Isolation

by Mary Anna Evans

  Twenty minutes after starting his boat’s wonderfully loud motor, they arrived at the marina that housed Liz’s Bar and Grill for the fourteenth time since his dad had stepped off the plane. The place had been seedy when Wally had owned it—actually, calling it seedy would have been generous—but Liz had poured her heart into giving the place a homey ambiance.

  Joe understood how she felt. He’d grown up in ramshackle houses that were held together by duct tape and landlords’ promises. Faye’s plantation house on Joyeuse Island wasn’t the home of his dreams. It was a home beyond his dreams. Joe felt like somebody had crawled inside his head to see the biggest and finest house he could imagine, then they had searched the world until they found something bigger and finer than that.

  Faye loved the old house. It was her home. But, still, when she looked at it, she saw ancient plumbing and wall plaster that she would never finish patching.

  Joe looked at it and thought, “I can’t believe this is really ours.”

  Every square foot of Liz’s business—the marina, the convenience store, the bar and grill, the dock, the grassy yard with its benches and picnic tables—showed the hand of a woman with only a little money but a lot of pride. She’d peeled up the sticky linoleum Wally had installed in the restaurant and store, and she’d put a multicolored epoxy coat on the concrete beneath. That floor was always as clean as her mop could make it. She’d painted the dark paneling a happy yellow, and Joe was damned if Liz didn’t learn how to run a borrowed sewing machine so she could make curtains for the place.

  She’d mowed the grass herself, from the back wall of the kitchen to the seawall where her dock stretched out into the Gulf. Joe didn’t know how she’d scraped together the money to re-gravel the parking lot, but she’d managed it.

  Liz Colton herself hadn’t weathered the years since her son Chip’s death nearly so well as her business had. Too much bourbon had added a little more grit to the plain-spoken redhead’s voice. She waited too long to touch up her roots these days, and the white stripe through the middle of her long and bushy orange locks was not a good look for her. She was surly to most of her customers, except Faye and Joe, and Liz was in a business that depended on her good humor. People didn’t want their fishing trips spoiled by a woman who called them stupid for buying the wrong bait. They’d begun buying their bait elsewhere, and also their ice and their gear, not to mention the fried flounder dinners that Liz had served them on those days when the fish weren’t biting.

  It didn’t make sense to Joe that Liz was still nice to him and Faye. They’d watched her son die after he’d come damn close to killing them both, so Liz had to feel a jolt every time she saw them. Joe was pretty sure Liz only tolerated them because Michael’s toddler grins made tiny moments of her life easier to bear. So she sucked it up and said nice things to Michael’s parents, but she couldn’t bring herself to say nice things to anybody else.

  Every day, while Liz was cooing “Who’s the cutest little black-haired boy in Micco County?” in her gravelly baritone, Joe was calculating just how much he could overtip without hearing her tell him to go to hell. And, for the last two weeks, every time he’d parked himself on one of Liz’s barstools—which was every single freaking day—he was also wondering what in the hell he was supposed to say to his father.

  He should probably have led with, “So, Dad, how long have you been out of prison? And what, exactly, did you do to get sent there?”

  Instead, he had bought the man breakfast every day, thus funding Sly’s improbable flirtation with Liz.

  “How’s my favorite redheaded bombshell today?” Sly would ask in a booming voice that filled the shabby grill. Every day. He asked this every day and Joe wanted to fall through the floor every day.

  “She’s ready to serve you up something hot and steamy and just the way you like it” was Liz’s invariable response. Every day, Joe wondered if it were possible to fall through a floor twice.

  Yes, Sly and Liz were about the same age. And, yes, they both possessed the cagey brains and crude senses of humor that marked them as survivors of a lot of hard years. Nevertheless, a woman with Liz’s street smarts should have looked at Sly and seen trouble on two legs. And a man with his father’s long and tough history should have looked at Liz and seen heartbreak in the flesh.

  In the movies, they would have found happiness and healing in each others’ arms. In real life? Joe had once witnessed two bears fighting for territory. The air had been full of blood, rage, and flying fur. He would expect pretty much the same results from any attempt at a romance between Liz and Sly.

