The Water Keeper(82)
I handed her the letter. She hung reading glasses on the end of her nose and read the letter. Nodding. “Uh-huh. Mmmm. Uh-huh.”
Next to me a peacock spread its fan and spun in a circle.
When finished, she looked at Ellie, then Summer, back to Ellie, and finally at me. She folded the letter, inhaled deeply, and said, “We hadn’t had anyone join us in over twenty years. The few who did didn’t stay too long. Too hot. Too many mosquitoes. Too much water.” She tapped the letter. “But . . . I remember her.”
Ellie burst out, “You do?”
The woman took a long look at Ellie, then pointed at the gate we’d just walked through. “Thirteen, maybe fourteen years ago. One of the most beautiful people I’d ever seen. Walked in here. Looked like somebody’d kicked her in the stomach. Took a look around. Crossed her arms like she was cold. Said she didn’t know what she was thinking. Turned around.” The woman shook her head.
Somewhat the skeptic, I asked, “How do you remember?”
“Easy.” She held up two fingers. “Had the most aqua blue eyes I’d ever seen. Like the sea at noon. Only time I’ve ever seen eyes like that—” She looked again at Ellie and pointed. “A lot like yours.” She turned toward the ocean, remembering. “I do remember she said the strangest thing. Apollumi.” She shrugged. “Not every day somebody walks in here quoting Greek.”
I swallowed. “Any idea what happened to her?”
She looked to Ellie and back to me. “I’m sorry, honey.” The woman waved her hands across the grounds. “Feel free to look around.” She swept a hand toward the blue canvas rolling in waves beyond the cottages. “It’s pretty this time of day.” With that, she disappeared as quickly as she’d appeared.
When we returned to the sidewalk, Ellie stood staring. Shaking her head. She kicked the gate. Then again. Finally, she shook it, rattling its rusty hinges. She was muttering, cussing. Soon she was screaming. Most was intelligible. The few words I could make out cut me.
The last lead had run dry, and Ellie knew it. From here, there was no trail. No bread crumbs. No cryptic letter. As the space between her eyes narrowed and anger blanketed her pain, I knew I was watching Ellie’s hope die. Summer tried to hold her, but she didn’t want to be held. She just walked up and down the sidewalk screaming a string of four-letter epithets. After a few minutes, she turned to me and told me what I could do with my boat and that she wanted to be on a plane. “Right now.”
I had one card left to play. “Okay.”
Chapter 37
I untied Gone Fiction, and Ellie looked at me suspiciously. “I’m not in the mood for any more of your games.”
“I know.” I pointed. “Private airport has a dock.”
We circled the island. Slowly. The Gulf was glass, and it felt good to be back on the water. I always thought better out here. We tied up at a dock within eyesight off the gaudy and ginormous marker for the southernmost point of the US. It’s an eight-or nine-foot concrete marker that looks like a giant Weeble-Wobble. I’ve never understood the attraction, but people throng here to stand in line to take a picture.
I helped Ellie out of the boat, and she crossed her arms. “I don’t see an airport.”
“I know you’re hurting, but I’m asking you to give me five minutes.”
“You have no idea how I feel.”
I never took my eyes off her. “Maybe.”
We walked up the dock with Gunner on a leash, which he tolerated but didn’t like, and walked to the right of the marker. We stood at a tall, black, wrought-iron fence overlooking a bulkhead and waterline of pieces of jagged concrete.
We walked up Whitehead Street past a food truck selling snow cones and pi?a coladas and slipped through a small door in the fence. I flipped the hidden latch, and we walked across a semi-grassy but mostly weedy beach that led out to the concrete seawall. Once there, we climbed up on the wall and then stood staring almost due south out across the invisible seam where the Atlantic bled into the Gulf of Mexico and vice versa.
I pointed at a large chunk of concrete. About the size of a minivan. Once part of a bridge somewhere, now it lay half buried in the sand. Defense against the storms. “I want to tell you about that rock.”
She and Summer both looked like I’d piqued their interest, but disbelief was also there. “I was twenty-three. I’d graduated the Academy near the top of my class. I’d also graduated seminary, which is another story, but it meant I could pass as a priest if needed. And it was needed. I’d taken a job with an agency within the government that didn’t really have a name. There were reasons for being covert. I told folks I worked in Washington, but I’d only been there once. On vacation.
“Anyway, my boss sent me undercover to a church on the East Coast that had a history of pretty young girls disappearing. Young priest. Wet behind the ears. But six months in I had followed the bread crumbs. Whispers from people afraid to talk. I walked into this guy’s house on the water. Bigwig in the church. Given lots of money. Problem was he had a thing for little girls. I was a bit green then, so I wasn’t expecting him to be expecting me, which he was. I got the girls out but turned my back too soon. Felt the bullets enter and exit. Not my best day.
“My boss, Bones, threw me over his shoulder and carried me to a hospital with a trauma unit. Then he called Marie and told her our wedding might get delayed. Twelve hours of surgery. Umpteen units of blood. Flatlined three times. She sat through it all. They moved me to ICU. A month. Then six months in a rehab unit where I couldn’t lift a two-pound dumbbell. Couldn’t walk two steps. Couldn’t go to the bathroom. She bathed me. Cut my hair. Changed my bandages. We slept together for six months before we ever got married, and yet we never ‘slept’ together, if you know what I mean. She never left my side. Least not when I was awake. Marie is the singular reason I walked out of that hospital.