Surface Tension Read Online Free PDF Page A

didn’t like the way he was staring at me.
    “Is there anything I can do to help?” I asked.
    He shook his head and handed me his card, looking at me as though he just knew I was lying about everything I’d said.
    “Call me if there’s anything more you want to tell me,” he said.

IV

    By the time I tied Gorda to the seawall back at the estate, and Abaco leaped off and ran into the bushes to pee, it was almost two o’clock. All the way back up the river I had tried to put things together. I refused to consider the possibility that Neal was dead. As I’d untied Gorda down at the Coast Guard dock, I overheard the police discussing the search that was taking place offshore; as far as they were concerned, it was a search for another dead body. But it simply couldn’t be, no way, not Neal. Not that former Seal trained in self-defense, trained to kill. Not the man who had once lain next to me on the foredeck of his sailboat and pointed out Orion’s Belt and Ursa Minor and tried to educate me, the celestial illiterate. I knew it didn’t make any sense, but he just seemed too alive to be dead.
    But if he wasn’t dead, then what had happened out there this morning? Where was he? Was he capable of doing that to that girl? I knew the answer to that question, and I didn’t want to think about it.
    I walked the brick path to my cottage, and even after the events of the morning, I felt some of the tension leave me. It had been almost two years since I first moved into the old boathouse on the Larsen estate, and I still marveled at how lucky I was to have found the place. The location, in the Rio Vista section of Lauderdale, was convenient for me, because it was close to both the inlet and downtown. The main house was a big two-story Moorish mansion originally built in the 1930s, with multiple turrets and towers, all topped by red barrel tile, and it was set about sixty feet back from the New River. My cottage, on the other hand, had the best river view. The tiny wood-frame structure had once been a boathouse, a storage outbuilding for some past owner’s collection of sailing dinghies and sculls. At some time in the sixties the place had been refurbished as a guest house and was now topped with a matching barrel-tile roof and divided inside into a small bedroom, with a combined living area and kitchen all built over varnished Dade County pine floors. The Larsens gave me a break on the rent because I kept an eye on the house, the grounds, and their toys, like the garaged Jaguar and the Jet Ski they kept on the dock. There had been a number of break-ins in this neighborhood of snowbird owners these past few years, and my comings and goings made the big house look lived in as well. What made the place perfect for me was that I could sleep just a few steps away from where I kept Gorda tied up.
    When I unlocked the front door, I saw that the red light was blinking on my answering machine. I punched the button on my way to the fridge and listened while gulping straight from the jug of cold orange juice—just one of the benefits of living alone. It was Galen Hightower, the owner of the Ruby Yacht , a seventy-two-foot steel ketch, reminding me that I had to be at Pier 66 at “eleven on the dot” Saturday morning. He’d had this tow booked for weeks, but he was the nervous type who needed his hand held all the time.
    The machine beeped and clicked to the next message. I immediately recognized the voice—my older brother, Maddy, who throughout my childhood had threatened to beat me up if I ever called him Madagascar in public.
    “Look, uh, we gotta talk. I got some problems, money problems, and you still haven’t paid your February payment. It’s not working, Seychelle. Gorda ’s gotta go. I want out, now . . . Call me.” The dial tone sounded. I jammed my index finger down on the stop button, rewound the machine, and listened to the message again.
    “You bastard, Maddy,” I said out loud and rewound the machine one more