Isolation (5 page)

Faye launched into an inaudible tirade that involved more words than he'd heard her say in the past four weeks, combined. She and Magda beckoned to Emma, who joined them on the couch. The three of them put their heads together as Emma, with her own quiet voice, began to wave her hands and speak inaudibly.

His wife and her two best friends were an impressive sight—tiny Faye with her sleek black hair and quicksilver motions, broad-faced and blunt-spoken Magda, and the very patrician Emma with her crown of tight black-and-grey curls. They looked like a posse having a final meeting before going out for vengeance.

Joe wished he knew what they were planning. More to the point, he couldn't believe that he didn't
already
know what they were planning. Joe knew no one by the name of Oscar.

Joe had lived on an island with Faye for a decade. They worked together. They slept together. They did everything together. Their social life largely consisted of the people in this room.

Joe was a homebody who only left Joyeuse Island when it was absolutely necessary but, in recent weeks, even Joe'd had more interaction with the outside world than Faye. So who was Oscar and why was Magda calling him crazy and why did Faye's shadowed eyes grow even darker at the mention of his name?

***

Sly was back in the woods with his ax as soon as they got home from the funeral. When it got dark, he came inside looking for a lantern. At bedtime, Joe and Faye could see its distant glow from the window near the foot of their bed, and they could hear the rhythmic blows of his ax.

“You think he's planning to do that all night?” Even as she asked the question, Faye wasn't sure she cared about the answer. She doubted she'd be sleeping much, and she liked the sound of Sly's ax hitting fresh wood. It would be okay with her if he kept swinging the ax all night long.

“I don't think that lantern's battery will go all night. I don't know what Dad's thinking. He's gonna need a lot of trips with a wheelbarrow to bring the firewood he's splitting back here to the house. We got trees way closer to the house than that. He's just making work for himself.”

Faye had a notion that Sly was working far away so that the noise wouldn't bother them. She also had a notion that he didn't mind making work for himself because work made him feel better. He wasn't dim-witted enough to think that this was an efficient way to chop wood for heating the house.

The lantern's battery lasted late into the night. After the ax was silent and the lantern went dark, Sly built a campfire and just sat there a while. Faye knew he did this because she could see a soft reddish glow on the undersides of tree branches deep into the distance.

Joe must have seen the glow, too. After a time, he went outside, his big feet padding softly on the floor. It was his habit to commemorate the dead with a time of fireside meditation. She knew that he liked to mark the occasion by burning purifying herbs. He could probably find those herbs in the dark by their fragrance, gathering them along the path that took him to Sly and his fire.

It was a long time before the two men came back in the house. A single footfall and the slight creaking of an old door were the only things Faye heard as Sly passed. Joe moved with his usual utter silence. He merely eased into the bed beside her, his long black hair smelling like warm sage and smoke.

Faye knew all these things because she wasn't sleeping and had no hope that she might.

Chapter Eight

The morning sunshine looked weak and watery, even for November, but the air was tolerably warm. Faye was glad for its warmth and she was glad to let the heavy wooden front door of Joyeuse shut behind her. Again, she was headed out for a day of unpaid work on her own island. The stout door cut off the sound of Joe's “Good-bye,” and Michael's “Mommy!” as it closed behind her.

She knew it hurt Joe when she disappeared for the day, but it would hurt him more if she sat around the house, gloomy and silent, and she just didn't have anything to say. It didn't help that they had already made plans to convert her office into a nursery when she miscarried. When she sat in that room, all she could see was the delicate shade of pink that they'd intended to paint the walls.

This morning, unlike recent mornings, she had a coherent plan for her day. It was not to earn money, which was too bad since Amande wanted a guitar for Christmas. Today's plan was to keep more money from flowing out the door and into the hands of environmental cleanup contractors. Faye was heading across the island to watch every move that Gerry and Nadia and their environmental technicians made.

She had gotten the impression that none of the scientist-types thought that this was any huge environmental tragedy. She had heard Gerry use words like “limited in extent” and “accelerated cleanup schedule.” Since time equaled money, “accelerated” sounded a lot cheaper than “long and drawn-out.”

Faye's plan for keeping an eye on Gerry's crew wasn't too detailed. Mostly, she was going to watch as Nadia sampled and tested soil and water. She was also going to hope that Nadia's test results told Gerry not to dig up and expensively incinerate too much of Joyeuse's dirt.

Gerry knew she was going to do these things, but he didn't know everything Faye planned to do today. He had no idea that Faye would be asking him some questions he might not want to answer.

***

Tommy had been watching while Gerry Steinberg stood beside the marina's boat ramp, supervising as a boatful of expensive equipment was lowered slowly into the Gulf of Mexico. Tommy's boat maintenance shop sat in full view of the boat ramp, but it was an unobtrusive shed that looked like it had sat through one too many hurricanes. He had pulled a stool up to his workbench so he could peer out a tiny window fogged by time and grease.

