It’s hard to say if anyone ever really intended to go to Florida. The soil is poor, the heat unforgiving. The refinement and the social organization of the Maya or the Inca were an impossibility on that peninsula. When de Soto made landfall near Anna Maria, he found only a smattering of warring tribes who wore inflated fish bladders in their ears and built their homes and charnel houses atop vast piles of discarded oyster shells. De Soto himself had believed Florida to contain something it did not, the city of gold, and when he died there after years of searching, I suspect he had begun to realize the vanity of his dream.
The native people most associated with Florida, the Seminole, aren’t from there at all. They came to the state only as a last resort during the nineteenth century, when they were forced off the more fertile and temperate lands of Georgia and Alabama. There is something fitting, though, in the Seminole as a state symbol, since any history of Florida is less a history of people arriving there than one of people fleeing somewhere else, Ohio or Germany, or anywhere it happens to be snowing. Like California, it exists for most people as an idea, something to be talked about while you’re counting your tips at the end of the night or punching your time card after a graveyard shift. As in de Soto’s time, when Florida stretched north unmapped and borderless, the shape of the Sunshine State is defined less by the 31st parallel than by the imagination. Only long after you’ve arrived, as de Soto discovered, does it become anything like a reality.
In January, Anna Maria Island is cold for Florida. The sky clouds over, sometimes for an entire day, and islanders won’t put a foot in the surf for another month or two. There are still tourists—there are always tourists—but they are their own breed: the misinformed, the perverse, the congenitally cheapskate. There are some Canadians, a few Swiss. I arrived on a Tuesday.
The motel looked exactly as it had during my last visit—the same German woman in the hut by the pool, the same teen in the office—except off to one side, set a little back from the street, the burned-out building sat, as though hiding, behind two large potted plants. The door had been swept clean of ash, but long, wavering scorch marks remained on the walls, and police tape flapped between the palms. UNDER CONSTRUCTION said a hand-lettered sign hung on a sawhorse, but there was no evidence to support this notion. In the front office, the girl sat working busily on a sudoku and did not look up when I entered. I asked for the same room I’d rented the previous January, and as I put my clothes in the dresser, removed my shoes, and unwrapped the tiny soap, I felt like in some way I was returning home.
For dinner, I found a restaurant on the beach with a large covered deck, the edge of which disappeared into the sand. All the tables were full, and I took my place on a long bench with the rest of those waiting to eat. To my left was a little boy with a shoe in each hand, pouring sand from one to the other, and to my right sat a man with hair so white and stiff and dramatically windswept it appeared, out of the corner of my eye, as though a seagull sat perched on his head.
It was a popular place to watch the sunset, but by the time I arrived the sky had clouded over. It refused to darken even well after the sun had gone down. Instead, all the objects—the tufts of grass along the beach, the rows of ketchup bottles at the hostess stand, and the plates of half-eaten halibut and shrimp—all these things spread their gloom out around them, and when the whole scene was connected by a single dimness, then it was night. The wait-staff was composed mainly of high school students wearing cutoff shorts and smelling of pimple cream and mall perfume, and older men and women with tobacco-stained fingers. As the first cold breezes blew in off the water, they unrolled large plastic flaps from the ceiling and positioned propane heaters at intervals around the deck, and this combination of the diffuse orange glow of the lamps and the clear plastic walls lent the dining area the distinct feeling of a large and fantastic incubator.
The man to my right finally turned to me. “You from around here?”
Before I could answer, a woman leaned out from behind his shoulder. “We’re from Pensacola.”
“Pennsylvania,” I said. “Originally.”
“Never been,” said the man. “No reason.”
“But I’ve heard it’s lovely,” the wife said. “They have the . . .What do you call it? In fall?”
“Foliage.”
“Foliage.” She sighed over the word. “That’s it.”
“Here for business?” the husband said.
“I came down to find out about the fire at the motel.”
“And the woman that got killed,” he said.
“Sabine, yes some people think she was murdered.”
“Sabine,” said the wife. “Yes, I heard it was her boyfriend.”
“True crime,” the husband said, inhaling deeply. “You ought to come up to Pensacola. Some unbelievable cases up there. Riots, murders, lynchings . . . Good stuff.”
