Isolation

by Mary Anna Evans

“All I know is that his house is dark and Lolita’s been seen walking the street in Tallahassee, so he’s not with her. His car’s at the marina. His boat’s in its slip there.”

  “Maybe he’s in the house asleep?”

  “We’ve been watching him for a while now. He’s a carouser. He doesn’t go to bed at sunset. And there’s a boat missing.”

  “Whose boat?”

  “Don’t know. The guy I’ve got doing surveillance took a picture this afternoon of the slips Tommy uses for his customers’ boats. One of the boats in his picture is gone now. Not the biggest one—he left a few behind that I’d call yachts—but it looks expensive and fast.”

  “You think he ran? He was afraid of facing charges for polluting the Gulf?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe he needed a way to get out here. I’ve got people out patrolling the water between Joyeuse Island and the shore. Sheriff Rainey knows I’m worried enough about you people to be out here tonight, so he agrees that some extra eyes on the water around this island would be a good idea. The officers who are out looking for Tommy and his boat will also be cruising past the island off and on through the night.”

  Faye said good-bye and hung up. Then she looked out the window and, finally, she accepted the truth. She was wrong when she told herself that she could magically know whenever somebody came and went from her island. Her haven. It was true that her ears were good and she was attuned to the sound of a boat motor. But there were ways. Someone willing to go far out into the Gulf, giving the area around the dock and her house a wide berth, could swing back landward on the uninhabited and heavily wooded east side of her island. It could be happening right now. She had been fooling herself.

  Tommy. Oscar. Delia. Any of them could have gotten out to Joyeuse Island without her knowing about it.

  Even Wilma could have done it. Maybe she was spreading lies about seeing a big man lurking near the murder site, hoping to distract people from the fact that she did as much business with Liz as Tommy ever did. Wilma could handle a boat. There was nothing to keep her from sneaking out to Faye’s island.

  Anybody with a boat could have done it, if they wanted it bad enough. And this realization went both ways. Her presumption that Sly couldn’t have left the island at any time that week without her knowledge rested on logic that was just as shaky. He would have had to get to the dock without being seen or heard, and Faye judged that this would have been hard to do in daylight, but at night? Even on those sleepless nights, her lids must have dropped over her eyes from time to time.

  She had likely crossed the border between sleep and wakefulness several times a night, and Sly might have been lucky enough to make his move during one of those drowsy moments. He would have had to have been lucky again when he came back, but logic dictated that it wasn’t impossible.

  Faye had spent too much time in grief, too much time in the blurry illogic of a woman wishing to turn back time. She felt her mind slip back into its customary groove of logic and clarity. She knew now that she didn’t have enough information to exclude anyone as a suspect. Anybody could be stalking Emma or Delia or Faye herself. Even her husband’s father. Even the armed lawman who had volunteered to stay all night to protect Faye and Joe and their family. Anybody.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Joe knew that Faye, Sly, Emma, and Gerry were at their posts below him, facing the four directions. He stood above them, constantly turning so that he could keep all the water around Joyeuse Island in his sights. On the island itself, he could see only treetops and he could barely see those without moonlight to help him. The other four watchers could see the open yard around the house, lit by the light streaming from the windows, but they could only see a few feet into the woods that surrounded the house and blanketed the island. There were huge gaps in their ability to monitor their surroundings.

  Any of them would be able to see a flashlight or campfire burning nearby, but Joyeuse Island was a big place. Joe could probably track a boat using its running lights. When the moon rose, he would be able to make out motion in the areas cleared of trees and the others would gain a little more clarity in their view of the woods, but the truth was that they were almost blind. Keeping watch defended them from utter surprise, but that was about all.

  What Joe didn’t know—what none of them knew—was that someone had traveled by rowboat while the sun shone, before the five of them ever thought to watch for an intruder. That person had come by a path that none of them had anticipated, rowing east and hugging the swampy coast of the mainland so closely that, even if anybody had been looking, the boat would have been hidden in the shadows of overhanging trees. But no one had been looking.

  The small and shallow-drafted boat had skirted the eastern tip of the island, far from the house, the dock, the everyday lives of Faye and her family, finally beaching on a spot of sand just wide and firm enough to support it and the footsteps of a single human being. That stretch of Joyeuse Island’s coast had the usual fringe of needlerush and cordgrass, so the vegetation hid the boat from anyone passing by water or land.

  The intruder had been there before, sneaking ashore in the dim evening light and waiting until moonrise made it possible to move around.

  It had been easy for that intruder to step into the trees, though not so easy to fight through the undergrowth to the path that circled this end of Joyeuse Island. By daylight, it had been possible to find and follow the paths that criss-crossed the island. By moonlight, it would be possible to retrace those steps. But in the moonless time just after dark? Not possible, not with a reasonable chance of success. Those hours must be passed by finding a place to sit and wait.

  An odd quirk in the human psyche meant that nobody in the house was expecting danger to come from the east end of the island. It was too overgrown to navigate in the dark. It didn’t occur to them as they planned their defense that, just maybe, the intruder had already arrived. Perhaps someone had been out there for hours, waiting for dark to come.

