Isolation (13 page)

Faye's ears never rested, not when a squall could blow in and trash a boat that was poorly secured and not when her family's lives might rest on the condition of that boat. Island dwellers slept lightly, listening for the next storm and, lately, Faye slept so little that it hardly counted. She couldn't prove Sylvester Mantooth's innocence, but she believed in it.

What if he needed her to prove it? What if Sheriff Rainey was set on pinning those crimes on the nearest ex-con?

Faye understood that Sly rubbed her husband the wrong way. She knew there was history between them that they needed to work out, but she couldn't help them with that, not when she was hardly keeping her own head above dark emotional waters. She hadn't realized it until this minute, but she didn't share Joe's irritation with Sly's coarse jokes and the buffoonish behavior that cried out “Like me! Please like me!”

When Faye looked at her husband's father, she saw a man who knew he'd made mistakes and wanted to fix them, but he wasn't sure how. Joe saw the man who had failed his dead mother.

Faye couldn't fix their relationship. Joe and Sly would have to do that for themselves. She could, however, do her best to keep her father-in-law from being railroaded for murder. She could honestly provide alibis for him for both crimes, but those alibis required a jury to believe her when she said that she would have heard him leave the island. So there would be no airtight alibi from Faye that would save Sly. This left her only one way to ensure that her father-in-law wasn't wrongfully accused: Find the killer herself.

Chapter Eighteen

Sly and his cigarette waited on the porch while the lawmen ran through the rain to get back to the dock. It was so damn quiet on this lump of land in the middle of the water that he could hear everything. Just everything. A tree full of birds tweeted to his left. The shushing sound of waves hitting the shore came from all around him. Before long, he heard the tap of hard knotted rope hitting the deck of Sheriff Rainey's boat. The wordless murmur of two men's voices drifted up to him, as did the quick cough of a boat motor coming to life.

He was not surprised to hear the house's front door open behind him as that motor raced for a second before the sheriff shoved his throttle forward. Joe had been listening, making sure they were gone before coming outside to have a long-overdue talk with his old man.

The boy—who was past thirty and a family man, so he should stop calling him a boy—lowered himself into the rocker beside him. Their chairs were conveniently located so that they didn't have to look each other in the face, and Sly was glad for that. After a time, and not a long time because Joe had been waiting to ask this question for years, Sly heard his son take a deep breath and say, “How did my mother die?”

***

Faye was trapped, as surely as if she were a mouse who had wanted a suspicious hunk of cheese a little too much and had paid the price. If she came out from under the porch now, Sly would know she'd been eavesdropping on his talk with the sheriff. That might have been okay. The more pressing matter, the thing that was going to keep her lurking under the staircase until they quit talking and went inside, was this: She couldn't interrupt Sly while he was answering the most important question of Joe's life.

This was going to be a problem. Joe was a hunter, so his ears were as attuned to the sounds of animals as hers were attuned to the sounds of boats. And Faye, technically, was an animal. To keep Joe from hearing her, she was going to have to sit still and try not to breathe. Or to sneeze.

Oh no, now she'd thought about sneezing. She raised her eyebrows and flared her nostrils and did every other facial contortion that might distract the reflexive part of her brain that wanted to sneeze. Just as she thought the urge would never pass, Sly started to talk and she forgot all about sneezing.

***

“What do you mean? How'd your mama die? Son, you was there. Didn't you hear anything the doctors said?”

Silence.

Sly only let the quietness hang for a second. “I guess you didn't. Or you was too upset to pay any attention. Son, your mama had cancer. Of the ovary.”

“I never heard of anybody getting cancer and dying the same week. You were gone on a long haul. A real long haul. You came home and she went straight to the hospital and died.”

“It was more than one long haul. That's what shames me. I was gone two…three…months. I think it was just three. I hope so. I should've asked her more questions before I went. She should've told me more than she did, too, but it ain't right to blame the dead.”

“You're saying she didn't tell you everything. What part did she leave out?”

Faye heard a long sighing drag on a cigarette.

“Patricia left out the part that said she was dying. She—” Sly's voice had ramped up until he was nearly shouting before he stopped himself and started again, quietly. “She did tell me she had cancer. She did. But there's the way she said it and there's the way I heard it and there's the way it really was. She said the doctor said she didn't need any operation, which I was real glad to hear, since we didn't have any insurance. She said the doctor had give her some pills that would do her for a while, then maybe she'd need some radiation. Or chemo. Or something.”

“I don't remember her getting chemo or radiation.”

“She didn't, but them words scared me, because I knew I couldn't pay for 'em. All I could think of was the money and how I could get enough to pay her bills. And I'll tell you for true, I wasn't even nice to her about it. I wasn't thinking about how she felt at all.”

“You weren't real good at that.”

