Jolie didn’t pay Hollis so much as a blink of attention, but drove like the wind down the narrow country highway to Hendrix. She didn’t slow till she swung into the drive of the parsonage, which was as weed-grown and deserted as it had been the afternoon before, the only sign of the night’s excitement a twin set of churned ruts from the fire truck, which circled the parsonage, then exited at the road.
She followed them to the corner and stopped short at this new view of the backyard, strewn with rock and glass and blasted, splintered trees. The shed itself was simply gone, burnt to its limestone foundation, the skeleton of the tractor sitting right where she’d left it, in a waist-high pile of rubble, ghostly and blackened, sending up a dozen plumes of smoke.
She didn’t get out or go any farther than the edge of the house, just felt for her BlackBerry and called Faye and (mercifully) got Tamara. She left her a message of where she was and when she’d be back—in time for the meeting, but not before, and begged her to call Hugh. “Tell him I’ll see him tonight, after the meeting. Maybe I’ll be back before,” she hedged, though Tamara was having none of it.
“Where are you? Something’s cooking around here—Faye all but wringing her hands.”
Jolie put her off with a quick “I’ll tell you when I see you. Just call Hugh—and listen, baby, call my brother, Carl—”
“Oh, he called, or his wife did. Called fifty times. You all right? Because something really is cooking around here. I don’t know what, but something is up.”
“Later,” Jolie promised, then hung up and tried both Carl’s and Lena’s cell phones, but got no answer. She left Carl another message, and with time running out, wheeled around in the yard and headed to her uncle Ott’s—his old house in town, on a side street by the post office.
She didn’t bother to get out as it was clearly vacant—the curtains drawn, the chimney not blowing smoke as it would on such a cold day had Ott been home. She figured he was at the fish camp, which was damn inconvenient, as it was still famously primitive, only accessible by boat, without phone lines or indoor plumbing.
Fortunately, Vic Lucas had expanded the KOA to offer half-day boat rentals, nothing fancy, just small jon boats with kickers for tourists who were willing to sign a liability waiver for the privilege of spotting an alligator in the wild. Jolie parked at the old concession stand and negotiated a half-day rental with the skinny teenage clerk Vic had hired for the slow season. While he was gassing it up, she went to her car and searched through the clutter of junk in her trunk, looking for whatever stray sweatshirts or socks or gloves she might have.
She found a few mismatched socks that she stuffed in her pockets, and a thick, old Mexican blanket covered in sand that she and Lena took for the kids to sit on at the beach. She wrapped it around her shoulders like a shawl and was digging around for a pair of leather florist gloves when a car jerked to a halt in the gravel behind her. The two-tone, dove-gray Cadillac Seville, the slope-backed kind they used to make in the mideighties, was one Hugh had taken a liking to and never traded in.
He got out briskly, dressed in the loungewear he sported at his river house—a maroon wool dressing gown over a pair of broad, gray-striped pajamas. The result was almost vaudevillian, though his face was anything but amused.
“My gosh, you scared me,” she groused, though he ignored her irritation, his still-handsome face drawn in lines of old-school, sniffling impatience.
“You’re actually taking another sick day while the city braces itself for a lawsuit, and going off on some”—he paused, having a difficult time laying hands on cutting-enough words—“ghoulish, graveyard jaunt.”
Jolie was running out of patience with his high-handedness and returned to her glove search. “Did you come here for a reason? Or just to nag the hell out of me?”
“I came,” he answered sonorously, “to see if I could talk sense into you before you allowed yourself to be drawn into some pointless, political shakedown, by people who are not connected to your city or your influence, in any way.”
“They’re connected to Hendrix,” she began, but was cut off by his noise of outrage.
“Oh? And it was the Hendrix city hall they traipsed into, with their nonsensical demands?” He moved around so he could face her, stooped low over the trunk, his voice lowered for emphasis. “They are banking on your guilt, and no more concerned with historic injustice than the man in the moon. I am frankly amazed you allowed yourself to be drawn in. Henry Kite’s been dead seventy years. Let him lie.”
