“Babe.” She kissed my cheek. “Big Guy.” Ditto.
Blanche’s nose was working overtime. She scooted next to Milo and rooted for crumbs. No immediate success, so she looked up at him with big, soft, imploring eyes. He dropped a noodle, long past trying to conceal their relationship.
Robin laughed. “What some people won’t do for approval.”
“Me or her?”
“Both.” Her eyes drifted to the murder book. “Am I interrupting a work session?”
Milo said, “Unplanned. I dropped by, he fed me, we’re tossing a whole lot of nothing back and forth. Excellent pasta, by the way.”
She smiled and bent closer. “These are their names.”
Milo looked surprised.
She said, “He’s told me the basics, not that. Gio and Meagin. Makes them seem more like people.”
Talking to Robin about patients I treat has never been an issue. I don’t do it. Ever. Crime cases are different and early on that caused tension between us. My wanting to shield her from ugliness, knowing how sensitive she is. She feeling infantilized and sidelined. We’ve worked it out. I tell her as much as she wants to know.
Her eyes drifted back to the name tag. “Meagin. Never seen it spelled like that.”
I said, “She reinvented herself totally, why not be creative.”
“Guess so.” She left without comment.
Milo and I looked at each other.
Seconds later, she returned with a sheet of paper and a pencil. “Do you mind?”
Milo said, “Mind what?”
“Indulging me, I’m sure it’s nothing.”
Sitting down between us, she wrote in her firm artisan’s hand:
M E A G I N
Studied the letters, squinted, wrote:
N I G
M E A
Several additional moments of contemplation were accompanied by rapid pencil twirls and an eraser tap of her lower lip.
Then:
E N I G M A
Chapter 37
Milo and I stared at the paper.
He shook his head.
I said, “Right in front of us, the whole time.”
Robin said, “No big deal. My advantage was coming in fresh. And it probably doesn’t mean much.”
Milo said, “It helps us understand her. That’s always useful.”
He leaned over, kissed her hand, took the paper and placed it in the murder book.
“Seeing herself as enigmatic,” said Robin. “Painting a ghost orchid. To me that seems more than some cute California reinvention. More like erasing herself and trying to start over. Maybe a woman who’s had a really hard life?”
Milo said, “And ended up married to a millionaire.”
“And ended up dead.”
He flinched and said nothing.
Robin’s eyes had misted. I squeezed her hand. Cool to the touch.
“Anyway,” she said, “it just looked like an anagram to me. I’ll leave you guys to it.”
I said, “Woman with a hard life.”
“I know the obvious assumption was she was a gold-digging con. Being unfaithful, that thing with the diamond. And maybe I’m just getting mushy-hearted. But I can’t help feel she was struggling to make sense of who she was. And remained a puzzle to herself. Then to be murdered like that. It’s just... even if she wasn’t a saint, it’s sickening.”
She stood, took a can of Pellegrino from the fridge and popped it. “This is what I came in for. Bye.”
She headed back to the garden door. This time Blanche followed.
When they were gone, Milo said, “You want to go talk to her?”
“Nope.”
“She’s okay?”
“She needs her solitude in these situations.”
“These, being...”
“When she needs her solitude.”
“Okay, your call,” he said, doubtfully. “Enigma. Hard life. If Robin’s right, we could be talking a crime victim.”
I said, “That’s exactly what I flashed on. Maybe the victim of an older man, not some mistress who conned a high-roller. And if we’re talking years ago, you know where that could lead.”
“Child abuse, incest. Whatever evil they haven’t put a name on yet.” Veins formed in his forehead. He rubbed his face, shot up and paced the kitchen for two circuits. Continued into the living room for the third. When he returned any trace of haggard was gone.
Energized by anger.
“How the hell am I gonna do her justice?”
Supplying an answer would’ve felt great.
I had nothing to offer.
At three in the morning, woken abruptly from dreamless sleep, I lay on my back, assaulted by question marks.
I turned the case over and over. Kept coming back to a spiky white thing that reduced the concept of a flower to a bizarre abstraction.
A fugitive hiding out among the marsh-nourished trees of a murky swamp.
The botanical essence of enigma.
Meagin March had identified with the ghost orchid. Maybe because she’d seen it.
As a child, subjected to terror and cruelty, seizing upon the flower and the stories surrounding it as inspiration. Like most victims, yearning to disappear. And she’d finally succeeded. But she’d never been comfortable laying down roots.
Playing by the rules was out of the question. The rules had failed her when she needed them most.
Nothing counted but survival.
By the age of forty-one, she’d figured she finally had things under control.
Then...
Thinking about the way she’d died — along with a man driven by his own issues — made my eyes ache.
I sighed. Letting loose a barely audible outflow of air but Robin stirred.
The person who loved me as no one else ever had. Finely tuned to my emotions. To the world.
It had taken me this long to reach the empathy Robin had achieved within seconds of solving an anagram.
What that said about the difference between us was something I didn’t feel like thinking about.
So I did what I always do when introspection looms: focus on a task that drew upon what I’d gone to school for.
A fifteen-year-old boy no one wanted. What would that do to a kid? How should I approach him? What should I refrain from asking?
Would I have anything to offer?
No satisfaction, there, so I switched back to a girl living near a swamp. Maybe no older than the unwanted boy.
Her problem: being wanted too much.
I pictured her, lying in the dark, shivering, as she anticipated a hideous, chronic ordeal.
Withering in the aftermath.
Imagining herself an exquisite parasite, a fragile beauty that had survived for millennia because it had learned to subsist on nothing.
The more I thought about it, the more certain I was that the ordeal of the woman who’d come to call herself Meagin March had begun in southwest Florida. Milo’s probing had been limited to checking out missing persons databases. But that had been doomed to failure because public scrutiny was the last thing an abusive family would want.
Careful not to wake Robin, I rolled out of bed, opened and shut the door gently, and padded on bare feet cramped by tension up a silent, dark hallway.
Chapter 38
I settled at my desk, using my Robin and Blanche screensaver as the sole lighting and smiling at it for a few seconds. Then, onward.
Meagin March — I had no other way to think of her — had died at forty-one. If her personal papers could be believed. Even if they couldn’t, the age seemed reasonable, so I began with a five-year spread in either direction.
Assuming she’d been abused and that it had taken place when she was a minor, I set twenty to twenty-five years ago as my target range and began searching for crime stories related to the Fakahatchee Strand Preserve. Starting with Copeland, the town listed as the park’s home base.