Dead Last (23 page)

April stood up and went into the pantry and returned with a sports page.

Using the blue swatch of cloth, he drew the pinking shears from his pocket and cut a circle around an article about the Marlins’ latest lousy season.

“Where’d you get those?”

“Your sewing room.”

“Why have you been sneaking around my house?”

He held the finished circle of newsprint up to the light, cocking it left and right. But no matter how he tilted the page, he could see no imperfections in the saw-blade edge. He opened the scissors and peered at the jagged blade. No dings anywhere. He set the pinking shears down, feeling a tingle of relief.

“Are these the only pinking shears in the house?”

“Now stop right there.”

“I’ll explain it to you later. I promise.”

“Who the hell are you, Thorn?”

“Just a guy, trying to figure a few things out.”

“But that’s not true, is it? You’re not just a guy. You’re not some Key Largo beach bum who’s wandered onto the scene.”

“And where’s that coming from?”

“How do you know a man like Frank Sheffield?”

“It’s a long story. We go back a few years.”

“You’re some kind of freelance detective, aren’t you?”

“Hardly.”

“Yes, you are, Thorn. Maybe you don’t even know you are, or you don’t want to acknowledge it to yourself, I don’t know. But I did some investigating of my own last night, went on the Web, made a few calls to my friends in the media and law enforcement. I have a lot of contacts in South Florida, Thorn. And your name produced some interesting responses. This isn’t the first time you’ve been involved with violence and crime, is it?”

“What difference does it make?”

“I want to know who you are. Who I have staying in my house.”

She took a sip of coffee. With her elbows on the table she held the mug in both hands and looked over the top of it at Thorn.

“Admit it. You’re not some beach bum.”

Thorn brushed a few crumbs off the edge of the table into his open hand, then got up and carried them to the sink and dusted them off. He came back and stood behind his chair, holding on to the top rail.

“Look, I’m an ordinary guy. Over the years I’ve had a bad string of luck. From time to time I’ve had to set a few things right. Help people put their lives back in balance. That’s all. A couple of times, bad things happened in my vicinity. But whatever I’ve done, I’ve always had good intentions.”

“And that’s how you got to know the special agent in charge of the Miami field office of the FBI, from putting things back in balance?”

He shrugged.

“Is that good enough, April?”

“For now,” she said, “I guess it’ll have to do.”

“So,” he said, “are there any other pinking shears in the house?”

“It’s possible. You’ll have to ask Mother. That’s her domain.”

Thorn pulled the chair out and sat.

She took another sip of coffee and set the mug aside. Eyes straying to the window, where the birds were raining seeds and husks down on the Siamese who continued to watch from the rail. Ever patient, ever ready.

“And your other questions?”

Thorn asked her if she’d mentioned to anyone that he and Buddha were staying in the Waterway Lodge.

She thought about it for a few seconds and shook her head. Nobody.

“You’re sure?”

“Absolutely. Now what else?”

“I need to look at your files,” Thorn said. “Recent obituaries.”

She rose and led him back down the hall and into her office. She sat in a wooden swivel chair, inched it up to an ancient rolltop.

“You want to go through all the obits? There’s years of them.”

“Mondays only. Go back a few weeks.”

“How many weeks?”

“Try six. What date would that be?”

“Middle of June.”

“Start there.”

April pulled open the drawer on the right side of the rolltop, which was full of file folders. She thumbed through them and extracted a black one.

“My collected works.”

She opened it on her desk and Thorn came up to her chair, looking over her shoulder as she paged through them. Then paged through them a second time, then turned a look of dismay on Thorn.

“Is this some kind of practical joke?”

“What?”

“When you were searching my house, did you tamper with these?”

“What’s wrong?”

“Some are missing. From July, one from June.”

“You’re sure?”

Once more she worked through them slowly, double-checking the dates, going all the way to the end of the fat folder.

“Maybe you misfiled them.”

“Everything I write goes in here. I’m obsessive about it. All in order.”

“What’s not there?”

“Four from July, one from June. Five in all.”

