The sheriff had lived in Micco County all his life. One of the great benefits of a job like his was that he was personally acquainted with a decent fraction of the people he served. This meant, of course, that when he dealt with death on the job, it was a reasonable bet that he knew the dead person. The sheriff had known Captain Eubank to be argumentative, opinionated, and completely likable. He would miss him.
It seemed like a cruel twist of fate for a man to up and drown after spending every afternoon on the water for literally decades. How could such a thing happen?
Sheriff Rainey sometimes thought that this marina was cursed. A woman named Wilma had owned it before Manny, but she’d let the place go. When you let a waterfront property go, it goes to rust and rot. And then the customers find someplace that isn’t rusty and rotten to do business. Exit Wilma.
But Wilma’s failure wasn’t the worst thing to happen here. The two previous owners, Liz and Wally, had both died violently. He’d be inclined to say that this third death proved that the marina was cursed, if the captain had died at the marina, too.
Where did he die? Who knew? But just for the sake of jurisdiction, he was going to say that the captain died within Florida’s seaward boundaries. Nine nautical miles was a long way, so he was on pretty solid ground claiming the case as his own.
Sheriff Rainey’s best guess was that the captain had indeed died within those boundaries. He’d probably floated in from someplace well offshore, toward the barrier islands or beyond, or else somebody would have found his boat. It made no sense to think that he’d died right here at the marina, like Liz and Wally. It seemed to him that Faye, Joe, and Amande might want to know this.
Now that he had something constructive to say to the people on the other side of the door, he was able overcome inertia and push himself through it.
He was talking before he sat. “I don’t want you people to think that this is like what happened to Liz or to Wally. They got murdered. I honestly don’t think that’s what happened to the captain.”
Faye, Joe, and Amande looked at him as if they were hoping that he would say something, anything, to make the situation less horrible.
He wasn’t sure he could do that, but he was going to try. “There’s some important differences to remember.”
He held up a hand and started counting those differences on his fingers. “First of all, Liz and Wally died right here, and I’ve got some reasons to think that Captain Eubank didn’t. And, second,” he said as he held up a second finger, “they had enemies. Liz was an innocent victim, but Wally earned his enemies the old-fashioned way. Can any of you think of any reason at all for somebody to want the captain dead?”
They all shook their heads.
“He had enough money to get by, but I don’t think he had the kind of money that people get killed over.” This brought him up to his third finger, but he knew his point here was weak. He moved on to his next point quickly, before the exceedingly logical Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth could arch a skeptical brow and remind him that people sometimes got killed for their pocket change.
“Fourth, suicide is a possibility that we can’t ignore. I can’t imagine him doing that, although we will certainly interview people who knew him better than I did. I’ll start with you folks. Have you ever known him to be suicidal or depressed?”
Amande’s curls bounced and her parents’ straight hair swung as all three shook their heads.
Moving on to his fifth finger, which most people would call a thumb, he drove home his point, which was This was a terrible accident, and you nice people shouldn’t feel guilty. “Fifth, I don’t think this happened because he was doing something illegal and got tangled up with the wrong people, like Wally did. The captain just didn’t care that much about money and material things, not as long as he had enough to buy books and bait. What else would he have committed a crime for? Can any of you imagine him stealing anything or…I dunno…selling drugs?”
Everybody laughed at the idea, and that lightened the moment.
“You don’t think he maybe got crosswise with somebody who was running drugs?” Joe asked. “Maybe he saw them doing something illegal and they were afraid he’d turn them in.”
“Could be, but to tell you the truth, the worst crime we’ve got happening lately is onshore. Every two-bit criminal around is thinking, ‘Hey! Nobody’s minding the store and it’s half blown down.’”
When they all laughed again, he followed up with, “Please know that I’m spending my whole year’s overtime budget on keeping my people out and about. Keeping ’em visible. The criminals will be crawling back under their rocks any minute now.”
Faye said, “That’s good,” in a weak voice.
“Look. It’s not out of the question that he got crosswise with some of the same two-bit crooks that are making my life miserable, but I’ll say this much. If somebody killed him, they sure were careful not to leave a mark on him.”
The sheriff could feel their eyes on his face, so he went ahead and laid out exactly what he thought had happened. “Based on the condition of the captain’s body, I think he probably washed in from somewhere farther out. The marina was just unlucky enough to be the place where it happened. For one thing, there were no drag marks on his hands and feet, like there would have been if he’d spent much time floating in shallow water. That’s what makes me think that this young lady found him almost as soon as he got here.”
It was hard to watch their faces as they thought about the things that happened to a human body floating in shallow water with a rough sand bottom, filled with sea creatures looking for a place to feed.
“I promise you people that we’ll investigate as closely as we would any unexplained death—we’re doing that now, actually—but I truly believe that this was just a tragic accident and that it happened somewhere offshore.”
“You do?” Amande said. “I keep picturing him drowning…dying…right here in a place where people love him. And none of us were here to save him.”
