Quint Mitchell 01 - Matanzas Bay (21 page)

I called his name once more. Still no reply. Frustrated and dripping wet, I decided to call it a night. If it was so damn important he could track me down tomorrow.

Opening the lighthouse door, I peered into the gloom, preparing to dash into the torrential downpour. I only made it to the bottom of the steps when a lightning bolt cracked loudly thirty feet away in the copse of trees behind the lighthouse. “Christ,” I sputtered as my heart jumped into high gear.

I edged along the side of the tower drawn by the lightning bolt. I stepped out into the rain, staring at the dark patch of trees behind the tower, wondering which of them has been struck. We had an old hickory tree in our backyard in Connecticut. I remember how my father had rigged a swing to its branches when my brother came along. He enjoyed that swing for nearly a year before the tree was blasted by lightning during a storm and died soon after.

A squawking noise above me caught my attention. Looking up just as the nightmark flung its ghostly ochre light across the murky sky, I saw a dark form hurtling toward me. Arms outstretched, legs flailing wildly, Clayton Ford Henderson plowed into the ground just a few feet from where I stood.

I gaped from the broken figure crumpled at my feet up to the vacant observation deck and back to Henderson’s body. Henderson’s arms were tucked beneath his body as if he tried to break his fall, and one leg pointed toward his head like a contortionist’s trick.

I edged closer, my Maglite sweeping over him. The left side of his face was imbedded in the soggy dirt. His guayabera shirt, the same one he wore when I last saw him, blossomed with an ever-growing pool of blood spreading out from his body and soaking into the ground below him.

As I bent over Henderson’s body, my imagination conjured the sound of mournful prayers and the gleam of candlelight dancing in the trees. His body seemed to twitch in the rain, and I half expected him to sit up and quote me another line of poetry. But I knew it was all illusion. Clayton Ford Henderson had written his last poem.

What were his final thoughts? He must have wrestled with inner demons too fierce to live with. Maybe the knowledge of how he’d treated his two children was too much for him to bear. I’d never know.

A wave of guilt swamped over me. If I hadn’t gone to the city commission meeting I would have received Henderson’s call. If only I’d been here earlier, I might have prevented this.

I’m not sure how long I knelt over his body, the rain pounding my back, before I came to my senses and realized I should call the police to report Henderson’s death. Thinking about the police finding the fastidious old poet in such a state made me want to clean the mud and blood from his face and comb his hair. Instead I walked toward my car to retrieve my cell phone.

Near my car, still absorbed in Henderson’s horrific fall, something caused me to turn around. My eyesight was nearly perfect in good conditions, but the gloomy night and drenching rain provided zero visibility. Squinting into the shadows, I thought I saw a figure dash behind the lighthouse and disappear into the tree line. Or did I? Was my imagination playing tricks on me again?

I rubbed the rain from my eyes, remembering my earlier vision of candlelight and ghostly moans. “Hey,” I yelled after the apparition. No one answered, and I ran toward the lighthouse.

I hit a muddy patch of grass and one foot slid out from under me. I tottered on one leg momentarily trying to regain my balance before my legs split in different directions and I fell on my ass in a puddle. Getting to my feet, I rushed to the brick wall and stared into the darkness. Nothing. No sound except the rain. No one here except one sodden private eye and the ruined body of Clayton Ford Henderson.

TWENTY-EIGHT

The police black and white arrived ten minutes after my call followed quickly by the now familiar white SUV. Sergeant Buck Marrano always seemed available when the Bat Signal went up. He looked at me curiously as I told him about Henderson’s message, and then seeing the old man drop to his death. He listened to the phone message, and made a few notes.

“This is becoming a habit for you,” Marrano said.

“What is?”

“Finding dead people. I hope it’s a habit you can break because I’m getting tired of it.”

“You and me both. But I know one thing for sure.”

“What’s that?”

“You can’t blame this on Poe. Not unless he knows the secret of walking through walls.”

“No problem there. Unless we find anything to the contrary, this looks like a clear case of suicide.”

The storm hadn’t lost any of its intensity, and we were standing under the back porch of the Lighthouse Museum while waiting for the Crime Scene Unit from the St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office to arrive. One of the deputies had placed a blue tarp over Henderson’s body and the surrounding area, but the rain had surely washed away any meaningful trace evidence.

