Isolation

by Mary Anna Evans

  “You got the situation on Joyeuse Island under control?”

  The former sheriff’s spies knew all, so he knew all, but he usually pretended he didn’t. McKenzie’s power in Micco County would linger for the rest of his life, but he had never rubbed it in Rainey’s face before tonight. Rainey had known why McKenzie was being suddenly upfront about the scope of his web of insider informants. Faye Longchamp-Mantooth and Joe Wolf Mantooth were among his closest friends.

  “I’ve got people on the way. The Coast Guard has been called. I’m in my car now.”

  “I knew you’d be doing things right. It’s just that my wife is about to lose her damn mind. I may have to sit on her to keep her from going out to that island and fetching those people home herself. And we don’t own a boat.”

  “I’ve got boats, and I’ve got good people to pilot them. We’ll get your friends home.”

  “See that you do. And Sheriff?”

  “Yes?”

  “You have our gratitude. Nobody knows more than me and Magda how hard your job is.”

  Shortly after ending his call with Mike McKenzie, Sheriff Rainey had seen fat drops of water spatter across his windshield. He had never been so glad to see an ordinary rainstorm in his life.

  ***

  Faye lay sprawled on a gurney being pushed into the emergency room of Micco County General Hospital. Joe was in the gurney next to hers. Emma, Sly, and Gerry had been wheeled in right behind them. Even Michael had a special little-boy gurney to get him into the hospital. Part of Faye thought it was dumb for the sheriff to insist that they all be thoroughly checked out, since they were all just fine, but the other part of her knew that their bodies were pumped so full of adrenaline that they had no idea whether they were fine or not.

  For example, she could see that her burned feet were all shades of red, black, and white. Some of the cuts on her soles looked pretty deep, but they were only now starting to hurt. Joe didn’t look like he was feeling the awful burn that slashed across his throat yet, but he would soon.

  Now somebody was spraying something wonderful on her feet, but she still didn’t want to be here. She wanted to go home. She wanted to see if she had a home left.

  Joe knew what she thinking. He always knew what she was thinking. The person who had just sprayed something wonderful on her feet was spraying it on his throat now, and she knew he had to be glad about that.

  Instead of enjoying the wonderfulness, he turned his green eyes on hers and said something so reasonable that she wanted to hate him for it. “There’s no point in going back out there tonight. It’s too dark. We need to make sure the fire’s really out before we go traipsing across the island, trying to see if the house is still standing.”

  Faye had found things to occupy her during that long night. Michael had needed tending. She and Joe had needed to get Amande on the phone and tell her they were okay, before somebody on the Internet sent her a picture of Joyeuse Island aflame. She had needed to keep an eye on the Internet herself, hoping that some enterprising reporter had flown a helicopter out there and taken some kind of fancy night-vision video that would tell her whether her home was still there.

  No luck. She was going to have to wait for sunup.

  ***

  The hour was early and the department boat was full. Sheriff Rainey had not argued when Sheriff Mike and his wife showed up, presuming there was room on the boat for them. It wasn’t strictly necessary for Emma and Gerry to be part of the expedition, but they had survived the inferno. They deserved to see what it had left behind. Sly was family, so there was no question that he was where he needed to be.

  When they left shore, Faye was seated between Joe and Magda, holding tight to both their hands. Emma sat with Sly, facing them. Rainey noticed that the man left a deferential inch of space between them, because that’s how gentlemen of his generation treated ladies, but Emma looked glad to have him next to her.

  No one said a word until they reached the dock. Even then, they were quiet, speaking only as they went about the business of moving from boat to dock. Faye took the lead. She walked perhaps three steps before breaking into a run. Long-legged Joe was able to keep up with her, but the rest of them held back. There was a sense that the couple might need some privacy when they saw what was at the other end of the path.

