The blue edge of midnight

Chapter 19

My truck was waiting for me in the lot when the cab dropped me at Billy’s tower. The new glass was shining but the three gouges in the paint brought up a taste of anger I couldn’t keep down. My keys were at the lobby desk and the assistant manager cleared me to the penthouse. I made a pot of coffee, drank half of it while I put my bags together and then poured the rest in a huge, wide-bottomed sailing mug. I threw the bags in my truck and drove out west to the ranger station.
When I pulled into my usual parking space, I could see Cleve and his assistant had pulled the Boston Whaler out of the water on a trailer and were washing the hull, scrubbing the algae and dirt stain from the water line. Cleve tossed his brush into a galvanized pail, wiped his hands on his trousers and greeted me with a handshake.
“Max. Good to see you back.”
The assistant was looking past us at my truck, his mouth had dropped open a bit and then he snapped it shut and turned away, shaking his head in disgust. Cleve and I walked up toward the office.
“I don’t have a new canoe yet. But if the offer still stands, I’d like to borrow yours to get out to the shack,” I said.
“No problem. But I’ll have to get you the key,” Cleve answered, moving through the office to his desk.
“After everything going on, I went out and put a hasp and lock on the door. Figured it might keep your stuff safe,” he said, putting the key in my palm and then looking at it a second too long. “First time I ever had to do that.”
I felt a pang of responsibility, like I’d taken something from him.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Ain’t your fault,” he answered. “Things change.”
We carried his canoe to the water. I loaded my bags from the truck and just before pushing off I called out to Mike Stanton, who was still working the waterline of the Whaler.
“If you want to fix her up again, I’ll pay you.”
He looked off across the ramp at my truck.
“OK. Yeah. Maybe.”
I nodded, put my right foot in the middle of the canoe, grabbed the gunwales and pushed off.
My ribs were sore from the plane crash. My arms and shoulders knotted from the parking lot fight. And my lungs were dry and constricted from too much air conditioning and not enough exercise. Cleve’s canoe seemed awkward and the paddle felt strange in my hand. I tried to get a rhythm going and got deeper into the flow of the current and around the first mangrove curves, but it wasn’t working. I couldn’t get the feel of someone else’s boat. The trim felt wrong. The balance was off. The only thing that wasn’t different was the river.
I still worked up a heavy sweat and a running heartbeat by the time I entered the mouth of the canopy. Inside the shade I stopped paddling and drifted into the coolness. A Florida red belly turtle stood guard on a downed tree trunk, his neck stretched out as if sniffing the air, the yellow, arrow-shaped marking on his snout pointing up the river. The white summer sky peeked through the leaves, its rays spattered the ferns below and in the distance I heard the soft roll of thunder. I resettled myself in the seat and moved on.
By the time I reached the shack it was raining, hard. The leaf canopy sounded like cloth ripping and lightning sent a flash through the undergrowth and for an instant stole the color from the trees. I lashed the canoe to my platform and ran the bags up the stairs but when I twisted the knob and pushed, the door rattled and stuck.
I’d forgotten Cleve’s new lock and dug through my pockets for the key. Once inside I dragged the bags through the doorway and stood dripping on the pine floors and squinting through the dusk. I had seen too much of Billy’s airy and fashionable apartment.
I found my way to the kerosene lamp and lit the wick. Hammonds’ warrant servers had been civil. With the exception of a few counter items out of place, it was the same as I’d left it. I started a wood fire in the stove and set up a pot of coffee. I found my old enameled cup that some officer had misplaced on the drain board.
Outside the lightning snapped and I could hear the water sluicing off the roof and onto the cinnamon fern below the windows. I took off my dripping clothes and sat naked in my wooden chair, tipped back on two legs, put my heels on the table and listened to the rain.

I lay in my bunk that night half dreaming and half recalling, my skin moist in the humidity, and every time I closed my eyes I could see blue and red lights flashing through the trees. I was back in Philadelphia. The concrete sidewalk was still wet from some early-morning drizzle and up high at the top of the hill in the distance loomed the huge, yellowish back wall of the Museum of Art. In front were the tiered steps that the Rocky character had charged up and then shaken his fists at the world. In back was the Schuylkill River winding out through an urban park of maple trees and wooded lanes and granite cliffs. On that morning, between the museum and boathouse row, under a thicket of azaleas, lay a young woman with her running suit muddied and half pulled off, her Nike cross trainer on one foot but without a partner, and her throat cut from ear to ear.
