“If you say so.”
Faye winced when Amande tossed this snide comment over her shoulder as she walked with Joe and Michael toward the boat that would take them home. The unoriginality of those four words was evidence of her distress. If Amande’s mind had been functioning on all cylinders, she would have done a more interesting job of rebelling.
Faye had been getting back talk ever since she decided to send Amande home and make the supply run herself. Any fool could see that the young woman was too upset to be behind the wheel. Faye wasn’t in any shape to drive, either, but she was the mother and Amande was the daughter, so she had pulled rank. And she didn’t take no for an answer.
Nor did she take whining for an answer. She’d helped Joe get both kids into the boat, and he’d taken them home. Joe would have to come back to the marina to help Lieutenant Baker look for the captain’s boat, but the lieutenant was going to be busy for a while and he needed to go home and get Ossie. And Faye needed to get food and water to hungry, thirsty people.
She drove Joe’s car to the pickup point in Crawfordville and loaded it up. After that, Thad’s Surf and Dive Shop was beckoning, so she pulled into its parking lot and went in.
She had known the current Thad’s late father, Thad Sr., but she only knew Thad Jr. by reputation. The first Thad had opened the dive shop in the late seventies and had been a fixture in the Crawfordville business community until his death thirty years later. His son was now in his late twenties, and the best thing that people could say about him was that he’d managed to keep the store open. Most of the time.
Young Thad was up front about his desire to sock away enough money to fund a life that was all surfing and no working. His pursuit of that goal had been singularly businesslike for a man who chafed at the very idea of having a job. The first thing he’d done after he inherited the business had been to sell his father’s modest home and convert the dive shop’s storage rooms into a small apartment. Now he had a cheap roof over his head and money for his early retirement fund. The second thing he’d done was to become a capitalist, investing the money in the stock market.
Thad’s emotional life was now measured by the motion of the Dow Jones and the NASDAQ, which he checked compulsively whenever he looked at his phone. When Thad judged that his portfolio was big enough, he would shake the sand of Crawfordville off his sandals and head for Puerto Escondido or Tamarin Bay or wherever he thought his dollars would stretch far enough to set him up for a life of surfing and diving and nothing else.
Thad Jr. wasn’t the type to join the Chamber of Commerce or the Rotary Club. He was the type to cut the store’s hours to the bare minimum so that he could have more time to dive. He’d close the store on a whim to surf, whenever he heard the waves were right, although trying to surf on the coast off Wakulla and Micco Counties was an act of optimism. The senior Thad had known that, but the junior Thad had added the word “Surf” to his store’s name anyway, as if doing so would change geography and geology themselves.
Two young men with similar dreams stood in the shop, wearing Surf Micco! shirts and admiring a pale-green surfboard. Their heads turned when they heard Faye push open the door.
Thad gave her a small wave, as if to say, “Welcome to my store. Glad you’re here,” but he kept trying to sell the surfboard. Despite his slacker reputation, he seemed to be decent at sales.
“A lot of times,” Thad said, “beginners make the mistake of buying a board that’s too short, so you don’t want to do that. But whatever you get, make sure you’ve got a car or truck that can transport it before you buy one that’s too big. I made that mistake once. I had to sell it to my buddy, and he got the deal of his life. I totally lost my shirt.”
Thad lifted the biggest board easily and his T-shirt tightened around his biceps. Faye had handled a few surfboards in her day, so she knew that this one wasn’t heavy, maybe twelve or fifteen pounds. Still, handling a seven-foot-long hunk of polystyrene without raking his merchandise off every nearby shelf showed Thad’s strength and dexterity.
He managed the board with a shake of his shaggy brunette hair that said, “This is no big deal for me, but it might be tricky for you newbies.” He had Manny’s gift of making people want to buy his stuff so that they could maybe be as cool as he was. Almost.
The customers looked like brothers. Both were stocky enough to need the sizable board that Thad was bandying about.
“We’re long on big trucks, but we’re short on money,” one brother said as the two sidled toward the door. “If we could afford these, we could move them. But we’re broke. Maybe some other time.”
When they were gone, Thad turned his attention to Faye. His jawline was strong and his eyes were as brown as Faye’s.
Faye introduced herself, and he recognized her name.
“Manny called to say that you were coming. Hey, I’m real sorry to hear about your friend. Manny told me that the man who died lived right near here.”
“Over there,” Faye said, pointing across the street and down a half-block.
“Him? He’s the one that died? Oh, man. He seemed like such a good guy. Everybody around here knew that his house was the place to go when you were between jobs. Yard work, house painting, floor waxing, whatever. Sometimes he even hired people down on their luck to work in his library. Me? I’d rather work outside, even when it’s hot. But when you’re flat out of money, you go where the work is and not where you wanna be.”
He looked around his store. “You see what I do? I sell stuff to people so’s they can go out on the water and leave me here, working inside. It’s a living, I guess, but I miss the sunshine.”
