“I’m Sophie,” she said. “I’m sorry to have bothered you.”
“No problem.” Who was it who had told me Sophie was less weird since they had moved to Destin? “I’m Mrs. Hollowell, Mrs. Crane’s sister. Would you like to come in and have something to drink?”
Sophie scowled, and I realized that part of the wide-eyed look was caused by a liberal application of eye liner, deep purple shadow, and what couldn’t possibly be real black eyelashes.
“I’m looking for my mother,” she said. She turned and wafted toward their apartment at the end of the corridor.
“Nice meeting you, too,” I mumbled to myself.
“Who was that?” Haley asked as I walked back into the kitchen.
“One of the Addams family children.”
“Which apartment do they live in?”
I leaned across the kitchen counter. “It was Sophie Berliner.” I described her to Haley and Frances.
“Rebelling,” Frances said, forever the guidance counselor.
“How old did you say she is?” Haley asked.
“Thirteen or fourteen, I’d guess. Y’all want some more coffee?”
Frances got up and handed me her cup. “Neither fish nor fowl at that age. I wonder how close she was to Millicent. The black could be her way of showing mourning.”
Shit
, I thought.
The kid’s just screwed up
. But I didn’t say it. Instead, I took my coffee into the bedroom, lay down on my bed, and opened my book. Lack of sleep and the breakfast pizza immediately took their toll. I was so sound asleep, the pounding on the door an hour later was incorporated into my dream as Fred hanging a picture on the wall. The sound of voices brought me awake, though. I peeked into the living room and saw Fairchild and a couple of Florida Marine Patrol officers. I ran a comb through my hair, brushed my teeth (on the mirror was a Post-it that Haley and Frances had gone to the outlet mall), and went to see what was going on.
The two Marine Patrol officers jumped up as I came in. One was a pretty young woman with curly brown hair, the kind of hair that I was sure drove her crazy frizzing in the high humidity of the beach. I knew, because mine did the same thing. The other officer was a man close to retirement age who had the opposite problem. You could have counted the hairs on his head.
“Patricia Anne,” Fairchild said, “this is Elaine Gregory and Tim Blankenship. They’re here to ask me some questions about Millicent.”
I shook both the officers’ hands and asked if they wanted to talk to Fairchild alone.
“Stay, by all means, Mrs. Hollowell,” Elaine Gregory said. “I understand you found Mrs. Weatherby’s body.”
“I didn’t look at her,” I admitted. “My sister did, sort of accidentally. And my daughter.” I sat on the sofa beside Fairchild. “You feeling better?” I asked him.
“Yes. Thanks.” But he was still very pale and the hands he kept running along the crease in his pants were shaking. Pants that Millicent had ironed. I looked away toward the water.
“We just need to ask you a few questions, Mr. Weatherby,” Tim Blankenship said.
“All right.”
Too placid. “He’s on medication,” I told the officers. And, patting Fairchild’s arm, “You don’t have to answer anything now, Fairchild.”
“It’s okay, Patricia Anne.”
Officer Blankenship cleared his throat and looked at his partner. She nodded. “Mrs. Weatherby didn’t come home night before last?” he asked.
“I’ve already told the Major Lieutenant about that. She had drinks at the Redneck Riviera with some friends and had a little too much. She went to sleep in the car in the parking lot.”
“Do you know who the friends were?”
“Some people from Blue Bay Ranch, I think.” Fairchild’s fingers quit creasing his pants. “I’m not sure.”
“We’ll check,” Elaine Gregory said.
“She’s never done anything like that before,” Fairchild looked at me. “Tell them, Patricia Anne.”
“She’s never done anything like that before,” I said, hoping I wasn’t lying through my teeth.
Elaine Gregory ran her fingers through her hair, making it spring out even more. “What time did she come in?”
“Look,” Fairchild said. “I’m trying to cooperate, but where’s that other fellow, that colonel what’s his name. I’ve already told him all this.”
“Lieutenant Bissell is taking a personal leave day,” Officer Gregory said.
“He’s at the writers’ conference,” I explained.
“Well, damn!” Fairchild’s face was no longer pale. He leaned forward. “Look here,” he told the two officers, “you find out what happened to my wife and you tell me when you are going to release her body. She’s got a sick sister in De Funiak Springs and this whole thing is going to kill her. I’ve got to at least tell her and her brother when we can plan a funeral. You hear me? And I’m damned if you’re going to keep asking me the same questions you’ve got the answers to there in those damn notebooks.”
This was the man who had just said he would answer anything they asked? I reached over and patted his arm again.
The two officers didn’t seem at all surprised by Fairchild’s outburst. “Okay, Mr. Weatherby,” Elaine Gregory said. “I’ll read you what we have in our notes and you can tell us if we’re right. Okay?”
“I guess so.” Fairchild folded his arms and waited.
