“A good woman! That’s a laugh.”
I squeezed his shoulder, wanting him to listen. “I didn’t want to have to use this, but I’ve got no choice. Three or four months ago, it was around Halloween. I couldn’t sleep, so I went for a jog. It was way after midnight when I got back, and I saw you in your skiff. You and that little waitress, the new one from Boston who tends bar sometimes at Sanibel Grill. Mary Kate? I didn’t come over for a close look, but it was pretty obvious what you were doing.”
He raised his head, turned as if to face me, then thought better of it. “You… you were there? You never mentioned that to me before, dah-da-Doc.”
“I’ll never mention it to you or anyone else again. I promise. If you just cut Janet some slack.”
“The little brunette who works for Matt. I… what I think we were dah-dah-da-doing was just talking. She stopped by the marina and it was kinda late.”
“Hey-this is me you’re talking to. You and the girl on the casting platform. Want more details?”
He shook his head, still not able to look at me. “Ah-h-h-h shit. I was hoping no one would ever know… that I could forget what an idiot I was. The night you saw us, I’d been at one of Duke Sells’s all-day duck-and-oyster parties. I don’t know how I ended up with her. She’s always been kind of a flirt. Told me I had nice eyes. I bought her a couple drinks. After that, I cah-ca-can hardly remember what happened.”
“I imagine Janet’s memory is pretty foggy, too. Could be it’s one of those if-a-tree-falls-in-a-forest deals. If no one’s around to remember, maybe it didn’t really happen.”
“I was so drunk. That’s what I mean.”
I heard a car pull around the last curve of the shell road. I looked up to see Janet’s little Ford pickup. I hardly recognized the woman inside. Janet’s hair was a stringy mess, her clothes were wrinkled, her face sunken around the two dark and haunted holes that were eyes. I clapped Jeth on the back. I said, “So right away, you and your former girlfriend have something in common,” as I watched her step out as if in a daze, eyes seeing nothing but Jeth. Then I gave him a little push toward her. Watched just long enough to see her walk
… then run into his slow, reluctant arms, the two of them holding each other in a silence that was more like mutual shock, and then one, then both of them, were sobbing.
I turned and walked down the boardwalk to my stilthouse… then I began to run, too, when I heard the phone ringing.
I answered just before the recorder took over, and heard Lindsey Harrington’s voice say, “Doc! I was about to give up on you, big boy. Man, do I miss that bod of yours!”
14
Lindsey said it’d been a crazy couple of days. She’d never been through anything like it in her life. That now she knew what it must be like to be President. Or a big-time rock star, the way they’d choppered her off the island, everything done in secret, to some airport she’d never seen before.
Hal Harrington had been there waiting, and flew her in a Learjet north, but her dad wouldn’t even tell her where. Then it was into another helicopter, and finally a waiting limo which drove them for more than an hour or so, and by that time it was dark, so she really couldn’t say for certain where she was even now. Didn’t even know for sure what state she was in.
“Woke up yesterday morning,” she said, laughing, “and I’m like, where the hell am I? Looked out the window and there were mountains all yellow and silver with aspens, and fresh snow on the ground like you see on calendars or Christmas cards. I mean, it’s a totally awesome place. Like my own ski lodge with a rock fireplace that covers one whole wall, and I’ve got a bird feeder outside, which I’m keeping full so I can watch the cardinals. Because what else do I have to do except read or watch TV?”
The worst thing, though, she said, was that I wasn’t there to share the place with her-she said it wistfully, in a way I found touching, a girl with a crush-and it’d be especially great having me around because she’d been alone since this morning when her father had to fly back to Colombia on business. Except for the two bodyguards her father had hired, of course. They were always around but kept their distance. “Dad thought Gale was a little too chummy, and that’s not gonna happen again.”
I was standing at the window, watching the band set up on the docks. I was using my home phone, not the new cell phone. I stood there watching the sky turn tropical fruit colors, from pale mango to orange to citreous yellow, then purple… the anvil shape of a spent thunderhead smoky gray in the distance. I could see Ransom tapping a steel drum experimentally, four men around her now, plus Mark Bryant’s ancient golden retriever, Shadow, his tongue hanging out. There were probably fifty people out there, socializing on the docks, and Ransom was the only one who’d drawn a crowd. I turned my attention from the window for a moment and noticed a white envelope on the Franklin stove, with a note attached to it.
As I listened to Lindsey telling me about how weird it was, wearing a thong bikini one day, earmuffs the next, I saw that the envelope was the letter sent to me by my late uncle. A letter I’d seen but had yet to open and read. I saw that the note was from Ransom to me, the handwriting on both envelope and note very similar. I read the first sentence of the note, “My brother, It’s hurting my heart that you still haven’t read Daddy Gatrell’s letter to you…”
I folded the note for later, as Lindsey told me, “The first thing my dad did, when he met Gale and me at the first place we landed-this was right after we left the island-he about squeezed the wind out of me, he was so relieved to see I wasn’t hurt, then he took Gale aside and fired her ass. I don’t know what he said to her, but you know how there’s a type of person you can’t picture crying?”
An image of Jeth popped into my mind. I checked the docks again-he and Janet weren’t out there. Hopefully, they’d gone off on their own to talk. I said, “Yeah, I know exactly what you mean.”
“Gale was such a macho jock, Mr. Tough Girl, that I wouldn’t’a believed she’d ever cried in my life. Wrong. I don’t know what my dad said to her, but she was bawling her eyes out when she came out of that room with him. She’ll never work for him again. Maybe never work in the security business again, he was so pissed off.”
I said, “Your father would really do that to her? Ruin her career?”
“He said she wasn’t very good at it.”
“I agree. She was terrible. Still-”
“You don’t know my dad, Doc. Nicest guy in the world-if he decides to make time for you. But don’t cross him. Ever. And he’s always been so protective of me, it’s practically like being smothered. Want to make him mad? Do something to hurt his little girl. Me, I mean. That’s the way he still thinks of me. The weird thing about Dad is, the madder he gets, the quieter he gets. That’s how I knew he was furious at Gale. He smiled at her-but a different kind of smile-and kept his voice real soft and low, which told me, uh-oh, Gale’s about to have her head handed to her on a platter. Which is what happened. She’d almost gotten me killed, that’s the way he saw it, and she had to go. He’s got this favorite saying. How’s it go? Oh yeah: In diplomacy, getting even is the best revenge.”
I told her, “I can hear him say it.” I could, too. After talking with Harrington on the phone, I didn’t doubt it for a second.
“But know what the great thing is, Doc? He actually likes you. First time maybe ever that he approves of a man I’m seeing. From just that talk you guys had. That, plus after checking you out through probably every file the government computers can access. He didn’t tell you that, though, did he?”