Strangers

by Mary Anna Evans

  “I said it already, Wheeler. My daughter is not the reason the voters threw you out on your ear. Do you understand—”

  Wheeler’s voice rose in volume and in pitch as he interrupted Smithson. “You said Lex could keep her quiet. You said—”

  “Don’t interrupt me, imbecile. Listen carefully. My daughter is not the reason for your problems.”

  A familiar metallic click sounded. It wasn’t loud, but it was. There’s no louder noise in the world than the sound of a revolver’s hammer being pulled back.

  “Now. Say that you understand what I’m telling you.” Smithson’s tone was as cool and even as the constant rustle of wind in the trees overhead.

  “I understand. I do.”

  Faye was pretty sure that she could hear Wheeler sweat.

  “Say it again, Wheeler.”

  The ex-commissioner stammered a bit, then said, “I understand you very well.”

  Faye was very glad that she’d just used her amazing new phone’s GPS capabilities to let Joe know exactly where she was. Just in case he hadn’t already figured it out, she texted him a message that would leave no doubt what she wanted him to do:

  come get me

  ***

  Faye wasn’t sure she could feel her feet any more, but moving them was too risky. Not far from the lip of the retention pond where she and Betsy crouched, Alan Smithson had been haranguing Dick Wheeler for quite some time.

  Faye’d had time to think about the best way to get rescued.

  It was clear that Alan Smithson was not quite sane, no more so than any man whose daughter was missing. The fact that his daughter’s boyfriend had turned up dead had only pushed the man further over the edge.

  “They say she might have been pregnant when she disappeared, Wheeler. I guess she’s still pregnant. If she’s still alive. If she hasn’t lost the baby…my grandchild…” Faye heard an ugly choking sound. “What are they doing to her? What do they—”

  “Put the gun down, Alan. You don’t want to hurt me.”

  “Are you sure? Where were you early Tuesday morning, Wheeler?”

  “What are you saying? Do you think I—”

  The voice broke. Now Faye was sure she could hear Wheeler sweat.

  “You know where I was, Alan. You know where I always am on Tuesday mornings—the Rotary Breakfast Club. I was the speaker, for God’s sake. I couldn’t have left in full view of half the businesspeople in the county. Nobody has a tighter alibi than I do, except for the other folks at that meeting. Speaking of Tuesday morning Rotary Club…where were you?”

  “I’m just not so sure about that alibi, Wheeler. How long does it take to subdue a young woman? A pregnant, scared young woman? We don’t know when Lex was killed, so maybe you had time to…hurt my Glennie…before you bellied up to the podium and gave that same stupid speech you give everywhere you go. What time does Rotary start, Wheeler?”

  “You know that. Eight o’clock.”

  “Dunkirk Manor’s five minutes from the restaurant that has served the Rotary Club the same bad breakfast for thirty years. Longer than Glennie has been alive. I think you had time to snatch her. Maybe she was in your trunk while you were eating your powdered scrambled eggs.”

  Faye heard footfalls. She imagined Smithson taking a step toward Wheeler, and Wheeler taking a step back, but she didn’t really know what was happening. She just knew that they were getting closer to the edge of the bank. If they got too close, there was no way they could miss seeing her and Betsy. Setting her feet down gently and slowly, the way Joe had shown her, she began making her way to the spot where the retention basin connected to the creek. Betsy nodded in understanding and followed.

  Crouched down with her fingers almost dragging the ground, Faye’s motion was more like crawling than walking. Her knees were in agony, but she used those low-hanging hands to clear brittle sticks and dry leaves from their path. If their feet fell only on pine needles, no one could possibly hear them. Well, Joe could, but he wasn’t here yet.

  Joe. He was on his way, and he would be walking into the worst kind of situation. Two angry men, one of them scared and one of them with a gun. She paused and texted the shortest message that would get her point across.

  wait

  Then she resumed crawl-walking, an activity that no pregnant body should ever be asked to accomplish.