The quaver in the teenaged girl’s voice cut Sheriff Rainey’s heart. He spoke directly to Amande. “It makes no sense for him to be diving right here. All those boats coming in and out of the marina keep the water too stirred up for a diver to see anything. If the captain left on his boat alone, like he always did, then he was away from shore. There’s no reason on this Earth to think that anybody was nearby who could have helped him.”
He heard Faye try not to sob. Oh, hell. He’d reminded her of her belief that the drowning had happened at Joyeuse Island and that it was her fault. This was not what he had been trying to say. He kept talking, trying not to keep blundering into statements that would make these good people cry.
The girl nodded slowly, so she wasn’t hysterical. She was capable of following a logical train of thought. Her mother wasn’t out-and-out weeping. Her father was holding it together. These things were good.
“Like I said,” he emphasized, “there was no sign of a struggle. No injuries at all. You saw it for yourself. His wetsuit stopped at his knees and he wasn’t wearing gloves, so there was a lot of skin exposed. You would have seen it if he’d been banged up like he’d been attacked—by a person or by a shark or whatever. Even if he just got tangled up in something and ran out of air, you’d still expect to see scrapes or bruises on somebody who had fought for his life.”
He could see Faye working to get hold of herself, so that she could put on the calm, logical face that she wore like some people wore makeup. It was important to her that she didn’t fall apart in front of her daughter.
“But you said you’re going to do an autopsy,” Faye said.
“Certainly. If somebody did kill that man, then I will be damned if they get away with it. And you should know that I’ve made sure that the person doing the autopsy has been trained to do them on people who died diving. That’s a specialty. Here in Florida, we see more diving deaths than anybody
wants to see, so we have people who know how to handle those cases right. Honestly, though, my guess is that the captain just made a mistake. Maybe he pushed his luck too hard or maybe his equipment failed. Once that happens, people tend to panic, and then things don’t go well.”
“Could it have been something like a stroke or a heart attack?” asked the daughter. “Something that could’ve kept him under the water until all his air was gone?”
He’d heard that Amande was raised by a grandmother who had died right before she came to live with Faye and Joe. He guessed that a kid who had lived her life with someone that old would be a lot more aware of cardiovascular disease than most teenagers.
“The autopsy should answer that question. Don’t you worry, Amande.”
And now he was treading on the line of dishonesty, a line that he made it a point to never cross. He knew something that these people didn’t, which was that autopsies on drowning victims were tricky. Those who didn’t spend their time looking at dead people’s internal organs would be justified in thinking that confirming a drowning death would be a slam-dunk. There was in fact a classic lung presentation—“boggy, voluminous, and crepitant” were the insider’s terms for it—but time and decomposition could complicate things.
Still, the captain hadn’t been in the water too terribly long. Sheriff Rainey had every hope that he wasn’t lying to this young woman.
“I can’t believe he’s gone.” Joe had been silent most of the morning. It was as if he’d been saving up his grief for this moment. “Everybody liked the captain. Everybody. He was always smiling, always kind. It must have been an accident. Or, like you say, he got sick while he was in the water and couldn’t save himself from drowning. There just isn’t any reason for somebody to kill him.”
“Baker and her technician will be going to his house soon. If he left a suicide note, we may know today. They’ll look for signs of a break-in and things like that, even though the captain’s house was long on books and short on the kinds of things thieves usually steal.”
They all nodded half-heartedly, then Joe spoke up again.
“I guess I’m confused about why his body…well…why was it floating? He was wearing that heavy air tank, and I guess he was wearing a weight belt. When he drowned, it seems like his body woulda just sunk to the bottom and stayed there.”
This was a question that the sheriff was prepared to answer. Training in how to investigate diving deaths came with the territory for the sheriff of a coastal Florida county. He skipped right over a major part of the answer, which was that bodies tended to sink at first, but that decomposition gases would eventually float them back to the surface. Amande did not need to hear this.
Instead, he focused on a factor that was less upsetting, the captain’s diving equipment. “None of you scuba dive, right?”
They all shook their heads, and Faye said, “We snorkel all the time, but none of us has taken the time to get certified for scuba.”
“Me neither,” he said, “but I do have training in investigating scuba deaths. First of all, I can tell you that a lot of diving fatalities stem from incorrect weighting. Sometimes, a diver’s carrying too much weight, which is something you’d expect to cause problems, but too little weight can be deadly, too.”
“Will you be able to tell if he was carrying the right amount of weight?” Amande asked.
Bless her heart, she was trying to be as analytical as her mother, and she was doing a damn fine job.
“In this case, we can’t even try to judge. He wasn’t wearing his weight belt when you found him.”
He saw the same look on all of their faces, and it said, That can’t be right.
He hurried to reassure them. “He probably ditched his weights when he got in trouble. This didn’t save him, but it was a logical move. And he was wearing a buoyancy compensator that he set when he was wearing the weight belt, so that would affect where his body hung in the water. Those things go a long way to explain why he was floating near the surface when you found him.”
