Undercurrents

by Mary Anna Evans

  Faye knew that Laneer wanted her to keep the next bit of information to herself, but she just couldn’t do it. McDaniel needed to know. “I understand that Kali left Laneer’s house this morning about daybreak.”

  “You understand this? Are you saying it that way so that you don’t have to tell me who’s keeping important evidence quiet?”

  Faye shrugged. “In conjunction with the ice cream sandwich, I think it means that Kali might have seen something, so I thought you should know. I don’t think she’ll talk to you, though.”

  McDaniel’s face was so flushed that it had passed pink and gone straight to red.

  “Detective, I think she told me all that she’s willing to tell anybody. If you try to lean on her, it’ll only make things worse.”

  “You don’t think I know how to talk to little girls? I have nieces.”

  “That’s beside the point. I just think that this little girl has said all she’s going to say. And maybe she’s said all she knows. If you push her too hard, you’ll never get her to open up.”

  “We’ll see,” he said, but she noticed that he changed the subject. “Did Laneer and Sylvia say anything else that I should know?”

  “Make sure they give you a full list of Frida’s terrifying boyfriends. Seriously. They told me about them, and I’m still shaking in my boots. While you’re doing that, I’m going to go to my cabin and lock the door until you find the one who did this.”

  “That’s sensible. Unless you’d prefer to run for home. That would also be sensible.”

  Faye shook her head. “I’ll be fine, as long as I don’t spook myself tonight, sitting alone in my fancy cabin.”

  “Those are nice cabins where the state’s putting you and your crew up. Brand-new and ready to rent. After you all leave, people are going to pay good money to stay there.”

  “They’ll be building more soon. That’s why I’m here. They want me to check out the building site and make sure they won’t be destroying anything historically interesting when they break ground. That’s presuming I ever get a chance to start this job.”

  He stuck out a hand and shook hers. “Give me and my forensic people till Monday with the crime scene to look for evidence, then you’re free to start excavating, okay? Unless we find something that changes things, obviously. Will that cramp your style too much?”

  “I’ve got some things for them to do at the museum and the library. Keeping my crew busy will be a trick, but I’ll manage.” She turned to go, but he stopped her with a word.

  “Faye.” He started to speak, then caught himself short. Clearing his throat to cover the awkwardness, he said, “I mean Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth.”

  “You can call me Faye.”

  “Thanks, Faye. I’d say you should call me Harold, but nobody does. They just say McDaniel, which I like better because it doesn’t sound like somebody’s grandfather.”

  “McDaniel works for me.”

  “Look, do you even know how to get back to your car?”

  She laughed. “Actually, no.”

  “Let me take you.”

  As she settled herself in his passenger seat, McDaniel cranked the engine, eyes straight ahead. He kept them straight ahead as he steered it slowly down a city street pocked with potholes and lined with a network of cracks. The people who owned the houses on either side of this street paid taxes like everybody else, and Faye got more pissed off on their behalf every time the car’s suspension screamed in pain.

  McDaniel drove for a while without speaking. When he did speak, it was slowly, as if he was choosing his words carefully. “If you think of anything else, or if Kali tells you anything else, you’ll tell me? I’m willing to give the two of you some space, because I know she’ll say things to you that she’d never say to me. So will Laneer and Sylvia. They all will.”

  “Because you’re a cop and I’m not?”

  “That’s part of it.”

  “And the other part?”

  Silence settled over a man who didn’t want to say out loud what he was thinking.

  She spoke for him. “Is it because you’re white and I’m not?”

  “You said it. I didn’t. But anybody with eyes can see that I’m in the minority here. On any given workday, I might not cross paths with a solitary soul who looks like me. I don’t blame them for mistrusting me. Honest. I don’t. But it keeps me from doing my job, and my job is to help people.”

  Faye wanted to say that starting from a presumption of innocence might help, but she didn’t want to remind him about his harsh treatment of her that morning. They seemed to be getting along better and she didn’t want to spoil it. She wanted to be on good terms with the person who was trying to get justice for Frida. And for Kali.

  “Do you want something from me?” she asked. “It sure sounds like it.”

  He took his own sweet time to answer her. They were nearing the parking lot where she’d left her car, and he stayed silent until he’d steered his own car into the slot beside it. Then he was silent for another moment. Faye used the time to look around at the beautiful trees. It had been early morning when she’d last seen them and it was only afternoon now, but they had lost their hazy beauty. She knew that they were no different than they’d been when she last saw them, leafy and green, but she was a different person now. She’d done her best to save someone who needed her, and she’d failed.

  “I’m not asking you to do anything dishonest or unethical, Faye. I don’t want you to do anything out of the ordinary. I’m just telling you that this is a case where doing your duty as a citizen is pretty damn important. That child, for whatever reason, is willing to talk to you. My guess is that her community will be a lot more willing to talk to you than to me. And, yes, it’s because of the color of your skin. So shoot me for saying so.”

  Faye started to interrupt him, but he held up his hand, asking her wordlessly to hear him out.