Elaine Gregory consulted her notebook. “Mrs. Weatherby got home between six and six-thirty yesterday morning.” She looked at Fairchild and he nodded. “She said she had been sleeping in her car at the Redneck Riviera because she had had too much to drink.”
“She only had a couple of drinks,” Fairchild said. “But she wasn’t much of a drinker.”
“She was with some people from Blue Bay, you think, either the staff or prospective clients.”
“That’s what she said.”
“Which? Staff?”
“I’m not sure,” Fairchild admitted. “I was angry and relieved at the same time, so I don’t remember what she said about who she was with.”
Elaine nodded and continued. “You had a few cross words, and then Mrs. Weatherby came over here to tell Mrs. Hollowell she was all right.”
“She did,” I agreed.
“And then she went back to your apartment, Mr. Weatherby, discovered you were out of tomato juice and said she was going to run over to Delchamps Super Market to get some.”
“Their Food Club tomato juice is delicious,” I said. “The store brand? It’s not as tart as some of the others. About twenty cents cheaper, too.”
Officer Gregory cut her eyes at me. “Well, it’s the truth,” I said.
“And she never came home.” Tim Blankenship spoke up.
“No,” Fairchild said. “And if you’ll consult your notes, you’ll see I thought she had decided to go on to work.”
“Not in the clothes she had slept in, Fairchild,” I interrupted. “Millicent wouldn’t be caught dead not looking neat as a pin.”
But she had been. Shut up, Patricia Anne
. I bit my lip and looked out at the Gulf again.
“Thank you, Mr. Weatherby.” Elaine Gregory put her notebook back in her pocket. “We’re just doing our job, trying to find out what happened to your wife.”
“I know,” Fairchild said. “And I’m sorry I flared up. It
just seems so unnecessary to go over the same things again and again.”
“We understand. We’ll try not to do that.” Elaine Gregory nodded toward Tim Blankenship. “You ready?”
They started out and I followed, being polite, seeing them out of the door. I was so close that when Elaine Gregory turned suddenly, I jumped backwards.
“Oh, Mr. Weatherby, there is one new thing we need to ask you about, the insurance policy.”
Fairchild was standing in the middle of the living room. “What policy?” he asked, though I could tell he knew exactly what she was talking about.
“Mrs. Weatherby’s million-dollar life insurance policy naming you the sole beneficiary.”
My mouth fell open. “Millicent took out a million-dollar life insurance policy? God, Fairchild, that must have cost a fortune.”
He sighed and looked down at the floor. “It’s not what it sounds like.”
“But you are the beneficiary, aren’t you, Mr. Weatherby?” Tim Blankenship asked.
“Of course I’m the beneficiary. This is some kind of deal the Blue Bay Ranch Corporation cooked up, this insurance thing. One of Jason Marley’s ideas. He’s the one you need to talk to.”
“We will, sir.” Tim Blankenship opened the door. “Y’all have a good day now.”
W
hen the door closed, I turned and looked at Fairchild.
“The insurance was a Blue Bay perk, Patricia Anne,” he said. “The corporation bought it and paid the premiums. The land was Millicent’s part of the corporation, you see, and she wanted to make sure I wouldn’t be left out if something happened to her.” Fairchild shook his head. “To tell you the truth, I didn’t pay much attention to it. Millicent was ten years younger than me, so it never occurred to me that I would collect it.”
I came back into the living room. “I believe you, Fairchild.”
“It looks bad, though, doesn’t it?”
“It won’t when they find out all the details.”
Fairchild sank down on one of the wicker rockers and put his face in his hands. “I wish she had just sold the land to Jason Marley; he offered her a good price for it. But she
wanted to be in on the development, said she wanted to be sure they did as little damage as possible to the environment.” He looked up. “Who would have killed her, Patricia Anne?”
I shook my head that I couldn’t imagine. I sat down in the chair across from him and for a few minutes we were quiet, lost in our own thoughts. Finally Fairchild sighed and said he had better go next door and see what was going on.
“I’m surprised Laura Stamps hasn’t been over here looking for you,” I said.
He managed a grin. “She’s scared of Mary Alice.”
I grinned back. “Smart woman.”
“Thanks for the R and R.” He got up. “I needed it.”
“Mary Alice left me a note reminding me to rescue you.”
“She did?” He looked pleased.
I handed him the Post-it that was in my pocket. “I would have done it anyway.”
“Thanks.” He left the apartment looking much better than he had when he came in.
I fixed myself a sandwich and went to the balcony to eat it. I missed Fred and wanted to talk to him. I missed Woofer and wanted to talk to him, too.
“You look woebegone,” Mary Alice said behind me.
I jumped. “What are you doing home? The conference isn’t over for the day, is it?”
“It is for me. All they’re doing this afternoon is poetry.” She said
poetry
as if it were something ridiculous.
