Findings

by Mary Anna Evans

  Chapter Seventeen

  Joe had just finished recording Viola’s letter when a momentary dimming of the lights told them that the library was closing. Well, not precisely the library. The university library was open early and it closed late, as one would expect at a large institution. The rare book room, however, kept limited hours, opening at eight every morning and closing at four each afternoon.

  Joe packed up his study aids silently, and Faye could tell he was upset. She wasn’t sure how she could tell, since he was silent most all the time anyway, but she could.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “There’s just too many letters. The library keeps closing on me before I can get them all read. I wish I could read faster.”

  Faye wondered whether someone had told Joe about Ross’ doubts about his intellect. If Ross himself had said anything like that to Joe, she would indeed kill him. Then she would tell him to take himself to Atlanta and to never come back.

  “If you were to read the letters any faster, the computer and I wouldn’t be able to understand you. You can only do so much in one sitting. Nobody could do it any faster. And it takes me a while to piece together the information hidden in Bachelder’s letters. He wasn’t writing for me, you know. He may have been telling Viola secrets in a way that only a married couple could. We’ll come back to the library tomorrow—or soon, at least—and we’ll get this thing wrapped up.”

  “I don’t like wasting your time.”

  Maybe Ross hadn’t needed to tell Joe what he thought of him. Joe’s intuition had made him a fearsome hunter. Maybe he could read people as well as he read rabbits.

  “Do I look like I’m sitting on my thumbs while you work? I’m getting lots of interesting stuff out of that stack of reference books. I’ll tell you about it on the way home.”

  Faye and Joe took the elevator down to the basement, where a corridor took them to the parking garage, which was in an unusually convenient location. College campuses tend to spread like melting cheese—or like cancers, depending on your point of view. The longer a school has been in existence, the less one can hope for a reasonable quantity of parking at the campus center. And libraries are, as they should be, always near the campus center. Being able to walk to her car through a short underground tunnel, protected from the weather, was a welcome and unexpected convenience.

  Sunlight leaked down from the upper levels of the garage as Faye and Joe made their way to her car. It lit a concrete cavern that would have been spooky if Faye hadn’t been so very glad it was there. She was way too tired to hike across campus to the next nearest parking lot. When she cranked her car, the noise echoed through space that was empty of everything except endless rows of cars.

  The garage’s ramp ran in a very tight spiral. The need to maximize parking space had led its designers to skimp on the access drive. Faye was exhausted after spending the afternoon hunched motionless over a succession of books, so exhausted that she got sloppy with her driving and narrowly missed scraping her fender against the bumpers of several cars. She twisted the steering wheel back where it belonged, and past. The overcorrection nearly cost a few more cars their bumpers.

  When she rolled five feet past the stop sign at the garage exit, she said, “I probably should have let you drive. I’m not doing too well here.”

  Joe made a move to open his door, but she waved him off, saying, “No, I’m fine. I just need to concentrate on my driving, instead of all those history books. I can see lines of type swimming in front of my eyes.”

  “I can see pages of handwriting—fancy writing with lots of curlicues. It’s on light brown, blotchy paper. And it’s written in kind of blurry ink.”

  “It’s a wonder you can see at all. Those manuscripts are going to give you eyestrain. I’ll take a turn reading them, next time.”

  “No. That’s my job. It’s something I can do. I couldn’t scan over those other books like you do. I’ve watched how you do it. Interesting stuff seems to jump off the page at you, but I have to go word by word. I’ll just keep poking along through Mr. Bachelder’s letters.”

  Faye managed to merge onto the interstate to get across town, though she misjudged the gap between cars in the right lane and nearly plowed into the car in front of her.

  Joe laid a gentle hand on her elbow. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  This was insane. Even Faye wasn’t hard-headed to a suicidal degree.

  “You’re right. I shouldn’t be driving. Let me get off the highway at the next exit. I’ll find a place to stop the car, and we can swap places.”