I was working with a Center City detective squad, low on the totem pole and “learning the craft,” according to my new lieutenant. We were on the first call out that morning.
It didn’t take long to identify the victim. Although she wasn’t carrying I.D. and the key she had strapped into a holder on the remaining shoe was unmarked, I recognized the store label on the running suit. It was a small specialty athletic place on Rittenhouse Square. It was five minutes away up the Benjamin Franklin Parkway and over to Walnut. When we got there the store manager went slack-jawed when he saw the Polaroid we’d taken of the woman.
“Susan Gleason,” he said, turning away from the photo. She was a regular. A dedicated runner who lived across the historic square in a centuries-old building retrofitted into high- priced condos. He knew she ran from there down to the river and along the row early every morning. She went through a pair of shoes every twelve weeks. She was a very good customer.
We confirmed with the condo management. Gleason lived alone, a thirty-six-year-old stock analyst, loved the city and worked constantly. The running seemed her only outlet.
The blue lights were still spinning when we got back to the scene. The body and been removed and the other shoe had been found fifty yards away near a parking spot close to one of the rowing clubs along the river. Other members of the detective squad had interviewed several early morning runners. Some recognized the woman’s running suit. Some also knew the parking spot was often occupied at dawn by a late-model, beat- up Chevy Impala with one of those orange, city employee parking stickers.
“A big, odd-looking white guy would just sit there with the window down. He’s there every morning except on the weekend,” a runner said. “You can see the Fairmount Dam from there. I figured he was just enjoying the view before starting the day.”
The prints of a size thirteen work boot were found in the mud by the azaleas. The squad fanned out among city maintenance divisions in Center City. A supervisor at the City Hall—area subway division recognized a description of the Impala: Arthur Williams. “Yeah, big guy, kinda, you know, slow.”
Williams worked in the underground subway access tunnels, sweeping trash and cleaning graffiti from the walls. He was in his 40s. Quiet. Didn’t come in that day, which was unusual.
We got an address in North Philadelphia and another car went with us. An upper-class woman from Rittenhouse Square had been murdered while jogging in a popular park along the river. They weren’t sparing any manpower at the roundhouse to button this one down by the evening news.
The house in North Philly was in the middle of a worn- down block of tired homes. They all shared a creaking roofline and were all connected so you could stand on the front porch at one end of the block and see your neighbor eight doors down standing out on his. Only a spindled railing separated your porch floorboards from the next guy’s.
We were greeted by an elderly woman who talked through the screen door.
“Mrs. Williams?”
“No, sir. I am Fanny Holland. Mrs. Williams’ sister.”
“Is Arthur home, ma’am?”
She could see the other detectives moving about the Impala parked on the street.
“He’s not going to lose his job over this is he?” the old lady said as she let us in. “He has never missed a day before.”
Two detectives went up the narrow staircase. My partner and I went into the kitchen with Fanny Holland and sat her down at the table. She listened for sounds up through the cracked ceiling. The house was not unlike my own childhood home. It smelled of liniment and old cardboard, ancient comforters and soiled doilies. My mother had grown sick in such a place.
The others brought Arthur down. Big, docile, with a confused child’s look on his face. They found him in bed covered with three blankets. He still had on his work clothes, including a pair of huge, mud-caked boots. He stumbled with his thick wrists cuffed behind his back and kept repeating in a low whine, “She was too pretty to die. She was too pretty to die.”
I was left to explain to the aunt while the rest of the squad took Williams to the roundhouse. The old woman seemed confused and stunned and took the words from my mouth as something indecipherable.
Attack a woman? He could not. There was not a bully on the street, male or female, who couldn’t slap the boy to shame since he was ten years old.
Cut her with a knife? He wasn’t capable.
Weighing the situation, Fanny Holland let loose the family ghosts. And I listened.
Arthur had been a damaged child. A low I.Q., a momma’s boy. A boy who fell further when his father left. His mother endured “until it got to be too much.”
She’d committed suicide. Cut her wrists out in the garden. Her favorite place. Had carried the knife in her picking basket. She was dead when Arthur came home from school.
