“It was more than one long haul. That’s what shames me. I was gone two…three…months. I think it was just three. I hope so. I should’ve asked her more questions before I went. She should’ve told me more than she did, too, but it ain’t right to blame the dead.”
“You’re saying she didn’t tell you everything. What part did she leave out?”
Faye heard a long sighing drag on a cigarette.
“Patricia left out the part that said she was dying. She—” Sly’s voice had ramped up until he was nearly shouting before he stopped himself and started again, quietly. “She did tell me she had cancer. She did. But there’s the way she said it and there’s the way I heard it and there’s the way it really was. She said the doctor said she didn’t need any operation, which I was real glad to hear, since we didn’t have any insurance. She said the doctor had give her some pills that would do her for a while, then maybe she’d need some radiation. Or chemo. Or something.”
“I don’t remember her getting chemo or radiation.”
“She didn’t, but them words scared me, because I knew I couldn’t pay for ’em. All I could think of was the money and how I could get enough to pay her bills. And I’ll tell you for true, I wasn’t even nice to her about it. I wasn’t thinking about how she felt at all.”
“You weren’t real good at that.”
Another deep breath was filtered through a cigarette. “Nope. And I didn’t do any better by you. Years probably went by that I didn’t say a nice word to neither one of you. I never got happy unless I was on the road. I was a big man out there. They knew me at the truck stops and the pool halls and the bars. They knew I was always happy to buy a man a drink or tip a waitress enough to make her smile, because five or ten dollars can make you look like a big man when everybody’s been drinking long enough. Coming home to that shitty house I’d rented for the two of you only reminded me how I wasn’t big. I was little. And I always would be. Thinking about them doctor bills I wasn’t going to be able to pay just made it worse…made me worse.”
There was silence again and this time Faye noticed something special about it. It was truly silence. There was no clacking of beer bottles hitting wooden porch tables. Neither man had twisted off a bottle top and tossed it on the floor. She heard no sips, no swallows.
Joe was a light drinker and so was she. There was wine and beer in the refrigerator and they’d offered it to Sly when he arrived, then they’d failed to notice when he drank nothing but coffee for two weeks. She wondered how long he’d been sober.
“Women don’t just up and die because their husbands are mean to them. If she didn’t need surgery or chemo or radiation for the cancer, how bad could it’ve been? Dad. She died. She passed out and we took her to the hospital and she never woke up again.”
“You think you’re telling me something I don’t know? I came home from all those hauls, bringing more money than usual but surely not enough to pay for cancer. And she was hardly there. You didn’t see it?”
“See what?”
“Son, I don’t think she’d ate a bite since I drove away.”
Now came the slight whistling intake of breath, the little choking sound that was the only sign that Faye’s husband was crying, and Faye knew that she was going to have to find a way to start eating again. Knowing what he knew now about his mother, it would kill Joe if he had to keep watching her waste away, just as it was killing her to hear him cry.
She’d heard this sound during the whirlwind emergency that had been Michael’s birth. She’d heard it on the day Amande was kidnapped. And she mustn’t think about this now or he’d hear her weeping, too, but she’d heard it on the day they lost the baby.
“Mama was always skinny. And tall. Must’ve been almost six foot. I was near fifteen before I passed her up. I didn’t see it. I didn’t see how sick she was.”
Sly’s voice lowered a tone, deep and warm, and Faye heard the note Joe used when he was talking to little Michael. “When you passed her up, you passed her up. You was a half-a-foot taller than her by the time she went, and you only eighteen years old. When you looked down at her, she just looked little. How was you supposed to see that she was getting littler every day? I should have been there. I’d have seen it.”
“But you said the doctors thought she didn’t need any medicine. I don’t understand.”
“That’s not what they thought. When I finally met her doctors—and they musta thought I was a genuine asshole not to have come met them before that—they told me what they really thought. She was too far gone for surgery when they first found it. Maybe for chemo, too, I don’t know. But radiation would’ve shrunk it. It would’ve shrunk it up. Eased her pain. Given her some more time. She thought it was stupid to pay for radiation that wasn’t gonna save her, so she told them to give her some pain pills and send her home.”
“For three months? She hurt for three months with just pills to help her? Dad.”
This time, there wasn’t even the sound of a man sucking in smoke. There was nothing to crack open the quiet night.
“No, Son, she didn’t hurt for three months with just pain pills. She didn’t take them. For three months, she didn’t take ’em. She saved ’em up until I’d got home and she knew you wouldn’t be by yourself, then she took ’em all. So, you see, a woman can just up and die, when things get bad enough.”
Chapter Nineteen
Sheriff Rainey was not surprised that Deputy Steinberg agreed with him on his strategy for dealing with Oscar Croft. Both men thought that this was one occasion when it was more effective to give away information than to keep it close to the vest. Rainey could tell by the expression on Steinberg’s face that he, too, had enjoyed the moment when Croft found out what they knew.
