Lightning

33

The coast highway carried less traffic than the interstate. Which meant Carver had to fall back well behind Adelle’s dark sedan. Not that it caused a problem; she continued to hold her speed steady and gave no sign of taking any of the turnoffs.

They drove that way for a while, following their headlights into the night, the ocean on their left yawning vast and black like the edge of the world. Then, about three miles beyond the Del Moray city limits, the glowing red taillights flared and merged as Adelle braked and made a right turn off the highway.

Carver slowed and pulled the car to the shoulder, listening to the crunch and plunk of gravel as the tires mashed it and slung some of it against the fender wells. From where he was parked, he could see a tall neon sign in the form of a leaping blue dolphin above the letters BLUE DOLPHIN MOTEL. He depressed the accelerator and steered the Olds back onto the highway, then drove to the sign and made a right turn, as Adelle had done a few minutes before.

The motel was a long, low building made of rough tan stone. The office was brightly lit. A separate brick building was built in a U around a swimming pool, which was lit and threw a wavering blue glow over the area around it. Two heavyset women in red swimsuits were sprawled in webbed lounge chairs, listlessly watching some preteen kids splashing around in the shallow end.

All of the rooms looked out over the pool, and all of their doors were visible. Carver didn’t see Adelle either on the ground floor or on the steel catwalk running outside the second-floor rooms, and he didn’t think she’d had enough time to park her car, walk to one of the rooms, and disappear inside.

He tapped the accelerator and drove between rows of parked cars until he saw the dark sedan. It was at the far end of the lot, nestled alongside a white van with Illinois license plates and a chrome ladder up its back to allow access to the mound of plastic-wrapped luggage strapped to its roof. Adelle’s car was midnight blue rather than black, he decided, seeing it up close for the first time.

He drove past the late-model Olds and parked his own ancestral Olds at the opposite end of the lot, then walked through the dark evening heat toward the office. He couldn’t see or hear the ocean, but he could smell it, and a thick, salty dampness lay oppressively over his exposed skin. Near the motel entrance was a smaller door with a glowing blue neon DEEP WATER LOUNGE sign above it. Deep indeed, Carver thought.

As his hand moved toward the brass push plate of the lounge door, he paused. Better to go into the lobby and approach the Deep Water Lounge through a lobby entrance, if there was one. Assuming she wasn’t in one of the rooms, he might push open this door and be face to face with Adelle. He could see into the lighted office and lobby and knew she wasn’t there.

As he entered the lobby, he smiled and nodded to the middle-aged woman behind the desk. She smiled back, looked at him expectantly from beneath thick gray bangs for a moment, then went back to something she was working on with a hand-held calculator when she realized he didn’t want a room. The lobby spread out far beyond the desk and was carpeted in dark blue. Cream-colored wing chairs were grouped around glass-topped low tables with plastic NO SMOKING signs on them. No one was in the lobby other than an old man in a white pullover shirt, plaid shorts, and startlingly white deck shoes, seated in one of the chairs and reading a Glamour magazine. Its glossy cover promised latest beach fashions and the answers to a previous marital sex quiz, and featured one of those interchangeable supermodels in a scanty two-piece swim-suit, standing and posturing with long legs spread wide and elbows thrust behind her as she smiled dazzlingly at whoever might buy the magazine. The old guy was engrossed in the magazine’s contents and didn’t seem to notice Carver.

There was an entrance from the lobby to the lounge, a stucco archway with lighted Spanish sconces on each side that looked like ships’ lanterns.

Carver approached it cautiously yet casually, moved parallel to it, and saw Adelle Grimm seated alone in a booth near the rear of the lounge, facing three-quarters away from him. The lounge was crowded, with most of the patrons at the bar watching a Marlins-Mets game.

There was a shrill giggle behind Carver and he turned and saw four women in business clothes approaching in a tight group. They were talking animatedly and headed for the lounge.

He saw an empty stool where the bar made a right angle, timed his entrance, and used the four gesticulating, noisy women as a diversion and to shield him from view as he made his way to the stool.

Very neat. He congratulated himself. He couldn’t see Adelle from where he sat, but he found that if he leaned slightly to the left, he could observe her reflection in the back bar mirror. The bartender, a young dark-haired guy in a blue shirt and red vest, approached and Carver ordered a draft Budweiser.

“They can’t beat the friggin’ Mets, they oughta take up some other sport,” the man on the stool to Carver’s right said.

Carver looked at him in the mirror, a very fat man with dark eyebrows that grew together and long, greasy hair, no tie, wearing an unstructured white sport coat that made him look even more immense.

