Michaela Thompson - Florida Panhandle 02 - Riptide Read online

  Praise for RIPTIDE, a Michaela Thompson Florida Panhandle Mystery :

  “A ripping good yarn… [Thompson] deftly weaves these diverse strands into an exciting tale.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “[Thompson’s] novel—with an imaginative plot, some rousing action, a black-hearted villain, a cute kid, some gently ironic humor, and a heroine who’s appealing without being perfect—is sure to keep readers entertained.”

  —Booklist

  RIPTIDE

  BY

  Michaela Thompson

  booksBnimble Publishing

  New Orleans, La.

  Riptide

  Copyright 1994 by Mickey Friedman

  All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  eBook ISBN: 9781625173805

  Originally published by St. Martin’s Press

  www.booksbnimble.com

  First booksBnimble electronic publication: February, 2014

  Cover by Andy Brown

  Digital Editions (epub and mobi formats) by eBooks By Barb for booknook.biz

  Contents

  Start Reading

  Full Table of Contents

  riptide: n. a tide running against another or others, creating turbulent waters

  —Oxford American Dictionary

  PROLOGUE

  Early-morning fog hung over the bay, dampening the heavy-headed sea oats on the dunes. No birds cried. Milky dull green waves broke and spread with no more noise than water makes slopping in a bucket.

  The lighthouse was set back from the beach, on a gentle rise sketchily covered with scrub palmetto and clumps of coarse grass. Its top was lost in whiteness. Standing at the base of the skeletal metal tower was a man wearing a lightweight windbreaker in a red lumberjack plaid. The man had been standing there a long time, leaning back on one of the structure’s supports, bending a knee to rest first one foot and then the other against it.

  When the muffled drone of an outboard motor reached his ears, the man straightened. He walked toward the beach and stood at the end of the dunes.

  The motor cut off, its cessation intensifying the hush. A moment or two later, the man in the plaid jacket heard splashing. A figure in a hooded black wetsuit came in view, pulling a blue boat with a ragged canvas top through the shallows. The diver beached the boat in the listless surf. His back was turned and he didn’t hear the lumberjack approach. He reached into the boat and pulled out a burlap sack. The sack seemed heavy, and when he placed it on the packed sand, it made a faint clatter. The diver flexed his shoulders and turned to see the lumberjack a few yards away. He stood still on bare feet as the lumberjack came closer.

  The two looked at one another. The diver’s clenching toes dug in the sand. When the lumberjack shifted his weight, the diver could see the gun clipped to the belt of the man’s jeans.

  “Reckon I better have a look in the sack,” the lumberjack said. He stepped forward.

  The diver bent sideways, as if going for the sack, but at the last minute he pulled a paddle out of the boat and swung it at the lumberjack with all his strength.

  The broad part of the paddle caught the lumberjack in the face and knocked him backward, down on the sand. The lumberjack shook his head and blood spurted from his nose. When he tried to sit up, the diver smashed the paddle on the back of his neck. The lumberjack pushed himself sideways into the softly spreading waves. He lurched to his hands and knees, his head hanging, a string of mucus and blood dripping into the water. The diver hit him once again, and as he listed forward, the diver dropped the paddle and pushed the lumberjack’s head down into the swirling water and mushy sand.

  When the lumberjack had stopped struggling, the diver sat back on his haunches. His body was heaving. “Don’t you come at me,” he whispered to the lumberjack’s corpse. “Don’t you come at me.”

  The diver splashed salt water on his face and replaced the heavy sack in the blue boat. He gripped the lumberjack under the arms and hauled him over the side of the boat. The lumberjack flopped into the bottom like a red plaid fish, but heavy and gone already, without gasping and thumping or arching death throes.

  The diver splashed his face again. Blinking rapidly, he turned toward the dunes and saw the old lady.

  She stood skinny and still as an egret, her white hair ruffled on top. She clutched a gray sweater around her. He could feel her accusation moving toward him, sharp and clear.

