The Mangrove Coast Read online

  The roommate intercepted them and refused to let them speak with Merlot or Gail Calloway. Then Merlot appeared, saying he would call the police if they didn’t leave. Frank asked to speak with Gail alone, just to confirm that she was all right. No deal. Then he asked to speak with Merlot alone. Same thing, and Merlot again threatened to call the police.

  “It was the first time that I can say Frank ever really let my mother and me down. The son-of-a-bitch was ready to walk away, saying it was a legal matter or time to call a lawyer, something like that. Not that angry, just frustrated and maybe a little pissed off because we were imposing on his new life. I wouldn’t budge, though, so the police finally did come, but at least they made Merlot bring my mom to the door.

  “Doc, I hardly recognized her. In the six or seven weeks since I’d seen her, she’d lost maybe fifteen pounds. She looked pale and gaunt, all eyes and hair and cheekbones. Her eyes, she’s got the most unusual eyes you’ve ever seen. One green, one blue, and I know she’s sick when her eyes get this milky, glassy look. Well, that’s just the way her eyes looked. Glassy, like she wasn’t well. She even sounded different when she spoke. What’s that word—mesmerized? That’s the way she sounded, but more like she was dazed. She came out, gave me a big hug and kiss right there in front of the cops. Then she told Frank and me that we had to stop saying all the bad things we’d been saying about Merlot.”

  I interrupted and told her to explain that in a little more detail.

  “My mom told us that we had to stop spreading lies about her friend Jackie.”

  “She was convinced that you two had been lying about the guy?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Did she seem paranoid? Or as if the guy might have her on drugs or something?”

  “No. She just seemed absolutely confident that Frank and I had been spreading lies about her boyfriend. She said that she knew what we’d been saying and that we had to stop because we were making ourselves look silly.”

  “Had you and Frank said anything to anyone about Merlot?”

  “Nothing. Yeah, we’d talked between ourselves, but we hadn’t said a damn thing to anyone else. Then she told us that she’d never been happier.”

  “Judging from her voice, did she mean it?”

  “I don’t think anyone was forcing her to say it. But she didn’t sound normal, either. Not like she was drunk or anything, but, like I told you, kind of in a daze. Or like she was trying real hard to show Merlot that she was a hundred percent on his side. That she was protecting him. You know the way people behave when they’re trying to let someone know they care? Like that. She said that she was living with Jackie now and they’d soon be going on a trip.”

  “Did she say where?”

  “I asked her, but Merlot cut her off before she could answer. As we were leaving, she kind of blurted out that it might be a while before she’d be able to call me on the phone. Because they’d be sailing and some of the ports were remote.”

  “The police were still there, they heard that exchange.”

  “Yeah, and it was … awful,” Amanda said. “It was like one of those nasty little scenes you see on television cop shows. Lights flashing, neighbors staring out their windows, trashy white people arguing on the sidewalk. That’s the way I felt, trashy. And helpless. Helpless because of the way my mother was behaving. You know what the worst thing was? Mom, my own mother, she believed Merlot, not me. That business about Frank and me spreading lies. It was like she’d been brainwashed or something. He’d been telling her that crap. Why? I mean, why go to the trouble? Christ, I wanted to scream I was so frustrated.

  “So then the cops tell us we’ve got to leave, stop harassing the happy couple. What choice did I have? I told Mom to please call me. I couldn’t make her believe that I couldn’t call her. She didn’t even know Merlot’s number’d been changed. So Frank and I go get in the car. Mom’s standing there behind the cops. Merlot, the fat ass, he’s got his arm around Mom, his Creole roommate standing there still looking pissed off, ready to fight. You know what Merlot does then?”

  “What.”

  “He flashes me this smug little smile as we’re pulling away. A very private smile, him looking right into my eyes, just him and me. It was kind of like he was telling me, yeah, you’re right about the kind of person I am. But your mother doesn’t know it and no one else will ever believe it, so screw you.”

