Pine island coast florid.., p.72
Pine Island Coast Florida Box Set, page 72
part #1 of Pine Island Coast Florida Series
Earlier in the week, as soon as she had hung up with Eugene Riser, Ellie had put in a call to Nathan Price, an old and trusted contact at Langley. She explained the situation surrounding her father and asked him to see if he could find anything on Frank O’Conner besides an online obituary in the Pine Island Eagle. Ellie informed Nathan that, as far as her father had ever led his family to believe, he had worked at the Department of Justice for the last twenty-five years. But in light of recent events and the shared connection in Ryan, Ellie was now thinking that her father either worked for the CIA or the other side, whatever side that might be. Allowing herself to consider that her father might be on the wrong team drew up deep feelings of guilt, as though she were betraying all that she knew to be true about him.
But the hard reality was, she just didn’t know anymore.
Nathan Price was as good an officer as they came, and a wonderful husband and father of three. During her two years in Afghanistan, Nathan had been Ellie’s stateside intelligence analyst, working closely with her and her team to provide up-to-date intel on Assam Murad and his terrorist cousin, Fahad Sarkaui. He had since been promoted to an operations director, based out of Virginia. Nine months ago, after Ellie chose to leave the CIA and arrived back in the U.S. for three weeks of exit debriefings, Nathan and his wife had her over to their house for dinner on a couple of occasions. Once her dismissal was finalized, Nathan told Ellie to reach out should she ever need anything.
At the time, Ellie thought it was all behind her. For good. She couldn’t imagine a scenario where she was back here in South Florida, leading a quiet civilian life, suddenly needing to call in a favor to someone within the intelligence community. But a week ago, she had reached out to two such people in a single day.
Ellie kept the hose running and went inside, leaving her amphibious canine to his water-bound ways. She went to the kitchen sink and washed her hands. On top of everything else there remained one additional barb pricking against a quiet conscience.
She still hadn’t told her sister that their father was alive.
When Ellie had found out three months ago, Katie was still living in Seattle and wasn’t talking to her. But everything had changed several weeks ago, when Ellie picked Katie and Chloe up from the airport and brought them back to their childhood home here on the island. In the last several weeks, whenever Katie mentioned their father, Ellie felt like a traitor. Katie had just as much right to know as Ellie did, she knew that. When Ryan was still alive, Ellie had decided to withhold it from her sister because she had no answers. But now things had changed.
Katie stepped out of the hallway bathroom, where Chloe was taking a shower, and shut the door. She walked into the kitchen. “Tyler leave?” she asked.
“He did. I offered for him to stay for lunch, but he said he needed to get back to work. I think maybe he’s a little queasy.”
“Are you two ever going to start dating?” Katie opened the refrigerator and brought out a cold can of LaCroix. “Because if you’re not, I’m thinking about asking him myself.”
“You’re not his type.”
“What’s that mean?”
“He likes blondes.”
“Well, I can dye my hair. Ellie, that little cleft on his chin. And the stubble...”
“Stop...”
Katie took a sip of her water and shrugged. “Well, you know I’m right.”
A picture of Frank O’Conner hung on the wall directly behind Katie, taken several years ago by Major. Ellie had probably been in Brussels at the time. Frank O’Conner was sitting on a barstool at The Salty Mangrove, beer in hand, looking off somewhere. He wasn’t smiling and he wasn’t frowning. He was just him. Handsome, contemplative, distinguished in his own laid back kind of way. Major had gifted Ellie the photo after she had moved back home. A house-warming gift, he’d said.
“Hey,” Katie waved a hand in front of Ellie’s face. “Are you all right?”
“Sorry, yes. Have a seat for a second,” Ellie said, and motioned toward the kitchen table.
