Artifacts (12 page)
Faye sat with Joe on Joyeuse’s shuttered back porch, eating breakfast. It was Tuesday but, since she didn’t have to go to work, Joe had fixed pancakes as a special treat. She was using her final bite of pancake to mop up the last drip of syrup while she blathered like a schoolgirl about her lunch plans. There was no reason to assume that Joe would be in the least interested to know that she had a date with a senator, but she had that adolescent first-date feeling. She wanted to talk about it.
Joe hardly responded, which wasn’t unusual, so Faye talked to herself until she reached the climax of her story. “And the weirdest thing is this: I accept a date with this man, then I pick up the paper and his picture is on the cover. And he’s going to be on TV this morning. Some kind of a press conference showcasing legislators who are opposed to the resort.”
Joe just gathered their dirty dishes and headed to the cistern.
She wished he’d stayed and let her natter on about inconsequential things, like what she should wear. She’d rather pay no heed at all to the fact that this was her first date in two years. If she tried, she could ignore the fact that her date was a politician and, thus, unlikely to be trustworthy. She could even ignore the age difference, remembering instead Mother’s sage advice: “Men are generally more trouble than they’re worth, but sometimes they’re downright entertaining. Besides, if there’s any other way to get yourself a baby to love, nobody ever explained it to me.”
She heard Joe crank his johnboat and wondered briefly where he was going. He usually fished at dawn and at dusk. It was unusual for him to leave the island in the middle of the day, but he was an adult. He could do as he pleased.
Deciding that Joe was in charge of his own whereabouts, Faye took a shower. Never one to waste a trip ashore, she needed to leave soon if she hoped to get a little research time before she met Cyril. She had a feeling the local library would have information on the disappearance of Abigail Williford that the larger university library had lacked.
Abby was a comfortable obsession. Her fate was distant and intriguing in a way that Sam’s and Krista’s could never be, and Faye was looking forward to delving deeper into it. Who would have ever thought that she’d be whistling happily, looking forward to a day that included an hour at the Sopchoppy Public Library, followed by lunch with a man probably destined to be her next congressman?
Joe found Wally’s Marina deserted and he was glad. He’d successfully avoided the place, just as he’d successfully avoided all public places in the four months since he moved to Joyeuse. Crowds made him jumpy, and Joe Wolf defined a crowd as three or more people.
He paid the woman behind the counter for a cup of coffee and some chips then, after asking if she minded, he flicked the TV over to the Tallahassee channel. Cyril’s press conference hadn’t started yet, so Joe found yesterday’s paper lying on the counter and focused on the front-page article highlighting the senator.
Newspapers are written at the eighth-grade reading level these days—slow going for Joe—but he learned that Cyril had entered public life as a county commissioner in his early thirties. A state representative at forty, he had moved up to the Florida Senate after a single term.
Cyril was a friend of the little man. He supported universal health care for children. He was in favor of an increase in the minimum wage. He co-authored a wildly popular bill that eliminated state sales tax on clothing the week before children started school in the fall.
Cyril’s politics had not always sat well with the environmentalist factions. Everybody knew that most of his campaign money came from developers who thought Florida would be better off with no wetlands at all. This was not a problem in his job-hungry home district, but the congressional seat he aspired to would require support in more affluent, more environmentally sensitive regions. His political aspirations demanded that he lose the anti-environmental label. There was no other way to explain the sudden switch that placed him in the forefront of the “Save Seagreen Island” movement.
Joe understood about every third word of the article detailing this switch, but he persevered. When he reached the last sentence, he had come no closer to liking Cyril than he had been before he began reading.
Cyril’s face materialized on the TV and Joe studied it, trying to figure out what he disliked about the man’s looks. His hair was too “fixed.” The short-sleeved sport shirt was just a little too casual in the way it revealed muscles that were just a little too well-defined to suit Joe. They were muscles purchased in a health club, not earned through meeting the burdens of everyday life.
Joe was too young, too content in inhabiting his own strong body, to realize that someday his own muscle-bulking testosterone would falter. He was years away from feeling empathy for Cyril or admiration for the man’s refusal to go gently into middle age. And he was years away from cheering Cyril on in his pursuit of a pretty young thing.
Joe usually limited himself to one thought at a time and, as he studied the man on the television and munched on his Doritos, his current thought was uncomplicated: this old man was not good enough for his friend Faye.
