“Anne was no Zelda,” I hear my mother saying. “Anne was a grownup. I liked her. Her daughter was a wild one but Anne I liked.”
“Me too, Mom.”
“It’s this godawful job of yours—writing about deceased persons every day. Who wouldn’t start to unravel?”
“I’m doing much better. Really I am.”
“Then why these phone calls, Jack?”
“Sorry.”
“You could switch over to the Sports page. Write about the PGA. Or even the LPGA—maybe you’ll meet a nice girl on the tour!”
“All I’m asking,” I say calmly to my mother, “is how you knew when my father died. It just seems peculiar, since you say you hadn’t seen or heard from the guy all those years… How did you find out about it, Mom?”
My mother delivers one of her trademark sighs. “You really want to know?”
“I do.”
“I’m warning you. There’s an element of irony.”
“Fire away. I’m sitting down.”
“I read it in a newspaper, Jack,” she says to me. “Your father’s obituary.”
9
The belly of the seaplane is hot. It smells of fuel, grease and sweat. We’re fanning ourselves with rolled-up magazines, but I’m not as jumpy about flying as I usually am.
I like the concept of an aircraft that floats. It makes a world of sense.
Janet Thrush says, “I’ve never been on one a these contraptions.”
I can barely hear her over the racket of the propellers. She’s sitting across the aisle, wearing a yellow sleeveless pullover, cutoff jeans, sandals and a floppy canvas hat. She looks perhaps a bit too ready for the islands.
Through the window I see the indigo rip of the Gulf Stream behind us. The waters ahead are turning clear and brilliant, a silky dapple of gemstone blues. Janet leans closer. “I love it here. I used to visit Jimmy all the time till he hooked up with Cleo.”
“She keeping the place in Exuma?” I practically shout.
“Who knows.” Janet shrugs. She slips into the same cheap shades that she wore last night as Rita the Meter Maid. “Hey, Jack,” she says, “did my brother leave a will?”
“You’re asking me?”
“Hey, you’re the one writin’ the story.”
The plane splashes down gaily and skims the wake of a cruise liner in Nassau harbor. We clear Customs without incident and I hail a cab. Police headquarters is downtown, across the big toll bridge. I’ve phoned ahead to make sure Sergeant Weems is on duty today, hut that doesn’t mean he’ll hang around to welcome us to the commonwealth. I warn Janet that we might be in for a wait but she seems determined and calm. The only sign of jitters is the prodigious wad of chewing gum she’s been chomping.
“It’s either that or Camels,” she says.
Incredibly, Police Sergeant Cartwright Weems is at his desk when we arrive. He is young and upright and courteous. His desk is exceptionally tidy. I introduce myself first, and then Janet as “the sister of the deceased.”
Weems says he’s sorry about her brother’s death. Janet says, “Jack, tell him why we’re here.”
“Certainly. It’s about the autopsy.”
Weems folds his arms, giving the appearance of polite interest.
“Actually,” I say, “we have reason to think there wasn’t an autopsy.”
“Why do you say that?” the sergeant asks.
“Because there were no stitches in the body.”
“Ah.” Weems sits forward and turns open the file folder on his desk. Inside is the official police report about the drowning of James Bradley Stomarti.
“When you say autopsy,” Weems says, scanning the file papers, “of course you’re thinking of how things are done in the States. Forensically speaking.” He smiles, then looks up at us. “Here in the Bahamas we don’t have the resources or the manpower to conduct what you might call a textbook postmortem on every accident victim. Unfortunately.”
His accent is more British than that of most Bahamians, and I’m guessing he was educated in London.
“May I ask—do you use pathologists?”
“Whenever possible, Mr. Tagger,” Weems says. “But as you know, we have seven hundred islands in the commonwealth, spread over a very large area. Sometimes we’re able to get a trained pathologist on scene in a timely fashion, and other times we’re not.”