The Cormorant (21 page)

Jesus, Mom, who are you?

Eventually Miriam sits down. She feels clammy. Queasy. Like she’s out there on that boat rocking back and forth. Watching her mother die.

It strikes her then: even as she was watching her mother die, someone else was watching her. Ashley. Talking to her like he knew she’d be here with her mother, here to touch her. Is he here now? Is he following her? She lurches up out of the chair, almost knocking it over.

“Miriam, it’s okay, sit back down–”

“Have you seen anyone?” Miriam asks. “Anyone suspicious? Particularly someone with a fake leg. Talking to you. Watching you. New neighbor. Weird guy on the sidewalk. Anyone?”

“No, no, what is this about?”

Miriam growls, charges through the house in denial of her nausea and heads out onto the street. Everything is quiet. The air so humid you could gargle it. Little bungalow houses darkened by fat-bellied palm trees. Down the block an old coot in a pink v-neck and noisy Hawaiian shorts pulls weeds from a flowerbed around his mailbox – and Miriam storms over, her mother trailing behind. The silver-haired retiree looks up, startled.

“You,” Miriam barks. “You see anyone around here?”

“What? Who are you?” His eyes dart toward Miriam’s mother. “Evelyn, is that you? Who is this? What’s happening?”

“Ernie, this is my daughter, Miriam.”

“Oh, hello, Miriam.” He offers a hand clad in gardening gloves.

She bats his hand away. “Don’t
hello, Miriam
me, you old shriv. I need to know if you’ve seen anybody strange around here. Anybody at all. One-legged guy? Maybe smells like cat piss, looks like he’s on meth? Got a pair of binoculars, probably.”

“No, I – I swear.”

“Don’t lie to me, dude. God’s watching. And with your advancing age you’re a lot closer to Him than I am. God doesn’t like liars. You don’t want to get to Heaven and he’s all ready to fuck your ass straight to hell–”

Suddenly, her mother is tugging on her arm. “Oh, Miriam, let’s go.”

She hesitates. But then she sees the pleading look in her mother’s eyes.
Since when do I care about what my mother wants?

That answer comes easy:
Since you saw that she’s going to die in three days.
Three days. Murdered by Ashley Gaynes.

Ernie says goodbye as she allows Evelyn to draw her back to the house. Once inside the foyer, Miriam thinks,
Okay, Mom, I’m going to tell you something now
, and she’s about to tell her mother what happened after Ben Hodge’s own mother beat her down with a snow shovel in the school bathroom, about to tell her the truth about her curse, her power. She thinks,
Maybe I need to give it a godly spin
, like tell the woman that this is something God gave
to
her or took
from
her or, or, or–

It’s then she realizes.

She looks around the kitchen.

Looks beyond it, to the living room.

To her own mother’s neck.

No pictures of Jesus on the walls.

No cross on a gold chain.

No prayers muttered. No entreaties to Christ to save her, save her daughter, save the world. Not a single religious utterance.

“You lost God,” Miriam says suddenly.

“What?”

“You don’t… you don’t go to church anymore.”

“How’d you–” But then she nods. “It’s true. I suppose you’re looking around and seeing something missing. I didn’t think you’d notice, honestly. But it’s true. I don’t… I don’t believe in that anymore.”

“Why?”

“I lost my child. I lost my grandchild. God did nothing to stop it. Which left me to believe He was either horribly cruel or simply not present at all. Believing in his cruelty was too painful. It was more comforting to instead suspect it was all just a fantasy.”

“The Bible shows a very cruel God, Mother.”

“Yes,” her mother says, short and clipped. “But it never felt pointed at me. I couldn’t handle it. I’m not Job. I cannot abide the stress test of faith on trial.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“You think it is.”

Here, Mother is silent.

“I have something I have to do,” Miriam says.
I have three days to save your life. I have three days to find Ashley Gaynes and sink his body below the surf.
“I need your car again.”

“Miriam, my car is–”

“This is important. This is everything. If you want to make up for lost years, then I need this.”

Mother pulls away. Bristles. “How do I know you won’t run away again? Steal my car and leave me high and dry.”

“Because I came back. Tonight. I’ll come back again.”

“I suppose I can have Helen next door take me places.”

“Thank you.”

“Will you at least eat a sandwich first? You look… rough.”

Miriam breathes. Feels the nausea wash back out to sea, pushed there by this small kindness offered by a mother she hasn’t seen in a long time.

“I’ll have a sandwich, yeah. Thanks, Mom.”

Evelyn gets out the bread.

PART FIVE

LOS MARTIRES

INTERLUDE

NOW

“That’s a nice necklace,” Miriam says, halting the story. She levels her gaze at Catherine Vills and the gold chain around the woman’s neck, a neck thin and fluted like the stem of a champagne glass.

Vills scowls, her woozy grin becoming a bridge to disdain. “You can’t even see it.” All that’s there is a whisper of gold disappearing beneath the high collar of her blouse. “It’s nothing special.”

“You sound defensive.”

“I’m not defensive.”

“When you say it like that –
I’m not defensive
– you just sound doubly defensive. Like, when a guy loudly protests how he doesn’t gobble donkey cock, you can be pretty sure that guy
totally
gobbles donkey cock any chance he can get. Can I see the necklace?”

Vills hesitates. Now Grosky is watching them with increased interest – one brow arched. His curiosity is a fish on the line: hooked right through the cheek. Finally, Vills draws the necklace out with a spidery finger.

