Snow White and Rose Red

13

I kept wondering where Sarah was.

What she was doing.

Was she out there in the darkness of the bird sanctuary someplace, a nighttime wilderness as tangled as her mind was supposed to be?

I shouldn’t have been drinking, but I was.

I kept going over it again and again.

Sipped at my second martini and tried to remember every word she’d ever said to me, every gesture, tried to decipher every nuance of meaning.

I still could not believe she was crazy.

But she had hit Christine Seifert with the stiletto-tipped heel of her sandal.

Could have killed her.

If she was not crazy, why would she have done that? We were on the way to Southern Medical. A team of unprejudiced doctors there would have examined her and...

Perhaps supported the findings of all the other doctors.

I sighed heavily.

I remembered her urgent request for a male attendant to accompany us. Had she been planning on flight all along? She’d known the location of the Mobil Station on Xavier and Taylor. Not far from the bird sanctuary, in fact. Had she been there before? Had she calculated that a man couldn’t possibly go into the ladies’ room with her? “Jake doesn’t watch me while I sit on the toilet.” But wouldn’t even a man have walked her as far as the restroom door? Waited outside for her? Or was there a window in the ladies’ room? Had she planned on making her escape through a window? If such a window existed? Go into the restroom, the male attendant waiting outside, climb out through the window, and run off into the thicket. Forced to change her plan, though, when Knott’s insisted that Christine come along. Picked a shoe with a stiletto heel, not entirely suitable for a meeting with the men who would rule on her sanity, but a deadly weapon in the hand of a desperate woman. Clobbered Christine, left her lying on the floor — God, had she killed Tracy Kilbourne and thrown her into the Sawgrass River?

The telephone rang.

Bloom.

They had found her.

I went into the kitchen and snatched the receiver from the wall phone.

“Hello?” I said.

“Dad?”

“Hello, honey, how are you?”

“Okay,” Joanna said. “I guess.”

“What are you doing?”

“Watching television. Mom went to dinner with Oscar the Bald.”

“Anything good on?”

“Is there ever?” She hesitated. “Dad,” she said, “what’d you find out?”

“About what, honey?”

“About... you know... the school.”

“Oh yeah, right,” I said.

“I won’t have to go away, will I, Dad?”

Dr. Pearson had mentioned that I was doing Sarah a great disservice by supporting her delusion. Should I now support Joanna’s hope that she would not be sent away to school in the fall? Should I become the White Knight she desperately wished I could be?

“Dad?” she said. “Did you work it out?”

She was fourteen years old.

I took a deep breath.

“Honey,” I said, “I’ll talk to your mother, of course, but—”

“I thought you might have talked to her already.”

“I did. And both Frank and I went over the separation agreement...”

“Well, what do you mean, ‘talk’ to her, then?”

“Talk to her again. But, honey, if she’s intent on sending you away—”

“Don’t say it, Dad.”

“Joanna... there’s nothing on earth I can do to stop her.”

“Aw shit, Dad!” she said, and hung up.

I looked at the telephone receiver. I sighed heavily. I debated calling her back, but instead I put the receiver back on the cradle and went out into the living room again. I turned on the pool lights. Outside, a mild breeze rattled the palms. I felt lonelier than I ever had in my life.

I thought about Sarah again, out there someplace.

“How old is Joanna?”

“Fourteen.”

“Oh my. Almost a woman.”

“Almost.”

“What color hair does she have?”

“Would you mind telling me what this fascination with hair is?”

“Well, your wife Susan had brown hair...”

“Still does.”

“And your girlfriend Aggie had black hair...”

“Yes?”

“So what color hair does your daughter have?”

“Blonde.”

“Ah. Like me.”

“Yes.”

“Is she pretty?”

“I think she’s beautiful.”

“Do you think I’m beautiful?”

“I think you’re very beautiful.”

“Am I more beautiful than Joanna?”

“You’re both very beautiful.”

“Who else do I have to worry about?”

“You don’t have to worry about anyone.”

“Not even Joanna?”

“Of course not. I want you to meet her one day. Once this is all over with...”

“Oh, I’d love to meet her!”

I remembered her kiss.

Fierce... urgent... angry... passionate.

“You’d better be true to me, Matthew.”

The telephone rang again.

I carried my martini glass into the kitchen and picked up the receiver.

Joanna was sobbing.

“How can you do this to me?” she said.

“Honey, if there were any way in the world—”

“Why’d you sign something that gave Mom the right to—”

“Now you sound like Frank,” I said.

“This isn’t funny, Dad!” Joanna warned.

