Bitter Legacy: A Matt Royal Mystery (Matt Royal Mysteries) (37 page)

Turk was in jail with his cousin in Collier County. He’d been turned over to Lieutenant Charlie Foreman, who had arrested the cousin. They would be tried for the blowing up of the as yet unidentified car.

Nobody had been able to find the Hacker. He was a ghost, a wisp of smoke that dissipated in thin spring air. All the digital trails had petered out in dead ends. The best of the tech guys at DEA and even in Jock’s agency were powerless to run him down. He was just gone and there was no hope of finding him.

My friend Abraham Osceola was still in the hospital. He was slipping inexorably toward death, his ancient body responding more and more feebly. The man had done his best for his people and the cruel irony was that it was all for naught.

That morning, shortly before we left for the Sand Bar my cell phone
had rung. I wasn’t going to answer, but the caller ID announced Professor Newman.

“The chemistry department took a look at the protocol. It’s a forgery.”

“How did they figure that out?” I asked.

“The ink. The document was written with a black ink that contains an organic compound called aniline. That wasn’t discovered until about 1864. It’s not a permanent ink. It can be dissolved by water getting on it and nobody would be able to retrieve the words written there. It was never used in permanent documents, such as government treaties.”

“Can you put a date on the forgery?”

“We could, but it would include destructive testing and take a while.”

“Never mind. It doesn’t matter. If the protocol couldn’t have been written in 1832, then it’s a forgery. Could it be a copy of an original?

“Could you prove that in court?” he asked.

“Hell, no.”

“Besides, even if there was an official copy, it wouldn’t have been done in a nonpermanent ink.”

“Okay, Professor. I’ll stop by next week and pick up the document.”

“Sure.”

I’d told my companions about the call. It was a sad denouement to the frantic events of the last week in March. All that death and pain, all for a forged document.

J.D. paused, a forkful of grouper halfway to her mouth. “I’ve seen people killed over a lot less.”

Marie looked at Jock. “Would you have used that syringe on Donna?”

Jock smiled. “It wouldn’t have made any difference even if I had.”

“Why not?”

“The stuff in the syringe was tap water.”

Marie laughed. “You’re kidding. Why didn’t you use a truth serum? Surely your agency has the stuff.”

“There’s really no such thing. At least if there is, nobody’s discovered it yet.”

“So you were bluffing.”

“Yep. And it worked.”

Marie turned to me. “Any word on Abraham?”

“Nothing new,” I said. “He’s still slipping.”

“What a shame,” said Marie. “He was trying to make things better for Black Seminoles. He thought he’d found the way to do it. A legacy for his people.”

“It turned out to be a bitter legacy,” said Logan.

“That it did,” I said, raising my glass of beer. “To Abraham Osceola, the last Black Seminole warrior.”

The sun was high, beating down on us from a cloudless sky, searing the land and the people in it. Pine trees stood silently, no movement because there was no wind. There was a taste of salt in the air, the faint whiff of brine. Humidity permeated the atmosphere, a wetness that you could feel and smell. The grunts of the men hand-winching the coffin into the open grave rode the air, punctuated by an occasional sob from a mourner, a mixture of physical effort and emotional pain.

The workers wore overalls and T-shirts and sweat-stained ball caps. The mourners were clad in bright clothes with floral patterns and straw hats made from palm leaves. Most of them were elderly, the young ones having fled to Nassau to find work.

Jock and Logan and I stood with the others, all black, all Bahamian, all descendants of the black Seminoles who had found refuge from the slave catchers. They had come in the early nineteenth century as the first and second Seminole Wars pushed the Indians farther into the Everglades. Many of the Indians had accepted transport to the Oklahoma territory, to a reservation that would never be their home. The blacks among them, many carrying Seminole blood, were hounded by white men from Georgia and Alabama who wanted to return them to slavery, a condition many of the blacks had never known. They and their parents and grandparents had been born into the freedom offered by the Indians of Florida, a territory of Spain until 1763.