  ***

  Faye knew Joe was behind her, so she didn’t look back. She got the information she needed in little dribs and drabs. Even from the dock, she could see the white painted walls of the house, so she knew that it hadn’t burned to the ground. Running along the fire-blackened path, she could see green lawn in the front yard, so she knew that the fire hadn’t roared through and destroyed everything. But that didn’t mean that she wouldn’t get to the clearing and see a white painted shell surrounding a burnt-out heart. It didn’t mean that a burning tree hadn’t fallen onto the roof and taken it down to the ground.

  In one heartstopping moment, the line-of-sight between Faye and her home opened up before it should have. The undergrowth that should have blocked her view was burned away and the forest floor was littered with fallen trees. The remaining trees around Faye were sooty twenty, thirty, maybe forty feet in the air, but the house was unchanged.

  She stepped across a hard line that divided blackened grass from green grass. The fire, quenched by water from a cistern and from the sky, had been stopped here. The line ran roughly from north to south. Almost everything east of it was torched, but everything west of it was spared.

  This is where they had held the line with towels and shovels and an ax. This was where the fire had been when the rain came.

  Disbelieving, she turned to Joe. This time, he was the one running, urging her on.

  She ran headlong up the grand staircase to the front porch, her feet clad in boots borrowed from Magda. Papery ashes of tree leaves littered the old boards under her feet. When she crushed them, they didn’t so much crackle as whisper.

  The rocking chairs and porch swing were dusted in soot, but they were still there. The cavernous rooms of the main floor were empty of everything but smoke. The vintage wallpaper was darkened by it, but this was nothing that couldn’t be fixed with a bucket of soapy water and some time.

  She clattered down the sneak staircase into the basement that she and Joe had made into a comfortable home. This was her nest, and it was unchanged. She might have expected at least a little water damage on the floor, left behind when the Mantooth men and their ax loosed thousands of gallons of water. Nope. The people who had contoured the ground around the house all those years before Faye was born had known what they were doing. The water had all flowed outward, toward the fire it was fighting.

  The crib Michael had outgrown, the bed where Joe kept the sheet untucked so he could hang his big feet off the end, the family room and its groaning bookshelves—everything was where it was supposed to be. She had imagined everything charred and dead, and she had been wrong.

  “Let’s go look,” Joe said.

  Faye was confused, because she was looking. She was looking at everything she owned as if she’d never seen it before. She wanted to go into the kitchen and fondle her grandmother’s cast iron skillets. In the night, when she’d lived with the idea that her home was gone, she had hung on to the fact that no fire was going to destroy those skillets.

  “Let’s go up top and look at everything.” Joe gestured over his head, in the general direction of the cupola.

  So they did. They walked together up the reconstructed spiral staircase. It was still standing! They stood together on the landing while Joe fetched the tool that opened the cupola’s trap door and lowered the ladder. Here was a reminder of how close they had come to disaster.

  Joe had left the cupola’s windows open when he rushed out to meet Delia, so the fire had been able to leave its mark here. Every visible surface—floor, walls, and ceiling—was dotted with burnt spots where
cinders had blown in and tried to set their lives on fire.

  The rain had blown through the same windows, drowning those fires before they took hold. Only the scars, black and starlike, remained. Faye thought she would resist the urge to sand and stain and paint them away. She would never be the same after losing her baby girl, but she would find a way to be whole again. Maybe if she let her house keep its scars, they would remind her that it was possible to heal.

  Joe pulled her to him and she leaned against his side. Together, they looked out at their island.

  To the east, blackened ground, dotted with tenacious green trees, stretched out to the horizon. The burnt acreage covered way more than half the island. To the west, nothing had changed. Greenness covered everything. She could see the old tree shading Gerry’s environmental cleanup site, and she was glad it still stood. Surrounding it all, the Gulf of Mexico moved under the early morning sun as it always had and always would.

  “Fire’s good for the trees,” Joe said. “Longleaf pines like it. Cleans out the competition. Gives ’em space and sunlight. They’ll grow better now. They’ll take their time about it—we won’t live to see everything this fire does for ’em—but they’ll grow.”

