Scorcher

Chapter 36

No one answered Carver’s ring at the Kave estate. He limped around the side of the house, calling Adam Kave’s name, getting only silence for his effort. The hot weight of the sun bore down on his shoulders; the day was heating up to record temperatures, according to the sadistic forecast out of Fort Lauderdale. He unfastened the top button of his shirt.

Then he saw the figure on the beach, a man seated facing the wide ocean with his knees drawn up. An exceptionally large wave sent foaming surf fingers scrambling up the sand, getting the man’s ankles wet. He didn’t budge. There was something unnatural about his perfect stillness. He reminded Carver of one of those sculptures of people in repose that kept turning up in museums and shopping centers, appearing real even down to the color and texture of their clothes.

Carver gingerly took the steep wooden steps down to the beach, then started across the sand, moving tentatively as the tip of his cane sank into softness and lent little support. The cane left a pattern of deep depressions and narrow drag marks behind him.

As he neared the unmoving figure he recognized Adam Kave. Adam was dressed in a white shirt and dark pants. He had on polished black wing-tip shoes and black silk socks, waterlogged by the ocean. The back of his neck was flushed and his dark hair was matted with perspiration.

When Carver got close he called, “Adam?”

No answer. No movement.

Carver worked forward with the cane and stood a few feet behind and to the side of Adam, who sat staring out at the sea and tightly hugging his knees. The surf slapped and spread high onto the beach again and foamed around his skinny black-clad ankles. He was clutching something white in his right hand. It looked like a crumpled envelope, but Carver couldn’t be sure.

“Where’s Paul?” Carver asked between crashes of surf.

Adam didn’t look at him. “He and Nadine drove to Joel Dewitt’s apartment to get some of Nadine’s things. They left this morning.” The husky voice was an odd monotone.

Carver started to crouch but found that he couldn’t. The cane in the soft sand was too unstable. “What’s wrong, Adam?”

Adam seemed to have forgotten Carver was there. Had he been so devastated by the news about Emmett and Dewitt? Or was his peculiar behavior in some way connected to Paul’s recently established innocence? Paul the troubled son, back in the human race and the family fold.

Carver turned and stared up at the rambling house with its many windows looking out on the ocean. He studied the green and manicured lawn and shrubbery, broken here and there by colorful flower beds. The place looked postcard-plush and sterile. Unoccupied. No one was on the grounds, or at any of the windows. No one had answered Carver’s ring. That could mean nothing. Elana might be asleep in her upstairs room, and Adam was here on the beach.

Sitting in the surf in his suit pants and wing-tip shoes. Not doing much talking.

A gull wheeled and soared delicately on an updraft, then arced in low off the sea and screamed. The sound pierced something in Carver’s mind and sent a cold tingle up his spine.

“Adam, where’s Elana?”

Adam said, “You did a fine job, Carver. Lying bastard that you are. You unearthed the truth. That’s why I hired you. But I didn’t know. . The truth’s a sonuvabitch, isn’t it?”

“Too much of the time,” Carver said. He watched a sailboat in the distance tack away from shore and disappear into low haze, as if it had never been there. Magic on bright water. “Where’s Elana?” he repeated.

Adam was still staring out at the ocean, his head raised in a strained, attentive attitude, as if anxiously waiting for something to appear among the waves. “Elana?” he said vaguely. “Oh, she’s in the boathouse.”

Carver left him there and trudged with his cane toward the boathouse down the beach, near the base of the wooden steps. A miniature canal had been carved in the beach, lessening the impact of the waves, and the boathouse, a weathered old structure with a leaky roof and glassless windows, straddled the foot of the canal. It had been there for decades, and only a small boat could be docked in it out of the weather. The white-and-brown Kave pleasure yacht still rode at the dock on the beach beyond, clean and fresh and yearning for deep water.

Carver clomped with the cane across gray, weathered wood to the boathouse door. He could hear water lapping inside in rhythm with the surf. He saw the rusty padlock hanging sprung on its hasp, and he extended his cane and shoved the door open on screaming hinges. The scream sounded exactly like the gull that had circled in near where Adam was sitting on the beach.

Sun and water sent shimmering reflections over the old walls. A small, open boat with a rotted teakwood bow rose and fell with the rush and ebb of the sea. The inside of the boat-house was undulating with dancing shadows and brightness, all silent, glimmering motion.

The only still thing-so very still-was Elana Kave, hanging by her neck from a rope looped over a rafter. She was even stiller than her husband out on the beach.

She was nude, her wasted, pale body unblemished and suspended in frozen grace. Her face was grotesque, tongue protruding and eyes wide with the final surprise and comprehension. Death had diminished her, made her seem incredibly small; she was a perfect but ephemeral miniature with a gargoyle head. Ruined mortal beauty on the first leg of its journey to dust.

Glittering brilliance shafted and swirled through the old structure and bounced broken off the water, a thousand brightly mocking things playing over her, somehow only emphasizing her waxlike stillness. She was no longer any part of the warmth and movement and suffering of life.

Adam must have found her like this.

Almost stumbling, Carver backed out of the boathouse. He didn’t look away from Elana until he’d shut the squealing door.

He glanced down the beach at Adam, who was still seated as before and staring out to sea. Then he made his way toward the house and a phone.