  ***

  Angry words spilled down into the retention basin where Betsy and Faye were trapped. The two women stood at the bottleneck where the basin overflowed into the creek, and the word “overflow” spelled bad news for Faye. The basin was designed to behave like the bathroom sink in the house where Faye grew up.

  There had been a little hole in that sink, a couple of inches from the top. If little Faye wanted to float her toy boat in the sink, she could stop the drain and fill it up. But if she filled it too full, the water would flow into the hole. Try as she might—and scientific little Faye had tried hard, resulting in wet floors, high water bills, and spankings—she couldn’t fill the sink to the brim and she certainly couldn’t make it overflow.

  This basin had been designed to hold most of the stormwater that flowed off this large piece of property, which was a lot of water. During an ordinary thunderstorm, the water level would rise, then it would go down later, as the water soaked in and evaporated. But during some major event like a hurricane, it was possible that the basin would fill up, run over, and flood all the pretty houses that hadn’t been built yet. So the stormwater engineer had designed this thing so that excess water would flow down the creek.

  It was too bad for Faye that this engineer had decided the water needed to be up to her waist before it overflowed. Because this meant that she had to haul herself up to an earthen ledge that struck her at waist-level. She had to do this silently, so as not to attract the attention of the armed man above her. And she had to do it quickly, because the angry voices were getting closer.

  She looked at Betsy, nodded, then placed both hands on the squishy ledge and pushed hard. All this accomplished was to lift her feet off the ground, where they flailed, trying and failing to gain a toehold. Digging in with her knees to try to lift herself up to creek-level accomplished just as little.

  Fortunately, Betsy had been pregnant—four times, if Faye remembered the conversation correctly. Faye suddenly felt the older woman’s shoulders beneath her feet. Betsy had squatted beneath her and was slowly standing, using the strength of her own legs to lift Faye to where she needed to be.

  Faye felt her swollen belly clear the top of the bank and shoved herself forward face-first into the creek, holding her left arm high enough to keep the phone clear of the water. Reaching back to help, she only needed to give Betsy’s arm a gentle yank before they were both lying in the mud, wondering how hidden they really were. Faye was ever-so-grateful for her preferred work garb, olive-drab Army surplus cargo pants and a matching t-shirt. Betsy was behind her, but Faye couldn’t remember seeing her in a bright color. Maybe she was wearing dirty jeans and a brown t-shirt. That would be fairly unobtrusive.

  Without looking back to see, Faye started moving down the creek toward the river. It couldn’t be far. Well, she didn’t think it could be far, but she’d been tooling around this property in a car. Now she was crawling on elbows and knees through water that was more than a few inches deep, with her cell phone clutched between her teeth to keep it dry…dry-ish. And she had no idea whether their butts were sticking up so high that they could be seen over the creek’s shallow bank. She figured it was best to just stay low and get the hell out of there. Betsy seemed to agree. The arguing men had grown louder, if possible, but nothing in their tone had changed to suggest that Betsy and Faye had been seen.

  When the gunshot came, it took every ounce of Faye’s will to keep from throwing herself face-first into the water, drowning the cell phone that was her lifeline to Joe.

  The noise echoed through the empty woods. Faye could almost smell burnt gunpowder.

  But then two angry
voices burst out again, and one of them said, “Have you lost your mind? You could have shot me. You could have killed me.”

  So she knew that the bullet hadn’t found its mark. She also knew that the two men were as completely distracted as they could possibly be, which gave her and Betsy a fighting chance to get away. And she also knew that Joe couldn’t be far away by now. Unfortunately, she knew with complete certainty that the sound of that gunshot had deprived Joe of the ability to wait. He would be here any minute, and Alan Smithson might aim better this time.

  She took the risk of stopping a moment and she also took the risk that her damp fingers would render her electronic lifeline useless.

  still okay…not near gun…wait

  This was sort of a lie. She was near the gun, but she was safe and if Joe ran toward the sound of that gunshot, he wouldn’t be.

