“Don’t expect great photography,” Diana Olan said self-consciously. “I’m not exactly Steven Spielberg.”
Two Florida Department of Law Enforcement special agents were in the small, stuffy room with her. The one named Reynoso seemed to be in charge. He was a small, dark man with a close-trimmed mustache and hair that had retreated back from most of his forehead. Diana had forgotten the other agent’s name.
“This isn’t film school,” Reynoso said gloomily. “Go ahead and hit it, Pete,” he said to the other detective.
Now the name came back to her—Pete Wallace. Alan Reynoso and Pete Wallace. She should probably try to remember those names.
Wallace aimed a remote control at the television. The TV sat on an industrial-looking steel stand with a VCR underneath. Diana sat at a painted metal table between the two detectives, feeling totally out of place in her wraparound skirt and halter top. The cops were wearing what might have been the only two business suits within fifty miles of Crab Claw Key.
“I’m hoping for an Oscar nomination,” Diana said.
The special agents said nothing. The tape started.
The picture on the TV screen was jerky, making sudden sharp lurches to the left and right. The color was poor, giving the tape a washed-out, faded look, like a colorized black-and-white movie.
“This is the front door of the Merricks’ mansion,” Diana narrated.
On the screen the door opened.
“That’s Ross Merrick,” Diana said, trying not to sound as hostile as she felt.
“I’m familiar with him,” Wallace said dryly. “Most cops in the area are.”
“Turn up the volume,” Reynoso directed.
Wallace pressed a button on the remote, and Ross’s leering tones filled the room. “Why, it’s Diana. What a surprise. Come back to get more of what I started to give you?”
Diana intercepted a glance that went from Reynoso to Wallace. Reynoso cocked an eyebrow.
“This is the main entrance hall at the Merrick estate,” Diana said. “It’s very impressive.”
“I could put my whole house in that hallway,” Wallace said glumly.
The picture followed Ross, swinging back and forth as Diana walked. The camera had been concealed in a shoulder bag. She’d done what she could to keep it stable, but she hadn’t wanted to alert anyone to what she was doing.
The next shot was of an unoccupied desk with bookshelves behind it. At this point the picture grew less jerky, since she’d sat down and the camera was positioned on her knee.
“You could probably fast-forward through this part,” Diana suggested.
Wallace did, stopping at the sudden arrival of another person in the room, a handsome, athletic, dark-haired young man with a very somber expression on his face.
“That’s Adam,” Diana said. “He’s Ross’s younger brother. He…he used to be my boyfriend.”
Senator Merrick walked into the picture. Diana heard both cops shift in their seats. Wallace leaned forward, focusing intently.
“Well, let’s hear it,” the senator said. He glanced at his watch. “What’s this about?”
“This is about rape.” Diana heard the tremor in her own voice. At the time she had felt bold and fearless, but there had been fear in her tone. Maybe it was just distortion from the video camera.
“Attempted rape,” Ross said.
Diana saw a slight, predatory smile on Wallace’s face, quickly erased.
The conversation played as she remembered it, as she had seen it already on this same videotape. Ross, furious and contemptuous; Adam, sad and disturbed; the senator, barely containing his fury at his own son and the mess he’d created.
“This is the good part,” Diana announced in a low voice.
On the TV screen Ross lost control and lunged at her. The picture went crazy, jerking wildly, focusing on the ceiling, on the floor, on the arm of the chair.
A crazy, sideways view of the senator came into focus. He swung hard and buried his fist in Ross’s stomach. Ross collapsed on the floor.
Wallace whistled softly. “That had to hurt.”
Even Reynoso seemed mildly impressed. “Huh,” he said.
Diana’s voice came next, a shrieking, enraged cry. “Now do you see? Do you see what he is? Do you see what your son is, Senator?”
The scene calmed somewhat. The picture showed Ross, only partly in the frame, crawling to a chair. It showed Adam comforting his father.
