SHADOW OVER CEDAR KEY (11 page)

Brandy was aware of darkness now outside. The street was silent except for the rustle of palm fronds against a window and the hollow echo of footsteps on the sidewalk.

“Marcia waited too long,” Miss Fleur said at last. “She couldn’t get to the school house with the rest of us. She managed to cling to the rafters when the roof went. The house was completely flooded, but the baby—well, the wind tore her out of her mother’s arms.”

She paused to collect herself, and then her voice became almost a whisper. “I’ve known Marcia since she came to Cedar Key as a bride. After that day, she was never the same. The child’s death was doubly sad because Marcia couldn’t have any more children. She needed an operation after the first little Cara was born.”

“But she and her husband did become foster parents?”

“Oh, she tried to compensate for the loss.” Miss Fleur shook her head. “They took in several children, and she began painting water colors. Both good therapy, we all thought.” She clasped her hands together and spread them apart. “But when she found that little girl during Hurricane Agnes, that changed everything for her.”

“In June of 1972?”

“I’m sure you’ve heard the story,” Miss Fleur continued in a more cheerful tone. “It was a miracle. That night Marcia was on her way to the school when she found that baby alone. The little thing was almost blown away.” Again the expressive hands moved together. “She and Mr. Waters didn’t live on the Gulf themselves anymore, but Marcia was helping a friend with her house on the water. Marcia just picked up that child, put her in her car, and brought her to the school house wrapped in an old coat she had on the back seat. Got there before the full hurricane hit. She came running in drenched. I’ll never forget. She was half out of her mind. She kept saying over and over, ‘The hurricane brought her back!’—like she’d found their lost baby.” She glanced over at the newspapers. “That would be late that month.”

Brandy flipped to a June 20, 1972, newspaper and scanned it. The Russia-Afghanistan War and Viet Nam were front page news. Early on the twentieth the hurricane raked Cedar Key with winds, flood tides, and tornadoes. Once again the town bore the brunt. High water marooned it by mid-day. The main streets were knee-deep in tides higher than any since 1935. Beach cottages crumbled, their roofs snatched off, their rooms awash in waist-deep water.

“For days afterward the floors of houses along the water were still layered with mud,” Miss Fleur said.

“Did most people wait it out again at the school house?”

“Most went to the school house. I did. It’s a wonder Marcia made it that time, too. A smaller group stayed at the Island Hotel. It always rides out any storm. Has all these years. But they all had to pitch in and shore up the basement with sandbags.”

“Mr. MacGill wasn’t here then?”

“He was in town. He’d bought some Gulf side cottages. Those that weren’t swept away were so badly damaged, they had to be torn down. He bought the hotel later that year.” She rose, joined Brandy at the panel, and pointed with one unsteady finger at the Island Hotel photograph. “A photographer at the hotel took those pictures. Folks couldn’t get out of town after the storm for two days. Some were in Cedar Key looking for work. There were oyster and fish buyers here, too. They all took turns with the sandbags.”

A tiny light flicked on in Brandy’s brain. “So a lot of people went into the basement that night?”

Miss Fleur nodded. “That’s what I hear. You can see the owner there, the large woman at the desk, and some of the locals, but there were others we never knew.” Brandy counted three disheveled women and six men, standing or sitting in the lobby. They all looked surprised. Obviously, it was a candid shot.

“What was going on along the Gulf that night, before the full hurricane came ashore?”

“Some fellows drove up First Street and around Goose Cove and the bayous, picking up folks that needed to get away from the Gulf. Some fellows you wouldn’t expect to help, like Truck Thompson. He was about eighteen then, and wild as a March hare.”

“And he came to the school house?”

“Quite late.”

“Mr. MacGill. Where was he that night?”

Miss Fleur dimpled. “Such a nice man. He settled here quite broken after his wife passed away, but he’s been so good for the community.” Her eyes brightened. Angus MacGill had become a popular figure in an insular society. “They say he made a small fortune in shopping centers up north. He’d been here on holiday. When he lost his wife, he sold everything and moved to Cedar Key. That would’ve been in the early sixties. The night of the storm he came to the school house, too, but late. He lost his own property, but he was out trying to help others.

“And Marcia Waters?”

“She finally found her husband at the school, too. There were hundreds of us. No one recognized the child, not then nor later.”

