Michaela Thompson - Florida Panhandle 01 - Hurricane Season (6 page)

“You have to stop these ways,” said Wesley. “If you don’t you’ll go to hell.”

“I’m there now,” said Diana.

She crossed the cabin and stood in front of him. “You really need those glasses?” In a quick gesture, she stood on tiptoe and took them from his face, then stepped back out of his reach.

Wesley shook his head in surprise, his face naked without the heavy black frames, his eyes small and pink-rimmed. “You give those back.”

Diana put them on. “Ooh,” she said. “Everything’s all blurry.”

Wesley lunged forward. “Give them to me.”

Diana sidestepped, giggling. “I want to see how I look.” She stood in front of one of the windows, trying to get a reflection. “I can’t even
see.
They’re making me go cross-eyed.”

“Stop it, now.” Wesley’s voice was anxious.

“Stop what?”

“Give me my glasses.”

She walked to the bunk. “Come get them.” She took them off and held them out.

He walked toward her and put out his hand. She put the glasses behind her back. “I changed my mind. I want them some more.”

“No!”

She put them on again. “They make me so
dizzy
,” she said, and collapsed on the bunk.

Wesley fell on top of her, grabbing at her shoulders as she started to squirm away. She made feeble efforts at escape and then they lay still, panting. “Well now,” Diana said.

“Give them to me.”

Diana took off the glasses and put them on the floor beside the bunk. “You won’t be needing them for a little bit.” She slid her arms around his waist and pulled him closer. “Will you?”

Wesley made a strangled sound as Diana pressed against him. “No,” she said softly, “I can tell you won’t be needing those for the next while.”

Wesley strained her to him and covered her face with wet, feverish kisses. “You,” he said. “You’re nothing but a whore.”

“Just like the whore of Babylon.”

He burrowed against her, breathing hard. “You flaunt yourself—” A thump interrupted him. They looked down to see his Bible, which had fallen from the bunk to the floor, the tracts scattered around it. “Forgive me, Jesus,” Wesley said.

“It’s all right.” Diana reached out to him, but he flung her hand away. He put on his glasses and began to gather the tracts.

“For heaven’s sake.” Diana sat up and touched his shoulder.

“Stop that, you harlot.” Wesley stood up and backed away from her. “You have to stop this. You have to repent.” He glanced wildly around the cabin, and his eye fell on the fishing reel. He picked it up. “You have to stop this.”

Diana eyed him warily and started to get up as he approached, but he caught her and pinned her arms behind her back. “Let me go,” she said.

“You have to stop.” He wound the heavy-duty line around and around her wrists.

“Don’t do that. It hurts.”

He cut the line with his pocket knife and tied it off. Then he began winding it around her ankles. “Don’t do that! Let me go!”

“I want you to think,” said Wesley. “I don’t want you to move and flaunt yourself. I want you to think and pray to Jesus.”

“You’re crazy.”

She was sitting on the edge of the bunk, ankles and wrists tied. Her voice took on a wheedling tone. “Let me go, all right? I’ll go to church with you. I’ll pray to Jesus. We’ll get right down on our knees and pray together. I repent. I promise.”

Wesley looked doubtful, then shook his head. “You’ve got to think and pray alone first. Like Jesus in the garden. I’ll come back in an hour, and we’ll pray together then.”

Tears welled up in Diana’s eyes. “Don’t leave me tied up like this. Please.”

“Take your troubles to Jesus.” Wesley made a gesture of benediction, tucked his Bible under his arm, and was gone.

Josh, at the tiller of his boat, surveyed the coast of the mainland as it caught the late afternoon sun. The creeks, inlets, and hidden bays could provide hundreds of places for a cabin cruiser like the
Southern Star
to hide. Besides, the boat could have traveled miles since he saw it rendezvous with Murphy this morning. The probable futility of his mission was as oppressive as the heat.

It had been difficult to get away from the island. “You got your pay, boy,” Murphy had sneered. “Can’t you wait a few days to spend it?” Josh had persisted because this was his only chance. Tomorrow they made another run. Murphy had at last grudgingly consented to let him go. “You sure do like to june around,” he said, squinting at Josh. “They must train you to be june bugs up there at Columbus.”