  Taking the exit at a higher speed than she’d ever been foolhardy enough to try before, she swerved onto the exit ramp. And kept swerving.

  During the long sideways slide, Faye tried every strategy for regaining control that she could conjure up. She steered into the skid. She pumped on the brake, hoping it would miraculously grab hold. She flailed around with her other foot, fumbling for the old sedan’s emergency brake. When she finally found it, she stomped hard, but it did no good.

  When a car is moving sideways, at right angles to its proper direction, the action of the brakes and the steering wheel are more or less useless. Even the driver is superfluous. There is nothing to do but go along for the ride and brace for the inevitable impact.

  Joe was falling toward her. But why? They hadn’t crashed, not yet. He couldn’t have been thrown from his seat already. Adrenaline had sharpened her perception and quickened her mind. As a result, her brain cataloged every detail of the world around her, as if it were taking a snapshot of her life as she entered the final few seconds of it. Joe was falling so very, very slowly. She could see his every motion as he spun in the air, flinging his arms wide open and turning his head in her direction.

  As the car started its slow spin, she realized that he had worked his upper body out of the shoulder restraint and was wedging himself between her body and the steering wheel. He was trying to be a human airbag.

  This realization reminded Faye that her car was too old to have airbags or anti-lock brakes or any of the other modern safety upgrades. This couldn’t be a good thing.

  The slide continued.

  When the impact came, the clashing groan of metal grinding over metal filled the car. Faye could feel it in her teeth, her bones, her guts. She felt no sign that the car was rolling over, and she thanked God for small miracles, but it was still moving. The longer it moved, the more likely it was to hit something massive. Faye couldn’t think of any way such an event could end well.

  Then she noticed that the spin had stopped and that they were slowing down. She could see through the window that the metal screaming past her ears was a guardrail. It had guided them down the side of the ramp, keeping them from plunging over the steep drop-off just on its other side. The friction of its metal against the side of her car had been the decelerating force that stopped it from careening off the ramp and into multiple lanes of high-speed traffic.

  Faye wanted to get out and kiss that guardrail, but Joe was lying in her lap.

  “Joe! Are you okay?”

  “Hit my head on the steering wheel, but I’m all right. How about you?

  “I don’t think anything’s broken, but nothing seems to be working right. I can’t think. I can’t move. Well, I can,” she stretched out an arm and jiggled a leg, “but I can’t do anything useful with a body that’s shaking like a leaf in a hurricane.”

  “You sound okay. You’re probably just shook up. My arms and legs aren’t paying my brain too much attention, either. How about we just stay like this for the time being? I’m guessing somebody’s already used their cell phone to call for help. There’ll be an ambulance here any minute.”

  ***

  As Joe had predicted, the ambulance arrived quickly, but it had taken considerably longer for the emergency room personnel to pronounce them healthy enough to go home. Joe had a nasty bruise on his shoulder blade and a bump on his head, where he had made cont
act with the steering wheel. They had waited an interminable time for a CAT scan saying that Joe’s brain was unaffected. Faye was powerfully relieved. Joe had been wrestling all his life with a brain that misfired on occasion. There seemed to be no need to compound his problems.

  Faye’s bruises traced an interesting pattern across her chest and lower abdomen, proof of the force that had been absorbed by her seat belt and shoulder harness…and Joe’s body. Those bruises, in combination with the fresh cut on her rear end, gave her a body that only a ghoul could love. Other than that, she felt creaky, but otherwise okay.

  The sheriff and Magda had bundled them into the back seat of their mini-van, behind Rachel, who was asleep in her car seat. Ross climbed into the far back seat.

  The sheriff had taken Faye aside to say, “I guess you called Ross, because he showed up at my house and invited himself along on this rescue mission. I’m glad to have him. I like him a lot, considering that he’s a lawyer and all. But you better sit back there and hold his hand, because he’s about ready to explode. You shoulda seen him pacing around and trying not to tell me that I need to give you a smarter bodyguard than Joe. Somebody smart like him.”

