Michaela Thompson - Florida Panhandle 01 - Hurricane Season
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Authors: Michaela Thompson
Tags: #Mystery: Thriller - 1950s - Florida Panhandle
| Michaela Thompson - Florida Panhandle 01 - Hurricane Season | |
| Florida Panhandle Mysteries [1] | |
| Michaela Thompson | |
| booksBnimble (1983) | |
| Tags: | Mystery: Thriller - 1950s - Florida Panhandle |
Lily Trulock, owner of Trulock’s Grocery & Marine Supply, leads a pretty quiet life until a stranger comes to town. The new guy’s not what he appears, but then, some of St. Elmo’s residents aren’t either. Before she can say, “down the hatch,” Lily’s at the center of a vicious murder and a no-holds-barred bootlegging war—with a nasty storm on the way.
PRAISE FOR HURRICANE SEASON:
“(Michaela Thompson) knows how to create that sense of place, which is so important to any novel but particularly to crime fiction; her characters are believable men and women in a real world, her mystery is credible, and in Lily Trulock she has created a middle-aged heroine who is both original and sympathetic.”
—P.D. James
“I enjoyed the book. It has real people in a real place, factors which seem to be ever more rare these days—even though it is the only way to create a real suspension of disbelief.”
—John D. MacDonald
Sterling dialogue, drily comic atmosphere, but a pulse of grim reality too: Miss Marple meets Eudora Welty (with a trace of Erskine Caldwell)…
—
Kirkus
“With the kind of realism that stems from William Faulkner, the author skillfully portrays her inbred, suspicious, nasty people…Hurricane Season ends up an orthodox murder mystery, but it is more than that. In a way, [Michaela Thompson] has attempted a microcosm of America, carefully dissecting out a single cell under a very strong lens. She writes with unusual confidence, particularly in her account of a gritty love affair. …she has written a murder mystery that in many respects breaks the mold, and that happens only two or three times a year.”
—
The New Times Book Review
THE FAULT TREE
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VENETIAN MASK
MAGIC MIRROR
A TEMPORARY GHOST
RIPTIDE
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verified
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HURRICANE SEASON
Michaela Thompson
booksBnimble Publishing
New Orleans, La.
Hurricane Season
Copyright 1983 by Mickey Friedman
Cover by Andy Brown
ISBN: 9781625170835
www.booksbnimble.com
Originally published by E. P. Dutton, Inc., 2 Park Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016
All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
First booksBnimble Publishing electronic publication: February, 2013
eBook editions by eBooks by Barb for
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To Alan
Hurricane Season: St. Elmo, Florida, 1952
Hurricane season comes when the year is exhausted. In the damp, choking heat of August and September, the days go on forever to no purpose. Hurricanes linger in the back of the mind as a threat and a promise. The threat is the threat of destruction. The promise is that something could happen, that the air could stir and become clammy, the heat could lift, the bay start to wallow like a huge humpbacked animal.
If a hurricane came, there would be something to do besides drink iced tea on the front porch and take long, sweat-soaked naps in the afternoon; there would be something to talk about besides how hot it is. So hurricanes linger in the back of the mind.
The town of St. Elmo is in northwest Florida on a corner of land that juts into the Gulf of Mexico. Tourists bound for Miami, or Palm Beach, or Fort Lauderdale do not see St. Elmo or know about it. In their rush to the south, they do not pass near it. They want palm trees and hibiscus; St. Elmo has scrub oak, and miles of sawgrass through which salt streams meander, and acres of pine woods. It has broad, slow-moving brown rivers lined with cypress swamps.
Water is a presence, and people live in connection with it. They fish, or deal in oysters, scallops, and shrimp. On the beach road, there are fisheries built on pilings over the water, corrugated iron oyster shacks, shrimp boats with swathes of net. People travel by boat where the roads don’t go—across the bay to St. Elmo Island or down the sloughs deep into the river swamp.
The beaches near St. Elmo are wide and white, unmarked except for the curving line of the sea wrack. Jerry-built piers, weathered to soft gray, stagger into the bay, and on them an occasional fisherman flicks a line.
About seven miles out of town, opposite one of these piers—a pier bigger and more sturdy than some—is a weathered white frame structure. A sagging wooden telephone booth leans near the corner of the building, and two pumps of Gulf gas stand under the breezeway in front. Metal signs, rusting in the salt air, advertise
Ice, Live Bait, Fresh Sweet Honey, Coca-Cola
. Above the door, on a faded blue sign, is written
Trulock’s Grocery & Marine Supply
. This is the landing where the ferry
Island Queen
docks three times a day on its trips back and forth to St. Elmo Island. The store, and the house across the road where Lily and Aubrey Trulock live, are St. Elmo Landing.
Across the bay, a dark green line on the horizon, is St. Elmo Island. During the twenties St. Elmo was a resort, with a reputation that spread as far away as Atlanta and Birmingham. There was a boardwalk and a hotel, the Elmo House, with gingerbread trim and red-and-white striped awnings, and a seawater pool near the ocean.
