Without a Grave

TWENTY-TWO

CONDITIONS MODERATE RAPIDLY TODAY AS HELEN EXITS, WITH SOUTH WIND BELOW 50 KNOTS BY MID-DAY. CLEAN-UP EFFORTS CAN BEGIN STRAIGHTAWAY.Chris Parker, Wx Update, Bahamas, Sat 6, 10a

The sun came out, shining on a settlement I barely recognized.

With Justice in the lead, Paul and I straggled back to town behind Molly and Gator, weaving through piles of debris, stepping over logs, and sloshing through puddles up to our ankles. Everywhere residents were emerging, dazed and blinking from the shells of their ruined homes. Where walls remained, jagged holes stood as reminders of doors that had once welcomed visitors, or windows that had once been open to the tradewinds, flower boxes blooming, curtains gently swaying.

Golf carts, generators, and air conditioners had been picked up by the storm, whirled about and discarded, sometimes hundreds of yards from their original locations. Behind the hardware store, a delivery van had overturned; the driver’s-side door yawned open, the seat missing. Next to it lay, incredibly, one of Tamarind Tree’s tiki torches.

The Pink Store, I was relieved to see, had suffered little damage. The slats of the jalousie windows were twisted and bent, allowing water to blow into the store, but Winnie’s pharmaceutical shelf appeared to be the only casualty. The wind had toppled it, sending boxes of Tylenol, Dramamine and cold tablets tumbling, bottles of shampoo, Pepto-Bismol and Benjamin’s Balsam cough mixture, too. They lay in two inches of water on the floor, a soggy jumble.

Winnie was already at work, sweeping everything out.

‘How’d they fare up at the school?’ I asked.

She paused in mid-sweep. ‘Trying to make it.’

I turned to Gator for a translation. He waggled his hand. ‘Means so-so.’

‘Anybody hurt?’ I asked Winnie.

‘No, praise the Lord.’

A few yards down the road, Tropical Treats hadn’t fared so well. Hurricane Helen had hurled a generator through its roof. It landed smack-dab on the ice cream freezer where crushed tubs of ice cream oozed and dripped, forming multicolored puddles of ice cream soup. ‘And I was going to buy you a rum raisin cone,’ Paul teased.

I poked him in the ribs. ‘Rain check.’

The marina was worse than I feared. As it came into view, Gator grunted. His dive shack had disappeared, tie-downs and all. The dock had twisted and heaved, planks were torn away leaving gaps, like missing teeth. Some floated loose below, knocking against the pilings.

Paul, Molly and I picked our way carefully down the dock while Gator stayed behind, kicking desultorily through the debris that had been his place of business.

One sailboat had sunk. Three others were still afloat, but all had parted company with their masts. One mast leaned crookedly against a piling; another had been hurled through the window of the marina office. I stuck my head inside. File cabinets had toppled, their drawers yawned open. Papers, magazines and books lay in a sodden, pulp-like mass on the linoleum.

I worried about Gator’s boat, Deep Magic. When I’d last seen her, she’d been tied into a slip, held off the finger piers by a web of lines strung from port to starboard, like a giant cat’s cradle. Three anchors had been set off her bow. I headed in that direction, calling to Paul and Molly over my shoulder, ‘I’m going to check on Deep Magic!’

I saw Gator was already aboard his boat, grinning hugely.

I ran down the dock, cheering wildly. ‘She’s OK! She’s OK!’

Gator patted Deep Magic’s console. ‘Good old gal. Never let me down yet.’

‘Can you give us a ride back to Pro Bono?’

‘Dunno. Depends on the engine starting.’ He twisted the key and the engine sputtered, rumbled and then growled to life.

‘Where’s your dinghy?’ Paul asked, coming up behind me.

I glanced at Deep Magic’s stern, embarrassed that I hadn’t noticed. The davits were twisted and bent where they’d tried to hold on to Gator’s dinghy, but lost it in a tug of war with Helen.

Gator shrugged. ‘It’ll turn up. They always do.’