“You couldn’t put a butter knife on the table since,” the old woman said. “Cut a woman? Impossible.”
Arthur’s only habit was to leave his house early each day and find a green place. A garden of sorts. She herself went with him on weekends to the Longwood Garden’s indoor arboretum in winter. It was the only thing he clung to.
When I got back to the roundhouse the TV news trucks were already stacked in the lot. Inside the bureau a knot of detectives was gathering in the hall opposite the interview rooms. I singled out one of the senior investigators and told him I thought I had some relevant information from the aunt on Williams.
“Good, Freeman. Write it up and we’ll add it to the package. The guy already confessed.”
The detective in charge didn’t want to hear about I.Q.s and broken homes and mothers who cut their own wrists.
“The guy was stalking women on boathouse row. Gettin’ his jollies watching ’em bounce down the jogging path every morning. It gets to be too much for his pants to hold, he grabs one, she fights, he cuts her.
“His footprints are next to the body. Her shoe is by the parking spot where people saw him this morning. Only thing we’re missing is the knife, which is probably in the river and DNA, which we ain’t gonna get cause he never finished the rape.
“Whata ya mean it doesn’t make sense, Freeman? The guy confessed. He keeps sayin’, ‘She was too pretty to live. She was too pretty to live.’ What more do you want?”
Charges were filed despite my suggestion that we rethink the case. The lieutenant listened politely to me and said: “There’s a sense of urgency with a case like this, Freeman. Sometimes you have to put it together quickly and act. You can’t grind on every little aspect. That’s the way it works sometimes.”
I told him I thought we had the wrong man. Three weeks later he approved my transfer back to patrol. Arthur Williams went to prison. He may still be there.

I awoke with my finger on the dime-sized scar at my neck. I had been drifting most of the night between dreams and consciousness, caught between those two places and feeling like I didn’t belong in either.
I got out of bed, lit the stove and then stood at my eastern window. An early light filtered in through leaves still dripping from the night rain. I heard the low grunt of an anhinga and spotted the bird swimming along small patches of standing water with just its head and long flexible neck showing. I watched him awhile as he stabbed into the water at fish and then I turned to start coffee. Padding across the room I stopped to pull on a pair of faded shorts and heard, or maybe felt, a soft thunk of wood against wood. The single vibration had shivered up from the foundation stilts, or maybe the staircase. I stood, listening, and heard it again. Paranoia got the best of me and I went quietly to my duffel bag and slipped my hand to the bottom, finding the oilskin-wrapped package and drawing it out. The warrant servers had indeed been careful. My 9mm handgun had been re-wrapped. The sixteen-round clip folded into the cloth so the two metals wouldn’t scrape together. It was done carefully by men who knew weapons.
I undid the trigger lock and fed the clip up into the handle and held the gun in my right hand. I had not picked it up with purpose in over two years. I stared at the barrel. Despite the packing, a hint of brownish rust was oxidizing on the edges from the humid Florida air.
I felt the thunk again. This time it seemed too purposeful. I went to the door and opened it slowly with my left hand. At the base of the staircase, with his back propped against a stanchion of the dock, sat Nate Brown. The early light caught the silver in his hair. He had one bare foot flat on the deck and the other draped over into a sixteen-foot wooden skiff. With a subtle movement of that leg he thunked the bow against the dock piling.
“Ain’t gotcha no alarm clock, eh?” he said without looking up.
I slipped the 9mm into my waistband in the small of my back and stepped out the door.
“I don’t usually get visitors,” I said, and quickly added, “this early.”
I took two steps down and sat on the top landing. Brown remained where he was. He had a sawgrass bud in his left palm and was carving out the tender white part to eat with a short knife that had a distinctive curved blade. It looked too much like the blade I’d taken from Gunther’s scabbard after the plane wreck and accidentally dropped into the mud of the glades.
“You ain’t gone need that pistol,” he said, finally looking up at me. I just stared at him, trying to see what might be in his eyes.
“I heard ya load it.”
I took the gun from behind me where it was digging into my backbone and laid it on the plank next to me. In the rising light I could see the dark stain under Brown where water had dripped off his clothes. His trousers were wet through and there was a water line that changed the color of his denim shirt at midchest. Somehow he must have walked through the thick swamp from the west to my shack and found it in the dark. There had been no moonlight in the overnight storm.
