Isolation (16 page)

“No. She mentioned the background samples, but I forgot to ask about the wood. Arsenic?”

“Yeah. Not a lot, but that chunk of wood was definitely impregnated with arsenic, as if it had been soaked in a solution of it. You might find that in modern pressure-treated wood, but I don't have a clue what could have gotten into it before your grandmother was a kid. I'm listening if you've got any ideas. Hell. Maybe you have a picture from 1912 of somebody emptying a big can marked ‘arsenic.'”

“If my great-grandmother had owned a camera and if the pictures had survived a few hurricanes then, yes, I might have that picture for you. My family has never had much, so they've never thrown much away. I'll keep feeding you information, if you keep doing the same.”

The sheriff said, “We're the law. You're supposed to tell us stuff. We don't have to return the favor.”

Gerry said, “Not to argue with you, Sheriff, but I'm required to include a summary of the site's environmental history in my report. Faye is the best source of information I've got. To get the best information out of her, I'm going to have to share at least some of what I know.”

“If you must, Detective. Within reason.”

Faye had felt powerless for so long. The loss of the baby, the loss of Liz, the expenses that would come due for Gerry's cleanup…all of these things had taken their toll. Feeling the power balance of one area of her life shift in her direction gave her an adrenaline rush so pronounced that she could feel her legs shake.

“If you tell me enough, Gerry, and if you're lucky,” she said, “I might just write that report for you.”

The sheriff looked like he wanted to distract her from her newfound power. He leaned over to look at the photo and pointed at a spot near its bottom. He asked, “Who's that woman standing by the fuel pump?”

“Her name's Wilma,” Faye said. “As far as I know, every cent that passes through her hands comes from sales from that one pump. She must be hurting by now.”

So this was Wilma Jakes. Rainey had thought so. That's why he'd asked. He studied her jowly face, her stout legs, her resolute stance. This woman might be able to take him in a fist fight, and she would probably fight dirty.

He looked at his watch. Wilma herself would arrive in half an hour with the evidence about Liz's killer that she'd promised. The timing could be tricky. He didn't want to interrupt Faye, who was voluntarily giving him evidence he could use in the Barnett case, but when Wilma arrived, Faye would have to go. Testimony about a murder trumped information about environmental contamination. It just did.

Together, the three of them thumbed through the snapshots, and Rainey tried to hurry things along. The faces of Faye and her family passed by, time and again. He saw Liz and her son Chip. He saw Tommy. He saw random strangers, dozens of them, with nothing in common except that they were standing near Tommy's maintenance shop. If Liz were still alive and if Tommy had kept his sludge to himself, these pictures would mean nothing to anybody who wasn't emotionally attached to the people caught by the camera.

“You can keep the pictures. I have copies,” Faye said, and Rainey gathered them in his hand, stacking them neatly like a deck of poker cards.

The picture of Liz was on top. There was something profoundly vital about the way her muscled arm swung out to encompass Faye's little boy. Something alive. Sheriff Rainey couldn't look away from her face and, judging by their silence, neither could Faye or Gerry.

“Who's that in the background?” Faye asked, bringing her eyes close to the picture, then tapping a fingernail on its upper left corner. Five or six people were coming around the building, heading from the parking lot to the restaurant door. They would have been nothing but blurs, indistinguishable in the distance, if it weren't for Delia's bright hair blowing into the weathered face of the man at her side.

Sheriff Rainey watched the archaeologist pull her reading glasses from her satchel. After a few seconds' study, she gave a firm nod. “Yep. It's them. Delia and Oscar. This means that they ate breakfast at Liz's sometime in the past two weeks. Breakfast is when my family usually eats at the marina.”

“These pictures are only two weeks old?” Gerry said. “You mean I've been staking out Tommy's operation for more than a year and I missed those rusty drums behind his shed?”

The sheriff said, “You weren't here every day. You had other things to do. I know, because I assigned them to you. You must have come on days when he didn't have any customers. Luck of the draw.”

“I don't see a date on the picture,” Gerry said. “You're sure it's recent? You were there?”

“No, I wasn't. But I know when it was taken because Sly has only been here for two weeks.”

“Oh, I thought he lived with you.”

The sheriff saw Faye flinch at the suggestion that her father-in-law might do something drastic like move in with them, but she said nothing. She only shook her head.

“Has your husband mentioned seeing Delia and Oscar here?”

