Night Moves (10 page)

“You really don’t need to do this,” I said, meaning clean my scratch wounds with the Betadine she was dripping onto a gauze pad, probably counting each drop.

Cressa made a shushing sound and continued. “He says people call him
the guru
sometimes.”

Among other things,
I thought, but said, “Yeah. It seems to fit him.”

“Guru,”
the woman said again, musing. “Must be true because he’s opened my mind to a lot of things. I was ready for a change, don’t get me wrong. But if I hadn’t’ve met him, well . . . let’s just say I’m way ahead of schedule when it comes to getting to where I want to go. He reads to me—he’s a beautiful writer. We meditate, we laugh, and he nails me on some of the totally bullshit lies I try to tell myself. Tomlinson’s more of a teacher . . . but fun, with absolutely zero inhibitions—I can’t tell you how refreshing that is for someone like me. And I don’t want to see him get hurt. Or you either.”

She attempted eye contact, adding, “It makes you uncomfortable, doesn’t it? Talking about yourself.”

No, she was wrong. Even so, I allowed myself to be distracted by the rumble of a boat idling into the marina basin—Captain Alex returning from a dinner trip to Useppa Island or ’Tween Waters. Just in time, though, I noticed Cressa reaching for the bandage on my arm and slapped a hand over it before she saw the teeth marks beneath.

“Good god!” she said, giving me a look. Surprise, a hint of fear, then approval—an odd mix.

“I just changed it,” I explained. “Barnacle scrapes take awhile. It’ll be fine in another week.”

The woman took an uneasy step back and trashed the gauze pad as if I’d soiled it, then selected another. I watched her fold the pad into a perfect square, then dab Betadine on it, a precise circle of red. “I think my husband knows,” she said, finally getting to it. “I think he has someone watching me.”

I waited, letting her explain in her own way.

“His name is Robert—Robby. I was fond of him once, but ten years of marriage has turned our age difference into light-years. The younger man!” She laughed, an older woman amused by her own naivety. “I keep expecting him to grow up, but it’s not going to happen. He refuses to divorce. Now it’s getting ugly—only I didn’t know it was ugly until I started putting things together.”

“Tomlinson said something about him being the nonviolent type,” I replied.

“I still believe that. But I’m starting to wonder. Robby and his family are in the development business—beachfront condos and shopping malls. Mostly in the Vineyard and Buzzard’s Bay, but a few projects in Florida, too. See, we signed a prenuptial—”

“Where in Florida?” I asked.

Cressa didn’t like being interrupted. “I’m trying to explain my situation. Can you save the interrogation for later?”

“I’m trying to understand,” I replied. “Background would be helpful. Their projects in Florida, what kind?”

“Rob doesn’t exactly include me in the company’s business. I don’t know . . . they do gated communities . . . some low-cost housing if Tallahassee offers the right perks, and they speculate on real estate, which has gone to hell in the last few years. That’s what I was telling you—we signed a prenuptial agreement. I didn’t want to, but Rob—well, his father, Robert Senior, actually—he insisted. Which didn’t turn out the way they expected, because the prenup figures we agreed on don’t fluctuate with the housing market. That’s why his family’s so against a divorce.”

I nodded the way people do when they’re impatient with the obvious, saying, “
Money
,
of course.” Then winced when she pressed the gauze to my face and scrubbed harder than was necessary.

“Cat scratches are dangerous,” she reminded me. “If I don’t get deep enough, you could end up in the hospital. They’re carriers, you know. A type of fever.”

I wondered if there was a message hidden between the lines but resigned myself to her nursing. The woman was thorough. While she worked on me, she addressed the dangers of cat scratch fever, but soon returned to the thread.

“Rob never calls between ten and eleven—e
ver.
That’s when he meets with his online fantasy-league guys, and he’s a sports junkie. A tornado could land, a burglar could break into our house at ten-fifteen, it wouldn’t matter. But last night, around nine, I don’t know why, I turned off the GPS thingee on my cell just to see what would happen. And an hour later, my phone rings. Rob. It was ten-thirty.”

I acknowledged the significance with pursed lips.

