Drowning Tides

  Lexi showed no sign of the chicken pox—yet—but Claire had put her down for a nap and left Bronco and Nita chatting in deck chairs. Just a quick nap for herself...ten minutes...then to Ada’s. She was grateful she had not had a terrible nightmare in the car last night. Nick had seen that only once when she went off her meds, that is, someone took her off them. But she’d taken a pill when they got back to the yacht, though not the liquid dosage of powerful stuff she still used at night.

  Just a few minutes of sleep to make up for last night, she told herself. She was as tired as she’d been in high school before she was diagnosed, when people teased and mocked her for always falling asleep...

  Falling for Nick. Yes, she had fallen for him. But she still felt for Jace, maybe felt sorry for him, wanted him to do well, wanted him to accept the way things were now...at least he was still flying...

  Flying... Claire was flying but she landed on the Goodland dock and walked up the gangway to the yacht. Someone she knew owned it, but why was thick saw grass growing on the deck? That stuff could cut you. And palmetto with strangler figs hung over the windows. Strangest of all, bushes of nightshade with its purplish flowers and poison berries crowded against the ship’s railings.

  But what a beautiful, big boat! As it set out to sea, she went inside to look around. The lounge was lovely, but something was very, very wrong. She expected Darcy to visit, but it wasn’t her sister who stood at the door, gesturing for her to enter. No, it was that other red-haired woman, the Irish one who knew dead people.

  The woman pointed to the lounge and said, “I know you. I know what you are here for.”

  As Claire went into the lounge, she saw a bloom of blood stained the carpet, and a woman was lying dead inside the outline of her body. Did what the woman at the door said mean the dead woman was still talking? Yes, her lips were moving. She was whispering, but Claire could not hear what she said and she needed to know. She went one step closer and gasped. The dead woman whispering was herself, as if she gazed down into a mirror!

  * * *

  Claire awoke with such a jolt that she nearly threw herself off the bed. A dreadful dream! What did it all mean? she wondered, as if her nightmares ever made sense.

  She felt still so caught up in it, so petrified that she could not move for a moment. She stared at the ceiling, thinking she was in Nick’s—their—bed, and would see her own reflection, not herself dead like in the dream. But this ceiling was blank, white and told her nothing.

  Groaning, she rolled to her side and pulled her knees up nearly to her chest. When she went off her meds, things always got deep and dark, like that buried eternal fountain of fathomless water.

  Reality slowly seeped back in. She wanted to talk to Ada Cypress, but what did this dream mean? “Can’t figure out my narc dreams, never could,” she told herself and sat up unsteadily.

  But she was determined, she told herself as she slowly stood, to figure out what Ada knew about the woman who had been murdered on this yacht. Why had Ada been at the Carnahan trial? And she was desperate to learn if Ada was middle-aged or ageless.

  * * *

  After spending more time with Lexi, Claire walked to Ada Cypress’s house. Trying to shut out the clinging remnants of the nightmare in which her own lips were trying to tell her—warn her—about something, instead she forced herself to recall things she’d learned about Ada’s people.

  Claire was intrigued by the fact that the Seminoles were traditionally matriarchal so that the men left their families to become part of their wives’ kin, pretty much the opposite of most cultures. The Seminoles were proud that they were the only Native Americans who “never surrendered.” Other tribes were vanquished or forced off their lands by the white man, but the Seminoles flourished in the Glades by finding their “final hiding place” there. Was Ada hiding something that would help her and Nick?

  It had annoyed Claire that he had never quite seemed to recognize Ada’s potential importance in this investigation. Nor did he pay attention each time Claire tried to hint that there was something weird about her. Maybe he was afraid that he’d look silly in court if he claimed Ada’s use of the fountain water kept her young. And Claire didn’t want the private, maybe secretive, old—how old?—woman to be dragged into court against her will. Ada had earlier made clear she wanted nothing to do with publicity. But why then was she at the sensational murder trial where Nick defended and exonerated Dylan Carnahan?