The rumor mill said that all this equipment, plus the environmental personnel who'd be running it, was being launched in the direction of Joyeuse Island. This would put Detective Steinberg and his friends out of Tommy's sight all day long, all of them, and he'd be out of theirs. It seemed like a good day to take his personal boat far out into the Gulf, so far that nobody would see what he threw overboard. He had a feeling that the law was onto him, and he had some business that needed finishing.

Tommy had customers waiting for him to get their boats working again, and they would be pissed if he didn't work today. Too bad. Most of them would be about as anxious to talk to the cops as he was, and the cops had been highly visible at the marina ever since Liz died, so they should understand his position. They had no other choice, not if they wanted their boats back. They might grouse, but they trusted Tommy to get the job done eventually.

Why, exactly, did they trust him? Tommy couldn't figure it out. He would absolutely steal a Little Leaguer's favorite catcher's mitt if he could sell it for a good price without getting caught, but he seemed to have an honest face. His customers left boats worth tens of thousands of dollars at his maintenance shop without even asking for a receipt saying, “I, Tommy Barnett, took this big and expensive thing to work on, but I promise to give it back.”

His other customers? The ones who hired him to do shadier work than making boat motors hum? For some reason, they instinctively trusted that he would get their work done for them, and they believed that he would always keep their secrets.

Tommy knew that his face wasn't honest at all, because it covered a mind that didn't much care about the difference between right and wrong. If the day came when it was better for Tommy to disappear than it was for him to stay in Micco County and run his businesses, then he would go. And he would go in the finest boat that was currently in his care, despite the fact that its owner trusted him implicitly.

Boats leave no tracks, and Tommy knew a place where the boat buyers didn't ask questions. It was a place where he could get enough money out of a fancy stolen boat to start over. He didn't want to start over, but if he had to do it, he could.

***

Joe washed bits of egg off the breakfast dishes, doing his best not to think about why he'd cooked them himself instead of paying Liz to do it. Faye had dressed and left the house in less time than the eggs had taken to scramble. He'd tried to make her eat, but she'd waved a granola bar at him as she walked out the door. Joe wasn't sure how long it was supposed to take a seven-months-pregnant woman to get her figure back, but Faye had done it. And more. She was too thin.

As Joe scrubbed a skillet clean, he was wondering whether he could get off the island without Faye finding out. He had a couple of good reasons to talk to Emma about things Faye didn't need to hear

Sly's thick Oklahoma accent rumbled out of the next room and it made him sound almost grandfatherly. “Hey, kid, let's get out your train track. If we run it up this chair and down the side of that one, we can have a hell of a crash. I mean heck.”

Joe knew Michael well enough to know that he could happily build and destroy train tracks for the full two hours it would take Joe to boat to shore, talk to Emma, and get home. If Sly picked up the pieces every time Michael knocked down the whole setup—and Joe thought Sly might actually enjoy doing that while he drank yet more coffee—they'd both be fine.

Okay, maybe “fine” was optimistic. They'd be fine enough. There was no reason to drag them along, and he'd be back that much sooner if he went alone.

Ordinarily, he would have texted Faye before he went ashore. Maybe she needed him to pick up some laundry detergent. Well, she should have thought about that when she started ignoring his texts.

Joe stuck his head in the family room and said, “Dad, can you play trains with Michael for a couple of hours? I've got some stuff I need to do in town.”

Sly nodded.

Joe plunked a couple of juice boxes and a box of really healthy unsweetened cereal on the table at Sly's elbow, and said, “If he gets hungry.”

Sly nodded again.

Joe was gone before his dad could ask him to bring back a few more pounds of coffee.

***

Faye looked Gerry over and decided that this was not a man who needed her to hem and haw. If she had something to say, she could go ahead and spit it out.

“Saw you at Liz's funeral yesterday. It was really good of you to come.”

Gerry looked up from a lab report that contained a full page of numbers, spaced in a regular grid. “Hmm? I thought it was the least I could do.”

“How did you know Liz? Were you a regular customer at the grill? I never saw you there, but it's not like I was there all day, every day.”

“I ate there a few times. She never said much to me beyond ‘Do you want butter on your grits?' but I liked her.”

His lab report became fascinating. Faye wasn't in the mood to leave him alone.

“You said you lived in Tallahassee. You come down to the marina to fish? You got another boat besides that big government barge tied to my dock?”

Gerry's swarthy face could have been tanned by Saturdays spent on the water, but Faye didn't think he was a fisherman. He looked like a man with naturally olive-toned skin who spent his Saturdays reading Dostoyevsky. He also looked like a man who was too smart to try making island-dwelling Faye believe he liked to fish.

He asked a question that proved he was smart enough to derail Faye's line of questioning completely.

“Is this the first time you've found buried contaminants on your island? You had any problems with people dumping out here in the past?”

