“Why the bubbles?”

I glanced at the plastic bottle. “I guess I like the way it feels.”

He took a long draw on his cigarette. He gazed out in front of us toward the coast of Florida some forty-four miles away. “I know you’re here running from something that hurt you—from someone—but you need to know that to the folks you meet—” He pointed his cigarette at my water. “You’re like that bottle of water.” He squinted at me, and I thought I saw the residue of a tear. “Don’t let the pain of whatever or whoever hurt you bottle itself up inside.” A breeze rippled across the water and settled on us. “Everywhere on the face of this planet, water is life, and I don’t know why, but you have that effect on people. They are drawn to it.” He reached for my bottle and swigged from it. “They like the way it feels going down.”

How I loved that old man.

Word spread and pretty soon Hack and I were both spending our days on the water. We built skiffs mornings and evenings and guided during the day. One morning I looked in the mirror, tanned, my hair turned blond in the sun, a few pounds lighter, and realized that the lifestyle agreed with me. I was reminded of the kid I once saw in the mirror. I don’t know what my blood pressure was, but I knew it was a good bit less than when I worked for Marshall.

And Hack was right. Working that wood, drawing out the oil, pulled the anger out. I could see Marshall’s face in my mind and not want to kill him or drive a fork through one eye and a spoon through the other. Between my folks, high school, being alone, Harvard, Amanda, her dad, I don’t know how much anger I’d buried in my life, but working with Hack brought me up against the rock of it. I’m not saying that I had found a way to blast through it, but I am saying that for the first time in my life, I had pulled away the facade that masked it. If Hack had given me a gift, it was honesty with myself. Through his patience without expectations, Hack had dug down inside me and brought me face-to-face with the stone that separated me from my heart. And what he showed me was not a pebble, but rather the Great Wall of China. While I was more comfortable being honest with myself, I would not say that I grew to be honest with others.

This would come back to bite me.

One morning, a guy a few years older than me walked into the shop and started talking with Hack. He’d heard about the skiffs through some friends in Miami and wanted to know if he could order one. Hack informed him that his waiting list was now seven years long, and given the sight of Hack, the fellow could read the writing on the wall. That’s when he spotted my skiff. “That yours?”

He wasn’t unkind. Just curious. Opportunistic. He was also used to getting his way—or at least being able to buy it. “Yes.”

“Any chance you’d sell it?”

“You like to chase bonefish?”

He shook his head. “Don’t fish.”

“You want to buy this skiff, but you don’t fish?”

He nodded with a grin.

Hack smiled at me and raised both eyebrows. I wiped my hands on a rag and turned to admire my boat. “I just spent the better part of a year building it. Have had it out a half-dozen times. I don’t mean to be ugly, but it would take a lot of money.”

The going rate for a custom-built skiff from Hack was $40,000 to $60,000 depending on the finishings. He smiled. “How about two hundred fifty thousand? Cash.”

I looked at him like he’d lost his ever-loving mind. “Are you on the level?”

“I’ll have the money delivered this afternoon.”

“A quarter of a million dollars? For some wood and glue and paint?”

He smiled. “And elbow grease.”

Hack nodded several times and spoke out of the corner of his mouth. “Take the man’s money before he changes his mind.”

I looked at the boat. Then at Hack. Finally at the man. I offered my hand. “Would you like that gift wrapped?”

That afternoon, I found myself in a predicament. Just what exactly does one do with $250,000 cash?

Chapter Nine

Colin’s house sat inside a gated community, the centerpiece of which was a resort hotel—a five-star-rated vacation. The resort also sold time-share condos with access to the hotel amenities, but the prizes of the community were the thirty or so ocean estates of which Colin’s house was the pièce de résistance. A long driveway, nearly a half mile in length, wound out onto the rock point on which Colin’s house sat, allowing for two points of entry from the water. The house faced the ocean and offered beach access down a winding path of rock and dune that led to a cabana. The back of the house led down to a deep-water port on a small, private cove—custom designed for large seafaring fishing yachts.

I docked the Bertram, tied her off, and inventoried the three other boats hanging on racks in the boathouse. I chuckled. Colin was a poor boat pilot, constantly running aground and knocking over pilings in the dock, but that did not hinder his ability to buy first-class boats. He had a great eye when it came to boats. Tiny lights had been mounted beneath every fifth step, lighting the way up the more than one hundred teak steps to the house. Whoever built this house had spared little expense. The smooth stairs wound up through the rock ledges, turning and twisting with several overlooks as I climbed higher. Off to my left, leading out of the boathouse, wound a cart path that serpentined its way around and then up the bluff. It allowed somebody with a golf cart or small car to shuttle necessities to and from the dock house without having to carry them up and down those steps.

The steps exited on the backyard, off to the side of the outdoor kitchen. Unnatural heat from the kitchen met me as I stepped around the stone wall serving as part of a chimney. One of the enormous gas grills—that could have doubled as a rotisserie—sat burning on high, and the commercial fan above it sucked up much of the heat. The residue and grease on and around the grill suggested that something had been burning at one time. I clicked off the grill and the fan, and then studied a margarita mixer, which sat mostly full and completely melted. The air smelled of rum and coconut oil. I circled the backyard and walked up onto the pool deck where the pool was lit. A couple of bathing suits and the halves of several bikinis floated in the water. Two lawn chairs sat at the bottom of the deep end. More than a hundred beer and whiskey bottles littered the backyard along with a couple dozen cigarette butts and almost as many marijuana joints, a couple of which were still stuck between paper clips. A hookah with several pipes lay on its side next to the pool.

The back of the house was mostly glass and the large doors had been slid open. One had come off its tracks and now rested on its side, crushing some bushes beneath it. Its partner had been broken and scattered in several large pieces off to the side. I stepped through a torn and flapping curtain and into the house to two smells: The first was of something having been burned in the oven. The second was something rotting in the main kitchen. Either oysters or shrimp. A glance in the sink and trash can confirmed both. If I thought the backyard was in disarray, I had another thing coming. The inside of the house was trashed. The stereo was pounding out something incomprehensible with a beat I couldn’t follow, so I found the power button and killed it. Much of the furniture had been turned on end. The kitchen table sat at an angle as one leg had been broken off. Someone had punched multiple holes in the Sheetrock with something the size of an anvil. A green stuffed animal that looked like Kermit the Frog had been tied to one of the blades of the ceiling fan and was currently doing about 280 revolutions a minute. The TV had been a large flat screen before someone threw what looked like a lamp through it. The lamp was still protruding from the screen, which was now black.