  Ada’s canoe was pulled up on the bank, so Claire assumed she was home. She probably didn’t own a car. Maggie had mentioned she took her to get groceries sometimes, and Claire had never seen a vehicle here. As she climbed the steps, she smelled some strange aroma. Smoke? None came from the chimney. Maybe Ada was cooking inside.

  The heady, earthy smell got stronger as Claire walked the elevated deck that led to the front door. Was there a back door? She hadn’t noticed.

  This door was ajar. She was going to knock, but glimpsed Ada inside, sitting cross-legged on the floor, inhaling smoke through what looked like a hollowed-out piece of sugarcane. Surely, she wasn’t using marijuana. What was that alluring scent? Something was burning low in a clay dish from which she drew the smoke. Just a small pile of leaves?

  As Claire stared and lifted her hand to knock, Ada slowly turned her head and expelled a plume of green-gray smoke. “I thought you would come back,” the woman said. “This is just bay leaves, good for protection. The ‘old ones’ had chants to go with it. The legends say drink it or smoke it to stop bad dreams if you see a ghost.”

  Claire stepped inside but went no farther. Yet the smoke seemed to envelop her. She felt afraid but somehow soothed too, despite the uncanny coincidence of Ada mentioning bad dreams.

  “And have you seen a ghost?” Claire asked, her voice shaky.

  “We all have. You also. Yes?”

  “Yes,” Claire admitted as goose bumps skimmed her skin. The hair on the nape of her neck prickled. Seeing herself again in that dream...dead...whispering... Did this woman read minds? Claire told herself that she had to question her, keep things grounded in reality, in the murder trial, the youth fountain.

  “Then sit,” Ada said. “I see in your eyes you know some things, and I do too.”

  As if stepping into a cloud and another dream, Claire sat.

  24

  For a southwest Florida guy, snow this time of year always amazed Jace, but this was mid-October, and those were the Rocky Mountains. Jace gazed down at the jagged peaks as he flew the Learjet toward LA to pick up the two water experts.

  Jace wondered just how much control Nick Markwood had over the case he was probably going to present in court to defend not only Haze Hazelton—if he was indicted—but the supposed magic water. He kind of liked the idea of the mastermind of Grand Cayman pulling Markwood’s strings, but he hated the idea of someone pulling his.

  One thing he’d always loved about flying, even when he was a copilot with lots of rules and regs, was freedom. He felt like his own man thousands of feet in the air heading cross-country or over the Pacific. But with a guy like Van Cleve dogging him, spying on him, he might have made a mistake to sign on that rich bastard’s dotted line.

  Except he’d had no choice that desperate night on Grand Cayman. He would have just disappeared as Kilcorse-Ames had threatened, “I’ll have these two gentlemen who brought you here take you out in a boat to Cemetery Reef and feed you to the fish.” And worse now—that photo Van Cleve showed him of Lexi, Jilly and Darcy was sheer threat. So, until he could figure out how to make Ames leave them all alone, he had to play his game.

  “Phew!” Jace said, expelling a rush of air. That horrible night was all too real, like a bad movie spooling back through his brain. Despite the diversion of spending his big salary, he wasn’t on this side of evil, and Kilcorse-Ames was that. But how to escape him? How to protect Lexi, to kee
p Claire safe to care for her?

  Should he warn Markwood and come clean about being forced to work for Ames too? Or was Markwood, with that big yacht and Claire for prizes, actually on Kilcorse-Ames’s side? He didn’t trust Markwood as far as he could throw him.

  Sometimes, the way things had gone lately, he felt it would be easier to just bring this jet down into one of those snow-white mountain peaks, especially when he was flying alone like this and wouldn’t kill anyone else. He’d get back at K-A that way too, obliterating this expensive jet. Maybe someday if he had that devil himself as a passenger...

  He shook his head, trying to throw off that ridiculous, terrible thought. He’d never wanted to kill anyone but the enemy in Iraq. He’d never been suicidal, ever. There had to be a decent way to get out from under the devil’s thumb, to win Claire back, to have Lexi in his home again.