“Okay… If what I said about Tyler was—”
“No. You’re fine. Really.” Ellie took a seat next to her sister and swallowed hard around a rock in her throat, realizing that she felt more nervous in this moment than when she was looking through a scope, about to take someone’s life. That dryness in the throat, the elevated heart beat, the knowledge that you won’t be able to turn back and change things. Ellie knew that sisters could be mad at each other. But they couldn’t stay that way. Somehow, the universe would always conspire to bring them back together again. Because the blood that made them sisters also made them friends.
Ellie placed her hand on top of her sister’s. “So, listen,” she said. “There’s something you need to —” she was interrupted by a knock at the front door. She released a frustrated smile. “Hold on.”
“The suspense,” Katie said.
Ellie walked across the living room and opened the door. “Well, hello,” she said, a little intrigued. It was Mark Palfrey, her former partner.
“Hey, Ellie. Do you have a minute?”
Chapter Seven
Ten Years Ago
The television was mounted high in the corner and emanated a nearly undetectable whine. It was set to her favorite team—the Chicago Cubs—playing their bitter rivals, the St. Louis Cardinals; the Cubs up seven to three in the eighth.
The door to her room opened to a tall, broad-shouldered man with a strong jaw, strong nose, and rugged features. He was bald, in a rugged sort of way. She had always thought him handsome. The older he got the more drawn and creased the lines on the sides of his mouth became. Today, like every day, he was wearing shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt. “Hey, Daddy.”
“Hey, Kat.” His voice was drawn. Quinton Davis smiled unnaturally and approached her hospital bed, sat into the chair positioned between the bed and the window. Katrina’s eyes remained fixated on the game, but all he could do was watch her. He finally leaned in and placed a gentle kiss on top of her head—across her Cubs bandana—and stroked her pale, browless forehead with his thumb.
She didn’t take her eyes off the pitch when she asked, “Did they get me into the trials?” She asked it hopefully, optimistically, as an eleven-year-old child who had not yet learned the fine art of closing a hard fist around her own plans for her life.
He kept stroking her forehead and with his free hand took her frail, clammy hand in his. She turned to him. Her eyes were gaunt, her skin jaundiced. His chin was quivering now. “No, Kat. They...they ran…” He looked away. “Ran out of funding. They can’t take anyone else.”
“Okay.” She turned back to the television.
He looked back to her, a devil’s fury raging on the inside, wishing he could take this with the same childlike acceptance as she did. One might think he had just told her she had to wait until after dinner to have a popsicle.
Okay.
And it wasn’t even that she failed to understand. She did understand. They had talked about it dozens of times over the last three weeks. It was all they thought about; their final and collective hope. She knew that “No, Kat” meant that her days were drawing up, that soon she would be moving on, leaving her father behind.
The hot anger within was fueled by the fact that the trials—funded by a non-profit—had no money left to accommodate Katrina Davis. This wasn’t breast cancer. Quinton had just heard on the radio that next year the NFL would have their players wear pink shoes and gloves to raise money to help fight that disease. Real men were about to wear pink after all. This wasn’t heart disease, with financial warriors lobbying on behalf of the American Heart Association. No, his little girl was dying of APL, acute promyelocytic leukemia, an aggressive disease that was but a blip on the radar compared to those other two major killers of mankind. But Katrina wasn’t a blip on the radar. Not his, anyway. She wasn’t a number or a patient or a statistic. She was his daughter and the entire world should be screaming and vying and donating and praying to get her the treatment she needed.
Kat had no white blood cells left. She had survived her induction therapy, but the chemo hadn’t worked. All other treatments had betrayed her.
Her attention was fixed on a pop fly heading into left field. “You’ll still finish the list, right?” she asked. “You’ll save Wrigley for last?”
Quinton nodded and stood, choked out, “Sure, baby. Of course.” Then he made a hasty exit from the room, tapped furiously at the elevator button until its doors opened, and, as they shut, collapsed into a loose bundle of hot tears and wailing grief.
