It was a blessing that the day of the funeral was cloudy with a sea breeze, or it would have made the temperature in the little church where Daria’s family stood in a receiving line unbearable. So many attended that the line came up the center aisle and snaked around the side, leading past the closed casket.
“This funeral brings back memories of someone lost too young,” Sam Travers told Bree.
She instantly felt on alert. Ric and Lance were with him. Bree stared hard at Ric, trying to see if he avoided her gaze. He didn’t, but his left cheek had a cut on the same side where she’d hit her attacker with the bottle. Of course, it could be from anything, and salvage diving was too often a contact sport.
“Yes,” Bree said to Sam, deciding not to give in to his subtle badgering. “Very happy memories of my life with Daria, which I will always cherish. I wouldn’t want to let bitterness consume me. And I do thank you for all your help in the search for her.”
“Oh, so nice of you to come...” she said to the next people in line as she turned away before Sam could fire another salvo. As if she had sent Cole a mental SOS, he suddenly appeared, shouldering Sam slightly aside and offering her a glass of water.
“Thanks for being so thoughtful,” she told Cole as Sam glowered and moved on.
“I heard,” Cole said, speaking quietly and quickly, “that Sam’s firm has taken a job in Sarasota to help demolish the supports of an old bridge, so he’ll be out of town for the next few weeks.”
“Good! Sam would go anywhere in the state for a demolitions job. Ted used to talk about how his dad was a Vietnam War hero, setting charges to destroy bridges and underwater barriers to troop movements. His specialty has always been combat or commercial explosives. That’s probably made it much harder for him to accept that Ted’s death was from a bomb. I wish he could let it go, but I am starting to understand his pain.”
Cole took her water glass and moved away again. He seemed to be everywhere in the room, yet kept an eye on her. Anytime she looked his way, he was watching, even when he had her two nephews practically hanging on to him in their mutual admiration society, which they had formed swiftly. That had deeply touched her. Cole was good with kids. Everything about him seemed so good.
“Mayor Dixon,” she said, greeting the next person in line, “thank you so much for coming. Daria would have been honored...”
During their wait to speak with the family, visitors viewed photos Bree had selected of high points in Daria’s life. It was hard to find ones that she herself wasn’t in, too. She made sure most of the early pictures had Amelia in them.
“Josh and Nikki, you’ve been a great support through all of this,” she greeted the Austins as they exchanged hugs.
“It’s the least we could do for an old friend of Josh’s,” Nikki said. “And for you, too, Briana. Oh, I’d like you to meet my father, Cory Grann from Clewiston. And I believe you’ve met his friend, Marla Sherborne.”
Politics might make strange bedfellows, Bree thought, but this was quite a crew. Cory Grann was extremely handsome. He would have made a good Marlboro man, and he would have fit in a Clint Eastwood gritty Western. Yet he was dressed like the captain of a yacht with white slacks, a natty navy blazer and an ascot, no less. More than anyone else here, he seemed to be cool and collected as he gave his condolences. This, she thought, was the so-called sugar baron ecologists loved to blame for pollution runoff.
“Oh,” Nikki said, gesturing toward a thirtysomething man who brought up the rear of their group, “and this is Mark Denton, our campaign aide and pilot.”
Bree shook his hand. His shake was so firm she fought to keep from wincing. She was still sore and had covered several bruises with makeup today. She noted that Nikki left out that Denton was also a bodyguard, but then others were leaning in, trying to hear what the celebrities of the gathering were saying.
“Sorry for your loss,” he told her. His lips barely moved when he spoke, as if he was the master of the stiff upper lip. If he was skilled at PR, it was probably all in written releases and sound bites.
Surprised that Josh hadn’t spoken, Bree turned to him. It wasn’t like him to be so quiet. He looked ashen. Either he was ill or he was grieving for all he and Daria had once shared. Tears in his eyes, he clasped her hand until Nikki put her arm in his and he abruptly let go.
