Michaela Thompson - Florida Panhandle 02 - Riptide Read online

  “Let Isabel have her drink before you get down to business,” Eve protested.

  A furrow of displeasure appeared between his eyes. “I expect Isabel would like to get this out of the way.”

  Eve raised her eyes to heaven. “I’ll go make the salad, then.”

  Clem plowed on, taking papers from his briefcase. “I imagine Dr. McIntosh told you Miss Merriam will need constant care, at least for a while. I’ve applied for a place in Sunny Haven, a facility in Bay City, but they’re full at the moment. What I propose is this—”

  What Clem proposed, it developed, was that Merriam be released from the hospital and live at the home of a local practical nurse until space became available at Sunny Haven. As he talked, Isabel realized that his plan was less a proposal than a fait accompli. “Miss Merriam will have individual care, and Bernice Chatham has provided this sort of service before. Miss Merriam can afford it, at least for a while.” He droned on, filling her in on details of Merriam’s modest financial situation.

  Isabel took a swallow of her drink and wondered why he was bothering to consult her. She had given up the right to any say over Merriam years ago, and vice versa. Isabel ran away; Merriam disinherited her. That’s all there was to it.

  When she got a chance to put in a word, she said she thought Clem’s idea was fine. He gave a brisk nod, wiped his brow, and got up to put the steaks on.

  Eve Davenant was easier to talk to. As smoke billowed above the barbecue pit, she asked Isabel questions about her life in New York and how she was managing at Cape St. Elmo. Eve, it developed, was a schoolteacher. She stretched her legs luxuriously. “School’s out, and am I glad,” she said. “I’m exhausted. The first year on a new job is so hard.”

  Isabel had pictured bachelor brother and spinster sister as longtime fixtures here, growing into middle age together. “You just started teaching?”

  “Oh, I taught for years in Atlanta. I moved back to St. Elmo last summer. To be here and help Clem.”

  To help Clem? Clem, standing over the steaks, seemed a capable, if taciturn, grown-up. Why his sister should give up another job to move back home and look after him was not immediately clear.

  Thanks mostly to Eve, dinner, which they ate at a backyard table, passed pleasantly enough. Clem, Isabel noticed, occasionally zoned out of the conversation. His eyes became fixed, his expression melancholy. When this happened, Eve would raise her voice, or direct a question to him, and alertness would return to his face.

  Mosquitoes drove them inside to have coffee. By this time, Eve and Isabel had discovered a common interest in children’s literature, and Isabel had warmed up enough to confide that she was working on a picture book. “I brought it with me. I’m planning to finish it this summer.”

  Eve was glowing. “How exciting! Tell me about it.”

  In the warmth of Eve’s reaction, Isabel’s enthusiasm began to stir. Maybe it had been worth digging out her sketches, after all. “It’s a retelling of a French fairy tale. I had to revise the original story drastically.”

  “Why was that?”

  “It was really gory and violent. I toned it down, and I think it has possibilities now.”

  “What’s the title?”

  “The Children from the Sea. It’s about twins, a brother and sister named Marin and Marinette. They’re castaways. They nearly drown when their ship sinks, but they wash up on a beach where—”

  Something was wrong. Eve’s smile had faded. In the shadows, Clem sat motionless. “It sounds just great,” Eve said in a strained tone. She stood up. “I’m going to have more coffee. Anybody?”

  Isabel dropped the subject of The Children from the Sea. Silence fell. It was, in any case, time to leave. She asked where the bathroom was and escaped down a hall, fleeing the uncomfortable atmosphere.

  She stayed in the bathroom longer than necessary, staring in the medicine cabinet mirror, fiddling with her hair. She would give Clem and Eve time to regain their composure and then say a swift good night.

  When she emerged, a light was on in a room across the hall. Clem was standing inside the door, gazing at something. Here was her chance to take her leave. She stopped in the doorway. “Thanks. It was a lovely evening.”

