***
After eating the pancakes Joe had saved for her, after doing the breakfast dishes with him, after leaving Sly with his coffee, Faye put Michael on her hip and she took Joe’s hand. They walked up the sneak stair to the second floor. From there they stood on the landing below the cupola and Joe lowered the staircase that would take them up there.
It wasn’t the original cupola. They had lost it in the big hurricane that had almost taken the whole house and the two of them along with it. Together, they had reconstructed it, building the wooden framework and roofing it and fitting new windows into all four sides. For a while after they finished the renovation, they had brought their morning coffee and bedtime snacks up here, but business and children and everyday chores had distracted them, and those relaxed days seemed a long time in the past.
As Joe listened to Faye’s stories about The Monster Man, he looked out a window and followed her pointing finger with his eyes. She showed him where the tank had been and where the arsenic still was. She told him about the bits of china and glass, and she asked him to imagine where the old cabin might have stood.
He scrolled through her phone’s displays as she talked, and he listened to her tell him how she’d shown Sheriff Rainey and Gerry Steinberg that they were wrong about his father. Then they’d just sat for a while, side by side, and watched the sun on the water. Faye could have convinced herself that there was no trouble out there in a world so beautiful, until Joe spoke and interrupted the silence.
“I hear what you’re saying about how you were out on the porch all night, and I appreciate you telling the sheriff about it.”
“But?”
“But it’s not proof that you didn’t go to sleep for a little while. Or that Dad didn’t find a way to slip past you, real quiet.”
“I would have heard—“
“Probably you would’ve heard. But probably ain’t proof.”
Joe wasn’t looking at her. He was looking out at the water where his father would have been navigating a boat in the dark, if he’d taken a surreptitious trip ashore to attack Delia.
“It ain’t proof,” he repeated. “I guess what I’m trying to say is this. I’m real grateful that you’re defending my dad this way. I believe every word you say. I believe everything you showed me on your phone. Still, all of those things added together don’t make me as certain-sure as you are that he ain’t guilty.”
***
Joe had taken Michael back downstairs, leaving Faye to look out at the water, alone, wondering how Joe could stand to let his father stay in the house if he thought the man might be a rapist. Or a killer.
The vibration of the phone in her pocket interrupted her thoughts.
When she answered it, Sheriff Mike’s voice said “Hello.”
“Long time no talk. How’s Magda?”
“Working too hard. She needs to retire, so she can do nothing but drink coffee and gossip. Just like me. She says she’s too young to retire, and she is, but that don’t mean I’ll quit pestering her to stop working and start sitting around, passing the time of day with her loving husband. Anyway, I’ve got some more gossip for you.”
“Lucky me.”
“Since you were so interested in poor Delia Scarsdale’s situation this morning, I thought you might want to hear the latest scuttlebutt. It’s about Liz this time. You knew her a lot better than Miss Scarsdale, so I thought you’d be even more interested in this piece of gossip.”
Faye looked toward shore, as if she could see the marina from where she sat. As if she could see the shallow water where Liz met death. “Have they found her killer?”
“No. But Tommy Barnett has been running his mouth.”
“About what? Does he know who killed her?”
“It’s not about who killed her. It’s about who was the mastermind behind Tommy’s waste dumping business.”
“I thought Tommy was behind it, if it makes any sense at all to call Tommy a mastermind. He was the one getting paid for it.”
“Well, that’s just the thing.” Sheriff Mike paused, like the true storyteller that he was. Storytellers made people wait for the good stuff.
“What’s just the thing?”
“Tommy says that he wasn’t the only one getting paid for dumping. He says that Liz was the one who ran the operation. He said people would come to her with their chemical problems. She would put them in touch with Tommy and then he’d make those problems go away, no questions asked. He claims that she took most of the money and let him take the risks and do the scut work.”
“Does that even matter?” Faye asked in a voice loud enough to overload the Sheriff Mike’s phone speaker. “He’s guilty. Gerry Steinberg and those other deputies saw him break the law with their own eyes. Why are they letting him accuse Liz when she’s not here to defend herself?”
“You asked if it mattered whether Liz was involved? No, it doesn’t. Yes, it does. It’s complicated.” He took a breath, but kept talking without taking a real storyteller’s break, probably because he didn’t want Faye to yell at him again. “Realistically, I doubt he’ll serve jail time. He was flagrant about his dumping, but compare the results to the Deepwater Horizon spill and you’ll get a sense of scale. And it’s technically a first offense, especially if he tries to claim he didn’t know he was breaking the law until Steinberg chased him down.”
“So. No jail time. What’s he worried about? Fines? Penalties?”
“Yes. There’s a fancy formula for calculating his fines. It will look at environmental damage Tommy caused. It will consider how much he gained, money-wise. It will consider whether his violation was deliberate or chronic—“
“Yes to both. Deliberate. And chronic.”
Sheriff Mike continued as if she hadn’t interrupted him. “And then the powers-that-be will run all those factors into a blender and come out with a number that says what Tommy has to pay for his environmental sins. If they don’t think his crime is worth the expense of a big court case, they have an incentive to keep the penalty low.