They’d probably enjoyed it more than they should have, in a professional sense. It was possible that Croft was responsible for the break-in at Emma Everett’s house and it was possible that he’d killed Liz, so Rainey had professional reasons for wanting the upper hand in any conversation with him. Beyond that, though, Rainey simply didn’t like him. He had the entitled air of a rich man, and he had the pushy ways of a man who didn’t know how things were done in small-town Florida.
Worse than that, he acted like a man who thought he was the smartest person in the room, merely because he was the richest person in the room. And probably also because he wasn’t from small-town Florida. Therefore, Rainey had really enjoyed beginning their talk by dropping a conversational bomb in Croft’s lap.
“Why were you at Emma Everett’s house yesterday evening? Did she invite you?”
Croft’s mouth gaped. He definitely didn’t look like the smartest person in the room.
“Who told you that?”
Rainey was under no obligation to tell the man that Emma Everett had been peeping out her peephole when Croft made his unannounced visit. Since Croft wasn’t under arrest, Rainey wasn’t even under obligation to tell him the truth. He opted to give Croft a look that said, “I’m not telling you how I know. Maybe I’m psychic. Don’t be stupid enough to lie to me.”
Rainey was successful in staring the man down. Eventually, Croft fussed with his Rolex and said, “Yeah, I stopped by to say hello to her. It’s not illegal.”
“Did you also maybe stop by Liz’s place to see her on the night she died?”
“Not that night, no.”
Shooting a look at Steinberg would have let Croft know that he’d just said too much, so Rainey kept his eyes on the man wearing a Rolex.
“You and Liz were friends? Why else would you be at her place? You don’t look like the kind of man who hangs out in bars. Not when you can drink whatever you like here.”
Rainey gestured at the fully stocked bar behind Oscar. It was a nice bar, the kind seen in houses designed for parties. It had shelves loaded with high-end liquor, racks of cut-crystal glassware, a sink, a tiny dishwasher, stainless st
eel muddlers and reamers and shakers. It was built for a hired bartender with a catering staff who roamed the expansive house with trays of cocktails and finger food.
In Micco County, a house like this would have been a corporate rental, used by companies who courted clients with alcohol-soaked fishing weekends. The only private home that approached it belonged to Emma Everett. Rainey knew that there was a dock out back as big as Emma’s, with a party boat and a speedboat sitting in lifts that would drop them into the Gulf at the touch of a switch. Oscar had been in town for a while, so he must have rented this house for at least a month, maybe for the whole winter. Rainey doubted the landlord had ever before had a renter who wanted it for so long.
“I like a little nightlife. Always have. Besides, Delia’s not a big drinker. Who wants to drink alone? So, yeah, I went over to Liz’s place now and then, before she…when it was open. It was the only bar in town. People are going to miss it, now that it’s gone. They still need a place to go. Somebody’s going to figure that out and make themselves some good money. Not sure I’m up for starting something so far from home, but I’ve been in business all my life. It’s hard to walk past an opportunity like that.”
“I can’t see you running a little dive way down here when you have businesses to run in Ohio.” Delia said this in a calm and professional voice as she stepped out of a bedroom, but she looked surprised to see guests. Or maybe she was just surprised to see Oscar being questioned by the law.
She looked fresh out of the shower, so she must not have heard Rainey and Steinberg come in. Her cheeks were pink and she was running a brush through damp hair, but she was fully dressed and Rainey was glad. It would have been awkward if any woman had walked into the room wearing a towel, but it would have been especially awkward if the towel-wearing woman had been this pretty.
Delia was actually very professionally dressed for a glorified tour guide. She wore a crisp, button-front shirt, loose linen slacks, and dressy flat shoes. She hadn’t come out of the same bedroom where Oscar had gone to fetch his glasses after they arrived, so it appeared that their relationship was a strictly professional one. Rainey had been wondering.
He was pretty sure that all of Micco County had been wondering, but his own professional ethics would keep him from spreading the news that the two tourists slept separately, despite the fact that doing so would damp down the gossip. Or it should. People only heard what they wanted to hear, and if Micco County wanted to believe that this fresh-faced woman was an old man’s paid escort, there was nothing he could do about it.
“I’m in no hurry to get back to Ohio,” the old man said. “I like it here. Maybe I’ll stay in Florida until Delia gets another client and I don’t have a personal historian to help me find the interesting sites to see.” He grinned up at Delia, who didn’t grace him with an equally flirtatious response. In fact, she rolled her eyes at him. She was one of those women who had learned to manage male attention with an air that said, “This far and no further.”
“You said you had business to do today, so I thought I’d do some shopping,” she said. “They tell me that the closest mall is in Tallahassee, so I’m driving up there for the afternoon. While I’m in town, I’ll check out that restored mission you wanted to visit. If I think it’s something you’ll want to tour, we can drive up there tomorrow.”
She turned to leave the room but Oscar called after her. “Buy something pretty!”
He got no answer, but her body language spoke for her. Rainey heard it loud and clear: “This far and no further.”
A safe moment after the door closed behind Delia, Oscar said, “Not bad, right?”
Rainey emitted a grunt intended to signify that he didn’t speak disrespectfully about ladies but that Delia’s looks were, indeed, not bad. This was a lot of information for a single grunt to carry, but he thought he pulled it off. Steinberg just sat there and looked uncomfortable.
