Isolation (19 page)

“I hear what you're saying about how you were out on the porch all night, and I appreciate you telling the sheriff about it.”

“But?”

“But it's not proof that you didn't go to sleep for a little while. Or that Dad didn't find a way to slip past you, real quiet.”

“I would have heard—“

“Probably you would've heard. But probably ain't proof.”

Joe wasn't looking at her. He was looking out at the water where his father would have been navigating a boat in the dark, if he'd taken a surreptitious trip ashore to attack Delia.

“It ain't proof,” he repeated. “I guess what I'm trying to say is this. I'm real grateful that you're defending my dad this way. I believe every word you say. I believe everything you showed me on your phone. Still, all of those things added together don't make me as certain-sure as you are that he ain't guilty.”

***

Joe had taken Michael back downstairs, leaving Faye to look out at the water, alone, wondering how Joe could stand to let his father stay in the house if he thought the man might be a rapist. Or a killer.

The vibration of the phone in her pocket interrupted her thoughts.

When she answered it, Sheriff Mike's voice said “Hello.”

“Long time no talk. How's Magda?”

“Working too hard. She needs to retire, so she can do nothing but drink coffee and gossip. Just like me. She says she's too young to retire, and she is, but that don't mean I'll quit pestering her to stop working and start sitting around, passing the time of day with her loving husband. Anyway, I've got some more gossip for you.”

“Lucky me.”

“Since you were so interested in poor Delia Scarsdale's situation this morning, I thought you might want to hear the latest scuttlebutt. It's about Liz this time. You knew her a lot better than Miss Scarsdale, so I thought you'd be even more interested in this piece of gossip.”

Faye looked toward shore, as if she could see the marina from where she sat. As if she could see the shallow water where Liz met death. “Have they found her killer?”

“No. But Tommy Barnett has been running his mouth.”

“About what? Does he know who killed her?”

“It's not about who killed her. It's about who was the mastermind behind Tommy's waste dumping business.”

“I thought Tommy was behind it, if it makes any sense at all to call Tommy a mastermind. He was the one getting paid for it.”

“Well, that's just the thing.” Sheriff Mike paused, like the true storyteller that he was. Storytellers made people wait for the good stuff.

“
What's
just the thing?”

“Tommy says that he wasn't the only one getting paid for dumping. He says that Liz was the one who ran the operation. He said people would come to her with their chemical problems. She would put them in touch with Tommy and then he'd make those problems go away, no questions asked. He claims that she took most of the money and let him take the risks and do the scut work.”

“Does that even matter?” Faye asked in a voice loud enough to overload the Sheriff Mike's phone speaker. “He's guilty. Gerry Steinberg and those other deputies saw him break the law with their own eyes. Why are they letting him accuse Liz when she's not here to defend herself?”

“You asked if it mattered whether Liz was involved? No, it doesn't. Yes, it does. It's complicated.” He took a breath, but kept talking without taking a real storyteller's break, probably because he didn't want Faye to yell at him again. “Realistically, I doubt he'll serve jail time. He was flagrant about his dumping, but compare the results to the Deepwater Horizon spill and you'll get a sense of scale. And it's technically a first offense, especially if he tries to claim he didn't know he was breaking the law until Steinberg chased him down.”

“So. No jail time. What's he worried about? Fines? Penalties?”

“Yes. There's a fancy formula for calculating his fines. It will look at environmental damage Tommy caused. It will consider how much he gained, money-wise. It will consider whether his violation was deliberate or chronic—“

“Yes to both. Deliberate. And chronic.”

Sheriff Mike continued as if she hadn't interrupted him. “And then the powers-that-be will run all those factors into a blender and come out with a number that says what Tommy has to pay for his environmental sins. If they don't think his crime is worth the expense of a big court case, they have an incentive to keep the penalty low.

“Define ‘low' for me.”

“If the fine is under ten thousand dollars, they can handle things administratively without going to court.”

Was ten thousand dollars really “low” in the environmental world? What did this say about the cost of the work Deputy Steinberg was doing on Joyeuse Island? Faye and Joe could soon be as broke as Tommy Barnett.

“You know they're never going to get ten thousand dollars out of Tommy,” she said.

“Hell no. But the penalty can't be too low, because the state wants to make Tommy an example to other people. Penalty calculations are a dark art. The fine goes down if the environmental damage is considered to be low, but how do you judge that anyway? Sometimes community service or public education can substitute for the dollars-and-cents fine. And I think that's what he's aiming for, myself.”

“Who's aiming for what?”

“Tommy. You'd think his case is black-and-white. Guilty or not guilty. But not really. If he's not going to jail, and I don't think he is, his whole game comes down to one thing. Getting that fine as low as possible. So why not shift the blame onto a dead woman? Make himself look like the little guy she took advantage of. Hell. I think he went out as soon as the sheriff finished questioning him and tossed the rest of his sludge inventory.”

