The Mangrove Coast

4

In terms of male behavior, the story of the Calloways is so unfortunately commonplace that you have to wonder about the validity of the human male as a lifetime mate. When Frank gave up his psychology practice, his land syndicate business blossomed, then it boomed. He kept his old secretary, a woman named Betty Marsh, and hired a second secretary to handle the growing workload. She was a twenty-seven-year-old former art student by the name of Capricia Worthington, “Cappy” for short, which Frank allowed a nautical interpretation, and so his name of endearment for her became Skipper.

“I don’t know when the affair started,” Amanda told me. “I didn’t see much of Mom and Frank before the split up because my job keeps me so busy. I’m district manager for Vita Tech, a medical supply company. We’re based outside Pompano Beach, just south of Deerfield, and I’m almost always on the road. That, plus I share a condo with a girlfriend-a pretty nice place north of Lauderdale called Sea Ranch Lakes-so it’s not like I got by their house much.

“But I remember this one time I was over there for dinner and Frank had this moony, distracted look. Like he had to really force himself to pay attention to what my mom or me said. Something else is, he gave Mom a couple of very pointed, well-disguised cuts about weight she’d gained and something about the way her skin looked, wrinkles, I think. My mom loves to lay out in the sun.

“He’s very good at stuff like that, making criticism sound like it’s some harmless observation or a joke, but he really means it, and he knows how to make it hurt, too.”

I asked, “Was it unusual for him to criticize your mother?”

“About her actual physical appearance, yeah. She’s so beautiful, that’s what he loved about her. In every other way, though, he was a very demanding person. The way she dressed, the way she spoke, the way she hosted a dinner party. Frank was always in control, and he let her know it.

“He was never loud or vicious, but just sharp enough to make his point stick. Oh yeah-that night, he made some remark about her being too old to do something. Learn to play tennis, I think, but he gave it a sexual connotation, as if to imply she was letting him down in the romance department. I didn’t say anything, but I felt like smacking him. My mom’s so damn sensitive, I knew she’d spend the next couple of weeks eating nothing but lettuce and carrots and fretting about the way she looked. Yeah, she’d gained a little weight. She was forty-four years old, for God’s sake. But Frank didn’t like it, so he had to let her know it and, at the time, I remember thinking, Uh-oh, this marriage is in trouble.”

It was indeed.

Frank moved out and rented a penthouse beach condo just across from Bahia Mar Marina, Lauderdale. Capricia Worthington moved in.

“I met Skipper three or four months after the divorce was final. Frank was having a house built for her at Boca Grande. New life, new home, new ocean, that was the thinking, I guess. Frank was being very modern and civilized about it all, so he and his young bride invited me to dinner. I accepted out of curiosity more than anything else. What did this woman have that made Frank act like such a complete dumbass? That’s what I wanted to find out.

“So I found out. She has the body, she has the looks, but in an… artificial mall-girl kind of way. Implants and fitness classes, that kind of body. Meet her and you get the feeling that, if stores sold women, she’d be in the front window of Dillards. Something else, she’s totally New Age, but the Junior League variety, the kind that takes money to maintain. She said things like ‘The reason I prefer crystals instead of magnets when there’s a full moon is, I’m an Aries, but with Scorpio rising, so my needs and my sensitivity change just like the tides.’ The details may be off, but that’s the kind of stuff she’d say. Or she’d say, ‘I hope to do a couple of seminars in Sedona, Arizona, over the ski season and learn exactly why I’m lunar-sensitive more than solar-active.’ Buzz phrases. She uses all the newest buzz phrases. A real ditz.”

“Sedona?” I said. “I have a friend who says Sedona is a major refueling spot for alien spaceships.”

Amanda mistook the comment for sarcasm. “Seriously, Sedona’s a real place. She wants to go there and take a seminar or take a sweat lodge, one of the two. Frank, he just sat there smiling, accepting it like a complete idiot. He told me that’s what she offered him, a new way of looking at life. She’d awakened a new spirituality in him. Something like that. They’d known each other in a previous karma-Jesus, it was all I could do not to bust out laughing-and that, together, they’d discovered a mystic link to certain elements in the sea. Bottle-nosed dolphins. They are very, very big on dolphins.”

