Dead of Night

2

Aside from a strange, shy message on an answering machine, the first words I heard Jobe Applebee speak were: “Please, don’t hit me again. My brain… you don’t understand. I can’t.”

The way he said it, “I can’t,” sounded touchingly childlike. This thirty-some-year-old man wasn’t begging. He was apologizing. Telling the blond woman who was beating him that he wanted to cooperate. He simply didn’t know how.

Only a minute or two before, I’d been standing on the porch of Applebee’s secluded island home on Lake Toho, Central Florida, in citrus, cattle, bass boat, and Disney country. I’d stood there feeling out of place, a little silly, looking up at all the dark gables and darker windows of the man’s solitary three-story. I would have guessed the place was empty but for a golf cart umbilicaled to a charger next to the porch.

Golf carts are standard transportation in Florida’s island communities. Drive them to the boat dock when leaving, drive them home upon return. The cart meant that Applebee probably was inside.

I didn’t know the man. Had never met him. I was there because I’d made a reluctant promise to his sister, a friend.

It was a promise I already regretted.

As I stood there trying to decide what to do, I grunted and I sighed, made the silly, adolescent sounds that a person utters when he’s about to continue some damn, silly task he doesn’t want to continue. I certainly did not want to do this, but, as Applebee’s sister pointed out, I am an ever-dependable pushover. I am Marion D. Ford, the amiable marine biologist, bookworm nerd, collector of sea creatures, and “wouldn’t hurt a flea, cheery sunset cohort who can’t say no to a pal.”

My friend’s words.

Finally, I stepped onto Applebee’s porch, went to the door.

There wasn’t a bell, so I leaned to knock… then stopped, knuckles poised, head tilted, listening to an unexpected sound. Stood for long seconds straining to identify an indistinct moaning. It was a noise that someone in pain might make. Or someone frightened. Or someone trying to pull a very bad joke.

This was no joke. The moaning was coming from the rear of the house.

Quietly, I tested the doorknob. Locked.

I waited, ears focused… heard it again: someone in pain.

Hurrying now, I swung over the porch railing and jogged to the rear of the house. That’s when I heard Applebee’s frightened, apologetic voice; heard him in person for the first time: “Please, don’t hit me again. My brain… you don’t understand. I can’t.”

Heard the words during a lull in the music that was being played loud, probably to cover the man’s pleading, and then his scream: “Stop, please. I can’t stand this!”

In bizarre contrast was the music, a Disney tune that even I recognized. Something about it being a small world after all.

The sound of a grown man begging detonates all the primitive caveman alarms. Terror has a distinctive pitch. We hear it through the base of the skull, not the auditory canal, and it’s interpreted as an electric prickle down the spine.

I waited until the music resumed, then began to move toward a set of French doors from which Applebee’s voice drifted. As I did, I fished a cellular phone out of my pocket, dialed 911. To the woman who answered, I whispered, “There’s a man being assaulted on an island, south of Orlando. Night’s Landing… no… Nightshade Landing. House number thirty-nine; owner’s name is Applebee. Dr. Jobe Applebee. Get a police boat or a chopper out here A-S-A-P. I’m going to try and help.”

I listened long enough to make certain she understood, then shoved the phone into my pocket.

There was a smaller porch at the rear entrance. I stepped up onto the deck, and pressed my face to the double glass doors. Through a space in the curtains, I saw the little man I knew to be Applebee-recognizable because he’s the identical twin of the sister who’d asked me to check on him.

Even with Applebee’s bloodied face, the likeness was unmistakable.

He was sitting on a chair in the dimly lighted space, dressed like an underpaid junior college professor: charcoal slacks, white shirt with a collar stiff enough to hold a clip-on tie. He was barefooted, which gave the peculiar impression that he was unclothed.

Men like Jobe Applebee do not go around without socks and shoes.

On his right ankle was a sloppy surgical dressing of gauze and tape. Maybe that’s why he was shoeless. He had a minor injury. It seemed a further indignity that the bandage was visible.

He had his face buried in his hands, rocking rhythmically even though the chair wasn’t a rocker. Nose and lips were bleeding, glasses askew. He had angular features, more feminine than his sister. His body was frail, as if his bone scaffolding were made of balsa wood.

