Alice in Jeopardy: A Novel (25 page)

“I can’t read,” he said, and grinned.

That grin. Jesus!

“Chocolate-vanilla swirl,” she said. “Strawberry. Coffee crunch.”

“What’s the coffee crunch?” he asked.

“It’s got like these little chunks of chocolate in it.”

“Is it good?”

“I like it.”

“What else do you like?”

Little bit of double intender there?

She looked at him.

“Lots of things,” she said.

“You like walking hatless in spring rain?”

She looked at him again.

“You flirting with me?” she asked.

“Yep,” he said.

“You too young to be flirting with a grown woman,” she said.

“Thirty-three last month,” he said.

“You look younger.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-seven.”

“Nice age difference,” he said.

“You think?”

“Don’t you?”

“How about that
other
little difference?” she asked.

“The Great Racial Divide, you mean?”

“No, I mean the gold band I spy on your left hand.”

“Oh,” he said. “That.”

“Yeah, that.”

“Yep,” he said.

“So whut’s a married man like you doing flirting with a nice colored girl like me?”

“Gee, I really don’t know,” he said. “What time do you get out of here?”

“Six o’clock.”

“Want to come for a ride with me?”

“A ride where?”

“To the moon,” he said.

That was the start of it.

“You still love me?” she asks now.

“Adore you,” he says.

“Even after what we had to do?”

“Well,” he says, “desperate people do desperate things.”

“Desperate, huh?”

“Is what we were,” he says. “We
had
to do what we did. There was no other way.”

“Here’s to all that money,” she says, and raises her glass in a toast. They clink glasses. Her eyes flash with sudden awareness.

“Why’s that waiter staring at you?” she whispers.

He turns to look.

“The bald guy over near the serving station.”

“He’s not staring at me.”

“He was a minute ago.”

They drink.

“Good,” he says.

“Yummy,” she says. But she is still looking toward the serving station.

“I wonder why they gave us fake money,” he says.

“
If
it’s all fake. We don’t really know.”

Still looking across the room.

“It must be, don’t you think?”

“Doesn’t matter,” she says. “Good as gold either way.”

He pours more champagne for both of them. They sip silently for several moments.

“So where do you think we should go?” she asks. “After we turn the kids loose?”

“Where would you like to go?”

“Bali.”

“Okay.”

“You serious?”

“Sure. Why not Bali?”

“Oh, wow, I’d
love
that.”

“Fake money, fake passports, why not?”

“Can we get them? The passports?”

“Oh, sure.”

“Do you know somebody?”

“Same guy who made the other stuff.”

“Then let’s do it.”

“We will.”

“Let’s get out of Florida tonight,” she says, really excited now. “Let’s give her a call…”

“Well, not yet.”

“…tell her the kids are all right…”

“Well...”

“…drop them off someplace, and get the hell out of here.”

“Well,” he says, and takes another sip of champagne. “The kids may be—”

“Excuse me, sir,” a voice says.

He turns.

The man standing at his elbow is the waiter who Christine says was staring at him a few minutes ago. Fifty years old or thereabouts, tall and lean, with a balding pate and clear blue eyes, an apologetic smile on his face now.

“I don’t want to interrupt your meal,” the man says. “Just wanted to say it’s nice seeing you here again.”

“I… uh… I’m sorry, but this is the first time I’ve been here.”

“Ah? From some other restaurant then? I used to work at Serafina’s out on Longboat…”

“Never been there.”

“Or The Flying Dutchman downtown?”

“Don’t know either of them. Sorry.”

“No,
I’m
sorry to’ve bothered you. I thought sure… well, excuse me, I’m sorry.”

He nods, smiles, backs away from the table.

“Do you know him?” Christine whispers.

“Never saw him in my life,” Eddie says.

Faking his death was
the easy part.

It had to look like a sudden whim.

Take the sloop out for a moonlight sail when it’s too late to get a sitter on such short notice.
Gee, Alice, I’d like to take the
Jamash
out tonight, would you mind?
Sudden inspiration, you know? But in preparation for this seemingly impetuous idea, he’s been watching the daily forecasts, waiting for a night when the seas will be high and the wind will be blowing out of the east.

They keep the boat at a ramshackle landing pier called Marina Jackson. It doesn’t have any hoists or storage racks, which they don’t need anyway because they never take her out of the water except to have the bottom scraped periodically, and they have that done at a true marina out on Willard. The guy running Marina Jackson is named Matt Jackson, and he’s surprised to see Eddie driving in at eight o’clock that night, fixing to take the boat out when the Coast Guard has issued small craft warnings. Eddie tells him he’ll be staying on the Intercoastal, which isn’t his plan at all, but Jackson frowns at him, anyway, and tells him to be careful out there tonight.

The sloop is a thirty-foot seaworthy Pearson that can sleep four, perfect for the Glendenning family, with a V-berth that can accommodate two up forward, and a port settee in the main salon that converts to a double berth. Eddie does indeed start out under motor on the Intercoastal, but the minute he rounds the tip of the key, he hoists sail and grabs the first wind that takes him westward, into the pass and out into the Gulf.

Man, it is not fun out here.

