Undercurrents

by Mary Anna Evans

  “How’s the job going?” he said.

  She noticed that he had not said, “Did they find out who murdered that woman?” so she joined him in avoiding the sore subject.

  “Real good,” she said. “We did some training at the museum this morning, then we had some fabulous barbecue for lunch. And peach pie. Good heavens, we had some amazing peach pie. I should have gotten you the recipe. Then we moved to this fabulous motel that you see before you.”

  She waved the phone around the cheery gray stairwell and Joe laughed. Neither of them mentioned the reason she had needed to move her crew.

  “After that, I took Kali to The Peabody for tea.”

  Danger, danger, cried the voice in her head, because mentioning Kali opened the door to talking about her mother’s murder. Joe looked too comfortable for her to disturb him with death and fear. She changed the subject and he let her.

  “One of my employees—Richard—got stinking drunk at lunch. My guess is that he was nearly stinking drunk when we got there and then he took advantage of my credit card to the tune of three beers. Those three beers pushed him over the edge. I wish you’d been here to see him make an idiot of himself.”

  “Did you fire him?”

  “Jeremiah talked me out of it, but I have my eye on him.”

  Joe grunted and she knew that he meant Damn straight. You better keep an eye on that one.

  “In the end, it was pretty funny. A twenty-one-year-old man is an adult, for sure, but when you get one staggering drunk? All of a sudden, he might as well be a middle-schooler who’s been sneaking drinks out of his daddy’s liquor cabinet. It’s not a good look.”

  Joe laughed, but not very loud. It wasn’t the half-hearted laugh of a man who doesn’t like other men behaving poorly around his wife. It was the laugh of a man about the change the subject, because he wasn’t going to let her get away with changing the subject.

  “What about that poor woman? Have they found out who did it?”

  “No, but they found out how he did it.”

  “You gonna tell me?”

  “Shovel. Beat her with it, then she died of the injuries.”

  “God.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  Silence between Joe and Faye was usually a comfortable thing, but not now, not when they both were thinking about what Frida had suffered.

  “You’re going to be really careful until they catch that guy?”

  “You know I always am.”

  “Oh, yes, I do. I know you can do anything you set your mind to, all by your own self. You could roll back the Mississippi and walk across it, if that’s what you needed to do. Might be easier on you if you let me help you more.” He softened his words with a laugh, and it was the drowsy laugh of a man who needed to go back to sleep.

  So she let him do that. She told him to sleep well and to call her soon, and then she blew him a good-night kiss. When his face was gone from her screen, the emergency lighting in the dank stairwell made it seem even danker. She sat there and wallowed in its charmlessness for a while, then she went back to her room.

  Yvonna sighed and rolled over in her bed as Faye eased her body under her own covers, pulling them over her chin. It was time to sleep. She just wished she believed that sleep would actually be coming for her.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  He usually slept like an innocent. Like the dead.

  On those times when sleep played coy, leaving him alone with himself, certainty dawned and he knew it was time to act. Tonight, the blood lust had roused him, sending him hunting for the woman who had frustrated him that very afternoon.

  Faye Longchamp-Mantooth had been wise to pick up and move. If she’d stayed another night alone in the state park cabin, she would already be a dead woman. Instead, she’d moved to this motel that was no more defensible, except for one thing. He had no way to know which of its dozens of windows was hers.

  She had parked near the stairwell, so the location of her car told him only that she was sleeping on the side of the building where he was parked. Sitting in his car with a pair of binoculars, he waited, hoping for a miraculous parting of the draperies that would show him where she slept. Just that one stroke of luck would seal her fate.

  Even if the barely parted curtain revealed that she wasn’t alone, he still would go in. Ted Bundy had done some of his best work in a sorority house full of women, walking out to freedom after killing two of them and critically injuring two more. No one had heard a thing.

  By comparison, killing a woman—two women, even—would be easy in a motel so crappy that odd sounds were simply part of the low-rent experience.

  The voices in his head argued with each other and with him. One urged restraint. The other demanded that he barge in and go door to door, bludgeoning anyone who answered his knock.

  For the moment, he had chosen restraint, but there was no guarantee that he could maintain it much longer.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Joe lay in the bed, his six-and-a-half-foot frame stretched out from headboard to footboard. The covers on Faye’s side were undisturbed. The smooth, unrumpled bedspread and linens made him lonely for her, and he supposed that was why he never disturbed them when she was away. He wanted to be lonely without her. He never wanted to get used to her being gone.

  Faye had just blown him a good-night kiss and his phone was still in his hand. He studied its blank screen for only a moment before he came to a decision. He shot a text to Amande.

  U awake?

  She responded immediately. Joe wondered where kids learned to type so fast. He wasn’t even thirty-five and his children made him feel like an old man.

  Yeah, but I can’t believe u r. Wut’s up Dad?

  Joe was a deliberate typist, but he tried to return her message quickly. An image of his daughter tapping her foot and saying “Any day now, Dad…” gave him speed, but speed lit his dyslexia on fire. Maybe she could read it anyway.

  Need hepl bying a plain tiket

  Crap. That looked awful. He wished he hadn’t already hit send.

