Faye wished she liked Lieutenant Baker better. The young woman was probably a perfectly lovely human being, but weren’t officers of the law supposed to know how to deal with the public?
Faye had left the lieutenant a voicemail as soon as she and Joe got back from their snorkeling expedition. She supposed that the woman’s three-hour delay in responding was reasonable, but Faye was not a patient person. Baker’s delay in meeting Joe on the day Ossie was shot had been rude, to say the least. This delay in returning Faye’s call made the rudeness seem intentional.
By the time her phone rang, Faye and her family had taken both oyster skiffs to shore. They had consumed heaping plates of Manny’s pancakes, and now they were splitting up for the day. She’d just finished buckling Michael into his car seat in Amande’s car when her phone rang. As she pulled it out of her pocket, Amande pulled out of the parking lot, on her way to do her daily rounds.
“You wanted to speak to me?” The lieutenant’s tone was cool and professional, but it would not have hurt her to say hello before launching into the conversation.
“I wanted to let you know that Joe and I swam out to the spot where we were thinking Captain Eubank might have been diving.”
“Did he say he was planning to dive there? To you or to anybody else?”
“No, but he and I were talking about a possible shipwreck in that spot just hours before he—”
The lieutenant couldn’t be bothered to let her finish her sentence. “But there’s no physical evidence that places him at that spot. And no witnesses that say he planned to go there.”
“No, but—”
“I’m interested in evidence, not supposition. I’m working with scarce resources and that means I have to target my activities. I can’t run out into the Gulf on a hunch, not any more than I can randomly search all that water.”
Faye was literally chewing on her tongue to keep from lashing out. There was no point in alienating one of the few people in a position to get justice for her friend.
She took a deep breath and spoke calmly. “I hear what you’re saying, but I’m going to tell you what I know. You don’t have to listen, but I don’t have to stop trying to get you to listen. Even if you hang up on me, I’m going to write down what we saw and send it to you.”
“You found some evidence that he’d been there? You found something that makes this spot different from the whole wide Gulf?”
“No, I didn’t. That’s the thing. I thought that there was a good chance he’d gone out there, but I found no trace. No weight belt, for sure. I found the spring vent that I think he might have been heading for, though. There’s a chance that he could have caught a hand or foot in it and drowned, but I think we’d be able to see marks in the sand made by his legs as he fought for his life. And the vegetation in that area is undisturbed. The most important thing, though, is that the water there is very shallow. Yeah, you could drown there, but it wouldn’t be easy.”
“Well, if you want to send me an email and include a map showing this place where the victim didn’t die, you can do that. That will make one less spot in the great big Gulf of Mexico for me to worry about. Right now, I need to get back to checking out the whole rest of the world. The autopsy is our best bet at finding something concrete. I also think that there’s nothing concrete to find. I think the autopsy will show no signs of foul play at all.”
Faye wanted to say, “Why did the sheriff order it then, if he thought it was pointless?” Instead, she kept it simple. “Will the report be in soon? It’s been almost two days.”
“Ma’am, I’m pretty sure that the autopsy is being done in a morgue that’s still using a generator for power. But everybody on this case is a professional. If there’s evidence of foul play on that body, it’ll be found. Maybe it has been found. The sheriff has other things to do besides babysit this case that you just won’t let go. But if the autopsy doesn’t turn up anything suspicious, I can’t see much reason to think this wasn’t a simple and sad diving accident.”
Faye took a breath, intending to answer her, but Baker interrupted even her quiet breath.
“I mean that. It is sad. Truly. But the time I spend trying to prove the obvious—which is that Captain Eubank’s death was an accident—is time when I’m not using my resources to find two missing people. Or to track down the looters who shot a gas station attendant last night.”
Faye had the sense that Lieutenant Baker wasn’t always like this. She was coming off of a long string of nights without sleep and days full of never-ending work. Faye sympathized, so she didn’t reflect Baker’s anger back at her. She just said, “We’re all tired these days.”
“I’m not tired. I’m outraged. Did you see the picture of that mother? The one who’s missing along with her little boy? I guarantee you that I’ve shed more tears over them than her husband has. There’s no way that his fairy tale holds water. He is not the kind of man who wades out into a flood to save his family. And I don’t believe the next-door neighbor, either. He knows something, and he won’t say what it is. One of them knows what happened to that woman and child. Maybe both of them know. If you were wondering where I was while your husband was waiting for me, now you know. I was with the husband and then the neighbor—questioning them, pressing them, trying to get them to break.”
Faye didn’t know what to say, other than “I’m so sorry. I had no idea.”
“Next time you want to think that I should be watching your husband fly his toy instead of trying to get the truth about that woman and her child, you go get a copy of the newspaper and take a look at their faces.”
