Isolation

by Mary Anna Evans

  “I’m sure you’ve been watching Tommy for a long time. Maybe months. Maybe a year?”

  Gerry declined to give her a time range.

  “Well, I’ve been using this marina as a jumping-off point to get to my island for way more than a year. I’ve had my own boat slip since Wally owned the place. My grandmother used this boat ramp since before I was born. I can’t tell you exactly when they were there, but I’m sure I remember drums on that pad. They were rusty and they stank. They wouldn’t have stunk if they weren’t leaking. And if they were leaking something like water or vegetable oil, they still wouldn’t have stunk.”

  “Please tell me you have pictures.”

  “I have pictures of my son fishing over there. I took them last year.” She pointed to the secluded shoreline where Joe’s john boat was beached. “And I have pictures of my other boat, the Gopher, after Joe and I finished restoring her, sitting in a slip right next to Tommy’s shed. That was maybe three years ago, before I started keeping the Gopher at home. If the drums were there when either of those pictures was taken, they’ll be in the background. If you need me to go back further, I can dig around on my computer. And if you need me to go way back, I have my grandmother’s picture albums.”

  Again, the slight nod of a man who accepted information when it was offered, but didn’t give it easily.

  “I’ll look at those photos with the best magnifying glass I’ve got, looking for a drum labeled ‘Arsenic’ but, Gerry, you know a lot more about these things than I do. You know what products have arsenic in them and you know what color drums they’re sold in and you know what their company logos look like. If I bring you those photos and they tell you where my arsenic is coming from, will you tell me?”

  “Yes. You’ll know it as soon as I do.”

  Faye knew this was a bold and forthright statement for a man who used information for currency. She felt victory, but she could be as noncommittal as he was, so she said only, “That’s good to know.”

  ***

  The feeling of victory ebbed when she saw her husband pull his car into the parking lot and step out of it alone. Faye’s fragile grasp on rationality might have held if he’d walked right over to her and said something like “I just came ashore to pick up a jug of milk.” Except there was no milk in his hand, no bread, no eggs. Still, if Joe had been a better liar or even a better poker player, she might have been even-tempered enough to ask him nicely where he’d been and listen to his answer before she flew off the handle.

  But Joe was no liar. When his eyes met hers, she saw that he had wanted this odd trip ashore, which had been important enough to leave Michael and Sly behind, to be a secret. She and Joe didn’t have secrets. She didn’t know what he had been doing, but she could see on his face that it had been a betrayal.

  If she’d given Joe a chance to answer her silent accusation, she knew he would have said, “We never had secrets before, but we do now. You’ve been keeping secrets from me for weeks,” and he would have been right.

  Faye gave him no such chance. She excused herself and left Gerry staring at her back. The motor of her oyster skiff was roaring to life within seconds. The marina’s no-wake zone was theoretical in the absence of other boats to be jostled around by the powerful waves she left behind her, so she violated it. She knew that Joe was looking at her back, too, as she goosed the throttle as high as it would go.

  ***

  “Shit.”

  Joe didn’t curse often. This particular curse word was prompted by the sight of Faye standing between him and his boat. It was followed by “Oh, holy shit,” when she looked him dead in the eyes before hustling straight to her skiff.

  He hurried to his own boat, but not because he thought he had any prayer of catching up with her so he could talk some reason. Faye had a head start, she was practically born in a boat, and she had nerves of steel. She would be getting to Joyeuse Island first, no question about it. If Joe were a betting man, he’d bet that she would disappear into its woods and not reappear until bedtime. If she didn’t show up at bedtime, he didn’t know what he was going to do.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Faye’s feet hit her dock and she started running for the woods. She didn’t even go indoors to set down the satchel she always carried because it was more practical than a purse. Her home was at her back and she kept going, heading for…somewhere. The contamination site? A random spot where she intended to dig yet another pointless hole? Who the hell knew?