I tugged on Paul’s sleeve. ‘Do we have time to check on Wanderer?’

Gator nodded. ‘Go ahead. Things I need to do.’

‘Want to come?’ I asked Molly.

She’d plopped herself down at the end of the dock, legs dangling over the water. ‘I think I’ll stay with Gator, Sugar. I’m absolutely beat.’

‘I can’t imagine why,’ I teased.

Poor Mr Pinder! His boatyard was a disaster. One powerboat had been blown off its jacks, toppled into the next, which fell against the next… over and over they had tipped and toppled, like a giant game of dominoes. ‘This breaks my heart,’ Paul said, surveying the damage.

‘Wanderer’s not here, thank goodness,’ I told him. ‘Last time I saw her, she was in dry dock. C’mon.’ I grabbed Paul’s hand and together we managed to climb over the debris that separated the boatyard from the marine railway. The space that Wanderer had once occupied stood empty.

‘Where’s Alice in Wonderland?’ I asked one of the yard hands who was bent over, picking up wood and other debris and adding it to a big pile near a dumpster.

He straightened. ‘Jaime Mueller thought she’d be safer tied up to a mooring ball.’

‘Where?’

The yard hand pointed, but I didn’t see anything in the harbor but empty water.

The yard hand shaded his eyes and squinted. ‘Ooops. So much for safety. Doesn’t look like she made it, does it?’

Five minutes later, we boarded Deep Magic.

Gator eased his boat into the harbor, proceeding slowly, steering a careful path through the floating debris. As we cleared the marina I stood up. ‘Over there!’

Gator spun the wheel. ‘What? Where?’

‘That mast sticking out of the water. I think it’s Wanderer. I recognize the radar dome.’

As we neared the obstacle, Gator cut the throttle, drifting as close as he dared. I held on to the gunwale and peered over the side, my eyes following along the length of the mast all the way to the bottom where Wanderer indeed lay. She appeared peaceful, undamaged, as if she’d simply turned over on her side and fallen asleep. A parrot fish pecked at the transom where it said, Alice in Wonderland.

Molly leaned on the gunwale next to me, chin resting on her hands. ‘The End,’ she said, wistfully, capitalizing each word.

Gazing at the sunken boat where we’d spent so many happy hours, I said, ‘I’m not so sure about that.’

I crossed the deck and stood behind Gator as he shifted into reverse and backed Deep Magic away from Wanderer. ‘What about the mini-sub?’ I asked him.

‘What mini-sub?’ Paul wanted to know.

I explained about the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t mystery vessel. ‘Sometimes I put two and two together and come up with five, but this time I think I’m right. As weird as it seems, I think Jaime Mueller was using that submarine to run drugs. Nothing else makes sense.’

‘Something funny was definitely going on at that beach,’ Molly added. ‘You’d think it was a top-secret military base the way Mueller guarded it.’

Gator motored past the settlement dumpsters that had disgorged their contents into the harbor, picking his way carefully through floating garbage as he rounded the headland at Poinciana Point. Miraculously, Henry’s airplane seemed to have survived the blow, if you discounted the broken wing. It had been sheltered from the worst of Helen’s wrath by the trees of Poinciana Point.

‘I’m having flashbacks,’ Paul said as we neared the plane. He shivered.

I took his hand and squeezed three times: I. Love. You.

With Gator at the controls, Deep Magic nosed in, eased out, nosed in as we searched the water around the Savage Cub for the blue mini-sub.

‘Gone,’ I said at last. ‘Do you think it’s been swept out to sea by the storm?’

Gator shook his head. ‘Not if that plane wasn’t. That mini-sub’s gone, someone drove it out of here.’

‘Well, lookey-lookey!’ Molly caroled in my ear.

I followed her gaze. Whatever had been in the Kelchner’s cottage had disappeared, too. Nothing but a cinderblock foundation remained. Everything else was gone, gone with the wind.