  The diver glanced at the boat where the lumberjack lay and said, “I didn’t—” But it was no use. “Oh hell,” he said, and surged up the beach toward the old lady.

  She ran faster than he would have credited, her blue-veined legs scissoring, her battered sneakers and crew socks churning through the sand, but of course he caught her. He clasped her shoulders and shook hard, her head jerking back and forth, but still she glared at him, a look so unyielding he got carried away and clipped her a good one with his fist. Her mouth fell open, her eyes turned up, and she fell out of his grasp, disjointed as a handful of toothpicks.

  He hadn’t had more than two seconds to contemplate her sprawled there among wiregrass and dollar weeds when from down the beach he heard a child’s voice, thin and piercing, singing:

  He’s got the whole world

  In ’is hands

  He’s got the whole wide wor-hurld—

  The diver left the old lady where she lay and ran back to the boat. His body was slick with sweat inside his wetsuit. He pushed the boat out, guiding it, scrambling in when the water was thigh-deep. From here, the old lady looked like a log, a pile of seaweed— like nothing at all.

  He found the lumberjack’s boat on the other side of the lighthouse, at the mouth of the slough. The mist was still heavy as he towed it out, the waves curling and falling lazily, buoys looming up and defining themselves as he passed.

  He dumped them out past the shoals. The lumberjack made barely a splash in the dead air as he went over the side. When the diver pulled the plug on the lumberjack’s boat, he stood in it a minute or two, feeling the water start to take it, feeling it start on its long trip down.

  PART ONE

  ONE

  Isabel Anders had been unemployed for two months when the letter arrived. Somehow being fired in March, a cold, mean month in New York but a month when it is reasonable to hope for spring, had seemed an additional cruelty.

  Spring, with its supposed promise of renewal, had arrived late and chill. Isabel monitored it from the window of her apartment while she refined her portfolio and honed her resume. The leaves on the chestnut tree in the garden below unfurled as she made endless follow-up phone calls. The bushy, undisciplined privet became a haze of green, and now Isabel could look down and see it busy with finches and sparrows, tough little New York survivors.

  Unlike, Isabel was beginning to fear, herself.

  Isabel was an artist, or so she fancied on good days, but she had no desire to be a starving artist. For ten years, since shortly after her twenty-fourth birthday, Isabel had been happily and productively employed in the art department of a small publishing house. She had loved every aspect of it— designing books, selecting typefaces, doing jacket illustrations. She had been good at it, too, or so she encouraged herself to believe. Publishing fell on hard times, though, and her employer was not spared. First the fat was cut, and then the lean, and after a while Isabel herself was sliced away.

  During a determinedly manic period right after she was laid off, Isabel made much of welcoming the crippling blow as a
n opportunity. At animated lunches with her former colleagues, she rhapsodized about the projects, long deferred, she would now have time to tackle. “I always wanted to try a children’s book,” she would say. “I started one once, based on a French fairy tale. I can’t wait to get back to it.” Her companions, fearful they might be next to get the chop, cheered her on and picked up the check. The French fairy tale, The Children from the Sea, remained on the closet shelf.

  Some years before, boosted by luck and creative financing, helped mightily by a rare and temporary downturn in the market, Isabel had bought a tiny studio in Greenwich Village. On the top floor of a ramshackle brownstone, the place was all but devoid of storage space, wretchedly inconvenient, the kitchen a converted broom closet, but it had a skylight and oozed charm. It also, and this was the nub of the matter, was extremely expensive. Even in good times Isabel was house-poor, constantly strapped to make her payments. Now unemployed, she was in arrears.

  When she was first cut loose, Isabel had eagerly descended the flights of stairs between her apartment and the mailboxes on the ground floor. In recent weeks, she had become less eager. She had learned that good news, of which she had had precious little, comes by telephone; bad news, of which she had had gracious plenty, comes by mail. She didn’t bother to check the box until 5:30 on the day the letter came.