“Define ‘low’ for me.”
“If the fine is under ten thousand dollars, they can handle things administratively without going to court.”
Was ten thousand dollars really “low” in the environmental world? What did this say about the cost of the work Deputy Steinberg was doing on Joyeuse Island? Faye and Joe could soon be as broke as Tommy Barnett.
“You know they’re never going to get ten thousand dollars out of Tommy,” she said.
“Hell no. But the penalty can’t be too low, because the state wants to make Tommy an example to other people. Penalty calculations are a dark art. The fine goes down if the environmental damage is considered to be low, but how do you judge that anyway? Sometimes community service or public education can substitute for the dollars-and-cents fine. And I think that’s what he’s aiming for, myself.”
“Who’s aiming for what?”
“Tommy. You’d think his case is black-and-white. Guilty or not guilty. But not really. If he’s not going to jail, and I don’t think he is, his whole game comes down to one thing. Getting that fine as low as possible. So why not shift the blame onto a dead woman? Make himself look like the little guy she took advantage of. Hell. I think he went out as soon as the sheriff finished questioning him and tossed the rest of his sludge inventory.”
“Why would he do that?”
“So he don’t get caught with so much stuff that he looks like a major player. It was a stupid move, but his best defense is to make himself look as stupid as possible.”
“Which won’t be hard.”
“No, ma’am, it won’t. The powers-that-be know that he doesn’t have any money to pay a fine, so he’s hoping they’ll think ‘Why not just sentence this dumbass to get some education and do some community service? Case closed.’”
So Tommy was going to try to s
ave himself by dragging Liz’s name through the dirt. Faye was not amused.
“Faye, you knew Liz and you know Tommy. Do you think he’s telling the truth? Was she involved?”
“Nope. I’ve got no proof. I just don’t think she’d do what he said. She loved living on the water. I don’t think she’d have been willing to pollute it.”
“I don’t, either,” Sheriff Mike said.
Faye looked out the cupola’s windows, over the roof of her old home and over her island and out to sea. She didn’t have anything left to say, not even good-bye. She just sighed and said, “Lying about the dead is really bad karma,” then she hung up.
Sheriff Graham and Gerry Steinberg had started Faye’s day shortly after dawn. Faye’s morning had been stressful and busy and it wasn’t even over. What was she going to do with the rest of her Friday?
For the first time in a long while, the answer wasn’t “Go dig some random holes and see what you find.” Today, the answer was “Go find out the truth about Liz.”
Her husband’s father was at risk of being railroaded for attacking Delia and maybe for killing Liz. Liz herself was in danger of being labeled as an environmental criminal, and she wasn’t here to defend herself. The person who broke into Emma’s house was still at large, leaving her vulnerable. Any fool could see that there was a good likelihood that all Micco County’s unsolved crimes were related.
All those crimes swirled around Sly Mantooth, but they also touched Oscar Croft. Faye had a photo proving that he’d been at the marina shortly before Liz’s death. He had asked Emma for a date on the very evening of her break-in, then he’d showed up unannounced on her doorstep when she was slow in returning his call. He was only a room or two away from Delia when she was attacked.
Or was he?
Delia didn’t see her attacker. Could it have been Oscar who came in through her window and blindfolded her with her own bedclothes? Then, when she got away and went looking for him, did he do nothing more than slip out her window and come back inside through a door?
Connecting Oscar to Tommy was more of a reach, but no matter. Exploring the connections between Oscar, Liz, Emma, and Delia was the important thing.
So how was she going to do that?
Oscar had been trying to get an appointment with Faye for weeks to talk about his ancestor Elias, but she’d been dodging him. As much as she hated to admit it, Faye knew that the time had come to stop avoiding Oscar Croft.
Chapter Twenty-five
Faye couldn’t believe that Oscar had agreed to see her that very afternoon, inviting her to the same house where Delia had just been through so much. She kept her surprise to herself, since she knew more about Delia’s attack than she was supposed to know. The news had already hit the Internet, but the reports had shielded the victim’s identity and the location of the crime. Still, this was Micco County and even people who weren’t best friends with the former sheriff’s wife had already figured out what was going on.
The mere fact that the victim had been a woman staying in a rented house near Panacea gave away a lot. There weren’t that many tourists hanging around the Florida Panhandle in November. Anyone who had met Delia probably suspected she was the victim, but Faye was going to pretend that she wasn’t one of them.
Faye was also going to pretend that she didn’t know the sordid details that hadn’t reached the Internet rumor mill—the sheets twisted into ropes, the wrists tied to bedposts, the man’s belt abandoned by the intruder. She was riding herd on her own imagination, working hard to block the image of a sheet over her head, tied into a cowl that blocked all vision and clung to her face when she inhaled. This was a place where sanity did not want her to go.
As far as Oscar was concerned, Faye knew nothing when she picked up the phone and dialed his number.
“Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth!” he had said. “Thanks for getting back to me! I know your work keeps you busy. I can meet with you any time you like. Today, even!”
So here she was, standing on his doorstep, and she had only just realized as the door swung open that she had been visibly pregnant when she last saw Oscar Croft. If he asked her about the baby, she might have to run away and hide.