We were heading back to find Pro Bono when I noticed something floating off Poinciana Point. At first I thought it was a tree limb, or a piling. I blinked, refocused, but still couldn’t turn it into a piling. ‘Paul, what’s that?’

‘Part of the airplane?’ He shrugged. ‘There could be anything floating out here about now. Even a body.’

Paul was joking, but as Gator edged closer, I saw that it was a body, floating face down, arms splayed.

Gator noticed it about the same time I did. ‘Bite your tongue, Ives.’ He guided Deep Magic closer, cut the engine, and coaxed the boat sideways until the body lay along the starboard side. ‘I’ll need a boat hook.’

Paul pulled a boat hook from the rack and handed it over.

I watched as Gator used it to hook the victim by the belt. ‘Help me, Paul.’

‘You want to lift him into the boat?’

‘No. I want to turn him over.’

Leaning carefully over the side, the two men tugged and pushed until the body rolled slowly over. Looking up into the sky with sightless eyes was what was left of Jaime Mueller.

I gasped, sat back. It wasn’t out of surprise at the identity of the victim – I had been half expecting that. It was because Jaime’s entire left leg had been torn off at the hip.

Gator buried his face in his hands. ‘Shit, man. I counted heads. Thought he’d made it back after the eye. Drowning’s a helluva way to die.’

‘This is the last time I go out boating with you, Gator Crockett,’ Molly scolded. ‘Every time I do, we turn up a body.’

‘The police…’ I began.

‘I hear you,’ Gator said.

I took a deep, shuddering breath. ‘We just can’t leave him here.’

‘We can in a way.’ He passed the boat hook to Paul. ‘Here. Hang on to him for a minute.’

While Deep Magic bobbed erratically on the restless sea and Paul tried to hold on, Gator went rummaging in the box where he kept his equipment, coming up a few minutes later with a dinghy anchor. He made a rope fast to the anchor, then looped the other end through Jaime’s belt and tied it securely. Then he threw the anchor overboard.

‘Now we call in the pros,’ he said, picking up his microphone. ‘Dive Guana, Dive Guana, this is Deep Magic. Come in Troy.’

Jaime Mueller’s would be one of five bodies claimed by Hurricane Helen. Found floating by a fisherman off Poinciana Point. Sharks may have contributed to Mr Mueller’s deathThe Abaconian would report.

But, I had seen the fury, the tears in Alice’s eyes.

I knew that Jaime was dead before he even hit the water.

Whoever recommended the mangrove was right on the money. Except for minor scrapes, Pro Bono had survived. In a matter of minutes we untied all the lines, climbed aboard and with a farewell wave to Gator, headed back to Bonefish Cay.

Molly’s dock was canted up and missing some planks, but still useable. Likewise ours, although we’d lost our favorite bench from the end of the pier. Branches, palm fronds, coconuts, even whole bushes, littered both yards and trash would continue to wash up on the shore for weeks. Paul hurried to check on his pet banana tree and when I heard him cheer, I knew it, too, had survived.

Inside the house, it was if the storm never happened. ‘Molly was right,’ I told my husband. ‘These houses are bulletproof. We should have stayed here.’ I pawed though Mother Hubbard’s cupboard, checking each can, looking for something that might do for dinner.

Paul opened the refrigerator, but there was no light to greet him. No milk, no cheese, no leftover spaghetti, no ice for his Bahama Mama. The corners of his mouth turned down in a pout, purely phony. ‘I guess it’s time for me to set up that generator.’

Before she left the island and the battered Tamarind Tree Resort and Marina, I paid a call on Gabriele. She met me in the dining room where a simple cold lunch was being served to the worker bees she’d hired to put the place in order.

‘Soft drink?’ she asked. ‘Our kitchen isn’t yet open.’

‘A Coke if you have one.’

We sat in lounge chairs by the side of the pool, which had been drained. Workers swarmed around in the deep end, shoveling debris out of the bottom and putting it in plastic sacks.

‘I’m sorry about Jaime,’ I said.