“As far as I know, he doesn't even know who they are. You can ask him, if you like.”

The sheriff noticed that this woman who had gone to so much trouble to bring him all these photos didn't offer to ask her own husband. This was interesting, but it seemed immaterial. He'd ask Joe himself, if he decided it was important. It was time to end this interview, so that Wilma could come tell them what she knew.

He shifted his weight forward and Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth unconsciously shifted forward in response to body language that said, “This interview is over.”

She got up and said, “Let me know if I can help in any other way. Maybe I could look at the pictures again or tell you what I remember about Liz or…it doesn't really matter. If I can help you find her killer, call me.”

As Faye turned to go, someone emerged from the woodsy area bordering the marina, as if she, too, was watching their body language and responding.

“Who's that?” Steinberg asked.

Sheriff Rainey tapped a finger on the bottom of the top picture in the stack in his lap, the one where Wilma stood by her fuel pump while Liz greeted little Michael Longchamp-Mantooth. If Steinberg's wits were about him, that finger tap would be enough to let him know who he was looking at.

Rainey himself would have known who it was, even without Faye's photograph. It was Wilma Jakes, arriving ten minutes ahead of schedule for their chat. Now it really was time for Dr. Faye Longchamp-Mantooth to get in her boat and go.

Chapter Twenty-two

Faye couldn't have guessed Wilma's age within two decades. Maybe she was sixty-five. Maybe she was forty-five.

Wilma wore dusty flip-flops that gave an aged shuffle to her walk, but her shoulder-length hair was still more brown than gray, so Faye guessed that she was on the young end of that twenty-year span. Her worn facial skin was hollowed at the cheeks. Faye watched her watery eyes shift from the sheriff to Deputy Steinberg to Faye, then back to the sheriff for another visual sweep. They were an odd color. Like her hair, Wilma's eyes were brown going to gray. Even her face was tanned to the gray-brown of an unpainted wooden house.

Aged shuffle or not, Wilma was upon them before Faye had shouldered her satchel and walked away. “I saw somebody. The night Liz got killed. I saw somebody.”

Faye saw the sheriff catch her eye, and she knew what he was trying to communicate. He wanted her to walk away.

So that's what she did. Or it's what she tried to do. Wilma had other ideas. The woman seemed to have come to the sheriff, ready to talk, and she wasn't interested in waiting until they were alone.

“The guy I saw, the one I told you about. The one I saw on the night Liz got killed? He was prowling around the outside of the building, peeping in the windows. I saw him walk over to Tommy's shed, too. It was a little bit after Liz closed up shop for the night, so there wasn't nobody else around.”

“Did you recognize him?”

“Naw.”

“Would you know him if you saw him again?”

“Naw. Didn't see his face, but he was a big man. I know that. Tall, for sure. Looked like a man with some muscle. Liz kept the parking lot lit up every night until she went to bed, so I got a good look at his back, but he never turned his face in my direction.”

“Did you see a gun?”

She shook her head. “All I can tell you is that he was big and he was wearing blue jeans. And work boots.”

Faye didn't look around, so she couldn't see the sheriff's eyes boring into her back. He wanted her gone. She was cooperative to a point, meaning that she kept walking, but she wasn't totally cooperative. She walked slowly and she took small steps.

The sheriff had eyes. He could see that she wasn't moving with any speed, but there was nothing he could do about it. He didn't dare interrupt Wilma to bark at Faye. What if Wilma decided to stop talking?

“Was anybody with this mysterious big man?”

First, Wilma said “Naw,” but then she gathered herself to her full height and spoke again, clearly this time. “No.”

“Did you see him leave?”

“No.” Her voice was firm. “First, I saw him in the parking lot. Then he walked around the far side of the bait shop, and I didn't see him no more.”

“What time was this?”

“Ain't sure.”

“Was it before or after you heard the gunshot?”

“Didn't hear any gunshot.”

Faye slowed to a trudge, knowing that the sheriff was probably wishing he could shoot
her
right about now.

“If you were close enough to see somebody, then you must have been close enough to hear a gunshot.” Rainey's voice sounded so reasonable that he must be working hard to make it sound that way.

“I didn't like the look of that man sneaking around. I got in my car and drove to the Sunset Lounge. It's in Panacea. I stayed till closing time.”

“Can somebody confirm that you were at the Sunset Lounge?”

“Sure. I'm there a lot of nights. They know me.”