He didn’t. He was far too focused on his hope that Faye could solve the mystery of Elias Croft and his fate. The intensity of that focus struck Faye as over-the-top, even abnormal.
“So,” he said, anxious to begin questioning Faye before her butt even hit the couch, “we haven’t talked for awhile. Have you had any thoughts on my search for Elias Croft? What’s my next step?”
They sat together in the living room of Oscar’s rented house and, from her perch on its comfy couch, Faye could see the kitchen and four doors. Behind those doors were at least two bedrooms, probably three, and a bathroom or two. And behind one of the bedroom doors was probably Delia, curled into a fetal position and recovering from a waking nightmare. It’s where Faye would have been, in her place.
Maybe Delia was nursing abrasions on her wrists and ankles, where sheets had rubbed hard against her skin as she fought against being tied. Maybe her knees were black with bruises from throwing herself off the bed and crawling to the door, still bound and crying for help.
Oscar seemed happy, even chipper. Even if he and Delia were nothing more than friends, how could he be having this calm conversation with Faye when his friend must be suffering?
Oscar was wearing short sleeves and shorts. Faye searched his arms and legs for bruises that might have been sustained while struggling with Delia, but there were none. And how paranoid was it for her to think of this annoying but harmless old man as a rapist? If she planned to go fully down the path of paranoia, she needed to consider whether Delia could have tied the sheets to her own wrists, then rubbed the skin raw. Could she have thrown herself on the floor, hard, to give herself bruises that would back up her claim of an attempted rape?
What was it about these two people that made her imagine such horrible things? Before they had arrived in Micco County, her suspicions about an attack like this one would have centered on sleazy characters like Tommy Barnes, not on a retired businessman or, dear God, on the victim herself.
Oscar crossed his legs at the knee, like a man on a 1960s talk show, and went straight to the point. “So where were we? How much did I tell you about the mystery of what happened to my great-great-grandfather after the Civil War?”
“You said he didn’t come home, but that his wife received many letters over the years. She got letters from Elias himself during the war, and they were the kind of passionate letters a wife expects to receive from a husband who is away at war. She had no reason to expect that he wouldn’t come home to her. Then the letters stopped without warning, about the time the war was over.”
“Well, to be honest, whether she had warning is in the eye of the beholder.”
“What do you mean?”
They were sitting at either end of the long couch. Oscar scooched toward the middle, leaned just one centimeter too far into Faye’s personal space and said, “I’m sorry, I should have offered you something to drink. Would you like a soda? Some coffee? Some water?”
She politely declined, but he didn’t retreat to his side of the sofa.
Leaning back a centimeter and hoping this sent the right signal, she said, “You were going to explain that maybe Elias’ wife had warning that he would disappear, but that the warning was in the eye of the beholder. Or something like that. What, exactly, are you trying to say?”
Oscar held his ground. He had staked a claim on the sofa’s center pillow and he wasn’t giving it up. Faye’s butt was up against the sofa’s arm and she was leaning back on it hard.
“My great-great-grandmother grieved over her husband’s last letter till the end of her days. It didn’t survive, so I’ve only heard about it third-hand. Fourth-hand. Whatever. Her son told his son, my grandfather, about it. I think she int
erpreted Elias’ last letter as being a typical wartime love letter, at least when it first came. He said he loved her and he missed her and he said some version of the thing that so many soldiers say, ‘If I don’t come home, remember me but find a way to be happy.’”
“Had he said this kind of thing before?”
“Yes. She said he had, and that she didn’t see that this letter was different until she realized it would be his last. Years later, after his sword was delivered, she read the letter again and saw that he had been saying good-bye.”
“And then after that letter came, she started getting letters from a woman demanding that she come down south and get her husband, because he was living in sin on an island with a woman of color?”
“So I was told. Are you sure I can’t get you something to drink?”
Oscar looked suddenly uncomfortable, maybe because he had realized that he was having this conversation with someone who was herself a woman of color, but he didn’t back away.
Faye pressed him to keep speaking. “Years later, she got another letter, this one claiming that he was being held prisoner.”
“Yes. By a woman named Cally Stanton. Have you heard of her?”
“I’ve searched every official record I can find. There’s no mention of Cally Stanton in any of them.” This evasion was conveniently true. He’d asked if she’d heard of Cally Stanton, and this was a name she’d heard all her life, but she knew Cally to be invisible in the official records, because she’d checked, over and over again.
Failing to tell Oscar the whole truth was a lie—a lie of omission, but still a lie—but she plunged ahead. “You don’t have anything? None of the letters? Not even the sword?”
“The sword? It’s the only part of the story I can hold in my hands. Yes, I have it.”
Oscar fetched the sword quickly from a room that she presumed was his bedroom. It was wrapped like a mummy in yellowing linen. He laid the bundle across his lap, unrolled one layer of the linen, and pulled out a pair of cotton gloves stored there. Faye thought that keeping the gloves so handy was a clever way to keep himself from ever being tempted to touch the old sword with a fingertip laden with destructive oils.
Isolation Page 18
