Wrecked

by Mary Anna Evans

“So run me through the timeline,” he said. “When have you been at this house this week?”

  “I was here the day before we found the captain’s body, which I think was the day he died.”

  He pulled his phone out of his pocket and started taking notes.

  “And when did you see Ms. Haines in the captain’s yard?”

  “One day later. The afternoon of the day we found him. I had stopped by the dive shop down the street, and I saw her SUV in the driveway.”

  “Did she go in the house that day? And did she have the key yet?”

  “I don’t know the answer to either of those questions.”

  “Then pardon me while I call Jeanine Eubank and see if she remembers when she told Greta Haines where to find the captain’s house key.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  While the sheriff was on the phone with Jeanine, Faye went out to her car. The photo the captain had given her was still there, lying flat on the back seat. She laid it carefully on the hood of her car and took a photo of it with her phone, then took it with her when she rejoined the sheriff.

  When she went back in the house, the sheriff was already off the phone. He shook his head and said, “Jeanine Eubank doesn’t remember when she told Greta how to get in the house.”

  Faye said, “That’s too bad. Greta and Cyndee confuse me. I find it completely believable that they sabotaged this house to try to get Jeanine’s insurance money, making it look like a branch had come down and damaged it. But is that related to the captain’s death?”

  “Considering that we’re still not sure the captain’s death was anything but an accident, I can’t say. I do know that I’ve dealt with murders that were committed for a lot less money than the value of this house.”

  “The missing photos and visitors’ log don’t seem to fit in with any insurance scam,” Faye said. “The photos were aerial shots of the Gulf, which is where the captain died, but they were taken days before he left us. Here, take a look.”

  She handed him the original print that the captain had given her.

  “This is the only photo Joe gave the captain that’s still available to us,” she said. “Joe’s helping clean up a house where there’s no cell service yet, but I just texted him to say he needs to make you copies of the rest of them. He’ll get the text when he’s done for the day. It’ll take a little while, because the files are on his computer’s hard drive at our house, but we can get them to you tonight.”

  The sheriff nodded his thanks.

  “I keep thinking about that missing visitors’ log,” she said. “The thief didn’t want anybody to have access to that. This could support my theory that somebody had been visiting the library regularly to identify valuable books worth stealing. But I also remember something the captain said on that last day.”

  “And what was that?”

  “He said that people were in and out of the library all the time, asking about the Philomela. If any one of the treasure hunters looking for that ship believed that they were about to find her, would they want to shut up the man who helped them with the search?”

  “It would show a terrible lack of gratitude, but yeah. Criminals do think that way.”

  * * *

  Sheriff Rainey was having fun as he watched Faye Longchamp-Mantooth walk around the captain’s library, trying hard not to touch things. Maybe he should just hand her a pair of gloves, since it was so hard for her to keep her hands to herself.

  She was a tactile person, which probably went along with her work as an archaeologist. When she dug up something interesting like a spear point, she probably wanted to hold it. Maybe she hefted it on her palm to assess how heavy it was for its size. She probably rubbed a thumb over its flat surface to see how the chipped surface had worn over time, then ran the same thumb along its edge to see how well it had retained its sharpness.

  She might even lick artifacts at times. He’d heard that this was one way to tell a bone from a rock that just looked like one, but maybe that was a technique from days gone by. Good-quality lights and magnifiers were easy to come by in the twenty-first century, but an archaeologist’s tongue might have been the only tool available back in the day.

  Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth struck him as a woman who would do whatever it took to get the work done. If she’d been working in the days when Howard Carter was finding King Tut for Lord Carnarvon, she totally would have licked the artifacts when the situation called for it.

  She was busy telling him how that single-mindedness could be useful to him.

  “It would be easier if the captain had bought a freakin’ computer and hired a kid to input the contents of his card catalog, but he didn’t. I could do that for you, and then we could use the electronic catalog to see if any of the captain’s books were missing. Even better, you could hire my kid and just pay me to supervise her a little. It would be cheaper, and it honestly wouldn’t take her all that long. This isn’t work that your deputies are trained to do.”

  She was very persuasive. He had caught himself trying to nod yes to Faye’s suggestion (or was it a demand?) but he had so far avoided hiring her firm by accident.

  “Not to insult you, ma’am, but I would still want a deputy in the room while you’re doing this stuff. You make a good point, and I might well hire you and your daughter to inventory this library eventually, but right now I can’t spare that deputy.”

  “You mean to keep an eye on us.”

  “Whatever you want to call it.”

  They were still standing there, silent and more than a bit adversarial, when his phone rang in his pocket and changed everything. Lieutenant Baker’s voice was even and calm, but Sheriff Rainey could hear the echo of something dark and disruptive in its cadences.

  “We’ve found Captain Eubank’s boat. And it was dragging Nate Peterson. The officer on the scene says his arm was hooked around one of the ladder’s rungs. He was trying to get out of the water but he just couldn’t manage it.”