“Why would he do that?”

“So he don't get caught with so much stuff that he looks like a major player. It was a stupid move, but his best defense is to make himself look as stupid as possible.”

“Which won't be hard.”

“No, ma'am, it won't. The powers-that-be know that he doesn't have any money to pay a fine, so he's hoping they'll think ‘Why not just sentence this dumbass to get some education and do some community service? Case closed.'”

So Tommy was going to try to save himself by dragging Liz's name through the dirt. Faye was not amused.

“Faye, you knew Liz and you know Tommy. Do you think he's telling the truth? Was she involved?”

“Nope. I've got no proof. I just don't think she'd do what he said. She loved living on the water. I don't think she'd have been willing to pollute it.”

“I don't, either,” Sheriff Mike said.

Faye looked out the cupola's windows, over the roof of her old home and over her island and out to sea. She didn't have anything left to say, not even good-bye. She just sighed and said, “Lying about the dead is really bad karma,” then she hung up.

Sheriff Graham and Gerry Steinberg had started Faye's day shortly after dawn. Faye's morning had been stressful and busy and it wasn't even over. What was she going to do with the rest of her Friday?

For the first time in a long while, the answer wasn't “Go dig some random holes and see what you find.” Today, the answer was “Go find out the truth about Liz.”

Her husband's father was at risk of being railroaded for attacking Delia and maybe for killing Liz. Liz herself was in danger of being labeled as an environmental criminal, and she wasn't here to defend herself. The person who broke into Emma's house was still at large, leaving her vulnerable. Any fool could see that there was a good likelihood that all Micco County's unsolved crimes were related.

All those crimes swirled around Sly Mantooth, but they also touched Oscar Croft. Faye had a photo proving that he'd been at the marina shortly before Liz's death. He had asked Emma for a date on the very evening of her break-in, then he'd showed up unannounced on her doorstep when she was slow in returning his call. He was only a room or two away from Delia when she was attacked.

Or was he?

Delia didn't see her attacker. Could it have been Oscar who came in through her window and blindfolded her with her own bedclothes? Then, when she got away and went looking for him, did he do nothing more than slip out her window and come back inside through a door?

Connecting Oscar to Tommy was more of a reach, but no matter. Exploring the connections between Oscar, Liz, Emma, and Delia was the important thing.

So how was she going to do that?

Oscar had been trying to get an appointment with Faye for weeks to talk about his ancestor Elias, but she'd been dodging him. As much as she hated to admit it, Faye knew that the time had come to stop avoiding Oscar Croft.

Chapter Twenty-five

Faye couldn't believe that Oscar had agreed to see her that very afternoon, inviting her to the same house where Delia had just been through so much. She kept her surprise to herself, since she knew more about Delia's attack than she was supposed to know. The news had already hit the Internet, but the reports had shielded the victim's identity and the location of the crime. Still, this was Micco County and even people who weren't best friends with the former sheriff's wife had already figured out what was going on.

The mere fact that the victim had been a woman staying in a rented house near Panacea gave away a lot. There weren't that many tourists hanging around the Florida Panhandle in November. Anyone who had met Delia probably suspected she was the victim, but Faye was going to pretend that she wasn't one of them.

Faye was also going to pretend that she didn't know the sordid details that hadn't reached the Internet rumor mill—the sheets twisted into ropes, the wrists tied to bedposts, the man's belt abandoned by the intruder. She was riding herd on her own imagination, working hard to block the image of a sheet over her head, tied into a cowl that blocked all vision and clung to her face when she inhaled. This was a place where sanity did not want her to go.

As far as Oscar was concerned, Faye knew nothing when she picked up the phone and dialed his number.

“Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth!” he had said. “Thanks for getting back to me! I know your work keeps you busy. I can meet with you any time you like. Today, even!”

So here she was, standing on his doorstep, and she had only just realized as the door swung open that she had been visibly pregnant when she last saw Oscar Croft. If he asked her about the baby, she might have to run away and hide.

He didn't. He was far too focused on his hope that Faye could solve the mystery of Elias Croft and his fate. The intensity of that focus struck Faye as over-the-top, even abnormal.

“So,” he said, anxious to begin questioning Faye before her butt even hit the couch, “we haven't talked for awhile. Have you had any thoughts on my search for Elias Croft? What's my next step?”

They sat together in the living room of Oscar's rented house and, from her perch on its comfy couch, Faye could see the kitchen and four doors. Behind those doors were at least two bedrooms, probably three, and a bathroom or two. And behind one of the bedroom doors was probably Delia, curled into a fetal position and recovering from a waking nightmare. It's where Faye would have been, in her place.

