“Of course you know what this means, don’t you?” asked Shannon.
“What are you talking about?" Cara shot back plaintively. "What does what mean?”
On an all but forsaken stretch of beach, tucked up under the dunes, awash in the pungent morning breeze off the ocean, Cara and Shannon huddled together. Vaguely moving forms, scarcely visible in the distance without squinting into the rippling heat, were the only indications that other humans were nearby. It was hot and promised to become hotter still and the beach glare intensified at each step the sun took on its relentless climb towards its high point. An hour or more had gone by since they arrived. They felt comfortable here. Here they could talk, in normal tones, about the matters at hand.
As incredible as it sounded, they couldn’t escape the conclusion that Miles was involved in Katie’s death, perhaps even ordered it, and further still may have ordered her death for witnessing some criminal activity. They could talk about it rationally, and even calmly, at one moment, but at the next, they were just as shocked and panicked by it as when it had first occurred to them. Katie, silly, blithe Katie, effervescent Katie, the froth on their young lives, was at the center of an nightmare more terrible than either of them had encountered. But they both knew it was time for them to stop looking at it aghast and confront it head on.
“… it means…,” Shannon explained, “that you’ve got to continue to act normal around Miles. And by normal, I mean, seeing him like you used to see him. Call him like you used to. Text him like you used to. If you don’t he’s going to know something’s up. If he’s got the stones to do what he did, God knows what he might do to us. Especially after that scene I put on with him at the Parrot the other night. We’ve got to smooth things over. I’ve got to smooth things over. We gotta get things back to the way it was before Katie died. Until we figure out what to do.”
“I don’t know.” said Cara. “I don’t know if I can. We were like once-a-week, you know… and now, even the thought of touching him makes me sick.”
“I don’t think we have a choice,“ said Shannon. Then she paused, reflecting, before she continued. “You know, actually, we do. We can either get things back to normal with him so that we can figure out what to do next or we’ve got to get the hell out of here… and not just us… we’ve got to warn your father and Chris and maybe even Paula - ‘cause she was there that night, too. And we can do that if you want. Maybe that’s the smart thing to do. We could go to Mark, your FBI agent and spill it all to him and let him take it over, then warn everyone involved and get the hell out. But, I’ll tell you what… I don’t want to. Right now, I’m pissed. I wanna fuck that bitch over for what he did to Katie. Some how, some way. I really don’t care about anything right now except that. Look at me, for God’s sake… 26 years old, hanging around a beach town, doing nothing, living like a bum, but things were good here. With you and Katie and Chris and your Dad - it was like a family…”
“But we’re still here,” said Cara weakly.
“Yeah, I know. I didn’t mean it that way, honey. But it can never be the same again. Nothing can ever be the same unless we do something, because he‘s always going to be there too.”
“What do you think we should do?” asked Cara.
They stared blankly at the surf for a moment, then Cara, feeling a little more resolute, said “Well first…, what we’ve got to do is get more information. We’ve got to find out what it is he’s up to. We’ve got to find out when he’s going to that marina again or any place we find out he‘s going that sounds shady - and follow him and watch him.”
“You’re right. Keep an eye on him. Anytime he‘s acting suspicious or weird, pay close attention…“
“…and there’s another thing I’ve got to do.”
“What?”
“I’ve got to find out how my Dad is involved in all this.”
It would all happen faster than they expected. At the Boiled Parrot Saloon that night, Cara went about her work as usual. Pouring drinks for the regulars, making small talk and trying to find a shallow conscious space she could inhabit, not thinking too deeply about the drama swirling around her, for fear that it would make her act differently and that, acting differently, she would call attention to herself. She felt like everyone could read her mind. But slowly… slowly… the musty, beery smell of the bar and the careless jabber of the customers, the woosh of the taps and the drone of the corny bar music, helped her relax and fade into the canvas.
In walked Miles. Taking a seat next to Chris, who’d come in only few minutes before, at the far end of the bar from where she stood, next to the tap, topping off a pint, he winked at her. A spike of a adrenaline shot up from her gut into her head, making her teeth tingle and her stomach churn. With some difficulty she mastered it and tossed a wink back at him, impressing herself with her coolness. She could hear Chris and Miles start up a conversation.
“What’s up, buddy?” asked Chris.
“Not much.”
Other than that, the only words she could make out were “coach” and “football”. Football talk. Miles didn’t know anything about football, so this was bound to be an awkward conversation. Working in bars as long as she had, she’d learned to decipher conversations smothered by bar noise, but they were talking too softly even for her. She was glad for the moment to have a few beer orders to fill because it put off the inevitability of having to talk to him. When she did, at least Chris would be there for cover.