“How about some coffee?” I finally said. “I was just making some.”
“We ain’t got time,” he answered. The tone of authority that had struck me at the Loop Road bar was back in his voice. “We got to go.”
I started to ask where, but he cut me off.
“It’s the girl. The little one. You’re gonna have to come git her.”
Now I could see his pale eyes as he stood up and there was an urgency in them that seemed foreign to his face.
“The kidnapped girl? Where?” I said, unconsciously picking up my gun. “Where is she? Is she dead?”
“Yonder in the glade,” Brown answered, barely tipping his head to the west. “She ain’t real good. But she’s alive.”
“Who’s with her? Is there anyone with her? Can we get a helicopter out there?” Now the urgency was in my throat.
“Ain’t nobody with her now. An’ ain’t nobody now who can find her ’cept me. You’re gonna have to git her,” the old man said, his voice flat but still holding strength. “You alone. Let’s go.”
I walked back in the shack and laid the gun on my table and quickly dressed, taking an extra minute to pull on a pair of high combat boots I rarely used. I picked up Billy’s cell phone and punched his number, got his answering machine and left a hurried message that I was heading out into the Glades with Brown and would call him back with details. I stuffed a first- aid kit into a waterproof fanny pack and strapped it around my waist. As I clomped down the stairs I put the cell phone inside too. Brown didn’t object.
I climbed into the stern of the shallow skiff and Brown crouched on a broad seat built about a third of the way back from the bow. Using a cypress boat pole almost as long as the skiff itself, he pushed us down my access trail and onto the river.
“It’ll be faster goin’ up the canal with two,” he said, heading upstream.
The old man seemed like a magician with the boat, poling and steering his way up my river at a speed that I could match only on my best days in the canoe. Sometimes he would stand erect, working the pole its full length but suddenly slip to his knees to duck a cypress limb and never miss his rhythm. I watched him bend down and noted the short leather scabbard on his belt where he’d holstered his curved knife. It was then that I remembered my 9mm. I’d left it on the table. I had also not thought to fasten Cleve’s new lock on the door. I had not needed the gun for some time and I hoped I wouldn’t need it now.
We got to the dam in twenty minutes, half my usual time, and I helped Brown hoist the skiff over. It was a flat-bottomed craft, made of marine plywood in a simple but efficient way. The techniques of both building and maneuvering such a skiff had been passed down through generations of Gladesmen. When Brown pushed off again I watched him as we slid past the spot where I’d found the wrapped body of the dead child. He never hesitated, never turned his head, either toward the spot in memory or away from it in avoidance. He just kept poling, his taut shoulders and back moving under the faded cotton of his damp shirt like the smooth muscles of a racehorse under its hide.
“I believe she will be fine” and “We’ll be there directly” were his only answers to my questions about the girl.
I sat back in frustration and watched him. The sun was up full over the eastern horizon now, deepening the blue in the sky and slicing through the river canopy like light through cheesecloth. We passed the canoe park and I stifled an urge to call out to Ham Mathis at the rental shack.
In another thirty minutes we pushed through a shallow bog of cattails and green maidencane to a canal levee where a culvert fed fresh water to the river. Brown jumped out into knee- deep water and I followed as he tugged his skiff up the grass-covered levee bank with a half dozen lunges. I tried to push from the stern but wasn’t much help and I was again awed by the strength coming out of a small man who we’d already determined was nearly eighty years old.
From the high berm I looked out over the open expanse of Everglades and tried to get a fix on our direction, but Brown had the skiff floating again and his silence screamed, “Get your ass down here.” I knew we were on the L-10 canal and headed deep into the Glades. The canal system had been dredged eighty years ago to transport commercial fish and produce from Lake Okeechobee, the huge liquid heart of Florida, to the shipping centers on the coast. But I couldn’t tell how far or how fast we were going. Now in open water, Brown used the full power of the pole and could push the skiff nearly a hundred yards with a single stroke. He worked silently, except the times he spotted an alligator lying in the grass at the water’s edge or a snout like a floating chunk of dark-colored bark in the distance.
