Plunder

by Mary Anna Evans

  Joe didn’t relish the company of a crowd of people who left beer and refuse all over a floor that didn’t belong to them. Or even one that did. If all those empties were generated by one person, Joe was pretty sure he’d cross the street to avoid that person. He needed to get his family off this island, just as soon as he’d checked out the scuba gear piled in the only one of the shack’s corners that wasn’t full of garbage.

  ***

  Joe idled the motor so that he could maneuver the boat into its slip. Amande took advantage of the lower noise level to broach a subject that had clearly been bothering her for a while.

  “I heard you talking on the phone with Detective Benoit. About Dane.”

  “Detective Benoit talked to Dane after we left, because he thought Dane might know something about your grandmother’s murder. And yes, Benoit called me the next morning at an unholy hour because he knew I’d want to know what he said.”

  “Did he think Dane killed my grandmother and my uncle? Because I don’t think so. I know he didn’t.”

  Choking back the questions she wanted to ask, like, “Did that man touch you?”, Faye opted for saying something safe and obvious. “You like him.”

  “He’s just so smart! The first time we met, we talked and talked about archaeology and pirate ships and sunken treasure. I showed him all the things I’d found, and he was interested in all of it, from the old coins to the little tiny pottery chips! Most people’s eyes just glaze over. He—”

  “You took him on the houseboat, alone—and into your room? Miranda couldn’t possibly have been home, because she’d never have allowed it. And what do you mean when you say, ‘The first time we met…’”

  Amande ignored the final query and went with the first question. “She was taking a nap. So I wasn’t really alone with him.”

  Faye would have grounded the girl on the spot, if she’d had any plausible status as a disciplinarian. Without that status, she could take no action other than to sputter. Most demoralizing of all…Amande’s teenaged agony meant that she didn’t even notice that Faye was on the verge of having a stroke over her behavior. She just kept babbling revelations that measurably increased Faye’s risk of cerebral hemorrhage.

  Joe, in the meantime, was displaying the timeless wisdom of a man who knew when to keep his mouth shut.

  “When we were talking at Manny’s place, just before you came, Dane asked to take another look at my Spanish coins, and I had to tell him they got stolen.”

  So the man had been wangling a second invitation into a sixteen-year-old’s bedroom. Faye’s resolution to stick with safe, obvious topics left her, but there were so many unsafe and obvious topics that she hardly knew where to begin. She decided to ask them in chronological order, from the moment of the quite adult Dane’s hitherto unknown meeting with this underaged girl.

  “You knew Dane Sechrist before the coins were stolen?” Faye’s sharp tone scared even her, and her resolution to take the questions one at a time crashed and burned. “When did you meet him? He knew you had those coins before they were taken? How many times have you seen him, anyway?”

  Amande’s eyes went to the ground. “Just the two times. I met him at the marina a few days before you and Joe got here. He saw me outside with my metal detector and we started talking about archaeology. He asked for my phone number, but he never used it. All we did was talk…”

  “Then why do you look like you just got caught robbing a bank?” A worse thought occurred to her. “Benoit said that he didn’t talk to anybody who recognized the name ‘Sechrist,’ but he talked to you. Amande…did you lie as part of a murder investigation?”

  “I could never have told Grandmère I’d been talking to a man Dane’s age, and I think I panicked when Benoit asked me about him. Somehow, it felt like she wasn’t really dead and that she’d know I’d been sneaking around. I felt…ashamed, I guess, and I didn’t want anybody to know about…about Dane and me. He’s got to be at least twenty.”

  There was no “Dane and me,” as far as Faye was concerned. Also, Dane was looking at twenty-five in his rearview mirror, if Faye was any judge, but she kept her mouth shut on that subject.

  “Well, this man that you’ve been sneaking around with, but know nothing about, did use your phone number. He used it to call your grandmother,” Faye said.

  “He did what?”

  “He called your grandmother and made an appointment for the afternoon she was killed, which she kept. She had a piece of pie with Dane in Manny’s restaurant, in fact. He and Manny may have been the last people she saw. Obviously, Dane said she was alive when he last saw her, but nobody knows if he’s telling the truth. You need to be careful, Amande.”

  “I am careful. And I don’t believe Dane killed my grandmother. He just couldn’t.”

  Faye knew that Amande was basing that judgment on Dane’s friendly brown eyes and general good looks, and she knew she would have made the same judgment when she was sixteen.

  It was a wonder anyone survived adolescence.

  ***

  “Would you mind taking Michael to the cabin to get a fresh diaper, Amande?” Faye asked, as soon as Joe had eased the boat into its slip outside the marina store, and before he’d even had time to cut the motor.

  She watched the girl walk away before peppering Joe with the questions that couldn’t be asked in front of her. “Did you hear what she said about meeting Dane before her grandmother died? And did you hear the part where she said he knew she had the Spanish coins in her room?”

  “I did.”

  “Benoit’s gonna blow a gasket when he finds out she lied to him.”

  “She’s not the only one. Now we know that Manny was the one telling the truth. Sechrist never asked him for Miranda’s number. He already had it, because Amande gave it to him. Sechrist lied.”

