Isolation

by Mary Anna Evans

  “It can’t have been long since Delia was attacked. My father-in-law is under the impression that you came straight here. Even taking into account that you had to respond to her call and question her and look for evidence, I’m still thinking that the attack came well after midnight, right?”

  The sheriff gave her a look that could only be described as a non-response.

  Her breath came ragged as she pointed to the white-painted walls of Joyeuse, clearly visible through the trees. “I’ve been sitting on the porch of that house since midnight, right after my husband came to bed. I didn’t see Sly come or go. I didn’t hear any boat come or go, not until I heard you coming this morning.”

  “What about before you got out there?”

  So they were going to try to keep her guessing about when the crime happened. Sheriff Mike had told her that Delia was attacked long after she walked onto that porch, but she could play that game.

  “I’m sure my husband was with him till bedtime. They like to stay up and play cards. Come in and ask Joe. Between the two of us, I think we can vouch for Sly’s whereabouts for the whole night.”

  Gerry Steinberg spoke up for the first time. “Meaning no disrespect, but I have to point out that we’re talking about your husband’s father. I understand that you want to protect him, but this evidence isn’t all that compelling. All you’re telling me is that Mr. Mantooth’s family is willing to say, ‘Coincidentally, we didn’t sleep a wink. We can vouch for him.’”

  Faye locked eyes with Gerry as she pulled her phone out of her hip pocket. She opened the thread of texts that had passed between her and Magda and handed the phone to him. Beautifully and clearly time-stamped, those texts proved where she’d been and when.

  “See? At 1:32 am, I sent a text to Magda that began, ‘Can’t sleep, so I’m sitting on my front porch worrying…’ At 2:14 am, I followed it with, ‘Still can’t sleep. Were there any popular homeopathic remedies imported from India in that same time period, the late 19th century?’”

  She took the phone back and opened up her record of outgoing calls. “Oh, look. At 6:47 am, I called Joe’s phone, which is pretty decent evidence that we weren’t sitting together in the house when you got here. See?” She held it out just long enough for them to confirm what she said, then jerked it back. “My testimony that I was still sitting on the porch, saw you coming, and called Joe to come outside jives with this phone call just fine. It explains why all three of us were waiting on the porch to meet you, doesn’t it?”

  Sheriff Rainey tried to speak, but she said, “Wait. I’m not finished. I don’t like even a suggestion that I’m a liar. Look here.” She held out the phone again. “Here’s an outgoing phone call to Emma at 12:07 am. After her break-in, I promised myself I’d call her every night at bedtime, just to make sure she was okay. And here I’d already failed, just two nights later, because I went to sleep right after supper. She didn’t answer when I called at midnight to apologize, so I’m guessing she was asleep. If you hurry to her house and check her phone before she deletes my message, you can hear me say I’m sitting on my porch and thinking of her.”

  “Are you finished?” asked the sheriff.

  “No.” She tapped the Notes icon on her phone. “For the rest of the night, I sat in that chair and made notes about my great-great-grandmother’s oral history and Liz’s murder and Emma’s break-in.”

  She showed the men her phone’s screen again then pulled the phone back and scrolled through her notes with her thumb.

  “Here they are, all of them time-stamped. Two forty-nine. Three-oh-two. Three-sixteen. And so on. You can try to say I saw Sly come and go and I’m lying about it. You can try to say that I spent all night faking this paper trail…a paper trail that I didn’t know I was going to need unless I was conspiring with Sly to help him break into Delia’s room. But do those things sound logical at all?”

  She looked up from the phone’s screen. “Oh, let’s just say what we mean. Sly told me that you found a man’s belt in her room. You can say that I was conspiring with my father-in-law so he could have an alibi for raping somebody. But to say those things, you will first have to clearly say that you think I’m a liar.”

  The men’s gazes drifted down away from her eyes, but just for a second. They were professionals. They got over it.

  Gerry said, “Well, strictly speaking, that phone is not a paper trail.”

  “No, it’s not. It’s an electronic trail,” the sheriff pointed out.

  If the phone hadn’t been so expensive, Faye would have thrown it at them.

  “We’re sorry if we insulted you,” the sheriff said, “but we’re paid to be skeptical. Your testimony and Joe’s…and your phone’s…support an alibi for your father-in-law. But the alibi isn’t iron-clad. He could have slipped past you, coming and going, while you were making those notes. He could have hidden a boat on the far side of the island, slipping out the back door. If he did that, you wouldn’t see him go from where you were sitting on the front porch.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense unless he knew I’d be sitting there.”

  Sheriff Rainey inclined his head in assent. “You are correct. Your evidence makes him a weaker suspect. It doesn’t eliminate him as a suspect, but it does help him. He’s lucky to have you on his side.”

  “You ever thought about going to law school, Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth?” Gerry asked.

  “I have a PhD, so I have spent quite enough time in school. Go out there and find some real criminals. None of them live here.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Tommy sat at his workbench, looking out of his maintenance shop’s one window. He doubted that he could be seen unless somebody walked right up to the greasy glass and peered in, but he could see out just fine. He avoided law enforcement officers on general principle, and he most definitely did not want to speak to Sheriff Rainey or Deputy Steinberg today, unless forced to do so by law.

