"You weren't supposed to see that. Not yet." Jessica stood holding the wineglasses, uneasy. He had never seen her embarrassed before. It changed her face; gave it a nice color. She said, "It's not done. I wanted to wait, get my courage up because . . . it's you."
"Me? I don't have a face."
"It's not done yet, silly."
"That's the way I look when I go collecting? And I thought I wore boots."
"Ah, Doc, please don't chide me . . . and don't smirk like that." She bumped him with her shoulder as she handed him his wine. "I've been trying to make myself paint what I feel, not what I see. I got into such a rut; that's what coming to Sanibel was all about. I don't know that I was ever really good, but I was successful; my first shows got great reviews. I'm just trying to find that thread again, the honesty that's in me. It's a hard thing to get back, honesty. Once you've lost it, it's damn hard to recover . . . and you've heard this speech way too much, over and over from me."
He had heard it. Jessica had been in New York only for a year before being embraced by some powerful critics who heralded her as the Renaissance stylist of American impressionistic gothic—whatever that meant; Ford didn't know. They said she was breaking old ground in a new way, and for a couple of years she could do no wrong. But then she fell from grace. In the eyes of the critics, everything she did was wrong and, worse, she had invested badly, spent lavishly; ended up in debt with a bunch of paintings that wouldn't sell. She had borrowed from her agent until her agent dropped her, and that should have been the low point, but it wasn't. For the next year she lived in a Greenwich Village flat sleeping all day, avoiding work at night, doing drugs in hip discos and fighting depression. She wasn't quite twenty-five. But then she somehow caught herself. She got a low job on some marketing firm's ladder, worked hard, lived cheaply, and paid off the debts. And saved enough to rent this working retreat on the island.
Jessica said, "You don't like it, do you?"
Ford looked at the canvas again. There was the man striding through shallow water, a wedge of mangroves and the bay behind him. A squall was coming, pushing a burnished green light, and the water was a roiled green with wind feathers in random streaks. It had taken great precision for her to capture that mood of randomness, that sense of the inexorable, yet she had controlled it so that the coming squall dominated the bay, but not the man. The view was from the man's side: revealing, powerful .. . somehow a little troubling, too, but not lurid. Ford said, "No ... I like it, Jessi. I like it a lot. Am I really that hairy—"
"Oh, you men—as if that matters at all. And you're smirking again."
"I've never seen myself on canvas before."
"Why should I be so embarrassed about this? I just wanted to try and do something different, something strong. Show the male form in an attitude that wasn't cheap or glitzy. I'm an artist, for Christ's sake, and there should be no taboos—quit that smirking!" She was laughing, the tension gone. "Drink your wine and shut up. No, don't shut up. Tell me what was so important yesterday; the thing that made me feel like such a shit for going off and leaving you."
Ford said, "You said you had something to tell me."
"I do. But not now." She was sitting on the couch, looking over the lip of her wineglass. "It'll keep."
Ford said, "Did you know a man named Rafe Hollins?" then watched her carefully as she stared into his eyes for a moment before saying "No; no, I don't think so—should I?"
"I found your name in his address book. There was a telephone number, too, but with a New York area code."
It was an old number, disconnected. Ford had tried it.
She puzzled over that, sipping at her wine, then said, "Wait—is he a pilot?"
"He was."
She was nodding. "Okay; right. I know who you mean. A couple of years ago, when I was thinking of moving down here, I wanted to fly over the area in a small plane, really get an idea of where the best places to live might be. I called the municipal airport to see about a charter, and I ended up in one of those small helicopters they use to spray crops. I think the pilot's name was Rafe; kind of an odd name—I don't remember his last name—and he flew me around all morning. He didn't have to charge much, he said, because it was a company helicopter or something. Big guy; very nice looking in a cowboy sort of way, but a little too loud for my taste. And he did things to try and scare me. Flew very low; made sharp turns. I guess he thought it would impress me. It didn't."
Ford said, "That was Rafe. Did you ever see him again?"
Jessica said, "No." Then: "Why were you looking through his address book?"
"Yesterday afternoon I found his body on a little island south of here—"
"His body? You mean he was dead?"
"As in very dead. I wasn't sure it was Rafe at first. Vultures had been working on the body for a while, so it was hard to tell—"
Jessica had her hand to her mouth, incredulous. "That's why you came here in such a mess! And you were bitten! My God, Doc, don't be so nonchalant. Tell me what happened!"
So he told her about Hollins. Told her about high school, the phone call and finding him on the island, finding the gems; some of the rest of it, but keeping it simple while Jessica listened, making sad faces. "My God, that's awful. Just terrible. But are you really sure it was him?"
"I am now. I thought maybe Rafe had killed someone accidentally; someone he was supposed to do business with and, in a panic, tried to cover it up by planting his own wallet on the corpse. It would have been a dumb thing to try, but people often do dumb things when they're scared. It was Rafe, though. If he wasn't dead, he'd have gotten in touch with me by now. He needed me to help get his son back."
"What are you going to do, Doc?" Jessica was on her feet, looking for the wine bottle, truly upset.
Ford said, "There's not much I can do about Rafe. For some reason, someone in Everglades County wants his death to appear as a suicide. They may have had a hand in the murder, but I don't see sufficient motive. Rafe went through a nasty divorce, and a local judge got involved with his ex-wife, but they'd already taken his son and his money; why would they want his life? It's more likely someone on Sandy Key decided that Rafe was unimportant enough to sweep under the carpet, avoid all the bad publicity, and then they could still look for the murderer on the sly. That's what I hope happened."
"But there has to be someone you can call; someone who can find out for sure if he was murdered or committed suicide—"
"He was murdered. There's no doubt about it."
She said, "I know he was your close friend, Doc. But that doesn't mean he couldn't have gotten very sick; sick enough to take his own life." The gentle voice of reason, reminding him.
"You think I'm making an emotional judgment. I'm not. Take the suicide note. It said: I just can't take it no more; something like that. Illiterate; real hicky in big, rough block letters. Well, that's a role Rafe liked to play: the backwoods redneck role. Talked real slow, real southern, like he was dumb as dirt. But he only did it around people he didn't know very well, and always for a reason. He liked to use it to bait the self-important ones, the snobs. He'd start asking dumb questions, and these people would kind of look at him like a bucket of meat, and he'd keep asking questions, getting sharper and sharper but still with the hick accent, until he had made them look like complete asses. Rafe was a very bright guy. Articulate on paper. I went to high school with him."