He felt obligated to point out the obvious. “He ain’t the sheriff anymore. He’s just Mike.”
“Don’t give me that. You still call him ‘Sheriff Mike,’ too.”
This was true, so Joe was now out of half-hearted arguments. “Then call the man. It’ll make you feel better.”
* * *
“What exactly do you think I can to do to help? I’m retired.”
Sheriff Mike even sounded retired to his own ears. In earlier years there would have been a sarcastic edge to his voice. Now, he sounded almost mellow, and “mellow” was not a word that anyone had ever associated with Mike McKenzie before he married, had a late-in-life kid, and walked away from law enforcement for good.
Faye was not easily dissuaded.
“You still know people. You still know the law. When somebody dies mysteriously, you know how to work the case. I think maybe Sheriff Rainey’s still a little green.”
Mike knew that this was what Faye sounded like when she was trying to be diplomatic. God help him if she decided to just come out with the unvarnished truth. If he didn’t address her concerns one way or another, she would escalate all the way up to undiplomatic straight-shooter and inform him that she was pretty sure the new sheriff was incompetent.
Sheriff Mike knew that Sheriff Rainey wasn’t incompetent. He was a good, steady, hardworking officer of the law. It might be possible, though, that he lacked the tendency toward treachery that made a good investigator great. If you weren’t capable of treachery, then how would you recognize it when you saw it? Sheriff Mike was immodest enough to admit that he was born a little treacherous. Brushing elbows with criminals for decades had honed this trait a little more with each passing year. This was why retirement had been so good for his soul. He didn’t deal with criminals every day, and this removed the temptation for him to be a little more like them.
“Tell me what’s bothering you, Faye.”
“The new sheriff seems willing to take Captain Eubank’s death at face value. Yeah, he’s going through the motions of doing an investigation, but he’s handed a lot of the work off to somebody named Lieutenant Baker—”
“The man is dealing with the aftermath of a hurricane. People died. Some are still missing. His attention is divided.”
“I know that. I do. I’m out there looking at what’s left of my friends’ homes every day that rolls. And you know it.” She heard herself and stopped. “I’m sorry for yelling.”
“Faye, honey, if you can’t yell at your friends, who can you yell at?”
“Yeah, well, sometimes I want to yell at the new sheriff. He thinks the captain got so carried away by excitement when he thought he’d located a treasure ship that he took his boat out and hopped right in the water. Alone. And then he died. The end.”
Mike knew that a good investigator tried not to talk much when he was talking to somebody who was just burning to tell him something, so he said nothing but, “You knew the captain well. What do you think?”
“When I last saw him, he was excited about maybe finding a shipwreck. I’ll grant you that. Maybe that explains why he did something so dumb, but I don’t know. Nobody would ever have called the captain dumb. You knew him. Do you think he would have risked scuba diving by himself? Especially since I don’t think he had a lot of experience. Have you ever even heard him mention scuba diving?”
This question had been bothering Mike ever since he heard about the captain’s death. “No, I’ve never heard him mention it, but that don’t prove much. I do believe that if the captain was ever going to do something crazy, it would happen when he was all excited about something historical. And you yourself have said that he thought he was on the trail of a shipwreck. That would have made our good friend fairly well giddy.”
“He would have waded into a gun battle if it meant that he would learn something.” Faye’s usually no-nonsense voice was wistful. “I know that. Only…”
Sheriff Mike’s instincts were suddenly on alert. When someone as analytical as Faye Longchamp-Mantooth stopped herself in the middle of an emotional rant, it usually meant something. He knew Faye well, and he knew what this hesitation meant for her. It meant that she’d had a logical thought that contradicted what she was saying. Faye’s logical thoughts were consistently worth exploring.
“Only what?”
“That’s the thing. I don’t think he needed scuba gear. Not to check out the spot we were talking about. The tide was pretty low yesterday afternoon. Early evening, too, and I just can’t imagine the captain going night diving by himself, so I think he was dead by nightfall. I know it didn’t happen this morning, because that’s when he was planning to go see Jeanine. You know he wouldn’t put anything ahead of her, not even a fabulous shipwreck.”
“Now, that’s true.”
“I’m pretty sure the tide was low enough yesterday evening for him to land the boat on Joyeuse Island and walk all the way out there. Even if he didn’t think to do that, he could have gotten there with a snorkel. Using scuba gear was overkill, especially since nobody has said anything yet to make me believe that the captain even owned any. And don’t forget that he lived near the Gulf all his life. He knew he needed to watch the tides, and he almost certainly swam like a fish.”
Oh, yeah. The captain could swim. Sheriff Mike remembered a time, maybe fifteen years back, when the man swam out to a tourist caught in a riptide and hauled her to shore singlehandedly. Captain Edward Eubank most certainly didn’t drown because he couldn’t handle himself in the water. Nevertheless, people made mistakes and sometimes they had terrible, awful luck.
