Ten Thousand Islands Page 4

“Yes, ghosts, too. Dorothy could probably hear ghosts. And believe me, ghosts are no different than people. Lots of loud, self-centered shits. They’re worse than drunks.”

  “Ghosts, uh-huh.” She looked at me. “Do you believe any of this?”

  I said, “No, of course I don’t. Half the time, he says things like that just to irritate me. Certain people are more perceptive than others, I believe that. I also believe that some people have a tough time dealing with their own imaginations.”

  Tomlinson tilted his bottle of beer upward, drinking, a familiar smile on his face as JoAnn said, “Whatever the reasons, Dorothy was different. The voices, the way she behaved, all sorts of things. But the main way she was different—and no one ever has explained this—the way she was most different was that she was good at finding things. Old stuff, stuff made of metal. Dorothy would go right to it. Lose your keys? A diamond ring on the beach? People would call Della and say, ‘You mind if we borrow Dorothy for an hour or so?’ She became kinda famous on Marco Island.”

  “That’s a great gift,” Tomlinson said. “Extraordinary.”

  “Yeah. I used to think so. But then, this gift of hers, her gift for finding things, I think that’s what went and got that little girl killed.”

  JoAnn didn’t know all the details. She’d been in her twenties when Dorothy died. She’d already moved away from Marco Island, but stayed in phone contact with Della Copeland.

  “I knew that Dorothy made good grades in school, but that she was kind of a social outcast. An oddball, the other kids probably figured. Della worried about that. It hurt her that the girl didn’t have friends. And there were always people around trying to get Dorothy to use her gift for reasons Della didn’t like. I know she worried about that, too. As I said, Dorothy got kind of famous on the island.”

  Something that contributed to the girl’s notoriety was her discovery of several pre-Columbian wooden artifacts. She found them in the muck of what everyone thought to be a mosquito drainage ditch. The ditch turned out to be a canal that had apparently been dredged by the Indians who’d once lived there, the Calusa.

  “They figure the Indians dug the canal a thousand years ago for their canoes. So they could cross the island and not have to go off-shore.”

  “Marco Island?”

  “No, it was a little island right next to Marco. I’ve forgotten the name of it. Anyway, Dorothy, she figured it out about the canal. Della was very excited, because the state archaeologists got involved and there was some talk of giving her a scholarship to college when she got old enough because of all the help she’d been to them. You can imagine what that meant to a single woman raising a daughter on waitress pay.

  “The stuff Dorothy found was real valuable. There was a carving of a cat and two of these horrible-looking masks with real long noses. Because of the muck, they were in perfect condition; still had paint on them. I guess because they hadn’t been exposed to air, or something. Also, there was this small wooden carving shaped like a paddle blade. About the size of both my palms together with very odd designs on it. Teardrops and a cross and circles within circles.”

  Tomlinson got up, found pencil and paper and drew what looked to be a bull’s-eye over a Gaelic cross. “Was it like this?”

  JoAnn squinched her jaw, thinking. “Maybe. I can’t remember. The newspaper did a story on what she found, with photographs and everything. I might have it in a box if I can find it. I remember thinking that the cat looked Egyptian. You know the one I’m talking about? The tall one with its eyes closed and paws folded up. It was very strange stuff and Dorothy gave some of it to the archaeologists. The title was ‘The Girl Who Finds Things.’ The newspaper story, I mean.”

  That was just the beginning, JoAnn told us. Less than a year later, the child made another discovery. Digging near the edge of the same canal, she’d found human bones, a skull, several hundred blue Spanish chevron trade beads and what JoAnn called a golden tablet. It was the only one like it ever found. The Florida Indians weren’t supposed to have had gold, but there it was, the child had uncovered it.

  “Della was so happy, it breaks my heart now. She didn’t know how much sadness that damn tablet was going to bring her. At the time, I guess it represented a little break in all her bad luck. The things Dorothy had found before were valuable, but the golden tablet was worth a bundle. It was her ticket to college, that’s the way Della saw it.”

  Tomlinson said, “How big was the medallion?”

