He shook William Hightower’s hand with a casual “Good to see you again, man. We’re gonna do our best not to inconvenience you any more than we need to, but I won’t lie. The first few days of demolition are going to be loud and dirty. If you have somewhere else to be I highly recommend it.”

Avery had expected Hightower to argue or at least fume a little, but William just nodded. The next morning when they arrived at the main house the door was unlocked and there was no sign of him. She caught the look that passed over Maddie’s face; it was one of half relief, half disappointment.

“Heard him leave just before sunrise,” Roberto said. He handed each of them a sledgehammer and pointed out the most vulnerable parts of the front staircase. “Let’s get this thing out of here. I’m going to rip out the cabinets on that kitchen wall to make room for the new stair.”

They settled Dustin in the back of the living area with a pile of toys near the pool table where he’d be out of harm’s way, and Avery, Maddie, and Kyra swung away.

“Wow! I feel so energized.” Maddie’s sledgehammer smashed into the balustrade and splintered an entire section.

Kyra swung at the stair beneath the now gaping balustrade and produced a huge hole. “It does feel good.” She swung again. “In fact, it feels great.” She sent a look directly into Troy’s camera lens. “This is the perfect way to work out aggression.” She swung again, connected, whooped aloud as more wood splintered. “Just picture someone who’s pissed you off or done you wrong and . . .” Wham! Another stroke, another hole.

Maddie laughed as she lifted the long-handled hammer. “Aiya!” she shouted as she swung it hard at the wooden box of the steps.

“Just be careful of the plank floor,” Avery said as she moved into position to take her swing. “We’re going to have to fill in this space, but I don’t want to damage anything we don’t have to. I’m hoping we’re going to be able to use planks from where the stair is going in up the kitchen wall to fill in here.”

They’d worked up a serious sweat and a huge mess by the time the stair was gone and its parts carried out and flung into the Dumpster. Bits and pieces of wood stuck to their sweaty skin. Avery reached out to remove a chunk from Maddie’s hair. Maddie did the same for Kyra. They looked like a family of chimps plucking insects from each other’s pelts.

Roberto worked to music, his sinewy arms swinging in time to the Allman Brothers Band’s “Black Hearted Woman” blasting through portable speakers. It made her realize that this was the first time they’d heard southern rock in the home of one of the world’s best-known southern rockers.

Roberto had the kitchen cabinets out by the time they finished the stairs. The stove and hood were all that remained. The refrigerator had been moved beside them, freeing up the wall where the new stair would go.

“Will lived at the Big House in Macon for a while with the Allmans back when he was on the rise. He and his band recorded ‘Mermaid in You’ at Muscle Shoals. Always thought that was one of the saddest songs I ever heard.”

“Yeah.” Maddie held the glass of lemonade up to her forehead, seemingly more interested in its cooling than its thirst-quenching properties. “All that raw emotion; the idea of loving someone so much that it sears your soul.”

“Yep, just hearing the opening bars of that song used to give me an ache in the pit of my stomach,” Avery said.

They listened as the music faded out. The room fell silent.

“Wild Will’s voice handled the blues almost as good as Gregg Allman’s,” Roberto Dante said. “But then, I don’t guess you write the kind of music Will was known for without knowing pain up close and personal.”

Chapter Twenty-three

With no plan in mind, Will threw a dry box of camping supplies, a cooler of drinks and sandwiches, and a couple of his more utilitarian rods and a tackle box in the skiff. He took his time winding through Florida Bay, reading the water as he went, curving through teardrop-shaped mangrove islands and dark saw-grass prairies that sat next to sandy-bottomed shallow basins. He fished desultorily, without purpose, moving from spot to spot with no real intention. The fish, most likely sensing that he was not in real pursuit but only hiding out, ignored his flies and halfhearted casts.

After a stop for gas and snacks on Flamingo, he rounded the mainland and staked the skiff to the sandy beach of Cape Sable, where skeletons of buttonwood trunks curved out of the sand like decomposing dinosaur ribs and a curtain of mangroves isolated him from what lay inland. There, with water gently licking the shore, he watched the sunset; the color streaking the sky so boldly that he imagined he might breathe it in along with the salted air.

