Wrecked

by Mary Anna Evans

  The newspaper with Joe’s photo on the front page still sat where she and the captain had looked at it together. His green teacup, made with the clean art deco lines of the 1920s, sat across the worktable from her, right where he’d left it. It had belonged to the captain’s grandmother, and it had been his favorite.

  Faye could see him even now, sipping his tea and holding that newspaper. The image made her breath catch in her throat. She held the cup up to the light. Its porcelain was so thin and fine that the cup was translucent.

  The fact that the captain’s cup was still sitting here might mean that he had walked out to his car as soon as she left. It was possible that he had driven straight to the marina and gotten into his boat for the last time. If so, he could have drowned within an hour or two of seeing Faye. Or he might have sat in that chair, sipping tea and pondering the Philomela’s end for hours.

  This train of thought presumed that he left alone. She saw no signs of a struggle, and it seemed far-fetched to imagine that someone would burst in, forcing him into the car, onto his boat, and into the scuba gear that he would wear to his death, without leaving some sign. She supposed that a hurried departure could be explained equally well by the sudden arrival of some friends who said “Hey! Let’s go diving,” but this explanation turned quickly dark when she asked why those friends didn’t call for help when he drowned.

  As her memory of their time together grew clearer, she remembered the stack of Joe’s photographs that the captain had pulled from a drawer in the desk behind him. The idea came to her that she should take another look at those photos. It seemed so clearly the right thing to do that she set the cup down decisively, so hard that she reflexively checked it to see if it had broken. No, the fine porcelain was too tough for that.

  The pictures weren’t on the worktable where she thought he’d left them, so she checked the drawer. The photos weren’t there, either, and they weren’t in the kitchen or in his bedroom or in either of the bedrooms that he used as library annexes.

  Had he taken them with him on that last boat ride? That seemed out of character for a man with the instincts and habits of an archivist, but she couldn’t find them in any of the logical places where he might keep pictures.

  Taking printed photos out on the Gulf of Mexico in a small fishing boat was a guarantee that they’d be sprayed with saltwater. This thought reminded her that the captain’s boat hadn’t been found. She wondered if it ever would be. He had loved that boat. She didn’t like to think of it floating out into the Gulf or capsizing or sinking or running aground in a coastal swamp, taking another small remnant of her friend’s life with it.

  If the captain hadn’t taken the photos with him, there weren’t many ways to explain the fact that Faye couldn’t find them. One scenario supposed that someone had come to the house before the captain died, he let them in, and he gave them the photos. Or perhaps that person or persons took him and his photos against his will but took nothing else. Another scenario said that an intruder had entered the house after the captain left, taking the photos and nothing else.

  Faye knew for a fact that Greta had been in the house, so she was a prime candidate, but there was nothing to say that someone else hadn’t done it. It really wasn’t that hard to get into the captain’s house. Anybody could have known which Sir Walter Raleigh can hid the key.

  Was there anything else missing from the library, other than the photos? The room—the whole house, really—had always been so orderly that she couldn’t imagine anything out of place. Lieutenant Baker must have found searching this home to be quick work.

  But had she searched it, really? It didn’t look like anyone had done things like empty the drawers and move the furniture around, as they would have done if they’d been working a murder investigation or a drug bust. Because it wasn’t a murder investigation. She needed to remember that. Lieutenant Baker certainly wanted her to remember it.

  Lieutenant Baker and her crime scene investigator had checked to see whether the captain had left a suicide note or whether there was some other clear sign that something in his life wasn’t right, but that was all. And her tone during their recent phone call had left Faye no doubt about one thing. The lieutenant would not have gone a single step further than her assignment in investigating this case.

  Faye wasn’t even sure what a sign that the captain’s life wasn’t right would look like. Evidence of a break-in might do it, perhaps, or some sign that he was mentally ill, like hoarding or unsanitary living conditions. Lieutenant Baker hadn’t found those things, so she had moved on.

  In a way, Faye was grateful. She would have been so sad to see his library overturned and scrambled. There could have been no greater desecration of his memory. The captain had always sat patiently with each visitor to make sure that they got whatever they needed from his collection.

  The thought of his library visitors made Faye’s eyes turn involuntarily to the small table by the door where he had kept the sign-in sheet. He had maintained it faithfully, because he was proud that people used his collection and because those attendance records had helped him earn the grants that funded his historical work.

  The sign-in sheet was gone.

  Chapter Thirty

  Dr. Samantha Kennedy crept along the side of Captain Eubank’s house. She moved quickly, considering that her flimsy sandals weren’t made for creeping through piles of pine straw and dead leaves. She needed to make it around the side of the house and slip into the back yard before somebody drove by and saw her.

  And she must not be seen. Samantha was desperate for validation, for recognition, even for a job that met her minimal needs. To get those things, she needed those books, and she was more than willing to break a window, crawl through it, and take them.