I liked the way she said that. I liked her hard-nosed rationality; was beginning to see Amanda Richardson more and more as an individual and less and less as the daughter of a long-dead friend.

She was still talking about the new wife; didn’t like her, but I also got the impression that part of it, maybe a lot of it, was jealousy. “My God, listening to Skipper, it really was a struggle to keep a straight face. But Frank, this guy I’d always known to be damn near cold-blooded when it came to logic or business or anything like that, was sitting there sipping a fine cabernet telling me he and his new squeeze had been talking to Flipper. The way he was behaving, it was like aliens had come down from Mars and taken over his body or something.”

I said, “When people go through big changes, they sometimes stop thinking rationally.”

“It sounds like you speak from experience.”

“I do my share of dumb things. I’ve gone through periods where I seem to specialize in the behavior. But I’m usually rational.”

“There was a time when I could say the same thing about my stepfather.”

“Then I don’t understand it.”

“Yeah, well, you haven’t met Skipper. Frank was thinking with his testicles, trust me.” She paused for a moment; gave me an amused look. “Tell me something, Dr. Ford. You’re a biologist, one of those solid, mild-mannered, UP-front guys. It’s practically stenciled on your forehead. And Frank can’t be more than seven or eight years older than you. So why is it that middle-aged men confuse immaturity with youth? Or is it just that an aging brain starts shrinking before the rest of a man’s body?”

She gave it a light touch, but there was some anger down in there deep, the same place her thirty-second rule came from.

Thinking, Me? Mild-mannered? I said, “So your stepfather’s not the only one in the family who knows how to make cutting remarks.”

“It wasn’t aimed at you, just an overall observation.”

“Men in general, huh?”

“They do seem to be fairly predictable. Not all, but most. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not gay, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

“I wasn’t wondering. I was commenting on your attitude.” When I saw her expression condense, I added quickly, “Not criticizing. Just commenting.”

“You didn’t see how devastated my mom was when Frank left. Like I told you, she was dependent on him. I’d moved out, then he moved out. So there she is, forty-some years old, overweight and a dud in bed according to the husband who abandoned her, living all alone. This beautiful woman, probably the kindest person I’ve ever met, and I’m not saying that just because I’m her daughter. She was hurt, disillusioned, she was depressed and vulnerable as hell. A perfect target for any wandering asshole who wanted to take advantage of her. You expect me to be happy about that?”

“Are you talking about the guy she disappeared with or someone else?”

Amanda said, “I’m talking about him, yeah, that’s exactly the guy I’m describing. Jackie Merlot, the one I’m telling you about.”

According to Amanda, Gail had met Merlot years ago. She pronounced it “MUR-lowe,” similar to the pronunciation of the wine. At about the same time, Gail also started seeing Calloway as her psychologist. “Apparently, Mom knew Merlot back when the two of us still lived alone. I say apparently because I can’t remember ever seeing the guy until about eleven months ago. When I did meet him, just looking at him, something about his face, those eyes, it gave me the creeps. Jesus, talking about him gives me goosebumps right now. See?”

I looked at the freckled arm extended toward me. When I touched my fingers to her forearm-there were, indeed, goosebumps-she flinched slightly, saying, “Merlot was supposedly one of Frank’s earliest land syndicate investors. I think he and my mom met through Frank at some party or something, got to be friends, but once she started to date Frank, Merlot vanished from the picture.”

Nearly twenty years later, Merlot had reappeared.