Two people stood over him. One, a man, was behind the chair, his hands on Applebee’s shoulders, steadying him, while the other, a woman, crouched in front, a leather belt doubled in her right hand. That moronic song had begun to play yet again-It’s a small world!-but I was close enough to hear the woman say in clumsy English, “Why you make us do this thing to you? You think I like hitting your face, idiot? Tell us what we want to know. Then we stop. We all be friends afterward.”

I watched as the woman used the belt to slap Jobe’s face sideways. It made an ugly, bullwhip th-WHACK against flesh.

She was Eastern European, probably Russian. Her accent was as telling as the high Slavic cheeks and forehead, the short chin, the high nasal bridge. She was tall-over six feet. Lean, athletic, flat chested with skinny ballerina hips, long sprinter’s legs, and short ballerina blond hair.

The man was her opposite. He was oxlike, with curly, shoulder-length black hair, and dense body pelt showing on arms, the backs of his hands, and neck. His face had similar Slavic characteristics.

He wore the sort of workman’s pants you find in chain outlets, and an equally cheap T-shirt, breast pocket squared by a box of cigarettes. The woman, though, dressed like she had money: pleated boating slacks and a baggy, silken blouse that gave her a traditional peasant look.

I’d seen the style when I was in Moscow.

Conclusion: Two immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Suspicion: Russians who slip into the U.S. illegally are often black marketers. They bring their talents with them. Crime is what they know best.

So maybe I was witnessing a robbery, or a crime-for-hire.

Ancillary impression: The woman enjoyed her role as abusive interrogator. She was the sort of person, typically male, who should be boxed up and studied like a bug.

This all went through my mind as subtext. I was more concerned with whatever weapons they might be carrying. Charging in, getting shot, wasn’t going to help anyone. I do dumb things on a regular basis, but seldom intentionally.

I held my glasses to my face as I touched my right eye to the door’s window. If they were armed, it wasn’t obvious. No telltale bulge of pocket, or pant cuff.

I was still watching as the woman used the belt on the little man again. Slapped him hard, then hit his face again.

Yeah… she liked it.

After that, I wasn’t thinking anymore. Just reacting.

I took three long steps backward, then charged the door, shoulder down.

Even though we’d never met, the guy I was attempting to rescue seemed worth rescuing. Jobe Applebee, Ph. D., was the twin brother of my old friend Dr. Frieda Applebee Matthews, both considered by peers to be among Florida’s finest field biologists.

Frieda is an authority on Caribbean sea mammals. The manatee, a hippo-sized, fluke-tailed estuarine mammal, is her specialty. You seldom read a newspaper story on the animal in which she is not quoted, or a scientific paper on the species in which her work is not referenced.

Brother Jobe was a hydrobiologist, an expert on the flow of nutrient pollution through karstic systems: how water makes its way through regions of porous limestone, plus the impact once the contaminants have spread.

Freshwater was his main interest, but I’d read some of his papers relating to salt water as well. He’d done work with deep-ocean blowholes and freshwater springs found a hundred miles out at sea. His data suggested that karsts channel ways to transport the same poisons you’d expect to find in garbage dumps of industrial towns.

Really excellent stuff. Painstaking and professional, but also brilliant in the same quirky, left-field way my old hipster pal, Tomlinson, is brilliant. Tomlinson, the unrepentant social revolutionary, drug fancier, and Zen Buddhist monk who might say something like, “Jogging is a masochistic form of bulimia, only in the active tense,” then give you a perfectly logical explanation for why the statement’s justified.

Applebee had the same weird gift. In a couple of his papers, he started with premises that seemed unlikely at first pass, but then he backed the data with a series of unexpected proofs, all from oddball angles (anomalies in his field, at least) to reach what I considered to be virtuoso conclusions. The way he stacked figures and minutiae suggested a penchant for the obsessive-not a bad thing for a scientist.

Numbers. The man loved numbers.

