Hell's Bay by James W. Hall Read Free Book Online Page B

strength he’d earned through backbreaking labor in the sun.
    Rusty slowed and the boat dropped off plane. Perched on the padded ice chest in front of the console was Mona Milligan. She wore a white fleecy sweatshirt and black jeans, and her auburn hair ran wild in the breeze, tossing like a warning flag as the boat muttered toward the stern platform where I waited.
    I tied off the bow line, then leaned over the loading platform to help our first two guests aboard.
    Mona looked at my outstretched hand, then met my eyes and held them as she took hold of a bow rail and hauled her-self aboard without assistance. Milligan shrugged an apology to me then held out a big paw. I heaved him up, and while he still held my hand, he gave it a firm how-do-you-do.
    â€œGood to meet you, Daniel. Or do they call you Oliver?”
    As his words registered, a cold weight shifted within my chest. The man looked at me steadily with a slender smile as though we shared a delicious secret. If I’d followed my instincts, I would’ ve shoved him backward into the choppy sea and hauled the anchor and set out toward the horizon, leaving him to swim the half mile back to shore.
    â€œWhat’s wrong, Daniel? You look ill.” A goading tone.
    The blood tightened in my veins.
    â€œMy name is Thorn,” I said.
    â€œWhatever you like,” he said, holding to his smile.
    As Rusty handed Milligan his duffel and the rest of his gear, I gave him a careful look. Plainly he was an outdoors-man from the melanoma-be-damned school, for the flesh around the open collar of his shirt was as charred as a steak forgotten on the grill. His mustache was barbered so primly it gave his rugged features an air that was faintly unsavory. An echo of Clark Gable as a riverboat gambler. A man who could damn well deal from the bottom of the deck if the spirit moved him.
    Rusty gave me a chastising glance and pushed past me to show the Milligans to their staterooms. My bad manners were already disheartening her. I stood on the rear deck and took careful breaths while I stared out to sea.
    It was true my given name was Daniel Oliver. Son of Elizabeth and Quentin Thorn. Born in a hospital in Home-stead, Florida, rushed home by my parents in the first twenty-four hours of my life so by local custom I would be officially pronounced a Conch—a title bestowed on those lucky enough to be born in the Florida Keys.
    A Conch I was, a Conch I remained. Hard shell, gristly meat, trundling across the floors of silent seas.
    Though everyone knew me as Thorn, more than once in private I’d spoken the words Daniel Oliver aloud to see how they sounded on my lips. It was a name with some special meaning to my parents, but it was a cipher I’d not broken. I would never know its origin, for my father and mother died in a car crash on the way home from the hospital, a collision that through some supernatural physics their baby boy survived.
    The two gentle spirits who adopted me, Kate Truman and Doctor Bill, never spoke of my parents. Trying to spare me, I assumed, from emotional pain. In my teens I spent hours in the courthouse digging through public records without luck. Years later I got my friend Sugarman to run a computer search on their names, but he came up empty. And none of the locals I questioned could provide anything about who Quentin and Elizabeth Thorn were or where they came from. So finally I was forced to invent.
    The history I crafted was that my parents, like so many refugees to the Keys, arrived in the islands to escape their pasts and reinvent themselves. I imagined that at the moment of their deaths they were at the awkward juncture when they’d succeeded in wiping out their previous identities but had not yet established new ones.
    Beyond that simple fiction I would not let my imagination go. If they had wanted to disappear, then who was I to ex-hume their remains?
    I accepted the idea that my parents, their backgrounds, the nature of