“I prefer a woman who’s lived a while, myself,” Oscar went on, “but there’s nothing wrong with having a traveling companion who’s nice to look at.”
Emma had lived a while. So had Liz, but not long enough. Rainey couldn’t point to a specific reason why he was uncomfortable with Oscar Croft and his relationships with the women around him, but he was. There wasn’t necessarily anything wrong with appreciating a young female employee, although it was more respectful to keep your appreciation to yourself and Oscar was pushing the boundaries of sexual harassment. There was certainly nothing wrong with politely appreciating the company of a woman of a certain age, like Emma or Liz, particularly if you were yourself of a certain age.
It was only natural that Oscar would like Liz’s verve and Emma’s composed wit. Going to Emma’s house unannounced was a little awkward, but it wasn’t a crime. Going to Liz’s bar for a drink wasn’t even awkward. She was in business to serve drinks to people who were looking for company. Still, Oscar made the sheriff’s creep detector go ping.
Chapter Twenty
Faye had thought about going into the house. She really had. She had sat under her own porch and listened to her husband and his father rip the patches off their torn relationship, and considered how she could make sure that they never knew she’d been there.
The basement door behind her had been an option. She could have backed quietly through it. Their bedroom was a few feet down the hall. She could have crawled in bed and let Joe presume that she’d come home to take a nap, although she couldn’t recall ever having done that so early in the day. Maybe she’d done it when she was pregnant or when she had the flu. If Joe found her napping, he’d probably think she had a terminal illness. Not a good thing, considering the conversation he’d just had.
No, she needed an unobtrusive way to communicate, “Who me? Eavesdrop on the most intimate moment in your life that didn’t involve me? Why would you think I’d do that?” A fake nap wasn’t going to work.
She could have backed through that basement door and walked all the way down the hall into the kitchen. Joe would have found her there, chomping on a sandwich. Or she could have crept up the sneak staircase and pretended to have been sitting in the cupola for hours, looking out to sea.
The problem with any plan that took her inside the house was that it would require her to look Joe in the eyes while he wondered what she might have heard. There was no way she could do that without giving herself away. He would know. He would know that she’d heard his father’s story, and Joe needed to tell her that story himself, in his own time.
So she had ruled out the basement door and stayed put until she heard their rocking chairs slide against the wooden porch floor above her head. She had listened to Sly give the slight groan of a man stretching out his aging ankles before walking into the house. She had listened for the non-sound of Joe’s moccasins as he followed his father without a word. Then she had waited.
***
After a time, the rain eased. Gerry’s crew arrived and started unloading the day’s supplies at the dock. Faye took the opportunity to walk swiftly in their direction. Unless Joe or his father was watching at the exact moment she stepped out from under the porch, there would be nothing odd about her presence among these busy workers.
She had been ready all morning to walk across the island and watch them work. She had loaded her satchel with all the usual things. Field notebook. Pen. Gloves. Camera. A few small, light tools, like brushes and dental picks and tongue depressors.
As usual, she carried her trowel in a scabbard at her waist, but she otherwise traveled light, knowing that she could walk back to the house if she needed something. A couple of bottles of water had gone into the satchel, too, and enough calories in the form of a banana and a protein bar to keep her alive, but probably not enough calories to maintain her body weight.
She was ready to go watch the environmental scientists work.
Since Gerry and Nadia and their contractors had started their environment
al cleanup, she had spent most of her days doing just that—watching them work. If she was going to be paying for this project, she wanted to fool herself into believing that she was its manager.
For days now, she’d also been carrying a copy of Cally’s oral history and, today, she added another research source, her tablet computer, because she wanted more convenient Internet access than her smartphone gave her. She also wanted a bigger screen and she wanted the wireless keyboard that made the tablet so much more functional.
The laptop she used at home would be still more functional, but she shared that computer with Joe and this was research that she didn’t want him to see. Using it would require her to believe that its “clear history” command worked flawlessly, and she didn’t.
It was time to see what the Internet could tell her about Sylvester and Patricia Mantooth. And, because she had decided that Sly was innocent of Liz’s murder—granted, she had no proof—and that Oscar was a suspicious character who deserved investigating as a possible suspect—again, no proof, just intuition—she planned to see what the Internet could tell her about Oscar, too.
Faye plopped to the ground and opened her tablet’s case, typing “Sylvester Mantooth” into the browser’s search bar. It was an unusual name, so Faye got a dozen or so hits that all referred to her father-in-law. As usual, it was amazing to see how much information the various “white pages” sites offered for free. She quickly confirmed Sly’s age, fifty-eight. She learned that the World Wide Web knew that he had been married to Patricia, even though she’d been dead more than ten years. Her throat closed when she realized that Patricia had died when she was hardly older than Faye was now.
The web also knew that Sly’s son’s name was Joe Wolf. She found several addresses in for Sly in Oklahoma and she knew that one of those addresses was probably the house where her husband grew up. She was relieved to find that her father in-law was not a registered sex offender.
Isolation Page 13
