Even in the shade it was hot. Turner Lockett was sitting in his boat, pulled up against the bank under the spreading limbs of a huge live oak. Despite the heat, he wore a dark-green, long-sleeved shirt and worn jeans to protect his skin from the sun and hungry insects.
It was late Sunday afternoon, and he was dividing his time between watching Skeeter Crewes’ place and Sam Larkin’s house. Clay was adamant about knowing the schedules of the people at each place and who came and went. The time spent watching Larkin’s place moved faster. Nothing at all to see at Crewes’, other than him going to work in the morning and a couple of pickaninies playing out in the dirt yard that Mrs. Skeeter swept with a grass broom every afternoon. Larkin’s was more entertaining, especially for the past two days when the female water cop came to spend the weekend. More than once he wished he could see what was going on inside the house. ‘Bet she fucks like a mink just to prove she ain’t a lesbian,’ he told himself the first night she spent there.
On Saturday morning he watched her come to the sliding glass doors. He thought she was naked, but by the time he got his binoculars up, she was gone. The woman had a good body; even when she was in uniform, he could tell that. Both mornings she and Larkin had come out to the deck to have coffee, and, from what he could see, she was only wearing an over-sized tee shirt. Probably one of Larkin’s. Through the glasses he could tell her tits weren’t huge, but they were more than a handful.
He opened his cooler and saw one, lone beer remaining. He popped it and made up his mind to go to Harry Tom’s for more. He wasn’t about to sit out in the heat all afternoon and another night with nothing to drink; the eyes would come back. A couple of times since he had been on watch, he had felt the eyes. At one point he even imagined he saw something in the grass and scrub along the edge of the bank, but it only looked real for a few seconds, then it was gone. A shadow. He had a couple of high-powered joints in the cooler that would help if old Jared’s ghost tried to spook him again. He resented being given all the shit work to do, but it was better than sitting in the trailer surrounded by spirits.
It was only a twenty minute run to the dock. The last beer was empty by the time he got there, and he was beginning to feel it and the eleven that went before it. After docking, he picked up the cooler and went inside. Harry Tom put in two six-packs and topped it off with ice while Turner made a phone call. Charley Clay answered on the first ring.
“Charles Clay.”
“Charley? It’s me, Turner. I been watchin’ them two houses for two days an ain’t nothin’ happenin’ in either one of ‘em.”
“Nothin’? Nobody come or go?”
“Skeeter goes to work and comes home; missus don’t go nowhere. She’s got the kids to take care of.”
“What about Larkin? Nobody comin’ or goin’ there either?”
“Oh I imagine there’s lotsa comin’ goin’ on there.” He laughed. “That female water cop—name’s Chaney, Ray Breslin told me—she’s been out here since Friday night. They’ve been eatin’ regular out on the deck, but that’s about all I’ve seen.”
“Been there since Friday night you say?”
“Yep. Hardly come up for air near as I can tell. Probably won’t be able to get her knees together, she don’t leave soon.” He found himself laughing; it had been awhile.
“You drunk, Turner?”
“Hell, no,” he said. “You give me a job to do, I do it. Now do you want me to stay out there?”
“Give it till the woman leaves. I doubt she’ll stay tonight; tomorrow’s a work day. If she leaves, wait a half hour and see if Larkin goes anywhere. If he dudn’t, call it a night.”
“I still don’t know what all this is for; I thought you already decided on Crewes’ place.”
“Dammit! Shut up, Turner. You don’t know who’s listening to you prattle-on on the phone. I am sure there are other people in the store.”
“But why, if—” Lockett tried again.
“Because we have to know everything that goes on in that area all the time. I don’t want any surprises. You never know what might happen and what contingency plans we might need, and why in hell am I explainin’ myself to you? You’re gettin’ paid.”
“Okay, Charley, I’ll go back out there.”
“Call me tomorrow, Turner.”
“Yeah.” He hung up the phone and went to pay Harry Tom for the beer.
