Faye was using her phone to take a picture of her latest pointless excavation. She’d dug down to groundwater, which wasn’t very deep on Joyeuse Island, and she’d uncovered exactly nothing. Taking a picture of the wet hole seemed like a waste of electrons and pixels, but she was trying to at least go through the motions of working like a professional archaeologist. As she aimed the phone at the ground, it rang.
Joe’s number was displayed on the screen and she heard his voice as soon as she put the phone to her ear.
“Something bad happened to Liz.”
“Tell me.”
“We found her floating off her dock. Shot in the back. Drowned, too, maybe, if she wasn’t dead when she went in the water. We tried—Dad tried—to save her. The paramedics say she’s been dead for hours. They’ve already taken her body away. Dad’s talking to the sheriff now.”
Faye dropped to a crouch and put her palm on the ground to steady herself. “Liz? Oh, God. Liz? Who would have shot Liz? There’s something wrong with a world where things like this happen.”
Joe said something that was probably “Yeah,” but she heard him choke on the word.
She tried to think of something else to say, but she couldn’t. She just murmured “Okay,” when he said, “Michael’s fine. I had some snacks for him and the new sheriff is letting him play with his badge. I think we’ll be home by lunch.”
Faye tried to say good-bye, but she choked on that, too, so they both hung up.
***
Joe could tell that the new sheriff wasn’t quite sure what to make of his father. Sly was weeping as if he’d lost a wife, while answering the sheriff’s questions by confirming that he’d only known Liz two weeks. Liz had been nothing to Sly but a nice lady who’d cooked eggs for him about fourteen times, so Sheriff Rainey must have been confused by Sly’s tears. Joe elected not to try to explain his father to Rainey, who had held office for a couple of years now, but whom Joe still considered “new” because he wasn’t Sheriff Mike.
Sly was getting louder by the minute. “So young. She was too young to die. It’s not right. It’s just not right!”
“I know it’s hard,” the new sheriff was saying, “but I need you to answer my questions. It’s the only way I’m going to find out why your friend is dead.”
As the law officer spoke, he was making eye contact with Joe, communicating one silent word: Help?
Joe wasn’t surprised by his father’s behavior. The man had never had a governor on his emotions, and he’d been as quick to rage when Joe was a boy as he was to grief now. The rage hadn’t shown itself since he and his father became reacquainted. Yet. Joe’s memories made him wary.
Looking at Sly was like staring into a distorted mirror. His father’s shoulders and biceps, so like his own, were impressive for a man pushing sixty. Like Joe, he had the black mane of a Creek warrior. His hair was still as thick as Joe’s, though he kept it cut to jaw length and it was streaked with white. Age had thickened his waist, but there was no paunch to his belly. His tears were streaking down skin coarsened by age but not yet wrinkled.
Joe could have given the sheriff a very good idea of why his father was overreacting to Liz’s death, if he had trusted himself to speak. His dead mother had worn her red hair long.
***
Sheriff Ken Rainey studied the weeping man for a good long minute. He would give Sly Mantooth credit for honesty. He had been upfront about his time in an Oklahoma prison. Rainey had asked a desk-bound deputy to run Sly’s history while he interviewed him.
As it turned out, the elder Mantooth’s criminal record wasn’t a long one, but his one offense had taken him straight to the pen. Truck drivers who decide to sell their transportation services to the highest not-legal bidder tend to be quick casualties in the War on Drugs.
Sheriff Rainey had no love for the people who sold and transported the mind-twisting substances that had ruined and then ended his brother’s life, but he was fair. Men like Sly, who had lived several decades without a single instance of violence blotting their criminal records, rarely hauled off and killed somebody late in life. He wouldn’t say it never happened, but murdering thugs were not usually born at the tender age of fifty-eight.
