Isolation

by Mary Anna Evans

  “I been looking for you since I got off the boat,” Sly said, “but I stopped when I saw your little light way across the island. I knew if I stayed right here, sooner or later, you’d have to come to me on your way home. I’m sitting out here by this fire, ’cause I can’t go in that house and look at my son when he’s this tore up.”

  “Did he tell you where he was going when he went ashore today?”

  Sly used a long stick to poke the fire. Sparks flew. “Didn’t ask him. I think he’d answer his wife if she asked him.”

  Faye didn’t say anything.

  Sly used the silence to pull out a cigarette. He reached his hand toward the fire and lit the cigarette on a hot coal. “I don’t know why you won’t just ask him, but I know you two ain’t happy. I never seen you happy together, but I never seen you before that baby died, either. Something tells me you was happy before, so I’m guessing you can be happy again, but it won’t be the same. Might be better, might be worse, but it won’t be the same. When you love somebody that dies, you ain’t never the same after that. You and Joe both lost somebody, so you’re both different now. That’s just how it is.”

  If this was supposed to be comforting, Faye’s tears suggested that Sly had failed.

  He tapped his ash onto the dirt, grinding it into the ground to make sure every last spark was dead. Then he kicked sand onto his campfire, scattered its coals, and doused them with a bucket of water sitting by his foot. “Go on in there. Even in the dark, I can tell you need some sleep. My son wouldn’t ever make you talk until you wanted to talk. I’m gonna stay out here and make sure this fire’s out. While I’m at it, I’m gonna smoke half a pack of these, so you two can have a little time alone. I think you need some.”

  ***

  The whooping alarm of Emma’s security system woke her. In her drowsy confusion, she couldn’t remember the code that would shut it up.

  She shook her head to clear it. A few seconds passed as she remembered that shutting up the alarm was not her problem. Her problem was figuring out how to spend the time until the security company sent someone to help her.

  Should she go out the window and risk showing herself to the intruder who had forced open a window or door? Or should she go trap herself in the closet or under the bed and begin counting the seconds until help came?

  She crept to her closed bedroom door, not sure whether she wanted to hear the intruder or not. Hearing footsteps would tell her how far away she was from danger, but the answer was already obvious. It was “pretty damn close.”

  Not hearing footsteps might mean that the intruder was far away, which was good, but it would leave her with no information whatsoever. Or it might mean that this was a false alarm. Emma decided to hope for no sound other than the screaming alarm. She rested an ear against the door.

  This was how Douglass had felt during those moments after his killers broke into their home and before the attack began. Lost in the dark, weightless, helpless, she was near a breakdown, but she had to fight back. If she sobbed, she would give away her location and, what is more, she would be giving power to someone who might want to hurt her. She breathed in calm, then she breathed it out.

  She kept a rope ladder designed for emergency escape under her bed in case of fire. It tempted her, but she didn’t know who might be waiting at the bottom of it and she wasn’t even sure how long it would take her to unreel it and hook it to her windowsill. Using it seemed like a foolhardy plan. So did rushing blindly out the bedroom door without knowing what was on the other side.

  After a moment’s thought, she decided that her reading alcove was the place to be. She would be near the door and shielded from view. If someone came through the door and moved to the right toward the bed, thinking she might be hiding underneath it, she had a shot at darting behind the intruder and getting out of the room. If the intruder came through the door and moved to the left, she would be pinned in place, hoping they didn’t see her lurking behind the curtains. It wasn’t much of a plan, but it only had to work until help came.

  Again, she breathed in calm, and she breathed it out.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Emma thought that Sheriff Rainey was doing an excellent job for such a young man. He probably wasn’t even forty yet. She also thought that the sheriff himself probably wouldn’t be personally responding to an attempted break-in if she weren’t Douglass Everett’s widow and if he didn’t know that her husband had been killed during a robbery gone wrong. Her husband’s robbers were both dead, but that wasn’t keeping her from having flashbacks to the night she lost him.

  She had crouched in her reading alcove until the deputies arrived and after. They’d had to come up the stairs and show her their badges before she could feel assured that it was safe to come out. They had been patient, even sweet, about settling her nerves before they brought her into the living room to talk.

  “Ma’am, your laundry room window’s busted,” Sheriff Rainey began. “The leaves under the window are scuffled up, but we haven’t found any prints so we don’t know how many people were out there. You keep a nice cushy lawn, so there may not be any prints to find. We can’t see any evidence that a car was here, so somebody could’ve come in on foot. I’ve got people checking the roads and your neighbors’ yards and the beach behind your house for footprints or tire prints or places a car might have been parked. Do you remember hearing a boat motor?”

  “Not before the alarm started howling. I couldn’t hear anything after it started going off.”

  “I’m guessing you were asleep before the alarm started.”

  She nodded.