People who’d worked with him said that he was as introverted as his sister, Frieda, was outgoing. She lived in Tallahassee, the state capital, and was at ease drinking cocktails with lobbyists and upper-echelon bureaucrats. As a researcher and environmental consultant, her work required that kind of interaction, but she also enjoyed it.

Her brother, the lady told me, never socialized.

My friend Frieda lives with a much-loved husband and young son. Brother Jobe had lived alone his entire adult life, much of it on an island in a lake south of Orlando. As far as she knew, the only time he went out was to buy necessities, or to do fieldwork.

She’d written me that in an e-mail the week before, then added, “He’ll at least answer the phone, though. But he hasn’t for the last three days. I’m worried about him. I wouldn’t ask, but you said you were driving to Vero Beach to go surfing, which means, coming and going across the state, his house isn’t that far out of your way. Plus, you’re trailering your boat. You’d have access. I know it’s a pain in the butt, but would you mind stopping and checking on Jobe?”

I’d made the mistake of mentioning that I was supposed to meet Tomlinson at Sebastian Inlet, north of Vero Beach, to try my hand at surfing. The Atlantic has bigger, more dependable waves than Florida’s Gulf Coast. But just in case a nor’easter wasn’t blowing, I was also bringing my twenty-one-foot skiff so we could poke around the Indian River Aquatic Preserve, an interesting estuary separated from open sea by a strand of barrier islands.

“Skiff” is another word for a fast, shallow water boat with low freeboard.

So, yes, it was true that a detour to see her brother would not take me far off course. The woman was familiar enough with my habits to know that I avoid driving interstate highways. Hate the damn things. So the route from my little stilt house, Dinkin’s Bay, Sanibel Island, on the Gulf Coast, to the much busier Atlantic Coast would wind me through Florida’s agricultural, theme-parked, and water-rich interior. It would take me within a few miles of the lake, and the tiny island development where her brother lived.

I didn’t like the idea of interceding in someone’s personal business, and wasn’t comfortable imposing on a reclusive man I’d never met. Friends-true friends-show up when there’s trouble, or work to be done, and stay long after everyone else is leaving or has left. Friends are also obligated to intercede if the situation warrants. But I wasn’t the man’s friend.

So I put her off, saying I’d think about it-my cowardly way of declining.

When Tomlinson called an hour or so later, though, he told me I was behaving like a thoughtless jerk.

Actually, he told me I was trying to avoid my “own preordained karma concerning a man you are destined to meet,” but his tone communicated what he really felt.

“Jobe Applebee is Frieda’s brother?” he added, surprised and impressed. “I’ve never met him, but I saw a diorama he built. It was featured at a rally in Coconut Grove a few months back. Mind-blowing. Incredible.”

Most people think of dioramas as three-dimensional models of events like famous battles, but they’re also used for settings like the interlinkings of natural habitats: a mangrove forest, a saw grass prairie.

When I asked, he told me the rally had been hosted by something called the Albedo Society. “A very sporty group of souls who believe the earth is a single organism that regulates her own well-being. The name has something to do with the earth’s color when it’s healthy, seen from outer space.”

There were a couple thousand people, he said. Speeches, a unity march to the nuclear power plant, and lots and lots of get-naked-and-go-swimming types.

I wondered why Applebee, a respected hydrobiologist, would join something like that. If he had.

The diorama was incredible, according to Tomlinson, a work of art: underground river systems, South Florida bionetworks.

“The guy who created it had his shit together. A couple of us asked around, wanted to say howdy, but I guess he doesn’t make the public appearance scene. Doc, if you don’t stop and check on the man, I will At least call his sister back and get a few more details.”

Tomlinson seldom pressures.

I called.

Frieda told me that building dioramas was one of her brother’s recent passions.

“Obsessions,” she said. “That’s more accurate. It’s his nature, so anything less than museum quality wouldn’t be acceptable.”

I’d told her Tomlinson’s reaction.

She knew the story, although she’d yet to see his newest work. He’d been contracted to create a data model of South Florida’s subterranean aquifers, then convert the data into charts. “Aqua-geology.” Her word.

