Isolation

by Mary Anna Evans

  ‘Then all you got is a story,” Joe said.

  “I have more than that,” Delia said in a voice that reminded him of Faye’s in its determination. “I did my doctoral work in a library, sifting through old papers, and I know what you can find when you don’t give up. I have more than a story. I have a real woman’s name. I know she lived in Micco County, just after the Civil War. That’s enough to find her.”

  “It better be an unusual name,” Joe said, “if you’re hoping to find one lone woman after all these years.”

  “It’s unusual enough. Somebody around here knows something about Cally Stanton and I’m going to find out what it is.”

  Chapter Twelve

  “So now do you understand what Faye’s looking for? Joe?”

  He had been looking through Emma, or maybe he’d just been looking at the artifacts lining the museum walls, neatly arranged and cataloged by Faye. He’d been thinking about Faye ever since Oscar Croft and Delia Scarsdale had left the museum, and he’d been thinking about Faye’s great-great-grandmother, Cally Stanton, too.

  “My wife is looking for something a hundred and fifty years old that probably doesn’t exist. It’s killing her to think that her great-great-grandmother is being accused of keeping that man against his will. Maybe even murdering him. She wants to prove that it’s not true. But what could Faye possibly find to prove that Oscar Croft is wrong?”

  “You’re talking about this like you think she’s looking for a thing. Things are nothing. Faye’s looking for an idea. She wants to clear Cally’s name. I tried to tell her that somebody made up Oscar’s story a long time ago, because it was fun to imagine a man trapped on an island with a crazy woman. I’m sure it was a lot more fun than imagining somebody you loved getting killed in a war or dying slowly of a natural disease. It’s just a fairy story they’re telling. I told her that. I told her to let it go, but she can’t. She’s not herself these days, Joe. You know that.”

  “How did Oscar’s family get Cally’s name? Stanton ain’t such a common name and Micco County ain’t such a big place.”

  Emma didn’t look like a woman who wanted to conjure up ghosts and make up sordid stories about them. “Maybe the man met Cally. Maybe he wrote home about her. Maybe he said he had reason to visit her on her island. That doesn’t mean that she locked him up on Joyeuse Island for years and years.”

  “You don’t think it could be true?”

  “I wasn’t there in eighteen-sixty-whatever, so I could be wrong, but no. I don’t think it’s true. Probably nobody but Oscar, and maybe Faye, thinks it’s true. It sounds like the plot of a Clint Eastwood movie I saw before you were born. Maybe Oscar’s family got its crazy notions from that very movie and they confused them with the real story about a man who went to war and never came home. Faye should just let Oscar chase his make-believe moonbeams and get on with her life, but you and I both know she’s got good reason not to be in her right mind at the moment.”

  Joe checked his phone. If he didn’t get home soon, he was going to be so busted, but Delia and Oscar had taken forever to leave and he wanted to finish this talk with Emma.

  “Did these people really tell Faye that her great-great-grandmother kidnapped a Yankee soldier and kept him prisoner until he died? Then, after he was good and dead, she gloried in what she’d done so much that she mailed his sword home to his dying wife?”

  “They didn’t know Cally Stanton was her great-great-grandmother—still don’t—but yeah. That’s what they told her. I still maintain that saying it doesn’t mean it’s true.” Emma handed him a cup of coffee and an oatmeal cookie. “It’s my fault she met them in the first place. They came here looking for information on Joyeuse Island, so I introduced them to Faye. I didn’t know they would fill her head full of crazy talk.”

  An oatmeal cookie seemed too heartwarming and homey for this conversation, but Joe didn’t turn it down.

  “You’re sure they don’t know that Cally is one of Faye’s ancestors?”

  “Not that I can tell. How could they? Cally’s daughter, Faye’s great-grandmother Courtney, was illegitimate, so the family connection almost certainly doesn’t show up in the records. That means there’s no marriage certificate for Cally and her husband. Probably no birth certificate for Courtney. The Stanton name disappears after that, because Courtney took her husband’s name, Wells, when she married. Faye says that even their marriage certificate doesn’t show up in the official record. There is no paper trail to tie Cally to Faye. None. Besides, Oscar doesn’t seem interested in Cally’s descendants, so we don’t even know if he’s looked.”

