Cutter Wood - Love and Death in the Sunshine State: The Story of a Crime

Love and Death
in the
Sunshine State

The Story of a Crime

Cutter Wood

Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill 2018

This unspeakable crime that lies between them is only the consequence of their ordinary comings and goings, of an unkind word here, a disappointment there, but it lies on them as heavily as any vice, as murder.

JOHN CHEEVER

There is almost nothing that is not brought to a finished state by means of fire.

Pliny the Elder

I never judged anybody who didnt deserve to be judged.

William Cumber

Contents

1: Convalescence in the Greater Tampa Bay Area

Th e island is about seven miles long. Nowhere is it higher than ten feet above sea level, and at its widest, it is hardly a thousand yards across. It floats like a shinbone in the Gulf of Mexico, so long and flat and narrow that when seen from a distance, the land hardly interrupts the surface of the water.

Still, there are houses on Anna Maria. Several thousand people live there, and many more rent bungalows or rooms so they can spend some portion of their year in such proximity to the sea. The back of the island is laced with dead-end canals, and though you have to drive to Cortez, over on the mainland, to find anyone who actually fishes for a living, the islands many boats and docks keep the idea vivid. When the tide goes out, the cement walls of the canals reveal a crusting of algae and oyster shells, and at dawn someone is always motoring for deeper water. One might as well fish. There isnt much else to do.

The motel remains in my mind exactly as it was that first January: small and dreary and bright. A few pale-yellow buildings squatted in the sun while above them a handful of spindly palms nodded in conference. In a cage by the office door, a green parrot carried on its endless and solitary conversation. Aside from myself, there were only two other people present, a teenaged girl at the reception desk erasing answers from a crossword, and an old German woman folding towels severely in a latticed hut by the pool. The room I was given was sparsely furnished. In one corner, a small black refrigerator rattled off the minutes of the afternoon. A comforter splotched in pastels had been spread across the bed, and lying there, I could almost reach out and flush the toilet.

My college graduation had occurred a few months previously, a celebratory event that had left me in a state of highly animated confusion. In all my years of education, in that succession of desks, in the thousands of cumulative hours stationed before them, and in the countless fancies Id entertained there, head turned, eyes drawn through the window to the trees beyond, I had somehow failed to foresee that moment when, dressed in a black cap and gown, I would no longer be going to school. During that abortive Floridian vacation, ostensibly a visit with extended family, I spent much of each day adrift in their talk, conversations that passed through various topics but eventually returned to the essential touchstones of real estate and physical ailments and the weather up north. At some moment, someone said we had better hit the beach if we wanted to catch the sunset, and as I walked along the sand trailing those familiar figures, I had the sensation of a return to childhood. The flatness of the sea, the incessant back-and-forth of the waves: these seemed to have been called up from another time, and as we picked our way around the ruins of sandcastles, with the waves measuring out the hours, I felt an acute uneasiness. Sidestepping the dissolving turrets and towers with their seaweed flags, I thought I saw in those shapes the futility of all human efforts, and by substituting human for my, I was able almost entirely to sidestep as well the uncomfortable topic of my own futile efforts.

There had been no place for me at the family house, so I had taken a room at the motel. I spent the nights on my own, taking long forced marches up and down the streets, and sitting on my bed with a book or the local paper and a Styrofoam container of fried mullet, maligning the future that refused to coalesce warm and graspable before me. The utter inanity of the trip was crystallized by a visit to a distant relative in St. Petersburg on our final day. An old Italian man, he concluded the tour of his home by walking me out to the dock. The bay stretched out before us, and a large blue heron cocked its head at our approach.

She comes every day, he said. Its my mothers spirit. He reached out a hand. The bird turned one eye on the empty palm, spread its wings with disdain, and flew off across the water. He shrugged. Usually I bring capicola.

Toward the end of January, I left with no intention of ever returning to the island or the state, and this would have been the case, I think, if some months later I had not received in the mail a clipping from the Anna Maria newspaper. A grainy color photograph showed a few palms outlined against a mass of fire. Sent by my mother, it was a story about the burning of the motel where Id been a guest.

The evening of the fire had been unusually cold, according to the article. There was a strong wind, and the sky was empty of clouds. As the sun began to drop into the Gulf, the water turned bronze, and a woman driving home didnt understand at first how the sun could be reflected so brightly in the windows of the motel. Only when she drew near did she realize it was flames.

As happens sometimes at the lower latitudes, it was dark before anyone realized, and when the fire department arrived shortly after seven, one of the motels buildings was wholly engulfed. The roof groaned. The palms crackled and swayed. The wind came in steady off the water, carrying smoke across the island, and for blocks around, the air had the sharp smell of melted plastic and polyester. Their gear clanking, a few firefighters walked the perimeter to assess the situation, while the rest began the work of unfurling the heavy hoses and loosening the hydrants caps. A crowd had already begun to form: couples out for a sunset stroll, retirees on their way home from an early dinner, children on bicycles and scooters with nothing better to do. Soon a car from the sheriffs office arrived, and a thin deputy began asking the onlookers, for their own safety, to step back, please, and allow the crew to do its work.

The rumor of arson always attends a fire, and this was no exception. The crowd murmured, and when a van pulled up from the local TV station it was clear the reporter hadnt come to tell a story about an accidental blaze. The deputy smoothed the air with his hands. This was a fire, nothing more and nothing less, and there was not yet any reason to believe it was a case of arson. But, he said, you had to admit it was suspicious, considering the circumstances.

The circumstances, in the most immediate sense, were a white 2000 Pontiac convertible. It belonged to one of the owners of the motel, a woman named Sabine Musil-Buehler, and it currently sat in the sheriffs impound lot. It was not a particularly nice car, but it contained a good deal of blood, and this, combined with the fact that the woman had been missing for nearly two weeks, gave a certain amount of credence to the more macabre fantasies of the crowd. As the fire department began sending sprays of water onto the buildings roof, an elderly woman still dressed in her pajamas declared that she was frightened and was leaving the island this instant, and for a long while after, she continued to make this declaration to anyone in earshot. It was hard not to stay around and skim the gossip. Who had set the fire, after all, and more importantly, why? For a time, the onlookers pursued these questions, picking up the various theories, turning them this way and that, and putting them back down again. But it was a cold night for Florida, and windy, and getting late, and there are limits to what reasonable people can be expected to ask themselves after dark. A little past eight, the fire chief declared the blaze under control, and the people, in ones and twos, began picking out paths home along the puddled road. A whole town runs to be present at a fire, as Hazlitt notes, but the spectator hardly exults to see it extinguished.