After pulling out of sight of the dock, Lockett let the boat idle in open water while he opened a beer for the trip back to Larkin’s. He would pass by Skeeter’s on the way and give it a glance, but it was Larkin’s he was interested in.
He let the boat idle back into the shade of the oak tree, two hundred yards across the creek from Larkin’s house. The water cop’s boat was still there. Maybe she was planning to spend the night again, get up early and make it into work. “Man, would I like a woman like that. Might even marry her,” he said to nobody. He opened another beer, sat back in the boat and focused on the house. He knew he should eat one of the fried baloney sandwiches he’d brought with him, but he wasn’t hungry.
He wondered what it would be like to be married. It wasn’t something he’d ever thought about. Never thought there was much chance of it. Especially to a woman like the Chaney woman. One who could hunt and fish and shrimp with him. One who could see in the outdoors what he did and appreciate it. One who could recognize in him smarts that indoor people never saw and who would realize he wasn’t dumb. That and her body to hold all night, every night. “Whew! That would be more than a man could stand,” he said. Of course, he didn’t know whether she felt that way about all those things or not, but it would seem so, given her job.
As the day waned, Turner found it more difficult not only to focus on Larkin’s house, but also to stay awake. He had been up for over fifty hours straight. He thought he might have dozed briefly because he remembered something about being married, which had to be some kind of dream. The third six-pack of beer was gone. There was another, but he left the beer and moved on to one of the joints he brought with him.
The grass took its toll. Charley said to wait until the woman left, stay another half hour and then go home. The only problem was that it didn’t look like she was going to leave, and he couldn’t last much longer. He lit the joint, took a couple of deep hits then put it out and back into his shirt pocket. Two hits at a blow with this stuff was enough.
It got to dark without his noticing. He must have fallen asleep again because the woman’s boat was no longer at Larkin’s dock. There was no recollection of seeing her leave, and no way of knowing if Larkin had gone with her. “No way of knowin’ nothin’. Shit!” he said to the boat. It was the one familiar thing he had to talk to; they had shared three days together. “Fuck!” he yelled. There was no way to know when the Chaney woman left, so he didn’t know if he had stayed a half-hour afterwards or not. Fifteen more minutes and he would head home. He fumbled in his pocket, brought out the joint, lit it and took three big hits before he put it out.
He waited what he thought was fifteen minutes, though he couldn’t be sure because the high from the grass was accelerating. Regardless, he was going. He pulled anchor, started the engine and began moving the boat away from the bank. He waved good-by to an imaginary Larkin standing on his deck. Maybe he was standing there; he couldn’t see clearly enough to tell. His eyelids felt like they weighed a thousand pounds each.
“That’s some shit,” he said to himself. When he turned back to look at where he had been anchored to judge the distance to the channel, Jared Barnes was standing at the edge of the woods, staring at him. His head was as misshapen as it was when he dumped him overboard. One eye was closed and the other was staring straight at him. Lockett rubbed his eyes and looked back. He was still there. He could almost discern a smile on the man’s face. He stood perfectly still, but the eye had life and it was burning into him.
“You’re not Jared, you son-of-a-bitch,” he yelled, unconcerned that anyone might hear. “You leave me alone. I know you’re not there. Fuck you, Ghost,” he screamed and then sobbed. “Oh, Lord, oh, Lord, oh Lord.” He hit the throttle hard and headed toward the channel. He wanted to get away, get home. Suddenly he was flying. Not going fast, literally flying.
The boat had gone up in the air for some reason. Everything was moving slowly. Half-speed. Like in a movie. Graceful. Then smacked into the water. He tried to hold on to the steering wheel mounted in the small console, but the weight of his body and its forward momentum forced his grip apart and launched him into the darkness.
