Three minutes later, a creaking door dashed that hope.
“I need to put some WD-40 on that hinge.”
Faye reflected that Ross was incredibly sexy when he talked shop. She instantly forgave him for intruding on her quiet time.
“How are you really doing?” he asked, enfolding her in a long pair of arms. At five feet nothing and a hundred pounds, Faye was on the dainty side, but she could usually ignore that fact. Faye knew she was tough. She was fierce. She was large inside.
Usually, Faye felt that her physical size was beside the point, but not when she was in Ross’ arms. He made her feel tiny but precious, like a gemstone. Like a rare emerald.
His lips were warm against her jaw, her neck, her ear. “I’ve missed you every minute. I know it makes sense for me to be here for Miss Emma, but I want to be the one watching over you. I’ll have to go back to Atlanta soon, but I want you to come.”
“I can’t leave—”
“I understand that you can’t leave Miss Emma, not for a good long while. I know you, Faye. You’ll take care of her for as long as it takes, until she’s on her feet and ready to face her new life. But after that, I want you to come to Atlanta. Let me take care of you the way you take care of everybody else.”
Faye was an extraordinarily independent person, but she’d also nursed her mother and grandmother through terminal illnesses that had taken years to do their work. Since then, she’d let Joe cook for her and save her life occasionally but, other than that, she’d looked after herself in nearly every way for twenty years. A loud and insistent voice in her head told her that she was ready to hand the reins to someone else. Just for a little while.
If only she were sure that she could fit into Ross’ elegant social circle. If only Atlanta weren’t so far away. If only.
Ross’ kisses slowed and stopped. He rested his cheek on top of her head and just held her. She was glad. Grief left her too wounded for romance. But she was more than ready for love.
***
Faye and Joe were making a slow exit from Emma’s post-funeral party. The sheriff and Magda were packing Rachel’s diaper bag, and it was time to go. Faye just wished it were easier to say good-bye.
“Call me on my cell if you need me,” she told Emma again, hugging her as she talked. “I don’t live that far out in the Gulf. I can be here quick.”
“I wish you could stay longer, but I don’t like you on the water after dark. Go.” Emma made shooing motions with both hands.
Faye met Ross’ eyes with a long look, then she took the helping hand Joe offered and stepped down into her skiff. The comforting gulf waters cradled the boat and rocked Faye like a mother.
As the others walked back toward Emma’s house, Joe pushed the boat away from the dock, saying, “I saw you pushing food around on your plate. There was enough on the table to feed…well…me. And that’s a lot. But you didn’t eat a thing.” He flipped the choke off and pushed the throttle forward. “I bet you could eat if you weren’t in that house where Douglass looks back at you out of every wall. I think we should go see what Liz is cooking this evening.”
Faye wasn’t sure when Joe got so bossy. He took charge of the skiff—her own personal boat—and pointed it toward Liz’s Marina without even waiting for her opinion on the matter.
Fortunately, Joe turned out to be right. As soon as he mentioned the homey cooking dished up in Liz’s Bar and Grill, she knew there could be no better cure for a heavy heart. Liz’s earthy good humor would help just as much. Maybe nothing but time could fix the empty ache in her chest, but a plate of eggs-and-grits would fill her stomach very nicely. She and Joe tied up the skiff and followed their noses. Liz’s food was nothing if not fragrant.
As usual, the grill was full of fishermen, lushes, and ne’er-do-wells, all of them devoted fans of Liz’s cooking. Her son Chip was Liz’s busboy and sole full-time employee. The menial job was completely unsuitable for a man of his education and ability.
Chip had parlayed a high school football career into a scholarship to play community college ball. Knowing he wasn’t cut out for a senior college team—not in the football-obsessed South—he’d earned the grades necessary to transfer to a four-year school as a non-athlete. Liz had been so proud of his scholarly and impractical choice of a major: history.
It had nearly killed Liz when Chip dropped out a semester short of graduation. He’d floated aimlessly until she hired him to help her with the cooking, but even that simple job hadn’t worked out. Liz’s customers simply refused to eat biscuits formed by anyone else’s hands. Chip had been reduced to patting out hamburgers and busing tables.