I’d already told the sergeant I thought I’d seen someone running away. “Maybe it’s not suicide,” I said.

Marrano’s dubious expression made it clear he’d already made up his mind. “From what I’ve seen, everything points to suicide. I’m not saying you dreamed up this mystery man, but you know the conditions are less than ideal, and you admit your imagination may have been playing tricks on you.” Marrano cut his eyes away from me dismissively and stared into the woods.

“I was pretty shook up,” I agreed, “but it sure looked like someone running into the woods.”

Marrano returned his gaze to me and nodded the way a pre-occupied father might after hearing his four-year-old tell a fanciful story about an imaginary friend. “Looked like someone? Maybe it was Henderson’s ghost.”

My jaw muscles tightened and I barked out, “Why the hell would I make up something like that?”

“Hey, I didn’t mean to upset you.” Marrano flipped to the page in his notebook where he’d written my earlier statement. “Let’s go over it again. You say you were heading to your car to call the police when you
thought you heard
a sound like someone running and
maybe you saw
a guy run into the woods?”

“That’s right.” I’d walked him through it twice already, showing him the path the man took.

“How far away were you?”

I shifted my eyes toward the path leading from the lighthouse to the parking lot. “About twenty yards.”

“Uh huh. Then you ran after him, slipped and fell. And he just disappeared into the woods back there.”

“Yeah.”

“And you can’t describe him.”

“I told you it happened so quickly I only got a glimpse of him. Dark clothes, maybe a ball cap.”

Marrano looked up from his notes. “Here’s what we know for sure. It’s darker than crap back there. It’s raining like a sunnuvabitch, and you were probably still in a state of shock from Henderson nearly hammering you into the ground.”

“So you think I imagined it?”

“I’m saying the mind can play funny tricks on us.” He peered into the dark again, gesturing with his chin toward the spot where I’d seen the man run away. “The thing is that we didn’t find any foot prints and no sign of anyone else up on the observation deck.”

I was too tired to spend the night arguing about it. “Do you need anything else from me?”

Marrano tucked his notebook into an inside pocket of his rain jacket. “I’ll tell you what, Mitchell. Why don’t you sit down while I take care of a few things? Then we’ll go to my office. Maybe you’ll remember something else by then.”

He walked toward the two men who had just arrived wearing yellow rain suits with Crime Scene Unit stenciled on the back. I watched while Marrano reviewed the scene with them, pointing to the top of the lighthouse and then to the misshapen heap beneath the blue tarp that used to be Clayton Henderson.

***

Nearly an hour later, Marrano steered me into the interrogation room at the SAPD. I was still wet, and the temperature in the room had to be in the mid-sixties. I began shivering, and Marrano excused himself. I glanced around the sterile, little room at the observation window and back to the table top. The words
Life sucks
were carved in the corner of the table next to my elbow. Fitting, I thought.

Marrano returned with a cup of coffee and a dry SAPD windbreaker. “Here, this should help. I can’t vouch for the coffee, though, probably’s been sitting there a while.”

“Thanks.” I tasted it and made a face.

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you. There’s something—”

A sharp rap on the door interrupted him.

“Come on in,” Marrano called.

Detective Horgan entered the room carrying a large manila envelope. He was wearing latex gloves. They huddled for a moment, their voices low, before Marrano turned to me. “Detective Horgan’s just returned from Henderson’s house. He found something I think you should see.”

Horgan opened the envelope and with a gloved hand pulled out a slim book with a teal dust jacket.

“
A Flash of Silence
,” I said. “Henderson must have a thousand copies of that book lying around his house. He even gave me one.”

“We found it on the foyer table opened to this page.” Marrano nodded toward Horgan, and the detective opened the book to the title poem.

Giving it a brief glance, I said, “Okay. That’s kind of his trademark poem. No big deal.” “Take another look,” Marrano said.

The second stanza of the poem had been circled in pencil, and in the margin were the words,
no more ticks of the clock left for me—good bye.

“What do you think of that?”