  ***

  Even in Florida, the air gets raw in November. A person sitting on a stump near the open water can go numb in the sea breeze. This is not optimal when those hands will be needed to aim a firearm and pull a trigger.

  Out of eyeshot of the world—out of earshot, too, but a tiny fire doesn’t make much noise, anyway—there is no reason not to clear some dry grass and set a few broken branches afire. A very few dry branches will do it, when the fire only needs to be big enough to warm two hands.

  Darkness was dripping out of the cold sky and it would hide any faint breath of smoke. The house was so far away. It was impossible that anyone would see the red flicker of a handful of burning branches.

  And if they did? If Faye and her husband and her husband’s father saw the flames and were drawn to them, so much the better. They would be easier to shoot as they streamed through the woods, separate and undefended, with one of them carrying a toddler.

  Let them come. Whether they did or whether they didn’t, there would only be one person left standing, and that person would not be one of the ones cowering behind the walls of the big white house on Joyeuse Island. The person left standing would be the one lurking in the trees with bullets enough for all the others.

  ***

  When Faye’s web search uncovered the photograph, she almost called to Joe out of instinct. Then, she remembered that she didn’t trust anybody in the world but Joe, not fully, so she didn’t want anyone to hear her news but him. Instead, she made sure that her phone was totally silenced, even the keyclicks, and she typed out a text.

  The return text from Joe was instantaneous, and it went out to all four of his fellow watchers.

  Get away from the windows.

  ***

  Faye unlaced her boots and slipped them off her feet. She wanted to move freely through her house, and she wanted to do it without being heard.

  She moved along the walls, peering out of e
ach window as she reached it, then dropping to her belly to get past. Walking in front of a window with the never-before-used electric lights blazing behind her would have been suicidal. The photo she had just seen on the cover of Stock and Barrel magazine had been innocent enough, just two people dressed for a weekend hunting trip, but an experienced hunter could pick her off in a heartbeat and there was more than one experienced hunter on Faye’s long suspect list. Two of them were with her in the house. Sly had taught her woodcraft-obsessed husband how to handle a bow. He was holding an ax, right that minute. And just because Gerry had learned his shooting skills as part of law enforcement training, did that mean that he could be trusted?

  She crawled over Joyeuse’s slick heart-pine floors and descended the sneak staircase. Standing in the basement hall, she clutched the grip of her weapon, acutely aware of her own inexperience in marksmanship. The door to Michael’s room was cracked open and she could see her son’s form beneath his soft and downy comforter.

  The door at the end of the hall led outside, into the space underneath the house’s front porch. Even that area had been wired for lights, so a bright rectangle extended into the hall through the open door. A shadow appeared into that rectangle, blocking the light that had been washing across her body. She felt the shadow’s coolness on her skin and turned her head in its direction.

  Sly stood in the door, ax in hand. He turned to look outside, then faced her again. “Something ain’t right.”

  Faye said, “No, it’s not and somebody could shoot you through that door. Close it and get in here.”

  Sly lingered some more.

  Hearing their whispers, Emma appeared in the doorway of Michael’s room. “You okay?”

  Faye nodded and said, “For the moment.” Sly adjusted his grip on the ax, then gave a short nod.

  Emma reached into a pocket sewn into the seam of her voluminous skirt and pulled out a dainty pistol fashioned of gleaming metal and inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Showing it to Sly and Faye, she said, “Douglass worried about me, and he liked to buy me jewels, so I got this for Christmas one year. I’m good with it. Your grandson will be safe with me.” Then she disappeared into Michael’s room.

  Sly took a step closer to Faye. “Where’s Joe?”

  “I guess he’s still upstairs, despite the fact that I just texted him a picture of two people holding high-powered rifles fitted out with telescopic sights. Somebody with a gun like that could pick him off in that cupola, easy. He probably decided we needed him to keep watch, regardless of what kind of firepower might be pointed this way.”

  ***

  Joe leaned into the corner of the cupola. He stood in a single room with four walls of glass, but each of those windows was framed with wood and set into a wood-frame wall. Even when he stood in the corner, he wasn’t completely invisible to someone looking through a scope, but he wasn’t a six-and-a-half-foot silhouette, either. A shooter who was looking for him would see him, but he wasn’t an easy target.

  As soon as he had stepped off the ladder and into this room, he had raised the windows. He couldn’t hunt when he was closed off from the world. With the windows open, he was like an eagle surveying his world for motion, sound, light, and scent. The cold wind on his face was the same wind that blew on the face of his prey.

  It was dark now, and Joe saw nothing but a dark blur of treetops, but he sensed something indefinable. He leaned into the corner and slid to the floor, crawling from window to window, looking for the one thing that wasn’t right. Kneeling at the window that faced east, he realized what it was.

  He smelled smoke.

  It was a faint scent, more like the memory of a fire than the actual smell of smoke, but it was there. It was real.

  Joe lunged for the trapdoor in the cupola floor, dropping through it feet first. He took the spiral staircase three steps at a time, lofting himself over the banister and dropping the last eight feet to the floor of the entry hall. Sprinting down the front staircase, he leapt over its banister, too, saving precious seconds in the trip from porch to ground.