  “Delia would look,” Joe said.

  Emma nodded to acknowledge the truth in his statement.

  Joe thought better when he was chewing, so he took a bite of the oatmeal cookie. “Oscar just wants the truth about happened to his great-great-grandfather.”

  “Exactly,” Emma said in a voice that was about twenty decibels louder than her usual ladylike tone. “And there’s nothing wrong with that! Genealogy is fascinating. It’s just too bad Oscar is obsessed with a story that sounds like something out of Grimms’ Fairy Tales. By the time he finished telling me about his great-great-grandfather being lured to an island, trapped in a cabin in the woods, tortured for years, and murdered, I was expecting him to tell me that Cally was also the wicked witch from ‘Hansel and Gretel.’”

  “Faye’s been reading Cally’s stories since before we got married. Longer than that. She’s been studying Cally’s oral history for as long as I’ve known her. Faye’s great-great-grandmother is as real to her as you and me. She worships Cally Stanton.”

  Emma let her bone china cup clank into its saucer. “Of course Faye worships that woman! Cally Stanton survived slavery, rape, a hurricane, a war, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and most of the Depression. And when she wasn’t doing all that, she raised a daughter all by herself. There is no room in Faye’s image of Cally for murder. For evil.”

  In Joe’s imagination, Cally had always looked like Faye, except she was wearing the faded cotton dress of a woman born a slave.

  “How do you know that Faye’s not wrong?” he said. “Maybe Cally did do what this man said she did.”

  “He hasn’t got a shred of proof, other than some old stories. All Faye’s got is Cally’s old stories, too, but I think they hold more weight because somebody wrote them down for her and we still have them. They’ve survived in her own words and Oscar’s ancestor’s story hasn’t. Cally’s memoirs never come out and say, “No, I didn’t mistreat Elias Croft, and I didn’t kill him, either,” but her words don’t sound like they came from the mind of a psychopath. Faye’s showed me some of that oral history. I admire Cally a whole lot.”

  “Me, too. I don’t like to think that we were wrong about her.” The rest of the cookie disappeared into his mouth. “A year ago, my wife would’ve told Oscar to shove his made-up stories into his suitcase and take himself home.”

  Emma studied the squint lines at the corner of Joe’s eyes. Some of them were new. Living mostly outdoors gave a man wrinkles before his time, but these didn’t look like weather wrinkles. They looked like worry wrinkles.

  She slid another oatmeal cookie across the table in his direction, as if she thought that comfort food might tamp that worry down a bit. “A year ago, your wife hadn’t lost a baby. She wasn’t clinically depressed. She wasn’t swimming in all those hormones, the ones that were supposed to make her fall in love with a baby that’s never coming. Haven’t you figured out the last part of this story yet? Where was Faye when she lost the baby?”

  His dark face grew still. “She was here with you.”

  “She started bleeding as soon as Oscar finished telling her his noxious stories and left. I took her to the hospital and you came running. We both know what happened after that.” She took his hand. Her fingers were cool. “It wasn’t anybody’s fault, Joe. You know the doct
or said that the baby had been dead for days. But Faye doesn’t listen. She’s got it in her head that she’s carrying Cally’s guilt around. She thinks losing that baby was her punishment. No, it doesn’t make sense, but it explains why she’s so obsessed with digging up proof of Cally’s innocence. She calls me night and day, asking if Oscar’s said anything else she needs to know. Joe, why don’t you take that woman to a doctor and get her some antidepressants?”

  “I did. She won’t take them. I can’t cram them down her throat. And I can’t check her into a hospital when she’s not sick enough to need it.”

  “It wouldn’t take much to make her that sick. There are days when I think that burning the breakfast toast might be enough to put her over the edge.”