“I reckon.”

“You don’t get no more money till next month, so don’t go spend all this and come asking.”

“Naw, I won’t.”

Still, Murphy hesitated, asking Josh delaying questions. Had he stirred the mash? Checked the cooker for tomorrow, made sure the kerosene blowers were working? When Josh’s answers were satisfactory, Murphy thought of several meaningless chores for Josh to do before, with evident reluctance, he said, “Go on, but I want you back here before dark. You understand?” Outwardly obliging, Josh nearly ripped his starter cord to pieces getting the motor cranked.

He followed the coast. Here were lagoons and bays where brownish green grass, waist high, extended into the water and hummocky islands supported a few spikes of palmetto or silver-trunked, moss-hung, leafless trees, long since strangled by the salt water. Occasionally an egret, standing long-legged, motionless, and white against the grass and water, became shy at the sound of his motor and flapped away.

The sun slanted lower. Soon, he would reach the St. Elmo city limits. The last landmark before that was the mouth of the canal that connected the Big Cypress River and the bay. Maybe he should turn back, Josh thought as he reached the canal and its rearing steel drawbridge. Then he remembered seeing boats berthed in a makeshift marina half a mile or so up the estuary. He turned beneath the bridge up the dark brown canal.

The canal was wide, lined to the water’s edge on either side with trees trailing Spanish moss. After a few minutes Josh saw ahead a rickety complex of docks at which half a dozen boats were moored. Overlooking it in a clearing on the bank was a shack with a
Live Bait
sign nailed to the front door.

He recognized the
Southern Star
before he saw the name. Somehow, in the glimpse he’d gotten as the boat had swung away from Murphy’s, he’d taken in the narrow blue stripe around the hull, the flash of blue-and-white curtains at the windows. Pretty fancy boat, Josh thought. Curtains and all. He rode past just to be sure, but he knew he could’ve picked it from among fifty. He cut his motor and drifted in.

The landing, as far as he could tell, was deserted. There were no boat owners working on their crafts or sitting out with a beer in the fading light. Josh checked the
Live Bait
hut. The door was fastened with a rusty padlock. Then he walked down the dock to the
Southern Star
.

His tentative call of greeting brought no response, so he jumped to the deck. Glancing around, he walked swiftly to the steps down to the entrance of the cabin. The door stood open.

The light inside was dim, filtered through the curtains. He slid them back and looked around. On one side of the enclosure was a counter with fishing gear and a bottle of Southern Comfort and two glasses on it. On the other was a bunk, its rumpled sheets trailing. A fishing reel had unwound, its line making a wavy pattern across the floor. It trailed through a spray of dark spots.

The wheel was forward. He checked the chart compartment and found a map of
St. Elmo-St. Elmo Sound,
but no indication of who the boat’s owner might be.

He returned below and began to search in earnest. The red ice chest contained nothing but a half inch of water in the bottom. The cupboard beneath the sink yielded three Cokes. The kitchen drawer harbored various implements of cutlery and a pack of Luckies. He cursed under his breath and wiped the sweat from his eyes.

He had started to cross the cabin to check the storage area beneath the bunk, when his foot slipped. Cursing again, he looked down and saw that the spray of dark spots on the floor was now a long smear. He bent, touched it, and rubbed the fluid between his fingers.

The back of his neck went stiff. He wiped his hand on his shirt pocket and looked around. Then he headed for the door.

He was standing on the edge of the dock when he saw something floating. It was submerged a few feet below the surface of the murky water, yet suspended, twisting with the vagaries of the current. Josh knelt. It was a blurred white figure. The figure, he saw, was entwined in a net—a cast net with its circumference lined with lead weights to make it sink. One side of the net had caught in a crack where the wood of the piling holding the dock had split, and it hadn’t sunk.

Josh’s mouth filled with fluid. He choked it down and looked again. The figure caught in the net was not, as he had been trying to tell himself, a large fish or a sodden pile of clothing. Dark hair wafted around what was unmistakably a woman’s head. A hand floated free. At any moment, a boat might come by. Its wake would wash her loose.

As he watched, the dark shape of a catfish swam up and nuzzled at her fingers. Josh’s body shuddered repeatedly, but, unwilling to leave a trace of his presence, he managed not to vomit.

