Turtles All the Way Down(7)

I opened up my phone and connected to the night-vision camera, which wasn’t password protected. In seconds, photos started downloading to my phone. I deleted the first two, which the camera had taken of us, and swiped past a dozen more from the past week—deer and coyotes and raccoons and possums, all of them either daytime shots or green silhouettes with bright white eyes.

“Don’t want to alarm you, but there’s a golf cart headed in our vague direction,” Daisy said quietly. I looked up. The cart was still a ways away. I swiped through more pictures until I got back to September 9th, and there, yes, in shades of green I could see the back of a stocky man wearing a striped nightshirt. Time stamp 1:01:03 A.M. I screenshotted it.

“Dude’s definitely spotted us,” Daisy said nervously.

I glanced up again and mumbled, “I’m hurrying.” I’d swiped to see the previous picture, but it was taking forever to load. I heard Daisy run off, but I stayed, waiting for the photograph. It was odd, for me to be the calm one while feeling Daisy’s nerves jangling. But the things that make other people nervous have never scared me. I’m not afraid of men in golf carts or horror movies or roller coasters. I didn’t know precisely what I was afraid of, but it wasn’t this. The image revealed itself in slow motion, one line of pixels at a time. Coyote. I glanced up, saw the man in the golf cart seeing me, and I bolted.

I wove back toward the river, scrambled down the riverbank wall, and found Daisy standing above my overturned canoe, holding a large jagged rock high above her head.

“What the hell are you doing?” I asked.

“Whoever that guy is, he definitely saw you,” she said, “so I’m making an excuse for you.”

“What?”

“We’ve got no choice but to damsel-in-distress this situation, Holmesy,” she said, and then brought the rock down with all her force onto the hull of the canoe, splintering the green paint and revealing the fiberglass below. She flipped the canoe back over; it immediately started taking on water. “Okay, now I’m gonna hide and you’re gonna talk to whoever is coming in that golf cart.”

“What? No. No way.”

“A distressed damsel has no companions,” she said.

“No. Way.”

And then a voice called out from atop the gabled wall. “You all right down there?” I looked up and saw a skinny old man with deep lines in his face, wearing a black suit and white shirt.

“Our canoe,” Daisy said. “It has a hole in it. We’re actually friends with Davis Pickett. Doesn’t he live here?”

“I’m Lyle,” the man said. “Security. I can get you home.”





FOUR



LYLE USHERED US INTO HIS GOLF CART and then drove us down a narrow asphalt path along the golf course, past a big log cabin with a wooden sign out front identifying it as THE COTTAGE.

I hadn’t visited the Pickett estate in many years, and it had grown even more majestic. The sand traps of the golf course were newly raked. The cart path we drove on had no cracks or bumps. Newly planted maple trees lined the path. But mostly I just saw endless grass, weedless, freshly mown into a diamond pattern. The Pickett estate was silent, sterile, and endless—like a newly built housing subdivision before actual people move into it. I loved it.

As we drove, Daisy struck up a wholly unsubtle conversation. “So you head up security here?”

“I am security here,” he answered.

“How long have you worked for Mr. Pickett?”

“Long enough to know you’re not friends with Davis,” he answered.

Daisy, who lacked the capacity to experience embarrassment, was not discouraged. “Holmesy here is the friend. Were you working the day Pickett disappeared?”

“Mr. Pickett doesn’t like staff on the property after dark or before dawn,” he answered.

“How many staff are there exactly?”

Lyle stopped the golf cart. “Y’all best know Davis, or else I’m taking you downtown and having you booked for trespassing.”

—

We rounded a corner and I saw the pool complex, a shimmering blue expanse with the same island I remembered from my childhood, except now it was covered by a glass-plated geodesic dome. The waterslides—cylinders that curved and wove around one another—were still there, too, but they were dry.

On a patio beside the pool were a dozen teak lounge chairs, each with a white towel laid out atop the cushions. We drove halfway around the pool to another patio, where Davis Pickett was reclining on a lounger. He was wearing his school polo shirt and khaki pants, holding a book at an angle to block the sun as he read.

When he heard the cart, he sat up and looked over at us. He had skinny, sunburned legs and knobby knees. He wore plastic-rimmed glasses and an Indiana Pacers hat.

“Aza Holmes?” he asked.

He stood up. The sun was behind him, so I could hardly see his face. I got out of the golf cart and walked over to him.

“Hi,” I said. I didn’t know if I should hug him, and he didn’t seem to know if he should hug me, so we just sort of stood there not touching, which to be honest is my preferred form of greeting.

“To what do I owe the pleasure?” he asked, his voice flat, neutral, unreadable.

Daisy walked up behind me and held out her hand, then shook Davis’s forcefully. “Daisy Ramirez, Holmesy’s best friend. We had a canoe puncture.”