Jolie was taken aback by Hugh’s voicing of the dreaded name, which was anathema to the sons of the men who’d made the bulk of their fortune deforesting the swamps and maritime woodlands of Old Florida. They were educated men, the sons of planters and governors and bankers, who read books and went abroad and feared neither ghosts nor curses, sheriffs, or legal recourse. They traded in human bondage as surely as their planter fathers, but were civic-minded, building charming downtown parks, and enormous, amber-planked houses from wood plucked from the hearts of their finest groves. They were gentlemen and, among themselves, realistic about the unsavory aspects of their industry. They hired brutality if they themselves did not possess it and never thought to stand in the dock for any of it, till shortly after midcentury when the wretched big dailies in South Florida began their digging. At first, it was more annoying than anything, till the unexpected drama of Rosewood spun out, proving against all good reason that dead men could indeed rise from the grave and, in the stories of their scattered daughters, find their voice and talk, and walk among the living.
She blinked at Hugh in wonder. “I can’t believe you even said the name.”
In the silence that followed, the skinny clerk whistled from the dock, signaling the boat was ready. Jolie waved her thanks and slammed the trunk.
“I don’t have a choice, Hugh. I’m in too far—”
“Of course you have a choice,” he snapped with rare bad manners as she headed for the dock, blanket in hand, with Hugh following close behind, still talking. “. . . you have a city to run and a lawsuit pending, and a very qualified city attorney to handle these sorts of things.”
Jolie didn’t answer till she was on the dock, eyeing the little boat. “So this was what it was all about? Selling me your house? Getting me in politics? To keep me busy, and out of Hendrix?”
Hugh looked severely peeved at the impudence of the question, but tried for prudence, lowering his voice to argue, “Jolie. The Times or the Democrat or the Herald has only to get wind of this, and it is all you’ll hear of in this town, for fifty years. Forever. And is that what you want? To throw away a career and a decade of hard work and have this sordid, horrid little melodrama hanging over your head, the rest of your life?”
It was the first time Hugh had ever hinted at the burden he carried, of being the son of a man who, like Henry Kite, hadn’t been overly concerned about how his freewheeling self-absorption might affect his larger family. Jolie suddenly pitied Hugh, standing there in his truly absurd dressing gown, having to pay for the sins of another day. As she untied the leads from the post, she told him with a reasonableness of her own, “Hugh. They’ll do it anyway. And who cares what they say? What do we have to lose? We’re nothing out here. We’re ghosts.”
Hugh had never been receptive to the charm of metaphor and didn’t smile at the gibe, but only glowered at her from beneath rule-straight brows. “You’ll care when the second Tuesday in October comes around and Alvin Tomlin takes back his office and turns this town into a solid concrete parking lot, a prison on one end, a pulp mill the other.”
“Good,” she said with that chin-out defiance. “Let him have it. God, Hugh, it’s not the last job on earth. I’ll get a job in Tallahassee, or go back to design—”
“Oh, sure,” he snapped. “You can open a nail salon or make fine silk arrangements at the drugstore. That’s what we’ve worked for all these years—to give it up, just like that”—he snapped his fingers, his nose now beet red from the cold—“while off you go to the Big City, and to hell with the rest of us.”
Hugh’s guilt trips could take the velocity of a tropical storm, and with as much composure as she could muster, Jolie climbed in the boat and called, “I’ll be back by three.”
Hugh loomed above, still not letting up, but calling down in a ringing, apocalyptic voice, “It’s a shakedown, Jolie, pure and simple. What’re they asking? Money? Reparations?”
“Two fangers,” she answered, “and I don’t think you can spare them, Hugh. Neither can I.”
“Fine,” he shouted. “But you’re making a huge mistake, Jolene. I hope you realize that.”
Jolie was about to yank the pull, but paused at his tone, as it had been a long time since anyone had played the Jolene card on her. His cold superiority was offset by a small tremble in his voice that made him seem suddenly very old, and wretchedly vulnerable—Noël Coward, lost in the wilderness. Loyalty was the great blessing (and curse) of the Hoyts, and she regretted her impudent needling.