After a few minutes, he got weakly to his feet, drenched with sweat. What he had to do, and do right now, was get away.

The throb of the
Island Queen’s
engine was fading, and inside Trulock’s Grocery & Marine Supply the only other sound was of Lily’s broom scratching the wooden floor. She had turned off the fan so it wouldn’t blow the dust, and heat had crept slowly into the room.

Overall, it had been a pretty good day. The after-school candy business had picked up again now that the fall session had started. That almost, but not quite, made up for the exodus of summer people who rented cottages on St. Elmo Island or the beach. This year she must have sold nearly a dozen red tin pail-and-shovel sets over the summer, half of them to perspiring parents whose wailing child had just remembered his own set, back home in Atlanta.

She hadn’t sold any pails and shovels today, but what with candy, cold drinks, cotton thread for net-mending, and lead for weights, she had done well enough. Not to mention popsicles, which were always popular when it got as hot as this. She could use more of the lime-flavored ones.

Once again, Aubrey hadn’t shown up for lunch. What he ate down there in the swamp she couldn’t imagine, unless it was honeycomb. Before his attack, he had done half the work at the store; now he did practically nothing. Of course he was—she counted mentally—sixty-three, but that wasn’t old enough to act like you were already dead. That heart attack might as well have killed him, she thought, shocking herself.

She swept the dust out the screen door and gave the concrete steps a quick going-over. Then she straightened the comics that drooped, dog-eared, in the round wire rack:
Archie, Little Lulu,
the classic of
The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Lily leafed through a
True Love.
The girls from the high school hung around drinking cokes and reading those for hours, poring over the heroes with patent-leather hair, the busty, big-eyed, tearful heroines, the kisses at the end, lovers silhouetted against a yellow moon. It wasn’t up to Lily, thank goodness, to tell the high school girls what it all amounted to.

Those bees. Aubrey had always kept a few hives. It brought in a little extra money. She looked at the glass jars of golden liquid on their special shelf, with the sign she had lettered saying
Our Own Honey. Our
honey! That was back when she’d been happy that Aubrey was interested in something again. While he was off taking care of
our
honey, somebody had to look after their livelihood, and it looked like she had been nominated. She went to the back room to put the broom away.

She was vaguely conscious of hearing an outboard motor, then hearing it stop, and she thought in passing that whoever it was should be getting home, because it was almost dark. She hoped it wasn’t motor trouble. When somebody’s motor cut out nearby, she often had to drive him all the way to town.

She moved back into the store, and at the same time heard running feet pounding on the boardwalk that led from the ferry slip. The sounds stopped for a moment or two, and Lily heard harsh breathing. A moment later, a young man rushed in, slamming the screen door behind him, and stood in front of the counter, chest heaving.

He looked about twenty-five, Lily thought, and he was dressed like a workman in filthy, stained khaki pants and a short-sleeved shirt wet with sweat. Had he been less dirty he would have been nice-looking—deeply tanned, black curls, dark eyes. He looked like he had something important on his mind.

“Help you?” she offered, wondering what was the matter with him.

Having run so desperately to get there, he seemed to have forgotten why. He looked at her blankly, perspiration running into his eyebrows.

“I said,” Lily began, pitching her voice a bit louder, and at that he focused his eyes.

“Change,” he said.

“What?”

He shook his head and dug into his pants pocket. He held out a limp dollar bill. “Nickel for the phone,” he said.

Lily chuckled. “Now I see what you want.” She glanced at the cash register. “Wouldn’t you know I already locked up the cash drawer.”

Although the young man didn’t say anything or move, simply continued to stand holding out his dollar, Lily sensed that what she had said wasn’t what he wanted to hear. He obviously would not yield to refusal. “Just hang on a second and I’ll get it for you,” she said.

The safe, which Aubrey had insisted they buy years ago, was in the back room. Lily hurried to it, at the same time calling back to him, “Can’t imagine how it got this hot. ’Course, I say that every year, I reckon. Wonder if it means there’ll be a hurricane. It’s better to have this than snow, though, from all I hear, not that I ever saw snow.” She pulled at the ribbon around her neck that held the key to the safe. “You ever see snow? I mean, falling down?”