s name, was stenciled in graceful black paint and gold leaf on her stern. I always admired it when I passed. Though the boat was in far better condition than the home, neither seemed to have been updated or changed from its original designs.

As we went by the Larsens’ place, Abaco recognized the sound of my tug’s engine, crawled out from under her favorite bougainvillea bush, and jumped around barking at us. When Zale turned his face to look back at the begging dog, I saw that his cheeks and nose were glowing bright red from the cold. I waved him into the deckhouse.

“You look like you’re freezing out there. Why don’t you come in here and warm up?”

The noise of the tug’s Caterpillar engine made conversation difficult, but you could hear as long as the other person was willing to shout.

“I like it out there on the bow. It’s always my favorite spot on a boat.”

“Me, too,” I said. “It’s a good place to go to feel alone. A good place to think.”

He nodded, but didn’t go back out to his post on the bow. It was not until we were entering the Intracoastal Waterway at the mouth of the New River and turning northeast toward Bahia Mar that he spoke again. I’d idled the engine down a bit and the noise level was kinder to conversation.

“Are you religious?” he asked.

I had been reaching for the VHF microphone to hail the harbormaster at Bahia Mar, but I paused with my arm in the air and stared at him for a second. “Not in the sense of any kind of organized religion,” I said, dodging the real question as I usually did, and lifting the microphone out of its holder. “Why do you ask?”

“Well, you know my mom,” he said, climbing onto the wheelhouse bunk and crossing his legs Indian-style. Sitting like that, he looked even younger. Much too young to be juggling these issues. “She never really took me to any church when I was growing up. The only one who ever talked to me about stuff like that was my great-grandmother. ”

I hailed the harbormaster to ask where he wanted us to dock, then said, “I remember meeting Molly’s grandmother. She’s quite a character.”

“Yeah? You know Gramma Josie?”

“When I was little she used to scare me.”

“How come?”

“She was so different, so foreign. Molly’s mom, your grandmother, she grew up on the Seminole reservation, but she never really wanted to talk about Indian stuff. But when Gramma Josie came, that was
all
she talked about. I guess I’d seen too many movies where Indians were bad guys.”

“Nah, Gramma Josie’s cool. She lives in this neat house out at Big Cypress, in the Everglades. Mom and I used to go out there for the weekend sometimes and stay with her. It was fun. When I’d go outside and play with other kids out there, they always thought it was a big deal that my gramma was Josie Tigertail. I guess she’s like an old medicine woman in the tribe or something. She’s kinda’ hard to understand because she doesn’t speak English too good. She says her language is called Creek. She used to tell me these stories about animals and stuff, and they would, like, have secret meanings to teach kids to be good and all.”

“Do you remember any of them?”

“Sure. Mostly, though, I was thinking about when she used to talk about God and heaven. She called God the Breath Maker, and she said when people died they went to a place called Skyland.”

“I don’t ever remember her talking about that to your mom and me.”

“Gramma Josie calls me an ‘old soul.’ She says I’m too serious for a kid my age. I can’t help it. I’m interested in stuff like that. I read a lot. She once told me that the Seminoles believed that they had to leave a place if a person died there because their spirit would haunt that place. Then, the spirit wouldn’t go on to join the Breath Maker. And she said when you buried someone, you always had to bury their possessions with them so they could use them in the afterlife.”

I nodded. I wanted to comfort him, to tell him that I was sure his dad was happily residing up in Skyland, but I had too many of my own questions on that count. Besides, even if I believed in heaven, I thought it might be a stretch to think they’d let Nick in.

It was dark by the time we started back up the river in
Gorda
after docking the ketch at Bahia Mar and turning the keys and the responsibility over to her new owner. The guy had looked ashen-faced after Zale and I had thrown off the towlines, setting B. J. and the new ketch adrift. I’d docked
Gorda
on the T-pier, and then he’d watched as B. J. started the engine and brought his fifty-seven-footer in so easily that Zale and I were able to reach up and grab the dock lines neatly coiled on her bow.

The three of us were huddled in
Gorda
’s deckhouse now, headed home, just waiting for the warm lights of the Larsens’ place to appear around the next bend. B. J. came up behind me and reached around to put his hands in the pockets of my sweatshirt. I leaned back into his chest, rested my head in the hollow of his neck, and pressed my butt against him. The instant rise in my temperature was due more to the thrumming I felt inside than to the mere combination of our body heat. With his hands still inside my sweatshirt pockets, he began tracing small circles on the front of my jeans. We had a couple hundred feet of clear water between us and the next channel marker, so I let go of the wheel and turned into his arms. Over his shoulder, I saw Zale sitting on the wheelhouse bunk, wrapped in a blanket, his head lowered, and I heard him sniffling in the darkness. I nodded my head and B. J. looked over, too. I didn’t know if it was the cold making the kid’s nose run or if he was crying again. I saw in B. J.’s eyes that he felt as I did—either way, we were helpless to cure it.

Once we’d tied up the tug at my dock and I’d shut down the engine, the night seemed eerily quiet. As is typical the day after a cold front comes through, the night was dry and cold, with temperatures in the forties already and headed for the thirties by morning. The unusual lack of humidity made the night air crisp and clear, and the stars and the lights of the city all seemed to pierce the black night with uncharacteristic clarity.

As the three of us walked up the path toward my cottage with Abaco bounding ahead, Zale stopped dead, staring upward. Without looking at me or B. J., he asked, “Where do you think he is right now?”

I didn’t know what to say to that. I tried not to let on how often I wondered that same question about all the people I’d loved and lost.

“Do you think he still
is
?” Zale looked at me, the starlight reflecting off his wire-rimmed glasses. “I mean, is my dad up there somewhere in the heavens—like Gramma Josie says, in Skyland—watching me? Is he still, you know, my dad?”

B. J. slid in between us and put his arms over both our shoulders. He hugged Zale especially tight. “Hey kid, there’s no way we can really know for sure about that, is there? We humans are always asking that question, the question of another life, of whether there is such a thing as an afterlife. But you know what I think? You know that feeling inside you right now? That hurt, that sense of loss?”

Zale nodded.

“That’s your dad settling in right here.” He took the arm off my shoulder and patted Zale on the belly. “You’ll always have that feeling there when you think about him. You’ll always carry that part of him with you.”

“I miss him so much already,” he said in a choked whisper. Then he wrapped his thin arms around his midsection, shrugged off B. J.’s embrace, and stepped off the path. He swung his torso back and forth as though he were suffering from a bellyache. Then, turning to us, he asked, “Why?” The tears rushed back and his voice cracked with emotion as he struggled to say between sobs, “Why would somebody shoot my dad?”

VII

When I pulled my Jeep to the curb in front of Molly’s house, I thought at first that she wasn’t home. The house looked dark and there wasn’t any sign of a car parked in the drive. We climbed out and B. J. lifted the seat so that Zale could get out of the Jeep’s backseat, and as soon as the kid’s sneakers hit the pavement, he trotted up the walk, opened the front door, and disappeared inside. He’d left the front door standing open, and from inside I could hear faint strains of Norah Jones’s voice coming from the stereo. I recognized the song “I Don’t Know Why.”

I looked at B. J. “Think we ought to go in?”

“Yeah, just to make sure his mom’s there and the kid’s safe. And to close the front door, anyway.”

“She’s there. You could go close the door.”