She looked out the kitchen window as she opened the microwave door and took out her scalding mug. The sheriff now headed up the path, past the house, holding a baggied gun in one hand, a purse and large envelope in the other. When he knocked on the door, he carried only a little notebook. She invited him in and introduced herself.
“You want to tell me how you found the body?”
Sam did. She worked at keeping her voice steady as she clasped the mug tightly between her palms, both to center herself and to eke out what warmth she could. The water stayed in the mug. Nothing could pass her lips except words, some she sucked in, some she let out.
“You know who it was, don’t you?” the sheriff asked. “India Monroe? Why do you think she’d shoot herself in that boat?”
Sam had tried to shut out the image, but her mind flashed to India’s dress shoes—black leather with a bow on the toe—their tips pointing skyward in the exact spot that Jack had pulled her onto his lap.
“Are you okay, ma’am?”
Sam tried to nod and must have, because he asked if he could look around. “Outside, I mean?”
She managed a feeble, “I don’t suppose Tootie would mind.”
“Tootie? Deb and Frank’s girl?” And then he seemed to remember. “That’s right. Pete said she’s living here. You back for a while or what?”
She gave him the abbreviated version of their arrangement.
He tapped his pen against the notebook. “That your car? The Toyota?”
She nodded.
He touched his forehead with two fingers. “Thank you, ma’am.” His shoes hit the flagstone and noisily crossed the gravel as he moved off toward the side of the property.
Sam just stared at her hands, at the mug in the hands. She took a sip of the lukewarm liquid. It didn’t taste very good, but she was only after the heat, not the flavor.
Besides, how could anything taste good right now?
Her eyes slammed shut. Oh, God.
No, she couldn’t close her eyes. She had to stare at something, anything, so she wouldn’t see India.
The plants. Her driveway. Okay. The plants looked good. Not as lovely as her azaleas had. But azaleas could be replaced.
The woman who’d killed her plants couldn’t be replaced or fixed or found again.
Poor, poor India.
Have mercy, please have mercy.
The sheriff walked back up to the house. She went out to meet him.
He tossed his head toward the back side of the property. “She’s got Jack Water’s truck parked back there. Found the keys on the front seat. Jack’s in the hospital, isn’t he?”
“So I hear. What’re you going to do with the truck?”
“I dunno. I’ll have to get hold of him. Got a letter for him, too. Probably a suicide note in there, but it feels like a book. I’ll see. You know, that boat woulda sunk if she’d aimed over a couple inches. The bullet lodged itself right in the thick part, a brace or something. It your boat or Tootie’s?”
“Mine.”
“I need a phone number where I can reach you.”
Sam got a pen out and scribbled the number to her cell phone. Ushering him to the door, she locked up, got in her little car, and thanked God Tootie hadn’t been the one to find India.
No, she was the one who’d have to live with that image branded behind her eyes.
36
Teo
Deeper shoot the tendrils,
Deeper dig the weeds...
Teo shuffled up the hill from Il Mare Turchese toward his flat. The night air bit his face, and he pulled his scarf up over his chin. Passing a nightclub, he imagined the warmth of bodies snuggled in booths, listening to jazz or pop, liquor flowing. It didn’t attract him, except for the idea of warm anything. He leaned on his cane more heavily this night. The damp cold and his bones were not friends.
Rain had fallen earlier, and puddles caught headlights before the tires splashed water at unwary pedestrians. He dodged to his left, but his foot caught on an uneven crack in the sidewalk. He barely corrected in time to balance with the cane and keep from colliding with two schoolgirls, still uniformed and giggling as they headed home.
“Mi scusi, per favore. ” He begged their pardon, which set them giggling again.
Such sweet innocents, their plaid skirts rolled to show more thigh than he imagined they revealed to their teachers, many of whom still wore traditional habits. Though there, too, things were changing, just more slowly than in the States. The girls paused in front of a shop window. He imagined they watched his lopsided gait. Something new to talk about, the odd old man with the funny accent.