“We should know,” the wife said. “Harry’s a state prosecutor.”
He bowed his head and put out his hand. “Harold and Noreen.”
“We’re here to get away from his work.”
“Lost a case at the state supreme court.” He bunched up his shoulders and released them.
“Florida won’t execute unless you’re the triggerman,” Noreen said. “Can you believe it?”
“Florida won’t execute unless you’re the triggerman,” Noreen said. “Can you believe it?”They wanted to say more—a public defender had gotten drunk at a Christmas party and told them things that would make your head spin—but just then, the hostess called their name. Harold shook his head and looked into his drink, and as he pumped my hand a final time, I had my first real glimpse of his face: smooth, almost boyish cheeks and two bright and undiminished eyes.
I made a short dinner of it. The trays of frozen margaritas, the weathered plastic tables, the keenness with which Harold and Noreen had yearned for an execution, and the aging rocker in a corner trying the first chords of a Jimmy Buffett song: all these things had begun to have an oppressive effect on me, and by the time my server arrived, hefting before her a mountainous Caesar salad festooned along its edge with shrimp, I had all but lost my appetite.
***
The phone at the sheriff’s office rang regularly with people offering tips, leads, and suspicions. A woman had seen Sabine at the ticket counter of the Sarasota-Bradenton International Airport, checking in for a flight to Costa Rica. She had also been seen walking west on Nebraska Avenue, holding a small purse; waiting patiently at the dentist’s office; or wearing a blue fleece jumpsuit in a bar in Bradenton, looking “disheveled and upset.” Or she’d been seen at a bar called Mr. Bones, with a short man with long gray hair, dressed like a “pimp”—though the witness, an amiable young woman, mentioned that she had been drunk at the time, so she couldn’t be entirely sure, and in his report the interviewing detective felt “it should be noted that she was intoxicated when I was speaking with her.” Sabine was in hiding. Sabine had debts. She was at the Circle K and the Salvation Army. Sabine had left a cryptic voicemail on a friend’s phone. Sabine was being held captive in a house with black-and-white linoleum floors. Someone was expecting a message from the beyond, which would be received telepathically via Sabine’s pet parrot, and she would be in touch when it arrived. One woman said she’d found bones in the sand and carefully relocated them to the top of a dune where Chilson Avenue met the beach. A deputy rushed to the location, but Chilson Avenue was not a through street; it did not meet the beach. Standing on a dune, he called the woman back. “Chilson Avenue doesn’t meet the beach,” he said. “The bones are on the dunes,” she said. “The bones are on the dunes. Anyone can find them.”
***
That first morning back in Florida, feeling drowsy after my late-night stroll, I pulled a collared shirt over my head, debated at some length between dress shoes and flip-flops, and finally crossed the patio of the motel and went to speak with Tom Buehler. Before the disappearance of his wife, he had been generally regarded on the island as a friendly and self-effacing member of the community, an earnest small-business owner, and a hard worker, though his businesses had occasionally struggled. But of the three men, he was the only one who had anything like a motive for committing the crime. His marriage to Sabine, like the three before it, had long been defunct, and some said that he had been duped into the arrangement in the first place. He stood to take full ownership of their house on Anna Maria, as well as the motel, and it was eventually revealed that he was the beneficiary of not one but two life insurance policies. Many recalled his anger when he’d discovered Bill and Sabine’s affair, and the mutual enmity between husband and boyfriend was well known (in his interviews with the sheriff’s office, he rarely used the man’s name, preferring the epithet scumbag). More than anyone, he was positioned to benefit from her disappearance, and he was the only person, it seemed, who had any reason to want her gone.
But when I arrived at the office, the small man I found there with glasses on his nose did not look the part of the murderer. His neck was short and his ears were wide, and a fine gray stubble covered the back half of his head. Though his body, bent over a computer keyboard, was tense, the roundness of his face seemed to predispose it to smile, and when I walked in, he did just that and asked what he could do for me.