“I don’t know how he heard about the divorce. Maybe he read it in the paper or something, but only a couple of weeks after the thing was final, Merlot was back on the scene. Mom had been living by herself for more than a year by that time. Frank and his soulmate bimbo were a public item, not even trying to hide the fact they were living together. He’d even gone to the trouble of making a full confession to my mom about his affair. About why he’d outgrown the relationship and why he hoped they’d be friends, but their life as husband and wife were over, because he needed space to grow and he’d met an old spirit probably from another lifetime, meaning Skipper. Can you imagine someone as nice as my mom sitting there listening to this bullshit? Also that he wished her well, but that she had to go on and find a new life. Nice guy, huh?”

“Kind of surprising behavior for a psychologist.”

“Yeah, it’s like little Skipper had actually screwed the man’s brains loose. But you know what gets me most of all? Frank really is a pretty nice guy. That’s one of the reasons it hurt my mom so much. She wasn’t just dependent on him, she liked him. He took care of her, he made her laugh. About a month after Frank left, she told me the whole story. The both of us just sat there holding each other and crying.”

I was sitting at the galley table, drinking iced tea, listening. I could look across the water to the row of guide slips, each with its own ornate wooden sign. Name of captain, name of skiff. At the end of the T-dock was Janet Mueller’s bright blue houseboat moored snugly among the more expensive sailboats, Aquasports, Makos and fiberglass party cruisers. Curled up on the stern deck of Janet’s boat was the marina’s black cat, Crunch amp; Des. His tail was slapping rhythmically in sunlight. He looked as predatory and as bored as some of the big lions I’d seen years ago while working in Mozambique.

Thinking about Mozambique, the way its jungle rose as a green bluff out of the mud of the Zambezi River, caused me to think about the small Central American nation of Masagua. Similar jungle, similar earth odors, similar rustred rivers. It also caused me to think about Pilar Balserio.

I said to Amanda, “I’ve read that losing a lover is like having someone die. Someone you care about. When a relationship ends, they say you have to go through a mourning period.”

“Well… my mom certainly did that. She’s a very sensitive person. If there’s a commercial on television that uses a dog or a baby, she gets teary eyed. It used to drive me nuts, but that’s just the way she is. When I was growing up, all my girlfriends absolutely loved her. Same with the boyfriend I had in high school. The two of them still stay in touch. At least, they stayed in touch before she met Merlot. See, I’m telling you about the kind of person my mother is. She’s very caring and extremely thoughtful. You need to understand that to understand why I’m positive she’s in some kind of trouble.”

According to Amanda, Merlot began by telephoning her mother regularly, checking on her, then dropping by to bring her books or little presents. Gail Richardson was lonely, depressed, and she welcomed the friendship.

“This was after they’d spent quite a bit of time getting reacquainted on the Internet.”

I said, “What?”

“You know, the Internet, the America Online thing. You don’t have a computer?”

“No.”

“I thought everyone had a PC. But you know how it works, right?”

I nodded. Tomlinson had told me about it.

“Mom and Merlot did a bunch of E-mailing, visiting the same chat rooms, that sort of stuff. Conversations through cyberspace. Merlot in his house, Mom in our old place, which is why it always seems so safe having on-line friends. I guess the two of them spent a lot of time getting reacquainted, just typing away.

“After a while, they had their own Internet friends, their own little circle, people she’d never met. This was early on she told me about the Internet stuff, back when she was still open about her relationship with Merlot. Like I told you, the Internet stuff always seems so harmless.”

“Your mother’s good with computers?”

“No. You don’t have to be good with computers to work the Internet. She was just lonely, that’s all. She’d be online almost every night. I know, ‘cause I’d always get a busy signal when I tried to call. Finally, I talked her into getting a second line.”

“She spent that much time.”

“Yeah. What else did she have to do?”

“And always with Merlot?”

“Not at first. I spend my share of time on-line. I’ve got E-mail friends all over the world, so Mom and I used to jabber away to each other. For some reason… it’s hard to explain… but there are certain subjects that are easier to write about than talk about. So that’s what we’d do. Write notes back and forth about all kinds of stuff. She’d write about the way it was between her and my real dad, and I’d write about… well, private stuff, the way I felt about things.”

“So what happened?”