‘Thank you. He wasn’t much of a brother, but in my own way, I loved him.’

I took a sip from my can. ‘I’d like to talk to Alice. I promised her lunch, but looking around here, I think it will have to be at my place.’

Gabriele blinked and looked away. ‘We sent her home to Texas. Jaime’s death came as a great shock.’

I’ll bet. There were only two people who knew what really happened on that headland overlooking Poinciana Cove during the eye of the storm. Alice was one, and the other one was dead.

‘During the storm, Alice hinted that she might be pregnant,’ I said.

‘She is. Due in April.’

‘That should be a comfort to her, don’t you think?’

‘Al vivo la hogaza y al muerto, la mortaja, Papa says. Live by the living, not the dead.’

I sat quietly for a while, thinking. My late mother would have agreed with Rudolph Mueller.

‘Did Alice take the dog with her?’ I asked.

‘Beckham?’ Gabriele smiled sadly. ‘Yes, yes, of course. The paperwork was a nightmare, but she wouldn’t be separated from Beckham.’

There didn’t seem to be anything left to say, so I wrote my address on a napkin and extracted a promise from Gabriele that she’d give it to Alice the next time she saw her.

‘One thing else, Gabriele. Promise me you’ll take care of Alice?’

She considered me with cool green eyes, nodded, and walked away.

I invited Molly for dinner. Afterwards, we sat on the porch, sharing a chocolate bar by candlelight.

‘We’ve worked it all out, haven’t we, Molly.’

Molly put a square of chocolate in her mouth and licked her fingers. ‘You should write a book, Hannah.’

Paul lay in the hammock, only half listening, I was sure. ‘Worked out what?’

‘Jaime Mueller was running drugs,’ I said. ‘The plane would fly in from Colombia or somewhere, they’d off-load the drugs into the mini-sub and toodle over to the United States. Underwater.’

‘Way under the radar,’ Molly added. ‘I saw it on CNN. The Coast Guard and the Navy are making it so difficult for boats and planes to get through that drug smugglers are turning to submarines.’

‘Right. Jaime was the kingpin. The late Craig Meeks, Jeremy Thomas and maybe even trigger-happy Kyle were his accomplices.’

‘Who…?’ Paul began.

I held up my hand, still holding the chocolate bar. ‘Wait a minute. I’m coming to that. When Frank did that underwater dive, he saw the sub. Maybe he even watched it go out. Trouble was, Jaime saw him, too. So I suspect Craig and Jaime murdered Frank and Sally and stashed their bodies under the lobster trap.’

‘And after he sailed Wanderer back to Hawksbill Cay,’ Molly added, ‘Jaime bumped off Craig Meeks.’

‘Wait a minute,’ Paul wanted to know. ‘Why would Jaime kill Craig?’

‘Maybe Craig was OK with the drugs, but not with the killing?’ I shrugged. ‘Anyway, I figure he killed Craig to keep him from talking. Set his body on fire so it looked like the poor sap died in the wildfire. That’s why he was so eager to volunteer. Ugh.’

Molly chimed in. ‘But Jaime kept Sally’s ring, and the dog Duffy, and gave them to Alice.’

‘Right…’

‘Now that’s what I don’t understand,’ Paul cut in. ‘Stealing Wanderer and trying to cover it up was dim-witted enough, but holding on to the dog and that ring was just as good as saying, “Hey, look! I killed those people.”’

‘Yes, except Jaime never expected the bodies to be found. When they were, he panicked. Alice told me he asked for the ring back, but she refused.

‘As for Duffy,’ I continued, ‘Jaime probably thought a dog is a dog is a dog, until he discovered the microchip under Duffy’s skin.’ I paused long enough to pass the chocolate bar around again. ‘And then poor Duffy had to go, too. Alice told me Jaime threatened to throw the dog off Poinciana Point during the eye of the hurricane, but I think Jaime went over instead.’

Paul rolled on to his side, setting the hammock swinging. ‘She killed her husband over a dog?’

