Skink--No Surrender Read online

  “Yeah, Malley flew up for early orientation,” he said.

  I just nodded while I chewed my cereal, avoiding the funky brown slices.

  “She forgot all about it,” Uncle Dan said, “until two days ago when her dorm adviser called. But that’s Malley.”

  “Classic,” I said.

  Uncle Dan and Aunt Sandy were sending Malley to an all-girls boarding school called the Twigg Academy. Basically, they didn’t want to deal with her on a daily basis anymore. She’s a handful, no question.

  Malley had told me the tuition at Twigg is thirty-nine grand a year, not including the meal plan. Add the cost of winter clothes plus airplane tickets back and forth to New Hampshire, and who knows how her parents planned to pay for that kind of an education. Malley suspected they were taking a second mortgage on their house, meaning they must’ve been semi-desperate.

  “It’s weird she didn’t tell you she was leaving,” Uncle Dan remarked, “so you guys could say goodbye.”

  “No big deal,” I said, a total lie.

  Malley and I were born only nine days apart. Except for vacations, both of us have spent our whole lives in Loggerhead. I couldn’t picture her at a boarding school in a place so cold that car engines froze. Truthfully, I couldn’t picture her at a boarding school, period. Malley wearing a uniform to class? No way.

  “Did she talk much to you about this move to Twigg?” Uncle Dan asked. “Because we got the impression she was sort of looking forward to it. I think all of us need a break.”

  “She seemed okay with it,” I told him, which was true.

  Malley had been incredibly calm and low-key when she told me the news. Where, if it had been me who was getting shipped to some snotty private academy, I would’ve been highly pissed off.

  New Hampshire? Seriously?

  Still, I wasn’t ready to swallow Malley’s “early orientation” story.

  To Uncle Dan I said: “She borrowed a book from me. You mind if I go get it?”

  “ ’Course not, Richard.” He was attempting to make waffles with a digital waffle-maker that my mother had bought him for his birthday. Programming the thing was complicated enough to keep him distracted while I snooped through Malley’s room.

  Her One Direction poster was still on the wall. So were Bruno Mars and the Jimi Hendrix Experience—Malley was into all kinds of music. The closet wasn’t as empty as I thought it would be, and right away I noticed that she hadn’t taken her winter clothes to school. There was a heavy parka that had a hood lined with fake rabbit fur, and a red fleece with the L.L. Bean price tag still attached.

  Okay, it was only August. Maybe she planned to come home for a visit and get her coat and fleece before the weather up north got cold, or maybe Sandy was going to pack everything and send it to her.

  Or maybe Malley hadn’t really flown to New Hampshire.

  Her laptop was gone and her desk was cleaned out, except for one drawer. Inside was a white envelope that had the initials T.C. printed on the front, above an address in Orlando.

  T.C. was a guy named Talbo Chock, who was older than Malley. He lived near Disney World and supposedly was some hot club DJ. Malley had never met him in person, but she’d made friends with him online, which was beyond stupid. I’d told her so more than once.

  Even though the envelope wasn’t addressed to me, I opened it.

  A note in Malley’s handwriting said: “Talbo, pleeze don’t forget about me when I’m away at Twitt’s ‘boring’ school. Try to land a gig in Manchester so we can finally get together!”

  Included with the note was a wallet-sized photo. It was her class picture from last year, before she got her braces removed—a picture she didn’t like, and one she would never have given to a guy she was trying to impress.

  Malley always kept some cute selfies on her iPhone. She could easily have texted one to Talbo Chock; she could have texted him the note, too.

  But the envelope wasn’t really meant for T.C., and Malley hadn’t simply forgotten to mail it. She’d left it inside her desk on purpose, for her parents to find. I put it back in the drawer.

  As soon as I got home, I Googled that street address in Orlando, which turned out to be a motel near Sea World. I called the place, and—big shock—nobody named Talbo Chock was registered there.

  Next I looked up the Twigg Academy and dialed the academic office.

  “When does early orientation start for new students?” I asked the lady who answered the phone.

