It took more than an hour to reach the final snarl of branches, with the secret lake shimmering just a few feet beyond.
By then John Milligan had become adept at snipping with the loppers, making only the cuts necessary and trying not to open the lane so wide another passerby might notice it was accessible.
I’d mastered a technique for maneuvering the skiff through nearly impassable gaps, reversing the prop, then slamming us forward, cutting the wheel in short choppy strokes from side to side to wriggle past obstructions. The bottom paint on my wood hull would be nicked and scored by the half-dozen logs and rocks we’d rammed, and the deck itself was blanketed by hundreds of tiny agitated spiders and the crumbled white crusts of barnacles and a thick coating of mangrove leaves. But otherwise the three of us seemed unscathed.
As we’d worked down the narrow channel, I was pleased to see no signs of other explorers preceding us. If the woman on the bass boat was trying to scare us away from her private fishing hole, this nameless lake was not it. Either no one had ever passed this way before, or their passage had occurred so long ago that no mark of it remained. I could sense a high, thrilling whistle in my veins that had gradually risen to a pitch I had not known since I was a boy basking in my first ecstasies.
Once we entered the still waters of the first lake, we spent a while whisking the spiders away and swept the deck as best we could with hand towels and scrub brushes. We worked in silence, part reverence, part exhaustion.
While John and Mona finished swiping at the remaining cobwebs and shook the spiders off their foul-weather gear, I knotted orange bucktails onto the leaders, then set their spinning rods in the holders. Afterward, I tilted up the motor and examined the prop. Along the route, I’d dinged two or three solid objects, and the stainless-steel blades showed some minor scarring, but nothing that would substantially alter their performance.
Mona took her seat on the padded ice chest while John finished cleaning the deck. I slipped the fiberglass push pole out of its clips and climbed up on the rear platform to propel us deeper into the lake.
John shook out his towel, folded it, and set it on the deck, then gave me a quick questioning look and I nodded my assent. He took a rod from one of the holders, set his feet, and after a practice motion he cast his lure toward the mangrove roots. Though his technique was capable enough, he was clearly rusty and his bait plinked into the water well short of the tangle of roots.
Using short jigs he retrieved his bucktail and after only two or three jerks of his rod and cranks of the reel, his road bent sharply. One cast, one strike. The tarpon was smallish, ten, twelve pounds, but it jumped a half-dozen times. A bright silver projectile launching several feet into the air, twisting and splashing on its side. Back in the water it made sizzling runs toward the roots before John managed to turn it each time and angle it back toward the boat. Finally he brought it up to the side, and I netted it and held it up for them both to admire. Smiles more genuine than I’d seen on their faces before.
I slid the fish back into the water and it shot back toward the roots.
On her first cast, Mona hooked a redfish and nailed a sizeable snook on her second. We’d been in the lake for less than ten minutes and we already had a backcountry grand slam. For the next half hour it was another fish at every cast, the closer the bait landed to the mangrove roots, the bigger the catch.
I gave only minimal directions. “Keep your rod tip down; cast side-armed.” Other than that all three of us were reduced to yelps and whoops of wonderment. To my surprise, I was starting to warm to these two—not for anything they’d done or said, but for their silence and restraint, their understanding of the rare good fortune of such fishing and such isolation, and for succumbing to what I took to be the same wonder and awe I was feeling.
Fifty yards to the west, I spotted the narrow channel that connected the first lake with the second and I began poling us quietly in that direction. The wind was light, the water brilliantly clear, and the circling egrets and cormorants seemed to be eyeing us with lazy indifference. We were one of them. We’d earned the right to be there.
Songbirds reveled in the dense branches, and the breeze was as plush and bracing as a swallow of aged whiskey. The fish we’d caught were not even close to the largest of their kind I’d landed, and I’d fished other remote backwaters where they were more abundant, lagoons where schools of giant tarpons rolled, their big scales flashing in the sun like rows of silver badges. But this nameless lake, in its utter isolation, had a purity I’d never known. So far removed from the squalor and jangle of urban streets, the jackhammer racket of brute machines, the bellow of fourteen-wheelers rolling by on the overseas highway, that for a moment it was possible to believe that all was not lost, that scattered here and there relics of the original Florida lived on, still with the power to absolve and restore.
“Want to take a shot, Thorn?” Mona held up her rod.
I nodded my thanks and set about stabbing the push pole into the muddy bottom, then lashing it to the platform to anchor us in place. But as I came down from the platform, John snatched the rod from Mona’s hand and slid it into one of the rod holders on the console.
“It’s time we talked.”
I stared at him for a moment, then let it go. I didn’t want to lose my high in some petty squabble. As I took a seat behind the wheel, a great blue heron watched us from a perch atop the clicking branches of a mangrove, taking a break from its ceaseless forage to study these curious creatures.
“So talk.”
“And I was so relaxed,” Mona said with a sigh. “This place is magical.”
“Give it a rest, Mona,” her father said.
She opened her mouth, then shut it and took a seat on the bow.
Milligan drew a breath and held me with his hard gray eyes. He rubbed a finger back and forth against his lips, pushing aside the black bristles of his mustache. I could see the clench in his neck and the swell of bulky muscles in his chest and shoulders. A man priming himself for hand-to-hand combat.
“I grew up on a cattle ranch,” John said.
“Oh, here we go,” said Mona.