  The envelope was a businesslike white, the printed return address a law office in St. Elmo, Florida. The blurry gray postmark seemed to be coming toward Isabel through fog, the kind of fog that hung low and smelled like salt and then coalesced and trickled from the porch railing.

  She put the letter from St. Elmo on the bottom of a stack of bills and brochures. A vibration had started in her head. By the time she had climbed to the third floor, it had formed into words: Merrìam is dead.

  She closed the apartment door behind her and opened the envelope.

  Dear Ms. Anders:

  I am sorry to tell you that your aunt, Miss Merriam Anders, recently had an accident and is incapacitated. She is in the hospital here in St. Elmo. As her attorney, I am in the process of making arrangements for her future care.

  I thought perhaps you would like to know.

  Sincerely,

  E. Clemons Davenant

  Attorney-at-Law

  Isabel dropped the letter and the other mail on her dining table. E. Clemons Davenant. Isabel thought she remembered him, sitting on the front porch with Merriam, a tall man with thinning white hair, wearing a seersucker suit and fanning himself with a straw hat.

  Isabel had made an effort. She had sent Christmas cards, a note now and again, but she had gotten very little response. Some gulfs couldn’t be bridged.

  Your aunt, Miss Merriam Anders, recently had an accident and is incapacitated. Isabel went and stood at the window. No doubt as a rebuke to Isabel, Mr. Davenant had been stingy with information.

  Well, Isabel had been rebuked by people more expert at it than E. Clemons Davenant. Merriam herself, for one. Rebuking Isabel had been one of Merriam’s most frequent activities.

  So Merriam wasn’t dead. It would have been easier if she were, Isabel caught herself thinking. After a brief flush of shame, she stood by the thought. It would have been easier. Below in the garden, birds fluttered in the privet. The sound of their quarrel drifted up through the open windows.

  ***

  Isabel’s lover, Zan, was in town. That night, they went out for barbecue. Zan, the most European of Eurobusinessmen, loved everything he considered authentically American, and that included barbecue. He was the most pro-United States person Isabel had ever known. His uncritical fervor had led to many heated arguments during the years of their disjointed and improbable affair.

  Zan’s job for a multinational conglomerate brought him to New York from his base in Paris for several days a month. He and Isabel had met when Zan took Isabel and his daughter, one of Isabel’s art school classmates, to a Yankees game. Although Zan was twenty-five years older and a couple of inches shorter than Isabel, their mutual attraction had been so explosive it had taken Isabel several years to wonder whether seeing a married man every now and then, and no other men at all, was a healthy format for her love life.

  Naturally, she had decided it was not. She made efforts to meet more suitable men, and had some success, but Zan had staying power, and she was comfortable with him. Besides, he could never be hers. For Isabel, this had been an argument in his favor.

  Zan was sixty now. His salt-and-pepper hair was completely white at the temples. Isabel was no longer consumed with lust at the sight of him, but she was almost always glad to see him. Lust could still blaze up, too, if the conditions were right.

  This evening, they weren’t right. Isabel was thinking about Merriam and the letter from E. Clemons Davenant. Zan seemed distracted, too. They had eaten in relative silence. When Isabel finally asked Zan what was wrong he said, “Elena isn’t well.”

  Isabel sat back. Elena was Zan’s wife, and Zan almost never mentioned her. If he was telling her Elena wasn’t well, Elena had more than a head cold. “I’m sorry.”

  Zan bent over his coffee cup. “It’s serious, I’m afraid.”

  “I’m sorry,” Isabel repeated.

  Steam from Zan’s coffee swirled toward his face. He looked careworn and old. “It isn’t good for me to leave her,” he said. “I’ve had to ask for a transfer— a job that won’t require me to travel.”

  There it was. Although she had always known it wouldn’t last forever, and indeed never wanted it to, Isabel had a moment of raw panic when she wanted to grab and cling, to beg Zan to tell her what she was going to do, having already lost her job and now losing him.

