Dead Low Tide (14 page)

“Will do,” Unc said, and smiled, nodded. I could see his coffee cup was empty, and then came three sharp knocks at the front door.

Tyler nodded at us both, and he was gone.

I
t’d been South Carolina Law Enforcement Division at the door, two crew-cut thick-necked boys with windbreakers all their own,
SLED
in bright yellow letters a foot high across their backs. Same questions as Tyler’d asked, but neither Unc nor I sitting down to answer them. We only went into two separate rooms, Unc staying there in his library with one of them, the other following me back into the kitchen. A half hour and we were done, and when we opened the front door to let them out, two sheriff’s deputies stood at the bottom of the stairs up to the porch, waiting in the gray light out there, Smokey Bear hats on.

A half hour after that it was the Hanahan police at the bottom
of the stairs, though not Poston and Danford, the two who’d arrived on scene at the Dupont house. These were two slightly older dudes in jeans and sweatshirts, detectives who’d obviously been asleep not that long ago, their hair still wild, the two unshaved. Unc knew them both, had fished with one of them’s father when they were kids, had dated the other’s mom when they were in high school.

And when we opened up the door to let them out, the sun just touching the tops of live oaks across the drive, of course I thought I’d find the ones I’d been expecting all along: somebody from the United States Navy, here to interrogate. I figured it wouldn’t be Prendergast—he’d made it clear he wouldn’t be seeing me or Unc until tonight at poker—and didn’t think, either, it would be Stanhope or Harmon. But somebody. Somebody.

But this time there was nobody. Only the black Charger the detectives’d parked in the drive.

We said goodbye to the Hanahan detectives, we’ll call you anything comes to mind, thank you, thank you, and closed the door.

Unc put a hand to my shoulder then, turned to me, said, “You did fine. We told them everything we know on how we come about finding this body. We just left off a couple details is all. Things we’ll wrap up tonight at poker.” He paused, took in a breath. “As for this woman,” he said, and slowly shook his head, looked down. “The body.” He paused again. “All these boys are doing their jobs. They’ll find whoever did it.” He looked back up at me. “Go on up and get some sleep now.” He let go my shoulder, turned from the foyer, and started back toward the kitchen.

And I’d done what he told me, climbed the stairs, turned to the left at the top and went to the second door on the right, opened it to find things exactly the way I’d left them at two o’clock this morning: bed unmade, dirty clothes in a pile in the right corner of the room, bookcases jammed with books and DVDs and games, Xbox booted up, the forty-two-inch plasma TV waiting to engage.

Though it didn’t seem enough to me, what was happening about
the body, and Unc’s words on it. It didn’t seem enough for Unc to just say somebody’d figure out who did it.

No doubt Unc’d poked around in the kitchen after I’d gone up to try and sleep, him looking for my book bag, just to make sure all was well. I imagined he pulled out of there the thermos and my travel mug, gave them a rinse and set them in the strainer beside the kitchen sink, good citizen that he is, and I wondered where his own travel mug was right then, if it was in the jon boat out at the dock, or maybe sitting on the wrought-iron table out back of the Dupont place. I saw him sipping at it again, right before I’d made my big escape with not one but two parties in tow, Harmon and Jessup both. My Covert Op.

Once he knew where the goggles were, he’d take a second to touch at that stick leaned in the corner of the breakfast area once more, just to make sure. Then he’d be on his way to try and catch a nap in his own room down off the library, where he kept his bed made from the moment he rolled out of it—usually 5:00
A.M.
—and where he had his own plasma TV mounted on the wall, the thing always on the History Channel. He claims the sound is why he bought the thing, though I know it’s the fact he’d been able to afford it after all his years of living in the trailer out to Hungry Neck.

I imagined, too, my mom—we hadn’t heard a word from her since she left us there in the kitchen—trying to sleep in her room at the opposite end of the second floor from mine, her there in the master suite with its Jacuzzi spa tub and stone-tiled shower with four showerheads and steam jets too. A bed the size of her whole bedroom on Marie. A walk-in closet the size of our old garage.

And with a Beretta subcompact, and a concealed weapons permit. Something called a pancake holster. I’d never heard of that before, a pancake holster. But it made sense: you had a gun on you, you wanted that thing flat as one so nobody’d see.

Eventually I’d found a piece of crappy sleep, and came out of it into late afternoon light. I stood from the bed and stretched, then leaned into the blinds, fingered them open for a second to find just another day going on out there, but with the added bonus of that fuzzy hot edge to everything for having stayed up all night: flower beds with their tabby paths through them still lay out there, and an empty driveway, past it all the gravel drive I’d walked in on, Spanish moss in live oaks like the same old dead men’s beards.

The weird thing was the way the world just kept moving on. At some point this evening we’d be turning on the television, seeing about the body the same shit everyone sees every time something like this happens: somebody finds a body, and there’s video on the five, six, and seven o’clock news from a camera in someone’s yard across the street or down the road. Yellow crime scene tape snaps or doesn’t snap in whatever breeze or still air was out there when the
cameraman set up. Vehicles jammed in a driveway. Men in uniforms and not in uniforms busy about the house or woods or marsh or wherever, talking to each other or with hands on hips or moving in and out of said house or woods. Somebody in the studio drones on about who what where.

Then you turn the channel, or crank up the TiVo, or just wait until sports or weather or whatever else comes on. And the world just keeps moving.

Same thing with a woman pried up out of pluff mud, it felt right then. After we’d watch the news, I’d drive Unc out to Mount Pleasant for poker, and we’d hand over goggles to solve the particular drama we’d been involved in with Prendergast and whoever saw us from over at the Navy tract. And now there was another, more pressing drama here in the house, with his showing up and Mom and Unc and Major Tyler’s reactions to that fact, something I didn’t know how to solve because I had no idea what it was all about. But a drama that’d made Mom get out a gun.