And then the senator delivered his ultimatum—if Diana ever accused Ross of anything, the senator would ruin her. He owned the prosecutor, he said. He controlled the local police. He would find a way to destroy Diana. Or…she could keep quiet and walk away with a large check.
“Oh, man,” Wallace said, awestruck.
Diana realized that he and Reynoso were more stunned by this portion of the tape than by what had gone before.
The tape went on. The senator left. Adam walked her out to the front steps of the Merrick estate.
And then had come the strangest moment of all for Diana.
She’d been carrying a small tape recorder as well as the video camera, wanting some backup, knowing she’d never get a second chance to do this.
Adam had spotted the tape recorder in the waistband of her slacks and had yanked it out. He’d listened to the recording and then, to Diana’s amazement, he’d handed the tape back to her.
The picture on the TV screen went to gray fuzz. Wallace turned it off.
“I guess they aren’t all rotten, huh?” Wallace said. “The kid, Adam, he seems all right.”
“That did surprise me,” Diana said softly. “He swore he’d never go against his family.”
“Hell of a piece of work,” Reynoso said, eyeing Diana with open respect.
“Can you…can you arrest Ross?” Diana asked.
Reynoso looked thoughtful. “There’s nothing on there that is a straight confession. He never says, ‘Look, I tried to rape you.’”
Diana felt panicky. “But…but isn’t it obvious?”
“Obvious, yes. But is it evidence? That’s another question. We can arrest Ross Merrick, but can we get to court? Can we convict? That’s the next question. We have the tape, and we have your testimony.”
Diana felt confused. She’d been certain that the tape was more than enough proof.
“Of course, Ross Merrick may choose to work out an arrangement for the sake of his father,” Reynoso said.
Wallace nodded. “Yeah, I guess we’ll see if the family loyalty goes both ways. See whether he’s going to leave his old man hanging out to dry.”
“His old man? What? You mean the senator?” Diana asked. “Why would this involve him?”
Reynoso shook his head in amusement. “Don’t you know what you have with this tape? It isn’t a confession from Ross Merrick, but it is stone-cold proof that the senator threatened you and offered you a bribe to keep you from reporting a crime.”
“Ms. Olan, you have one of the richest and most powerful men in America by the…Well, let’s just say you have him,” Wallace said. “You have him good.”
2
Home, Strange Home
The stilt house seemed almost unbearably pretty. It brought tears to Summer’s eyes. She had thought many times over the past day that she would never see it again.
It didn’t look like much, perhaps. It was a shabby, wooden-sided bungalow built out over the water, raised on tall pilings and connected to the shore by a walkway. Frank the pelican was sitting on the railing, and as they approached he deposited a glob of bird poop on the wood.
“Home, sweet home,” Summer said, laughing. She and Seth were finally alone after a Coast Guard doctor had pronounced them both fit to be released.
They had slipped around the side of the Olan house, hoping to avoid Diana and her mother, Mallory. As far as Summer knew, neither her cousin nor her aunt had heard anything about her misadventure, and she wanted to keep it that way. Aunt Mallory would almost certainly have told Sum
mer’s parents, and they would have yanked her back to Minnesota faster than the speed of light.
Summer didn’t want to leave Crab Claw Key, not yet. Not anytime soon. In fact, she wondered if she’d ever want to leave. Seth was there for the rest of the summer, and J.T. lived there year-round. Two very powerful reasons for her to want to stay.
She had to figure out the truth about J.T. And Seth…She didn’t even want to think about having to leave him when summer ended. She wasn’t going to do anything to hurry that moment.
She squeezed his hand tightly.
They reached the door. Summer went inside. All was how she’d left it. Nothing had changed. The very normalcy of it all seemed odd. It had been only a little more than a day, but it felt as if days and weeks and lifetimes had passed. How could her bed still be made? How could there still be the odor of adhesive and paint from the work Seth had done fixing up the house? How could the same posters be on the walls, the same picture of her parents be sitting on the table beside her bed?
“Seems kind of alien, doesn’t it?” Seth said, echoing her thoughts as he joined her.