  She passed the window where she’d taken the photos, the all-important photos that she’d used to pinpoint exactly where the critical books were stored. There was no need to turn her head and look into the room again, but human beings do many things reflexively. The contents of that room’s bookshelves were critically important to her, so she couldn’t help herself. She looked.

  There, her back to the window, sat a woman who had turned Samantha down for a job she desperately needed. She wanted to pick up a rock and throw it through the window at Dr. Faye Longchamp-Mantooth’s head.

  Instead, she dropped to all fours and backed quietly away from the window. There was no sense in trying to get to the books until the intruding Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth was gone.

  Samantha knew that she’d lost her chance at working for this woman because she was too cerebral and not outdoorsy enough. Or at least Faye Longchamp-Mantooth had judged that this was true. Now that she was moving on her hands and knees, rather than struggling with her inappropriate shoes, Samantha found that she was as agile as she needed to be.

  Maybe the opinionated Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth, who had made her thoughts clear by the way she eyed Samantha’s shell-pink nail polish, would have been more impressed if she could have seen how well she moved when the occasion required her to scrabble in the dirt. Maybe she would have understood that Samantha Kennedy was someone who could do whatever needed to be done.

  Samantha crawled through the azaleas, bush by bush. When the coast was clear, she escaped to the sidewalk, where she had as much of a right to be as anybody.

  If anybody had been paying Samantha any attention at all, they would have seen the brown stains on the knees of her beige pants and the green twigs in her auburn hair. But she wasn’t the kind of person who attracted attention, so they didn’t. She moved inexorably away from the house where Faye sat, but she would be back. Faye couldn’t sit there forever.

  Samantha faded into the distance, plotting her return.

  * * *

  Faye stared at the empty spot where the captain’s sign-in sheet should be. Who would have taken it? Probably somebody who didn’t want anybody to know that they’d sp
ent time here with the captain.

  Faye looked at the stack of books on the captain’s desk, all of them dealing with Samantha Kennedy’s research interests. Her name was almost certainly on that sign-in sheet. But so were the names of the people the captain had mentioned, the ones looking for the Philomela and other nearby shipwrecks. Amande’s name was on it, since she said she’d been here recently to do a school project. Faye’s was on the list, probably more than once, but she was certain that she hadn’t stolen it. Other than that, there was simply no way to know who took it and why.

  She slid her phone out of her pocket and dialed the sheriff directly. She was done with presuming that Lieutenant Baker considered this investigation to be worth her time.

  “Did your people take anything when they came to Captain Eubank’s house, Sheriff?”

  “No. They didn’t find anything out of the ordinary, so they left.”

  “And they haven’t been back since that first day?”

  His answer was quick and firm. “If we find something that indicates that the captain’s death wasn’t accidental, then we’ll do a complete search of the house. Until that time, I see no reason for my people to be plundering through a dead man’s things.”

  “Well, I’m at the captain’s house at the moment, but I’m not plundering through his things. At least not much.”

  Faye could hear some testiness in the way he dragged in a breath and blew it out. “And you’re there why? Do I need to come arrest you for breaking and entering? And are you touching anything? Stop touching things.”

  Faye jerked her hands away from the captain’s beautiful books and stuffed them in her pockets. Then she remembered the timing of her last visit and said, “This house was already full of fingerprints I left behind just a couple of days ago. I’m here because his sister asked me to check on things. I have her permission, and I have a key, so I don’t think this qualifies as breaking and entering. Is it unusual for a friend to help the family out when somebody dies suddenly?”

  “No, but I don’t usually get calls from people standing alone in a deserted house that ain’t theirs. So why did you want to know if my people had been there?”

  She noticed that he didn’t ask why she was calling him instead of Lieutenant Baker. He had to know that she and Baker did not see eye-to-eye on the captain’s death. Baker had probably told him exactly how annoying Faye was.

  “I called because there are some things missing—a stack of photos and the sign-in sheet that kept track of his visitors.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I saw them here the afternoon before Amande found his body, so yeah. I’m sure. If his last day was as simple as it should have been—he drove to the marina, got on his boat, and never came home—then everything in the house should be pretty much like it was when I last saw it. And it is, except for what I just told you.”

  “Some pictures and a piece of paper? What did the pictures show?”

  “They were aerial views of the area damaged by the hurricane. Joe took them right after the storm passed. You saw one of the same batch. It was on the front page of the newspaper.”

  “Well, if it was in the newspaper, it ain’t much of a secret. Could be that one of the other pictures showed something that the thief didn’t want people to see, though. You got any idea who would want those things?’”

  “The pictures? I don’t know. But maybe somebody’s name was on the sign-in sheet and they didn’t want anybody to know they’d been here.”

  The sheriff’s wordless grunt said, I can’t argue with that logic. “Was it a notepad? Did they take the top sheet and leave behind a sheet with impressions of the signatures made by the pencil point?”

  “That would be handy, but no. It was a clipboard and the whole thing is gone.”

  “Well, damn.”

  Faye’s eyes raked over the gilt-embossed spines of the captain’s books. “We’ve been overlooking one motive for murder.”

  “I’m so glad I have you to tell me about my mistakes.”