“What happened was she got involved with a different group of E-mail friends. I wasn’t a part of it. And I think she had an on-line crush on some guy from California. She never told me that, but if my mom mentions a guy more than twice, I know she has some feelings for him. I warned her about telling strangers too much about herself. I mean, no one really knows who anyone else is on the Internet. Right?”

I didn’t reply. I had never been on the Internet. I had a phone. Sanibel’s good little library and the post office were just down the shell road. What did I need with the Internet?

She was still talking about it. “Like the guy she was E-mailing, the guy who she said was from California. He could have been anyone. Like a ninety-year-old man from Jamaica. Or maybe not a man at all, but a woman. Or maybe some kinky teenager who lived two houses away. People can say anything about themselves. And there’s no way of knowing.”

“Did she say how Merlot found her on-line?”

“No. Just that she’d been E-mailing an old friend who’d been very kind and helpful to her. Her saying that, I think it was her way of telling me that she was going to start dating again. Mom and Frank were couples people. The only people they socialized with were married couples, so Merlot was one of the few single men in the picture. But every time I asked about him, my mom insisted that she had no romantic interest. Just that he was very kind to her, someone to talk to. So I figured, fine, that’s exactly what she needs. A friend.”

But Amanda’s opinion changed when she finally met Merlot. “I stopped by Mom’s house one afternoon. I hadn’t called ahead and he was there, the two of them sitting out by the pool. Have you ever surprised someone doing something they shouldn’t be doing? That’s the way Merlot reacted. I could see his expression change when I walked in, surprised like he was ready to jump up and hide. I couldn’t figure out why. They were both fully dressed, they weren’t even sitting that close together, but I still had the feeling I’d interrupted something. Not from my mom. She was happy to see me, perfectly at ease. But from him, he was very nervous, lots of shifting around in his chair and the kind of eye contact where someone’s searching your face for a reaction.

“He recovered pretty fast, though. After that, he was as nice and charming as he could be. He’d been saving a couple of presents for me. A hat and a T-shirt from some rock group he claimed to be associated with. And he made sure that I was the focus of conversation. But even if he’d have reacted differently when I walked in, I don’t think I’d have trusted the guy. He’s got all the social skills and he’s very, very smooth. Too smooth. He’s a hugger and a cheekkisser, one of those feel-good people who’s great at a wedding or a dinner party, but there was something odd about him. Just looking at him made me feel… dirty? No, that’s a little strong. But creepy, yeah. Something about Jackie Merlot… just wasn’t right.”

Amanda said she didn’t tell her mother about her negative reaction to Merlot because she didn’t think it was necessary. Gail Richardson insisted that Merlot just wanted to be friends and that she had absolutely no romantic interest in the man.

“I believed her. Up to that point, I don’t think she’d ever lied to me in her life. She needed friends and I wasn’t about to interfere. Besides, I never in a million years imagined that someone who looked like Merlot could get to first base with my mom. The man is more than just unattractive, he’s actually kind of disgusting.”

I said, “Oh?”

“Picture a mound of mashed potatoes or a very large marshmallow with the face of a teenage boy attached. Hairless and cheeky, that kind of face. Add one of those tiny, round mouths you sometimes see; one of those rosebud Irish mouths, then stick a blond toupee on top and razor-cut it smooth. You know, a disco haircut from the seventies. I don’t know why it’s blond, because he looks like he might have a little bit of something else in him. Asian? I don’t know, something. Eastern European maybe. But that’s Jackie Merlot. And he’s big. Huge, actually. One of those really freakish oversized men.

“But the way he moves, the way he looks, he seems far more feminine than masculine. When he walks, he takes small, quick steps, almost like he’s dancing, and he has the kind of high, gravelly voice that I associate with large women who smoke a lot or who are very overweight.” She paused for a moment, thinking about it before she added, “So make it two reasons I didn’t think Merlot had a chance with my mom. Physically, he was way too unappealing, plus I also figured he was gay. He seemed so… safe.