There was no way he was going to talk to these people about the buoyancy of a body’s decomposition gases, so he stopped talking. He may already have given them too much information. The horror on their faces was obvious. He kept talking, trying to distract them.
“Nobody is sure how much diving experience he had. The overwhelming possibility is that he just made a rookie’s mistake. Or something happened with his health and he wasn’t physically able to save himself.”
Not that the sheriff was as convinced as everybody else was that Captain Eubank was a diving rookie. More likely, over the course of a long lifetime spent in proximity to the Gulf, he’d done more diving than anybody thought, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t made a mistake. The captain was getting older. Maybe his reflexes and judgment weren’t what they used to be.
“So what happens now?” Joe asked.
“I’ll get a report soon from the walk-through of his house.”
“And the autopsy. You may still get information from that.”
“Yes, and we’ve contracted with somebody to check out his gear.” They were still looking at him expectantly, so he kept talking longer than he probably should have. “Here’s what I think. I think he got excited because he thought he’d found a treasure ship. He got in his boat, put on some diving gear that he hadn’t used in years, jumped in the water, and got in some trouble that he couldn’t get himself out of. It’s the simplest explanation, and it fits all the facts that we know.”
Faye sniffled, and the sheriff knew what she was thinking. She was pretty sure she knew where the captain had died, and she was pretty sure that she herself was responsible. She was going to torture herself this way unless he managed to clap a pair of cuffs on someone she could point to as the person who had killed her friend.
* * *
As the sheriff walked down Manny’s stairs, his mind kept straying to the submarine spring Faye kept talking about, the one nobody had ever seen. Well, maybe Captain Eubank had found it, or one like it. The sheriff had heard fishermen talk about tremendous craters—caves, really—in the seabed where fresh water flooded out of the earth. They’d never shown him one, though, because fish were said to adore those craters. People who loved to fish didn’t share their favorite spots with just anybody.
If the captain had found a cave out in the wide-open Gulf, anything could have happened to him. Divers loved to explore caves, and cave diving was an exceedingly dangerous hobby. More than that, Faye herself had said that archaeologists often found things like arrowheads and stone knives in spring vents. Mammoth and mastodon bones, even.
It was so easy to imagine Captain Eubank following one fascinating find after another, like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs, until he was deep in a submerged cave with no idea of how to get out.
The more the sheriff thought about it, the more he favored that theory.
Chapter Twelve
Faye said, “Let’s go talk to Manny,” and Joe thought maybe he should check her pulse. Most of the time, Faye acted like Manny was her mortal enemy. Joe thought that this was dumb, but even a smart person like Faye was entitled to act dumb sometimes.
“Why?” Joe asked. “So we can get Michael back?”
“I need to ask him whether the captain was a diver.”
They trooped downstairs from Manny’s apartment and went into the bar and grill. He was standing in his usual spot, handing off his spatula to the day cook. Michael was perched on a bar stool in front of him, chowing down on bacon-studded pancakes with his face covered in maple syrup. Her son’s brown-green eyes were half-shut and dreamy, as if he were rethinking his affection for sugary breakfast cereal because he’d found something way better.
“So, Manny,” Joe heard his wife say, in the friendly tone of someone with a regular habit of making pleasant conversation with her daughter’s friend-whom-she-did-not-like. “The
captain came in here a lot, right?”
“Sure thing.”
“Have you ever heard the captain say anything about going scuba diving?”
“Nope. I’ve only been in town a few months, but I know the local divers well. I sell them equipment. I fill their scuba tanks. Stuff like that.” He paused, as if reconsidering. “Well, Cody fills their tanks sometimes. He runs the dive shop for me when I need to be doing something else, like flipping pancakes or keeping happy hour happy. The rest of the time I take care of the shop while he works for himself, running a boat repair business out of space I rent him in the barn. I’ll ask him if the captain’s done any business with him in the dive shop, but I doubt it. I arrange my schedule so I can be in the store during high-traffic times, and I never once saw Captain Eubank buy anything diving-related.”
“You sell bait and groceries out of the same store, right?” Joe asked, because it was sometimes dangerous to let Faye do all the talking.
“Yep. Out of the same register. The only way this business can stay afloat is if the owner does as much of the work as humanly possible.”
“That’s how Liz and Wally did it,” Joe said. “God rest their souls.”
“Wilma? Not so much,” Faye said. “And it showed.”
“That’s how I got this place so cheap. And it’s why I’m close to working myself to death, cleaning up her mess. So, yeah, I know the divers. I sell ’em ham sandwiches to eat while they’re out on the water. Sell ’em beers when they get back. While I’m doing all that, we shoot the breeze and I pretend like I’m as laid back as they are. Like I said, I know ’em and the captain wasn’t one of ’em.”
He paused and smiled. “I liked that man. Good Lord, he could talk. I think he saved it up all day, living by himself. Mostly, he talked about fishing. I sold him live bait, snacks, stuff like that. He loved his beef jerky and his root beer.”
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