  Shit. Joe had been hoping that he’d been overreacting. He’d been praying that bystanders who didn’t have to live with this weird new Faye were thinking she’d snap out of it any minute now.

  “You talk like somebody who thinks she still eats breakfast.”

  “I see the bones sticking out of her little wrists. I know how much she doesn’t eat.”

  Joe had learned archaeology on the job with Faye. He knew that an archaeologist without a work plan was just a dummy with a shovel, digging worthless holes. “She goes out every day and digs holes to nowhere. What does she think she’s going to find, going out there every day and digging willy-nilly?” he asked. “Elias Croft’s body? How would she know it was him? Unless she can prove how he died and she can show that it wasn’t murder, how’s she going to prove that Cally didn’t kill him?”

  “You think she’s hoping to find his skeleton holding a miraculously preserved note that says ‘Cally Stanton is a kind and generous woman who did not torture me to death,’ in perfect 19th-century penmanship?’” Emma took Joe by both his calloused hands and made him lift his gaze from his toes. “Only a woman in Faye’s state of mind would think that digging random holes would help this situation. I think she’s just digging holes because she can’t rest with Elias Croft’s death on her mind, and she doesn’t know what else to do.”

  “My wife is hoping for a miracle?”

  “Pretty much.”

  ***

  Faye settled herself on a bench with an excellent view of the Gulf of Mexico, easing her heavy satchel off the shoulder that ached all the time. If anybody were to pilot a boat into this marina that had belonged to Liz, Faye would be their witness. So would the two people sitting over across the parking lot in the car marked “Micco County Sheriff’s Office.” She figured they were waiting for Gerry to arrest Tommy Barnett and deliver him to them.

  She missed Liz in weird little ways. It was unthinkable that she was within shouting distance of the grill without a Coca-Cola in her hand, but there was a padlock on the door that should have taken her to a cooler full of Cokes. Faye had learned to hustle through that door and buy one as soon as she set foot on Liz’s dock. If she didn’t, Liz would soon show up, shove a can in her hand, and disappear back into the kitchen. If Faye made the mistake of waiting that long, trying to pay for it inevitably resulted in profanity. If, however, Faye managed to get inside, grab a Coke, and show up at the cash register with her money in hand, Liz would usually let her pay.

  Was this logical? Was friendship ever logical?

  Sitting on this bench without doing the Coke dance with Liz made Faye feel empty. Worse than empty.

  Even the boat slips were empty. Faye missed the slapping sound of waves on the fiberglass hulls of pleasure boats. The marina had emptied overnight, as people acted on their fears that their boats might be impounded by the police, although if they hadn’t been impounded already, Faye reckoned they weren’t going to be. More likely, they might be seized by the bank that held Liz’s business loans.

  The few remaining boats were in the slips Liz rented to Tommy for boats belonging to his clients. Despite being shiny and well-maintained, Faye knew they were just broken toys, so it made her sad to look at them

  Her own oyster skiff was the only functional boat in sight, except for the dark spots on the distant water. Faye’s binoculars identified these spots as the law enforcement vessels that were poised to nab Tommy.

  Gerry seemed to think the sketchy boat mechanic was dumping chemicals in the Gulf. Was he?

  Faye stood and walked toward Tommy’s shop. It, too, was padlocked, although the padlock didn’t look as final as the one on the restaurant that was keeping Liz’s old customers out. Tommy’s padlock looked like it was opened and locked again on most days. The metal around its keyhole was scratched and polished bright by its daily encounter with a key. The old door sported an oil stain behind the spot where the lock hung, and the stain measured at least a foot across. It was a remnant of an owner with greasy hands. Tommy had probably turned the padlock’s key not long before, just before he got into the boat that Gerry and his fellow law enforcers were now chasing.

  Faye walked around behind the maintenance shop to get a better view and she saw that every owner of a functional boat hadn’t skedaddled. A familiar john boat had been dragged onto the sandy shore and Faye realized that she hadn’t seen Joe’s car in its usual spot in the back of the parking lot. Liz had always let him keep it there for free, right next to Faye’s. If he’d brought Michael and his dad ashore without even the feeble entertainment that Liz and her restaurant had offered, he must really be bored.