Watching Chris talk to Miles, she saw it again. The itchy reluctance in Chris, indicating that he didn’t want to talk to Miles any more than he had to. All her friends seemed to feel that way. She could see it from across the room, crowd noise, smoke and all. Chris didn’t hate Miles, they were just different sorts, not meant to be together. Chris, the unassuming, quiet tattoo artist, sleeve-tattooed down both arms, all dry humor and eye-rolls, happy enough to be by himself in a crowd. Miles the Metrosexual, too tanned, ridiculously handsome, attentive and boring. Chris wasn’t exactly her type, but couldn’t she just for once, split the difference and go for something other than these vain nut jobs that she always found herself with.
“This is the way it always is…,” she muttered, audibly, to herself. “My friends always hate my boyfriends. Boyfriend? Is he my boyfriend? This blow-up doll? More like a commodity? Service? Prostitute? Fuck! What kind of a piece of shit am I? “
She knew she had to so, eventually, she edged her way over too him. By that time, Chris had made good his escape into the men’s room. Cara knew he wouldn’t be back.
“Hi sweetie, how are you?” he said.
“Okay,” was all she could muster. Then she forced herself. “Anything interesting going on?” Although the question was lame in the extreme, but she was pleased with the way it came out. She thought it sounded fairly normal.
“Not much. I gotta go down to Key West on Wednesday night to check around that hotel real estate my Dad is developing. Things aren’t going as well as he wants. Some of the subs aren’t showing up and the whole thing’s falling behind.”
“Oh, brother,” she thought. “Could he be so stupid as to use the same cover lie twice? Yes, he could be that stupid. How much more obvious could a lie be? Checking into a real estate deal on a Wednesday night? The same exact cover story he had used - that Katie had busted him on - when she saw him at the marina. Perfect. He’s just blocking off that time because he knows we usually get together then and he needs that time because he’s got something important to do. Okay buddy, we’re watching your idiot ass!”
For acting normally and being relaxed, she gave herself passing grades. That was a good thing. The better she felt, the easier it was to keep it up. She was positively bubbly from that point on. She blabbered giddily on to him until: “Slow down, fool… he’s going to see through you. You’re never this enthusiastic.” Then, like a safe falling from the ninth floor, he hit her.
“Can we hook up later?” he asked.
“S-s-sure.”
At closing time, she cleaned up with Manny as usual. Stacking chairs on tables, cleaning up spilled beer and ketchup, shutting down the CO2 feed to the taps, putting ingredients back in the freezer and refrigerator. Old Walter was already gone. She used to hate to do this, now it was her favorite thing, she lingered over it. It was safe. It was her old life; the life she’d lost. It was the only thing that stood between her and what she knew she had to do next.
And then out the door, around back to the footbridge over the mangroves. The scent of the dark air soaked in a perfume of wood, water and mud, long steeped, worked one into another like an exotic tea, filled her lungs. Normally these sensations signaled release, a day’s work done, rest. Tonight they seemed like incense burned at her own martyrdom and the footbridge, the stairs to her scaffold. Emotionally, she prepared herself, stiffened in her resolve. She thought about Katie. Then like Jepthath’s daughter, going to meet her death, for her father’s rash vows, she mounted the bridge toward the beach and her rendezvous with Miles.
But once her foot hit the cool, dry sand and she saw him out there on the sand, waiting, cigarette burning, she changed. Sneering at the Joan of Arc pretensions of just a moment ago, she emerged an incarnation of a Sylvia Plath bitch goddess, an avenging, retributive wraith, more than ready to sweep the scythe. “He thinks he’s going to fuck me? Well, fuck him!” she seethed to herself, startlingly calm on the outside, while inside, a chilling admixture of fury and jubilation. She wondered at it for a moment. Who is this in me? Who am I now? And then, as if by revelation, she answered herself: “I am my father’s daughter. I am the child of an amoral man who consumes the lives of women and men and discards their hollowed husks. I am the child of a criminal, a liar.
She crept up behind him, playfully, as always, but this time, she went at him, her friend’s murderer, with a burning hate just below the surface. Like a fighter, she parried every thrust, teasing him on, mocking him, giving in to everything he wanted, satiating herself on his flesh like a shark tearing apart it’s prey and leaving an eviscerated victim to bleed out. She took him on and played the part to the hilt. She beat him to a pulp. And then it was over.
By the time she fully awakened from her blood lust, she found herself walking toward the causeway and homeward toward the bungalow. He was behind her, heading in the opposite direction, a hundred yards off, to his car. She stumbled and fell as the trance wore off, her blood pressure dropped, her skin went cold and nausea swept over her. She retched and vomited in the sand. Deep sobs like tremors shook her. “Dear God... Oh dear, sweet Jesus, forgive me.”