An hour later Carver was sitting with McGregor on the screened veranda overlooking the beach and ocean. The police technicians had come and gone, and Elana had been removed in a black rubber body bag. Adam Kave had been taken inside and was being treated for shock. Nadine and Paul hadn’t been located and still didn’t know about their mother’s death. They hadn’t learned they were in a nightmare without end.

Carver sat at the glass-topped table where he’d seen the Kaves have breakfast. Not exactly amiable family meals. He tapped his cane lightly and rhythmically against a chair leg, trying to keep his mind from flashing to Elana dangling in the boathouse. It wasn’t unusual for suicides to hang themselves nude, as if the act were a return to the moment of birth rather than chosen death. The sea wind was brisk, and the canvas awning, rolled out to shield from the sun, rustled and snapped overhead.

McGregor was standing with just his fingertips slid into his pants pockets, as if he liked to stay ready for action. He was chewing on something infinitesimal and hard, working it around with his long jaw, probing now and then with his tongue to find out how he was doing. Carver could hear a faint clicking as McGregor’s eyeteeth slipped off the stubborn morsel and met with enough force to dismay a dentist.

“So, we know each other again,” Carver said. He watched McGregor turn his head and spit out whatever it was he’d been chewing, barely parting his lips.

“You betcha,” McGregor said. “Pals, you and me, right down the line. We done okay in this thing, Carver. Might even call us heroes.”

“Might,” Carver said. He knew McGregor had read Elana’s suicide note, which was in the white envelope the stricken Adam had clutched in his fist on the beach. “Why’d she hang herself?” Carver asked. “She’d just got her son back. Was it the cancer? She knew she wasn’t going to recover.”

“Wasn’t that,” McGregor said. He straightened his tall body awkwardly, as if his back were stiff, then walked over and sat down opposite Carver. He ran his tongue across the wide gap between his front teeth and folded his big hands. He seemed to consider not telling Carver about the note’s contents, but only for a second; pals all the way. He said, “She was, in a manner of speaking, Emmett’s accomplice.”

Carver remembered Elana’s beauty and gentleness and reacted instinctively, as Adam might have. Protecting her memory in Adam’s stead. Carver’s obligation. He’d done things to this family. “Bullshit! She hated Emmett. He tried to rape her.”

“That’s true,” McGregor said. “Still, she had no choice but to cooperate with him. She married young, before she knew Adam Kave, and had a child. Her husband was killed in Korea. Afterward, while she was grieving, she fell in love with and married a guy who made her life pure hell and caused severe depression. She ran away from her new husband and her son, and probably herself. Years later she was penniless and in trouble, and she remembered things she’d heard about Adam Kave even though she’d never met him. She came to the Fort Lauderdale area and got to know him under an assumed identity, and ingratiated herself until he helped her financially and in other ways. It was a desperate kind of con she worked on him, but not an unusual one, what with all the unattached big-rich assholes in Florida. Then she unexpectedly fell in love and married him, and never could muster the guts to tell him the truth.”

McGregor smiled nastily, loving the effect this was having on Carver. “Some juicy suicide note, hey?” he said. “Never know what you’ll find when you kick over a gold rock and study these wealthy families. I seen it time and again.”

Carver’s mind was numb except for some far corner that was trying to fit all this together. Trying to accept it as truth. McGregor helped him.

“Elana had to stay silent or have Adam and the kids learn about her long-ago relationship with Emmett, and the blackmail money she’d been paying Emmett for years, in amounts small enough to escape Adam’s notice. She was Emmett’s former wife, Carver. Her maiden name was Jones. She was the woman who met Emmett Kave at the Orlando motel. Joel Dewitt’s mother.”

Carver said, “Sweet Christ!” And full realization rolled over him.

McGregor laughed. “Explains some things, don’t it?”

“Some things. Other things can never be explained.”

“Don’t you believe it,” McGregor said. “The guy doing the explaining just has to be convincing, is all. Way the world works, pardner.”

“Did she actually think she could marry Adam without Emmett ever finding out her identity?”

“Sure. Remember, the brothers were estranged, hated each other, and never saw one another. There’s so many rich jokers in this part of Florida, they get married and divorced all the time without anybody’s picture getting on the society page-not that Emmett would read the society page. And she hadn’t planned on love rearing its nasty head. Once she fell for Adam and didn’t want to lose him, she had no choice. She was desperate.”

“Did Dewitt know about all this?”

“I was interrogating him when you called and told me Elana was dead. He knew about everything. That was how Emmett got him to go along with the plan. Dewitt was getting even with the woman who abandoned him as a child, and he thought he had some kind of moral claim on the Kave fortune. Once Elana died before Adam, Dewitt was out in the cold forever. Adam ain’t the charitable type.”

“Then Dewitt knew Paul was his brother.”

“Hey, don’t look so shocked, Carver. Cain did it to Abel. And these guys are only half brothers.”

“But Nadine. .”

“So Dewitt was plugging his sister-hell, there was a lotta money at stake.”

Wind off the ocean whipped the canvas awning again, cracking it like a sail. The breeze felt cool on Carver’s face and he realized he was perspiring. He was nauseated and wanted to get away from McGregor immediately. Didn’t want to look at him or hear his voice ever again.

He stood up shakily with his cane and shoved his chair back, almost tipping it over. His mind still trying to assimilate what had happened, he limped toward the door to the house. He knew his way through the place and out.

Behind him McGregor said, “We oughta work together again sometime, tough guy. Ain’t we a fuckin’ team?”