At one end of the long narrow thing was a pair of flippers the same dark red color as the air tank. At the other end was a head covered with wet, stringy gray hair. Two long, thin arms dangled in the water, and so did two legs with stringy musculature that was beginning to atrophy from age.
The man hung in the water, motionless, and Faye knew two things instantly. This was her friend Captain Edward Eubank, and he was dead.
Faye knew to her core that, somehow, he had been killed by his own curiosity.
* * *
The marina wasn’t fancy. Manny had worked hard to spruce it up, but it would never be without damp and mold. This was the way of watery places.
Regardless of the mold, the marina served its purpose. It provided a way station for people moving from land to sea and back, and it was a place for them to drink, eat, and enjoy each other. It was a place of community. Faye had spent happy hours at the marina, but she thought it was a shabby place to die.
Manny’s Marina sprawled along the shore of a creek, near the place where it emptied into the Gulf. Long docks lined with boat slips extended into the water, and a wide ramp served people who trailered their boats. Several buildings sprawled across the marina’s grounds. They held the things boaters needed—a bar and grill, a convenience store, a dive shop, storage sheds, and a barn for dry boat storage.
Manny lived in an efficiency apartment above the bar and grill. Faye was grateful to him for opening it to her family. The sheriff wanted to talk to them, but how awful it would have been to wait for him with Manny’s other breakfast guests, knowing that the captain’s body was being retrieved not far away.
Amande sat slumped on Manny’s couch beside Faye, her head on her mother’s shoulder. They were both weeping. The feel of her daughter’s shuddering chest against Faye’s was both comforting and heartbreaking.
Joe sat in an easy chair beside them, also weeping. At first, he’d done this while bouncing a confused Michael on his lap, but Manny had silently taken the little boy, leaving Joe, Amande, and Faye to grieve without upsetting a preschooler.
“The captain was such a nice man,” Amande said between sobs. “I was just at his house last week, working on a project for my history class.”
“Nothing made him happier than seeing somebody make good use of his library,” Faye murmured. “And for him to see a young person like you poring over his maps and books? He must have been in heaven.”
Faye almost said, “I guess he’s in the actual heaven now,” but now she was crying too hard to talk, and this was bad. Talking kept the truth at bay. Silence gave her space to think the horrible thought that she’d been pushing back ever since she looked into the water and saw Captain Eubank’s lifeless body.
He had probably died within sight of Joyeuse Island, her home, and she hadn’t been there to help him.
Where else would he be? His romantic obsession with history was essential to everything that he was, and he believed he’d found his own holy grail, the historic wreck of a very old ship.
Why else would he be suited up in scuba gear? He had probably gone out to Joyeuse Island as soon as Faye left his house. He would have known that her family was all ashore doing hurricane cleanup, leaving him free to explore alone.
No one would have seen him drop an anchor at The Cold Spot and hoist himself overboard. Nobody would have known that he was swimming beneath the water’s surface, looking for an old, old shipwreck.
She should have offered to help him look for it. All she’d had to do was say, “I can’t go today, but let’s make a date to go exploring next week. Okay?”
If she’d done that one simple, kind thing, Captain Eubank would still be alive.
* * *
Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth kept saying, “This is my fault. It’s all my fault.”
Sheriff Ken Rainey knew it wasn’t, of course. He couldn’t say how many times he’d sat with a bereaved family and heard one person after another repeat, “It’s my fault,” like a prayer of absolution. It was only human nature for a person to claim responsibility for a loved one’s death. The only other comfortable option was to blame the dead person or to blame someone else or to blame God. It was too terrifying to admit that nobody had much control over anything. Certainly not death.
This family had a logical, controlled approach to life, particularly the mother. It oozed from all her pores. She didn’t tolerate uncertainty well.
“I should’ve known that he’d go looking for that shipwreck.” She stopped herself. “Not that I think it’s a shipwreck, Sheriff. I already told you that I think it’s a submarine spring, and I told him so. It’s just that I should’ve gone with him and made sure he was safe while he checked it out.”
The sheriff sat up straighter in his chair. “‘Spring’ is just another way to say ‘underwater cave.’ Lots of divers swim into caves and never swim out alive. Maybe he swam into the spring vent and got lost.”
He could tell that Faye didn’t like that idea.
“If a cave that size were right up next to my island, it would have been obvious before the storm. Even a hurricane wouldn’t be enough to clean out something that big,” she said.
“Then why do you think there’s a spring near your island, if you’ve never seen anything obvious like a vent?”
“The water’s always cold there, probably because groundwater was seeping out of a little crack that was clogged up with something like a wad of sand. I’m thinking the hurricane cleaned that crack right out, but I really doubt that it uncovered a cave big enough to get lost in. You’re describing something more like Wakulla Springs. The water doesn’t seep out of a cave like that. It comes roaring out like a firehose.”
Sheriff Rainey thought “firehose” was a bit of an exaggeration, but agreed Faye had made a reasonable point. “If you’re right that the spring vent is just a narrow little crack,” he said, “maybe he got a foot caught in it and couldn’t get it out.”