  Everything about the sheriff’s wide face said, “Trust me.’ This was the kind of face that got people elected sheriff. He laid his hands, palm-down, on his widespread legs and said, “Bottom line. We don’t think anybody got into the house. Probably the alarm spooked ’em. We found this outside, and it may explain why somebody—or some somebodies—were bold enough to break a window that any fool could see was wired for an alarm system. I’m thinking you don’t use it these days.”

  He put a plastic container on the coffee table in front of her. Inside it was a teardrop-shaped piece of plastic smaller than her palm.

  “It looks like—is that my fob? The one I’m supposed to use to get into my house when I come home?”

  “But you don’t.”

  It wasn’t a question. He knew her habits, which Emma found a little spooky.

  “I just never got in the habit. My old alarm system didn’t have a fob, so I always use the keypad to come and go. That fob’s been on my keychain for years and I never even think about it.”

  “You’ve had the system serviced lately.”

  Again, a statement, not a question. Spooky. “Yes. Something went kaflooie with the wiring and the whole thing had to be reprogrammed.”

  “But neither you nor the technician thought to reprogram your fob, because you don’t use it.”

  Emma was trying to figure out how he could know all these things about a malfunctioning device lying outside her laundry room window. There was only one answer that made any sense and it wasn’t a comforting one.

  “Somebody stole my fob. They were planning to deactivate my system and just waltz in. Not through the front door, because it was deadbolted and chained, but a window? Yeah. That would have been easy. Click the fob to turn off the alarm, break a window, and you’re in. It would have worked if my fob had been up-to-date.”

  Emma pictured the back of her house. The laundry room window wasn’t within sight of any of her neighbors, so it was an obvious choice for a break-in. It was directly beneath her bedroom. This insight made her queasy. If she had climbed out of her window on her emergency ladder, she’d have been handing herself over to whatever criminal was down there breaking her window.

  Emma had a momentary vision of Douglass, lying in a pool of his own blood, but she shook it off
. Things hadn’t gone that way tonight, and it was best not to dwell on what could have happened.

  “Had you noticed that your fob was missing?”

  “No, but it didn’t do anything but hang on my key ring. I never used it. It could have been missing for weeks and I’d have never known.”

  Sheriff Rainey stroked his close-cropped brown beard until she finished speaking, then he immediately contradicted her. “I don’t think it was missing for weeks. I think it was probably stolen today.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Because the thief had no way to know that you never used it, not unless that thief was your best friend who watched you come in your house, day in and day out.”

  There was no one like that in Emma’s life. Every day, she came home alone.

  “Say this thing got stolen today,” the sheriff said, picking up the container and studying the fob through its clear walls. “If you used it regularly—which you don’t—you would’ve tried to use it when you got home and noticed that it was gone.”

  “That’s what the thief would have presumed.”

  “Exactly. So say you got home today and it didn’t work. You wouldn’t have rushed out and replaced it at the end of a long day.”

  “Not unless I was completely paranoid.”

  “Exactly,” he said again. “You would’ve thought, ‘Darn. I lost my fob. I better get another one.’ Then you would’ve have turned the system off at the keypad and made yourself a note to call your security company. Maybe you’d have done it tomorrow or the next day. All the crook knows is that you were more likely to get that replacement with every day that passed. The security technician would probably reprogram the system when you did that. The thief had to act right away for the best odds of getting in your house.”

  “On the very same day.”

  The sheriff nodded.

  The night air coming in her broken window was cold. Emma felt a shiver start between her shoulder blades. “Why? Why would somebody want to get in my house?”

  He shrugged. “Probably wanted to clean out the house of Douglass Everett’s widow. Everybody around here knows you’ve got nice things. But maybe there was more to it than that. A nice lady named Liz got killed not so very far from here, and she had a lot less to steal than you do. I don’t like to think about what might’ve happened if somebody had gotten into your house tonight.”

  Emma wondered what it was going to take for her to get warm. She didn’t think that nailing a board over that open window would do it. She was cold on the inside.

  “Miss Emma,” the sheriff said, in a tone of voice that suggested that he was repeating himself. How long had he been calling her name? She was feeling too tired and cold to focus. “Who did you see today? Who could have taken the fob?”

  “Today?”

  Emma tried to trace back through her day, but it wasn’t easy. She had never been one of those people who could remember what she’d had for lunch. “Um…Joe came to see me this morning, but I know he didn’t steal the fob. He wouldn’t have had to. If he’d asked me for it, I’d have given it to him. Then there were a bunch of people in and out of the museum, like always, but I didn’t know any of them. After lunch, Oscar Croft and Delia Scarsdale came to talk to me and I saw Joe again. Oh, and I saw Sly Mantooth. He took me fishing. And there was somebody else…hmm. Who was it?”

  Sheriff Rainey had started taking notes on his tablet, probably because there were too many names on her list for him to keep in his head.

  “Oh, yeah. It was Oscar again. He came by my house this evening, but I already mentioned him, so he doesn’t count.”

  “Why was he here?”

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t expecting him and I was wearing my nightclothes,” she gestured at the robe she still wore, “so I didn’t open the door. Which means that he couldn’t have stolen the fob then. Maybe he could have done it earlier in the day, when we were chatting at the museum, but not tonight.”