  She only knew that she couldn’t look at Joe, not right now. She saw that look on his face, morning and night. It said, “Talk to me. Hold me. I lost a baby, too.” This afternoon, it had also said, “I’m going to fix things between us, whether you like it or not.”

  Faye wasn’t ready to be fixed.

  ***

  When Joe neared the island, he saw that Faye’s oyster skiff was bumping hard against the dock with each passing wave, because she had done a terrible job of tying it up. This one thing, a lurching boat, spoke as clearly to Joe as anything Faye could have said. His wife was struggling, trying to keep her face above water, and that was all she could do. She couldn’t even spare the emotional energy to take care of her boat.

  Her trail headed into the woods. Footprints, scuffed leaves, disturbed pine straw, broken twigs. He could track her. She knew he could track her. But should he do it or should he leave her alone?

  He wasn’t finished securing his boat and Faye’s when his father walked up, holding Michael by the hand.

  “I’ll take that john boat off your hands, Son, if you don’t mind.”

  “Emma told me you were taking her fishing, so I reckon you’re gonna need a boat. Help yourself.”

  Sly carried a canvas bag and a tackle box. Joe would guess the bag held two peanut butter sandwiches and two beers. When he was a kid, his bottle had held root beer, but Emma was of age. She could drink and make decisions for herself, even bad decisions like dating his father. Joe handed over the boat and received his son in exchange.

  Sly paused at the head of the dock, looking down at Faye’s dainty tracks running away from the house, her family, everything. Joe knew his father was as good a tracker as he was, so he, too, could write the story of Faye’s trail by the shape of the prints she left behind.

  “Going after her, Son?”

  “Don’t know. Would you?”

  His father stepped down into the boat, bending to stow his gear. His face was hidden for a moment, then he stood up and pushed thick black hair out of his eyes. “Why the hell you asking me what to do? Did I make your mama happy?”

  As he stooped over his work again, a few mumbled words escaped from behind the curtain of his hair. “Make a lot more sense to do the opposite of what I would’ve did.”

  The roar of a starting motor silenced everything else. Sly Mantooth headed for his rendezvous with Emma without a backward glance.

  Joe looked down at his own son. Was he going to take him along on a search for his mother? It wasn’t like he could sneak up on her while Michael was singing “Pop Goes the Weasel” at the top of his lungs.

  Without Michael, Joe was fully capable of moving silently under the trees until he found his wife, but if she really didn’t want him with her, he didn’t want to be there. Arguing against that was his father’s advice to do the opposite of what he would have done. Joe’s clearest memory of his parents’ marriage, and of his own childhood, was his father’s absence. By that logic, he should go to Faye.

  In the end, he decided to take Michael back in the house and feed him some supper. His father wouldn’t be out late, because it was a first date and Emma was a lady. She would send him home. If Faye hadn’t come home by the time Sly got back, Joe would go looking for her then. He didn’t feel good about this decision that wasn’t a decision, but he was going to have to live with it.

  ***

  Sheriff Rainey studie
d the lowlife across the table from him. Law enforcement in Micco County had taken a strange fork in the road lately. Rainey knew he didn’t understand the science required to bust Tommy Barnett for his environmental crimes. That’s why he needed Gerry Steinberg. But Steinberg had no experience dealing with this kind of lowlife. Tommy Barnett wasn’t Steinberg’s typical perpetrator. Rainey imagined that a typical adversary for Steinberg would be the CEO of a chemical company that had violated its hazardous waste storage permit.

  Tommy Barnett had been caught redhanded, throwing paint cans and five-gallon buckets of mystery sludge overboard in broad daylight. He had been behaving like the typical adversary of the sheriff of a rural county, which was to say that he’d been acting like a drunken idiot who might possibly have recently murdered a nice lady. This was why Steinberg needed a cagey lawman like Sheriff Ken Rainey.

  Barnett had been surrounded by Steinberg and his men, but he had kept acting like a man bent on believing that all the laws of probability might fall in his favor this time. He really seemed to have been hoping to hit the criminal’s lottery. First, he’d thrown everything in his boat over the side. Why did he think this was a good idea? Deputy Steinberg had been getting video and there had been a half-dozen witnesses in those boats chasing Tommy Barnett.

