Dead Low Tide (7 page)

That was when Stanhope broke, let his head drop so that he was looking at Unc’s chest. But even in the shadows and light out here I could see the way his jaw was working, the set of it. He wasn’t done.

“Harmon,” he said, and the black sailor shot out “Sir” and turned to him, the word and move so quick it seemed like bad acting, a bit player jumping his lines.

Unc hadn’t moved, his face still to where Stanhope’s had been, and I could see the smallest smile on him: he’d won this round.

Stanhope looked up at Harmon beside him, nodded hard to his left and away from the crowd, and the two moved a couple yards away toward the woods.

Unc looked over here at the house. He moved his head a little side to side, like he was scanning the place same as Harmon had, then called out loud, “Huger?”

I let him look for me a couple seconds more before I said, “Here.”

He lasered in on exactly where I sat, those sunglasses right on me. He looked at me a long moment while the cops and deputy and Jessup—everyone down there but the sailors—turned to me.

“You get us your thermos out that book bag of yours and pour us each a cup of that glorious instant coffee. This is going to take a while.” He nodded, held his look on me.

But I hadn’t brought the bag with me from the jon boat, had left it there when I’d stood and walked away. “Left it on the boat,” I called out.

He pursed his lips, turned to the creek, then looked right back at me. “Sure would like a cup,” he said.

And it came to me, what Unc was trying to tell me: he wanted me to have hold of those goggles, no matter what.

I sat there a few seconds, the all of them—even Mrs. Q had turned to me by then—looking at me, waiting, like a cup of coffee out of a thermos was the only next thing could happen on the face of the earth. But Unc and I knew this wasn’t anything at all about coffee. It was about those stupid goggles, and nothing else. Unc’d found a body, but it sure seemed he was only worked up about being spotted with the goggles. All we had to do was to name Commander Prendergast, the fellow poker night chump Unc’d won them off of, hand them off to Stanhope, and the whole thing’d be over.

But Unc wasn’t going there. And the problem was I couldn’t tell why.

“Huger?” he said, and I could see now, over at the tree line past
Unc and his brood of lawmen, Stanhope and the black sailor, Harmon, looking at me too.

I wanted to let Unc twist out there on his own right now, for whatever reason it was I had of my own. Maybe it was because I didn’t want to get up and walk all the way back down there and back across that plank again, and risk seeing one more time that body. Or maybe it was because I’d wanted to just give the damned goggles up when they’d first got here, because of what they’d made me see for Unc, me as always his eyes: the woman’s face torn up, the pale green of her flesh buoyed by the pole beneath her.

Maybe I wanted to have my own life, to live on my own and not have to ferry Unc through his days, me his chauffeur and caddy and coffee bearer and eyes every day I was alive.

Or maybe—and I knew this was it, finally—maybe it was because it didn’t seem like Unc gave a shit about this body, some woman who’d been killed and left in the marsh. Maybe what made me sit there a few seconds without answering him was because of that glee he seemed to be deriving at having beat Stanhope this round. While behind him down in the water was a body.

“Here you go” came from behind him, and I sat up quick, saw making his way across the plank from the jon boat Major Tyler, holding out in front of him my book bag, and already I was up and around the wrought-iron table and jogging the few yards down the lawn toward him, and then I stood among them all, these Hanahan police and the deputy and Unc, and Tyler.

He was taller than I’d thought, maybe six four or five, and I could see his face now for Dupont’s back porch light: he was a little jowly, had heavy eyebrows and a thick neck. Football, was the first thing came to me. He’d had to play somewhere when he was in college.

He nodded, gave a smile that was all business, my bag held out in his hand like some kid’s toy for how big he was.

I took the book bag, slung it quick over a shoulder. I nodded, said,
“Thank you,” and wondered for a second why I’d never heard from Unc any mention of an Alton Tyler with the DNR.