Faye watched the smart, handsome young man as he dumped other people’s half-eaten food in a slop pail, wiping his hands on the bib of his apron now and then. He seemed like an amiable soul, making small talk with the restaurant’s patrons as he moved among them. His outgoing nature seemed genuine, too, not the forced friendliness of someone looking for a tip. Faye had a feeling that his sharp eyes missed nothing.
This situation couldn’t possibly last. Chip would find something else, because young men with his gifts tended to land on their feet. Maybe that would have happened sooner if he’d been a more take-charge kind of guy but, without a coach to chew his butt out for slacking, it looked to Faye like Chip was content to just drift through life. For Liz’s sake, Faye hoped Chip drifted back into college soon.
He picked up a dirty plate sitting on the bar, right next to Faye’s steaming hot food.
“Sorry about that. You shouldn’t have to sit next to somebody’s half-chewed food.”
“That’s okay. Your mother and her customers keep you pretty busy.” She shifted on the stool to get a good look at the young man. Intelligent hazel eyes were set into an affable face that featured full lips and broad cheekbones. Liz had good reasons for her poorly concealed pride. Actually, Faye didn’t think it ever occurred to Liz that she should conceal it.
“Business is good. There’s no sense in complaining about that.” He glanced around the room, and Faye could almost see the calculations spinning in his brain. She’d worked food service before, so she knew he, as the son of the proprietor, was figuring the evening’s likely gross income, based on his quick headcount of patrons. He could almost surely estimate his own income based on that number and on his personal knowledge of the regular customers tipping habits. The young man had grown up in this bar and grill, and Liz hadn’t raised a dummy. Faye knew this, because Liz had told her so on countless occasions.
Chip set down a tray loaded with salt, pepper, ketchup, and hot sauce—everything a girl eating a plateload of eggs could ever want. He gave her a smile that might not have been intended to trigger a healthy tip, but that most assuredly would cause Faye to dig deep into her wallet, and said “Enjoy your meal. Let me know if you need anything else.” Then he took his smile elsewhere and left Faye with her eggs and her memories of Douglass.
She rubbed the back of a hand across her teary eyes. Joe noticed—she knew he noticed—but he let her be, which was the right thing to do. On another occasion, she might wipe the same eyes with the same hand, and he would turn his head in her direction and get her to talk about what was bothering her, all without saying a word. And, on that occasion, this would also be the right thing to do. Faye didn’t know how Joe knew what she needed, but he always did.
Liz bent her ever-brilliant red head in Faye’s direction. “How’re you holding up?”
Faye heard herself whisper, “I can’t believe he’s gone.” She’d said the same sentence to herself, over and over, since she received Emma’s terrible call.
Liz, whose nurturing tactics tended to involve calories, put a heaping platter of buttered biscuits on the counter in front of Faye and Joe. Faye was astonished to find that plugging an emotional wound with food actually worked.
“Sheriff Mike will find out who did it, and he’ll make sure they pay.” Liz plunked a pitcher of cane syrup next to the bi
scuits, in case Faye and Joe found themselves short on carbohydrates.
Looking for something else, anything else, to talk about, Faye settled on a subject that wasn’t as painful to Liz as Douglass’ death was to Faye, but it was close.
“How’s Chip doing?”
“Look at him. Still strong. Still handsome. Still smart as a whip. Still busing tables.”
“You don’t have any idea why he came home?”
“Not a clue. His grades were fine. I was paying his tuition and dormitory fees, and he had a job that should’ve covered everything else, so I don’t think it was a money problem.”
Faye pondered. “Unless his money was going somewhere he doesn’t want to talk about.”
Liz pursed her lips and did some pondering of her own. “Yeah. Don’t you think for a minute that something like that hasn’t crossed my mind. I’ve tried to imagine all the worst things. Drugs. Alcohol, maybe. But he doesn’t act drunk or high, not ever. I hug him all the time, sniffing for liquor or cigarettes or pot. He drinks a little, but in this business, you learn to spot real drinking trouble fast. I know kids fool their parents all the time, but I try to be realistic. I just don’t see it.”