  He started, as if he hadn’t heard her approach. The room was a library, book-lined and hung with old maps. Clem, she saw, was standing in front of a mounted glass display case containing a collection of seashells. He gestured, inviting her in to look. She recognized conchs and cowries, shark’s eyes and whelks. She pointed to an array of unfamiliar ones with long, delicate spines. “What are those?”

  “Murex and spiny oysters. You have to be careful cleaning them or they’ll break and be spoiled.” His voice was almost inaudible.

  “Cleaning them? You mean you found these on the beach?”

  “Oh, no.” His lips actually curved. His first smile. “Not on the beach.”

  “They’re beautiful.”

  He nodded. “These with the spines, you can’t boil. You have to leave them outside until the ants strip out the flesh. Take the algae off with muriatic acid.”

  “Where did they come from?”

  “Out in the bay. Deep water.”

  “You go scuba diving?”

  He didn’t answer right away. When she glanced at him again, she saw that his eyes had reddened. “Not anymore,” he said.

  “Here you are, for heaven’s sake!” It was Eve. She went on with forced cheerfulness. “I keep telling Clem to donate those shells to the school. They’d make a wonderful display for the students, and then we’d have the space they take up.”

  Isabel looked at Clem. He seemed to have forgotten she was there. She hurried through her final thank-yous and said good-bye.

  FOUR

  Harry Mercer, in swimming trunks and unbuttoned shirt, sat on the roof of his boat, the Miss Kathy, watching out for his afternoon dive party. They should be surfacing soon. The married couple had already come up once, in a flurry, to tell Harry they’d seen a barracuda down there. Six feet long, they said, which probably meant three or four. The husband had looked nervous, but Harry could tell the wife was excited.

  “He won’t bother you,” Harry had called down, talking to the man.

  The woman wasn’t even listening. “I’m going to find him again,” she said, and down she went. Her husband hadn’t had much choice but to follow her.

  People from the air base. Harry had never seen them before, probably wouldn’t again. Of the three, she was the only one who knew what she was doing, but Scooter was down there with them. They would be all right. Harry was left with very little to do, which was fine. He hadn’t slept so good last night.

  He had lain there, his wife Kathy practically smothering him, thinking about Isabel Anders. If all his thinking could have been boiled down, it would have amounted to this: Isabel had been gone all this time; why didn’t she stay gone?

  Harry had good reasons for wanting Isabel out of here. It was nothing personal against Isabel, although, God knows, years ago she had cut him off at the socks and damn near killed him with grief. None of that was important now.

  The orange anchor buoy bobbed on the glistening swells. The glare was fierce, and it was hotter than hell on the roof. Harry settled his Beachcomber Boatel baseball cap lower on his brow. When the party got back on board, he would suit up and go down to cool off.

  Kathy would never leave him. She couldn’t get enough of him, even after all these years of marriage. Kathy would not take off with some Yankee dude from the air base and leave without one goddamned word.

  Harry had cried when Isabel did that to him. A big old boy of seventeen crying like an infant. And he couldn’t say a word to a soul, because everything between him and Isabel had to be secret so Miss Merriam wouldn’t find out and make Isabel memorize verses from the Bible.

  They had been cunning, Harry and Isabel. Meeting on the beach, or after choir practice. Putting notes in each other’s locker at school with times and places. You had to
be a crazy teenager to carry on like that, making love in abandoned beach cottages, rowboats, the backseats of cars. Even now he could remember Isabel’s small white breasts, the sounds she made. The thought made his body quicken, and he shifted position.

  He had just about time to get himself a drink. He climbed down from the roof. The deck of the boat was a tangle of towels, discarded clothing, masks and fins. In the shade of the roof overhang, he wiped his face with the tail of his shirt and took a Coke from the cooler. The first deep swallow made the back of his nose prickle. He’d better get back up there before they surfaced. As much of an amateur as the husband was, he was likely to come up under the bow of the boat and get his brains, if he had any, knocked out.

