Isolation

Isolation

A Faye Longchamp Mystery

Mary Anna Evans

www.MaryAnnaEvans.com

Poisoned Pen Press

Copyright

Copyright © 2015 by Mary Anna Evans

First E-book Edition 2015

ISBN: 9781464204050 ebook

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

The historical characters and events portrayed in this book are inventions of the author or used fictitiously.

Poisoned Pen Press

6962 E. First Ave., Ste. 103

Scottsdale, AZ 85251

www.poisonedpenpress.com

[email protected]

Contents

Isolation

Copyright

Contents

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Excerpt

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-six

Chapter Twenty-seven

Chapter Twenty-eight

Chapter Twenty-nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-one

Chapter Thirty-two

Chapter Thirty-three

Chapter Thirty-four

Chapter Thirty-five

Chapter Thirty-six

Guide for the Incurably Curious

More from this Author

Contact Us

Dedication

For little Oliver

Acknowledgments

I’d like to thank all the people who helped make Isolation happen.

Tony Ain, Amanda Evans, Michael Garmon, Erin Garmon, and Rachel Broughten read it in manuscript and provided their customary astute observations. Faye’s adventures wouldn’t be the same without the thoughtful attention of those near and dear to me.

Nadia Lombardero, Kelly Bergdoll, and Jerry Steinberg were my consulting environmental scientists. Attentive readers will see that Nadia and Jerry have namesake environmental scientists in Isolation. Very attentive readers will recall that Kelly had a namesake environmental scientist in Artifacts. I am deeply grateful for their generosity in sharing their expertise. They are responsible for the passages in which I got things right, and they are innocent of wrongdoing on any occasions when I did not.

As always, I am grateful for the wonderful people at Poisoned Pen Press. My agent, Anne Hawkins, and my editor, Barbara Peters, have been my partners in bringing Faye to life for a very long time now. My publicist, Maryglenn McCombs, does a masterful job at getting the attention of people who will enjoy Faye’s stories.

And, of course, I am grateful for you, my readers.

Excerpt

Excerpt from the oral history of Cally Stanton,

Recorded in 1935 and preserved

as part of the WPA Slave Narratives

Secrets hold power. My mama told me so, more than ninety years back. The power of secrets holds true for everybody, I expect, but it holds a lot more true for people who ain’t got power of their own.

Think about a young girl, born a slave. Try to imagine that she has any power over her Missus at all. You can’t, can you?

Now, think about a young girl, almost a woman, who has been tending her Missus since she was big enough to carry a chamber pot. Maybe before that. Maybe she’s been tending her Missus since she was old enough to carry a bottle of bourbon. Maybe she’s spent her short life listening to the things her Missus says when she’s been into the bourbon since noontime.

A young girl like that knows how much her Missus pines for her home up north. She knows how much her Missus wishes the Master remembered where her bedchamber was. She knows the thing that even the Missus can’t know, because she can’t think it when she’s sober. Only after several goodly portions of bourbon can her Missus listen to herself say, He married me for my money. Now it’s his, and all I’ve got for company is you, Cally.

So, yeah, you could say that I stepped out of my cradle knowing how to keep a secret. And I stepped into womanhood knowing how to use it to my advantage.

Maybe you’re thinking that I’m heartless with my secrets, using them for my gain and for the ruin of others. No, that ain’t so. Sometimes there is only one gift a body can give another person. Sometimes that gift is silence.

Chapter One

Fish know which docks are owned by people who are generous with their table scraps. In the evenings, they gather around wooden posts that vibrate with the footsteps of a human carrying food. They wait, knowing that potato peels and pork chop bones will soon rain from the sky. They race to skim the surface for floating bread crumbs. They dive, nibbling at each half-eaten hot dog as it sinks. When a restaurant, even a shabby dive where hungry people clean their plates, throws its detritus off one particular dock every night, fish for miles around know all about it.

On this night, the fish wait below a dock that has always offered a nightly feast. Tonight, they feel the vibrations of familiar feet. The food falls into the water, as always, and the sound of a stainless steel spoon scraping the bottom of a stainless steel pot passes from the air above to the water below. Everything is as it has been, until a sharp noise jabs into the water hard enough for the fish to hear it. The spoon falls.

