Was that the sort of cryptic message that I was supposed to process and correcdy interpret? If so, I'd missed badly. It was surprising. Such silent dialogue is something that I'm usually good at deciphering. At least, that's what I've always thought.
Finally, there was her most troubling claim: that I was a loner and would always be alone.
No, that definitely wasn't true, I told myself. I liked people and people seemed to like and trust me. I had a family at Dinkin's Bay Marina. The point could not be argued. There were people there to whom I was dedicated and who reciprocated without question. There was Tomlinson, Mack and Jeth, Janet, Rhonda and JoAnn, plus several others.
See, I wasn't alone. No way. Not me.
Five
I found out about the grave robbery on Friday afternoon. I came cornering across the bay, doing sixty easy, a smoky, lucent veil of rain and electricity right on my tail. In hurricane season, squalls come blowing up out of nowhere.
I'd just dropped off the last of the snook to Mote. I came swinging up to the dock, to find JoAnn standing above me on the porch outside my stilthouse. She was wearing faded cotton slacks and a pale pink jersey banded with horizontal stripes that I associate with French painters or British seamen of long ago. Her eyes were red; she'd been crying.
As I ded my boat, she said, "They dug her up, Doc. I've been trying to get in touch with you. The county people, the ones from Marco, they called Delia."
I said, "They what?"
"Someone dug up Dorothy's grave. She was in the old town cemetery down on Marco Island. They dug her up and tried to get into her casket. Who knows what they took out? Tomlinson says it's time for you to get involved. He needs your help down there."
"Let me get the lines on my skiff," I told her, "then we'll talk."
Delia had called that morning in hysterics. JoAnn could hear Tomlinson in the background trying to comfort her. "I picked up the phone and she's yelling, 'Oh, they've hurt my little girl again. They've hurt my baby!' Panicky stuff. Terrible, like after a car wreck. I thought she was drunk or the pressure had finally pushed her over the edge, until Tomlinson took the phone and told me what happened."
JoAnn and I were sitting in caneback chairs in the little roofed walkway between my house and lab. In gentler days, such passages were known as dog trots. Listening to JoAnn's story, I was reminded that the gentler days of Florida, if such days actually existed, were long gone.
Inside, on the hatch-cover table, was the opened box of artifacts that Tomlinson had mailed, with the beads, the arrowheads and the cat. The similarities to Egyptian art were not apparent to me, but then I know next to nothing about the subject.
"If you think that's pretty," she said, "you ought to see the medallion. The way I remember it, so intricate and beautiful, it takes your breath away. Maybe you'll see it if Delia still has it or knows where it is."
"Maybe I will."
Beside the carving was a bushel basket of unopened mail, all delivered by JoAnn two days before.
My ability to ignore mail has grown stronger over the years. I view it as a sign of maturity.
It was dusk. The storm cell was a foggy mushroom cloud above us. Thunder vibrated in the windows; lightning popped and sizzled outside. Rain flowed down off my tin roof, so that the mangroves and bay beyond were blurred as if through a waterfall.
A waterfall is exactly what it was.
To take advantage, I'd slid open the cover of my thousand-gallon rain cistern so that it might fill faster, then, standing naked in the rain, shampooed and sluiced away three days of beach sand before joining JoAnn.
Because it seemed like a good idea to go to a primary source, I'd already tried to phone Tomlinson at Delia's trailer. While JoAnn waited outside, I left a message on the recorder. I also called the place Delia worked, the Mandalay, on Key Largo. They weren't at the restaurant, either, so I left another message: "Have him call, ASAP."
Tomlinson, apparently, was already a popular fixture on the island because the waitress who answered said, "You callin' for Tommy-san? Oh, I just love that guy! 'Course I'll give him the message if ya'll're a friend a' his."
Tommy-san? Tomlinson collected nicknames as quickly as house pets and small children.
So now I was sitting beside JoAnn while she told me what she knew, which wasn't much. Her voice provided a steady alto tempo to the lightning and chilly rain.
"Early this morning," she began, "one of the Marco Island cops was driving past the old town cemetery. It was still dark and he noticed some kind of light through the trees. How well do you know Marco, Doc?"
"Not well. It's changed a lot. Years ago, I spent some time on the island. It was already pretty heavily developed. My uncle had a ranch in Mango, south of there in the Everglades."
"Then you probably saw the cemetery but didn't notice it. It's a little tiny thing, real easy to miss. There're some pine trees and old tombstones. When we were kids, we used to say the place was haunted. There're all these old graves of sailors and fishermen, and we'd dare each other to walk through it at night. Which is what the cop thought, it was just kids playing around. So he shined his spotlight and saw at least two people run off, maybe more. He told Tomlinson he couldn't be sure, but didn't think it was important. He'd scared them, so the cop drove away."
At first light, though, the cemetery maintenance man found that Dorothy Copeland's grave had been exhumed. After a check of the cemetery records, they'd tracked down Delia, who still paid a yearly fee to keep her daughter's plot trimmed and neat.
"What a nightmare for Delia," JoAnn said. "The poor lady's been through so much. The cops asked her for permission to rebury her, but Delia said no. She wants us to meet there tomorrow and have a little ceremony. Say goodbye to her little girl one last time, plus she thinks something might be missing from the casket."
"So they did get the casket open."
"She's not sure. The guy from the funeral home, the guy who called Delia, he didn't think so. He opened it with the some official what-a-ya-call-it standing by. The medical examiner? They opened it just to be sure and he said everything appeared normal. Whatever that means. But only Delia would know, because of something she put in there when Dorothy was buried."
"Did she say what it was?"
"I didn't hardly talk to her at all, she was in such hysterics. Tomlinson, he's the one told me. You two-you and Tomlinson-he said you guys need to take a look inside the casket, because he doesn't think Delia can deal with it emotionally. He said that's why you need to do some reading first. To understand what it is you might find."
I'd already noticed that, along with the blanket, she had a book and some papers in her lap. She'd been to the library.
Over the years, in different parts of the world, I'd dealt with enough drug people to know that they are prone to fixation. If the drug person happens to be dangerous, it is a wise thing to take his fixations seriously.
Tomlinson was a drug person, always would be. The difference was, he wasn't dangerous.
Hadn't been dangerous for many years, anyway I said, "Could you just paraphrase so I don't have to read through all that? I don't see the point. It seems obvious that the girl found something that someone wants badly enough to risk digging up a grave in a public cemetery. Financial gain, that's what robbery's all about."
"Tomlinson says no, that's not it. Money has nothing to do with it. He says it's a lot more complicated. Like an ancient-curse sort of deal, only it's not a curse. They're after things that will give them more power. That's why they're after what Dorothy found. I'll sum it up and make it quick. It can't hurt at least to listen, can it?"