My mother, Elizabeth Milligan, was known as Liz. She was a quiet, withdrawn kid, a reader of books. In her early childhood, during the darkest years of the Depression, she began disappearing for hours in the woods and far-flung fields near her family’s ranch house. She wrote plays and poems and stories. She drew elaborate sketches of imaginary kingdoms with dragons and fairies and knights. While her father indulged these diversions, Abigail grew ever more impatient with her daughter’s flightiness, and when the girl turned ten, her mother started to impose strict rules on Liz’s daily routines. Abigail came up with a list of chores that grew ever longer, meant to ground the girl in the fundamentals of farm life, force her to confront the hard facts of subsistence living.
By any standard the Milligan family was the wealthiest in the county, probably among the most affluent in that part of Florida. But they lived with sober simplicity, forgoing modern appliances, making their own clothes, and running their cattle operation with the minimum of hired help. Abigail was the driving force behind this rigorous ascetic life.
In what became the last year of her life, Abigail confessed to Mona that she’d fought a lifelong battle with anxiety and despair, a condition that now might be moderated by medications. But back then, with the shadow of the stock market crash still hovering over the shaky economy, gas rationing, food shortages, troops massing across Europe, and America lapsing into sterile isolationism, Abigail’s despondency seemed a reasonable reaction.
Within the family she imposed a ruthless campaign of selfdenial. Work and more work. Grinding days, a strict focus on thrift. Sweets and books and fairy-tale frivolity were outlawed, shows of affection were restrained. A quick cold kiss good-night. Now and then a lifeless pat on the back.
Though Liz’s father was more tolerant and open, he remained loyal to his wife’s regime and never challenged her in front of the children. Maybe on the sly there was a hug or kiss for Liz. Abigail suspected there were hours when she was working with the herd or immersed in bookkeeping when Charles indulged Liz with a session of pleasure reading or drawing. But when Abigail was present, the rules were enforced.
Though she had every reason to be one, Liz was no rebel. She was diligent and reliable and an excellent student in school. Yet Abigail forever found fault with her performance. No job she completed, from washing dishes to cleaning the stalls, was without defect.
When Liz was twelve, the Thorn family arrived from south Georgia and settled in an abandoned farmhouse a mile down the road. They kept to themselves, stayed indoors with the windows shuttered up through most of the daylight hours. None of the children attended school. Broken couches crowded their porch. Oil drums, piles of scrap metal, the rusty hulks of cars, and old bathtubs, sinks, and assorted plumbing fixtures soon littered their yard. Two thick-necked dogs were chained to the trees, one that howled all night like a famished wolf. The Thorn family, by Abigail’s gauge, was a cut below white trash.
The eldest son was named Quentin, and he quickly earned a reputation as a gifted shade-tree mechanic. Ineligible for the military because of two missing fingers on his right hand, he was his family’s sole breadwinner. His skill with machinery was so notable that Abigail eventually yielded to temptation and engaged him to repair their tractors, keep their tillers up and running, and tune their cars and trucks on the cheap.
There was talk that Quentin’s father was running from a federal beef. A bank holdup, or counterfeiting. From time to time, Quentin’s old man would vanish for a week or two, and those occasions always coincided with the arrival of some man with a fresh haircut, a dark suit, and polished shoes who rode up and down the back roads in a new Ford. A few days after the agent left, Quentin’s father would reappear. That’s how the law worked in those parts. No love lost between backwoods sheriffs and federal outsiders.
Then the A-bomb leveled Hiroshima. Confetti snowed from the American sky. Liz turned eighteen and graduated high school. First in her class, valedictorian. Abigail’s view was that Liz’s schooling was now complete and she would assume more responsibility for the family’s growing business. The war had been good to the Bates family. Cattle prices soared. Bates Inc. branched into fertilizer production, and Abigail began acquiring adjacent citrus groves. What land she could not purchase outright, she secured the mineral rights to. Amid this flurry, Liz was expected to assume responsibility for the day-to-day operations of the ranch to free her parents to concentrate on their expanding enterprise.
“The photograph,” Mona said. “Your mother and my dad standing in front of that new car. That was her graduation day.”
I nodded. The wires before me had turned to mist.
“Her daddy bought Liz the car without Grandmother’s knowledge and she was pissed. Very pissed. It was an outrageous extravagance by her measure.”
“And the next day Liz was gone,” I said.
“How did you know?”
“I knew.”
“What? You read that in the photo? In your mother’s face?”
“Go on,” I said. “Finish your story.”
Liz and Quentin had become lovers a year before that photo was taken. Though Abigail had no suspicion of the affair, she later assumed that her husband must have known, and maybe even John. And it was likely the two of them conspired in Liz’s escape, each for his own reason.
Hours after that photo was taken, the lovers disappeared. Years would pass before Abigail uttered her daughter’s name. She never wasted a tear, never permitted a mention of her, and never forgave her husband for buying that car.
She would have drawn her last breath without knowing what became of Liz were it not for Charles preceding her in death. When he passed away, a half-dozen notes and postcards tied up in red ribbon were discovered hidden inside his shotgun case. Liz had addressed the letters to her father’s office in downtown Summerland.