He struck the water on the back of his head, causing him to skip across it like a flat stone thrown at a low angle. On his last skip, his back arched and forced him down into the blackness, wrenching his arms backward and upward, tearing the muscles and tendons in his shoulders. He couldn’t see anything; it enveloped him. He realized he was underwater and had to get to the surface. The air in his lungs was expended when he hit the water and went under. There was no reserve. A fire burned in his chest. He thought about the boat circling and coming back over him, cutting him to pieces. He feared being cut up. Blood mixing with water was one of the most frightening sights he could think of. He had to swim out a few yards from where he was and then move to the surface. He began swimming as hard as he could, holding on to the last vestige of oxygen in his body.
When he realized he could go no further, he pulled toward the surface, but something was wrong. Terribly wrong. He felt plant growth all around him. Suddenly his hands, reaching out to pull the water behind him and propel him toward the surface, struck mud and shell. He tried to recover, turn himself upside down and go in the opposite direction, but it was too late; he was out of air. He fought the deep breath that he took, tried to halt it, but he couldn’t hold it back. He felt the water filling his lungs, inching its way up like the red line in a thermometer is the way he saw it. Maybe there was a bubble of air at the top that would save him, but there wasn’t. His last thought was of Jared Barnes watching him from the edge of the woods.
Karen Chaney’s spending the weekend was a total surprise, albeit, as it turned out, a pleasant one; however, Larkin was not accustomed to allowing anyone else make his plans for him, and she had taken it upon herself to show up unannounced. It amazed him that he allowed it to happen. Once she was there, it all became too comfortable. It continued to be difficult to relax around her, which was ridiculous considering all of the things they had done together; however, her unbridled curiosity caused him to guard everything he said. If she was after something, she hadn’t gotten it. Still it bothered him.
The call came into the Sheriff’s office at twelve fifty-eight Monday afternoon. They, in turn, notified the Matthew’s Island Fire Department and the Covington office of the South Carolina Environmental Service. By one forty-five, two sheriff’s department cars and a fire department rescue vehicle with a boat trailer were parked in the area surrounding Sam Larkin’s house. Karen Chaney and Ray Breslin, notified of an overturned boat on Jones Run Creek, made high-speed runs from their respective positions in the Marion River backwaters near Covington and were anchored next to a twenty foot Grady White, the propeller of its Evinrude motor standing above the water’s surface like a buoy marker. Upon his arrival, Ray Breslin identified the craft as belonging to Turner Lockett, which two of the deputies already knew.
After an hour of searching, no body had been recovered. Tramping through the mud edges of the creek bank, Sheriff’s deputies, who had been ferried across by the Fire Department rescue boat, began to weary of fighting the intense afternoon heat and seemingly repellent-resistant mosquitoes. The fact that the boat belonged to a man known for making his living off the waters of the area stimulated a more intense search than normal for clues as to what might have happened or, best case scenario, any sign of the survival of Turner Lockett.
“The only thing I can figure is that it was dark, and, for some reason or other, he didn’t see that spit of land yonder and that dead pine stickin’ out in the water.” Breslin said to Karen and the deputy he had picked up on Larkin’s dock when he arrived. “But even that dudn’t make sense. That tree fell nine months ago durin’ what we thought was gonna be Hurricane Chloe; he knew about that. Must’ve thought he was further away from the bank when he hit the throttle. Had to have been a ways back up the creek for that motor to get up enough speed to throw the boat upside down.” It was obvious Breslin was enjoying his position of expertise.
“I can’t imagine someone who knew these waters making a mistake like that,” Chaney said. Breslin’s explanation sounded logical, but it didn’t sound realistic. She had known a lot of watermen in her days in the service, and the ones she knew could take a boat through a cypress swamp in the dead of night without a second thought.
“That’s what dudn’t make sense. Turner knew these waters like the back of his hand. Hell, I been out night fishin’ with him, and he could maneuver through these creeks like he had night vision. There’s somethin’ in the grits that ain’t gravy.”
“Maybe somethin’ went wrong with the boat,” the deputy said.