“Football, maybe,” Carver said, turning his body slightly away. He hoped the big man was sensitive to body language. He didn’t want to talk baseball right now, or any other subject.

“Yeah, football. They kick the ball around a lot anyway,” the man said.

Carver didn’t answer, glad when the batter singled and a Marlins run scored. There was cheering along the bar, which meant he wouldn’t have to make more conversation.

The four women were in a booth directly behind him. One of them said, “When he told me a raise, I didn’t think he meant my skirt.” The giggler sounded off shrilly again, causing the fat guy in the white jacket to swivel ponderously on his stool and look for the source of the noise.

That was when Carver glanced in the mirror and saw Martin Freel.

At first he didn’t believe it. But there was the good reverend, wearing dark slacks and a gray-and-yellow tropical-pattern silk shirt, passing within ten feet of Carver.

When the reflected image passed beyond the shelf of liqueur bottles next to the mirror, Carver leaned forward to make sure he hadn’t imagined seeing Freel.

This was getting better by the second. Freel was sitting down opposite Adelle Grimm.

Carver leaned forward as casually as possible so he could see them both. A barmaid walked over and Freel said something to her. Then he and Adelle leaned toward each other over the table, heads close together, and began talking earnestly. The reverend was nodding his head. Adelle seemed to be doing most of the talking.

They paused in their conversation as the barmaid returned with their drinks, a mug of beer for Freel and a fresh whatever-clear-beverage Adelle had been drinking, and took away Adelle’s half-empty glass. Then Freel reached across the table and gently clasped Adelle’s right hand with both of his, as if it were a delicate bird he didn’t want to be injured or fly away.

They sat that way talking for almost fifteen minutes, not touching their drinks, apparently captivated by each other. Now Freel seemed to be guiding the conversation. Carver watched as Adelle’s composure disintegrated. Her free hand rose to brush tears from her eyes.

Suddenly she stood up. She was gripping her purse which had been sitting on her side of the table. Freel stood also and touched her shoulder, as if urging her not to leave. But Adelle spun around and strode from the lounge. Freel stared after her with a hopeless, longing expression on his tanned face.

Carver wanted to follow Adelle, but he knew Freel would notice him if he limped away from the bar with his cane. Maybe Freel would run after her and Carver could follow them both, or have his choice.

But Freel stood watching until Adelle had disappeared out the door to the parking lot, then he slumped back down in the booth and sipped his mug of beer.

Ten minutes later, he laid a couple of crumpled bills on the table, stood up, and walked from the lounge, using the exit to the parking lot. Carver left the bar and went through the archway into the lobby. Standing inside the glass front entrance doors, he watched Freel make his way along a row of cars parked to the left. It was easy to follow the almost luminous yellow pattern of the reverend’s silk shirt in the dark, moving and undulating like a bright spirit of the night. Carver’s Olds was parked to the right. He slipped out through the door and hurried in that direction.

He was sitting in his car and had just started the engine when Freel drove toward him in a sky blue Cadillac, then steered toward the driveway. The Caddy paused, then smoothly turned and accelerated out onto the highway.

Carver put the Olds in drive and followed.

He stayed behind Freel until the Caddy turned off Highway 1 and sped west on 50 toward Orlando. That was something of a disappointment. The odds were that Freel was simply going home or to the Clear Connection.

Carver lost interest and turned back toward the coast, heading for the cottage, thinking hard all the way to the hum of the engine and the ticking of the tires over seams in warm pavement.

Maybe the Women’s Light bombing had nothing at all to do with abortion rights; maybe that was simply a blind. Freel might have set up Norton and used the anti-abortion demonstration as a cover for the murder of Dr. Grimm, and for one of the oldest, most compelling motives in the world: he wanted the man’s wife.

Freel himself might have somehow planted the bomb, timed to go off during the demonstration. Or, more likely, he’d used the unknowing Norton, instructing him when and where to plant the bomb, so he could be sure Dr. Grimm would be at the clinic that day and would be near the blast point. Some of the death threats received by Freel’s wife Belinda Lee might have been sent by Freel himself. Now he could be setting the stage for her murder so he could be free to maintain his reputation and standing with his congregation and pro-life advocates, and at the same time possess forbidden fruit Adelle Grimm.

Hypothesis, Carver warned himself, speeding along A1A with the sharp ocean breeze cutting in through the car’s open windows. He’d gotten into trouble before by hypothesizing and then acting without ascertaining the facts. His theory about Freel and Adelle Grimm might be nothing but speculation. Yet it answered so many questions.

And he’d seen them together in the motel lounge, an obviously furtive and emotional meeting they’d both driven a long way to attend in an attempt at secrecy.

That wasn’t speculation. That was fact.

And it had to mean something.