I made it out to Stone Crab in ten minutes flat.
The house was dark.
Beyond the house, the sun was staining the sky and the gulf a red as deep as blood. I could hear the pounding of the distant surf as I got out of the Ghia and started running up the driveway. Susan’s car — the Mercedes-Benz that used to be ours before the divorce — was gone. Susan was out to dinner with Oscar Untermeyer, but never in a million years would she have gone to pick him up. The car was gone. The glass panels on the kitchen door were shattered, and the door stood wide open.
I was not often made welcome in this house since the divorce. Normally, whenever I picked up Joanna, I parked outside and honked the horn. But I knew this house like the back of my own hand, and I went into the kitchen and immediately found the light switch, and turned on the lights, and yelled “Joanna!”
No answer.
I ran through the house, turning on lights ahead of me, shouting my daughter’s name.
The house was empty.
I went back into the kitchen.
The spare keys were kept on an ornate brass twelve-hook key rack Susan and I had bought in Florence in happier times.
I had personally fastened the rack to the side of one of the kitchen cabinets.
The rack was still there.
The spares to the Mercedes should have been on a key chain I had bought at Ludlow’s Car Wash, an enameled thing with the Mercedes crest on it.
The spares were gone.
I was reaching for the wall phone when I saw the high-heeled sandal on the living room carpet.
Sarah’s sandal.
There was blood on the heel.
There was blood on the living room carpet.
I snatched the receiver from the hook.
A knife rack was on the counter under the telephone.
The biggest knife was missing from the rack.
A French chef’s knife.
I looked quickly at the drainboard near the sink.
No knife on it.
My hand was trembling as I dialed Bloom’s number at Calusa Public Safety.
“Stay there,” he told me.
I did not stay there.
As I ran up the driveway to my car, I saw another sandal lying on the gravel.
Snow White was barefoot now.
Barefoot Snow White had my former wife’s car... and my daughter... and a French chef’s knife.
And I thought I knew where she was headed.
“There’s the bird sanctuary. Have you ever been there, Matthew?”
“Once. With Joanna. When she was younger.”
“Nice in there.”
On the sole occasion of my visit to the bird sanctuary, my former wife, Susan, did not accompany me and my daughter. She said that birds, like bats, could get tangled in a woman’s hair. At the time, I harbored the perhaps unfair suspicion that she was also fearful they might fly up under her sacrosanct skirts.
My previous visit to the bird sanctuary had been during the day.
I had held Joanna’s sticky little hand in mine.
Hawks had circled against the sky.
Now it was night.
My car headlights picked up the letters burned into the beam over the entrance:
A sign on one of the entrance posts read:
NO VISITORS AFTER
5:30 P.M.
The chain that should have been fastened from post to post across the entrance had been unhooked from the post on the right and now lay on the dirt road leading into the park.
I drove over the chain.
I had read the Jane Doe/Tracy Kilbourne file, and I had a vague idea of where her body had been found. A boat dock from which hourly excursions ran along the river was situated some twelve miles from the entrance gate, and the body had washed ashore some five miles past that, near what was identified in the file as Ranger Station Number 3. I checked my odometer the moment I passed through the entrance gate.
I imagined eyes watching me from the undergrowth. Alligator eyes. I thought I could hear the secret rustling of feathered wings in the branches of the trees.
My headlights thrust tunnels of illumination into the blackness ahead.
The dirt road wound through palmetto and mangrove, oak and pine.
An owl hooted.
I could hear the river now.
Gently rushing through the stillness of the night.
I looked at the odometer again.
I had come eight-point-six miles from the entrance gate.
I drove hunched over the wheel, hypnotized by the headlight beams.
Had she brought Joanna here?
If not here, then where?
The boat dock now, on the right, my odometer reading twelve-point-two miles from the entrance gate. Another rustic wooden sign, letters burned into it:
EXCURSION BOAT DEPARTS
EVERY HOUR ON THE HOUR.
LAST BOAT 3:30 P.M.
If the police report was accurate, I would find Ranger Station Number 3 five miles past the dock. If Sarah had brought Joanna here...
I did not want to think beyond finding the ranger station.
It loomed in my headlights suddenly, seventeen-point-four miles on the odometer, a wooden structure that looked like an oil rig. I stopped the car.
The sign fastened to one of the lower cross beams read:
RANGER STATION #3
Silence.
To the right of the scaffolding, a single-lane dirt road angled off into the woods.
I could hear the sound of the river again.
I turned the Ghia onto the road.
I had driven no more than six-tenths of a mile when I saw the headlight beams ahead. My heart lurched into my throat.
Joanna was lying motionless on the matted undergrowth in front of the Mercedes-Benz.
Sarah was standing over her, the French chef’s knife in her right hand.
Her yellow dress was stained with blood.
Her bare legs were scratched and bleeding.
She turned as I got out of the car.
Our headlight beams clashed like drawn swords.
“Sarah,” I said.
“No,” she said.
“Sarah,” I said, “give me the knife.”
She took a step toward me. The Benz headlights silhouetted her long legs in the bloodstained yellow dress. The Ghia beams hit the knife in her hand, set it glistening and slithering with light as if it were alive.
“I’m not Sarah,” she said.
Her eyes were wide. In the glow of the headlights they seemed entirely white. No pupils. Wide and white and unseeing.
She was moving toward me now.
“Snow White,” I said quickly, “give me the—”
“Oh no,” she said, “no, my dear, it’s Rose Red, didn’t you know? Rose Red!” she screamed, and came at me with the knife.
I had never known such brute strength in my life.
I do not know how long we struggled there in the crossed beams of the headlights. I heard — and this time it was not imagined — the shrieking of birds in the mangroves, Sarah’s own shrieking as she tried repeatedly to plunge the knife into my chest, my hands locked onto her wrist, fitful shadows flitting over the ground and onto the branches of the trees, “Blood red!” she screamed, “Rose Red!” she screamed, the knife going for my throat, my face, my chest again, “Rose Red, Rose Red!” she screamed again and again, and moved against me with such force that my right hand momentarily lost its grip.
We stood locked in a deadly, one-armed embrace in the crossed beams of the headlights, my left hand clamped onto her right wrist as she flailed at me with the knife, raw power trembling through her right arm, her lips skinned back over her teeth. Our eyes met. I was staring into the face of a madwoman.