Where Is Janice Gantry? Read Free

coming up. In the stillness, the muggy heat was like a stale blanket. I heard a sudden thrash of water down near my dock, and I snatched the spinner and trotted down the path and saw the swirl of some snook working twenty feet out. It was the middle of August, when they work the passes and the bays by moonlight, and these boys were on their way home, with room for a final snack. I dropped the white bucktail a dozen feet beyond them and began yanking it back through the swirls, and it banged hard just when I hoped it would be. Had he scooted under the dock, as too many of them have done, his only damage would have been a sore mouth. But he took off toward open water. I had six pound test, but a lot of it, so he finally turned, losing a little steam, and I walked forty feet down the narrow beach, bringing him back, watching him show twice in the golden slant of the early sun, checking his rushes, finally gentling him up onto the rough broken shell of the narrow bay beach, his gills working, his eyes big as dimes. I saw he would go around ten, maybe a little over. After I had clubbed him and picked him up and was sure of him, I realized that a wolf pack of mosquitoes had found me, and I remembered again that I was entertaining a house guest who was being hunted by every law officer in the state of Florida.
    After I had rinsed the rod, cleaned the fish and put him in the small refrigerator, and washed up, I did a few chores and wrote a note to leave for Charlie Haywood. “I’ve locked the place up. I’ve laid out clothes that should fit you. Look around and you’ll find orange juice, coffee, etc. There’s eggs, milk, bacon, fresh-caught snook in the ice box. Help yourself. Nobodyis likely to come here during the day. I’ll make it back in the middle of the afternoon.”
    I had laid out a brown knit sport shirt that had been too small for me from the day I bought it, and some khaki pants that had shrunk too small.
    After I locked the cottage behind me, I drove the four miles north into Florence City. It was Monday morning, August 15th, getting stickier and hotter every minute. After I got my mail out of my box at the post office, I drove on out across City Bridge to the commercial area adjacent to Orange Beach, parked my old Ford ranch wagon behind the office and walked across the street to Cy’s Lunch and Sundries for breakfast.
    “You early as can be, Sambo,” he said.
    “It’s Monday, Cyrus. New week. New start. Energy. Git up and go.”
    “Oh, sure,” he said sourly, busting my two eggs onto the grill.
    I found one small story on the Haywood escape on the lower half of the third page. They were still looking for him. They expected to recapture him any minute. There was a possibility he had stolen a car in Clewiston and abandoned it in Tampa.
    When I walked back to the office after breakfast, Sis Gantry had arrived and opened it up. The big rackety air conditioner was just beginning to make its chilly function felt. Actually the cinderblock structure is the place of business of Tom Earle, Realtor. It has one big room, with his private office and the washrooms and storage room behind it, in the rear. There are seven desks in the big room, with six of them used by his associates and his clerical help, and one of them rented to me. I am Automotive Appraisal Associates, which is an overly impressive name for a one-man firm. The monthly figure I pay him covers desk space, phone service (including phone answering service by his gals when I amout) and the right to have my name in small print, along with the name of my business, painted on the bottom half of the front door.
    Sis Gantry faked vast surprise and said, “I get it! That crummy shack of yours must have burned down.”
    “My good woman, I caught and cleaned a snook this morning before your alarm went off.”
    Her name is Janice, but she is never called anything except Sis. She is a local girl with eight brothers, four older and four younger, so it is a fate she