“What are you talking about?" Cara shot back plaintively. "What does what mean?”
On an all but forsaken stretch of beach, tucked up under the dunes, awash in the pungent morning breeze off the ocean, Cara and Shannon huddled together. Vaguely moving forms, scarcely visible in the distance without squinting into the rippling heat, were the only indications that other humans were nearby. It was hot and promised to become hotter still and the beach glare intensified at each step the sun took on its relentless climb towards its high point. An hour or more had gone by since they arrived. They felt comfortable here. Here they could talk, in normal tones, about the matters at hand.
As incredible as it sounded, they couldn’t escape the conclusion that Miles was involved in Katie’s death, perhaps even ordered it, and further still may have ordered her death for witnessing some criminal activity. They could talk about it rationally, and even calmly, at one moment, but at the next, they were just as shocked and panicked by it as when it had first occurred to them. Katie, silly, blithe Katie, effervescent Katie, the froth on their young lives, was at the center of an nightmare more terrible than either of them had encountered. But they both knew it was time for them to stop looking at it aghast and confront it head on.
“… it means…,” Shannon explained, “that you’ve got to continue to act normal around Miles. And by normal, I mean, seeing him like you used to see him. Call him like you used to. Text him like you used to. If you don’t he’s going to know something’s up. If he’s got the stones to do what he did, God knows what he might do to us. Especially after that scene I put on with him at the Parrot the other night. We’ve got to smooth things over. I’ve got to smooth things over. We gotta get things back to the way it was before Katie died. Until we figure out what to do.”
“I don’t know.” said Cara. “I don’t know if I can. We were like once-a-week, you know… and now, even the thought of touching him makes me sick.”
“I don’t think we have a choice,“ said Shannon. Then she paused, reflecting, before she continued. “You know, actually, we do. We can either get things back to normal with him so that we can figure out what to do next or we’ve got to get the hell out of here… and not just us… we’ve got to warn your father and Chris and maybe even Paula - ‘cause she was there that night, too. And we can do that if you want. Maybe that’s the smart thing to do. We could go to Mark, your FBI agent and spill it all to him and let him take it over, then warn everyone involved and get the hell out. But, I’ll tell you what… I don’t want to. Right now, I’m pissed. I wanna fuck that bitch over for what he did to Katie. Some how, some way. I really don’t care about anything right now except that. Look at me, for God’s sake… 26 years old, hanging around a beach town, doing nothing, living like a bum, but things were good here. With you and Katie and Chris and your Dad - it was like a family…”
“But we’re still here,” said Cara weakly.
“Yeah, I know. I didn’t mean it that way, honey. But it can never be the same again. Nothing can ever be the same unless we do something, because he‘s always going to be there too.”
“What do you think we should do?” asked Cara.
They stared blankly at the surf for a moment, then Cara, feeling a little more resolute, said “Well first…, what we’ve got to do is get more information. We’ve got to find out what it is he’s up to. We’ve got to find out when he’s going to that marina again or any place we find out he‘s going that sounds shady - and follow him and watch him.”
“You’re right. Keep an eye on him. Anytime he‘s acting suspicious or weird, pay close attention…“
“…and there’s another thing I’ve got to do.”
“What?”
“I’ve got to find out how my Dad is involved in all this.”
It would all happen faster than they expected. At the Boiled Parrot Saloon that night, Cara went about her work as usual. Pouring drinks for the regulars, making small talk and trying to find a shallow conscious space she could inhabit, not thinking too deeply about the drama swirling around her, for fear that it would make her act differently and that, acting differently, she would call attention to herself. She felt like everyone could read her mind. But slowly… slowly… the musty, beery smell of the bar and the careless jabber of the customers, the woosh of the taps and the drone of the corny bar music, helped her relax and fade into the canvas.
In walked Miles. Taking a seat next to Chris, who’d come in only few minutes before, at the far end of the bar from where she stood, next to the tap, topping off a pint, he winked at her. A spike of a adrenaline shot up from her gut into her head, making her teeth tingle and her stomach churn. With some difficulty she mastered it and tossed a wink back at him, impressing herself with her coolness. She could hear Chris and Miles start up a conversation.
“What’s up, buddy?” asked Chris.
“Not much.”
Other than that, the only words she could make out were “coach” and “football”. Football talk. Miles didn’t know anything about football, so this was bound to be an awkward conversation. Working in bars as long as she had, she’d learned to decipher conversations smothered by bar noise, but they were talking too softly even for her. She was glad for the moment to have a few beer orders to fill because it put off the inevitability of having to talk to him. When she did, at least Chris would be there for cover.