“Gambling.”
“Maybe. You can’t smell gambling debts. But if he’s in deep with a bookie, he sure ain’t come to me for money. If it got bad enough that he had to drop out of school, wouldn’t he act desperate? Wouldn’t he hit me up for a loan, or nag me to pay him more for his work? Or maybe even steal from me? I don’t get it.”
“No legal troubles?”
Sorrow pinched Liz’s brow and lips. Faye was so accustomed to her friend’s ever-affable zest for life that she wasn’t sure she’d know Liz if she saw her somewhere else, wearing that doleful face.
“He got himself arrested once, but it was a long time ago. He and his football buddies got themselves some fake IDs and they were a-strutting like roosters around some two-bit bar in Sopchoppy, crowing over their big victory. They looked a lot older than seventeen, so they would’ve got away with it if the quarterback hadn’t picked a fight with some of the regular customers. Chip wouldn’t ever have done something that stupid on his own, but he’ll follow somebody he looks up to. Why is that, I want to know? Men.”
“Sometimes I think that Y-chromosome is a birth defect. It sure makes men do some stupid things,” Faye said. “That’s why they named it ‘Why?’”
Joe, who had been studiously ignoring this conversation, cut a pair of eyes in her direction and grunted. Sometime in his GED preparation, he must have learned the purpose of a Y-chromosome and recognized her insult of the entire male gender for what it was.
Liz turned around to shove a tray of biscuits into the oven. She opened her mouth to resume talking about her favorite subject—her son—when that son turned and walked her way. Faye hid a smile, triggered by Liz’s obvious effort to stifle another outburst of maternal pride and concern.
Chip brushed by her, carrying a tray of dirty dishes. He used an elbow to give his mother a playful poke in the ribs as he passed, then he leaned over and kissed her on the top of the head. Liz beamed like an adolescent girl who has caught the attention of a handsome male English teacher.
Chip disappeared through the swinging door that led from the grill to the utility kitchen. Faye could hear the clank of glass on glass as he set the tray down next to the dishwasher. Liz hadn’t been smooth enough to manage a change of subject. Over the awkward silence, Faye could hear the sound of a refrigerator door opening and closing. Chip reappeared quickly, this time carrying a tray loaded with raw hamburger patties.
“You’re going to need these in a few minutes, Mom. Herbie and his friends are just now getting drunk enough to be hungry. I’ll be back in a minute to chop you some onions.”
Setting the tray down and squinting critically at the patties, Chip looked like an artist who was dissatisfied with his work. He picked up a lopsided burger and patted it back into shape, nodding as if to say that the patties now met his high standards. Wiping raw meat juice on his apron, he reached for an empty tray and carried it to yet another table that needed busing.
“He’s a good boy,” Liz said to no one in particular.
“Anyway.” She hunkered down and started whispering to Faye as if she’d just realized that she didn’t want Chip to overhear her. “He should’ve known that jumping into a bar fight was a dumb move. After all, he was brought up here in this bar.” She gestured at her own establishment and its seedy-looking customers. “He knows that drunken brawls don’t ever end well.”
“So they got him for underage drinking?”
“And assault. Punched the local tough guy’s lights out. He was a juvenile and it was a first offense, so they slapped him on the wrist. Hell. I smacked him harder than that when I heard what he did. Men shouldn’t be allowed to drink ‘til they’re forty.”
Faye observed that instituting this law wouldn’t put much of a dent in Liz’s mature clientele.
“But that happened years ago, before he even started college.” Liz sighed. “He and the law have gotten along just fine ever since.”
“Then it’s gotta be a woman,” Faye said. “I bet he got his heart broken.”
She squinted in Chip’s direction. He didn’t look lovelorn. Shaggy chestnut hair and a confident stance made him look more like a heartbreaker himself.
