Faye stood a safe distance from the excavation where Gerry and Nadia were directing two technicians swaddled in safety gear. The technicians were digging soil away from a buried cylindrical vessel made of tin. It had a volume of maybe five gallons, which should have been a good thing. Five gallons just wasn’t much kerosene. Arguing against that optimistic viewpoint were the words Gerry had uttered when its curving side came into view.
“What in the hell?”
When the man in charge of a project that Faye was probably funding, a project with no budget that Faye knew about, looked and sounded perplexed, Faye could feel her bank account dwindle.
The thing that made the archaeologist in Faye stand up and take notice, though, was not the rising price tag of her environmental cleanup. It was the obvious age of the container that had been holding the kerosene. Except for the hole in its side that she had punched with the sharp point of her trowel, it was in excellent condition for something so old. Faye would wager that this thing dated to the 1930s or before. If so, it had waited here underground, filled with kerosene, since Cally Stanton, Faye’s great-great-grandmother, had been the mistress of Joyeuse Island.
Faye owned the house and island that Cally had held onto through Reconstruction and into the Great Depression, but she had almost no physical connections to the ancestor she idolized. She had one photograph of her. She had a copy of the memoirs that Cally had dictated to federal workers collecting the oral histories of former slaves like her. She had dug up some random bric-a-brac that might or might not have belonged to Cally. And now she had a leaking kerosene tank that Cally perhaps had buried or abandoned in this completely illogical spot. Only an archaeologist would consider this bad-smelling object exciting.
***
Faye and Joe had both showered and gotten ready for bed. They had sent the day’s sweat down the drain, along with rainwater from their cisterns, some sandy grains of dirt, and some petroleum fumes. Faye tried not to think that Joe had showered away a few drops of seawater and blood that had rolled off Liz’s body and clung to Joe’s during those frenzied moments when he helped his father try to revive her.
Faye crawled under the bedclothes, still shivering because their solar-heated water tank had been emptied of hot water by her father-in-law’s long shower and there wouldn’t be any more until the sun shone.
“Somebody shot Liz in the back before she went in the water? Oh, Joe. That’s awful.”
It wasn’t fair that Joe had been one of the ones to find their friend dead. He was such a gentle soul.
“The bullet went in between her shoulder blades,” he said. “Came out through her breastbone. She didn’t crawl down to the end of the dock in that kind of shape. If she’d managed it somehow, she’d have left some blood behind, and I didn’t see a drop anywhere that wasn’t close to the spot where she must’ve been standing when she got hit.”
“It would’ve been late, after she closed up the grill.”
“Moon was full.”
Yes, it had been. Faye remembered it streaming through their bedroom window, just as it was doing now. When Liz died, she had been lying awake in this bed with Joe sleeping beside her.
Faye had been lying awake a lot lately. She had watched the moon grow every night for the past two weeks. Right now, it was behind a raincloud, but it was out there and it would emerge again. When it did, there would be less and less light for the next two weeks until the moon was gone.
That’s what the moon did, waxed and waned. Right after the darkest night, the knife-edge slice of the new moon showed itself at sunset and the whole cycle started again. Faye was ready for the light to come back into her life. More than ready. She was ready to stop being caught up short by the echo of a baby’s cry. These days, the inside of her head was a terrible place to be.
A fire roared in a two-hundred-year-old fireplace that had been built to warm this room when it was Joyeuse’s plantation office. Now it was their bedroom. Michael’s room was next to theirs, and the bricked backside of this fireplace warmed his little room on those rare nights when a Florida house got cold. Amande’s room was on the other side of the hall and it held the other ground floor fireplace. Sly was sleeping in there while she was gone. He’d move into the smaller room next to hers when she came home. If this cool snap hadn’t passed by then, he’d have to let himself be warmed by the backside of Amande’s fireplace.
Faye took an extra blanket from the foot of the bed and spread it over Joe and herself. “Why do you think somebody did that to Liz?”
“The window in the kitchen door was broken. I was looking through it while the sheriff and the deputy stood next to the cash register and talked. They talked a long time.”
“You think they were saying maybe a thief shot Liz?”
“The cash drawer was open and it didn’t look like there was any money in it, so it makes sense that there might have been a thief. I also saw a little bit of water on the concrete outside the kitchen door and another damp spot just inside the door, so I showed them to the sheriff. They weren’t footprints, really, nothing that would point to one particular person. Just some wetness to the cracks in the tiles and the concrete. A person who’d been in the water with Liz, holding her head under till she drowned, would have left wet spots in just those places if they went inside afterward.”
Faye hoped the new sheriff appreciated Joe and his tracking skills as much as Mike McKenzie had, back when he was sheriff.
“What did the sheriff say? Did he think Liz was killed by somebody who came to rob her?”
“Maybe. I didn’t tell him what to think, and he didn’t so much ask me what I thought. He just kept asking me questions about what I saw. Really seemed to want to hear if anything seemed different or unusual.”
“That’s what sheriffs are supposed to want to hear. What did you tell him?”
“I told him that Liz closed up the grill at the same time every night and then she usually had a drink or three. Then she went out there to feed the fish every night, right before going to bed. If somebody had been watching her, getting ready to rob her, then that somebody picked the right time to find Liz alone. But if the killer had been watching her for long—for any time at all, really—it would’ve been obvious that she lived upstairs and that waiting another thirty minutes would’ve put her in her bed asleep. Passed out drunk, probably, like she’s been nearly every night since Chip passed. There wasn’t no reason to kill Liz to get her money.”
Faye knew how little Liz charged for a plate of eggs and grits. “There couldn’t have been enough money in that drawer to make it worth killing somebody, anyway.”
Joe shook his head. “No. I don’t think so, either, and I told the sheriff that. Maybe if it was somebody too strung out on crack to wait thirty minutes to get their hands on some more. But for a normal person and for most criminals? There ain’t no reason Liz had to die for somebody to get into that cash register.”
Faye pictured the grill and the marina and the dock, trying to imagine what she’d take if she were a thief. “None of the boats were missing? And nobody took anything off the boats?”
“Not that I could see. I guess somebody could come check on their boat and find something missing tomorrow, but there wasn’t a sign that any of ’em was tampered with.”
“The storage lockers? The tool shed? Tommy’s maintenance shop?”
“Everything looked fine to me.”
Liz was dead and nothing Faye could do would change it. She might not be feeling like herself, but she could do simple math. Everybody for miles around knew that Liz’s business was struggling. There were other cash registers in the county that could have been emptied. Maybe Liz was the unlucky victim because hers was less heavily guarded, but if that was the motive for choosing her, why didn’t her killer just wait for her to go to bed?
It was certainly possible that Liz was the random victim of a criminal too stupid to do the math that said there was no payback in her murder, but Faye had never been comfortable with illogic. Tonight, though, she had no choice but to let illogic lie.
She wanted to see justice done for Liz, but she couldn’t even summon the energy to continue this conversation. She gave Joe’s arm a good-night pat and pulled the blanket to her chin. She had no faith that she would sleep tonight, but she needed to close her eyes and try. Sleep crept up on her in fragments these days, and sometimes she thought that those fragments were the only thing between her and a breakdown.
A few moments later, she felt Joe get up, arrange the covers carefully over her, and walk out into the chilly night. It was raining, so he wouldn’t be going far. She pictured him standing under the front porch, listening to rain hit the leaves of trees he couldn’t see.
He would certainly be lighting a cigarette. If she knew her husband, he was doing this on purpose, because she always yelled at him when she smelled tobacco on his breath. And she knew he wanted her to yell at him. Or cry. Or something. She wished she had the energy.