“Tomlinson and I were on his boat playing Beach Boys cassettes. Maybe I shouldn’t have answered my cell, but I was thinking, you know, an emergency, like someone in his family had died. But it was nothing like that. Rob told me he called because he’d had a ‘premonition.’ He was worried I was hurt or in trouble. That’s what he said, anyway. Trust me, men like my husband don’t have premonitions. Especially not on the nights they’re drafting their fantasy baseball teams.”

“That was it, no details? How long did you talk?”

“He was checking up on me, that’s what I think. It still gives me goose bumps, the feeling I got”—Cressa held out an arm to prove it—“like he was watching me. Could see me right through the phone. His tone was weird, too. Suspicious . . . passive-aggressive. My husband
knew
I was with another man, I’m sure of it.”

I glanced out the window toward A-Dock, where the no-name Kevlar Stiletto was moored. Then said, “The guy’s ten years younger than you, but has no problem with his wife spending part of every month in Florida?”

“Nine years,” she corrected. The woman was adding salve to my scratch marks, but gentler now. “I’m not getting into our personal life. He’s not gay, but sometimes men get injuries playing sports . . . or there’s a chemical imbalance. I’ve stopped wondering or blaming myself. So let’s just say he prefers fantasy sports to
fucking
.”

It wasn’t just the profanity, it was the angry emphasis that caused me to look up. But the woman was still focused on her work and carried on. “Robby might be laid-back, but Robert Senior isn’t. Robby has a younger brother, too, who’s crazy—I mean that literally—and seems to be getting crazier. The Arturo family is very powerful in some circles”—she let it float there a moment—“if you know what I mean.”

I understood. She was insinuating a popular fiction about Italians and an underworld organization that had been dismantled by the Justice Department decades ago.

“No kidding?” I said. “So the crazy brother or his dad might have Tomlinson killed because you’re having an affair? A debt of honor? Swimming with the fishes?”

“Make jokes, if you want, but I’m scared. Something’s going on. I’ve never given Rob or his father reason to be suspicious—until the last month or so.” In response to my expression, she snapped, “That’s the truth!”

“If you say so,” I replied, then looked at my watch. “It’s getting late. Full day tomorrow.” I was thinking,
I need some ice on this knee
.

Still standing, the woman picked up her wine and took a first sip, her mind working at something. After several seconds, she said, “You can be an ass. Tomlinson said that, too.”

I wasn’t going to deny it, plus I like assertive women. Somehow she’d sensed this and was still trying to win me over.
Why?

“What time do you leave?”

I replied, “For where?”

“
Tomorrow.
You’re flying to the Everglades in that damn seaplane again. Tomlinson told me all about it—those five Bermuda Triangle planes from World War Two. Then, next week, it’s some cleanup project in Boca Grande. More flying, more diving. It worries me. Couldn’t you two just play it safe for a while?”

I got to my feet and went to the fridge. “Why not relax for a few minutes, enjoy your wine. Then I’ll drive you home.”

“Especially diving that goddamn pass!” she said.

The cleanup project, she meant. Every winter, scuba volunteers sweep the bottom of Boca Grande Pass, a saltwater canyon that separates two barrier islands, Gasparilla and Cayo Costa. Annually, groups collect more than a ton of lead fishing weights, hooks, and miles of monofilament line, much of it residue from fishing tournaments. What I saw would be a useful follow-up to the project I’d done there.

I wrapped ice in a towel, asking, “You scuba dive?”

The woman shook her head, still preoccupied. “No . . . Robby’s brother and his father are into fishing. I went out with them twice in Boca Grande Pass, but never again. It’s a circus with all those boats flying around at full speed. Even on the charter boat they hired.”

Once again, the lady had earned my attention. I wondered if I should press it and ask if the Arturo males fished the big-money tournaments. Before I could decide, she returned to what was actually on her mind, insisting, “It is
true
,
you know.”

She’d lost me again. “What?”

“I’ve never been unfaithful! Ten years living like a nun and not one single slip. That’s what’s so maddening about you, Ford. I’m the private type. I come here—which wasn’t easy to begin with—and I tell you something honestly. Your reaction? Like it’s no big deal! And that I’m lying to somehow hide my lustful ways. Please don’t expect me to feel guilty for finally having the nerve to—”

“I don’t,” I said. Then added, “That was unfair,” even though I wasn’t persuaded.

