Ten Thousand Islands Page 6

  He held out a blue envelope, which was addressed to me in her tiny, precise hand. When I started to open it, O’Rourke said, “Christ, don’t read the damn thing in front of me! I feel bad enough as it is. Go back to your boat, catch us some more fat brood snook. You still owe me five or six fish, right? We need them by Saturday, don’t forget!” He pointed me toward the dock before adding, “That way you can suffer in private.”

  In the afternoon, I found a deserted stretch of beach on one of the barrier islands, Cayo Costa, and I camped between a fringe of coconut palms and the water. I stayed two nights.

  By the end of the first day, all the beer was gone and most of the food. The morning of the second day, depressed and feeling sluggish with a hangover, I told myself that twenty-four hours of fasting and a marathon workout was not only what I needed but what I deserved.

  It has been a lifelong practice of mine. When things are going badly, or when I’m dissatisfied with my own work or behavior, I devise a new and improved Dumb Ass Triathlon. The events are determined by my environment. There must be at least two different disciplines and three different punishing events.

  For me, it’s an effective way of stopping negative momentum and of jump-starting a change in personal behavior. It is also an effective way to give myself a personal kick in the butt.

  Punishment is the order of the day.

  So I punished myself.

  I stripped down to Nikes and running shorts and lumbered along the beach to the north point of the island, then all the way back to my camp, about eight miles.

  Then I traded in the shoes for goggles and swam almost to the south point of the island—three miles, and all the harder because, toward the very end, I was pulling myself along against an outgoing tide.

  Finally, I jogged and hobbled barefooted back to camp, where I drank a half gallon of water, cleaned my glasses, then laid down beneath a sun tarp to read.

  Kathleen’s letter was troubling. It was troubling because she wrote without anger nor any attempt to manipulate. There is no criticism so unsettling as the truth, and her observations were logically presented. Perhaps they were accurate, perhaps not.

  Certain sentences stood out. I read and reread them.

  She wrote: Marion, You have a wonderful brain and a heart that is bigger than you know, but you are a strange man. Your heart and your brain don’t seem to be connected …

  She wrote: I remember the look on your face when that drunk stumbled out of the bushes and surprised us. I learned something I couldn’t have learned any other way. I learned that you have a capacity for violence without emotion. No emotion that I could see. No anger, no fear. The only primate who has that capacity is man, and very, very few of them. It frightened me. It should frighten you….

  She wrote: I’ve found few men as attractive as you, but neither have I felt so isolated during intimacy. As thoughtful as you are, part of you is always in some faraway place. I wish I knew that place. I would have gladly traveled there with you …

  She wrote: Humans aren’t driven to behavior for which we are not coded, nor do we long for something unless we’ve lost it. One or both may explain how you are different from other people. You have always been alone, Marion. I think you will always be alone….

  The portrait that emerged wasn’t very flattering. How long had Kathleen and I dated? Seven months off and on, then four months exclusively. Could she really have gotten to know me so well in so short a time?

  As I lay on the sand listening to the respiratory wash of waves, the whistle of sea birds, I considered the validity of her observations.

  I remembered the night that the drunk had come charging at us out of the shadows. We’d had dinner in downtown Sarasota and were walking along the waterfront to her car. We were talking, looking at the mast lights of sailboats. Unexpectedly, a big man was reaching for her, only a few meters away. Yes, he’d stumbled, but there was no way I could have known that.

  I consider my reaction very practical, not extreme. I’d turned the man without much effort, then pinned him to the sidewalk until I was certain of his intentions. It had been methodical, not violent. Of course I hadn’t been emotional. In such a situation, of what possible value was emotion? Yet, the woman found fault with my behavior. It made no sense.

  I was also surprised by the depth of her affection. She mentioned her attraction and implied that she would have traveled with me anywhere. Yet, she’d never openly voiced her feelings, so how was I supposed to know? Had I missed some signal?