  “I can’t emphasize this enough. Don’t go playing detective like someone who’s watched too much TV. Don’t run around questioning suspects and, for God’s sake, don’t poke around in the business of dangerous people. But I get the sense that you’re not going to walk away from Kali, or even Laneer and Sylvia. If one of them tells you something that might help me crack this case, remember that I am asking you personally to help me do that. Bring me the information and then get out of the way, because there are dangerous people around us.”

  Faye remembered Frida’s injuries and said, “No kidding.”

  “Get me any information you can, but beyond that? Stay safe. Please.”

  Faye noticed as McDaniel backed out that he was angling his car so that he had a good view of her car door as she unlocked it. Then he lingered while she tucked her purse under the passenger seat, started the car, put it in gear, and backed out.

  Faye’s nutritional choices weren’t always the best, and today she was feeling downright self-destructive. It was mid-afternoon, she’d had a hellish day, and she was hungry. She wanted a greasy piece of pizza and she wanted a Hershey bar and she wanted a frosty can of Coca-Cola, and she wanted them immediately.

  She’d seen a convenience store at the corner where Kali’s street met a bustling, four-lane thoroughfare, and she knew it was where Frida’s exes, Mayfield and Linton, worked. The place hadn’t looked like much, but it would sell her everything she needed, and she could drive there in minutes.

  Kali’s neighborhood wasn’t so far from the urban center of Memphis, but each house was on a small lot with a grassy lawn and trees, and the creek snaking through those lots added a bit of natural beauty. The downside of having enough room for grass and trees was that the houses and business were more widely spaced than they would have been in the center of a city. Faye pictured trying to live in this neighborhood without a car, then she tried to remember if there had been a car in front of Frida’s house. Faye judged that it might take an h
our to get downtown on a bus and another to get back. If Frida, a single mother of a small child, had done that every day, then her life was one notch harder than Faye had been imagining.

  She saw the convenience store on her left, just as she remembered, and pulled into the parking lot. No other cars were parked there, so no one would witness her suicidal food choices but the person who sold them to her. Good. Now she was inspired to make her pizza a Meat-Lover’s Special.

  She put her car in park and stepped out onto broken, oil-stained pavement. The air smelled like diesel and old garbage, so she hurried to get inside.

  The battered door was located between two plate glass windows covered by bars. When she opened it, a bell sounded, and the clerk magically appeared at a cash register where no one had been before. She passed a magazine rack as she made her way to the register, which made her wonder whether this was where Kali got her inappropriate reading material. She didn’t like to think of the little girl being in the same room as the silent clerk, who was completely creeping Faye out. He watched her, wordless, as she gathered the candy and soda she wanted. His nametag said that his name was Linton.

  Actually, “watched” wasn’t really the word for what he did. He was eyeballing her. His eyes rolled over her face and down her body, and they took way too long to do it.

  Customer service didn’t seem to be high on his priority list, so there would be no “Good morning!” or “How can I help you?” coming from this guy. Faye had never before wished for a long line at the check-out counter, but she wanted one today to ensure that she was not alone with this man. She broke the silence with a chipper “Here you go!” as she laid her purchases on a counter covered with taped-on lottery ads.

  The man’s muscles bulged under his work uniform and his head was shaved slick-bald. When she ordered her Meat-Lover’s Special, he reached without looking into a display case full of pizza waiting under a heating element. Head still down but eyes on her, he dragged the soda can toward him. It left a damp trail of condensation on the countertop. He scanned the soda’s bar code, then dragged the candy bar through the can’s damp trail. During the entire transaction, he only spoke once, and that was to ask for her payment.

  She handed him a credit card. Somehow, she wasn’t surprised when he violated the retail worker’s cardinal boundary by touching her bare hand with his. His close-clipped fingernails tracked the length of her first two fingers as he withdrew his hand too slowly.

  Faye quickly pulled her own hand back, forcing him to lay her card on the counter when he returned it. When the transaction was done, she collected her money and fled, wishing that Joe were beside her. She hated herself for that wish, not because she wasn’t missing her husband’s company, but because she had always resisted anything that impinged on her independence and she always would.

  Today’s argument wasn’t the first one she’d had with Joe about this job. The contracted amount wasn’t big enough to support both their salaries, so having him join her had never been on the table. Still, she’d been unprepared for him to insist that he didn’t want her to go without him. Joe had never once wavered in treating his wife like an equal, so she hadn’t known how to respond when this demand came from out of the blue.

  “You’re telling me what to do? How Victorian,” she’d said, but he hadn’t backed down.

  “Memphis is one of the most dangerous cities in America. I looked it up.”

  “Sometimes I wish I hadn’t taught you to use the Internet.”

  She had regretted that comment immediately. Faye had always been better than Joe at things like books and school, but this had never been an issue in their marriage. He had knowledge and skills that she didn’t, and she was truly happy that she’d been able to help him overcome the learning disabilities that had come between him and a formal education. She had never lorded her PhD over Joe and she didn’t intend to start now, so she had immediately blurted out, “I didn’t mean that.” Then she had pressed her lips together to squelch the other unkind comments bumping around inside her.