“I love poetry,” I said.
“I like some of it, too,” she admitted, plunking down in the chair beside me. “I like that woman’s poetry, you know, that book you gave me Christmas. She makes sense.”
“Mary Oliver?”
“Yeah. She’s not at the conference.”
“Too bad. Who is?”
“I don’t remember.” Sister held out a manila envelope. “We swapped short story manuscripts this morning and we’re to critique them and take them back tomorrow.”
“That sounds interesting. Did you see Major Bissell?’
“God yes, Mouse.” Sister rattled the manila envelope. “I hope this isn’t his story. Lord only knows what he’d write about. You know what he told me? Just came right out and told me while I was eating a doughnut and a kiwi?”
“What?”
“That Millicent’s throat wasn’t cut. He said it was torn, like some animal had ripped it right through the jugular and the carotid.”
“Dear God!”
“You should have heard him describe what the blood must have been like.”
“Don’t tell me.”
“Well,
spurting
and
fountain
were included.”
“Thank you for sharing that,” I said, putting my sandwich down.
“See?” Sister said. “I couldn’t finish my snack either, and they’d put out all kinds of good stuff during the break.” She looked down at the beach. “Where are Haley and Frances, and what’s been going on?”
I told her they were at the outlet mall, described my rescue of Fairchild, and related the visit of the two Florida Marine Patrol officers. I even managed to remember the details, as many as Fairchild had related, of the insurance policy.
Sister was amazed. “Millicent had a million dollar life insurance policy?”
“A perk of the Blue Bay Ranch Corporation, so Fairchild says. But he’s the beneficiary.”
“You know, Mouse, I remember when Tod Abernathy bought that land over on the bay. You probably do, too. We thought he’d lost his mind spending a thousand dollars or some such amount on that worthless property. I thought Millicent was going to divorce him. And now it’s Blue Bay Ranch.”
“Beats all. Fairchild said Millicent wouldn’t sell the property outright because she wanted to have a say-so in its development. She didn’t want the environment disturbed.”
“You know, that could be why someone killed her.” Sister saw the look on my face. “I’m serious. She could have found out they were breaking some environmental law, maybe the wetland thing, and was going to squeal on them.”
“Tell that to the lieutenant colonel tomorrow.”
“Lieutenant Major. In the meantime, let’s ride over there and see what those ranches look like. It’s just what I’ve always wanted, a ranch on the beach.”
“You want to wait on Haley and Frances?”
Mary Alice shook her head. “They wouldn’t be interested.”
“Haley said she wanted to see it.”
“We can go back any time. We’re just scouting.”
I had grown accustomed to the seatbelt on Mary Alice’s Jaguar, so when it grasped me I wasn’t surprised. In fact, it gave me a sense of being pampered. “You’re safe now, ma’am,” the clasp proclaimed. And then Mary Alice peeled out of the parking lot.
“Slow down,” I screeched.
“My Lord, Patricia Anne, I’m barely moving.” Which was true when she said it, because by this time we were headed down Highway 98. Mary Alice has maxed out on the number of speeding tickets she can receive on 98 in a three-year
period without having to go to driving school. It is, she claims, the fault of the Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Department, who actually enforce the ridiculous thirty-mile-per-hour speed limit with unsportsmanlike shenanigans such as popping out from behind billboards and the Greek Orthodox church to nab innocent speeders.
So we drove sedately down 98, past the Mid-Bay Bridge to a huge billboard that proclaimed the entrance to Blue Bay Ranch was one-quarter mile on the left. The billboard, which did not have a policeman behind it today, featured a bikiniclad girl (much girl, small bikini) in cowboy boots, lassoing a sea horse.
“That’s just downright tacky,” I said, studying the sign.
“I know,” Sister agreed. “I saw it on the way to the conference. They’ve got a pretty entrance, though.”
Soon I noticed a split-rail fence wending through the stunted palmettos and saw-briars. “To keep the sea horses in, I suppose.” I pointed toward the fence.
I thought it was funny, but Sister didn’t even smile, just clicked on her left turn signal and pulled into the double driveway that made a “U” in front of an honest-to-God log cabin with a sign announcing it was the visitors’ center. A small parking lot was on the side of the building, and I expected Mary Alice to stop there. Instead, she headed out one of the roads that angled from the “U” like antennae toward the bay. A man stepped from a guard house at the entrance to the road and she slowed.
“Ma’am,” he said politely, “do you have a visitor’s pass?”
“No,” Sister said. “We’re not visiting, just looking.” And she drove on.
“I don’t think that’s what he meant,” I said, nervously looking back at the guard standing in the middle of the road scratching his head.
“Then he should say what he means.”
“I suppose so.” What was the worst thing they could do to us? Run us out? I relaxed and looked around.