____________________
Nine Days Later
Warren Hall stepped from his Jeep Wrangler and walked across the newly paved parking lot, the afternoon humidity condensing on his skin, the sun assaulting the earth with an unrelenting commitment to make the human race as miserable as possible. As he made his way to the front entrance, Warren passed a looming willow tree that stood in the center of the turnabout. He had recently decided, after coming here each day for the last two months, that he liked willows after all. They displayed an inherent grace, their tendrils hanging lazily from hardy branches, the lightest of breezes sending them swaying in elegant unison. A symphony of nature.
Warren moved more slowly than usual, the large lunch of fried shrimp and conch that he had shared with Frank and Katie sat delightfully heavy in his stomach. At lunch Katie had challenged him to a competition to see who could throw down the most shrimp. He had her beat in ten minutes and accepted her offer to do a load of dishes at The Salty Mangrove. He loved the three he called “his girls.” Warren had no children of his own, and Ellie, Katie, and Katrina were the daughters he never had.
Katrina. The brightest smile he had ever seen. She was turning twelve tomorrow and he had a surprise party planned for her. Even her father didn’t know. With help from Sharla Potter, Warren had spent the last three days getting in touch with all of Katrina’s friends, planning a party for the ages to be held in her hospital room. Sharla had sweet-talked and Warren had charmed every nurse and administrative personnel needed to get the approval pushed through. A clown was even coming. After that, a magician.
Katrina hadn’t gotten into the trials...yet. Warren had put in several calls to people who had pockets deeper than their pants legs, and he was just waiting to hear back.
They couldn’t lose her.
Her father had opened up a bait shop on Monroe Canal when she was but an infant, wanting to anchor his life so he could give her a stable upbringing. As a fellow member of the Chamber of Commerce and wishing goodwill toward anyone brave enough to open their own small business, Warren had wasted no time introducing himself to Quinton Davis. He even offered to sell Quinton’s bait at his own marina. They soon became fast friends. Sometime after Katrina had entered kindergarten, her father started bringing her by The Salty Mangrove on Friday afternoons, where they would grab a late afternoon snack of fried grouper before going out on the water together. It had remained a tradition of sorts ever since. Warren went with them on a couple of occasions but had somehow felt that he was encroaching on sacred time between father and daughter. From then on he would wave them off when they asked him to join them. At least on Friday afternoons.
Katrina had matured with a sense of humor that none could attribute to her father nor her mother. Without fail she would have the bar in stitches, embellishing stories about her father’s fishing mishaps, or Warren’s receding hairline, or taking long-winded guesses as to what old man Chesterfield was really saying, being that he never wore his dentures.
And then she got cancer.
And not just any cancer. Katrina had been diagnosed with the dreaded APL. She had been riding her bicycle around her cul-de-sac two months earlier when her nose started dumping rivers of blood onto her T-shirt, and shorts, and legs. The next day a bone marrow sample was followed by a bleak diagnosis.
But if Warren knew anything, he knew that Katrina was a fighter. She should have gotten into trials a month ago. People coming out of them were getting better. But the money just wasn’t there. Last week they thought she might be able to get into a spot that had opened up. But they had been wrong. Still, Warren hadn’t given up. He was going to get that girl into those trials no matter who he had to beg, regardless of the favors he would owe.
The automatic doors to the hospital shuffled open, and Warren’s Birkenstocks slapped quietly on the vinyl composition floor. He walked to the elevator and pressed the small circular light mounted in the wall. When it opened, he stepped in and went up. He got off on her floor and turned down the corridor. Nurses were whispering at the station, their backs to him. He pushed on the door to Katrina’s room and walked in. Her father was sitting in an armchair looking out the window, his back toward the door.
Katrina’s bed was missing from the room.
“Quinton?” Warren said. “Did they take her for more testing?”
“I hate that willow,” Quinton said, staring out the glass, looking down toward the front of the hospital. “It looks like it’s in constant mourning.” His voice cracked.
Warren’s throat tightened. “Quinton. Where is Katrina?”
