And now Joe could see that Manny knew what he was talking about, because the captain really had liked a cold root beer almost as much as he had liked a cup of hot tea. With his own eyes, he’d seen the captain slurp down three root beers at a sitting. He’d always said that the sweetness was just right when you were eating something salty, like beef jerky.
He could see that Faye was remembering the captain and his root beers, too. The memories were making her eyes tear up again.
“I never saw any scuba gear on his boat,” Manny continued, “and he never once mentioned diving. If he liked to dive, I think he would have said so. Like I said, the man could talk.”
“Was he a good enough boat pilot to get out to Joyeuse Island?” Faye asked. “Or someplace farther out, maybe?”
“Oh, yeah. Many’s the time I watched him handle that little boat of his, and he was real comfortable on the water. He didn’t look all that comfortable in his diving gear, though.”
This comment must have struck Faye wrong, because Joe heard a sharpness in her voice as she asked, “Why would you say that, if you never saw him in it while he was alive? Can a dead body look uncomfortable?”
Manny stammered a bit, but he finally managed to get his thoughts out. “It’s hard to say why, but something about his body in that wetsuit looked wrong. I guess it just didn’t look to me like gear a man his age would wear.”
Faye was watching Manny’s lips, like she hoped they’d miraculously reveal his motives. He always wore a too-cool-for-you expression, which meant that Joe’s wife never quite believed Manny was telling the truth. Joe thought the too-cool attitude was an act, so he took what Manny said more seriously than Faye did.
“So that’s why you think his dead body looked uncomfortable,” she said. “Not because it didn’t fit right?”
“Yeah, though you can’t be sure of that, because a dead body ain’t the same as a live one. But…hmm, how to say this? His wetsuit wasn’t new but it wasn’t real old. It was the latest style maybe five or seven years ago. Captain Eubank didn’t strike me as a man who’d be wearing something with a fancy swoop of 2013 maroon across his chest and around the back. A plain black wetsuit would have been more his style.”
Joe actually agreed with Manny on this. The captain had died dressed like someone who spent money on looking good underwater. It would have been more like the captain to wear gear that was really out-of-date, like maybe he’d bought it in the 1970s when Jacques Cousteau was still diving. And, yeah, Joe would have pictured him in something black and utterly plain.
Joe decided to insert himself into the conversation. It was one way to keep Faye on her toes. “So you’re saying that he didn’t buy the gear he was wearing from you? And you didn’t fill his tank?”
Manny shook his head. “Nope. I was selling gear in Louisiana in 2013, when that gear was new. And nope. Like I said, he never got a tank filled here unless Cody did it.”
“Is there any other place nearby where he might have gotten his tank filled or bought some gear?” Faye asked.
“Yeah, at Thad’s place. Thad’s Surf and Dive Shop. It’s in Crawfordville. You know him?”
“I know of him,” Faye said.
“Me, too,” Joe said. “His store’s right down the street from the captain’s house. Maybe the captain did business there and that’s why you didn’t know he was a diver.”
“Maybe so. Maybe he did buy every last thing from Thad,” Manny said. “But I sell a lot of last-minute equipment to divers who get to their boats and find out they don’t have everything they need. I imagine that most all of Thad’s customers have bought diving gear from me at some time. Never the captain, though. Not once. It just seems weird to me.”
“I guess it’s possible that he never once forgot anything. He was extremely organized. Still, nobody’s perfect,” Faye said. “I have to make deliveries to shut-ins this afternoon, so I’ll need to pick up food and water in Crawfordville. I could stop by that other dive shop. Do you think Thad would talk to me about the captain?”
“No, Mom,” Amande said. “Making those deliveries is my job. You don’t need to drive all the way into Crawfordville.”
“You’re way too upset to be driving today, sweetheart. I’ll do it. I want to do it.”
Amande turned away, obviously angry at her mother for trying to spare her a hard job on a hard day. Joe knew it wasn’t fair of her to feel that way, but she did.