When night fell he lit a small fire to keep the mosquitoes at bay, lay on top of his sleeping bag, and stared up into the stars. The night sky twinkled above, and the warm breeze floated over him, but the comfort they usually afforded eluded him. The mangroves and the bay teemed with life. The rub and thrum of insects, the scurrying of small animals in the brush, the hoot of an owl, all teased his senses. Once he’d believed that being high out here connected him cosmically—made him one with the mud, the sea grass that swayed beneath the surface of the water, the crabs that scurried across the sand, even the star-filled sky. When the drugs and alcohol that buffered him from reality began to replace reality, he’d clung to the hope that this was where he’d hear the music again. That the words and melodies would come to him on the breeze as they had in the beginning; that they’d replace the white noise of fame that had filled his head for so long.

But that had been bullshit, just one more way in which he’d convinced himself that the universe revolved around him.

The moon was so full it made him wish he could let loose and howl. Or cry for all the things he’d lost and especially those he’d pushed away. When he finally fell asleep he dreamed of a thirst he couldn’t quench. An oasis of clear blue water sparkling across a desert that no amount of crawling allowed him to reach. A good-bye flip of a mermaid’s shimmering tail disappearing beneath a storm-tossed sea.

In the morning he watched the sun rise above a distant mangrove hammock. He barely moved or breathed as a white heron took to the air in an elegant spiral of flight and watched in awe while a magnificent frigate bird soared from its roost in a nearby buttonwood, its massive wings spread, its forked tail cleaving the powder blue sky.

When the rain began to fall out of a virtually cloudless sky, he welcomed the feel of it on his skin, allowing it to cleanse and cool him. He lost track of the days spent on his own very screwed-up vision quest, at which his Seminole ancestors would have scoffed. But he began to feel alive from the inside out and see the beauty around him with a new knife-edged clarity. Over the following days, Will poled the skiff through Snake Bight then meandered through mangrove canopies and winding waterways, allowing his mind to wander at the same slow pace. Occasionally he stopped at a spit of mangroves or a favorite backcountry flat, but he didn’t bother to make a cast or drop a line. Not even when a school of tarpon rolled right off his bow practically begging to be caught. He ignored the siren call of home as long as he could, not yet ready to face the invading army that had assembled at Mermaid Point.

* * *

In those first weeks of June each day became hotter, the air heavier until it was like a sack of rocks they carried around with them. Spontaneous sweating occurred; sometimes even the thought of stepping outside caused beads of water to form on their skin. There were light morning rains that arrived gently and tiptoed across U.S. 1, only to disappear across the bay. Even the darker, heavier storms that roared across the Atlantic like a dark locomotive, and hit the asphalt in a saunalike cloud of steam, didn’t linger for long.

“No landmass here. Nowhere to loiter,” Roberto had said, and he seemed to be right.

The hippy-dippy carpenter bopped through each day mellow, unhurried, and seemingly immune to the heat, the humidity, and the amount of rainfall. Best of all as far as Avery was concerned, he and the two-man crew he’d assembled wasted not a nail or a hammer blow. Roberto Dante did in fact seem able to make wood sing—or at least hum along happily.

He worked to a personal playlist dominated by southern rock bands that had emerged on the national scene in the seventies, a time Avery had been too young to remember and that she had never given much thought to. It was alternately bittersweet and hard-driving and had its roots, according to Roberto, in blues, rock, and country.

“The southern rockers themselves argue that it’s just good rock and roll and that it was only labeled southern rock because the performers were from the South.” He’d paused a moment to hum along to what she now knew was a Wet Willie song. “I agree that there is a truth to the lyrics and stories they tell that is universal. But they all came from a pretty similar background. And of course the southern groups did have the reputation for a certain level of . . . rowdiness.” He smiled at this and closed his eyes as he listened, his lips moving silently along with the lyrics.

Avery was happy to listen to Roberto’s music and his insights into the songs and the bands that performed them, but she was even happier at the progress they were now making. The kitchen was an empty shell waiting to be refilled and reconfigured. The new stair that would run up the back kitchen wall had been roughed in, as had a guest bath, laundry room, and walk-in pantry behind the kitchen. These new spaces opened off the back hall and could be accessed from the main house common area as well as the front and back porches. A large hole gaped above the new stairs and in the foyer ceiling where the original stair had been, but already Avery could feel the space taking shape. The heady scent of sawdust filled the air. And while she appreciated Roberto’s soundtrack, it was the sound of the power miter and radial saws the carpenter had set up on the front porch, and the rhythm of hammer on nail as his assistants framed in the new walls and bathrooms for the upstairs and downstairs guest suites, that were the sweetest of melodies to her.