* * *
After another morning of boarding up broken windows, Faye took a break and called her daughter. She didn’t have a lot of hope of getting through, but lunch was the time when Amande was most likely to be picking up her afternoon supplies in Crawfordville. This meant that there was a decent chance that she had cell service. And she did.
“You caught me just before I drove back out into the land of dead cell phones.”
Amande sounded almost glad to hear from her. Faye hoped that this attitude stuck around. She needed to remember how happy it made her daughter to feel needed.
“Did you do that favor for me?”
“Yep, I went to Miss Jeanine’s house first, like you asked me to. Guess what’s in my back seat?”
“A big, big pile of paperwork that includes a power of attorney made out to Greta Haines? Unsigned, I hope.”
“Yep.”
“Thank you, sweetie. You did something really important for Jeanine. What did she say about letting me check on the captain’s house?”
“She said that you were more than welcome to do that. If you don’t mind, it would be a big help if you’d air it out a little while you’re there.”
“It’s the least I can do.”
“She said something else, and this made me a little sad.”
Everything about Jeanine Eubank’s life was sad right now. “What did she say?”
“She said that she wanted you to take anything you wanted from his library. She doesn’t want anything out of the house except family photos. She’s going to hire somebody to do an estate sale, but she knows you appreciate all his books and maps and stuff. She’d rather give them to you for free than sell them to somebody who just wants them because the shiny gold printing on the spines looks good.”
Faye wanted to pull the car over and cry. When that library was broken up, it would be as if the captain had never existed. He really would be dead.
“But you know what, Mom? There’s at least one person who wants those books for the right reasons. Besides you and me, I mean.”
“Who’s that, sweetie?”
“Her name is Samantha Kennedy. I’ve seen her at Miss Jeanine’s house twice now. She’s there now.”
“Samantha Kennedy? I know her. I interviewed her for a job.”
The words, “But I didn’t hire her,” hung in the air asking to be said. Faye had a soft spot for young people trying to get a start in the world, so she didn’t say them.
Amande said them for her, more or less. “There’s got to be a reason you didn’t hire her. You and Dad have some big contracts coming up soon. You’re gonna need warm bodies to do all that fieldwork.”
Faye heard what Amande didn’t say, which was that she wasn’t planning to be around to help. “That’s why I didn’t hire her. Samantha is very smart. You saw how young she is, but she’s already got a PhD. And a Master of Library and Information Science, too. But she’s just not a field archaeologist. Samantha has tons of intellectual stamina, but I need somebody with the physical stamina to dig all day with an actual trowel.”
“That’s what most people want from an entry-level archaeologist,” Amande said.
This was true, but Faye was surprised that her daughter had given this much thought. Maybe she wasn’t wrong to harbor a hope that she could hand the business down to Amande someday.
“You’re right about that, sweetie. Samantha was born to be a professor, but the academic job market is in the pits these days for people who want full-time work. And by full-time work, I mean teaching jobs that pay a salary you can live on. Last I heard, she was teaching single classes here and there, making about a third of what she’d make teaching the same classes in a tenure-track job.”
Amande said, “Well, that sucks,” and her tone said that Faye had just dissuaded her from ever considering a life in academia, but her question was on a different topic entirely. “Is she from around here?”
Faye was surprised at this question. If there was one thing that Amande wasn’t, it was provincial. “No. She’s from somewhere up north. Indiana, I think. Why do you ask?”
“I’m just wondering how she knows Miss Jeanine. It’s not like she gets out much.”
“Did Samantha say why she was there?”
“Oh, yeah. Now I remember. The first time I saw her, she was there to return one of the captain’s rare books. Maybe she and Miss Jeanine really hit it off and she came back just to keep her company. That’s really sweet. Maybe Miss Jeanine wants to be around somebody who likes books as much as the captain did. I bet Samantha reminds her of her brother a little bit.”
The lump in Faye’s throat was back. It came back at odd times when she remembered Captain Eubank and really understood, deep down, that she would never again hear him enthuse over something cool that he’d just learned. Her silence broke the rhythm of the conversation, making it obvious to Amande that her mother wasn’t doing very well.
“Mom? Are you okay?”
Faye prided herself on being the buffer between her children and a hard world, and now she’d failed at that. Again.
“I’m fine. Just fine. Did you get a key to his house like I asked you to?”
“Don’t be silly. The captain lived in Crawfordville. I’m surprised that he locked the house at all. Miss Jeanine says there’s a key in the garage. It’s on a shelf over his workbench, under the third Sir Walter Raleigh can from the left. You can go on over there right now. You don’t have to wait for me to bring you a key.”
Now Faye remembered watching the captain scoop Sir Walter Raleigh pipe tobacco into cigarette papers, rolling his own smokes and carefully licking the paper to seal them into neat cylinders. With this memory, she was undone, but she still managed to say, “Well, that makes it easy to get in the place. And the garage isn’t locked?”