  Faye did as she was told. The sheriff might have been irritated by Ross’ insistence on inserting himself into this situation but, in her current muddled state, Faye was rather charmed to have somebody who cared so much about her well-being.

  After spending about a minute assuring Ross that none of her bones were broken and nothing essential to life had been damaged, she resumed blaming herself for the accident. “I should never have tried to drive in that condition,” Faye said. “We could have been killed.”

  She expected Magda to jump in and help her rag on herself, but only silence came from the front passenger seat. The sheriff cleared his throat.

  “What? What aren’t you telling me?”

  “Was it the brake lines? Or did somebody drug her?” Joe asked.

  “Funny you should ask those exact questions,” Sheriff Mike said. “Ross asked me the same things. And don’t think I didn’t ask myself the same questions before you two young pups got to me.”

  “What makes everybody think this was anything more than an accident? I was just too tired to be behind the wheel.”

  “You already said that,” the sheriff said. “You said it to the emergency room people. You said it to the police. You said it to me.”

  Magda interrupted her husband. “Me, too.”

  Joe and Ross made it unanimous. “Me, too.”

  “You want to know why it never occurred to you that this accident wasn’t your fault, sweetheart? Because if it wasn’t your fault, then that might mean you don’t have control over every little thing in your life, and admitting that might make you nuts.”

  Faye reflected on the fact that Sheriff Mike knew her thought processes so well, because they were virtually identical to his wife’s.

  “You want this accident to be your fault. You keep saying that it’s your fault. But that doesn’t make it so.” The sheriff paused to shove a stick of gum in his mouth. “So I made sure your blood got checked for alcohol and drugs. Which they didn’t find. Nobody expected them to, but it was worth looking into. They had a neurologist check your reflexes and response time and coordination and such—”

  “You mean when they made me walk a straight line?”

  “Yep. It was all routine, to make sure your brain didn’t get too shook up by the accident, but it served my purposes, as well. There’s no sign that you were impaired in any way, not even by a drug that we didn’t think to test for. Certainly not because you were a little tired. Faye, you’ve been running on no sleep and hardly any food for years. It’s a poor idea, but today wasn’t any different from yesterday or the day before.”

  Faye’s seat belt bruises ached. So did the shovel wound that she was sitting on. “So since I wasn’t drugged, everybody’s jumping straight to the conclusion that my car was sabotaged. I’m not actually a perfect driver, you know.”

  “When was your car built, sugar?” the sheriff asked, chomping on his gum. “Sometime during the Carter administration? Cars that belong to careless drivers don’t live that long. You’re as careful behind the wheel as you are with your money. That car sounded like it had emphysema, but I bet you would’ve gotten five more years out of it, if you hadn’t totaled it yesterday.”

  Totaled. She was going to need a new car. Faye could feel her bank account shrivel.

  “Don’t declare it dead yet,” Magda said. “I bet Faye gives it mouth-to-mouth. It’ll be back for another few years.”

  “Where is my car?”

  “See?” Magda’s voice was smug. “Told you so. She’ll bring in some paramedics and have it back on its feet—tires—before you know it.”

  “My car. I was asking where my car was.”

  “It’s been towed and stored until your insurance company can take a look at it. And the Tallahassee police. I gave ’em a heads-up on all the people that had been dropping dead in your presence.” The sheriff popped his gum. Even sitting in the back of the mini-van, Faye could see Magda cringe with every chew, but she said nothing to her gum-popping husband. The woman clearly loved that man. “They’re gonna check the brake lines. Maybe they already did. I’ll know soon enough.”

  “Who would’ve cut her brake lines?” Ross asked.

  “Nita and Wayland?” Faye wanted to believe that the culprit was someone completely antisocial, someone that you could see coming, so that you could avoid them. Nita and Wayland fit that description.

  “I wouldn’t put it past them, but no. They’ve been in custody all day long.”