Watching Chris talk to Miles, she saw it again. The itchy reluctance in Chris, indicating that he didn’t want to talk to Miles any more than he had to. All her friends seemed to feel that way. She could see it from across the room, crowd noise, smoke and all. Chris didn’t hate Miles, they were just different sorts, not meant to be together. Chris, the unassuming, quiet tattoo artist, sleeve-tattooed down both arms, all dry humor and eye-rolls, happy enough to be by himself in a crowd. Miles the Metrosexual, too tanned, ridiculously handsome, attentive and boring. Chris wasn’t exactly her type, but couldn’t she just for once, split the difference and go for something other than these vain nut jobs that she always found herself with.
“This is the way it always is…,” she muttered, audibly, to herself. “My friends always hate my boyfriends. Boyfriend? Is he my boyfriend? This blow-up doll? More like a commodity? Service? Prostitute? Fuck! What kind of a piece of shit am I? “
She knew she had to so, eventually, she edged her way over too him. By that time, Chris had made good his escape into the men’s room. Cara knew he wouldn’t be back.
“Hi sweetie, how are you?” he said.
“Okay,” was all she could muster. Then she forced herself. “Anything interesting going on?” Although the question was lame in the extreme, but she was pleased with the way it came out. She thought it sounded fairly normal.
“Not much. I gotta go down to Key West on Wednesday night to check around that hotel real estate my Dad is developing. Things aren’t going as well as he wants. Some of the subs aren’t showing up and the whole thing’s falling behind.”
“Oh, brother,” she thought. “Could he be so stupid as to use the same cover lie twice? Yes, he could be that stupid. How much more obvious could a lie be? Checking into a real estate deal on a Wednesday night? The same exact cover story he had used - that Katie had busted him on - when she saw him at the marina. Perfect. He’s just blocking off that time because he knows we usually get together then and he needs that time because he’s got something important to do. Okay buddy, we’re watching your idiot ass!”
For acting normally and being relaxed, she gave herself passing grades. That was a good thing. The better she felt, the easier it was to keep it up. She was positively bubbly from that point on. She blabbered giddily on to him until: “Slow down, fool… he’s going to see through you. You’re never this enthusiastic.” Then, like a safe falling from the ninth floor, he hit her.
“Can we hook up later?” he asked.
“S-s-sure.”
At closing time, she cleaned up with Manny as usual. Stacking chairs on tables, cleaning up spilled beer and ketchup, shutting down the CO2 feed to the taps, putting ingredients back in the freezer and refrigerator. Old Walter was already gone. She used to hate to do this, now it was her favorite thing, she lingered over it. It was safe. It was her old life; the life she’d lost. It was the only thing that stood between her and what she knew she had to do next.
And then out the door, around back to the footbridge over the mangroves. The scent of the dark air soaked in a perfume of wood, water and mud, long steeped, worked one into another like an exotic tea, filled her lungs. Normally these sensations signaled release, a day’s work done, rest. Tonight they seemed like incense burned at her own martyrdom and the footbridge, the stairs to her scaffold. Emotionally, she prepared herself, stiffened in her resolve. She thought about Katie. Then like Jepthath’s daughter, going to meet her death, for her father’s rash vows, she mounted the bridge toward the beach and her rendezvous with Miles.
But once her foot hit the cool, dry sand and she saw him out there on the sand, waiting, cigarette burning, she changed. Sneering at the Joan of Arc pretensions of just a moment ago, she emerged an incarnation of a Sylvia Plath bitch goddess, an avenging, retributive wraith, more than ready to sweep the scythe. “He thinks he’s going to fuck me? Well, fuck him!” she seethed to herself, startlingly calm on the outside, while inside, a chilling admixture of fury and jubilation. She wondered at it for a moment. Who is this in me? Who am I now? And then, as if by revelation, she answered herself: “I am my father’s daughter. I am the child of an amoral man who consumes the lives of women and men and discards their hollowed husks. I am the child of a criminal, a liar.
She crept up behind him, playfully, as always, but this time, she went at him, her friend’s murderer, with a burning hate just below the surface. Like a fighter, she parried every thrust, teasing him on, mocking him, giving in to everything he wanted, satiating herself on his flesh like a shark tearing apart it’s prey and leaving an eviscerated victim to bleed out. She took him on and played the part to the hilt. She beat him to a pulp. And then it was over.
By the time she fully awakened from her blood lust, she found herself walking toward the causeway and homeward toward the bungalow. He was behind her, heading in the opposite direction, a hundred yards off, to his car. She stumbled and fell as the trance wore off, her blood pressure dropped, her skin went cold and nausea swept over her. She retched and vomited in the sand. Deep sobs like tremors shook her. “Dear God... Oh dear, sweet Jesus, forgive me.”