“A bed. With actual sheets,” Summer said. She went over to it and sat down. It seemed very soft. She stroked her pillowcase.
“You okay?” Seth asked.
Summer thought about the question before answering. “I guess so. I’m weirded out over this whole thing with J.T. You know?”
“I can kind of guess,” Seth said. He sat beside her.
“Plus, I halfway feel like I’m still in that cave,” Summer said. “Although the part that really sticks with me is the part before we found the cave. When we were down to just a few minutes of air…”
Summer took a very deep breath, filling her lungs to capacity. Seth did the same. Neither of them thought it was funny.
“Yeah. I don’t think I’ll forget that myself,” Seth said grimly. “Later, though—” He brightened a little. “Well, that had its nice parts.”
“Yes, it did.” Summer took his hand and raised it to her lips, kissing the bruised knuckles and pressing the palm against her face. “I guess it shouldn’t have taken that to get me to admit how much I love you. I mean, maybe actually being on the edge of death was not necessary.”
Seth laughed. “In the future let’s agree to avoid situations that involve dying. I’m totally opposed to dying.”
“It’s going to seem almost strange sleeping alone tonight,” Summer said.
“I could—” Seth began.
Summer shoved him playfully. “No, you couldn’t.”
He made a face. “Anyway, I have to go tell Trent what happened to his boat. The Coast Guard towed it back in, but it’s going to take some major work to repair.”
“You’ll fix it,” Summer said. “You’re good with your hands.” She kissed him deeply. “And you’re not so bad with your lips, either. Now go away. I need to brush my teeth six or eight times and take a hot bath and eat every single thing in the refrigerator. And then I’m just going to sleep.”
Seth stood. “Okay, I’ll go,” he said reluctantly. “Do what you said—sleep. Try not to think about all this with J.T.,” he advised. “You’ll think better when you’re rested and everything is back to normal again.”
Summer nodded agreement. “The question is, can I go back to normal again?”
“I know it will work out,” Seth said.
“Yeah?” Summer asked, unconvinced. “Suddenly my brother reappears in my life—maybe. I don’t know how it can work out. Not for everyone. Not for J.T.’s parents.” She started to say something else, then stopped herself.
“What?” Seth asked.
“Nothing, I guess. It’s just…last night, when we were in the cave, I saw something. Someone. I know this is going to sound totally insane, but it was this little boy, dressed all in white. And I’ve seen this boy in my dreams lately. Only, this wasn’t a dream. He was there, in the cave. I mean, really there.”
Seth looked worried for her. “Do you think it means something?”
“I don’t know,” Summer admitted. “He was in my dreams, and then he appeared in the cave.” She shrugged and shook her head dismissively. “I probably was dreaming.”
“What did this little boy do?”
“I asked him who he was, and he said he didn’t know. And then he took a little red ball he was holding and threw it up through the hole. The hole we escaped through.”
“Summer?” Seth said. “You are creeping me out.”
Summer laughed. “Okay, okay. It was just a dream. Forget about it.”
Seth kissed her on the forehead. “Get some sleep. And no dreams, unless they’re about me.”
Marquez slept too. She and J.T. had been up all night searching for Summer and Seth, and she was exhausted. But after only four hours of slumber she woke, fully alert.
She looked at her clock. It said 10:47. But whether that was a.m. or p.m., she wasn’t sure at first. She looked at the curtain drawn across the storefront window that was one wall of her room. No sunlight peeked around the edges. It was p.m.
She snapped on the lights, a series of shaded lamps positioned around her cavernous room. Over the years Marquez had covered the walls from floor to ceiling with a huge, brilliant, confused, intricate mural of pictures and graffiti. A spray-painted palm tree filled one corner, roots spread across the cement floor, branches fanned across the ceiling. A stylized mural showed her own family’s arrival in Florida in a fugitive rowboat from Cuba, complete with an infant Maria Esmeralda Marquez. A stunning sunset sprayed red and gold covered a field of graffitied names—from Orlando Bloom to Hillary Clinton; from Ms. Palmer, her eighth-grade history teacher, to Lloyd Cutler, the lawyer Marquez wanted to be like someday; from Kurt Cobain to Bob Marley. And then there were the other names: former boyfriends, school friends, family friends, her brothers, her parents—even the old man who thought he was Ernest Hemingway and swept the downtown sidewalks with an imaginary broom.
