Dead Low Tide (11 page)

“Huger,” the man said, and nodded, and now I saw the gold at his collar, the four narrow bands of bright colors above his left shirt pocket. I knew already who he was, even before Mom in that next second pulled away from me and linked her arm in my elbow, turned to him and, gathering together what she could of herself, said, “Huger, this is Commander Prendergast.” She took in a quick, broken breath. “He’s been here keeping me company until you and Leland got back.”

I could hear on Mom’s voice a forced ease about this whole thing—a Navy officer in her house in the middle of the night—and I glanced down at her, saw her chin still trembling, saw her quick swipe at her eyes with the back of her free hand. But I saw too that she was smiling, giving this man her best shot at trying to get herself back together.

“Good to finally meet you,” the man said, and took a step toward me, put out his hand to shake. “Though I think I’ve laid eyes on you a time or two out to Warchester’s place.”

I said nothing, still too startled at who was standing here inside our house: Prendergast: the one who’d lost the goggles to Unc.

“Poker night,” he said, and tried at a little bigger smile. “I see you now and again bringing Leland in.”

His voice was higher than I’d thought it would be, and he stood a good six inches taller than me. He had dark hair in the standard officer cut: nearly shaved above the ears, thicker on up, parted on the side but the hair so short the part was more an idea than anything else. He was tan, and every crease in his shirt and pants could’ve cut stone.

He smiled, nodded again, and now here was my hand out to him, slowly, and I could feel of a sudden the book bag on my shoulders, the weight of it.

He squeezed hard my hand, shook it once, let go and stepped back, put his hands behind him like he was at parade rest. He looked down at Mom, nodded at her, looked at me again. “Surprised we haven’t met before,” he said. “Not just because of our shenanigans on poker night, but because—” And he stopped, tilted his head a little toward Mom and looked at her again, gave another quick smile.

“Jamison and I go way back,” Mom said, and I looked at her, saw her smiling at him still. She seemed not to hold on to my arm so tightly, and now I saw that she was dressed, had on a white turtleneck shirt and a blue sweater, a pair of jeans, and not the robe and pajamas I’d expected. She looked up at me, smiling. “Jamison was a year ahead of me at Stall,” she said, and nodded. Maybe she was smiling too hard now, I couldn’t quite tell, but she went right on, “Everybody knew him because he was a receiver for the football team.” She looked at him then. “Of course he’d never give me the time of day, all the girls chasing after him, and me—”

“If I’d had the nerve, Eugenie, I’d have asked you out. But you had
your own cadre, if you’ll remember. There was Tommy Sanborn and Trace Suggs and Alton—”

“Why are you here?” I cut in. The words were too loud, I could already hear. But Prendergast was in my home. The exact man I had to keep these goggles away from, and Unc’s words—
Hide the goggles—
came to me again, as though he’d known already this man would be waiting for me here.

They both stopped, caught in the nothing of this squirrelly nonsense talk about high school and who knew who when, and I stood there in the middle of it, the book bag hanging on my back, while what we weren’t talking about—where the goggles were—lay square in front of us all. Because that’s why Prendergast was here. Plain and simple.

“Had the men drop me off first, just in case you were already here. I ended up staying just to make sure your momma was all right, and let the men handle things down at the Dupont residence,” he said, still at parade rest, still with that tight smile, and I realized only then there hadn’t been a vehicle out front of our house, the driveway empty. “We had a report,” he went on, “that there was some trespassing going on at the Weapons Station, and one of my men said he saw the two of you. That’s all I know, and all we’re here for, but—”

“Nobody trespassed,” I said. “Nobody. We never even came close. We only—”

He shot out a hand from behind him like a traffic cop: Stop. “But our men found otherwise, once they were on scene,” he said, and here was that same stupid smile of his, that same tan tightness to his face. “But no one dispatched out here knew anything about a body, and so we’ll be on scene for a little while longer, just to make sure everything’s all right.”

He nodded again, and I felt Mom’s arm slip from mine, let go altogether, her getting hold of herself like I thought she would have all along—there was still hell to pay, and I knew it—until finally she took a step away from me so that we three stood in a kind of triangle
there in the foyer, the doorway still open behind me. She put her hands in front of her, laced her fingers together, and started sort of bouncing in the smallest way: how she lets you know she’s done with you, that you ought to move along now before she blows up.

