Honestly Dearest, You're Dead

Twenty-four

I managed five hours of sleep, more or less, but it came in ragged twenty-and thirty-minute chunks, each one ending when a dream of Maris jerked me awake. I’d long ago buried most of my memories of Maris deep enough for me to move on, but that night they all came back, as bright and hot as fires in dry brush. I sat up, finally, at eight, drenched by the humidity and the past.

I spent some minutes staring at my cell phone, then set it down and took a shower. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to talk to Amanda, it was that I didn’t want to lie. After I got dressed, I put the phone in my pocket, still turned off, and went out.

Traffic was almost devoid of putty-colored people. I guessed they were still inside, reading their newspapers, and bracing for another evening’s dinner that afternoon. The still-struggling folks were out, though, buzzing north and south on Shell Drive, on their ways to tend to pools and sewers and stores. The temperature at the bank was already past ninety. Motoring along with the car windows open, the heat felt good after the dampness of my motel room. I wondered if Maris had come to Florida for the heat. Or because it was about as far away from Rivertown as she could get without dropping into the ocean.

I got to the diner a half hour early and took a booth that looked out over the water. Already the sand was littered with beach umbrellas, blow-up balls, and vinyl alligators. Nine thirty was family time for mothers and fathers and toddling kids. The sun was not yet high enough to burn. It was safe, then, on Windward Island.

Maris and I never called it love, that thing growing by glances and smiles between us. We didn’t come from places where that word was used. But neither was it one of the vague, restless, ever-shifting fixations I’d felt for other girls at school. Those had been the stuff of fantasies, of heroic athleticism, or courageous rescues played against historical backdrops: Dek rescues teen queen, bound to the tracks, from onrushing railroad train; Dek fights duel, saves honor of teen queen; and teen queen rewards Dek with…well, I didn’t know exactly what the reward might be, but I knew enough to hope it would involve getting at least partially naked.

What joined Maris and me was something else, something born of our histories, of being out of place, like red pawns in a black and white chess set. We sought distance from what we didn’t have, and shelter in each other. We found reasons to stay after school, she and I, just long enough for Leo to have to walk home alone. And what had begun as grand camaraderie, of Maris and me, both pale and unformed, orbiting around the flash and sizzle that was Leo, changed. Our orbit began to wobble, and then it broke free, and then everything began to orbit around us.

“Name’s Dina,” the gray-haired hostess from the Copper Scupper said, sliding into the booth. “And you are?”

“Dek Elstrom.”

Our waitress appeared almost instantly, perhaps because people in Florida hear the clock ticking louder than in other places.

“From where?” Dina asked, after we’d both ordered scrambled eggs.

“From Rivertown, just west of Chicago. I’m trying to trace down Carolina Dare.”

“You a friend?”

“I’m not sure.” I pulled out the copy of the driver’s license photo and gave it to her.

She pulled reading glasses out of her purse. “Who’s this?”

“Carolina Dare?”

She stared at the photo for a minute, then shook her head. “That’s a frightened woman, Dek Elstrom, some woman who didn’t want to be photographed.” She handed it back. “Tell me,” she said.

She was direct, like Maris, and it was easy to like her. So I told her most of it, beginning with Attorney Aggert’s phone call, the Louise Thomas will, my poking around the Rambling cottage. I told her, too, of discovering the name Carolina Dare in the mail forwarded from Windward Island, but I offered up nothing about Honestly Dearest, the Iowa bank robbery, the letters from Lucia Helm, and the threatening letters that followed.

“Are you withholding a lot?” Dina asked when I finished.

“Enough.”

Dina looked out the window. The sun was higher now. Most of the families had left the beach.

“A girl that pretty…” She stirred her coffee, then looked up. “You think she’s dead?”

“I’m hoping she’s running.” I told her about the blood spatters in the cottage and the subsequent fire.

“Like somebody’s destroying evidence of something?”

“It’s better for Carolina if I don’t get into that,” I said.

Our eggs came. She stabbed at hers for a minute, then set down her fork. “You told one of my girls you didn’t know her as Carolina Dare.”

“As I said, I got hired by a Louise Thomas.”

“There’s a third name, isn’t there?”

“Perhaps, a long time ago.”