The spoon is large, designed for a commercial kitchen, so it hits the water with a smack that can be heard both above and below the surface. A scream falls into the fishes’ underworld along with the spoon.

A big pot, with food scraps still clinging to its inner surface, hits the water an instant later. Only creatures with the agility of the waiting fish could scatter quickly enough to avoid being hit.

After another heartbeat, something else falls among them, something bigger and softer. Soon there are two somethings, both with arms and legs and feet and hands, one that gurgles and another that leaves when the gurgling stops.

The thing that stays behind is a human body. As it settles in the water, tiny minnows nestle in the long hair that floats around it like seaweed. Catfish explore its ten long fingers with their tentacled mouths. None of them associate its two bare feet with the sprightly vibrations that had always signaled a rain of food.

Before long, predators appear, drawn by the smell of blood.

Chapter Two

Joe Wolf Mantooth was worried about his wife.

Faye was neglecting their business. She was neglecting her health. He wanted to say she was neglecting her children, but it would kill her to think he believed such a thing, so he spent a lot of time telling that part of himself to be quiet. He also wanted to say she was neglecting him, but it would kill him to believe it, so he spent the rest of his time telling that other part of himself to be quiet. Or to shrivel up and die. Because if he ever lost Faye, that’s what Joe intended to do. Shrivel up and die.

The children seemed oblivious to the changes in their mother. Michael, at two, saw nothing strange about her leaving the house every morning with her archaeological tools. She had always done that.

Amande was away from home, doing an immersion course in Spanish at a camp situated so high in the Appalachians that she’d asked for heavy sweaters long before Halloween. Faye had been too distracted to put them in the mail. Joe had shopped for them, boxed them up, and sent them off. Faye seemed to have forgotten that her daughter had ever said, I’m cold.

Amande was perceptive for seventeen. If she hadn’t noticed that Joe had been doing all the talking for the last month, she would notice soon. Lately, when faced with a call from her daughter, Faye murmured a few distracted words before pretending that Michael needed a diaper change. If Faye didn’t come up with another excuse to get off the phone, Amande might soon call 911 and ask the paramedics to go check out her brother’s chronic diarrhea.

Though Joe did speak to Amande when she called, surely she had noticed by now that he said exactly nothing. What was he going to say?

The closest thing to the truth was Your mother’s heart fell into a deep hole when she miscarried your baby sister, and I’m starting to worry that we may never see it again, but Joe was keeping his silence. Faye had forbidden him to tell Amande that there wasn’t going to be a baby sister.

Was this rational? Did Faye think that her daughter was never going to fly home to Florida, bubbling with excitement over her Appalachian adventure and the coming baby?

If she did, it was yet more evidence supporting Joe’s fear that Faye’s mind wasn’t right these days. Every morning brought fresh proof of that not-rightness as she walked away from him…to do what? As best he could tell, she was carefully excavating random sites all over their island. If she’d found anything worth the effort, he sure didn’t know about it.

In the meantime, Joe sat in the house, face-to-face with a serious problem. This problem was almost as tall and broad as Joe. His hair had once been as dark. His skin was the same red-brown, only deeper. This was a problem Joe had been trying to outrun since he was eighteen years old.

His father.

***

Try this spot.

Faye Longchamp-Mantooth believed in intuition. It had always guided her work as an archaeologist. After she’d gathered facts about a site’s history, inspected the contours of the land, and scoured old photographs, she always checked her gut response before excavating. Her gut was often right. It was only recently, however, that her gut had begun speaking out loud and in English. Lately, her gut had been urging her to skip the boring research and go straight for the digging.

Have you ever excavated here before? its voice asked.

Faye’s answer was no.

Then try this spot.

Every day, Joyeuse Island sported more shallow pits that had yielded nothing. Of course, they had yielded nothing. Faye had failed to do her homework. But going to the library or sitting at her computer would require her to be still and think. Thinking was painful these days, so she skipped it.

Okay, she said, not pleased to see that she’d begun answering the voice out loud, I’ll give it a shot. But I don’t think there’s anything here.

Her hand was remarkably steady for the hand of a woman who’d been hearing voices for a month. She used it to guide her trowel, removing a thin layer of soil.