He nodded at the other witness to Liz’s murder scene, the taller and younger man who was silently helping his little son throw rocks in the water. Joe Wolf Mantooth gave every indication of having known the dead woman well. If Sly Mantooth did not look like a murderer, then Joe looked like a Vatican-certified saint. Either of them was physically capable of throwing a mortally wounded woman into the water to drown, but Sheriff Rainey didn’t think either of them had done it. He had seen a tear leak out of the corner of the younger Mantooth’s eye as he watched his son, and he suspected that this man wept a lot less easily than his father did.
Rainey had questioned them both. He would be keeping tabs on them, but it was time to let the Mantooth men, all three of them, go home.
***
Joe was ready to load his father and Michael into his john boat and head for Joyeuse Island. It was time to make one last phone call before cranking the motor. When Faye answered, he said, “We’re heading home.”
The cell phone’s reception was predictably terrible, but Joe could hear Faye clear her throat before she answered him. He knew she’d been crying for Liz. No, probably not. She was probably trying so hard not to cry that her throat had closed up on her. Joe thought Faye could use a good cry, but he didn’t think she was ever going to let herself have it.
She said only, “Be safe.”
He said he would and hung up.
Joe balanced Michael on his hip while he stepped off the dock. Sly followed, settling himself in the john boat just as easily as Joe had. The older man was still wiping the back of his hand across his eyes now and then, and Joe had gotten over being irritated with his father over his public display of emotion. Liz’s death was sad. She deserved some tears.
Faye had checked in by phone more than once since Joe had called her with the news, but she should have been here with him. Joe saw Faye’s absence at Liz’s death scene as a clear sign of the depth of her distress. The real Faye would have been in her skiff, headed for shore, before Joe had finished telling her what had happened.
Why did her absence upset him so? What, really, would her presence here have accomplished?
Nothing. Michael was oblivious to what he’d seen. Faye couldn’t have quelled Sly’s inappropriate grief. Joe himself would suffer over the loss of Liz, but he would do it later, in private, and Faye would be there. He didn’t need Faye with him now, but he wanted her. He wanted his wife back, the wife who cared about everything. She cared too much sometimes, and it made her do stupid things for love, but that was so much better than the vague words of grief he’d heard coming out of the phone this morning.
“Oh, poor Liz,” she had said. “I can’t believe it.”
She’d gone no further or deeper than that, and Joe thought he knew why. Acknowledging the hole Liz left in their lives would rip open another hole that hadn’t begun to heal. Faye couldn’t let herself think too much about the daughter they’d lost.
***
Faye picked up her trowel and tried to concentrate on her work, as if she were naïve enough to think that this would make her stop thinking about Liz. She stood on the far west end of Joyeuse Island, in a place where an outward curve in the coastline exposed her to sea breezes from two directions. A big live oak rose in front of her, but it was too far away to offer shade. Otherwise, she was surrounded by scattered small trees—saplings, really—and shrubby undergrowth that didn’t cover the ground. Sandy soil dotted with weeds sloped to the waterline behind her. Technically, it was a beach, but it didn’t look like much. Everything around her was November-drab. Her surroundings looked about as cheerful as she felt.
She scraped a thin layer of soil from the bottom of the unit where she’d been excavating. Then she thrust the point of her trowel into the soil again, midway up the unit’s wall, trying to square up the corner. A pungent odor struck her. Immediately, a thin stream of clear liquid started running down the wall.
Using the side of her trowel to try to find the source of the leak, she uncovered just enough old and corroded metal to see that it came from a container that was gently curved, like a tank or a drum. The odor grew as the liquid continued running down the wall and puddling into the bottom of the excavation. Its chemical edge said, “Danger.”
The fumes continued to rise and she started imagining fires and explosions. Should she call 911? An environmental response team?
She backed away from the edge. Her miscarriage had been so recent that she still cradled a protective hand on her belly when she felt threatened. She did it now, as if there were still a baby inside who could be damaged if she breathed in something toxic. The part of her that had forgotten that she lost the baby was warning her not to breathe the fumes. And the part of her that blamed herself for the baby’s death wanted her to breathe deeply and take her punishment.