“Who’s the contractor? Tomlinson mentioned a group called the ‘Albedo Society.’” At first, I couldn’t picture an introverted scientist hanging out with Tomlinson types, but maybe it was a good thing. Healthy for both.

“Actually, I think it was one of the big sugar companies. Tropicane? I’ll ask him. Or you can ask him when you meet. Either way, Jobe wouldn’t care who hired him. He lives for his work.”

What Applebee created far exceeded specifications. Instead of charts, he built a three-dimensional model. A diorama so detailed, Frieda said, that it was more like a satellite photo-if satellites could photograph what’s beneath the ground.

A friend had told her about it, not her brother. He seldom shared personal information, even with her. She didn’t know why.

There was a lot she didn’t know about her brother, she said. For instance: Why hadn’t he returned her calls?

Using my shoulder to hold a phone to my ear, I listened to her say, “It’s just him alone in that great big house. I’d contact his neighbors if I had some names, but I don’t. And asking the police to stop by, well… that would scare him. It’d be way too much emotional trauma for someone like Jobe.”

Her inflection left the statement open-ended, maybe inviting questions, maybe not. Applebee was a brilliant recluse. She was hinting that he also had some emotional instabilities.

But then she added, “You two might hit it off, professionally. The only friend Jobe has is his laboratory. You’re both goofy that way. And you’re both obsessed with water, with what goes on among those three tricky atoms. Plus, he’s a fan. Did you know?”

I said, “Huh? I’ve got a fan?”

“Fans, sweetie. My brother’s read your papers; a lot of us have. And Jobe’s kind of a star himself. Nobody knows more about groundwater, and how it flows. If you two kooks put your collective heads together, all your knowledge about the environment, it could be a damn good connection for this screwed-up state of ours.”

That sealed it. In a subtle way, Frieda had withdrawn her request that I go on a snooping mission, and transformed it into an elevated meeting between two biologists. A professional courtesy call.

“You’re driving across the state Saturday?”

I told her no, I was driving over tomorrow-Friday-coming back Sunday.

“Excellent. Then you will be able to stop and say hello…”

I had no out. We both knew it, which is why she was laughing when I replied, “Why is it I feel like I’ve just been leveraged by a master?”

The lady had a nice laugh; lots of joy, with a hint of the devil. “It’s because you haven’t spent enough time in Tallahassee to recognize a master. Florida has an annual budget that’s creeping close to seventy billion. Bigger than lots of sovereign nations. Centralize that kind of power in a small town, and that’s where you’re going to find the real manipulators. Compared to some of the sharks here, I’m just a toothless dogfish.”

I found a notepad. “I guess this is where I write directions. You knew I’d say yes, so you’ve already figured out the best route for me to take. Correct?”

The woman thought that was hilarious. “Damn tootin’, sweetie. You’d make an awful woman, ’cause you just don’t know how to say no. Either that, or a very, very popular one.”

When I finished talking with Frieda, I let my eyes move around the lab, taking refuge in its orderliness. My lab’s one of two houses built over water on pilings, beneath a communal tin roof. I’d chosen the largest of the two as a workplace. A lucky call. The lab’s where I spend most of my time, and where visitors prefer to gather if it’s too hot or rainy on the deck outside.

I prefer functional to fancy. Not everyone does. A disapproving lady visitor once told me the place was a cross between Tom Sawyer’s raft and a castaway’s tree house. She pretended not to be offended when I thanked her.

Some people are lucky enough to find their life’s love. I’ve found my life’s home in this drafty, salt-glazed wooden vessel-which is another rare kind of luck. It’s a good place for a biologist who makes his living collecting and selling marine specimens, but who also enjoys socializing with fellow islanders with a beer or two at sunset.

I like approaching the building by boat, seeing the horizontal banding of clapboard exterior balanced on stork-legged pilings, the tin roof pitched like the bow of an Indonesian junk, all framed by deck railings.

The place also possesses a distinctive olfactory mix-which is something else not everyone appreciates. It’s a fusion of ozone from aquarium aerators, graphite from precision instruments, chemical reagents, and formalin all mixed with odors that sift through the wooden floor: the smell of barnacles, creosote, and salt water.