Quinton turned around. His eyes were puffy, moist with tears. “She’s...gone,” he said it like he was still trying to believe it.
“What? Gone?”
“She died, Warren.”
“Oh, God.” Warren choked, and grabbed at a chair and sat into it.
“When?”
“Half hour ago.”
“I thought—”
“Intracranial hemorrhage is what they’re calling it. Brain…” he faltered. “Brain bleed.”
“Gone?” Warren repeated, and then his face took on the same disbelieving look as his friend’s. He leaned forward and put a strong hand on Quinton’s shoulder. “I’m sorry. I’m just so sorry.” His heavy body shook as he wept.
“What do I do now?” Quinton finally whispered. “I can’t...I can’t go home. She won’t ever be there again.”
“You’ll stay at my place for a while.”
“And then what?”
“We’ll worry about ‘what’ down the road.”
“I don’t think I can keep my promise, Warren.”
“What promise?”
“She...she told me to finish the remaining stadiums. I don’t think I can do it.”
Warren swallowed back another sob. “You don’t need to think about all that right now.”
Quinton nodded and wailed into his hands.
Warren sat with his friend for the next half-hour, the nurses and staff leaving them to their privacy for the time being. It wasn’t until a priest and an old family friend showed up at the same time that Warren decided to step out.
He didn’t walk back to his Jeep. Instead, he turned left after stepping out of the elevator, walking the length of the hospital wing before exiting out a side door. A winding sidewalk led past a prayer garden and around a banyan tree that stood sentinel over a small lake, a place of serenity created for the solace of the grieving and the prayers of the hopeful.
Warren sat down on a metal slat bench and looked out over the water where a small fountain threw misty water into the air. Millions of droplets sparkled in the sunlight like tiny diamonds, as if there were something to be celebrated. A duck swam by. A frog hopped off a pad and splashed as it entered the water. Swans paddled to the other side. How could such a place as this incubate such grief?
An unseen dissonance raged within Warren Hall.
Why hadn’t the world stopped? Why were the birds still singing, the roots of the banyan tree swaying gently, almost happily, just above him, the ducks and the frogs animated, the clematis and coneflower still in vibrant bloom?
If only they had the money. People were being healed by this new retinoic acid treatment. The only reason Katrina didn't make it was because of funding—money. How many more fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters and grandparents would have to suffer because there was no money left in benevolent coffers?
Warren Hall didn’t move from his seat on that slatted bench for the next two hours, questions churning in him like an infant hurricane coming off the coast of Africa, stirring up a darkness that would change how Warren Hall would now look at the world.
He owned a bar and a marina. Quinton owned a bait shop. They weren’t in a position to help others, to keep more families from feeling like some merciless force had reached down into their souls and cut away the best parts of them.
And it was there, next to the lake, beneath the magnificence of the banyan tree, that it came to him. It came to him in a flash of inspiration that could only be called unholy, cutting through all his moral inhibitions as swiftly as the great lie that had been whispered to Adam as he stood naked in the garden. Warren’s lip curled and his chin rose. He stood up. He walked to the edge of the water, his jaw set hard, the resolve that was hardening deep within his heart finally overcoming the tears still pooled in his eyes.
A quote from Nietzsche’s pen slowly distilled from his mind to his heart: To survive is to find meaning in the suffering.
They would be able to help. Warren would ensure that money wasn’t the reason children died and families mourned. He would get the money.
He would get it by the kilo.
Chapter Eight
“Mark,” Ellie said. “Come in.”
Mark, who was generally a pressed polo and khakis kind of guy, was wearing shorts and a rainbow tie dye T-shirt with a black and white image of the Fonz stamped across the front. He stepped in and Ellie shut the door.
The door to the hallway bathroom opened, and Chloe came out wearing fresh clothes and wet hair. She stopped when she saw the unexpected man. She shriveled her nose. “Who are you?” she asked. “Your shirt is weird.”
