Isolation (3 page)

Sly checked her airway and started CPR. Joe wondered if they taught emergency resuscitation in prison these days.

Chapter Four

Faye was using her phone to take a picture of her latest pointless excavation. She'd dug down to groundwater, which wasn't very deep on Joyeuse Island, and she'd uncovered exactly nothing. Taking a picture of the wet hole seemed like a waste of electrons and pixels, but she was trying to at least go through the motions of working like a professional archaeologist. As she aimed the phone at the ground, it rang.

Joe's number was displayed on the screen and she heard his voice as soon as she put the phone to her ear.

“Something bad happened to Liz.”

“Tell me.”

“We found her floating off her dock. Shot in the back. Drowned, too, maybe, if she wasn't dead when she went in the water. We tried—Dad tried—to save her. The paramedics say she's been dead for hours. They've already taken her body away. Dad's talking to the sheriff now.”

Faye dropped to a crouch and put her palm on the ground to steady herself. “Liz? Oh, God. Liz? Who would have shot Liz? There's something wrong with a world where things like this happen.”

Joe said something that was probably “Yeah,” but she heard him choke on the word.

She tried to think of something else to say, but she couldn't. She just murmured “Okay,” when he said, “Michael's fine. I had some snacks for him and the new sheriff is letting him play with his badge. I think we'll be home by lunch.”

Faye tried to say good-bye, but she choked on that, too, so they both hung up.

***

Joe could tell that the new sheriff wasn't quite sure what to make of his father. Sly was weeping as if he'd lost a wife, while answering the sheriff's questions by confirming that he'd only known Liz two weeks. Liz had been nothing to Sly but a nice lady who'd cooked eggs for him about fourteen times, so Sheriff Rainey must have been confused by Sly's tears. Joe elected not to try to explain his father to Rainey, who had held office for a couple of years now, but whom Joe still considered “new” because he wasn't Sheriff Mike.

Sly was getting louder by the minute. “So young. She was too young to die. It's not right. It's just not right!”

“I know it's hard,” the new sheriff was saying, “but I need you to answer my questions. It's the only way I'm going to find out why your friend is dead.”

As the law officer spoke, he was making eye contact with Joe, communicating one silent word:
Help?

Joe wasn't surprised by his father's behavior. The man had never had a governor on his emotions, and he'd been as quick to rage when Joe was a boy as he was to grief now. The rage hadn't shown itself since he and his father became reacquainted. Yet. Joe's memories made him wary.

Looking at Sly was like staring into a distorted mirror. His father's shoulders and biceps, so like his own, were impressive for a man pushing sixty. Like Joe, he had the black mane of a Creek warrior. His hair was still as thick as Joe's, though he kept it cut to jaw length and it was streaked with white. Age had thickened his waist, but there was no paunch to his belly. His tears were streaking down skin coarsened by age but not yet wrinkled.

Joe could have given the sheriff a very good idea of why his father was overreacting to Liz's death, if he had trusted himself to speak. His dead mother had worn her red hair long.

***

Sheriff Ken Rainey studied the weeping man for a good long minute. He would give Sly Mantooth credit for honesty. He had been upfront about his time in an Oklahoma prison. Rainey had asked a desk-bound deputy to run Sly's history while he interviewed him.

As it turned out, the elder Mantooth's criminal record wasn't a long one, but his one offense had taken him straight to the pen. Truck drivers who decide to sell their transportation services to the highest not-legal bidder tend to be quick casualties in the War on Drugs.

Sheriff Rainey had no love for the people who sold and transported the mind-twisting substances that had ruined and then ended his brother's life, but he was fair. Men like Sly, who had lived several decades without a single instance of violence blotting their criminal records, rarely hauled off and killed somebody late in life. He wouldn't say it never happened, but murdering thugs were not usually born at the tender age of fifty-eight.