  She resumed crawling on elbows and knees. Florida is not a rocky place. As a person who spent her days digging in the dirt, Faye knew that better than anybody. Nevertheless, there were rocks in this creekbed, and pine cones and tree roots and prickly sweetgum balls. Her pants protected her legs a little, but her forearms were bruised and she was pretty sure that their skin was being peeled off a piece at a time. Her sodden shirt, riding up beneath her armpits, wasn’t doing the best job of protecting her belly, either.

  Nevertheless, she kept crawling, because Joe’s ability to stand still when he thought she was in danger was limited indeed.

  ***

  Joe had the eyes of a raptor and the ears of a bat. When the gunshot sounded, he was not fooled by the echo. The sound hit each of his ears a fraction of a millisecond apart, so he knew exactly which direction to look for the shooter. And despite Faye’s instructions to wait, he intended to locate that gun.

  When he got there, maybe he’d do what she’d told him to do. Maybe he’d wait. Or maybe he’d go for the shooter’s throat. But surely Faye knew that he would not leave her alone and in danger.

  Never.

  He pulled off the road and hid the car in a copse of bushes, then he set off walking through a lightly wooded piece of ground marked for development by surveyor’s flags and orange paint. His moccasins didn’t make a sound on the pine needles that littered the ground. He could see two men arguing in the distance. One of them was waving a handgun at the other one.

  He couldn’t see Faye yet, but he intended to get a lot closer.

  ***

  The creek broadened and picked up speed. Faye was not surprised to see the Matanzas River ahead, the same river that Father Francisco had seen so long ago…the same river where Lex Tifton had floated dead so very recently.

  With the river in sight, she sat her butt down in the muck and leaned her back against the creek’s low bank. Her jaw muscles were very glad when she reached up and took the cell phone out of her mouth and checked the GPS function for her new coordinates. Zapping them to Joe, she sent the words she knew he was waiting for:

  come get me

  please

  come down the river, not over land

  I love you

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Faye was glad that Joe had just picked her up and carried her. She really didn’t want to have to tell him that she couldn’t stand up and she couldn’t walk.

  She didn’t know exactly how far he carried her, slogging knee-deep in the Matanzas River. Joe had apparently scouted out the area and knew what she’d suspected, that the river wasn’t visible to Alan Smithson and Dick Wheeler, because he had just scooped her up and started jogging, without hunching down in fear of being found.

  Faye didn’t have the energy left to do anything but hang from his arms and drip. She was wet all over. She was muddy all over. But, by God, the cell phone had stayed dry. And it had brought her Joe.

  When they reached the car, he had laid her on the back seat, ripping off his shirt and covering her with it. He’d no doubt have ripped off his buckskin pants, too, and used them to cover her, but they were almost as wet as hers.

  Then he did something she hadn’t seen Joe do in a long time. He looked at Betsy with a face that was completely baffled.

  He’d looked like that a lot when they’d first met. Joe had grown up with parents who didn’t have much use for education. Even if they had, they wouldn’t have bothered Joe with it, because they’d thought he was slow.

  How they could have believed something so ridiculous when they saw how quickly Joe absorbed the lessons that nature taught? There was nothing about trees or fish or the motion of the stars or the vagaries of the weather that Joe didn’t understand. He’d just been born with a brain that shut down when it was confronted with a letter or a number.

  If he’d been born in 1798, Joe would have been a man among men, the best tracker and the finest shooter on the American frontier. If he’d been born in 1998, he’d have been recognized as dyslexic and handed over to a teacher who knew what to do about it. But he’d been born in 1978, and by the time 25-year-old Joe showed up on Faye’s island, unemployed, homeless, and barely literate, he’d spent all his life being baffled by the modern world.

  Faye felt like she’d done nothing but give Joe a home where he could get his bearings, but her friends had opened up his world. Magda had badgered the university into using him as a glorified lab rat in their special education department, and he’d gotten massive amounts of tutoring. Sheriff Mike had been the encouraging, mentoring father that Joe’s own father didn’t know how to be.