  “Well, the cat’s out of Pandora’s box,” he’d said, mixing his metaphors but succeeding in his goal of reminding her that he did now have an education that included Greek mythology. “I’ve gotten real good at the Internet and I looked up the part of Memphis where this job is. Don’t go. We don’t need the money that bad.”

  She’d said, “We need it bad enough,” which was true. She hadn’t said, “I’ve been independent too long to let you tell me what to do, so you’ve forced my hand. Now I have to go.”

  But she’d thought it, and it was true. And now here she was, alone in a convenience store parking lot in one of the most dangerous parts of one of America’s most dangerous cities.

  By the time Faye unlocked her car door, she was no longer the only person around. Someone was walking up the street. He walked closer to her than she liked as she opened her car door, but he didn’t look her way as she got in. She quickly locked the door, chagrined to think that he was hearing the loud thunk of her automatic locks, but not chagrined enough to sit unprotected so near a man with such an angry face.

  He wore a nametag like the one pinned to the shirt of the man who had just groped her hand while selling her a slice of pizza. It said that his name was Mayfield.

  She’d seen Mayfield before, walking down Kali’s street. She recognized the tattoos and the towering mohawk. Like Linton, the handsy convenience store clerk, he didn’t bother to speak to her. But he looked, and he kept looking until she drove away.

  Chapter Fifteen

  As Faye neared the campground where she would be staying with her crew, she noticed a nondescript gray-blue car driving behind her that she was virtually certain was McDaniel’s. Had his route coincidentally overlapped with hers? How likely was that? Or had he maybe been following her ever since she got out of his car, waiting down the street while she bought an awful slice of pizza?

  She’d never know for sure whether she’d had an unofficial bodyguard escorting her back to her cabin, but she was comforted by the thought, nonetheless. And also, it would make Joe happy to know there was a policeman looking out for her.

  No, it wouldn’t. It would completely freak him out to know that a detective, who would absolutely have a feel for how much danger she was in, had thought she needed to be protected.

  She did know one thing for sure. Nothing on Earth could coerce her into telling Joe about her conversation with McDaniel or about the straightforward bluntness an experienced detective had used to describe the danger surrounding her.

  Jeremiah and his crew were already at the campground, moving in. He met her at the car, saying, “We set up the clotheslines and the camp stoves close to your cabin, but kept the campfire far enough away so the noise won’t disturb you.”

  Jeremiah was a big guy, with big hands, big feet, big ears standing out straight beneath his close-cropped black hair, and a big mouth. He grabbed her duffel bag and jerked his head in the direction of her cabin. Faye didn’t stop him, but she also didn’t really need help carrying her gear. Years in the field had taught her to travel light. The heaviest thing she carried was her bargain-sized jug of sunscreen.

  “I’ve hired you some great kids, Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth. Smart, enthusiastic, strong, funny. You’ll like them. And energy? We’ve been staying in the university dorms for a week while they did their training, and I learned on Day One that I had to make plans for the evening or they’d do it for me. I didn’t spend all the training budget you gave me, because I wrote my own teaching materials instead of buying books, so I used what I saved to take them to movies in the evenings. I hope that was okay?”

  Jeremiah really should have asked permission for that kind of budget-juggling. Faye would have said yes, but still. She held her tongue, though, because she admired his initiative, even while she wished he was a bit more respectful of the chain of command. She was also a little dizzied by the fo
rce of Jeremiah’s personality and the amount of information he was dumping on her.

  “We grocery-shopped on the way here. Hot dogs were on sale, so I had enough left in the food budget for marshmallows, chocolate, and graham crackers. That’ll keep ’em busy in the evenings.”

  This was a bit of budget-juggling that Faye could totally get behind. “I was wondering why you were planning to build campfires in this heat.”

  “Is it ever too hot for s’mores?”

  The answer to that question, in Faye’s mind, was a resounding, “Are you out of your mind? No!” and she said so.

  She took her duffel bag from Jeremiah and said, “I need to shower. Badly. And I need to get my work clothes organized. You’ve told them where the laundromat is? After a week, they probably need to do some washing. I sure do.”

  Faye clutched Sylvia’s cardigan shut to hide her ill-fitting clothes. She couldn’t bring herself to talk about the reason she needed to shower and do laundry.

  Jeremiah nodded that, yes, he’d shown his employees where the washers were, and Faye wasn’t surprised. Anyone with Jeremiah’s over-the-top level of organization had surely given them a thorough tour of the campground as soon as he parked the ancient sedan he used to carry them around. Faye was spoiled, because she usually had the unobtrusively efficient Joe as an assistant, but Jeremiah seemed more than up to the task.

  It had made sense for Joe to stay home and tend the children and the garden. He might even get the porch painted before she got home. She didn’t like being forced by finances to do this job without him, but it looked like Jeremiah and his contract employees had been a good choice for hired help who could get this job done.

  Faye had rather enjoyed watching Jeremiah herd his young charges through dinner, barking orders and cracking jokes with every breath. He had pooh-poohed the camp stove, insisting that they roast their hot dogs on sharp sticks over the campfire while he pulled ketchup, mustard, relish, and mayonnaise out of his cabin’s refrigerator.