  Rainey’s reflexive response was to go into overdrive, running to his car and asking questions like “Where’s the boat right this minute?” so that he could get there as quickly as possible. Based on the tone of Baker’s voice and the way she’d referred to Peterson, almost like cargo, he presumed that the man was dead, but he forced himself to stand right where he was and gather the information he needed.

  “What’s Peterson’s condition? Is he dead? You make it sound like he’s dead.”

  “No, he’s not dead, but he’s damn close to it.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  “So you’re saying that Nate is unconscious, seriously ill, and in an ambulance?” Faye asked. “And that he was found with the captain’s boat?”

  The sheriff had dropped his poker face. Faye could see that he was confused, he was upset, and he was scared. It was disconcerting to watch the man in charge of protecting her community struggle as he decided his next move.

  She spoke gently, looking for information but also hoping he realized that she was on his side. “Do you think this means that Nate was involved with the captain’s death in some way?”

  “Don’t know,” the sheriff said. “The captain’s boat apparently drifted in close to shore and got hung up in the tidal swamps west of Manny’s place, between the marina and your friend Emma’s house. All that vegetation was doing a pretty good job of hiding it, or we’d have found it before now. Maybe it’s been there all this time. Maybe not. Hard to say.”

  Faye pictured the geography of the area. “So that’s on the same side of the creek as the marina. And it’s on the same side of the marina as the spot where Ossie got shot down.”

  “I don’t know if it means anything. It’s a fifty-fifty shot on both counts. The captain’s boat has gotta be somewhere, either east or west of the creek and either east or west of the marina. But yeah. That’s where it is.”

  “How far from
the marina?”

  “Don’t know for sure. That swampy area to the west is pretty thick, but it doesn’t go on forever. The boat’s location had to be pretty secluded or somebody would have seen it, so I dunno. A mile, maybe? Much farther than that and you get back into a populated area.”

  “Who found it?”

  “One of Manny’s customers saw it on the way out to take her kids fishing. It must have been pretty obvious that things weren’t right when she saw an empty boat with an unconscious man floating behind it. That poor woman deserves a medal for hauling a hundred-and-eighty-pound man—plus the weight of his diving gear—into her boat. Do you know how hard it is to get a grip on a body in a wetsuit? It’s heavy, slippery, dead weight. I hope her kids were big enough to help.”

  Faye remembered Captain Eubank floating dead in the water, and she shivered.

  “Manny says that he didn’t see Nate leave the marina today, even though he usually stops to say hello on his way out,” said the sheriff.

  “Just like the captain used to do.”

  “Sort of. Except the captain presumably just walked from his car to his boat and took off, like he always did. There’s nothing unusual about that, except he skipped talking to Manny. Nate, though… I’ve got to do some thinking about how Nate got himself in this situation. He didn’t leave the marina on his boat. A neighbor checked his house, and it’s sitting right there in the driveway on its trailer.”

  “Maybe he went out on the captain’s boat, which means that he knew where it was.”

  “Could be. I guess it’s possible that he went out with somebody else and they left him out there. Then maybe he came across the captain’s boat while he was trying not to drown. But that would mean that the person he went out with is a freakin’ psychopath.”

  “Because nobody reported Nate missing?” asked Faye.

  “Exactly.”

  This, too, echoed the captain’s death.

  Another awful possibility occurred to her. “Or maybe he went out there with somebody who’s also incapacitated or dead, and maybe they were on that person’s boat. This would mean that there could still be another boat out there that we need to find. And another body, dead or alive.”

  “I don’t know what you mean by ‘we.’ You don’t work for me, and I haven’t hired your firm to help me out, either. In case you haven’t noticed, people in boats are turning up dead and nearly dead. I do not want your help, because your children seem to like their mother just fine. I want you alive for their sake.”

  “My children and I live on an island with their father. We’re in boats all the time. I won’t feel like my family is safe until I know why people are floating around in the Gulf dead, or close to it. If you would let me help you find out what’s going on, maybe we could get to the truth quicker.”

  The sheriff didn’t ask her to play crime fighter. He went straight to practicalities. “I’m heading to the hospital. If Nate regains consciousness—when he regains consciousness—I need to talk to him immediately. While I’m doing that, there’s something I’ll ask you to do. But don’t take this as a sign I’m going to make you some kind of honorary deputy or something.”

  “Anything,” Faye said.

  “Go home now and email me files of the photos that you think were stolen from the captain’s house. I want to get a look at them as soon as possible.”

  Faye looked at her watch. The afternoon was gone, so Joe was probably already waiting for her at the marina. It was a good thing that Amande had brought her own boat so they wouldn’t have to wait for her. She said goodbye and got behind the wheel.

  Her car rolled toward Manny’s Marina as easily as if it had memorized the way. As she traveled the captain’s street, she saw an object levitating high in the air. It moved up, down, forward, and back, and none of those motions were anything like the flight of a natural creature.

  Faye looked around to see who was flying a drone. There, a city block ahead of her, stood a man she recognized as Ray Peterson. Nate’s dad was standing in the parking lot of the small commercial building that housed his newspaper. He was intent on the controls in his hand, watching the flying device drop slowly toward the ground.