The great days of St. Elmo were brief and have been over a long time. The Elmo House is boarded up, loosening at the joints in the wind and blowing sand. Adventurous lovers and beer-drinking teenagers have found their way inside and left crude messages. The pool, drained long ago, now contains only sand, occasional rainwater, dried seaweed, discarded egg cases from marine creatures.
The Elmo House sags nearer to the earth. Every year, people wonder if it will survive another hurricane season.
In August 1952, the St. Elmo Men’s Lodge put on a Womanless Wedding.
The lodge members had talked about other ways of raising money—a talent show, a fish fry—but these were rejected. Donald La Grange, whose tap dancing was always the hit of any St. Elmo talent show (especially the finale to “Swanee”) was laid up after twisting an ankle chasing his bird dog through the woods. As for a fish fry, the men thought soon everybody would be fish-fried out, it being an election year. There hadn’t been a Womanless Wedding in St. Elmo since ’48, when Eldred Segrist ruined everything by setting his wig on fire with one of the candles. It was time for another.
Ticket sales were brisk at fifty cents apiece. The St. Elmo Elementary School auditorium would be full. Although he had vowed never to do it again after what had happened the last time, Luke Draper agreed to sing his falsetto “O Promise Me.” And despite his reelection campaign against a strong challenge by LeRoy (“Gospel Roy”) Mclnnes, the First Baptist choir director, Congressman Robert (“Snapper”) Landis agreed to be the preacher.
The preacher was a good role for Snapper. It was fairly dignified, since he wouldn’t have to mess around with wigs and falsies; but he’d also get to use his politician’s voice and might even get to work some words about the Communist Threat into the invocation.
On the evening of the performance, people gathered in the sandy schoolyard, avoiding the heat of indoors. Teenaged girls in freshly ironed sundresses giggled and eyed the teenaged boys draped over parked cars. Children, oblivious to the heat, screamed and chased each other while their mothers watched languidly. Men greeted each other with uneasy camaraderie and talked about the frogs they’d gigged the last time they’d gone frogging, or how many squirrels they’d shot recently.
Male laughter drifted from the lighted classroom where the wedding’s cast was getting into costume. With the onset of deep dusk, the mosquitos got bad and drove everyone indoors.
Lily and Aubrey Trulock arrived while the crowd was trooping into the auditorium. The room was filled with the slapping sound of hard wooden seats being folded down. At either end of the stage, in front of the threadbare red curtain, were white florists’ baskets filled with balloons. Lily hadn’t much wanted to come, she told herself. It was, after all, seven miles in and seven miles back to the Landing. But Aubrey was a lodge member, even though he hadn’t been to the meetings (or much of anywhere else, except his apiary) since his heart attack. He hadn’t said anything, but Lily believed he wanted to come, and since he’d been willing to walk out and get in the car, she supposed she was right.
Now that they were here, though, she felt irritated. Instead of going down to the first two rows of seats, where his lodge buddies were waiting to cheer on their fellows, Aubrey hung back and sat meekly by her in the middle of the auditorium.
“There’s Jack. Don’t you want to see Jack?” asked Lily, fanning herself with her church fan, a cardboard picture of Jesus Risen from the Tomb stapled to a wooden stick. She glared at his perspiring pink forehead as, eyes downcast, he shrugged. “I expect Jack would like to see
you
,” she said.
When she got no response she craned her head around to survey the crowd.
Lily liked to keep up with what was happening. She was a wiry woman in her mid-fifties. Her skin was dark brown and roughened by years of exposure to the coastal sun, her light green eyes surrounded by wrinkles from squinting in the glare. She could run a boat, pump gas, open oysters. She had more energy than it took to keep a store, and she used it to stay abreast of events.
Wesley Stafford was across the way, she saw, standing slightly apart from a crowd of Methodist youth. Wesley, a ministerial student from Montgomery who had worked with the young people for the summer, looked ill at ease. His companions seemed to be cracking jokes among themselves and ignoring him. She had known from the beginning, Lily told herself, that Wesley was too gawky and intense to make an impression on the youth, since they had been spoiled last year by a young music minister who played the banjo. Something about Wesley—with the short sleeves of his shirt flapping around his thin arms, his hair wildly cowlicked, his eyes behind glasses fixed in a nervous stare—reminded Lily of the flamingo on a postcard her friend Theo had sent her from Miami once. Wesley’s elbows, she realized, looked like that flamingo’s knees.
Wesley’s gaze was fixed on the back of the room. Twisting her head, Lily saw Diana Landis slouched against the back wall of the auditorium. Lily clucked. “Snapper’s girl is here,” she whispered to Aubrey, and turned to look again. Diana had never dressed in a manner appropriate to a congressman’s daughter. Tonight she had on shorts and a peasant blouse that seemed to be a little too large, since it was slipping off one shoulder. Her hair was a tangle of black curls around her sullen-looking olive-skinned face. It was a mystery to Lily why the men kept after her the way they did. Maybe it was her wild reputation.