There was a somberness to the small crowd gathered in honor of one of their patriarchs, a boy who had grown into a man while living among them. He’d left this little village on the northwest coast of Andros Island, seeking a better life than that offered by the meager sponge beds that had
survived the great fungal infections of the 1930s. But he always came home, came to visit and teach the young ones the ways of his Seminole forebears. Now he was home for good, buried in the poor soil from which he had sprung eighty years before. We were saying goodbye to Abraham Osceola.

It was the first Friday in May and as hot as a Florida summer in these latitudes southeast of Miami. The village of Red Bays had sustained this remnant of Seminole culture, peopled as it was by the descendants of those who had braved the fickle waters of the Atlantic to paddle their dugouts to freedom.

Abraham had hung on, his great body fighting for life. But it wasn’t to be. Finally, the spirit that propelled him to seek a better life in Florida, to search for his people’s patrimony, to give his life in the cause of his people, flagged and surrendered.

I paid for his body to be shipped home and Jock and Logan flew with me to Andros to bury him. He had no immediate family left, but his cousins had reserved a small plot of ground in the village cemetery next to his parents. And that is where we buried him on a hot day in May when the breeze deserted us and our clothes were soggy with sweat, where old people moaned in anguish and the very young wondered at the cause of such emotion.

We joined the villagers for food and drink at the little Baptist Church that seemed to be the center of activities for the town. We couldn’t stay long. Russ Coit, a friend from Longboat, was waiting for us at the San Andros airport in Nicholls Town. He’d flown us over in his plane, but decided not to join us for the twenty-mile ride to Red Bays. He hadn’t known Abraham and hadn’t been involved in the killings. He wanted to be in Sarasota before the arrival of the afternoon thunderstorms that daily stalked the peninsula of Florida.

I was standing under a clump of pine trees that dotted the dirt yard in front of the sanctuary when the old minister who’d presided over the funeral approached me. He was stooped with age, his face wrinkled by the years of caring for his people, a large nose set off by the high cheekbones of his Indian ancestors, his skin a deep chocolate. He wore a threadbare suit, light gray, a white shirt that had been hand washed rather than laundered,
a pale blue tie, and sandals. He was the keeper of the Seminole heritage, the elder who tried, mostly in vain, to impart the remnants of that fading culture to the youngsters in the village.

“You’re Matt Royal,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“Abraham told me that he might call on you for help. Did he?”

“He tried, but some bad people got to him before he reached me.”

“Do you know anything about the document he had with him?”

“The protocol to the treaty of 1832. Abraham made sure it got into my hands.”

“Abraham seemed to think it was of great significance,” the old preacher said.

“It might have been, but unfortunately we couldn’t prove its validity in a court of law. I had a chemical analysis done on the ink. That ink didn’t come into existence until many years after the document was supposedly written. It was a forgery. Do you know where Abraham got the document?”

“Oh, yes. It was here in the church. My father was the minister of this congregation and his father before him. I don’t know who first came into possession of the paper, but it has been in my family’s keeping since before my grandfather’s time.”

“Has anybody ever tried to make a claim under it?”

“Claim? No. I’d read it years ago, but it didn’t make a lot of sense to me. I kept it because it was old and I thought someday some of the young ones might find it an interesting artifact of their Seminole ancestors.”

“How did Abraham come to have it with him?”

“Abraham was one of us. He and I were boys together. He came to Red Bays every year from Key West. He’d bring money for the church and try to interest the young ones in their past. He knew a lot about the Seminoles and had made friends with many of them on their reservation in Florida. One day I showed him the old paper and he got excited. He said he thought the paper had a great significance and asked if he could take it back to Florida with him. I agreed.”

“When was this?” I asked.

“In March. A little more than two months ago.”

“I brought the document with me in case you wanted it back.”

“Yes. We’ll know it’s a forgery, but there is some sentimental value in the keeping of it. It’s part of our past, even if it is a fake.”

I went to the rental car and retrieved a cardboard tube from my luggage. I handed it to the old preacher. He opened the tube and pulled out the document. He unrolled it, looked at it, and put it back in its holder. “To think that this very old forgery caused the death of a good man is almost too sad to contemplate.”

“I think he died doing what he wanted. He was on a quest to ease the hardships of those he loved above all others.”

“He was a good man, Mr. Royal.”

“Yes, sir. He was.”