Cressa Arturo touched my shoulder with tentative fingers—a request for permission, it seemed—then softened her tone to share another secret. “You’re forgiven,” she said. “The truth is, I am worried . . . but mostly glad. If I’d only
known
what freedom feels like . . . so now I’m making up for lost time.”

Her meaning was obvious enough for all but the naive and slow-witted, which is why I had to bumble along, saying, “With Tomlinson, you mean.”

My answer was delivered via green eyes, an acetylene look that left no room for doubt. “Tomlinson and I are friends and nothing’s going to change that. The chemistry, though . . . let’s just say the pheromone wallop wasn’t the same as the one I just experienced on your porch when we shook hands.”

My second impression of the married mistress was now tied to my own internal struggle:

Take advantage of this woman, just to even the score with Tomlinson, and you are scum, Ford. Scum.

8

CRESSA’S VISIT WAS UNSETTLING, BUT I THOUGHT I
could move it to the back of my mind at least while Dan, Tomlinson, and I resumed our search for the missing Avengers the next day. As it turned out, though, she wasn’t my only visitor that weekend—and this one set off alarm bells.

We weren’t leaving until later in the day, so Sunday morning I was attempting to capture on video something I’d never witnessed—a southern stingray giving birth—when a man called from the boardwalk gate, “Dr. Ford? You have a moment?”

No, I did not and said so. It didn’t deter him. He opened the gate and came toward the lab. “I heard through the grapevine that you and your partners have an interest in Flight 19. Maybe even found wreckage? I think we might be able to help each other.”

Another fast look: a genial smile on a big man in his twenties, the successful outdoorsy type, in slacks, waxed boating shoes, and a silver Rolex, but still hip enough to wear shaggy hair tied in a ponytail. Just a hint of accent, enough of a scar showing on his forehead to suggest hockey or boxing, and weight room muscles but without the bulk—a weekend athlete who stayed in shape.

“Not now,” I told him. With my digital camera, I gestured to the shallow water below. The stingray was a meter wide, a diamond-shaped slab of brown muscle, with a reptilian tail and undulating wings for lateral fins. It was behaving erratically, spouting water from spiracle vents aside its big shark eyes, gliding in short bursts from one end of the netting to the other as if pacing.

“Is it sick?” My visitor sounded concerned.

“I’m busy,” I replied. His accent was Boston, I decided, but unusual in that it seemed forced. Grew up there but moved, I guessed . . . or wealthy enough to have attended private school in the area for a few years.

“I’ve seen thousands of those things,” he told me. “At night, their eyes glow if you hit them with a light.”

A phenomenon caused by
tapetum lucidum
in an animal’s eyes, but all I said was, “Feeding time is when they come in shallow. They’re common here.”

“So . . . how’s this stingray different?” A moment later, though, the man was saying “Good boy, it’s okay,” then asked, “What kind of dog’s that?”

I looked up. The retriever was at the top of the steps, staring, eyes like two yellow lasers focused on this stranger. If a message was being communicated, the content was neutral, but my visitor read it as a threat.

“Does he bite?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t
know
?”

“He’s a stray,” I said and signaled the dog with a hand, palm out, that commanded
Stop there!

A stray that obeys hand signals?
If that’s what the man was wondering, the answer was
Yes
.

It was another fun discovery I’d made about the mysterious retriever. Instead of anchoring him with a sit or stay command when he followed me, there was a more tolerant way. Hold up a hand like a traffic cop and a boundary line was created. Since I’d noticed the stingray’s erratic behavior, the upper deck was now the dog’s to roam, but the steps were off-limits. Because of this new arrival, though, the dog was tempted, so I signaled him again, then returned to what I was doing.

“A runaway, huh? That’s why he’s so skinny. I’ve seen lots of chocolate labs, but their coats are different. So he’s probably a mixed breed, you think?”

I was concentrating on the ray: something was happening. So I dropped onto my belly, eye to the camera, and said, “I think it’s starting. Don’t talk while I’m filming.”

The man said,
“Oh . . .”
but caught himself. Then we both watched the stingray float free of the bottom, an envelope of flesh now protruding from its uterine vent.