As promised, a lone golf cart was waiting right outside the door. A plastic milk crate had been bungee-corded to the back. Inside it was a long-handled dip net, a collapsible fishing rod with a child’s plastic Zebco spinning reel, a lethal-looking sheathed knife, a ball of twine, some bottled water, and a can of insect repellent. There was a brown paper sack too. Peering into it, she found a ham sandwich neatly wrapped in waxed paper, an apple, and what appeared to be a couple of homemade oatmeal cookies. Her fingers clutched a scrap of paper. “Good luck, girl!” was penciled in crabbed print. “XO Iris.”
“Thanks, Iris,” Gina said softly. “I’ve got a feeling I’m gonna need it.”
She felt a bead of sweat travel down her spine, dampening the back of her shirt as it moved toward the waist of her jeans. She swung behind the steering wheel and floored the cart’s accelerator.
As she bumped along the cart path away from Rebeccaville, she heard the thrum of cicadas in the high grass, and birds trilling from the tops of the live oaks. Not even ten o’clock, and the sun was already high overhead, promising a scorcher of a day. Gina forced herself to rethink her options. No cast net. There went her shrimp dishes. True, she had a fishing rod—of sorts. But she had nothing for bait. And no boat.
Fine, she thought, just fine. Her mama and daddy had not raised any sissies. She would find a way.
She steered the cart toward the inland side of the island, and followed the crudely painted wooden stakes that acted as the island’s road markers.
She doglegged right onto Burned Church Road, made a quick left onto the first unmarked path after that, and followed the oyster-shell path deeper into a palmetto thicket that seemed to close in on her from either side. The jagged palm fronds scratched her shoulders and arms as she lowered her head and powered on through.
Half a mile in, she glimpsed a stretch of shining water through the gnarled and twisted limbs of a wind-bent grove of oaks.
The oyster path gave out abruptly at a tall stand of sweetgrass. A fire circle—scorched earth surrounded by moss-covered chunks of broken concrete—and a pile of discarded soda and beer cans told her she’d found Runaway Creek.
The smell of the marsh—the deep gray pluff mud redolent of a place where land and sea melted into one oozing expanse of netherworld—rose up to meet her nose.
“That grass look tall, honey,” Iris had told her. “But you look around, you see a lil’ trail goin’ in there. Oyster shells, some boards, like that. My daddy drug all that out there, cuz we din’ have no bateau when I was a kid. Just you follow that, like a lil’ bridge, that’ll take you out to the creek bank.”
She could see the gleam of Iris’s gold-capped front teeth as the old lady smiled knowingly. “That there is my daddy’s honey hole. They’s a deep spot right offa there. You wade out when the tide’s out, catch you some swimps, throw a line, maybe catch you a spot-tail.”
“Spot-tail?”
Iris’s smile widened. “Redfish, girl.”
“All right, Iris,” Gina said aloud. “I’m counting on you.” She uncapped a bottle of water and took a deep swig. Her watch told her nearly an hour had passed. Her stomach told her she’d been too keyed up to eat breakfast.
She reached around and fetched the brown lunch sack Iris had packed for her, and her fingers closed over the apple.
Gina bit in, savoring the cool green sharpness of the fruit. She finished it off in scant minutes, and considered the carefully gnawed core. Would a fish bite a bit of apple? How about a blue crab? Doubtful.
Then she remembered the ham sandwich. Her daddy had always used chicken necks or stinky fishheads for bait. This time, though, she’d have to rely on something else.
She rolled the legs of her jeans above her knees, and slathered her bare arms, chest, and legs with the insect repellent. Ruefully she looked down at her shoes—gleaming white Tretorns. She’d bought them back in the spring, a lifetime ago, when her career wasn’t in the pits, when she hadn’t paused for a second over spending $250 for a pair of tennis shoes. The pluff would ruin them. Still, she didn’t dare risk going barefoot because the oyster shells would cut her feet to ribbons.
In the milk crate, Gina found a baseball cap with “Food Fight!” embroidered on the bill, and jammed it on her head. She took the knife and cut off a length of string, which she wound around her waist. She carefully put the knife back in its sheath and tucked it in the waistband of her jeans.
When she picked up the Zebco, she discovered a small flat plastic box underneath it. It was a cheap, ineffective tackle box, the kind unknowing Yankee tourists bought at any tourist trap on the southern coast, convinced that with it, they would catch the kind of trophy fish that would be the envy of the folks back home in Buffalo or Bayonne.
Opening the tackle box, she nearly cried with frustration when she saw the contents: a small plastic envelope of shiny gold hooks, some tiny lead weights, a plastic bobber, some gigantic fiberglass lures, and a package of neon-green-and-pink rubber worms. Useless crap, most of it. But she shook a hook and a weight into the palm of her hand and attached them to the line on the fishing reel, with the bobber positioned eight inches above them, then tucked the rest of the hooks into her pocket.
