Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 135, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 823 & 824, March/April 2010

When, He Wondered by Lynne Barrett

An Edgar Allan Poe Award winner for her 9/90 EQMM story “Elvis Lives,” Lynne Barrett has since published many stories in literary magazines. Imagine our pleasure this past summer when we opened the mail to find a new story from this evocative writer. Ms. Barrett teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University, in Miami. She tells EQMM: “I follow my characters where they take me, across genre lines.” Recently they’ve been taking her back into crime fiction!

Maybe it was at the Fenwicks’ playoff party in January, when Tom went to the kitchen for a beer and Elise came up behind him as he turned in the cold exhale of the refrigerator. She said, “Was I wrong? I thought you wanted to kiss me.” He heard the football shouts from Wick’s den, the chattering living room, his own voice, rough with surprise, saying, “Who wouldn’t?” Was it then he crossed the line?

Or there was the afternoon at the Holiday Inn Express twenty miles north, when he asked if she still did it with Wick. Elise sat cross-legged on the bed, sighed, pulled her chestnut hair up into a knot revealing her pretty ears and tiny diamond teardrops, and said she had to, that once when they had gone without for a month, for no good reason, she just hadn’t felt like it, he’d hired a detective. She saw a charge she didn’t recognize listed on a credit-card bill, and then, in Wick’s desk, she located the report, filled with daily schedules of Elise driving their daughter Nikki to school and horseback riding, and photos of Elise at a fund-raiser for literacy, at the gym, standing beside Wick at a groundbreaking. Though the detective didn’t find anything, because there’d been nothing to find, that wasn’t a risk she could take anymore, could she?

From this Tom could tell she wasn’t going to leave Wick, and all Wick had, for him. He hadn’t really imagined she would. But still, from then on he had to picture what she was doing to deflect suspicion.

How about when Wick asked him to go to the driving range one evening in early June? They’d shot hundreds of buckets of balls here when they were teenagers. Now their shadows stretching towards the 50-yard marker were wider, Tom’s with a breadth of shoulder he hadn’t had when young, and, okay, some gut. The dark green Wick shadow reached, as always, farther, his inch of height advantage multiplied by the low angle of the sun. Tom swung his three wood and listened to Wick complain. The wife, a bit extravagant, money just vanished through her fingers, and Nikki, who knew a kid could cost so much? And bigger problems, the pause in real-estate sales since the winter, the sinkhole suits at Spoonbill, the loans and due dates, how overextended you could get when things were ticking down. Maybe it was time to cash it all in. But he’d need a bit of help to do that. And who else could he ask but Tom?

When, as young guys starting out, they worked construction together on Sunshine Marketplace, the first shopping center near Peregrine Springs, Wick hadn’t liked the grubby stuff, the details of aggregate and rebar. He wanted to rise from concrete to dreams. And he did, built the outlet mall near the highway, then the hotel and conference center, the first golf condos, the Spanish-Moorish developments that ineluctably surrounded the village where they’d grown up. After twenty-three years the Sunshine Marketplace, weathered and out of style, was gutted and expanded by Wick’s company, re-facaded and renamed The Shops at Spoonbill, with signs proclaiming what 600 acres of scrubland behind it would be: COMING SOON: SPOONBILL, A GOLF RESORT COMMUNITY, A BILL “WICK” FENWICK PROJECT. Wick liked to name things Heron, Hawksbill, Manatee — evocations of what he was displacing. Wick would say that was Florida tradition: Peregrine Springs had been noplace in the middle of nowhere, an imaginary paradise, when it was incorporated optimistically in the twenties. In their childhood, it had been a would-be artist town with a few motels and cottages on the Little Peregrine River. Now it was cute and clogged with cars circling to park, people lined up to grab cash at a bank machine, get coffee in the old drugstore building, and search the boutiques of the Peregrine Springs Arcade to decorate their new homes with the plunder of the world.

Wick had carried him along — Tom the supply guy, the one with the patience for measurements, quantities, invoices, Tom an essential part, Wick always said, of his success. Tom had dated tan, fun women Florida had in abundance, but somehow rather than marry he moved toward solitude. He could afford toys, Jeep and sport catamaran and dirt bike, and a golf villa that faced a fairway, across a finger of water where gators sometimes sunned. Before he moved in he’d put backstops on doors and re-vented the laundry, little things not standard in a Bill “Wick” Fenwick home, where people boasted about the two-story Great Room and the terrazzo floors. On the first-floor “garage and laundry level,” which opened onto the lap pool and lanai, he installed a tool wall and workbench. He had a library with louvered shutters and a leather chair where he read with sun-dazzled eyes at the end of the day, a glass of Irish whiskey on the oak table beside him, some big book full of facts open on his lap.