When his cell rang, he almost ignored it, but he recognized Tootie’s tone. His primary fan. He answered.
“You won’t believe what happened,” she began, her voice more tense than he’d ever heard it. “Sam found India Monroe’s body. Here! On Alice. Lying in the cockpit!” She gave him all the gory details, most of which she’d learned from that cousin of hers, Pete. It sounded to Teo as if she knew a little too much.
“Has Samantha moved back to her house?”
“Oh, no. She just came to visit, but I wasn’t here.”
“Maybe you ought to move back home for a while.” He’d stopped walking when she first gave him the news. Now his feet shuffled up the hill.
“Oh, no. It was suicide, so there’s no danger. Not now. Not from her. And Jack’s in the hospital.”
“What about that Rick fellow?”
“I don’t know. I mean, I haven’t heard anything about another Rick. You know, other than her brother. Who’s dead.”
What a mess. “Let me know if you learn more, will you?”
“As soon as I hear.”
Teo sighed as the call ended. Not only did Samantha live in some hovel in a Durham suburb, but she’d found a dead body. That woman’s dead body. She must be horrified. And reeling from guilt.
His cane handle fit one calloused palm. When he saw the sign for the café, he shouldered open the door and entered the cheerful room.
He felt aged. His bones might not have been particularly old in years, but they carried an old man’s aches. As he sipped the hot liquore di mandarino, he remembered Samantha’s graceful fingers holding the glass and her tongue licking the sticky remnants from her lips.
37
Samantha
We choose the words that we will say.
We choose the action, sometimes the deed,
Always the posture and whether to pray.
Sam pulled on a pair of jeans and a turtleneck. They’d had a nasty ice storm yesterday, and the streets were full of brown slush. Slush about equaled her mood.
She slid her feet into boots and her arms into a warm jacket and headed for the diner where she’d promised to meet Tootie, though why the younger woman had picked a place in Durham, she couldn’t imagine. There’d been something slightly frantic in Tootie’s voice.
Tootie waited in a booth, a cup of coffee clutched between her palms. It looked like mud.
“Tea, please,” Sam told the waitress as she slid in across the table.
“You want pancakes, too?”
“No, thanks. Tea will be fine.”
The waitress set a mounded plate of doughy things in front of Tootie. Tootie thanked her, drowned the pancakes in syrup. After the waitress brought Sam’s tea and left, Tootie finally spoke. “I saw Jack.”
Sam dunked her tea bag in barely warm water, focusing on the up and down motion. “How was he?” She tore open a packet of sugar. And then a second. Maybe it wouldn’t all dissolve.
Tootie swallowed, forked another bite, and held it suspended over the plate. “He looks horrible. I mean, really, really sick. And he seemed kind of angry that no one except his foreman had come to visit. I told him India’d said he didn’t want company, that he was supposed to be getting better. He laughed, but it wasn’t a ha-ha laugh, you know?”
“What did he say about India?”
“That’s the t
hing. It’s so awful.”
“What do you mean, awful? Besides the fact she killed herself.”
“I guess we know why she did it now,” Tootie said. “She’d been poisoning Jack and he found out.”
That tea wasn’t doing a thing to warm her as a deeper cold took hold of her belly and spread. “Poisoning? The woman must have been mad.”
“Yeah. There’s not much doubt about that. She’d been killing him with moonshine.”
Sam couldn’t have commented on that if she’d tried.
“Incredible, isn’t it?” Tootie swirled another bite of pancake in the sugary goop. “Jack said the stuff India gave him tasted like a smooth tequila. He was touched that she’d thought of him, started drinking it occasionally even before you left. Then, when he moved back in with her—”
“Ah.” What else could she say? “Ah” seemed to work as well as anything.
“Yeah. Said he hadn’t been well, so she offered to cook for him, make soup and stuff so he’d feel better. He figured it was easier, being there.”
When she’d absorbed that, Sam asked, “And this moonshine was poisoned?”