But was that really what happened? The captain had been serious about his passions. He had talked Sheriff Mike’s ear off about fishing many times. He could also deliver an hour-long monologue on nineteenth-century fish canneries in Micco County that was actually pretty interesting if you were in the right frame of mind. It helped if you had a cup of coffee in your hand. But never once had Mike heard him deliver one of those monologues on scuba diving.
Faye was right to harp on this fact like a dog worrying a bone. And she was right to wonder about why he was scuba diving in water that was really pretty shallow.
“Think about it,” she said. “If he’d gone out at another time, the tide would have been higher, but we’re still not talking about unfathomable ocean depths. You could drown in that water, but you’d almost have to work at it.”
She was right, but she was ignoring a very real possibility. “It ain’t all that hard to drown if you’ve had a heart attack,” Sheriff Mike said his voice gentle. “Or a stroke or something like that. The captain was my age or better, and stuff like that happens to old dudes like us. Surely there will be an autopsy.”
Her voice was quiet, barely audible. “Yeah. It’s probably happening right now, if it’s not already done. Not that I expect the sheriff to stumble all over himself to tell me what it says.”
“I’ll talk to some people and see if there’s been any chatter on the street. If I hear anything, I’ll call you. I promise. But Faye, honey, sometimes terrible things happen and it ain’t nobody’s fault.”
She didn’t say anything.
“Honey,” Mike said, knowing that he was really concerned about Faye if he was calling her “Honey” in back-to-back sentences. “Magda’s real worried about you. She’s sitting right here beside me, telling me to tell you that you should pick up your phone once in a while.”
Faye must have seen the calls from her best friend. They’d been coming in all the damn day, ever since word got out about the captain’s death. With his connections, Sheriff Mike was among the first to know such things. Magda, as his wife, was the next. She’d been dialing Faye’s number ever since.
“I saw the messages. Tell Magda—”
Faye went silent.
So what was Mike supposed to tell his worried wife? That her friend was just too
sad to talk?
Magda knew that. That’s why she was blowing up Faye’s phone, because she knew that letting her stew in that misery wouldn’t end well.
“Tell her what? Please say that I should tell her you’ll call her soon.”
He got a quiet “Yeah” out of her, and he figured that was the best he was going to do when loyal Faye was hurting over a friend.
Chapter Nineteen
After Faye had read Michael his bedtime story and Amande had retreated to her room, Joe came to her and said, “Before I went back to the marina…before Ossie got shot…I sent her out to do some reconnaissance here on the island. Got something to show you. I think you’re gonna like it.”
She followed him into his office in the aboveground basement of their old home. The late afternoon light slanted in through a small window in the tabby cement walls, molded by enslaved people out of sand, oyster shells, ash, and sweat. Those walls were covered in many layers of whitewash, worn by time. Over their heads, the vast plantation house shifted as the sea wind breathed through its porches and around its cupola. It creaked, as old wooden things tend to do. A loose shutter slammed rhythmically against an exterior wall, telling Faye that she needed to add yet another task to her never-ending list of maintenance chores. This was the price of living in a house that was two hundred years old. Well, parts of it were.
Joe’s desk was littered with coffee mugs, maps, and books about vegetable gardening. On his computer display was a slide show of pictures Ossie had taken, flashing on the screen one after another. Or, rather, with pictures that Joe had used Ossie to take. Just because Joe had forgotten that the late Ossie was a machine didn’t mean that Faye should join him in his fantasy world.
His fancy new printer sat on a stand next to the desk, and it made Faye think of Captain Eubank. The last time they were together, he’d shown her pictures that Joe had printed just for him.
Joe, despite being a generation or two younger than the captain, was only a little better with technical things. He could email because their business required it. He could operate search engines, not just because their business required it but because he was as curious about the world as Faye was. Joe had learned to use Ossie because she intrigued him, and he’d learned to download the drone’s photos onto this desktop computer just because he loved to look at them.
Honestly, though, he was still stuck in the twentieth century in a lot of ways. One of them was his love for physical photos. He had spent a pretty penny for this printer, just so he could hold Ossie’s images in his hands.
“So, like I was saying, I took some pictures for you today, Faye. After I brought the kids back here, I took them out on the beach and we flew Ossie for a while. They watched while I sent her way out over the Gulf, south of here.”
He was grinning, so she knew what he’d done.
“You sent Ossie out to look at The Cold Spot?”
“Yup. Those were the last pictures she ever took. I think they would have come out better if I’d waited a little later in the day. The sun wouldn’t have been so harsh, for sure. And the tide would’ve been lower, so maybe Ossie could’ve seen the bottom better, but I needed to put Michael down for a nap before I left home again.”
“Smart move. What could you see?”
He handed her an eight-by-ten glossy so brightly colored that Faye wondered what Joe’s ink bill looked like. It had been taken when Ossie was flying high. “First, I sent her way up, so I could see the shape of Joyeuse Island and the coastline. Kinda like that other picture, the one that went in the paper. See? There’s the house. That’s Seagreen Island. And that’s us.”
Faye thought she might be able to see three person-shaped blobs on the beach.