  The way Amanda described it, I could picture it: the man’s eyes boring into hers, making her hate him even more, wanting her to hate him because he was enjoying it.

  Slightly more than two weeks later, Amanda received a card from her mother postmarked Cartagena, Colombia. All it said was that they were aboard a forty-eight-foot sailboat and having a wonderful time. Over the following two months, she received three more cards, all of them postmarked Cartagena, all of them pleasant and very brief. They offered no return address and gave no more information than the first.

  “She might have been writing to a stranger,” Amanda said. “They were that impersonal, that cold. And there wasn’t a clue about what their plans were, where they were headed.”

  Amanda received the last of the three cards nearly a month before she tracked me down on Sanibel. Increasingly concerned about her mother’s well-being, she contacted the Broward County Sheriff’s Department and then the FBI. Both agencies were attentive and sympathetic, but how could they list Gail Calloway as a missing person when an official police report quoted the woman as saying that she was staying voluntarily with Jackie Merlot? Not only that, but Gail had volunteered that the two of them expected to be out of touch for a while while traveling.

  “It’s quite a predicament,” I said.

  “Yeah. Now you see what I mean when I say the police can’t help. And the private investigator Frank hired, he’s not going to travel out of the country to try to bring Mom back. He’d be risking his license.”

  I thought about it for a moment before saying, “I’m going to tell you something that you may not want to hear. You’re assuming that your mother wants to be rescued. You need to face the possibility that your mother really is happy, that she meant exactly what she told you. She’s a grown woman. Merlot may be a bad guy, maybe the scum shyster of the earth, but it doesn’t much matter what we think. She may be doing exactly what she wants to do.”

  “No, nope, I don’t think so. I know my mom. She’s in trouble. She may not know it yet, but she is.” Amanda gave it a couple of beats, looking at me before she added, “And you think so, too.”

  I said, “I do?” amused by her confidence; sat there letting her know I was waiting for an explanation.

  “I’ve been watching your expression, Ford, the way your eyes changed. While you were listening, I could almost see the wheels turning. You’re a smart man. You’ve been around and you’re good enough at reading people to figure I’m not the kind of person to exaggerate or to panic or go all freaky just because I don’t get my way. I’m not exactly the all-American girl, but I’m no ditz, either. And I’m not one of those adult children who can’t leave their parents. For the last five years, I’ve lived very happily on my own, thank you.

  “But what I told you about my mom, it got to you. It made you mad. I could tell. There’s something very … unhealthy about Merlot’s behavior, and you know it. You and my real father were once very close friends, and the woman that he loved is in trouble. Guys like you—and I may be wrong here, but it’s the way I read it—guys like you, the straight shooters, you’re throwbacks. You take friendship seriously, and what I just told you really pisses you off. Not you personally, but in a way that offends your sense of loyalty. I may be way off base but, hey, I hope I’m right because there aren’t many people left, male or female, a person can count on. So, the question is, do you have any ideas how to find her and pry her loose from that fat bastard?”

  So, along with her other good qualities, give the lady low marks for her generous, hopeful assessment of my character, but high marks for the wa
y she read my reaction to her story.

  She was right. Even though I had never met Gail Richardson Calloway, I felt fraternal and protective toward the woman to an emotional degree that I found surprising. I was also surprised to realize that Amanda’s story had filled me with an irrational dislike of a man I’d never seen, spoken with or met: Jackie Merlot. It had to do with an image that lingered in my imagination: a fat man with a boy’s face flashing a private smile at a tough, introverted girl with stringy strawberry blond tomboy hair; a man who took perverse joy in driving a wedge between a mother and a daughter.

  But I was wary of my own reaction because I am wary of emotion as a motivator. Emotion is energy without structure, without reason. Emotion can be a dangerous indulgence.

  I finished the last of my tea; rattled the ice cubes in my glass as I said, “What you want me to do is go to Colombia and try to find your mother. That’s the point of all this, isn’t it?”