  Faye wanted to bury her face in his chest, but she wanted to look at her reconfigured island more.

  “The fire uncovered a lot of new places for you to dig, Faye. You’ll probably be spending all the day out there, looking for stuff. I might never see you.”

  “You’re not really worried about that? You’ll see me. You’ll always see me.”

  When he didn’t answer her, she said what she knew he’d been waiting a month to hear. “Joe, I’m going to be okay. We’re going to be okay.”

  “When you talked to Amande last night, did you tell her about the baby?”

  She nodded.

  “What did she say?”

  “She cried. She wants to come home, so I bought a ticket and e-mailed it to her. Her plane lands late tomorrow. We need to be together. And I want her to have as much time as possible with her grandfather.”

  Faye felt a tightness in Joe’s back ease. He laughed and said, “The old man was pretty awesome last night, wasn’t he?”

  “Like father, like son.”

  Wrapping both arms around her husband, but keeping her face pointed at the miracle spread below them, Faye said, “He saved it. He saved the house. Without your dad and his ax, this house would have been gone before the rain came.”

  “We would’ve been okay. We would’ve had each other and the kids. Not the baby. Not Jessica. But the rest of us would have been together. I love this place, but it’s just a house.”

  Faye felt the tightness in her own neck ease. It had happened. She had heard the name they’d planned to give their daughter, and she hadn’t broken. She would never stop wishing that there was a Jessica Eagle Longchamp-Mantooth in the world, but she was going to be herself again.

  “Aren’t we enough to make you happy, Faye? Michael, Amande, me? Am I enough?”

  She pulled on his shoulders in the way she always did when she wanted him to lean way down and kiss her. “Always. You’re everything, Joe.”

  Chapter Thirty-six

  From her vantage point under the old oak tree on the far west end of Joyeuse Island, Faye could see no evidence of the fire. If she had looked up, she would have seen waves lapping at a weedy narrow beach, but she was too excited to look up. She was busy with her camera, because there was no such thing as taking too many pictures of an exciting find.

  Amande’s plane was landing in seven hours. Faye hadn’t been sure she would make it through those hours until she saw her daughter, so she had grabbed a trowel and set out to do the thing she did best—look for the past and the stories it tells.

  Faye had imagined herself in Cally’s shoes and, armed with all she’d learned, she had walked straight to the answer to so many questions. What was the source of the arsenic contamination? What was the story behind Courtney’s Monster Man? Most importantly, what had happened to Elias Croft?

  She had uncovered the Army-issue button first, nestled within a few shreds of a Union-blue uniform and of the sheet that had served the soldier as a shroud. This Yankee soldier had been buried with care, very near the tree that must have shaded the cabin of The Monster Man. She had a pretty good idea that the foundations of that cabin waited for her nearby.

  Soon after finding the button and the bits of fabric, Faye had uncovered a skull. She’d stopped digging then, and not just out of respect for the dead and the laws that protected them. She was digging in arsenic-tainted soil, so she had augmented her usual protective gloves with a dust mask to keep out contaminated dust, but this skull spoke of another danger. The misshapen bones around its nasal opening looked like a textbook example of the ravages of leprosy. She didn’t think bacteria could linger in the soil after all these years, but it wouldn’t hurt to speak to an expert before she excavated further.

  She had laid her trowel aside and snapped some photos to document the find, then she had stepped back to a distance that seemed both safe and respectful. Now she lingered, delaying the inevitable paperwork that came with uncovering human remains by taking just a few moments to commune with the body of Captain Elias Croft of the United States Army.

  ***

  Oscar Croft looked okay. Faye knew that Delia’s death had been a shock, but he didn’t look like a man who had suffered an emotional gut punch. Not that he looked especially happy, either. His lips were pressed together tightly, like a man determined to squelch any passing emotion that might show on his face, but he seemed to be holding up.

