Findings (5 page)
Faye stifled the urge to giggle at the image of Liz as a cookie-baking mom.
“Don’t you laugh. I make ’em. I eat more of ’em than I strictly should, but I make ’em.”
Liz waved her spatula in Faye’s general direction, so Faye tried not to keep giggling. She hadn’t giggled in a while. At times like this, women friends were good things to have.
“Since he always hits rock-bottom when some girl dumps him,” Liz went on. “I’ve kind of settled on woman trouble as the explanation for why he dropped out. Maybe he needs to take up with a smart, pretty archaeologist.”
Joe bristled. He was getting very good at that.
“Don’t look at me,” Faye said quickly. “What is Chip? Twenty-two? I’m old enough to be his…hip young aunt.”
Yeah, right. At thirty-eight, Faye was plenty old enough to have had a youthful indiscretion that resulted in a strapping young man like Chip. That thought called for another cup of coffee. Heavily laced with some of Joe’s bourbon.
Liz turned back to the griddle, wielding her spatula over an array of eggs being cooked every-which-way. Four of them, scrambled, were quickly dumped in front of Joe, before Liz bustled off to find someone else who needed feeding. Joe had done his share to help Emma get rid of all that surplus funeral food. Faye glanced sideways to peek at his flat, muscled abdomen. Where did he put all those calories?
Faye had cleared half her plate before she noticed the prickly feeling on the back of her neck. She turned and scanned the room. It was full of people who appeared…perfectly ordinary. They looked pretty much like Liz’s usual crowd—loud, jovial, and decked out in extremely casual clothing. In other words, they looked like pleasure boaters, fishermen, and hunters.
Given recent events, two of them might also be killers.
Faye slid her eyes to the left. Two…interesting-looking…young people sat at a table in the corner, and they’d sat there before. She knew their names—Wayland and Nita—and she knew that they were shrimpers and that Wayland, the last in a long family line of shrimpers, had inherited his boat from his father. The plain bands on their left hands told her that they were married. But that was about all she knew. They’d always seemed harmless enough, but now Faye found herself wondering. Were the lightning bolts and eagles tattooed on their arms Nazi symbols? Did their close-cropped hair make them skinheads?
Nita, in particular, was eye-catching. Few women with her striking good looks would choose to be nearly bald. The young couple cultivated a look that said they didn’t like the rest of the world much, although they wouldn’t mind if everybody looked at them. Were they the kind of losers who would be enraged by the sight of a wealthy black man?
Still furtive, Faye kept eyeballing the couple. Though Nita was of average height, with long and willowy limbs, Wayland was a short, stubby, wiry man, with prominent muscles on arms that showed not the first gram of fat. He had the wizened, sunburned face of a man who made his living on the water. He sure looked like a shrimper. But did he and Nita spend their evenings beating peaceful men to death?
And what about Chip’s good buddies, the big table of Civil War re-enactors in the corner? She recognized the biggest, loudest, happiest pseudo-captain as Herbie Canton, who had learned that he could endure his weekdays as an insurance salesman, just as long he could look forward to leading bloodless battles on Saturdays.
Faye had always had a soft spot for re-enactors, being a bit over-fascinated with history herself. She saw nothing wrong with a little harmless obsession in anyone’s life, and most re-enactors that she’d met didn’t seem like throwbacks who wished the good old days would come back, slavery and all. Heck, a lot of them had two uniforms, one blue and one gray, so that they could be as useful as possible in service of their make-pretend wars. But that didn’t mean there weren’t two devils lurking in this happy, collegial group.
Faye couldn’t sit still. She felt like everybody in the place was looking at her, which was stupid. Even if they’d heard about Douglass’ death on the news, they didn’t all know he was her friend. She doubted any of them had ever even laid eyes on him, though his house wasn’t far up the coastline. Douglass had been a little too upper-crust to hang around a joint like this.
She used her biscuit to mop up the last drops of egg yolk. Leaving enough money on the counter to cover the eggs and a big tip for Chip, she said, “I’m going out to check on my boat.”
Liz’s worry lines deepened and she came out from behind the counter, following Faye toward the door. “It’s nearly dark. Now, why’d you want to go out there by yourself, after what just happened to poor Mr. Everett?”
Joe, who hadn’t left his stool yet, laid some money on the counter next to Faye’s. He reached out a long arm and tapped Liz on the shoulder. “I’m with her.”
Liz gazed up at Joe, who was tall even when he was sitting down, then looked fondly at the way his black ponytail draped over his broad shoulder. “You know what, Faye? If Joe goes with you, you’ll be just as safe as a woman can be.”
Her dreamy smile followed Joe out the door.
