It had taken Faye forever to run Amande’s delivery route, and she’d spent that time in parts of Wakulla County that were still without a functional cell tower. This had become obvious when she finally edged out of the hurricane zone, because her phone had lit up with notifications. She’d had calls and texts from Joe, Amande, Magda, and Emma, and none of them made sense.
Even Manny had shot her some messages that were meant to be reassuring:
Dont freak out
Joes telling the truth
He’s ok
Then, as soon as she’d read the messages and listened to the voicemails, she’d lost service again. This forced her to drive for another quarter-hour wondering what people were talking about. Why on earth would somebody shoot Ossie?
Also, despite what everybody said, somebody had been firing a gun in her husband’s vicinity, so she felt completely entitled to freak out. And she did, within reason. She held herself together enough to handle the car, but the inside of her brain was a mess.
When she got Joe on the phone, he sounded fine. He was already home with the kids. This gave her permission to finally fall apart. She found a stretch of road where the shoulder wasn’t heaped with hurricane debris, parked her car, and indulged in some hysterics while he kept saying that there was no reason for her to do that.
“You keep saying you’re fine,” she said between hiccuping sobs, “but the things you’re telling me don’t sound fine. I’ll be home as quick as this car can get me there. And my boat…which isn’t at the marina, is it?”
Joe tried to say that he’d come get her, but she interrupted him. “You’ve been through enough today, and so have the kids. I’ll use Amande’s boat. I’m sure she won’t mind, but I’ll ask her. She thinks I don’t respect her space. I don’t want to make her right about that.”
As soon as she ended the call, her phone rang again. It was Amande, trying to sound like she hadn’t been crying about the captain or Ossie or the pain of being nineteen. All she said was, “Please use my boat to get home as soon as you can,” and then she was gone.
* * *
Faye was finally, finally home. She buried her face in Joe’s chest, grateful for the feel of his heartbeat against her cheek. “I was so scared.”
Michael was sandwiched between them, yelping for air.
“What happened?” she asked. “Why would somebody be shooting at you?”
Joe shook his head, saying, “They weren’t shooting at Nate and me. They were shooting at Ossie. She’d been out over the water and was just coming inland when we heard the shots, two of them. As soon as Ossie was on her way down, there weren’t any more.”
“Mission accomplished,” Amande said. “A perfectly harmless machine was dead, so they stopped shooting. I’m sure this makes perfect sense to somebody, but not to me.”
And now the children were crying over Ossie, forcing Joe to say, “She was just a machine. I mean, it was just a machine. We can save up our money and buy another one just like her. I mean, just like it.”
Faye came to his rescue. “Ossie can be replaced. Your dad can’t. Everything turned out for the best. And if the sheriff can find the person who’s shooting a gun when they’re way too close to people, that’ll be even better.”
* * *
When Joe had seen Faye trudge into their house at the end of a terrible day, he’d had a feeling about what she was going to say. And he’d been right.
“I’m not sure Sheriff Rainey is taking the captain’s death seriously enough,” were the first words out of her mouth when the children were out of earshot, and Joe wasn’t at all surprised. And her next words weren’t unexpected, either. “We’re supposed to be happy that he hasn’t closed the case and called it a day, but I don’t sense that he’s as hell-bent on solving it as he should be. I’m gonna call Sheriff Mike.”
He felt obligated to point out the obvious. “He ain’t the sheriff anymore. He’s just Mike.”
“Don’t give me that. You still call him ‘Sheriff Mike,’ too.”
This was true, so Joe was now out of half-hearted arguments. “Then call the man. It’ll make you feel better.”
* * *
“What exactly do you think I can to do to help? I’m retired.”
Sheriff Mike even sounded retired to his own ears. In earlier years there would have been a sarcastic edge to his voice. Now, he sounded almost mellow, and “mellow” was not a word that anyone had ever associated with Mike McKenzie before he married, had a late-in-life kid, and walked away from law enforcement for good.
Faye was not easily dissuaded.
“You still know people. You still know the law. When somebody dies mysteriously, you know how to work the case. I think maybe Sheriff Rainey’s still a little green.”
Mike knew that this was what Faye sounded like when she was trying to be diplomatic. God help him if she decided to just come out with the unvarnished truth. If he didn’t address her concerns one way or another, she would escalate all the way up to undiplomatic straight-shooter and inform him that she was pretty sure the new sheriff was incompetent.
Sheriff Mike knew that Sheriff Rainey wasn’t incompetent. He was a good, steady, hardworking officer of the law. It might be possible, though, that he lacked the tendency toward treachery that made a good investigator great. If you weren’t capable of treachery, then how would you recognize it when you saw it? Sheriff Mike was immodest enough to admit that he was born a little treacherous. Brushing elbows with criminals for decades had honed this trait a little more with each passing year. This was why retirement had been so good for his soul. He didn’t deal with criminals every day, and this removed the temptation for him to be a little more like them.
“Tell me what’s bothering you, Faye.”
“The new sheriff seems willing to take Captain Eubank’s death at face value. Yeah, he’s going through the motions of doing an investigation, but he’s handed a lot of the work off to somebody named Lieutenant Baker—”
“The man is dealing with the aftermath of a hurricane. People died. Some are still missing. His attention is divided.”