Another deep breath was filtered through a cigarette. “Nope. And I didn't do any better by you. Years probably went by that I didn't say a nice word to neither one of you. I never got happy unless I was on the road. I was a big man out there. They knew me at the truck stops and the pool halls and the bars. They knew I was always happy to buy a man a drink or tip a waitress enough to make her smile, because five or ten dollars can make you look like a big man when everybody's been drinking long enough. Coming home to that shitty house I'd rented for the two of you only reminded me how I wasn't big. I was little. And I always would be. Thinking about them doctor bills I wasn't going to be able to pay just made it worse…made
me
worse.”

There was silence again and this time Faye noticed something special about it. It was truly silence. There was no clacking of beer bottles hitting wooden porch tables. Neither man had twisted off a bottle top and tossed it on the floor. She heard no sips, no swallows.

Joe was a light drinker and so was she. There was wine and beer in the refrigerator and they'd offered it to Sly when he arrived, then they'd failed to notice when he drank nothing but coffee for two weeks. She wondered how long he'd been sober.

“Women don't just up and die because their husbands are mean to them. If she didn't need surgery or chemo or radiation for the cancer, how bad could it've been? Dad. She
died
. She passed out and we took her to the hospital and she never woke up again.”

“You think you're telling me something I don't know? I came home from all those hauls, bringing more money than usual but surely not enough to pay for cancer. And she was hardly there. You didn't see it?”

“See what?”

“Son, I don't think she'd ate a bite since I drove away.”

Now came the slight whistling intake of breath, the little choking sound that was the only sign that Faye's husband was crying, and Faye knew that she was going to have to find a way to start eating again. Knowing what he knew now about his mother, it would kill Joe if he had to keep watching her waste away, just as it was killing her to hear him cry.

She'd heard this sound during the whirlwind emergency that had been Michael's birth. She'd heard it on the day Amande was kidnapped. And she mustn't think about this now or he'd hear her weeping, too, but she'd heard it on the day they lost the baby.

“Mama was always skinny. And tall. Must've been almost six foot. I was near fifteen before I passed her up. I didn't see it. I didn't see how sick she was.”

Sly's voice lowered a tone, deep and warm, and Faye heard the note Joe used when he was talking to little Michael. “When you passed her up, you passed her up. You was a half-a-foot taller than her by the time she went, and you only eighteen years old. When you looked down at her, she just looked little. How was you supposed to see that she was getting littler every day? I should have been there. I'd have seen it.”

“But you said the doctors thought she didn't need any medicine. I don't understand.”

“That's not what they thought. When I finally met her doctors—and they musta thought I was a genuine asshole not to have come met them before that—they told me what they really thought. She was too far gone for surgery when they first found it. Maybe for chemo, too, I don't know. But radiation would've shrunk it. It would've shrunk it up. Eased her pain. Given her some more time. She thought it was stupid to pay for radiation that wasn't gonna save her, so she told them to give her some pain pills and send her home.”

“For three months? She hurt for three months with just pills to help her? Dad.”

This time, there wasn't even the sound of a man sucking in smoke. There was nothing to crack open the quiet night.

“No, Son, she didn't hurt for three months with just pain pills. She didn't take them. For three months, she didn't take 'em. She saved 'em up until I'd got home and she knew you wouldn't be by yourself, then she took 'em all. So, you see, a woman
can
just up and die, when things get bad enough.”

Chapter Nineteen

Sheriff Rainey was not surprised that Deputy Steinberg agreed with him on his strategy for dealing with Oscar Croft. Both men thought that this was one occasion when it was more effective to give away information than to keep it close to the vest. Rainey could tell by the expression on Steinberg's face that he, too, had enjoyed the moment when Croft found out what they knew.

They'd probably enjoyed it more than they should have, in a professional sense. It was possible that Croft was responsible for the break-in at Emma Everett's house and it was possible that he'd killed Liz, so Rainey had professional reasons for wanting the upper hand in any conversation with him. Beyond that, though, Rainey simply didn't like him. He had the entitled air of a rich man, and he had the pushy ways of a man who didn't know how things were done in small-town Florida.

Worse than that, he acted like a man who thought he was the smartest person in the room, merely because he was the richest person in the room. And probably also because he wasn't from small-town Florida. Therefore, Rainey had really enjoyed beginning their talk by dropping a conversational bomb in Croft's lap.

“Why were you at Emma Everett's house yesterday evening? Did she invite you?”

Croft's mouth gaped. He definitely didn't look like the smartest person in the room.

“Who told you that?”

Rainey was under no obligation to tell the man that Emma Everett had been peeping out her peephole when Croft made his unannounced visit. Since Croft wasn't under arrest, Rainey wasn't even under obligation to tell him the truth. He opted to give Croft a look that said, “I'm not telling you how I know. Maybe I'm psychic. Don't be stupid enough to lie to me.”

Rainey was successful in staring the man down. Eventually, Croft fussed with his Rolex and said, “Yeah, I stopped by to say hello to her. It's not illegal.”