  Nevertheless, Joe continued to put Sly in his john boat and take him to these early morning trysts because he couldn’t think of any better way to pass the morning. In one more week, Thanksgiving would come and go, then Sly would go home to Oklahoma. Not that Joe knew for certain that the man possessed a return plane ticket.

  Joe eased the boat alongside the dock. Once it was secured, he set Michael down to see which way he ran. When he was lucky, Michael ran away from the restaurant door, insisting on delaying breakfast long enough to watch fish and turtles gather at the end of the dock. Liz had been throwing her kitchen scraps in that spot for years, and the fish knew where free food fell from the sky.

  Joe was big on time killers these days, and this one was actually pleasant. The sun glinted off the water and the fishes’ scales, and his blood pressure always settled down when he spent a little time listening to the creaking and sighing sound of seafaring crafts safely moored.

  Michael hurried toward the spot where the fish waited for him. He burbled happily while Joe produced a slice of bread from the leather bag that always hung from his waist, full of necessities like stone tools and food. Sly, who didn’t move like a man in his late fifties, dropped to his knees beside the boy and told him about all the fish, just like he did every morning.

  “See them minnows, all different shiny colors? Purty, ain’t they?” Flailing his hand at a few bigger fish floating among the multitude of minnows, he said, “Them’s pompano.”

  Yes, they were. They had been pompano every single day for two weeks now and they always would be, but Michael didn’t mind hearing about them again.

  “And over there?” The big hand flailed at a silver flash further away from the dock, gliding underwater like a bird. Only its wingtips broke the water. “Stingray.”

  Right again. Sly Mantooth knew a stingray when he saw it. Soon enough, Michael would, too. In the meantime, all three of them watched its flat, undulating body pass by.

  Joe was irritated with his father’s constant chatter, no doubt. It had been his understanding that ex-cons weren’t talkative, not when the wrong word might put them in life-or-death trouble with their fellow prisoners, but maybe prison didn’t mark everyone in the same way. If anything, Sly was chattier now than he’d ever been when Joe was a child. Leave it to his dad to do everything backwards.

  Still, Joe watched his father with a flicker of interest. Looking at Sly lean easily over the side of the dock and riffle the silty water with a relaxed hand, Joe thought that maybe there was some hope that he himself wouldn’t move like an old man before his time, either.

  As always, the fish rose from the darkness, fluttering their pectoral fins and piercing the surface of the water with their gaping mouths, and Michael talked to them as if they were familiar playmates. Joe supposed that they were. Bending his head toward the bag hanging from his belt, he reached a hand in to fetch some bread before Michael started to whine for it, so he missed the moment when Sly flung himself headfirst off the dock.

  Michael had left the dock, too, intent on following his grandfather into the water, but Joe reached out a long arm and plucked the boy from midair. Caught off-balance, he nearly toppled over the edge himself. When he gained his footing, Joe found himself on the dock’s edge staring down at Liz. Ten feet from the dock, she floated below the murky water’s s
urface with her arms outstretched through circling schools of minnows, catfish, and pompano. Her hair, iron gray and faded red, snaked through the water as if reaching out for air.

  Joe was as much a man of action as Sly and he needed to be in the water. He needed to be doing everything in his power to save Liz. He looked reflexively for Faye, so that he could hand their child to her and dive in, but she wasn’t there. Sly, burdened by nothing to stop him from yielding to the impulse of the moment, had already wrapped both arms around Liz and yanked her to the surface. He was shaking her, slapping her, doing anything to rouse her, but she hung slack in his arms.

  It was no accident that Joe was a strong swimmer. His father had made time to teach him very few things, but Sly had ensured that Joe could handle himself in the water because he himself swam with the power of a killer whale. Joe’s father turned Liz on her back, wrapped one big arm around her chest, and struck out for land.

  Joe paused only to dial 911, then sprinted up the dock while carrying a struggling child and barking information at the emergency dispatcher. Sly was already dragging Liz onto the muddy shoreline before Joe got there. It was littered with soda cans and candy wrappers that had held snacks sold by Liz herself.

  Sly checked her airway and started CPR. Joe wondered if they taught emergency resuscitation in prison these days.

  Chapter Four

  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?