Hell's Bay by James W. Hall

their love affair, their private dreams, and their natural talents would remain a mystery. Though from time to time when I was praised for my accuracy in casting or disparaged for being such a dogged loner or admired for my surgical precision in fashioning wisps of fur, feather, bead, and thread into bonefish flies, I attributed those gifts as part of my birthright from two people I never knew. If I had sometimes been guilty of excessive introspection, my only defense was that by looking inward I was hoping to catch some glimpse of those two ghosts who were harbored in my veins.
    Behind me Mona wandered into the galley and sunk down on one of the couches that faced the satellite TV. The television was Rusty’s idea. It seemed bizarre to me that anyone would go to such expense and trouble to trek into one of the last wild places on the globe, then sit around and watch twenty-four-hour cable news instead of climbing up onto the houseboat roof to listen to the hushed wing beats of thousands of egrets and herons and wood storks heading back to their roosts and watch the sun melt into the watery horizon leaving behind eddies of reds, blues, and purples too gaudy for words.
    I made my case, but Rusty overruled me on the TV as she had on every issue. “People who will pay a thousand dollars a day to catch tarpon on a fly in some hideaway lake no-body’s ever fished before aren’t like you and me, Thorn. End of the day they want their extradry martini and stock-market update.”
    When Milligan finished stowing his gear in his forward stateroom, he returned to the galley. As he passed Mona, he patted his sullen daughter on the shoulder, then came over to me still wearing that knowing grin. He moved with the loose-limbed swagger of a barroom tough.
    Rusty had climbed up to the wheelhouse to make a cell-phone call to Annette Gordon to see if her flight had landed yet at Miami International. On the couch Mona pressed her chin to her chest, hunched deep in her funk. Since arriving she had not spoken a word. Nor had she brushed the snarls from her red hair.
    In an earthy, unfussy way, she was quite pretty, though she had the look of a woman who’d been told that far too often and no longer considered it a compliment. Her eyes were opaque blue. A sharp upward jag in her right eyebrow gave her the look of a steadfast skeptic—a woman not easily conned. The eyebrows were thick and a darker shade of red than her hair. Scattered across her forehead was a constellation of tiny freckles. Otherwise her skin was flawlessly sun-bronzed, a healthy flush in her cheeks. She wore no watch, no rings or any other jewelry, and her clothes were so lumpy and rumpled she might have slept in them for the last week.
    Her expression was fixed in the same harsh squint as it had been when she climbed aboard, an odd mix—part glare, part wince—as though Mona Milligan was hovering indecisively between defiance and desperation.
    Milligan slid into my line of sight, his eyes crafty, his head cocked a few degrees to the side like a man sizing up a sparring partner.
    â€œSurely you must be intrigued about how I know your name?”
    â€œI’m trying to contain myself,” I said.
    â€œSo that’s your act, huh, the cool dude?”
    â€œI don’t have an act.”
    Milligan reached into his back pocket, withdrew a photograph, and with a small flourish he lay it on the bar next to me. Then he stepped back and waited with that smile deepening.
    I took a look, glanced back at him, then took a longer look.
    It was a faded black-and-white snapshot of two teenagers posing in front of an ancient Ford coupe. Behind the car was a section of the veranda of a dignified Victorian home. A handsome older couple sat on the porch swing, engaged in conversation and seemingly oblivious to the photographic record that would include them. There were big oaks shaggy with moss, and runty cabbage palms growing at the edges of the porch.