Where was she? Where was Amande?
The sound of her daughter’s scream hit Faye hard. She was shaky, weak, nauseated. Knowing that these things were caused by adrenaline did not help at all, because she needed to find her daughter with all of her being. She flung herself in the direction of Amande’s heart-stopping scream.
Faye stubbed her toe on a loose board and almost went down, but determination kept her on her feet. Behind her, Manny dragged the rubber sole of one of his deck shoes on the same board. She heard him go down, but he was cool, smooth Manny, so he probably did it gracefully.
The scream morphed to a long continuous wail that tore Faye’s heart out. It only stopped when Amande took a breath. The next sound out of her mouth was a single word.
“Mom.”
There was another ragged breath before the next wail. “Mom!”
When Faye reached Amande, she found her standing in the spot where Manny let her keep her boat for free, but she wasn’t looking at the battered skiff. She was staring down into the water near where it floated, rising and falling with the moving water. Something long and narrow floated on the same waves. It was covered in black and maroon rubber, with an air tank painted a dull, matte maroon strapped onto it.
At one end of the long narrow thing was a pair of flippers the same dark red color as the air tank. At the other end was a head covered with wet, stringy gray hair. Two long, thin arms dangled in the water, and so did two legs with stringy musculature that was beginning to atrophy from age.
The man hung in the water, motionless, and Faye knew two things instantly. This was her friend Captain Edward Eubank, and he was dead.
Faye knew to her core that, somehow, he had been killed by his own curiosity.
* * *
The marina wasn’t fancy. Manny had worked hard to spruce it up, but it would never be without damp and mold. This was the way of watery places.
Regardless of the mold, the marina served its purpose. It provided a way station for people moving from land to sea and back, and it was a place for them to drink, eat, and enjoy each other. It was a place of community. Faye had spent happy hours at the marina, but she thought it was a shabby place to die.
Manny’s Marina sprawled along the shore of a creek, near the place where it emptied into the Gulf. Long docks lined with boat slips extended into the water, and a wide ramp served people who trailered their boats. Several buildings sprawled across the marina’s grounds. They held the things boaters needed—a bar and grill, a convenience store, a dive shop, storage sheds, and a barn for dry boat storage.
Manny lived in an efficiency apartment above the bar and grill. Faye was grateful to him for opening it to her family. The sheriff wanted to talk to them, but how awful it would have been to wait for him with Manny’s other breakfast guests, knowing that the captain’s body was being retrieved not far away.
Amande sat slumped on Manny’s couch beside Faye, her head on her mother’s shoulder. They were both weeping. The feel of her daughter’s shuddering chest against Faye’s was both comforting and heartbreaking.
Joe sat in an easy chair beside them, also weeping. At first, he’d done this while bouncing a confused Michael on his lap, but Manny had silently taken the little boy, leaving Joe, Amande, and Faye to grieve without upsetting a preschooler.
“The captain was such a nice man,” Amande said between sobs. “I was just at his house last week, working on a project for my history class.”
“Nothing made him happier than seeing somebody make good use of his library,” Faye murmured. “And for him to see a young person like you poring over his maps and books? He must have been in heaven.”
Faye almost said, “I guess he’s in the actual heaven now,” but now she was crying too hard to talk, and this was bad. Talking kept the truth at bay. Silence gave her space to think the horrible thought that she’d been pushing back ever since she looked into the water and saw Captain Eubank’s lifeless body.
He had probably died within sight of Joyeuse Island, her home, and she hadn’t been there to help him.
Where else would he be? His romantic obsession with history was essential to everything that he was, and he believed he’d found his own holy grail, the historic wreck of a very old ship.
Why else would he be suited up in scuba gear? He had probably gone out to Joyeuse Island as soon as Faye left his house. He would have known that her family was all ashore doing hurricane cleanup, leaving him free to explore alone.
No one would have seen him drop an anchor at The Cold Spot and hoist himself overboard. Nobody would have known that he was swimming beneath the water’s surface, looking for an old, old shipwreck.
She should have offered to help him look for it. All she’d had to do was say, “I can’t go today, but let’s make a date to go exploring next week. Okay?”
If she’d done that one simple, kind thing, Captain Eubank would still be alive.
* * *
Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth kept saying, “This is my fault. It’s all my fault.”
Sheriff Ken Rainey knew it wasn’t, of course. He couldn’t say how many times he’d sat with a bereaved family and heard one person after another repeat, “It’s my fault,” like a prayer of absolution. It was only human nature for a person to claim responsibility for a loved one’s death. The only other comfortable option was to blame the dead person or to blame someone else or to blame God. It was too terrifying to admit that nobody had much control over anything. Certainly not death.
This family had a logical, controlled approach to life, particularly the mother. It oozed from all her pores. She didn’t tolerate uncertainty well.
“I should’ve known that he’d go looking for that shipwreck.” She stopped herself. “Not that I think it’s a shipwreck, Sheriff. I already told you that I think it’s a submarine spring, and I told him so. It’s just that I should’ve gone with him and made sure he was safe while he checked it out.”
The sheriff sat up straighter in his chair. “‘Spring’ is just another way to say ‘underwater cave.’ Lots of divers swim into caves and never swim out alive. Maybe he swam into the spring vent and got lost.”
