Isolation

by Mary Anna Evans

  Joe hated guns. He hated the way they looked and the way they smelled, and he hated the things they did to human bodies.

  Tonight, he wished he owned more than one.

  He needed to get up in that cupola before dark, but first he was going to take a few minutes to talk to his wife.

  Chapter Thirty

  Faye was sitting on a stool by the parlor window. Its seat was hard and her butt already hurt. The windowsill was wide enough for her to rest both forearms on it, hands clasped. There was room at her elbow to rest the handgun that she had hoped she never had to look at again.

  She had aimed this weapon at a person before, someone she believed had killed Joe. Her bullet had missed, but it had torn into a gasoline engine and the explosion had done the killing for her. In other words, if she wasn’t a killer, it was only because she’d gotten off on a technicality.

  She heard Joe walk up behind her. She knew he was making noise on purpose. Joe’s motions were ordinarily soundless, but he knew it was dumb to sneak up on an armed woman, particularly when that woman’s nerves were shot. He leaned down, his lips brushing the hair behind her ear.

  “Dad thinks the person who left that footprint by the campfire was out here looking for you. I think he’s right. Faye, if something happened to you, it would kill me. Or I’d have to go kill the person that did it. Or both. We haven’t been talking lately—”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Is that my fault?”

  “No.”

  He was squatting beside her and his hand was resting on her thigh. She reached for it, rested her hand on top of it. He let her do it, but he didn’t take her hand in his.

  The lips at her ear said, “You’re my wife and you’re also the smartest person I know. Who do you think is doing these things?”

  Faye pulled her hand back and rested it on the windowsill, next to the one holding the gun. “Well, it could be a stranger who just came to town to hurt women. If that’s true, then there’s no way to know who it is and we’re wasting our breath. So let’s think about people we know.”

  “There’s Tommy,” he said. “I think he’s scum. With him spending all that time with Liz every day, anything could have passed between them. I can see him killing Liz.”

  “That’s a terrible thing to say about a person, but I can, too.”

  “You’re in and out of the marina all the time, Faye, so maybe Tommy had his eye on you, too. The same goes for Delia for the past few weeks. But Emma’s never at the marina these days. What about Oscar? He was around all of them.”

  “I have a picture of him at the marina, so he probably met Liz before she died. Emma said he asked her out, then came knocking on her door, uninvited. Who knows what his relationship with Delia is like? That’s three women in his vicinity who have had some serious trouble.”

  “He doesn’t have a lot of connection with you, other than meeting you a couple of times.”

  Faye didn’t respond.

  “Faye?”

  “I didn’t want to tell you, because it seemed like nothing. It knew it wasn’t nothing, but I still felt dumb about telling you.”

  “Telling me what?”

  “Oscar sort of…he…well, I guess the word is groped. My arm. Just my arm. When I saw him yesterday, he sat way too close to me and he was just starting to rub his hand up my arm when Delia came in the room and interrupted him.”

  Joe looked like he wanted to go break a seventy-year-old man in two. “If somebody’s been sitting out there watching you—targeting you—Oscar just went to the top of the suspect list, because he’s the only one who’s crossed that line with you. Isn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then go tell Gerry what you just told me. No, don’t. We need you at the window and, as soon as I tell Gerry what you just told me, we need me upstairs. I can’t stay here much longer.” Finally, he reached for Faye’s free hand, dragging it off the windowsill and putting it inside both of his. “After I tell Gerry what you said, he may want to send somebody to get Delia out of there.”

  “She may not want to go. I think she cares for Oscar, although I’d think a woman who’d been widowed would steer clear of older men. A thirty-year-old widow starting something with a seventy-year-old man is just asking to go through the same thing again.”

  “Her husband died? I figured she’d gotten divorced.”

  Faye knew Joe didn’t snoop around on the Internet the way she did, so she asked him, “How’d you know she’d been married?”

  “I saw the mark on her wedding ring finger. It takes a long time for the dent to go away. You saw that, too?”

  No, she hadn’t noticed a micrometer-deep dent on Delia’s finger, because she did not have Joe’s eyes and attention to detail. “I didn’t pay any attention to her hands, but I did look up her business on the web. Delia’s husband died five years ago, according to her website.”

  “He’s been gone five years? That means there’s been another one.”

  “Another what? Another dead husband?”

  “I don’t know if he’s dead, but that dent on her finger ain’t five years old. She’s been wearing rings on that hand lately, so there’s been another husband.”

  Joe pulled Faye’s phone out of her hip pocket. “I know what you and the World Wide Web can do. You could find the lost treasure of Captain Hook, if you set your mind to it. See what you can find out about Delia and her husbands. Text it to Gerry and me.”

  “While I also keep an eye out the window, in case I need to shoot a bad guy?”

  “Yes.”

  Faye was pleased to know that her husband thought she had magical powers.

  “We should’ve been talking,” Joe said. “You should’ve told me that Oscar put his hands on you. Not because I’m jealous, but because I should know when you’re upset. And if we’d been talking, I would’ve known Delia was married a long time ago and you would’ve known that she just got finished being married again.”

  “Do you think it matters?”