“Including Rusty’s?”

“Hers isn’t here, that’s right. What the hell is this?”

“Give me a minute. I’ll be right back. And while I’m gone, think about who had access to this file in the last four or five weeks. Everybody, every single person who could’ve been in this room, opened that drawer, and taken something without your knowledge. Okay?”

He left her doing the grim calculations and walked out to the rental car, retrieved the evidence bag, locked the car again, and carried the Ziploc back inside.

She was sitting in an upholstered chair when he returned.

“Gus Dollimore,” she said. “The boys, and Dee Dee. And Mother, of course. I’m not exactly a social butterfly. Mother and I don’t have dinner parties. The boys stop by after work now and then, and Gus has been with them several times lately. He always travels alone, and Dee Dee usually tags along with Sawyer. They have a beer or a glass of wine alongside the river, hang around for a while, talk about the show, blow off steam. A few times they’ve stayed longer, cooked dinner, wandered around the house.

“So there’s them. Then there’s Jeff Matheson.”

“The pest control guy.”

She squinted at the wall, then blinked hard as if banishing a thought.

“That’s right.”

“I met him this morning coming out of a crawl space. He had a bag full of dead rats. Is that normal, him coming so early?”

“He works odd hours. Nothing like a normal schedule. For the last few months we’ve had a terrible rat problem, the place is just infested, and Jeff’s been putting out traps and trying to seal all the entry points. Not an easy job in this rambling old house. Off and on since May he’s had the run of the place.

“And there was a plumber for a few jobs, but I was with him most of the time he was working. Beyond that, no one.”

“Jeff, the rat guy, you trust him?”

A look he couldn’t read whisked across her face.

“Jeff’s a good kid. He went to high school with the boys. He practically grew up in this house. He’s down to earth, an animal nerd. Yes, I trust him completely.”

“What’s the name of his company?”

“Miami Humane Wildlife Removal.”

“And what about the others during that time period? You’re confident about them?”

“Do I trust my own boys? Would they go through my files, take something without asking? No way in hell.”

“You’re sure? Maybe doing research for the show, something like that?”

“They’d ask permission. I’m certain.”

“Gus and Dee Dee? Have they ever come into this room?”

Her mouth was partly open, but she couldn’t bring herself to speak.

“Why would someone steal obits from my files? They’re in the paper. Anyone could buy a paper.”

“Breadcrumbs,” he said.

“And what’s that mean?”

“Somebody’s thought this through very carefully. I think they’re trying to misdirect things.”

April stared up at the bookshelves.

“Tell me something,” Thorn said. “If you saw one of those missing obituaries, would you be able to say for sure it was from your files? Do you make marks on them? Date them, anything like that?”

She shook her head.

“Just cut them out and file them away.”

Thorn opened the Ziploc bag and drew out Rusty’s obituary and handed it to April.

She looked at it, touched the jagged saw-blade edge, then turned it over and saw his name in black ink.

The flush in her cheeks bloomed a deep crimson. With such a high-strung sympathetic nervous system, April Moss would never hack it as a liar.

“You wrote that?”

She swallowed and her eyes flicked around the room as if searching for a better answer than what she had.

“I did, yes,” she said. “You were on my mind. I wrote your name. Yes, I’m guilty of that.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “I understand.”

“Do you, Thorn? Do you really?”

He sloughed off the question.

“How’d you decide to do Rusty’s obit? Would you have done it if you and I had never met?”

“Maybe,” she said.

She was staring down at Thorn’s boat shoes.

“No, that’s not true,” she said. “I wrote about her because her story touched me. But the reason it jumped out of the pile was because of you and your connection to her. I was thinking about you, imagining your life down in the Keys, wondering how you were doing, how you were dealing with her loss. Of course I was remembering the night we had together, and the next day. Is that what you wanted to hear?”

“I wasn’t angling for anything.”

She drew herself up, planting her feet on the floor, her back straight, chin lifted. Holding her body with great care as if trying not to spill some precarious weight balanced on her shoulders.