He nodded at the other witness to Liz's murder scene, the taller and younger man who was silently helping his little son throw rocks in the water. Joe Wolf Mantooth gave every indication of having known the dead woman well. If Sly Mantooth did not look like a murderer, then Joe looked like a Vatican-certified saint. Either of them was physically capable of throwing a mortally wounded woman into the water to drown, but Sheriff Rainey didn't think either of them had done it. He had seen a tear leak out of the corner of the younger Mantooth's eye as he watched his son, and he suspected that this man wept a lot less easily than his father did.

Rainey had questioned them both. He would be keeping tabs on them, but it was time to let the Mantooth men, all three of them, go home.

***

Joe was ready to load his father and Michael into his john boat and head for Joyeuse Island. It was time to make one last phone call before cranking the motor. When Faye answered, he said, “We're heading home.”

The cell phone's reception was predictably terrible, but Joe could hear Faye clear her throat before she answered him. He knew she'd been crying for Liz. No, probably not. She was probably trying so hard not to cry that her throat had closed up on her. Joe thought Faye could use a good cry, but he didn't think she was ever going to let herself have it.

She said only, “Be safe.”

He said he would and hung up.

Joe balanced Michael on his hip while he stepped off the dock. Sly followed, settling himself in the john boat just as easily as Joe had. The older man was still wiping the back of his hand across his eyes now and then, and Joe had gotten over being irritated with his father over his public display of emotion. Liz's death
was
sad. She deserved some tears.

Faye had checked in by phone more than once since Joe had called her with the news, but she should have been here with him. Joe saw Faye's absence at Liz's death scene as a clear sign of the depth of her distress. The real Faye would have been in her skiff, headed for shore, before Joe had finished telling her what had happened.

Why did her absence upset him so? What, really, would her presence here have accomplished?

Nothing. Michael was oblivious to what he'd seen. Faye couldn't have quelled Sly's inappropriate grief. Joe himself would suffer over the loss of Liz, but he would do it later, in private, and Faye would be there. He didn't need Faye with him now, but he wanted her. He wanted his wife back, the wife who cared about everything. She cared too much sometimes, and it made her do stupid things for love, but that was so much better than the vague words of grief he'd heard coming out of the phone this morning.

“Oh, poor Liz,” she had said. “I can't believe it.”

She'd gone no further or deeper than that, and Joe thought he knew why. Acknowledging the hole Liz left in their lives would rip open another hole that hadn't begun to heal. Faye couldn't let herself think too much about the daughter they'd lost.

***

Faye picked up her trowel and tried to concentrate on her work, as if she were naïve enough to think that this would make her stop thinking about Liz. She stood on the far west end of Joyeuse Island, in a place where an outward curve in the coastline exposed her to sea breezes from two directions. A big live oak rose in front of her, but it was too far away to offer shade. Otherwise, she was surrounded by scattered small trees—saplings, really—and shrubby undergrowth that didn't cover the ground. Sandy soil dotted with weeds sloped to the waterline behind her. Technically, it was a beach, but it didn't look like much. Everything around her was November-drab. Her surroundings looked about as cheerful as she felt.

She scraped a thin layer of soil from the bottom of the unit where she'd been excavating. Then she thrust the point of her trowel into the soil again, midway up the unit's wall, trying to square up the corner. A pungent odor struck her. Immediately, a thin stream of clear liquid started running down the wall.

Using the side of her trowel to try to find the source of the leak, she uncovered just enough old and corroded metal to see that it came from a container that was gently curved, like a tank or a drum. The odor grew as the liquid continued running down the wall and puddling into the bottom of the excavation. Its chemical edge said, “Danger.”

The fumes continued to rise and she started imagining fires and explosions. Should she call 911? An environmental response team?

She backed away from the edge. Her miscarriage had been so recent that she still cradled a protective hand on her belly when she felt threatened. She did it now, as if there were still a baby inside who could be damaged if she breathed in something toxic. The part of her that had forgotten that she lost the baby was warning her not to breathe the fumes. And the part of her that blamed herself for the baby's death wanted her to breathe deeply and take her punishment.

