“I really couldn’t do that,” she said.
“It’s my name.” He set one empty glass inside the other. “Why would it be a problem?”
“It’s not who you are to me anymore,” she said. “It doesn’t feel right.”
“What if I called you Mrs. Kinsey? How would that feel?”
She turned in her chair, crossed her legs. “I don’t care how it feels. Call me whatever you want.”
“Whore,” he said, his face darkening, his voice low. “There’s something.”
She recoiled, the way you might if someone’s injury had bloomed with blood. Her limbs felt hung with weights. Still, she managed to stand. Another woman who might have been her neighbor waited at the counter for her coffee order as if nothing were out of the ordinary.
Eva left the coffee bar, the door’s bells jangling behind her, and began to walk toward her house. Other people were out walking, in groups or alone, with dogs on leashes or pushing strollers. The air blew, hot and thick, lifting her skirt. Oak trees swayed overhead, sending acorns down onto rooftops, onto car hoods. Dry leaves skittered across the sidewalk. The wind in the oaks was a sound like a hiss, a faucet left on, a leak in a gas line. She easily blended in — a resident out for a walk, not someone fleeing a man in a coffee bar.
She approached her house, its 1950s facade so benign, so unremarkable. When she’d been a college student seeing Dr. Harcourt she met another student and began to see him too. The boy knew about her affair with Dr. Harcourt, she told him everything — where they had sex, the positions Dr. Harcourt liked, the things he told her to say. The boy loved hearing the stories, and then he must have repeated them, and it was a small college and somehow Dr. Harcourt found out. He hadn’t retaliated overtly, but now Eva surmised he must have been instrumental in her failure at school, the reputation she’d acquired, the accusations, the meeting with the dean who asked about her drug use, her poor grades, and who would not entertain her confession.
“Jim Harcourt?” he had said, twinkly-eyed and paternal, his expression bemused. He didn’t need to say more. She would not be believed.
The Prius was there at the curb, and Dr. Harcourt waited at the gate to the front courtyard. She had cared for him in college. She’d had every intention of staying with him, assured his love for her was greater than that for his wife and it was only a matter of time before he divorced her. The other boy was just a boy, and she regretted ever spending time with him.
Eva edged past Dr. Harcourt, his coat’s corduroy fabric brushing her arm. She opened the door with her key and stepped into the house, moved down the terrazzo hall to the living room and the wall of glass that offered its view of the patio and lawn, the wind-scalloped canal. She heard Dr. Harcourt enter behind her. He stepped alongside her and took her hand, gently.
“Let’s not do this,” he said.
“You should leave,” she told him.
“You haven’t gotten the tour yet. I promised you that, and I won’t renege.” He walked to the center of the room, his hands on his hips. “The scene of countless drunken escapades. Parties, dancing.” He swiveled his hips, his hands holding invisible things: a cigarette, a drink. “Glass dish of peanuts.” He mimed taking a handful, popping them into his mouth.
He took her hands and tried to get her to dance. He sang part of an old Barry White song. She felt the sharp press of the glass in her finger, and she tugged her hands away. He had told her the story to remind her of their time together, but he told her to frighten her too, knowing that what they’d done together would get mixed up in the story, that she needed to hear it, wanted it, much as the college boy wanted her stories of sex with a professor. Eva knew they all needed the stories for something.
“He came in here,” Dr. Harcourt said, gesturing to the sliding glass doors. “It was wall-to-wall carpeting then. My mother favored white.” He crossed the room to a door that led into what Eva and her husband had designated as an office. “He hid in here, so when my father came in,” he walked down the hall to the foyer, “and set his keys down, he was in direct view.”
“Were they caught?” she asked.
“The body was found here,” Dr. Harcourt said, his mapping of the room ending, the foyer the X.
“Who found him?” Eva said, her voice small and soft. “Was it you?”
He stared at the spot on the floor. “We made a mess of things back then, didn’t we?” he said.
He stepped around the imaginary body and approached her, the soles of his Converse squeaking. He put his hand on her shoulder and slid it down her arm. They had a history together, he said. “There’s something really powerful in that.”
D.P. Davis, the developer of the Islands, had died mysteriously in 1926. He’d fallen from a porthole on a sea voyage to Paris with his mistress — a former Hollywood actress. There’d been questions about the night he died, Dr. Harcourt had said. The man was a drinker, but he was also in debt. “Did he fall, or did he leap?” he had said. “Or was he pushed?”
She imagined the dead man in the foyer, the white carpet stained with blood, these same tree shadows moving along the walls, the quiet of the neighborhood its own sound. And then a rattling of keys in the door and the door opening on the scene. It might be this scene, she and Dr. Harcourt together, and it might be her husband coming into the house, calling her name. Was it always clear? Victim or criminal?
The tree shadows rubbed the walls, a delicate, inaudible friction. Dr. Harcourt dipped his face toward hers. Eva thought she might cry out, though from fear or desire she could not ever say.
Triggerfish Lane
by Tim Dorsey
Palma Ceia
They keep coming to Florida.
People who maintain such records report that every single day, a thousand new residents move into the state. The reasons are varied. Retirement, beaches, affordable housing, growing job base, tax relief, witness protection, fugitive warrants, forfeiture laws that shelter your house if you’re a Heisman Trophy winner who loses a civil suit in the stabbing death of your wife, and year-round golf.
On a typical spring morning, five of those thousand new people piled into a cobalt-blue Ford Aerostar in Logansport, Indiana. The Davenports — Jim, Martha, and their three children. They watched the moving van pull out of their driveway and followed it south.
A merging driver on the interstate ramp gave Jim the bird. He would have given Jim two birds, but he was on the phone. Jim grinned and waved and let the man pass.
Jim Davenport was like many of the other thousand people heading to Florida this day, except for one crucial difference. Of all of them, Jim was hands down the most nonconfrontational.
Jim avoided all disagreement and didn’t have the heart to say no. He loved his family and fellow man, never raised his voice or fists, and was rewarded with a lifelong, routine digestion of small doses of humiliation. The belligerent, boorish, and bombastic latched onto him like strangler figs.
He was utterly content.
Then Jim moved to Florida and something quite unnatural happened: he made strange new friends, got in disputes, and someone ended up dead.
But none of this was on the horizon as the Davenports entered the second day of their southern interstate migration. The road tar at the bottom of Georgia began to soften and smell in the afternoon sun. It was a Saturday, the traffic on I-75 thick and anxious. Hondas, Mercurys, Subarus, Chevy Blazers. A blue Aerostar with Indiana tags passed the exit for the town of Tifton, “Sod Capital of the USA,” and a billboard: Jesus Is Lord... at Buddy’s Catfish Emporium.