The sheriff noticed that she didn’t really respond to that idea. She just said, “I never thought he’d go out there, certainly not by himself.”
“People who have lived alone all their lives are pretty independent, as a rule,” the sheriff said. “I can absolutely see the captain diving by himself. It’s not smart, but nobody’s smart all the time. And who’s to say that he was anywhere near your island when he died? There could certainly be other, bigger springs and caves under the Gulf.”
This woman wanted to think Captain Eubank had died off the coast of Joyeuse Island because it made her feel better to blame herself, but that didn’t mean that it was so.
She also wanted to think that he’d had some kind of accident. It was just as likely, though, that he’d suffered a heart attack or his equipment had failed or he’d made a fatal error far underwater, in a world that tolerated no error. There would be an autopsy and the captain’s equipment would be checked out, but it was overwhelmingly likely that the cause of Captain Eubank’s death was something very simple and very sad.
* * *
Faye couldn’t stop looking out Manny’s window. From her second-story vantage point, she could see all the way to the waterfronts, both creek and Gulf. She would have been able to see the captain’s motionless form, if someone from the sheriff’s department hadn’t set up barricades that blocked her view. For this she was profoundly grateful. The image of his body floating facedown would always be with her. She did not need to add more images to her nightmares.
Even the simple retrieval of the body was unthinkable. Was he still floating in the water, or was he already shrouded in a body bag and waiting for transport? How many people would it take to lift him out of the water and onto the dock? Would they do it with a sling and a winch, or with their bare hands? Would they lift him onto a gurney and roll him to a waiting hearse? A sheriff’s department van? And then what would happen when the medical examiner took charge of his body?
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She did not want to know.
Faye had seen someone official-looking pass below her window carrying a camera and a notepad. Later, she had passed again, heading back toward her vehicle, and then returned with a video camera. While Faye was focused on her, she’d lost track of what the sheriff was saying. His voice had shifted into a warm and calming, but unintelligible, audio blur.
As he spoke, she thought of a question and blurted it out, knowing that she was interrupting him. It bothered her that she was so upset that she couldn’t even force herself to be polite.
“It looks to me like you’re treating this like a crime scene. Do you think somebody—”
She couldn’t say “murder,” especially not in front of Amande, so she tried again. “Do you think somebody did this to him?”
“I don’t. There’s no evidence of foul play. None whatsoever. But drowning investigations are tricky, so I’ve assigned Lieutenant Baker of our Criminal Investigations Division to make sure we tie up all the loose ends. And please know that when I say ‘Criminal Investigations Division,’ I’m speaking of Lieutenant Baker and one evidence technician. That’s as close as Micco County gets to the kind of CSI work you see on TV.”
Faye nodded. She knew this. Her friend Mike McKenzie had done the sheriff’s job for years, and she knew exactly how much funding he didn’t have.
The sheriff was still talking. “We owe it to the captain to be sure we learn as much as we can about what happened to him. It’s very easy to jump straight to ‘Accidental Death’ when you’re dealing with a drowning, especially when someone drowns alone. There’s a school of thought that says we miss some murders when we do that. Lieutenant Baker’s expertise in forensic investigations can keep us from making that mistake.”
Faye didn’t want the sheriff to make that mistake, either.
“Now, you can’t do much of an investigation when you don’t have a crime scene,” the sheriff pointed out. “We’ve got nothing but a body, really. Nevertheless, Lieutenant Baker will tell us if she finds anything unexpected. If she does, I promise that we’ll stretch our budget to give the captain what he deserves.”
Joe said, “We’ve lived here a long time. We understand about ‘small’ and we totally understand about ‘no money.’”
Sheriff Rainey almost laughed, but his stone-faced act held. “Then you know what our budget is like. It’s even tighter at the moment, since the hurricane. Everybody’s working overtime, night and day. We’ve still got people missing. I can’t spare anybody else to work this case. Actually, I can’t really spare Baker, but we’re going to try to do it all. We always do try. I wouldn’t ordinarily be here now myself, but the captain was my friend.”
He turned his head to clear his throat, and Faye thought he might also be wiping his eyes.
“Lieutenant Baker’s going to do a walk-through of his house. We’ll talk to some people—like you folks—to see if we hear anything suspicious. Will we find any evidence of a crime? Probably not, because I do honestly think that this was an accident, but we’re going to tie up the loose ends. The captain deserves that much.”
Chapter Ten
Sheriff Rainey excused himself when Lieutenant Baker stuck her head in the room and said, “Can I speak with you, sir?”
Faye stayed put, perched on Manny’s sofa and peering out the window of his apartment. From this vantage point, she could see the captain’s car. It was far away, under a tree on the far side of the parking lot, but the sedan’s weathered red paint was unmistakable.
She rose and crossed the room to another window where she could get a better view of the marina’s creekfront facilities—slips, docks, and ramp. The captain’s boat slip was empty.
It was possible that she’d been the last person to speak to him. He might well have hopped in his car right after she left, driven to the marina, gotten in his boat, and made the questionable decision to dive alone, all without meaningful contact with another person.