“Did you also maybe stop by Liz's place to see her on the night she died?”

“Not that night, no.”

Shooting a look at Steinberg would have let Croft know that he'd just said too much, so Rainey kept his eyes on the man wearing a Rolex.

“You and Liz were friends? Why else would you be at her place? You don't look like the kind of man who hangs out in bars. Not when you can drink whatever you like here.”

Rainey gestured at the fully stocked bar behind Oscar. It was a nice bar, the kind seen in houses designed for parties. It had shelves loaded with high-end liquor, racks of cut-crystal glassware, a sink, a tiny dishwasher, stainless steel muddlers and reamers and shakers. It was built for a hired bartender with a catering staff who roamed the expansive house with trays of cocktails and finger food.

In Micco County, a house like this would have been a corporate rental, used by companies who courted clients with alcohol-soaked fishing weekends. The only private home that approached it belonged to Emma Everett. Rainey knew that there was a dock out back as big as Emma's, with a party boat and a speedboat sitting in lifts that would drop them into the Gulf at the touch of a switch. Oscar had been in town for a while, so he must have rented this house for at least a month, maybe for the whole winter. Rainey doubted the landlord had ever before had a renter who wanted it for so long.

“I like a little nightlife. Always have. Besides, Delia's not a big drinker. Who wants to drink alone? So, yeah, I went over to Liz's place now and then, before she…when it was open. It was the only bar in town. People are going to miss it, now that it's gone. They still need a place to go. Somebody's going to figure that out and make themselves some good money. Not sure I'm up for starting something so far from home, but I've been in business all my life. It's hard to walk past an opportunity like that.”

“I can't see you running a little dive way down here when you have businesses to run in Ohio.” Delia said this in a calm and professional voice as she stepped out of a bedroom, but she looked surprised to see guests. Or maybe she was just surprised to see Oscar being questioned by the law.

She looked fresh out of the shower, so she must not have heard Rainey and Steinberg come in. Her cheeks were pink and she was running a brush through damp hair, but she was fully dressed and Rainey was glad. It would have been awkward if any woman had walked into the room wearing a towel, but it would have been especially awkward if the towel-wearing woman had been this pretty.

Delia was actually very professionally dressed for a glorified tour guide. She wore a crisp, button-front shirt, loose linen slacks, and dressy flat shoes. She hadn't come out of the same bedroom where Oscar had gone to fetch his glasses after they arrived, so it appeared that their relationship was a strictly professional one. Rainey had been wondering.

He was pretty sure that all of Micco County had been wondering, but his own professional ethics would keep him from spreading the news that the two tourists slept separately, despite the fact that doing so would damp down the gossip. Or it should. People only heard what they wanted to hear, and if Micco County wanted to believe that this fresh-faced woman was an old man's paid escort, there was nothing he could do about it.

“I'm in no hurry to get back to Ohio,” the old man said. “I like it here. Maybe I'll stay in Florida until Delia gets another client and I don't have a personal historian to help me find the interesting sites to see.” He grinned up at Delia, who didn't grace him with an equally flirtatious response. In fact, she rolled her eyes at him. She was one of those women who had learned to manage male attention with an air that said, “This far and no further.”

“You said you had business to do today, so I thought I'd do some shopping,” she said. “They tell me that the closest mall is in Tallahassee, so I'm driving up there for the afternoon. While I'm in town, I'll check out that restored mission you wanted to visit. If I think it's something you'll want to tour, we can drive up there tomorrow.”

She turned to leave the room but Oscar called after her. “Buy something pretty!”

He got no answer, but her body language spoke for her. Rainey heard it loud and clear: “This far and no further.”

A safe moment after the door closed behind Delia, Oscar said, “Not bad, right?”

Rainey emitted a grunt intended to signify that he didn't speak disrespectfully about ladies but that Delia's looks were, indeed, not bad. This was a lot of information for a single grunt to carry, but he thought he pulled it off. Steinberg just sat there and looked uncomfortable.

“I prefer a woman who's lived a while, myself,” Oscar went on, “but there's nothing wrong with having a traveling companion who's nice to look at.”

Emma had lived a while. So had Liz, but not long enough. Rainey couldn't point to a specific reason why he was uncomfortable with Oscar Croft and his relationships with the women around him, but he was. There wasn't necessarily anything wrong with appreciating a young female employee, although it was more respectful to keep your appreciation to yourself and Oscar was pushing the boundaries of sexual harassment. There was certainly nothing wrong with politely appreciating the company of a woman of a certain age, like Emma or Liz, particularly if you were yourself of a certain age.

It was only natural that Oscar would like Liz's verve and Emma's composed wit. Going to Emma's house unannounced was a little awkward, but it wasn't a crime. Going to Liz's bar for a drink wasn't even awkward. She was in business to serve drinks to people who were looking for company. Still, Oscar made the sheriff's creep detector go ping.