Thirteen
I said, “Dr. Coffey must be awfully busy.”
“Oh, he is! At least one person a week from here has a bypass, and that’s just the people living here.”
“It must be awfully hard for their families, having them die so suddenly like that.”
They nodded, but with a look of some disturbed confusion. “Actually, none of them has had a family. They’ve all been alone.”
Somehow that didn’t surprise me.
While the valet retrieved my car, I calculated Dr. Coffey’s income from bypass surgeries. The going rate was around $150,000 per artery, so a triple bypass could bring him a cool half million. If he did just two of those a week, the million dollars Marilee had conned Coffey out of would be only a week’s income. In light of the fact that she had bought her grandmother an apartment that probably cost at least a half million, and in light of the fact that it sounded like some of his patients hadn’t needed the surgery anyway, it didn’t seem so bad for Marilee to have taken advantage of him.
I drove south on Tamiami Trail, passing Marina Jack, where a few cotton-ball clouds were reflected in the glassy blue water, and naked masts of sailboats stood sentinel around yachts sleeping in the sun. A million questions were running through my mind. Why did Cora say Harrison Frazier had ruined Marilee’s life? If Marilee knew Frazier, had she had her keys changed to keep him out? And where the hell was Marilee, anyway?
When I got back home, I put a Patsy Cline CD in the player, and Patsy and I sang together while I took the sheets off my bed and gathered up more laundry to put on top of the stuff in the washing machine. I added detergent to the wash and turned it on, and while the washer filled, Patsy and I sang another song. I got out the Swiffer and punched a clean cloth into its head, and Patsy and I sang some more while the machine started chugging. The thing about Patsy is that she kept it clean and simple. Nothing oily or mysterious. The world would be a better place if everybody thought like Patsy.
One minute I was running the Swiffer and singing with Patsy, and the next minute I was yelling “Oh shit!” and running to open the washer. The laundry was twisted and bloated under murky water, looking like the slimy fetuses of some horrible monster. I jammed my arm in and yanked up Ts and towels, Keds and shorts until I hauled up my khaki cargo shorts with the flapped pockets. I spread them over the washer’s agitator head to hang in sodden folds while I fumbled the Velcro flap open and fished out Marilee’s letters that I’d taken from her hall table.
Making moaning noises, I laid each wet, ink-smeared envelope on top of the dryer. I imagined myself explaining to Marilee that I’d had good intentions about mailing the stuff, but just, you know, forgot. I imagined myself telling Marilee that I would pay her IRS fine for being late. Then I started getting mad and imagined myself saying, “You didn’t actually tell me to mail it, you know. You went off and left it, and a lot of people wouldn’t even have noticed it. It’s really not fair to expect me to pay the penalty!”
I went to the kitchen for paper towels and blotted as much water from each envelope as I could, but they were all a sorry sight. Some of them had more or less disintegrated over the checks and invoices they held. I recognized the familiar Florida Light and Power envelope, and also Verizon and Teco, but not the others. One bedraggled check was made out to a pool-cleaning service, but the ink was too blurred to make out the name, and another check was stapled to an invoice from a home-security company. The check was a loss, but the print on the soggy invoice was clear enough to see that it was for $785, for the installation of a Centurion wall safe.
“Huh,” I said brilliantly. Marilee must have had something she deemed important enough to hide in a wall safe. Something she wanted to keep close at hand instead of in a safe-deposit box at the bank. Perhaps the person who had trashed Marilee’s bedroom had been looking for whatever it was.
All the envelopes were business size except one pale blue square of heavy linen-woven stock. The dark blue ink of the address had run badly and the flap had come unstuck, but the thickness of the envelope seemed to have kept the paper inside relatively dry. I raised the flap all the way, just to see how wet the letter inside was, just to see if it might be salvageable. Well, okay, I raised it to see if I could see anything written on it. I know I shouldn’t have, but I did.
Marilee’s handwriting was round and girlish, with little hearts dotting the i’s. The sentence at the top of the opening in the envelope said, “I can’t wait to see you!”
Carefully, I extracted the damp letter from the envelope and gingerly carried it to the kitchen and laid it out on paper towels. It was two pages long, and I laid each page out as precisely and clinically as a pharmacist laying out prescription pills. So long as I focused on drying these moist sheets, I could ignore the fact that I was tampering with the U.S. mail, violating Marilee’s privacy, interfering with a homicide investigation, and generally sticking my nose into things that were none of my business.
I left the pages drying and went back to the washer and restarted it, then finished Swiffering and dusting and plumping up the cushions on the living room furniture. I have one chair in my living room. It matches a rattan love seat with dark green linen cushions patterned with bright red and yellow flowers of a purely artistic species. Originally, both love seat and chair sat in my grandmother’s little private parlor off the bedroom she shared with my grandfather. The idea had been that she could retreat there when she wanted privacy or just to get away from the noise of a man and two children—the two children being me and Michael. But she never found time for privacy, so the furniture stayed like new. When I moved into the apartment over the carport, I appropriated it for myself. Like my grandmother, however, I’m not very good at just sitting, so when I die, my living room furniture may still be as good as new. But of course I won’t have a granddaughter to inherit it. Unless Michael and Paco adopt a child, there won’t be any relative to inherit anything. We’ll all just die without leaving a trace, like sculptured sand people obliterated by the tide.
By the time I put clean sheets on my bed and cleaned the bathroom, the wash was ready to go in the dryer. I tossed it all in and turned it on, then went to the kitchen to check on the letter. Most of the ink was too blurred to read, but I took it to the porch and sat down at the table.
Dearest Lily,
It still seems strange to call you Lily! It’s a pretty name and I like it, but I had intended to name you Bonnie, and that’s what I’ve always called you in my mind. My Bonnie. I guess when you’re only fifteen, you aren’t real good at naming babies. Ha! I guess I know why they named you Lily, but that’s something else I’ll tell you when we’re together.
The next paragraph was blurred, then some clear lines: “You have a right to know all the truth, not just part of it. Honey, please don’t feel bad about keeping it a secret that—”
That was the only legible bit except for “I can’t wait to see you!”
I read those few lines over and over, and each time I had to blink hard to keep from crying. Obviously, Marilee had given birth to a daughter when she was only fifteen, and evidently she had found her. Finding a daughter you gave up at birth would be like having a dead child returned to you, a fulfillment of the heart’s deepest yearning.
I leaned back in my chair and looked out at the sea. Sunshine sparked diamonds off the glittering waves. In the distance, triangular sails moved slowly along the horizon. A few shorebirds were leaving tracks down on the sand. A snowy egret, perched on one leg on a mooring post, was blissfully turned the wrong way to the breeze so his feathers could ruffle. From the rooftop, a pelican sailed to the edge of the shore and gulped something from the lapping water. No matter what happens in the world, the ocean keeps rolling. It’s the one thing you can depend on.