“Yep. When India finally confessed to Jack, she claimed she’d only wanted to make him sick, but what no one can figure out is why this friend—someone from the airlines, Jack said—gave it to India in the first place. Maybe she stole it.”
Sam had imagined India a crazy, rather pathetic figure, but she’d never suspected the woman would hurt Jack. And she’d thought her own small life miserable when she trudged through muck to do her laundry in the basement next door—because the dryer in her building just tumbled with no heat.
Tootie wiped her lips and continued. “It’s fascinating in an awful sort of way. I mean, the poison aspect, not India’s death or the attempted murder. Just how they made the stuff. Jack said the doctor at the clinic explained how all the poisons had probably gotten in the alcohol. It must be common enough.”
Sam raised a brow. “You think? In what universe?”
“I know. Crazy, isn’t it? Anyway, he said the bootlegger who made the liquor must have accidentally added some seed corn to the mix. Seed corn won’t ferment because of the way it’s treated, and this batch had been preserved with an agent containing mercury. Jack said treated seed corn scattered as bait has been known to kill shore birds. That was poison number one.” Tootie held up a finger.
“There was more than one?”
“Three, actually. Poison number two was lead.” Up went the second finger. “Our brave fellow used auto radiators in the condensing process. Lots of lead in the solder, and we know what lead poisoning does.”
Tootie took a small bite, chewed, and swallowed again. Sam couldn’t have eaten anything if she’d been force-fed.
“And,” Tootie continued, “if that wasn’t enough, the galvanized pipes leached zinc into the mixture.” She wiggled the three fingers, then went back to forking more food. Obviously, the grotesque subject wasn’t affecting her appetite. “So, poison number three. This harmless looking—and delicious, according to Jack—stuff was chock full of heavy metals. Sixty days or less, and you’re dead if you consume up to six ounces a day. What’s that? Two stiff drinks? Three?”
Yeah, Jack drank at least one glass of something every day—vodka, whiskey, the occasional gin and tonic. But more? Sam had never seen him even tipsy, so how would it have occurred to him to think danger from that source? Maybe he’d upped the ante when he started feeling lousy.
She tried to imagine the scene, but she couldn’t wrap her mind around it. “How could India have done such a thing? She said she loved Jack.”
“I know.” Tootie’s eyes sparkled as if her thoughts amused her. “Sort of the wolf dressed in granny’s clothes, you know?”
Sam didn’t smile.
Her normally perceptive assistant pressed on as if this were a snatch of gossip instead of a horror story. “You remember my cousin, Pete, the deputy? The one who watched the house after India poisoned the plants?”
She nodded.
“He said that package India left on the dock was her diary.”
A diary? But the question wouldn’t even croak past Sam’s lips.
“That’s what Pete said. He called me the day after. Okay, he shouldn’t have, but it happened in my —your—backyard. He knew I’d want the details.”
Sam’s fingers began shredding the napkin. She noticed and folded her hands in her lap, waiting.
“Well, he overheard the sheriff say India wrote pretty much every thought that came into her head and wanted it sent to Jack, if you can believe that. Even addressed the envelope to him. I’ve kept a diary before, but no way would I want somebody to read it. I guess that’s how you know a person’s crazy. Sheriff says her death was obviously suicide.”
“Everyone read the diary?” Her stomach sent the tea water straight up her throat. She swallowed it back down. She just hoped she could keep it there.
“Oh, no,” Tootie said hurriedly. “Only the sheriff. It’s just, he made some comments while he was reading it. Pete heard about them from one of the other deputies.”
Sam’s eyelids shut over the image of those deputies, that sheriff, devouring words that would include her name. Coupled with Jack’s. She wanted to die. Right here. Right now.
She must have groaned, because she felt Tootie’s hand touch hers.
“It’s okay,” Tootie said, in what she must have imagined a soothing voice. “Pete promised he wouldn’t tell anyone else.” A pause and then, “But that’s not all.”
What more could there possibly be?
