Sunset Beach(76)
“Can you get me any more video from that night at the hotel?” Drue asked. “I don’t mind watching the boring stuff.”
“Don’t push your luck, kid,” Hernandez said.
Drue sat in the car for a few minutes, trying to decide on her next move. She was now only a few blocks from the Silver Sands motel, where Jazmin’s boyfriend worked. She called the motel and asked for Jorge Morales, but was told his shift didn’t start until 8:00 P.M.
“Guess I’ll go home and wait,” Drue said, starting the Bronco and backing out of the library parking lot.
37
Drue sat in the living room at Coquina Cottage, examining her temporary library card. Had she really been back on the west coast for a month now? Had it been only a month since she’d held her mother’s hand and watched as she drifted into unconsciousness?
The cottage was neat as a pin. The floors were swept clean, her refrigerator held neatly organized shelves of perishables, her bed was made and the office she’d set up in the guest bedroom held a desk she’d recently acquired from Craigslist. But the rooms seemed bare and lifeless.
This was not the colorful, joyful home of her grandparents. The cottage lacked soul.
She went into the office and pulled out a box she’d unearthed from the attic but had resisted unpacking until now.
With a smile, she laid the paintings out on the desktop, and then on the floor. These were Papi’s masterpieces. A pair of framed paintings of flamingoes. Another pair of red macaws, their bills open, wings extended. There was a large painting of a majestic snowy egret and a pale pink cockatoo perched on a flowering dogwood branch, a blue heron depicted wading in shallow water, much like the heron Drue had stalked at sundown, and another pair of bird paintings, these of roseate spoonbills, returning to roost over a moss-draped swamp. There was even a paint-by-numbers of a dolorous-looking pelican sitting on a piling that reminded her of the pelicans at Merry Pier.
For much of his working life, woodworking had been her grandfather’s passion, but after his first heart attack in his early seventies, Nonni had demanded that he find a less active hobby. She’d bought him his first paint-by-numbers kit, a cheesy depiction of The Last Supper, and he’d eagerly put down the hammer and picked up the paintbrush.
Drue estimated that her grandfather probably completed at least a hundred paintings before his death, all with his name, Alberto, proudly signed in the bottom right corner. Tropical birds were his favorite subject, but after he’d filled up all the walls in the cottage, he’d moved on to snowy scenes of New England, then sailboats at sunset, followed by exotic depictions of palm trees and grass huts in the South Pacific, woodland scenes of stags and does and elk, then dogs and kittens. He’d crafted his own frames for the paintings, and joyfully gifted them to family and friends, even his cardiologist and the mailman.
She was still filled with remorse at the memory of the paint-by-numbers works Papi had presented to her for her bedroom in Fort Lauderdale: three scenes of ballerinas in pink tutus, which she’d callously replaced with posters of New Kids on the Block. What she wouldn’t give to have those long-lost paintings back.
A blank wall in the living room became a gallery wall of Alberto’s bird paintings now, and in her bedroom she hung a trio of the Polynesian scenes he’d toiled over for weeks, one of a sarong-clad beauty in front of a grass hut, another of an outrigger canoe at sunset, and the third, her favorite, a pair of palm trees with a glowing volcano in the background. Now, when she was lying in bed, looking out the window at the dunes and the beach beyond, she could also look at Papi’s paintings, and remember the joy his hobby had given him.
Early that evening, she put on her swimsuit and walked out to the beach. She waded into the water and floated on her back for a while, then swam laps, back and forth, parallel to the shore, until the muscles in her arms and legs burned with fatigue. Her legs wobbled as she trod the sand back to the cottage to shower and change.
Standing in the shower, she found herself humming, then singing at the top of her lungs. For the first time since returning to Sunset Beach, she felt whole. She felt alive and glad to be where she was. And she was ready to find the answers to the questions that had been plaguing her since the day Yvonne Howington walked into the reception room at her father’s law office.
* * *
Drue waited until nine o’clock to present herself at the front desk at the Silver Sands Motel. The place was a throwback to the 1950s, with a low-slung white stucco exterior topped with its exuberantly scripted neon-turquoise Silver Sands sign across the roof, and turquoise-striped awning overhanging the plate-glass doors to the lobby.
The clerk behind the front desk was dressed in a turquoise golf shirt with the hotel logo embroidered over the breast. He was the age Drue thought Jazmin Mayes’s boyfriend might be, early to late twenties, with neatly groomed dark hair and mocha-colored skin.
“Hi,” he said, looking up from a computer screen. “Welcome. How can I help you on this beautiful evening?”
“Jorge?” she asked.
His smile revealed deep dimples. No wonder Jazmin had fallen hard for this man.
“That’s me. Do we know each other?”
She extended her hand. “I’m Drue Campbell. Jazmin Mayes’s mother hired our law firm to find out the truth about what happened to Jazmin the night she was killed at the Gulf Vista Hotel and Resort.”