Chapter Five

If his phone hadn't been lying face-up on the seat beside him, Joe would have missed Faye's next call. The motor's noise drowned both the phone's sound and its vibration, but he saw its face light up.

It was Faye. Joe knew before he answered that Faye had reached her limit. There had been a tautness to her mouth for a month, but this morning every line of her face said that she'd reached her tipping point. And then they'd lost Liz. All day, his phone had been in his hand more than it had been in his pocket. When he'd boarded the boat, he'd risked losing it to water damage by laying it on the seat next to his thigh. If his wife called him, he wanted to know.

Their dock was in sight, so he cut the motor and used the boat's own momentum to ease it into place. Faye's voice was higher-pitched than normal and it was loud in the suddenness of the motor's silence.

“Joe?”

Joe tucked Michael under one arm and left his father alone to secure the boat himself.

With both feet already pounding the dock, he said, “I'm coming, Faye. Tell me where you are.”

“I'm on the far west side of the island, under that big oak tree standing all by itself next to the water. Something's not right, Joe. I'm not sure what it is, but something's not right.”

***

Joe had been wrong. Faye hadn't broken. In fact, she looked more like herself than she'd looked since…well, in more than a month.

She had met them halfway, saying, “You need to carry Michael. It's not safe to let him run loose around here.”

Now she was crouched by an open excavation, trowel in one rubber-gloved hand and phone in the other, studying the problem at hand. The focused expression. The pursed lips. The curious squint that should have put wrinkles into the golden-brown skin around her eyes, but somehow hadn't managed it yet. The impatient shake of the straight black bangs that she was always too busy to get cut. This woman was the person he'd known for more than ten years.

Well, she was almost his familiar Faye. An occasional fidget in her thin shoulders said that all was still not well, but an unanswered question was a tonic for Faye. Now she had one.

Waving the phone, she said, “I checked the Internet. It told me I should call the emergency responders, so I did.”

Balancing Michael on his knee, Joe squatted beside her. He might have asked, “What's the emergency?” but his nose and eyes were already giving him the answer.

Faye leaned her head in the direction of the dark wet spot spreading slowly down the side of the pit and across its bottom. “Diesel?”

“Smells more like kerosene to me.”

She pointed her trowel at a dark area about midway up the far corner of the excavation. “See that spot? I was working on the corner of the unit, trying to square it up, and the point of my trowel grazed something hard. I felt something give a little, then release. Right away, something wet started bubbling out of the wall. I smelled something strong—kerosene, I guess—as soon as it happened.”

“What did the Internet say we should do?”

“I looked up legal reporting requirements for petroleum spills. Diesel, kerosene…they're both petroleum, and so's everything else that smells like that. The emergency response website said that spills bigger than twenty-five gallons have to be reported.”

“That ain't anywhere near twenty-five gallons,” Joe said, assessing the shallow puddle of glistening liquid at the bottom of the excavation.

“No,” his wife said. “Not yet. But it's still coming. Who knows where it's coming from or how to stop it or how bad it's going to get?”

Joe studied the darkened soil. “Going by how fast it's spreading from that one little spot, I'd say you poked a hole in a tank or a drum or something. Can't tell if that buried tank's more than twenty-five gallons without uncovering it. Couldn't we have tried that before calling in the environmental people?”

Faye held up a hand, sheathed in a protective glove. “That's why I've got these on. I was all set to dig up the tank myself, because we'd really rather not have emergency responders come out here. The website says that property owners can get saddled with paying for disposal of abandoned waste, even if they weren't the ones who dumped it. I thought maybe if I tried to uncover the problem, it might turn out to be just a leaky five-gallon bucket and we could legally keep this to ourselves.”

“But you called the emergency people instead of doing the digging yourself?”

She waved the phone again, pointing it at something behind Joe's back. “Unfortunately, this phone tells me that, in our case, it doesn't matter how big the spill is. If the state's waters are involved, we have to call.”

Joe looked where she pointed. An iridescent oil slick spread itself over the water behind him. It hadn't been there when he arrived.