Tom liked to read earth science, geology, geography, so he understood the unreliability of the landscape, the karst topography of Florida, how the ground water, slightly acidic, dissolved the calcite in the limestone as it worked its way down through, creating voids. As long as the water table stayed high enough to buoy up the overburden, your mantle of sand and clay, you had the illusion of solid ground. But when you lowered the water level, by stripping out slash pines, by digging drainage canals, by paving so the runoff was redistributed, well, sooner or later, say early one April morning, something had to give. The curve of dirt that would be the Spoonbill clubhouse drive became a bridge over nothing and then dropped, taking two trucks into the widening cavity as the first workers tossed aside their coffee and ran for it. By the time Tom got there, a crane had fallen in. He ordered everything drivable moved, but the men didn’t particularly want to risk it. He found Wick standing on the roof of the Shops at Spoonbill supermarket, looking out at the catastrophe, arms crossed, jaw square, as newspapermen took pictures of him saying, truthfully, that no one could predict this, it was an act of Florida nature, unfathomable and bizarre. TV helicopters hovered as the sinkhole swallowed the foundations for half a dozen already-sold “executive homes.” Hungry attorneys arrived by day, and teenagers showed up at night, so you had to hire guards to keep them from drinking and daring each other to venture down into the pit. No one knew if the sinkhole would take more. Building of the Homes at Spoonbill was indefinitely suspended.

And somehow this disaster had given Wick the idea he laid out that evening at the driving range in June. The way he was going to keep what he could.

East of town, in the woods Tom Baugh and Bill Fenwick had roamed as boys, was one of the original “sights” of the area, a sinkhole known as Old Crater because early travelers ascribed it to a meteor, where a thousand years ago the land had collapsed to the aquifer. This sink, of course, looked nothing like the raw wound at Spoonbill. Trees that grew up out of its sides formed a canopy. The water in its depths was rumored to be bottomless, to be haunted by sacrificed Tequesta maidens or ambushed conquistadors, to be fed by pure and magical springs, to have patches of quicksand, to lead to caves in which was hidden pirate treasure.

Parents warned against swimming in Old Crater. But the boys had boundless confidence — inexplicable, now Tom thought about it — and they explored. Others before them had made a pathway through the greenery, spiraling down to the water. When they dove, they found springs, and, where there was sand, shark’s teeth. Once, swimming underwater, they popped up into a cave at the western edge of the sinkhole with a ledge they could sit on, and as they watched they saw the water moved, sluggishly, yes, but always southwestward.

Tom theorized that the water here might connect eventually to the Little Peregrine, that these springs might feed an underground river. “No way to know but to try,” said Wick, and they filled their lungs and dove, their bodies slim darters slipping downstream, going on past caverns, possible channels, as if they knew the way, till the choice was turn back or drown, but they saw light and came up in another sink — smaller, a hole six feet across and ten feet up, its sides erose and crumbly.

“We can just dive and go back,” said Tom, but Wick — and maybe this was the moment he took the lead? — found footing on an outcropping near water level, and made a stirrup with his hands, and Tom, lighter, stepped up, then stood on Wick’s shoulders and hoisted himself to the edge. He grabbed on with his legs to a bush there, nothing that should have held, really, reached down, and grabbed Wick’s hand, and Wick climbed right up and over him, then lifted him to the top. They stood in an overgrown spot they hadn’t seen before, with the sun just overhead, and laughed, sparkling with ancient water and immortality.

After they’d found their way back over the surface through the woods to where they started, at least one hundred yards away, they talked about the other place — “The Well,” Wick wanted to call it — and vowed to keep it secret. So secret that soon they didn’t speak of it, just sometimes, when anyone mentioned Old Crater, or underground streams, exchanged a look, or not even a look, just shared consciousness.

But once was enough; they’d never done that dive again. Why risk what had been perfect?

In July, Wick told Tom he was ready. Sales were at a standstill, creditors closing in. He picked his evening. Nikki was off at camp in the mountains, and Elise was going to a gallery opening in the Arcade.