  Faye leaned down to gather Michael’s toys from the bottom of the boat. “Why?”

  “Maybe he didn’t want anybody to know he knew about Amande’s coins, which would have made Benoit suspect that he stole them and maybe even that he killed Miranda. Or maybe he just didn’t want anybody to know he was talking to an underage girl. I think it was that, actually.”

  Feeling that she was getting a rare glimpse into the convoluted workings of the male mind, Faye said again, “Why?”

  “Because he couldn’t have gotten away with the lie unless he knew that Amande wouldn’t tell people she gave him her phone number. They must have agreed to keep their relationship—”

  “They only met twice!”

  “Relationship. Friendship. Whatever. They must have agreed not to tell anybody. Maybe because he really did know that she was underage, or maybe because she didn’t want her grandmother to find out she was interested in somebody, or maybe because he was up to no good. Hard to say. But I think they’d agreed to keep that first meeting secret, and Dane was sure enough that she’d do it that he was willing to lie to the detective.”

  Faye thought it seemed extraordinarily cocky for Dane to presume that a woman would unswervingly follow his wishes. As she thought about it, though, she realized what Dane’s experience with women had probably been like, so far. The women in his life would have had to be young, and they’d probably been willing to do pretty much anything he asked. When he got older, and when he started focusing on women his own age, he might encounter a rude surprise.

  Of course, she was always willing to do whatever Joe asked.

  Usually.

  Sometimes.

  When he was lucky.

  Maybe it was time to change the subject.

  “I know you walked all over that island while I was swimming with Amande and Michael. What did you see? And I know you noticed that scuba gear in the fishing shack, didn’t you?”

  “I did. Besides a few soda cans, I didn’t see nothing but a bunch of fo
otprints, far from where you were. But I do mean a bunch of footprints. Somebody was looking for something. It looked like they might’ve been doing it with a metal detector, because the footprints were…you know…back and forth, back and forth.”

  “Do you remember what brand of beer came in all those cans? I do remember that they were all the same. I’m also wondering what kind of beer Dane Sechrist drinks. If he’s hunting for treasure out here, it only makes sense that he might use the shack as a base camp. I haven’t had a chance to tell you what happened this morning. He came to visit me.”

  “He what?”

  “He said he was looking for a job, and maybe he was. But he also spent a good amount of time picking my brain about local archaeology. He played it cool, but he mentioned shipwrecks a little too often.”

  “You think he’s onto something? Maybe he’s diving on a ship and he wants to know if it carried treasure?”

  “I don’t know. I think maybe he thinks he’s onto something. But Dane’s not nearly as smart as he thinks he is.”

  “Maybe he is, but he ain’t as smart as you.”

  Faye liked it when Joe called her smart. For him, it was the same thing as calling her sexy.

  “Be that as it may. Some of the documents he showed me were copied at the Historic New Orleans Collection. You know that place should just give up and hire Bobby, because he spends so much time there. He sees everything. He knows everything. He knows everybody.”

  “Bobby knows Dane?”

  “Of course he does. Better than that, he knows Dane’s research interests…and they center on Amande’s island.”

  “So you think Dane is the slob that’s been throwing Busch cans around Amande’s shack?”

  “Yeah, maybe Dane’s our Busch drinker, but something feels wrong. First of all, he doesn’t come off as a slob. He looks a little finicky to me. Every last little short blond hair is always in place. I got a look in his briefcase this morning. All the paperwork is neatly filed and in perfect order. I don’t remember what he was drinking when we caught him hitting on Amande, but it wasn’t Busch.”

  “It was Abita. I remember, because I like Abita. You don’t remember, because you like the cheap stuff.”

  “Which makes me the perfect date, now, doesn’t it?”

  “It does,” said Joe, leaning down for a kiss. “Even when you’ve got sand all over your butt. I mean, especially when you’ve got sand all over your butt.”

  Faye twisted in her seat to get a look at the back of her teensy bikini bottom, secretly glad that bathing suit manufacturers did not make mom suits in size 2.

  “No need to twist yourself in a knot. There’s sand back there. I already checked.”

  “Glad to hear it.” She brushed at the sand coating her bare belly, but it wasn’t going anywhere. Joe looked like he wanted to help. “Now I’ve lost my train of thought.”

  “You were gonna tell me you thought the scuba gear might belong to Dane, and I was gonna say that he seems real serious about his diving. He wouldn’t be risking his life with gear that looks like somebody unloaded it cheap on Craigslist.”

  Amande appeared in the distance, with Michael on her hip. It was time to wrap up this conversation. Faye could see that her time to speak privately with her husband was going to dwindle month by month as Michael grew, and she felt a pang.

  “There are a lot of people running around here who seem to have time on their hands,” she said. “Take Tebo, for instance. I don’t see him around much. Where does he go? And Steve…where does he go in the daytime? Didi’s husband Stan turns up now and then. Where does he spend his time? Maybe he’s been going out to the island to check out the part of Justine’s estate that his wife didn’t inherit, but that’s a reach. He’s probably more interested in whether he can get part of Didi’s chunk of the houseboat and stock, since he’s surely getting ready to file for divorce.”