  Amanda was shaking her head. “I won’t say I didn’t come here hoping you’d offer. Yeah, that’s what I was hoping. I really was. But the main reason I came is because of the letters I found, my dad’s letters. It’s like he knew what was going to happen and he was giving me directions what to do. But I don’t expect you to try to help, Doc. Not now. Not after meeting you.”

  What the hell did that mean? I said, “You just lost me.”

  The girl stirred from her seat, stood away from the table and tugged at the T-shirt with its terse warning message. Through the window, near mangroves at the back entrance to the marina office, I could see Mack at the fish-cleaning table filleting a couple of pompano. Tucker Gatrell watched, yammering away. Suspended from the porch overhead was a cast net. It looked like a gigantic spider’s web. Jeth was enmeshed in the thing, carefully inspecting its elemental network, using a spool of fishing line to mend holes.

  Amanda swiped a wisp of copper hair from her eyes and said, “I hoped you’d volunteer to go help my mom because of the way my dad described you. But the thing is, I pictured a … well, let’s just say I pictured a more adventurous type of guy.”

  “More adventurous?” I said. “Is that right?”

  “What was that line in my dad’s letter? ‘The man’s got special skills.’ He was talking about you, so I pictured one of the soldier-of-fortune types. One of the tough guys you see in films. But not somebody like you, Doc. As big as you are, I didn’t picture somebody who looks like they spend all their time reading books and looking through a microscope.”

  “I like books,” I said agreeably. “And it’s true that my work requires a microscope.”

  “Don’t take that the wrong way. It’s not a cut. I don’t like the macho types. Not at all, so no offense. Really.”

  Listening to Amanda’s story, her tone, her tough logic, I could hear the faintest echo of a good man who was lost long ago and far away. It was a frail thin chord that was the voice of an old friend. I fought the urge to allow myself an ironic smile as I replied, “Gee, no offense taken, Amanda. Really.”

  “But any advice you have to offer,” she added, “it could be very helpful.”

  “Advice, sure. If I can help, you bet I’ll try.”

  “I’ll give you my number in Lauderdale. If you have any ideas, you can give me a call. I figure what I’ll have to do is just fly down there—Colombia, I mean, maybe get a friend to go with me—and have a look around.” The smile she then allowed me was one of those bright, meaningless smiles of dismissal; the kind of smile we all use when we are dealing with people who are attempting to sell us something we do not want, or who have not met our initial expectations.

  I hoped my own bright smile mirrored hers. “Give you a call in Lauderdale, Amanda, you can count on it. Boy oh boy, I’ll give it some thought, too. Maybe try to figure out a way to locate your mom and the guy she’s traveling with. What was his name again?” Said it with false gusto, as if I hadn’t been paying attention.

  “His name? You mean after listening to the whole story, you’ve already forgotten—” She stopped and eyed me closely, thinking it over.

  I said, “Isn’t it handy to be able to take one look at a person and know what he’s like? And you’re so right! I’m the big, gawky, absent-minded-professor type. My brain’s so jammed with research material I just can’t seem to remember that guy’s name. The big fellow you described. Boy do I feel like a dope.”

  I watched her expression: Is this an act? Then her face narrowed: Yep, it was definitely an act … but why?

  “His name’s Merlot,” she said slowly.

  “Merlot. That’s right. You know, something that may account for my bad memory is when your dad and I were living over there in the jungles of Cambodia? It was almost too darn stressful. About half the time these little black-haired people were sneaking around trying to kill us. Well … I say ‘kill us,’ but what the Khmer really wanted to do was cut our heads off and carry them around on a pole. Know why?”

  Her expression changed, but she didn’t answer.

  “The reason they wanted to cut our heads off is because they believe a man remains conscious for nearly a minute after his head’s been severed. Which makes sense if you stop and think about it. Sure, you can’t breathe, you can’t walk, but your eyes and your brain are in the same place, right? To them, it’s like the perfect punishment. They’d cut off our heads and then position us in such a way so that the last thing we saw before we died was our own headless corpse. You talk about having a bad memory? The strain of worrying about that probably killed off some my brain cells.”

