Love and Death in the Sunshine State by Cutter Wood

Author:Cutter Wood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2018-03-13T04:00:00+00:00

8: All the Lives

There were a lot of questions that I never found the answer to in Florida—sometimes because no one could tell me, often because there wasn’t one. At some point during that year, for instance, it must have occurred to Tom Buehler that the course of his life had been permanently altered. Where was he when the realization came? Skimming the pool at the motel? Eating cereal and sliced grapefruit? Driving the bridge to Cortez? And what did he do? He and Sabine had long been husband and wife in name only. By that fall, he had his own girlfriend. It had been an insult that Sabine carried on her affair at the motel, and it was tempting to think Tom would have been relieved by her disappearance. In some measure, perhaps he was. However, a lover’s indifference so often engenders only more love; it seemed just as likely Tom was devastated by her loss. A little while after the disappearance, beside a road on Anna Maria, a man discovered a suitcase full of photographs of Sabine. Questioned by detectives, Tom freely admitted he had put it there, and the newspapers proceeded to make some to-do over it. The event did seem important somehow, but it was difficult to say why. Eventually, everyone forgot about the abandoned suitcase. There wasn’t a law against throwing things away.

I wished I could have been present during Robert Corona’s brief cruise down Fourteenth. How it must have felt to swing out onto the road a few hours short of dawn, to punch the gas and roll down the windows and run the cool night air. Even a life of regular incarceration is punctuated by moments blind with the sense of possibility, and I wondered if Corona, in the quarter mile between the green light and the siren, had been allotted such a feeling of freedom.

But most of all, I was captivated by the relationship between Bill and Sabine. Had she spun her hair between two fingers when she worked? Did they ever dance? Did he know her middle name? Did he know why she was afraid of the dark? I knew that Bill had lied to me, but I knew, too, that even if he’d told me everything he remembered, it would hardly answer all the questions I had.

I had talked to one of the state’s attorneys about the case. Sitting at a table stacked with papers, he’d held a pen between his hands and looked out the window. “Even when they confess,” he said, “you still don’t get the truth.”

I left Florida that Tuesday, taking a plane from Tampa in the first hours of the morning. As a boy, the sight of the earth falling away beneath my feet had delighted me, but that day it only gave me a feeling of vague unease. I leaned my forehead against the plastic oval, as I always do, and watched the tarmac blur and disappear. The landscape flattened; the people shrank. First, the

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