“Turns out,” she said, “he wasn’t.”

By the time it was obvious that Gail Calloway and Merlot were involved in a physical relationship, it was too late for Amanda to tell her mother about her gut reaction to the man. Not that she didn’t try to tell her.

She did.

But it was too late to carry much influence. Merlot had a hold on her by then.

“It’s the only way I can describe it,” Amanda told me. “He had a powerful hold on her that just kept getting stronger and stronger. When I asked her why she was interested in Merlot, her answer actually gave me chills. Her exact words were, ‘Because he thinks I’m pretty. He buys me presents and he says the nicest things to me.’

“Doc, my mother is not a shallow person. Besides, she’s a fairly wealthy woman on her own. Frank and the courts saw to that. The way she said it, ‘He buys me presents,’ her voice had this robot kind of little-girl quality that scared the hell out of me. ‘He thinks I’m pretty.’ My God, like all the confidence she’d once had had been destroyed when Frank split.

“I’m no spoiled little brat. I don’t have to approve of the man my mother dates, but there was something… weird?… yeah, something weird about this guy. It really bothered me. Another thing was, the more she saw of Merlot, the more distant she became toward me. Same with her closest women friends, and she had quite a few. We almost never heard from her. That sense that something sneaky was going on-the same thing I saw in Jackie Merlot’s face the day I surprised them-I now began to hear and see in my mother. It wasn’t like her. I knew then what I’m now positive of: Merlot had control of her and, whether she knew it or not, my mom was in trouble.”

Gail Richardson began to spend weekends at Merlot’s home. Then she spent whole weeks at a time; increasingly long periods when Gail seldom made an attempt to communicate with her daughter or her friends. Amanda had the strong impression that Merlot discouraged outside contact. She saw her mother briefly in September, then again around Halloween. More than a month of silence followed before Gail finally replied to one of Amanda’s many phone messages to Merlot’s house. A few days later, Merlot had his telephone number changed.

“It was getting pretty close to Christmas by then,” Amanda said. “I didn’t know what in the world to do, so I finally broke down, called Frank and I’d told him what was going on. What scared me most of all was the sound of Frank’s voice when I told him. He recognized Merlot’s name right away and I realized that maybe, just maybe, Merlot had been a patient of Frank’s instead of an early investor like Mom had told me.”

“You say that just because of the way your stepfather reacted?”

She was nodding, very matter-of-fact. Her expression said: You’d have to know the guy to understand. “The way Frank reacts, that’s the only way you’d ever know anything from his shrink days. He takes the ethics of his old profession very seriously. It’s the only thing that explained why he sounded so damn worried.”

“When you mentioned Jackie Merlot.”

“Exactly. When I told him, what he said was, ‘Jesus Christ, no wonder your mother didn’t tell me.’ And a little bit later, he said, ‘I thought Jackie Merlot would be in a facility by now,’ and then he clammed up quick, like it had just sort of slipped out. But he was worried enough to hire a professional to have Merlot investigated, and he also offered to go with me to Merlot’s house and insist that we be allowed to speak with Mom.”

Which is just what they did.

Confronting Merlot while briefly reuniting with her mother had created an awkward, emotional scene. Amanda had a tough time telling me about it. People who shield themselves with a hard outer core do it for reasons of protection. Her voice broke several times. She drifted between tears and rage, but each time fought her way back under control.

Merlot had a rental in one of the older canal-front subdivisions off A1A, Lauderdale. That he apparently had a live-in male roommate was unexpected. Amanda described the roommate as tall, muscular, not really black but not really white, with some kind of heavy accent, maybe French or Creole.

The roommate intercepted them and refused to let them speak with Merlot or Gail Calloway. Then Merlot appeared, saying he would call the police if they didn’t leave. Frank asked to speak with Gail alone, just to confirm that she was all right. No deal. Then he asked to speak with Merlot alone. Same thing, and Merlot again threatened to call the police.