***
Liz kept a locked cabinet full of boat maintenance supplies out on the dock, and Faye had a key. She reached in and hauled out a jug of bleach. Her world was dirty, but at least her boat could be mildew-free. She and Joe worked while the sun dropped lower.
The lapping of waves against the hull masked any noise made by the happy drunks in Liz’s bar. The early evening air was utterly quiet. So when a dark figure lurched off the dock and over the gunwale into Faye’s arms, she let out a scream that brought those happy drunks boiling outdoors to see what was going on.
“Wally?” Faye said, when she realized who she was holding. It was her old, two-faced friend Wally, who had owned the marina when Liz was just a short-order cook. Wally, the pothunting scoundrel who would do anything for a buck. Wally, the long-time friend who had kept her secrets back when she lived one step ahead of the law and the tax collector. Wally, the fink who had sold her out to the scavengers who would have killed her for the artifacts buried under her own property.
Wally had disappeared when his crimes came to light, and Faye had missed him in spite of herself. He looked bad, pale and sweaty, like he’d been on one of his legendary benders, which would explain why he’d just staggered and fell into her arms. Where had Wally been all this time?
She reached to wipe the beads of sweat off his forehead and realized that her hand was bloody. A crowd of onlookers was gathering. Joe was already out of the boat, shouting for somebody to call a doctor.
“I’m sorry, Faye. About Douglass.” Wally wheezed hard, and Faye could tell it hurt him to talk.
“Don’t say anything, Wally. Just lie still. Joe’s getting you some help.”
Wally’s small watery eyes scanned the faces gathering on the dock. He wheezed again. Ignoring Faye’s efforts to calm him, he tried and failed to rise up out of her supporting arms. “Need to tell you…sorry…sorry for everything. Tried to stop…never meant to…”
His mouth worked to form the words. “Remember before. You have to remember before,” he said, looking hard into her eyes. The light was already fading from his. “Remember. Before,” he said one more time, his voice urgent.
“I do remember. We were friends, Wally. We
are
friends.” She called out for someone to get a doctor, but it was too late. Wally was gone.
Faye had seen death before, but she’d never seen this much blood. Everything in her world was red. The blood. The fiery sunset that reflected in the eyes of a sea of confused bar patrons. Liz’s hair, hanging over her face as she wept for Wally, who had been her friend and her boss and maybe her lover.
Even the warm highlights in Chip’s chestnut hair were red, as he cradled his weeping mother against his chest. And that chest was covered with a cherry red polo shirt, wet with her tears. The sheriff’s mechanical pencil was the color of blood as it scratched notes on a white sheet of paper. There was a red ambulance and its red lights circled pointlessly, because the patient was dead.
Blood coated Faye’s hands and arms and chest—the parts of her that had touched Wally as she cradled him in her lap. It still lay in red puddles around her feet, even though the emergency personnel had gently lifted his body onto a stretcher quite some time ago.
She couldn’t focus her mind enough to get up and get out of the boat. Where would she go? Joe, God bless him, didn’t try to tell her what to do. He just sat beside her and held her hand.
The sheriff and his forensics team seemed happy to let them sit in the gory mess, probably because it meant they weren’t messing up the crime scene. They weren’t tracking through the blood, dropping hairs, or strewing fibers hither and yon. All they were doing was sitting there in a pool of congealing gore while they answered questions.
No, she hadn’t seen anybody lurking in the shadows when she walked out to her boat. And neither, Joe said, had he.
No, she hadn’t even seen Wally until he dropped into her lap. Neither had Joe. And neither of them had seen the knife that had gouged a hole in his back. It seemed to have disappeared into that mysterious place where Wally had been hiding for years now.
No, Wally didn’t say any more about Douglass, beyond being sorry. Sorry for killing him? Sorry somebody else killed him? Sorry for Faye’s pain? Sorry he cheated him at poker? Neither Faye nor Joe could say.
No, neither of them knew of anyone in particular who would have wanted Wally dead. Wally had been the kind of person who generated murderous feelings in everyone around him at one time or another. He lied at the drop of a hat. He manipulated people for the sheer hell of it. He cheated at cards, even when he wasn’t playing for money. If Faye had been asked to guess which of her friends was most likely to wind up dead of a stab wound, it would have been Wally. But, no, she didn’t know who did it.
She noticed that Joe had climbed onto the dock, and he was talking to the sheriff. When had he done that? Even Joe was wearing Wally’s blood. The red smear on Joe’s cheek contrasted with the near-black of his sleek hair and the clear green of his eyes. His moccasins were soaked. Faye suspected he’d have to make himself a new pair.
Lanky Joe had to stoop over to get his mouth close to the stocky lawman’s ear. Clearly he didn’t want someone to hear what he was saying. Maybe that someone was her.