  Even with his learning differences, Joe could tell the difference between trendy text abbreviations and embarrassing mistakes. This was why he needed Faye—not to do things for him, but to remind him to take his time.

  He heard Amande’s light, firm tap on his door, which meant that he could stop typing and start talking,. Praise God for that. He would have walked down the hall and knocked on her door in the first place, but sometimes it was a little uncomfortable to be the father of a young woman. It was better for her to be the one to decide how she wanted to be seen at this time of the morning.

  “Come on in,” he said.

  She entered the room in an oversized tee-shirt and gym shorts, golden-brown curls tumbling over her shoulders. Crossing the room in one long-legged step, she flopped across the foot of his bed.

  “A plane ticket? Where are you going? Can I come? What website’s giving you problems?”

  “Ain’t even pulled one up yet. I figured you could do it in half the time.”

  “I love you, Dad, but it’ll be a lot less than half the time.”

  He handed her his phone to use, but she waved her tablet at him. “I’ll use this. So seriously…where are you going?”

  “How quick can you get me to Memphis?”

  “You’re going to see Mom? Does she know? Is it a surprise? I guess you do have an anniversary coming up.…” Her voice drifted off and she cocked her head to the right, studying him. “What’s wrong?”

  “Well…hmm.” Amande was nearly grown and she’d led a hard life before he and Faye had adopted her. Joe figured he didn’t need to beat around the bush. “Your mama tried to save a woman’s life yesterday. Well, I reckon I should say she did save her. She called 911 and she did CPR, and the lady was still living when the ambulance took her. It ain’t really your mama�
��s fault that the hospital couldn’t keep her alive.”

  “So you want to go up there and spend some time with her, in case she’s upset about the poor woman. Dad, that’s really sweet. What happened that Mom needed to do CPR? Heart attack? Stroke?”

  “Somebody showed her the business end of a shovel.”

  “She was beaten with a shovel? Bad enough to kill her? Dad. You have to go.”

  “Considering that the person who did the beating is still running loose and your mama won’t come home, yeah. I have to go.”

  Amande was too busy tapping on her tablet to answer him. She was also mumbling, but Joe judged that she was mostly talking to herself and didn’t need any answers from him.

  “Tallahassee’s the closest airport, but the 5:40 a.m. flight is booked solid. So’s the one that leaves at six. The 6:20 makes two stops and takes thirteen hours to get there. That’s not counting the time to rent a car and get to Mom.”

  “That’s what? Twenty hours from now? That’s way too long. How come the airplanes take so blamed long? They’re supposed to be fast.”

  She peered at him through the lashes of lowered eyelids, then she pecked around on the tablet a little more. “I could get you something out of Mobile, but it would take just as long, with the drive time and all.”

  “The woman your mother found? She was buried alive. I need to be there now. I mean right now this minute.”

  Silent, Amande tapped out a few more keystrokes and hit the enter key. After a moment’s reflection, she typed a while longer, then pounded the enter key like someone who was done with passive research and was ready for action.

  “It’s a nine-hour drive from the marina in Panacea to Memphis. Add in time to throw some clothes in a bag and take the boat to the marina, plus a few minutes to stop at the Sheriff and Magda’s house, and I’d say we can be in Memphis by lunchtime, easy. Wait! We’ll gain an hour with the time change. If we ignore the speed limits, we can have a late breakfast down the street from Elvis’ house.”

  Joe felt control of the conversation slipping away from him and he did his best to stop it. “I like the idea of driving, but you can just quit saying ‘we.’ Who’ll take care of Michael?”

  “Why do you think we’re stopping to see the Sheriff and Magda? Because we miss them? Well, I do miss them, but that’s not why.”

  “No. I’m serious. I’m going to Memphis because it scares me that your mother is there. What makes you think I would take you?”

  “Dad. You haven’t slept and now you’re talking about driving the rest of the night and into the morning. You’ll die in a flaming car if I let you do that.”

  Joe said, “No, I won’t,” but she was still talking and she showed no signs of taking a breath.

  “Plus, I’m sorry to say this out loud, but it’s true. We both know you drive like an old man. I can drive it in nine hours or less, but it’ll take you ten. Or more. And also, I wish you’d let me show you how to use your GPS again. You could find your way out of a Panamanian rain forest without a compass, but you’re useless on the highway. I don’t want to answer my phone and hear you saying that you’re not sure how you wound up in Dallas.”

  Joe was, for the first time in his life, beginning to like the idea of corporal punishment.

  “We’ll swap off driving so we can both get some sleep. I’ll drive the legs that go through Montgomery and Birmingham.” She squinted at him. “And Tallahassee. You’ll be fine on the straight stretches. As long as you don’t have to deal with any city traffic. Let me check the traffic reports.” She lowered her head and went back to tapping on her tablet.

  “We’re not talking about the driving. We’re talking about me going someplace dangerous. Like, murder-level dangerous. Without you.”

