Wrecked

by Mary Anna Evans

  Faye wanted to pull the car over and cry. When that library was broken up, it would be as if the captain had never existed. He really would be dead.

  “But you know what, Mom? There’s at least one person who wants those books for the right reasons. Besides you and me, I mean.”

  “Who’s that, sweetie?”

  “Her name is Samantha Kennedy. I’ve seen her at Miss Jeanine’s house twice now. She’s there now.”

  “Samantha Kennedy? I know her. I interviewed her for a job.”

  The words, “But I didn’t hire her,” hung in the air asking to be said. Faye had a soft spot for young people trying to get a start in the world, so she didn’t say them.

  Amande said them for her, more or less. “There’s got to be a reason you didn’t hire her. You and Dad have some big contracts coming up soon. You’re gonna need warm bodies to do all that fieldwork.”

  Faye heard what Amande didn’t say, which was that she wasn’t planning to be around to help. “That’s why I didn’t hire her. Samantha is very smart. You saw how young she is, but she’s already got a PhD. And a Master of Library and Information Science, too. But she’s just not a field archaeologist. Samantha has tons of intellectual stamina, but I need somebody with the physical stamina to dig all day with an actual trowel.”

  “That’s what most people want from an entry-level archaeologist,” Amande said.

  This was true, but Faye was surprised that her daughter had given this much thought. Maybe she wasn’t wrong to harbor a hope that she could hand the business down to Amande someday.

  “You’re right about that, sweetie. Samantha was born to be a professor, but the academic job market is in the pits these days for people who want full-time work. And by full-time work, I mean teaching jobs that pay a salary you can live on. Last I heard, she was teaching single classes here and there, making about a third of what she’d make teaching the same classes in a tenure-track job.”

  Amande said, “Well, that sucks,” and her tone said that Faye had just dissuaded her from ever considering a life in academia, but her question was on a different topic entirely. “Is she from around here?”

  Faye was surprised at this question. If there was one thing that Amande wasn’t, it was provincial. “No. She’s from somewhere up north. Indiana, I think. Why do you ask?”

  “I’m just wondering how she knows Miss Jeanine. It’s not like she gets out much.”

  “Did Samantha say why she was there?”

  “Oh, yeah. Now I remember. The first time I saw her, she was there to return one of the captain’s rare books. Maybe she and Miss Jeanine really hit it off and she came back just to keep her company. That’s really sweet. Maybe Miss Jeanine wants to be around somebody who likes books as much as the captain did. I bet Samantha reminds her of her brother a little bit.”

  The lump in Faye’s throat was back. It came back at odd times when she remembered Captain Eubank and really understood, deep down, that she would never again hear him enthuse over something cool that he’d just learned. Her silence broke the rhythm of the conversation, making it obvious to Amande that her mother wasn’t doing very well.

  “Mom? Are you okay?”

  Faye prided herself on being the buffer between her children and a hard world, and now she’d failed at that. Again.

  “I’m fine. Just fine. Did you get a key to his house like I asked you to?”

  “Don’t be silly. The captain lived in Crawfordville. I’m surprised that he locked the house at all. Miss Jeanine says there’s a key in the garage. It’s on a shelf over his workbench, under the third Sir Walter Raleigh can from the left. You can go on over there right now. You don’t have to wait for me to bring you a key.”

  Now Faye remembered watching the captain scoop Sir Walter Raleigh pipe tobacco into cigarette papers, rolling his own smokes and carefully licking the paper to seal them into neat cylinders. With this memory, she was undone, but she still managed to say, “Well, that makes it easy to get in the place. And the garage isn’t locked?”

  “The garage key is under the doormat outside the side door of the house. The one that goes into the kitchen. I guess the captain liked the idea of a burglar standing on that doormat trying to figure out why the key he found under it didn’t fit the door.”

  And now Captain Eubank felt alive to Faye again, smoking a roll-your-own and enjoying one last laugh against intruders who might want to steal his precious books.

  * * *

  The third Sir Walter Raleigh can from the left was heavy, because it was full of nuts and bolts instead of tobacco. So was the second Sir Walter Raleigh can from the left, but Faye was pretty sure that the nut and bolts in it were ever-so-slightly smaller. And the nuts and bolts in the first tobacco can from the left looked infinitesimally smaller still. Captain Eubank’s workshop was as meticulously organized as his library, minus the Library of Congress numbers. None of the tobacco cans were labeled, but Faye felt sure that the captain had known exactly where his 5/16-inch hex bolts were.

  She palmed the key and headed for the kitchen door. Once through it, she saw that everything in the captain’s kitchen looked the same as always, except it didn’t. A fine layer of dust dimmed the sheen of the countertops he had kept so brilliantly waxed. A faint sprinkle of black dots on the grout around the kitchen window showed the beginnings of mildew, because decay happens fast in a steamy climate. The captain would have hated seeing his kitchen look like this.

  Faye’s hair was beginning to stick to her sweaty neck, and she thought that she, too, might begin to mildew soon. A stack of opened mail sat on the corner of the captain’s kitchen table, and the corners of the individual sheets of paper were beginning to curl in the humidity of a house where the air conditioning hadn’t run for days.

