Plunder: A Faye Longchamp Mystery #7 (Faye Longchamp Series)

by Evans, Mary Anna

  “How d’you think you’re gonna come out in the divorce, Didi?” Stan’s voice was quavery and his words were slurred. He didn’t hold his liquor nearly so well as his wife did.

  She rested a fist on her cocked hip. “You make a good salary, when you don’t gamble it away. I imagine I’ll see some alimony out of you.”

  “Not if I can prove adultery. Which won’t be hard.”

  He swayed on his feet, which Steve took as an aggressive movement toward Didi. He stepped into the gap between man and wife, then showed that he was drunker than he looked by swinging at Stan and missing. Faye was glad for Stan’s sake that Steve’s fist had passed his jaw by. Steve might have been drunk, but he carried some weight, and he’d put every ounce of it behind that punch. He was still regaining his balance when Manny hustled himself out the door.

  Manny grabbed Stan by both shoulders and steered him away from Steve and his fists. “What are you doing, man? You know she ain’t worth it. Don’t let your pride put you in jail. Or get you killed.”

  Stan didn’t acknowledge him, hollering over his shoulder at Didi instead. “Maybe I’ll get alimony. If they don’t stop that damn oil from dumping in the gulf, I’ll be the one out of work, and you’re fixing to inherit Miranda’s stuff. How will it feel to write me a check every month, bitch?”

  Manny kept shoving Stan toward the door to the bar and grill, saying, “Don’t make me call the police. I want you to come in here and drink some coffee and eat a piece of pie. Leave the whore alone. Do you really want her back? No. You don’t. I’m telling you, pride can cost a man all he’s got.”

  The doors closed behind them as Manny successfully steered Stan back inside. Steve and Didi resumed their walk to the houseboat, interrupted periodically to give Didi a chance to rub herself all over Steve, in case he’d somehow forgotten what it had felt like when she’d done that thirty seconds before.

  Faye hurried to the cabin, because she was ready to stop breathing the same air as these people.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Faye wondered if she should put a revolving door on the rental cabin. Amande had earned her pay by getting Michael to go to bed without much intervention from Faye or Joe, then she’d stepped outside into the night. Wondering if the girl remembered that one or two killers were prowling around, Faye moved her computer to the chair closest to the window. Now she could work and keep one eye on Amande. Funny. She wouldn’t have thought that a teenager would require the same kind of attention as a toddler.

  At first, Faye thought the girl was talking on a cell phone, but then she remembered that Amande didn’t have one. Her sigh of relief that Amande wasn’t whispering midnight endearances to Dane Sechrist made her feel like a middle-aged thwarter of young love. It was hell to get old.

  Squinting out the window at Amande, while trying not to look like a spying old woman, Faye determined that the device in her hand was a voice recorder. So this was what adolescents used for diaries these days. Amande talked to her hand for almost an hour, during which Faye wrapped up her work, then the girl came in and said good night.

  The sound of rustling sheets had escaped their bedroom periodically during that hour, so Faye had known that, though Joe was lying in bed, he wasn’t sleeping. She wasn’t surprised to see him shuffle out of the bedroom, clad in his usual khaki shorts and wearing a t-shirt that Faye knew was for Amande’s benefit. Modest Joe would eat dirt before he’d run around shirtless in front of a girl her age. She also wasn’t surprised to see the pack of cigarettes in his hand.

  Joe was no chain-smoker, but he believed in the old Creek ways, and those ways included occasional tobacco use as a spiritual practice. Faye hoped that it wasn’t possible to give oneself lung cancer in really slow motion, by smoking every month or two. Sometimes, Joe just needed some time with that noxious weed and a campfire and the night sky and the old spirits that Faye couldn’t see. She’d stopped nagging him about it long ago. That wasn’t exactly true, but she had slowed down with the nagging, since it didn’t work anyway.

  She watched him gather firewood and arrange it in the fire ring provided by the campground, then she went to bed instead of standing guard, because Joe could take care of himself.

  Hours later, he crawled under the covers beside her. She rolled onto her side and slung an arm across a broad chest, cool-skinned and damp with dew.