“I know that. I do. I’m out there looking at what’s left of my friends’ homes every day that rolls. And you know it.” She heard herself and stopped. “I’m sorry for yelling.”
“Faye, honey, if you can’t yell at your friends, who can you yell at?”
“Yeah, well, sometimes I want to yell at the new sheriff. He thinks the captain got so carried away by excitement when he thought he’d located a treasure ship that he took his boat out and hopped right in the water. Alone. And then he died. The end.”
Mike knew that a good investigator tried not to talk much when he was talking to somebody who was just burning to tell him something, so he said nothing but, “You knew the captain well. What do you think?”
“When I last saw him, he was excited about maybe finding a shipwreck. I’ll grant you that. Maybe that explains why he did something so dumb, but I don’t know. Nobody would ever have called the captain dumb. You knew him. Do you think he would have risked scuba diving by himself? Especially since I don’t think he had a lot of experience. Have you ever even heard him mention scuba diving?”
This question had been bothering Mike ever since he heard about the captain’s death. “No, I’ve never heard him mention it, but that don’t prove much. I do believe that if the captain was ever going to do something crazy, it would happen when he was all excited about something historical. And you yourself have said that he thought he was on the trail of a shipwreck. That would have made our good friend fairly well giddy.”
“He would have waded into a gun battle if it meant that he would learn something.” Faye’s usually no-nonsense voice was wistful. “I know that. Only…”
Sheriff Mike’s instincts were suddenly on alert. When someone as analytical as Faye Longchamp-Mantooth stopped herself in the middle of an emotional rant, it usually meant something. He knew Faye well, and he knew what this hesitation meant for her. It meant that she’d had a logical thought that contradicted what she was saying. Faye’s logical thoughts were consistently worth exploring.
“Only what?”
“That’s the thing. I don’t think he needed scuba gear. Not to check out the spot we were talking about. The tide was pretty low yesterday afternoon. Early evening, too, and I just can’t imagine the captain going night diving by himself, so I think he was dead by nightfall. I know it didn’t happen this morning, because that’s when he was planning to go see Jeanine. You know he wouldn’t put anything ahead of her, not even a fabulous shipwreck.”
“Now, that’s true.”
“I’m pretty sure the tide was low enough yesterday evening for him to land the boat on Joyeuse Island and walk all the way out there. Even if he didn’t think to do that, he could have gotten there with a snorkel. Using scuba gear was overkill, especially since nobody has said anything yet to make me believe that the captain even owned any. And don’t forget that he lived near the Gulf all his life. He knew he needed to watch the tides, and he almost certainly swam like a fish.”
Oh, yeah. The captain could swim. Sheriff Mike remembered a time, maybe fifteen years back, when the man swam out to a tourist caught in a riptide and hauled her to shore singlehandedly. Captain Edward Eubank most certainly didn’t drown because he couldn’t handle himself in the water. Nevertheless, people made mistakes and sometimes they had terrible, awful luck.
But was that really what happened? The captain had been serious about his passions. He had talked Sheriff Mike’s ear off about fishing many times. He could also deliver an hour-long monologue on nineteenth-century fish canneries in Micco County that was actually pretty interesting if you were in the right frame of mind. It helped if you had a cup of coffee in your hand. But never once had Mike heard him deliver one of those monologues on scuba diving.
Faye was right to harp on this fact like a dog worrying a bone. And she was right to wonder about why he was scuba diving in water that was really pretty shallow.
“Think about it,” she said. “If he’d gone out at another time, the tide would have been higher, but we’re still not talking about unfathomable ocean depths. You could drown in that water, but you’d almost have to work at it.”
She was right, but she was ignoring a very real possibility. “It ain’t all that hard to drown if you’ve had a heart attack,” Sheriff Mike said his voice gentle. “Or a stroke or something like that. The captain was my age or better, and stuff like that happens to old dudes like us. Surely there will be an autopsy.”
Her voice was quiet, barely audible. “Yeah. It’s probably happening right now, if it’s not already done. Not that I expect the sheriff to stumble all over himself to tell me what it says.”
“I’ll talk to some people and see if there’s been any chatter on the street. If I hear anything, I’ll call you. I promise. But Faye, honey, sometimes terrible things happen and it ain’t nobody’s fault.”
She didn’t say anything.
“Honey,” Mike said, knowing that he was really concerned about Faye if he was calling her “Honey” in back-to-back sentences. “Magda’s real worried about you. She’s sitting right here beside me, telling me to tell you that you should pick up your phone once in a while.”
Faye must have seen the calls from her best friend. They’d been coming in all the damn day, ever since word got out about the captain’s death. With his connections, Sheriff Mike was among the first to know such things. Magda, as his wife, was the next. She’d been dialing Faye’s number ever since.
“I saw the messages. Tell Magda—”
Faye went silent.
So what was Mike supposed to tell his worried wife? That her friend was just too sad to talk?
Magda knew that. That’s why she was blowing up Faye’s phone, because she knew that letting her stew in that misery wouldn’t end well.
“Tell her what? Please say that I should tell her you’ll call her soon.”
He got a quiet “Yeah” out of her, and he figured that was the best he was going to do when loyal Faye was hurting over a friend.