“I’ll call Thad and tell him you’re coming. We’re competitors, but we’re not cutthroat about it. I throw him some business sometimes, and he gives me a cut of his profit on the deal. He throws me a little business sometimes, and I give him a cut of what I make. It works out.”
Joe presumed, but was not sure, that Manny’s business relationship with Thad was legal. As long as he kept his distance from Joe’s daughter, he did not care. Much.
* * *
Faye thought of the captain as she paid Manny’s cashier for overpriced supplies she could have bought elsewhere. She’d rubbed her last drop of sunscreen onto Michael’s face when they left the house that morning. There was no way she was putting her family on the water on a bright summer day without protection, so this poor planning was going to cost her big-time. Manny’s sunscreen offered forgetful boaters their last chance to avoid third-degree sunburn, so he charged top dollar for a little tiny tube of it.
His convenience store was small, with a concrete floor and concrete block walls. Two walls were devoted to coolers full of unhealthy vacation food like sodas, beer, cold cuts, and ice cream. Four rows of metal shelving dominated the center of the room, two of them loaded with candy, bread, and chips and two of them loaded with convenience-sized toiletries like the sunscreen in Faye’s hand. The dive shop consisted of racks of dive gear and a tank-filling station with pressurized cylinders of oxygen, nitrogen, and helium. This merchandise was technically in another room, but the two spaces were separated by an open archway so that one person could keep an eye on everything while they ran the entire operation.
It was hard to believe that the captain had been a secret scuba diver who never ever forgot anything critical. Surely he had spent money in this dive shop if he liked to scuba dive, but Manny said no.
Faye studied the tanned blond man silently taking her money. This must be Cody, Manny’s tenant and part-time employee. She’d already tried and failed to make idle conversation with him.
Cody’s eyes darted around the room, then returned to her face, disappointed.
She suppressed a smile. “No, Amande’s not with me.”
Oblivious Joe, standing behind her, gave a grunt of surprise. He kept forgetting that their daughter was constantly on the radar of men on the prowl.
Now Cody loosened up and smiled a little, giving her a glimpse of white teeth framed by his deeply tanned face. “I thought you were her mother. Nice to meet you.” He pulled a dollar out of his pocket, put it in the cash drawer, and slid a couple of miniature chocolate bars across the counter to sit beside the tube of sunscreen. “She likes these. Tell her they’re from Cody.”
Michael said, “Ooh, Sissy’s getting some candy!”
Cody retrieved one of the chocolate bars and held it out for the little boy. Michael said, “Mom?” and Faye said, “You’re a good boy for asking. You can have it.”
As Michael grabbed the candy bar and commenced peeling off the wrapper, Faye watched Cody revert to his all-business stone-faced act. She watched his hands as they bagged up her purchase and took her money. They were calloused, with nails clipped so closely that he was able to scrub away almost all of the engine oil that a mechanic’s work left behind.
She was tempted to say “Hey! Sold anything to a dead man lately?” but she decided she’d let the sheriff have that special joy.
As if she’d conjured him up, the sheriff walked into the store. He didn’t come right over to talk to them. Faye
figured that he’d already said all he had to say to her family. She didn’t have anything left to say to him, either, but Joe was too straightforward for uncomfortable silence.
He strode over to the sheriff, shook his hand, and said, “I’ve been thinking about something. Is it weird that the captain’s boat is missing?”
“Not so much. The Gulf’s a big place. It’ll be a real trick to find it, if it’s made its way to shore and grounded itself in one of those coastal wetlands, but we will.”
“Would it help to have a drone?”
Faye couldn’t believe that she hadn’t already thought of using Ossie to help with the investigation. Nothing would make Joe happier than doing something concrete for the captain.
“It certainly would. We’ve got a couple of them, but we’re using them on that missing persons case. You can see why I wouldn’t want to take them off that job. Can I tell Lieutenant Baker to get in touch with you when she’s finished with the captain’s house and car? She can meet you here, and you two can see what your drone might uncover.”
