Isolation

by Mary Anna Evans

  Isolation

  A Faye Longchamp Mystery

  Mary Anna Evans

  www.MaryAnnaEvans.com

  Poisoned Pen Press

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2015 by Mary Anna Evans

  First E-book Edition 2015

  ISBN: 9781464204050 ebook

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  The historical characters and events portrayed in this book are inventions of the author or used fictitiously.

  Poisoned Pen Press

  6962 E. First Ave., Ste. 103

  Scottsdale, AZ 85251

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  info@poisonedpenpress.com

  Contents

  Isolation

  Copyright

  Contents

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Excerpt

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Guide for the Incurably Curious

  More from this Author

  Contact Us

  Dedication

  For little Oliver

  Acknowledgments

  I’d like to thank all the people who helped make Isolation happen.

  Tony Ain, Amanda Evans, Michael Garmon, Erin Garmon, and Rachel Broughten read it in manuscript and provided their customary astute observations. Faye’s adventures wouldn’t be the same without the thoughtful attention of those near and dear to me.

  Nadia Lombardero, Kelly Bergdoll, and Jerry Steinberg were my consulting environmental scientists. Attentive readers will see that Nadia and Jerry have namesake environmental scientists in Isolation. Very attentive readers will recall that Kelly had a namesake environmental scientist in Artifacts. I am deeply grateful for their generosity in sharing their expertise. They are responsible for the passages in which I got things right, and they are innocent of wrongdoing on any occasions when I did not.

  As always, I am grateful for the wonderful people at Poisoned Pen Press. My agent, Anne Hawkins, and my editor, Barbara Peters, have been my partners in bringing Faye to life for a very long time now. My publicist, Maryglenn McCombs, does a masterful job at getting the attention of people who will enjoy Faye’s stories.

  And, of course, I am grateful for you, my readers.

  Excerpt

  Excerpt from the oral history of Cally Stanton,

  Recorded in 1935 and preserved

  as part of the WPA Slave Narratives

  Secrets hold power. My mama told me so, more than ninety years back. The power of secrets holds true for everybody, I expect, but it holds a lot more true for people who ain’t got power of their own.

  Think about a young girl, born a slave. Try to imagine that she has any power over her Missus at all. You can’t, can you?

  Now, think about a young girl, almost a woman, who has been tending her Missus since she was big enough to carry a chamber pot. Maybe before that. Maybe she’s been tending her Missus since she was old enough to carry a bottle of bourbon. Maybe she’s spent her short life listening to the things her Missus says when she’s been into the bourbon since noontime.

  A young girl like that knows how much her Missus pines for her home up north. She knows how much her Missus wishes the Master remembered where her bedchamber was. She knows the thing that even the Missus can’t know, because she can’t think it when she’s sober. Only after several goodly portions of bourbon can her Missus listen to herself say, “He married me for my money. Now it’s his, and all I’ve got for company is you, Cally.”

  So, yeah, you could say that I stepped out of my cradle knowing how to keep a secret. And I stepped into womanhood knowing how to use it to my advantage.

  Maybe you’re thinking that I’m heartless with my secrets, using them for my gain and for the ruin of others. No, that ain’t so. Sometimes there is only one gift a body can give another person. Sometimes that gift is silence.

  Chapter One

  Fish know which docks are owned by people who are generous with their table scraps. In the evenings, they gather around wooden posts that vibrate with the footsteps of a human carrying food. They wait, knowing that potato peels and pork chop bones will soon rain from the sky. They race to skim the surface for floating bread crumbs. They dive, nibbling at each half-eaten hot dog as it sinks. When a restaurant, even a shabby dive where hungry people clean their plates, throws its detritus off one particular dock every night, fish for miles around know all about it.

  On this night, the fish wait below a dock that has always offered a nightly feast. Tonight, they feel the vibrations of familiar feet. The food falls into the water, as always, and the sound of a stainless steel spoon scraping the bottom of a stainless steel pot passes from the air above to the water below. Everything is as it has been, until a sharp noise jabs into the water hard enough for the fish to hear it. The spoon falls.

  The spoon is large, designed for a commercial kitchen, so it hits the water with a smack that can be heard both above and below the surface. A scream falls into the fishes’ underworld along with the spoon.

  A big pot, with food scraps still clinging to its inner surface, hits the water an instant later. Only creatures with the agility of the waiting fish could scatter quickly enough to avoid being hit.

  After another heartbeat, something else falls among them, something bigger and softer. Soon there are two somethings, both with arms and legs and feet and hands, one that gurgles and another that leaves when the gurgling stops.