Michael squirmed in Joe's hands as his parents watched the water's surface twinkle with each wave. Joe couldn't believe this was happening.

Joyeuse Island had miraculously escaped contamination by the Deepwater Horizon spill. Not even one tar ball had washed ashore. Now, after they'd dodged that bullet, an environmental cleanup crew was going to descend on their island? For what? For maybe a quart of liquid kerosene soaked into a small spot of soil? For an oil slick so tenuous that he expected it to be gone by dark? And did he hear Faye saying that there was a good chance they'd have to pay for whatever the cleanup ended up costing? This sounded like writing a blank check to a government agency that had absolutely no motivation to keep down costs.

“It's the law,” Faye said, and he wanted to remind her that there had been times when she'd been a little casual with the law, and this might have been the time to remember how that was done. Then she said, “And we don't know how bad it's going to get. Better to call in the professionals now than to find ourselves sitting in a puddle of petroleum goo.”

“You made the right decision.”

This was true, and Joe was glad to be able to say so. It proved that Faye's logic circuits hadn't completely failed. He was looking at a problem that could cost them a small fortune, but that problem had brought him a feeble indication that his hyper-rational wife hadn't completely slipped away into her grief. He watched the spot of kerosene-stained soil grow bigger by the minute and reminded himself that some things were harder to lose than money.

***

Joe stood in the shade and watched his home being overrun by environmental protection people. His father was enjoying this too much. Sly had been on the dock all afternoon, chatting up serious-faced scientists who obviously weren't interested in telling him every last detail about their jobs.

Joe didn't want to talk to those specialists, not at all. He wanted to lurk and observe, because he was a hunter and that was how hunters behaved when faced with potential adversaries.

Joe didn't like to think of environmentalists as potential adversaries. He shared their goals. Joe figured that he and Faye left a lighter footprint on the world than most. Their house was totally off the grid. They got their electricity from the sun, and their hot water, too. They'd rehabbed Joyeuse's old wooden rainwater cisterns, so they drank and bathed in what came out of the sky, just like the people who built those cisterns in the 1800s. Joe shot, netted, and grew most of what they ate.

Joe was pretty sure he cared about the earth just as much as the environmental protection people headed for the west end of Joyeuse Island, so they'd ordinarily be his friends. Today, they looked to him like an invading army.

Joe had met the scientists at Joyeuse Island's only dock, but he'd stayed there just long enough to meet the man in charge, Gerry Steinberg, and to say hello to the sheriff. Steinberg, a not-tall man with graying hair and hazel eyes, had said that he worked for the county environmental agency, but that he was also a sworn deputy working as a detective for the Micco County Sheriff's Department. He'd explained that this dual arrangement streamlined the investigation of accidents like this one, as well as the enforcement of environmental crimes.

Faye had said, “It's always good when two arms of the government can work together.”

Joe had thought, “Yeah, because maybe it will save us some time and money,” but he didn't say anything.

Faye had asked if they should call the investigator “Deputy Steinberg” and he'd said, “Oh, no. Just call me Gerry.”

This made Joe worry that Gerry was trying to be all folksy, so that they wouldn't notice when he ran up an environmental cleanup bill so big that it would have restored the Everglades to the pristine condition it had enjoyed before the Army Corps of Engineers got hold of it. Joe had noticed that the government was not totally consistent in its approach to environmental preservation. He had also noticed that anything the government touched became immediately expensive.

Gerry was already asking Faye questions as they left Joe and headed for the place where the spill was still happening in slow motion. The sheriff walking beside him hadn't said much. It was at least a ten-minute walk from Joyeuse Island's sole dock to the west end of the island, and the two were soon out of sight. Joe occupied himself by seeing just how high he could push Michael's tire swing without making him squeal in fear. Pretty high, as it turned out.