I shook my head. ‘It took me a while to put it together, but earlier in the week Gabriele mentioned that Alice had been under the weather. Then something Alice said during the hurricane finally clicked. “He said I couldn’t keep it.” At first I thought she was talking about the ring. Now that I know she’s pregnant, I’m pretty sure Jaime was pressuring his wife to have an abortion.’

Paul climbed out of the hammock and came to sit on the bench beside me. ‘The boat, the ring, the dog. It beats me how Jaime could be so stupid.’

‘Guys like Jaime think they’re above the law, like they’re born with a get-out-of-jail-free-card clutched in their chubby little hands.’

Paul shook his head. ‘But still…’

I raised a hand. ‘Why would Michael Vick risk a multimillion-dollar career with the NFL by staging illegal dog fights?’

‘I read it in the News & Observer,’ Molly said. ‘A twenty-two pit bull operation.’

I covered my mouth with my hand. ‘Eeeuw!’ Then forged on. ‘And there’s hotel maven, Leona Helmsley, who believed that paying taxes was only for “the little people”.’

Next to me Paul was nodding vigorously. ‘Martha Stewart went to jail because she wanted to save a measly seventy-five thou.’

‘I rest my case,’ I said.

‘Can we back up a minute?’ Paul asked. ‘Who’s Jeremy?’

‘He’s one of the staffers at Tamarind Tree,’ Molly explained. ‘He was around when the hurricane started, and he went out during the eye, but we didn’t see him at all afterwards. Gabriele came around looking for him.’

‘So, if Jeremy is gone and the mini-sub is gone…’

I threw my hands in the air. ‘Case solved!’

‘Not exactly,’ Molly added.

‘Oh, yeah. I forgot to mention that Gator notified the Coast Guard to be on the lookout for the sub. But if Jeremy was dumb enough to take it out in the middle of a hurricane, it’s unlikely either he or the submarine will ever be found.’

‘Did Gabriele Mueller know what her brother was up to?’ Paul wondered.

‘I don’t think Gabriele knew, or Alice either. I’m not so sure about Jaime’s dad. He might have known, but simply looked the other way.’

‘With Jaime gone, what do you think will happen to the Tamarind Tree Resort?’

I shrugged. ‘Whatever Gabriele wants, I imagine.’

It had been several weeks since Hurricane Helen blew through, and things had returned more or less to normal. The Pink Store reopened at once, although pickings were slim until the barge steamed in with fresh supplies. The Cruise Inn and Conch Out reopened after a week with an all-you-can-eat conch fest which Paul and I attended with Molly and half the population of Hawksbill Cay.

The power came back on after six days, and we celebrated the return of the Cruisers’ Net to our morning routine.

Pattie confirmed what we’d learned through the grapevine, that Marsh Harbour had fared surprisingly well. Boats, docks and marinas had sustained moderate damage, but nothing like the havoc wreaked by Jeanne in 2004. Mangoes and Snappas were still closed, but planned to reopen soon, and the Conch Inn was serving dinner in the upstairs bar until their downstairs furniture could be replaced. Groceries, hardware and appliance stores were doing land-rush business, but most happily of all, Mimi called in to report that the horses had survived the hurricane as they had for centuries by taking refuge in the forest.

Paul picked up Daniel as usual each Thursday. Daniel chopped and trimmed and raked, making huge piles of debris on the rocky headline which he’d burn some day, but only when the wind was right.

One afternoon I sat on the dock drinking iced tea and watching Daniel do his Zen-like thing with the rake, and I was remembering Dickie.

I really missed that cat!

I left his bowl in the usual spot, but he never came to eat. Every time a bush rustled, I searched for him. I walked the beach, dreading that I’d find his body washed ashore.

Maybe I should adopt a potcake.

I sighed, waved to Daniel and went inside to wash a load of laundry.

When I came out carrying a basket of wet clothes, Dickie lay on the steps next to his empty food bowl, calmly rearranging his stripes with his tongue.