They paddled for more than an hour up the St. Johns, the river becoming wider each mile. Max sat in the center of the canoe, her eyes following the flight of ospreys diving for fish. She watched as an alligator, half the length of the canoe, swam unhurried across the river. The big alligator’s eyes, nostrils, and part of its thick back breaking the dark surface. Max uttered a low growl when an emerald-green dragonfly alighted on one edge of the canoe.
Joe Billie stopped paddling for a moment. He lifted his wide-brim hat off his head and ran one hand through his long, dark hair. The air was still, humidly rising like an invisible steam from the river and black water creeks that merged and joined the river’s passage to the sea. Billie smiled at Max and said, “That dragonfly is the best hunter out here. Much better than the gator.”
“How so?” O’Brien asked.
“The dragonfly has four wings. Each can move independently. It can fly in any direction, including upside down. The dragonfly attacks its prey from behind, in midflight. The insect it catches never is aware it was stalked until the dragonfly begins tearing the insect’s face off.”
O’Brien squinted in the sun. “Let’s be glad they aren’t four feet long.”
Billie grinned, putting his hat back on his head. “Ever notice how many women wear dragonfly jewelry?”
“I’ve seen a few wear them as lapel pins.”
“Those aren’t so bad, but when a woman wears dragonfly earrings, that’s when I try not to think how tasty an earlobe might be to a real dragonfly.”
O’Brien laughed.
At that moment, the dragonfly rotated its large saucer eyes and flew across the river, less than three feet directly above the alligator. One predator leaving a slight wake. The other leaving no trail. O’Brien said, “You have to wonder who’s been here the longest, the gator or the dragonfly. Both, no doubt, have a lineage to the dinosaurs.”
Billie used his paddle to point. “See that jetty, the bluff with the big cypress tree?”
“I see it.”
“I believe that’s where the woman in the picture stood.”
O’Brien slipped the photograph from the folder. He held it up and studied the shoreline. “Let’s take a look. We can walk around the area and look back over the river. That’ll give us — or at least me, a better perspective.”
Billie dipped his paddle back into the water. O’Brien did the same. Both men were quiet the ten minutes it took them to cross the river. When the bow of the canoe slid under cypress limbs and nudged onto the riverbank, O’Brien jumped to the shore and pulled the canoe farther out of the current. Two white herons, stalking fish in the shallow water, took flight, beating their wings, sailing across the river. Max hopped from the canoe onto soft sand, Billie following. They walked up a slope, past a huge cypress tree, into a small clearing covered in lush ferns and wild red roses. Near the edge of the clearing hundreds of gnats hovered in flight above the ferns. The air smelled of wet moss, black mud, and fish.
O’Brien held up the picture. He walked about thirty feet inland and then turned around, again holding the picture. “More than 160 years later…the woman in this photo stood right about here. The trees and foliage have changed, that cypress tree was small, but the river is basically the same. I can almost see her standing in front of us, her back to the river. Photography was new, so she might have been a little hesitant.” He glanced down at the woman in the photo, and then studied the landscape. “She may have been hesitant, but she didn’t look nervous. This spot is beautiful…and so was she. I wonder where she’s buried.”
Billie shook his head. He watched two roseate spoonbills slowly walk around knotty brown cypress knees protruding from the river at the shoreline, the birds pink feathers a stark contrast to tea-colored water. “Sean, this most likely is the area where she stood alive…see the width and the bluff…but it wouldn’t mean she died here. Why are you interested in her grave?”
“Just trying to put the puzzle pieces together.” O’Brien looked across the wide expanse of river, the forlorn call of a train whistle in the distance. “She may have taken the secret of the river to her grave. You mentioned something your ancestors spoke about on the river. You said it was bizarre, very dark. What was it?”
Billie stood next to O’Brien and pointed to the far shoreline, almost a mile wide. “Over there. Pretty much opposite where we are standing. The elders spoke of a great sailing ship that went under the river. But it didn’t go all the way under. They watched, hidden in the bushes, as the soldiers sank it. The ones in the gray coats. They didn’t blow it up. They bored holes in the hull. ”
“Confederates?”
“Maybe. The ancestors said that night the river ran red with blood. The blue coats and gray coats were fighting all night. Gunboats everywhere. Smaller boats going down. Bombs exploding. Men screaming and swimming for their lives. Many were injured. They tried swimming to shore. In those days the gators were larger and a lot more of them in the river. The elders heard the crunch of bones, screams of men being eaten alive.”
“Causalities of war that never made it into the history books.”
Billie nodded. “Bad as all that was, the thing I remember hearing as a kid, spoken from the lips of a very old medicine man at the time, was what happened to one man captured by the blue coats.”
“What?”
“It might have had something to do with that huge sailboat that was sunk. The soldiers caught this guy and later that night they hung him from the highest mast that was sticking out of the water like a big cross. They say it looked like the soldier was crucified rather than just hung.”
“How so?”
“Because they used a hook, a boat anchor. Tied his hands behind his back and ran the hook through his shoulder. Then let him hang from the tallest mast, swaying in the breeze, and dying. A foot over the river. An easy leap for the gators. It was ugly. The remaining band of Seminoles slipped further into the Ocala Forest to let the whites fight it out. The elders retold that story for generations.”
O’Brien said nothing. He stared across the river.
“Sean, I don’t know if what I told you is the secret of the river you heard mentioned, but I’m sure it’s something, once done, was so wicked it was kept quiet. Never discussed. Especially by the soldiers who did it. You think the woman in the photo was somehow connected to what went on here during the Civil War?”
“Yes. Maybe her husband, brother, or father was one of the soldiers out there on the river the night your ancestors saw it running red with blood.”
“Where do you go from here?”
“I’m trying to decide. I mentioned the antique dealer in DeLand, the guy who had bought the painting made from the photo…he said a husband and wife bought it. Couldn’t remember their names until he saw a picture of the dead husband on the news. Shot. Apparently accidental…and on that movie set. Killed by a stray Minié ball from rifles that were supposed to be unloaded. Now that I know that the mystery painting, which was made from the original photo of the woman in this file folder, was owned by the Civil War re-enactor shot on a movie set…things are becoming more complex. Working crime, I never found irony or coincidence in motive.”
Billie nodded and stepped closer to the large cypress tree. He studied the mud between the ferns at the base of the tree. “You used the word crime. But a moment ago you said the shooting was apparently accidental.”