  He rechecked the altimeter and speedometer screens and thought of Lexi after their “real fast” airboat ride. The little sweetheart had thought he’d named his new Lexus after her.

  “You know what?” he’d asked her.

  “What?” she said, bouncing along beside him with her hand in his.

  “Next time we go out for a special day, we’re going to ride on what’s called a Jet Ski, a WaveRunner, instead of an airboat. I went on one not long ago, and it was really fun. It goes fast over the water, but you’ll have to wear a life preserver.”

  “To preserve my life? And you better wear one too.”

  “Yeah, my Lexi-Lexus. I’d better wear one too.”

  He gazed down at the ground again, at the pointed peaks, rotating slowly under him, far, far below.

  * * *

  Claire didn’t mind the bay leaf smoke. It didn’t make her cough; it kind of soothed her. She had to concentrate on the questions she’d rehearsed for Ada.

  “No, thanks, I’m fine,” she lied to Ada when the woman offered her the pipe. “So, I’ll just be honest, because I know you will be honest with me.” Her voice sounded a bit strange. Maybe because she was breathing the smoke or was just nervous. This woman not only intrigued her, she scared her.

  “If I can,” Ada said. “Ask then.”

  “When I was doing some research lately on another case my husband worked on, I saw a photo of you outside the court building in Naples. I’ll bet that was unusual for you.”

  Ada nodded and sucked in another breath of the smoke.

  Claire hoped she wasn’t babbling. Usually, she was calm in interviews, even with possible hostile suspects. “I don’t mean to imply a connection between that case and the one we’re preparing for now,” she told Ada. “But do you mind if I ask you why you were at that trial?”

  Ada put the pipe down on the floor. “Yes, I mind. My people are private in their hearts despite having public alligator wrestling shows and the casinos. But you honor me by asking me and not others, so I will say, it was about the casinos—and about a friend of my gr—my son.”

  “But how was that trial about the casinos?”

  “It is like this. My son—he lives with the tribe deep in the Glades—helped to oversee one of the casinos. There, he—and isn’t this a good way to say it?—fell for a deceitful woman, a white woman, Sondra McMillan, the murdered woman that trial was for.”

  Claire realized that Ada was hesitating as she spoke, as if afraid to say too much. And speaking in longer sentences than usual. But with such a unique person, did that mean she was lying? Claire had the feeling Ada always spoke the truth, however she cloaked it, or said nothing at all. She was so hard to read. And Claire’s own hardly brilliant forensic psychologist response was, “Oh.”

  “He did not harm the woman who died. Someone else did, one of the other men she caught in her net of beauty, maybe even the one accused.”

  “My husband proved Dylan Carnahan innocent.”

  Ada gave a little snort. “I saw your husband take people’s words apart in court. I suppose he could make a tree seem guilty. It is his way to show others have their reasons for a murder. It is why poor Haze should not come to trial. Others will suffer, be pulled in.”

  Including you? Claire wanted to ask. “But my husband, Haze’s defense lawyer, will defend him. That’s what he’s pledged to do,” Claire insisted, feeling she had to rush to Nick’s defense.

  “That Sondra could have ruined him—my son, Jimmie Cypress, I mean. Too often my people stand accused because they are not understood or trusted.”

  “But that didn’t happen with your son, did it? He was not accused.”

  “Your husband questioned him before the trial. He could have called him to testify, but did not.”

  “There, you see. Nick is always after the truth, not just to defend his clients. And he obviously trusted your son.”

  Ada’s stare seemed to bore into Claire’s brain. Claire too had not only sat through but testified in a trial where Nick was the opposing lawyer. He’d cross-examined her thoroughly and been tough but fair. Of course, any good lawyer had enemies, but she hoped Ada Cypress was not one of them.

  “Ada—I just—thank you for explaining about your son Jimmie. I’m glad there was no problem for him at that trial, that Nick believed in him, didn’t question him publicly.”