I introduced myself and explained, haltingly, that I was hoping to talk to him about his wife, that I wanted to write a story about the disappearance, nothing sensationalized, and even as I spoke, a look of bodily horror overtook him. He had stood when I told him my name, and now, as I continued to speak, rambling at this point, about how this story might be important, how I hoped to tell it in a considerate manner, he was backing away from the counter, his arms tucked around his chest and the skin tight around his eyes. Those eyes were of a distinctly pale blue, and they watched my mouth with mounting tension as it formed yet another syllable and another. “I just want to hear what—”
He threw up his hands, and those eyes began to dart, looking first at the floor, then the ceiling, then back to me, then at his hands, which he now held clenched before him. “I’m not talking to reporters anymore,” he said.
“I’m not a reporter,” I said. “I’m a graduate student in a writing program.”
Here his posture eased slightly. “A student.” He looked at me again—I had chosen flip-flops—and seemed to consider this plausible. “Where?”
“Iowa.”
“That’s a long way.”
“It is.”
Now he shifted his weight from foot to foot, looking past me as if hoping someone else might walk in the door and rescue him from this situation. “A student. I don’t know. Can I think about it? Can I think about it and get back to you?”
I wrote my cell phone number on the back of a brochure, and with this in his hand, he seemed at last to have regained his equilibrium.
“There’s one other thing,” I said. His face paled, and again he raised his eyes to me. “I stayed here last night, and I was hoping to stay another five nights. But I only have two hundred fifty dollars.”
“Five more nights?” Relieved to return to the customary relationship of motel owner and motel guest, or maybe only thankful to have something specific to do, he sat again at the computer, his fingers pecking rapidly at the keyboard. “Five nights.” He hemmed and clicked, hemmed and clicked. “You’d have to pay up front, and I couldn’t give you a kitchenette. I just couldn’t.”
“I don’t plan to cook.”
“All right, I think we can work something out.” His face turned to the computer, and he began rapidly typing. “So you’re in college,” he said. “They should make kids in college learn about sales. Why don’t they?” Here he paused and looked at me as if truly perplexed. “Life is sales. It’s about convincing other people that they want what you want. It’s about convincing other people to give you . . .” He paused, seeming to lose his way in the thicket of his own speech. “To give you what they want.” He laid a receipt out on the counter between us. “With tax it’s an even two hundred eighty.”
I bit my lip. “I only have two hundred fifty.”
He grimaced, turned back to the keyboard again and printed another receipt, this one for $250.82. I had the feeling, as I counted the bills out of my wallet and pulled the coins out of my pocket, that those cents represented to him a matter of principle and pride, that it wasn’t really a sale unless I parted with something I had intended to keep.
***
With my bill settled, I hurried up the street to the island coffee shop. Racks of sunglasses stood on the counter, alongside bowls of sand dollars and bric-a-brac and curios and postcards of otters (You Otter Be Here). All the panels on the drop ceiling had been removed, and a variety of sea paraphernalia had been wedged in the four-square metal structure: buoys, starfish, flip-flops, surf-boards, pieces of driftwood, red and blue and green glass balls. A sense of nostalgia predominated, not for the Gulf specifically but for some broad idea of the sea. And beneath a shelf of faux drift-wood, on a long green velvet divan, a reporter from the island newspaper was waiting for me. It had been her article, the keenness of her details—the old woman threatening to leave the island, the heavy gear of the fire fighters, the anguish of a motel guest who had left his Labrador in his room—that had caused me to undertake this trip, and I was surprised to find a diminutive woman with a pageboy haircut and a ball cap. She seemed prepared at any moment to dissolve into a crowd, and she spoke so quietly as she introduced herself that I could hardly make out her name. She tilted her head as I asked her about the case, and after thinking a moment, she spoke with exactingly enunciated syllables.
“Nobody knows what to think. Some people think her husband killed her. Some think it was her boyfriend. Some think it was the man driving her car.”
“Corona?”
“He seems like pretty bad news—lots of arrests—but the sheriff’s office seems pretty sure it wasn’t him. Just a case of the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Have you spoken to the husband or the boyfriend?”
“Tom Buehler—he’s the husband, you know that—he certainly has the motive, as I’m sure you’ve heard. They co-owned their properties, and there was a life insurance policy, two hundred fifty thousand dollars, I think. But everyone who knows him doesn’t seem to think he could have done it.”