  When Faye told Sheriff Rainey that she suspected Delia of drugging Oscar, he had immediately sent paramedics to check on him. They had found the older man deeply sedated and brought him in to the hospital for observation. He’d been released that morning, and Sheriff Rainey had told her that the first thing he’d wanted to do was to talk to Faye and Joe.

  Oscar had given Faye a funny look when he first saw her and she wondered whether he remembered fondling her arm.

  As if reading her thoughts, he walked straight to her, stopping an appropriate distance away and saying, “I owe you an apology. I probably owe you a lot of apologies. Part of me wants to tell you that I haven’t been myself since Delia started drugging me. Another part of me isn’t so sure you’d like the man I was before she started drugging me, either. Maybe I don’t have to be that man anymore. In any case, I hope you can forgive me.”

  Perhaps the drugs Delia had fed Oscar had lowered the inhibitions of a man who was already known for appalling behavior. Faye couldn’t say, and it didn’t matter to her any longer, because Oscar was going home to Ohio. He’d come to say good-bye. Amande’s plane was landing soon, so the good-byes would have to be brief.

  Gerry Steinberg had come out to Joyeuse Island with Oscar for no reason Faye could discern, but she needed to thank him some more for helping save her home, so she was glad he was there. As Oscar settled himself, setting a tissue-wrapped package on the couch beside him, Gerry caught Faye’s eye.

  “We found Tommy. He got as far as Louisiana in that big boat he stole from his customer. These charges are going to stick, and I still have hopes of getting some money out of him for environmental fines, too.”

  Faye was pampering her newfound emotional balance by pretending that there was no chance that she, too, was going to be saddled with an environmental bill, so she just smiled and nodded.

  “You found my great-great-grandfather,” Oscar said. “I don’t know how to thank you.”

  Faye handed him a photo, taken close enough to its subjects to show every worn letter on their metallic surfaces.

  Oscar held the photo close to his face. “A button from my great-great-grandfather’s uniform.” He looked up with tears in his eyes. “You found him.”

  He put on a pair of reading glasses and p
ulled a folded sheet of paper out of his pocket. “I printed out your e-mail. This kind of story belongs on paper. I’ll keep it with this picture of Elias’ buttons and buckle that you found for me.”

  “You can have them,” she said. “If I find any more of his personal effects, I’ll send them to you. As his nearest relative, you’re also entitled to choose his bones’ final resting place.”

  “Here,” he said without stopping to think. “Elias’ bones belong here, right where Cally Stanton laid them to rest.” Squinting at the message Faye had e-mailed him, he said, “It all fits together. Your explanation of our families’ stories. Everything fits. The timing of your great-great-grandmother’s story about Captain Croft visiting her home fits, because it happened just before Elias disappeared. The lesions on the skull you found confirm your theory that he had leprosy. The later story about him covering himself before going out in public during the yellow fever epidemic works, too, when you think about how a man with leprosy might have looked by that time. If he knew he had leprosy before the Civil War was over, he would have been pretty sick by 1888. And Cally even mentioned chaulmoogra oil…that’s the most convincing evidence of all.”

  “Well, there’s the kerosene tank and the arsenic contamination,” said Gerry.

  “You’re right, Detective,” Oscar said. “The kerosene tank and the arsenic contamination are important clues. If Cally Stanton helped Elias while he battled leprosy, putting a roof over his head and making sure he had food and medicine, he would have needed kerosene for fuel. And if he bathed in arsenic-based medicines for the rest of his life, the arsenic would have had years to soak into the ground. You’re the scientist, Detective. You’re telling me that your lab would still be able to see that arsenic after all this time?”

  Gerry nodded.

  “May I see your great-great-grandmother’s memoirs, Faye?” Oscar asked.

  Joe fetched copies of the mimeographed sheets from their bedroom. Faye paged through them, showing him Cally’s memories of the yellow fever epidemic and the day Elias Croft tipped his hat to her.