In the middle of the maze of names and images was a rough white rectangle—the place where she had painted over J.T.’s name.
Marquez knew she should go back to sleep. But she felt restless and agitated, as she sometimes did in the wake of disturbing dreams. She didn’t remember anything specific from her dreams, just a feeling of certain vivid colors and shapes.
Marquez knew that if she was going to be awake she ought to go upstairs and take a shower, wash her hair, watch some TV with her mom and dad and brothers. Or at least put on some clothes. But she didn’t feel like performing familiar rituals. She was fired up. She was jumpy. Her skin was crawling with electricity.
Marquez snapped her fingers and tossed her head in short, quick jerks. Music. That was the first thing.
Keane? No, too mellow. The Shins? No, way too mellow. No, something harder, something to fit her dangerous mood. Old Nirvana, maybe. She slid Never-mind into the CD player and hit Play.
She swept all the paint cans together and dumped them next to the wall, just below the blank white square. She realized she was breathing heavily, as if excited or exhausted, or maybe both. She was. Both. It happened sometimes, for no apparent reason, this sudden need to paint.
She snatched up a spray can and began shaking it, the rattling little ball a perfect counterpoint to the music pounding from the CD.
With quick strokes she directed the crimson spray against the white. As she did something came over Marquez, as it did from time to time. Her thinking, rationalizing mind simply went away for a while. Her brain became as blank as the patch of white. Her hands grabbed at paints, then threw them impatiently away and reached for some new color. The sweat began to run down her forehead, and her hair flew with each angry toss of her head. Fumes filled the room, barely controlled by the big exhaust fan that had been painted to look like a sunflower. Her eyes stung, the music pounded, her bare feet slipped on the concrete floor, and her hair and body were highlighted with careless reds and blues and golds. She dragged her ladder over, and her brushes and r
ags and sponges and every tool she had.
The music had long since stopped, the CD played out, when at last she was done. Hours had passed unnoticed. She stepped back to look at it—J.T. reborn. Huge letters, shaded for a 3-D effect so that they leaped out from the wall and picked up the glint of the mural sunset, each line woven through the entire tapestry of her walls by connections of color that insinuated themselves around each name, each picture.
The real J.T., as he was in her life: too much a part of the whole ever to be completely painted out again.
Marquez sat down on one of the red vinyl stools and hung her head. She cried, and in wiping away tears smeared new colors over her face—the same colors that made J.T.’s name. She had tried to paint him out. He was confusion and trouble, now more than ever.
When they’d started going out, he’d just been the cute cook at work. Then the simple, fun-loving guy had grown complicated. He’d learned he was not the biological son of his parents, though they had never told him directly. And he’d begun to wonder who he was and where he fit in. In the midst of it all, he’d grown angry and depressed. Who knew how he would respond to all this about being Summer’s brother Jonathan? Knowing J.T., it would not be a peaceful adjustment.
It had all been too much for Marquez. She wasn’t interested in complications and emotional problems. She was determined to keep her life orderly. She had her plan—one more year of high school, and sure, during that time she could be free and have fun and party. But then, she had determined, a different life would begin—college, law school, then a brilliant career in law. It was laid out. She already had the grades and the SAT scores.
Sixteen years ago her family had landed penniless in the United States, and the USA had taken them in, given them a chance and a hope they’d never had in Cuba. The family was dedicated to making good on that hope. Marquez was not going to be the weak link. She was not going to be the flake, the failure.
She looked around the room. The clock showed it was after two in the morning. The room reeked of fresh paint. She herself smelled of paint and sweat.