  The sheriff swiped his finger across his tablet screen. She imagined that he was bolding Oscar Croft’s name, because of the man’s effrontery in paying her a visit without calling first. Being a crime suspect seemed like a harsh punishment for bad manners.

  He clicked the tablet off. “I’m leaving a deputy here for the rest of the night. You’ll be in touch with your security company first thing in the morning, I presume.”

  “I will.”

  “Let’s talk again after that. You look like you’ve done all you can do today.”

  It was true. Emma let him introduce her to the deputy who would be babysitting her, and then she took herself to bed.

  ***

  “I can’t think of any good reason for you to go to shore without telling me and then come back empty-handed. If nothing else, you could have said, ‘Need something at the store?’ I’m supposed to not notice when you do something strange? I’m supposed to pretend like it’s not happening? Joe, that doesn’t make any sense.”

  Anybody listening to them fight would have conceded Faye’s point, because it was unusual for either of them to burn enough fuel to get to shore without checking with the other one. Truthfully, it was unheard of. There were few things more frustrating than spending half a day buying groceries and coming home to find that your spouse drank all the milk while you were gone.

  Married people learned each other’s ways. Changes, even small ones, stirred up insecurities. Wives asked themselves what else their husbands were doing that they didn’t know about. Husbands asked themselves the same thing about their wives. The fights of married people are many-layered, and even the most trivial ones rest atop the deepest fear of all: “Am I losing you?”

  Anybody listening to the fight would also have praised Joe’s self-restraint in refusing to say, “And I’m supposed to not notice when you do something strange? Because it’s been weeks since you did anything that wasn’t strange.”

  Yes, his trip to shore had been out-of-character, but it bore no comparison to Faye’s recent behavior. He could have fought back, blow by verbal blow. He could have said, “How is what I did different from what you’ve been doing? Maybe you don’t get in a boat and leave, but you walk away every day without a word about where you’re going. For all I know, you’re going to shore every day without telling me. It’s what you did today.”

  Joe knew that if he said these things, he might have won the argument, but he would have lost in the end. Maybe he would even have lost Faye.

  Over the course of a marriage, a wife can draw invisible lines that her husband knows he cannot cross. Maybe Faye’s had moved and he didn’t know it yet. He felt like he didn’t know her anymore.

  Joe was human, so he had invisible lines, too, and Faye was tiptoeing near them. He knew one of them needed to maintain control or they were in real trouble, so he held his tongue and took the punishment she was dishing out.

  He considered telling her that he’d met Oscar and Delia. She might respond by telling him everything, which was what he wanted more than anything, but the risk was too great. If she knew he’d been talking to Emma, she might stop talking to Emma. She might stop talking to anyone. Joe had no wish to watch his wife explode from her pent-up pain.

  In the end, he said only that he’d gone to have a cup of coffee with Sheriff Mike and that he was sorry he’d forgotten to call her. Sheriff Mike would back him up, because he, too, had a complicated wife whom he loved to distraction.

  Faye quickly got tired of pummeling him with words. She was a quiet woman. She loved quietly, never saying much about her feelings but always managing to say enough, and her anger was quiet, too. She listed his errors and yelled at him a while, but then she was done.

  Fortunately for them both, the phone in Faye’s pocket rang and saved her from ending the argument the way an introvert does it, by mumbling “So there! You’re wrong!” and hurrying away.

&nb
sp; Instead, she thumbed her phone on and he heard her say, “Oh, Emma!” as she backed into her office and closed the door between them.

  ***

  Faye knew she should go to bed. She had failed to convince Emma to stay with them on Joyeuse Island until her intruder was found. The very idea that someone had stolen the fob that controlled her friend’s security system was going to keep Faye awake all night, so going to bed seemed silly.

  She was exhausted by her time spent worrying over every move Gerry Steinberg and Nadia Lombardero made, and she was emotionally flattened by her argument with Joe. The longer she stayed holed up in her office, the more he would worry about how mad she was.

  Let Joe worry. She had already spewed out most of her anger, but she didn’t know what to say to him, so let him worry himself to sleep. (Yeah, that was a good plan. Faye knew how compatible worry and sleep were.)

  While she waited for her husband to exhaust himself, she made good use of her time. Gerry Steinberg had said that he would love to see some photos of chemical storage on the grounds of Tommy Barnett’s business. Faye had years of photos of Liz’s dock and marina. She knew she could grant his wish.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Sheriff Ken Rainey loved getting to work early. The air was crisp and his mind was crisp. Too often, that crispness was wasted on administrative chores while his deputies got to do the interesting work. Not today. There was an unsolved murder in Micco County and an unsolved break-in. When one considered that Liz Colton and Emma Everett were about the same age and that they had lived fairly close to one another, Emma’s intruder was more disturbing than a single broken window suggested. These things gave Rainey a good excuse to be personally involved, and he liked that.