Faye Longchamp-Mantooth had found out that this was what Oscar’s wife had done. She had aired every grievance that had led to their divorce. Presuming Oscar Croft was capable of shame, he had to be sorry that she’d chosen that tactic. Anyone motivated enough to check the public record would know that the first Mrs. Croft had based her petition for divorce on Oscar’s infidelity, and her private detective had provided reams of salacious proof. Public records in Ohio would, forever after, include evidence that Oscar Croft had enjoyed the company of a barely legal blonde more than he enjoyed the company of his wife.
Sheriff Rainey had seen a lot in his years on the job, but he’d rarely seen such graphic testimony in a file that didn’t involve a criminal action. If Oscar Croft’s divorce had been a movie, there was no way that the movie industry would let it sneak by with just an R rating.
Rainey was grateful for the information, because Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth was correct that it was pertinent to his investigation of Liz’s murder and Emma’s attempted break-in. Both incidents had occurred very near Oscar Croft’s rented house and very shortly after he came to town. This proximity, combined with the man’s undeniably uncomfortable history with women, made him a person of interest, and this didn’t even take into account the fact that Rainey had witnesses saying that Croft had seemed attracted to both Liz and Emma.
If Sheriff Rainey had to choose between knowing his wife was in the presence of Oscar Croft or Sly Mantooth, he believed he would choose the ex-con.
***
It didn’t get any easier for Faye, walking up the dock where Liz had died. Fish gathered around the posts under her feet. She wondered whether they heard her footsteps and were hoping that Liz had come back to give them their daily basket of stale dinner rolls.
Beer cans were starting to accumulate in the parking lot. This place had been her friend’s life and now it was a hangout for underaged drinkers. The windows of Liz’s upstairs apartment overlooked that parking lot. Faye could see Liz now, hanging her bright orange head out the window and bellowing at beer-swilling loiterers. The window was closed, and it had been closed since Sunday night. The air conditioner hadn’t run for days, so the apartment had to be sweltering and damp. If nobody had emptied the closets of her clothes—and who would have done that?—they were mildewing by now.
She had timed her arrival right. Gerry and the sheriff pulled off the highway before she’d walked the few steps from her boat to the parking lot. Faye had brought them information that she hoped might help them find Liz’s killer. She hoped they were grateful.
***
Sheriff Rainey thought back to the e-mail he had sent Faye Longchamp-Mantooth, responding to her messages about Oscar Croft’s divorce and his other legal woes. Had he mentioned that he was on his way to the marina? He must have, because here Faye stood, uninvited.
She shook his hand, then pulled her satchel off her shoulder. Reaching into it, she said, “I have those photos you wanted.”
Rainey looked around for Steinberg. He was already standing in front of Tommy Barnett’s maintenance shed. Just standing there. He was pretending like he was studying the padlock on the door and the oily stains on the concrete pad out back, but Rainey thought he really just wanted to get close to the greasy stains on the concrete pad behind the shed. He couldn’t manage it because the pad was surrounded by a chain-link fence, but he looked like he wanted to cut that chain-link fence real bad.
“Detective, there’s nothing to see over there. The man has taken his hazardous waste out to sea, and we’re going to nail him for it. Come over here and help me look through some pictures taken before Tommy Barnett and his sludge flew the coop.”
The three of them sat together on a bench, stomping down the dried grass at their feet. With Faye in the middle and a lawman on either side, Rainey and Steinberg watched as she flipped through a fat envelope full of family photos. The top one was a sucker punch, because it showed Liz hanging out the kitchen door of her bar and grill, the same door where Joe had found wet footprints on the night she died. She was leaning down to scoop up little Michael in mid-toddle. Sly was jogging to keep up with his grandson. Joe must have been holding the camera.