  The thing that stays behind is a human body. As it settles in the water, tiny minnows nestle in the long hair that floats around it like seaweed. Catfish explore its ten long fingers with their tentacled mouths. None of them associate its two bare feet with the sprightly vibrations that had always signaled a rain of food.

  Before long, predators appear, drawn by the smell of blood.

  Chapter Two

  Joe Wolf Mantooth was worried about his wife.

  Faye was neglecting their business. She was neglecting her health. He wanted to say she was neglecting her children, but it would kill her to think he believed such a thing, so he spent a lot of time telling that part of himself to be quiet. He also wanted to say she was neglecting him, but it would kill him to beli
eve it, so he spent the rest of his time telling that other part of himself to be quiet. Or to shrivel up and die. Because if he ever lost Faye, that’s what Joe intended to do. Shrivel up and die.

  The children seemed oblivious to the changes in their mother. Michael, at two, saw nothing strange about her leaving the house every morning with her archaeological tools. She had always done that.

  Amande was away from home, doing an immersion course in Spanish at a camp situated so high in the Appalachians that she’d asked for heavy sweaters long before Halloween. Faye had been too distracted to put them in the mail. Joe had shopped for them, boxed them up, and sent them off. Faye seemed to have forgotten that her daughter had ever said, “I’m cold.”

  Amande was perceptive for seventeen. If she hadn’t noticed that Joe had been doing all the talking for the last month, she would notice soon. Lately, when faced with a call from her daughter, Faye murmured a few distracted words before pretending that Michael needed a diaper change. If Faye didn’t come up with another excuse to get off the phone, Amande might soon call 911 and ask the paramedics to go check out her brother’s chronic diarrhea.

  Though Joe did speak to Amande when she called, surely she had noticed by now that he said exactly nothing. What was he going to say?

  The closest thing to the truth was “Your mother’s heart fell into a deep hole when she miscarried your baby sister, and I’m starting to worry that we may never see it again,” but Joe was keeping his silence. Faye had forbidden him to tell Amande that there wasn’t going to be a baby sister.

  Was this rational? Did Faye think that her daughter was never going to fly home to Florida, bubbling with excitement over her Appalachian adventure and the coming baby?

  If she did, it was yet more evidence supporting Joe’s fear that Faye’s mind wasn’t right these days. Every morning brought fresh proof of that not-rightness as she walked away from him…to do what? As best he could tell, she was carefully excavating random sites all over their island. If she’d found anything worth the effort, he sure didn’t know about it.

  In the meantime, Joe sat in the house, face-to-face with a serious problem. This problem was almost as tall and broad as Joe. His hair had once been as dark. His skin was the same red-brown, only deeper. This was a problem Joe had been trying to outrun since he was eighteen years old.

  His father.

  ***

  “Try this spot.”

  Faye Longchamp-Mantooth believed in intuition. It had always guided her work as an archaeologist. After she’d gathered facts about a site’s history, inspected the contours of the land, and scoured old photographs, she always checked her gut response before excavating. Her gut was often right. It was only recently, however, that her gut had begun speaking out loud and in English. Lately, her gut had been urging her to skip the boring research and go straight for the digging.

  “Have you ever excavated here before?” its voice asked.

  Faye’s answer was no.

  “Then try this spot.”

  Every day, Joyeuse Island sported more shallow pits that had yielded nothing. Of course, they had yielded nothing. Faye had failed to do her homework. But going to the library or sitting at her computer would require her to be still and think. Thinking was painful these days, so she skipped it.

  “Okay,” she said, not pleased to see that she’d begun answering the voice out loud, “I’ll give it a shot. But I don’t think there’s anything here.”

  Her hand was remarkably steady for the hand of a woman who’d been hearing voices for a month. She used it to guide her trowel, removing a thin layer of soil.

  She would have known this old trowel in the dark. Her fingers had rubbed the finish off its wooden handle in a pattern that could match no hand but hers. Since God hadn’t seen fit to let her grow the pointy metal hand she needed for her work, she’d chosen this one tool to mold into a part of herself.

  Faye was working in sandy soil as familiar as the trowel. It was her own. She’d been uncovering the secrets of Joyeuse Island since she was old enough to walk, and she would never come to the end of them. As she grew older, she saw the need to mete out her time wisely, but she rebelled against it. The past would keep most of its secrets, and this made her angry.

  Faye didn’t know where to dig, because she didn’t know what she was trying to find. It would help if the voice ever offered a less hazy rationale for ordering her out of the house. All it said was “You can find the truth. Don’t let this island keep its secrets from you.”

  Her frenetic busyness was an antidote for the times the voice tiptoed into ground that shook beneath her feet. It crept into dangerous territory and then beckoned her to follow. It asked her to believe that she was to blame for the baby’s death, for the mute suffering in Joe’s eyes, for every tear Michael shed.