Joe was so proud that his Ossie was practically a deputized officer of the law that his “Yes!” was immediate and enthusiastic.
Chapter Thirteen
“If you say so.”
Faye winced when Amande tossed this snide comment over her shoulder as she walked with Joe and Michael toward the boat that would take them home. The unoriginality of those four words was evidence of her distress. If Amande’s mind had been functioning on all cylinders, she would have done a more interesting job of rebelling.
Faye had been getting back talk ever since she decided to send Amande home and make the supply run herself. Any fool could see that the young woman was too upset to be behind the wheel. Faye wasn’t in any shape to drive, either, but she was the mother and Amande was the daughter, so she had pulled rank. And she didn’t take no for an answer.
Nor did she take whining for an answer. She’d helped Joe get both kids into the boat, and he’d taken them home. Joe would have to come back to the marina to help Lieutenant Baker look for the captain’s boat, but the lieutenant was going to be busy for a while and he needed to go home and get Ossie. And Faye needed to get food and water to hungry, thirsty people.
She drove Joe’s car to the pickup point in Crawfordville and loaded it up. After that, Thad’s Surf and Dive Shop was beckoning, so she pulled into its parking lot and went in.
She had known the current Thad’s late father, Thad Sr., but she only knew Thad Jr. by reputation. The first Thad had opened the dive shop in the late seventies and had been a fixture in the Crawfordville business community until his death thirty years later. His son was now in his late twenties, and the best thing that people could say about him was that he’d managed to keep the store open. Most of the time.
Young Thad was up front about his desire to sock away enough money to fund a life that was all surfing and no working. His pursuit of that goal had been singularly businesslike for a man who chafed at the very idea of having a job. The first thing he’d done after he inherited the business had been to sell his father’s modest home and convert the dive shop’s storage rooms into a small apartment. Now he had a cheap roof over his head and money for his early retirement fund. The second thing he’d done was to become a capitalist, investing the money in the stock market.
Thad’s emotional life was now measured by the motion of the Dow Jones and the NASDAQ, which he checked compulsively whenever he looked at his phone. When Thad judged that his portfolio was big enough, he would shake the sand of Crawfordville off his sandals and head for Puerto Escondido or Tamarin Bay or wherever he thought his dollars would stretch far enough to set him up for a life of surfing and diving and nothing else.
Thad Jr. wasn’t the type to join the Chamber of Commerce or the Rotary Club. He was the type to cut the store’s hours to the bare minimum so that he could have more time to dive. He’d close the store on a whim to surf, whenever he heard the waves were right, although trying to surf on the coast off Wakulla and Micco Counties was an act of optimism. The senior Thad had known that, but the junior Thad had added the word “Surf” to his store’s name anyway, as if doing so would change geography and geology themselves.
Two young men with similar dreams stood in the shop, wearing Surf Micco! shirts and admiring a pale-green surfboard. Their heads turned when they heard Faye push open the door.
Thad gave her a small wave, as if to say, “Welcome to my store. Glad you’re here,” but he kept trying to sell the surfboard. Despite his slacker reputation, he seemed to be decent at sales.
“A lot of times,” Thad said, “beginners make the mistake of buying a board that’s too short, so you don’t want to do that. But whatever you get, make sure you’ve got a car or truck that can transport it before you buy one that’s too big. I made that mistake once. I had to sell it to my buddy, and he got the deal of his life. I totally lost my shirt.”
Thad lifted the biggest board easily and his T-shirt tightened around his biceps. Faye had handled a few surfboards in her day, so she knew that this one wasn’t heavy, maybe twelve or fifteen pounds. Still, handling a seven-foot-long hunk of polystyrene without raking his merchandise off every nearby shelf showed Thad’s strength and dexterity.
He managed the board with a shake of his shaggy brunette hair that said, “This is no big deal for me, but it might be tricky for you newbies.” He had Manny’s gift of making people want to buy his stuff so that they could maybe be as cool as he was. Almost.
