“There’s the bird sanctuary,” Sarah said, indicating a wooden sign hanging on posts over the entrance road. “Have you ever been there, Matthew?”
“Once,” I said. “With Joanna. When she was younger.”
“Nice in there,” Sarah said. “Do you enjoy wildlife, Chris?”
“Yes,” Christine said.
“Chris leads a very wild life,” Sarah said. “Don’t you, Chris?”
Christine said nothing.
“Taking care of all the nuts at Knott’s.”
Christine still said nothing.
“God, am I glad to be out of there,” Sarah said. “How much longer will it be, Matthew?”
“Twenty minutes or so.”
“Because if we pass a gas station, I’d like to use the ladies’. I’m about to bust here, if you’ll pardon the expression. Would that be all right, Chris?”
“You should have gone to the toilet before we left,” Christine said.
“I did,” Sarah said. “Don’t you love the way loonies are scolded by their keepers?” she asked me in the mirror. “Oh, will I be happy when this is all over. You have no idea how demeaning it is to have to ask permission to pee.”
“You’ve never had to ask permission to urinate,” Christine said.
“Urinate, yes, excuse me. May I please urinate if we pass a gas station?”
“Yes, of course,” Christine said.
“We’re coming to Taylor Road,” Sarah said, leaning forward. “If I remember correctly, there’s a Mobil station on the corner there.”
I looked at the dashboard clock.
It was twenty minutes to six.
“I don’t want to be late,” I said.
“Won’t take a minute,” Sarah said. “There it is. Do you see it?”
I pulled into the gas station and found a parking space near the air pump.
“I’ll get the key,” Christine said, and got out of the car, closing the door behind her again.
“Naturally, she’ll be in mute attendance,” Sarah said, and pulled a face.
Christine was in the office now, talking to one of the men there. He handed her a key attached to a wooden block. She came back to the car, opened the back door again, and said, “Sarah? We’d better hurry.”
“Are you going to time me, Chris?” Sarah said, getting out of the car. “Did you bring your stopwatch?”
“We don’t want to keep the doctors waiting,” Christine said.
“Even doctors have to pee,” Sarah said. “Excuse me, urinate.”
I watched them as they walked toward the side of the building where the restrooms were. They turned the corner of the building and disappeared from sight. I looked at the dashboard clock again. A digital clock: 5:44. I turned off the engine, and belatedly realized the windows were on an electric switch. I turned the ignition key again, pressed the button that lowered the window on the driver’s side, and then turned the key yet another time.
The digital clock read 5:45.
The corner of Xavier and Taylor was perhaps seven miles from US 41, but it could have been fifty miles from nowhere. Cattle country was far behind us to the west now, but this was still open land, the road on either side of the gas station flanked by palmettos and thickets of pine and oak. The Sawgrass River Bird Sanctuary — where Bloom’s Jane Doe had been discovered — was now some two or three miles back, but the terrain here was much the same as could be found inside the park, flat and wild and tangled, Florida in its natural state, Florida before the developers and the bulldozers came in.
I looked at the dashboard clock again.
5:47.
I checked the time against my own watch.
Won’t take a minute, Sarah had said.
The seven on the digital clock changed to an eight.
A truck carrying chickens in crates pulled into the gas station and up to one of the pumps. A burly white man in a soiled T-shirt and blue jeans got out, spit tobacco juice onto the concrete, and then signaled to the office.
“Want to fill her up?” he called.
The dashboard clock read 5:49.
They had been in there for five minutes now.
The chickens in their crates cackled and squawked. The chime on the gas pump ticked off gallons and seconds.
5:50.
The chicken farmer got back into the cab of his truck. He started the engine and drove off. The corner of Xavier and Taylor was still again.
The digital clock read 5:51.
I got out of the car.
I went around the side of the building to where a pile of used tires was stacked between the men’s room and the ladies’ room. I knocked on the ladies’ room door.
“Sarah?” I called.
There was no answer.
“Sarah?”
I tried the doorknob. It turned. I pushed open the door.
Christine Seifert was lying on the floor near the sink.
There was blood on the floor.
The blood was pouring from a wound the size of a dime in Christine’s left temple.
The door to the toilet enclosure was partly open. I shoved it open all the way. The enclosure was empty.
Sarah was gone.
And with her all hope.
Detective Morris Bloom got to the gas station ten minutes after I’d called him. The ambulance was there by then, and an intern was in the ladies’ room, crouched over Christine Seifert and trying to stanch the flow of blood from her temple. Bloom took one look at the wound and said, “Either a ball-peen hammer or a high-heeled shoe.”
“Would you mind giving me some room in here, sir?” the intern said.
Bloom showed him his shield. “Calusa PD,” he said.
“You can stuff that up your ass,” the intern said. “I’ve got a badly injured woman here.”
“Had one just like it in Hicksville, Long Island,” Bloom said. “Woman in a bar took off this high-heeled shoe she was wearing, whacked her husband on the side of his head, almost killed him. How is she?” he asked the intern.
“Breathing,” the intern said, annoyed. He had fastened a butterfly suture to the wound, and was putting a bandage over it now. “Bring that stretcher in here,” he called to the ambulance attendant outside. “Stand back, please, will you please?” he said to Bloom.
They carried Christine out on the stretcher and loaded her into the ambulance. The garage attendants and a man in bib overalls, his hands on his hips, watched from the open garage door bays. The ambulance went off with its siren screaming. And then the corner of Xavier and Taylor was still again.
“What happened?” Bloom asked me.
I started to tell him what had happened, what I thought had happened. My eyes were blinking. He put his hand on my arm.
“Calm down,” he said.
I nodded. I took a deep breath. I told him about the case I’d been working on — he remembered the case, didn’t he? The time I came in asking about the night of September twenty-seventh? Asking to talk to the patrolman who had gone to the Whittaker house...
“Whittaker, yeah,” he said.
I told him I’d been trying to effect Sarah Whittaker’s release from Knott’s Retreat. I started to tell him—
“Sarah Whittaker, huh?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Any relation to Horace Whittaker?”
“His daughter,” I said.
“Yeah,” Bloom said, and sighed heavily.
There were contradictions and convolutions.
In Bloom’s office some forty minutes later, we tried to untangle it.
If Horace Whittaker was the man who’d set up Tracy Kilbourne in that luxurious apartment on Whisper Key, then Sarah was not crazy; her father had indeed been involved with another woman.
Bloom said there was no concrete proof that the apartment owned by Arch Realty had been used by Horace Whittaker as a love nest.