He was chatting with a group of Civil War re-enactors, still half-decked out in their military finery. One of them landed a punch on Chip’s upper arm, the kind of punch men give when they like you. Everybody was laughing as he took their dirty dishes. “Well, he’s never been such a big ladies’ man, but he usually has a serious girlfriend. Not now, but usually. When a relationship goes south, he just crashes and burns. I always have to pick him up and dust him off. Give him a lot of hugs. Tell him some stupid jokes. Make a few cookies…”
Faye stifled the urge to giggle at the image of Liz as a cookie-baking mom.
“Don’t you laugh. I make ’em. I eat more of ’em than I strictly should, but I make ’em.”
Liz waved her spatula in Faye’s general direction, so Faye tried not to keep giggling. She hadn’t giggled in a while. At times like this, women friends were good things to have.
“Since he always hits rock-bottom when some girl dumps him,” Liz went on. “I’ve kind of settled on woman trouble as the explanation for why he dropped out. Maybe he needs to take up with a smart, pretty archaeologist.”
Joe bristled. He was getting very good at that.
“Don’t look at me,” Faye said quickly. “What is Chip? Twenty-two? I’m old enough to be his…hip young aunt.”
Yeah, right. At thirty-eight, Faye was plenty old enough to have had a youthful indiscretion that resulted in a strapping young man like Chip. That thought called for another cup of coffee. Heavily laced with some of Joe’s bourbon.
Liz turned back to the griddle, wielding her spatula over an array of eggs being cooked every-which-way. Four of them, scrambled, were quickly dumped in front of Joe, before Liz bustled off to find someone else who needed feeding. Joe had done his share to help Emma get rid of all that surplus funeral food. Faye glanced sideways to peek at his flat, muscled abdomen. Where did he put all those calories?
Faye had cleared half her plate before she noticed the prickly feeling on the back of her neck. She turned and scanned the room. It was full of people who appeared…perfectly ordinary. They looked pretty much like Liz’s usual crowd—loud, jovial, and decked out in extremely casual clothing. In other words, they looked like pleasure boaters, fishermen, and hunters.
Given recent events, two of them might also be killers.
Faye slid her eyes to the left. Two…interesting-looking…young people sat at a table in the corner, and they’d sat there before. She knew their names—Wayland and Nita—and she knew that they were shrimpers and that Wayland, the last in a long family line of shrimpers, had inherited his boat from his father. The pla
in bands on their left hands told her that they were married. But that was about all she knew. They’d always seemed harmless enough, but now Faye found herself wondering. Were the lightning bolts and eagles tattooed on their arms Nazi symbols? Did their close-cropped hair make them skinheads?
Nita, in particular, was eye-catching. Few women with her striking good looks would choose to be nearly bald. The young couple cultivated a look that said they didn’t like the rest of the world much, although they wouldn’t mind if everybody looked at them. Were they the kind of losers who would be enraged by the sight of a wealthy black man?
Still furtive, Faye kept eyeballing the couple. Though Nita was of average height, with long and willowy limbs, Wayland was a short, stubby, wiry man, with prominent muscles on arms that showed not the first gram of fat. He had the wizened, sunburned face of a man who made his living on the water. He sure looked like a shrimper. But did he and Nita spend their evenings beating peaceful men to death?
And what about Chip’s good buddies, the big table of Civil War re-enactors in the corner? She recognized the biggest, loudest, happiest pseudo-captain as Herbie Canton, who had learned that he could endure his weekdays as an insurance salesman, just as long he could look forward to leading bloodless battles on Saturdays.
Faye had always had a soft spot for re-enactors, being a bit over-fascinated with history herself. She saw nothing wrong with a little harmless obsession in anyone’s life, and most re-enactors that she’d met didn’t seem like throwbacks who wished the good old days would come back, slavery and all. Heck, a lot of them had two uniforms, one blue and one gray, so that they could be as useful as possible in service of their make-pretend wars. But that didn’t mean there weren’t two devils lurking in this happy, collegial group.
Faye couldn’t sit still. She felt like everybody in the place was looking at her, which was stupid. Even if they’d heard about Douglass’ death on the news, they didn’t all know he was her friend. She doubted any of them had ever even laid eyes on him, though his house wasn’t far up the coastline. Douglass had been a little too upper-crust to hang around a joint like this.
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