Isolation

by Mary Anna Evans

  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.

  Chapter Seven

  The morning of the day they buried Liz was awful. Joe ha
d stirred up some eggs to scramble, stared for a long minute down into the yellow glop in the bowl, and then just walked away.

  Faye, who did actually know how to cook but who stayed out of Joe’s kitchen because she wanted to stay married, offered to cook the eggs so they wouldn’t go to waste. All she got out of Joe was “Go ahead. Just don’t cook any grits, or—“

  He swallowed and she could hear the words he wasn’t saying. Or I’ll start thinking about Liz and her grits and I won’t be able to stop.

  He tried again. “Just don’t cook grits. I won’t eat them.” Then he stomped outside and sat under the tree where he always sat to chip stone. She could tell that he was knocking two rocks together, but she couldn’t see that he was focused enough on what he was doing to make anything more useful than the stone chips that were flying everywhere. The ground around that tree was covered with flakes of chert that would still be there when Joe was dead.

  The morning stretched out. Faye burned the eggs and had to throw them out. Michael threw a tantrum because he wanted some grits. Sly drained his tenth cup of coffee and said, “You folks must have an ax around here somewhere,” as if this observation somehow pertained to the conversation nobody was having.

  “In the shed under the back porch.”

  She had hardly said it when Sly was gone.

  Ten minutes later, Joe was at the sink, rinsing blood off the hand he’d just nicked with a half-finished stone knife. When Joe couldn’t handle his sharp toys, Faye’s whole world was askew.

  “What was my dad planning to do with that ax?”

  “I don’t know. Chop something?”

  A moment later, they heard the ring of an ax striking wood, again and again. Faye decided that Sly and Joe weren’t far wrong to think working with their hands might beat back grief. She got out a bowl and her grandmother’s hand mixer, with its narrow 1940s beaters and the crank on its side that made those beaters go round. It was time for her to decide what she was going to cook for the mourners at Liz’s wake.

  ***

  Faye loved funeral food well enough to spend the morning after a long night making a mess in the kitchen. She had baked a hummingbird cake to add to the feast that would follow Liz’s memorial service. She hated eulogies and the scent of carnations and the heavy footsteps of people who were carrying sadness, but she loved the custom of gathering the mourners afterward for a communal meal.

  Everyone had their funeral food specialties and she knew that people would be looking for her hummingbird cake. Liz’s mourners were Faye’s friends and neighbors, so she had known what to expect when they gathered at Emma Douglass’ house. Here were the familiar heavy casseroles, brightened by the butter and salt in their cracker-crumb crusts. Beside them were improbable combinations of fruit, nuts, and cottage cheese molded into Jell-O salads. Faye’s offering was not the only tender-crumbed cake baked from scratch. Faye wished she were hungry enough to eat some of the feast.

  Emma Everett had tried, mounding food on a paper plate and putting it on the table in front of Faye with a thwack. “Eat something. You look like a runway model, and I don’t mean that as a compliment.”

  Emma’s marble kitchen counters were not nearly as laden with funeral food as they had been after her husband Douglass had died. Douglass had been a prominent businessman, active in the Optimist Club. He’d been chairman of the deacons at his church. He’d lived in Micco County from birth to grave. The whole county had turned out for his funeral, and everybody had brought enough food to feed their families, and also the families of people who maybe didn’t know how to throw a casserole in the oven or (and this would always be unspoken) the people who couldn’t afford the ingredients to cook for a crowd.

  Liz hadn’t had Douglass’ lifelong connection to the community, but she had lived in Micco County for fifteen or twenty years. Nobody at the funeral was quite sure how long they’d known her. Liz had appeared at the stove of Wally’s Bar and Grill in mid-life, and no one knew a thing about her past. Her status as the single mother of a son who was teenaged when she arrived proved that she’d had a life before Micco County, but she had never talked about it. She’d never mentioned a family. No relatives had shown up at the funeral, just a few dozen people saying, “I didn’t know her well, but I’m so sad to hear that she’s gone.”

  There had been no publicly acknowledged lovers to prove that Chip’s father wasn’t the last man in Liz’s life. Faye had always suspected that Liz and Wally had been more to each other than an employer and the short-order cook who kept his business afloat when he was too drunk to do it himself.

  Faye would never forget the day Wally died. She had caught him as he fell and his blood had covered her, pooled around her, dripped from her hands. She had sat with Wally, red-stained, looking for someone to explain to her what was happening, and she had found herself looking at Liz.