  Joe grunted, managing to communicate his opinion of Didi’s worth as a wife with that single inarticulate sound.

  “It occurs to me that the person sloshing Busch on the floor of that shack may have a right to be there,” Faye went on. “Amande isn’t the only owner, you know. Do you remember what kind of beer Steve was drinking last night?”

  “Nope, but he and Didi looked like an instant couple when we saw them at Manny’s place. Maybe we need to visit Amande at home, so we can check the trash cans and see what they drank when they got home last night.”

  “Can we do it soon?” Faye asked. “Because I really need a bath right now, and if I go mucking around in Didi’s garbage after I’ve had it, I know I’m gonna want another one.”

  “I think we should wait until tomorrow morning, while she’s sleeping off tonight.” Joe nodded at the deck of the houseboat, where Didi and Steve sat in folding chairs, giggling and fawning over each other. “See? Instant couple.”

  Faye tried not to gag.

  “I think we’re gonna need an overnight babysitter again. Don’t you, Mrs. Doctor Longchamp-Mantooth?”

  “Yeah, but first I’ve got to call Benoit and tell him that Miranda’s sweet little granddaughter lied to him about knowing Dane before her grandmother was killed.”

  ***

  Benoit was not disturbed enough to suit Faye.

  “You never did anything sneaky when you were sixteen?”

  Faye was starting to wonder how long it had been since Benoit himself had been a teenager. Fifteen years, tops, probably less. That wasn’t long enough.

  “To the best of my knowledge,” she said, “I wasn’t spending time with possible murderers when I was sixteen.”

  “You were just riding around with boys who had brand-new driver’s licenses, hoping to get hold of a fake ID that looked enough like you to fool bar bouncers. Maybe you might have been better off with possible murderers.”

  “Exactly how is that observation supposed to help me sleep better at night?”

  Benoit emitted a sharp noise that might have been a laugh, but sounded more like, “Heh.” Then he did it again, as if he were trying to convince himself that the situation was funny. “I told you that I have a baby sister about Amande’s age. I don’t sleep at night, no. Maybe one day I’ll get used to it.”

  “You think you’ll get used to watching your sister grow up and start hanging around with men?”

  “No. I’m thinking I might get used to not sleeping at night. But we were talking about Dane Sechrist. What do we know about him? We know that everything in his story is something we can check out. By the end of the day, we’ll know if he really did grow up in a nice home on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and we’ll know whether he did all that other stuff he told me. As I said before, Mr. Sechrist is the Boy Scout on our suspect list.”

  “But now we also know that he talked to Amande a week or more ago, before Hebert died and before you or I even knew she was alive. And he didn’t tell you about that, now did he?” Her next thought was a new one, tying two pieces of information neatly together. “And we know for sure that he knew about the Spanish coins. Amande said she showed them to him, and she said that he was sorry to hear that they’d been stolen.”

  “Praise God. My highly paid consultant has finally stopped trying to do my job for me, and she’s started talking about the archaeology stuff, which is what I hired her for. So Dane knew about the coins. That means what, exactly? He talked to a pretty girl who’s interested in the same things he is. He saw her in Manny’s bar, sitting with a couple of lowlifes, and he talked to her again. I’ll admit that it bothers me that she showed him the coins and now they’re gone, but maybe she tells a lot of people about those coins. She showed them to you, almost as soon as she met you.”

  This time it was Faye’s turn to belch out a “Heh,” because she didn’t have a ready answer for him. Time to change the subject again. “So you think it’s a good id
ea for Amande to spend time with Dane Sechrist?”

  “Did I say that? Hell, no, it’s not okay for a teenaged girl to spend time with a man that age. But I don’t say that because I think he’s more likely to be our killer than any of the other characters hanging around that marina. I just say that because he’s too old.”

  On this point, Faye agreed with him.

  “Have you gotten any more information on the time of death for either Hebert or Miranda?”

  “In both cases, eyewitnesses are giving us better information than we can get from a forensics lab. Hebert was seen alive at a bar near the marina just a few hours before you found him.”

  “I didn’t find him. Amande did. Poor kid.”

  “Yeah, you’re right on all counts. You didn’t find him and she did. And that makes me want to say, ‘Poor kid,’ too. Anyway, other than Dane Sechrist and Manny, the poor kid was also the last person to see Miranda alive that we know about. The fact that both bodies were found in the water is a complicating factor.”

  “Because it changes the rate at which they lose body heat?”

  “You got it,” Benoit said. “You think like a scientist. The water temperature is way up in the seventies right now, so a dead body that started at ninety-eight-point-six doesn’t have far to go. A body immersed in seventy-five-degree water is going to get to seventy-five degrees fast, just because of convective heat transfer, and then it’s gonna stay there. We know that much. Also, we know that both victims were dead when they went in the water.”

  “No water in the lungs?”

  “Not much. So there’s no way to know whether Hebert’s body cooled off in a bar’s parking lot for hours, then got dumped in the gulf, or whether he went straight in the water and cooled off quickly there. The same thing’s true for Miranda. She could’ve died right after she left Manny’s place, or she could’ve died hours later, shortly before we found her. There are just too many variables, and the time frame is just too short.”