  Why couldn’t Isabel stay gone? Harry didn’t need that complication.

  These days, Harry resented the time he spent taking out dive parties. You always imagined things would be fun. That’s why you did them in the first place. It would be fun to be married. It would be fun to have a boat and run dive trips for a living. It would be so much fun.

  Until you had a couple of daughters who wanted everything they saw on TV and then some, and a wife who didn’t appeal to you the way she used to, and on top of that you realized the business you really were in was kissing the asses of idiots and making sure they didn’t kill themselves.

  On his perch again, Harry studied the coastline. He could barely make out the lighthouse, all but lost in the shimmering brilliance. He squinted, but he couldn’t see the Anders house.

  When Isabel took off, it was in the middle of Harry’s senior year. Afterward he couldn’t study, and he almost didn’t graduate. His parents couldn’t figure out what was the matter with him.

  His daddy had taken him freshwater fishing up the river. The hooks were hardly wet before Harry’s daddy said, “Son, let me ask you something.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Harry’s daddy’s eyes were fixed on his cork floating out in the current. “Are you sick or something?”

  Harry swallowed. “Naw, sir.”

  “I mean any kind of sick at all. Any kind.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “I’m glad to hear that, because you ain’t acting too—”

  The cork went under, and Harry’s daddy pulled in a good-sized shellcracker. Harry hoped by the time they got it strung that would be the end of the conversation, but Harry’s daddy came back to the point. “Your mother says you don’t eat. You always used to eat.”

  Harry couldn’t figure out what to say, so again he said, “I’m fine.”

  “If you were in trouble, Harry, I would want to know about it.”

  “I’m not in trouble, Daddy,” Harry said, and the slow water and drifting corks had seemed like messages sent to torment him with what his life used to be.

  He had been a fool, but there was no use dwelling on it. He had graduated, after all, and by the end of that summer he had met Kathy. Kathy was soft, where Isabel was bony; placid, where Isabel was restless; faithful, where Isabel was a betraying bitch.

  Out in the water, heads started to appear. Idiot number one. Idiot number two. The woman. Scooter. Harry climbed down from the roof.

  Helping the woman up the ladder at the stern he said, “Careful when you sit down,” but she paid no attention and whapped hell out of the ledge with her tanks. Without acknowledging Harry at all, she started talking to the two men about her barracuda, which she had found again.

  “Good dive?” Harry said to one of the men, the one that wasn’t the husband.

  “Super,” the man said. In a louder tone, so the woman would be sure to hear, he said, “Betsy met up with her twin sister down there.”

  The woman— Betsy, it must be— threw one of her diving booties at him, and a look passed between them that told Harry all he needed to know about what was going on in that trio. “Everything all right?” he said to Scooter, the deckhand. Scooter nodded, unzipping his wetsuit.

  Harry didn’t like this woman. She treated him like the waiter in some restaurant where she was eating. Wondering if he could shake her up, he said, “You talk about barracuda. Not long ago, a fisherman over at Westpoint caught a shark. Know what they found in its stomach? Part of a guy’s arm.”

  The woman wrinkled her nose. “Ugh,” she said, but Harry could tell she wasn’t especially impressed. She probably ate men for breakfast herself.

  “Do they know whose arm?” the husband asked.

  “They reckon it belonged to a Marine Patrolman who went missing.”

  The woman wasn’t even listening anymore. “Gross,” said the guy. Stupid comment.

  Harry stripped off his shirt and went into the small forward cabin to retrieve his wetsuit. To Scooter, who had followed him to the door, he said, “I’m going down for a few minutes, cool off.”

  “I told you everything was all right, Harry.” Scooter looked at Harry with edgy defiance.

  “I believe you. I’m going down to cool off. Let them have a drink and comb their hair.” Harry zipped his wetsuit and moved past Scooter to get his tanks.

  When he was ready, he somersaulted backward off the side of the boat and felt the water close over him. His world was a cool, shadowy, infinite blue. His breath was loud and harsh in his ears.