“I can respect that,” she said when I didn’t say any more. She pushed away her uneaten food. “I’ve been afraid for her since I first met her, going back over a dozen years. She answered an ad I had in the paper for an attic apartment, said she was hoping to find work. Poor kid, she looked like it was time for her to catch a break. I rented her the apartment, got her a job waitressing at the Scupper, and became as much of a friend to her as she would allow.”

“What do you mean?”

“Carolina was always looking over her shoulder. You see that a lot down here. Mixed in with the tourists is a different bunch, people leaving something behind. They come here thinking it’s warm enough to live cheap, sleeping in their cars even. Carolina was like them. She was guarded and kept to herself. I noticed it right off, with the pictures.”

“Pictures?”

“We have staff parties at the Scupper, rum punch and beach volleyball things, two or three times a year. Her first one, she faded into the shadows whenever somebody started snapping pictures. She didn’t want to be photographed. And there were times when tourists, men, wanted her to pose with them-you know, pretty young local thing. She always found a way not to. I figured she had her reasons and never asked her about it.”

“Do you remember her car?”

Dina nodded. “I took her over to buy it. A blue something.”

“A Dodge Aries?”

Her eyes narrowed. “You know that car?”

That was it, then. “It was in the garage that burned down.”

Dina looked out the window, the glare bright in the watering in her eyes.

“She have any boyfriends, anybody else she knew on the island?”

She shook her head. “When she wasn’t working, she was upstairs in her apartment. Pretty girl like that, she got talked to a lot at the Scupper, but I don’t think she ever once went out. I think she read a lot.”

“She wrote, though, didn’t she? On a typewriter?”

Dina smiled at the memory. “I’d hear that, yes.”

“What was she writing?”

“Never knew. She didn’t leave any of it behind.”

“She ever get any mail?”

“Thick envelopes sometimes, from a newspaper in New Jersey. I figured she was sending stuff in, articles maybe, for publication. And getting rejected.”

“When did she leave?”

Dina leaned back in the booth, sipped coffee for a minute. “A little over a year ago. Left me a note with her key.” She opened her purse, pulled out a folded piece of typing paper, and handed it to me.

“Dina,” she’d typed. “Thanks. C.”

“Just this?”

“Like I said, I think she was running from something.”

“But no boyfriends?” I had to ask it again.

“Other than you?”

I started to deny it, then stopped.

“You got that look.” She smiled.

“It was a long time ago.”

Dina looked back out the window. “No boyfriends, but there was one guy. He came into the Scupper a few times right before Carolina took off. Sat at the bar inside, making two or three drinks last the whole evening. You get that, slow drinkers. Owner doesn’t mind, so long as they’re not taking up a table all night.”

“This guy was different?”

“He was real watchful. Guys sitting by themselves at the bar, they mostly look down, like they’re self-conscious, or else they stare at every passing girl, hoping to catch a look back. Not this one. He was interested only in Carolina, kept his eyes on her all night. He stayed until closing, those nights, so I made sure one of the busboys walked Carolina to her car. She laughed it off, but there was something in her eyes that told me she was taking it serious. She never said anything, but after a few days, she was gone.”

“Because of him?”

“That’s what I thought.”

“Did the man ever come in after she took off?”

“Just once, the next night. But he left early. I’m thinking he asked around, found out Carolina had quit.”

“What did he look like?”

“Six three or four, your height. Brown hair, about the color of yours. And blue eyes-” She stopped, looking at my face.

Something oily was working its way up my throat. She could have been describing John Reynolds.

“Have you rented her apartment?” I asked.

“Didn’t seem right, after she went away,” she said slowly. “She’d cleaned it real thorough, and there’s no trace of her left, but I’ve just never gotten around to putting another ad in the paper. I guess I was keeping it for her, in case she ever wanted to come back. Everybody needs a place to come back to.”

“Can I see it?”

Dina dug in her purse, took out a ring of keys, and detached one. She handed it to me. “I’ve got to get to the Scupper, but you can look around.” She told me where she lived and said to bring the key to the Scupper when I was done.

I walked her to her car in the parking lot. She got in and started the engine with the door open, to let the air-conditioning blow out the superheated air. She looked up at me as she reached to pull the door closed.

“She ever say anything about a family?” I asked.

Dina looked at my eyes until I thought to take sunglasses out of my shirt pocket and put them on.

“A family?” she repeated.

“She ever mention anybody at all?”

“You mean like parents?”

“Anybody at all.”

“I don’t know about any family,” she said and drove away.