  “I just want to get you to Mom fast, and I want you to get there alive. Once we get to Memphis, you can…I don’t know…get us a motel room far away from the murdering spot and you can warehouse me there. You’ll have the car, so I can’t go anywhere you don’t want me to go. I’ll have cable TV, which I’d like to remind you that we don’t have here, and I’ll have the Internet. Wait. Hang on. Let me find us a place with free Internet. And free parking.”

  Joe felt himself crumbling under the barrage of words that, if he were to be honest, did make a lot of sense. “Your mother said she’d moved her crew to a motel that was pretty far from the scene of the crime. It would be simpler if we got a room there. You know she wouldn’t have picked a place that charged for Internet. Parking, neither.”

  “Then why aren’t we packing our bags?”

  Joe didn’t have a good answer for that, so he said, “You be ready in ten minutes or I’m going without you.”

  Amande was instantly on her feet. He watched her head for her room with the high-stepping lope of a victorious running back enjoying his moment in the end zone, and he knew that Faye was going to kill him for bringing their daughter to a place so dangerous that a young woman had ended up dead. But then, she was already going to kill him just for coming to her and she couldn’t kill him twice.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  The phone was loud, really loud. Faye was floating in a dreamless place, a place without fear or pain, and she hadn’t been there long. She wished the phone would shut up, because she didn’t want to be awake in the bed where she had tossed and turned the night away.

  The phone rang again. Yvonna groaned as she threw her sheets over her head, and Faye returned fully to reality. She reached for the phone and her bad shoulder yelled at her for disturbing it.

  Detective McDaniel’s voice sounded remarkably alert. “I hope I didn’t wake you, but I wanted to tell you this while it was still early enough for you to do something about it. It’s good news.”

  She still wasn’t fully conscious, but she was awake enough to respond to the promise of good news. “You found the killer.”

  “I wish. No, my news isn’t that exciting, but you should like it. My forensics people say they’ve done all they can do. They did all they’d planned to do yesterday, but they wanted to do one more walk-over today. Unfortunately, there was a terrible storm early this morning. There’s just no point. The odds that there’s still any physical evidence that didn’t get washed away are zero. They told me to go ahead and release the site to you.”

  “There was a storm?”

  “You’re a hard sleeper. Yes, there was a storm. Thunder. Lightning. Wind. Hail. Will the wet ground make it hard for you to work? I’m hoping you’ll keep me posted on what you all find at that old CCC site. I’ve always thought that archaeology was fascinating.”

  He sounded eager, even ingratiating, like he was hoping she’d stop being mad at him now.

  Was she mad at him? Not particularly. He merely made her uncomfortable, unsure, as if the world could shift under her feet and leave her talking again to a man who didn’t believe her when she spoke.

  Faye couldn’t shake the drowsiness. She really needed to sleep all the way through the night sometime soon. “You’re saying we can work at the site today? In—” She squinted at her phone. It was six o’clock. “In two hours?”

  “Whenever you want to start. You can wait until tomorrow, if it’s better to stick to the original plan, but the site is yours when you’re ready.”

  Faye thought through her disorganized plan for the day, which had been to take her crew to the university library and then to…well, honestly, she had been planning to give them Sunday afternoon off. She didn’t know about the others, but she would be going to Frida’s funeral, and she knew that Jeremiah would want to be there. It made her nervous to leave the group unsupervised after Richard’s drunken display, but it wasn’t right to require them to go to the funeral of somebody they didn’t know.

  She was walking a fine line with managing this team. She couldn’t work them around the clock because that would put her afoul of about a million labor law
s. There was just no way around the fact that they were going to spend a lot of hours unsupervised. Richard’s drunken trip to Armand’s barbecue joint was evidence that idle hands were an open invitation to Lucifer, but it couldn’t be helped.

  “Wait until tomorrow? No, I don’t want to waste the day. We can get a lot done before I turn them loose so I can go to Frida’s funeral,” she said to McDaniel. “Tell your forensics people I said thank you for giving today back to us.” Then she told him good-bye and dialed Jeremiah to tell him that they had work to do.

  Mobilizing the crew had gone smoothly, because everybody was anxious to start the project. Faye and Jeremiah had rousted them out of bed. They’d gotten dressed. Everybody was loaded in the vehicles.

  Faye was patting herself on the back for her efficiency, until Jeremiah pulled her aside.

  “We need to feed them and I didn’t make a grocery run.”

  Food. Faye knew she was stressed when she forgot about food.

  “Oh, yeah. Food. Hmmm.”

  She tried to picture the state park and the area surrounding it. She couldn’t remember any fast food, nor a grocery store, but she knew there was a shabby convenience store, staffed by an unpleasant man. It would have to do.

  “I know a place, just a few miles away from the site, and they have a big sign advertising their chicken biscuits. We can stop there and buy chicken biscuits for breakfast, plus some bread and some sandwich meat that should cover lunches for several days.”

  “Bread. Meat. Ice for the cooler, water, chips. I’ve got mayonnaise and mustard. That’ll make lunch, and it won’t cost all that much.”

  Faye nodded her agreement and they got underway. She hoped they weren’t going to be buying their supplies from the sullen and creepy Linton, but even if he had the day off, the odds were good that his replacement would be Mayfield, who didn’t seem much better.