CONWAY TWITTY WAS singing “Hello Darling,” the mellow tones burrowing into my sleeping brain, goading me awake, and interrupting a pleasant dream that was dissipating even as I shook off the bonds of Morpheus. As awareness displaced the dream, I realized I was in my own bed in my cottage on the north end of Longboat Key, Florida. I’d once paid a buck twenty-five for the ringtone that was issuing from my cell phone. Jennifer Diane Duncan, the police detective known as J.D., the woman whom I loved, thought it a waste of good money, even though I had assigned the ring to her incoming calls.
The light of a March morning was peeking through the window blinds, the high angle of the sun glaring at me with disdain for sleeping so late on a Friday. I glanced at the clock on my bedside table. Nine a.m. Most mornings I had already finished my daily jog on the beach.
I fumbled for the phone, almost dropping it. “Were you afraid I was sleeping too late?” I asked.
“No. I’ve got a problem,” J.D. said. “Aunt Esther is in the Sumter County jail.”
“What?”
“She’s charged with murder.”
“That’s absurd. What’s going on?”
“I don’t know. I just got a call from Sue Rapp, her next-door neighbor. She said the deputies took her away about fifteen minutes ago. One of them told Sue that Esther was being charged with murder. Apparently, Esther’s house is crawling with cops. They’re searching the place.”
“There’s got to be some mistake.”
“Must be. I’m going to call the sheriff’s office up there and see what’s going on.”
“No, don’t do that. Let me handle it.”
“She’s my aunt, Matt.”
“I know, but I’m her lawyer. Or I will be as soon as I can get to Bushnell. Let’s not interject you into this just yet. If the authorities know you’re a police detective, they might close ranks. They won’t want there to be even a whiff of favoritism to come back and bite them. The sheriff has to face election, you know.”
“You might be right.”
“I’ll make a call to the jail and get ready to go up there. Why don’t you come on over. I’ll put the coffee on.”
I booted up my computer and found the number for the Sumter County Detention Center and called, identified myself as a lawyer, and asked to speak to the supervisor. I explained to him that I had been retained to represent Esther Higgins and that I would be arriving at the jail in a few hours. I insisted that he make a notation in the file that Esther was represented and that there would be no interrogation until I could meet with her.
The supervisor, who identified himself as Lieutenant Chris Ricks, told me that he expected Esther to arrive at the detention center momentarily. I asked for his email address and he gave it to me. I hung up and emailed him, confirming our conversation. I didn’t want anyone at the jail to conveniently forget that I had called and invoked Esther’s right to silence. And if they did forget, I’d use that email to suppress all the evidence they found as a result of any conversation they had with my client.
I was already thinking like a lawyer. I’d hoped I was over that, but I guess not. Three years of law school and a number of years in a courtroom tend to engraft a certain way of thinking onto one’s brain. I’ve found that what works well in a trial does not lend itself to interpersonal relationships. Both the women I have loved were sensitive to my almost irrepressible need to cross-examine them when we were having what I thought of as discussions and they assured me were arguments. Either way, I lost more of them than I won and I assuaged my bruised ego with the thought that they were simply bereft of logic and therefore not worthy foils for my incisive, legally trained mind. I actually have better sense than to burden them with my thinking on that issue.
My name is Matt Royal and I live on a little slice of paradise known as Longboat Key, an island that lies off the southwest coast of Florida, sixty miles south of Tampa and about halfway down the peninsula. The key, a barrier island separated from the small cities of Sarasota and Bradenton by the broad sweep of Sarasota Bay, is ten miles long and a half-mile wide at its broadest point. It is a small community that each winter swells to a rather large community with the arrival of the snowbirds, our friends from the north who seek refuge from the colder zip codes. Most of them leave by Easter, and we find ourselves nestling down and preparing for the heat and somnolence that summer brings.
Easter came in late March this year, and at the end of the second week of March, our little slice of paradise was a mixed bag of year-round residents and snowbirds who never left before Easter, regardless of when it arrived. The weather was at its most pleasant and would remain so until mid-May when the sun seemed to focus on us, bringing the heat and humidity that kept all but the hardiest souls cowering in our air-conditioned homes.
I was once an officer in the United States Army, saw some combat, got some medals, came home and graduated from law school. I practiced law in Orlando for a number of years, worked too hard, drank too much, and spent too many hours chasing what had become the holy grail of too many lawyers—the almighty dollar. I lost the wife I loved to divorce, quit the practice in disgust, directed mostly at myself, cashed out all my assets and my interest in the law firm, and moved to Longboat Key. If I were frugal, the money would last me for the rest of my life.
I worked diligently and successfully at becoming a beach bum, in the process garnering a lot of support from my new friends on the island, good people who were masters of idleness. During the course of my transformation, I met Detective Jennifer Diane Duncan, J.D. to the islanders, and fell in love for the second time. The great surprise to me, as well as to my island friends, was that she loved me back. Life was good on Longboat Key, but no matter how hard I tried, I could not seem to get the lawyer out of the beach bum.
