Off the Chart

Lawton raised his hands and raked his fingers through his mane of white hair, then laid his hands flat on the table and pressed down as if he meant to levitate it.

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘That explains why I don’t remember. Something happens a minute ago, why should I waste my mental faculties on that? Most likely it’s not going to turn out to be worth remembering anyway. All the important stuff happened a long time ago.’

‘I don’t know about that,’ Alex said, giving Thorn a brief look. ‘I believe some of the important stuff may still be unfolding.’

She had a sip of her beer and patted her father’s hand.

‘Hey, did either of you see the tarpon?’ Lawton said. ‘Over by the pilings. They’re huge. You should go look.’

Closing in on seventy-five, Lawton suffered from an evaporating memory and a growing confusion about things great and small. So far, no doctor had given his condition a name. Apparently he was headed down the steep and irreversible slope of dementia. There had been times lately when the old man’s focus narrowed so severely, he seemed to be peering at the world through a pinprick hole. Staring mutely for a solid hour at a blade of grass, water dripping from a faucet, the hairs on the back of his knuckle.

For the last few months he’d been preoccupied with returning to his boyhood home in Ohio. Packing his bag at any hour of the day and night, heading out toward the highway to catch a bus. Twice Thorn and Alex had woken in the night to find Lawton missing from his living room cot, and both times they’d finally located him sitting in the bus shelter a mile from Thorn’s house, his valise on his lap, dead set on a journey back to Columbus.

When Alex asked him why in the world he’d want to abandon the paradise of the Florida Keys for Columbus, Ohio, Lawton puzzled on it for a moment, then told her that he wanted to go home so he could dig up a time capsule he and his younger brother Charlie buried sixty-five years before. A time capsule? Alexandra wanted to know what was so important about a time capsule. ‘My past,’ he said. ‘It’s buried in the dirt behind a white frame house at 215 Oak Street.’ But what was in the capsule that required Lawton to depart on a journey in the middle of the night to retrieve it? ‘What’s in it?’ he said. ‘How the hell am I supposed to remember what I buried sixty-five years ago? That’s why I’ve got to go dig the damn thing up.’ He looked hard into her eyes and said, ‘So maybe I can find out who the hell I used to be.’

Now each night before she put him to bed, Alexandra lectured Lawton sternly. If he wandered off from the house one more time, she would have to start padlocking the door. Lawton always listened with a deadly earnest look. Although the midnight jaunts had ceased, neither Thorn nor Alexandra was sleeping easy.

During the day Thorn looked after the old guy while Alexandra labored as a crime scene photographer for the same Miami police department Lawton had once served as a homicide detective. For the last few months she’d been making the sixty-mile journey from Key Largo to the treacherous streets of Miami, then back each evening. A commute she claimed to find restful.

They’d met a few months back when Lawton showed up on Thorn’s doorstep. The old detective was on a self-appointed mission to track a killer and Thorn had been just a quick stop on his erratic journey. Hours after Lawton disappeared, Alexandra showed up at Thorn’s searching for him. And though things had started badly between them, the clash of his flint against her steel had sparked a smoldering connection that since then had been growing ever hotter.

While Alex dabbed her napkin at a spill of Coke on her father’s lap, Thorn’s gaze drifted over to Anne Joy, who was waiting on a nearby table. He’d nearly forgotten about the woman. So much intensity at the time, but the months had fleeted by and Anne had turned to smoke and drifted almost completely from his memory.

‘Thorn?’ Alex tapped him on the shoulder. He turned to her, but she’d already tracked down the source of his attention, and her smile was tart.

‘Yeah?’

‘Dad and I are going to take another look at the pet tarpon. You want to come, or stay here and ogle?’

‘Those fish are huge,’ Lawton said. ‘Wish to hell I’d brought my pole.’

Thorn got up and took Alexandra’s hand in his. She answered his squeeze with the slightest pressure, and they walked over to the rail to join Sugarman and his girls.

Like everyone else sitting outside at the Lorelei that sunny Sunday afternoon, Anne Bonny Joy noticed the sleek black Donzi sliding up to the restaurant dock – just another flashy Miami asshole down to the Keys for brunch – and she wouldn’t have given him a second look except for the name printed in gold script on the stern of the big rumbling speedboat, the Black Swan, which happened to be the name of her mother’s all-time-favorite pirate flick.

The boat’s captain and two top-heavy blondes barely out of their teens took one of Anne’s tables, and while the girls sat reading their menus, the guy tilted his head back and closed his eyes to bask in the sun. Anne Bonny came over, placed their water glasses in front of them, and stood next to the table until the man rocked his head forward and revealed his dark blue eyes. Longer and thicker lashes than her own.

‘Take your order?’ she said.

Standing there in the Lorelei uniform, green shorts and a tight white T-shirt. The girls in bikini tops and snug shorts, the guy bare-chested, with a caramel tan. His dark hair was long and swept back like a teen idol from forty years earlier. A man too handsome for his own good, and for anyone else’s.

‘How it’s usually done,’ he said, giving her a lazy grin, ‘you’re supposed to say, “Hi, I’m Mandy; I’ll be your server.”’

The girls were both platinum blondes. They might’ve been twins. Anne looked at them as they giggled at the man’s wit; then she looked back at the man.

‘Take your order.’

‘What’s good here?’ one of the girls said. ‘Let’s have what’s good.’

‘Cheeseburger,’ the other girl said. ‘You have cheeseburgers, don’t you?’

‘It’s a fish joint, Angie,’ her double said. ‘You should order fish.’

‘I hate fish. It smells funny.’

‘Your name?’ The man was in his mid-thirties, about Anne’s age, and had a coarse black beard he hadn’t bothered with that morning, bristles glinting in the harsh sunlight.

‘It’s there on her shirt, the little tag,’ one of the girls said. ‘Anne Bonny.’

The man turned his head to the blonde.

‘I see the tag,’ he said. ‘I’d like to hear her say her name out loud.’

The blonde’s lips wrinkled into a practiced pout.

‘My name is Anne Bonny Joy. Can I take your order?’

‘That’s a weird name,’ the other girl said.

‘It’s an illustrious name,’ said the man. ‘Legendary.’

‘Never heard of it,’ the pouting girl said. ‘I think it’s stupid.’

‘Three hundred years ago,’ the man said, ‘Anne Bonny was the most famous woman in the world. Bigger than a movie star.’

‘There weren’t any movies three hundred years ago,’ the blonde said. ‘Were there?’

He was watching Anne’s face. His voice was dark and liquid and his blue eyes were fastened to hers, stealing past her usually impenetrable shield. She held her ground, her pencil poised above her pad. It was all she could manage. Seagulls squealed overhead. On the other side of the patio the reggae band started their version of ‘I Shot the Sheriff.’ The bell in the kitchen rang, another order up. Garlic and shrimp and coconut suntan oil floating on the breeze.

‘Anne Bonny was the greatest pirate of the Caribbean, ruthless and daring, the equal of any man.’

‘Big deal,’ the sulky one said.

‘My mother named me,’ Anne said. ‘It’s just a name.’

‘Whatever you say.’

The man touched a fingertip to the lip of his water glass, smiling down.

‘And your boat?’ Anne said. Irritated now, wanting to push back.

‘My boat?’

‘The Black Swan.’

‘Oh.’ He glanced out toward the docks, then let his eyes drift back to her. ‘It’s the name of an old movie with Tyrone Power.’

‘And Maureen O’Hara,’ said Anne.