Feeling like a ghoul, Faye stood in the captain’s kitchen and flipped through his mail. She found nothing but bills and advertising circulars. Everything else in the kitchen looked exactly as it had during her last visit, so she moved on into the library. It, too, looked exactly as it had.
The library’s walls were still lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. A large worktable and the captain’s personal desk still dominated the center of the room. The room still smelled like library ink and dust, but the acrid tang of mildew was beginning to intrude.
Amande’s voice came out of Faye’s phone. “Mom?”
“I’m here. Sorry. I got distracted by the captain’s books. I forgot to ask you something when I called before. Did you give my message to Jeanine?”
“Sure did. I told Miss Jeanine that you wanted to help her with her paperwork. I made sure nobody was around when I asked. She was so so so grateful, Mom. I had a box with me, just like you said, so I loaded the papers all up. It was a really good idea for you to offer to take care of them for her.”
“Thanks, sweetie. I think it’s the right thing to do.”
Standing in the middle of the captain’s vast book collection, Faye spun in place. She saw any number of volumes that she’d love to have in her personal library, but she saw nothing out of the ordinary.
A teetering pile of books on the captain’s desk caught her eye. Some of them had ragged linen covers and some were wrapped in cracked leather, but all of them were old. Had they been there before? Faye wasn’t sure.
She leaned over sideways to read their spines. Some of them were too timeworn to have legible titles, but a few of them did. She saw early copies of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Palmetto-Leaves and Frank Parker Stockbridge’s Florida in the Making, as well as an old promotional book aimed at bringing people to the Florida Panhandle to work in the lumber industry. Atop the stack was a Hammond’s Complete Map of Florida from 1912. She knew these books and knew that their publication dates bracketed the late nineteenth and early twentieth century years when Micco County’s longleaf forests were clear-cut by people like Nate Peterson’s ancestors. She also knew somebody who would be interested in these particular books.
“Amande? Do you remember what book Samantha Kennedy was returning to Jeanine?”
“It was an atlas of railroads in the Southeast around the turn of the twentieth century.”
Yep. That book fit perfectly with this stack of volumes that could have been hand-selected to appeal to Dr. Samantha Kennedy. And they probably had been hand-selected, because that was the way Captain Eubank treated his friends.
* * *
Faye had ended her call, then circled the captain’s living room. She was looking for the shelves where he’d stored books with Library of Congress numbers beginning with F, which denoted books on local history in the Americas. She also scrutinized GE titles on environmental science and SD titles on forestry, arboriculture, and silviculture, all of which probably had Samantha Kennedy’s fingerprints all over them.
On a hunch, she did a web search for Dr. Samantha Kennedy and Florida history. A sizable number of scholarly journal articles popped up, especially considering the woman’s youth, and they were in some highly respected publications. Since it was the twenty-first century, the web search also turned up social media posts. Even in those, Dr. Kennedy was focused on her career.
Do any of you people have access to documents that show railroad spurs in Micco County in the early 1900s? Not the permanent ones. I’m looking for the ones that served the temporary sawmills that moved on when the trees were all cut down. Surely somebody drew maps showing those but I can’t find them. I’m also coming up dry in searches for photographs of those sawmills.
The post was a year old, but none of her Twitter friends had been able to help her. Maybe the book she’d returned to Jeanine had shown where the spurs were, but it wouldn’t have had photos of the mills. Samantha might well be looking for documents that didn’t exist any longer. This was the kind of wild goose chase that the captain would have loved.
Faye studied the shelves full of books in Samantha Kennedy’s field. They were all neatly filled from end to end with books. If she—or anybody else—had taken and kept anything from those shelves, it wasn’t obvious to Faye. And why should Faye think she’d done that? She knew that the woman had just returned a book voluntarily, when it was a reasonable bet that nobody would ever have known she had it.
Faye hated herself for being so suspicious. The absolute worst motivation that she could ascribe to Samantha Kennedy was that she might be kissing up to Jeanine Eubank so that the old woman might give her some rare books she wanted.
And what if Jeanine did give them to Samantha? They were her books now. She could burn them if she wanted to.
* * *
Samantha Kennedy crouched in Captain Eubank’s azalea bushes, waiting. Traffic along the street in front of the captain’s house had been nonstop for ten minutes. She couldn’t risk being seen, so she resigned herself to wait for her chance.
Her phone was open to a photo she’d taken on the last occasion she’d crouched in these azalea bushes. It was hard to read the titles on the captain’s books on this small screen, but her computer screen had been big enough to do what she needed. She knew now for certain that the captain’s library held the books that could make her career.
Samantha had done everything she could think of to prompt Jeanine Eubank to offer her the pick of Captain Eubank’s library. She’d had no luck.
The old lady had said that she dreamed of finding a home for her brother’s collection where it could be available to anybody who was interested in it. Donating it to a university library wouldn’t serve that goal, because university libraries were for the use of their students and professors, not the general public. But nobody else had the kind of money that it took to take care of all those fragile bits of paper.
Jeanine was Samantha’s last hope, but she was no more cooperative than her brother had been. He, too, had wanted his library to be open to everybody, forever.
Samantha couldn’t live with that. She didn’t want everybody to have access to the books she had in mind. If everybody had access, then somebody might publish their findings before she was able to write them up. It was a slam dunk that a tenured professor would have more time to write those articles than Samantha would, running as she did from class to class and from college to college. These days, she was waiting tables, too, because the class she needed to make her income livable had been canceled at the last minute.