  “It depends on how that first husband died. And on what happened to the next one. She’s young to be a widow. She’s real young to be a widow twice. Maybe Oscar’s not the creepiest half of that pair. Maybe it’s not just one killer out there. Maybe they’ve been working together. I’ll let Gerry know about Delia and her husbands. You start web crawling and find us some answers.”

  Joe was still holding her left hand. He gently disengaged the right one from the gun and pulled her to her feet, wrapping her in his two long arms. Then he kissed her. Joe was so tall, a foot and a half taller than Faye, that a simple kiss required him to stoop his shoulders and crouch low while she stretched up to meet him. She knew they looked a little bit stupid when they kissed, nothing at all like the cover of a romance novel. Well, this was her romance, and it didn’t matter whether anybody else thought it looked like one.

  “We’re going to make it,” Joe said, and Faye didn’t know whether he meant they were going to make it through the night or whether their marriage was going to make it through this dark time. Whatever he meant, if Joe said it, Faye believed it.

  ***

  Faye’s phone beeped. She had just sent Gerry an extended text with information on Delia’s husbands, with links to both marriage licenses and both death certificates. These things showed that Delia liked her men old. Old and rich.

  Her first husband had been the heir to a family chain of drugstores, the old-timey variety where the pharmacist made your cough syrup while you soothed your sore throat with an ice cream soda. A business profile in their small-town newspaper showed an even younger Delia and her graying-but-fit husband, posing with the mountain bikes they rode every weekend. It said that they had met when she worked as a cashier at one of his stores. Two years later, his death certificate said he had died of kidney failure.

  According to Delia’s second
husband’s obituary, they had met when he hired her to research his genealogy, and they had just three years together before he died at sixty-eight of Alzheimer’s. She had buried him only a few months before she met Oscar. His obituary said he had recently closed the last location in his chain of video rental stores. Poor Delia. Had she married a wealthy man just in time to see his fortune evaporate when movies went streamable?

  As Faye thought about it, she realized that she had known a lot of men who developed near-obsessive interests in things like genealogy and their family’s history as they got older. Delia’s services were expensive, so her clientele would naturally be weighted toward people with money. It was almost like she was running a one-woman dating service for golddiggers. Make that one golddigger. Faye guessed she’d never given much thought to how someone would go about looking for a meal ticket.

  A text came in from Joe, directed to both her and Gerry:

  How cd Delia do this stuff? Is she snkng out after he goes 2 sleep? Did she fake gttng atakd? Cn u send smbdy ovr there 2 see if she’s home?

  Gerry answered immediately. He was as persnickety with his texting grammar as Faye was.

  We don’t know that Delia’s our killer. There’s no law against having rich husbands who die conveniently. Don’t forget Oscar’s awkward history with women. And Tommy’s awkward history with the world. I’m sending somebody to check their houses. If they’re at home, they’re not out here stalking us.

  This left Faye with a smartphone in her hands but no good ideas to chase. Joe said that the shoeprint could have been left by a tall woman or a man of small-to-medium height. Delia, Oscar, and Tommy all fit that description.

  If Delia had been on Joyeuse Island, uninvited, what, exactly, would her motive be? Faye thought back to the time she had spent with Oscar and Delia. She remembered Delia’s hand patting Oscar’s shoulder and the times she’d let him touch her. Delia had walked into the room just as Oscar was groping Faye’s arm. Faye had caught the younger woman in one unguarded moment, studying Faye and Oscar through narrowed eyes. If Delia was trying to get her hands on Oscar’s money and if she really was a murderer, Faye had become a target in the instant that Delia first perceived her as a threat to her attempts to land yet another sugar daddy.

  By the same logic, Emma had become a threat when Delia saw that Oscar was attracted to her, probably on the very day of Emma’s break-in. Faye had heard Joe tell Gerry that he’d seen them all together that day—Oscar, Delia, and Emma.

  Faye wouldn’t have had to overhear this, if she and Joe had been talking. She would have known it days before.

  If Delia had seen the emotional spark that had prompted Oscar to ask Emma to dinner later in the day, she would have had any number of opportunities to swipe the security fob. All she would have needed was a quick distraction for Oscar. Joe’s arrival might even have been that distraction, but Oscar was such a lecher that Delia could probably divert his attention any time she liked just by showing a little skin.

  What about Liz? Oscar had certainly visited her marina. Faye had seen a picture of him leaving the parking lot with Delia. Gerry had underlined that point this evening by telling her that Oscar had enjoyed a nightly drink at Liz’s bar. It wouldn’t have been hard for a jealous Delia to go back to the bar after closing time and put a bullet in her back.

  Jealousy. Sexual jealousy made all the puzzle pieces fit, but so did avarice. Whether Delia was worried that another woman would take her potential lover, or whether she was concerned about losing the man she wanted for her next meal ticket, the stakes had been high for her. Had they been high enough to prompt her to fake an attempted rape?

  She shot off a text to Gerry:

  Could Delia’s wounds have been self-inflicted? Do you have any evidence beyond her word that anybody came in her window that night? Or do you think it’s possible that Oscar was the attacker and Delia didn’t know because she was blindfolded? I think I’m afraid of both of them.