“We’re staying for the funeral,” Nikki told Bree. “And we’d love to have you visit us someday, especially if you want a change of scenery for a while. At our retreat near Clewiston, I mean—in Tallahassee we do nothing but run around in circles, both in different directions. But we have a house on my father’s grounds near Clewiston and Lake Okeechobee. Nothing but boring sugarcane for miles, but it’s amazingly relaxing. We could even send Mark to fly you over.”
“It is just lovely there,” Marla put in.
“That’s very kind,” Bree told them, deeply touched.
“Sure, no problem, picking you up,” Mark Denton said as if to fill an awkward moment when Josh still didn’t speak. “My employers’ wish is my command.” Marla and Cory Grann were already talking to Ben and Amelia, and the line moved on.
Friends and friends of friends went by in a blur. Bree had a chance to ask Daria’s accounting instructor if any of the students went out together after class, but he said he didn’t think so. She asked the same of Viv and Frank Holliman.
“We suggested it once—twice, didn’t we, Viv?” he said.
“But Daria always had to get home and left very promptly, though we did spend time chatting with her before class, when she was there.”
“I saw her copy of your brochure,” Bree told them, still embarrassed she hadn’t believed them at first. “Eternal Shells looks like a fascinating opportunity, but I really needed to pass on it for my sister.”
“After all, our earthly shells are delicate and we need to think in terms of eternal ones,” Frank said, quoting exactly a line from their brochure. “Well, keep it in mind for yourself—someday.”
Bree could not shake her instinctively uneasy feeling around them. Despite what they had said about never meeting Daria after class, Frank was built a lot like her attacker—and perhaps like the man Daria had met out in the Glades. He could have worn a wig to help disguise himself, and he could have cheated on Viv. But surely Daria couldn’t have been attracted to him—at least, the Daria Bree thought she knew.
After greeting guests, who must have numbered at least two hundred, and making sure that the reporters at the front of the church were kept at a distance, the family led everyone outside in back for the funeral itself.
It was standing room only, after the family and closest friends filled the chairs that church volunteers had set up. The view of the gray-green bay and gulf beyond the coffin, then the pewter-hued horizon, was magnificent. Bree had left the photos inside, for they would just blow away, but she’d placed some of Daria’s favorite seashells and her diving mask on the casket next to the family’s spray of white roses, with the ribbon which read Beloved Sister and Aunt.
James and Jordan were on Ben’s far side, swinging their little legs and shifting in their wooden seats. Briana was on the center aisle at Amelia’s right side, with Ben on Amelia’s left. Bree thought that Pastor Wallace said all the right things, comforting things, uplifting things. But she still felt so lonely and low.
“I’ll read now from Psalm 107,” the pastor said as his simple black-and-white robe fluttered in the breeze.
“Those who go down to the sea in ships,
Who do business on great waters,
They see the works of the Lord,
And his wonders in the deep...”
He went on reading about those at the mercy of the sea, who cry out in their troubles. He said everyone was grateful that they had not lost Briana that dreadful day, too. Was everyone grateful for that? she wondered.
The pastor segued into a message on Daria’s too-short life, on the gifts she took from the sea and the gifts she gave the sea, including a mention of the report that would be made public tomorrow. “Daria’s sea grass project endeavored to protect God’s great and precious sea, just as God now protects her soul forever. Daria—with her twin sister at her side—loved God’s creation, both above these waters we see even now and far below their surface.”
When Amelia kept fidgeting more than her sons, Bree realized she should have asked the pastor not to overplay their twinship, but then, he knew little about the third sister. So many people had remarked about how much Bree looked like Daria, how it was as if she still moved among them, and Amelia had looked more shaken each time she overheard that.
The funeral director had asked Bree and Amelia if they would like to view the body before closing the casket, but they’d both declined. Bree wanted to shut out the horrid picture of how Daria had looked when they’d found her body, and Amelia just repeated, “I can’t. I’m so sorry, so sorry...”
Bree tried to concentrate on the service, but she kept wondering whether her attacker—and maybe Daria’s murderer—was here. Fred Holliman was the perfect height, but would a wig have stuck to his head after a fall in a ditch when his baseball cap came off? And that bruise on Ric’s cheek. She had no doubt Sam Travers would give everything he had to see Bree suffer as he had since Ted died. No, she was going crazy, carrying everything too far. Where was the line between self-protection and paranoia?