As he pushed the swing, he considered the size of the crew that had come to check out his little kerosene spill. He saw a need for Gerry, the site manager. He saw a need for Nadia, the chemist who would be using her boat-based lab to test samples of the stinking mess Faye had uncovered. He saw a need for the safety specialist, since somebody had to decide whether the tank (or drum or whatever) Faye had uncovered was going to explode. He maybe saw a need for the nameless helper following Gerry around.

He saw no need, however, for the sheriff himself to show up for this little tiny fuel spill. Something wasn't as it seemed, but Gerry and the sheriff were keeping their mouths shut.

***

While Faye led the sheriff and Gerry Steinberg across the island, Nadia had stayed behind on the work boat that served as a floating analytical laboratory. Joe had been watching her for half an hour. From his position behind Michael's swing, Joe could see her packing equipment into one of the coolers stacked on its deck. She periodically went into the cabin to fetch more technical-looking stuff. He could see a reason for every motion she made. This was not a woman who wasted time.

Sly's mouth had been moving since Joe walked away, so the petite scientist with the Spanish accent had been listening to his folksy come-ons for quite a while.

Sly had led with “Don't pretty ladies like you get tired of standing in a chemistry lab all day? Don't the smell ever get to you?”

Nadia had said only, “I like the way my lab smells.”

He'd followed up with “Can I help you load up any of that stuff? It looks too heavy for a little thing like you.”

She'd said nothing, just locked eyes with him as she hefted one fully loaded cooler to waist height and lowered it on top of another.

“Can I come on that boat and get you to explain that lab to me? I like the ladies, but I like smart ladies the most.”

“No, you can't come on the boat. Not unless your safety training is up to OSHA standards.”

Ouch. Shot down again. Sly didn't even look flustered. Men like Joe's father who flirted constantly must see it as like buying a lottery ticket. If you hit the jackpot, great. If not, fork over another dollar and buy another chance to win.

Nadia looked about Faye's age, early forties, so Sly wasn't quite old enough to be her father, but he was pretty close. Nadia's body language said she wanted to push him off the dock and then go wash her ears out with soap.

Holding up a hand to stop the flow of Sly's words, she took a phone call. Then she pulled something white and shiny out of a bag and put it on. It was a protective jumpsuit, probably disposable, and it covered her from neck to wrists and ankles. Despite the fact that she was putting it on over her clothes, she was going through the motions of getting dressed and Sly was taking an unseemly interest in watching her do that. Joe wanted to go wash his eyes out with soap.

Draping the strap of her equipment bag across her body from shoulder to hip, Nadia hoisted a small cooler. Sly reached out a hand to help her carry it, but Nadia didn't acknowledge him. Her long dirty-blond ponytail switched from side to side as she set off walking without looking back. Sly dogged her steps like a man who couldn't tell when he wasn't wanted.

It might be November, but the air blowing off the Gulf was still damp and sticky. Joe thought Nadia might soon be wishing she'd waited till she got where she was going before putting on a waterproof jumpsuit that would hold in every drop of sweat, but she seemed like a smart lady. She wouldn't make that mistake twice.

***

Faye squatted beside Gerry as they watched Nadia sample the contaminated soil at the bottom of Faye's archaeological excavation. Nadia's trowel wasn't shaped like Faye's. It looked more like a garden trowel, designed for scooping soil samples into a jar, rather than scraping the thin layers of archaeological work. Still, there was some overlap in their field technique. Nadia treated each gob of scooped soil with the same care Faye used to brush grains of dust away from something mysterious and long-buried.

Faye could see by the way Nadia handled the trowel and sample jar that they were clean and that they needed to stay clean. Nothing could go into the jar but that gob of soil. After Nadia hauled it back to the work boat, her portable laboratory was going to reveal every single chemical in that soil. Watching the chemist handle the samples with care, Faye felt confident that any god-awful contamination Nadia found would be honestly hers. She could own that god-awful contaminant, whatever it was.

Faye was also confident that, if Nadia's patience were to be tried much further, she would shove Joe's talkative and lecherous father off the lip of the excavation and into the stinking puddle of kerosene at its bottom. Presuming it was kerosene.