motel in Key Largo, then weeping with remorse on her breast.
That was when she tried women. In each instance she felt mildly curious before the experience and empty and vaguely embarrassed after, as though she had been a spectator rather than a participant in her own tryst. She saw a psychiatrist in Coral Cables who treated her with pharmaceuticals. He also told her that she had never been loved and, as a consequence, was incapable of intimacy. “What can I do about that?” she asked.
“It’s not all bad. Eighty percent of my patients are trying to escape emotional entanglements,” he replied. “You’re already there. What I think you need is an older and wiser man, namely a paternal figure in your life.”
“I have feelings I didn’t tell you about, Doc,” she said. “On a bright, clear day out on the ocean, without a problem in the world, I have this urge to do some payback. On a couple of occasions I acted on my urge, one time with a guy who owned a skin joint and asked me out on his boat. Things got pretty entangled. At least for him. Want to hear about it?”
Later that day the receptionist called Gretchen and told her that the psychiatrist was overloaded and would be referring her to a colleague.
Alafair left her car in town and rode with Gretchen down to Cypremort Point. On the western horizon a thin band of blue light was sealed under clouds as black as a skillet’s lid, and waves were sliding across the darkness of the bay, smacking against the shoals. Gretchen could smell the salt in the air and the rain in the trees and the leaves that had been blown onto the asphalt and run over by other vehicles. But inside the coldness of the smell and the freshness of the evening, she could not take her eyes off the rain rings on the surface of the swells. They reminded her of a dream she’d been having since she was a child. In it, giant hard-bodied fish with the grayish-blue skin of dolphins rose from the depths and burst through the surface, then arched down into the rings they had created with their own bodies, slipping into darkness again, their steel-like skin glistening. The dream had always filled her with dread.
“You have dreams?” she asked.
“What kind?” Alafair said.
“I don’t mean dreams with monsters in them. Maybe just fish jumping around. But you wake up feeling like you had a nightmare, except the images weren’t the kinds of things you see in nightmares.”
“They’re just dreams. Maybe they represent something that hurt you in the past. But it’s in the past, Gretchen. I have dreams about things I probably saw in El Salvador.”
“You ever have violent feelings about people?”
“I was kidnapped when I was little. I bit the guy who did it, and a female FBI agent put a bullet in him. In my opinion, he got what he deserved. I don’t think about it anymore. If I dream about it, I wake up and tell myself it was just a dream. Maybe that’s all any of this is.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like a dream in the mind of God. We shouldn’t worry about it.”
“I wish I could be like you,” Gretchen said.
“There’s an amphibian out there,” Alafair said.
Gretchen looked through the window and saw the plane on the bay, not far offshore, floating low in the water, bobbing in the chop. It was painted white, its wings and pontoons and fuselage glowing in the blue band of light on the western horizon. A fiberglass boat with a deep-V hull and flared bow was anchored close by. The cabin of the boat was lighted, the bow straining against the anchor rope, the fighting chairs on the stern rising and falling against a backdrop of black waves. “Where is Varina Leboeuf’s place?” Gretchen asked.
“Right up there about a hundred yards.”
Gretchen pulled to the shoulder of the road and cut the headlights and the ignition. Through a break in the flooded cypress and gum trees, she had a clear view of the plane and the boat. She took a small pair of binoculars from her tote bag and got out of the truck and adjusted the lenses. She focused first on the amphibian, then on the boat. “It’s a Chris-Craft. The bow has a painting of a sawfish on it,” she said. “That’s the boat Clete and your father have been looking for, the one that Tee Jolie Melton’s sister was abducted on.”
Alafair got out and walked around to Gretchen’s side of the truck and stood beside her. Gretchen could see Varina Leboeuf on the stern and, next to her, a man with albino skin and shoulder-length hair that looked like white gold. He was wearing a shirt with blown sleeves and slacks belted high up on his stomach, the way a European might wear them. His forehead and the edges of his face were scrolled with pink scars, as though his face had been transplanted onto the tendons.
Gretchen handed Alafair the binoculars. “I’ll call Clete and tell him about the boat,” she said.
“We don’t have service here,” Alafair said.
“What do you want to do?”
“Confront her.”
Gretchen took back the binoculars and looked again at the boat and at Varina and the man standing on the deck. The man was heavyset and broad-shouldered, thick across the middle and muscular and solid in the way he stood on the deck. He looked in Gretchen’s direction, as though he had noticed either her or her truck. But that was impossible. She forced herself to keep the binoculars directly on his face. He was backlit by the lights in the cabin, his slacks and shirt flattening in the wind. He leaned over and kissed Varina Leboeuf on the cheek, then boarded the amphibian.
The plane’s twin engines coughed, then roared to life, the propellers blowing a fine mist back over the fuselage. Gretchen watched the plane gain speed, the pontoons cutting through the chop, the nose and wings abruptly lifting into the air. Her mouth was dry, her face hot, her breath catching in her throat for no reason.
“Are you okay?” Alafair asked.
“Yeah, sometimes I have kind of a blackout. More like a short circuit in my head. I look at somebody and can’t breathe and get dizzy and have to sit down.”
“How long has this been going on?”
“Since I was a child.”
“What do you see through the binoculars that I didn’t?”
“Just that guy with the weird face. He’s like somebody from a dream. When I see a guy like that, maybe on an elevator or in a room with no windows, strange things light up in my head. I’ll go on okay for a few days, then shit starts hitting the fan.”
“What kind of shit?”
“I go out and look for trouble. I’ve got a bad history, Alafair. There’s a lot of stuff I’d like to scrub out of my life. That guy with the albino skin and pink scars on his face-”
“What about him? He’s just a guy. He’s made of flesh and blood. Don’t rent space in your head to bad people.”
“He’s like Alexis Dupree. These are people who are made different from the rest of us. You don’t know them. Neither does Clete. But I know everything about them.”
“How?”
“Because part of them is in me.”
“That’s not true,” Alafair said. “Come on, the boat is headed for Varina’s dock. Let’s see who these guys are.”
“I told you I wanted to deal with Varina Leboeuf the way you would. How should I handle it?”
“You don’t ‘handle’ anything, Gretchen. You step back from bad people and let their own energies consume them. It’s the worst thing you can do to them.”
“See? You know stuff I never even thought about.”
They got in the truck and drove down the road to the shell drive that led to Jesse and Varina Leboeuf’s house. Out on the bay, the pilot of the Chris-Craft had throttled back his engine, allowing the boat to drift into the dock. As soon as the hull thumped against the tires that hung from the pilings, Varina stepped off the gunwale onto the planks, and the pilot turned the boat southward and gave it the gas.
The rain had stopped and the clouds had broken up in the west, and there was a tiny glimmer of purple melt at the bottom of the sky. Gretchen got out of the truck before Alafair did, and walked across the lawn toward Varina Leboeuf. The windmill palms were rattling in the breeze, rain dripping out of the tree limbs overhead. “I’m sorry to disturb you,” Gretchen said.
“You’re not disturbing me. That’s because I’m going into my house now. That means I will not be talking with you, hence there is no reason for you to think you’re disturbing me.”