  This was craziness. Two-year-olds cried several times a day. Men who had lost babies suffered. And there was rarely any blame to be handed out in the wake of a miscarriage, even late miscarriages that carry away a child who has been bumping around in her mother’s womb long enough for mother and daughter to get to know one another.

  Still, the voice said Faye was to blame, so she believed it. And it told her that it was possible to dig up peace, so she dug.

  Chapter Three

  Joe had promised himself, time and again, that he would call his father, then he had let another year roll on. After he’d left home at eighteen, he’d thought, “When I get settled somewhere, I’ll let him know where I am.” But he’d wandered for years, working odd jobs and sleeping wherever he could pitch a tent.

  He’d lingered so long in North Carolina, learning to flintknap from Old Man Kingsley, that he’d thought, “It’s time. I need to call my dad and let him know I settled down.” Then Old Man Kingsley died, which is what people with nicknames like “Old Man” tend to do, and Joe had taken to wandering again.

  If Faye had kicked him off the island like she should have—why had someone with her brains let a vagrant camp on her island, anyway?—he would be wandering still. Instead, he’d acquired a wife who had never met her father-in-law, fathered a son who had never met his grandfather, and adopted a daughter who also hadn’t met her new grandfather.

  When they’d found out Faye was pregnant again, Joe had thought, “It’s time,” and he’d invited his father to spend Thanksgiving with them on Joyeuse Island and stay to meet his new granddaughter. Then he’d waited too long after the miscarriage to call him and ask, “Could you come another time?” So now Joe was stuck on an island with a wife who wouldn’t talk to him, a father he didn’t like, and a two-year-old. Happy holidays.

  Sylvester “Sly” Mantooth didn’t ask his son why his daughter-in-law left the house every morning. He didn’t do much, really. Joe couldn’t put his finger on the reason his father annoyed him so. The man just sat, coffee cup in hand, and talked the live-long day. He talked to Joe. He talked to Michael. He talked to himself, when Joe and Michael left the room and forced him to do that. He didn’t say anything much, but he talked a lot.

  Faye didn’t seem to notice. Every afternoon, she came home empty-handed and avoided Amande’s daily calls. She silently ate the supper Joe had cooked, letting Sly’s endless words swirl around her. At dusk, she gave Joe and Michael distracted kisses before nodding at Sly, showering, and falling into the bed where she spent a lot of time not sleeping.

  Joe had to do something. He didn’t know what it was, but he had to do it. If this situation rocked along until Amande got off that airplane, lugging a huge teddy bear for the baby-that-wasn’t, he wasn’t sure his family would survive intact.

  If Joe didn’t know something was very wrong with Faye, he would have been angry. Okay, he was angry. But he would get over it.

  Since Faye had stopped her obsessive monitoring of their finances—the normal Faye could pinch a penny in two and spend it twice, so what was up with that?—sh
e hadn’t noticed that Joe had been spending more money than he should at Liz’s Bar and Grill. For the two weeks since Sly Mantooth’s arrival, Joe had loaded his father and his son into the john boat every morning, as soon as Faye was out of sight, and he had pointed it toward the marina that their friend Liz owned and called home.

  On every one of those mornings, he had savored the fact that the noise of the boat motor silenced his father by making conversation impossible. Once ashore, there were the very welcome, time-killing activities of carefully securing the boat and fueling it, before leading father and son into the grill. Inside, Liz’s crooked grin and her peerless fried eggs made another sliver of the morning easier to bear.

  The state of their budget said that Joe ought to stay home and fry his family’s eggs himself. Except Joe didn’t really know the state of their budget, since Faye had stopped balancing the checkbook. Playing short order cook would have saved him a few bucks, but his stomach roiled at the thought of sitting at the breakfast table with his absent-eyed wife, his toddler son, and the father who had never actually told him how long he’d been out of prison. Or why he’d been there in the first place.

  Faye was doing her share to save on groceries. Every morning, she tucked a single banana in her work bag as she trudged across the island to do whatever it was she did these days. And every morning, before she’d even disappeared into the distance, Joe said, “Ready for some biscuits? Then get in the boat!” in the happy voice of a man looking forward to quality time with his father and son.

  This morning, as always, Sly had answered, “Damn straight!” and Michael had run in circles yelling, “Bikkits! Bikkits!”

  Joe always enjoyed that one moment of feeling like the family hero. It was totally worth thirty bucks for three breakfasts and a big tip. More than thirty bucks, actually, when he factored in enough fuel to get there. Still. Totally worth it. Also, Liz needed the money more than they did, if such a thing could be possible.