  She had hardly pressed “Send” when she got a response, but the text wasn’t from Gerry. It was from Magda, another spelling champion who refused to compromise just because she was on her phone.

  Sorry to be so slow getting back to you. Rachel has had strep throat for a solid week. Ear infection, too. I looked up the last yellow fever epidemic in this part of Florida for you. It was in 1888. “Jowl mooker” took me a while. If you hadn’t said it was from India, I’d never have found chaulmoogra. It was an oil used to treat skin infections. Hope you’re surviving the visit with Joe’s dad.

  The chaulmoogra oil of Cally’s friend Elias should have been Faye’s last concern, but she was antsy and Gerry wasn’t answering her. She had found that resting her phone on the windowsill allowed her to work while she kept an eye out for intruders, so she did a web search for chaulmoogra, just to pass the time and just because she was curious.

  One of the snippets offered her by the search engine jumped off the computer screen:

  “…extracted from the nuts of the chaulmoogra tree was used until the advent of modern treatments in the 1940s. It largely replaced earlier treatments, which included mercury, arsenic…”

  Faye wanted to read anything that connected something she knew to have been on her island—chaulmoogra oil—with the unexplained presence of arsenic. She clicked on the snippet and found a brief entry in an encyclopedia of medical history.

  “In the days before modern treatments were developed, chaulmoogra oil was applied to the skin and injected as a treatment for leprosy. Oil extracted from the nuts of the chaulmoogra tree was used until the advent of modern treatments in the 1940s. It largely replaced earlier treatments, which included mercury, arsenic, and elephant’s teeth.”

  These two sentences took Faye straight to a theory about Elias Croft that fit all the facts. She knew that a man named Elias had lived on Joyeuse for years and that he’d ordered a steady supply of chaulmoogra. She knew that Cally had scared her daughter away from a cabin on the west end of the island with stories of a Monster Man and threats of being switched. She also knew that Cally thought Elias had taken a big risk by coming to meet the supply boat during the yellow fever epidemic, and that he’d disguised himself with a hat and scarf to do it.

  Thanks to Gerry and Nadia and their testing, she knew that traces of arsenic still remained on that end of the island. Could it have seeped, over time, out of the buried body of a man treated for leprosy over years and years? The arsenic-tainted chunk of wood came to mind, and she thought that this was exactly what a lab would find if it tested a sample from a wooden tub used by a sick man to soak regularly in a medicinal bath of arsenic. If these arsenic baths had been emptied onto the ground over a period of years, they could explain the pattern of arsenic contamination in the soil in a way that Gerry and Nadia hadn’t been able to do.

  Faye tried to put herself in the shoes of a man using Joyeuse Island as his own private leper colony in the late 1800s. He would have needed help. He would have needed someone to bring him food and order his medicine, while he treated himself with arsenic and chaulmoogra oil until his body finished failing. He would have needed to lock himself up in a cabin far from anybody, and his helper would have absolutely beaten her daughter’s legs with a switch before she let the child’s curiosity expose her to leprosy.

  What if, in the middle of that long decline, yellow fever had come to Joyeuse Island? Wouldn’t that man have risked being exposed as a leper? Wouldn’t he have covered his skin lesions and rushed to the dock to get help for the woman who had sheltered him?

  As time passed, he would have needed someone to help him through the last stages of leprosy. And he would have asked that person to write his beloved wife when he died. Faye thought he probably would have asked the person to leave his illness out of the letter, just as he had left it out of his last letter home, because an honorable Victorian man wouldn’t have wanted his family to carry the stigma of leprosy. He would h
ave told them good-bye, then asked a trusted friend to help him drop off the face of the earth, sending his sword home as a remembrance when he was gone.

  Was Cally that friend? Faye was sure that she was. To a man desperate for a place to hide, a gracious and resourceful woman who owned an island had probably looked like a gift from God. Captain Croft would have seen that grace and resourcefulness in Cally when he visited Joyeuse and she helped him feed his troops. Perhaps he had sensed he was in the presence of a woman who would someday say, “Sometimes there is only one gift a body can give another person. Sometimes that gift is silence.”

  She texted Magda back to say

  Thank you! You are not going to believe how helpful a simple definition of chaulmoogra oil has been. Can’t wait to tell you about it.

  A moment later, her phone rang. It wasn’t Magda, hoping to get the scoop on why chaulmoogra oil was suddenly so important. It was Gerry.

  “I heard from the officers I sent to check on our suspects. The lights are on at Delia and Oscar’s house. The TV is on. The boats are both out back. The car’s out front.”

  “They didn’t knock on the door and see who was home? Delia could be watching TV while Oscar sits out there in the woods, waiting for a chance to shoot us. Or maybe Oscar’s watching TV and Delia’s out here. Or maybe they’re both out here and they left the TV playing.”

  “I don’t want to tip my hand yet. I’ve got someone watching the house. If anybody comes or goes, we’ll know.”

  “But if they’ve already come or gone?”

  “We won’t know. This is the best I can do right now. But I didn’t call to talk about Oscar and Delia. I called to tell you about Tommy. He’s gone.”

  “Gone where?”