Here was Unc with a hand at my elbow, leading me off and back toward the patio. “Thank you so much, Alton,” he said over his shoulder, then, a little too loud and meant, I could hear, for nothing more than show, “This coffee’s sure gonna do me good.”

And off to our right, at the edge of the woods, stood Stanhope and Harmon. I looked straight at them, too, saw their eyes were right on me, their mouths thin lines.

Harmon, his hand still flat on the stock of his M4, looked right at the book bag, and back up to me. He nodded.

I set the bag on the table once we’d gotten to the porch, opened it, careful not to let Grange or Mrs. Q or Priscilla see inside. There lay the goggles, and that construction helmet, at the bottom the old thermos and the travel mugs, and I pulled one out and the thermos, poured off a full cup for Unc, set the bag at my feet.

Unc made a big show of sipping at it, all for those two sailors watching every move over there. He wouldn’t sit down, though Grange had stood up when we’d gotten here and offered his seat. I’d offered him mine, too, but he’d have none of it, while Mrs. Q sat beside us whispering loud “The idea, the idea.”

By this time Priscilla’d given up trying to monitor the old lady, and stood beside Grange, all of us facing the creek while here came more neighbors: first the Bennetts, then the Moores, the Michauxs, the Balls, the Legares. The usual suspects, all of them anchored to Landgrave Hall for as long as the place had been here, each with portraits aplenty of dead ancestors inside the hallowed halls of their cottages, each with their own dedicated tables at the clubhouse. I knew already the front of the Dupont house was clogged with the golf carts they’d all driven over here, all of them talking low to each other now, shaking their heads, arms crossed, now and again nodding toward us here at the table, watching.

Tyler took first the deputy out onto the plank and across our boat
onto his, shone that Maglite down into the water, the two of them talking, the beam darting back and forth. Then the deputy left, the two Hanahan cops moving out next to have their own peep show.

A minute or so later the EMTs came bumping up amidst all the neighbors, a gurney pushed and pulled and lifted and prodded by a man and a woman in white shirts and dark pants and latex gloves already on. The two of them labored to get the gurney close as they could to the water, no way for the truck itself to back in here. On the gurney was stacked their equipment, what looked all the world like a pile of tackle boxes.

Another shuffle and twist of the neighbors, and here now were two men and a woman coming out into this all, the three of them in wet suits and with a black duffel bag each, scuba tanks on their backs. They headed right down to the water, stepped across the plank one at a time—the Hanahan cops’d come back on ground when the EMTs showed up—and then were out there with Tyler.

That was when I left.

I leaned over, picked up the book bag with one hand, and sort of took a side step away from Unc and Grange and the table. I looked one last time at the whole circus going on out here, at the dozen or so people standing in their bathrobes and whatnot all watching, and at these lawmen with their hands on their hips, and at Stanhope and Harmon too, who’d been caught up like the rest of everyone else by the ghoul-work coming up next, and at the boats jammed in here, and at Tyler back on the bow of his, the only man out here, it seemed, who’d had the kind of bearing and calm the finding of a dead body called for.

I meant to go around the house on the other side. I meant to keep from having to say word one to anybody. Pretty soon SLED would show up and the whole South Carolina Law Enforcement Division investigation would start in earnest, not just the retrieval of a crab-picked body out of pluff mud. They’d find me. They’d come over to the house, knock on the door, and start asking away the predictable
questions—Why were you out here? How did you find it?—with a bonus question thrown in for good measure: Why did you leave the scene?

And none of this—none of it—would be over for who knew how long.

I sure didn’t know, because, I understood as I looked at them all, I still wasn’t over the last bodies I’d seen. Though I’d told myself I was, managed enough times to convince myself that the all of that was over, I knew, with this girl coming up from the dark into that green porthole of sight, that here it all was again. My life and what I’d seen and done only as far away as the thin skim of muddy water that’d kept her hidden until Unc levered her up.