“I mostly just wanted to bring a picture of Liz,” Faye said. “You know…to remind you that she was a real person who should still be here. But look at this,” she said, pointing to the lower left corner of the photo. The person holding the camera had been standing on the dock and a small portion of Tommy’s fenced-in storage pad could be seen. Two fifty-five-gallon drums were visible. Faye handed the photo to Gerry who was obviously dying to study the words printed on the side of the drums.
“Take it,” she said. “Maybe it will help you figure out what kind of gunk he was dumping.”
“You give him too much credit,” Gerry said, holding the picture inches from his eyes. “You presume that the chemicals that are in the drums are the same as the chemicals that are on the labels. Who knows what Tommy put in there? But this is a start.” He looked up from the photo and met Faye’s eyes. “Thank you. Thank you for going to the trouble of bringing these pictures to us.”
“You said you’d tell me what you learned about the contamination on my property. I thought returning the favor was the least I could do.”
“Yeah. Um…about that.”
Faye said nothing, just cocked an eyebrow to encourage him to talk.
“Did Nadia tell you the lab results on the wood you wanted us to analyze?”
“No. She mentioned the background samples, but I forgot to ask about the wood. Arsenic?”
“Yeah. Not a lot, but that chunk of wood was definitely impregnated with arsenic, as if it had been soaked in a solution of it. You might find that in modern pressure-treated wood, but I don’t have a clue what could have gotten into it before your grandmother was a kid. I’m listening if you’ve got any ideas. Hell. Maybe you have a picture from 1912 of somebody emptying a big can marked ‘arsenic.’”
“If my great-grandmother had owned a camera and if the pictures had survived a few hurricanes then, yes, I might have that picture for you. My family has never had much, so they’ve never thrown much away. I’ll keep feeding you information, if you keep doing the same.”
The sheriff said, “We’re the law. You’re supposed to tell us stuff. We don’t have to return the favor.”
Gerry said, “Not to argue with you, Sheriff, but I’m required to include a summary of the site’s environmental history in my report. Faye is the best source of information I’ve got. To get the best information out of her, I’m going to have to share at least some of what I know.”
“If you must, Detective. Within reason.”
Faye had felt powerless for so long. The loss of the baby, the loss of Liz, the expenses that would come due for Gerry’s cleanup…all of these things had taken their toll. Feeling the power balance of one area of her life shift in her direction gave her an adrenaline rush so pronounced that she could feel her legs shake.
“If you tell me enough, Gerry, and if you’re lucky,” she said, “I might just write that report for you.”
The sheriff looked like he wanted to distract her from her newfound power. He leaned over to look at the photo and pointed at a spot near its bottom. He asked, “Who’s that woman standing by the fuel pump?”
“Her name’s Wilma,” Faye said. “As far as I know, every cent that passes through her hands comes from sales from that one pump. She must be hurting by now.”
So this was Wilma Jakes. Rainey had thought so. That’s why he’d asked. He studied her jowly face, her stout legs, her resolute stance. This woman might be able to take him in a fist fight, and she would probably fight dirty.
He looked at his watch. Wilma herself would arrive in half an hour with the evidence about Liz’s killer that she’d promised. The timing could be tricky. He didn’t want to interrupt Faye, who was voluntarily giving him evidence
he could use in the Barnett case, but when Wilma arrived, Faye would have to go. Testimony about a murder trumped information about environmental contamination. It just did.
Together, the three of them thumbed through the snapshots, and Rainey tried to hurry things along. The faces of Faye and her family passed by, time and again. He saw Liz and her son Chip. He saw Tommy. He saw random strangers, dozens of them, with nothing in common except that they were standing near Tommy’s maintenance shop. If Liz were still alive and if Tommy had kept his sludge to himself, these pictures would mean nothing to anybody who wasn’t emotionally attached to the people caught by the camera.
“You can keep the pictures. I have copies,” Faye said, and Rainey gathered them in his hand, stacking them neatly like a deck of poker cards.
The picture of Liz was on top. There was something profoundly vital about the way her muscled arm swung out to encompass Faye’s little boy. Something alive. Sheriff Rainey couldn’t look away from her face and, judging by their silence, neither could Faye or Gerry.
