The Gulf Watcher office was in the middle of an L-shaped strip mall, between a hardware store and an Irish restaurant with a Budweiser sign in its window. Inside were three desks and a red-haired woman talking on the phone. I sat on a vinyl chair next to the door and took a copy of the paper from a wire rack. On page eight, next to an article about ridding the Florida house of palmetto bugs, the Honestly Dearest column offered advice to a love-starved teenaged service station cashier, an elderly gentleman afraid that his lady-friend bridge partner had given him herpes, and a bowler who worried that his shirt made him look fat. I barely remembered writing the smart-assed answers and wondered who was the bigger fool: Charles, the editor, or myself.
When the woman hung up, I said, “I’m looking for information on one of your columnists.”
“We only have the one, writing on senior citizen issues. You look a little young to be offended.” She smiled.
“Honestly Dearest,” I said.
“Ah, you mean a syndicated columnist.” Her smile grew broader. “She’s getting a little more feisty, don’t you think?”
“Most assuredly. I heard she lives around here.”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” she said, but the corners of her eyes had tightened.
“We buy her columns from a syndicator in New Jersey.”
“I’m not asking you to betray any confidences. All I want to know is whether a guy came here, asking about Honestly Dearest.”
“Like you’re asking?”
“He was up at the Copper Scupper, too. You could ask Dina, the hostess.”
The wariness stayed in her eyes.
“Dina told me it was about a year ago.”
She shrugged. “I really don’t understand what you’re talking about.”
“About a year ago?”
She looked past me, out the window. “I told him nothing, because there’s nothing to know.”
The temperature at the bank was ninety-four degrees. On impulse, I swung in.
“Not one of ours,” the lady at the lockbox desk said, handing me back the numbered key. “Matter of fact, that key looks too old to belong in any bank built in the last fifty years.”
“Are there any other banks on Windward Island?”
She said no, and I left.
Dina was in the bar, talking to a waitress who was holding a tray of silverware wrapped in napkins. The Buffett was nowhere to be seen. He was probably warming up at home, strumming his electric thing, on his front porch swing. I sat at a high table at the back.
A few minutes later, Dina brought over two cups of coffee. “You don’t look like an afternoon drinker,” she said as she sat on the other stool.
“Not anymore.” I set her keys on the table.
“Any luck?”
“Immaculate rooms.”
“That’s the way they always were. The few times I went up, I never saw any clutter. She lived like she never unpacked.”
“There was that. Clacking away, sometimes, until all hours of the morning. I never minded it, though.”
“Her typewriter left little marks on the kitchen table.”
“I hadn’t noticed.”
I set down the copy of the Gulf Watcher I’d gotten earlier. I’d folded it open to the Honestly Dearest column. “Ever read that?”
“Honestly Dearest?” She shook her head. “I’ve gotten enough bad advice in my life.”
“Carolina Dare.”
Surprise widened her eyes. She looked down at the page. “I’ll be damned,” she said, after looking at the paper for a long minute. “I never asked what she was typing. She was so private…I’ll be damned.”
“You know of nobody else she might have had a relationship with?”
“She didn’t even have a phone, cell or otherwise. She was either in her apartment or here at the Scupper.”
We sipped coffee in silence. Outside, a waitress on the deck was setting out silverware on the tables. She was a brunette, and at least ten years younger, but when she moved in the shadows next to the building, she could have been Maris.
Dina set down her coffee. “Earlier today, you asked about a family?”
I turned away from the window. “Yes.”
“Do you know of a family?”
“Just her father. He died long ago.”
“What were you asking, then?”
I wanted to go out on the deck and tell the waitress to make wise choices in her life. “I don’t know, exactly.”
Dina’s eyes were steady on my face. “You were asking if she had a child.”
The waitress came in from outside. Even in the dim light of the bar, she had no resemblance to Maris, none whatsoever.
“There was no child,” Dina said.
I laid one of my business cards on the table next to her keys and stood up. As I went through the door, into the sunshine, the Buffett man, dressed in a ridiculous shirt with frolicking lobsters on it, passed in front of me, carrying his keyboard. I looked back at Dina. She was staring out the window at the water.
I caught the day’s last plane out of St. Pete.
Florida was dead.