Sam opened her eyes and pulled free of Tootie’s grasp, trying to warm her frigid hands beneath her armpits. She didn’t want to hear more. She really didn’t.
Tootie grimaced after another sip of coffee. “This stuff is terrible. Anyway, Jack got the diary from the sheriff, I guess because she wanted him to have it. That’s really sick. But can you believe? On her last visit, India gave him photographs, ones she’d taken.” Tootie shook her head, obviously puzzled. “I don’t get why he was so chatty about all of this. Why tell me? I mean, would you?”
Not on your life. Tootie was a kid. What had Jack been thinking? “It…it doesn’t sound like him.”
“No, I didn’t think so either. But I got the feeling he wanted an audience. He acted really put-upon that no one had been to see him until this all happened.”
India was dead, and Jack felt neglected?
“Jack wouldn’t tell me what the pictures showed, but I got the idea that they were somehow compromising and were the reason she was so mad at him. Well, he almost admitted that when he said she’d tried to poison him because of what was in the pictures.”
Yep, she was going to be sick. The bile this time was more than just tea rising. She bit her lips together, tightly. The pain helped. Some.
“Like I said, absolutely crazy.” Tootie stared at her plate for a few moments, then looked at Sam with sympathy. “Maybe I shouldn’t tell you this. I mean, I don’t want to hurt you more, Sam. But then I thought you’d want to know.”
“Know what?” Why would she want to know anything more? No, she just wanted to go home and die.
Tootie still hesitated.
Sam tasted blood. “What?”
“Jack said her diary was pretty explicit. She wrote that she was going to shoot herself in Alice because she wanted to kill your boat. I’m so sorry.”
Lightheaded and feeling slightly battered, she braced herself against the table. She would not collapse. She would not faint. “Did...did you tell Jack I was here?”
“Yeah, but he doesn’t want to see you now. I think because he’s in such bad shape.”
She pushed away from the table. “I’ve got to leave.”
“Sam...”
“I’m sorry,” Sam called over her shoulder as she raced toward the door.
She had no idea how she made it into her car and back to the apartment without her stomach emptying itself. And she didn
’t remember that she’d forgotten to pay for the tea until she found herself on her own bathroom floor, spent and aching.
She waited for the next axe to fall. How long before her name was splattered all over the local papers? Word would get out—it always did. The sheriff had read the diary. His deputies gossiped—and not just among themselves. Pretty soon all of Carteret County would know. They’d find out in Beaufort. They’d know everywhere.
The consequences of her affair had played out in Jack’s body and India’s death. Her portion was bound up in these, but there would be more. There always was.
Her cell phone, set on vibrate, bounced around on the living room table. She brushed out her hair, slipped her feet into wooly socks and padded out to check caller ID. Tootie.
Sam thought about their meeting and Tootie’s revelations as she brewed a cup of tea, spooned a dollop of honey into it, and sliced a banana over a bowl of oat cereal. The yellow floating on yellow in a cream-colored mess did not look appetizing. Still, she carried both bowl and cup to the table, pulled out a chair, and sat down. Her hands rested on the table’s surface.
This time of morning, Tootie would probably be skipping around the cottage, doing interesting things to her body: a new hair color, different makeup, perhaps replacing hoops with dangles in her earlobes, studs up the outside edge. Maybe she’d be flipping through her wardrobe to search for something apricot or turquoise or—horrible thought—magenta to brighten the day.
Brown surrounded Sam. Dirty, cracked brown. Okay, not dirty. She’d scrubbed until her hands were raw—why did she keep forgetting to buy rubber gloves?—but the cracks and the flaked Formica felt dirty, like grit in her teeth from badly washed clams, the sort of meat to swallow whole (or spit out, if home alone).
That image brought on goose bumps.
She glanced at the phone again. Tootie might need to discuss the business, and, as much as Sam might prefer to crawl under a rock, she couldn’t.
Sailing out of Darkness (Carolina Coast Book 4) Page 25