“So then the cops tell us we’ve got to leave, stop harassing the happy couple. What choice did I have? I told Mom to please call me. I couldn’t make her believe that I couldn’t call her. She didn’t even know Merlot’s number’d been changed. So Frank and I go get in the car. Mom’s standing there behind the cops. Merlot, the fat ass, he’s got his arm around Mom, his Creole roommate standing there still looking pissed off, ready to fight. You know what Merlot does then?”
“What.”
“He flashes me this smug little smile as we’re pulling away. A very private smile, him looking right into my eyes, just him and me. It was kind of like he was telling me, yeah, you’re right about the kind of person I am. But your mother doesn’t know it and no one else will ever believe it, so screw you.”
The way Amanda described it, I could picture it: the man’s eyes boring into hers, making her hate him even more, wanting her to hate him because he was enjoying it.
Slightly more than two weeks later, Amanda received a card from her mother postmarked Cartagena, Colombia. All it said was that they were aboard a forty-eight-foot sailboat and having a wonderful time. Over the following two months, she received three more cards, all of them postmarked Cartagena, all of them pleasant and very brief. They offered no return address and gave no more information than the first.
“She might have been writing to a stranger,” Amanda said. “They were that impersonal, that cold. And there wasn’t a clue about what their plans were, where they were headed.”
Amanda received the last of the three cards nearly a month before she tracked me down on Sanibel. Increasingly concerned about her mother’s well-being, she contacted the Broward County Sheriff’s Department and then the FBI. Both agencies were attentive and sympathetic, but how could they list Gail Calloway as a missing person when an official police report quoted the woman as saying that she was staying voluntarily with Jackie Merlot? Not only that, but Gail had volunteered that the two of them expected to be out of touch for a while while traveling.
“It’s quite a predicament,” I said.
“Yeah. Now you see what I mean when I say the police can’t help. And the private investigator Frank hired, he’s not going to travel out of the country to try to bring Mom back. He’d be risking his license.”
I thought about it for a moment before saying, “I’m going to tell you something that you may not want to hear. You’re assuming that your mother wants to be rescued. You need to face the possibility that your mother really is happy, that she meant exactly what she told you. She’s a grown woman. Merlot may be a bad guy, maybe the scum shyster of the earth, but it doesn’t much matter what we think. She may be doing exactly what she wants to do.”
“No, nope, I don’t think so. I know my mom. She’s in trouble. She may not know it yet, but she is.” Amanda gave it a couple of beats, looking at me before she added, “And you think so, too.”
I said, “I do?” amused by her confidence; sat there letting her know I was waiting for an explanation.
“I’ve been watching your expression, Ford, the way your eyes changed. While you were listening, I could almost see the wheels turning. You’re a smart man. You’ve been around and you’re good enough at reading people to figure I’m not the kind of person to exaggerate or to panic or go all freaky just because I don’t get my way. I’m not exactly the all-American girl, but I’m no ditz, either. And I’m not one of those adult children who can’t leave their parents. For the last five years, I’ve lived very happily on my own, thank you.
“But what I told you about my mom, it got to you. It made you mad. I could tell. There’s something very… unhealthy about Merlot’s behavior, and you know it. You and my real father were once very close friends, and the woman that he loved is in trouble. Guys like you-and I may be wrong here, but it’s the way I read it-guys like you, the straight shooters, you’re throwbacks. You take friendship seriously, and what I just told you really pisses you off. Not you personally, but in a way that offends your sense of loyalty. I may be way off base but, hey, I hope I’m right because there aren’t many people left, male or female, a person can count on. So, the question is, do you have any ideas how to find her and pry her loose from that fat bastard?”
So, along with her other good qualities, give the lady low marks for her generous, hopeful assessment of my character, but high marks for the way she read my reaction to her story.
She was right. Even though I had never met Gail Richardson Calloway, I felt fraternal and protective toward the woman to an emotional degree that I found surprising. I was also surprised to realize that Amanda’s story had filled me with an irrational dislike of a man I’d never seen, spoken with or met: Jackie Merlot. It had to do with an image that lingered in my imagination: a fat man with a boy’s face flashing a private smile at a tough, introverted girl with stringy strawberry blond tomboy hair; a man who took perverse joy in driving a wedge between a mother and a daughter.
But I was wary of my own reaction because I am wary of emotion as a motivator. Emotion is energy without structure, without reason. Emotion can be a dangerous indulgence.
I finished the last of my tea; rattled the ice cubes in my glass as I said, “What you want me to do is go to Colombia and try to find your mother. That’s the point of all this, isn’t it?”
Amanda was shaking her head. “I won’t say I didn’t come here hoping you’d offer. Yeah, that’s what I was hoping. I really was. But the main reason I came is because of the letters I found, my dad’s letters. It’s like he knew what was going to happen and he was giving me directions what to do. But I don’t expect you to try to help, Doc. Not now. Not after meeting you.”
What the hell did that mean? I said, “You just lost me.”
The girl stirred from her seat, stood away from the table and tugged at the T-shirt with its terse warning message. Through the window, near mangroves at the back entrance to the marina office, I could see Mack at the fish-cleaning table filleting a couple of pompano. Tucker Gatrell watched, yammering away. Suspended from the porch overhead was a cast net. It looked like a gigantic spider’s web. Jeth was enmeshed in the thing, carefully inspecting its elemental network, using a spool of fishing line to mend holes.
Amanda swiped a wisp of copper hair from her eyes and said, “I hoped you’d volunteer to go help my mom because of the way my dad described you. But the thing is, I pictured a… well, let’s just say I pictured a more adventurous type of guy.”
“More adventurous?” I said. “Is that right?”
“What was that line in my dad’s letter? ‘The man’s got special skills.’ He was talking about you, so I pictured one of the soldier-of-fortune types. One of the tough guys you see in films. But not somebody like you, Doc. As big as you are, I didn’t picture somebody who looks like they spend all their time reading books and looking through a microscope.”
“I like books,” I said agreeably. “And it’s true that my work requires a microscope.”
“Don’t take that the wrong way. It’s not a cut. I don’t like the macho types. Not at all, so no offense. Really.”
Listening to Amanda’s story, her tone, her tough logic, I could hear the faintest echo of a good man who was lost long ago and far away. It was a frail thin chord that was the voice of an old friend. I fought the urge to allow myself an ironic smile as I replied, “Gee, no offense taken, Amanda. Really.”