  “You awake?” he asked.

  Of course she was. When Joe’s peaceful mind couldn’t rest, then nothing was right with Faye’s world.

  “Yeah.”

  “I can smell it. The oil. I can smell it.”

  Faye sniffed. She smelled nothing but the night air and Joe’s shampoo, but she didn’t doubt his word. Joe’s senses were honed by years as a hunter, and he had surely been a fearsome hunter to begin with, because he’d been born with the ability to sense things that others never noticed. Sometimes he knew things that couldn’t possibly be detected with the five garden-variety senses that everybody else had. Faye firmly believed that Joe had at least seven of them. If Joe said he smelled oil, then Faye knew that it was spreading over the Gulf faster than even her imagination could grasp.

  “My nose just isn’t any match for yours,” she said.

  “But you can feel it. I know you that well.”

  And when he said it, she knew that she did. The tremble in the air. The prickle on her neck. The bone-deep sense that even the wind blew wrong.

  Maybe it was because she watched the news compulsively over breakfast and at bedtime, hoping the engineers would shut off the gushing flow. Maybe it was because she brushed elbows with people whose offshore jobs were on hold, and with other people whose deep-sea fishing businesses were going without customers, and with still more people trying to run stores when everyone around them was afraid to spend money. There was something in the air. Maybe she couldn’t smell it, but it was there.

  “I’ve been all over the Internet,” he said, “trying to figure out where the currents are going to take all that oil.”

  Faye knew this. She’d rarely seen him sit indoors for so long, with his face lit by a computer screen instead of the sun.

  “Faye. What are we going to do?”

  Even now, he couldn’t say it. He couldn’t say, What are we going to do if the oil gets to Joyeuse Island? How are we going to protect our home? They’d lain here, night after night, unable to say such a thing to each other, but Faye knew she wasn’t the only one troubled by dreams of blackened sea grass and tarred beach sand.

  And neither could she say, What are we going to do if we can’t meet the terms of this contract?

  If their company failed to complete a project of this importance, what client would ever trust them again?

  “We’ll have to split up,” Faye said. “I’ve been talking to Sheriff Mike back home. He thinks he can get us some oil-absorbent booms. You’ll be better at getting those deployed, so you should be the one who goes. I’ll be better at hiring people to help us finish this project, and if we default on it, we won’t be able to afford that money pit we call a house, anyway. So I’ll stay here with Michael.”

  Faye had spent her entire adult life restoring her family’s ancestral plantation house, and she’d spent nearly that long chasing her PhD and building this business. If she lost everything all at once, how would she face it without Joe here by her side?

  “I don’t have to go yet. We’ll watch what the oil does. When I have to go, I will.”

  Episode 3 of “The Podcast I Never Intend to Broadcast,” Part 2

  by Amande Marie Landreneau

  They say that Gola George liked having women around, but that he didn’t actually like women. He thought they would make him weak, if he’d let them, and a weak pirate is a dead pirate. This would explain his habit of kidnapping whole harems full of women. It’s certainly one strategy to avoid getting attached to any single one of them. It would also explain his habit of leaving those women alone with no food and no help for months at a time. Any of them who su
rvived probably didn’t like him much when he returned, but they were also probably in no shape to do anything about it.

  I’m guessing that Henry the Mutineer, on the other hand, was the subject of much speculation in his younger years. He didn’t seem to have any use for women at all. His sumptuous cabin aboard Gola George’s ship was strewn with more than navigational tools and the piles of paperwork accounting for George’s riches. He purchased books in every port. He knew where to find the finest wine, and he paid whatever it cost. He taught himself to play the violin and to paint in oils. He bought fine sable brushes and paints in every shade of blue, so that he could capture the colors of the sea and the sky, whether they were at rest or torn by storms.

  Grandmère’s descriptions of Henry always stopped here. If women her age are aware that homosexuality exists and that some people actually practice it, they live by an unwritten code that says, “You must not mention such things. Ever.”