“I know it isn’t. But, sweetie—”

“Yeah, sweetie, sure,” Joanna said, sobbing.

“I’ll talk to her again, I really will. I’m sure she doesn’t want you going that far away, either.”

“You’re both trying to get rid of me, is what it is,” Joanna said.

“Honey, we both love you to death.”

“I’ll bet,” she said.

“We’ll talk it over,” I said. “We’ll try to work something out.”

“Uh-huh.”

“We will, darling.”

“You promise you’ll work something out?”

“No, I can’t promise that, Joanna. But I promise I’ll do my best.”

“Okay,” she said, and sighed.

But she had stopped sobbing.

“You all right now?” I asked.

“I suppose.” She was silent for a moment. Then she said, “I hate Oscar the Bald. Do you think that’s why Mom wants me to go away to Massachusetts? So she can be alone with him?”

“Honey,” I said, “would you want to be alone with Oscar the Bald?”

Joanna burst out laughing.

“I’ll talk to her, okay?” I said.

“Okay,” she said. “Thanks, Dad, I love you a lot.”

“I love you, too,” I said.

“G’night,” she said, and hung up.

I went back into the living room. I sat in one of the easy chairs facing the pool, and drained my martini glass. I debated mixing another one. I decided against it. I wished with all my heart that Joanna could be here with me tonight — but of course I had signed that goddamned settlement agreement.

“Joanna lives with her mother. The way I used to live with my mother. Isn’t that right, Matthew?”

“Yes.”

“Where do they live, anyway, Matthew?”

“Out on Stone Crab Key.”

“Will we be passing the house?”

“No, no.”

“Pity, I wanted to see it I feel I know her already. Your daughter. You did promise I’d meet her one day, Matthew. You haven’t forgotten that, have you?”

I had not forgotten it.

But I doubted now that Sarah would ever meet my daughter.

The telephone rang again.

I went into the kitchen and picked up the receiver.

“Dad?”

Joanna’s voice. High and hysterical.

“Dad, there’s somebody in the yard!”

“What?”

“Can you get here right—”

And suddenly there was the sound of splintering glass.

“Daddy!” she shouted.

Silence.

And someone replaced the receiver with a small, deadly click.

“Joanna has blonde hair, like mine... Daddy’s bimbo was blonde, too, you know... Or so they tell me. She was supposed to be blonde, isn’t that right, Chris? My daddy’s bimbo? Isn’t she supposed to be blonde in my alleged delusion?”

Daddy’s bimbo was blonde, and my daughter was blonde, and I was Sarah’s shining White Knight.

She knew my former wife’s name. “Do you call her Susan or Sue or Suzie?” And she knew my daughter lived with Susan on Stone Crab Key. “Where do they live, anyway, Matthew?” And Susan was listed in the phone book.

I made it out to Stone Crab in ten minutes flat.

The house was dark.

Beyond the house, the sun was staining the sky and the gulf a red as deep as blood. I could hear the pounding of the distant surf as I got out of the Ghia and started running up the driveway. Susan’s car — the Mercedes-Benz that used to be ours before the divorce — was gone. Susan was out to dinner with Oscar Untermeyer, but never in a million years would she have gone to pick him up. The car was gone. The glass panels on the kitchen door were shattered, and the door stood wide open.

I was not often made welcome in this house since the divorce. Normally, whenever I picked up Joanna, I parked outside and honked the horn. But I knew this house like the back of my own hand, and I went into the kitchen and immediately found the light switch, and turned on the lights, and yelled “Joanna!”

No answer.

I ran through the house, turning on lights ahead of me, shouting my daughter’s name.

The house was empty.

I went back into the kitchen.

The spare keys were kept on an ornate brass twelve-hook key rack Susan and I had bought in Florence in happier times.

I had personally fastened the rack to the side of one of the kitchen cabinets.

The rack was still there.

The spares to the Mercedes should have been on a key chain I had bought at Ludlow’s Car Wash, an enameled thing with the Mercedes crest on it.

The spares were gone.

I was reaching for the wall phone when I saw the high-heeled sandal on the living room carpet.

Sarah’s sandal.

There was blood on the heel.

There was blood on the living room carpet.

I snatched the receiver from the hook.

A knife rack was on the counter under the telephone.

The biggest knife was missing from the rack.

A French chef’s knife.

I looked quickly at the drainboard near the sink.

No knife on it.

My hand was trembling as I dialed Bloom’s number at Calusa Public Safety.

“Stay there,” he told me.

I did not stay there.

As I ran up the driveway to my car, I saw another sandal lying on the gravel.

Snow White was barefoot now.