“Who’s that in the background?” Faye asked, bringing her eyes close to the picture, then tapping a fingernail on its upper left corner. Five or six people were coming around the building, heading from the parking lot to the restaurant door. They would have been nothing but blurs, indistinguishable in the distance, if it weren’t for Delia’s bright hair blowing into the weathered face of the man at her side.
Sheriff Rainey watched the archaeologist pull her reading glasses from her satchel. After a few seconds’ study, she gave a firm nod. “Yep. It’s them. Delia and Oscar. This means that they ate breakfast at Liz’s sometime in the past two weeks. Breakfast is when my family usually eats at the marina.”
“These pictures are only two weeks old?” Gerry said. “You mean I’ve been staking out Tommy’s operation for more than a year and I missed those rusty drums behind his shed?”
The sheriff said, “You weren’t here every day. You had other things to do. I know, because I assigned them to you. You must have come on days when he didn’t have any customers. Luck of the draw.”
“I don’t see a date on the picture,” Gerry said. “You’re sure it’s recent? You were there?”
“No, I wasn’t. But I know when it was taken because Sly has only been here for two weeks.”
“Oh, I thought he lived with you.”
The sheriff saw Faye flinch at the suggestion that her father-in-law might do something drastic like move in with them, but she said nothing. She only shook her head.
“Has your husband mentioned seeing Delia and Oscar here?”
“As far as I know, he doesn’t even know who they are. You can ask him, if you like.”
The sheriff noticed that this woman who had gone to so much trouble to bring him all these photos didn’t offer to ask her own husband. This was interesting, but it seemed immaterial. He’d ask Joe himself, if he decided it was important. It was time to end this interview, so that Wilma could come tell them what she knew.
He shifted his weight forward and Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth unconsciously shifted forward in response to body language that said, “This interview is over.”
She got up and said, “Let me know if I can help in any other way. Maybe I could look at the pictures again or tell you what I remember about Liz or…it doesn’t really matter. If I can help you find her killer, call me.”
As Faye turned to go, someone emerged from the woodsy area bordering the marina, as if she, too, was watching their body language and responding.
“Who’s that?” Steinberg asked.
Sheriff Rainey tapped a finger on the bottom of the top picture in the stack in his lap, the one where Wilma stood by her fuel pump while Liz greeted little Michael Longchamp-Mantooth. If Steinberg’s wits were about him, that finger tap would be enough to let him know who he was looking at.
Rainey himself would have known who it was, even without Faye’s photograph. It was Wilma Jakes, arriving ten minutes ahead of schedule for their chat. Now it really was time for Dr. Faye Longchamp-Mantooth to get in her boat and go.
Chapter Twenty-two
Faye couldn’t have guessed Wilma’s age within two decades. Maybe she was sixty-five. Maybe she was forty-five.
Wilma wore dusty flip-flops that gave an aged shuffle to her walk, but her shoulder-length hair was still more brown than gray, so Faye guessed that she was on the young end of that twenty-year span. Her worn facial skin was hollowed at the cheeks. Faye watched her watery eyes shift from the sheriff to Deputy Steinberg to Faye, then back to the sheriff for another visual sweep. They were an odd color. Like her hair, Wilma’s eyes were brown going to gray. Even her face was tanned to the gray-brown of an unpainted wooden house.
Aged shuffle or not, Wilma was upon them before Faye had shouldered her satchel and walked away. “I saw somebody. The night Liz got killed. I saw somebody.”
Faye saw the sheriff catch her eye, and she knew what he was trying to communicate. He wanted her to walk away.
So that’s what she did. Or it’s what she tried to do. Wilma had other ideas. The woman seemed to have come to the sheriff, ready to talk, and she wasn’t interested in waiting until they were alone.