  But really. I may have only lived sixteen years, but I still wasn’t born yesterday. I don’t think Henry the Mutineer wanted women at all. I think he wanted Gola George.

  How could he not have wanted Gola George? George was the tallest, broadest, strongest, swashbucklingest man in the New World. His skin was as smooth and dark as coal. His eyes glittered like coal set afire. His teeth were whiter than the ivory he stole from Asian trading ships. He dressed in flowing silk blouses and tight pants and tighter hose and silver-buckled shoes. Even when he didn’t have finger bones tied in his dreadlocks, no one could look away from Gola George. Anyone, man or woman, who was born to want men, wanted George. Nothing in the stories, however, suggests that Gola George wanted Henry the Mutineer. So Henry poured his love into music and into painting and into managing the financial interests of the most fearsome pirate who ever sailed.

  The stories are very clear that Henry was only a paper pirate. He plotted the courses for voyages that were destined to kill whole shiploads of men. He kept track, through newspaper reports and the gossip of loose-tongued sailors, of where the richest treasure ships would be. He invested George’s bloodstained gold in land and molasses and rum and slaves, and he traded those commodities shrewdly.

  Henry the Mutineer shared the guilt for George’s murders, because he made them possible, but he never participated in the ugliness of boarding a ship and killing its crew. He carried no cutlass and no pistol, no weapon at all, other than a stylishly jeweled dagger tucked into one expensive boot. They say he only raised a hand against one man in his whole life.

  You can imagine what the other men had to say about all that. Such speculations could have been deadly for Henry, if some murderous pirate had decided that he didn’t like the way Henry was looking at him, but Gola George owed his life to Henry the Mutineer. Anyone who struck out at Henry was taking on Gola George, and this was not something a man did casually. Gola George was the biggest, the strongest, and his blood was the coldest. No man sailing the vast waters between Mexico and Spain was going to take on Gola George, so Henry the Mutineer was safe from their contempt.

  Then the day came when Marisol boarded Gola George’s ship, and George never put her ashore with the others. They say that anyone could tell by looking at her that she would not have survived George’s usual rough treatment. She was impossibly slender, with tiny white hands and feet that bore not a single callous. Marisol had been a lady, and a rich one, but the stories don’t tell us how she came to be in the kind of place where George found his women—wretched port cities, infamous for thievery and prostitution and free-flowing rum. The stories say that Marisol drew the eye, even when she stood in a crowd, simply because the light on her pale oval face shone like the moon. The woman couldn’t hide. She was too beautiful.

  This was her downfall, because the day came when Gola George’s eye lighted on that beautiful face.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Faye rose early, hoping to drive a stake into the heart of that infernal spreadsheet before anyone else got up. She’d just stepped into her pants when the phone in the hip pocket buzzed. She stepped outside to take the call, since the cabin was full of sleeping people. Michael was snoring quietly in his crib. Amande was in Dauphine’s old room, sleeping off her late night. And Joe was sleeping as only Joe could, as motionless and massive as a felled longleaf pine.

  Detective Benoit was on the phone. After apologizing for the early hour, he said, “I interviewed Dane Sechrist at Manny’s place after I talked to you last night. It might have taken us a good long while to find him, without your help. I wish he’d had more to say, but I do appreciate your tip that he was eating in the marina bar and grill.”

  “Well, I didn’t figure he was going to confess to both murders, though it sure would have been convenient. What did he say?”

  “He said that he was a scuba diver and that he was thinking of buying a boat he could live on. I get the impression he’s one of those divers who’s so into it that he doesn’t want to do anything else. Living on his boat and eating a whole lot of fish might cut his expenses to the point where he wouldn’t have to work much. If he’s been saving for a while or he’s got a nice little lump sum from an inheritance or something, maybe he wouldn’t have to work at all. Anyway, he said he’d seen Miranda’s boat and liked it, so he found Manny in his office at the marina and asked him for her phone number. He used the number and made an appointment with her.”

  “Did Manny back up his story?”

  “Quite the amateur investigator, aren’t you? I’d tell you to stick to archaeology, but your instincts are too good. Yes, I’ve already, at this early hour, talked to Manny. He remembers Dane buying Miranda a piece of apple pie.”

