Dead Low Tide (13 page)

“Easy to laugh now,” Tyler volunteered then. “Back out on the ramp, no way any of us was going to say a word, you stomping around and swearing like a sailor.” He shook his head, smiling. He held his DNR hat in his hands by the bill and facing him, then eased off on the laughs, shook his head again. “Old Mitch,” he said. “I miss him.”

“Mitch,” Unc said, his eyes down. He stopped smiling, took a sip of his coffee, set the cup down. “Wonder where that old picture is.”

I looked at Mom beside me, saw her with her arms crossed, looking down, her head slowly shaking too.

“Mitch who?” I said. “What happened?” The way they’d all gone quiet I was ready for something about cancer taking him, or his running off same as my father had, never heard from again.

Unc shook his head one more time, said, “Mitch Claussen. Lost him in a bust out near Awendaw in ’seventy-nine.”

“A good man,” Tyler said. He’d set the cap on the table, took a sip off his coffee, set it down on the table. He put his hands in his lap, leaned back a little bit in his chair, and I could hear the leather creak of his belt and holster.

He looked up at Mom then. “Thank you for the coffee, Eugenie,” he said, and got this small and careful smile. He nodded, said, “You look good as ever, too.”

“I’m a wreck,” Mom said and looked down, pushed a strand of hair behind her ear, tilted her head.

Unc still sat there, the cup in both hands, no look on his face at all, and I couldn’t tell if he was thinking about this Mitch, or whatever was up with Mom and Tyler, or about a dead woman in pluff mud.

“You look just fine for this early in the morning,” Tyler said, that small smile still on him.

But then he lost the smile, took hold of that cap and looked at the bill again. He didn’t see, like I did, Mom glance up at him an instant, her head still tilted.

“I know,” he started, “all y’all been through a lot in the last few years. But I need to talk with Huger here—”

His eyes cut to me, a quick nod, then he looked back to Mom, who’d sat up straight, quit with that tilt of her head. “I’ll need to ask him a few questions, just like I already did with Leland on the way over. And there’s going to be a whole lot more people coming over soon enough to just keep on asking them. State Law Enforcement Division ought to be here in a few minutes, then the sheriff’s office.
Hanahan police will be here too, though most of this’ll end up handed off to SLED. Seems we got at least four sorts of jurisdictions involved here, and everyone likes to put his oar in on this kind of thing. But SLED’ll be the ones to handle it all.”

He paused, looked over at Unc. “Beat about all the info I could out of this bull shark here,” he said, and reached out, gave a soft punch at Unc’s shoulder. Unc smiled, nodded sharp. “But tell you the truth,” Tyler went on, and now he was looking at Mom again, “I’m not even sure how much the DNR’ll be involved in the end.”

He stopped, looked down again, slowly shook his head, but this time in some other way. No rueful sort of pondering the loss of a comrade in a bust, but a puzzled kind of regard. He said, “Seems somehow the Navy’s gotten involved, too, for whatever reason.” He looked at me now. “Unc tells me you both never even come close to the tract, but here two seamen were, acting all kinds of put out, like they—”

“Jamison Prendergast was over here,” Mom said flat-out right then, and both Unc and Tyler looked at her.

“When?” Unc said, cold and hard.

“Not fifteen minutes after Quillie Grimball called me,” Mom said. She sat up even straighter now, crossed her arms again. “His boys dropped him off here and went on over to where you were.” She paused, bit her lip. “Then he stayed here. To keep me company. He said.”

“And you let that son of a bitch in here?” Unc shot out, his hands on the table already in fists, and I wondered for a moment why he’d be so pissed. He played poker with the man.

“What was I supposed to do?” Mom said, and though I’d expected on her voice some fire, some pissed off Mom-ness about whatever even deeper shit we were heading into here, she was quiet, her voice just like it’d been when she’d laid that gun on the table. “A black Suburban rolls up at three in the morning,” she nearly whispered, “and
out pops a man in uniform and a second later I see it’s him and I don’t even know what—”

“Eugenie,” Unc whispered hard, shook his head.

“She’s right,” Tyler said, and looked at Unc. He laced his fingers together on the tabletop: all business. “She did the right thing, Leland. Nothing to worry about, either. Prendergast gets a report you two are wandering around on the tract—”

“But we—” Unc started in, but Tyler said “Leland,” sharp and low.

