“I think I’ve figured that out. Maybe my mother remembered the island from when her mother took her there when she was a little girl. When she was older, maybe my age, maybe she took Grandmère out there. Then, later, Grandmère took me. It was the perfect place for a picnic. Some trees big enough to give shade. Really good fishing. And the shack didn’t seem like a shack, really. It was old, with interesting woodwork and peeling wallpaper and a cute little kitchen. It was like a dollhouse. That’s what it was, a dollhouse. I loved it.”
She rolled the map up into a tube and gave it a tender little pat. “A few years ago, Grandmère stopped hoping my mother would come back. I think she never wanted to go back to the island, because it reminded her of my mother when she was a girl. There were too many memories there.”
She unrolled the map again and looked it over, as if she couldn’t bear being separated from her very own piece of the world. “My grandmother doesn’t forget much. I’ve never believed she didn’t remember that picnic we took.”
Faye found that she was talking like an adult again, and she hated herself for it yet again. “If your grandmother doesn’t want you to go out there, we just can’t take you, Amande.”
The girl grabbed for one of Faye’s hands with both of hers. “Please. You can’t possibly understand this, but I’ve never had a piece of ground that was mine. Not even a rented piece of ground. Look at my home.” The houseboat rocked slightly beneath their feet. “I can’t go out in my backyard when I’m mad at Grandmère, ‘cause I don’t have one. I have to go sit at that picnic table that belongs to the marina, and I can only do that if nobody’s using it. And then I have to hope that none of the drunks from the bar decide to come blow their tobacco-y beer breath in my direction. That island’s mine….partly mine…and I want to see it. I’ve just got to have a boat of my own again, so I can go there when I need to be away from people.”
That last sentence rattled around in Faye’s head. There were many reasons why she kept her impractical island home, and the need to escape from human weirdness was one of them.
“Here’s the deal,” Amande said. “I know you need to work. If I understand your project right, maybe you need to go check out this island where I found some very old Spanish silver. Maybe there was a pirate lair there. Maybe there was a shipwreck nearby. Maybe it used to be a big island and there was a trading post there or a plantation or even a little town. You won’t know if you don’t go check.” The golden brown eyes narrowed. “And you can’t go check without the property owner’s permission. You need to see my island. And you want to see my island. To get my permission, you have to take me along.”
Faye questioned whether Amande had the clout she thought she did. Most of the island actually belonged to Steve, but Faye was willing to overlook that little detail. She actually did need to go to Grand Terre, which was in its general direction. Grand Terre was the site of Jean Lafitte’s pirate lair and it was right in the path of the coming slick, so she needed to get there fast before the oil did.
Amande’s island might take the brunt of that slick as well, but Faye didn’t feel like being the one to tell her. She was starting to warm up to the idea of taking the girl out there. If she and Joe were lucky enough to find evidence of human activity as old as that coin, then it would be nice to have someone with them who had seen the island before it was reconfigured by Katrina.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll talk to your grandmother. If she gives her permission, you can go.”
Amande’s eyes positively glittered as she placed her final chip on the table. “Tell her you need a babysitter, or you won’t be able to finish your work. I’ll work for free if you take me to my island, but don’t tell my grandmother that. If she thinks I’m pulling in a paycheck, she’ll let you take me to Cuba, as long as you get me home by dinner.”
Flushed with victory, she said good-bye and turned to go back into the houseboat. Tebo’s voice floated out an open window. He was making his opening move on his mother’s estate, despite the fact that she wasn’t even dead yet.
Faye heard him say to Reuss, in a man-to-man kind of voice, “Surely my mother owned something when she married Landreneau. It’s not like she was a deadbeat welfare queen. Won’t all of that pass to me when she dies, now that my brother Hebert’s dead?”
Faye was so interested in Reuss’ response that she put a hand on Amande’s arm to keep her from opening the door and interrupting Tebo’s gambit.
Reuss was silent for an instant longer than necessary, which gave Tebo time to correct his insensitivity toward his dead brother by adding, “Hebert…God rest his soul.”
Reuss showed how well he knew his client Miranda by asking Tebo a few rapid-fire questions.
“Your father died when you and your brother were both still living at home?”
“Correct.”
“Did you work and contribute to the household when you were a strapping sixteen-year-old and your little mother was supporting two boys who ate a whole lot?”
“Um…no.”
“Did your brother?”
“Oh, hell, no. He never worked a steady job in his life.”
“I didn’t think so. Did your mother ever bail you out of jail? Or did she ever help you pay restitution on any of the several occasions you were on probation?”
“Well…hmmm…yes. I believe so.”
“Your brother?”
“If his probation got paid for, it must have been Mother that done it. I don’t know how else it would’ve happened.”
“Then why on earth would you think that your poor mother had one red cent when she married Mr. Landreneau, or that she ever accumulated any money afterward when she was continually bailing out her worthless sons? If you disagree with me, then I suggest you get your own attorney. I work for Mrs. Landreneau and her granddaughter.”