He could tell that Faye didn’t like that idea.
“If a cave that size were right up next to my island, it would have been obvious before the storm. Even a hurricane wouldn’t be enough to clean out something that big,” she said.
“Then why do you think there’s a spring near your island, if you’ve never seen anything obvious like a vent?”
“The water’s always cold there, probably because groundwater was seeping out of a little crack that was clogged up with something like a wad of sand. I’m thinking the hurricane cleaned that crack right out, but I really doubt that it uncovered a cave big enough to get lost in. You’re describing something more like Wakulla Springs. The water doesn’t seep out of a cave like that. It comes roaring out like a firehose.”
Sheriff Rainey thought “firehose” was a bit of an exaggeration, but agreed Faye had made a reasonable point. “If you’re right that the spring vent is just a narrow little crack,” he said, “maybe he got a foot caught in it and couldn’t get it out.”
The sheriff noticed that she didn’t really respond to that idea. She just said, “I never thought he’d go out there, certainly not by himself.”
“People who have lived alone all their lives are pretty independent, as a rule,” the sheriff said. “I can absolutely see the captain diving by himself. It’s not smart, but nobody’s smart all the time. And who’s to say that he was anywhere near your island when he died? There could certainly be other, bigger springs and caves under the Gulf.”
This woman wanted to think Captain Eubank had died off the coast of Joyeuse Island because it made her feel better to blame herself, but that didn’t mean that it was so.
She also wanted to think that he’d had some kind of accident. It was just as likely, though, that he’d suffered a heart attack or his equipment had failed or he’d made a fatal error far underwater, in a world that tolerated no error. There would be an autopsy and the captain’s equipment would be checked out, but it was overwhelmingly likely that the cause of Captain Eubank’s death was something very simple and very sad.
* * *
Faye couldn’t stop looking out Manny’s window. From her second-story vantage point, she could see all the way to the waterfronts, both creek and Gulf. She would have been able to see the captain’s motionless form, if someone from the sheriff’s department hadn’t set up barricades that blocked her view. For this she was profoundly grateful. The image of his body floating facedown would always be with her. She did not need to add more images to her nightmares.
Even the simple retrieval of the body was unthinkable. Was he still floating in the water, or was he already shrouded in a body bag and waiting for transport? How many people would it take to lift him out of the water and onto the dock? Would they do it with a sling and a winch, or with their bare hands? Would they lift him onto a gurney and roll him to a waiting hearse? A sheriff’s department van? And then what would happen when the medical examiner took charge of his body?
She did not want to know.
Faye had seen someone official-looking pass below her window carrying a camera and a notepad. Later, she had passed again, heading back toward her vehicle, and then returned with a video camera. While Faye was focused on her, she’d lost track of what the sheriff was saying. His voice had shifted into a warm and calming, but unintelligible, audio blur.
As he spoke, she thought of a question and blurted it out, knowing that she was interrupting him. It bothered her that she was so upset that she couldn’t even force herself to be polite.
“It looks to me like you’re treating this like a crime scene. Do you think somebody—”
She couldn’t say “murder,” especially not in front of Amande, so she tried again. “Do you think somebody did this to him?”
“I don’t. There’s no evidence of foul play. None whatsoever. But drowning investigations are tricky, so I’ve assigned Lieutenant Baker of our Criminal Investigations Division to make sure we tie up all the loose ends. And please know that when I say ‘Criminal Investigations Division,’ I’m speaking of Lieutenant Baker and one evidence technician. That’s as close as Micco County gets to the kind of CSI work you see on TV.”
Faye nodded. She knew this. Her friend Mike McKenzie had done the sheriff’s job for years, and she knew exactly how much funding he didn’t have.
The sheriff was still talking. “We owe it to the captain to be sure we learn as much as we can about what happened to him. It’s very easy to jump straight to ‘Accidental Death’ when you’re dealing with a drowning, especially when someone drowns alone. There’s a school of thought that says we miss some murders when we do that. Lieutenant Baker’s expertise in forensic investigations can keep us from making that mistake.”
Faye didn’t want the sheriff to make that mistake, either.
“Now, you can’t do much of an investigation when you don’t have a crime scene,” the sheriff pointed out. “We’ve got nothing but a body, really. Nevertheless, Lieutenant Baker will tell us if she finds anything unexpected. If she does, I promise that we’ll stretch our budget to give the captain what he deserves.”
Joe said, “We’ve lived here a long time. We understand about ‘small’ and we totally understand about ‘no money.’”
Sheriff Rainey almost laughed, but his stone-faced act held. “Then you know what our budget is like. It’s even tighter at the moment, since the hurricane. Everybody’s working overtime, night and day. We’ve still got people missing. I can’t spare anybody else to work this case. Actually, I can’t really spare Baker, but we’re going to try to do it all. We always do try. I wouldn’t ordinarily be here now myself, but the captain was my friend.”
He turned his head to clear his throat, and Faye thought he might also be wiping his eyes.
“Lieutenant Baker’s going to do a walk-through of his house. We’ll talk to some people—like you folks—to see if we hear anything suspicious. Will we find any evidence of a crime? Probably not, because I do honestly think that this was an accident, but we’re going to tie up the loose ends. The captain deserves that much.”