Thad’s Surf and Dive Shop was housed in a modest mid-century building, all stucco and glass inside and out. It had a practical terrazzo floor and an overachieving air conditioning unit that was making Faye forget that it was July. There was plenty of floor space for Thad’s merchandise and for the tank-filling station. Thad was lucky to have inherited such a nice facility, and it must have come with a built-in clientele that his dad had built up over decades.
None of this meant that he enjoyed his work, and it was obvious that the current Thad did not. Not at all.
Thad affected the so-relaxed-as-to-be-lazy demeanor of surfers in Hollywood movies, despite the fact that he didn’t look like them. His very dark hair seemed resistant to bleaching by the sun, and his light skin looked like he used sunblock consistently, at least on his face. His arms and upper chest were exposed by a short-sleeved V-neck T-shirt. They were deeply tanned, which proved that he had more time to go outside than he wanted to admit.
“I’m glad you know who Captain Eubank was,” Faye said, “because I thought you might be able to answer some questions I have. You may have heard that he was killed in a diving accident. Except I’ve never once heard him mention scuba diving. Did he shop here?”
“Not while I was working. It’s not like I keep a big staff. If I don’t know him, he probably didn’t come in here at all. I don’t know that I ever even spoke to him, except for saying ‘Hey,’ when I passed him on the sidewalk. I just know that nobody deserves to die that way. When you spend as much time in the water as I do, you can’t help thinking about what it would be like to drown.”
Faye felt a chill in her gut when she imagined being far, far from the surface, knowing that the air in her lungs couldn’t last until she got there. That feeling had gripped her from the moment she first saw the captain’s body, and it hadn’t left yet.
She waited silently, watching Thad. He looked uncomfortable with the silence, but no more than anybody else she knew. Most Americans didn’t do real well with silence. Joe was the rare person who was willing to let it be.
“Seems funny,” she said. “If a man’s confident enough in his skills to dive by himself, don’t you think he did it a lot? And wouldn’t such a dedicated diver do business at the shop down the street?”
“Maybe he shopped with my dad and took his business elsewhere when he died, but I never saw him here. And I worked afternoon shifts from the time I was thirteen.”
“He never in all those years even just struck up a conversation with you, as a neighbor, one diver to another? That’s what most people do when they have a hobby they love. They go looking for people to talk to about it.”
“You got that right. Some of my customers—they just talk and talk. Sometimes I don’t think they’ll ever leave.”
And then he dropped the conversational ball and just stood there, silent.
Was he telling her to go? In a sense, she was wasting his time, but the store was empty. Was it really a burden to spend a few minutes shooting the breeze with someone who might turn into a customer? Maybe she should have mentioned her boats or asked if he had any snorkeling gear. Could a man with no customers in sight really afford to be rude to someone who might become one?
But these weren’t the reasons he wanted her to leave. At least she didn’t think so. More likely, this was a simple case of a man who didn’t want to get involved. It was screamingly obvious that he hated everything that kept him out of the water, even this store that paid his bills.
Thad had told her what he knew about Captain Eubank, and he didn’t owe her any more of his time. His body language said that he wasn’t going to give it to her.
Faye instinctively took a single step away from this heavily muscled man who clearly wanted her gone. He responded with a single step of his own, crowding her in the direction of the door.
He really didn’t want to talk about the captain.
“Thanks for talking to me about my friend,” she said, taking another step back and watching him crowd her toward the door by taking a bigger step forward. “I’ve got a car full of supplies that I need to get to some hungry and thirsty people, so I’d best be on my way.”
He did nothing to stop her from going, nor to give her a warm and fuzzy feeling that might make her want to return with money to spend. He didn’t even say “Have a nice day.” He just went back to organizing his stock.
As she walked to her car, she couldn’t stop thinking about something she herself had said. Sometimes she didn’t know what she thought until she heard herself say it out loud.
While she was saying to Thad that the captain must have been a confident diver because he was willing to dive by himself, the words had jangled her nerves a bit. Now that she had a moment to think about those words, it wasn’t hard to figure out why they had jangled. She was presuming that the captain had been alone because nobody had reported an accident. But what if he hadn’t been alone?
She considered that question, turning it over and over in her head as she sat in the parking lot of Thad’s store, too dispirited to drive the car full of supplies to the people who were waiting for her. She could think of no innocent scenario that involved the captain having a companion when he went out on the Gulf. Yeah, maybe a friend in another boat had been there when he entered the water and then left before he surfaced, but that seemed far-fetched and, frankly, irresponsible.
There were really only two realistic options. Either the captain had been alone on his last dive, or he hadn’t been alone and his companion had died with him. This scenario left his boat out there somewhere, and there might well be another corpse floating alongside it.
No. There was still another option. A second person might have gone out on the water with the captain and failed to call for help when he didn’t reappear from his dive.
That would have been impossibly irresponsible. Unforgivable. Illegal. And deeply disturbing.