“It was the first time that I can say Frank ever really let my mother and me down. The son-of-a-bitch was ready to walk away, saying it was a legal matter or time to call a lawyer, something like that. Not that angry, just frustrated and maybe a little pissed off because we were imposing on his new life. I wouldn’t budge, though, so the police finally did come, but at least they made Merlot bring my mom to the door.

“Doc, I hardly recognized her. In the six or seven weeks since I’d seen her, she’d lost maybe fifteen pounds. She looked pale and gaunt, all eyes and hair and cheekbones. Her eyes, she’s got the most unusual eyes you’ve ever seen. One green, one blue, and I know she’s sick when her eyes get this milky, glassy look. Well, that’s just the way her eyes looked. Glassy, like she wasn’t well. She even sounded different when she spoke. What’s that word-mesmerized? That’s the way she sounded, but more like she was dazed. She came out, gave me a big hug and kiss right there in front of the cops. Then she told Frank and me that we had to stop saying all the bad things we’d been saying about Merlot.”

I interrupted and told her to explain that in a little more detail.

“My mom told us that we had to stop spreading lies about her friend Jackie.”

“She was convinced that you two had been lying about the guy?”

“Exactly.”

“Did she seem paranoid? Or as if the guy might have her on drugs or something?”

“No. She just seemed absolutely confident that Frank and I had been spreading lies about her boyfriend. She said that she knew what we’d been saying and that we had to stop because we were making ourselves look silly.”

“Had you and Frank said anything to anyone about Merlot?”

“Nothing. Yeah, we’d talked between ourselves, but we hadn’t said a damn thing to anyone else. Then she told us that she’d never been happier.”

“Judging from her voice, did she mean it?”

“I don’t think anyone was forcing her to say it. But she didn’t sound normal, either. Not like she was drunk or anything, but, like I told you, kind of in a daze. Or like she was trying real hard to show Merlot that she was a hundred percent on his side. That she was protecting him. You know the way people behave when they’re trying to let someone know they care? Like that. She said that she was living with Jackie now and they’d soon be going on a trip.”

“Did she say where?”

“I asked her, but Merlot cut her off before she could answer. As we were leaving, she kind of blurted out that it might be a while before she’d be able to call me on the phone. Because they’d be sailing and some of the ports were remote.”

“The police were still there, they heard that exchange.”

“Yeah, and it was… awful,” Amanda said. “It was like one of those nasty little scenes you see on television cop shows. Lights flashing, neighbors staring out their windows, trashy white people arguing on the sidewalk. That’s the way I felt, trashy. And helpless. Helpless because of the way my mother was behaving. You know what the worst thing was? Mom, my own mother, she believed Merlot, not me. That business about Frank and me spreading lies. It was like she’d been brainwashed or something. He’d been telling her that crap. Why? I mean, why go to the trouble? Christ, I wanted to scream I was so frustrated.

“So then the cops tell us we’ve got to leave, stop harassing the happy couple. What choice did I have? I told Mom to please call me. I couldn’t make her believe that I couldn’t call her. She didn’t even know Merlot’s number’d been changed. So Frank and I go get in the car. Mom’s standing there behind the cops. Merlot, the fat ass, he’s got his arm around Mom, his Creole roommate standing there still looking pissed off, ready to fight. You know what Merlot does then?”

“What.”

“He flashes me this smug little smile as we’re pulling away. A very private smile, him looking right into my eyes, just him and me. It was kind of like he was telling me, yeah, you’re right about the kind of person I am. But your mother doesn’t know it and no one else will ever believe it, so screw you.”

The way Amanda described it, I could picture it: the man’s eyes boring into hers, making her hate him even more, wanting her to hate him because he was enjoying it.

Slightly more than two weeks later, Amanda received a card from her mother postmarked Cartagena, Colombia. All it said was that they were aboard a forty-eight-foot sailboat and having a wonderful time. Over the following two months, she received three more cards, all of them postmarked Cartagena, all of them pleasant and very brief. They offered no return address and gave no more information than the first.