  Because Barnett had behaved like a drunken idiot, Rainey now needed to send down some divers to fetch the evidence. And also to make sure the evidence didn’t leak anything noxious into the Gulf of Mexico, which was already suffering enough. Tommy should have known that this move was only going to make the sheriff mad.

  Then the fool had taken off for shore as fast as his piece-of-junk boat would take him. Granted, the thing would fly. Boat engine maintenance was Tommy’s legitimate business and, judging by the speed of his attempted escape, he was actually pretty good at it. But what did he hope to accomplish? Even if he had made it to shore ahead of the four law-enforcement boats that had pinned him so efficiently that he would have had to ram one to get away, what did he plan to do? Get in his car and drive to Mexico? Surely he knew that Steinberg had stationed officers on the single highway that served the marina.

  Stupid. And provably so. But was he stupid enough to kill the landlady who lived and worked thirty feet from his mechanic’s shop? Rainey didn’t know, so he thought it was time to find out.

  “What did Liz think about your hazardous waste dumping habits? Did she use your services? Did she ask you to pay her to keep quiet about it?”

  “What did she have that needed dumping? Leftovers off her customers’ plates?”

  “Lots of people paint. Lots of people change their oil. Maybe there was some asbestos in the kitchen.”

  Tommy’s face was fleshy and sunburnt. Even the flesh of his eyelids looked tan and thick. Wrinkles networked his forehead. Broken blood vessels showed through the skin of his nose. This was the face of a man who lived outside, worked outside, played outside. It was also the face of a man whose liver was working hard to keep up with years of abuse. Alcohol, probably. Or maybe he had breathed in enough chemical waste to overstress his liver.

  “Would you have killed her if she found out what you were up to?”

  “I gave you my alibi the day after she died, the first time you came sniffing around. Lolita told you where I was the night Liz died.”

  “I don’t find it hard to believe that you visit hookers, Tommy. What other woman would have you? But you cannot make me believe that you pay them by personal check.”

  “Just one. She knows me. When I don’t have cash, she takes a check. I don’t hardly ever have cash.”

  “You’re telling me that her johns are willing to give her a piece of paper with their names signed on it.”

  The eyelids looked heavier, like they were narrowing due to their own weight. “I don’t know about the others. I just know about her and me and the way we do things.”

  Rainey wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t seen the check, written and dated on the morning after Liz’s death. It neatly tied up the loose ends of Lolita-the-hooker’s story that Tommy had been with her all night. It didn’t prove anything, but when accompanied by an unbroken line of cancelled checks that said Tommy had paid Lolita the same fee every Saturday morning for time out of mind, it added some heft to the man’s alibi. She could still be lying but, for Lolita, it would be like a lie told by a guilty man’s wife, not like a lie told by a woman who was being paid to hide the truth. Good luck with getting Lolita to change her story.

  There was no way that college boy Gerry Steinberg was going to be able to deal with these people. It looked like Rainey and Steinberg were going to be bound together tight until they disentangled Tommy Barnett and his dumping from the murder of Liz Colton.

  Rainey nodded at Tommy, not politely. Then he told him he could go, but not to even think about leaving town.

  ***

  Sly had stopped fishing when Emma said, “We’re going to sink this boat if we keep pulling fish out of the water. We should leave a few of them where they are. For next time.”

  If a bear could laugh, it would sound like Sly Mantooth, and Emma liked bears. She listened as he gave her his growly laugh and said, “I thought you were going to outfish me, until I started letting you bait my hook. That’s when I started hauling ’em in. Don’t laugh! You saw it. I think they like the way your pretty hands smell.”

  He reached for her hands and she let him, trying not to be nervous about whether they smelled like fish scales.

  “I’m having a real good time, but the sun’s getting low. I should get you home,” he said, turning one hand over and stroking a single finger across its palm. “Can we do this again?”

