“I see. Well, look.” I pushed the document back across the picnic table. “The amount you’re offering me is an insult. How much do you figure the Top Ten is worth, anyway? Three, four million? What’s she insured for? You go back and tell the owner to think about that. I found her floating around out there completely unmanned. She was very nearly lost on that beach, and there are those who would consider me crazy to have taken my tug into water that shallow and that close to the surf line. The idea in marine salvage is no cure, no pay. That was the chance I took. Well, I cured their problem, and they now have to pay me for my services. You tell them they’re lucky I didn’t just say finders keepers.” I tossed his contract down on the table.
“Really, you should reconsider. This is a very fair offer.” His face was reddening, and the man looked like he was having an anxiety attack. What a change from the cool, confident guy who had been banging on my cottage door.
“This is bullshit, Burns, and you know it. You go back and tell the owner that I resent this offer, especially your thinking that I would be fool enough to sign something without even reading it first. My attorney is Jeannie Black. She will need to contact the vessel’s owner, and we will present our bill for my services. If that’s not satisfactory, we’ll be happy to ask Lloyd’s arbitrators to decide what’s fair.” I stood with my arms folded across my chest and watched him pack up his papers. The cashier’s check disappeared into the briefcase. I hoped I was making the right decision and would win this round. Ten grand was a lot better than nothing.
He snapped the case closed, lifted it up on end, and leaned on it. Maybe he thought he was smiling, but it was an ugly sneer. “You will regret this. These are powerful people, Miss Sullivan. You don’t fuck with them.”
Wow, I thought, interesting. Uptown suit and gutter mouth. I couldn’t resist. As he walked out along the path, I stuck out my tongue and crossed my eyes at his back.
Unfortunately, no magical elves had appeared overnight to clean up the mess inside the cottage. When I unlocked the door, the sight of all my belongings trashed in heaps on the floor didn’t exactly cheer me up. Robberies and break-ins were not uncommon in South Florida, and I’d often heard people talk about how violated they felt after their homes had been entered. I just felt pure, seething anger. A girl was dead, and while the Coast Guard was out there spending tens of thousands on a search-and-rescue operation and the cops were looking for some kind of evidence to hang the whole thing on me, Neal Garrett was apparently alive and well enough to toss my cottage. The jerk. In the bright light of morning, it seemed so obvious. I wasn’t ready to believe some dumb thief just got lucky.
I picked my way into the bedroom and found a reasonably presentable pair of jeans and one blouse that remained hanging half on, half off a hanger in the closet.
The bathroom had scarcely been touched. Some of the bedroom debris had fallen in there, but it seemed almost as if he had run out of steam. Had he been looking for something in particular, something besides the cash?
After a long, hot shower and lathering my hair three times, I finally started to feel human again. Clean clothes felt great, though rumpled. I combed out my wet hair, stepped into my Top-Siders, grabbed my shoulder bag, and went out the front door. I knew I couldn’t go on living this way; eventually I would have to face the prospect of an entire day spent putting my house back in order, but right now, more than anything, I wanted to see what my brother Maddy would say face-to-face.
Maddy lived in a townhouse in Surfside, and he kept his boat in Haulover Marina. Since they were close together I figured I’d swing by the boat first, and if he wasn’t there, I’d check the house. I hoped he wasn’t out on an all-day trip. Maddy’s truck wasn’t in the marina parking lot, and his boat, the Lady Jane, was securely tied up in her slip, so I didn’t even bother turning into the marina parking lot.
They had inherited the townhouse from Jane’s dad. It was in a very nice neighborhood in Surfside, full of retirees and escalating property values. It hadn’t quite developed the South Beach coolness, but you could see it was coming. I was pretty sure they were mortgaged up to their eyeballs, and while they could sell the place, the top of the market would be a few more years in the future; undoubtedly, they intended to hold out for that.
My eight-year-old nephew, Freddie, answered the door, and without even saying hello, he screamed, “It’s Auntie Seychelle!” Then he turned and headed back to the Nintendo hooked up to the big-screen color TV in the living room. I closed the front door behind me, and Jane appeared out of the kitchen wearing a flowered housecoat. Though she was only about six years older than me, she looked old and tired already.
“Hi, Seychelle,” she said, up on tiptoe and delivering an air kiss next to my cheek. She didn’t look particularly happy to see me. From the kitchen I heard a wail. “Oh, Annie’s in the high chair. I’m feeding her. Maddy’s up in our room, at the office.” She pointed to the carpeted stairs and disappeared back down the hall.
Such a warm family welcome.
Maddy had an old rolltop desk that he kept in his bedroom, and that’s where he sat to pay all his bills. He called it “the office.” I guess he wanted his kids to be able to say, “My daddy goes to his office,” instead of “My daddy baits dead ballyhoo on rich people’s hooks.”
I climbed the stairs.
“I thought you might show up.” He didn’t look up from the check he was writing. One thing about his townhouse, it wasn’t exactly soundproof.
“I guess you would expect it after that bombshell you dropped yesterday.” I sat down on the quilted bedspread. A can of Old Milwaukee was making a wet ring on the desk. It wasn’t even noon yet, and he was already sucking up the beer.
“You shouldn’t be so surprised, Seychelle. There’s a lot of capital tied up in that boat. I can’t afford to keep on being sentimental over its being Red’s boat.”
On the far side of the room, a sliding glass door opened onto a balcony overlooking a canal. The view looked nice, but he’d discovered the first time he tried to bring the Lady Jane up to the house that the water was less than two feet deep.
I couldn’t believe what he was saying. My brother had never been sentimental a day in his life. He had agreed to let me run Gorda because he thought it was a good investment. “Maddy, that’s my business. It’s my life. It would be like my asking you to sell the Lady Jane.”
“No. It wouldn’t. You don’t own a third of the Lady Jane.”
I looked out the window across the canal at the townhouse opposite theirs. A white-haired man in bright golf-green polyester pants was sitting in a wrought-iron chair reaching for a young girl’s hand. The child looked about ten years old, and she was wearing a frilly, going-to-see-Grampa special dress. He pulled her to him and sat her on his lap.
“I thought we all agreed to let me have a go at it for two years, Maddy.”
“Seychelle, we also agreed that you were going to make payments to me and Pit.” He consulted his watch. “Today is March nineteenth. I haven’t seen the February payment yet. You’re getting behind, and I don’t think we should let the business go all to hell.”
It was true, things had been slow lately, but I didn’t know how I was going to eat if I paid Maddy. I had been late before, and he had never said anything about it. Maybe it had been bothering him all along, or maybe something had changed.
I looked back out the window and watched the girl and the old man. He was talking to her, and her face looked slack and vacant, as though she wasn’t hearing a word the old man said.
I took my checkbook out of my shoulder bag and began writing. “Here.” I tore off the check. I wasn’t sure I had enough in the bank to cover the five hundred bucks, but I sure as hell didn’t want Maddy to know that. “February and March. I didn’t think my own brother would try to shut me down if I let one month’s payment ride for a couple of weeks.”