C
HAPTER
ONE
Ethan paddled his kayak slowly across the inland waterway, heading into the dawn. The sun was a glorious red-rimmed blister rising straight ahead of him. The strengthening light made it impossible to actually see where he was headed. Not that it was a problem. Ethan had been coming and going from this particular dock since the ripe old age of nine and a half months.
The pain in his chest was worsened by the paddling motion. He needed to take his morning meds. But the pain medication left him somewhat removed from the world. That was not altogether a bad thing, since it was precisely what would be happening soon enough. Permanently. Even so, Ethan wanted to make his last journey out here with as clear a head as possible.
Skin cancer was a risk for every aging waterman. Over recent years Ethan had lost far too many friends to the aftermath, when the skin disease invaded the body. The week after he turned fifty-five, Ethan learned the melanoma had landed in the lining around his heart and lungs, what the doctors called thoracic sarcoma. Because he had waited so long to be checked out, treatment was simply not an option.
He minded, but not as much as he might have suspected. This dawn paddle was the first time in quite a while that he allowed his regrets to almost overwhelm him. Ethan did what he had been doing since the diagnosis. He pushed the bitter taste aside as best he could. By this point, the mental action was almost second nature.
His brother, Adrian, used to love telling and retelling the story of Ethan’s first trip out here. How their father had basically ruined the best-ever father-and-son outing by insisting they bring the worm. That was what ten-year-old Adrian had named the family’s unexpected newcomer. The human worm.
Needless to say, there had not been much love lost between the two brothers early on.
Their father and Adrian had been passionate about kayak fishing, which perfectly suited the marshes and shallow waters of Florida’s inland waterway. As he grew into adulthood, Ethan had kept it up mostly because of his brother’s love for the sport. He personally found it a little ridiculous, maintaining an impossible sense of balance while casting. Not to mention the nightmare of catching and landing a large fish. But Adrian treated it like his drug of choice. And because of how close the two brothers had become, especially after their parents were taken from them, Ethan continued to paddle out and fish and paddle home. Even now. Thirty-five years after Adrian was murdered on the Jacksonville courthouse steps.
In the past, Ethan had also made an annual trek up to the Saint Augustine cemetery where his brother and parents were buried, marking the trio of losses. Customarily this paddle-out took place the day he returned home to Cocoa Beach. But the graves were too far away now. And Ethan wouldn’t be asking anyone to cart his remains up to the family plot. He’d already arranged for buddies to cast his ashes over his beloved Atlantic surf.
Ethan could make out the silhouettes of homes and carefully planted tropical gardens that now rimmed the Cocoa Beach waterfront. None of this had existed when he and his brother used to come out here, of course. The world had moved on. Soon it would continue without him.
The pier was pretty much derelict now, used mostly by locals who remembered how things once had been. Back in the eighties, when the Holiday Marina was the center of their young lives, Cocoa Beach had positively hummed with energy and people and new money. The space race had ended, and I Dream of Jeannie had shifted from the nation’s number-one show to late-night reruns. But NASA was still going strong, and Cocoa Beach had become a choice winter destination for the nation’s college students.
The Holiday Marina’s owners had retired twenty-three years ago. Because they loved their hometown and the folks who had been their regular clients for decades, they willed the place and the land to the city. The marina had been razed, and the pier was badly maintained by volunteers. But the boat ramp and parking lot were still jammed almost every weekend.
As Ethan made the final approach, two silver-grey dolphins swam up alongside his kayak. They were the smaller brackish-water breed, and so tame that one let him reach down and scratch the slick pelt beside its dorsal fin. The other peeped a soft welcome, or perhaps a farewell.
Then Ethan saw who was waiting for him, and he wished the dolphins had managed a clearer warning.
There on the end of the pier stood Professor Sonya Barrett, widow of Ethan’s late brother. The reason Ethan had not been with Adrian on the day he was murdered. The point of the worst—and the last—argument the two brothers ever had.
Sonya had not aged well. Ethan had not seen her since the day after the funeral, but he remembered her as a lithe figure with a ballerina’s grace. Now her hair looked chopped off with garden shears, blown by the dawn breeze into a bird’s nest of grey and silver. Her face was heavily lined. But at least the eyes were the same. Angry and tight. Ethan remembered that gaze.
Sonya started in on him even before Ethan docked. “I’ve been waiting here over an hour.”
If he’d had any doubt about who the woman was, her attitude confirmed it. He’d had no reason to think she’d be showing up today. Even so, she treated Ethan like he had been born permanently in the wrong.
He swung the kayak around as though readying for a quick getaway. “Did I miss a message you were coming?” Ethan left unspoken the fact that if he’d known, he’d still be paddling in the opposite direction.
She gestured impatiently. “We don’t have time for that. Get on up here before it’s too late for everything.”
It had always been this way between them. Ten seconds together and they were circling each other like curs, hair bristling, looking for the chance to draw first blood.
Only not today.
The weight of knowing this would be his final paddle-out, and all the wrong moves that had brought him to this point, left Ethan immune to Sonya’s ire for the first time ever. On any other day, he might have found a bit of humor in the thought that struck as he gripped the lower railing. How being close to death proved to be the only way to put up with his brother’s widow.
He reached out, offering her the line. “Want to make me fast?”
Sonya hesitated, as if needing a moment to search out the hidden barb. She took the rope. “I positively loathe to be kept waiting.”
Sonya had always been impatient with a world that refused to spin at her frenetic pace. He remained silent as he clambered onto the dock. But he pushed himself erect too fast, and the pain in his chest went from bad to unbearable. He clamped his arm to his chest and managed, “Give me a minute.”
“I don’t have another minute.” She lashed the kayak to a rusting stanchion. “And by the looks of things, neither do you.”
He breathed around the pain, waiting. Gradually the discomfort fit itself back inside a manageable space. When he could breathe easy once more, he asked, “You heard?”
“Of course I heard. Why else do you think I’d be out here?”
A younger voice called from the shore, “Okay, Mom. That’s enough.”
“Well, really. Timing is everything.” Sonya waved an irritated hand in Ethan’s general direction. “And this man is making us late.”
“Mom. You told me to say when you were being a pain. This is me doing my job.” The woman walked closer. She was tall and willowy and good-natured, the exact opposite of her mother. “Go start setting up, why don’t you.”