The Mangrove Coast Read Online Free PDF Page A

have time to meet her or anyone else—”
    He cut me off, saying, “Wait, I don’t mean Calloway. That’s her what-a-you-call-it … her adopted name, the name she goes by now. The name she gave me, the one she said you’d know is Richardson. Amanda Richardson. That’s who she used to be.”
    “Same thing. I don’t know any Amandas—”
    “And she said to mention Bobby Richardson.”
    It stopped me cold.
    Bobby Richardson
…?
    I hadn’t heard his name spoken aloud in fifteen, maybe sixteen years. Not that I had forgotten him. No. Men like Bobby Richardson, you don’t forget.
    I said, “Amanda is Bobby’s widow? … wait a minute. That doesn’t sound right. His wife’s name wasn’t Amanda. Her name was …”
    I couldn’t remember. What the hell was the name of Bobby’s wife? He’d talked about her often enough during those long, soggy nights in the rain forests of Asia. It was stored somewhere in my memory, but I was having trouble bringing it to the surface.
    Tucker said, “The girl says her mamma’s name is Gail—”
    Gail.
That was the wife’s name. Gail Richardson.
    “—but this is his daughter; she’s the one I’m talkingabout. Amanda. She’s the one who wants to see you, this man’s little girl. Or was the man’s little girl, I guess. She said he died when she was, what, less than five years old?”
    I said, “Bobby died when his daughter was a child. That’s right.”
    “Then she’s the one. The one who called me trying to find you and that I’m bringing with me to Sanibel tomorrow … now that you said you’re not too busy. ‘Cause she wants to talk to you and needs to ask a favor.”
    Bobby’s daughter? Just hearing the man’s name brought back memories of a time in my life and of a style of life that now seemed as remote as the far side of the Earth or as distant as a comet’s bright contrail.
    The girl was wrong about one thing, though. I
had
seen her before. I’d seen her in a photograph, long, long ago …
    When I hung up the phone, I wandered around the lab putting things away, getting dissecting table and instruments clean and neat so I could start fresh the next day. But I was operating on autopilot. My routine in the lab is so entrenched that it takes no conscious effort. Good thing, too, because my mind had locked onto the task of digging out and dusting off memories that were nearly two decades old.
    The photograph … I could still see the photograph of a little girl named Amanda Richardson in fairly precise detail … probably because Bobby had pulled it out and showed it to me so many times.
    It was one of those quick-print Polaroid shots, Easteregg bright colors, that someone back in the States had had the good sense to have laminated before sending it to our APO address in Bangkok.
    There’s lots and lots of rain in the jungles of Southeast Asia. Metal rusts. Cloth rots. Paper turns to paste. But, because it was laminated, the photo survived our months there.
    Unfortunately, Bobby had not.
    Here’s what I could reconstruct of the photo: a tiny girl with hair the color of freshly sheared copper wearing a frilly yellow dress, as if ready for a birthday party.
    That was it: the photo had been taken on Amanda’s birthday. Third birthday or fourth, I couldn’t remember.
    And … the girl wore plastic-rimmed, nerdish glasses … and gloves. Yes, gloves. Her small hands folded.
    Nothing very distinctive about that, but what I remembered better than the glasses was that the child’s left eye was turned slightly inward, a malady that I knew to be strabismus, or lazy eye, as it is sometimes called. Bobby said they’d have it fixed when the girl was old enough, not that he was worried about it. And buy her some more stylish glasses, too.
    To me, her wandering eye, that slight imperfection, implied a depth of character … or of vulnerability … that made the child’s face distinctive, lovely to look upon, and I told the proud father that he should think twice