Wick’s holding company owned the whole Old Crater tract, had bought it years ago. He’d spoken of donating it someday for a state recreation area, with a visitor center and walkways built down into the pit, but all he’d done was fence it and post signage warning trespassers of danger. Tom watched Wick turn his Lexus onto the Old Crater dirt access road and park by the gate. Tom drove on along the state road in the car Wick had rented with his new identity. Wick had arranged another name and documents years back: He said it was a sensible thing for any businessman to do, and he’d taken care of it before means of identification got hard to obtain. On some level, Tom realized, Wick had always expected the business to collapse. He knew his Florida history of boom and bust.

Wick planned for his new identity to drive the car across the state tonight, get on a Fort Lauderdale late flight to the Bahamas, then fly on to where the money Wick had moved offshore was banked, a destination Wick said Tom was better off not knowing. Tucked beneath the passenger floor mat were the reservations and passport in a sealed envelope.

Tom parked the nondescript sedan in among pines that marked the spot they reckoned was as close as they could get to The Well. Wearing gloves and a Tyvek jumpsuit that came down over his new rubber boots, Tom took out his backpack and carryall and a long piece of rebar he’d laid across the backseat. He locked the car. He went through a break in the fence Wick had cut earlier in the summer — already rusting. Tom moved carefully through the woods to the hidden sinkhole. He pulled from his nylon carryall a small sledge and set to work.

Wick, he knew, had by now unlocked the padlock of the chain-link gate, gone through and pulled it to, and walked to Old Crater. Tom pictured him descending through clouds of midges. By the water, he’d leave his clothes, his keys, his cell phone, his big flashlight, and a partly drunk bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Would Wick take one pull of the whiskey? Tom thought he would, and look up, as Tom did, at the last color from the west touching the rippled clouds overhead. He’d put an underwater light around his head before he got into the water.

“The weak point of any faked death,” Wick had said, “is the lack of a body. It has to go somewhere where it could plausibly disappear.” Tom had asked why Wick couldn’t just leave his evidence at Old Crater and walk over here, but Wick said, “No. They’ll track me through the woods. It’s conceivable they’ll search with dogs. I have to go through the water, and come up where no one would expect. That’s the beauty of it. They’ll think I’m stuck down there, somewhere in the depths of the sinkhole.” He planned for Tom to carry him out on his back, leaving no scent of Wick on the ground.

Tom tried to talk him out of it, one last chance, the day before, but Wick just said, “You think I can’t do it? I’ve been practicing holding my breath for months.”

Nearly eight o’clock. The sky above was losing light, shifting towards purple. Tom clicked on the camping lantern he’d brought. It caught the retinas of something in the shadows across the way — an owl, Tom thought, or a coon. Tom hung the lantern from a branch, aiming the beam down toward the water, to illuminate the spot and help Wick find it.

Elise, Wick had insisted, couldn’t know. She had to act natural when he disappeared, and ignorance was the best guarantee of that. When it was all done, after a year, maybe, he’d secretly contact her, get her to come on what would look like a vacation to where he was living. She’d forgive the charade when she learned how much he’d rescued from the crash. Maybe he’d have started a new business on the island by then. Maybe she’d marry his new self, one day. And his daughter, they’d trust her with the secret at some point. Tom had listened to his romantic confidence and said nothing.

Now Tom breathed in the humidity and heard the singing of mosquitoes. He tasted salt on his upper lip and knew he was sweating. What if Wick hadn’t found the cave? The aquifer would be charged now, the water level higher in rainy season, the movement faster. On maps no stream was shown, but he and Wick understood what they had found years ago, the course of something, whether it reached the Little Peregrine or no. He waited.

He remembered the dim sense, when they moved through the darkness underwater, of other caverns opening to the side. Possibly Wick would turn somewhere and lose his way?

Perhaps Wick would simply not come up?

No, here he was, puffing, gasping, in the water, his headlamp a weak flicker. “Tom,” he whispered. “Hey, y’there?”

Tom sat silent for a moment, then stirred. “Here, buddy, right here,” he said.

“Can’t find any foothold,” Wick said. “Let down the rope.”

“Mmmhmm,” said Tom, “I’m doing it.” He had the polypropylene mountaineering rope secured to the stake he’d driven deep into the ground, angled properly away, a couple of yards from the edge, something not part of Wick’s original plan. Wick had wanted no marks anybody could find. But tying rope to some bush or sapling just wasn’t secure enough for a full-grown man, and it would leave more trace, Tom had argued. A stake removed just left a single hole, sure to fill in with summer rain, and he assured Wick he’d put it under foliage where no one would look.

Tom clipped the rope to his climber’s harness and let himself down four feet, one boot propped on the side to keep him still. He could stretch his arms out and brush the sides of the hole with his gloves.