  “We don’t do early orientation,” she said.

  I called Beth right away to tell her. She wasn’t surprised. Her conversation with Malley that morning had lasted barely two minutes.

  “She swore me to secrecy,” Beth said, “but she didn’t tell me enough to even call it a secret.”

  “What about Talbo Chock?”

  “All she said was, ‘Don’t worry, girlfriend, he’s a man of the world.’ ”

  “So was Jack the Ripper.”

  “I’m scared, too,” Beth admitted.

  “Let me see what I can find out.”

  The stranger who’d buried himself on the beach wasn’t just a regular homeless person, if there is such a thing. A long, long time ago he’d been governor of Florida—as in the governor.

  According to Wikipedia, Clinton Tyree was a college football star before going to Vietnam and winning a bunch of army combat medals. After the war, some friends talked him into running for governor, even though he didn’t like politics. He campaigned on a promise to clean up all the corruption in Tallahassee, our state capital, and apparently he tried hard. Frustration set in, then sadness, depression—and even, some said, insanity.

  Then, one day halfway through his term of office, Clint Tyree flat-out disappeared from the governor’s mansion. Nobody kidnapped the man; he just bolted. The politicians who’d been fighting against him said it proved he was crazy, but his supporters said that maybe it proved just the opposite.

  All kinds of wild rumors got started, and some of them turned out to be true. According to one Wikipedia entry, the ex-governor became a wandering hermit of the wilderness, and over the years he’d been a prime suspect in several “acts of eco-terrorism.” Interestingly, he’d never been arrested or charged with any serious crimes, and it seemed to me that the targets of his anger were total scumbags anyway.

  The Web article included interviews with a few witnesses who’d supposedly encountered Clinton Tyree by chance. They said he’d lost an eye, and was going by the name of “Skink.” They had differing opinions about whether or not he was nuts. The most recent entry quoted the governor’s closest friend, a retired highway patrol trooper named Jim Tile, who said:

  “Clint passed away last year in the Big Cypress Swamp after a coral snake bit him on the nose. I dug the grave myself. Now, please let him rest in peace.”

  Except the man was still alive.

  I found him only a mile or so up the beach from where he’d been the night before. He’d constructed another fake turtle nest, though he hadn’t yet concealed himself beneath the sand. He was kneeling outside the pink ribbons, calmly skinning a rabbit.

  “Roadkill,” he explained, when he caught me staring.

  “There’s a deli on the corner of Graham Street. I can get you a sub.”

  “I’m good, Richard.” The shower cap was arranged on his head in the manner of a French beret. In the light of day I could see the color was baby blue.

  “You didn’t walk very far today,” I said.

  “Nope.”

  “How come?”

  “Maybe I’m feeling too old and broken down.”

  He was old, but he looked solid and tough as nails, as Trent liked to say about the cage fighters on TV.

  “They had your picture on the Internet,” I said, “from like forty years ago.”

  “No doubt I’ve aged poorly.”

  “Even without the beard I could totally tell it’s you.”

  It was some beard, too. The night before, in the moonligh
t, it had looked distinguished, like Dumbledore’s. Now I could see how ungroomed and patchy it was. To the twisted tendrils Skink had attached what appeared to be broken seashells—until you got a closer look.

  “Are those what I think they are?” I asked.

  “Bird beaks.”

  “Okay, that’s not funny.”

  “From turkey vultures, Richard.”

  “But … why?”

  “Kindred spirits,” he said.

  In the sunlight I saw that his good eye was a deep forest green, and that the artificial one—the one I’d cleaned for him—was brown and shaped differently than the other.

  “What’s the latest on your cousin?” he asked.

  “Not good. I think she’s run off with some dude she met online.”

  “Meaning, on the computer.”

  “He’s older than her,” I said.

  “How much older?”

  “Old enough to drive, obviously.”

  “That’s unsettling.” Skink wrapped the rabbit meat in a rag. The fur he carried up to the dunes and tossed into some sea grape trees. Afterwards he asked me what I planned to do about Malley.