“She might have been writing to a stranger,” Amanda said. “They were that impersonal, that cold. And there wasn’t a clue about what their plans were, where they were headed.”

Amanda received the last of the three cards nearly a month before she tracked me down on Sanibel. Increasingly concerned about her mother’s well-being, she contacted the Broward County Sheriff’s Department and then the FBI. Both agencies were attentive and sympathetic, but how could they list Gail Calloway as a missing person when an official police report quoted the woman as saying that she was staying voluntarily with Jackie Merlot? Not only that, but Gail had volunteered that the two of them expected to be out of touch for a while while traveling.

“It’s quite a predicament,” I said.

“Yeah. Now you see what I mean when I say the police can’t help. And the private investigator Frank hired, he’s not going to travel out of the country to try to bring Mom back. He’d be risking his license.”

I thought about it for a moment before saying, “I’m going to tell you something that you may not want to hear. You’re assuming that your mother wants to be rescued. You need to face the possibility that your mother really is happy, that she meant exactly what she told you. She’s a grown woman. Merlot may be a bad guy, maybe the scum shyster of the earth, but it doesn’t much matter what we think. She may be doing exactly what she wants to do.”

“No, nope, I don’t think so. I know my mom. She’s in trouble. She may not know it yet, but she is.” Amanda gave it a couple of beats, looking at me before she added, “And you think so, too.”

I said, “I do?” amused by her confidence; sat there letting her know I was waiting for an explanation.

“I’ve been watching your expression, Ford, the way your eyes changed. While you were listening, I could almost see the wheels turning. You’re a smart man. You’ve been around and you’re good enough at reading people to figure I’m not the kind of person to exaggerate or to panic or go all freaky just because I don’t get my way. I’m not exactly the all-American girl, but I’m no ditz, either. And I’m not one of those adult children who can’t leave their parents. For the last five years, I’ve lived very happily on my own, thank you.

“But what I told you about my mom, it got to you. It made you mad. I could tell. There’s something very… unhealthy about Merlot’s behavior, and you know it. You and my real father were once very close friends, and the woman that he loved is in trouble. Guys like you-and I may be wrong here, but it’s the way I read it-guys like you, the straight shooters, you’re throwbacks. You take friendship seriously, and what I just told you really pisses you off. Not you personally, but in a way that offends your sense of loyalty. I may be way off base but, hey, I hope I’m right because there aren’t many people left, male or female, a person can count on. So, the question is, do you have any ideas how to find her and pry her loose from that fat bastard?”

So, along with her other good qualities, give the lady low marks for her generous, hopeful assessment of my character, but high marks for the way she read my reaction to her story.

She was right. Even though I had never met Gail Richardson Calloway, I felt fraternal and protective toward the woman to an emotional degree that I found surprising. I was also surprised to realize that Amanda’s story had filled me with an irrational dislike of a man I’d never seen, spoken with or met: Jackie Merlot. It had to do with an image that lingered in my imagination: a fat man with a boy’s face flashing a private smile at a tough, introverted girl with stringy strawberry blond tomboy hair; a man who took perverse joy in driving a wedge between a mother and a daughter.

But I was wary of my own reaction because I am wary of emotion as a motivator. Emotion is energy without structure, without reason. Emotion can be a dangerous indulgence.

I finished the last of my tea; rattled the ice cubes in my glass as I said, “What you want me to do is go to Colombia and try to find your mother. That’s the point of all this, isn’t it?”

Amanda was shaking her head. “I won’t say I didn’t come here hoping you’d offer. Yeah, that’s what I was hoping. I really was. But the main reason I came is because of the letters I found, my dad’s letters. It’s like he knew what was going to happen and he was giving me directions what to do. But I don’t expect you to try to help, Doc. Not now. Not after meeting you.”

What the hell did that mean? I said, “You just lost me.”