Wick, treading water, called out, “Hey, you didn’t have to come down yourself. I could climb up.”

A few feet lower and all Tom had to do was land on Wick’s shoulders, paying out the rope, his weight pressing Wick down. He heard Wick’s huff of surprise as he went under.

Wick reached to grasp Tom’s legs but couldn’t, his hands slipping off the slick jumpsuit. He flailed and ducked low, out from under Tom, but he couldn’t wait long for air, and when he pushed his face up, three feet over, his headlamp showed his hand grasping for the edge. He coughed water out, and Tom was there, stepping down on his head, shoving him forward and under. Wick couldn’t have grabbed more than half a breath. And Tom got back on his shoulders and held Wick down, his weight more than any upward force Wick could muster.

Would the drowned man have some bruises when he was found? What more natural, if he came up under some obstacle, in the cave, the underground river, the mineral subterranean world.

Wick had fallen forward and gone deeper.

Tom lifted his feet and went up a bit on the rope. Wick stayed down.

Tom waited, dangling. He flexed his hands and regripped the rope.

He imagined Wick trying to go back through the stream, against the flow, airless: No, it was impossible.

The body surfaced, floating facedown.

Tom waited, counting, making himself go slow.

When it had been five minutes, he pulled himself up. Once on the top, he lay there for a minute breathing, then stood, detached his line, and coiled it up. He took the other rope he’d brought, regular twist, and tied it to the rebar stake, rope and metal both from Fenwick construction. He tossed the fresh line into the sink: it dangled against the side, just breaking the water, visibly unused. He looked down into the dark pool, at the back of a white water mammal, extinct. He pulled out a towel and wiped his boots dry, then hung it around his neck. The lantern was starting to fade. It would die soon, no way to tell how early it had done so, whether Wick had made the simple error of not using fresh batteries, whether darkness kept Wick from finding the rope. From the backpack he took Wick’s set of new casual clothes and left them, the car keys tucked in the right shoe, near the stake. Tom put his harness, line, and sledge into his backpack, and hoisted it.

He walked out, following the path he’d taken before; this would have to look like the route Wick had come in when he set up the stake, rope, clothes at some earlier time. Tom looked into the locked car. One corner of the envelope with the new identity’s information poked out from underneath the floor mat, the way he’d left it.

Tom stayed in the shadows under the trees and moved parallel to the road till the car was out of view. He took off his boots and jumpsuit and put on his running shoes. The carryall was empty now. He rolled it up, and put it and the boots, the jumpsuit, and his gloves — only now did he remove them — into his backpack. He shouldered it and stood square, in running shorts and T-shirt, running his hands through his sweat-soaked hair. He took a minute, thinking through the details, and left.

He walked. It was dark now, and he stayed just off the road, avoiding headlights. Brief rain pattered somewhere in the woods. He concentrated on keeping his mind empty, his pace, his breath, his heartbeat even.

At the Spoonbill Shops, where he’d left his car, he slid the backpack inside a grocery bag on the floor, and went into the market. When he got home, he had two full grocery bags to carry inside. The sledge went into its slot among his tools. He hosed down his boots and jumpsuit and threw them, with rope and tackle, in the catamaran, among the rubble of his other outdoor gear, a temporary risk he’d have to take. He put his clothes in the washer and stepped into the lap-pool shower. Dressed in clean sweats, he started the wash and went upstairs, unloaded groceries, and read for a while, or tried to. When he looked out at the golf course, he saw lightning flicker in the distance. He hoped it would rain a lot during the night.

A little after eleven the phone rang. He looked at the caller ID. After four rings, after the machine kicked in, he picked up, said, “Hello. Sorry, I was doing laundry.”

Elise asked if he’d seen Wick that evening.

“No,” he said, “I thought he was staying late in the office, paperwork.”

“That’s what he told me,” she said, “but he isn’t answering there, and his cell phone’s off, and he hasn’t come home.”

“Maybe he’s on the way. Or maybe he stopped off somewhere for a drink,” said Tom.

“Maybe,” she said. “I guess I’m silly to worry, but he’s been odd lately.”

“Under a lot of pressure,” Tom said.

“Yes,” she said. “Well. Sorry to bother you. I’ll call the bar at the club — maybe he’s there.”

That conversation was on tape, if anybody ever got that far, checking.

