States of Grace by Mandy Miller (great novels of all time .TXT) 📗

then, I came to understand his own shadowy time overseas was why he replaced “Keep your wits about you” for “Stay in your trench and keep your helmet on,” when I enlisted in the Army.

When we round Cape Florida, the southernmost tip of Key Biscayne, just off the coast of downtown Miami, my heart seizes. Stiltsville. The coordinates on my tattoo.

“You are an asshole, Sonny!” I shout into the void, futile, like one hand clapping.

“Yeah, but you know what, Grace? I’m the asshole with the gun.”

Chapter 33

It’s surreal. I’m en route to my death, yet I am still enthralled by the dreamy mirage on the horizon.

Stiltsville. A clutch of pastel colored wooden stilt houses erected atop pilings in the middle of Biscayne Bay, floating like a floral wreath in the nascent glow of dawn. Seabirds hovering all around, their wings gilded by the rising sun. If you’ve never seen Stiltsville, you might try to blink away the image, dismiss it as the product of one too many umbrella drinks, but throughout my life, Stiltsville has been my refuge. Until now.

It’s one of those “only in Miami” kind of phenomena. Made up of a dozen stilt shacks which functioned as social clubs, fishing huts, and speakeasys in the 1930s. An offshore oasis where booze, bikinis, and gambling were the name of the game and rules didn’t apply. A Prohibition-era hub for wreckers, rum runners, and all manner of rascals, where ne’er-do-wells mixed with lawyers, bankers, politicians, and anyone else looking to escape the scrutiny of their landlubber life.

I count and recount the remaining shacks not yet destroyed by hurricanes, seven in all, and cast my mind back to happier times. Winter vacations from boarding school at the family estate, Miramar, on Key Biscayne, with ready access across the Bay to this place, my secret place. As a teenager, I’d motor across in my father’s Zodiac, not unlike the one tied to the stern now, to hang with friends, to drink beer and smoke. And, on one muggy night, to lose my virginity to a boy named Chad. Once, on a dare, I swam across.

Sonny steers the boat alongside the Jimmy Ellenberg House, a yellow stilt shack with a wraparound porch, a haven for pelicans and people, like me, willing to violate the trespassing ban in place since 2003, when Stiltsville was taken over by the National Park Service. He eases back on the throttle, cuts the engine, and hops out to secure the bow line to a piling covered in a stucco of bird droppings.

“It’ll look like you rowed your little boat out here, like you used to,” he says, tying the Zodiac to an adjacent piling.

A furnace of fury ignites in my gut, the kind of rage I haven’t felt since Reilly said he’d found pills in the glove compartment of my car.

Sonny jumps back on board, grabs a duffel bag from the back of the boat. He unlocks the handcuffs from the chair and pulls me upright. An instinctive attempt to kick back at him with my good leg leaves me sprawled on the deck, looking up into his eyes, bottomless pits drilled into his tanned face.

He motions with the gun for me to get up.

Unable to get my balance on one leg, I pitch forward onto the dock, scraping my face against the rotten wood reduced to splinters by eight decades of relentless tropical sun. One arm hooked under my armpit, he yanks me up like a sack of flour and, disgusted as I may be, I have no choice but to lean on him to steady myself.

“Upstairs!”

Gun at my back, I hop up the stairs, one at a time, holding onto the handrail for balance. At the top, he reaches around me and flings open the flimsy door, its busted screen flapping in the breeze.

The shack is as I remember it—one large room with a bare board floor, ringed by windows, most of which were broken out decades ago. The only thing in the place now is an old-fashioned wooden desk chair.

As he secures my leg and arms to the chair with zip ties from the duffel, I sense the healing power of this place draining from my soul, its magic gone for me now. This was the one place that had given me hope, renewed me, time and time again. A safe place, when I was a gawky teenager bullied for my bookishness. A hideout with bad boys my parents considered “unsuitable mates.” A refuge, when I came back from Iraq, broken and lost, with nothing but bad memories and worse habits.

He squats in front of me, hands clasped. “It’s either me or you. And, given that choice, you lose.”

I turn my head away. “It’s like Reilly says, murder always comes down to the same three things.”

“Money, jealousy, or just plain evil. That’s about the only thing that old-timer ever said that made any sense at all, except no damn way I’d ever kill for anything but money. No upside in the others.”

“Why kill at all?”

He’s walking in circles around me now. “You tell me, why don’t you? You’re Miss Ivy League.”

As loathe as I am to comply with any order he might give me at this point, I’ll be damned if I’ll go to my grave not knowing for certain what I’ve spent months trying to figure out.

“You got tired of seeing the low-life dealers driving all over town in their Ferraris and Bentleys, going home to their mansions on the water.”

He keeps pacing, head bobbing back and forth like a professor evaluating a student’s theory.

“You couldn’t let Joe tell the truth, that Zoe couldn’t have killed Sinclair, because you were involved.”

“Go on.”

“You and Sinclair already had a connection—you’d arrested him for dealing and turned him into a rat.”

He snaps his fingers. “I prefer the term ‘confidential informant.’”

“Not only did you use him for information, you also made him cut you in on his profits in exchange for turning a blind eye