  “Not big. Three or four ounces of gold I think Della said. About half the size of a postcard. Beautiful, very intricate, that’s the way I remember it. But its real value was historical. I guess those things, the rare Indian stuff, sell for a lot.”

  “That’s true, I’m afraid. The designs, were they similar to the designs on the wooden totem?”

  “Totem? Oh, you mean the paddle. I never saw the totem in person, but I did see a picture. It was a good picture, but I really can’t remember. The gold tablet, though, wow! I remember that. Really beautiful. Maybe they were kind of similar.”

  Tomlinson was nodding as if he’d expected it to be so. “What makes you think the medallion had something to do with the girl’s death?”

  “She began to have bad dreams. Nightmares, Della said, almost every night after she found the thing. The tablet was in the dreams. I don’t know what the dreams were about. You can ask Della if you want.” JoAnn placed her glass of tea on the hatch cover beside her. Her voice had remained calm, but I noticed that her hand was shaking.

  I said, “You’re still upset by this. It happened, what? fifteen years ago?”

  She was nodding. “I helped raise Dorothy, Doc. I carried that little girl around and burped her and did all the stuff that mothers do. She was a sweet kid. Very gentle and quick to cry at another person’s pain.

  “It rained the day of the funeral. One of those gray drizzles. It made her casket look so tiny and alone. I’ve never had children. Dorothy was about as close as I ever came. So, yes, it still hurts and it’s still hard for me to talk about and it never goes away.”

  “How did she die?”

  “The coroner ruled it a suicide, but Della still believes it was an accident. What happened was, one of the island teenagers found Dorothy hanging from the limb of a low tree. This was on Marco, way back on an Indian mound behind the house. Her hands weren’t tied, her feet were touching the ground. So Della thinks maybe she was experimenting with unconsciousness. You know how kids will hold their breath, hoping to pass out, maybe have an out-of-body experience? Della thinks it was like that. But I don’t know. I think the child was probably so scared by the demons she couldn’t take it anymore.”

  “Her mother wants to believe it was an accident?”

  “I think so.”

  “These break-ins,” Tomlinson said, “it must be very hard on your friend, someone going through the clothing of her dead daughter.”

  JoAnn was nodding. “Della’s a wreck. An absolute nervous wreck. It’s brought all those old emotions back, all the pain. Someone is violating her daughter. That’s the way Della sees it. All she has left is Dorothy’s clothing and some photos, and last night it happened again.

  “She got back from work and realized someone had taken out the drawers where she hides her keepsakes and very carefully slit open the sealing paper on the back of the drawers. You know that brown paper I’m talking about? She called the police—third time it’d happened, and by now they think she’s a nut case, which she practically is after all she’s been through.”

  “Was anything missing?”

  “Some photos, she thinks. Maybe some of the Spanish beads that Dorothy found. She’d found a lot of beads and that’s where Della hid some of them, in the little space between one of the drawers. But the point is, fellas, the woman is in trouble and needs a helping hand.”

  Meaning us.

  There was no one else to choose from. Della had an estranged boyfriend who was an abuser. He couldn’t be trusted. And her taste
in men was so consistently bad that JoAnn had taken it upon herself to find a brotherly protector.

  “What she could really use is a friend. Someone to stay there for a week or so, so she can at least get some sleep at night. As it is, she’s terrified of every sound. If our magazine wasn’t right on deadline, I’d be down there now. It’s gonna be another week or so before I can get away, and she can’t come up here because she’s gotta work.”

  Years ago, recently divorced and broke, JoAnn and Rhonda Lister had founded a single-sheet weekly “newspaper” that they called The Heat Islands Fishing Report, and sold advertising. Within two years, it was a full-sized magazine and hugely successful. They’d both made a lot of money but they still ran every aspect of the business themselves. Busy ladies.

  “Something else, Doc. It wouldn’t hurt for someone to ask around, talk to the police and give them a nudge. The jerk who’s scaring her needs to be caught. That’s the only way she’s going to feel comfortable living there.”

  I said, “That’s not exactly my line of work.”