“Did you see Liz on the night she died?”

Wilma gave him a firm no.

“Have you seen any suspicious activity since then?”

Again, she said, “No.”

When he said “Had you ever seen any suspicious activity before that?” Faye wondered if he was just trying to exhaust all the possible questions that Wilma could answer with “No.” Anyone could tell that the woman had come to tell the sheriff only so much and no more.

Faye picked up her pace. She'd heard all that Wilma was going to say. If she put enough distance between herself and the sheriff before Wilma walked away, he wouldn't be able to yell at her for dawdling.

As expected, Wilma quickly drew away from the two lawmen. By the time Faye reached her own oyster skiff, Wilma was gone.

***

Faye had dawdled away the afternoon, walking the trails that circled her island until she was too tired to move. She had no destination. She just couldn't stand to see anybody, not the environmental scientists at their dig site on the other side of the island and not her family in the house at its heart. After a lot of walking, she had found a place where she could sit on the ground and lean against a tree. It was a good spot to do yet more timekilling web searches. The Internet wasn't going to tell her why Liz was dead or why her baby was dead, and it sure wasn't going to tell her how long she was going to feel this way, but it certainly was distracting.

At some point, she remembered that it had been a long time since she ate, and the banana and energy bar that she'd thrown in her satchel that morning were long gone. Since she'd promised herself that she would eat more, if only to keep Joe from worrying so much, it was time to go home.

As she walked quietly into the hallway of her home's ground-floor basement, her satchel felt so heavy in her hand that it seemed to drag the floor. She could smell chicken frying somewhere ahead of her, so she knew where Joe was. The slapping of bare feet on brick floor told her that Michael was on his way. She set down the satchel and dropped into the widespread crouch that usually kept her upright when her son launched himself into her arms.

As she waited for Michael to leap, his grandfather came into sight. “I knew you was home by the way the little fella's face lit up.”

When Faye saw that Sly held a wooden locomotive in one oversized hand and a coffee cup in the other, she realized two things. She realized that he was a big man who wore blue jeans and work boots. And she realized that she loved him for his coffee cup. She loved him for deciding that coffee was a better bet for him than whiskey. Every day, he made that decision again.

Maybe that love showed on her face, but all Sly said was, “Welcome home, Daughter. I believe my son has intentions of putting some meat on your bones. He's frying chicken
and
okra. And also some corn. He just slapped the pulley bone out of my hand 'cause he says it's your favorite piece of the bird. You better go eat it so's he'll quit yelling at me.”

So she did. She sat at the kitchen table, so close to the stove that Joe could fork food out of all of his skillets, straight onto her plate. She gnawed the rich meat of a chicken thigh right down to the bone. She used her fingers to pop crispy rounds of cornmeal-coated okra into her mouth like candy. Joe's corn, cut off the cob and fried in butter, dripped off her fork.

He didn't say anything. He just kept giving her food.

The pulley bone, a palm-sized hunk of white meat clinging to a wishbone, was an odd dessert, but she saved it for last. Then she wrapped the clean wishbone in a napkin and tucked it in her satchel for later. The time would come, sooner or later, when she would know what wish should be made with it.

***

The gargantuan meal had put Faye in bed before sundown. She had slept hard for five hours straight, and that was a better night's sleep than she'd had in a month, but now she was done. It would be a long time before the sun showed its face, probably more, and she needed something to occupy her mind.

Joe had been in bed maybe fifteen minutes. He was now sleeping like a man who'd cooked up ten thousand calories. She eased herself out from under the covers and found her satchel. Once out of the house, she opened it and pulled out her flashlight and Cally's oral history.

The flashlight led her out the basement door and up the stairs to the grand front porch of Joyeuse Island's big house. Curled up in a rocking chair, she read her great-great-grandmother's stories. Faye hadn't given up on finding Elias Croft.

She wondered whether Elias had been a common name in those days, because she remembered Cally mentioning a man named Elias who had lived on Joyeuse Island. She'd never had any reason to think that this man and the respectful Yankee captain had been one and the same. In fact, she had presumed that Elias had been one of the freed slaves who worked for Cally, but now she was beginning to wonder.

Cally's memoirs started before the Civil War and they stretched to the Great Depression. Based on what she remembered of Oscar's story, she hadn't had the impression that his Elias had lived into old age. Oscar's great-great-grandmother had received letters about her Elias for years, it was true, but she had died prematurely of consumption and she'd still managed to outlive him. So he'd likely died after the Civil War, but before the turn of the twentieth century.