I heard J.D. come in the front door of my cottage as I stepped out of the shower. She had spent the night alone in her condo, catching up with the endless paperwork her job required. There wasn’t much crime on our small island, but even the most mundane misdemeanor required pages of documentation. It was the part of the job that J.D. disliked the most, and sometimes it backed up so much that she had to hunker down alone and spend hours typing endless drivel into useless forms. Her words, not mine.
I shaved and dressed in shorts and an old Army t-shirt and walked into the living room. My cottage perched on the edge of Sarasota Bay, and the sliding glass doors that opened from my living room onto the patio provided a spectacular view east across the usually calm water. Today was no different. The bay was resplendent in its springtime mantle of turquoise, with not even a ripple to mar its flat surface.
J.D. was sitting at my computer, sipping from a mug of coffee. I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. The computer screen was filled with the online edition of The Villages Daily Sun, the newspaper of The Villages, the sprawling community that covered much of Sumter County and parts of two others in North Central Florida. “Good morning, sweetheart,” I said. “What’re you looking for?”
“Hi, sweetie,” she said. Her soft voice carried a hint of the Old South, acquired during her childhood years in Atlanta. “I was trying to find out if anybody had been murdered in The Villages lately. I found it on the Daily Sun’s website. There’s not a whole lot to the story in today’s paper. I don’t think they know anything yet. Somebody found the body of a woman named Olivia Lathom in the middle of Paddock Square in Brownwood at dawn yesterday. She was apparently killed and left there Wednesday night or early yesterday morning. The medical examiner ruled it a homicide, but there are no suspects, at least none that the cops are releasing to the press.”
“Where’s Brownwood and what’s Paddock Square?”
“Brownwood is the town square not far from where Aunt Esther lives in the Village of Collier. Paddock Square is the outdoors entertainment venue in the middle of the town. She drove us there in her golf cart when we visited just before Christmas.”
“I remember that. Scariest ride I ever took. I’ve had five near-death experiences in my life. Two of them were in the war and the other three were between Esther’s house and Brownwood.”
“It was,” I said. “Who is Olivia Lathom?”
“I Googled her. She is, or was, a mystery writer in Atlanta. She’s written a couple of books that were released only as eBooks. They did okay, but her latest one came out in hard cover and has taken off. It’s a top ten New York Times best seller.”
“What was she doing in The Villages?”
“The paper said she had a book signing at the Barnes & Noble store in Lake Sumter Landing on Wednesday. It apparently drew a big crowd.”
“What does Esther have to do with Lathom?”
“I don’t know. Esther spent most of her life in Atlanta. Maybe she knew some writers. She was a high school English teacher for thirty years. Maybe Lathom was a former student.”
“I’ll know more when I get to Bushnell. Does it say how she was killed?”
“She was shot.”
“Anything else? Like the caliber of the gun, location of the wound, that sort of thing?”
“No. Just some stuff about Lathom’s background and career. The story doesn’t have a lot of information. This was probably posted yesterday. Maybe we can find out more when they get around to posting this morning’s paper.”
“Did you get much sleep?”
She shook her head. “I turned out my lights around three and the phone rang just before I called you. I didn’t sleep well. Had a lot of crap running through my head from those cases I was doing the paperwork on.”
You hungry?” I asked.
“As a bear.”
“I’ll whip us up some breakfast.”
I’m not much of a cook, but I can scramble eggs, fry bacon, toast bread, and make coffee. I put it on the table and we dug in. “Tell me about Aunt Esther,” I said. “I know she’s your mother’s sister and the only family you have left, and that she lived in Atlanta her whole life and taught school. That’s about it.”
“She lived next door to us in Atlanta and was kind of a second mom to me. When I was twelve and we moved to Miami, she decided to stay in Atlanta. We were the only family she had and she and my mom were just a couple of years apart in age. They were very close and she spent the summers with us in Miami. She got about three months off every year and would head south when school ended in early June. My dad liked her a lot and encouraged her to stay with us.”
“She never married?”
J.D. smiled. “No, but she had several torrid affairs over the years. When I got older, she’d tell me about the men. I think she fell in love every couple of years, got that out of her system after a few months, and endured what she called her ‘doing without’ periods until the next right man came along.”
“Doesn’t sound at all like the spinster schoolmarm.”
J.D. laughed. “I think she was the exact opposite. Probably still is. There are a lot of single men in The Villages and she’s only sixty-two.”
I’d first met Esther about a year before when she had spent a few days with J.D. on Longboat. She had just bought a new house in The Villages and was waiting for it to be completed. Shortly before Christmas, after she’d had several months to get settled, J.D. and I spent a couple of nights with Esther at her new home. She was a gracious hostess, and I found her to be a delightfully funny and often ribald conversationalist. I liked her a lot.
“You don’t have to do this, you know,” J.D. said.
“Mount your great white steed and ride off to do battle for Aunt Esther.”
“Actually, I do. She’s family.”
“Not your family.”
“She’s your family, and that makes her my family, too.”
She put her hand on top of mine, looked closely at me, smiled, and nodded. “Yes, it does.”