“What could go wrong? It’s a damned outboard. If the throttle had stuck, he’d of just killed the motor. He wudn’t stupid.”
“And we have no way of knowin’ when all this happened.” The deputy stated a fact that was a question.
“No way to tell until we find a body or Turner walkin’ around somewhere. Body more’n likely,” Breslin said.
“Well, he could be under the boat,” the deputy said. “We’ll have a diver in the water in a coupla minutes.”
“He wouldn’t be under there if he hit something,” Chaney said. “He would have been thrown clear.” The deputy gave her a disgusted look.
Shortly after the diver entered the water, a cooler popped to the surface next to the overturned craft. One of the deputies on the bank used a boat hook to pull it within reach. He put on a pair of gloves and pulled it up on land and opened it.
“Well, we might have a reason here. We got about sixteen, no, eighteen empties in here and a six-pack that idn’t opened. Nothin’ else.”
“Still dudn’t seem right,” Breslin said. “Turner’s been drinkin’ on the water all his life.”
“Got a body!” a voice from back up the creek hollered. Everyone turned toward a deputy on the bank about a hundred yards to the left of where they were anchored, directly across from Sam Larkin’s dock.
Turner Lockett was wedged in the branches of a fallen water oak. The color of his wet shirt was a perfect match to the color of the water, and the filigree of the leafless branches on the tree provided a camouflage that might have left him undiscovered for days were it not for the face turned toward the sky at just the right angle to catch the sun. It glowed like a warning beacon. One of the deputies waded out to the body and, after fighting the entanglements of growth and dead tree limbs, managed to pull it to land. Chaney and Breslin edged their boats to the bank, got out and watched as the EMT began to examine the body.
“Can you tell anything?” Breslin asked.
“Well, he wasn’t hit in the head with a hatchet or shot that I can see, but, beyond that, who knows? I’d say he drowned, but I’m not the coroner. I guess we’d better see about getting him in a boat and across the creek. Want to give us a hand here?”
Sam Larkin was cutting a faculty meeting that would explain, in detail, how final exams, final grades, locker clean-out and the closing of school for the summer would be handled. It was exactly the same way that it had been done for the past three years. He decided when the meeting was announced that he would not spend two hours hearing a repeat of things he already knew. When his last class ended, he left.
He was shocked when he attempted to enter his driveway to find two sheriff’s department cars and a fire department emergency vehicle blocking his way. He parked on the shoulder of Osprey Landing Road and hurried up the dirt drive. There was no one in the vicinity of the vehicles. When he walked around the house, he spotted the gathering across the creek. There was an overturned boat and two Environmental Service boats, but, at the distance he was standing, it was impossible to recognize any of the people. He ran up to the deck, took the binoculars from the hook where he kept them for wildlife observation, and stood watching the operation that was going on across the water.
Lockett’s boat was easily recognizable, even upside down. He could see Karen Chaney and Ray Breslin observing as the EMT technicians worked over a body he assumed to be Turner. It was obvious there was little to be accomplished, and it was only minutes before they began the task of putting the body into the boat for transport to his side of the creek. When the boat moved out, Larkin walked down the steps to meet them. Karen Chaney was the first across and pulled her boat into the dock, tied it off and walked toward Sam. The fire department craft was much slower and was directed toward a part of the bank where it would have closer access to the emergency vehicle.
“Quite a reception, huh?” Karen said as she approached.
“What the hell happened?” Larkin asked.
“We really have no way of knowing, Sam. Somehow the boat turned upside down and threw Turner Lockett out. He drowned as near as we can tell, but the coroner will have to make it official.”
“That doesn’t seem reasonable,” Sam said. “Turner was born on this creek.”
“Well, there are eighteen empty beer cans in his cooler, and, as they say, everybody has his day.” As Sam looked at her, he had difficulty placing her only as an officer on duty and not the companion he had shared the weekend with. Somehow her job was lost during those two days. They hadn’t spoken since she left the night before, so merging the two images was difficult.