  It took the officers a little while to tie up their boat, and they were deep in conversation by the time they walked past where he sat. He watched them move his way, one step at a time.

  Step. They approached his shop, so close that either of them could have reached out a fist and punched its wall.

  Step. They passed the window without looking inside where Tommy sat.

  Step. They passed the door without noticing the telltale sign that someone was on the other side of it. Its padlock was missing. Tommy had unlocked it and put it in his pocket with the key, which is where they always stayed until he finished working and locked the place behind him.

  And another step. Tommy was home free. There was no way now that they would notice that he was here. He had arrived by boat, so there was no truck in the parking lot to give him away. He’d had the forethought to hide his boat a quarter-mile east, in a tiny inlet obscured by tree branches hanging so low that they brushed the water. They hadn’t seen it as they came in from the island where the good-looking archaeologist woman lived, and that was a good thing. He’d been out to that island himself, just the day before, and he needed to hide all evidence of his trip.

  He’d needed to wait overnight, so that nobody would see a light on at his shop, but he’d gotten here at the crack of dawn. Who would’ve thought that the cops would already be out and about? Didn’t they have doughnuts to eat?

  As soon as he was sure they were gone, he’d finish the task they’d interrupted. He’d come here to fetch some rags and two buckets of the best industrial solvent money could buy. He knew the law wasn’t through with him, and he couldn’t let anybody see his boat in this condition. He needed to get it so clean that they’d never be able to find a trace of the things he’d been hauling. Suspecting a man of something and proving it were two different things, and boat mechanics owned solvents that could clean anything off anything.

  Tommy figured it would take him a couple of hours to make his boat cleaner t
han it had been the day he bought it.

  ***

  Wilma listened to Tommy’s phone ring until it went to voice mail. He wasn’t out of bed yet.

  Of course, he wasn’t out of bed yet, and he probably wasn’t alone there. He wasn’t working these days, which gave him time and energy for drinking himself into a stupor with Lolita. She really must love him. At the moment, Tommy didn’t have any income to pay for the liquor or for her services.

  He sounded half-drunk in his voice mail message, so Wilma knew that she was going to have to be the public face of their partnership. People who knew her would laugh at the notion of Wilma investing in a marina, but people had been underestimating Wilma for fifty years. She had some money saved. She had enough cash to buy herself a dress to wear to the bank when she went to negotiate the loan. She could pay somebody to cut her hair and fix it. She could buy all the makeup she needed at Walgreens, and she did in fact know how to put it on.

  More importantly, she knew the name of the bank that held the mortgage on Liz’s business. Many nights, she’d sat with Liz after the bar closed, sharing drinks and competing for who had the saddest story. She’d heard all about the bank and its antics.

  Wilma knew that Liz had sweated every check she sent that bank. It was never a sure thing that any of her checks would clear until they cleared. Anytime a check didn’t clear, Liz knew to look out for letters and calls from the entity that she called Asshole National Bank.

  More than once, Wilma and Liz had taped a nagging letter from Asshole National Bank to the bar’s dartboard and had some drunken fun. There had been many months when Liz got behind on her payments, but she had always found a way to catch up. Wilma felt sure that Asshole National Bank was missing Liz’s almost-regular payments and her late fees. Especially the late fees. They were practically pure profit.

  Deep in her heart, Wilma believed she could step right into Liz’s shoes and run her business, because Liz had told her all about it. Those nights in the bar had been like tequila-fueled management training. Wilma’s best guess was that Asshole National Bank was sweating over Liz’s outstanding loan. How easy was it going to be for them to sell a business that had never been profitable? Wally had turned to crime to support himself when he owned the marina. Liz had dealt with the problem by living for years without a dime to spend on herself.

  And now poor little Asshole National Bank was making do without that income. Wilma wasn’t half-bad at math. Since Liz had been getting by, Wilma figured she and Tommy would be in good shape if they got hold of the marina, because they already had income from their own businesses. If they rolled the marina rentals, the income from the bar and grill, the boat ramp fees, the fuel sales, and the boat maintenance into an entity that they could manage and promote as a single business, they would be sitting pretty.

  Interest rates were lower than when Liz got her loan, so she and Tommy wouldn’t be struggling under the same payment schedule. They could even make a few hundred dollars a month by renting out Liz’s apartment.

  Wilma had run the numbers. This could work.

  To most banks, Wilma and her partner might seem like low-lifes and bad credit risks, but Liz had been rough around the edges and Asshole National Bank knew that she’d always found a way to get her bills paid. Wilma figured that, with the help of a new dress, a haircut, and the Walgreens cosmetics department, she could manage to look like as much of an upstanding citizen as Liz ever did.

  And, best of all, Tommy would have to be satisfied with thirty percent because she was going to keep him out of jail. For the first time in her life, Wilma had the upper hand in a business deal. She had waited fifty years for the chance to say, “Screw you,” to the world that had ground her under its heel because she’d been born poor and ugly. Liz’s death had given her that chance.

  ***

  Faye had watched the sheriff’s boat disappear into the distance and still she stood on her own dock. She didn’t want to be where she was. Where did she want to be?