  Perhaps. I thought about the night Kathleen had played at a big bayside folk concert, several hundred people listening. This was on the grass of pretty Coolidge Park, just across the bridge from Saint Armand’s Key—could picture her seated, head tilted above guitar, lost in the music, brown hair hanging down over strings that her fingers touched knowingly, lovingly, long legs crossed, her face in the spotlight.

  I thought about a particular song she’d played. It was a Judy Collins song or maybe a Joni Mitchell song, one of the vocal greats from an unstable decade. The song was wistful and resigned, something about a woman yearning to follow her cowboy lover. After the song, Kathleen had looked pointedly at me and nodded.

  Was that the sort of cryptic message that I was supposed to process and correctly interpret? If so, I’d missed badly. It was surprising. Such silent dialogue is something that I’m usually good at deciphering. At least, that’s what I’ve always thought.

  Finally, there was her most troubling claim: that I was a loner and would always be alone.

  No, that definitely wasn’t true, I told myself. I liked people and people seemed to like and trust me. I had a family at Dinkin’s Bay Marina. The point could not be argued. There were people there to whom I was dedicated and who reciprocated without question. There was Tomlinson, Mack and Jeth, Janet, Rhonda and JoAnn, plus several others.

  See, I wasn’t alone. No way. Not me.

  5

  I found out about the grave robbery on Friday afternoon. I came cometing across the bay, doing sixty easy, a smoky, lucent veil of rain and electricity right on my tail. In hurricane season, squalls come blowing up out of nowhere.

  I’d just dropped off the last of the snook to Mote. I came swinging up to the dock, to find JoAnn standing above me on the porch outside my stilthouse. She was wearing faded cotton slacks and a pale pink jersey banded with horizontal stripes that I associate with French painters or British seamen of long ago. Her eyes were red; she’d been crying.

  As I tied my boat, she said, “They dug her up, Doc. I’ve been trying to get in touch with you. The county people, the ones from Marco, they called Della.”

  I said, “They what?”

  “Someone dug up Dorothy’s grave. She was in the old town cemetery down on Marco Island. They dug her up and tried to get into her casket. Who knows what they took out? Tomlinson says it’s time for you to get involved. He needs your help down there.”

  “Let me get the lines on my skiff,” I told her, “then we’ll talk.”

  Della had called that morning in hysterics. JoAnn could hear Tomlinson in the background trying to comfort her. “I picked up the phone and she’s yelling, ‘Oh, they’ve hurt my little girl again. They’ve hurt my baby!’ Panicky stuff. Terrible, like after a car wreck. I thought she was drunk or the pressure had finally pushed her over the edge, until Tomlinson took the phone and told me what happened.”

  JoAnn and I were sitting in caneback chairs in the little roofed walkway between my house and lab. In gentler days, such passages were known as dog trots. Listening to JoAnn’s story, I was reminded that the gentler days of Florida, if such days actually existed, were long gone.

  Inside, on the hatch-cover table, was the opened box of artifacts that Tomlinson had mailed, with the beads, the arrowheads and the cat. The similarities to Egyptian art were not apparent to me, but then I know next to nothing about the subject.

  “If you think that’s pretty,” she said, “you ought to see the medalli
on. The way I remember it, so intricate and beautiful, it takes your breath away. Maybe you’ll see it if Della still has it or knows where it is.”

  “Maybe I will.”

  Beside the carving was a bushel basket of unopened mail, all delivered by JoAnn two days before.

  My ability to ignore mail has grown stronger over the years. I view it as a sign of maturity.

  It was dusk. The storm cell was a foggy mushroom cloud above us. Thunder vibrated in the windows; lightning popped and sizzled outside. Rain flowed down off my tin roof, so that the mangroves and bay beyond were blurred as if through a waterfall.

  A waterfall is exactly what it was.

  To take advantage, I’d slid open the cover of my thousand-gallon rain cistern so that it might fill faster, then, standing naked in the rain, shampooed and sluiced away three days of beach sand before joining JoAnn.

  Because it seemed like a good idea to go to a primary source, I’d already tried to phone Tomlinson at Della’s trailer. While JoAnn waited outside, I left a message on the recorder. I also called the place Della worked, the Mandalay, on Key Largo. They weren’t at the restaurant, either, so I left another message: “Have him call, ASAP.”

