Killer Move - Michael Marshall [59]
It was dark, but the air felt soft and warm. At one point, halfway along the drive, I stopped for a moment, frowning. I turned around. I almost always did this when I came along this way, but had never been able to work it out before.
“Aha,” I said, however, feeling a flip of recognition deep in my gut. “This is it.”
“Yeah, I heard they kept the secret of life along here somewhere. So you found it, huh?”
“The Lido Beach Inn,” I said. “That’s where it was.”
“Excuse me?”
I turned to look at her, feeling old. “We came to Florida a couple times when I was a kid,” I said. “We always used to stay on Lido Beach. Back then this key wasn’t so developed, in fact it was the budget option—though it had been a big deal in the distant past. There was a huge old hotel back on that last corner, where the Sun Palms is now, but it was abandoned all the years we came. And along here . . .”
I indicated the row of finished and nearly finished developments that now lined this stretch. “I think there were already a couple of smaller condos back then, but it was mainly old motels. They’re all gone now, but every time I’ve been along this road since we’ve lived here, I’ve tried to work out where the Lido Beach Inn was. And I’ve finally realized, it’s here. Or it was.”
I pointed into the heart of a small, upscale development, and suddenly I could actually feel it, situate myself on the planet and in my memory and know this was the spot that had held a scruffy old U-shaped motel where you drove under an awning and turned right or left to park in front of two parallel blocks of rooms. There were perhaps a dozen rooms on each of the two levels, a swimming pool in between—and a walkway that led out to the beach. The motel had a laundry room, a Ping-Pong area with a table whose net never stood up, and whirring ice and soda machines. No restaurant, no bar, no store, no child-care facilities or concierge service. Just a place for families to hang out while they soaked up some rays (back in the days before it was determined that sunlight was cancerous poison and to be avoided at all costs). For a moment it all seemed totally real, as if those family vacations had been only a year or two ago.
I saw, however, that the building that had replaced the Lido Beach Inn could itself do with a lick of paint, a chunk of render missing up on one side. The next generation was already getting old. I recalled, too, that only two days ago I’d been caught up in lobbying Tony Thompson to refresh The Breakers, and found it hard to remember why. I knew I would do so again, at some point, but right now it seemed far less important than the fact that a gangly kid with my name and DNA had once passed over this stretch of sidewalk without realizing that twenty years later an older version of himself would be weaving there, drunk, missing a wife, his life in disarray. It seemed strange that we can do this, stand in a place and not be able to feel the breeze of a future self walking past. We wouldn’t be coming back, after all, had we not been there before—so the events must be conjoined. How had he not been able to see my shadow standing here? Had he not happened to look in the right direction? Or not listened hard enough? Or had I in fact caught a glimpse, and was that why I was back here now, to try to find my way back to that self? I thought about asking something like this out loud, but guessed I probably seemed drunk enough already. I let my hand drift back to my side.
“Come on,” Cassandra said. She stepped closer and looped her arm through mine. “I think you need to sit down for a while, big guy.”
It was only another ten minutes’ walk, down at the far end of the drive. Just before the road abruptly downsized to a single lane before winding off into the palms and scrub of the undeveloped part of the key,