“Gator,” he would call out, not in warning, but like a cop in a prowl car might say “crackhead” or “eight-baller” to his partner as they cruised a drug area. This was Brown’s work sector. The neighborhood he knew. I was on his turf and at his mercy.
As the sun climbed up the sky he did not seem to tire or slow or even sweat. I had to admire his ability to grind. After more than an hour he suddenly stopped poling and steered to the side. No marker. No trail. No indication that this spot was any different than the miles we’d already passed. When he jumped down into the water I followed and we hoisted the skiff to the top of the berm. To the west lay acres of freshwater marsh, stretched out golden in the high sun just like I’d seen from the cockpit of Gunther’s plane. On the horizon was a faint line of dark green rising like a ridge and bumping the skyline. We had to pull the skiff some thirty yards through shallow water and around clumps of grass the size of small autos until Brown found a serpentine trail of deeper water that spun out toward the faint hardwood hammock in the distance. He tossed me a quart of water in a clear Bell canning jar. It was sealed with a metal screw-on collar and a rubber rimmed lid.
“We’ll be there directly,” he said, stripping off his shirt to expose a sleeveless white T-shirt underneath. I had taken off my own shirt and draped it over my head and shoulders as protection against the sun. We pushed off again and this time Brown took up a spot on a smaller poling platform at the back of the skiff. He started us down the middle of the water trail and I straddled the center platform, alternately looking ahead trying to keep my bearings and watching him, standing above me, framed in the blue canvas of sky and squinting into the distance.
“Who brought her out here, Nate?” I finally asked, wondering if he would let go of it.
“Ain’t for me to say,” he answered, and I wasn’t sure whether the response meant he knew but wouldn’t tell, or that he simply wouldn’t speculate. But somehow I believed that it had not been him.
In short time I lost track of the turns and directions we moved. I had no clue why he took one watery path over another. On occasion I would stand up on the platform, wobbling the boat, and see that we were gaining on the line of trees. Then I would sit back down and take a drink from the jar. The heat was rising and the sawgrass smelled warm and close, like hay in a summer barn, but the sweet odor of wet decay mixed with it to create an odd perfume. It was not like my river where everything was dominated by moisture. Out here the battle between a drying sun and the soaking water was waged in the six- foot-high envelope of space we were sliding through.
I didn’t know how much time had passed. An hour, maybe more, as the wall of trees grew taller and more distinct. Finally Brown shoved the nose of the skiff up into the grass and we stepped out onto semi-solid land. He yanked the boat up on a dry mound.
“Got to walk in,” he said, and started off.
I stuck the water jar in my bag and followed, watching where he stepped and peeking ahead, hoping to see some sign of a destination. We walked thirty yards through ankle-deep mud, my boots making sucking noises with each step. Then we climbed a gradual rise onto a dry ridge and plunged into the hammock.
I slipped my shirt back on and it stuck to my skin with sweat and when we stepped into the shade it quickly took on the feel of a cold wet cloth. The place was filled with thick trees; reddish gumbo-limbo whose limbs bent and curled at odd angles, mahogany that was native to South Florida but had been harvested out of most areas, and scaly, black-spotted poisonwood that was dangerous to the touch.
There was no trail. Brown made his own and I tried to follow but where he gracefully ducked past wide swathes of spiderwebs, I caught them full in the face, the sticky filament pasting across my eyes and lips. While I wiped at the strands I would trip over a root or knot of vines and then look up to see Brown fading into the vegetation and shadows ahead.
I struggled to keep up, slushing down through water-filled ditches and back up over downed trunks of mottled pigeon plum. But my eyes had adjusted to the filtered light and after several minutes I could see the unnatural shape of dark right angles in the trees up ahead. A structure became more defined, and when we got to the clearing, I could see it was a shack not unlike my own but in sadder shape. Balanced on top of a shell mound, it was built of rough-hewn lumber that was darkly weathered and rotting at its corners. The spine of the tar- papered roof was broken and sagged at the middle. A tall wooden rack that might have served as a child’s swing in another world stood off to the side and was hung with alligator skins from four to six feet long.
Brown had stopped at the edge of the clearing and stood staring at the building, his eyes narrowed as if he was still in the sun, his shoulders slumped slightly. He was going no farther, and for the first time in the journey he seemed tired.
“You’ll have to git her,” he said with a nod at the shack.