The diamonds glitter. They almost look like a halo – an angel born in the counter case at Saks Fifth Avenue.

Grosky whistles.

“That watch is nice, too,” Miriam says. “It’s a Movado, right?”

Vills tucks her wrist away under the table, which only makes it look like she’s hiding the evidence.

Miriam says, “I had a watch, too, once. A really spiffy calculator watch. I didn’t do much mathematizing on it, but you could spell BOOBS on it if I turned my wrist upside down. I really loved that watch. I once sat across from a guy – just like we’re sitting across from each other right now – and he… gave it to me.”

“You kill him?” Vills asks.

Miriam sneers. “I did not.”
But he is dead
.

Grosky interrupts: “Focus up. I want to get back to it, not talk jewelry with a bunch of hissing cats. I don’t get it, Miriam.”

“Don’t get what?”

“You just bailed on her. Your mother. You learn she’s gonna suck seawater through stab wounds in –
one two three
– days and all you do is bail on her. Why didn’t you stick around? Check the house for bugs or hidden cameras? This prick was spying on you. So he had to be nearby.”

Every inch of her goes taut like a strangler’s rope. “He wasn’t. I had a hunch.” She sniffs and stares. “I wanted to be the hunter, not the hunted. So that meant leaving my mother to find him.”

“Maybe things would’ve been different had you stayed.”

She flinches. “Maybe they would’ve. I’m fond of bad decisions.”

Everything feels off-kilter. Like she’s trading power to these people and getting nothing back. Offense, not defense.
Hunter, not hunted
. So before the fat fuck or the bony bitch can say anything else, she steers the conversation right back where she wants it. Looking right at Vills, she says: “So, shiny watch, pretty necklace. Where you getting the bling, Miss Thing?”

“We’re talking about you, not me,” Vills says.

But Grosky’s lip twitches again.
There’s that fishhook again…

“I’m not saying,” Miriam says, “
but I’m just saying
. You don’t look like the type who can afford that kind of shiny. You got a new love in your life, hmm?”

Vills hesitates.

Grosky must detect Vills’ reticence, and he’s clearly not the type to let voids go unfilled. “You got a man, Vills?”

She nods. “I do.”

She’s lying. Miriam knows this.

That will come out in time.

“Good for you, Vills,” Grosky says, clapping her on the back like she’s a fellow player who just scored a touchdown for the team. “I always said you needed to get a man and get laid.” He gets a playful look on his face. “Oh, wait. It
is
a man, isn’t it? You going scissoring like Miriam here? That’s OK, I don’t judge. I think they should be able to get married. And I always wondered if maybe you had a thing for the bearded taco.”

“For the record,” Miriam says, “I’m a supremely vulgar human being and even I think
bearded taco
is a disgusting term. My vagina is a beautiful flower, thank you very much, not a pube-shellacked burrito. Uck.”

Grosky just shrugs.

Vills says, “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

The agent shifts in her seat, looking uncomfortable.

Which is exactly what Miriam wants from her.

Discomfort.

THIRTY-FOUR

VACANCY

Three days.

In three days, Miriam will watch as Ashley Gaynes returns to her life and stabs her mother to death on a boat.

She can’t let that happen.

She can’t even let it
get
to that point.

When she saved Louis, it was by a hair’s breadth – a half second between Louis getting dead and Louis staying alive. That’s too small a window. She can’t crawl between seconds like that again.

Which means finding Ashley before any of this happens.

Three days to find him. Three days to
kill
him.

He’s somewhere in the Keys. He
has
to be. It adds up. In the vision, he’s out on a boat. The vision didn’t show her much but it looked like what she saw when she was down in the Keys: the crystal blue-green waters. The swampy mangrove. He would have been watching her there, too. At Torch Key. Maybe even in Key West.

Plus, the whole mystique of the Keys – it’s mile zero. It’s
the end of the road
. She appreciates the poetry and he would, too. Or he’d at least expect
her
to appreciate it, and since this seems to be about her…

The hot breath of the day comes in through the car window and she takes it all in: the stench of sea-wind, the stink of fish, the smell of sun and salt and sand. Again threading the needle through palms and inlets, past marinas and dinky motels.

She sees one such dive motel: THE CONCH OUT INN.

The big weathered sign sticks up above the black palms like the flag on a mailbox, except this flag is shaped like a conch shell, most of the color blasted out of it except for a few zebra striations of bright coral.

Beneath the sign is another sign: VACANCY.

That’s all she needs.

She whips the Malibu into the lot.

Time to get a room.

THIRTY-FIVE

THE SPIRIT OF THE THING

Miriam gets the key from the proprietor – Jerry Wu, a chubby-cheeked Chinese guy with a New York accent. Jerry says he bought the place a couple years back and is trying to fix it up. Right now it’s a mish-mash slap-dash cram-together affair: not a motel so much as a bunch of buildings and trailers (and even a small Quonset hut) connected by a walkway made of mismatched stone pavers. A walkway winds between palm trees that shed bark the way a leper sheds skin.

The key in her hand is on a massive boat anchor keychain – made of pewter or something. It makes her hand smell funny. Heavy enough too that she could probably use it to gag a shark.

The anchor says FLORIDA KEYS.

Keys, keys, everywhere, keys.
It’s keys all the way down.