  “Absolutely. Next time, I’ll have the makings for coleslaw and hushpuppies in my kitchen. If you’ll gut the fish, I’ll fry them.”

  “I’m sold.” He let go of her hand long enough to secure their rods and close the tackle box. Then, deliberately, as if he’d been thinking hard and waiting for the time, he touched her again. This time, his hand was on her neck and his thumb was taking a slow path down her jawbone. The kiss was firm and slow, but there was only one.

  He pulled away, grinned at the setting sun, and bellowed “We’re losing daylight!” over the roar of a boat motor that was just getting started. As the john boat wheeled around toward shore, it kicked up a crystalline spray of sea water. It had been years since Emma had laughed for no reason at all.

  Then they flew past Liz’s marina on their way to Emma’s private dock and her laugh caught in her throat. She remembered that Sly had been the one who found Liz and she wondered how it felt for him to pass the spot where she died. She looked up at him, but he mistook her glance. With a grin calculated to charm, he reached out a hand and squeezed her gently on the knee.

  ***

  Sly was gone. There had been just one more kiss and Emma was the one who had stolen it.

  She opened the refrigerator. She felt thirsty, despite the thermos of lemonade that Sly had very hospitably provided. The sandwich he’d brought her was also long gone. Being on the water made her thirstier and it also made her hungrier, so she poked around until she found the makings of a ham-and-cheese sandwich. She’d eaten half of it before she remembered to look at her phone.

  Flicking on the ringer, she saw a message from an unfamiliar number. She tapped on the notification and Oscar Croft’s voice spoke.

  “I’m sorry to have missed you, Emma, and I apologize for the spur-of-the-moment invitation, but there’s a show at a dinner theater in Tallahassee that I thought you might enjoy. If you get this message before five, I think we could still make it, so give me a call and let me know if you’re interested. I’ve been wanting a chance to get to know you better.”

  Well, this was a first. She’d met Douglass when he was an ambitious twenty-five-year-old who knew what he wanted. He had wanted to be the most successful contractor for miles around, a
nd he had wanted sixteen-year-old Emma Fairbanks bad enough to wait until her daddy couldn’t stop her from marrying him. Emma wondered what Sly would think if he knew that he was only the second man who had ever kissed her.

  And now there was another man asking for the pleasure of her company. Oscar didn’t have Sly Mantooth’s looks, but it wasn’t fair to compare the two. Sly had at least a ten-year advantage on seventy-ish Oscar. Emma didn’t care so much that he was older. Douglass had been about Oscar’s age, and she would have taken Douglass right then, on the kitchen floor, if she could have had him back for the evening. She just wasn’t sure Oscar was for her.

  Testosterone had hung in the air around Douglass, just as it did around Sly. A manly aura can’t be faked, and Oscar didn’t have it. But he was confident and worldly, and she was pretty sure he was smart enough to provide interesting dinner table conversation.

  She must not be all that vain, because Oscar’s invitation surprised her. She wouldn’t have thought she was his type. She hadn’t been able to pinpoint his relationship with Delia, who was certainly young enough to be his daughter. Maybe his granddaughter, if he’d started early.

  Delia was solicitous of Oscar, but maybe she was showing respect for his age. And, well-mannered though he might try to be, Oscar couldn’t hide his appreciation of her perky blonde looks. Emma hadn’t been sure, but she’d thought they might be a May-December couple until the day she saw him flirting shamelessly with Liz, right in front of Delia. After that, she’d mentally filed Oscar and Delia under the category of “Flirtatious, but Just Friends.”

  She doubted there had been time for Oscar to ask Liz out before she died, if that had been the goal of his flirting. Liz would have enjoyed the dinner theater, and Emma would have happily lent her a dress for the occasion, since Liz had certainly not owned one. She and Liz had been friends and Emma missed her, but they couldn’t have been more different. She would never have thought that a man who had been attracted to Liz—or to Delia, for that matter—would see anything in her.