  She wanted to be in her boat.

  Where did she want to go?

  It would be a while before Gerry and his crew showed up for work. Faye had a sudden desire to be at the contamination site in the daylight, alone, so she indulged that desire. Newly appreciative of a smartphone’s power to put a time-stamp on a person’s whereabouts, she shot Joe a text:

  You and your dad should go ahead and have breakfast. I’m taking the boat out for a few minutes and I’ll eat when I get back.

  ***

  Faye rounded the far end of the island and cut the motor, drifting silently into sight of the live oak that marked the contaminated area. She’d hoped that seeing the trouble spot from the water would give her a miraculous mystery-solving perspective, but she was disappointed. Between her boat and land, she saw nothing but an expanse of shallow water. Beyond it was a sandy shelf of land between the water and the excavation. This sand-and-grass beach was narrow now, with the tide high. It would be wider later in the day.

  She had seen these things before. They were not news.

  Beyond the overgrown beach was an open area of about an acre, centered on the excavation. The big live oak gave the only real shade in that acre. Faye would have guessed it to be hundreds of years old. Nadia had taken one of her background samples at its base, on the presumption that the soil beneath that tree had been undisturbed by anything but its roots for a long, long time.

  Behind the open acre was the lightly wooded area where she had found the piece of an old wooden trough, the basis for some of her grandmother’s scariest stories about The Monster Man. And now she knew that it was tainted with arsenic, but again, this was nothing new. What could she learn, right this minute, by looking carefully at this trouble spot?

  She looked down at the water, glad that she could see clear to the bottom. There was no oil slick on its surface, where there had been an obvious rainbow sheen just a few days before. Maybe she’d done the right thing by calling in the cleanup crew. Maybe they were doing a good job, earning every penny of their eventual bill.

  Raking her eyes over the scene, she saw only one thing that surprised her. The cupola of her house rose above the far treetops. The distance from her home to the spot where she sat was a decent walk, but she sometimes forgot how massive the big house at Joyeuse Island really was. Two stories, surrounded by porches on all sides, sat atop an above-ground basement, and the whole thing was topped by a cupola the size of a large bedroom. The view from that cupola was breathtaking, blue-green water dotted by islands and hugging a dark coastline. It had been a long while since Faye’d had enough free time to sit up there and do nothing but look.

  If she went there now, she would see that her great-grandmother Courtney had been right when she remembered seeing this end of the island from the top floor of her house. If there had ever been a Monster Man’s cabin here, or any cabin at all, little Courtney could absolutely have sat in the cupola and seen lamplight shining out of the monster’s cabin door. When Courtney, Faye’s great-grandmother, was a little girl, that lamp would have been lit by burning kerosene.

  Had Faye really dug up The Monster Man’s fuel tank?

  Before she gave any thought to what she was doing, Faye had beached the boat. Trowel in hand, she sidled up to the excavation that she really wasn’t supposed to revisit until Gerry had signed off on its safety. He had greatly enlarged the unit where she’d been working, removing the old tank and the kerosene-saturated soil near it. The contaminated soil had been placed in fifty-five-gallon drums that sat nearby, waiting for disposal. Soil that had been screened but tested as clean sat in piles, waiting to be returned to the excavation as backfill.

  As Faye surveyed the piles of clean soil and thought that “screened” was a funny word. If she’d been the one doing the excavation, looking for artifacts instead of contamination, her technicians would have used actual screens to check out this soil. They would hav
e methodically run this backdirt through progressively smaller screens to separate it from the tiny things that archaeologists loved. Seeds from garden plants, fish bones left from somebody’s dinner, buttons—any of these things could help tell the story of the way people used to live.

  Faye squatted next to Gerry’s screened soil and thought. If this dirt was clean enough, environmentally speaking, to go back in the ground, then why couldn’t she screen it again her way? When she saw Gerry, she’d ask his permission to do that. In the meantime, she figured he wouldn’t even notice if she disturbed his dirt.

  There was no stratigraphy left to preserve. This soil was totally churned. Since she couldn’t do much more damage than Gerry had already done, Faye stuck her trowel in the pile at a random spot and started scraping.

  It would have beggared the imagination if she’d found something interesting right away, and she didn’t. Faye had spent a lot of her life digging and finding nothing. This had fine-tuned her already considerable capacity for patience. She used that patience to keep scraping at Gerry’s backdirt for two hours until she heard the boat bringing him and his crew back out to Joyeuse Island.

  During that time, she found only a triangular shard of blue glass and a chip of white china, neither of them as big as a dime. They had the look of age, but she saw no identifying marks on them to tell her anything more without the aid of a lab. Nevertheless, they had their value.

  Faye had never heard any mention of someone living on this end of the island. There had never been a garbage pit here, because nobody was going to haul garbage to this end of the island when it was so easy to bury it behind the house. She could construct any number of narratives that would bring these bits of trash to the west end of Joyeuse Island—hurricanes, wayward pirates, messy picnickers—but one of those narratives was her grandmother’s tale of a forbidden cabin. It presumed that someone really had lived in a cabin right here. It presumed that The Monster Man stories were based on truth.