The rain is beginning to taper at three-thirty as he drives south on the Trail to Timucuan and then turns the car eastward, toward the farm. The clouds are breaking off in tatters, blue is beginning to show in patches here and there. The road is wet and black ahead, the low red car hugging it, engine humming, tires hissing on the asphalt. He could get to like this car, he supposes, if he could ever bring himself to be unfaithful to the Caddy. He is beginning to think he might take the boat out. If it clears up. Drive over to the marina, dry off the seats, take her out for a little spin. Maybe run her up to Calusa Bay and back. Half-hour each way. If the weather clears.
By four o’clock, you’d never know it had rained at all. It is that way down here in Calusa during the month of August. It happens, and then it is gone, and the heat is still with you even though the fields lay emerald green and sparkling under a late-afternoon sun and the sky has been swept clean. He asks Jessie if she’d like to come out with him on the boat, but she tells him no…
“She’s not a boat person,” he tells Matthew now. “Never got the hang of running it, never enjoyed being on it…”
… so he drives all the way back into Calusa again. It takes about twenty minutes, this time of year, door to door from the farm to the marina. In the wintertime, when the snowbirds are down and the roads are packed, it’ll take a half hour, sometimes forty minutes. Those are the times he wishes he had a little house on a deep-water canal, keep the boat right there at the dock, take it out whenever he wanted to. Come and go as he pleased. Free. But the farm is his business, of course, his livelihood. He’s a farmer. The farm is what his father left him. His sister in Tampa got the trailer parks, and his brother in Jacksonville got the downtown real estate. The farm is a big moneymaker, Leeds has never regretted his inheritance.
The marina is off Henley Street, just past the big Toys “Я” Us warehouse. You go down the Trail heading south, and you make a right on Henley and follow it around past Twin Tree Estates, and then you take the little dirt cutoff leading down to the creek. Charlie Stubbs calls his marina Riverview, but it’s really on a little creek, is all it is, leading out to the Intercoastal. Willowbee Creek, it’s called. Sometimes the water’s so shallow you can’t get anything but a raft up it. Got to check the tides, give Charlie a call, ask him how it looks, can you move a boat up the creek? No such problem now when it’s just quit raining, and the tide’s coming in, and the draft on his boat is only three feet four inches.
The boat is a thirty-nine-foot Mainship Mediterranean. Powered with a pair of freshwater-cooled Crusader inboards, the Med is capable of doing almost thirty miles an hour, but Leeds has never pushed it that far. He loves this boat almost as much as he loves the Caddy. To him, the boat spells luxury. Well, it should spell luxury, it cost him close to $145,000. The Caddy is a comfortable old shoe, but the boat is a diamond-studded glass slipper.
It is one of those afternoons.
Matthew knows just what Leeds is talking about; he himself has been out on a boat on a day like the one Leeds is now describing, the sky a soft powder blue, the water still and smooth and golden green, a bird crying somewhere off to the right, shattering the silence, the cry echoing, drifting, and at last fading entirely. And all is still again. There is only the sound of the boat’s idling engines.
Mangroves line the shore on either side of the creek, reflecting in the water. Beyond these, receding into the landscape, there are palmettos, a scattering of sabal palms, a hummock of oaks trailing moss. The boat glides. A great blue heron stalks the edges of the shore, delicately lifting one spindly leg after the other. There are signs on slanted wooden posts in the water, no wake. Gliding. Gliding, idle SPEED ONLY. The Burma-Shave signs of boaters everywhere in America.
Leeds stands at the helm, a grin on his face. He is wearing jeans and a T-shirt, Top-Siders and a nylon mesh cap that was part of a giveaway two, maybe three years ago, when the Brechtmann Beer people down here were making a big push for their new Golden Girl Light. The cap is yellow, with a pair of interlocking red B’s — for Brechtmann Brewing — back to back in a circle above the peak. The cap is perfect for boating, Leeds wears it every time he goes out. If it’s a chilly day, he also wears a yellow windbreaker he bought at Sears. It is not a chilly day today. It is a normal day for August, insufferably hot and humid. But out here on the water, it is also heartachingly beautiful.
He hates to take the boat back in.
He cruises all the way up to Calusa Bay, moves slowly under the big bridge there, and makes a wide arcing turn on virtually deserted water. He feels utterly alone in the world. Alone with God. Who is being exceedingly good to him. And he forgets, for a little while at least, that there is anything in the world but peace and solitude.
He gets back to the marina at twenty past six and then drives the Maserati out to the farm again. He arrives there at a quarter to seven, somewhere around that time. Pete is just coming in from the fields, he waves hello from the tractor and Leeds waves hello back. Pete Reagan — no relation to the former president, whom Leeds hates, by the way — is his foreman, one of the thirty-six regulars employed by Leeds and his wife, an indispensable part of what has become a vast and very profitable operation since the death of Osmond Leeds six years ago.
For dinner that night, Jessie has asked their housekeeper/cook, Allie — who is Pete’s wife — to prepare steamed lobster, corn on the cob, and a mixed salad. The corn comes right from their own farm, as does the lettuce in the salad, but none of these is a cash crop like the tomatoes that are also in the salad. They sit down to dinner on the screened patio overlooking the pool. It is still stiflingly hot, but the water promises relief if the heat and humidity become unbearable, and the icy-cold beer in tall, frosted steins does much to dissuade thoughts of the weather. Besides, Leeds feels — and Jessie agrees with him on this point — that lobsters demand to be eaten outdoors at a long wooden table.
It is still a good day for Stephen Leeds.
God is still being good to him.
“When did you go out on the boat again?” Matthew asked.
“The boat? What do you mean?”
“What time that night did you go out on the boat again?”
“I didn’t.”
“You didn’t drive over to Riverview…”
“No.”
“… in your wife’s car…”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Didn’t you call Charlie Stubbs…?”
“Charlie? No. Why would I call him?”
“To tell him you’d be taking the boat out for a moonlight spin…?
“A moonlight spin?”
“A moonlight spin, yes. That’s what Charlie Stubbs says you…”
“He’s mistaken.”
“You didn’t call him?”
“I did not call him.”
“You didn’t ask him not to worry if he heard someone starting the boat…”
“I just told you I didn’t call him.”
“He says you called around nine.”
“No, I was already in bed by then.”
“He says you arrived at the marina around ten-thirty…”