“What was that about?” Anna asks.
I tell her.
We are in our room, whispering to each other as Taylor naps on the enormous bed.
Each room in the Florida House is named for and themed after a famous Floridian. So far I’ve seen the Zora Neale Hurston, Henry Morrison Flagler, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Thomas Alva Edison, and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.
We’re in the Ernest Hemingway room—inspired by his time in Key West. It’s a huge room filled with what I’m assuming are replicas and what “American Pickers” Mike and Frank would call repops, but each item looks and feels original, antique, real. There’s what looks like Spanish seventeenth-century furniture, a French chandelier, an Italian marble fireplace, hand-painted tiles, a white Chenille bedspread covering two full-size beds that have been strapped together in a manner similar to what Hemingway did, and an ornate wooden headboard that appears to have come from a Siglo de Oro Spanish monastery, just the way Hemingway’s had. The room is so classically tropical, so obviously from an earlier era, it feels like we could step outside the room and be in 1930s Havana.
I quickly and quietly tell her about what happened to Magdalene and what Keith and Christopher asked me to do.
“They want you to investigate the case?” she says, though I’ve already told her they did.
“Look into it, yeah,” I say. “See if I can find anything that’s been missed.”
“What’d you tell them?”
“That my talks would require a lot of me and that we were on vacation . . .”
“But?” she says. “And? I know that’s not all you said. What else did you tell them, John?”
I start to say something, but she continues.
“Did you tell them you’d investigate it?”
“I told them—”
“I really thought this was a yes or no kind of question.”
I open my mouth but before any sound comes out, she is talking again.
“What’s over there under your suit coat?” she asks, cutting her eyes momentarily in the direction of the desk and the chair behind it where my folded suit coat covers the case file scrapbook Christopher made me. “You tried to be slick, but I noticed. You brought it in like you were sneaking a bottle of booze.”
I tell her what it is. “I wasn’t sneaking it in. I just wanted to talk to you about the case and my possible role in reexamining it before I brought out the book.”
“Then do,” she says. “Talk to me.”
“I’m committed to this vacation,” I say. “I’m going to spend as much quality time with you and the girls as I possibly can. But would you mind if I read over the case while y’all are sleeping? Maybe work on it a little as long as it doesn’t interfere with our vacation or my talks?”
“Doesn’t sound unreasonable at all, does it?” she says. “But we both know that’s not all it will be, and even when it doesn’t seem like you’re working on it, you will be. You’ll be thinking about it and figuring on it and letting it distract you from . . . us.”
“Okay,” I say. “I’ll see if they mind if I take the casebook home with me and . . .”
“Answer me this,” she says. “Is the case the real reason we’re here?”
I shake my head.
“The main reason?”
“No,” I say. “For me it’s the talks and the vacation we get to have because of them.”
“But you knew about it,” she says. “You planned to investigate it all along?”
“I knew about it and certainly hoped to look into it some while we were here. Nothing more.”
“Did it factor into you accepting the invitation to speak?”
I nod. “It did.”
She nods as if this has confirmed for her what she knew all along.
“But not as much as us being able to get away from everything for a while,” I say. “Not as much as it affording us the opportunity to have this nice vacation with the girls.”
She doesn’t say anything else, just nods thoughtfully to herself, and becomes even more distant, opaque, implacable.
“What?” I ask.
She shakes her head and shrugs. “Nothing.”
“Something,” I say. “And it has been something for a while now. What is it? What’s going on? What can I do? How can I help?”
“What do you mean?”
“For the past little while—since shortly after the trial—you’ve seemed withdrawn, distant, unhappy.”
“I have?”
“Come on, Anna. You know you have.”
She twists her lips and they form a little frown. “I . . . I guess I . . . I’m not sure I have been. I certainly don’t know that I have.”
“You’re saying nothing’s going on?” I say. “That you’re just the same.”
Taylor stirs and we both turn to glance at her.
“She’ll be up soon,” she says, “and I really need a nap so I’ll feel like taking her to the beach and entertaining her this evening.”
“You won’t have to do it by yourself,” I say. “I’ll help.”
“I’m gonna lie down,” she says. “Can we talk about all this later?”