The question to be found in Cally's journal was
when
a man named Elias had lived on Joyeuse Island. If Cally had known an Elias during the Depression, then he wasn't Elias Croft. If she knew him during Reconstruction, then perhaps he was.

Not sure where in the sheafs of paper to look for him, Faye flipped to random pages until a familiar passage showed itself. This story of Cally's Elias was overshadowed by a crisis that had nearly killed everyone on Joyeuse Island. It was a wonder that Faye had remembered his name in the first place.

***

Excerpt from the oral history of Cally Stanton,
recorded by the Federal Writer's Project, 1935

It was my job to keep the island provisioned, always. It was my job when the old Master was alive, and it was my job when my husband Courtney took over after the old Master died. After my husband Courtney died, it was still my job to stock the stores on this island, and it would be for all the rest of my days.

Young Courtney don't know she still needs me to keep things running, but she do. We raise most all our food, always did, but there ain't never been a time when we wouldn't have sorely missed the supply boat if it didn't come bring the other things I sent away for. Even during the War, the supply boat got out here now and then, and it was always a happy day when the boat come out here to Joyeuse Island.

Tea. Coffee. The supply boat brought us wheat flour and sugar, when I had the money. Most medicines, I could make for free out of weeds I found in the woods, but some of 'em needed to be bought and paid for. Castor oil comes in handy, sometimes, and cod liver oil, and Elias swore by something he said was a distilled homeopathic oil that come all the way from India. “Jowl mooker” is what he called it, and I do think it was a help to him at times.

The supply boat brought yard goods to sew up into clothes. Kerosene. Newspapers and books. Records, after we got the Victrola. It was all I could do to keep everybody on the island from a-gathering at the dock as soon as that boat come into sight, but I always shooed 'em away. How was I supposed to keep my accounts straight if I had a hundred people watching me tally up the deliveries?

I met the boat when it come in the rain and in the cold. I met the boat the day after we put my husband Courtney in the ground. I met the boat the morning of the day young Courtney come into the world. Many's the time I carried her on my hip down to the dock, my account books in my free hand. I go with her now, never mind how much she fusses when I mess with her bookkeeping. Only one day did I miss that boat, and it was the day I was in the bed with the yellow fever, me and everybody else living in my household and in the workers' cabins out back. Everybody on the island was down with yellow fever but Elias. I guess it was the only time he was happy to live all by hisself.

I was as scared as I ever been. I'd tended many a soul with yellow fever and I knew what it was like to die from it, blood a-running out your eyes and your mouth. Still, I think I would've crawled to that boat on my hands and knees out of nothing but habit, if I could just have got out of bed. Sometimes I think it's habits that keep us a-going. Breathing's a habit, and that's a fact.

Elias went down there to the dock, wrapped up in a scarf and hat in the full-out summertime—I told him not to go, but he did—and he told the boat captain how it was. The captain went straight back to shore and sent us a doctor.

We all lived, and I credit Elias and the captain and that doctor for a miracle. Nothing I ever done for Elias in all the years I knew him could add up to what he done for us that one day. He took a risk to do it, and he shouldn't have. I told him not to.

***

So there he was. Elias. Was this Elias Croft? Was the Yankee Captain Croft named Elias? Did anything in Cally's stories connect the two men? No, not that Faye could see.

Did those stories suggest that Cally killed either man or kept him captive? No. Did they clear Cally's name? No. She revealed no murderous feelings for the man she called simply “Elias,” and she'd seemed to have warm feelings about her encounter with “Captain Croft.” but that proved nothing.

Could Faye put a date on the story of Elias and the supply boat? Not really. Cally herself had said she met that boat for her entire adult life. But what about the part of the story that mentioned yellow fever? Faye remembered that the last big yellow fever epidemic in America had happened in New Orleans, sometime after the turn of the twentieth century, and this gave her an idea. She shot off a text to Magda:

Can't sleep, so I'm sitting on my front porch worrying about really important stuff like when the last big yellow fever epidemics came through this area. Late 19th-century, right? Were there any particularly bad years?

Magda turned her phone off at night, so she would wake up to this question. If Faye had resisted off-loading the question onto Magda, she would have lost any slender chance that she might go back to sleep, but now her mind could rest. More likely, her mind could find something else to fret about.