There was all of this. But beneath it that woman, levered up by Unc and me. And out my window the same old world going on.

M
om’s bedroom door was closed, and I went down to the kitchen, saw she wasn’t anywhere around, figured maybe she was asleep. But out the windows in the breakfast area, the same windows I’d watched the gradual light of this day come up on, I could see Unc down at the end of the dock, sitting in one of the lawn chairs we kept folded up in the marine storage locker out there.

He was parked facing the setting sun, him looking back up the creek toward the Dupont house, though you couldn’t see it from here for the arc the creek made. Once you reached the tip of the arc, the creek turned around the point, and it was still a half mile to Judge Dupont’s from there.

At the right end of the dock stood the boathouse, pylons with a roof over it, the jon boat cradled up in the rafters, all put away neat
and clean by Unc alone. His walking stick was leaned up against one of the pylons, and I saw him lift his hand to his mouth now. He was smoking one of his cigars: a Hoyo de Monterrey Excalibur II. The only thing he smoked.

I reached for the door out onto the deck, started to pull it open, but stopped, turned to the breakfast table behind me. Beneath the glass top sat my book bag, exactly where I’d left it last night, and there seemed for this second something good about its not having moved. But in the exact same moment it seemed totally wrong. The goggles’d been what brought Prendergast here to the house, and so whatever piece of Mom’s past with him. But tonight Unc’d be handing them back to Prendergast, and maybe whatever shard of glass Mom’d had pressed into her hand for all this might disappear.

I turned to the door, opened it, and went out onto the deck, careful to close it quiet as I could for fear I might wake Mom.

The deck was wide as the whole back of the house, the half of it to the right under a pergola, a built-in gas barbecue and range and sink against the far side, wooden benches built right into the deck railing. The other half, right out the kitchen door, had railing, too, but had a wrought-iron table and chairs of its own. Big ceramic garden pots sat beneath the railing, filled with petunias and snapdragons. All very elegant, all right out of
Southern Living
, all very Landgrave.

But centered on the table was a bright blue and definitely ugly ceramic thing big as a bowling ball, a thick spray of rosemary growing out the top of it: something I’d made when I was on a field trip in third grade. I’d meant it to be a lidless cookie jar that looked like an apple, had painted it with a glaze that seemed at the time something like red. But when it was delivered with all the other kids’ creations from the kiln back to Miss Picken’s class a week later, here had been this hideous bright blue thing. I’d carried it home in my yellow nylon
Jurassic Park
backpack, the padded shoulder straps cinched down tight—the jar was heavy as a bowling ball, too—and had given it to Mom. I lied to her, told her it was a giant blueberry, then watched as
she fussed over it and fussed. “What a beautiful planter!” she’d said, and bent to me, kissed me on the cheek.

I had no idea what a planter was, and so, because I’d already lied about its being a blueberry, I nodded, acted like that was exactly what it was. It’d sat on the front steps of the house on Marie from then on, was now in residence in the classy digs here. Still a blue apple just as ugly as the day I’d brought it home. But still displayed by Mom.

Our place had no backyard, so when you stepped off the deck onto the dock you were already in the marsh, sawgrass and salt-marsh hay on either side. When it was quiet you could hear the tick and dribble of the tide crawling in or out, filling in or emptying out the billion tiny crab holes in the pluff mud all around. The sun lay straight out in front of me a couple fists above the tree line over at the point on the creek, the tide already back on its way in for the second time since this morning, and as I walked out toward Unc, I could see the cordgrass on the edges of the creek already swallowed up in water. The world just kept moving on.

I waited for Unc to say something to me as I came closer to him. He’d have heard me from the second I opened the back door, figured he’d ask after how well I slept, or what Mom was up to. Some small talk as a means not to go headfirst into talk about last night. But he was quiet, only sat there with the cigar to his mouth.

I made it to the end, headed for the marine locker in under the roof of the boathouse, unlatched and lifted the long white lid of it, reached in and pulled out a folding chair, all still without a word. I closed the lid, parked the chair a few feet to the right and behind him, and sat down.

The air was a little thick today, the distance between the dock and the tree line over at the Naval Weapons Station the slightest white. Already I was sorry I hadn’t grabbed a ball cap of my own and a pair of sunglasses, though the sun was fast on its way down.

The marsh had hit that color in mid-spring when the brown of winter was being hustled out by the sharp green of new growth. Even
with the thin white pall of the air I could see the hard push of colors one against the other out there, beneath it all the creek and cold green water. The sun was already too low to bang its reflection off the creek and up into my eyes, and for the same old reason I ever had I wanted right then to drop the boat in, head out on the water.

“You remember,” Unc said then, his voice quiet, “that first night I played cards with those gentlemen over there in Mount Pleasant?”

His voice had been an interruption, but not a surprise. But still, with just those words, here was triggered in me the surprise tremble of my mom’s mouth last night, and her tears. Here was the surprise of her gun on the kitchen table, and the stunned look of both Unc and Tyler at the news Prendergast’d been at the house with Mom, all of it crashing down on me. No tick and dribble of a tide secreting its way in, but a wave that slapped hard from high above, and I shut my eyes, felt myself holding tight the arms of the lawn chair, felt my feet flat on the boards of the dock and pressing down.

I said, “Yes,” and did my best to conjure up some picture of the first few times we went to poker night. But all I could see was that huge orange stucco house in Mount Pleasant three stories tall, a grand set of stairs up to the front porch on the second, the front doors up there a huge arch that looked more like the entry to some sort of church than anything else.