Barefoot Snow White had my former wife’s car... and my daughter... and a French chef’s knife.

And I thought I knew where she was headed.

“There’s the bird sanctuary. Have you ever been there, Matthew?”

“Once. With Joanna. When she was younger.”

“Nice in there.”

On the sole occasion of my visit to the bird sanctuary, my former wife, Susan, did not accompany me and my daughter. She said that birds, like bats, could get tangled in a woman’s hair. At the time, I harbored the perhaps unfair suspicion that she was also fearful they might fly up under her sacrosanct skirts.

My previous visit to the bird sanctuary had been during the day.

I had held Joanna’s sticky little hand in mine.

Hawks had circled against the sky.

Now it was night.

My car headlights picked up the letters burned into the beam over the entrance:

A sign on one of the entrance posts read:

The chain that should have been fastened from post to post across the entrance had been unhooked from the post on the right and now lay on the dirt road leading into the park.

I drove over the chain.

I had read the Jane Doe/Tracy Kilbourne file, and I had a vague idea of where her body had been found. A boat dock from which hourly excursions ran along the river was situated some twelve miles from the entrance gate, and the body had washed ashore some five miles past that, near what was identified in the file as Ranger Station Number 3. I checked my odometer the moment I passed through the entrance gate.

I imagined eyes watching me from the undergrowth. Alligator eyes. I thought I could hear the secret rustling of feathered wings in the branches of the trees.

My headlights thrust tunnels of illumination into the blackness ahead.

The dirt road wound through palmetto and mangrove, oak and pine.

An owl hooted.

I could hear the river now.

Gently rushing through the stillness of the night.

I looked at the odometer again.

I had come eight-point-six miles from the entrance gate.

I drove hunched over the wheel, hypnotized by the headlight beams.

Had she brought Joanna here?

If not here, then where?

The boat dock now, on the right, my odometer reading twelve-point-two miles from the entrance gate. Another rustic wooden sign, letters burned into it:

If the police report was accurate, I would find Ranger Station Number 3 five miles past the dock. If Sarah had brought Joanna here...

I did not want to think beyond finding the ranger station.

It loomed in my headlights suddenly, seventeen-point-four miles on the odometer, a wooden structure that looked like an oil rig. I stopped the car.

The sign fastened to one of the lower cross beams read:

Silence.

To the right of the scaffolding, a single-lane dirt road angled off into the woods.

I could hear the sound of the river again.

I turned the Ghia onto the road.

I had driven no more than six-tenths of a mile when I saw the headlight beams ahead. My heart lurched into my throat.

Joanna was lying motionless on the matted undergrowth in front of the Mercedes-Benz.

Sarah was standing over her, the French chef’s knife in her right hand.

Her yellow dress was stained with blood.

Her bare legs were scratched and bleeding.

She turned as I got out of the car.

Our headlight beams clashed like drawn swords.

“Sarah,” I said.

“No,” she said.

“Sarah,” I said, “give me the knife.”

She took a step toward me. The Benz headlights silhouetted her long legs in the bloodstained yellow dress. The Ghia beams hit the knife in her hand, set it glistening and slithering with light as if it were alive.

“I’m not Sarah,” she said.

Her eyes were wide. In the glow of the headlights they seemed entirely white. No pupils. Wide and white and unseeing.

She was moving toward me now.

“Snow White,” I said quickly, “give me the—”

“Oh no,” she said, “no, my dear, it’s Rose Red, didn’t you know? Rose Red!” she screamed, and came at me with the knife.

I had never known such brute strength in my life.

I do not know how long we struggled there in the crossed beams of the headlights. I heard — and this time it was not imagined — the shrieking of birds in the mangroves, Sarah’s own shrieking as she tried repeatedly to plunge the knife into my chest, my hands locked onto her wrist, fitful shadows flitting over the ground and onto the branches of the trees, “Blood red!” she screamed, “Rose Red!” she screamed, the knife going for my throat, my face, my chest again, “Rose Red, Rose Red!” she screamed again and again, and moved against me with such force that my right hand momentarily lost its grip.

We stood locked in a deadly, one-armed embrace in the crossed beams of the headlights, my left hand clamped onto her right wrist as she flailed at me with the knife, raw power trembling through her right arm, her lips skinned back over her teeth. Our eyes met. I was staring into the face of a madwoman.

“Yes, die,” she said, and more strength than I thought she had left surged through her arm as the knife came at my throat.

I punched her in the face.

I hit her as hard as I’ve ever hit anyone in my life.

It was the first time I had ever struck a woman.

She collapsed with a small whimper.

I stood over her, breathing heavily.

And then I began to cry.