Wreckers' Key (35 page)

Mounds of blood-soaked towels littered the cabin sole. On the opposite side of the salon, the blanket B.J. had used to cover Catalina’s legs now covered her whole body. Her knees were no longer drawn up as they had been when I had last seen her. Now she was stretched out beneath the blanket that peaked over her toes and then stretched nearly smooth to the point of her nose. It took my exhausted brain several seconds to comprehend why the blanket covered her face.

“Oh no, God no.” I rushed to the settee. When I leaned against the cushion, I realized it was soaked with blood. I pulled back the blanket. Her long dark lashes curled against the smooth cocoa-colored skin of her cheeks. I pressed my cheek to hers. “Cat, no, not you.” I took her shoulders in my hands and started shaking her. “No, not now, you can’t go.”

Her body shook like a flaccid bag of bones. Her head rolled to one side. I pulled back my hands and stared at her, my vision blurred by the tears. Slowly I pulled the blanket up and re-covered her face.

I crossed to the opposite settee and slumped on the cushion next to my lover. His eyes remained closed. I watched his chest rising and falling with his breaths, and I reached out and touched his cheek.

He turned his head away as though burned by my touch. Finally, he sat up, pulling the bundle to his chest. For the first time he opened his eyes and looked down into the folds of the blanket.

With one arm he held the tiny bundle toward me. There in the shadows I saw blinking eyes and a tiny mouth opening and closing. “She told me we’re to call him Nestor.”

XXXII

Faith gave us the keys to the place. She said the house belonged to some relatives of her second husband and that she had many happy memories of escaping there when the stresses and strains of their daily lives had grown too heavy to bear. The house, located on Lower Matecumbe Key, had been built in the 1960s in the shape of an octagon up on stilts, and because the place stood over six feet off the ground, it was possible to park several cars in the space beneath. Part of the interior was broken up into smaller bedrooms, but most of the floor plan consisted of the great room that was part living room and part kitchen. The view overlooking Florida Bay was spectacular on those clear blustery March days, but when we’d first arrived after all those hours with cops and in court, seeing judges, making statements, dragging out records, we’d been just too exhausted to notice.

We’d sailed Faith’s boat
Annie
down, again at her insistence, cutting through the Channel Five Bridge and turning back north to make the short tack up around the point and into the bay off the house. The lovely old boat now bobbed in the boat basin, tied to the concrete seawall, and B.J. was out there daily keeping himself busy with new coats for her brightwork. He wasn’t talking much these days, but at least he was keeping himself busy and out in the sunshine.

Once we’d arrived and moved into the house, neither of us went down below inside
Annie
's cabin if we could avoid it. In the main salon, behind the dining settee, there were two white cardboard boxes that I knew we would need to deal with eventually, but we had plenty of time. We were having trouble enough dealing with the living, much less the dead.

So much had changed in the last month. Melvin Burke had dropped his lawsuit when Jeannie met him in the halls of the Broward County Courthouse, where he was wearing a cervical collar and walking with a cane. She showed him the photos I had taken, but the coup de grace was the fact that she had met up with his daughter in the ladies’ room and learned some very specific details about his boat—and how he had intentionally sunk her—in the exchange.

The deaths of Nestor Frias and Quentin Hazell were reclassified as homicides, the cases closed with the demise of the perpetrator. Ben’s boats were both seized by the government, as was Arlen’s house on the canal, but by the time the cops got there, Sparky and his little boat were long gone. They haven’t found him since. I’d like to think that he’s holed up somewhere out in the back-country in the Ten Thousand Islands waiting for the mess to blow over, but it’s just as likely he put his boat on autopilot, set an easterly course, and sailed off on a last cruise to nowhere. I didn’t expect to ever learn the outcome of that one. Arlen would remain one of life’s mysteries.

The authorities discovered that Neville Pinder was in the United States on a tourist visa that had expired twelve years earlier, and the government promptly deported him. Since I knew he wasn’t welcome back home in Man O’ War, I wondered what poor little cay had wound up inheriting Neville.

And that left me and B.J. After what felt like weeks of talking into microphones, telling the story over and over again, they cleared B.J. in both deaths. In those first couple of days, when we were still in Key West, they hadn’t allowed us to talk to each other very much, and I worried about him. Then Jeannie arrived, and once she’d swept in and taken over on the legal front, things started to go a little easier for us.

On our second day back in Fort Lauderdale, when Jeannie and I had been sitting in the hallway outside another office in the county courthouse, she told me she wanted to talk to me about all the consequences of Ben Baker’s actions. She wanted to know how I was feeling, about where my future was headed.

Jeannie had, in her inimitable way, learned a great deal about the Bakers via courthouse and waterfront gossip. She’d learned that Ben had been the one offering to buy
Gorda
and that he did indeed own a black Lincoln Navigator. He had inherited a trust fund worth more than two million when his mother died, so for Ben, the whole GPS wrecking business had never been about the money.

As happens in many cities that are really just big small towns, Junior Baker had always gotten special treatment from the Fort Lauderdale police when they were called out to his house. He had been one of the jolly boys who ate breakfast at the Floridian with the mayor and the chamber president and the local developers. If he lost his temper with the wife and kid, the cops usually just drove him around for a while to calm him down and then took him back home to sleep it off. No one except me had ever seen any hint of what Ben’s mother had done, where she had turned for solace when her husband left the house.