  Liz had given her no answers, but for that moment the woman had worn no shield to cover her naked heartbreak. She had loved Wally. Faye had no doubt of it. And Wally had given his life to save Faye, so she too had loved him, in her way. He should have been here for Liz today, instead of lying cold and dead in the ground. But then, Liz should have been here, too.

  Without Wally and Chip, the list of guests at Liz’s funeral was bound to feel scant and incomplete. A few longtime customers had come to the service, but more of them had shown up beforehand at Emma’s house with a Jell-O salad, murmuring their regrets that they weren’t going to be able to make it to the funeral.

  Faye felt rather sorry for Sheriff Ken Rainey and his deputy Gerry Steinberg. She guessed they needed to be at the funeral as part of their investigation, in case Liz’s murderer showed up and confessed. Or, more likely, they needed to be at the funeral in case one of the guests said something they wanted to overhear. It was too bad that there was no way for the sheriff and his deputy to blend into the thin crowd. They felt awkward and it showed.

  After the funeral, they had stopped by Emma’s house for a few minutes, then excused themselves. Faye took this to mean that she and her closest friends had told Rainey and Steinberg all that they wanted to hear, for now.

  Most of Liz’s real mourners now sat with Emma in her living room, relaxing in the deep upholstery of her leather furniture. Faye. Joe. Sly, who was mingling with his son’s longtime friends as if they hadn’t always known him as Joe’s mysteriously absent father. Mike McKenzie, who had been retired for years, but who would always be Sheriff Mike to his friends. Sheriff Mike’s wife, Dr. Magda Stockard-McKenzie, who was Faye’s archaeological mentor and best friend. Their late-in-life daughter Rachel McKenzie, who was barely older than Michael but who was enough of her mother’s daughter to be giving Michael sage supervision in the piling up and knocking down of multi-colored wooden blocks. The look on little Michael’s face, who would never understand why Liz wasn’t around to call him the cutest little black-haired boy in Micco County, was enough to make Faye cry, but she held strong.

  Faye watched Rachel bend down and say to Michael, with the exaggerated patience of an adult instructing a student driver, “I already told you! You can’t stack anything on top of that pointy block. It’ll all fall down.”

  Joe, listening, elbowed Sheriff Mike. “Wonder where she got that attitude from?”

  Faye saw that Joe got Sheriff Mike’s elbow in his own ribs.

  “He better get used to it,” the sheriff said. “Our wives have already decided that my daughter is marrying your son. I don’t give Michael very good odds, not if he goes up against Faye, Magda, and Rachel. He might as well knuckle under and marry my baby girl. There’s worse things than that could happen to a young man.”

  Faye thought of what had happened to Chip and remembered when he’d been a clumsy teenager, hardly more than a little boy. Her heart ached like a broken tooth.

  Too sad to talk, she just kept people-watching as Magda walked across the room and flopped her stocky bo
dy down on the couch between Joe and Mike. She was smirking like a woman happy to deal out some insults of her own. When she made this move, Emma and Sly were left to make one-on-one conversation. Faye would have thought that the rough-around-the-edges ex-con trucker wouldn’t have had a thing to say to the widow of the richest man in Micco County.

  Faye would have been wrong.

  Judging by the way Sly’s mouth stayed close to Emma’s ear and the way she ducked her head and laughed, Faye thought he was probably telling her jokes unsuitable for the widow of the chairman of the deacons at the Blessed Assurance AME Church. Or maybe not so unsuitable. Emma looked like she was having a good time.

  Faye tried to picture the long-ago Douglass who had wooed Emma. He had been the son of a sharecropper before he parlayed his charisma and brilliant mind into big money. When Emma had met him as a teenager, Douglass would have been in his twenties. He would have been rough around the edges, and he would have had the same testosterone-laden charm as Sly Mantooth and his son Joe.

  Sly leaned in to deliver a probably bawdy punch line, gently brushing Emma’s shoulder with his own. Emma leaned further in, laughing, and swatted at his muscled forearm. Faye’s first thought was that Sly had Joe’s devilish grin, then she realized that she needed to turn that around. Joe had Sly’s devilish grin.

  Faye wanted to be glad that Emma was getting a chance to enjoy a little man-woman chemistry. She didn’t think anybody ever got too old to want that. But she would feel untrue to Douglass’ memory if she didn’t worry about the thought of Emma with a man whose history included time in the penitentiary.

  It had been a long time since Faye laughed, but laughter bubbled around her. Six adults and two children brought so much life to this lovely room where Emma usually sat alone. This was as it should be. Funerals should be celebrations of life. The actual service had been a drab affair, officiated in a drab nondenominational way by a drab man who had never met Liz. The attendees who were not in this room had scattered immediately after he said “Amen.”