“This high-up picture helped me get a notion of how things were laid out.”
The blotch of darkness was hard to see at this scale, but she was pretty sure it was there.
“Next, I brought Ossie down a little, like a zoom lens. Speaking of which, if we decide we need to get another drone for the business, I want to get a zoom lens, too.” He gave her an appraising look, as spouses do when they want to spend money on something fun. “When we’ve got a little extra money, I mean. Whatcha think?”
Distracted by the photos, she gave him an absent nod. And boom. The family budget had a new line item.
Next, Joe handed her a sequence of five photos taken at successively lower altitudes. The top one, like the one the captain had given her, showed the colorful biminis of pleasure boats, this time in deep red and shades of blue.
She flipped through the photos one by one. It was obvious by the way the center shifted with each new photo that Joe was focusing in on a particular location, the shaded area that grew more defined with each shot. By the time she reached the fourth photo, the boats were off-screen and so was land. There was nothing left to see but open water. Her heart quickened to see a small dark spot, sharply demarcated and almost circular, at the center of the last two photographs in the stack.
Because Joe was a sucker for drama, he had held the last photo in reserve. He handed it to her, then he sat back and waited for her squawk.
And she did squawk. Then she said, “That’s not a sunken ship,” with full confidence.
“Nope. I don’t think so, either.”
In the middle of the dark circle was something long, dark and narrow, with crisp edges. “It looks…geological. I guess that’s the right word.”
“Yeah. It looks like a hole in the ground.”
She laughed and gave him a playful swat on the shoulder. “That’s what I want it to be. A deep watery hole in the ground.”
“Yeah, I know.” He took the photo back and studied it. “You still can’t tell much. Too much reflection off the water. Not enough color contrast between your hole in the ground and the seabed. I’ve been reading up on post-production editing, though. I think I could clean it up, if the file hadn’t been blown up along with Ossie, and if I had the right software. I could scan this print on a really good scanner and maybe still be able to clean it up some.”
“Well, aren’t you tech-y?” asked Faye, who had no idea what post-production editing could and couldn’t do.
He grinned. “I can be if I buy that software. I’ve been checking into filters for drone lenses, too.”
Joe wasn’t one to spend much money. If he was willing to even consider buying something so expensive, Faye knew they’d be getting that software and another drone to go with it. And the zoom lens and the filter, too. Maybe he could hold off on some of it until Christmas. Or his birthday, which was almost as far away because it was Christmas Eve. She suspected that every present with Joe’s name on it was going to be drone-related this year. She had to admit that she loved Joe’s pictures and the joy it gave him to make them.
She put on her reading glasses to make the image a little crisper to her eyes, but this tactic wasn’t showing her any more detail than she’d already seen. “When we can send another drone out there, you should try to get some pictures from a low, oblique angle,” she said. “If the hurricane opened up a big spring vent, there might be enough water coming out to make a bulge in the surface of the water over it. It might even bubble, like the springs we see when we go kayaking in Spring Creek. A boil like that might show in pictures, if you took them when the drone wasn’t right overhead.”
“The right lens and filters will help with that.”
“You’re hoping my obsession with this…” She waved her hand at the photos. “…this underwater crater thingie…will convince me that you need to buy some more toys. Right?”
“You got it. But Faye, don’t you think we can use a drone in our work? I’ve been reading about how other archaeologists are finding all kinds of cool stuff. You can even see things that are all the way underground, because the plants grow different in the ground on top of them. Foundations. Gardens. Walls. Mounds. Roads. You can’
t see ’em when you’re standing on the ground, but you can sure see ’em from the sky. Just think what we might uncover right here on our own island if we outfitted a drone with really good lenses and stuff. Not to mention for our clients. And it would all be tax-deductible.”
“He’s doing tax planning,” Faye said to the air. “He’s not just tech-y today. He’s business-y.”
Joe said nothing. He just waggled his eyebrows at her.
“Buy your toys,” she said. “And keep your receipts for our tax returns. The IRS is finicky about helping people buy toys.”
Chapter Twenty
When morning came, it took Faye a full minute to remember that her friend had drowned and a hurricane had blown her surviving friends’ lives apart. During that minute, she enjoyed the sunshine through the window and the sound of Joe breathing at her side. She was glad for the roof over her sleeping children and for the unending sound of the waves on the shore of her island. And then she remembered that bad things had happened and that there would always be more coming.
She hauled herself out of bed, trying to ignore the shoulder that hurt all the time. It was time to wake the kids and get ready to go ashore. She moved quietly, so that Joe could sleep a little later while she made breakfast. The kids would complain because Joe’s cooking was sublime and Faye’s was merely adequate, but they’d survive. Her scrambled eggs weren’t that bad.
The kids ate her substandard eggs, then Joe appeared with his long black hair still wet from the shower. They all loaded themselves onto two boats. Amande was in hers because Faye had come home in it the night before, and families who lived on islands needed to choreograph their boats’ movements to avoid stranding somebody. Amande took off for shore without a look back.
Wrecked Page 11