In bad financial times, the state needed a good laugh. And Florida guffawed with scorn at the man who died faking his own death. Too tricky by half, that Bill “Wick” Fenwick, who thought he could thread his way under the surface, come up in a new spot, and get away. But no: After his wife’s worried calls, police found his car parked by the gate to Old Crater. In the early morning light, it was easy to follow his track. There were his clothes, his wallet and keys still in his khakis, his cell phone on top of a little memo book, a note in there talking about how he’d always liked to come here to get close to nature, to get ideas. And now, in his despair, where could he turn for peace? (This was utterly hokey, Tom thought, when he read it in the paper. No wonder Wick hadn’t mentioned the note to him.) Further search turned up the other car, parked among pines, inside it the new identity, the planned escape. And from that end, they found the declivity with the rope dangling, and below it the body, a middle-aged man in swim trunks, with a lamp on his head, askew.

They brought in a diver who located the passage from sinkhole to sinkhole. It was assumed Wick had gotten through (a feat in itself, the sheriff said on TV), but didn’t make it out of the deep water — no foothold and perhaps he couldn’t find the rope in the dark, or couldn’t climb it. Unnamed official sources were quoted speculating about how much whiskey he’d drunk, the lamp up above failing, maybe a cramp, maybe his heart, though it was found he’d definitely drowned. Anyway, it looked like justice.

Editorials said, enough of these scoundrels.

Parents said, sinkholes are very, very dangerous.

The widow and the daughter at the funeral were grateful for the support of old friends, of whom there were not many as the financial facts came out.

The businesses, layered with debt, would be closed in on by creditors. Forensic accountants found funds Wick had siphoned overseas, though not as much as they hoped. Under Florida homestead law, business bankruptcy or not, the Mrs. got the house. Which she could sell, in time, when things had settled down.

The life-insurance company had to pay Elise: The policy had long outlasted the suicide waiting period, and anyway it’s not suicide if you die faking suicide, so, though there was comment about Wick’s accident being the result of a planned embezzlement, in the end, she’d get that money.

Tom saw her at the funeral, and at the office a few times, only in public, all aboveboard. She looked pale, and spoke slowly, hesitantly, and people said she’d been given sedatives. And when she told friends she was taking Nikki away for a time, up to the mountains, people said, of course, poor thing, she’s near a breakdown, imagine the betrayal and bad publicity. But Tom was sure she was alert, and careful. Wick had underestimated her, Tom knew. She was an excellent actress.

She had told him, when he revealed Wick’s plan to her in June, that she’d long suspected he’d do some such stupid thing, had seen the other id in Wick’s desk back when she found the private-eye report. From then on she’d set aside cash culled from their expensive life, sent where it wouldn’t be found, against the day when he abandoned her and Nikki.

Still, the details of Wick’s plan had infuriated her. She said it was all boy’s adventure and would look fishy, there’d be a lot of noise and a big chase after him, and then she’d be tied up in it, suspected. And when Wick was, inevitably, caught, and tried, and jailed, what a disaster for Nikki. Better he should fail, she said, and Tom had agreed.

At times Tom walked through waves of vertigo, a feeling that the ground beneath him could turn to powder, but he did what was demanded. He worked with the receivers, his employment now to salvage what could be saved. He got to know the accountants, who listened to his requests for payments that would keep things going and bring in revenue for a smaller, steadier business that could perhaps emerge in time.

In separate trips through August and September he’d dropped the rope, sledge, cut-up jumpsuit, each glove, each boot in the Little Peregrine, in distant spots, where the water ran fast and deep after tropical rains. Nobody was looking for them. Nobody was looking at him. The accountants talked about what Wick’s books told them, about the nested companies making each other loans. Some days, they laughed and whistled with admiration at Wick’s nerve.

In mid November, Elise flew down from the mountains to come to the office to sign papers. She looked serious, and older, in a brown suit, no earrings, a thread of gray in her hair. She said goodbye to him in front of others, saying to him, as to them all, “I hope we’ll meet again.”

But he knew it would be better not to. While she could visit here, and he could court her, even after a few years they could marry — that’s how Wick would think — it was better for her to be free, and far away. He shook her hand, and wished her well.

Tom realized, of course, that she’d known in any plan Wick would turn to him, and so she’d made sure he was her ally. But once she was gone, he started thinking she must have seen, for a long time — years? — what he was capable of. Tom wondered exactly when he’d started hating Wick.

Playing the front nine one morning in early December, on a day when the humidity had cleared, he drove into a bunker. Stood there, waggling the five iron, feeling the sun on his bunched shoulders, the golden force of it. He swung and sprayed sand, and the ball lifted and reached the green, but there was nobody to see it. Then he got what he had lost. And what he had: his own shadow stretched unrivaled across the fairway.