“The guy I saw, the one I told you about. The one I saw on the night Liz got killed? He was prowling around the outside of the building, peeping in the windows. I saw him walk over to Tommy’s shed, too. It was a little bit after Liz closed up shop for the night, so there wasn’t nobody else around.”
“Did you recognize him?”
“Naw.”
“Would you know him if you saw him again?”
“Naw. Didn’t see his face, but he was a big man. I know that. Tall, for sure. Looked like a man with some muscle. Liz kept the parking lot lit up every night until she went to bed, so I got a good look at his back, but he never turned his face in my direction.”
“Did you see a gun?”
She shook her head. “All I can tell you is that he was big and he was wearing blue jeans. And work boots.”
Faye didn’t look around, so she couldn’t see the sheriff’s eyes boring into her back. He wanted her gone. She was cooperative to a point, meaning that she kept walking, but she wasn’t totally cooperative. She walked slowly and she took small steps.
The sheriff had eyes. He could see that she wasn’t moving with any speed, but there was nothing he could do about it. He didn’t dare interrupt Wilma to bark at Faye. What if Wilma decided to stop talking?
“Was anybody with this mysterious big man?”
First, Wilma said “Naw,” but then she gathered herself to her full height and spoke again, clearly this time. “No.”
“Did you see him leave?”
“No.” Her voice was firm. “First, I saw him in the parking lot. Then he walked around the far side of the bait shop, and I didn’t see him no more.”
“What time was this?”
“Ain’t sure.”
“Was it before or after you heard the gunshot?”
“Didn’t hear any gunshot.”
Faye slowed to a trudge, knowing that the sheriff was probably wishing he could shoot her right about now.
“If you were close enough to see somebody, then you must have been close enough to hear a gunshot.” Rainey’s voice sounded so reasonable that he must be working hard to make it sound that way.
“I didn’t like the look of that man sneaking around. I got in my car and drove to the Sunset Lounge. It’s in Panacea. I stayed till closing time.”
“Can somebody confirm that you were at the Sunset Lounge?”
“Sure. I’m there a lot of nights. They know me.”
“Did you see Liz on the night she died?”
Wilma gave him a firm no.
“Have you seen any suspicious activity since then?”
Again, she said, “No.”
When he said “Had you ever seen any suspicious activity before that?” Faye wondered if he was just trying to exhaust all the possible questions that Wilma could answer with “No.” Anyone could tell that the woman had come to tell the sheriff only so much and no more.
Faye picked up her pace. She’d heard all that Wilma was going to say. If she put enough distance between herself and the sheriff before Wilma walked away, he wouldn’t be able to yell at her for dawdling.
As expected, Wilma quickly drew away from the two lawmen. By the time Faye reached her own oyster skiff, Wilma was gone.
***
Faye had dawdled away the afternoon, walking the trails that circled her island until she was too tired to move. She had no destination. She just couldn’t stand to see anybody, not the environmental scientists at their dig site on the other side of the island and not her family in the house at its heart. After a lot of walking, she had found a place where she could sit on the ground and lean against a tree. It was a good spot to do yet more timekilling web searches. The Internet wasn’t going to tell her why Liz was dead or why her baby was dead, and it sure wasn’t going to tell her how long she was going to feel this way, but it certainly was distracting.
At some point, she remembered that it had been a long time since she ate, and the banana and energy bar that she’d thrown in her satchel that morning were long gone. Since she’d promised herself that she would eat more, if only to keep Joe from worrying so much, it was time to go home.
As she walked quietly into the hallway of her home’s ground-floor basement, her satchel felt so heavy in her hand that it seemed to drag the floor. She could smell chicken frying somewhere ahead of her, so she knew where Joe was. The slapping of bare feet on brick floor told her that Michael was on his way. She set down the satchel and dropped into the widespread crouch that usually kept her upright when her son launched himself into her arms.
As she waited for Michael to leap, his grandfather came into sight. “I knew you was home by the way the little fella’s face lit up.”
Isolation Page 15
