“She got married and moved to Georgia. I don’t see much of her.”
I said, “Hunh.”
I tried to consider Maureen’s mother from the viewpoint of the adult I was and not the teenager I’d been when I knew her. From an adult’s perspective, I decided that being left to raise a daughter by herself might have had a lot to do with her sour disposition.
I said, “Ever see your dad?”
She shrugged. “Just that one time.”
And with those four words, Maureen summed up the real reason I had agreed to do what I was doing. She had expected me to understand her cryptic answer, and I did. For a second we were once more two hurt kids who only admitted pain to each other.
I well remembered the moment Maureen had told me about seeing her father. We’d been hiding behind a sand dune on Turtle Beach, trying to get high on a marijuana cigarette a boy had given me during math class. She said her mother had sent her to the 7-Eleven for a loaf of bread, and her father had been there buying a carton of cigarettes. She hadn’t seen him since she was about five, but she had recognized him immediately.
Telling it, she’d taken a long drag and squinted her eyes, the way we imagined real users did, and passed the roach to me—we called it a roach no matter how long it was.
She said, “He didn’t even know me. I’m his own daughter, and he didn’t know me.”
I sucked on the joint and wiped at moisture in my eyes. With adolescent swagger, I said, “I hope I never see my mother again. If I saw her, I’d turn my back and walk away.”
Tears had spilled down my face as I said it. I had pretended it was the weed making my eyes leak, but the truth had been that if I’d seen my mother again I would have run to her and begged her to forgive me for whatever I’d done to cause her to leave.
The other truth was that Maureen had known how I really felt, but she’d let me pretend to be tough. Nobody ever knows us as well as the friends we had before we got old enough to be good actors.
At Stickney Point, we turned east and went over the bridge to the Tamiami Trail, where we turned south. We rode silently for a while, all my nostalgic memories making me think of how crazy Maureen had been about Harry Henry, and how devastated Harry had been when Maureen married Victor Salazar.
I said, “Mo, do you ever see Harry?”
“No! Of course not! I’m faithful to my husband.” Her voice was too high.
I turned my head and studied her profile. “I wasn’t implying you weren’t. Harry lives here, you live here, you’re bound to see him every now and then.”
Stiffly, she said, “We live in two different worlds now. I probably wouldn’t even know him if I saw him.”
It was true that they lived in different worlds, but the key is small, and I doubted that she never caught a glimpse of him.
Maureen and Victor lived on Casey Key, which is south of Siesta Key. Like God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Casey’s outstretched finger touches the south end of Siesta. Even so, to get to Casey by car you have to drive down the Tamiami Trail for a piece, then turn west and go over a bridge. Casey Key’s bridge doesn’t rise to let boats through like Siesta’s bridge does. Instead, the whole thing swivels to the side. It’s probably one of the last swiveling bridges in the world.
The bridge leads to a narrow strip of land where some of the world’s most famous people have built houses that make Versailles look modest. It’s a miracle the little island hasn’t sunk from the sheer weight of all the brick and marble.
Maureen’s house was at the far south end of the key, built artificially high on trucked-in soil that had been cleverly terraced to give the effect of steepness down to the shoreline. Three stories tall, the house was the color of raspberries. Standing proudly behind a green screen of royal palms, it had lime green shutters. The house and grounds were enclosed by an eight-foot-tall raspberry stucco wall. Lime green iron gates in the wall kept out both the uninvited and those whose color scheme clashed.
At the gate, Maureen did something magic and the gate parted like the Red Sea, its two halves silently gliding wide to allow us entry. I refused to ask her by what remote signal she’d made that happen.
The driveway curved around the side of the house to a six-car garage. One of the garage doors was open, and Maureen slid the SUV inside its lighted interior. The garage was paneled. I wasn’t sure, but the paneling looked like teak. Rich people spend money on strange things.
We sat still for a moment and then looked at each other.
Maureen said, “We might as well get this over.”
“Yep.”
While I got out she went to the back of the SUV and hauled out a good-sized pink duff el bag. It wasn’t stuffed so tightly that it didn’t bend in places, but it wasn’t slack, either. She slammed the SUV door and turned toward the path leading down the terraced descent to the beach. The bag was heavy enough to make her list to one side.
I gripped the bulb end of my flashlight and rested its barrel on my right shoulder, law enforcement fashion. If I needed to, I could bring the barrel down on somebody’s head. With my left hand, I pulled the hood of my sweatshirt forward and followed her. Not that I was cold, I just wanted to hide from the eyes I imagined watching us.
Before we stepped into an area where we’d be fully visible from the water, Maureen stopped and looked intently into my face. I knew what she was going to say.
“Dixie, they said for me to come alone. If both of us go, they’ll know I’m not alone.” She seemed proud of herself for figuring that out.
I stuck out my left hand. “Just give me the damn bag.”
A million dollars in twenty-dollar bills is surprisingly heavy. The bag clunked against my left leg as I went down the path. On each terraced level, my flashlight illumined a walkway that curved for a few feet to create a serpentine trek around low-growing flowering plants. I had mental images of a crew of landscapers coming in every few weeks to replace things killed by the salt air. I also had mental images of criminals in a boat somewhere out in the darkness watching me through night goggles. With my blond hair covered, I doubted they could tell that I wasn’t Maureen, but I was still careful to keep my face out of the light.
The descent seemed to take forever, but it was probably less than five minutes. At the shore, a long dock stood with its feet in the water. A sliver of lemon peel moon left the sea hidden in darkness, with only occasional glints of starlight reflecting its humped sleep. The only sound was the sea’s rhythmic gasps and my own breath. At the dock, three boats nosed the planks like nursing sea creatures—a forty-footer, a twenty-foot pleasure cruiser, and a run-about. At the far end of the dock, a graceful little gazebo made an incongruously delicate note.
Turning toward the gazebo, I strode past the line of boats with what I hoped was the walk of a rich woman. I kept my gaze straight ahead and tried to breathe normally. At the gazebo, I paused and tilted the flashlight to search the interior before I stepped inside. On the one occasion when I’d been there for lunch with Maureen, tall woven chairs with flaring peacock backs had been arranged around a cane table. Around the perimeter of the room, bench seats had been topped by bright colored pillows.
The floor was paler than I remembered, probably bleached by salt breeze, but the peacock chairs and table were still there. The chairs had a strangely shabby look, as if they needed attention, and the pillows that had topped the bench seats were probably stored in the benches. From what I remembered of Victor’s iciness, I doubted that he and Maureen had enjoyed many romantic times in the gazebo.
I stepped inside and made a straight line to the cane table. For a second, I couldn’t decide whether to leave the duff el bag in one of the chairs or on top of the table. The voice of reason in my head screamed, It doesn’t matter! Just put it down!