She just watched him a moment, then offered in a quiet voice, “Give it up, Hugh. He was your father; he wasn’t you. I’m going to the camp to talk to Uncle Ott. Don’t worry, I won’t implicate anyone else. I know how to hold my mouth right. I’m a Hoyt.”
This last was a try at humor to lighten the moment, as it was reputed to be the reason that rich men were said to prefer Hendrix women to their counterparts in town: for their Indian reticence. They knew how to hold their mouths right. They were polite and assenting, never threatened to tell unsuspecting wives or make waves about niggling matters of paternity.
Hugh was schooled enough in local lore to get the jab and roll his eyes in a way that made Jolie smile as she ripped the cord once, twice, then finally hard enough to make the little engine roar to life with a cloud of white exhaust and the sharp, pungent smell of gas.
She didn’t wait around for his response, but lifted a hand in farewell, then turned the nose of the little boat downstream, her last thought identical to Sam’s when he had faced the same wall of cypress, twelve years earlier: God, it was cold on the water.
And, God, she’d be glad to get home.
• • •
She kept the blanket pulled high on her face, her eyes an inch above the fringe, pouring tears from the whip of the wind. Nothing marked the boundaries of the National Forest to the left or the Hoyt camp, which predated the park by a hundred years, off one of the nameless creeks on the far end of the swamp. It was closer to the beehives and tupelo trees of Wewa than Cleary, the older cabins built in the trackless days before the lumber companies had begun their deforestation—before pulpwood and turpentine, mule skinners and saloons, had become the lifeblood of the local economy. They were Spartan, even by local standards, board-and-batten shacks that had been purloined from local cotton fields and floated downstream, then perched on makeshift floating docks along the fringe of the cypress so that they became waterborne in the rainy season (“On the water,” Jolie once explained, “not beside it”).
The bunkhouse was the only permanent structure. A stooped, low-ceilinged old lodge that eventually became the infamous hideaway that Wes Dennis spoke of with such nostalgia, as the Hoyt men quickly discovered more money was to be found in cards than catfish, moonshining than turpentining. They were too isolated to be easily chivvied out by the Law, and the old fish camp hosted many a wild and freewheeling Saturday night, till the midyears of the century, when the cypress was finally cut and the feds began buying up the land—miles of it, stretching from the river to the coast, including the old lumber-company property and the farms and homesteads abandoned in the Trouble. They called it a National Forest and took their stewardship seriously, sending in conservation and forestry men and filling the books with all manner of curious regulation.
By the time Jolie came along, the camp had become nothing more than a cluster of sagging old cabins, ground zero for the men of the family, who fled there as often as they could, to fish and drink and retell stories of wilder, less fettered days. Every year the river gave the old cabins a tougher beating, so that the young men of the family (Carl among them) annually predicted that this year would be the last, that the current would finally take it and the Hoyt fish camp would end up on the bottom of the Gulf, home to the very catfish it had been built to pursue.
Jolie herself had no opinion on the matter, as she had been raised a churchgirl and was seldom allowed into the male sanctum that was the old camp. She’d only been down there a dozen times her entire life and was beginning to wonder if the river had sure enough taken it when she finally passed a small point of land that marked the edge of the Hoyt property. She cut the motor to idle and maneuvered close enough to grip the low overhang of a bent old water oak, using it to guide herself around a sharp, deep cutoff to the old dock, which was sometimes landlocked, but was now completely on the water, full of wasps and dirt-dauber nests, missing half the slats.
She shouted a halloo, but got nothing in answer except a mighty howl of dogs that rose to a deafening roar as they hurled themselves down the mud path to the dock—a motley assortment of tan and spotted hounds of curious pedigree. Ott preferred hunting hogs to deer, and these were once mostly cur dogs, but over time a few misplaced beagles and walkers had made their way across the river and added spots and yipping to the pack, which was well fed but unregulated in breeding, a few fat pups always bringing up the rear. Since Ott was the current keeper of the hounds, they were a good-natured crew, more curious than ferocious, their keening wail giving way to wags of welcome when they sniffed a Hoyt.