  “I know that, but a guy like you—kind of big and bookish and solid—the cops will pay attention to a guy like you. Plus you’re smart. All I’m asking is, drive down there, talk to Della. Maybe you can help, maybe you can’t. Spend a day or two. Are you that busy?”

  Yes, I was that busy. I was under contract to collect for Mote Marine Laboratory, near Sarasota, one of the world’s great research facilities. After months of paperwork and genuinely asinine government red tape, I’d finally received a Scientific Collecting Permit from the great state of Florida that allowed me to net and transport brood snook, a favorite game and food fish.

  Getting the permit had been a bureaucratic nightmare. Never mind that the snook I caught would be released unharmed after we stripped them of milt and eggs. And never mind that Mote is the first to successfully raise snook in large quantities, then reintroduce them into the wild—something state biologists had tried but failed to do.

  In the bowels of certain agencies, Florida’s bureaucrats maintain a superior attitude of bored disapproval. I wanted to help save the snook population? Well, I’d have to jump through their silly hoops first! Which is why I’d missed the annual June spawning run and would now have to hustle to catch up.

  I told Jo Ann, “I’m supposed to deliver twenty brood snook to Mote by Saturday and, this late in the season, they’re going to be very hard to find. I’ll be working day and night. But if you want, I’ll drive down to the Keys after that.”

  “I’ll go.” Tomlinson was standing. He found the trash bag nailed to the wall and carefully placed his empty bottle therein. “No Más is loaded and ready. I’ll leave this afternoon with the outgoing tide. I’ll need Della’s phone number. There’s gotta be a place to anchor near her trailer park. You said she lives on Key Largo? That’s a pretty big island.”

  JoAnn gave me a searching, nervous look. One more private little exchange. “But Tomlinson, you’ve probably got stuff to do, too. Why don’t you wait until Doc—”

  “No reason to wait. I’ve been wanting to take a trip, just couldn’t decide where. Now I know. Besides, I’m restless as hell. The equinox, that’s the problem. And now I’ve got this full moon thing to deal with.”

  “I don’t know….”

  “Only plans I had was playing harmonica for Jimmy Louis at the Hardware Store, then spend Sunday sitting around the pool bar at ’Tween Waters. So what else is new? That and I’ve got a monograph due to the International Academy of Sociology and Science—but screw it, they waited this long, they can last another month.”

  I received another visual inquiry. What should she do?

  I told her, “You can trust Tomlinson. If he leaves today, he can be on Key Largo by tomorrow afternoon. Let him check it out, talk to people. If he thinks I can help, I’ll drive down next week.”

  “You’re going to sail all that way? It’s got to be a hundred miles down to the Keys. I’ll pay for a rental car if that would be easier.”

  Tomlinson was looking around, seeing if he’d forgotten anything, patting his pockets for sunglasses, getting ready to leave. “Nope, a thousand miles of water is easier than a hundred miles of land. Know what? It’s exactly what the doctor ordered. Blue water, lots of clean air. Get some boat beneath my feet. Yeah, that’s the ticket. Then roll a couple of Maya Mountain fatties to cleanse the receptors.” Now he was going out the screen door. His John Lennon sunglasses were still lying on the bookcase in plain sight. “I’m already getting some very strong vibes about this one, and not totally unexpected. Della and Dorothy, those two ladies have both keyed into Karma 9-1-1. As of now, I’m on the job.”

  JoAnn was watching, listening, trying not to seem worried. “Jesus.”

  I told her, “He’s actually not as airheaded as he seems. Your friend will love him. Almost everyone does.”

  “If you say it’s okay, Doc, I guess it must be.”

  “Then you’d better call Della. Tell her she’s about to get company.”

  3

  I spent the next three days working fourteen hours a day, trying to fill the order from Mote. I was up every morning before first light, cruising the beaches of Captiva Island and Cayo Costa, looking for spawning snook. They are a hardy species but delicate in their way. Most conventional nets will injure them, so I had to use a castnet. A castnet is a circular web of monofilament with lead weights seeded along the perimeter. It is ancient in its design and very effective. Three thousand years before Christ was born, men wading in water were throwing castnets at fish, and we still throw them pretty much the same way.