  Tomlinson, apparently, was already a popular fixture on the island because the waitress who answered said, “You callin’ for Tommy-san? Oh, I just love that guy! ‘Course I’ll give him the message if ya’ll’re a friend a’ his.”

  Tommy-san? Tomlinson collected nicknames as quickly as house pets and small children.

  So now I was sitting beside JoAnn while she told me what she knew, which wasn’t much. Her voice provided a steady alto tempo to the lightning and chilly rain.

  “Early this morning,” she began, “one of the Marco Island cops was driving past the old town cemetery. It was still dark and he noticed some kind of light through the trees. How well do you know Marco, Doc?”

  “Not well. It’s changed a lot. Years ago, I spent some time on the island. It was already pretty heavily developed. My uncle had a ranch in Mango, south of there in the Everglades.”

  “Then you probably saw the cemetery but didn’t notice it. It’s a little tiny thing, real easy to miss. There’re some pine trees and old tombstones. When we were kids, we used to say the place was haunted. There’re all these old graves of sailors and fishermen, and we’d dare each other to walk through it at night. Which is what the cop thought, it was just kids playing around. So he shined his spotlight and saw at least two people run off, maybe more. He told Tomlinson he couldn’t be sure, but didn’t think it was important. He’d scared them, so the cop drove away.”

  At first light, though, the cemetery maintenance man found that Dorothy Copeland’s grave had been exhumed. After a check of the cemetery records, they’d tracked down Della, who still paid a yearly fee to keep her daughter’s plot trimmed and neat.

  “What a nightmare for Della,” JoAnn said. “The poor lady’s been through so much. The cops asked her for permission to rebury her, but Della said no. She wants us to meet there tomorrow and have a little ceremony. Say goodbye to her little girl one last time, plus she thinks something might be missing from the casket.”

  “So they did get the casket open.”

  “She’s not sure. The guy from the funeral home, the guy who called Della, he didn’t think so. He opened it with the some official what-a-ya-call-it standing by. The medical examiner? They opened it just to be sure and he said everything appeared normal. Whatever that means. But only Della would know, because of something she put in there when Dorothy was buried.”

  “Did she say what it was?”

  “I didn’t hardly talk to her at all, she was in such hysterics. Tomlinson, he’s the one told me. You two—you and Tomlinson—he said you guys need to take a look inside the casket, because he doesn’t think Della can deal with it emotionally. He said that’s why you need to do some reading first. To understand what it is you might find.”

  I’d already noticed that, along with the blanket, she had a book and some papers in her lap. She’d been to the library.

  Over the years, in different parts of the world, I’d dealt with enough drug people to know that they are prone to fixation. If the drug person happens to be dangerous, it is a wise thing to take his fixations seriously.

  Tomlinson was a drug person, always would be. The difference was, he wasn’t dangerous.

  Hadn’t been dangerous for many years, anyway.

  I said, “Could you just paraphrase so I don’t have to read through all that? I don’t see the point. It seems obvious that the girl found something that someone wants badly enough to risk digging up a grave in a public cemetery. Financial gain, that’s what robbery’s all about.”

  “Tomlinson says no, that’s not it. Money has nothing to do with it. He says it’s a lot more complicated. Like an ancient-curse sort of deal, only it’s not a curse. They’re after things that will give them more power. That’s why they’re after what Dorothy found. I’ll sum it up and make it quick. It can’t hurt at least to listen, can it?”

  6

  What Tomlinson had her find at the Sanibel Library were a couple of books plus translations of letters from Spanish Jesuits who’d been sent to what is now the west coast of Florida. This was back in the late 1500s, when missionaries were an important political arm of colonialism.

  When Europeans arrived in Florida, they found a complex society living on the Gulf Coast. The dominant tribe of the region, controlling both coasts and what is now the Florida Keys, had built great pyramids out of shell, ornate plazas and a highway system of canals. Because Carlos was ruler of Spain, or because the conquistadors misheard, they called the chief Carlos, although Caalus was probably closer. The kingdom and people over which he reigned was soon mispronounced, Calusa.