Faye had panicky visions of bulldozers scraping the surface off her entire island, looking for illegal dumping. “No! Think about it, Gerry. I called for an emergency response for this,” she gestured at the small hole with its small volume of contaminated soil. “You and I both know that it was a borderline situation. Joe and I could have covered it up and forgotten about it. We wanted to do the right thing. So we did. Why would you think we'd ever have ignored people dumping anything out here?”

“Yes, you did do the right thing. I wasn't accusing you. It's just that this is not the first cleanup we've had to do out in these islands, and it's certainly not the worst. You win the trophy for the smallest dump site in Micco County. Ten gallons of kerosene isn't going to get you put on the Superfund list.”

So there wasn't a spot on the Superfund list for her? Praise God for small miracles.

“And you also win the trophy for the oldest contamination problem I've ever seen. Did you have a chance to look at the mount on that kerosene tank?”

She had. It had been a metal frame constructed so that the tank could be mounted on pivots. Someone filling a small kerosene can for household use could tip the tank forward with a single hand, letting the fuel pour easily out of a spigot. It was a clever design, built for an earlier age. It had been a long time since most people needed a daily supply of kerosene to run their households.

“So this isn't the first cleanup you've done around here? Is it common for people to dump nasty chemicals on any convenient island?”

Now she had Gerry's attention.

“On islands?” he asked. “Oh, yeah. If they think they can get away with it, people will put nasty chemicals anywhere. It's really easy to pitch them overboard, right into the Gulf, but sometimes they find a nice secluded place to bury it. Secluded and beautiful, just like this.”

He made a sweeping motion with his hand that encompassed the island, the Gulf, and maybe even the sky. “Sometimes, the stuff wouldn't have even cost all that much to dispose of properly. It's just too much trouble to find out where to take it. Or maybe they're afraid that paying for disposal will cost more than it really does. And then there are those people who don't want to do things the right way, no matter what, because they don't like the government telling them what to do. Micco County's got enough undeveloped land to attract idiots like that. Those people are the reason the sheriff's department partnered with the state environmental department to create my job.”

“It's nice when the government's right hand is willing to work with its left hand. And it's rare.”

“No joke.”

He lowered his eyes to the lab report in his hand, as if to signal that he really needed to get back to work. Faye couldn't believe Gerry really thought he'd successfully deflected her from asking questions about Liz.

“So you've done enough environmental enforcement around here to make Liz's acquaintance, maybe eat some meals at her marina?”

She heard herself say the word “marina,” and all the conversational threads clicked into a coherent whole. Gerry looked like a man who realized she'd put two and two together, but who really didn't want her to ask him whether he agreed that they equaled four.

Too bad. She wasn't finished with him. “Dumping in the islands requires a boat. People who use boats have to either get them in the water or keep them in the water. If I had your job, I'd keep my eye on any public boat ramps—and there aren't any for miles around, but you already know that, don't you?—and on private marinas like Liz's that charge people to use their ramps and boat slips. There's only one marina for miles around and Liz owned it. That's why you've eaten more than a few meals she cooked. Isn't it?”

Gerry shrugged like a teenager who couldn't be bothered to answer his parents' questions.

“And it's why you were at her funeral yesterday. I get it that the sheriff had to be there as part of the investigation, but you're not an ordinary detective. You've got this dual-job-thingie with the environmental department, and he's got other people to work his murder cases. There's a connection between your environmental work and her murder, isn't there? If your illegal dumpers used the marina, they knew Liz. Maybe they rented a boat slip from her.” She got no response from the detective, not even an adolescent shrug.

Faye had spent enough time at the marina to be able to hold an image of the whole thing in her mind, picturing it and all the people who frequented it. She pictured the marina's maintenance shed, located near the slips Liz had rented to people wealthy enough to pay rent so that their boats would have a place to stay. The shop was rented out to a man named Tommy Barnett who worked on balky boats when he worked at all.

Her mind also turned to Wilma, the woman who paid Liz for the right to sell fuel to the marina's customers. Neither Tommy nor Wilma seemed to make much money, but they were never without customers and they didn't seem to work all that hard. The very definition of a “captive market” would be “a person sitting at Liz's dock in a boat that won't go.”

“You talked to Tommy and Wilma yet? About the murder? Or about whatever environmental case was sending you to Liz's place?”

Gerry was studying the papers in his hand hard, like a man who was trying not to listen.

“When you think about it,” Faye said, “any boat that's not a sailboat is a useless bucket without a working motor and fuel. When it comes to fuel, Wilma's the only game for miles around. As for motors, putting metal in salt water is just stupid, but that's what we do. When a motor quits—and sooner or later, it
will
quit—Tommy's the only game for miles around. Anybody that uses this marina is going to cross paths with Tommy or Wilma sooner or later. Guaranteed.”