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  Instead, I pointed to a ridge of oysters exposed by the low tide. Marking the bar were six plastic milk bottles tied to stakes. “That’s the old Mail Boat Channel,” I said. “Used to be, there weren’t roads or bridges to the islands, so one of the captains delivered mail twice a week. Not many folks use this cut anymore.”

  “Who maintains it?” the man asked, but I got the impression he was more interested in me than the answer.

  “I never figured that one out. Mullet fishermen don’t need the markers, so it must be part-timers. Something nice is, every Christmas someone sticks a casuarina pine on that bar and decorates it with seashells and stuff. To me, it doesn’t feel like Christmas until I’ve stopped and hung a shell on that tree.”

  Mr. Seasons said to Ms. Calder-Shaun, talking over my lap, “Hannah comes from an old fishing family. Her Uncle Jake guided me for years, before he died—plus that other work I told you about.”

  I wasn’t going to ask what that meant, although I had some ideas. More interesting to me was that Mr. Seasons wasn’t gripping his chair quite as tight, which gave me a good feeling. We were soon running parallel the oyster bar, following milk jugs, water on both sides not deep enough to cover my ankles. A few minutes later, we were north of Chino Island. Behind us, the storms had joined forces, and rain was gaining on us so fast, a sudden blast of cold air told me we weren’t out of danger yet. I had planned on cutting west toward Captiva Island, where Mr. Seasons lives on a five-acre estate, but the odds were against us once again.

  I wasn’t worried, though. Half a mile away, I could see a tin-roofed cabin built on stilts, standing lonely as a stork in shallow water, a mile from the nearest land. A married man had willed the place to my late aunt—out of guilt, I’d heard—so our family owned it, but how and why, I wasn’t exactly sure. The cabin—a “stilthouse,” locals called it—was built with thick walls for storing fish back before there was refrigeration, so it was a good safe spot to be, if we could beat the rain.

  We did, but only by a minute or two. Throttle backing, I stood with one hand on the wheel, the other holding an anchor, as we approached what would soon be the leeward side of the shack. Not until we were a few boat lengths away did I reduce speed, then dropped the anchor, playing out line, after punching us into idle so we continued toward the dock.

  “Nicely done,” Mr. Seasons said, but he was watching the squall charging us, only a hundred yards away. Rain was loud as a mountain river and getting louder.

  “Stay put until we’re tied!” I replied. I had snubbed the anchor to a stern cleat, hoping I’d guessed right about how much scope to use. Sure enough, just before my skiff’s nose bumped the dock, I felt the anchor line stiffen and stretch, which is when I stepped up onto the dock and threw a quick clove hitch around a piling.

  “Ladies first,” I called, offering Ms. Calder-Shaun my hand, then helped her onto the dock. The woman looked a little woozy but was smiling, and gave my fingers a squeeze that meant something, I wasn’t sure what.

  Soon, both clients were sitting beneath a waterfall that blurred the world around us, but they were snug and dry inside the stilthouse, where I was lighting a Coleman stove to make coffee. When the coffee was ready, I poured them each a mug, then stood outside beneath the breezeway so they could have their privacy. Some fishing guides try to be entertainers, too, telling jokes and stories during boring times, but that’s not my way.

  After a while, when the rain had slacked, I returned to check on the two. Mr. Seasons was looking at Ms. Calder-Shaun, who was staring at me, both with odd expressions on their faces as if they’d just made a surprising discovery.

  “I’m right about this, Larry,” the woman said, her eyes still studying me. “After today? Goddamn right, I’m convinced—if the agency is still licensed.”

  The first thing that came into my mind was the private investigation agency my uncle had run—obviously the “other work” Mr. Seasons had mentioned before—and where I’d helped out at every once in a while. But I thought it was better to keep my mouth shut, so I pretended to want more coffee.

  The man was nodding as I stepped toward the stove, then caught me off guard by including me in the conversation. “Would you be willing to meet for lunch tomorrow, Hannah? Just me, Martha has to fly home for the day. There’s something I’d like to discuss with you.”