  I’d had this net custom-made just for snook. It was huge: twenty-four feet in diameter. It was woven of much heavier, finer mesh than most nets. Because there was more mass and resistance, the net required twice the lead weight to make it sink fast enough. Throw a castnet properly and it will open like a parachute, trapping everything beneath. Throw it improperly and it will spook every fish around. A standard bait net weighs maybe fifteen pounds. This monster weighed nearly thirty pounds dry, and so, good throw or bad, it was like tossing a small refrigerator. And I was making forty to fifty throws a day, without much success.

  It’s tiring enough to spend all day in the heat of a September sun, poling a boat, stalking fish, anchoring and re-anchoring. Add this man-killer net to the equation and you are toying with debility.

  So, at the end of each day, when the work was finished, I would limp up the steps to my little house, strip off my sodden, filthy shirt and shorts, and stand under the outdoor shower for half an hour, my muscles quivering, threatening to cramp. Then it was into fresh clothes, maybe some snapper or grouper on the grill if I could manage, or else hobble over to Timber’s Restaurant for dinner. After that, I would sit on the porch, my feet propped up on the railing, beer in hand, and wait for sunset, because it is inappropriate for a grown man to go to bed before it’s dark, and I do have some pride.

  A couple of days after I watched No Más make the tricky jibes out the channel, bound for the Keys, JoAnn stopped by with a snack of sandwiches and one of those collapsible coolers filled with ice and bottles of beer.

  It was a Sunday. Beyond the mangroves, the sunset horizon was a lemon sphere streaked with blue. On Sanibel’s beach side, the Gulf of Mexico absorbed light and deflected colors skyward.

  She asked me, “Did you talk to Tomlinson last night?”

  I was in a porch chair as usual. One more tough day behind me in which I’d managed to fall off the poling platform and damn near drown with thirty-some pounds of net tied to my wrist. But I’d also added five good brood snook to my holding tank.

  I sipped the bottle of beer she’d placed in my hand and said, “For the last three or four days, I haven’t answered the phone, returned messages, nothing. Haven’t checked my mail or paid bills. I’m on autopilot. So the answer is no.”

  “He said he was going to try and call. Something else, he took the other stuff Dorothy found, all the remaining
artifacts, put them in a box and mailed them to you. So the thieves wouldn’t know where to look. So now I understand why you haven’t gotten it yet.”

  “Like what?”

  “That Egyptian-looking cat I told you about? He mailed it insured, priority, plus some other things Della wanted to protect. Nothing really valuable, except for maybe the cat, but Della’s lost enough. You don’t mind, I’ll stop at the post office tomorrow and pick it up. I’ll get your mail while I’m at it, drop it all by tomorrow morning.”

  “Does he want me to open the box?”

  “You can ask him when he calls. But I wouldn’t mind seeing that cat again.”

  “If I talk to him, I will. lust before I fall into bed, I unplug the phone. The idea of waking up to Tomlinson on a talking jag is not pleasant. I’ve been through that too many times.”

  She pulled a chair close enough to the railing so that she could prop her feet up beside mine. I got a whiff of shampoo and subtle, indefinable female odors.

  It was a calm evening. The saltwater lake that is Dinkin’s Bay spread away in shaded increments of brass and pewter and pearl. Pelicans roosted heavily in nearby mangroves, while white ibis crossed the bay in gooselike formation.

  The moon, one day past full, would soon balloon up over the bay.

  She watched the ibis for a moment before she said, “I figured there was a reason he couldn’t get you. Last night, he kept me on the phone for more than an hour. And it’s not easy to call him because he and Della are either at the bar where she works or he’s aboard his boat. There’s a lot of stuff he wants to tell you about the gold medallion that Dorothy found. The wooden paddle thing, too. What he calls the totem. The medallion and the totem, that’s all he talked about. He says it’s related. The break-ins, Dorothy’s death, everything. There’s some books he wants you to find and read.”

  “I barely have time to eat. If I don’t get those snook to Mote by Saturday, they may not renew my contract. Getting permits from the state was a nightmare.”

  “Then I’ll go to the library for you, maybe tell you about it. The history stuff, I think it’s interesting.”