“He seems like a good guy?”
“A good guy, yes, but also a little”—she scouted around for the right word—“scattered, I guess. Has trouble finishing projects, can’t stay focused. Not the type to dispose of a body without a trace. And then he has an alibi, too. He was at a party the night she disappeared.” She looked momentarily uncomfortable. “I actually was at that party, too. It’s not a large island.”
“I tried to talk to Tom this morning. He didn’t seem too excited.”
“He won’t talk to anyone anymore. I think he didn’t like the way the whole thing was played up in the news. Bill, though, that’s the boyfriend, he actually asked me to interview him. He’s . . .” She paused again to look for the appropriate description. “He’s funny. Just before Christmas, he called me on my cell phone and asked me to meet him on the beach. He said he had very important information to discuss. I’d heard he was losing it. He was sleeping in the toolshed of an abandoned motel on Fourteenth Street, right across from the bar where her car was abandoned, if you can believe it. Anyway, when I got there, he seemed pretty drunk. He hadn’t shaved. He had this backpack that he carried around with him everywhere, and he just held this backpack on his lap and smoked one cigarette a er another.”
“What was the important information?”
“That she was still alive. He was sure of it, and he was going to find her. He kept saying that he loved her, he missed her.”
“Did he say anything else?”
“He said he was going to stay on the island, he had to find her, he had to see it resolved.” One of her thin eyebrows arched. “Two days later, he took off. They found him up in Ocala and put him right back in prison for violating his parole.”
“I guess you don’t think she’s still alive.”
“It’s weird,” she said. “It’s just I’ve never seen anything quite like this case.”
“How do you mean?”
“You’ve got grand the auto, driving without a license, resisting arrest, arson, violation of parole, maybe insurance fraud.” She listed each item off on her fingers. “But there’s just no body. It’s six crimes in search of a murder.”
“You’ve got grand the auto, driving without a license, resisting arrest, arson, violation of parole, maybe insurance fraud.” She listed each item off on her fingers. “But there’s just no body. It’s six crimes in search of a murder.”Having watched the journalist disappear down the street on an old bicycle, I walked around the corner and stood in front of the apartment building where Sabine Musil-Buehler had lived with William Cumber. It was a modest structure, pink beneath a high turquoise sky, and it had a modest patio and a half dozen parking spots along the road. A car with Ontario plates sat out front, and on a concrete bench a woman leaned over her knees painting her toenails. This was the last place anyone had seen Sabine Musil-Buehler alive, and I wished that my vision could penetrate not only into the building’s rooms but also into its past.
When I turned back, I was confronted by a bank of newspaper machines, each of which depicted, in various photographs, the face of Sabine Musil-Buehler, and the reality of this undertaking, the fact that somewhere a woman’s body lay hidden, a fact that until that moment had seemed quite far from me, suddenly became quite real. As I climbed back into the stifling cabin of my station wagon, I felt much as that deputy must have felt, atop a dune in the middle of the night looking for bones, having arrived somewhere he never expected to be with directions he now knew, in their very premise, to be false.
***
I have been trying for some time to understand the atmosphere that pervaded that first return to Florida. The dread that was eventually to accompany these southern sojourns had not yet fully unwound in me, and instead, on the surface, I felt the vacationer’s sense of being merely adrift. I’d prepared for myself a busy schedule—phone calls and lunch meetings and appointments at the office of the clerk of court—but despite the activity ahead, a feeling of idleness predominated.
Perhaps this is only a feature of that part of Florida, where so many of the residents measure their days in rounds of golf and glasses of chardonnay, but it seems to me now that the morbid nature of the project threw its shadow across everything. In the men and women crowded along a darkly varnished bar, in the rows of identical pastel homes, in a misspelling in the newspaper or a soda bottle in the gutter, I thought I perceived the symptoms of a universal decay, among which the disappearance of a woman was only the most striking example.
__________________________________
Adapted from LOVE & DEATH IN THE SUNSHINE STATE by Cutter Wood, published by Algonquin Books. Copyright © 2018 by Cutter Wood.