“You know what’s strange?” Jeannie said, not really expecting an answer. “Even as modern as we supposedly are today, as open and tolerant, males who are victims of maternal sexual abuse still have the toughest time finding help. It’s one of our last and deepest taboos. I’ve never been one to excuse criminal behavior because somebody had a bad childhood—there are just too many survivors who make it through and are okay. But from what I’ve heard was going on in that house, that poor kid didn’t have much of a chance. I guess his mother’s death was the thing that nudged him over the edge.”

“Jeannie, it seems like being a mother should be something that comes naturally. Look at you. You make it look so easy when you’re with your sons. I mean, where did you learn this stuff? How do you know what to do? And why do so many of the rest of us screw it up so bad?”
 

“Sey, I don’t think it’s a question of mothering taking all that much talent. Really, I don’t. It’s a question of what kind of heart you’ve got. You know, there are good people and there are bad people in this world. The real heart of goodness is found in the ability to love unconditionally. To love someone else so much that you would sacrifice your life for his happiness. That’s all it takes to be a good mother. And you already know how to do that. Women like Ben’s mama? They only know how to think of themselves.” She patted my knee. “Honey, that will never be your problem.”

She only had to ask me once where I stood on the whole issue of motherhood and baby Nestor, and she wasn’t the least bit surprised by my response.

I was right to worry about B.J. It didn’t matter which he saw as worse, the taking of a life or the failing to save a life: he bore the responsibility for both like a coat of nails. There was no more lovemaking or laughter in our lives. He wouldn’t talk, he barely ate. And I was the one who sailed
Annie
down to the Keys while B.J. slept on a settee belowdecks. Once inside the five-bedroom house, he’d chosen his room and come out only to work on
Annie.

The third week in March, Jeannie called to say that my brother Pit was back from his delivery and Maddy had agreed to bring everyone down to the Keys. She told me that the time had come for us to open our doors to the world, hold the wake for those we’d lost, and move on with our lives. When I told B.J. they were coming, he unloaded some gear from the sailboat, including the two boxes of ashes, and then motored
Annie
out and anchored off the dock.

That afternoon, Maddy’s sportfishing boat, the
Lady Jane,
arrived with Jeannie, Molly, Zale, Pit, and all the gang. They had brought a ton of food and CDs and soon the place was rocking with music and laughter. Maddy volunteered to take us all out to an island he knew on Florida Bay on the
Lady Jane
the next day. The time had come for Catalina and Nestor to find their last home.

As they settled into the big house, Jeannie walked out on the dock with me. She was carrying a special basket she had brought just for me. I’d been waiting for them all morning, pacing the dock, watching to see if B.J. was going to raise his head or show any interest in me or the rest of the world. There had been no sign of him.

“Seychelle Sullivan,” she said. “You never cease to amaze me.”

“Ah, Jeannie, come on.”

She indicated the
Annie
resting at anchor. “I would have expected him to be the strong one and you to fall apart. Not the other way around.”

“No way. I don’t think any of us will ever fully understand what that day cost him. He’s lost himself. It’s been so hard standing by, feeling helpless to make him better. He was the guy who caught mosquitoes and let them go outside the house. To have taken a human life—even if it was to protect the lives of himself and those he loved— cost him more than you or I can ever imagine. And then to lose his first patient. Jeannie, I’m so afraid I’ll never get him back.”

“You know, there’s still a long legal road to walk here.”
 

“Yeah, but I can never thank you enough for helping make this happen. He may not be getting the best deal offered, but it’s what she wanted.”

I climbed down the dock ladder and stepped into the dory. She handed me the basket, and I set it carefully in the bottom of the dink. I sat on the thwart, fitted the oars into the locks, and looked out at the
Annie
sitting at anchor not more than fifty feet off the dock. “Don’t worry Jeannie. I’ll take good care of him.”

I rapped my knuckles on the hull. “Hey, sailor, you want to give me a hand?” I hollered.

B.J. appeared in the cockpit looking like he’d been fast asleep. His long black hair hung in dull tangles around his unshaven face. “Come on,” he said. “Just leave me alone.”

“Sorry, I need a hand to get our passenger aboard.” He ran a tired hand through his hair and looked more annoyed than puzzled. “What are you talking about?”

I lifted the basket and held it out to him. “B.J., this is Nestor. You two have already met, but I think it’s time you got better acquainted.”

THE END

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WRECKERS’ KEY

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Bonus Material

Read the first chapters from
 

CIRCLE OF BONES: A CARIBBEAN THRILLER

From CIRCLE OF BONES: A CARIBBEAN THRILLER

PROLOGUE

Cherbourg, France

November 19, 2008

The man lingered in the dark alley, the bill of his hat pointing through the gray veil of rain that poured off the café’s awning. From her seat inside the window, Riley blew at the steam rising off her
café au lait
and watched him from the corner of her eye. He rocked, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. Rain dribbled from the baseball cap jutting out from under his hood. She couldn’t see his face, but she looked down anyway. She knew it in her gut. He was watching her.
 

Her chest got that dizzy, hollow feeling as her heart rate climbed. She concentrated on slowing her breathing as she had been trained to do. She tried to sip her coffee with nonchalance but grimaced at the taste of it. Either the French had forgotten how to make coffee, or her mouth was dry from nerves. She’d thought she was over all this.
 

When she glanced up again, the man had disappeared. Riley brushed the hair back from her eyes and pressed her nose to the window. She checked the street in both directions. Her breath fogged the glass, but there was no sign of him. Closing her eyes for a moment, she rested her hot forehead against the cool glass. She was getting as bad as Cole. Perhaps paranoia was contagious, she thought, and that made her sit back in her chair and shake her head.