  This brought her up short. The captain wouldn’t have turned off the central air just because he was going to be gone for a few hours. He probably wouldn’t have turned it off if he was going to be gone for a week, because heat and humidity wouldn’t have been good for his books and maps. As she listened to the quiet house, she realized that she had never been there when it was utterly silent. The captain’s dehumidifiers had always been a humming counterpoint to every conversation.

  Who had turned off the central air conditioner and the dehumidifiers? Jeanine?

  No, wait. It couldn’t have been Jeanine who shut off the A/C. She was housebound.

  Would the deputies have done that when the sheriff sent them to check out the house? Maybe, if Jeanine had asked them. Faye didn’t see any visible signs that they’d been there, so the sheriff had been serious when he’d called it just a walk-through.

  Faye dialed Amande’s number and had the great good luck to get through again. “Did Jeanine say if anybody else has been in the house since the captain died, other than the people from the sheriff’s office?”

  “She didn’t have to say. I know at least one person who’s been in there. Yesterday, I heard Greta volunteer to close things down for her. Shut off the water heater, empty the fridge, turn off the A/C, return the cable box…that kind of stuff. It was nice of her to think about those things, wasn’t it?”

  Faye mumbled an insincere, “Yeah.”

  “It’s good thing she did, or else Miss Jeanine would have been stuck with a kitchen full of rotten food, not to mention bills for electricity and cable that she didn’t even use. Greta said she would wait to shut off the water and electricity until after the house sold, because the estate sale people and the real estate agent would want them on, but the cable’s off now. I never would have known what needed to be done. Sometimes I think I’ll never be a real grown-up because there are just too many things to do. I’ll never know how to do them all.”

  Faye thought that Amande would navigate adulthood just fine, but she did not like her daughter being on a first-name basis with a woman who seemed to be doing her best to che
at vulnerable people. She thought of the innocuous-looking power of attorney that Greta had given Emma, and she thought of all the ways it could help an evil person cheat somebody like Jeanine Eubank. Greta could offer to handle the estate sale and pilfer anything valuable she found in the house. She could lie about how much she made on the sale, giving Jeanine a pittance for all of her brother’s worldly possessions. She could even sell the house and pocket the money, and the captain’s own sister might never know.

  That was the advantage of cheating somebody old and housebound. After a few years of Jeanine asking, “Did my brother’s house ever sell?” and Greta answering, “Not yet, dear,” the older woman would eventually die. In her condition, she might never come into town again, and Greta could make that even more likely by doing Jeanine’s shopping for her and urging her not to exert herself. When Jeanine died, her estate would be settled, Greta would wave her signed power of attorney at the estate attorney, and all the lying and cheating would be done. It would be wiped away as if it had never happened. All but the money in Greta’s pocket, that is.

  Faye got a sick feeling when she remembered the pile of paperwork that Amande had seen at Jeanine’s house. Somebody evil could have slipped anything into that pile, where it now sat waiting for her signature. Faye needed to go through that paperwork, page by page, and help Jeanine get her affairs in order.

  Faye was not ignorant of the fact that this was essentially what Greta had offered to do for Emma and probably for Jeanine, too. She ignored that quibble, because she knew that her motives were pure, and she had deep doubts about Greta’s.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Feeling like a ghoul, Faye stood in the captain’s kitchen and flipped through his mail. She found nothing but bills and advertising circulars. Everything else in the kitchen looked exactly as it had during her last visit, so she moved on into the library. It, too, looked exactly as it had.

  The library’s walls were still lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. A large worktable and the captain’s personal desk still dominated the center of the room. The room still smelled like library ink and dust, but the acrid tang of mildew was beginning to intrude.

  Amande’s voice came out of Faye’s phone. “Mom?”

  “I’m here. Sorry. I got distracted by the captain’s books. I forgot to ask you something when I called before. Did you give my message to Jeanine?”

  “Sure did. I told Miss Jeanine that you wanted to help her with her paperwork. I made sure nobody was around when I asked. She was so so so grateful, Mom. I had a box with me, just like you said, so I loaded the papers all up. It was a really good idea for you to offer to take care of them for her.”

  “Thanks, sweetie. I think it’s the right thing to do.”

  Standing in the middle of the captain’s vast book collection, Faye spun in place. She saw any number of volumes that she’d love to have in her personal library, but she saw nothing out of the ordinary.

  A teetering pile of books on the captain’s desk caught her eye. Some of them had ragged linen covers and some were wrapped in cracked leather, but all of them were old. Had they been there before? Faye wasn’t sure.

  She leaned over sideways to read their spines. Some of them were too timeworn to have legible titles, but a few of them did. She saw early copies of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Palmetto-Leaves and Frank Parker Stockbridge’s Florida in the Making, as well as an old promotional book aimed at bringing people to the Florida Panhandle to work in the lumber industry. Atop the stack was a Hammond’s Complete Map of Florida from 1912. She knew these books and knew that their publication dates bracketed the late nineteenth and early twentieth century years when Micco County’s longleaf forests were clear-cut by people like Nate Peterson’s ancestors. She also knew somebody who would be interested in these particular books.

