The mention of Millicent had made me think of Blue Bay Ranch. “Do any turtles still nest on the bay beaches?” I asked.
“Sure,” Tammy said. “If it’s dark enough. That’s one of the things that bothered Millicent about Blue Bay. They’ve already lost their nesting spots over on the Niceville side of Choctawhatchee Bay to developments. That’s why she in
sisted on keeping part of the property as wilderness.” Tammy pointed. “Turn left up here, Fred. We have to go over the bridge.”
We went through the small resort town of Navarre Beach and soon were driving between high dunes that marked the National Seashore.
“How will we find them?” Fred asked.
“We’ll see the car. It’ll be no problem.”
And it wasn’t. On this deserted strip of beach, the Berliners’ Bronco was the only parked car. Fred pulled off the road and parked behind it.
“Okay,” Tammy said. “No lights. No talking. If the turtle is already laying her eggs, nothing we can do will disrupt her. But she may not be on the beach yet. So let’s be quiet.”
We got out of the car, shutting the doors as gently as possible, and followed Tammy over the dunes. The sand was so white, the moon gave a surprising amount of light. Fred reached over and took my hand. It was hard to remember in this setting how mad I was at him.
The dunes along this part of the beach are so high that the water is not visible. One of them is nicknamed The Matterhorn; fortunately, that wasn’t the one we had to climb, but we were out of breath when we reached the top and saw the Gulf.
Tammy paused and looked around. “There,” she whispered. About forty feet to our right and lower down the dune, we could see two figures crouching low. We made our way toward them.
“Anything?” Tammy whispered as we sat down beside Jack and Sophie.
“She’s trying to make up her mind,” Jack whispered back. “She’s been out of the water twice and gone back. Skittish.”
We settled into the sand to wait. Fred’s hand still held
mine, and in a few moments, I was aware of a pulse beating between us. Was it my heart? His? I had cried on the phone, and he had come to rescue me. Wasn’t that what I had wanted?
I think during part of the wait that I was half asleep, drifting somewhere between the slightly hazy stars, the distant lightning, and the water that rippled phosphorescent, white on white sand. At one point, a meteor burst across the sky, green, glowing. Fred’s hand squeezed mine.
And then someone (Sophie?) touched my shoulder and I was no longer drifting but watching a huge black form materialize from the water. It came slowly, dragging itself across the sand, a creature of the sea ponderous in an alien world.
We were afraid to breathe. In the distance we could hear music and the hum of an airplane. Would the noise frighten her off? She stopped, and against the white sand, we could see her huge head darting this way and that. Was all safe?
She lumbered forward again, dragging herself onto the dry, upper beach, through the first vegetation. Then she stopped. In a moment we heard the rhythmic scoop of sand.
“We can go see her now,” Jack Berliner murmured. “She’s nesting.”
“Wait a minute,” Tammy said. “Let her get the nest dug.”
So we waited for the sound of digging to stop, and then we followed Jack to the spot where the turtle had disappeared.
“Any of you ever seen a turtle lay eggs?” he asked.
We all shook our heads no, with the exception of Tammy and Sophie.
“Well, they cry.”
I remembered that Sophie had told us that.
“I just thought I’d better warn you. They aren’t real tears,
of course; they wash sand from her eyes and get the salt out of her system.”
“So they say,” Tammy said.
Sophie was the first to shine a light on the turtle. “Oh, look, Daddy. She’s a big one!”
And she was. She had looked huge crossing the beach. Up close, she was immense. Sophie’s flashlight, and then Jack’s, shone down on a reddish-brown shell that was larger than a table. From this shell a huge reptilian head jutted forth. She paid no attention to us. Tears poured from her eyes and she groaned like any woman in labor.
“Damn,” Fred said in awe. But Haley asked if it was all right to touch her.
“Sure,” Jack said. “The Rolling Stones could be playing on her back right now and she wouldn’t know it.”
The turtle groaned loudly. Haley knelt beside her and patted her shell. “It’s okay,” she said. “Push!” She didn’t think it was a damn bit funny when we laughed.
“She’s pushing,” Tammy said. “Show them, Jack.”
“Okay. Come on, Sophie. We forgot to count the eggs.” The two of them knelt behind the turtle and shone their flashlights into the surprisingly deep hole the turtle had dug in such a short time.
“I count nine, Daddy. She’s just started.”
“Y’all look,” Jack invited us. “Keep counting, Sophie.” He got up and I knelt in his place. Eggs the size of Ping-Pong balls were dropping into the nest.
“Oh, my,” I said, pulling Fred down beside me. “Look at this.”
“Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen,” Sophie counted.
“Let me see.” Haley pushed between Fred and me. Frances was right behind her. “Lord have mercy,” she said when
she saw the size of the eggs and how they were popping out. “Now this is the way to do it.”
“Nature trying to beat the odds,” Tammy said. “The babies that hatch and find their way to the water still face all kinds of survival problems.”
“But we’ll be back in two months to see they get to the water,” Jack said. “We can do that much.” He held up a small strip of metal. “I’m going to clamp her tag on now so we’ll know if she comes back.” He turned the light on the metal. “She’s number 349, Sophie.”
Sophie nodded. “Forty-one, forty-two.”
“Where do you tag her?” Fred asked, getting up to see.
“Front left flipper. It doesn’t hurt her. It’s like piercing ears.”
Which hurt like hell, I remembered, but I didn’t say anything.
“Who keeps up with all this stuff?” Fred asked.
Jack knelt to his job. “The Florida Department of Natural Resources. Millicent was the Okaloosa County volunteer coordinator and she handled the information and gave out tag permits. You’ve got to have control over the tagging or it won’t do any good. I guess I’ll have to find out tomorrow who to report Miss 349 to.”
Miss 349 had not flinched when Jack put the tag on her flipper. The Ping-Pong-ball-sized eggs were still popping out, forming a white mound in the nest.
“How many?” Haley asked Sophie.
“Seventy-two. Millicent and I counted 153 one night last week.” Sophie didn’t look up from the nest, but in a moment she brushed the back of her hand across her eyes.
On the horizon, lightning streaked across a cloud, and moments later we heard distant, muffled thunder. I looked at the dark water of the Gulf, at the turtle laying her eggs,
at my daughter, her face filled with awe as she knelt in the sand, at all of us caught in a small pool of light on this beach on this primal night. It was something I’ll always remember.
“She’s through,” Sophie said. “A hundred twenty-one.”
“Let’s move back,” Tammy said.
The turtle heaved herself from the nest, turned, and clumsily began to push sand over the egg-filled hole with her front flippers, throwing more sand around after she had finished so the site would be concealed. Then she lumbered home to the Gulf.
“Will she be back next year?” Frances asked.
“She’ll be back,” Sophie answered.
T
he dark shape became one again with the water. Behind her, in the sand, she had left a wide rut that looked like a tractor had been driven across the beach.
“Amazing.” Haley voiced what all of us were thinking.
“We mark the nest now,” Jack explained. “It won’t keep the ghost crabs and raccoons out, but people have learned to respect the nests. Some of them the hard way. This is federal property and they’re breaking the Endangered Species Act if they bother them.” He took a wooden stake, pushed it deep into the sand, and then tamped it. On the side of the stake was the number sixteen. “This is the sixteenth nest we’ve marked,” he said. “I’m sure there are some we’ve missed, but sixteen is pretty good. They’ll be coming in here until August, even September sometimes, to lay their eggs, and by that time these eggs will be hatching. That’s when the volunteers really get busy. The adult turtles
won’t go near a light and the hatchlings are just the opposite, heading straight for them, even headlights on the road.”
“I want to be here when this nest hatches,” Haley said.
“I’m looking forward to it,” Tammy said. “Jack’s seen the hatchlings, but Sophie and I haven’t.”
There was another distant roll of thunder; the clouds were building in the southwest.
“Looks like we might get that storm,” Jack said.
“Do you think more turtles will come in tonight?” Haley asked him.
“Maybe. I’ll stick around until midnight. Joe and Edna Tarrant are coming then. When there have been sightings, we try to keep several watchers posted down the beach.”
“I had no idea all this went on,” I admitted.
Sophie looked up from the notebook she had been writing in. “I want to stay, too.”
“Ask your mother.”
“I’ll stay with you,” Tammy said.
The four of us thanked them, told them good night, and crossed the dunes without talking, still under the spell of what we had just witnessed. The sound of our feet scrunching in the sand was loud in the quiet night. And then from the pine barrens beyond the road came the most ungodly scream I’ve ever heard in my life. Multiply Sophie’s Tarzan yell exponentially and you’re getting close.
And then came one of the shining moments of Fred’s life. We three women threw ourselves at him for protection. Threw ourselves so hard, we literally upended him in the sand, knocking him on his butt with the three of us on top of him.
The scream came again, with a protracted moan this time. Someone was being tortured in the pine barrens. Dismembered in the pine barrens by a sadistic monster.
“My God!” Frances moaned.
“Do something, Papa!” Haley said.