Time was passing. There was John to think of. Brandy moved away from the panels and paused before the door. The lights were out in the art gallery across the street, where on one darkened wall Marcia’s drawing of a tiny figure cowered before a giant wave.

“You’ve been so kind,” Brandy said. “One last thing. I heard that a skeleton was found in the hotel cistern a year after Hurricane Agnes. Do you know anything about that?”

A pained look crossed the white brow. “A dreadful mystery, that skeleton. No one had used the cistern for years. I think the water and sewer board required some work on the plumbing, a city inspection, something like that. There’d been talk of another storm on the way, and the workers pulled the sandbags out of the cistern while they were there, to have them ready, you know.”

“Mr. MacGill didn’t order the work?”

“No. That is, it was mandated by the town. Constantly have to work on maintenance in an old building like that. When they removed the sandbags, they found the bones.” She shuddered. “Once in a while people had gone down there for tools and things, and they’d complained of a foul odor. But you know, old basements are likely to smell bad. They’d use poisons to kill rats, and people thought the rats died in crawl spaces and in the walls.”

“What happened when the workers found the skeleton?”

“The medical examiner said nasty blows to the head killed the woman. No one in our area was missing, and they never could find out who she was. Folks figured some of the migrants stranded in the storm must’ve gotten in a fight. A few women were among them. They could’ve taken the body down the outside steps. Folks parked their cars there to get away from the water on Second Street. The police found the rear door hadn’t been locked.”

“Cara Waters seems to think the skeleton might be her mother’s.”

“Oh, dear, I’ve heard that. So sad. Marcia’s been a wonderful mother to her. She’s put this town on the map in the art world and with nature lovers, too. The new child was so good for Marcia. I’ll tell you the truth. None of us wanted that child identified and taken away.” Brandy wondered if that was why MacGill hadn’t cooperated with Rossi. Of course, he could have an even more powerful motive.

“With that new baby, Marcia was like a woman resurrected.”

Brandy turned the knob. “But Cara wants to leave Cedar Key now. She wants to go to college, to study photography. Surely if she left like that, Marcia wouldn’t be losing her.”

Miss Fleur drew herself up, her soft features congealed in a teacher’s look of disapproval. “That’s where you’d be much mistaken. When young people leave Cedar Key, they don’t come back.”

CHAPTER 9
 

In the hotel lobby Brandy was relieved to see John and MacGill behind the counter, bending over an architectural rendering of the old hotel, above them the print of Edinburgh castle’s bleak walls. She murmured, “Be back soon,” and hurried on toward the kitchen.

When she pushed open the door, Cara was waiting, dressed for work in a crisp mauve uniform, her hair bound by a white head band and fastened back with a clip. Yet in those wide eyes Brandy saw apprehension, even fear. Cara led her into a large kitchen, past gleaming metal cabinets and a long wooden table where a cook in a white apron was cutting up garnishes and setting out seasoning.

Cara’s slender fingers moved to her face, then flitted back to her waist and locked together. “I want you to see the cistern. It was built to store water. In the fifties people were afraid of an atomic war. Of course, it was never used.”

Never used except on one fatal night, Brandy thought. “If you write this story,” Cara added, “you’ll need to describe it. I won’t go down with you. When I went to work here, I learned that I couldn’t. I get that feeling, like in nightmares, that I can’t breathe.”

The stout cook turned to wash carrots and celery at the sink. “Dead right about that.” She wagged a plump finger at Cara, a smile on her ruddy face. “Mr. MacGill sent her down for mineral spirits the first night she was here. Found she’d fainted dead away when we finally went to look for her.” The large woman shook her head. “We never sent that one down in the basement again.”

Cara led Brandy into a small adjoining room with a washer and dryer and halted before the wooden steps that descended into the gloom. “Notice the door from the back parking area,” she said, handing Brandy a large flashlight. Brandy remembered that it had been unlocked the night of Hurricane Agnes. “The cistern’s in a separate space in the rear. Back in the fifties the owner planned to make it a bomb shelter.”

