“It is.”
“I went to your office this morning but you weren’t there, so I looked you up in the phone directory. I’m Nate Posey.”
Carver couldn’t place the name and was about to say so when Posey added, “Wanda Creighton’s fiance. You know, from the Women’s Light Clinic.”
The gangly young man in the waiting room the day of the bombing. Almost had to be him. “I think we saw each other at the hospital,” Carver said. “I’m sorry about what happened.”
“So am I. For me, for you, especially for Wanda. I want to talk with you. Can I drive to wherever you are? I’m on Magellan about three blocks from your office.”
Carver wanted to talk to Posey, but he didn’t want him here. He wanted the cottage to serve as a haven for Beth to fully recover, and he didn’t want a visit by Posey to disturb her and spur her on to more activity before she was ready.
“Or we could meet someplace halfway,” Posey almost pleaded, reading Carver’s silence as indecision about whether to have a meeting at all.
“Drive north on Magellan about four miles,” Carver said. “There’s a public beach there, some park benches and picnic tables under some palm trees. I’ll meet you there in about twenty minutes.”
“I know where it is,” Posey said. “Thanks, Mr. Carver.”
“You’ll meet who there?” Beth asked when Carver hung up the phone.
“That was Wanda Creighton’s fiance.”
“The woman who was killed in the clinic bombing?”
“Yeah. He wants to talk.”
“Maybe I should go with you,” Beth said. “I mean, maybe it would be safer for me.”
Carver considered that manipulative suggestion. It really didn’t make much sense. Posey might not want to talk in her presence, and she’d wind up sitting alone on a bench or in the car while they conversed out of earshot. For that matter, Carver knew nothing about Posey, or even if the man he was going to meet was really who he said he was. Deviousness seemed to be going around like a virus.
“I don’t think so,” he said, “You’ll be safer here. That’s why I got Al.”
Before she could answer, he went into the sleeping area and pulled the top drawer of his dresser all the way out and laid it on the bed. In a square brown envelope fastened to the back of the drawer with duct tape was his Colt .38 semiautomatic. It was actually an illegal gun for a Florida private detective to carry. The investigator’s G license specified .38 revolvers or nine-millimeter semiautomatics. But Carver had never been called on the matter, didn’t ordinarily carry the gun, and had seldom used it. Besides, at a glance it looked like a nine-millimeter.
He checked the clip in the handgrip, then racked the mechanism to jack a round into the chamber. Making sure the safety was on, he carried the gun in and laid it next to the printer, which had finished its work and was now switched off along with the computer. He didn’t have to instruct Beth in how to use the gun. She was at least as proficient with firearms as he was.
“You’ll be safe here,” he said, “with this, and with Al.”
Beth was frowning at him. “What I might do,” she said, “is use the gun on Al.” Al arched an eyebrow and seemed to smile, knowing she wasn’t serious. He was apparently aware of his charm. Like Carver. Only quite often with Beth, Carver was wrong. He wished he could somehow convey that to Al.
“Lock the door behind me and let no one in,” he said to Beth. “I’ll come back here immediately after meeting with Posey and let you know what it was all about.”
Beth picked up the gun, hefted it expertly in her hand, and stared down at it. “I hope the WASP does come here,” she said.
“Don’t go to sleep until I come back,” Carver said. “Al might go to sleep too.”
He kissed her on the lips so she couldn’t reply, then limped out of the cottage.
On the porch, he stood still in the shade until he heard the snick of the locks on the other side of the door.
Carver parked the Olds with its front tires up against a weathered telephone pole that had been laid sideways and was half buried to mark the edge of the gravel parking area between the coast highway and the rough, grassy slope of ground that led to the beach. The beach itself was deserted. The only other vehicles were a red Jeep with a canvas top, the one that Wanda Creighton had gotten out of before walking into the clinic just before the explosion-Nate Posey’s car-and a silver Honda station wagon with a sun-bleached American flag on its aerial.
Even before Carver climbed out of the car, he saw whom he presumed was Nate Posey sitting on one of the wooden benches beneath some palm trees, facing away from him and staring out at the ocean.
Hearing the car door slam, the man turned slightly, then stood up and watched Carver approach. He was the gangly young man from the hospital waiting room, as Carver had thought. He was wearing a white pullover shirt with a red collar and a wide red horizontal stripe across the midsection, and khaki pants that clung to his legs in the sea breeze and crept up to reveal red socks. The wind molding his clothes to his lean body made him look thin and misshapen. When Carver was close enough, Posey held out his bony hand and smiled.
Carver shook hands with him. “Want to sit back down?” he asked. Despite the bright late-morning sun, it was almost cool in the brisk wind off the water.
“I’d rather walk.” Posey stole a look at Carver’s cane. “If you don’t mind.”
“Let’s stay on hard ground,” Carver said. “Walking with a cane’s kind of tricky on sand.”
Posey strolled slowly and deliberately alongside Carver over the sandy but firm soil, about twenty feet away from where the beach began and parallel to the shore. Several minutes passed and he didn’t say anything, as if the words would have to be forced out and he didn’t yet have the strength. Carver idly studied the ground as he walked, careful not to place the tip of his cane on an uneven or soft spot that might cause him to fall. Like walking through life.
“Wanda’s funeral was yesterday morning,” Posey said finally in a hoarse voice Carver could barely hear. “I know I’m still in shock . . . or something like shock. But at the same time, something in my heart tells me I’m thinking more clearly now than ever before.”
“That’s possible,” Carver said. He knew shock could work that way when it began to wear off, like an electrical jolt that somehow cleared one’s thought processes.
“I’ve been mulling over what happened, Mr. Carver. How I was ignorant and fooled and the world’s never what it seems. One moment everything’s normal. All the pieces are in place and all the machinery of your life is humming away. The future seems almost as predictable and unchangeable as the past. The next moment everything changes.” He wiped his hand down his face, dragging thumb and forefinger over his eyes to staunch any tears. “Wanda was dead as suddenly and unexpectedly as if she’d been struck by lightning, and everything was different, changed forever.”
Carver thought about how close he’d come to losing Beth that morning at the clinic and understood Posey’s state of mind. “None of us sees it coming,” he said. “That’s the nature of lightning-it’s sudden, out of nowhere, a blast of change. It happened with my leg.”
“Your leg?”
“When I was shot. I was an Orlando police officer, happy with my life, assuming the kind of future you mentioned, useful work rewarded by promotion and eventual retirement. Then one day I was off duty and went into a convenience store to buy groceries, and ran into a boy who was holding up the place. I wasn’t playing hero. He was on his way to escaping with the money when he suddenly giggled and lowered the gun and shot me in the leg. I don’t think he even knew he was going to do it. And suddenly there was a muzzle flash and his future and mine were radically changed.”
“That’s why you’re a private investigator?”
“I was a pensioned-off, self-pitying beach bum for a long time, then people who cared about me talked sense into me. I needed something to do, so I got into the only thing I knew well. I had the experience, the contacts, and a case came my way. Then I met a woman who changed my life again.”