She would have known this old trowel in the dark. Her fingers had rubbed the finish off its wooden handle in a pattern that could match no hand but hers. Since God hadn’t seen fit to let her grow the pointy metal hand she needed for her work, she’d chosen this one tool to mold into a part of herself.

Faye was working in sandy soil as familiar as the trowel. It was her own. She’d been uncovering the secrets of Joyeuse Island since she was old enough to walk, and she would never come to the end of them. As she grew older, she saw the need to mete out her time wisely, but she rebelled against it. The past would keep most of its secrets, and this made her angry.

Faye didn’t know where to dig, because she didn’t know what she was trying to find. It would help if the voice ever offered a less hazy rationale for ordering her out of the house. All it said was You can find the truth. Don’t let this island keep its secrets from you.

Her frenetic busyness was an antidote for the times the voice tiptoed into ground that shook beneath her feet. It crept into dangerous territory and then beckoned her to follow. It asked her to believe that she was to blame for the baby’s death, for the mute suffering in Joe’s eyes, for every tear Michael shed.

This was craziness. Two-year-olds cried several times a day. Men who had lost babies suffered. And there was rarely any blame to be handed out in the wake of a miscarriage, even late miscarriages that carry away a child who has been bumping around in her mother’s womb long enough for mother and daughter to get to know one another.

Still, the voice said Faye was to blame, so she believed it. And it told her that it was possible to dig up peace, so she dug.

Chapter Three

Joe had promised himself, time and again, that he would call his father, then he had let another year roll on. After he’d left home at eighteen, he’d thought, When I get settled somewhere, I’ll let him know where I am. But he’d wandered for years, working odd jobs and sleeping wherever he could pitch a tent.

He’d lingered so long in North Carolina, learning to flintknap from Old Man Kingsley, that he’d thought, It’s time. I need to call my dad and let him know I settled down. Then Old Man Kingsley died, which is what people with nicknames like Old Man tend to do, and Joe had taken to wandering again.

If Faye had kicked him off the island like she should have—why had someone with her brains let a vagrant camp on her island, anyway?—he would be wandering still. Instead, he’d acquired a wife who had never met her father-in-law, fathered a son who had never met his grandfather, and adopted a daughter who also hadn’t met her new grandfather.

When they’d found out Faye was pregnant again, Joe had thought, It’s time, and he’d invited his father to spend Thanksgiving with them on Joyeuse Island and stay to meet his new granddaughter. Then he’d waited too long after the miscarriage to call him and ask, Could you come another time? So now Joe was stuck on an island with a wife who wouldn’t talk to him, a father he didn’t like, and a two-year-old. Happy holidays.

Sylvester Sly Mantooth didn’t ask his son why his daughter-in-law left the house every morning. He didn’t do much, really. Joe couldn’t put his finger on the reason his father annoyed him so. The man just sat, coffee cup in hand, and talked the live-long day. He talked to Joe. He talked to Michael. He talked to himself, when Joe and Michael left the room and forced him to do that. He didn’t say anything much, but he talked a lot.

Faye didn’t seem to notice. Every afternoon, she came home empty-handed and avoided Amande’s daily calls. She silently ate the supper Joe had cooked, letting Sly’s endless words swirl around her. At dusk, she gave Joe and Michael distracted kisses before nodding at Sly, showering, and falling into the bed where she spent a lot of time not sleeping.

Joe had to do something. He didn’t know what it was, but he had to do it. If this situation rocked along until Amande got off that airplane, lugging a huge teddy bear for the baby-that-wasn’t, he wasn’t sure his family would survive intact.

If Joe didn’t know something was very wrong with Faye, he would have been angry. Okay, he was angry. But he would get over it.

Since Faye had stopped her obsessive monitoring of their finances—the normal Faye could pinch a penny in two and spend it twice, so what was up with that?—she hadn’t noticed that Joe had been spending more money than he should at Liz’s Bar and Grill. For the two weeks since Sly Mantooth’s arrival, Joe had loaded his father and his son into the john boat every morning, as soon as Faye was out of sight, and he had pointed it toward the marina that their friend Liz owned and called home.