  “Fishing?” I said, turning.

  The man exchanged looks with Martha, his New York attorney. “Around two would be good,” he said. “I’ll explain everything then.”

  “Noon’s better,” I replied, because it irks me when people dodge simple questions, and also because it was embarrassing to admit I had an open date tomorrow, at the height of tarpon season, when most guides were busy. “Even on days I don’t fish, I’ve got a lot to do,” I added, which was mostly true.

  “Noon it is,” Mr. Seasons replied, then said nothing more about it. Soon enough, though, I would discover that outrunning that storm had meant more to my clients than I ever could’ve guessed. How I’d handled myself had convinced them a woman fishing guide was a good choice to go in search of a missing girl—although it took some doing on their part to convince me, the woman fishing guide.

  Considering all that happened afterward, good and bad, I have no reason to regret beating that storm. But it has made me fretful about how one small event—something as common as lightning and heavy rain—can change a person’s life in ways so big, there is no hope of returning. Only hope for what comes next.

  ONE

  MY MOTHER SAYS I REOPENED UNCLE JAKE’S PRIVATE INVESTIGATION agency because I’m always losing men, so it’s natural for me to search for things that are missing. This would offend some women my age, but she had a stroke two years back and now her damaged brain relies on honesty instead of good manners, so I’ve got no choice but to take it in stride. One thing I’ve learned is, don’t argue with the truth on those scarce occasions when you’re lucky enough to know what the truth is.

  Mother was heavy on my mind the next morning. It’s because of something that had happened the night before, after the storm. Loretta—that’s Mamma’s name—got into Uncle Jake’s paint shed, then sprayed swearwords all over the walls of a house being built next door. Not a house, really. It’s more of a concrete box the size of a Walmart, and just about as tasteful—which is only one of the reasons Loretta hates the building so. Some of the words she wrote were so foul, they had never even passed my lips—not louder than a whisper, anyway—let alone would I use Day-Glo orange to write them in cursive, exclamation points dotted, t’s neatly crossed, for all the world to see.

  Well . . . as much of the world that ventures down the road to York Island and our little fishing village, which is on the Gulf Coast of Florida, just across the bay from Sanibel Island.

  Thank goodness, it was only an hour after sunrise when I discovered what that addled woman had done. I was on the dock, making sure my skiff had enough fuel for the trip to Mr. Seasons’s place, when Arlis Futch whistled and waved to me from the throttle of his mullet boat.

  I waited for the man to kill his engine and drift closer before calling, “How you, Arlis?”

  “My Lordy, Hannah, you lookin’ more and more like your dead aunt every day—God rest her soul.”

  Old Arlis loves to talk, and I had things to do, but it peeves me when men confuse lying with flirting. “Aunt Hannah’s been in the grave ten years, Arlis, so that’s not much of a compliment. Except to her, maybe, but you might be right. Hannah Three in her coffin is probably prettier than me and all the rest of us put together. Don’t you have some work to do?”

  There have been four Hannah Smiths in our family, which Arlis knows better than most, so there was no need to explain. My aunt was a pretty woman, and more than a tad wild, which is common knowledge. Along with the stilthouse, which a guilty husband had left her, I had inherited Hannah Three’s name, height, and crow-black ha
ir. Unfortunately, that was about it—until a few years ago, anyway, when my body began showing some of her other assets as well.

  The old man started to apologize, saying, “Dang it, I wasn’t comparing you to a dead person—though you are lookin’ pasty since you moved across the bay. Tell the truth, now. You been eatin’ too much that damn hippie food and not enough fried mullet. Ain’t I right?”

  Hippie food, I guessed, was anything that didn’t produce grease for gravy or a good old-fashioned heart attack. I was about to suggest this to Arlis by inquiring about his recent double bypass, but the man slipped the hook by staring over my shoulder, with a weird expression on his face, like an image of Jesus had just materialized in the sunrise clouds behind me.