  “Go tell her parents, I guess. Today I texted her and called a bunch of times, but she’s not answering.”

  “Is that like her?”

  “Sometimes,” I said.

  He sat down a few feet away. I told him how Malley had lied about going to early orientation. “The note she left was totally bogus, to fake out her mom and dad.”

  “Tell me the name of her new boyfriend, Richard.”

  “Talbo Chock.” I spelled it for him, though it was just a guess on my part.

  “I’ll make a call,” he said.

  “Want to borrow my phone?”

  Skink smiled. “Thanks, but I’ve got my own. All incoming calls are blocked except one.”

  “Hey, why did your friend Mr. Tile tell that reporter you were dead?”

  “Because I asked him to. Come back in an hour or so.”

  While the governor made his private call, I walked to a surf shop on Kirk Street. My father used to hang out there, so the owners know me. Dad bought all his boards there, and so do my brothers. Before going off to college, they used to surf every day. There’s no beach in Gainesville, so now they’re suffering.

  I’m not a surfer, but I like board shorts and flip-flops; that’s basically my official summer uniform. I was looking through a rack of new Volcom shirts when my phone made a high moaning noise, which freaks people out until I tell them my ringtone is a humpback whale. I walked outside to answer the call.

  “ ’Sup, Richard?” It was Malley.

  “Where are you?”

  “Don’t be all mad or I’m hanging up.”

  I said I wasn’t mad, just bummed.

  “Sorry about the beach last night,” she said. “I forgot about this orientation thing—I must’ve blocked it out of my mind. Mom was totally pissed, but she got me on a late flight out of Orlando. It was, like, the last seat on the whole plane.”

  “What luck,” I said drily.

  “But still I almost didn’t make it because airport security found a bottle of vitaminwater in my backpack. Seriously! One of the TSA guys pulled me out of line and made me dump everything out—”

  “Vitaminwater?” I had to laugh. Malley was on a roll.

  “What’s so funny, Richard? Vitaminwater is the bomb.”

  “Whatever. Why’d you text me that you were grounded at home?” I tried to keep my voice low because I was standing on the sidewalk in front of the surf shop, customers going in and out the door.

  “I couldn’t call you at the time,” my cousin said, “and I didn’t want you to be mad that I left without saying goodbye.”

  “So now you’re really up in New Hampshire?”

  “Yeah. And this place? The armpit of all armpits, Richard.”

  Very calmly I said: “Malley, there’s no such thing as early orientation at the Twigg Academy. I called and checked.”

  “What? You. Did. Not!”

  “You’re so busted,” I said. “Tell me where you really are.”

  And she hung up, not exactly an earth-shattering surprise. Malley is legendary for hanging up on people. Usually she calls back in five minutes, ten max, but this time she didn’t.

  A text popped up as I was heading to the beach: “If you go to my parents, I’ll never speak to you again!”

  “Knock it off,” I texted back.

  “I’ll tell your mom what happened in Saint Augustine! Swear to God, Richard.”

  “You would NEVER.”

  “Don’t push me,” my cousin texted back.

  Suddenly I felt sick. Not barfy sick, just sick at heart.

  The governor was collecting crabs when I returned to the beach. I told him that I’d finally heard from Malley, and that everything was fine.

  He said, “No, son, it’s not.”

  Then he told me something that made me feel even sicker.

  THREE

  Talbo Chock completed almost one full tour with the U.S. Marine Corps in Afghanistan. He’d been born in New Orleans and lived there until he was eleven, when his family moved to Fort Walton Beach, Florida. There, Talbo played first-string guard on his high school basketball team. His dad worked at a boatyard; his mother was a bookkeeper and secretary for an Episcopal church.

  Talbo had just turned nineteen when the supply truck he was driving got blown to pieces by a roadside bomb in a place called Salim Aka, which Skink said was in the dangerous province of Kandahar. Two other Marines in the vehicle survived their injuries, but Talbo died three weeks later at a military hospital in Germany.