  His father must have been standing inside the basement, watching out the door, and he must have been there since Joe forwarded him Faye’s text. Of course he was. That’s where Joe would have been if he thought someone was coming for his family, telescopic sight be damned.

  Sly was at his son’s side before Joe had straightened up from the impact of another eight-foot drop and started running again. Faye, Emma, and Gerry were right behind him.

  Sly grabbed his son by the shoulders and started saying, “What’s wrong? Why—” but he interrupted himself. “I smell smoke. I think I been smelling it for a while, but it’s faint. Barely there. What’s burning?”

  It wasn’t easy for Joe to shake himself free of those powerful hands, the only hands that might have stood a chance of holding him back, but he managed it and he was running again. Sly was following him, ax in hand. Joe turned to face him, but he kept moving backward, hands stretched palm out, as if to hold his father back.

  “No, Dad. No. I need you to stay and take care of my family.”

  ***

  Sly stopped cold in his tracks. His son sprinted into darkness.

  Joe was trusting him with his whole world. Sly had gotten on the plane from Oklahoma to Florida, determined to find a way to make things right between him and his son. Here was his chance.

  A black-haired blur passed him, tracking Joe into the trees.

  “You can’t do that. You can’t go out there,” he called after Faye, but she kept moving. “Daughter. Listen to me. He wants you to stay here.”

  Faye paused, still leaning in the direction she intended to run.

  “Joe told me to take care of his family. You have to stay here and let me do it.”

  “He needs me. And as much as he hates guns, he needs this tonight.” Faye inclined her head in the direction of the heavy revolver in her hand. “I’ll take care of Joe. You help Emma take care of Michael.”

  And she was gone.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  It was too dark to see. It was certainly too dark to be careening headlong through the darkness. Faye pictured disastrous possibilities ranging from the ridiculous—running full tilt into the trunk of a stout tree—to the mundane—putting a foot down into a hole and breaking an ankle. Ridiculous, mundane accidents like those could put her on the ground with a fractured skull or a broken tibia protruding from her skin.

  If Faye did something stupid that took her out of the action, Joe would be running into danger alone. She had an urgent need to be careful, but she was always careful. The only extra safety measure she could take would be to pray. So she prayed. And she kept dodging trees and trusting that no holes would open up under her feet.

  She couldn’t have kept going if she hadn’t trusted Joe with everything she had. He, too, was plunging into impenetrable blackness, but he had a hawk’s eyes and she didn’t. He walked these paths every day, even the ones that led nowhere interesting. He knew them. The soles of his feet knew them. Faye trusted Joe, all the way to the soles of his feet, so she listened for his footfalls so that she could run in his footsteps. Joe’s ability to move noiselessly through the forest had put many a rabbit on their table, so she had to listen with her whole being. Only Joe’s wife could have tracked him by sound.

  Faye’s eyes might not have been as good as Joe’s, but her nose was doing its job. She knew why Joe had burst out of the house and run headlong into danger. She smelled smoke. She hadn’t smelled it at first, but now it was unmistakable.

  Faye had no idea how far she was from the house, but she had run long enough to be gasping for air. Any minute, she would follow Joe around the broad curve in the trail that skirted the water’s edge before turning back to the west. Surely, he didn’t plan to run off the end of the island, nor would he have run all this way if he only intended to turn around and run back. They must
be near their destination.

  The smell of smoke grew with each step.

  ***

  Sly left Emma and Michael in the basement, scaling the staircases and the tall ladder between him and the cupola with the speed of a man half his age. If danger was coming, whether it be in the form of a gun or a human or a raging fire, there was no better vantage point than the cupola to get a look at it.

  The ladder took him up through the cupola’s wooden floor. He saw nothing.

  There was nothing outside the windows but blackness. Now and then, the wind brought a breath of air that made Sly think, ever so slightly, of smoke, but he couldn’t pinpoint its direction. Where was the fire?

  He stood in the middle of the cupola, facing the four directions one at a time—south, west, north, east. Nothing.

  He imagined that he saw the occasional glint of water to the south, west, and north, but it was only because he knew the Gulf was out there. Starlight alone wasn’t bright enough to show him those waves. To the east, the long axis of Joyeuse Island stretched out. He knew this, but he couldn’t see it. Sly felt in his heart that the danger lurked in that direction. He stood silhouetted in the east window and peered into the darkness, looking for his son and praying that he would be able to make sure that Joe found his family safe when he came walking home.

  ***

  Gerry had been waiting too long for a response to his last text to Faye.

  How long had he been waiting? Five minutes. A woman sitting at a window with nothing to do but web-surf and watch for criminals had plenty of time to answer a text. Five minutes was too much time.

  He checked his phone for the time and compared it to the time of his text. No, not five minutes. Eight minutes. That was way too long.

  He dialed her number. No answer.

  The feeling that something wasn’t right took him off the back porch and into the house, where Faye wasn’t waiting at the parlor window. His heart sank when he saw her cell phone on the windowsill. There was no way to find out where she’d gone.