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you later, Effie.”
    She crossed her arms again, stood the way she’d been standing when he first saw her. “If you need any help around Key Montaigne, I mean, need to know anything only somebody lives in this place might be able to tell you, I’ll be glad to help that way, too, Mr. Carver.”
    “You can do that right now,” Carver said. It was almost five o’clock; he’d taken care of some business by phone from Miami, had a long but light lunch with an old friend, then hadn’t stopped except for gas on the drive south. “Where’s a good place in town to eat supper?”
    She gnawed her lower lip a moment, considering. “Ain’t a lotta choices, but mine’d be the Key Lime Pie. That’s what they call it, like the actual pie only it’s a restaurant.”
    “Thanks, I’ll try it.”
    She smiled, bobbed up and down on her thick-soled jogging shoes as if building momentum, then swept away in a dash. He heard the reverberating slap of the screen door echoing out over the water.
    He walked to the window and watched her mount a balloon-tire Schwinn bike with a rusty wire basket attached to its handlebars, then build up speed, her boyish body whipping back and forth as she stood high on the pedals.
    Carver removed slacks and shirts from his suitcase and put them on wire hangers from Henry Tiller’s closet. Henry had one of those space-saving fold-down multihanger plastic gizmos in his closet; it came in handy. Carver hung it on a brass hook on the outside of the closet door and placed all the hangers on it so his clothes were draped in descending layers. Neat, he had to admit. He left socks and underwear in the suitcase and placed it in a corner with the lid closed but not latched. His shaving kit he carried into the bathroom and set on top of the vanity, over to the side, where it wouldn’t get wet. There was a large white towel embossed with s uncrest motel folded over a rack in the bathroom, that had on it stitched in red, “Hi, I’m Mr. Towel and I live here. If you take me away from home, please bring me back.” Henry must have abducted Mr. Towel. Carver saw himself smiling in the medicine cabinet mirror, a tan, bald man with a fringe of curly gray hair that had grown too long in back. Lean, with a powerful upper body from exercise and walking with the cane. A scar at the right corner of his mouth. Pale blue eyes that were oddly catlike. As soon as his strikingly beatific smile faded, his was a brutal face rather than handsome. He knew the abrupt contrast could be unsettling.
    He went outside and stood in the heat for a while, gazing across the expanse of glimmering water at the Miss Behavin’ rocking gently at her moorings. He could only see about half of the back of the large white clapboard house with red canvas awnings, a corner of a swimming pool behind a chain-link fence, a round blue table with a fringed umbrella sprouting from it at an angle. There was no sign of anyone at the Rainer estate.
    Listing sharply over his cane, Carver shielded his eyes from the sun with his cupped hand and looked westward over the Gulf. A pelican flapped low above the surface, seeking its dinner. A large vessel that had the look of a cruise ship haunted the hazy, distant horizon like a wavering ghost. Henry Tiller had retired to beauty if not peace.
    The sun wouldn’t be setting for a long time, but Carver was hungry.
    He locked the cottage door, then he drove toward Fishback to look over the town in daylight. After that, he’d eat an early supper at the restaurant Effie had recommended.
    There were a number of things he wanted to find out. One of them was why anybody would name a town Fishback.

6
    N O ONE SEEMED to know. The waitress, a stout, broad-shouldered woman named Fern, said she thought Montaigne got its name way back in the nineteenth century when the Keys were a haven for pirates. So serious was the problem that a U.S. naval base was established in Key West to stop piracy. It was successful only up to a point.