This woman was sharper. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” She crushed out the stub of her cigarette and pulled another Marlboro from the pack on the desk.
“Nothing,” I said.
“She dead?”
“I hope not.”
She lit the Marlboro. “If you’d like to leave her a note,” she said from behind the smoke, “I’ll be happy to pass it on if she ever comes in.”
“I know you’re cashing her checks and forwarding her mail to Woodton, Michigan.”
“Then you can mail your note up there,” she said.
“I’ve been reading her mail.”
“Then you can read your own note when it arrives up there.”
“I don’t know how to get in touch with her.”
“I can’t help you.”
The dim bulb that occasionally lights my attic flickered. “Maybe I can help you.”
“How’s that?”
“Are her bills with you paid?”
“We bill quarterly, in advance, fifty bucks a month.” The woman wasn’t going to give anything away.
“I imagine she sent in her payment in December. That would cover her through the end of this month?”
She said nothing, and I realized my mistake. Maris hadn’t needed to send in any payments. Smith’s would just take their fee from the New Jersey checks and forward the balance up to Woodton.
“I would imagine there are laws preventing you from making any deduction if Carolina wasn’t around to authorize it,” I said.
That got her attention. She crushed out the new Marlboro, half-smoked. “Go on.”
“How about I make you a deal?” I pulled out my checkbook. “I’ll pay her account six months in advance, for April through September. If she contacts you, authorizes you to make further deductions from the checks that you cash, you return my three hundred.”
“Fair enough.” She set a pen down at the edge of the desk.
I didn’t pick it up. Instead, I pulled out the copy of the driver’s license photo Patterson had sent to my computer. “Is this her?”
She studied the photo through the smoke, then looked up. “Mister, that isn’t anybody.”
I wrote the check for three hundred and handed it to her. “One more thing, which shouldn’t violate your confidentiality restrictions: Ever hear of a woman named Carolina Dare?”
“Sure.” She grinned, sliding open her desk drawer and dropping in my check. “She used to waitress at the Copper Scupper, north point of the island.”
“Used to?”
“Worked there for years, then took off sudden, a year ago. Nobody’s heard from her since.”
“Nobody?”
“I would have heard. This is a small island.”
I started for the door but stopped and asked the question I’d wanted to blurt at the beginning.
“What did she look like?”
“I thought you said you were her executor,” the woman said, reaching for another Marlboro.
“Court-appointed.”
“Of course.” She laughed up a bit of phlegm. “Court-appointed people come down here all the time, looking to settle the estates of women who made the big bucks waitressing at beach bars.”
I reached for the doorknob. “What did she look like?” I asked again.
“About your age, slim, medium height, blond, blue eyes. Ordinary looking,” she said.
I started to turn the knob.
“Ordinary looking,” the woman said behind me, “but damn, when she smiled, it changed her into the most beautiful woman in the world.”
I walked down the stairs.
Twenty-three
It was only three thirty, but already both lanes of the imaginatively named main road, Shell Drive, were packed with crawling vehicles. Half of them were putty-colored sedans filled with gray-headed, putty-colored people. They were the used-to-be working class, retired to planned activities and dinner at four on Windward Island. The other half were dinged trucks, faded SUVs, and beater Jeeps like mine. They were driven by sun-darkened people, the still-struggling service class. Both lanes were choked, so I couldn’t tell who was coming or going, but maybe that’s the way it always was on an island that had only one main road: Everyone was always coming and going simultaneously.
I supposed that was what I was doing, too. I was coming and going simultaneously; chasing a woman who might be alive, or who might be dead; hunting a girl who’d changed my life, or a woman I’d never known. Or both.
I followed the throng inching south toward the middle of the island, scanning both sides of the road for a place to stay. Windward was going upscale. Interspersed along one stretch of classy-looking restaurants was a barbecue joint with a skull-and-bones sign, a garage that did oil changes and repaired marine engines, and a shack trying to pass itself as selling authentic Chicago-style hot dogs. It was a fraud, that shack; its outdoor counter was lined with ketchup bottles. Chicagoans know that ketchup has as much place on a hot dog as motor oil.
Every motel had a NO VACANCY sign dangling out front. That was no surprise. It was March, the time when the hordes from the north descend on the Florida beaches to blister themselves, incubating little carcinomas. A digital sign outside a bank said the temperature was ninety-two degrees.
Ten minutes later, but only a mile down, I spotted a turquoise two-story motel with pink shutters and an almost empty parking lot, right on the beach. Its sign said simply ROOMS and appeared to be too solidly rusted to its metal pole to creak if there’d been a breeze. The place looked just seedy enough to offer cheap rates. I swung in, parked next to the pickup truck that was the only vehicle in the crushed shell lot, and extracted myself from the micro-rental.
I pushed open the screen door. The lobby was dark, and so dank it made me wonder why the old guy behind the counter wasn’t wearing a snorkel.
“Nine hundred for the week,” he said.
I turned to go.
“What were you looking to spend?” he asked from behind me.
“Fifty a night,” I said to the screen.
He laughed. “In tourist season?”
I put my hand on the door handle. A screen on a windless, blistering day explained the empty parking lot.
“One ten a night,” he said.
“You got air-conditioning?”
“Make it ninety.”
“Fifty-five a night,” I said.
“How long you going to stay?”
“Maybe a week.” I turned and walked back to the counter. It wouldn’t take that long to check out the details of Carolina Dare’s life. If I became certain that she was Maris, though, it might take that long to walk the beaches she’d walked, smell the salt air she’d breathed, see her dawns, feel her sunsets.
It might very well take a whole week to kiss a ghost.
I gave the guy a check for two nights.
“You told me a week,” he said.
“Depends on whether I can catch a breeze in the room.”
I carried my duffel and my Oreos up the outside staircase. My room had windows facing both the beach and Shell Drive. Depending on the breeze, if one arose, I’d either be savoring salt air or sucking auto exhaust. Of such is life.
The hot and cold water worked, and the toilet flushed. The bed’s headboard and the top of the dresser were sticky, as though the salt air were dissolving the laminate. I took that to be a good sign. If I was sharing the room with cockroaches, they’d stick to the Formica and might drown in the humidity, standing up. I unzipped the duffel, changed into a red knit shirt and blue plaid shorts, colors made all the more vivid by my northern skin, and went out.
Traffic was easing as I started back up Shell Drive toward the northeastern part of Windward Island. The bank thermometer said the temperature was now ninety-four degrees. It was getting hotter as the sun was setting. I wondered if that was a sign of Doomsday and regretted not buying more Oreos.
The Copper Scupper was at the very tip of the island, a bleached-board place with white metal furniture, green umbrellas, and a planked deck on the sand. The waiters and waitresses wore khaki shorts, and Hawaiian shirts like Leo’s, except that theirs fit. A sign said to wait to be seated, so I did, watching a guy in an orange parrot shirt and pink baseball cap plug in an electric keyboard-readying himself, no doubt, for Margaritaville music.