The girl stirred from her seat, stood away from the table and tugged at the T-shirt with its terse warning message. Through the window, near mangroves at the back entrance to the marina office, I could see Mack at the fish-cleaning table filleting a couple of pompano. Tucker Gatrell watched, yammering away. Suspended from the porch overhead was a cast net. It looked like a gigantic spider’s web. Jeth was enmeshed in the thing, carefully inspecting its elemental network, using a spool of fishing line to mend holes.

Amanda swiped a wisp of copper hair from her eyes and said, “I hoped you’d volunteer to go help my mom because of the way my dad described you. But the thing is, I pictured a… well, let’s just say I pictured a more adventurous type of guy.”

“More adventurous?” I said. “Is that right?”

“What was that line in my dad’s letter? ‘The man’s got special skills.’ He was talking about you, so I pictured one of the soldier-of-fortune types. One of the tough guys you see in films. But not somebody like you, Doc. As big as you are, I didn’t picture somebody who looks like they spend all their time reading books and looking through a microscope.”

“I like books,” I said agreeably. “And it’s true that my work requires a microscope.”

“Don’t take that the wrong way. It’s not a cut. I don’t like the macho types. Not at all, so no offense. Really.”

Listening to Amanda’s story, her tone, her tough logic, I could hear the faintest echo of a good man who was lost long ago and far away. It was a frail thin chord that was the voice of an old friend. I fought the urge to allow myself an ironic smile as I replied, “Gee, no offense taken, Amanda. Really.”

“But any advice you have to offer,” she added, “it could be very helpful.”

“Advice, sure. If I can help, you bet I’ll try.”

“I’ll give you my number in Lauderdale. If you have any ideas, you can give me a call. I figure what I’ll have to do is just fly down there-Colombia, I mean, maybe get a friend to go with me-and have a look around.” The smile she then allowed me was one of those bright, meaningless smiles of dismissal; the kind of smile we all use when we are dealing with people who are attempting to sell us something we do not want, or who have not met our initial expectations.

I hoped my own bright smile mirrored hers. “Give you a call in Lauderdale, Amanda, you can count on it. Boy oh boy, I’ll give it some thought, too. Maybe try to figure out a way to locate your mom and the guy she’s traveling with. What was his name again?” Said it with false gusto, as if I hadn’t been paying attention.

“His name? You mean after listening to the whole story, you’ve already forgotten-” She stopped and eyed me closely, thinking it over.

I said, “Isn’t it handy to be able to take one look at a person and know what he’s like? And you’re so right! I’m the big, gawky, absent-minded-professor type. My brain’s so jammed with research material I just can’t seem to remember that guy’s name. The big fellow you described. Boy do I feel like a dope.”

I watched her expression: Is this an act? Then her face narrowed: Yep, it was definitely an act… but why?

“His name’s Merlot,” she said slowly.

“ Merlot. That’s right. You know, something that may account for my bad memory is when your dad and I were living over there in the jungles of Cambodia? It was almost too darn stressful. About half the time these little black-haired people were sneaking around trying to kill us. Well… I say ‘kill us,’ but what the Khmer really wanted to do was cut our heads off and carry them around on a pole. Know why?”

Her expression changed, but she didn’t answer.

“The reason they wanted to cut our heads off is because they believe a man remains conscious for nearly a minute after his head’s been severed. Which makes sense if you stop and think about it. Sure, you can’t breathe, you can’t walk, but your eyes and your brain are in the same place, right? To them, it’s like the perfect punishment. They’d cut off our heads and then position us in such a way so that the last thing we saw before we died was our own headless corpse. You talk about having a bad memory? The strain of worrying about that probably killed off some my brain cells.”

Her expression changed again. “Oh my God. You’re not exaggerating, are you?”

“Wish I was. So, yeah, I can understand why you wouldn’t trust someone like me to deal with a guy who might be taking advantage of your mother. This… what’s his name again?”

Reevaluation time: Maybe I wasn’t such a bookish, nerdish type after all. “Jackie,” she said. “Jackie Merlot.”

I was still smiling when I said, “Gee, a guy like that, I’d just love to meet.”