  “I wouldn’t’ve missed this for nothing,” he said to himself, chuckling, then began to laugh. “Loretta and me learned cursive from the same schoolteacher, so I recognize her hand. But her spelling used to be better. Tell your mamma the word truckers starts with a t—same t that don’t belong in the word ship.”

  That’s when I turned and saw it.

  “Oh dear,” I said, jumping up onto the dock. “My Lord! Maybe if I get her to apologize, they won’t call the law.” Even before her stroke, no one would have described my mother as “sweet,” but neither had she, or anyone else in our family, behaved like trailer park drunks. I didn’t want to believe what I was seeing.

  Arlis was still laughing. “Tell ’em it’s modern art and send ’em an invoice. Don’t apologize. Folks who’d dig up an Indian mound to build a big-ass dog kennel might be trashy enough to believe it.”

  The old man was right about what Loretta’s neighbors had done. Our village sits on a paw of waterfront that is dotted with the remains of shell temples built three thousand years ago by Florida’s first people. “Indian mounds,” some call them, but they’re more than that. When tourists think of the Sunshine State, they picture Mickey Mouse, not pyramids, but that’s what the mounds were, and a few dozen still remain between Tampa Bay and Key West.

  There was one less pyramid now, which was the main reason Loretta was mad enough to combine her painting skills with her knowledge of profanity—neither top-notch, which her only daughter was now ready to confess in a court of law.

  “You’re gonna need some help,” Arlis said, rubbing his bad leg before swinging his boat alongside the dock. Arlis had been bitten by an animal of some sort a while back—a giant reptile, he claimed—and never missed a chance to rub his wound to remind people he had survived.

  I was still gaping at the stuff Loretta had written. The sentences were neatly spaced, I had to admit, and easy to read even from a long distance because Day-Glo orange is like a magnet to the eye.

  “Some of those words, you don’t hear every day,” I remarked, keeping my voice low. “Where in the world you think she learned them?” It wasn’t that I really wanted to know, but it was important to make clear she hadn’t learned the words from me.

  Arlis replied, “Hannah One chopped wood for a living, and I suppose they’d come natural to a lumberjack who also hunted wild hogs. Could be your mamma learned them in the cradle. I was jest reading something about that: parents got this computer program, recites foreign words to their sleeping babies. By the time they’re off the teat, those babies are talking whole sentences in French, Italian, you name it.”

  I turned and started toward the house because the old man would have stood there jabbering all day if I’d let him.

  Arlis couldn’t let it go, though. By the time I was off the dock, stepping through mangroves, he was still offering possibilities, calling, “Lock up her computer at night, that’s my advice to you. And check with the cable company—make sure Loretta ain’t watching HBO!”

  —

  TWO HOURS and a gallon of turpentine later, Arlis and I were just getting the last of the mess off the stucco when the brain-damaged artist appeared. A daughter doesn’t need eyes to know when her mother is charging up from behind. Loretta pushed a wall of tension ahead of her that had a brittleness like glass. It made my stomach knot and set off an alarm in my ears.

  “Hannah! What you and Arlis think you’re doing? That paint cost your Uncle Jake four dollars a can, and I was up writing past midnight! Not that you care. Or that I hurt my ankle real bad when I slipped off that damn ladder.”

  The last part, she said in a self-pitying way as if she’d broken a bone and would soon die.

  “Loretta,” I replied, wiping my hands on a rag, “I’ve got an appointment with Mr. Seasons at noon, as I’ve told you more than once. That gives me less than two hours to clean up, which is not much time for a woman who smells like a pine tree and has orange fingernails—” I turned and looked at Arlis. “Is it in my hair, too? Please tell me my hair isn’t orange.”

  The old man appeared nervous, and was backing away, as Loretta informed me, “I’d of used lavender, if we’d had it. Aquamarine can be nice, too—so blame your uncle for his poor taste in paint, not me.”

  Then her tone suddenly became suspicious.

  “As for Lawrence Seasons, that man has been coming here to catch tarpon and snook for twenty years, but I don’t trust him. Never did. Never will.”