  The sound of boat motors reached her ears. Even before she looked out into the Gulf, she had a fair idea of the boats she’d see. Certainly, she’d see Tommy piloting his crappy-looking boat that was faster than it looked. And, equally certainly, she’d see Gerry’s official boat streaking across the water in Tommy’s direction, accompanied by the backup he’d requested.

  She fiddled with the focus on her binoculars and she saw that she wasn’t wrong. Tommy, Gerry, and the boats carrying Gerry’s backup were all heading her way.

  The boats’ motors were straining, the sound rising in volume and intensity. Tommy and his pursuers had picked up speed. Squinting into the distance, she saw four dots converging on a single dot that didn’t have a chance. She guessed that Tommy had minutes of freedom left to him, but no more.

  ***

  “Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth, if you don’t get in your boat and go, I’ll arrest you, too.”

  Faye had quite enjoyed watching the boat chase that had ended with Tommy being escorted into the backseat of a marked car. Gerry looked like he hadn’t enjoyed being part of the chase nearly as much as Faye had enjoyed watching it.

  “You’ll arrest me for what?” she asked.

  “Obstructing justice.”

  Faye looked around. “Your suspect is being arrested way over there. I’m sitting on a bench way over here. I’m not obstructing anything. And I’m sitting here peacefully, I might add, so don’t threaten to arrest me for disturbing the peace.” She crossed her arms across her chest. “I heard what you said before you rushed out to arrest Tommy. You think he’s dumping chemicals…somewhere. Probably out in the Gulf. I want to know whether you think he’s the reason you and your people are digging up my land. Has Tommy been dumping on my island? Tell me that much and I’ll go away.”

  “I don’t have to tell you anything. But think about it, Faye. Where would Tommy have gotten that antique kerosene tank?”

  She watched as the marked car carrying Tommy eased out of the parking lot and onto the narrow, two-lane highway skirting the shore. “Farmers around these parts don’t waste much,” she said. “If one of them had a tank that could last a hundred years, then the tank wouldn’t get dumped. It would get used. Having no money makes you creative that way. But maybe somebody thought that tank might start leaking any day and they decided that they wanted to get rid of it before it turned into a problem. Maybe Tommy got paid to get rid of it.”

  “Didn’t look like it to me. Looked like the dirt on top of that kerosene tank had been there a long time
, but I’m not an archaeologist. Maybe I was wrong.”

  She shook her head. “No, I don’t think you’re wrong. I think the dirt did look like it hadn’t been disturbed in a long time, so long that we might as well call the tank mine. But I don’t know where the arsenic came from. I’ve looked up all the most common uses for arsenic and I’m stumped. I’ve got a list that starts with ‘old agricultural chemicals’ and goes through ‘outdated cures for leprosy’ and ends with ‘pressure-treated lumber.’ I don’t think Tommy has been handling any of those things.”

  Gerry gave a short shake of his head, probably because he was too pissed off at her to say, “I don’t think so, either,” out loud.

  Since he didn’t seem inclined to help her figure out her problem, Faye kept talking. “If Tommy is dumping waste illegally, I figure it’s something common like waste oil and paint thinner and old solvents. Those things don’t have arsenic in them, so he probably didn’t give me my arsenic problem. But if I’m wrong about that, will you tell me? If it turns out that Tommy poisoned my island, I want him to feel the consequences. And I want to know that he felt them.”

  “I suppose if somebody slipped into my backyard and poured herbicide on my vegetable garden, I’d feel pretty harsh toward the polluter, myself. My final report on your fuel spill will cover all the possible sources of your pollutants, and it will be in the public record. If Tommy did this, you’ll know it.”

  “There used to be a bunch of leaky drums stored out back of Tommy’s shed.”

  Gerry’s head jerked involuntarily toward the concrete pad behind the shed. “When? I’ve never seen anything back there.”