She picked up the ham sandwich and, lacking any other safe place to stash it, tucked it into the neckline of her top.
Then, shouldering the rigged fishing pole and dipnet over her shoulder, she stepped gingerly out of the cart and into the marsh. Fiddler crabs skittered away into their holes, and a startled marsh hen rose from its hiding place in the grass with a sharp, remonstrative cackle.
“Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to work we go,” Gina sang softly.
Iris’s walkway was narrow—three feet at its widest, and made of whatever cast-off materials her father had access to: chunks of broken concrete, weathered and rotting boards, discarded rubber tires—even, in one place, what appeared to be a sun-bleached tree trunk. Gina stepped cautiously, looking out at the undulating expanse of greenish gold marsh grass.
A hundred yards out, she saw the faded red paint of a wrecked bateau riding jauntily atop a bleached clump of driftwood. A boat, she thought. What she wouldn’t give for a boat right now.
Five hundred yards out, she found herself standing on a solid mound of oyster shells—with the gray-green waters of Runaway Creek lapping at its edges.
The tide was out.
Holding her breath, she stepped into the creek. The water swirling around her ankles was warm as bathwater. Her shoes made a sucking sound as they sank into the mud, and it was an effort, with each step, to keep them from being sucked right off her feet.
When the water was almost up to her hips, she decided it was time to fish or cut bait. Reaching into her neckline, she brought out the sandwich, pinched off a bit of ham, and threaded it onto the tiny gold hook of her fishing line.
The opposite side of the creek bank was maybe two hundred yards away. She cocked back the bail of the reel and cast her line, letting her wrists flick it, as her daddy had taught her all those years ago.
The bobber landed with a soft plonk, ten yards away. Not her best effort. But the wind was blowing toward her, and the light weight of her tackle and line would not send it any farther.
The little red-and-white bobber did its job, riding gently atop the slow-moving current of the creek.
She watched it intently. ‘Come on, baby,” she whispered, willing it to sink—a signal that she had a bite. “H’yah, fish!” she called.
Within a minute, the bobber dipped below the water’s surface. She felt a gentle tug on the line, and her spirits soared.
The line zigged quickly off her reel for a moment, before she jerked back hard, setting the hook as she’d been taught.
“H’yah, fish!” she called triumphantly, reeling as quickly as she could. In her mind, she was planning her catch. A nice spot-tail, she hoped. There was a cast-iron skillet in her designer kitchen back at Rebeccaville, and with the cayenne pepper and other seasonings she had on hand, she could quickly and easily blacken it on high heat. She’d seen some tomatoes and yellow banana peppers in Iris’s little kitchen plot, and perhaps, if she could talk her out of a couple of them, she could make a quick salsa with them and the onions and peppers from the countertop basket. She would slide the blackened redfish out of the skillet and onto a bed of buttered grits, and ladle the salsa over the redfish.
The fish fought, zigging away from her despite her crazed reeling, and she jerked the pole again, making sure she’d set the hook.
The line slackened a little, and she reeled in quickly. She caught a flash of silver through the greenish murk of the creek water, and then she reeled it up and out.
“Durn!” she cried, as the fish’s silver scales glinted in the sunlight. There was no telltale black spot near the fish’s tail. It was not a redfish. It wasn’t a fat sea trout. It was, she thought, a lowly, stinking, no-good, totally inedible pinfish.
It wriggled enthusiastically on the end of her hook, and she gritted her teeth, clamped her hands around the fish, and carefully extricated the hook from its mouth. She tossed it back into the creek without ceremony, and rebaited and recast.
An hour passed. She caught five more pinfish, each the exact same size as the first. The ham from her sandwich was nearly gone. The sun beat down, and the wind picked up. Something brushed against her ankles, and she let out an involuntary shriek.
Time to go, she thought. She’d wasted two hours, and had nothing to show for it except a nasty sunburn. As she trudged back to shore, she tried to cheer herself up. She still had four hours. Plenty of time.
Time to go to Plan B. She would ride over to the ferry dock and use the string as a crab line, tied around the last bit of her ham sandwich for crab bait. Now she frowned. Why hadn’t she saved one of the pinfish to cut up and use for bait? What had she been thinking?
The mud sucked her tennis shoe clear off her foot. She reached down into the water to retrieve it, and a tiny wave caught her by surprise, knocking her off her feet and into the water.
She came up sputtering, and another wave broke over her head. Perfect. She reached back down into the water. Her $250 shoe was gone, washed away, probably even now providing shade to a whole school of redfish.
Gina struggled to her feet and limped forlornly back to the creek bank and her golf cart. Four hours to go. It was going to be a very long day.
And what about the enemy? What about Tate Moody? She’d seen no sign of him since he’d sprinted out of the ballroom earlier that morning. If there was any consolation, it was in knowing that somewhere on Eutaw Island, Tate Moody was faced with exactly the same equipment—or lack of it—and the same predicament.