Reuss squared up the stack of papers in his hand yet again, then threw out a bit of advice that wasn’t strictly legal. “As my client’s advocate, I also suggest that you learn to show a little grief over your dead brother, even if you don’t feel any. My client has lost a son. If her surviving son was much of a man, he’d be looking for the man that killed his brother, instead of looking for a way to get hold of some money or property that he didn’t earn and that isn’t his.”
Faye was trying hard not to laugh, but she thought she might just choke. She waited until Amande went inside, then she caught Joe’s eye. He’d obviously heard everything she had.
“Until this minute, I thought that man was the poorest excuse for a lawyer I ever saw,” she said. “It’s entirely possible I was wrong.”
Joe threw Michael over one shoulder and the boy squealed. “It finally happened,” he said. “Faye was wrong. When we’re old and I tell our grandchildren the story of this moment, it’ll start with, ‘We were in Louisiana and it was a Thursday.’”
Faye punched him on the arm.
Joe leaned down and kissed the top of her head. “Don’t make me drop the baby.”
Chapter Twelve
The island was one of dozens. Hundreds. Thousands. It all depended on how you counted them, and on whether you had a healthy imagination. At what point did a tiny patch of marsh grass achieve the stature necessary to deem it an “island?”
When Faye spread a map out beside her, she could see the vast Mississippi delta, speckled by land and splashed by water. It was a good thing she had a GPS and the coordinates of Amande’s island, or they’d be picking their way through this watery maze forever.
“There it is! I see it! There it is!”
Out in open water, well away from the grassy marshland, a spot of land poked up. It was far more deserving of the word “island” than the blobs of mud they’d seen so far, but it didn’t remotely resemble Faye’s own island. Joyeuse had supported plantation agriculture and a hundred inhabitants in its
heyday. This island sported a thicket of scrubby trees and a shack covered with peeling paint.
If Faye had turned her back on the island and looked only at Amande’s face, she would have thought the boat was headed for Shangri-La.
“It’s just like I remember,” the girl said, hopping overboard to help Joe as he raised the motor and dragged the boat onto the sand. “See! There’s even a beach.”
And there were a few square yards of exposed sand in front of the house. Even Faye wasn’t scrooge-ish enough to criticize Amande’s sand for being less sugary-white than Pensacola’s. Faye’s own beach wasn’t big and it wasn’t tourist-worthy, but she’d spent many pleasant hours there.
Amande stood in the open front door of the fishing shack. “The roof’s still on!” she cried, like a realtor pointing out the finer selling points of a suburban ranch home. “It’s not leaking in the kitchen much at all. Come see!”
But Faye didn’t budge. She’d found an eroded spot of soil near the copse of trees at the center of the island. The trees’ roots held the sand around them in place, but rainwater and wind was carrying other soil to sea quickly. Faye’s experienced eyes saw bits of weathered wood protruding from the newly exposed soil.
“Joe!”
A two-headed beast appeared. The top head, Michael’s, looked completely ecstatic to be seated in a backpack that made him even taller than his daddy.
Faye pointed at the splintered wood in the sand. Joe squatted, keeping Michael carefully balanced.
“Don’t you think I need some gloves and a little aluminum foil?” she asked.
“And some tweezers. I’ll get them.”
Fortunately, Joe kept such necessities around whenever they were working. There was no knowing when they’d need to collect a sample for carbon dating. She’d have the supplies she needed in the time it took Joe to lope to the boat and back.
If this wood turned out to be old, and if the site turned out to be significant enough to be included in her report, then Amande would never let her hear the end of it.
Amande poked her head around a tree. “I see you found the spot where I uncovered one of the coins. You found something else interesting, too, didn’t you? Didn’t you???”
Faye couldn’t hide her grin.
Amande crossed her arms and leaned her head, capped with a fuchsia hat, back against the tree’s trunk. “I told you so.”
***
Faye had bagged the side trip to Grand Terre. She’d spent too much time canvassing Amande’s pitiful little island for more old stuff. She hadn’t found much—mostly soda and beer cans from the past three decades—but the wood fragments that she’d collected had the look of age.
All the way back to the marina, Amande had fed Michael crackers and jostled him on her lap and lifted up his hat to rumple his hair and just generally distracted him from the fact that his life jacket made him sweaty and miserable. She also reapplied his sunscreen at least three times. The girl was certainly earning the salary Faye wasn’t paying her.
“God, I miss my boat,” she was saying for the tenth time.
Like Faye, Amande had piddled around in boats for as long as she could remember. Looking at Michael in his teensy life jacket, Faye knew that she planned for him to have that same freedom to explore the watery world. She was also pretty sure she was never going to be able to let the child out of her sight. Not even when he was forty. She had no idea how she was going to reconcile those two things.
“Grandmère used to keep me supplied with fuel and bait, as long as I kept the freezer full of fish. That wasn’t so easy, back when I had to go to school every day. Now that I can do my schoolwork when I damn well please—”
She checked to see whether Joe or Faye was going to bark at her for cursing. Neither did.
“—now that I’m homeschooling, I could go out at dawn every day of the week. That’s when you’re supposed to fish. I don’t know why Grandmère got so weird on me all of a sudden. I mean…she took my boat. And she sold it.”