A flurry of confused thoughts flickered through my mind. Maybe he wrote it in a fit of depression. Maybe it was an idea for another poem. Maybe he didn’t write it. “I don’t know. Are you sure it’s his handwriting?”

Horgan and Marrano exchanged glances before the detective answered, “We’ll have to do more tests, of course, but it sure looks like his writing.”

Turning to Horgan, Marrano said, “Thanks, George. I’ll take it from here.”

Horgan returned the book to the envelope, and after he left, Marrano sat in the chair opposite me. He was quiet for a long time, probably waiting for my reaction. When I didn’t say anything, he finally spoke, “You and Henderson were friends, weren’t you?”

“Friends? No, I wouldn’t say that. I met him at Poe’s house a few weeks ago for the first time. They were good friends. Poe and Henderson. Since then I spoke to him twice trying to learn more about Poe’s involvement with this Matanzas Bay project and your brother’s death. That’s about it.”

“You know, as a cop I have to go to these educational workshops from time to time and read stuff about behavioral problems.”

“Is this where I get the mental health lecture?”

Marrano rubbed his eyes and I could see exhaustion on his face. “Hear me out, you might learn something. Suicide’s the eighth leading cause of death in this country and it’s highest in old people.”

“Henderson didn’t strike me as someone who was thinking of killing himself.”

“How many times have you heard friends or relatives say, ‘we didn’t have any idea so-and-so would do something like this?’ That’s the sad part, most of the time they don’t know until it’s too late.”

I remembered what Watts told me about the old man’s mood swings, and how something seemed to be bothering him.

“One other thing that plays into this is alcoholism. Henderson was a boozer, wasn’t he?”

“Yeah, he might have been,” I agreed, “but I don’t think—”

“The suicide rate among alcoholics is three or four times the average.” He let that sink in for a moment before adding, “Everything points to suicide—his state of mind, his drinking, his age. Hell, he even left a suicide note. And he had his own key to the lighthouse.”

This was a side of Marrano I hadn’t seen before. Serious, concerned. “I admit it makes a lot of sense.”

“So maybe your eyes were playing tricks on you and you only thought you saw someone running away.”

The events of the past few hours had taken their toll on me. I felt like an oxygen-deprived diver drifting toward sleep, wanting nothing more than to close my eyes and forget about everything else. With great effort, I replayed the lighthouse scene in my head. The shock of Henderson plunging to the ground. His broken and bleeding body washed by the downpour while I searched for ghosts amidst the lightning strikes. Perhaps Marrano was right and I imagined the whole thing.

I sipped the bitter coffee before saying, “I don’t know, maybe you’re right.”

“Are you aware of anything else that might push him to take his life?”

I’d already told him about dropping by Henderson’s house earlier in the week. I gave him all the details of our final discussion, leaving out Henderson’s tirade about the Marrano family. Now I considered whether to tell the sergeant about Henderson’s early history, the death of his wife, and the abandonment of his twins. But besmirching the dead poet’s reputation seemed petty and pointless.

“Not really. You seem to have dug up all the usual suspects—old age, depression, alcoholism.”

Marrano gazed at me then down at his notes. “What about his call to you? Do you think it might have been a cry for help? Maybe he wanted you to talk him out of it.”

That idea had flashed through my head more than once. I wondered what would have happened if I’d arrived an hour earlier. “Could be,” I said, feeling goose bumps shuttle across my shoulders and down my arms. “Any more coffee?” I pushed the empty cup toward him.

I waited another five minutes before the sergeant returned with two steaming cups. “I made some fresh,” he said, and handed me one of the cups.

I sipped it cautiously. It tasted like it may have been brewed this morning instead of last week. Looking up, I noticed Marrano staring at me.

“I think we can put this thing to bed. Henderson, for whatever reason, obviously jumped.”

I started to protest, but he ignored me. “I want to give you the benefit of the doubt, but your story about a third person just doesn’t hold water. There’s no way it’s anything but a suicide.”

“Maybe someone encouraged him to jump.”

“We’ll see what the coroner says.” He stood and I did the same. Leaving the coffee cup and the windbreaker in the room, I followed Marrano down the narrow hallway past dark and empty offices toward the front entrance. Before we got there, he stopped and leaned against the wall.