It wasn’t lost on Prendergast. Still with his hands behind him, he nodded hard this time, said, “Well, I have to be heading out, now you’re home safe.” He turned to Mom, leaned in and kissed her cheek, brought a hand from behind him and put it to her shoulder, like the evening’d been some simple get-together. I stepped back and away from the door, let him pass between me and Mom, his hands at his sides now, and saw a radio clipped on his belt at his back.

Mom and I both followed him, stepped out onto the porch. He took a step down the stairs out there, then another, and stopped, half turned to us.

“The police will be over here pretty soon, and SLED,” he said. “They’ll be asking questions. Feel free to let them know about Master-at-Arms Stanhope and Petty Officer First Class Harmon, why they came over to Judge Dupont’s for a visit.” He took a breath, held it a moment, then said, “And we’ll find out what happened and who that is over there. The body. I’m thinking you’re safe, though. That’s what’s important.”

I said nothing. I knew what would happen next, who’d be showing up at the door. But I hadn’t actually thought of what I’d be saying to them, and especially about Stanhope and Harmon. I only knew the cops’d be here, and want some answers.

And it was a relief, if only a small one, to hear somebody say something about the body. About her.

“Fine,” I said, and Mom, leaning against me again but this time, I knew, for only an effect—this piece of the family was safe at home—said, “Thank you, Jamison, for staying until he got here.”

And it hit me: I could play along too, just like Mom was doing already. She didn’t lean into me like this when I was in trouble, and I knew I was in trouble.

“You want,” I said, “I can drive you in the golf cart over there. To the judge’s house.”

He’d taken another step, but stopped again, slowly turned to me. Here was that smile, still and always there: tight and determined.

“I’ll walk, if you don’t mind.” He nodded over his shoulder, just a touch of a move, his eyes right on me, his face clear as day for the landscape lights out here. “Petty Officer Harmon here will take me back the same way you two came in.”

I blinked once, felt my face start into some kind of a question, but then I looked past him, down to the left of the foot of the stairs.

There on the tabby walkway stood Harmon, that M4 pointed down. He was looking at me, and nodded.

“See you tonight,” Prendergast said.

I blinked again, felt Mom stiff beside me.

Harmon had followed me the whole time.

I said, “What’s tonight?”

“Poker!” Prendergast shot out, and now he laughed, a high-pitched thing that sent a kind of black twist through me. “Over to Warchester’s,” he said and shook his head. “It may be four in the morning right now, but it’s a Thursday.”

He took the last two steps down, and turned one more time. “I imagine I’ll be seeing Leland over at Judge Dupont’s,” he said, and it seemed that smile of his was even tighter, that laugh he’d given as fake as Mom’s leaning into me right now. “But in case I forget to tell him, you let him know I’ll be taking him to the cleaners tonight.” He paused. “You tell him to bring only what he’s willing to lose.”

He nodded again, and turned. Harmon stood at attention, saluted him, but Prendergast did nothing, only started on the path toward the drive, away and to our right. Harmon fell in right behind him without looking back up at us.

And I’d gotten the message: Bring the goggles. Prendergast would get them tonight.

But then, as if all of this weren’t enough, Prendergast and Harmon
only made it to the end of the walkway and a step or so out into the drive before they both stopped, sudden and sharp, as though they’d been scared by something.

I felt Mom beside me jump for it, felt too the blitz of hot blood to my face and neck, the rush of it, all in an instant, and looked past them off into the dark on the other side of the drive, there past where the landscape lighting blazed down.

A man stood there, maybe fifty feet away from the two of them.

Jessup, in his black ball cap, black windbreaker, and black pants.

“Thought I’d tag along, just in case,” he said, and I saw the ball cap nod at them. He looked up at us on the porch, called out, “Huger, Mrs. Dillard. How you doing?”

“I’m sorry for all this mess Huger and Leland are putting you through,” Mom called out quick as that, when I hadn’t even got my breath yet, hadn’t any words even to answer back.