Amande sank into a funk for a moment, but Michael kept poking his fingers in her mouth until she gave up pouting.
“I guess I was spending a lot on gas, but she should’ve said something. I could’ve gotten a job. Or I could’ve saved gas by going out a little less. I really think she just didn’t want me to go anywhere. Her kids are all gone, and they don’t pay her any attention, none of them. When I leave, she’ll be really lonely. But I have to go. I can’t live on that houseboat and make dolls for the rest of my life. Can I?”
Amande had been boatless now for three months, with no end in sight. Faye foresaw an adolescent rebellion on the horizon. More than that. An adolescent explosion. Maybe getting her off the houseboat for the day had delayed that explosion for a while.
Once at the marina, Amande helped Faye and Joe unload the boat. Faye enjoyed watching the way Amande kept casting sidewise glances at the handsome young blond expertly piloting a boat loaded with scuba gear into its slip for the night. Further away, Faye saw Steve Daigle fueling the strangest looking boat she’d ever laid eyes on. Actually, the boat itself was nothing more than a johnboat painted in the dappled tans and greens of a duck hunter’s camouflage, but the motor wasn’t like anything she’d ever seen. A shaft as long as Faye extended diagonally from it, meaning that the propeller was several feet behind the boat’s stern.
Joe saw where she was looking. “It’s made for shallow water—really shallow water with a muddy bottom. That means it has to be air-cooled. If it was water-cooled like other motors, it’d be sucking mud all the time, which ain’t good for moving metal parts. You can run it in an inch of water, if the bottom’s soft, but it’ll tear that bottom right up. I don’t think that’s good for the fish, personally. They hang out down there, and they gotta lay their eggs someplace.”
Faye took this to mean that Joe wasn’t going to be wanting to trade the perfectly serviceable motor on his johnboat for a fish-egg-destroying beast like Steve’s. She was glad, because she thought it was ugly, and she was enough of a girl to want her boats to be sleek and pretty.
Michael toddled along between Faye and Amande all the way back to the cabin, while Joe stayed at the marina to talk to Manny about renewing the rental for another week.
“I’d better check in with Grandmère. It’s almost dark. Thank you so much for taking me out to my island.”
Faye’s hands were full and Michael was on the cabin floor in full tantrum mode, so Faye just nodded and said, “Go. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
***
Later, Faye would try not to beat herself up for being slow to respond to Amande’s call. At the time, she’d been crooning tunelessly to Michael, who had finally gotten tired of screaming for no reason. Her ears were ringing from those screams. Those ears had been bombarded all day by boat noise and wind noise and water noise. And those ears were forty-one years old.
She would never know how many times Amande cried, “Faye! Faye, please come!” When she finally heard it, she snatched Michael off the floor and ran. Joe had been further away, but his ears were abnormally good. He was also a lot younger. He reached Amande on the deck of the houseboat a second before Faye did
“Grandmère wasn’t here when I got home. She’s always here. I checked the marina store, even though she hardly ever even goes that far. If I were old enough to buy her rum, she’d never have any reason to leave the boat at all. I’m the only one that ever goes over there. I shop for the groceries and everything else we need. She just doesn’t ever go anywhere.” As if to emphasize her grandmother’s ever-presence, she repeated herself. “She’s always here.”
Faye moved toward the door and Amande said, “I told you, she’s not there.”
A faint shake in her young voice, as lovely in its way as a trilling bird’s song, told Faye everything. The girl had marched, chin-up, through a childhood
that would have leveled most kids. She had only recently looked a corpse in the face with more composure than most adults could muster. And her mother was freshly dead. Amande was an extraordinary young woman. Her grandmother had to share some of the credit for that victory.
Miranda was remote. Truth told, Miranda was strange. Nevertheless, she had provided Amande with a home, when she wasn’t even the girl’s natural grandmother. She had scraped together the money to raise a child who didn’t appear to have ever gone hungry or been without shoes that fit. She had filled that most basic of parental roles: she was always there.
Until now.
Chapter Thirteen
It doesn’t take long to search a houseboat, and it doesn’t take two people. Three people and a toddler would have just tripped over each other, so Faye had left Joe on deck with Amande and Michael. She knew first-person how comforting Joe’s brand of silent caring could be.
Built for economy of space, rooms on a houseboat are small. Furniture is swapped out for built-in drawers that lock, so that their contents don’t spill out when seas are rough. Beds are bolted down, and the space underneath is filled with more drawers. There is no place to hide.
Faye took longer to search the boat than she needed, because she wanted so badly to find something that would reassure Amande. Maybe, somewhere, there was a note saying, “We needed tea and the marina was out. I’m walking to the grocery store.” Or maybe even, “Walking to the liquor store because the voodoo gods and I need some rum.”
Even if the note said something awful like, “Having chest pains. Called 911,” it would be better than this emptiness.
Few things were out of place. The drawers in Miranda’s room had been pushed closed yet not locked, which wasn’t expected behavior for someone who had lived aboard a boat for many years. Faye didn’t like their look.
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