On every one of those mornings, he had savored the fact that the noise of the boat motor silenced his father by making conversation impossible. Once ashore, there were the very welcome, time-killing activities of carefully securing the boat and fueling it, before leading father and son into the grill. Inside, Liz’s crooked grin and her peerless fried eggs made another sliver of the morning easier to bear.

The state of their budget said that Joe ought to stay home and fry his family’s eggs himself. Except Joe didn’t really know the state of their budget, since Faye had stopped balancing the checkbook. Playing short order cook would have saved him a few bucks, but his stomach roiled at the thought of sitting at the breakfast table with his absent-eyed wife, his toddler son, and the father who had never actually told him how long he’d been out of prison. Or why he’d been there in the first place.

Faye was doing her share to save on groceries. Every morning, she tucked a single banana in her work bag as she trudged across the island to do whatever it was she did these days. And every morning, before she’d even disappeared into the distance, Joe said, Ready for some biscuits? Then get in the boat! in the happy voice of a man looking forward to quality time with his father and son.

This morning, as always, Sly had answered, Damn straight! and Michael had run in circles yelling, Bikkits! Bikkits!

Joe always enjoyed that one moment of feeling like the family hero. It was totally worth thirty bucks for three breakfasts and a big tip. More than thirty bucks, actually, when he factored in enough fuel to get there. Still. Totally worth it. Also, Liz needed the money more than they did, if such a thing could be possible.

Twenty minutes after starting his boat’s wonderfully loud motor, they arrived at the marina that housed Liz’s Bar and Grill for the fourteenth time since his dad had stepped off the plane. The place had been seedy when Wally had owned it—actually, calling it seedy would have been generous—but Liz had poured her heart into giving the place a homey ambiance.

Joe understood how she felt. He’d grown up in ramshackle houses that were held together by duct tape and landlords’ promises. Faye’s plantation house on Joyeuse Island wasn’t the home of his dreams. It was a home beyond his dreams. Joe felt like somebody had crawled inside his head to see the biggest and finest house he could imagine, then they had searched the world until they found something bigger and finer than that.

Faye loved the old house. It was her home. But, still, when she looked at it, she saw ancient plumbing and wall plaster that she would never finish patching.

Joe looked at it and thought, I can’t believe this is really ours.

Every square foot of Liz’s business—the marina, the convenience store, the bar and grill, the dock, the grassy yard with its benches and picnic tables—showed the hand of a woman with only a little money but a lot of pride. She’d peeled up the sticky linoleum Wally had installed in the restaurant and store, and she’d put a multicolored epoxy coat on the concrete beneath. That floor was always as clean as her mop could make it. She’d painted the dark paneling a happy yellow, and Joe was damned if Liz didn’t learn how to run a borrowed sewing machine so she could make curtains for the place.

She’d mowed the grass herself, from the back wall of the kitchen to the seawall where her dock stretched out into the Gulf. Joe didn’t know how she’d scraped together the money to re-gravel the parking lot, but she’d managed it.

Liz Colton herself hadn’t weathered the years since her son Chip’s death nearly so well as her business had. Too much bourbon had added a little more grit to the plain-spoken redhead’s voice. She waited too long to touch up her roots these days, and the white stripe through the middle of her long and bushy orange locks was not a good look for her. She was surly to most of her customers, except Faye and Joe, and Liz was in a business that depended on her good humor. People didn’t want their fishing trips spoiled by a woman who called them stupid for buying the wrong bait. They’d begun buying their bait elsewhere, and also their ice and their gear, not to mention the fried flounder dinners that Liz had served them on those days when the fish weren’t biting.

It didn’t make sense to Joe that Liz was still nice to him and Faye. They’d watched her son die after he’d come damn close to killing them both, so Liz had to feel a jolt every time she saw them. Joe was pretty sure Liz only tolerated them because Michael’s toddler grins made tiny moments of her life easier to bear. So she sucked it up and said nice things to Michael’s parents, but she couldn’t bring herself to say nice things to anybody else.

Every day, while Liz was cooing Who’s the cutest little black-haired boy in Micco County? in her gravelly baritone, Joe was calculating just how much he could overtip without hearing her tell him to go to hell. And, for the last two weeks, every time he’d parked himself on one of Liz’s barstools—which was every single freaking day—he was also wondering what in the hell he was supposed to say to his father.