Over Amelia’s protest, Bree had insisted the Salazars sit just behind their family. Manny was deeply grieved today, and his wife, Juanita, kept crossing herself. Lucinda sat next to her older sister, Carianne. Their family was all in black and wearing large crucifixes, even Lucinda.
The members of the Clear the Gulf Commission were here and sitting together, except for Cole, who kept prowling the perimeter of the church and now was standing off to the side as if he’d been hired to keep order.
The congregation sang “Eternal Father Strong To Save,” which Bree knew as the Navy Hymn, with its resonant, haunting chorus of “O, hear us when we cry to thee/ For those in peril on the sea.”
Oh, yes, she could cry right now. Amelia was sobbing silently, her shoulders shaking despite the fact Ben had a firm grip of her left wrist. Bree clasped her other hand. Crying would do no good. It was finding out who had possibly hurt Daria and making that person pay that would bring some closure. Bree would find a way to forgive, but only after truth and justice had its way.
She stared at Daria’s favorite diving mask on top of the casket. The diffused sun glinted strangely off the plastic as if two bright, unearthly eyes stared out from behind it. Someone here was wearing a mask. Someone here might be pretending to be grieving and be staring at her even now. Had Daria’s murderer meant to kill her, or was it an accident and he or she had simply fled before the boat was taken by the storm and bashed on the seawall? Had that same killer come after Bree? And the most terrifying thought of all: could the murderer have meant to kill Bree but mistook Daria for her twin?
The benediction was from a Bible verse Bree and Daria had always liked because it seemed to them it asked for the Lord’s blessing on daily work. Starting out their business, they’d needed all the help they could get.
“So teach us to number our days
That we might have a heart of wisdom...
And let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us,
And establish the work of our hands for us;
Yes, establish the work of our hands.”
After a final prayer, Pastor Wallace announced that everyone was invited to stay for a luncheon served by the women of the church here on the lawn, after which there would be a private burial for family only. Everyone stood while the pallbearers carried the casket to the hearse for now.
Bree took Amelia’s arm and walked her inside, with Ben on her other side and both boys keeping close. Amelia was trembling so hard that Bree’s heart went out to her. She had denied coming into their apartment and searching Daria’s room for mementos. Bree believed her, but even that inquiry must have shaken Amelia. Her older sister must also be mourning the times she had never had with Daria, and the lack of precious memories to cherish.
“I just can’t face everyone right now,” Amelia said, pulling away. “I’m going to ask the pastor if there’s someplace I can lie down.”
“I’d go sit with you,” Bree said, “but someone besides Ben has to mingle.”
“Yes, of course. Besides, everyone’s feeling sorry for you, not me.”
“Amelia, I—”
“It’s all right, Bree,” Ben said. “You boys stay with Aunt Bree until I get your mother settled down.”
* * *
“Not much wailing and no kneeling, not like when Grandpa died,” Lucinda told her family in English as they ate sandwiches and salads on the lawn between the church and the bay. “Feels funny not to have a mass, too.”
“It is their way, and it’s okay,” Manny told her.
“Glad you can accept different ways of thinking and doing things,” Lucinda muttered.
“Don’t start!” he said, shaking a finger in her face.
“Don’t either of you start,” Juanita said. “She set you up for that one, sí? Let’s just get along today, all right? This the United States of America, and thanks to Bree, we accepted here right with the money and power people.”
Manny just glared at Lucinda as he finished his lemonade. “Maybe when word gets out I’m Bree Devon’s partner, people ’round here won’t like that,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “When I went with Cole to that place I told you ’bout, if looks could kill, I be dead. And that backwoods bar not even up to Turtle Bay.”
“Shh!” Juanita scolded. “It bad luck at a funeral talk about your own death. It mean, if you not die within the next year, the next of kin of this one buried today be dead.”
Manny rolled his eyes. “Sometimes, mi Juanita, I see why our Lucinda want to run from our ways. Next you be telling me just ’cause this a sad day, our quinceañera for her be cursed. Let’s say adios to my partner Briana and head home, sí?”