Samantha had her eye on three books and just three books. They were as rare as they could be, because she knew of no other copies, but they wouldn’t bring much money on the open market. Nobody but Samantha and two rival academics had any interest in them whatsoever, but for the three of them those books could mean scholarly publications and respect. If she played her cards right, they could bring her a full-time job doing the work she loved. They could bring her a retirement account. They could bring her health insurance.
Samantha wanted them out of the captain’s house and safely hidden in her own home. The captain had denied her this. So had his sister.
If this meant that she had to steal those books, then so be it.
* * *
Faye had spent too much time prowling among a dead man’s treasures. She could so easily conjure up the living memory of her friend while she stood surrounded by his things, but the memories lasted only so long. When they dissipated, she was left with nothing but the memory of him floating facedown in the water.
That image made her shiver. She moved away from the shelves of books that Samantha Kennedy probably coveted—away from the all the books, actually—and she found a place to stand in the exact middle of the room.
Right next to her, so close that she couldn’t move without bumping it, was the chair where she’d sat during her last talk with the captain. Unsure why she had ever thought that coming to his house was going to help anything, she dropped into that chair to think.
The newspaper with Joe’s photo on the front page still sat where she and the captain had looked at it together. His green teacup, made with the clean art deco lines of the 1920s, sat across the worktable from her, right where he’d left it. It had belonged to the captain’s grandmother, and it had been his favorite.
Faye could see him even now, sipping his tea and holding that newspaper. The image made her breath catch in her throat. She held the cup up to the light. Its porcelain was so thin and fine that the cup was translucent.
The fact that the captain’s cup was still sitting here might mean that he had walked out to his car as soon as she left. It was possible that he had driven straight to the marina and gotten into his boat for the last time. If so, he could have drowned within an hour or two of seeing Faye. Or he might have sat in that chair, sipping tea and pondering the Philomela’s end for hours.
This train of thought presumed that he left alone. She saw no signs of a struggle, and it seemed far-fetched to imagine that someone would burst in, forcing him into the car, onto his boat, and into the scuba gear that he would wear to his death, without leaving some sign. She supposed that a hurried departure could be explained equally well by the sudden arrival of some friends who said “Hey! Let’s go diving,” but this explanation turned quickly dark when she asked why those friends didn’t call for help when he drowned.
As her memory of their time together grew clearer, she remembered the stack of Joe’s photographs that the captain had pulled from a drawer in the desk behind him. The idea came to her that she should take another look at those photos. It seemed so clearly the right thing to do that she set the cup down decisively, so hard that she reflexively checked it to see if it had broken. No, the fine porcelain was too tough for that.
The pictures weren’t on the worktable where she thought he’d left them, so she checked the drawer. The photos weren’t there, either, and they weren’t in the kitchen or in his bedroom or in either of the bedrooms that he used as library annexes.
Had he taken them with him on that last boat ride? That seemed out of character for a man with the instincts and habits of an archivist, but she couldn’t find them in any of the logical places where he might keep pictures.
Taking printed photos out on the Gulf of Mexico in a small fishing boat was a guarantee that they’d be sprayed with saltwater. This thought reminded her that the captain’s boat hadn’t been found. She wondered if it ever would be. He had loved that boat. She didn’t like to think of it floating out into the Gulf or capsizing or sinking or running aground in a coastal swamp, taking another small remnant of her friend’s life with it.
If the captain hadn’t taken the photos with him, there weren’t many ways to explain the fact that Faye couldn’t find them. One scenario supposed that someone had come to the house before the captain died, he let them in, and he gave them the photos. Or perhaps that person or persons took him and his photos against his will but took nothing else. Another scenario said that an intruder had entered the house after the captain left, taking the photos and nothing else.
Faye knew for a fact that Greta had been in the house, so she was a prime candidate, but there was nothing to say that someone else hadn’t done it. It really wasn’t that hard to get into the captain’s house. Anybody could have known which Sir Walter Raleigh can hid the key.
Was there anything else missing from the library, other than the photos? The room—the whole house, really—had always been so orderly that she couldn’t imagine anything out of place. Lieutenant Baker must have found searching this home to be quick work.
But had she searched it, really? It didn’t look like anyone had done things like empty the drawers and move the furniture around, as they would have done if they’d been working a murder investigation or a drug bust. Because it wasn’t a murder investigation. She needed to remember that. Lieutenant Baker certainly wanted her to remember it.
Lieutenant Baker and her crime scene investigator had checked to see whether the captain had left a suicide note or whether there was some other clear sign that something in his life wasn’t right, but that was all. And her tone during their recent phone call had left Faye no doubt about one thing. The lieutenant would not have gone a single step further than her assignment in investigating this case.
Faye wasn’t even sure what a sign that the captain’s life wasn’t right would look like. Evidence of a break-in might do it, perhaps, or some sign that he was mentally ill, like hoarding or unsanitary living conditions. Lieutenant Baker hadn’t found those things, so she had moved on.
In a way, Faye was grateful. She would have been so sad to see his library overturned and scrambled. There could have been no greater desecration of his memory. The captain had always sat patiently with each visitor to make sure that they got whatever they needed from his collection.
The thought of his library visitors made Faye’s eyes turn involuntarily to the small table by the door where he had kept the sign-in sheet. He had maintained it faithfully, because he was proud that people used his collection and because those attendance records had helped him earn the grants that funded his historical work.
The sign-in sheet was gone.