“I was just curious,” he said. “I thought it might’ve played a part. But that doesn’t matter. It was very kind of you to write about her. You did a beautiful job. It was touching. A lot of Rusty’s friends were pleased to see her life and accomplishments described with such clarity and feeling. Count me as one of those. So, thank you. Thank you very much.”

April’s eyes were full of things she wanted to say, but she held on to them and instead drew a long, slow breath like a diver about to go deep.

“Since we’re being personal,” he said, “I keep wondering what was going on between you and Buddha at the bar. That weird back-and-forth.”

April closed her eyes and drew another careful breath.

“What is it?”

Gradually the tightness in April’s face relaxed into a helpless smile. She looked up at a high place on the wall. Another look passed across her face, one that Thorn believed he recognized. A milder version of the expression Rusty had worn toward the end, when she was bracing herself and summoning strength. A woman bravely accepting the inevitable.

April said, “Sheriff Hilton was a very perceptive lady.”

“About what?”

“I believe she had it all figured out. My dark secret.”

“I’m not following you,” Thorn said.

“When you showed up at the Floridian, Garvey saw it right away. She doesn’t understand what the big deal is. Nothing is ever a big deal to Mother. She has no dark secrets. The woman is incapable of dark secrets. Everything that crosses her mind instantly comes tripping off her tongue. She’s always been that way. Born without a censor.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“I wish I could be more like Garvey. No filters, no worries about propriety, unconcerned what people think. But no, I’m not her. I’ve always tried very hard to guard my reputation, to please others, to behave in a proper manner. You, on the other hand, you seem to be cut from the same cloth as Garvey. No filters, not particularly concerned about anyone’s opinion.”

“You’re trying to tell me something, but it’s catching in your throat.”

“See, that’s what I mean. You’re perceptive. Maybe not as much as your young friend, but for a man you’re quite sensitive.”

Thorn was quiet. Something had come loose inside April Moss; one stone in an ancient rock pile that had been securely balanced had been dislodged, and the delicate equilibrium disturbed. A landslide looming.

“What are we talking about, April?”

“We’re talking about what your friend Buddha was saying to me, and what I was saying back. A woman’s secret code.”

“Okay.”

“She saw what anybody might have seen if they were paying attention.”

“And that was what?”

She rolled her bottom lip under her upper teeth and sucked it for a second, then swallowed the hardness in her throat, and looked into Thorn’s eyes, making some last reckoning before she went on.

“What, April? What could anybody have seen?”

“The striking resemblance between you and Sawyer and Flynn, your sons.”

At that moment there was utter silence in the house, like the quiet that comes after some crash of thunder has exploded in the sky, when every twittering bird goes still, when all the insects cease their chirring, the wind drops away to nothing, and the faint ticking of every clock halts in every room.

He heard the shush of his own blood in his ears, and then the slow restarting of the world, its mad scramble, its bric-a-brac, its jumble of books on shelves and papers and flowerpots and the rumbling of some appliance as it switched on again after a short sleep. Thorn looked around this pleasant room, seeing it with a sudden vividness as if he’d just been transported here from some faraway place. Startled to find himself with this woman, in this study, on this July morning with everything changed.

“You tell the bozo yet?”

Garvey was in the doorway, braced inside an aluminum walker, wearing gray slacks and a bright red T-shirt, with her dark hair braided in two pigtails.

“Hey, handsome stranger, you missed all the fun. Shitty diapers, fistfights in the living room, broken teeth, screaming nightmares, braces and the mumps and chicken pox. All that never-ending teenage angst. You missed the drama and the sulking, then you come sweeping in just in time for dessert. If you weren’t such an irresistible dreamboat, I’d kick your sorry ass straight out the front door myself.”

NINETEEN

THE GRANDFATHER CLOCK IN THE
corner chimed nine times, then went back to counting off the seconds. Thorn stood near the front window of the study, looking out at Boxley, who was giving a thorough crotch sniff to Frank Sheffield. Sheffield patted the dog’s head and tolerated the nosing with a faraway smile.