  “Why didn’t he tell you that already?”

  “I have quite a long list of people to interview, and it’s only been a day. I hadn’t gotten to Manny yet.”

  “I wasn’t questioning your skills, Detective. I just wondered.”

  “Yeah, I know. I’m the one questioning me. Anyway, Manny checked his receipts and found a cash purchase at 2:07 p.m. that was probably the selfsame slice of pie, so everything checks out. According to both Dane and Manny, she was perfectly healthy when Dane left. Manny did not, however, remember giving Miranda’s phone number to Dane or to anyone else. Dane was insistent that he did, so it was one man’s word against another. Not sure how much it matters, since even Manny agrees that Dane met with her in broad daylight.”

  Faye who had once, long ago, lived on a boat, said, “Miranda’s houseboat isn’t meant for the kind of use Dane has in mind. It’s too big, for one thing. It’s meant to spend its useful life moored in one place, just like it is.”

  “Exactly. And that’s what Dane said she told him.”

  Thinking as much about Amande’s infatuation with Dane as she was about the murder investigation, Faye asked, “What do you know about Sechrist?”

  “I asked everyone I’ve talked to since Miranda died if they knew the name, since it was on her refrigerator door. Nope. He’s been hanging around here for awhile, but he keeps to himself. Whatever else I know about Sechrist I got from him, though now that I have his first name, I’ll be digging around plenty, starting today. He didn’t tell me anything especially exciting when I questioned him last night. He grew up on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, in Biloxi, which explains his attachment to boats and the water. Everything about the man says his upbringing was middle class or better, and that makes him stand out in Manny’s usual crowd of customers. He says he spent a couple of years in college in Hattiesburg, but that’s just sixty-nine miles too far from the Gulf to suit him.”

  Faye had felt the same way while she was a college student in Tallahassee.

  “Hey, this might interest you,” Benoit said. “He spent the first summer after he dropped out of school on an archaeological research vessel. If we stumble over some more archaeology stuff, it might make some sense that we hired an amateur like you to help with this investigation.”

  “You can hardly use the word ‘hired’ when
you don’t pay a person. Did Sechrist’s archaeological research crew work in the Gulf of Mexico?”

  “Yup. Our boy just doesn’t seem to be happy anyplace else.”

  Faye didn’t hear anything that remotely linked Dane Sechrist to Miranda’s death. Nor to Hebert’s, so she cut to the chase. “Do you think he did either of the murders?”

  “I see no motive. Compared to the other scumbags I’ve interviewed, he’s a Boy Scout. Until somebody tells me some compelling reason he’d want those two people dead, I just can’t imagine him committing any violent crime. But I’ve been wrong before.”

  Faye agreed with the detective, mostly, but until she was definitively able to mentally move Dane Sechrist from the category of Boy-Scouts-who-might-have-committed-murder to the kinder and gentler category of Boy-Scouts-who-were-way-too-old-for-her-friend-Amande, she was not going to be happy.

  Chapter Twenty

  Amande had gone back to the houseboat to shower and change clothes, before starting another day as Michael’s paid playmate. Faye wasn’t surprised to see her back, but she was a little startled by her appearance. Amande had plaited the hair around her face into tiny braids, but she seemed to be having trouble with the back of her head. When Faye opened the door, the girl was standing on her doorstep, holding a clump of hair skyward so that it wouldn’t unbraid itself. With her other hand, she held out a bunch of elastic bands, saying, “Would you help me? I’m trying to cornrow it, but it’s not as easy as it looks.”

  Having cornrowed a girlfriend’s hair in high school, Faye knew that it wasn’t easy at all. She also knew that doing a whole head of hair would take her all day. Fortunately, Amande had figured that out.

  “I think I should have started from the bottom and worked up, but maybe we could just finish the hair on the crown of my head. Then I can do a little more every day. I was thinking of doing dreads like Manny’s, but I’m not actually sure how to make those. Cornrows aren’t hard to do, but I need so many of them to cover my whole head!”