Killer Move - Michael Marshall [44]
She reads. She watches boxed sets of TV shows. She enjoys a few rounds of Sudoku, so long as she can stop herself remembering how pointless it is. She and Marie discovered the craze together, back in the old days, though Marie was always much better at it. She chats with the maid who comes in every other day.
The afternoons do pass, in the end. There has never been one yet that hasn’t eventually come to a conclusion—though there have been a few that felt like they might not, as if time had actually stopped and might never start again—leaving her alone forever, sitting in her chair, in a dry, cool room.
But they drag. They really drag, which is why, when Hazel hears the knock on her door at a little before three, she’s happy to get up and go answer it.
A man is standing outside. The walkway is much brighter than her room, and he’s initially presented to her in silhouette.
“Afternoon, ma’am,” he says.
His voice is polite, deferential. He’s dressed in dark jeans and a new-looking shirt. Trim build, broad shoulders, short hair touched with gray in the temples. Hazel alters her position against the glare and sees that he’s kind of good-looking, with a nice open smile.
Once in a blue moon Hazel feels the shallowest of stirrings when confronted with a good-looking man: it has to be an unexpected encounter, as if to bypass her mind and go directly to the biological core. It’s not something she’s ever going to act upon, but it’s pleasant to experience all the same—a reminder that only one of the Wilkinses is actually buried in the ground, so far.
“Afternoon,” she says. “Can I help you?”
“I hope so. Looking for a man called Phil Wilkins.”
And just like that, her mood collapses. “You’re too late,” she says, not a woman, merely a widow again.
“Too late? What time will—”
“Six years too late. Phil died.”
She’s looking at the man’s face as he receives this information, and it’s as if his eyes go flat, matte, like a pond icing over. It’s fanciful, but she catches herself thinking that this is a man who also knows what it is to wait, and who has just discovered it isn’t over yet.
Welcome to my world, she thinks.
“Dead, huh?” he says.
“Yep.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“You and me both.”
He nods, looking pained. Rather too late, it occurs to Hazel that he looks familiar, as if he’s someone she saw in passing once or twice, long ago.
“Then I guess it’s you I need to talk to,” he says, stepping inside.
An hour later Hunter is sitting in his car. His door is open. He has driven to a location at the northern end of Longboat Key. When he last saw it the place was nothing more than a couple of acres of scrubby woods, swampy in parts, a reminder of the true nature of these half-sea, half-sand islands—an example of the kind of wilderness that still exists down at the southern end of Lido Key. He discovered it by accident when he came to live in the area. For someone raised on the alien plains of Wyoming, there is an endless fascination about this borderland between water and land.
It is no longer how it was. Some developer has bought and cleared it, cutting down the trees and carting off their carcasses, filling in the boggy parts, laying down swatches of crabgrass until it looks like a golf course. Anything that was natural has gone. Even the ocean now lies in an artificial relationship to the land, its edge trammeled, made convenient and beautiful according to the values of leisure development. Somewhere, perhaps in Sarasota, maybe New York or Houston or Moscow, someone owns this land. Hunter wonders if they think of it, beyond seeing it on a balance sheet with the words Not Yet scribbled next to it by