  “No, this one’s on me. I’m the one who spends a lot of time working with rare books. Any of the books in this room could be worth real money, and it could be shelved next to a worthless book that looks just like it. There’s no way to tell just by looking. The leather-bound ones with gold lettering could be worthless. The ratty-looking ones with worn-out cloth bindings could be priceless.”

  “You think somebody wants to sell off his collection? Maybe they’ve already started. Can you tell if any of ’em are missing?”

  “There can’t be many books gone, because it would be obvious. The captain kept his shelves exactly full. No big gaps. Certainly no overcrowding, because that totally messes up a book’s spine. If a thief has been here, it was somebody who knew what to look for. And it was somebody who knew how to cover their tracks by sliding a few books off their shelves but no more.”

  “Could you do that? And, no, I’m not accusing you. I just want to get a mental picture of who might be able to pull off something like that.”

  Faye shook her head as if he could see her. “No. Well, I could take a few books and make it look like I didn’t. But I don’t know his collection well enough to know which ones are valuable.”

  “What would it take for you to figure out which ones were worth a lot of money?”

  “I’d need access to the captain’s card catalog—and I do literally mean a card catalog. He maintained a physical catalog, so there would have been no way to access the information from anywhere but here. I’d still need an internet connection to check the prices of individual books, one at a time, and I’d need plenty of time spent right here in this room to check on their condition. Not to mention the other rooms where he kept his maps and such. It would take for-frickin’-ever, but it could be done.”

  She looked around the room and wished she had the time to give the captain’s collection a good going-over.

  “Maybe that’s why somebody stole the visitor log,” the sheriff said. “If they hadn’t, it would have told us that somebody’s been spending a lot of time in the captain’s library. And the captain would certainly know who’s been there. If any books went missing before he died, he might have been suspicious. Maybe he even confronted the person. That wouldn’t have gone well for him, because criminals tend to be dangerous.”

  Faye was still studying the printing on the spines of a thousand books. Several thousand books, probably. “That’s exactly right. But it’s not like somebody killed him in a fight, shoved his body in a wetsuit, and dumped it in the Gulf. That would be obvious during autopsy.”

  “Heck,” the sheriff said. “I’d have seen it on sight. You might even have seen it on sight. You saw the body.”

  Faye tried not to think about the way the captain had looked hanging in the water. When she was here with his books, it was almost like he wasn’t dead.

  “Maybe the thief thought it was better to get rid of the captain before stealing his stuff,” she said. “We do know one other person who has been inside this house since the captain died. Besides your people, I mean. And besides me.”

  “Who would that be? And how do you know?”

  “Greta Haines. I saw her standing outside in the yard just a few hours after we found him. I was just driving past the house and I saw a car I didn’t recognize, so I stopped to check things out. I thought it might be Jeanine, and I wanted to pay my respects.”

  “Did she go in the house?”

  The sheriff sounded interested. Well, good. Faye wouldn’t be sorry for Greta Haines to get a little close attention from law enforcement.

  “I know she’s been inside sometime, because Amande says that Greta shut the captain’s house down for Jeanine. Could she have been doing that when I saw her? Maybe, but the timing is tight. Jeanine got cell service sometime that day. I guess Greta could have called her and come right over. More likely,
she was here again later. I didn’t see her go in the house with my own eyes, though. I didn’t see her do anything but poke around in the yard.”

  “Did she say why she was in the yard?”

  “She made some lame excuse about checking for hurricane damage.” Faye tried to make sure that her voice communicated how hard she was rolling her eyes at Greta’s lameness.

  “She’s an insurance adjuster. She’s allowed to do her job.”

  “Well, yeah. As long as she isn’t overstepping herself. Florida is full-up with crooks trying to make a buck off of old people. I know for a fact that Greta tried to get Emma Everett to sign a power of attorney that would give her control of her insurance reimbursement. Is that illegal?”

  “Not unless she was coercive about it. I’ve known some fishy public adjusters, and Greta Haines may well be one of them, but I’ve never heard any complaints about her.”

  Faye snorted. She tried to keep it quiet so he wouldn’t hear it on the other end of the call, but she failed.

  “It’s not necessarily illegal to ask somebody for a power of attorney,” the sheriff said. “Maybe Jeanine wants somebody to help her manage her personal business. She’s entitled to authorize someone to do that. Adults get to decide how their own affairs are managed. That’s the very definition of being an adult. Ain’t it? And it’s the reason powers of attorney were invented.”

  Faye snorted at him again.

  “However,” he went on, “Greta’s got a license that requires her to maintain ethical standards. The licensing board might have something to say about it if that power of attorney doesn’t meet their rules.”

  “Yeah, but even if what Greta’s doing is legal, it doesn’t mean that her motives are on the up-and-up. Maybe she was trying to get her hands on the captain’s house, now that Jeanine’s going to inherit it. And maybe she’s got some kind of back-channel deal with the tree contractor who’s going around town with her. Cyndee Stamp’s her name.”