  Her expression changed again. “Oh my God. You’re not exaggerating, are you?”

  “Wish I was. So, yeah, I can understand why you wouldn’t trust someone like me to deal with a guy who might be taking advantage of your mother. This … what’s his name again?”

  Reevaluation time: Maybe I wasn’t such a bookish, nerdish type after all. “Jackie,” she said. “Jackie Merlot.”

  I was still smiling when I said, “Gee, a guy like that, I’d just love to meet.”

  5

  I got a fresh notebook from the lab and, in my small, blocky print, jotted down all the useful phone numbers and addresses that Amanda could provide.

  Someday, if the notebook became important, I would attach a label, give it a file name, then lock the notebook away with the others I’d kept and saved over the years. There were some interesting titles in that fireproof box:

  Coast of Bengal

  Borneo/Sandakan

  Nicaragua/Politics/Baseball

  Havana I. Havana II

  Ox-Eyed Tarpon/South China Sea

  Masagua’s Ridley Turtles and the Magnetic Mountain

  Singapore to Kota Baharu (with 3rd Gurkhas)

  There were others.

  All contained the carefully kept details of a lifetime spent traveling alone through the Third World tropics; necessarily duplicitous years spent doing clandestine work, as well as the work I still care passionately about: marine biology.

  The notebooks added order. They allowed me a sense of purpose, even though much of what I’ve done in my life now seems absurd, nearly existential because of the violence to which I’ve contributed.

  Tomlinson knows a little bit about it. Not much, but enough to attempt to comfort me one beery evening when he said, “You’re not the Lone Ranger, Doc. Take the seventies, for instance. It wasn’t a decade, man. It was a damn crime scene. And you worry about the little bit of political stuff you were involved in?”

  As I said, Tomlinson doesn’t know much about it.

  So Bobby Richardson’s ladies were allotted their own notebook. When I’d finished with phone numbers and addresses, I asked Amanda if she’d thought to bring the four postcards she’d received from her mother. She had. They were in the envelope that contained her father’s letters. She paced around studying my overloaded shelves of books while I studied the postcards.

  All the cards were postmarked Cartagena, Colombia, and onto each was pasted a hundred
-peso stamp that paid tribute to emeralds, the gem for which the country’s jungles are famous. Cartagena is an ancient seaport city built like a fortress during the 1500s, when conquistadors shipped gold and silver to Madrid. I’d been there a number of times, but that had been years ago.

  Three of the cards were photographs of sites I recognized as Cartagena tourist attractions: the clock tower entrance to the old walled city; a busy street vendor scene; a small Spanish garrison (stone walls with gunports overlooking Cartagena Harbor) that was now a restaurant, according to the card, called Club de Pesca.

  Had I once eaten at that restaurant? It was possible. There was a little marina close to that old Spanish garrison. I’d maybe stopped at the marina for a beer, but I couldn’t remember the name of the place.

  Who could I check with to find out? I’d have to think about it.

  The fourth postcard showed a roomful of polished ship’s bells—“a magnificent nautical museum,” according to florid Spanish on the back of the card. The place was apparently a private museum near Cartagena called CoMarCa.

  The cards were not dated, but they were postmarked: 6 January, 12 January, 16 February and 20 March, respectively.

  On the back of each postcard, in flowing, ovoid script, were typical tourist inanities: “Everything is so different here!” … “The weather is very warm because we are so close to the equator!” … “Miss you, wish you were here!”

  They contained nothing more personal than that.

  There was no mention of Jackie Merlot, of where they were staying, or of where they planned to travel.

  Each card was written in black ink from what might have been the same rollerpoint pen. I also noticed that each of the last three cards had suffered a few water smears, as if the wet ink had been splattered with random raindrops … or maybe beads of sweat.

  I found that very odd. But still … there was a benign explanation. Wasn’t there?

  I said to Amanda, “Are you absolutely certain this is your mother’s handwriting?”