“Get off him!” I pushed my way under the other two. I could feel Fred shaking. “You’ve hurt him.” Fred shook harder. “Get up, sweetheart, if you can.”
“It’s a screech owl,” he said. “Just a plain old screech owl. Y’all let me up.” He started snickering.
“Are you sure?” Haley asked.
“I can’t believe you city women don’t know what a screech owl sounds like.” The snicker became a laugh.
The three of us got up and brushed the sand off. “Hush,” I told him.
But he laughed like hell all the way to the car. In fact, we were across the bridge and headed east down 98 before his fits of laughter stopped. The last one was accompanied by a pat on my leg and a request to clean off his glasses, which were fogging up.
“I can’t believe that turtle,” Haley finally said into the silence.
“And the number of eggs!” Frances was trying.
After five more miles of silence, Fred announced that the Berliners were very nice people. We all agreed that they were. But how, he asked, could they work in Atlanta and live in Destin and wasn’t Gulf Towers still a “no children under sixteen” facility?
I had forgotten about that. But the moment he said it, I realized that Millicent had bent the rules for the dark-eyed Sophie. It also meant that while there were plenty of children visiting during vacation seasons, much of the time Sophie would live in a world of adults.
We explained to Fred about the Berliners’ jobs, that they had wanted to get Sophie away from Atlanta.
“She’s very precocious,” Haley said. “And I think they
thought the environment would be safer here.” She paused. “That’s ironic, isn’t it. Anyway, Sophie can’t spread her wings quite as widely here.”
“She still does a pretty good job, though. Wait until you see her black gauze outfit and her bikini,” Frances added.
I came to her defense. “But she’s also got the turtles and sharing them with her parents. She didn’t have anything like that in Atlanta.”
“True,” the others agreed.
Mary Alice and Berry West were sitting on the sofa drinking wine when we came in.
“Hey, y’all,” she said. “Where’ve you been?”
“To see the turtles.”
“It was wonderful.”
“You should have been with us.”
Berry stood and was introduced to Fred. “There’s some beer in the refrigerator, Fred,” he said. “Can I get you one?”
“Sure.” Fred sat in one of the wicker rockers.
“Ladies?” Berry asked.
We all declined. Fred leaned forward. “I think Mary Alice’s glass needs topping off there.”
“Of course.” Berry headed for the kitchen.
Fred smiled at Sister who scowled back at him. “How you doing, Mary Alice?”
“Fine.”
“I heard you did a great reading tonight.”
“Thanks.”
“You ever heard a screech owl?”
“No. Why?”
“You should have been with us a while ago. They get your attention right off.”
“I’ll vouch for that,” Haley said.
Berry came from the kitchen with Fred’s beer and the wine bottle. “How many turtles did you see?”
Frances spoke up. “One huge one. She laid 121 eggs.”
“I hope some of them make it,” Berry said, pouring more wine into Sister’s glass.
Fred opened his beer with such an exaggerated swoosh that we all turned to look at him. “Well,” he said, “you never can tell. I have an idea that some of them will.”
“I do, too,” Haley agreed.
“Where did y’all eat?” I changed the subject.
“At The Boat House,” Sister said. “It was great. I had broiled grouper and Berry had scampi. Angel hair pasta. The doggy bags are in the refrigerator.”
Berry reached for his jacket, which was across a dining room chair. “And I’ve got to call it a night. I don’t want to wake Jason if he’s asleep.”
“You’re still staying over there?” Frances asked. She realized the question sounded rude and apologized. “That didn’t come out the way I meant.”
Berry shrugged into his jacket. “It’s real uncomfortable, but I’m not sure what I ought to do. Jason is so upset about Emily and Millicent’s deaths that I feel like I’m intruding on his grief. On the other hand, if I’m not there, he’s by himself. And I’ve been able to help some by seeing that he eats and by taking some of the phone calls. Somebody needs to be there with him.”
“He doesn’t have any family?” I asked.
“A son in the navy. He’s coming next month on leave.”
“It’s so sad,” Frances said. “Being alone.”
“Yes, it is.” Berry leaned over and kissed Mary Alice on the forehead. “Thanks for a great evening. I’ll see you tomorrow.” He turned to Fred and held out his hand. “Fred, nice meeting you.”
“Yes,” Fred agreed. I gave him a sharp look. He had fallen into his king-of-the-mountain mode.
Mary Alice walked Berry to the door and they stood there for a moment whispering.
“The two of you seem to be hitting it off fine,” I told her when she came back into the room.
“He still counting dimples?” Fred asked.