  And now somebody had stolen his name, somebody who’d tricked my cousin Malley into running away with him.

  “How’d you find out all this?” I asked Skink.

  “Reliable source,” he said. “The Pensacola paper ran a short story about Corporal Chock’s death. It would have been a bigger story—should have been—except a hurricane was clipping the Panhandle the same day. The corporal’s first name was Earl and his middle name was Talbo, which is the one he went by.”

  Which explained why nothing popped up when I’d Googled “Talbo Chock,” right after Malley befriended him online.

  Now my brain was tumbling. “The guy who stole that soldier’s name,” I said, “he could be a total lowlife!”

  “Odds are he is.”

  “But Malley doesn’t know. Malley is—”

  “In a bad situation,” said Skink. “Now go tell her folks, Richard.”

  They say everybody keeps at least one secret, and maybe that’s true. Mine was an ugly one. I didn’t rob a bank or anything like that, but what I did was serious enough to crush my mother if she ever found out. And there was at least a fifty-fifty chance that Malley would narc on me, just like she’d threatened to do. She has a ferocious temper.

  So, a selfish part of me didn’t want to tell her parents that she’d run off with the Talbo Chock impostor, because I was afraid for myself, afraid of what my mother would do if Malley revealed what had happened in Saint Augustine.

  I felt a hard stare from Skink’s good eye, the one that actually moved. He said, “What’re you waiting for, son?”

  “You ever done something you were really ashamed of?”

  “Oh, never once.”

  “I’m serious.”

  He chuckled. “I could write a whole encyclopedia of mistakes. Hell, I could write an opera.”

  “About a year ago I did something wrong—something against the law—and Malley saw the whole thing. She’s gonna rat me out if I let her mom and dad know she’s not really up at boarding school.”

  “Would you prefer they hear it from the cops,” Skink said, “after they find her body?”

  “God, don’t say that!”

  He put down the sack of crabs. “Listen up, Richard.” It was the deepest voice I’ve ever heard, like the rumble of faraway thunder. “Whatever you did that you think is so te
rrible? It’s nothing—I mean, nada—when weighed against the life of your cousin.”

  “Yeah, I know. You’re right.”

  He put a hand on each of my shoulders, not a hard squeeze, but I could feel the strength. “Go,” he said.

  And I did.

  Trent was playing golf, and Mom wasn’t home from work yet. Our front door sticks in the humidity, so sometimes you have to give it a shoulder. I grabbed a cold Gatorade from the refrigerator and went to my room and pounded on the mattress with the baseball bat. What was my cousin thinking when she said yes to this jerk? Had she lost her mind?

  I got a chance to ask her, because at that moment she called.

  “His name isn’t really Talbo Chock!” I blurted.

  “Duh.”

  “Then who is he?”

  “You didn’t tell anybody, right?” she said.

  “Where are you?”

  “Oh, Richard. You think I’m stupid or something?”

  I was so happy to hear her voice that I couldn’t stay angry. She sounded as chill as always.

  “He could be a stone psycho,” I whispered.

  “Ha! So could I.”

  “This isn’t a joke. You don’t know a thing about him.”

  “You don’t know what I know,” said Malley.

  I told her that threatening me about Saint Augustine didn’t matter. Even if I stayed quiet, her parents would eventually learn that she wasn’t at boarding school.

  “All I need is a week,” she said. “Then you can tell ’em everything.”

  “What happens in a week? Why are you doing this?”

  Gaily she said, “YOLO,” an annoying abbreviation for You only live once.

  “That’s weak, Mal. Only yo-yos say YOLO.”

  “Gotta go, dude.”

  After she hung up I checked the caller ID, which said “Blocked.” I tried back on Malley’s regular number but her phone went straight to voice mail. There was no point leaving a message—the Talbo Chock impostor was probably screening her calls.

  When I heard my mother come in the front door, I took a deep breath, counted to twenty and walked out of the bedroom. She gave me a hug and said there were groceries in the car.

  I pulled out a chair from the kitchen table. “Mom, sit down.”