Faye knew she was sitting in a puddle of blood, but she felt like her brain could use a little boost in its blood flow. The hum in her ears was drowning out all ambient noise, and black dots swam in her field of vision.
The sheriff squinted in her direction. “Why hasn’t someone gotten that woman out of there? Look at her. Merciful God.”
He gave Joe a short nod, then jerked his head in the direction of one of his deputies. As Faye watched, Joe boarded a little aluminum johnboat belonging to the sheriff’s department and piloted it expertly, pulling alongside her and holding out a hand. Faye gathered her wits well enough to scramble out of Wally’s blood and into the boat. By moving carefully, she was able to accomplish this without disturbing the crime scene much at all.
“The sheriff said I could take you home. He said he’d make sure your skiff was cleaned up. We can swap it for this one tomorrow.”
Home. Faye could already feel the sand of Joyeuse Island under her feet. She could see her elegant home, rising high on its sturdy foundation, an above-ground basement, and two floors of cavernous living space, crowned with a magnificent cupola and surrounded by a forest of Grecian columns. Trying to restore this grand old ruin would be a lifelong project, but that was okay with Faye. She could hear the footsteps of six generations of her ancestors echoing through its halls. She wanted to go home.
Joe opened the throttle, and they left all that blood behind.
***
Faye’s finances had improved in recent years, so she’d been able to add a number of modern conveniences to Joyeuse. A few solar panels enabled her to run some electric lights and a small appliance or two, though not necessarily at the same time. Gas-powered appliances—refrigerator, range, and oven—gave her a near-normal kitchen. A diesel generator filled in the gaps in her newly modern lifestyle.
Still, beyond patching a few leaks, she’d never had to update the old house’s original plumbing. A rooftop cistern installed before the Civil War brought running water to her modern bathroom, sun-warmed and with ample pressure, any time she wanted it. And, tonight, she wanted it. Faye needed, more than anything else, to be clean.
Peeling off her clothes, stiff with drying blood, she shrank from the notion of tossing them on the bathroom floor or into the hamper. She vastly preferred the notion of burning them. Pushing open a casement window, she threw the ruined shirt and pants out of the house.
Naked and barefoot, she padded back to the shower, stopping only when something small and damp stuck to her foot. She stooped to pick up the folded paper and noticed, with a sigh, that it was bloody, too.
What on earth had she tucked in her pocket? In her headlong rush to purge her life of Wally’s blood, she was tempted to simply pitch it, until she recognized the stationery. The scrap of paper was torn from a piece of university letterhead. Graduate students like Faye could hardly afford to overlook correspondence from the entity that held their futures in its figurative hands. She uncrumpled the paper, wondering what the university wanted from her now.
How odd that she couldn’t remember opening any mail from the university in weeks. It had been longer than that since she visited the campus. She looked at the paper again, and she thought she saw the outlines of four bloody fingers. Could Wally have slipped this into her pocket?
Spreading the sticky paper out in the sink, she saw that it wasn’t a letter, just a hand-scrawled note. No, not even a note. Just eight characters: RARE F301.
Faye recognized the cryptic letters and numbers instantly. Any student in a graduate program that still required extensive research on hard copy documents would recognize it. This was a Library of Congress call number.
Actually, it was only part of a call number. RARE signified a book shelved with rare documents. The F said that the book’s topic was American history. She’d need to look it up, but she was pretty sure that 301 was one of the numbers assigned to the states ringing the Gulf of Mexico. There should have been a period after the 301, and some additional characters identifying the exact document, but they were missing.
Without those characters, this call number would leave her standing helplessly in front of a whole row of shelves full of books on southeastern history. Without some clue about what Wally had wanted her to know, she could paw through all those books for months without finding anything.
Baffled, Faye left Wally’s note in the sink to dry and got in the shower. Sometime in her shampoo cycle, between lather, rinse, and repeat, Wally’s contorted face crept into her mind and wouldn’t leave. He may have been a scoundrel, but he’d been her friend, too. Faye was just so sad to get him back, only to lose him forever.
His last words came back to her.
Remember before, Faye.
She and Wally went back a long way. There was plenty of “before” for her to remember.
***
Faye considered a night of dreamless sleep in her own bed to be the very definition of heaven. When she woke, Joe had already gone fishing and cleaned the morning’s catch, which was a fair measure of how badly she’d needed the sleep. A breakfast of grilled fish that couldn’t have been fresher quelled her nervous stomach.
If she purposefully kept her thoughts on the here-and-now, ignoring her insistent memories of Douglass in his coffin and Wally lying dead in her lap, then she felt almost ordinary…until she flashed back on the sound of Emma’s voice as she told her that Douglass was gone. Or until Wally’s weak, thready voice intruded on her ears, insisting that she “remember before.”
“The sheriff told me to bring you back to see him this morning. He said he’d want to talk to you some more. About Wally and all that stuff.”