  Isabel had come here to see about Miss Merriam. She wouldn’t stay long. She might be packing up now. She might be gone by this afternoon. The thought sent a tremor through Harry Mercer’s gut.

  FIVE

  Isabel slept late the next morning. She was getting used to the sound of the palms, the scraping of the undergrowth against the back wall, the animal scrabblings that filled the night. She was still at the breakfast table when the telephone rang. It was Eve Davenant.

  “I owe you an apology,” Eve said.

  “You do?”

  “Yes.” Eve rushed on: “You see, it hadn’t occurred to me that you’ve been out of touch with St. Elmo, and you probably hadn’t heard about Clem, and—”

  She broke off. Isabel waited.

  “I’m lying, damn it,” Eve said. “I used you as a guinea pig. I wanted to see if we could get through a normal evening with somebody who didn’t know. It was close, but the answer was still negative.”

  Isabel sat down on the sofa, wishing she had brought her coffee with her. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m sorry. I’m calling to explain.” She hesitated. “A year ago, there was a— the only word for it is tragedy. Clem and his son, Edward, were scuba diving in the bay. There was a freak accident, and Edward drowned. Twelve years old. Clem went to pieces. We all did.”

  This explained a lot about Clem Davenant. “I’m so sorry.”

  “It was in no way Clem’s fault, but he blamed himself,” Eve went on. “So did Andrea, his wife. She left him three months later, filed for divorce. So you see” —her voice wavered— “you see why Clem acts strange sometimes.”

  Isabel was dismayed. “Oh God. And there I was, talking about The Children from the Sea.”

  “Look. In the first place you didn’t know, and it was my fault for not telling you. In the second place, Clem has to get used to it. He can’t be protected all his life from people talking about drowning or accidents at sea.”

  “I guess not, but still—”

  “I really think it would’ve been all right, except lately there’s been a lot of talk about things like that.”

  Isabel’s breakfast toast seemed to have congealed beneath her breastbone. “What happened?”

  “A young Marine Patrolman from Westpoint named Darryl Kelly took a boat out early one morning and didn’t come back. A few days later, a fisherman caught a shark, and part of Kelly’s arm was found inside it. Everybody has been buzzing. I know it bothered Clem.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “Two weeks ago, maybe? I guess they’re continuing to investigate, but the excitement has died down.”

  It occurred to Isabel that Merriam’s accident had happened two weeks ago. It had been an unfor
tunate time for both her and Darryl Kelly.

  “So anyway, please forgive me. I hope you’ll come see us again.”

  “Of course I will.”

  “Good. I’ll call you.”

  The coffee was cold. Although Isabel liked Eve, the phone call had left her feeling dyspeptic. Clem Davenant’s melancholy face hovered in her mind. Listlessly, motivated by a need to give the morning a purpose, she took out her portfolio and spread the sketches for The Children from the Sea on the dining table.

  She had done these sketches at least a year ago. She had labored hard and, as well as she remembered, enthusiastically. Now, she decided, she didn’t like them much. She studied each drawing. They were pretty enough, but remote, unrelated to the emotional impact of the story. After a while, she hunched over the table and buried her hands in her hair.

  Someone knocked at the door.

  A sharp-faced, grubby-looking little girl was standing on the step. The child had lank yellow hair and wore red shorts and a yellow T-shirt. Her legs were dust-streaked from her knobby knees to her sandaled feet. She was, it took Isabel a couple of seconds to realize, the early-morning baton twirler she had seen on the beach singing “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.”

  The girl regarded Isabel with suspicion. “Where’s Miss Merriam?”

  “She’s— sick. She’s in the hospital.”

  The girl nodded impatiently. “I knew that.” She pointed at the Ford parked beside the trailer. “That’s her car. I saw it go by yesterday. I thought she came back.”

  “That was me. I was driving her car.”

  “Did she say you could?”