“My daughter has no respect for family history, but I’m deeply proud of my heritage. My father and mother worked long, grueling hours, as did their parents. And when I was a boy, I joined them, side by side, mending fences, moving the herds, feeding, branding, watering, slaughtering. Exhausting days, harsh work. From the time I was five, I was riding horseback and was expected to keep up with the adults. We raised cattle. A good portion of the herd was descended from Andalusian stock. Cracker cattle. Forty years I busted my ass working that land. No vacations, no breaks. While you were being a beach bum or playboy or whatever the hell you did, I was a cattleman, shoulder to shoulder with the laborers we hired. A cowboy pure and simple.”
“Don’t forget the wolves,” Mona said, “and the mosquitoes.”
Milligan looked away and shook his head. When he turned back to me, his eyes had hardened. Nostalgia time was over.
“When Mother passed away last summer, she left us quite a surprise.”
“The lockbox, you mean.”
Milligan glared at Mona.
“I told him that much,” she said. “I left the good part for you.”
Milligan swung back to me.
“Yes, the lockbox. It seems Mother had taken a keen interest in following your . . .” He searched for the word.
“My career?”
“If you want to call it that,” Milligan said. “In any case, she collected a good bit of information about you. For a woman of such hard-bitten temperament, such a tough old bird, she had a sentimental streak she kept hidden. Somehow she kept track of her daughter’s son. Her only grandchild.”
I looked over at Mona.
“Only?”
“I’m adopted. Milligan in name only. None of their blood. Lucky me.” She faked a smile then let it go.
“It’s a legal matter now,” Milligan said. “Mother left a will that none of us knew about. She went behind our backs. Our corporate legal office was unaware of the second will, one that superseded the estate plan they helped her draw up. She wrote it up herself, in her own handwriting, created an entirely new structure to her estate.”
“Did a damn fine job, too,” Mona said. “Dad and Carter tried to tear holes in it for months but couldn’t find a judge who’d turn a trick.”
Milligan stabbed a finger in her direction. “Shut up, Mona. Just shut the hell up for once.”
She smiled back at him but complied.
He fumed for a moment more, then turned to me. I was struck again by his hard-muscled build. Rangy and limber, with long arms, meaty hands. The sinews and tendons rippled beneath his flesh like restive snakes. I shared just enough of that physique to sense the strength he had at his command. Even at his age, he was not a man I wanted to test myself against.
“She divided her estate into three portions: corporate, cash, and land.”
“I get cash,” Mona said. “Lots and lots of cash.”
Once again Milligan’s face darkened, and I thought I might have to seize him before he attacked his daughter. But he caught himself and looked off at the lagoon as though seeking solace in that isolated spot, and in a few seconds the blood seeped from his face and he stepped closer to me.
“I’ll be running Bates International,” he said. “Chairman of the Board, CEO. The business is a vast and complex enterprise, and I’m grateful Mother saw fit to bestow that kind of trust on me.”
“But the land is yours, Thorn. That’s the kicker.” Mona gave her father a gloating smile.
“What land?”
“What I showed you last night,” said Mona. “The quarter on the map. The land where Daddy played cowboy.”
“It’s a great deal of property,” Milligan said. “An enormous responsibility. Parcels of immense value and variety. It would present a challenge for even an accomplished businessman to manage competently.”
“And completely impossible for a fuck-up like you, Thorn.”
“So that’s why you’re here. Why you booked a trip on the houseboat. To negotiate with me, convince me to give up the land. What? You’re going to dangle a few million dollars in front of me? Is that what’s coming next?”
“I told you, Daddy-O. He wouldn’t be a pushover. He’s one tough nut. Must be channeling Abigail.”
Milligan gritted his jaw, smiled out at nothing.
Mona said, “A good chunk of your land, Thorn, has already been mined. There are problems. Lawsuits. Environmental issues. It’s a mess.”
I was silent, waiting for this to end.
“Know what a gyp stack is?”
“I’ve heard of them.”
“Well,” she said, “you’re the proud owner of two dozen gypsum stacks. Mountains twenty stories high, their bases covering a few hundred acres, each one full of toxic leftovers from the strip mines. They emit radon gas, leach sulfuric acid into the aquifer. Now and then they collapse and spill millions of gallons of contaminated sludge. Nobody knows what the hell to do with them long term. You own two dozen of them, Thorn.”
I watched a school of tarpon flash past, biggest tarpon I’d seen in years.
“This is why Abigail Bates was killed?”
“Could be,” Mona said. “She had lots of enemies. One bunch hated her for what she’d already done, like putting gyp stacks in their backyards, and the other bunch despised her for what she was planning to do: stripmine the watershed. Some hated her for both.”
“That’s enough, Mona,” Milligan snapped. “Quite enough.”
He aimed a finger at his daughter, but she stared him down, and after a moment, he folded the finger back into a fist. Clearly he was a man bedeviled by strong women. A mother who had set an unmatchable standard. A daughter who dismissed his gruff bluster. A sister who long ago abandoned him to live alone in the shadow of his colossal parents.
And now a final treachery. His own mother had betrayed him. Passed on the land that was the foundation of the family wealth and status to an outsider. A man who had done nothing to deserve the gift.
“No, it’s not enough,” Mona said. “Thorn needs an education, and he needs it quick. And you’re sure as hell not going to give it to him.”
Milligan was about to bark at her again when the VHF radio squawked.
“Mayday, Mayday, Mayday.”
Teeter’s voice came in a rush, quivering with fright.
“Mayday, Mayday, Mayday, Mayday.”
I snatched up the mike, punched the button.
“Teeter? Teeter, what’s going on?”
“Mayday,” he said. Then chanted again, with a forlorn pause between each word. “Mayday . . . Mayday . . . Mayday.”
A second later I heard the electronic snap of his radio going dead.