Maybe Delia was nursing abrasions on her wrists and ankles, where sheets had rubbed hard against her skin as she fought against being tied. Maybe her knees were black with bruises from throwing herself off the bed and crawling to the door, still bound and crying for help.

Oscar seemed happy, even chipper. Even if he and Delia were nothing more than friends, how could he be having this calm conversation with Faye when his friend must be suffering?

Oscar was wearing short sleeves and shorts. Faye searched his arms and legs for bruises that might have been sustained while struggling with Delia, but there were none. And how paranoid was it for her to think of this annoying but harmless old man as a rapist? If she planned to go fully down the path of paranoia, she needed to consider whether Delia could have tied the sheets to her own wrists, then rubbed the skin raw. Could she have thrown herself on the floor, hard, to give herself bruises that would back up her claim of an attempted rape?

What was it about these two people that made her imagine such horrible things? Before they had arrived in Micco County, her suspicions about an attack like this one would have centered on sleazy characters like Tommy Barnes, not on a retired businessman or, dear God, on the victim herself.

Oscar crossed his legs at the knee, like a man on a 1960s talk show, and went straight to the point. “So where were we? How much did I tell you about the mystery of what happened to my great-great-grandfather after the Civil War?”

“You said he didn't come home, but that his wife received many letters over the years. She got letters from Elias himself during the war, and they were the kind of passionate letters a wife expects to receive from a husband who is away at war. She had no reason to expect that he wouldn't come home to her. Then the letters stopped without warning, about the time the war was over.”

“Well, to be honest, whether she had warning is in the eye of the beholder.”

“What do you mean?”

They were sitting at either end of the long couch. Oscar scooched toward the middle, leaned just one centimeter too far into Faye's personal space and said, “I'm sorry, I should have offered you something to drink. Would you like a soda? Some coffee? Some water?”

She politely declined, but he didn't retreat to his side of the sofa.

Leaning back a centimeter and hoping this sent the right signal, she said, “You were going to explain that maybe Elias' wife had warning that he would disappear, but that the warning was in the eye of the beholder. Or something like that. What, exactly, are you trying to say?”

Oscar held his ground. He had staked a claim on the sofa's center pillow and he wasn't giving it up. Faye's butt was up against the sofa's arm and she was leaning back on it hard.

“My great-great-grandmother grieved over her husband's last letter till the end of her days. It didn't survive, so I've only heard about it third-hand. Fourth-hand. Whatever. Her son told his son, my grandfather, about it. I think she interpreted Elias' last letter as being a typical wartime love letter, at least when it first came. He said he loved her and he missed her and he said some version of the thing that so many soldiers say, ‘If I don't come home, remember me but find a way to be happy.'”

“Had he said this kind of thing before?”

“Yes. She said he had, and that she didn't see that this letter was different until she realized it would be his last. Years later, after his sword was delivered, she read the letter again and saw that he had been saying good-bye.”

“And then after that letter came, she started getting letters from a woman demanding that she come down south and get her husband, because he was living in sin on an island with a woman of color?”

“So I was told. Are you sure I can't get you something to drink?”

Oscar looked suddenly uncomfortable, maybe because he had realized that he was having this conversation with someone who was herself a woman of color, but he didn't back away.

Faye pressed him to keep speaking. “Years later, she got another letter, this one claiming that he was being held prisoner.”

“Yes. By a woman named Cally Stanton. Have you heard of her?”

“I've searched every official record I can find. There's no mention of Cally Stanton in any of them.” This evasion was conveniently true. He'd asked if she'd heard of Cally Stanton, and this was a name she'd heard all her life, but she knew Cally to be invisible in the official records, because she'd checked, over and over again.

Failing to tell Oscar the whole truth was a lie—a lie of omission, but still a lie—but she plunged ahead. “You don't have anything? None of the letters? Not even the sword?”

“The sword? It's the only part of the story I can hold in my hands. Yes, I have it.”

Oscar fetched the sword quickly from a room that she presumed was his bedroom. It was wrapped like a mummy in yellowing linen. He laid the bundle across his lap, unrolled one layer of the linen, and pulled out a pair of cotton gloves stored there. Faye thought that keeping the gloves so handy was a clever way to keep himself from ever being tempted to touch the old sword with a fingertip laden with destructive oils.

With the gloves on his hands, Oscar finished unwrapping the sword, folding the linen and laying it beside him on the sofa cushion. Pulling the sword from its sheath, he held both sheath and sword out toward her on flat palms, as if he were a servant offering it to a master going to war.

“It's a Model 1860 Light Cavalry Saber. Brass guard. Steel scabbard. Most of the leather wrapping the grip is still intact.” He laid the sheath in his lap, turning it over to show her the other side, then he leaned over the sword. Still gazing at the sword, he ran a gloved finger lovingly across the flat side of the blade and the grip.