When they made their farewells, he was surprised that Bree and Lucinda hugged each other. And annoyed when he heard Bree say quietly to her, “Remember what I said, Cindi.”
* * *
The ceremony at the grave site was blessedly brief, because Amelia was still a wreck and that was destroying Bree’s hard-won poise, too. They all walked to their cars. Ben put Amelia in theirs—the boys had gone home with a friend—when Bree said, “I’m staying until they close the grave.”
Ben turned to face her. “It will depress you even more. You don’t have to do that.”
“I know. But I came into the world with her, and I want to see her settled and at peace, as they say.”
He took her arm and walked her away from his car. In the distance they could see the funeral director talking to the cemetery crew with their waiting backhoe.
“Bree,” Ben said, obviously fighting to keep his patience, “she’s at peace. Now you have to work on that, too, not keep causing waves.”
“That’s a good one,” she said. “Not causing waves.”
“You know what I mean. I can tell you’re not really letting the dead be dead. I’m not the county prosecutor for nothing, and I can read between the lines about what you’ve been thinking all of a sudden. If you pursue a half-cocked murder scenario, you’re only going to get yourself upset or worse, hurt.”
She pulled away from his hand on her arm and turned to face him squarely. She was tempted to tell him she’d been attacked, but she didn’t want him insisting she stay home or with Amelia. And what he’d just said almost sounded like a threat. “Hurt, meaning?” she asked.
“To use another cliché, you’re going to stir up a hornet’s nest if you go around suspecting people of some sort of wrongdoing, accusing them—”
“I will accuse them if I find out someone staged that so-called accident. I thought a county prosecutor might call a possible murder a little more than ‘some sort of wrongdoing.’”
“Amelia said you think someone broke in and searched Daria’s room. If I get a CSI tech to come out there and take prints, will you lay off?”
“I’d appreciate that. I was going to try to get the police to do that.”
“I said, will you lay off then?”
“No. Someone clever enough to pop the lock on my veranda doors and desperate enough to climb up onto the second story to do that needs to be stopped. But if CSI does turn up a set of prints other than mine or Daria’s, will you pursue it?”
“Of course I will. Look, I’ll see if I can call in a favor and send someone over tonight. We wanted to have you come back to the house, but Amelia needs to take a tranquilizer and go to bed. She’s never gotten over what she considered desertion by her mother, then her father.”
“That’s not the way it was.”
“But if she thinks it’s true, it’s reality to her, and I can’t risk her losing you on top of Daria. There’s my bottom line.”
So he wasn’t actually threatening her. He was just worried about Amelia, and that was completely understandable.
“And another thing,” he said, in what seemed a lame attempt to change the subject so she wouldn’t argue about Amelia and their father, “is Cole DeRoca.”
“What about him? He only saved my life and has been more help to me than anyone. Please don’t tell Amelia that, but it’s true. Jordan and James like him and—”
“I like him, too, but think about it. He’s overly possessive and protective of you, and you’ve only known him a week. I’m advising, in the emotional state you’re in, not to get either psychologically or physically involved with him.”
That advice reminded her of what she’d just told Lucinda, but this was different. She was not some adolescent girl in rebellion against her parents.
“Actually,” she told Ben, “I had met Cole once before. I even had lunch with him, but he was going through a divorce and nothing came of it right then.”
“See, then he might be emotionally vulnerable right now. You know—the rebound effect.”
“Thank you, Dr. Phil.”
“I admit it’s a blessing that he found you on the beach and saved your life. But he’s too convenient. He’s always in the right place at the right time. His office and workshop are right next to the Grog Shop at the end of town, right?”
“Yes. And?”
“Are you positive he didn’t know Daria, if he’d bumped into you before?”
“What are you implying? He knew of Daria, because he’s on the Clear the Gulf Commission. But we were given our assignment to observe and photograph the sea grass meadow without actually appearing before the commission. My report tomorrow will be the first time I’ve been there live, so to speak. Ben, you’re wrong about Cole. If I can’t trust him, I can’t trust anyone.”
But those last words tasted bitter in her mouth. If she hadn’t known her own twin sister, her lifelong best friend, could she really trust a man she’d known only a week?