  “Amande? Do you remember what book Samantha Kennedy was returning to Jeanine?”

  “It was an atlas of railroads in the Southeast around the turn of the twentieth century.”

  Yep. That book fit perfectly with this stack of volumes that could have been hand-selected to appeal to Dr. Samantha Kennedy. And they probably had been hand-selected, because that was the way Captain Eubank treated his friends.

  * * *

  Faye had ended her call, then circled the captain’s living room. She was looking for the shelves where he’d stored books with Library of Congress numbers beginning with F, which denoted books on local history in the Americas. She also scrutinized GE titles on environmental science and SD titles on forestry, arboriculture, and silviculture, all of which probably had Samantha Kennedy’s fingerprints all over them.

  On a hunch, she did a web search for Dr. Samantha Kennedy and Florida history. A sizable number of scholarly journal articles popped up, especially considering the woman’s youth, and they were in some highly respected publications. Since it was the twenty-first century, the web search also turned up social media posts. Even in those, Dr. Kennedy was focused on her career.

  Do any of you people have access to documents that show railroad spurs in Micco County in the early 1900s? Not the permanent ones. I’m looking for the ones that served the temporary sawmills that moved on when the trees were all cut down. Surely somebody drew maps showing those but I can’t find them. I’m also coming up dry in searches for photographs of those sawmills.

  The post was a year old, but none of her Twitter friends had been able to help her. Maybe the book she’d returned to Jeanine had shown where the spurs were, but it wouldn’t have had photos of the mills. Samantha might well be looking for documents that didn’t exist any longer. This was the kind of wild goose chase that the captain would have loved.

  Faye studied the shelves full of books in Samantha Kennedy’s field. They were all neatly filled from end to end with books. If she—or anybody else—had taken and kept anything from those shelves, it wasn’t obvious to Faye. And why should Faye think she’d done that? She knew that the woman had just returned a book voluntarily, when it was a reasonable bet that nobody would ever have known she had it.

  Faye hated herself for being so suspicious. The absolute worst motivation that she could ascribe to Samantha Kennedy was that she might be kissing up to Jeanine Eubank so that the old woman might give her some rare books she wanted.

  And what if Jeanine did give them to Samantha? They were her books now. She could burn them if she wanted to.

  * * *

  Samantha Kennedy crouched in Captain Eubank’s azalea bushes, waiting. Traffic along the street in front of the captain’s house had been nonstop for ten minutes. She couldn’t risk being seen, so she resigned herself to wait for her chance.

  Her phone was open to a photo she’d taken on the last occasion she’d crouched in these azalea bushes. It was hard to read the titles on the captain’s books on this small screen, but her computer screen had been big enough to do what she needed. She knew now for certain that the captain’s library held the books that could make her career.

  Samantha had done everything she could think of to prompt Jeanine Eubank to offer her the pick of Captain Eubank’s library. She’d had no luck.

  The old lady had said that she dreamed of finding a home for her brother’s collection where it could be available to anybody who was interested in it. Donating it to a university library wouldn’t serve that goal, because university libraries were for the use of their students and professors, not the general public. But nobody else had the kind of money that it took to take care of all those fragile bits of paper.

  Jeanine was Samantha’s last hope, but she was no more cooperative than her brother had been. He, too, had wanted his library to be open to everybody, forever.

  Samantha couldn’t live with that. She didn’t want everybody to have access to the books she had in mind. If everybody had access, then somebody might publish their findings before she was able to write them up. It was a slam dunk that a te
nured professor would have more time to write those articles than Samantha would, running as she did from class to class and from college to college. These days, she was waiting tables, too, because the class she needed to make her income livable had been canceled at the last minute.

  Samantha had her eye on three books and just three books. They were as rare as they could be, because she knew of no other copies, but they wouldn’t bring much money on the open market. Nobody but Samantha and two rival academics had any interest in them whatsoever, but for the three of them those books could mean scholarly publications and respect. If she played her cards right, they could bring her a full-time job doing the work she loved. They could bring her a retirement account. They could bring her health insurance.

  Samantha wanted them out of the captain’s house and safely hidden in her own home. The captain had denied her this. So had his sister.

  If this meant that she had to steal those books, then so be it.

  * * *

  Faye had spent too much time prowling among a dead man’s treasures. She could so easily conjure up the living memory of her friend while she stood surrounded by his things, but the memories lasted only so long. When they dissipated, she was left with nothing but the memory of him floating facedown in the water.

  That image made her shiver. She moved away from the shelves of books that Samantha Kennedy probably coveted—away from the all the books, actually—and she found a place to stand in the exact middle of the room.

  Right next to her, so close that she couldn’t move without bumping it, was the chair where she’d sat during her last talk with the captain. Unsure why she had ever thought that coming to his house was going to help anything, she dropped into that chair to think.