  * * *

  Ray studied the face of his cell phone, strapped to his new drone’s controller. More accurately, the drone belonged to the newspaper, not him. This meant that its purchase price was tax-deductible.

  His new drone had given him a glimpse of Crawfordville from the air, showing him its street grid and surrounding countryside. The highway cutting diagonally through the town’s heart had been obvious, and so had the swampy area northwest and west of town.

  He’d seen the sheriff’s car parked outside the captain’s house, beside the car that belonged to Faye Longchamp-Mantooth, the archaeologist wife of Nate’s friend Joe. He wondered what they could be doing there together. Checking out the captain’s collection of curiosities, maybe, as if they could be useful in figuring out why the captain was dead? Ray didn’t see much likelihood of them solving the crime while standing in a library.

  Down the street, he had watched Thad climb into his father’s old truck. He’d gotten on Highway 319 and headed south. Was he heading to Manny’s Marina, one of his usual drinking spots? Or was he heading to Panacea, where he kept his daddy’s old boat, a Willard Marine 30 Trawler that was older than Thad but was too much of a tank to ever die. It was hard to say.

  Ray had spent a couple of seconds watching a redheaded woman walking down the sidewalk in front of Thad’s place. He’d had no reason to track her movements. In fact, she’d only caught his eye because of the lovely color of her hair. Ray had other things to do, so he appreciated the hair for a moment and then moved the drone east.

  On the far eastern side of town, he finally saw what he was looking for, two people who were up to no good. One of them was on a roof, diligently prying up shingles that had made it through the hurricane just fine. The other was in a tree, breaking off limbs and letting them fall to the ground.

  Ray thought it was about time for his newspaper to do an exposé on insurance fraud.

  * * *

  Faye watched Ray guide the drone with precision to a landing spot near his feet. She wondered if he realized that it really wasn’t okay to be flying it over people’s private property. If not, his neighbors would be telling him soon.

  Just as she was wondering what he was doing here when his son was terribly injured, she saw him take his cell phone out of the drone’s controller, look at its face, and put his hand to his heart. Ray Peterson backed away from the grounded drone, leaving it sitting on the asphalt-and-gravel parking lot. He touched the screen a single time and slapped the phone to his ear.

  For a moment, he just listened, hunching slowly forward as if hearing news that hit him like a spear to his chest. Then he was running to his sleek red sports car, phone to his ear, and throwing himself behind the steering wheel. As Faye neared the spot where he had stood flying his drone, Ray Peterson’s Maserati was already in drive. She stopped her car dead in the road to let him out of the parking lot, so that he could be on his way to his son’s side.

  Too torn up to question why traffic was parting to make space for him, Ray floored the Maserati’s accelerator, charging onto the street. The powerful car’s tires spun, scratching up gravel as he made tracks to wherever Nate was.

  * * *

  As if Faye’s phone were psychically linked to her daughter’s, several beeps heralded the appearance of a series of texts on her phone screen just as she was arriving at the marina. Faye could tell that Amande had typed them over a period of time while one or both of them was out of range, and now they were coming through in a single information dump. Their casual spelling and lack of punctuation made it clear that Amande, whose grammar was perfect when she wanted it to be, knew how to disable autocorrect.

  finished my rounds early so gonna check
on emma and head home

  emmas doing fine and she wants to know if ur drinking enough h2o

  you woulda thought michael hadnt seen emma in a century so I said yeah when she invited him for a sleepover

  michael thinks emma is a goddess probly cause she feeds him jelly and white bread on command

  Sorry if he comes home hyper and w/sugar coming out his ears

  so. exhausted. SERIOUSLY.

  gonna go home and eat some leftovers and crash

  take your time coming home cuz you and dad got nobody to feed & clean up after but yourselves & youre welcome

  Joe was waiting for Faye at the marina, just as she’d expected. He was sitting with Manny on his usual bench outside the bar, surrounded by the kind of junk food he ate when he was stressed—corn chips, beef jerky, and cheese sticks. Joe believed that most problems could be solved by salt and grease, but it was a sign of Manny’s stress level that he, too, was chowing down on junk when his snacking style usually ran more toward fruit and nuts. Faye wasn’t sure she liked being close enough to Manny to know this.

  Manny left Joe chewing on cheese sticks and intercepted Faye before she could get to her husband. Speaking too quietly for Joe to hear, he asked, “You heard about Nate?”

  Faye nodded.

  “Joe’s taking it hard. Keeps saying that Nate risked his life to keep him from being shot when he was too stupid to keep himself safe. You know—on the day Ossie got shot down. He wants to know why this had to happen to Nate when he wasn’t around to help him. I got no answer for him.” Manny patted Faye awkwardly on the arm. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine,” Faye said. “I just want to understand what’s happening. It’s like I was living in a safe, secure bubble until the hurricane came through and then boom. Terrible things started happening to people.”

  “Nate wasn’t unconscious the whole time. After he got here, I mean. I was trying to make him comfortable while we waited for the paramedics to get here, and there were moments when he was awake.”