  Faye felt that her primary contribution had been teaching Joe to drive, which had been an adventure in itself. Joe’s lightning reflexes had been an advantage on the road, except when they led him to slam on the brakes so that he could focus on a street sign that was just too hard to read at highway speeds.

  The two of them had survived. And they would survive this day. But the lost-child expression on his face when he looked at Betsy spoke of a man whose world was threatening to crumble.

  “I’m okay, Joe,” Faye mumbled from the back seat, aware that she looked completely un-okay and thus she looked pretty much like a liar.

  Joe didn’t answer.

  Betsy reached over, flipped on the car heater, and twisted the dial to “High.” Faye was grateful, but it was not a good sign that Joe hadn’t already thought to do that.

  “Really, Joe. I’m fine.” She rubbed her belly and found that it was soft. The baby stirred companionably inside her, just as it had done for weeks. “No contractions. And the baby seems perfectly okay.”

  She didn’t like the way his shoulders were hunched as he put the car in gear and got on the road, traveling way faster than his usual cautious speed.

  Betsy reached over the back seat and patted Faye on the knee. She’d been pregnant four times and she’d been married for decades. The reassuring pat seemed to be saying, “Settle down. You’re both safe and so’s the baby. He’ll get over this.”

  And Betsy was probably right. But the drive home seemed longer than it was, because Joe didn’t say a word.

  ***

  Faye was shivering. Hard.

  She’d shivered before, but she’d never before had this sense that she had completely lost control of her muscles. They shook her, head to toe, and any effort she made to fight back only made things worse. She closed her eyes and told herself to relax, but that effort was just as big a failure.

  This was bad. If Joe looked back here and saw her shaking like this, he was going to lose what was left of his mind. Then he was going to take her to the emergency room, and she’d rather eat dirt than go there, not when she was so sure that she and the baby were both perfectly okay.

  Betsy was prattling to Joe, telling him reassuring stories about three of her pregnancies and conveniently leaving out the story of the premature baby who almost died. All the while, her calming hand gripped Faye’s shoulder lightly. This helped. If Faye concentrated on that hand, the waves of trembling eased a bit. And she was really loving the blast of the heater as it blew hot air between the front seats.r />
  Then the car stopped and Betsy got out. The heater was still on, but Faye felt like Betsy had taken a lot of warmth with her, until a car door opened and her friend’s smiling face reappeared.

  By covering Faye with a dusty tarp that she’d found in the city vehicle’s trunk, Betsy accomplished three things: she made Faye feel cared for, she made her feel a little bit warmer, and she completely hid Faye’s shivering body from Joe. Betsy gave Faye a comforting wink, then disappeared. A moment later, Faye heard the anemic purr of Betsy’s vehicle as the archaeologist drove away.

  By the time Joe killed the engine in the Dunkirk Manor parking lot, Faye’s shivering had eased and she was just dead tired. When Joe flung open the car door at her feet and shoved the tarp onto the floorboards, she was actually glad he’d decided not to let her get up and walk. Drowsy, she didn’t protest when he grasped her with his two strong hands and slid her toward him, gently lifting her out of the car.

  She was glad that he took her in the kitchen entrance. She didn’t think she could stand the drafty atrium or the cold light streaming through its skylights or the painful energy of the bright expressive paintings on its walls. She didn’t want to hear Joe’s footsteps stop as he stepped from the polished oak floors onto a rug so deep and dense that it absorbed all sound. She didn’t think she could bear the room’s chilly beauty.

  She wanted to be in the warm, shabby room where she slept wrapped in Joe’s arms.

  He hauled her across its threshold, closed the door, and gently stood her on her feet. She was surprised to find that her legs were willing to hold her up. He took three steps across the tiny room, threw open the bathroom door, and opened the hot water tap. Steam rose quickly as the old claw-footed tub filled.