Faye didn't think he realized that he was too close to her. He seemed less like a lecher than like a man with no sense of personal space. She would guess that this deficiency had gotten him slapped a few times.

“Custer carried a sword like this. So did Jeb Stuart.”

Faye pulled away from him, but he and the sword leaned forward into the space she'd vacated. She wondered what he would say if she called his attention to the fact that Custer and Stuart had both died of battlefield injuries, but this would have been unfair. Their swords might not have been to blame for the famous generals' sad ends.

Instead, she said, “You told me that Cally Stanton sent this sword to Elias' wife. What did you say that her letter said?”

“Only that Elias had used his dying breath to ask Cally to send his sword home to his wife, and that he had asked her to send his love with it. I couldn't tell you why Cally Stanton was there when he died, not unless the other letter-writers were right. If she had imprisoned him and tortured him and killed him, she would have been there at the end.”

Faye's eye raked over the slight curve of the saber's blade. She was speaking more to herself than to Oscar when she said, “But why would she have written his wife to send her his love? Wouldn't a woman so evil have taunted her? To tell you the truth, I don't think somebody evil would have sent his wife anything at all. True evil would have left her wondering for the rest of her days.”

Something about the pile of linen was drawing Faye's eye. There was a stroke of green across one end of it, made out of silk thread with tiny even stitches. The fabric had been adorned with a garland of embroidered leaves, and Faye had seen this pattern before.

She was about to ask him to let her take a closer look at the old linen, but she was startled silent when one gloved hand reached toward her. Oscar touched her hand, then slowly brushed the back of his index finger up her bare arm. Oh, yes. This man was completely aware that he was invading her space.

She jerked her arm away from his finger and leaned back until the sofa's arm caught her in the lower back and she could go no farther. Even then, this man was too close to her.

She heard the sound of a door opening behind her, and Oscar cried, “Delia! How was your nap? Are you feeling better?”

He was immediately out of Faye's personal space and into Delia's. Taking the young woman by an arm, he guided her into an easy chair. “Can I get you something? Some tea? A sandwich?”

Unlike Oscar's unmarked wrists and forearms, Delia's arms did show battle wounds. Her hands were bruised, and the skin around her wrists was raw. Another bruise showed on her forehead, beneath a fluffy fringe of hair. Delia hadn't had bangs before. The thought of Delia in front of the bathroom mirror, snipping just enough hair to hide her wounds, went straight to Faye's heart.

Oscar patted the brand-new bangs tenderly, saying, “Faye came to talk to us about the sword and about Cally Stanton. Do you feel up to joining us?”

“Yes. If you'll get me a cup of tea.”

Delia smiled and Faye was impressed with her resilience. Faye herself had shown a noticeable lack of resilience lately.

“You can help us track down Cally Stanton?” Delia was indeed resilient. She was already looking Faye coolly in the eye, while backing her into a commitment she didn't want to make.

“I'm afraid I can't do any more than what you've already done. You're the historian, so your skills at tracking down primary sources are at least as good as mine. I haven't found any trace of Cally Stanton in public records. Have you?”

“No. But if I know Oscar, we'll be living in this house until somebody does. You don't pile up accomplishments the way Oscar did without being willing to chase your goals longer than you probably should. He's really a very impressive man. Don't you think?”

Faye wanted to say, “Impressively sleazy,” but Oscar arrived with a cup of hot water and a tea bag, saving Faye from having to answer. She studied Delia as the woman reacted to Oscar fussing over her tea.

Delia hadn't drawn back when Oscar leaned too close. She had worn a tender twist of a smile while she watched him stir sugar into her tea. Most telling of all, she had accepted the cup with an open hand that lingered on the timeworn hand offering it.

Faye might have been disturbed by Oscar's inappropriate invasion of her space, but Delia was not. This meant that his manner toward Delia wasn't inappropriate at all. She liked it. She liked him.

Faye needed to think again about Oscar's relationships with Liz and Emma and, given his excursions into her own personal space, with Faye herself. Mostly, though, she needed to revisit her prejudices about Oscar's relationship with Delia. So he was forty years older than she was. Big deal. Some people would remind her that it wasn't all that usual for Faye to be eight years older than her husband.

“I'm glad you were able to come talk to Oscar about our research, Faye,” Delia said. “I know you're busy, but is it possible you could meet us at Mrs. Everett's museum sometime? She has access to some databases there that are way too expensive for me to buy on my own. Besides, only a fraction of her collection is on display and she's given me access to the archived pieces. So many of those artifacts was found right here in Micco County. There could be things in Emma Everett's museum that Cally Stanton herself touched.”

“Or Elias Croft.” Oscar stroked Delia's hand absentmindedly as he spoke. Delia let him.

Faye and several crops of interns under her supervision had curated everything in Emma's museum. If Delia found a relationship between Cally Stanton and any physical object in that museum, Faye would eat that object.