Sister surprised me. She smiled and said that, as a matter of fact, he was, and that it was amazing how many he had discovered. Then she picked up her wine glass, told us good night, disappeared into her room, and shut the door.
“What’s the matter with you?” I asked Fred.
“I’m hungry. I’m going to go find the doggy bag. Any takers?”
“I want some,” Haley said.
Frances sat on the sofa examining her fingernails carefully.
“Penny for your thoughts,” I said.
“Just thinking about Jason Marley over there by himself in that beautiful pink house. That’s not a bachelor’s house, Patricia Anne. That’s a Hansel and Gretel house.” I had no idea what a Hansel and Gretel house was, but I knew where this was headed.
“You can check on him tomorrow,” I said. “See if he needs comforting.”
“I’m sure he does,” Frances smiled.
Before we went to bed, I knocked on Sister’s door. Her departure had been too sudden, too agreeable.
“You okay?” I asked. She was lying on the bed wearing the peignoir that had nearly blinded Fairchild and reading
Beach Music
.
“Sure. I had a good time tonight.”
“You did a great job at the reading. I was proud of you.”
She patted the bed and I sat down beside her. “Tell me about the turtles.”
I did, describing the eggs and the way the turtle cried and groaned. The way Haley had said, “Push!” “Maybe we can all go back tomorrow night,” I added.
Sister shook her head no. “Berry and I are going to The Slipper dancing. He’s a great dancer, Mouse.”
“He can dip you?”
“You got it.”
“Fairchild wanted to make sure you were coming to the funeral tomorrow. Fred asked what he could do for him and he said bring Mary Alice.”
“That’s sweet.”
Was Sister half crocked? God forbid that she was falling in love.
“Fairchild also told us that Eddie Stamps is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s.”
That got her attention. “Really? I haven’t noticed anything.”
“He says Laura’s done a good job of covering up for Eddie. Fairchild is convinced the police think he killed Millicent and Emily. Fairchild, that is, not Eddie.”
“Fairchild wouldn’t hurt a flea.” Sister yawned and then smiled.
Lord, let her be half crocked!
“Sister’s being too nice,” I complained to Fred as I crawled into bed a half hour later. “She’s acting like somebody’s hit her over the head with a two-by-four. Last time she acted like this was when she fell for that ancient guy that nearly croaked in her hot tub.”
“How’s he doing?” Fred asked. “I haven’t heard about him in a while.”
“His daughter gave him a big birthday party at the Bir
mingham Country Club a couple of weeks ago. The pictures were in the paper, and he looked pretty good for ninety-something. Plaid jacket.”
“So the skin grafts must have worked.”
“Dummy.” I leaned over and gave Fred a very satisfactory kiss in spite of the fact that he now tasted like Scope and Crest masking recent garlic butter that had been added to the earlier onions from Porky Pete’s.
“I think she’s really falling for Berry West,” I added. “I think he’s real nice. You were short with him, though.”
“I’m sure he’s fine. He just looked like he was taking over.”
“A macho thing.”
“Hush,” Fred said, “or I’ll throw you to the screech owls.”
So I hushed.
The small town of De Funiak Springs is about forty miles from Destin. It’s a beautiful old Chatauqua town built around a large lake, supposedly one of only two perfectly circular lakes in the world. Victorian and ranch houses exist harmoniously side by side beneath live oaks older by far than the oldest of the homes. A few palm trees, planted by the city or a garden club, struggle to survive in the city park.
It’s a good town with good people and sidewalks and a library with large windows on the lake. It’s where Fred and I were when we heard Kennedy had been shot. We were sitting at the soda fountain at the drugstore eating grilled cheese sandwiches. We sat there until Walter Cronkite wiped his eyes and said Kennedy had been pronounced dead. The pharmacist said, “God rest his soul.”
We have not been back to the drugstore since, but it’s still there. We passed it on the way to Millicent’s funeral.
The thunderstorm of the night before had proved to be the forerunner of a low pressure system that had moved in over the coast. Rain had fallen most of the night, and now a fine mist was enveloping us in fog. We were driving on a dark, dismal day to the funeral of a friend who had been murdered; we were both lost in our own thoughts.
I closed my eyes and saw once more the photographs of Millicent and Emily at the picnic. They had looked so happy. What on God’s earth had happened to bring them to such violent deaths? Greed? Was Blue Bay Ranch and its potential millions the motive? Or something as simple as an insurance policy? Or jealousy?
“There’s a crowd here,” Fred said as we neared the chapel. Cars were parked on both sides of the road.
“Everybody loved Millicent,” I said. And then I realized not everybody. Somebody had definitely not loved Millicent.