“We’ve all enjoyed her crazy… postcards. Darn it, I have to keep reaching for words.”
“Otherwise?”
“Not so bad. Some bad little spots. Like the other day I was looking in the bathroom mirror and my face just started to sort of melt and slide off. It’s like… parts of nightmares happen in the daytime. Heidi sounds happy as a clam.”
“I beat her when she gets out of line. I’ll let you say hello in a minute. Look, what I called about, where did Anna go?”
“That’s a strange thing, Travis. I just don’t know. I had an address she left, care of Mrs. Hans Kemmer in Winter Haven, and I wrote there and it came back address unknown, and then Susan said that Mrs. Kemmer died years ago. It’s weird, isn’t it?”
“Very.”
“I have a nightmare about her, over and over. She keeps clapping her hands in front of my face and telling me I’m burning up, that my skin is getting so hot I’m going to set fire to anything I get near.”
“Maybe it was the fever you ran. How’s your group there?”
“Great. Really great!”
I summoned Heidi onto the line. She took the phone and, talking, slid onto the long yellow couch and ended up in a teenage posture, on her stomach, propped up on her elbows, sheaf of pale hair obscuring the phone, upright calves slowly scissoring. She wore white work pants with old paint stains thereon. The soles of her bare feet were dusty. One of the two snaps were undone on the back of her bandana halter. She and Glory compared climates, and she told Glory that St. Croix was the absolute of all time. I sat and watched her and pondered the disappearance of Anna Ottlo: When I paid attention again, Heidi was talking to Susan. I looked at her slender brown back between halter and waistband, at the almost invisible sunwhitened fuzz along that graceful curve that deepened and then lifted to the bisected heartiness of the splendid bottom. I felt the inner wrench, the sideways slide, the feeling there was not quite enough air in the whole lounge to fill the lungs of McGee. I moved over and wedged beside her and she slid over to make room. I ran a. slow thumb down the crease of the strong back across the little knots of the vertebrae. Her breath caught and broke in the middle of a word and picked up again and when I rested my hand quietly upon her I felt that inner humming that had begun, like the inaudible idling of the great engine of the yellow car of long long back.
Keep this one, I thought. It’ll keep well. It has one hell of a shelf life:
At the final good-bye, I popped the single snap with my thumbnail and the two halves of the halter slid away. She faked collapse, face down. “Nothing but work, work, work,” she grumbled. “Jeez!” Then rolled around grinning to reach out with both arms, and the phone bumped onto the rug and was tugged toward the desk by the coiled accordion phone wire.
Monday morning I phoned Dr. Hayes Wyatt and he phoned back in a half-hour and I found out he had not heard Glory’s dream about Anna Ottlo. He said she was coming along nicely and if she could keep on coming back at the present rate, she should be quite herself by June. The dream interested him. I asked some questions.
“Yes, Mr. McGee, under any of the psychedelics the subject is extraordinarily suggestible. If she could be made to believe that her body heat was such that her clothes and the things around her were beginning to smolder, she might very well run out onto that winter beach, shedding her clothes.”
“What about the hand clapping?”
“Yes. Acceptable technique to capture and hold the attention long enough for the suggestion to be made and accepted.”
I looked down at my brown hand at the two pale little puncture marks, still visible, the scars from the bite of the terrified thing in the howl of wind on that beach. I explained the curious thing we had learned about Anna. I asked him if he could find out if Gloria could remember anything that could have happened the morning of that day or the evening of the day before which might have given Anna some cause. He said he would try, but if Gloria began to get agitated he would have, to wait for another time.
When the call came through at four o’clock, Heidi was over on the beach with a hairy friend of mine named Meyer. The wind had died and the Florida day had warmed up, but not enough for swimming. When Meyer had first seen her he had shaken his head slowly from side to side. He had clucked. He had sighed. He had said, “Now if Vogue only used a centerfold girl.” He pointed a thumb at me, his eyes still on hers. “That one. He shouldn’t have such luck. He shouldn’t have such good taste. He brings you around and all of a sudden I am a bitter old man.”
In resignation he had put his hand out, and she had laughed, moved in, kissed him a good hearty smack and said, “I hate shaking hands with bitter old men, Meyer. ”
“I swoon,” he had said. He offered his arm. “Come with me to a saloon. I need sustenance. Let this aging beach boy here stew in his own jealous venom.” And off they had gone, laughing, the best of friends. Instant Meyer.
Dr. Hayes Wyatt called back and apologized about being tied up and not getting to me sooner. “But I don’t have much. It’s all pretty shadowy in her memory: Seems she got up very early that morning. Much earlier than usual. And she found Mrs. Ottlo in Fort’s study, sitting at his desk, just putting a handwritten letter and some kind of legal document into an envelope. As she was holding it, running her tongue along the flap, the envelope was toward the doorway, a pre-printed business address, quite gaudy. All she can remember is something like Mark Bay or Macko Bay, and a palm tree, and a row of airmail stamps. When she saw Gloria, she started violently and slapped the envelope face down onto the desk. She seemed agitated. ”That’s all. I’m sorry“
“Not much to go on.”
In the middle of the night something came sliding into my mind and slid right out again before I could grab hold of it. At breakfast I caught a glimpse of an edge of it in the back of my mind and caught it before it could get away and pulled it into sight.
Your retirement paradise! A planned community for the senior citizen. Live the golden years in the golden way. And it wasn’t Mark or Macko, but she had been close. Marco Bay and Marco Bay Isles, between the mysterious Everglades and the glorious Gulf. Marco Bay Development Corporation.
“What’s with you?” Heidi demanded. “Something wrong with the eggs, dammit?”
“They are beautiful eggs and you are a beautiful girl and I think I can lay a hand on Anna Ottlo. We’re going for a nice long ride.”
“But we were going to go fishing with Meyer, honey.”
So we stopped and told Meyer it was off. I said we were going over to Marco Bay, between the mysterious Everglades and the glorious Gulf, to see if, perchance, a good cook I had met in Chicago had settled herself there to live the golden years in the golden way.
We took a cab over to the garage. Heidi was enchanted with my old stately transportation, name of Miss Agnes, one of the really big old Rolls-Royces. She had suffered a curious trauma, perhaps during the Great Depression, when somebody had converted her into a pickup truck and painted her bright blue.
In the bright clear cool morning we struck west across the Tamiami Trail, sitting high above the squatty and more frangible products of later years, Miss Agnes going along with stately rumble and faint wind-hiss, floating up to her mild and amiable eighty miles an hour when I had clear pieces of road.
And so at eleven-thirty I parked in a broad lot next to the sales office of the Marco Bay Development Corporation. I left Heidi by the truck and went into the office. It looked like functional slices of three kinds of jet aircraft fastened together with aluminum windows. The salesmen weren’t in. A Miss Edgerly was. She was all wrists, eyebrows, and big rabbity teeth, and determined to be helpful if it killed both of us.
“Gee now. From Chicago in late December.” She went trotting from file to file. She was about eleven inches across the shoulders and forty inches across her secretarial butt, making the pink blouse and madras shorts less than totally attractive.