Dark Waters (2 page)

I handed my wife a coffee and the fruit plate, and grabbed two of the plastic glasses from the bathroom sink. I poured some of the OJ in each glass, opened the cereal boxes so that they would be their own bowls, and poured in some milk. I'd been brazen enough to demand plastic spoons and forks from Denny's. The boys were settled and I headed with my coffee and its accompanying sweeteners back to the bed I'd shared the night before with my wife. Or part of the night before, whatever.

‘You want some sweetener?' I asked, handing her the bag.

‘Thank you,' she said, not looking up but taking the bag.

‘There's some forks in there, too, for the fruit plate,' I said.

‘How very nice,' she said, and it hardly sounded sarcastic at all, but still she wouldn't look up. She put the bag on the other side of her as I sat down next to her.

‘Can I have one of the forks?' I asked.

‘Certainly,' she said, handing me the bag.

I grabbed two real sugars out of the bag and the one fork left over. ‘Is this the silent treatment?' I asked her.

‘I hardly think you could call this the silent treatment,' she said, studiously spearing a pineapple chunk.

‘Well, you're saying words, but they don't seem real, if you know what I mean,' I said.

‘I have no idea what you mean,' she said.

‘You want me to explain?' I asked.

‘Hardly,' she said, then got up and, using her crutches that were by her side of the bed, went into the bathroom.

I sighed and ate the rest of the fruit, and the donut I'd stashed in my jacket pocket.

The line to get on the boat – ship, whatever – was really long. And again, my warnings came true (Jean insists it was a self-fulfilling prophesy) – the boys were hell-bent on making life miserable.

Just coming over the causeway onto Galveston Island had been a real treat for our two landlocked boys. Each grabbed a window and exclaimed the virtues of their side, then switched, then switched again. We were a couple of hours early for boarding, so we drove to the sea wall, found a parking spot and took the kids down to the Gulf of Mexico. The water was still pretty cold, but we let them play with the small waves and pick up seashells and throw them at each other. Had they been girls, I suppose they may have kept the seashells to make necklaces or something; thank God we had boys, or I'd have to wear a seashell necklace for the entire cruise. Even though it was mid-March and the day was pretty overcast, the beach was crowded with people and there were quite a few surfers riding the paltry waves of the Gulf. They weren't very good waves, but they were all they had.

The hell that is traveling with children started when we needed to leave the beach to go find the ship.

‘No! I wanna stay!' Johnny Mac whined.

‘Yeah, please?' Early, not biologically ours so therefore polite, said.

‘No, guys, we got the boat to catch,' I said.

‘Ship,' Jean corrected.

‘I don't want to go on any stinking ship!' my son said.

My wife turned and gave him a look. It was the same look my mama had given me when I'd been a whiny pest. It worked on Johnny Mac the same as it had me.

He turned, his face a mask of sulking, and headed back to the car, Early following him. When they were far enough away that we could hear only the sound of words but not the words themselves, the two began talking, and what they were saying was pretty damning to someone – or maybe two someones.

The two sulked all the way to the boat. Having never been to Galveston, I was gaping big time at the old houses surrounding the sea wall. Due to last year's hurricane a lot of them were under reconstruction, but a bunch had been finished, and the fresh paint on these old-painted-lady Victorians was pretty neat, with combinations of colors I wouldn't have chosen, but somehow worked on these: cerrillium blue with orange shutters, and purple with green, and all sorts of crazy combos.

‘Aren't these glorious?' Jean said, and I was grateful for the beginning of the thaw.

‘Yeah, I like 'em,' I said.

‘We had some like these in our neighborhood in Chicago when I was little – before we moved to the 'burbs. I always wanted one,' she said. ‘But to have one this close to the water would be awesome!'

‘Yeah, we could go surfing every day,' I said in a playful voice.

My wife laughed, but my son – with the big ears – said, ‘Daddy, are we gonna move here? Can we? Please?'

‘No, buddy. Your mama and I were just kidding,' I said.

There was silence from the back seat, then, ‘Well, it's not funny,' he said in a very-much-not-amused tone of voice.

Jean and I looked at each other and grinned. We were back.

But then we had to park. The parking lot was extremely crowded and Jean's handicap sticker did us no good as all the handicap spaces were full. So I drove up to the back of the line waiting to get aboard and deposited Jean, the boys and the luggage before heading for a parking spot.

I ended up in the back row of the lot, about four city blocks from the boat. I got out, locked up and headed seaward. By the time I got there, Jean, the boys and the luggage were gone.