  She conquered the urge. Zan was holding her hand, saying how much their relationship had meant to him. She responded warmly, with similar sentiments. In a surprisingly short time, there was nothing left to say. Soon they were walking up Bleecker Street toward Isabel’s apartment.

  Isabel had told Zan about the letter. Zan was endlessly fascinated by Isabel’s childhood years at Cape St. Elmo with Merriam. He had claimed to want to visit the northwest Florida panhandle some day, listening eagerly to her descriptions of swamps and pine woods, wide white beaches and barrier islands. “Will you go to Florida to visit your aunt?” he now asked.

  “I hadn’t thought about it. We didn’t exactly part on good terms,” Isabel said.

  Zan, in his way, was a great believer in family ties. “I thought perhaps since she’s ill—”

  “To go would be hypocritical,” Isabel said. “She never tried to communicate with me. Why should I pretend?”

  He put his arm around her shoulders. “I’m sorry you’re upset.”

  “I’m not upset.”

  They walked on. The sidewalk glowed dully under the streetlights. “I can’t even afford the airfare,” Isabel said after a minute. “Even if I could, there’s no reason for me to go.”

  Back in her apartment, Isabel poured two glasses of cognac. She and Zan slipped their shoes off. This had been their routine for years. Tonight, the comforting ritual was suffused with sadness. Isabel sat on her end of the sofa, her feet tucked under her.

  “Any luck finding a job?” Zan asked.

  She shook her head.

  He asked a few questions about her financial situation. She answered reluctantly. Outside, a car alarm whooped.

  Zan sipped his cognac. “I can help you, Isabel.”

  “Help me how?”

  “Money. I can lend you money. I can make the payments on this apartment, if you like, until you’re able to take them over again.”

  A broad road was opening in front of her. If Isabel traveled it, everything would be changed. “No, thanks, Zan.”

  “Please think it over first. I’d be happy to do it.”

  “No, thanks. Really.” Isabel put down her glass. “I’ve got a plan,” she said. She did have a plan. She’d just this minute thought of it. “I’ll find a tenant. I’ll sublet this place and go live cheaper somewhere
else for a while.”

  Zan nodded. “Live cheaper? Where?”

  “I don’t know.” She waved a hand, indicating the rest of the known world. “Out of the city. Maybe upstate.”

  “Maybe Florida?”

  Isabel stiffened. “I told you,” she began, and he laughed. They dropped the subject and made love.

  TWO

  At dusk on an early June evening, Harry Mercer pulled his pickup into Beach Texaco, on the corner where the state highway dead-ended into Cape St. Elmo Road. Leaving the truck to be gassed up, he walked into Margene’s MiniMart to get a soft drink and some peanuts. Moths and bugs danced around the lights on the poles at the filling station.

  Margene was sitting on a stool at the counter, leafing through USA Today. On his way back to the refrigerator case, Harry waved and called, “Hey, hon.”

  “Harry.” Margene turned a page. She was liberally freckled and on the hefty side.

  When Harry returned with his Coke and put it on the counter with the peanuts, he said, “So tell me the latest. What’s going on?”

  Margene, who always knew the local gossip, rolled her eyes, thinking. “You heard about the Marine Patrolman. Darryl Kelly.”

  “The one that disappeared? Sure.”

  “You heard they found his arm. Part of his arm.”

  Of course Harry Mercer knew about that. “Fisherman over at Westpoint found part of the arm in a shark’s belly, is what I heard,” he said. “And they knew it was Kelly’s, because of some kind of plaid cloth he was wearing.”

  “Slit that shark open, there was the arm,” Margene confirmed.

  “Never did find his boat, though,” Harry said. “They reckon he came up on a floating log or something, tore up the bottom. It sank, he went in the bay, and that was that.”

  “That’s about it,” Margene said. Her eyes strayed back toward USA Today, still open on the counter. She licked her finger, turned a page, and said, “I bet you remember Isabel Anders.”