  “And, I hope for the same for myself in this coming trial about the fountain water, if Haze is arrested. That your husband will not question me there.”

  Claire’s pulse pounded. “But why would you be called to testify? Just as a neighbor of the accused? As a character witness, as they say?”

  “Because I believe in the water. But I don’t want to say that in court with all the TV and the paper reporters there. Mark Stirling’s attacks were bad enough, about the water, about my people. But a hundred of him?”

  Claire startled as the woman spit into the dish of burned bay leaves. So did Ada have something to do with Mark’s death? And could—should—Nick use her as a possible suspect, a person of interest, for she surely was?

  “I know you believe in the water,” Claire repeated the woman’s words. “Maggie said you have used it...over time. It seems to have done wonders for you, however old you are.”

  Again Ada narrowed her eyes at Claire. “You try the water and you go into court and say it. But you are already young and healthy.”

  Confession time, Claire thought. Build more of a bond with this woman. And she did not want to leave here without knowing if the fountain waters really worked for Ada.

  “I’m not that young and I have a serious health problem I have to medicate with pills and some vile stuff I drink at night,” Claire told her, fighting to blink back tears that suddenly threatened. “It definitely does not taste like good water.”

  “I am sorry. We all have our sadnesses, yes?”

  Ada rose by simply standing, without getting on her knees or putting a hand to the floor. “The water must be protected at any cost,” she went on. “And already Haze has sold his soul when he sells it for profit. Best you go now, for I have said enough for one day.”

  Claire scrambled to her feet. “I thank you for your honesty and kindness. It is good of Haze and Maggie to let you use the water.”

  “It is not really theirs and not for those who buy and sell it. It has belonged to the earth and to my people for years.”

  Claire followed Ada out onto the raised deck. The woman pointed down over the railing away from the canal toward the back of her house. “It runs off there, especially if it rains,” Ada said. Claire hurried to stand beside her at the rickety railing draped with drying moss and looked down.

  She saw a spot where the grass was greener, where the speckled croton plants were brighter and a firecracker bush taller than anything around. Claire gasped. Even in the midst of lush plants and green grass, it was like a tiny Garden of Eden. Behind those plants, she could just glimpse what seemed to be a s
eries of small stepping stones near a place where the grass looked bent down by water flow.

  “Here,” Ada said, stooping to a large earthenware glazed pot that sat on the deck, “take some home. Wash in it, drink it, not that diluted, fake stuff they sell from it. Ask Haze for more. Here,” she repeated and effortlessly poured some water from the heavy-looking pot into an empty but clean plastic jar that still bore its peanut butter label.

  “You ask questions and you listen,” Ada said. “I like that. But beware of where you love, for that can bring the ghosts. That is what my gr—I mean, my son Jimmie learned. So I have learned. Go now for you have tired an old woman.”

  Claire stood her ground. “How old are you really, Ada?”

  “Haven’t you heard never to ask a woman that? I just feel old, that is all. Do all you can to protect the water. I will never be questioned again because that would not protect the water. You and your husband must do that.”

  Holding the peanut butter jar of supposed youth-preserving water, Claire just stared as Ada Cypress cut off her next question, went inside and closed the door.

  * * *

  “Nick, can’t you just have this water tested, peanut butter jar or not?” Claire asked. “See, it looks clean, the jar and the water. You said two water experts are flying in.” She was not backing down from their argument in the lounge of the Sylph, which was not her favorite place right now.

  “Look, Claire, Ada can’t be much over fifty. So what if Heck can’t locate her birth certificate? Not uncommon in the tribe. Quit obsessing about the eternal water part of this. It’s marketing for Ames, not reality.”

  “I’m sure she could have had her son when she was young, but—”

  “Didn’t Heck tell you? She doesn’t have a son, just a daughter, so if she told you different, she’s lying, and you’re supposed to be good at psyching that out.”

  “No, her son, Jimmie Cypress, oversees the casino nearest to Miami. The man in the picture with her at the trial.”