Unc stopped, his teeth clenched. He let out a short breath through his nose, and Tyler went on.

“Somebody’s been spotted out on U.S. Navy land, and he has the job of making sure it’s secure. He knows you, Leland, which is a fact no one can say isn’t true, and so his first stop with his support is to come to your house in case you and Huger are in transit via the jon boat, then dispatch his men to the scene itself.” He stopped, looked at me, at Mom. Then he looked at his hands. “It’s a man doing his job. Doesn’t matter what history somebody brings up a set of stairs,” he said.

From where I sat it seemed suddenly like his eyes weren’t looking at his hands at all, but straight through the glass tabletop, and to the book bag still here at my feet. Both my feet were touching it now, though I hadn’t known I’d done this, hadn’t realized I’d pushed my toes right up against it.

And I wondered: Had Unc told him about what we’d seen with the goggles? Had he told him about the goggles at all?

Was he looking right now at the book bag beneath us, his words about what somebody brought to the table a signal he knew everything?

And for the ten thousandth time in my life, here was Unc, looking at me now, a blind man reading me better than anyone on the planet, though I hadn’t said word one since I’d asked about this Mitch Claussen.

Unc said, “You’re right. Better we don’t bring any of that old history to what’s going on here tonight.” He nodded. “Because what matters is a woman’s been killed, and everybody’s just trying to find out how to get the piece of trash did it.”

And I got it: shut up about the goggles.

“It’s all right, Eugenie,” Tyler said, and I glanced at him, saw his head tilted, his eyebrows drawn together. His eyes were on Mom now, and I turned, looked at her.

She was crying without a sound out of her, her chin on her chest, her shoulders heaving up and down, arms crossed in front of her. Already I was up and out of my chair, and I touched her shoulder, said, “Mom, it’s okay, we’re here. It’s okay,” even though I still had no idea what I was comforting her for. Prendergast was a bad person, and everyone here at the table knew why except me. But right now that didn’t matter at all, and now I was crouched beside her chair, ran my hand across her shoulder and arm. She leaned into me, and I put my arm around my mom.

No one said anything for a minute or so. Unc only sat with his cup, looked inside it like it could tell him something. Tyler looked up at us now and again, then down to his hands, still laced together in front of him. Then Unc finally said, “Another cup of this coffee sounds good to me,” and stood from his chair, turned straight for the kitchen counter two paces away, and touched its edge, traced it to right where the maker sat.

He reached in, pulled out the pot, and like always held the handle of the cup so’s his index finger was hooked over the rim, his way to tell how full the cup was, and he poured.

“Alton?” Unc said, and turned to him, still in his seat. “You want a refill?”

Mom took in a couple deep breaths, touched my arm with a hand, patted it. She nodded, a signal to me all its own: I’ll be okay. I’ll be fine.

Suddenly she was standing from her chair, and here she was wiping
an eye again. She gave out a crumpled smile while Tyler and I both stood. She said, “I’m sorry, Alton, for this fit I’m pitching. I just can’t seem to—”

“No apologies necessary.” He squared himself up at this, hooked his thumbs into his duty belt, that creak of leather again. He nodded, and it seemed he was trying now to be an agent of the Department of Natural Resources, this talk about a boat dumped on a ramp and sharks’ teeth a mile behind us.

At least he was
trying
to make it feel like that. Because now I could see in his eyes, and in the stiff nod he gave, and the posed thumbs-in-the-belt, just a boy, a kid standing here.

He liked my mom.

“I have to go,” Mom said, and she turned, started away from the table and through the sitting room for the front of the house, and the stairs. “Anybody needs me I’ll be upstairs,” she called out, and I could hear her trying to make herself sound all right, make us believe she’d be fine. “In case anyone has to ask me any questions. I’m okay.” Then she was gone.

Unc stood in the kitchen looking toward us, the pot in one hand, the cup still on the counter with his finger hooked inside. Tyler stood with his thumbs in that belt, his eyebrows a little up for the surprise of how quick she was gone.

I said nothing, only looked out past Tyler to the sky out the window, a dull and dark purple gearing up for daylight.

“Now we get to the questions,” Tyler said, and turned to me, nodded. He reached behind him, pulled from his back pocket a thin black notebook.

I
couldn’t sleep much at all the rest of the day.

