Chapter One

The last major crime in the town of Verity was in 1958, when one of the Platts shot his brother in an argument over a Chevy Nomad they had bought together on time. Usually it's so quiet you can hear the strangler figs dropping their fruit on the hoods of parked cars, leaving behind pulp and tiny black seeds. Since Verity is the most humid spot in eastern Florida, local people know enough to drink their coffee iced in the morning. The air all around the town limits is so thick that sometimes a soul cannot rise and instead attaches itself to a stranger, landing right between the shoulder blades with a thud that carries no more weight than a hummingbird.

Charles Verity, who founded the town, after killing off as many native people as he could, is said to have discovered this the hard way. He couldn't get rid of the spirits of all the men he'd murdered; they perched up and down his spine and on top of his cookstove, until he caught them in a sugar bowl, then tied the lid closed with thick brown string so they couldn't escape. Charles Verity swore he would live forever. Every night he drank a bitter tea made from the bark of the paradise tree to ensure his good health, but as it turned out he was eaten by an alligator up by the pond where the municipal golf course was later built. Each year, on Charles Verity's birthday, children parade down Main Street to the parking lot of the medical center, where a mud pit ringed with ropes is set up. For ten dollars, anyone can wrestle a papier-mâché alligator and raise funds for the burn ward. Up until the early sixties there were alligator farms all around the outskirts of Verity. At least once a year there would be a big escape, and Half Moon Road, which is now part of the Interstate, would be green and slithery for days, until a posse went out with shotguns and fishing nets. When breeding for profit became a federal offense, Verity turned its past around to suit itself, naming the high school football team the Gators, and featuring Alligator Salad in most restaurants, a mixture of spinach, green pepper, avocado, and chopped egg tinted with green food coloring.

People in Verity like to talk, but the one thing they neglect to mention to outsiders is that something is wrong with the month of May. It isn't the humidity, or even the heat, which is so fierce and sudden it can make grown men cry. Every May, when the sea turtles begin their migration across West Main Street, mistaking the glow of streetlights for the moon, people go a little bit crazy. At least one teenage boy comes close to slamming his car right into the gumbo-limbo tree that grows beside the Burger King. Girls run away from home, babies cry all night, ficus hedges explode into flame, and during one particularly awful May, half a dozen rattlesnakes set themselves up in the phone booth outside the 7-Eleven and refused to budge until June.

At this difficult time of the year people who grew up in Verity often slip two aspirins into their cans of Coke; they wear sunglasses and avoid making any major decisions. They try not to quit their jobs, or smack their children, or run off to North Carolina with the serviceman who just fixed their VCR. They make certain to stay out of the ocean, since the chemical plant on Seminole Point always leaks in the first week of May, so that the yellowfin float to the surface, bringing sharks closer to shore. In the past few years, there has been an influx of newcomers, lured by the low rents and wild hibiscus. As a result, Verity is now home to more divorced women from New York than any other town in the state of Florida. None of these women had any idea of the sort of mess the month of May in Verity could make of their lives, any more than they knew what daily exposure to chlorine could do to their hair. There were now dozens of greenheaded women all over town, all addicted to Diet Dr Pepper, and each and every one of them was shocked to discover that in Verity mosquitoes grew to the size of bumblebees and that the sea grape, which grew wild along the beach, could pull their children right into the thicket if they didn't keep to the wooden paths.

After midnight, when the heat was almost bearable and anole lizards ran fearlessly across quarry tile floors, these women never wept but did their laundry instead. While the bleach was added to the white wash and the laundry softener doled out, it became clear that although some of the children these women had transplanted were doing well, most were not. There were toddlers who called out for their fathers in the middle of the night, and boys who dreamed so deeply of the houses where they grew up they'd wake damp with sweat, smelling of cut grass. There were sullen teenage girls running up astronomical phone bills, and babies so accustomed to ranch houses they got hysterical at the sight of an elevator.

At 27 Long Boat Street, just off West Main, in a pink stucco condominium facing the flat blue bay, there lived a twelve-year-old boy, a mean little Scorpio named Keith Rosen, who would have liked nothing better than to knock someone's block off. He was so mean he could cut his own finger with a serrated steak knife and not flinch. He could drop a brick on his bare foot and not cry out loud. Last week, when his only friend, Laddy Stern, dared him to pierce his ear with an embroidery needle, Keith didn't even bleed. The following afternoon he stole an earring shaped like a silver skull from a jewelry concession at the flea market over at the Sunshine Drive-In. He has never been a particularly good boy, but after eight months in Florida, he is horrid. Already, he has been suspended from school three times. He is willing to steal almost anything: lunch money, teachers' wallets, birthstone rings right off his classmates' fingers. He keeps everything in a secret stash in the laundry room down in the basement, inside a hole he punched into the plaster behind a washing machine.