“That doesn’t make a lot of sense either. What would he be doing out here in the creek long enough to drink eighteen beers, and, even if he did, I don’t think that would have stupefied him enough to make a fatal mistake. Was anyone with him?”
“Not that we can tell. They’ve walked the entire bank. If there was anything to find there, they wiped it out. It took quite awhile just to find him; he was hooked up half underwater in some tree limbs. What were you saying about why Turner was out here? That it didn’t make sense,” she said.
“Nothing maybe, but I know he doesn’t have to fish long enough to drink eighteen beers to get all the fish he wants. He’s a pro. And I don’t think he would load the boat with that much beer if he didn’t intend to drink it.”
“Maybe some of the cans accumulated over several trips.”
“Not likely.”
“So what’s your opinion?”
“I don’t have one,” he said. Conjecture wasn’t a part of Sam Larkin. “Where’d Breslin go? I thought he’d stick to you like glue given a good excuse.”
“He went ahead to get the report started.”
His mind was still on why Turner Lockett was on the creek with eighteen empty beer cans in his cooler. It wasn’t right, but he didn’t want to get into that discussion.
“This beer can thing is bothering you, isn’t it?”
“Not really.”
“You lie,” she said with a smile. “Never can predict people, Sam.” She turned to see the gurney being lifted into the emergency vehicle. “I need to go talk to them,” she said gesturing toward the EMT’s. “And then I need to get back into town. Don’t want to expose our friendship, do we?”
“I think we exposed it all weekend,” he said with a smile.
“Hush. You gonna call me sometime?”
“When I get lonely.”
“That could take years. Don’t worry about the deputies, I’ll answer whatever questions they might have for you. By the way, you didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary or see anything suspicious over the last couple of days did you? Any unusual activities?” she asked with a grin.
“Nothing to speak of,” he said, turned, threw a hand in the air and started back up the stairs.
In ten minutes all of the vehicles, deputies and Karen Chaney were gone. Sam opened a beer, walked out on the deck and stared at the bank across the creek. Turner Lockett’s boat, still upside down, was tied off to a tree at the water’s edge. He wondered how long it would be there as a reminder. Flipping it would be a major salvage operation, but the boat wasn’t his primary concern; Turner Lockett’s presence in the creek was.
“Charley, we might have a problem,” Ray Breslin said into the phone at Harry Tom’s boat dock.
“What’s the matter, Ray?”
“Turner’s dead.” There was silence on the other end of the line.
“What happened?”
“Drowned, far as we could tell. He’d been drinkin’ pretty heavy. We found eighteen empty beer cans in the cooler. Looks like he hit a submerged tree. Have no idea when it happened, so I don’t know if it was dark or not. The boat turned upside down and threw him out.”
“He must’ve been doin’ somethin’ besides drinkin’ beer. That dudn’t sound like Turner. Where’d it happen?”
“Right across from Larkin’s; that’s why I called,” Breslin said.
“Anybody have any questions as to why he might have been out there?”
“Not really. Karen Chaney couldn’t believe that someone like him could have that kind of an accident.”
“I been hearin’ that name a lot lately. Does seem peculiar though, and I’m sure there will be questions and theories. I don’t think there’s anything to be done right now except for you to go over to his place and take a look around before the sheriff’s deputies get out there. Make sure nothin’s there that’s not supposed to be there, nothin’ obvious. But don’t change anything unless it’s somethin’ that needs to be changed. He dudn’t have any family, does he?”
“Not that I know of. I’ll head over there right now. I don’t think the deputies have thought that far ahead yet, but even if they have, I can get there faster on the water.”
“You do that, Ray, and thank you. I’ll be talkin’ to you.”
When Breslin got back in his boat, he headed directly to Turner Lockett’s trailer. He didn’t know what he was to look for, but he was certain that if there was anything that would give The Company away, he would recognize it.
It was a shame, he thought. He liked Turner. What he knew of him.