Oh, Lord. I didn’t know whether to be pleased or not. I said, “Sadd, I’m getting a bit creaky for—”
“Just as I was leaving the house the phone rang. It was—”
“Tell me when we get home. This traffic is insane.”
“And you don’t trust me to drive and chew gum?”
“Chew gum, yes. Talk, no.”
The drive from the mall in Sarasota to Sadd’s home on Santa Martina Island takes about forty minutes. It’s my opinion that nature designed Florida’s west coast barrier islands as shock absorbers. You cross the bridge from the mainland and are hit with the breathtaking expanse of the Gulf of Mexico. You gasp and gape, no matter how many times you’ve done it, all the way to Sadd’s house at the end of the tiny key where the gulf merges, sometimes tumultuously, with the waters of Tampa Bay. The filagree shape of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge is discernable ten miles away.
Today the gulf and the bay lay in a shining sunset embrace and I tore my eyes away to go inside and put parcels in my room. Sadd went into his little galley kitchen with the words “Drinks outside.”
“Can I help?” I asked halfheartedly.
“No. Go out and sit down.”
“I’ve been here two weeks and I haven’t lifted a finger.”
“You’ll be lifting all ten of them next week if you insist on going back to New York. Why you have this bourgeois urge to spend Christmas with your grandchildren is beyond me.”
Since retiring from a publishing house in New York, Sadd has devoted himself to ecology in Florida, has no interest in visiting his daughter’s family in Toronto, and deflects visits from them by, as he puts it, “shipping them off to Europe or the destination of their choice.”
I smiled at him affectionately as he came out bearing a tray of martinis. I accepted one and said, “This mystery of yours better be flat-out simple. Remember my decrepitude.”
He sat down and looked out at the water. “Actually, the thing is more sad than mysterious. There’s been no crime and no one has died. It began with a bizarre accident about three years ago and I guess had been pretty much forgotten. Then suddenly, a few days ago...”
His almost somber face made me say anxiously, “I hope it doesn’t affect you personally, Sadd.”
“No, not at all.” He straightened in his chair. “But it did affect a good friend of mine, the one who called me just as I was leaving to pick you up. So, as I was saying when I was told to shut up and drive...”
Sadd, owing to his many years as an editor, can give an account of an episode that is both concise and compelling. You learn to listen to him without interrupting and his story will unfold with just enough detail to make it edge toward the lengthy, then he will rein you in with a zinger and your glass stops halfway to your lips.
“My friend, Malcom Elder by name, is a retired judge who lives just up the road from here. He has a granddaughter whom he adores and she is indeed adorable. A few years ago when this happened she’d have been about twenty-one, fresh out of college, vacationing with Grandpa and waitressing in a popular restaurant on the island. Enter the villain — do I call him that because I was jealous? — in the person of the restaurant owner, a three-times-her-age, three-times-married entrepreneur: successful, good-looking, and apparently catnip to women. His name is — was? — John Bell. Nobody seems to know if he’s alive or dead.” Sadd sipped his drink and frowned. “My poor friend Malcom. How he loved — loves that girl. He sat where you’re sitting now and told me what she’d said to him, quoting her exactly and smiling a little in spite of himself: ‘Gramps, I love him. Do me a wedding.’ ”
“And of course he did.”
“Of course. And, oh my God, that wedding...”
I was about to ask why he had to call upon his Maker at the mere memory, then a thought interjected.
“Where were the girl’s parents?”
“Who knows? Probably she least of all. As I recall, her mother is Malcom’s daughter, but there were multiple divorces and a general atmosphere of absenteeism.”
I sipped my drink. “Gramps was all, and Gramps was it?” Sadd nodded. “Tell me about the wedding.”
“I’ll need a refill for this.” He got up and went into the house. I sat still and thought about my own granddaughters and said a sort of prayer. Now he was back with his drink and a bowl of pretzels.
“When you ‘do’ a wedding in Florida and you live near the beach, you are apt to do it there. The thing can range from a rather nice little ceremony to a circus. This was a circus. The beach teemed with young people in bathing suits and there was a raucus band. The bridal party was disporting itself in the surf when I arrived. There was a row of canvas chairs for fogie friends of Malcom and there we all sat trying to make conversation and not look too disapproving. At one point I said something to Malcom about the sunset and he nodded and kept staring straight ahead. He seemed unable to take his eyes off his granddaughter, who at that moment was riding the shoulders of the bridegroom as he frisked in the water.”
I couldn’t help it; I giggled. Sadd ignored me.
“Finally the bandleader squawked something over his speaker and the happy pair sloshed out of the water as their friends cheered and converged about them. A guruish looking figure came beaming forward across the sand. He was wearing a Banana Republic shirt, jeans, and some sort of peace emblem on a cord. Naturally, he was barefooted.”
This time I burst out laughing. What else can you do? And Sadd grinned. “Clara, you know conventions never meant a great deal to me — you’ve even said I’m a philistine — but damn it, a wedding is a wedding. I would certainly never hold out for a church, but I do think I’d hold out for shoes.”
Now we laughed together. Then Sadd was suddenly sober.
“There began some sort of ritual, which, just before the exchange of vows, ended in a freakish disaster.”
“What...?” I whispered.
Sadd downed his drink. “I must go back in time a bit for you to get the full impact of what happened. Years ago, Malcom had given his granddaughter an enormously valuable ring that had been his mother’s. Given, that is, in the sense that he told her it would be hers someday, and from her childhood he had often taken it out of his safe and allowed her — have I mentioned that her name is Sophie? — to fondle it and try it on. She would say it was going to be her wedding ring someday. He showed it to me once — a magnificent mass of gold and diamonds.”
I drew a breath. “And now it was sure enough about to become her wedding ring.”
“About to become.”
In the house the phone rang. I said, “Don’t you dare answer that. Finish the story.”
The answering machine began a muffled message as Sadd continued on.
“Sophie had pulled a T-shirt over her bathing suit and Bell was struggling into a pair of shorts — God forbid he should cover the array of gold chains about his neck with a shirt. Everybody gathered round and Malcom went to stand beside his granddaughter. The guru started to intone something. I stayed in the rear of the group. There were about twenty persons between me and the bridegroom so all I saw was the back of his head as he went down.”
“Down?”
“On his knees. He’d dropped the ring.”
It must have been the martini. I saw something beautiful and bejeweled drop into the sand — sand, that terrible swallower...
“It only took a few seconds for everybody to realize what had happened; then all hell broke loose. Sophie shrieked and went down beside Bell and the pair of them proceeded to do the worst thing possible when a small object falls into sand.”
“Dig frantically?” I was sitting forward in my chair.