We said our goodbyes to the cousins and left that small village out of another world and flew home to Longboat Key and all the amenities we take for granted, amenities that most of the world can only dream about. We outran the storms and landed at Sarasota-Bradenton airport at mid-afternoon. Russ suggested that we stop at Tiny’s, have a few beers, and start getting our lives back on the beachbum track.

And so on a warm day in May, my friends and I sat at a high-top table in the dim recesses of Tiny’s and talked of absent friends, of those who had gone to rest, each one leaving an ever diminishing hole in our hearts. We wondered who would be next, who would succumb to the blandishments of the Grim Reaper and follow him into the great unknown. We knew that the one immutable law of the universe is that each of us has his own appointment in Samarra, his own date with death. And that produced an ineffable sadness that gradually diminished in the light of warm memories told of friends who no longer graced our world.

J.D. was sitting next to me, wearing shorts and a tank top, her bare feet propped on the closed hatch leading to
Recess’s
small cabin. We were motoring slowly under the Longboat Pass Bridge. To our right, families were enjoying the day on Coquina Beach on the southern end of Anna Maria Island, multicolored umbrellas shielding them from the sun and giving the place the look of snow cones resting on white sand. Picnic baskets and coolers dotted the beach and a trio of teenage boys tossed a football back and forth. Across the pass, the shore of Beer Can Island was hosting the usual Saturday assault of boats, bows on the beach, stern anchors holding them against the current of the outgoing tide. More people enjoying the soft spring weather that would end soon with the first bath of summertime humidity that always fell on us in mid-May. The green water was clear and I could see the featureless sand bottom of the pass as we puttered along at idle speed in what my depth sounder told me was fifteen feet of water.

The trip to Andros Island the day before had given me a greater appreciation of my home island, of the ease with which we moved through the endless days in the sunshine, of the rhythms that pushed us along like the current of a great river, never ceasing, never slowing, never depriving us of the essentials that graced our lives in such abundance.

When we’d finished our pity party at Tiny’s the day before, I went home and called J.D. “You like boats?” I asked.

“Love ’em. My dad always had a boat and I spent a lot of time on them. Why?”

“I was wondering if you’d like to join me on
Recess
tomorrow for a run down to Venice for lunch.”

“Love to. What time?’

We’d agreed to meet at my house at ten o’clock. I’d put a cooler onboard filled with beer and white wine, some crackers and cheese. She showed up right on time, and we loosed the lines and shoved off.

I cleared the bridge and was passing the sign indicating the end of the no-wake zone. A party fishing boat out of Cortez was behind me and I knew the captain would be anxious to pour on the juice and get to the fishing grounds before his anglers got restless. I eased the throttles forward and the big Yamahas began to purr, the sound rising as the bow came up and then over to settle onto its cruising plane.

I followed the markers through the shoals that hugged the channel and broke clear at the sea buoy. I turned southwest angling seaward, planning to run south to Venice while staying about a mile offshore. I wanted to be far enough out in the Gulf that I didn’t have to worry about the shoals that had crept out from New Pass and Big Sarasota Pass.

The water was dotted with boats, some sitting stationary while those aboard fished, some moving at slow speed, lines out, trolling for their catch, a few go-fast boats running flat-out, their unmuffled engines roaring. To the north of us a boat towing a parachute from which a tourist dangled turned slowly in wide circles. A sailboat far out on the horizon beat slowly north. The sea around us was flat, not a ripple on the surface, a perfect day to set the autopilot, put my feet on the dash, and let the boat take us toward the Venice Inlet.

In less than an hour, I began to angle shoreward, heading to the pass that would take us back inside the barrier islands. The inlet at Venice is bordered by two rock jetties jutting several hundred yards into the open Gulf. Walkways ran along the top of the jetties and people were fishing from them. I slowed as we entered the jetty area, coming off plane, the boat settling in the water. I idled just inside the pass and used my radio to hail the dockmaster at the Crow’s Nest Restaurant. He gave me a slip assignment and I backed
Recess
into it. J.D. handled the lines like a pro. I cut the engines, helped her off the boat, and we walked across the parking lot and upstairs to the dining room.