He should probably have led with, So, Dad, how long have you been out of prison? And what, exactly, did you do to get sent there?

Instead, he had bought the man breakfast every day, thus funding Sly’s improbable flirtation with Liz.

How’s my favorite redheaded bombshell today? Sly would ask in a booming voice that filled the shabby grill. Every day. He asked this every day and Joe wanted to fall through the floor every day.

She’s ready to serve you up something hot and steamy and just the way you like it was Liz’s invariable response. Every day, Joe wondered if it were possible to fall through a floor twice.

Yes, Sly and Liz were about the same age. And, yes, they both possessed the cagey brains and crude senses of humor that marked them as survivors of a lot of hard years. Nevertheless, a woman with Liz’s street smarts should have looked at Sly and seen trouble on two legs. And a man with his father’s long and tough history should have looked at Liz and seen heartbreak in the flesh.

In the movies, they would have found happiness and healing in each others’ arms. In real life? Joe had once witnessed two bears fighting for territory. The air had been full of blood, rage, and flying fur. He would expect pretty much the same results from any attempt at a romance between Liz and Sly.

Nevertheless, Joe continued to put Sly in his john boat and take him to these early morning trysts because he couldn’t think of any better way to pass the morning. In one more week, Thanksgiving would come and go, then Sly would go home to Oklahoma. Not that Joe knew for certain that the man possessed a return plane ticket.

Joe eased the boat alongside the dock. Once it was secured, he set Michael down to see which way he ran. When he was lucky, Michael ran away from the restaurant door, insisting on delaying breakfast long enough to watch fish and turtles gather at the end of the dock. Liz had been throwing her kitchen scraps in that spot for years, and the fish knew where free food fell from the sky.

Joe was big on time killers these days, and this one was actually pleasant. The sun glinted off the water and the fishes’ scales, and his blood pressure always settled down when he spent a little time listening to the creaking and sighing sound of seafaring crafts safely moored.

Michael hurried toward the spot where the fish waited for him. He burbled happily while Joe produced a slice of bread from the leather bag that always hung from his waist, full of necessities like stone tools and food. Sly, who didn’t move like a man in his late fifties, dropped to his knees beside the boy and told him about all the fish, just like he did every morning.

See them minnows, all different shiny colors? Purty, ain’t they? Flailing his hand at a few bigger fish floating among the multitude of minnows, he said, Them’s pompano.

Yes, they were. They had been pompano every single day for two weeks now and they always would be, but Michael didn’t mind hearing about them again.

And over there? The big hand flailed at a silver flash further away from the dock, gliding underwater like a bird. Only its wingtips broke the water. Stingray.

Right again. Sly Mantooth knew a stingray when he saw it. Soon enough, Michael would, too. In the meantime, all three of them watched its flat, undulating body pass by.

Joe was irritated with his father’s constant chatter, no doubt. It had been his understanding that ex-cons weren’t talkative, not when the wrong word might put them in life-or-death trouble with their fellow prisoners, but maybe prison didn’t mark everyone in the same way. If anything, Sly was chattier now than he’d ever been when Joe was a child. Leave it to his dad to do everything backwards.

Still, Joe watched his father with a flicker of interest. Looking at Sly lean easily over the side of the dock and riffle the silty water with a relaxed hand, Joe thought that maybe there was some hope that he himself wouldn’t move like an old man before his time, either.

As always, the fish rose from the darkness, fluttering their pectoral fins and piercing the surface of the water with their gaping mouths, and Michael talked to them as if they were familiar playmates. Joe supposed that they were. Bending his head toward the bag hanging from his belt, he reached a hand in to fetch some bread before Michael started to whine for it, so he missed the moment when Sly flung himself headfirst off the dock.

Michael had left the dock, too, intent on following his grandfather into the water, but Joe reached out a long arm and plucked the boy from midair. Caught off-balance, he nearly toppled over the edge himself. When he gained his footing, Joe found himself on the dock’s edge staring down at Liz. Ten feet from the dock, she floated below the murky water’s surface with her arms outstretched through circling schools of minnows, catfish, and pompano. Her hair, iron gray and faded red, snaked through the water as if reaching out for air.

Joe was as much a man of action as Sly and he needed to be in the water. He needed to be doing everything in his power to save Liz. He