  My mother and I had been over the subject umpteen times the previous night, and I didn’t want to cycle through it again. Her brother, Jake, had died the year before, and I’d been taking out his fishing clients for almost two years, which is when my sweet, funny uncle first got sick. Now Mr. Seasons was my fishing client, along with about twenty of Jake’s regulars. Combined, it brought in enough money for me to rent my own place, and also pay for the nurses Loretta needs—one of whom would soon be explaining why she’d let a crazy woman escape with a can of spray paint and a head full of swearwords.

  Actually, fishing came up a little short in the money department. It almost always does for people who depend on saltwater for a living. It was now late June, and tarpon season was about over. Soon, we’d be in the dead months when tourists avoided the heat of hurricane season. By Thanksgiving, my savings account would be drained, and I’d have to find a part-time job, as I’d done for the last two years, to see us through until Christmas.

  I turned and headed up the shell mound, toward the old tin-roofed house where’d I’d grown up. Loretta had to hustle to keep up, still fuming.

  “Why’s that old snob want to see you? Is it about fishing?”

  I shook my head, and reminded her, “It’s unprofessional to speak badly of clients—Jake warned you more than once. Mr. Seasons brings interesting people on the boat, he’s polite, and he tips nice. That’s all I care about.”

  “Sure, sure, but why’s he want to see you if it’s not about fishing?”

  I shook my head again, meaning it was none of her business. Truth was, I still didn’t know, only that I was to meet him at his estate on Captiva Island, which was a ninety-minute drive by truck but only fifteen minutes across the bay in my fast little boat.

  “That man’s got as much personality as a bucket of ripe mullet,” Loretta said. “Did I mention he made a pass at your Aunt Hannah?”

  “Yes, I believe you did,” I replied, staying calm. Mention it? My God, she’d told me a hundred times.

  “And Hannah Three, well . . . I’ll bet the old snob got more than he bargained for if he made it past that girl’s front gates. Right to your face, Hannah would admit she liked men as much as some men like women. And she had an eye for the rich ones especially. Not that your aunt ever took money—that I know of.”

  I said, “Don’t start, Mamma.”

  “’Course, most men were scared of Hannah Three—but those were the ones she’d hop into bed with, once she had ’em buffaloed. There was a term she used to excuse her raw behavior”—Loretta had to think about it as she clumped up the hill—“‘Womanly hormone something,’ as if a naked man was a type of vitamin pill. She was sort of like a spider that way
. You know about female black widows, don’t you?”

  I was on the porch, holding the screen door open, saying, “Yes, Loretta. Now, go on inside where it’s cool, and let Mrs. Terwilliger bring you some sweet tea. I need to shower and wash this paint out of my hair. Tonight, I’ll give you a call and make sure you’re okay.”

  Loretta didn’t move, though. She stood there staring up into my face. “He just wants inside your panties, I hope you realize.”

  “I’ve got no interest in Mr. Seasons, so just quit.”

  “Darling, that’s not what I’m saying. There hasn’t been a man in your life for years. And that one was only around for a day after you was married, so it hardly counts.”

  I knew I shouldn’t bring up my friend Nathan Pace, but I did because he was all I had as a defense. “What about Nate? I have dinner with him two or three times a week, and he’s a man.”

  “In the looks department, maybe!” my mother countered, a wicked grin on her face. “I used to think the same thing about Liberace. Only difference between him and that butterfly Nathan is, one of them had nice hair and played the piano.” Loretta’s eyes started to drift. “Nathan don’t play the piano, does he?”

  “Violin,” I said, feeling tired. It was how Nathan and I had met—in high school band, two outsiders thrown together less by mutual interests than a mutual fear of not measuring up.

  Her eyes snapped back.

  “Keeping company with a muscle-bound homosexual is no way to attract a man, Hannah. Not the ones who got no interest in wearing your panties, anyway.”

  I tried again, even though it was pointless, by mentioning our good-looking UPS driver, whom I enjoyed seeing in his brown uniform, particularly when he wore shorts. “Christian Rhoades is getting friendly,” I argued. “I suppose you haven’t noticed how often he stops even when he doesn’t have a package.”