Jolie made her way onto the listing dock, nearly knocked off her feet by the frisking, wiggling dogs. She couldn’t negotiate the slats in heels and yanked them off while she sweet-talked the alpha male in a cartoon doggy-voice: “He’s a good-looking old dog, he’s a tough ol’ dog. Go getchure papa, tell him I’m here.”
The Hoyt hounds were much like their owners—approachable by flattery—and with no more persuasion than that, the dogs followed Jolie as she climbed up the wet path, howling her arrival. Ott heard them long before he saw them and waited on the stoop of the bunkhouse in ancient work pants and a flannel shirt, blinking like a pleased old bear when he saw it was her.
She tried to call a greeting, but couldn’t outshout the hounds, till Ott let go a piercing whistle that cut off the yipping in an instant.
“Well, thank God for that,” she said into the sudden silence, then went up the steps and kissed his grizzled cheek. “I wish I could teach that trick to the City Commission,” she shouted in his face, as Ott’s hearing hadn’t improved in the last twenty years and talking to him was like making conversation in a wind tunnel.
When he cared to, he was adept at lip-reading, and he grinned in reply. “Well, what’s a city girl doing on the water this time of the day?”
“Come to see you,” she answered in full shout as she followed him into the cluttered great room, which despite its reputation for iniquity was really nothing more than an ill-kept living room, a last resting place for the larger family’s cast-off chairs and beat-down sofas.
“Is it safe for you to be out here alone?” she asked as she settled into a corner of an ancient Duncan Phyfe sofa that was pushed close to the room’s sole source of heat—an old gas heater littered with shells from boiled peanuts Ott must have been eating for breakfast.
He fetched a dry blanket and offered her a handful of peanuts before taking a seat in the old La-Z-Boy that had once belonged to her father.
“Well, Obie’s boys come out ever once in a while, and Mr. Vic, and the Fish and Game man drops by—a colard feller, named Dais. He picks me up a few thangs from the sto, if I thank to ask.”
“How long you been out here?”
He considered the question a moment. “Fo’th of July. There’bouts.”
Jolie made a face. “Well, good Lord, Uncle Ott. This place ain’t fit for permanent habitation. What d’you do with yourself all day? It’s too cold to fish, surely.”
He didn’t deny it, but admitted with a sheepish grin, “A whole lot of nothing, mostly. How you been, shug? How’s the City treating you?”
Jolie could not hurry a family visit, nor did she want to, for the moment. She was glad of the warmth of the stove and the blanket and always happy to see the old boy, whatever the occasion. She tore open the peanuts and caught him up with City business—the cell tower and the pending lawsuit—as Ott had always been a sociable old recluse, fascinated by the insider details of city life.
“Bet a lot of skulduggery goes on with thet sort of thang,” he said of the cell tower. “Lot of greased palms.” That was a typical response from the old folk on the river, who thought that life in the city was full of intrigue, bribes, and big money.
“God, I wish there was,” Jolie said sourly, making the old man laugh, though he believed not a word of it.
She would have liked to have sat there all day chewing the fat, but the clock was ticking. When she was done with the peanuts, she slapped the salt off her hands and jumped right in, asking him bluntly, “Well, listen, Uncle Ott, I got this idiot meeting and need to ask you something. D’you remember a family that used to live around here named Frazier? Colored? Nice people. Had a farm, couple of sons?”
“I knew a Buddy Frazier,” Uncle Ott allowed after a moment. “He worked at Camp, run mules. Married a Hitt.”
“That’s him,” Jolie said, trying not to sound too eager. “They left after the Trouble, went back to Arkansas. Listen, Uncle Ott, did you ever hear what might have become of his fingers?”
“His whut?” The old man cupped his hand behind his ear to hear her better.
“His fingers,” she repeated a little louder, and held out her own hand, middle one bent to demonstrate, “middle ones, right hand. Men from the Camp cut ’em off, back in the Trouble, trying to make him talk. His son thinks they might still have ’em.”
Her uncle looked at her blankly, as if still not sure he’d heard her correctly. “Well, I ain’t ever heard of such a thang,” he finally said, honestly astounded. “They cut off Buddy Frazier’s fangers? On purpose?”