I turned then, safe, I figured, and already on my way home, though Mom was probably up and sitting with a cup of coffee, fuming at why her son and his father couldn’t just play golf in daylight like the rest of the whole stupid world.

And there, inside the French door window, was that Guatemalan nurse. She had a handful of curtain pulled back, her face nearly pressed to the glass, her black hair tight into a ponytail or bun, I couldn’t tell which.

Our eyes met a second, just long enough for me to pause, to take in the fact she was there and looking at me, before she let go the curtain, disappeared.

But the moment between us lasted just long enough for my momentum to shift for that pause, my feet already moving, and I bumped the smallest way into the wrought-iron table.

Not a second later here was a hand on my shoulder: Unc.

I turned to him, had no choice. But he only looked at me, those sunglasses lasered in yet again.

“Go on,” he whispered. “Hide the goggles. Tell your momma we’ll all be all right.”

I took a breath, nodded, though he had no way to see.

But he knew.

The strobe on the orange and white EMS truck shredded the front of the Dupont house into bright red pieces, the clot of golf carts and the cops’ Charger and deputy’s Crown Vic all quivering in the pulse. Up closest to the house was a black Suburban, no doubt what the sailors had arrived first on the scene in; behind the EMS was parked another truck, a huge and dark Silverado, on its door, I could see from here, the bold white letters
DNR
, above it the round logo: the search and rescue truck.

I hung back in the shadows on this side of the house, watched for more neighbors rolling up, saw none. And of course as I stepped out, started across the yard, here came the headlights of another vehicle pulling into the drive, and I ducked down into a wax myrtle at the edge of the grass, made myself small as I could.

Yet another Silverado, those letters and logo again. The DNR agent Tyler’d called in.

He edged up to the bumper of the Crown Vic, and the dome light in the cab came on. Then I heard the door slam shut, the cab dark again, and saw somebody moving off quick to the hubbub ahead.

I ran across the lawn and the gravel drive, headed right on up and past the tee box, the camp chair I’d been sitting in still parked there. I slowed down, turned and sort of jogged backward a few steps, looked at the chair and the lights and carts and vehicles all beyond it: a circus, the center ring a body.

I let out a hard breath, edged up on it something like a cry for how sharp had been in me that feeling in my chest, the pressing down and pushing out. Not long ago I’d been sitting in that chair, watching golf balls go places I wouldn’t go, being pissy about Unc and his life now, pondering the architecture at Stanford. And thinking about Tabitha.

But that was then.

I turned, headed for the dark line of trees past those kidney bunkers and the thirteenth green I could barely see up ahead for how dark it was. Those trees, the avenue of live oak leading to the original plantation house—planted by Landgrave Elliot himself in 1679—bordered the eleventh fairway. From there I’d have to walk that hole’s length, then cross the tenth, make it past the clubhouse without setting off the motion sensor on the floodlights all over it, next head on through the ninth and eighth, careful all the while to steer clear of the couple dozen houses sprinkled everywhere out here. Then I’d be at the seventh, where at the far end, just off the left-hand side of the green and looking out on Goose Creek toward the Cooper River, was our cottage.

Our home. Or at least where we wrong elements—my mom, Unc, and me—all lived.

M
ore days than I care to count I miss the old house on Marie, back before we ever lived here, and even farther back, even before all of what’d happened out to Hungry Neck so long ago. Too many times since Unc, Mom, and I had gotten here I was sorry I wasn’t a kid
anymore and hanging out with my old high school cohorts Matt and Jessup and Rafael, LaKeisha and Polly and Deevonne, us there on the tracks beside the Mark Clark high up on its concrete pilings, enjoying ourselves for no better reason than parking our butts on the railroad tracks. We’d sit and pass around Colt 45s and talk about teachers and who we liked and didn’t, about grades and how we didn’t care or did, about what shits other people were, ourselves included. We were black and white, stupid and smart, good grades and bad grades. We were just us.