The apartment was small, but well furnished and clean. Sliding glass doors opened out to a balcony that overlooked the swimming pool. There was a long leather sofa, glass-topped end tables, chrome-framed wall hangings. A stereo was set up unobtrusively in one corner. Everything was modern. In good taste.
“What do you know about Ray’s disappearance?” Lottie asked.
Carver leaned on his cane on the soft carpet. “Nothing you don’t know, I’m afraid,” he said. “He seems to have suddenly gotten up and walked away from his campsite.”
Lottie shook her head and sat down on the sofa. She crossed long and elegant legs. “Ray doesn’t do rash things like that.”
“How long have you known him?” Carver asked.
“Three years. We met when he was in Chicago for a Save the Whooping Crane seminar.” She didn’t smile.
“You were that interested in saving whooping cranes?” Carver asked.
She looked at him levelly. “Yes. I still am. They’re worth saving. I’m interested in most of the things that interest Ray. Except for the swamp; I wouldn’t go with him there. It gives me the creeps.”
“But he liked the swamp.”
“He loves it,” Lottie said, neatly changing tenses. “Do you know that there’s plant life in the Everglades that can be found nowhere else in the country? Hurricane winds blow the spores over from Cuba and the West Indies. Ray’s fascinated by the variety of vegetation there.”
“Did he go into the swamp often?”
“No, not really. He was spending most of his sabbatical here, with me, working on his book. He’s writing a novel. A mystery. I was doing some of his typing. Then he got the phone call.”
“Phone call?”
“Yes. He wouldn’t tell me who from. Said he’d explain later. And we weren’t getting along, not as well as we thought we would be with all this time together. He told me he was going into the field, somewhere in the Everglades near a town called Solarville. Then he left.”
“He didn’t tell you why?”
Lottie ran a hand through her mop of black hair and shook her head. “No, he was supposed to phone me from Solarville, but he didn’t.”
“Are you one of his students?” Carver asked.
“I was last year. My required science course. Four years ago I quit the business world and decided to become a teacher. Just got fed up with all the lying and all the crap and swimming against the current. They make it tough.”
“Because you’re black and a woman?” Carver asked.
She raised an eyebrow in surprise. “No, I’ve been black all my life. Female, too. I didn’t really experience discrimination I had trouble coping with until I began living in Florida with a white man. Chicago’s no cosmopolitan paradise, Mr. Carver, but this place has a way of castigating interracial couples. Stiff-backed, fundamental religion rules down here. Even the places you do business with identify themselves with God. Honestly, some of the people here, their idea of God is like He’s president of some celestial chamber of commerce.”
Carver thought about Ernie Franks and his crucifixion oath for Sun South employees.
“The way the people in this area, the neighbors especially, looked at us, treated us… it put a strain on our relationship that hadn’t been there before. A couple of the tenants even paid us a visit one night and hinted that they were Ku Klux Klan members, suggested we move out. Ray got mad and told them he had a shotgun and if they tried anything he’d put holes in their sheets.”
Carver was beginning to like Ray. He shook his head slightly. The Klan and Mickey Mouse and drugs and the Bible and sunshine and murder and palm trees. Florida had become some state. “Why do you live here?”
“Ray’s work at the university. And the swamp. He’s doing ongoing research on its vegetation.”
“Ongoing can be a long time,” Carver said.
“You’re dead right about that.”
“Did Mackenzie ever mention my name?”
Lottie thought for a few seconds before answering. “Not that I can recall.”
“Do you have a photograph of him?”
She stood up and walked lithely into the bedroom. Carver could see an unmade bed beyond the door. She walked around it, letting her long fingers drag along the bunched sheets at the foot of the mattress. There was something infinitely sensuous in the gesture. The women men sought and then left. What the hell was wrong with his gender? Carver wondered. What was Mackenzie doing in the swamp instead of here?
Lottie swayed back into the living room a minute later with a photograph of a thin, mustached blond man in his early fifties. He was grinning and touching the frames of his round-lensed glasses, as if he were about to peel them from his head in the manner of people who put on and remove reading glasses frequently. He was wearing a checked flannel shirt and there was a rock formation and some pine trees behind him.
“I took that shot in Colorado,” Lottie said, “and had it enlarged.”
Carver stared at the photograph. He was sure he’d never seen Raymond Mackenzie or his likeness before this moment.
“Did you try to find out exactly why he was going into the swamp this time?” Carver asked.
She put the photograph down, faceup on an end table. “At first I did. But he wouldn’t say. If things had been better between us just then, maybe he’d have told me. But we’d just come from the bank, where he tried to get a loan for a new Jeep. He made the mistake of taking me in with him. The loan officer wanted to know more about me, about us, than whether Ray could afford the payments. Too many of the questions were personal. I excused myself and left. It was no big deal compared to the kind of bigotry that goes on around this place, but Ray was mad at me for not telling off the loan officer. Things had piled up; this happened right after the Klan conversation. Ray and I had an argument. The next day he took the old Jeep and his camper trailer and left. He didn’t phone me when he got where he was going. And he never called anyone at the university, either. I kept on them over there, finally got them to get someone in Solarville to investigate. Then I learned that Ray had disappeared.”
“Has he ever dropped from sight like this for any length of time before?” Carver asked.
“He’s not the type just to up and disappear,” Lottie said. “Not even for a few days. He’s no adventurer except when it comes to saving whooping cranes or snail darters.”
Carver thanked her for answering his questions, assured her the Solarville police were still looking for Mackenzie, and limped toward the door.
“You’ll let me know right away if you find Ray, won’t you?” Lottie asked. Desperation drew her words taut.
He swiveled his body with the cane and nodded. “The tenants who threatened you and Ray,” he said, “do you think they’re really Klansmen?”
“Who knows?” she said, shrugging. “They wear hoods when they’re out in their white linen jammies. My impression, though, was that they were mostly talk.”
Carver wished her luck, and left the apartment.
As he walked toward where he’d left the Olds parked in the shade, he noticed half a dozen tenants lounging around the swimming pool, working on their tans.
CHAPTER 23
Carver was sitting on his porch the next morning, still wet from his swim, watching the sun climb slowly higher as if it needed to gain leverage to bear down and burn the low haze off the Atlantic. It was still too misty to see the wide swells off the coast, but he could sense the waves forming out there, water rising massively as it met the backwash from the shore. And he could hear them roar in with ponderous force to become visible through the mist, showing whitecaps like teeth, hungry for the beach.
The rhythmic, rushing sound of the surf relaxed Carver. He was still breathing a bit rapidly from his swim, and his eyes were half closed as he leaned back in the webbed aluminum chair in the shade of the porch roof.
Everything was under control, sort of. At least put in abeyance for a while. He’d aired out the cottage, watered the plants, and found it easier than he’d anticipated to get back into his therapeutic swimming routine. He’d talked to Desoto and Burr the day before, called Ernie Franks and told him there was nothing substantial to report, and left Edwina preoccupied with catching up on real-estate business. She’d told him there were contracts on two of the houses she had listed, and she was sure she had a client for a third. She hardly had time for Carver. He was pleased to see this healthy streak of greed in her.