Liz and Quentin had landed in Key Largo. Quentin had found work repairing marine engines. They rented a tiny house with a view of Tarpon Basin, and within a year Liz was pregnant. She loved the place, the water, the light, the fresh ocean scents. They were saving for a boat.
The tone of the letters was restrained, apologetic, almost formal. They seemed to be written with the knowledge that one day Abigail would read them and grade them by her severe standards. Then abruptly the letters ceased.
“They died in a car crash,” I told Mona. “Quentin and Liz.”
She nodded solemnly as if that was one option she’d considered.
“I’d just been born and they were hurrying back from the hospital to Key Largo. Drunk driver ran them off the road. Somehow I survived.”
She was silent for a few moments, her nails against the console tapping out some grim Morse code.
“You remind me of her.”
“Abigail?”
She nodded.
“There’s something going on inside—hard, stubborn parts grinding against each other. Sand in your gears. I don’t know. Gruff on the outside, but something else underneath. Something you work hard to keep hidden.”
“You got a license to do this kind of thing?”
She kneeled down beside me, reached out, and ran a fingertip along the line of my jaw, from hinge to tip.
“The bone structure, too. You’re one of them.”
“And luckily you’re not.”
She smiled.
“Luckily I’m not.” Then the smile weakened. “An interloper, that’s me. A stray brought in from the rain.”
“What do you know about your own parents?”
“Not a damn thing. Five foster families, Tampa, St. Pete, Bradenton. I was nine when Christine Milligan showed up and took me away. Two years after I had moved in with John and her, I’d just turned eleven, Christine decided she couldn’t hack the parent thing. One night she tucked me in, pecked me on the forehead, wished me luck, and flew. From that point, Dad went through the motions, but it was Grandmother who raised me.”
“She treat you any better than Liz?”
“Yeah, I got a long leash. She let me screw up. Just stood back and gave me something she hadn’t been able to give your mother.”
“Got to love her for that.”
Her eyes muddied and she blinked them clear, then straightened her shoulders, sniffed, and backhanded her nose.
“She wasn’t a bad woman. She had her own demons. Grew up in the shadow of domineering men. Those old pioneer roughnecks. Badasses.”
“Lots of demons in this family,” I said.
“I think that’s why your grandfather never got in touch with the couple who raised you. He didn’t want Abigail to botch another generation.”
She eased down and settled onto the deck beside me. She brought her hip flush with mine. I inhaled her aroma again, fresh plums, wood smoke, leather baking in the sun, a jasmine bloom breaking open. She turned her face to me.
I reached up and ran a finger around the rim of her right ear, tucked away a strand of hair that had fallen across her cheek. My touch closed her eyes.
When I kissed her, Mona held back. Lips so indifferent I almost drew away. But a second or two later, her mouth warmed and softened and I felt her rise from somewhere distant and wintry, as though she’d been hibernating and was shaking free of that slumber, coming into my arms with a slow, drowsy need and a ravenous hunger.
She planted her hand flat against my chest as if feeling for my heartbeat or else preparing to shove me away.
As our kiss deepened, the hand coasted down my shirt, button by button. At my waist, she wormed a finger inside the fabric and circled in on my navel. She broke away from the kiss, drew a long gasp, smiled at my bewilderment, then brought her lips to mine again with new frankness. Her fingertip still skimmed the edges of my navel.
It felt like more than simple physical exploration. Something instinctive. As if driven by impulse, Mona was harkening back to the primal situation. Invoking the umbilical, the broken cord. The scar that marked the severed union between mother and child, one generation and the next, the closest bond two people ever have, and the endless exile that follows.
As I was easing her back onto the deck, Holland cleared his throat and broke us apart.
He was in the doorway of the wheelhouse, camera in hand. But he managed, with some new show of restraint, not to snap us in our intimacy.
“Sorry, kids,” he said. “But Uncle Fuck-up is trying to fix things. You better see this. He’s pretty trashed.”
Before I stood, I looked into Mona’s eyes. Neither Bates nor Milligan, but more than their match in certain ways. A woman who easily could have surrendered long ago to the poisonous rivalries, the lessons in isolation at the core of that family, but somewhere she’d overcome, and had even managed to win for herself the childhood Abigail had not granted my mother.
When we made it outside and saw what was unfolding, I cursed and hammered a fist against the rail. Milligan was in one of the kayaks and was paddling at a leisurely clip, heading east into the open bay, closing in on the spot where the killer had instructed me to go.
Mona called out to him, then called again and another time, her voice lost in the wind. Milligan continued to paddle.
We hustled down to the lower deck. Rusty was there, hands cupped to her mouth, bellowing his name, commanding him to turn around. Holland took a picture of John, focusing his long lens.
Only Annette stayed inside, typing away on her laptop.
“Here we go,” Holland said. “Party time.”
He offered me the telephoto lens, but I waved it off. I could already make out the yellow bass boat idling from the mouth of the distant creek.