Faye nodded. The fish in her mouth tasted like smoke and sea. It seemed a lot more real than the bizarre happenings that had taken the lives of two of her friends. The sand, the fish, the warm air, the sea smells, the fresh breeze—these things were real. The dead bodies of her friends were not.
What had left their bodies at the moment of their death? She had watched Wally pass from this world to the next, yet she couldn’t say what had happened. One minute, he was himself, alive, carrying around with him the memories of their past together. The next minute, her friend was inarguably dead, but she couldn’t say how she knew it. She certainly couldn’t say how it happened. Well, there was the bleeding hole in his back, but that wasn’t what she meant. What had changed when Wally went away and left her sitting alone, with a man’s empty shell in his lap?
Thinking of these things gave Faye vertigo. She regained her balance by reminding herself that she had no control over the things life hit her with, but she could control how she reacted to these blows. Her natural response to pain was to fight it. She could fight her friends’ murderers by helping Sheriff Mike bring them to justice.
Faye was a little fuzzy on how she might do that. The sheriff had said he wanted her to pursue the stories behind Bachelder’s flask and the emerald. It wasn’t clear to her how learning that history would help but, like the sheriff, she had a tenuous feeling that the events of the past week were connected. She would follow the story as best she could, for Douglass and Wally, and to satisfy her own ferocious curiosity. One topic that she was uniquely qualified to pursue was the emerald. At the first opportunity, she would be retracing her professional steps, trying to find the precise spot where she dug it up, so she could dig there again.
Her pulse quickened when she thought of what she might find. Anything. That was the part of archaeology that had ensnared her like a narcotic. She might find more emeralds. She might find golden links of the chain that had held them together. She might find a clue to identify the person who lost them, or who put them in the ground. Or she could find nothing but dirt.
But first, she would do something that was more immediately and obviously useful. She would meet with the sheriff and dredge up every last memory of her final moments with Douglass and Wally. It would be painful, but it was the least she could do for her dead friends.
***
Emma had bought a new door. Of course, she’d bought a new door. She couldn’t exactly leave the front of her house open to the wind and rain. Faye realized that she must have had the door replaced before the funeral, because Emma was a woman who showed the public her best face. She would not have let half of Micco County walk through a mangled entryway. This meant that Faye had walked blindly through the new door, many times, oblivious to the change.
Coming upon the new door caught her up short. It was beautiful, with ornate patterns of leaded glass, but it wasn’t the door she’d shuffled through over the years, carrying loads of books or boxes of dirty artifacts. It wasn’t the door where Douglass had met her so many times with a smile and a hug. He would never see this door. She hurried into the house so that she wouldn’t have to look at it.
Emma led Faye and Joe to the kitchen table, where she and the sheriff and Ross were already nursing huge mugs of coffee. Magda was frowning at the glass of milk in front of her. Coffee had kept her afloat through graduate school and all her years of chasing tenure and then the late-night hours that even tenured professors kept. But coffee taints breast milk, so Magda was stuck drinking cow’s milk for a while longer. Caffeine hunger did not improve her disposition. Cuddling a baby did, but she’d left Rachel with a babysitter so that she could concentrate on the task at hand.
“I liked Wally,” she said, “but he could be a son-of-a-bitch. Several people at this table have felt like killing him from time to time. Does anybody have a clue who actually did it?”
The sheriff riffled through the papers in front of him. “It
looks
like everybody in the restaurant…bar…whatever Liz calls it…was accounted for. I’d say some of those alibis were stronger than others. For example, we’ve got that big table of re-enactors in the back corner. They were all drinking. They all say that nobody left the table for at least half an hour before Wally was killed. I’m not so sure anybody would’ve noticed if one of ’em got up and went to the bathroom, though. As much as they were drinking, I’d be jiggered if there wasn’t a steady stream of guys going to take a piss.”
“I remember Wayland and Nita were sitting off to themselves,” Joe said. “Doesn’t seem like anybody would’ve been keeping a real close eye on them.”
Emma, whose head had been bowed over her coffee cup in deep thought, jerked her head up. The sheriff was trying to say “Liz says they never left the bar,” but Emma wasn’t letting him hold the floor.
“Did you say Wayland? Wayland Curry?”
“Yes,” the sheriff said, shoving his reading glasses down his nose so that he could focus on Emma. “You know him?”
“He was the biggest problem employee Douglass ever had. You name it, he did it. Sleeping on the job. Fighting on the job. Faking an injury. Douglass kept giving him chances, until he stole a wad of bills out of the petty cash. Then, after he got fired, the guy had the gall to sue for wrongful termination. He had no case, but Douglass fought hard, anyway, because he felt like the accusation was such a blot on his reputation.”