  Physically, the Calusa were much bigger than the Spaniards and impossible to intimidate. A member of Ponce de Leon’s crew described the men as being more than seven feet tall, though that was an exaggeration. The Jesuit missions all failed and Ponce de Leon was mortally wounded in battle and later died in Cuba. The Calusa never accepted Christianity, nor the Spaniards who came later. They had controlled the peninsula for several thousand years and would not submit. However, they had no way to fight European diseases, and they gradually vanished, leaving their cities abandoned.

  At one point, from the work of an anthropologist, JoAnn read, “The Calusa operated as a conquest kingdom with a pattern of tribute collection that resembled that of the Aztecs and Incas. There are indications that the Calusa language originated in the interior of South America, around the Orinoco River, nearly 2,000 years ago.” Then she added, “Tomlinson said that would interest you, because you’ve spent so much time in Central and South America.”

  I said, “Uh-huh. What I’m trying to understand is what any of this has to do with someone opening the grave of your friend’s daughter.”

  JoAnn also read a series of letters by a Jesuit missionary, Father Juan Rogel, and also one written by Juan Lopez de Velasco, both of whom lived for a short time among the Calusa. “You picture these guys with shaved heads, swatting mosquitoes, writing on parchment in the Florida jungle. I find it interesting as can be.”

  Some of it was.

  According to the priest, Carlos was the most powerful man in Florida. His people didn’t view him as a leader. He was divine, like a god. They believed that he controlled the heavens, and he had secret religious knowledge that he wouldn’t share with commoners. He’d go to the burial areas at night and talk to ghosts. From those conversations, the priest wrote, Carlos could correctly predict the future. As a symbol of his divinity, the missionary described Carlos as wearing a golden medallion and carrying a wooden totem.

  “Now we’re getting to it,” I said. “Pure Tomlinson.”

  According to the priest, Carlos enjoyed the absolute loyalty of his people. He hated the Spaniards, therefore none of his people would cooperate. So the Jesuits found a traitor, a Calusa they called Felipe. Felipe l
ured Carlos into a trap where the Spaniards murdered him. That was the beginning of the end of the Calusa.

  At the same time, a similar drama was being played out in the Ten Thousand Islands, a region of mangroves, black water and swamp south of Marco Island. The ruling chief there was Salvador. Like Carlos, he was a human god, controlled the skies and storms, wore a royal golden medallion and carried a sacred totem. He, too, despised the Spaniards.

  To illustrate, JoAnn read part of a letter from one of the priests who tried to convert Salvador: “When my fellow priest, Fray Castillo, ordered Salvador to tell his people to pray to the True God, Salvador became angry. Salvador gave the Father a number of blows to the face. He then rubbed human excrement on the Father’s face while he was praying. Then Salvador urinated on him, saying, ‘Man boy, why are you so small?’ He then told we religious many times that they did not want to become Christians and that we should go away.”

  JoAnn added, “Because the Spaniards couldn’t make Salvador cooperate, they started recruiting a traitor. It solved the Carlos problem, so why not assassinate their second great chief?”

  I said, “Religion had an edge to it in those days.”

  “Uh-huh. What’s the biblical line? Something about a terrible swift sword.” She paused for a moment. “Funny thing is, Tomlinson said you’d understand that part easiest of all. Deposing one leader to put your own guy in power. Political assassination, that sort of thing. What’d he mean by that, Ford?”

  Very softly, I said, “One of Tomlinson’s little jokes. He thinks he’s funny.”

  The traitor selected to dispose of Salvador was an outcast shaman from a “distant land” they called Tocayo, a dangerous man, according to one of the priests, but potentially useful to the Spaniards’ cause.

  The priest wrote, “I believe that the devil is in Tocayo, yet he promises that he will accept the True God if we help him depose Salvador. Tocayo also promises that he will forsake witchcraft and burn his sacred idol and no longer kill and eat the children of his enemies, nor have unclean knowledge of his daughters. He has promised that he will remove the sodomites.”