“Then I met Willis,” she said, “just the way I told you, at a time when I thought I might be ready again for one more try at a relationship, my last. And he turned out to be the lover I’d only dreamed existed, the one I’d searched for after playing punching bag for Larry, before my illness. He knew exactly what I needed. He was gentle and compassionate.”
“It was his business to know what you needed,” Carver said softly.
She looked directly up at him. “I know that now; I can face it. When I told you about going up to Willis’s room with him at the sales convention, that was true. But we didn’t make love. I told him about me. Everything. About how the violence and shame had made sex impossible for me with other men. And he understood, held me to him all that night. He was the only man who ever stayed with me without sex. He didn’t demand, didn’t rush things. He had more patience with me than my therapist had shown me during analysis.” She drew a deep breath, then said, “The only time Willis and I made love was the night before he disappeared. That’s how I know it was a good-bye, Carver. It was the only time.”
Carver sat silently. He wondered if Willis would have been so understanding and gentle if he hadn’t had an ulterior motive. All that time with a beautiful woman, without sexual union… He didn’t voice that thought to Edwina, who had lived so long with brutality and then found the gentleness she’d sought. Her gentle man.
Carver understood now why Willis had meant so much to her. And he understood why she’d been vague, why she’d kept this part of her life secret: She’d taken a chance on Willis and lost. She had to know Carver before she could trust him with her past.
She smiled, a soft smile he was seeing for the first time. “Despite your cynicism and hard exterior, there’s a gentle compassion in you, too.”
“Is that why you called Willis’s name that night at the motel, when you were with me in my bed?” Immediately he realized the selfish cruelty of his question and regretted it.
Her smile dimmed and she seemed surprised. She had no answer. Her face was transformed to the familiar mask again, but it wouldn’t hold. Her lower lip began to tremble; the mouth of a ten-year-old beneath those calm and knowing eyes.
Carver took her hand and drew her to him, gently.
When they emerged from the house into the heat, Edwina locked the front door behind her and got in the Olds with Carver. She had a leather overnight bag slung by a strap across her shoulder. She worked it free and turned to place it on the backseat.
“I didn’t pack a lot of clothes,” she said. “How long will we be in Solarville?”
Carver shrugged and started the engine. “Maybe not long. It depends on how things go. On how right I am.”
He backed the car away from the small but plush house that had been home to Edwina and Willis, in that simpler world before the truth, then drove north along the coast to his cottage.
While Edwina waited, he packed a few things in the new suitcase the Tumble Inn had provided after the fire. This time the zipper stuck and he had to wrestle with it, snagging a fingernail before he finally had it zipped all the way around.
Then he phoned Ernie Franks at home and explained where he was going and why.
It all sounded good to Franks; the odds on Willis Eiler being found, and at least some of the Sun South money being recovered, had suddenly improved. His elation and hope throbbed in his voice. Franks and Edwina; maybe there was something in sales that eventually engendered desperate faith.
“Let me know,” Franks said, before hanging up. “When whatever it is that’s going to happen is over, you let me know about it, okay?”
Carver assured Franks that he would. That was the idea behind their arrangement. That was why Franks had offered him a percentage of the money, wasn’t it?
As Carver and Edwina drove south, then cut west on 70 toward south-central Florida, Carver watched the lengthening shadows along the flat highway and began to feel the same heightened optimism that Ernie Franks had voiced. Not because of the money, or the possibility of a cracked drug operation, but because it seemed that at last Willis Eiler could be put to rest alive or dead.
That might be the final stage in the exorcism of a demon.
CHAPTER 29
Daninger seemed surprised to see them again at his motel. He smiled, bowed, smiled, genuflected, smiled, smiled, and gave Carver and Edwina adjoining rooms near the deep end of the Tumble Inn’s swimming pool. The possibility of litigation still ran strong.
Carver slept late the next morning, but he was still awake before Edwina. He left her sleeping and drove into Solarville to check in with Chief Armont. At the rear of the headquarters lot, Mackenzie’s Jeep was parked, its wheels and fenders caked with mud.
The chief said he was glad to see Carver but didn’t put on nearly as good an act as Daninger. But then, he didn’t have the motivation. He asked Carver what he was doing back in town.
When Carver told him, Armont didn’t seem to like it. He knew there was plenty of drug trafficking going on in and around Solarville. He also knew that some of the people involved had the influence to cost him his job. He didn’t like the fine line he had to walk; he did what he could without committing professional suicide, kept his town as straight as possible and only looked the other way when he had to. Carver sympathized with him, but at the same time wondered exactly how much Armont did or didn’t know. A man could keep his eyes clenched shut only so long.
“I didn’t figure you were the sort a few murder attempts would keep away,” he told Carver. “I knew you’d be back. You’re the dog-with-a-rag type: won’t let loose because you can’t.” He sounded as if he were that type himself, only circumstances kept him from acting on instinct and sinking his canine teeth into the rag. His flat, cop’s eyes narrowed. For an instant it was apparent that he envied, and admired, Carver. “You’ve got leeway. You’ll always find a way to get the job done.”
“I’ll always try, anyway,” Carver said. “You know how it is.”
Armont nodded. He did know. That was his burden.
“Have you checked on Sam Cahill?” Carver asked.
“His house has been staked out. No Sam Cahill anywhere around here lately, if you ask me.”
And no Willis Eiler, Carver thought. It was possible that the hand Willis and Cahill were playing had folded of its own accord and they’d moved on to new hunting grounds. They were both men who had disappeared with daylight before.
After leaving police headquarters, Carver drove the short distance down the hot and dusty street to The Flame. He parked on South Loop, directly across from the restaurant, and was starting to get out of the car when he noticed there were few other cars parked nearby and there was no sign of life inside the restaurant’s tinted windows.
It was Sunday; he’d forgotten. Apparently The Flame was extinguished for the Sabbath. That meant that to talk to Verna Blaney and try to get an inkling if she knew where Cahill had gone, he’d have to drive out to her cabin.
He got directions easily enough from jug-eared Wilt at the Shell station, then drove to the south end of town and then farther south on a series of narrow, elevated dirt roads that ran through thick swamp, between tall cypress and mangrove trees, their limbs laden with Spanish moss and dangling creeper vines. An otter glared at the car from the side of the road, then disappeared back into the swamp. Carver realized he was inside the red-penciled area on the map he’d found in Willis Eiler’s apartment in Orlando.
Verna Blaney’s place was in disrepair, but it was more than simply a cabin. It was isolated well off the road, at the end of a long gravel driveway. Low and ramshackle, it had a flat-roofed front porch with three wooden steps leading up to it, and curtains pulled closed at all the windows. The grayish clapboard house sported black shutters and a tall brick chimney. There was a screened-in porch built onto the west side, but the screens were rusty and torn, hanging in flaps as if objects had been hurled through them. Behind and to the left of the house was a crude wooden dock, and near it, resting on dry ground, was one of the flat-bottomed airboats some of the Everglades residents used to navigate the swamp.