Expert sailor though he is, he knows this is goddamn dangerous, knows he can
really
drown out here tonight, if he doesn’t get off this boat fast, before it gets too far from shore. He inflates the rubber dinghy, carries it back to the stern platform and lowers it into the water. Clinging to the line that holds it to the
Jamash,
he climbs down into the dinghy, and starts its fifteen-horsepower Yamaha engine. He lets the line fall free of the sloop’s cleat. Still under sail, the
Jamash
seems to fly away westward into the night, disappearing from sight almost at once.

He is still fearful that he might really drown.

Waves crash in over the sides of the rubber dinghy, drenching him, threatening to capsize the small boat. He keeps its furiously bobbing nose pointed consistently eastward, constantly checking a handheld compass, squinting into the squall, his heart beating wildly in his chest.

At last he sees the light marking the entrance to the pass and the Intercoastal. He shifts course slightly, adjusting for the wind that threatens to blow him and the dinghy farther out into the Gulf. When he comes to within a hundred yards or so from the white sand beach that marks the tip of Willard Key, he removes a bait-cutting knife from its sheath and rips two gaping slashes in the dinghy’s orange rubber hide. He is over the side and swimming for shore as the deflating dinghy, weighed down by the engine, sinks out of sight.

He lies on his back on the sand, breathing harshly.

The night rages everywhere around him.

But Eddie Glendenning is dead.

Isn’t he?

Christine is silent all
the way back to the ferry landing. She is still wondering about that waiter in The Unicorn. They park the car, lock it, and board the ferry at ten-thirty. Ten minutes later, they are approaching the marina.

Years ago, when Ashley first saw the place, she began applauding. Jamie, who was then four, began clapping his hands, too, in imitation, and not knowing what he was cheering. Both children kept clapping as Eddie brought the
Jamash
in. The only approach to Marina Blue was by water. You either came on your own boat, or you took the rickety ferry over from the end of Lewiston Point Road.

Then, as now, the docks were painted the palest tint of azure, streaking the wood like a thin wash of watercolor. Before the site was turned into an eccentric boating hideaway, the grounds had served as an artists’ retreat called The Cloister. Here, in the dim distant past, as many as a dozen writers, painters, and composers at a time could be housed and fed for periods as long as two months, while they worked on projects proposed to and accepted by The Cloister’s board of directors.

Isolated on this secluded stretch of land a thousand yards off the northern tip of Lewiston Point, a wide assortment of creative men and women lived and worked in wooden residences affording views of tranquil Crescent Inlet to the east, and the sometimes turbulent Gulf of Mexico to the west. The largest of the dwellings served as a community meeting place, where the transient citizens of the retreat gathered nightly to discuss and sometimes vociferously evaluate each other’s work in progress.

It was rumored that back in 1949, when Marina Blue was still The Cloister, John D. MacDonald wrote his first novel,
The Brass Cupcake,
while living on a houseboat here. It was further rumored that this earlier experience afloat served as inspiration for Travis McGee’s
Busted Flush.
Adding credence to the hearsay was the large framed photo of the writer now hanging in the marina dining room, which had once been the community meeting hall. None of the other wooden buildings remained, although there were now tennis courts and a swimming pool on the grounds as well, luxuries not thought essential to the creative process back then in the bad old days.

The long weekend the Glendennings spent at Marina Blue provided the fondest of memories for the entire family. Eddie guessed he was still in love with Alice at the time. He had not yet begun gambling heavily. He had not yet met Christine. He later supposed he started gambling only when he realized he could not make his for tune as a stockbroker. In his view, betting on the dogs was a lot like buying and selling stocks, bonds, and commodities. It never occurred to him that one was a job and the other was an addiction.

He later also supposed that he’d started up with Christine only because he was no longer in love with Alice. It never occurred to him that he might have fallen out of love with Alice only because he’d already started up with Christine.

The way Eddie looks at it now, he chose Marina Blue as a hideaway only because he thought it would be a safe, familiar, and therefore comforting place to hold the kids until all this was over and done with.

It never occurs to him that he might have been trying to re-create for himself one of the happiest times of his life—before it got too late.

It never once occurs to him that it might already be too late.

Eddie doesn’t think of
himself as a criminal. He met criminals while he was working at Lowell, Hastings, Finch and Ulrich, thanks, men who engaged in insider trading and were later caught and sent to prison. He was never one of those. Which was perhaps why he’d never made a killing in the market, he was never a goddamn criminal. And he is not a criminal now.

There are men all over these United States, perhaps all over this
world,
righteous men who take their children away from negligent or promiscuous mothers, men who
rescue
their children, in effect, from households that are hopeless—though he can’t claim to have done that, no. That would be lying to himself. And Eddie has never in his life lied to himself.

He knows that in the eyes of the law, he has kidnapped his children, which is a crime, but he is not a criminal. In the eyes of the law, he has taken his own children away from their mother, a woman perceived to be a widow. Which, by the way, and for all intents and purposes, is patently true. Since he is legally dead, or at least
presumed
to be dead, who is to say that someone declared dead isn’t actually dead? Who is to say that Alice is not truly a widow if, in her own perception, she is in fact a widow? Who indeed?

And who is to say that Edward Fulton Glendenning did not cease to exist on that night of September 21 last year, which was when Edward Fulton Glendenning disappeared? And is it a crime to vanish from the face of the earth? Does this make him a criminal?