“The garage key is under the doormat outside the side door of the house. The one that goes into the kitchen. I guess the captain liked the idea of a burglar standing on that doormat trying to figure out why the key he found under it didn’t fit the door.”
And now Captain Eubank felt alive to Faye again, smoking a roll-your-own and enjoying one last laugh against intruders who might want to steal his precious books.
* * *
The third Sir Walter Raleigh can from the left was heavy, because it was full of nuts and bolts instead of tobacco. So was the second Sir Walter Raleigh can from the left, but Faye was pretty sure that the nut and bolts in it were ever-so-slightly smaller. And the nuts and bolts in the first tobacco can from the left looked infinitesimally smaller still. Captain Eubank’s workshop was as meticulously organized as his library, minus the Library of Congress numbers. None of the tobacco cans were labeled, but Faye felt sure that the captain had known exactly where his 5/16-inch hex bolts were.
She palmed the key and headed for the kitchen door. Once through it, she saw that everything in the captain’s kitchen looked the same as always, except it didn’t. A fine layer of dust dimmed the sheen of the countertops he had kept so brilliantly waxed. A faint sprinkle of black dots on the grout around the kitchen window showed the beginnings of mildew, because decay happens fast in a steamy climate. The captain would have hated seeing his kitchen look like this.
Faye’s hair was beginning to stick to her sweaty neck, and she thought that she, too, might begin to mildew soon. A stack of opened mail sat on the corner of the captain’s kitchen table, and the corners of the individual sheets of paper were beginning to curl in the humidity of a house where the air conditioning hadn’t run for days.
This brought her up short. The captain wouldn’t have turned off the central air just because he was going to be gone for a few hours. He probably wouldn’t have turned it off if he was going to be gone for a week, because heat and humidity wouldn’t have been good for his books and maps. As she listened to the quiet house, she realized that she had never been there when it was utterly silent. The captain’s dehumidifiers had always been a humming counterpoint to every conversation.
Who had turned off the central air conditioner and the dehumidifiers? Jeanine?
No, wait. It couldn’t have been Jeanine who shut off the A/C. She was housebound.
Would the deputies have done that when the sheriff sent them to check out the house? Maybe, if Jeanine had asked them. Faye didn’t see any visible signs that they’d been there, so the sheriff had been serious when he’d called it just a walk-through.
Faye dialed Amande’s number and had the great good luck to get through again. “Did Jeanine say if anybody else has been in the house since the captain died, other than the people from the sheriff’s office?”
“She didn’t have to say. I know at least one person who’s been in there. Yesterday, I heard Greta volunteer to close things down for her. Shut off the water heater, empty the fridge, turn off the A/C, return the cable box…that kind of stuff. It was nice of her to think about those things, wasn’t it?”
Faye mumbled an insincere, “Yeah.”
“It’s good thing she did, or else Miss Jeanine would have been stuck with a kitchen full of rotten food, not to mention bills for electricity and cable that she didn’t even use. Greta said she would wait to shut off the water and electricity until after the house sold, because the estate sale people and the real estate agent would want them on, but the cable’s off now. I never would have known what needed to be done. Sometimes I think I’ll never be a real grown-up because there are just too many things to do. I’ll never know how to do them all.”
Faye thought that Amande would navigate adulthood just fine, but she did not like her daughter being on a first-name basis with a woman who seemed to be doing her best to cheat vulnerable people. She thought of the innocuous-looking power of attorney that Greta had given Emma, and she thought of all the ways it could help an evil person cheat somebody like Jeanine Eubank. Greta could offer to handle the estate sale and pilfer anything valuable she found in the house. She could lie about how much she made on the sale, giving Jeanine a pittance for all of her brother’s worldly possessions. She could even sell the house and pocket the money, and the captain’s own sister might never know.
That was the advantage of cheating somebody old and housebound. After a few years of Jeanine asking, “Did my brother’s house ever sell?” and Greta answering, “Not yet, dear,” the older woman would eventually die. In her condition, she might never come into town again, and Greta could make that even more likely by doing Jeanine’s shopping for her and urging her not to exert herself. When Jeanine died, her estate would be settled, Greta would wave her signed power of attorney at the estate attorney, and all the lying and cheating would be done. It would be wiped away as if it had never happened. All but the money in Greta’s pocket, that is.
Faye got a sick feeling when she remembered the pile of paperwork that Amande had seen at Jeanine’s house. Somebody evil could have slipped anything into that pile, where it now sat waiting for her signature. Faye needed to go through that paperwork, page by page, and help Jeanine get her affairs in order.
Faye was not ignorant of the fact that this was essentially what Greta had offered to do for Emma and probably for Jeanine, too. She ignored that quibble, because she knew that her motives were pure, and she had deep doubts about Greta’s.