The customers looked like brothers. Both were stocky enough to need the sizable board that Thad was bandying about.
“We’re long on big trucks, but we’re short on money,” one brother said as the two sidled toward the door. “If we could afford these, we could move them. But we’re broke. Maybe some other time.”
When they were gone, Thad turned his attention to Faye. His jawline was strong and his eyes were as brown as Faye’s.
Faye introduced herself, and he recognized her name.
“Manny called to say that you were coming. Hey, I’m real sorry to hear about your friend. Manny told me that the man who died lived right near here.”
“Over there,” Faye said, pointing across the street and down a half-block.
“Him? He’s the one that died? Oh, man. He seemed like such a good guy. Everybody around here knew that his house was the place to go when you were between jobs. Yard work, house painting, floor waxing, whatever. Sometimes he even hired people down on their luck to work in his library. Me? I’d rather work outside, even when it’s hot. But when you’re flat out of money, you go where the work is and not where you wanna be.”
He looked around his store. “You see what I do? I sell stuff to people so’s they can go out on the water and leave me here, working inside. It’s a living, I guess, but I miss the sunshine.”
Thad’s Surf and Dive Shop was housed in a modest mid-century building, all stucco and glass inside and out. It had a practical terrazzo floor and an overachieving air conditioning unit that was making Faye forget that it was July. There was plenty of floor space for Thad’s merchandise and for the tank-filling station. Thad was lucky to have inherited such a nice facility, and it must have come with a built-in clientele that his dad had built up over decades.
None of this meant that he enjoyed his work, and it was obvious that the current Thad did not. Not at all.
Thad affected the so-relaxed-as-to-be-lazy demeanor of surfers in Hollywood movies, despite the fact that he didn’t look like them. His very dark hair seemed resistant to bleaching by the sun, and his light skin looked like he used sunblock consistently, at least on his face. His arms and upper chest were exposed by a short-sleeved V-neck T-shirt. They were deeply tanned, which proved that he had more time to go outside than he wanted to admit.
“I’m glad you know who Captain Eubank was,” Faye said, “because I thought you might
be able to answer some questions I have. You may have heard that he was killed in a diving accident. Except I’ve never once heard him mention scuba diving. Did he shop here?”
“Not while I was working. It’s not like I keep a big staff. If I don’t know him, he probably didn’t come in here at all. I don’t know that I ever even spoke to him, except for saying ‘Hey,’ when I passed him on the sidewalk. I just know that nobody deserves to die that way. When you spend as much time in the water as I do, you can’t help thinking about what it would be like to drown.”
Faye felt a chill in her gut when she imagined being far, far from the surface, knowing that the air in her lungs couldn’t last until she got there. That feeling had gripped her from the moment she first saw the captain’s body, and it hadn’t left yet.
She waited silently, watching Thad. He looked uncomfortable with the silence, but no more than anybody else she knew. Most Americans didn’t do real well with silence. Joe was the rare person who was willing to let it be.
“Seems funny,” she said. “If a man’s confident enough in his skills to dive by himself, don’t you think he did it a lot? And wouldn’t such a dedicated diver do business at the shop down the street?”
“Maybe he shopped with my dad and took his business elsewhere when he died, but I never saw him here. And I worked afternoon shifts from the time I was thirteen.”
“He never in all those years even just struck up a conversation with you, as a neighbor, one diver to another? That’s what most people do when they have a hobby they love. They go looking for people to talk to about it.”
“You got that right. Some of my customers—they just talk and talk. Sometimes I don’t think they’ll ever leave.”
And then he dropped the conversational ball and just stood there, silent.
Was he telling her to go? In a sense, she was wasting his time, but the store was empty. Was it really a burden to spend a few minutes shooting the breeze with someone who might turn into a customer? Maybe she should have mentioned her boats or asked if he had any snorkeling gear. Could a man with no customers in sight really afford to be rude to someone who might become one?
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