Morning wormed in through the blinds in my room, for starters. Every time I took Unc out to golf it was like this, me trying once we were home to sleep and failing at it. Whatever time I’d get up, the rest of the day always had this fuzzy hot edge to it, like I was watching
myself from inside a low-grade fever as I did whatever that day called for.

There was poker night tonight to think about, and my job of having to make certain Unc brought to the house in Mount Pleasant the goggles to hand over to Prendergast. And there was Prendergast himself to think about, and whatever it was made Mom into the mess she’d become for his showing up to the house.

There was that gun she carried with her, and how long she’d been carrying it without me knowing anything at all.

And buried at the bottom of it or heaped at the top was a woman pulled up from pluff mud by me, and by Unc.

So I lay there in my room, pretended I was sleeping, rolled back and forth under the covers in my pajamas—a pair of basketball shorts and one of my old Bass Pro T-shirts—and did nothing but think, and think.

Tyler’s questions had been only routine, his demeanor suddenly nowhere near a kid with a crush sitting at a table and drinking coffee in the predawn dark. But he wasn’t any kind of menace, either, once we were left sitting alone there at the table, Unc with his coffee heading to the library and his recliner in there.

They were only questions, a good couple dozen of them, among the standouts Why were you there? What were the circumstances involved with finding the body? How long had you been out there? Was it Unc or you to wedge it up? Did you know anyone at the Dupont house?

Anything else you care to tell me?

Of course it was that last one that made me into a liar. I could answer every question he’d thrown at me and not have to mention anything about the goggles, or those IR illuminators shining at us from across the marsh, and know I was giving him the truth. But when it came to that last question, all I knew to do was to shake my head, look Tyler right in the eye, and hand him a good solid flat-out
no. The question made me into a liar, because there was plenty more I wanted to tell him about.

The interview had taken about a half hour altogether, and then he smiled, nodded, put the black notebook he’d been scribbling in back in his pocket. He stood, the light behind him out through the window gone now a heavy blue, and he took in a deep breath, looked past me toward the hallway to the front of the house.

“Leland,” he called out, “how’d I do?”

“Couldn’t hear a word y’all said,” Unc shot right back from where he’d been sitting and listening the whole time.

Tyler let out a small laugh, looked back at me, and now I was standing, put my hands on my hips. “You think of anything else you want to tell me,” Tyler started, “you just—”

“Tyler, ten-eighteen, Tyler, ten-eighteen,” cut in from the radio on his belt just then, sharp static yelps of sound. He quick reached down and pulled the thing off his belt, held it up to his mouth.

“Tyler,” he said, and turned from me to the window, looking, I figured, for some private way to talk.

“Nine seventy-seven,” came the voice. “All the way up here to Wambaw Creek at Echaw Bridge Landing. You still working with recovery?”

I could hear Unc move in the recliner, his steps on the hardwood floor back toward us now. But I didn’t turn to him, only stood watching Tyler, and listening.

“Negative,” he said into the radio. “Interviewing witness, but we’re done.” He paused. “Nine seventy-seven?” he said.

“It rains, it pours,” the voice crackled out. “Charleston County recovery already on the way. Sure could use a hand up here. Vehicle in the water, body in the trunk.”

“Campbell,” Tyler barked, then said a little easier, “Quiet.” He paused a moment, put the radio back to his mouth. “ETA one hour. Over.”

A couple seconds later came this Campbell and his single word, “Over.”

Unc said from behind me, “He got that right about when it rains it pours,” and Tyler turned to us, already had the radio clipped back on, a hand pulling his windbreaker off the back of the chair.

He put it on, said, “Two in one night. All I’d planned was putting in at Bushy Park Landing and motoring up Flag Creek, see if I can’t park somewheres and hide out until a couple duck hunters who’ve baited the place back in there show up, start banging away.” He shook his head, let out a low whistle. “Planned on having a nice quiet morning, just enjoying the sunrise and writing tickets. But no.”

He stepped to the door off the kitchen, pulled it open, but turned to me, looked me in the eyes. “I’m sorry for what you saw today. Everyone involved’s going to do their best to get who did it.” He nodded, glanced at the floor a second. He drew in a breath, and looked at Unc. “Leland,” he said, “you make sure and give Eugenie my best. And tell her I hope we can all get together over better circumstances sometime soon.”