The young man had said his name was Joe and the name suited him. Liz had been watching him study the newspaper for a while now and she’d been thinking.
Somebody had been in the marina, just yesterday, asking all the regulars about Joe—or somebody who looked like him—and a dark-skinned adolescent boy that he was known to hang out with. He’d been offering a pretty penny for information on their whereabouts, too. Well, nobody fitting Joe’s description had sidled up to her snack counter in quite a while, so—adolescent companion or not—he must be the man in question.
It was puzzling. The guy had clearly been a goon, a human weapon working for somebody outside the law, so it was natural to assume he was looking for someone of his ilk. Yet this cute overgrown boy eating chips in front of the TV had none of the hallmarks of a criminal. Liz had encountered a few criminals in her day. Shit. She’d been married to one.
Stirring up a batch of waffle mix, Liz watched a scruffy fisherman in hip-waders shuffle into the room. He stood gape-mouthed a moment in the middle of the room, before fumbling in his tackle box and pulling out a cell phone. Her pony-tailed customer never looked up from the TV and so never saw the man who sold him out.
Stuart rolled over in the lumpy hotel bed and picked up the ringing phone, letting it crash back down without ever bringing the handset near his ear. Damn wake-up call.
It rang again. If he’d been suffering from his usual hangover, he would have buried his head under the stale-smelling pillow and let it ring, but he never drank when he was working. This time he lifted it to his ear. After a pause, he let it crash onto the receiver without ever having spoken a word.
He jumped into his pants, grabbed his room key and his weapon, and pointed his car toward Wally’s Marina. Indian Boy had finally surfaced.
The grill was still deserted, except for one pony-tailed customer, and Liz leaned on the counter, waiting for something to happen. She’d sold the boy two more bags of chips, but that was probably his limit. He’d had to dig deep into the leather bag at his waist for the money, and he’d mostly come up with pennies. She noticed that the eight or ten pennies left over after he paid for the chips hadn’t gone back into the bag. He’d put them in her tip jar, then settled back down in front of the TV.
Within fifteen minutes, the goon showed up, pretending to be a Fish and Wildlife officer. He stomped over to Joe and asked, “Been doing any fishing lately?”
“Yeah,” said Joe.
“Got a license?”
Joe’s baffled face broke Liz’s heart. She wondered if the boy knew what a fishing license was.
“Come with me. Let’s take a look at your boat and see if you’ve been doing anything else you shouldn’t.”
Joe listened, but he didn’t have anything to say for himself. He was just going to follow the man outside. It seemed to Liz like the innocents of the world were the ones who got tangled up in life’s cobwebs and eaten by spiders.
The cost of hiring a goon and paying for days of room and board while he located his quarry would be steep, and criminals were notoriously stingy with their money. Somebody wanted this boy bad.
Her heart went out to the young man as he threw his three empty Doritos bags in the trash and followed the so-called officer out, pausing only long enough to hand her his empty coffee cup and say thanks. Damn. Now she’d have to take action. In her day, she’d waited on thieves, wife beaters, and drug runners like her dear departed husband. She’d found many of them to be attractive and well groomed. Even polite. But she had never yet met a bad guy willing to bus his own table.
Liz dipped a big potful of hot grease out of the deep fryer and followed Joe and his escort out onto the dock.
“Where’s your badge, Officer?” she asked in a voice that stopped just short of a bellow.
“You’ve got no authority here, lady,” the impostor said, hustling Joe along.
“Your ID, your badge, your uniform, anything. Just show me and the boy here something that proves you have a right to treat him this way.”
“You want ID? I’ll show you ID,” he said, reaching under his windbreaker.
Liz had never heard anybody say that Fish and Wildlife officers carried concealed weapons, but the action was unmistakable. With one foot, she swept Joe’s feet out from under him. Once he had landed on his butt, safely out of range of her sizzling ammunition, she gave the pot in her hand an underhanded sling.
Hot grease slopped over the goon and his gun. It thumped to the dock and bounced into the water as the man staggered back and ripped at the soaked jacket and shirt holding the scalding grease to his body.
“Get away from here, boy,” she said to Joe. “This place ain’t safe for you.”
She watched Joe navigate his little johnboat deep into the salt marsh, where no shooter would ever find him, especially not one nursing third-degree burns. Then she headed back to her kitchen to call the sheriff, swinging her empty pot and striding like a Valkyrie.