I decided against it. It was a little too touchy-feely for comfort. To me, self-exploration has always seemed an excuse for self-absorption. I’m too interested in the world outside to waste time on dramatic introspection.
I kept driving.
Still, the question lingered: Why had I experienced such a vivid recollection-especially after what I’d been through earlier? The leering face of a crazy man, threatening castration with a knife, is not easily displaced.
But it had been displaced. It had been replaced by the forgotten memory of my final few moments with my parents.
I thought about it as I drove.
I was in a wild section of Everglades called the Fakahatchee Strand. Traffic was sparse. I had windows down, peepers and bullfrogs rioting as I burrowed through their darkness at speed. The moon, nearly full, had been up long enough to saturate the flora with incandescent current. The sawgrass was luminous, a plateau of blue. Isolated tree canopies glowed cellularly-a kind of lunar synthesis.
I continued to wrestle with the question: Why? What had caused that buried moment to reveal itself?
I tried to cut through all the emotional, sentimental BS, seeking a rational explanation. I’ve read that internal, emotional anomalies are often catalyzed by external change. My life had changed dramatically in the last few days.
Key elements came to mind, then key words: son… parents… heredity… genetics… blood.
Yes, that seemed a sensible linkage.
It had only been in the last year or so that Lake had accepted me as his father, and I’d come to accept and value him as my son. The man and pretty woman who’d returned in memory with such startling clarity were my son’s grandparents.
I’d never thought of my parents in that context before. In fact, I no longer even thought of myself as having parents, nor of being someone’s son.
Family? I think of the cheerful live-aboards and fishing guides of Dinkin’s Bay Marina as my extended family. But to be a member of an actual family, a blood kinship? With the exception of my cousin and friend, Ransom Gatrell-Tucker’s daughter-having relatives, being part of a family, was something I’d never coveted.
Maybe shock caused by Lake’s dilemma had sparked the forgotten memory. If so, it had also sparked the realization that I was the member of a family.
What was left of one, anyway.
I’d lost my parents years ago. Now I was confronting the possibility of losing their only grandson. As a biologist, the enormity of such a loss hit me for the first time. Two generations, two bridges in a family hereditary chain, wiped out.
As a father, the possibility of losing yet another generational member hit me much harder. Lake was my son. He was a great kid who loved science and baseball, and he was a hell of a lot more than just some genetic bridge.
I don’t use a lot of profanity, but I used a couple of rough words now, banged my hand on the steering wheel, and yelled into the night, “Where are you? Where are you? ”
I’ve never thought of myself as an orphan. Nor will I-too much self-pity in that word. But after a lifetime spent living alone, I had the frailest suspicion of an understanding that it meant something very different to exist alone in the world.
I now faced that possibility.
I had to stay smart and hope for the right breaks. We had to make contact with the kidnappers at the first opportunity.
I had to find my son.
The satellite phone was beside me on the seat. With Balserio and his men put away, I felt there was a window of time in which it would be safe to carry the thing. In a couple of days, maybe three, I’d destroy it. Hadn’t the lady detective told me I’d be notified before they were released from jail?
Yeah.
So the phone remained a tenuous link.
I glanced at the thing now, willing it to ring.
It didn’t, of course.
Why hadn’t they called? Maybe they’d given Pilar the phone only so they could use it to track her. It seemed plausible, but I was desperate enough to hang on to it anyway. They might call.
Tomlinson and Pilar came to mind. I checked the dashboard clock-10:04-as I picked up the cell phone. Maybe they’d returned to the hotel room. Or… maybe something really had happened to them.
I squinted to touch Redial, then stopped myself as my mind transferred data. There’d been another recent, surprising change in my life. There was yet another person who might become a part of that linkage that joined Lake and me.
Those key words again: heredity… genetics… blood.
This much I knew: The well-being of the woman who’d slipped into my mind was a hell of a lot more important than an ex-lover.
Quickly, I dialed Dewey Nye’s home number. She’s the early-to-bed type during the week, so I expected to catch her reading before turning off the light.
I didn’t. She not only didn’t answer, her message machine didn’t intercept. Odd.
So I tried her cell phone. I decided I must have dialed wrong, because a recorded message told me, “The number you have reached is no longer in service.”
I felt a little chill when, after dialing carefully, I got the same message.
Dewey had kept the same cell phone number for years. A dummy number she called it. The last four digits were all sevens. Lucky sevens, she called it that, too. She wouldn’t have canceled her service.
I dialed once again just to be sure, and got the recording.
She had canceled it.
Or did wireless phones, when broken, respond in that way?
I didn’t know.
I’d been driving the speed limit. I’d been considering turning back to Miami. Instead, I pushed the car up to eighty.
Now I had to find Dewey, too.
I reached the four-way stop at Tarpon Bay Road, Sanibel Island, at eleven-thirty. But instead of turning right onto the narrow road that leads to Dinkin’s Bay Marina, I continued on toward Captiva.
I crossed Blind Pass Bridge, noticing that the bar at ’Tween Waters was still open, and the Green Flash, too. At Twin Palms Marina, it looked like the Jensen brothers were having a midweek cookout and party. There were colored lights and a bonfire that glazed boats, docks, people, coconut palms with oscillating gold.
I knew that if I stopped at any one of those places, I’d find friends and a drink, and sympathy, too.
Normally, the idea would have been appealing. Not now. During times of personal calamity, even the most familiar of safe harbors can seem as foreign as a far planet. Emotional chaos has its own trajectory. Until the energy of that path dissipates, and we arc back into the customary orbit of our normal lives, nothing feels or appears quite as it should be.
Until I found Dewey-knew that she was safe and that we were on good terms again-my life, and these familiar islands, would not be the same.
Off Mango Court, I turned down the sand drive to her home. I felt even more pressured than on my last visit, but I drove slowly, watching for local pets, driving along the high ficus hedges, headlights glaring off security signs, and then I swung into her drive hoping once again to see the Lexus parked beneath the carport.
Once again, it wasn’t.
There was activity at the house, though. The front door was open, lights on. A Dodge Ram pickup was parked out front, some kind of white compact, too, plus a smaller red pickup-all the vehicles seemed familiar-and there were people inside the house, moving across the lighted windows.
My first impression was that Dewey was having a little party of her own, and maybe her car was gone because she had had to run to the store to fetch more ice or mixer.
But then I recognized the bumper stickers on the Dodge. Knew it was Jeth Nichols, one of our marina fishing guides, and so I instantly knew the owners of the other cars, too.