On the walls are shelves of books, lab instruments, paintings and pictures tacked at eye level so I can look at them if I want, chemicals in jars, and rows of tanks that hold fish, crabs, shrimp, bivalves, and mollusks-including one goat-eyed octopus that now watched me, its focus as intense as my own.

Octopi are the geniuses of their phylum. I was the entity that delivered a crab into its tank daily. To this animal, I was food. If it were larger, or if I were smaller, it would have stalked, dispatched, and eaten me with equal relish.

I stood alone for a few moments in the middle of the room, and let my attention settle on a 250-gallon aquarium into which I’d released five newly born bull sharks; genus: Carcharhinus, species: leucas. My son, Laken, visiting from Central America, had helped me build the thing, rig the filters and aerators, so the water inside was Gulf Stream clear. The finger-sized sharks were active, always moving. They seemed to be acclimating just fine.

I’ve had a long-standing interest in bull sharks; spent a lifetime traveling the same jungle rivers and remote sea places they inhabit. I find their ability to prevail in dissimilar environments fascinating. They roam tropic waters worldwide, commonly forage hundreds of miles up rivers, and can thrive in freshwater lakes.

Because the species is identified by various names-Zambezi River shark, the Lake Nicaragua shark-it’s not widely known that it’s responsible for more serious attacks on humans than great whites.

In popular literature, bull sharks are often described as “ferocious,” which is misleading because the word implies emotion. Efficient-that’s more accurate, and the way I prefer to think of them.

I’d discovered these five pups while doing a necropsy on a two-hundred-pound female one of the guides brought in. Finding living young inside a shark isn’t uncommon. But three of these fish were uncommon, which is why I’d rigged this big tank. Like the mother, three of the five had visible spinal deformities. It was probably a genetic defect, though it might have been caused by waterborne contaminants. Whatever the source, the deformity was unusual in the cartilaginous fishes. A first, in my experience.

The big female had found a way to survive. Would her young?

On a table near the aquarium was a leather-bound day-book in which I’d been keeping lab notes, a things-to-do list, a few personal observations on people and events. It was novel-sized, with SHIP’S LOG embossed on the cover. A salty touch, but a tad theatrical. It was a present from my son, so I used it.

That morning, as had become habit, I opened the log and noted date, tides, and moon phase, before writing:

5 immature specimens, C. leucas, 18 cm long +/-. 3 exhibit obvious spinal deformities rarely reported in sharks or rays, but common in bony fishes. I’ve found only two cases of deformed elasmobranchs, both bull sharks, both collected in Florida waters (Eugenie Clark, 1964; Mote Marine Laboratory). Deformities include: scoliosis (lateral spinal curvature), lordosis (axial spinal curvature), and kyphosis (humpback curves)…

I also made some personal notes. Wrote more than usual, referencing Lake, my girlfriend Dewey Nye, and Tomlinson. No one is entirely the person he or she appears to be. We all inhabit a more solitary dimension in which we deal with our secret aspirations and fears; frailties seldom suspected even by those closest.

It’s true for me. I didn’t realize to what extent until I began keeping daily notes. Writing allowed me to fret or inspect on a private level, so I now carried the journal even when I traveled.

It wasn’t long before I transitioned back from personal matters to the more interesting subject of sharks:

No field observations on immature sharks with skeletal abnormalities have been published. Does deformity = handicap? Am I wrong to suspect lineage between these fish, and the abnormal bull sharks collected by Dr. Clark several decades ago?

I was excited about the project. Which is why I was proportionately pissed off at myself for saying yes to Frieda. Did I really want to go off and leave the sharks, leave my work, to look for some oddball biologist who lived on an island in the middle of the state?

No, I didn’t. Hell no. Didn’t want to leave Sanibel. The longer I live where I live, the more I dislike being away. Hate missing a good sunset. Hate missing the 5:00 A.M. silence of a fresh tropical morning.

But the woman had me.

Before I’d received her first Internet message, I’d even already formulated a plausible excuse for not making the surfing trip. But now I was committed.

Tomlinson and I are close enough that it would have been okay to bail. He’d have understood. But I didn’t know Frieda well enough to disappoint her.