Shining the light before her, Brandy shuffled down the stairs into the stale odor of dank soil. She wasn’t sure what she expected to see. After all, the skeleton had been gone for nineteen years. The front of the basement had a cement floor and, she was surprised to discover, was at ground level. Before her a pair of plank doors opened into the back yard. She pushed them apart and noticed a garbage shed to the right. Next to it, a yellow metal fire escape served as a rear exit for the upper floors. In the front section, broken chairs and a ladder leaned against the thick tabby wall of oyster shell, limestone, and sand.

Brandy turned instead toward the back of the staircase and threw the flashlight beam on a narrow passageway that opened into the other room. Stooping, she inched between concrete block partitions into a lower, mustier area with a dirt floor. Against one wall lay old bags of insulation and a broken lamp. Sand bags had been tumbled along another, ready for the next flood. But the most prominent feature was the concrete block cistern, its exterior walls about three feet high, and far below, a fetid pool of greenish water. Beside it lay the scattered boards of what must once have been a lid.

Staring into the silent depths, Brandy felt the full horror of what must have happened here—the rear door banging open, in the darkness outside the mounting roar of rain and wind, a figure stumbling through the back passage, perhaps following the faint beam of a flashlight, a limp woman’s body hoisted over a shoulder, or worse, dragged behind, the groan of the cistern lid wrenched aside, the body dumped, the sickening splash as it plunged into the dirty water. Sand bags hauled then in a panic across the damp soil, pitched down into the blackness, the lid shoved in place.

Maybe the murder weapon thrown in the cistern, too, or stuffed in a crevice or covered with dirt. Then the figure groping its way through the darkened basement into the yard, or darting up the kitchen stairs to join the refugees huddled in the hotel lobby and lounge. Who would notice when a hurricane was thrashing its way ashore? Who would miss those sand bags when the others were layered against the rising water?

Brandy found herself shaking, overcome with the closeness, the sour smell, the feel of evil. How easy to pull the lid aside, to push an inert body down into this wet crypt. Within her flickered a current of alarm. How easy, even yet, if the victim probed secret places. Turning, she hurried back through the passage way to the stairs and up into the light.

In the shadows of the cramped kitchen hallway, Brandy met MacGill, motionless as a rock, scowling like a medieval defender of Edinburgh Castle.

* * * *

At six-forty-five John and Brandy selected a dining room table, John once more facing the thicket of palmettos beside the verandah. He fidgeted for a few minutes with his menu, then set it down and leaned across the mauve tablecloth, his eyes searching hers.

“Look, we’ve made a spotty first half of the weekend, but let’s not spoil the rest.” He reached for her hand. “I know you’re excited about this new story. I should be patient. But let’s save tonight and tomorrow for each other.”

Brandy nodded and smiled back. “That’s a sweet and generous thought.” She truly wanted to seize this time with him. Still, over his shoulder she could not help watching Jeremiah Strong stride into the lobby and see MacGill come to meet him. The detective bent forward, shook hands, and motioned toward the hall. Brandy shifted her gaze to John and tried to block out the scene in the lobby, while part of her brain recalled Rossi’s sealed room and the deputies who had passed her on the stairs, carrying a kit.

John lifted her fingers to his lips, then signaled Cara, who had finished setting plates on the next table. “Something special from the bar, I think,” he said, when Cara stood beside him, pencil poised over her note pad. “Maybe a special wine? or a Margarita?”

Brandy felt warmth in his brown eyes as she settled on Zinfandel and chicken du jour. Perhaps they could recapture the romantic spell of last night. Then, remembering Jeremiah Strong and Cara’s Shell Mound photograph, she laid a hand on Cara’s arm as she stood by their table. “You need to see the gentleman with Mr. MacGill. He’s the detective investigating Mr. Rossi. He was asking questions about Shell Mound.” Cara stared at her, uncomprehending. Apparently she hadn’t heard about the private detective’s body. “You need to let him know you were there, taking photographs.”

Cara shrugged delicate shoulders and pocketed her pad. “I’ll tell him I was trying for a good print of the horned owl. I’m not telling him I was ghost hunting, and don’t you.”

John raised his dark eyebrows. “And are you still?”

Cara looked past him at the palmettos, a shapeless mass in the half light. “Not now. The tropical storm’s stalled south of Naples. It could move north.” She paused before she left their table and added, her voice low, “Although another sighting was reported last night. A fisherman near the mouth of the Suwannee saw the round light.”