“No problem,” he called out, and nodded again, a dark figure down there. “Just doing my job,” he called, then looked back at Prendergast and Harmon. “Think I know a little quicker way than the one y’all came in on.” He turned then, started away down the drive, and into the black out there.

I looked at Prendergast down at the edge of the drive, saw he was turned to Harmon behind him, his head cocked to one side, eyes open wide.

You know he was there?
I could hear loud as a brick on an aluminum hull for the look he was giving him, that tilt of his head.

Harmon shook his head, just once, and they were gone, walking fast across the gravel drive, following a security guard who’d been there all along.

M
om wouldn’t talk to me, only went to the kitchen at the back end of the house, pulled the coffeepot from the maker, turned it upside down in the sink and rinsed it out. Two empty cups sat on the glass-topped breakfast table, two of the four wrought-iron chairs pulled out, too,
the ones that faced the picture window to the dock and marsh and creek out there.

I didn’t egg her on, didn’t ask her the dumb question what was wrong, didn’t volunteer any apology. Whatever was coming would come, and so I stayed quiet, only went around the table to the far side closest to the window, and took off the book bag and leaned over, slipped it beneath the glass tabletop.

I turned then, looked out the window at the dock lit up every few feet with the knee-high solar lamps we had running the whole length. The lights were dimming down now, night almost over and the solar power nearly bled out.

From here the creek made an arc away to the left and right so that I could see a good long stretch of it, maybe a mile altogether, our dock off the back of the house, maybe twenty yards out, at the bottom of the sweep of it all. Even in the dark out there and the light in here, I could see the water, the silver run of it, like a thin ribbon lying in the uneven lay of blacks and grays and silvers of the marsh. Out there, farther now, a couple miles off and to my left, sat the Weapons Station land, on it nothing I could see, just that ragged black tree line, to my right the far spread of marsh that led out to the Cooper River. From inside the kitchen it was all a guess what exactly it looked like, the broad void out there filled in with my memory of being on my boat, or at the end of the dock and just throwing a cast net for mullet to bring along with me fishing somewhere. But I could see from here the creek, the curve of it away on both sides. I could see that much.

Of course Mom and Prendergast’d known I was on my way here. Harmon had followed me every step, radioed in, and I hadn’t known it, thought myself alone out there among the ghosts. But Harmon hadn’t known
he
was being followed, and there was something to that: the fact a Navy dude was following me without my knowing, while
he
was being followed by someone
he
couldn’t hear.

And I thought of my mom, and how quick she was to answer Jessup
calling out to us, how fast she’d been with an answer when Harmon and Prendergast both had been stunned at him standing there.

I smiled. For the first time that night.

I heard behind me one of the chairs move against the heart-pine floor, and I turned, saw Mom sit down at the table, those two empty coffee cups gone now.

She didn’t look at me, only put her hands on the glass tabletop, her fingers together, and looked down, like she was ready to start in on a prayer.

I turned from the window, pulled out the chair across the table from her, and sat.

“I’m sorry,” I finally said, though I wasn’t quite certain about what. The fact, of course, was that I’d taken Unc out to golf, so I was the one who’d had a hand in getting caught, and Mrs. Q was the one to call us in. There was that humiliation for starters.

But there was also a dead person involved, one I’d been the first to lay eyes on, and I felt like I had to ask forgiveness for that too, for whatever reason. Maybe because the woman’d been trumped by concerns over some shitty game about Unc and the commander and me and night goggles, the idea of a dead woman taking a big backseat to the cat-and-mouse crap these goggles were causing.

Still she said nothing, and so, just to fill the quiet, like maybe she’d done with turning on all the lights, I said, “That’s something, huh? Jessup scaring those guys like that.” I paused, still got nothing. “And I didn’t know you knew Prendergast. That’s funny, because Unc sees him every—”

Mom lifted her head at that, and I stopped. I could see her chin set hard, no more trembling, her mouth a thin line, her eyes nearly closed.

She unlaced her fingers from in front of her, reached behind her with one hand. She moved that hand a little, fishing for something, then brought it from behind her, and lay on the glass tabletop a pistol.