Blood of Cain

4

The next morning I awoke at sunrise, poured a cup of coffee, and walked onto my screened porch to feed Max. The porch overlooked the St. Johns River, a 310-mile river of history that meandered north from Vero Beach, spilling its heart into the Atlantic Ocean east of Jacksonville. My old cabin, built in the 1930's from cypress, pine, and red oak, sat at the mid-way point of the river. My nearest neighbor was a mile away. The Ocala National Forest, with its primordial beauty, bordered the far side of the St. Johns.

I sipped coffee and watched the match-flare of dawn smolder in the horizon behind live oaks and cabbage palms. The sunrise cast the trees in silhouette, their leafy heads and shoulders stitched in the golden threads of morning light. At the base of the old oaks, and deep in the ancient forest, secrets lie buried in folklore and fauna like the watery graves of mastodon skeletons discovered at the bottom of the forest's gin-clear springs.

I thought of the girl I'd found last night, Courtney Burke. I hoped she was on a bus heading to someplace safer than where she came. My thoughts were interrupted by a cardinal, tossing back his head and singing to the new day.

A breeze danced across the river and brought the scent of wood smoke and honeysuckles. A fisherman puttered down the center of the river in a dark green Boston Whaler, a V formation from the boat's wake pitching the surface into a sea of copper pennies winking in the sunlight.

Max barked once. “Patience, little lady,” I said, pouring some food into her bowl. I watched her eat for a few seconds and then looked at the framed picture of my wife, Sherri, which I kept on a small end table next to a rocking chair on the porch. Sherri died a few years ago from ovarian cancer, but her spirit still lived with us, Max and me. When I worked as a homicide detective with Miami-Dade PD, Sherri bought Max when I was on an extended criminal surveillance. She'd named her Maxine, but with the little dachshund's feisty brown eyes and fearless heart of a lion in a ten-pound body, she took on the swagger of a Max.

She swallowed her last bite and stepped to the screened door, glancing over her shoulder at me with the look that asked, what are you waiting for? We walked toward the dock, under the limbs of live oaks. Spanish moss, streaked and damp with dew, hung from the limbs like gray lamb's wool left in the rain. From the top of a huge cypress tree near the shore, a curlew called out to the rising sun. The bird's river song echoed across the St. Johns in a haunting tune of rhythmic chants. Its symphony skipped over the water with the beat of smooth stones cast in the alluring harmony of sad and sweet notes long ago sung by the Sirens of Homer's Greece.

As we walked toward my dock on the river, my thoughts again drifted to the brave but frightened face of Courtney Burke. Even though I was exhausted when I first saw her, I remembered seeing a cue in her eyes that alluded to something long ago lost, maybe partially buried. What was it?

“You lived here all your life?”

“Part of my life. The important part. Why?”

“It's nothing. Look, I …”

I sat on one of two Adirondack chairs at the end of my dock, the girl's face, the blood on her T-shirt, her compelling and scared eyes swirling in my mind like moths circling a light source. Her eyes, with their sea green-golden irises enclosed in dark circles around the mesmerizing color, reminded me of the iconic picture of a young Afghan girl captured years ago by a National Geographic photographer. It was the eyes, the haunting image of the girl seen and felt around the world. I hoped Courtney Burke didn't make the morning news. I reached for my cell to check local news sources, but paused, not wanting to confirm that she'd become a runaway statistic.

Max leaned over the edge of the dock. She watched an eight-foot alligator swimming from dark water surrounding knobby cypress knees protruding out of the river less than thirty feet from where Max stood. She growled. The gator stopped moving, its yellow eyes and snout visible from our perch above the river. Max lifted her front foot, like a little hunting dog, a pointer. The gator dropped below the surface, and Max whined, looking over her shoulder at me. I said, “Leave well enough alone, kiddo.”

Watching the river dress in the colors of the morning, I tried to remove the girl's face from my thoughts. An osprey dropped straight down out of the hard blue sky, plunging into the center of the river and hooking something in its talons. Within seconds, the bird was beating its massive wings, gaining altitude, its claws deep in the back of a wriggling bass.

My cell buzzed. I pulled it out of my pocket and read the text message. It was from an old friend, Dave Collins.