She slipped her phone out of her pocket and dialed Manny. Part of her wanted to apologize for the scene at the bar that had sent Amande running and the other part of her wanted information.
She opened with, “I’m sorry about what happened. I’ll pay for the plate and the syrup pitcher.”
She thought he was about to laugh, and she thought maybe he was hysterical. He, too, had just discovered his dead friend’s body. Then she heard his voice crack and he fell silent.
Faye didn’t know what to say, so she just started talking. She wanted information, and talking to Manny was the price of that information. “Is it weird that the captain’s car is here and his boat isn’t?”
She could hear the steel-on-steel sound of Manny’s whisk whipping up somebody’s eggs or pancakes.
“It wasn’t weird that he drove here and parked his car.” His voice was still trying to crack, but it held. “And it wasn’t weird that he took his boat out. He does those things every afternoon. The weird thing is that he didn’t stop to talk to me on his way through. And, of course, the other weird thing is that he didn’t come back. His car was out there when I got up this morning, parked all by itself.”
She wasn’t convinced that these things were all that weird. “There’s a lot of little islands out there, places where you can just drag your boat up on the beach and throw up a tent. Maybe the captain did that last night.”
Manny’s whisk kept whisking. “If he did, it was the first time. The captain was a man of habit. You know that. He liked to sleep at home.”
She did know that. “Are you saying that he was dead by bedtime?”
The whisk went silent. After a moment, Manny said, “Yeah. His body would have needed time to get here. Unless he died practically within sight of the marina, it would have taken hours for him to float here on the currents and the tide.”
This tracked with Faye’s understanding of the timeline. She knew that the captain had planned to see his sister bright and early that morning. Faye had been sitting in his library early the previous afternoon. If he were going to take a foolish solo dive, the only reasonable time to do it was shortly after she left.
Faye looked at the eaves of the buildings around her, checking for cameras. “Do you have surveillance video?”
“Are you kidding? It’s all I can do to make payroll these days. I’m saving up for cameras, but I ain’t got any now.” He paused, and Faye heard the refrigerator open and close. “If I only had those cameras, we could get one last look at him. I’d give anything to be able to say goodbye.”
* * *
Once the door was shut behind him, the sheriff stood on the landing atop the outdoor stairs leading to Manny’s apartment and jumped straight to the point. “Did you find any witnesses, Lieutenant Baker?”
“Nobody admitted seeing the victim recently. Not today. Not yesterday, except for Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth. I’d say he drove here, got in his boat, and made the fatal mistake of diving without a buddy. End of story.”
She looked down at her close-clipped fingernails, and the sheriff noticed her unconscious need to break eye contact. She didn’t leave it broken for long.
Meeting his eyes again, she said, “Can I tell you what I really think?”
“Sure thing, but thanks for asking. It makes me feel important.”
“You know, and I know, that this is a waste of time. The man made a mistake or had a heart attack. Maybe it would make sense to spend my time and the county’s money on a full-out investigation of his death if we were having a slow month. But we’re not. Every minute that I’m chasing this wild goose is a minute when a missing woman and child lie dead in the swamp. There is no chance that they’re still alive more than a week after the hurricane washed them out of their own house, but it eats at me to think of them out there alone. It’s like nobody cares.”
He tried to interrupt the flow of words, murmuring, “I hear you, Baker,” but
she wasn’t finished.
“How can I face that child’s grandmother if I walk away from her case to launch an investigation that simply has no point, just because this dead man was apparently lovable enough to have a million friends? Where are that child’s friends?”
And now the sheriff really appreciated Baker’s razor-edged mind. She could tiptoe right up to saying he was wasting money on the captain’s death because the man had been his friend, without passing into the unforgivable subordination of suggesting that he was making poor decisions out of grief.
Well done, Baker, but I’m still in charge.
“It’s my job to stretch my little budget far enough to do the impossible,” he said in what he hoped was a calm tone of voice. “And that includes finding out what happened to the captain. You’ve been talking to witnesses for a while now. Is it true that nobody saw him get in the boat? A talented interviewer such as yourself must have found out something.”
She shook her head. Her hair didn’t move because it was cropped into a blond buzz cut. “Nothing helpful. Most of them just said, ‘I didn’t see anything,’ and waited for me to tell them they could go. The marina owner was the only one who was willing to get involved.”
“Manny? I know Manny. More days than not, he cooks my breakfast. What did he have to say?”
She checked her notes. Her long, rawboned fingers clasped her tablet computer with a surprising gentleness. “Manny’s best guess is that the captain took his boat out yesterday afternoon, while the marina was really busy, and then he didn’t come back. He thinks he would have noticed a boat motor starting at a weird time, like late last night or early this morning. He’s sure the captain left yesterday afternoon without talking to him, and that’s weird.”
She looked Sheriff Rainey straight in the eye. “Or so Manny says.”
Chapter Eleven
Lieutenant Baker had gone back to her work, but the sheriff still stood on the landing outside Manny’s apartment, gathering his thoughts before speaking to the grieving Longchamp-Mantooth family. A popular misconception about officers of the law is that they are stoic and without feeling. The sheriff knew that anyone who believed this believed a lie.
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