Lindsey said, “I don’t know how he finds out all the stuff he does, but don’t worry about it. Plus, who cares? The only thing I really care about right now?” She gave me a slowly lingering kiss, then a slap on the butt. “All I care about is you calling those numbers I gave you, letting me know when we can get together again. You promised, so don’t forget, damn it.”
I was nodding, still considering the probabilities. “Yeah, it would have to be the cell phone. You wouldn’t even need to add a mini-transmitter into something like that. Just dial in on the phone’s preprogrammed number. Or… yeah, maybe they would have to install one more little chip.”
“Ford! You are going to call me. Leave a message at the numbers I wrote down, let me know where you are. I’ll call you here on the island, just as soon as I get to wherever in the hell it is they’re taking me. But if they won’t let me call, don’t think it’s because I don’t want to.” She had gray-green eyes with flecks of gold on the iris. Looking at me, her expression became affectionate, her eyes intense. “I like you, Ford. It’s nice not to feel that itch. That destructive itch. I want to stay in touch.”
I became certain that someone had eavesdropped via the girl’s phone a few minutes after I watched the chopper bank away, swinging northward, gaining speed, when I was summoned to the island guests’ services desk.
Someone had called my room three times; left the same name, the same number.
The first two message slips were blank, but the third read, “Hal Harrington wants to discuss recent Apollo mission. Call immediately.”
7
R ansom Ebanks asked me, “Why would our daddy lie about somethin’ like that? About you and me being brother and sister? You look at the papers I’ve been trying to show you, the ones back on the island, then you understand.”
In Tomlinson’s bungalow, in a small black backpack, she had a manila envelope filled with papers. Letters mostly, some legal documents and photos. I’d glanced at them long enough to notice that there was a drawing of some kind, too.
I said, “Tucker would lie because-” I almost said Tucker Gatrell lied because he was a fraud and a pathological liar, but caught myself.
Tomlinson was right. The genetics were unmistakable. The eyes, the vocal tones, even the way she turned her head and paused before speaking: all characteristics that reminded me of Tuck. Not that it was surprising my bawdy old uncle had sired a daughter down in the islands. He’d spent a lot of time in Cuba, the Bahamas, and Central America, drinking and carousing. I reminded myself that daughters tend to be sensitive and protective about their fathers no matter who they are. It wasn’t Ransom’s fault that she was Tucker’s daughter. No need to be cruel, so I started over.
“Tucker would lie because he was… let’s just describe him as an unusual person. He was theatrical. Prone to exaggeration, almost like an actor. That’s one way to describe him-the man would have been a decent actor. Which is what he was doing when he told you I was your brother. Exaggerating. Acting like it was true. His little way of having fun. Isn’t that right, Tomlinson? Tomlinson knew the guy. Oh, he was wild about Tomlinson.”
I was being facetious. Tucker’s common greeting when he saw Tomlinson approach was, “It’ll be a couple hundred more years before you hippie bastards should be allowed to mate with human beings. But that doesn’t mean I won’t let you buy me a beer.”
“Wild about me,” Tomlinson echoed. “Describes our relationship perfectly.”
I said, “My mother was Tuck’s younger sister. Much younger. She and my father were killed in an accident a long time ago. But you and I are fairly close to the same age. So see? It’s impossible. If we are related, Ransom, you’d be my cousin.”
She turned away then paused, that familiar cowboy actor pose. Toyed with the big gold ring on her right hand, thoughtful, then shook her head.
Why was it so difficult for her to accept?
We were aboard my twenty-four-foot trawl boat, dragging nets and culling the catch so I could finish my fish survey. Tomlinson and the woman had agreed to help because I was temporarily one-handed and couldn’t operate the trammels alone.
It was a winter-blue morning with a light chop out of the south. The breeze was balmy, scented with jasmine and mown grass. We were less than a hundred meters off Guava Key, both outriggers down, nets in the water. They created a brown swale that, if seen from above, would be an expanding vortex contrail as I steered us in wide circles and the rollers pressed themselves along the bottom.
I hadn’t called Harrington yet. For one thing, I dreaded it. Talk to a man about a one-night stand with his daughter? For another, my work took precedence-or so I told myself.
My trawl boat is a specialized vessel, built to drag shallow water, and ideal for collecting on the flats around Sanibel Island and the Gulf littoral. It is made of cedar planking and painted gray on gray, with a gray wheelhouse.
No, it is not built for style, nor is it maintained for looks.
I’d bought her used in Chokoloskee a couple years ago and single-handedly chugged up the inland waterway past Mango and Naples and Fort Myers Beach, and put her to work. It’d paid for itself in less than a year. When a university or lab sends me a big order for a species of plant or animal that I can’t collect by hand at low tide, or with a cast net, I fire up the net boat and rumble out into the bay.
“Rumble” is the appropriate word. It is powered by an old standard six-cylinder engine. The name brand is Pleasure Craft but it is actually made by Ford. Plugs and points, and no computer gizmos of any kind. In the little pilot house is a wheel, a throttle and the minimum of gauges-water pressure, oil pressure, and temperature. Above the pilot house, folded like the wings of a pterodactyl, is a complicated rigging of wires and steel booms to raise and lower drag nets, port and starboard. On the stern, a plywood culling table runs across the transom, with a twelve-volt light system so I can work at night. There are two huge live wells and a storage hatch on the port side built the size of a bunk, so I’ve got a place to doze if I get sleepy or just choose to lay out late, looking at the stars.
The trawler is slow, dependable, and about as graceful and easy to maneuver as a floating slab of cement.
But it’s functional-all I care about-and easy to use.
Tomlinson had been out with me enough to know how to set the nets while I steered. Ransom stood next to me in the wheelhouse, talking, not wanting to believe that I was telling her the truth.
She illustrated a component of the human quandary: When you have wholeheartedly accepted one vision of reality, it is very difficult to have that reality challenged, then replaced by another.
She was still shaking her head as if perplexed. “Whenever he mentioned you, I could hear the daddy sound in his voice, him telling me about the brother I had back in Florida. Like the sun rose and set on you. Tell me about how you so smart and big and strong, jes’ about the best at everything you did. From what I saw out there on the dock yesterday, the way you handle yourself with them bad men, sweet Jesus, he tol’ me the truth, he did. Get yourself shot and you act like, hey, it no big deal. Like you knew exactly what to do, zoomin’ around out there on that fast boat.”
That was surprising to hear. Tucker was prone to criticize and denigrate, particularly when he was drunk-which he usually was.