  “For what?” Faye asked. “You told me you had to let them go.”

  “They got caught digging in the National Wildlife Preserve this morning, and that’s big trouble. As you well know. The Feds are talking to them now.” His gum made some truly awesome noises, but Magda remained silent. Faye figured she knew that chewing helped Sheriff Mike think. “Nita and Wayland—those two are scared this time. If they know something, I think they’ll spill it.”

  He gave the gum a rest and the minivan grew silent, except for an occasional sleepy sigh from Rachel. Faye couldn’t get her brain around the notion that someone might have tampered with her car. Why? She didn’t see Douglass’ killer, nor Wally’s. What was more, she was keeping her nose out of the investigation, letting law enforcement people do the criminal investigation, while she simply did a little archaeology. That was her job. How was she a threat to anyone?

  Joe sat in front of her, as silent as she was. Again, she sensed that this was more than his usual quiet manner. “What’s wrong? You mad at me for nearly killing us both?”

  “Why would I be mad at you? You didn’t do anything. I’m mad at me.”

  “Whatever for?”

  “I should have thought of the car.”

  There was a long pause, and Faye thought he was going to drop back into his self-reproachful silence. Then he spoke again. “The sheriff told me to look after you, and I did, but I never thought that somebody might mess with the car. Maybe you need somebody smarter than me to keep you safe.”

  To Ross’ credit, he didn’t say a word.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Magda and Sheriff Mike had urged Faye and Joe to sleep at their house, which only made sense, since it was the middle of the night before they arrived. They wouldn’t be going home to Joyeuse for quite some time, since everybody in Micco County seemed to think her island was a more dangerous spot than…say…Iraq. Or the Sudan. And even though Emma was their official hostess, for the time being, there seemed to be no sense in waking her, just to find a place to lay their heads.

  Faye had slept late and awoken to the smell of coffee left too long on a hot burner. The sheriff had left it in the coffee maker for her when he went to work, having no idea that it would be hours before she was awake to drink it. Joe, not being big on coffee, had gone for a walk for his
morning pick-me-up. Faye was rather enjoying the overcooked brew’s sooty, nutty, flat flavor, but she was enjoying Magda’s misery more.

  Magda had Rachel on her lap, trying to coax a burp out of her little mouth. She kept casting lovelorn glances at Faye’s coffee cup. Faye didn’t have the heart to tell her that most people would have said it tasted really, really bad. Instead, she dosed it heavily with cream and sugar and sucked it down, knowing that she was giving a caffeine-starved woman a little vicarious pleasure.

  “So somebody really did sabotage my brakes?”

  “That’s what Mike says. Apparently, it’s not all that hard to do, when you’re talking about a car the age of yours. A crook who’s a real artist can fix it so a little brake fluid leaks out every time you hit the brakes. You get a few miles down the road and—boom!—you’re in real trouble.”

  “If they’d wanted to kill me, there are better ways.”

  “Mike thinks they were trying to scare you away…from something. We’re not sure what. The important thing to remember is that they didn’t care whether you were killed in the process. Or Joe. Or the people you could have hit. These are not nice folks.”

  “Maybe they don’t like me going to the library—since that’s what I was doing when they messed with my car.”

  “That would be an obvious answer. Or somebody could have followed you until that dark lonely parking garage gave them the perfect opportunity.”

  Remembering the way every sound had echoed through the empty garage, Faye realized that there were few better places to commit a crime that might be as simple as dropping to the cement and rolling under a car. It wouldn’t be hard to do that, then to make sure all was quiet before rolling back out. Then the saboteur could simply walk away. It was an easy way to commit possible murder.

  “Trouble is,” Magda said, patting abstractedly on Rachel’s back, “all our suspects are down here. Tallahassee is—what?—an hour or so away, but in some ways, it’s the other side of the world. I mean, picture the nighttime crowd at Liz’s. How many of them spend time on university campuses? If I saw any of them prowling the campus, I’d presume they were up to no good.”