Other than the road, not much clearing had been done. Red flags and stakes with numbers on them marked the boundaries of lots. Tall pines leaned away from the Gulf, pushed constantly by the prevailing winds. Between them were the typical vegetation of the coastal piney woods and a lot of Sold signs.
“I’ll bet there are rattlesnakes in here big as a tractor tire,” I said.
“Looks about like it did when Tod Abernathy bought it,” Sister said. “Any money Millicent got offered for it, she should have taken.”
And then the road branched. We were almost to the bay when Sister said, “Look, Mouse. Can you believe that?”
It was a fairy-tale house, the only problem being that the imaginative architect had incorporated every fairy tale from Rapunzel and her tower to what looked suspiciously like a big shoe, but which must have been some kind of garden room. Painted a shrimp pink and trimmed in white gingerbread, the house perched on the edge of Choctawhatchee Bay.
“It looks like about five houses squashed together,” Mary Alice said, slowing so we could get a good look.
“It looks embarrassed.”
“And there’s a blue one.”
Five houses had been completed or were close to completion, five enormous houses, all rainbow colored, all mirrored in the bay. These, I realized, were situated on what was the prime location in Blue Bay Ranch. A couple of them already had piers and boat houses, but only the pink house seemed totally finished and occupied. A concrete block seawall pre
vented erosion by pushing the bay’s tides down the beach for others to worry about.
“Lord have mercy,” Sister said. “Who would ever have thought.”
“Boggles the mind,” I said. “Millicent was really in on something big, wasn’t she?”
“Yes, she was. Bless her heart.”
“This doesn’t look like one of those community developments, though. You know, with the sidewalks and all.”
“Let’s stop by the visitors’ center and get some brochures on our way out.” Sister was forced to turn around in a pale lavender house’s driveway since the road was blocked by a bulldozer, and we headed back the way we had come. As we passed the guard shack, she let the window down and called “Thank you.” The man inside actually waved.
“Act like we’re interested in buying some property,” she said. “They’ll jump on us like chickens on a June bug. You can find out all kinds of stuff that way.”
“What kind of stuff is it we want to find out?”
“Well, personally, I want to know how much that pink house cost. Those folks got taken to the cleaners, I’ll bet you.” Sister pulled into the parking lot and we got out of the car. “I think this log cabin is cute, don’t you? Those rocking chairs across the front?”
“I don’t understand it.”
“What’s to understand? You sit on the porch and rock.”
“I mean I don’t understand this whole ranch bit. Did you ever hear of a ranch where the Intra-coastal Waterway runs right by the bunkhouse?” But I was speaking to Mary Alice’s back as she disappeared into the log cabin.
We didn’t have to act as if we were interested in property in order to have the sales staff jump on us like chickens on a June bug. They had spotted the Jaguar as it pulled into
the parking lot. The first woman to get to Sister was skinny, in her forties, and had greenish-blond hair, something that happens sometimes in Florida given the amount of sun and chlorine people are exposed to. Her name tag read Lolita.
“Hello, hello,” she smiled. “I’m Lolita Brown. Welcome to Blue Bay Ranch where your own personal rainbow ends.”
Mary Alice looked at her. “My personal rainbow ends here?”
“She means the places cost a pot of gold,” I said.
“Hush, Patricia Anne. That’s not what she means at all, is it, Lolita?”
“Of course not.” And then Lolita did something that made me decide that if I ever won the lottery and bought a place at Blue Bay, it would be from her. She grinned and said, “Well, maybe a little pot.”
We introduced ourselves and declined the guided tour she offered. At her insistence, we admired the huge map on the wall that showed the configuration of all the building sites, denoting the ones that were sold with a pale pink, magic markered
x
. The prices were also marked on each lot, increasing in price as they neared the water.
I pushed my bifocals up and looked at the numbers. “Two hundred and twenty thousand dollars for a lot?” I gasped.
“Close to the bay with a view of the bridge,” Lolita explained. “As you can see, there aren’t many of them left.”
“And the ones on the bay?” Sister asked.
“Are all sold. Many of them are already built on.”
“We rode around there,” Sister admitted. “I especially liked the pink house.”
Lolita beamed. “That belongs to Mr. Jason Marley, the chairman of Blue Bay. It’s a beauty, isn’t it?”
“I’ve never seen anything quite like it,” Sister said truth
fully. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance he’ll be selling anytime soon?”
“I wouldn’t think so. He loves that place even though he’s a widower and needs all that room like he needs a hole in his head.” Lolita sighed a little wistfully. “Here,” she said, going over to a desk and handing us several brochures, “take these home and look them over. I don’t think you could go wrong here at Blue Bay.”
We thanked her and left, promising that we would be back for the guided tour. I looked down at the first brochure. On the cover, the girl in the bikini lassoed the seahorse. Tacky.