Emmett Hopkins, chief deputy and temporary acting sheriff for Prophesy County, Oklahoma, looked out over the bullpen at his charges. Dalton Pettigrew was staring moon-eyed at Holly Humphries, the new civilian aid (only called new because the last aid, Gladys, was at the job for twenty-something years). Holly stared moon-eyed right back at him, which meant a lot of work wasn't getting done. Emmett was thinking he might have to separate those two. Maybe put Dalton back in his office while he was occupying the sheriff's office. Milt hadn't said it was OK for him to use his office, but Emmett figured if he had the job, however temporary, he should look the part. And how could he look the part when he was stuck in his cubbyhole of an office? The sheriff's was big with two walls of windows, whereas Emmett's just had the one wall with a window. Hell, Milt used to bitch about it all the time when it was his office. So of course he'd understand Emmett moving into his – however temporarily.

That settled in his mind, he glanced once more at the bullpen. Jasmine Bodine, now Jasmine Hopkins, his wife, sat at her desk on the phone. He was going to pretend it was work related and not her talking to the babysitter about their daughter, Petal. She was in the second grade now and one of Emmett's worst fears had come true: his beautiful daughter had come home crying from school, telling her mama that the boys at school were calling her Petal Pusher. He'd been assured by his wife that they didn't call those short pants for women that aren't pants and aren't shorts petal pushers anymore – they were called capris; no one used petal pushers at all. Well, all he could say to his wife was, ‘Oh, yeah?'

But Jasmine had been adamant. She was one of four sisters and a brother and all the girls were named after a flower: Iris, Rose, Jasmine and Daffodil, the baby. Her brother's name was Paul. Emmett always thought they shoulda named him Stem, but he never said that to Jasmine.

At the desk next to his wife's sat Nita Skitteridge, their newest deputy, an African-American woman, who, despite Emmett's misgivings, had turned out to be a pretty good deputy. The only deputy not in the bullpen was Nita's cousin, Anthony Dobbins, the department's first African American ever, who would come on duty at noon and stay until eight when they locked the doors and the phone was switched over to the deputy on call. Tonight it was Jasmine, which meant Emmett might have to do some babysitting, although he'd never say that out loud. Jasmine hated it when he said he was babysitting, because as far as she was concerned it wasn't babysitting when the kid was your own. Emmett stipulated that might be true.

Emmett wandered down to his office just as Holly transferred a call to him. He picked up the phone and said, ‘Acting Sheriff Hopkins.'

‘Hey there, Acting Sheriff Hopkins,' said a familiar voice. ‘This is Bill Williams, and I'm not acting like a sheriff, I really am one.' And then, of course, he laughed like it was funny.

‘Hey, Bill,' said Emmett. Bill Williams was the sheriff of the next county over, Tejas, which was a might smaller and had a much smaller budget than Prophesy County. Of course, Prophesy County housed the township of Bishop, one of the higher property-taxed communities in the state.

‘Just called to let you know I got a call from McAlester that they released Darby Hunt yesterday.'

‘Darby Hunt?' Emmett said, knowing the name was familiar but not being able to place it. McAlester was the town that housed the Oklahoma State Prison.

‘Yeah, you were probably at the police department when this went down, back in 'eighty-seven,' Bill said. ‘He lived in your county and beat his wife something awful. She ran away – came over here to her mama's house. He found her and gutted her like a chicken in front of her entire family, most of whom live in your county. Everybody testified and he said he'd kill 'em all when he got out. Well, like I said, he got out yesterday – no prior warning – so I thought I'd give you a heads up.'

‘Why'd the parole board call you instead of me?' Emmett asked.

‘'Cause the killing was here in Tejas. Trial was here and everything. But like I said, he lived in your county and most of his wife's folks that testified against him live in your county. Of course, maybe he got over them sending him to prison, but he never did have what you might call a good disposition, and I doubt if twenty-five years in prison made him all warm and fuzzy.'

Emmett was nodding his head. ‘Did Hunt and his wife have any kids?' he asked.

‘Yeah, a daughter, Elizabeth, but she was too young to testify against her father. According to the warden – I checked – she never went to see him.'

‘How old was she when this happened?'

‘About four, I think. She went to live with her aunt until her eighteenth birthday – the aunt in Prophesy. You might ask the aunt where she is – if the aunt ain't dead by now.'

‘Hush that kinda talk. OK, can you fax me or email me or whatever the names of the family members in Prophesy?'

‘Already done. Check your fax machine.'

‘Will do, and Bill, thanks for letting me know.'

‘Hell, Emmett, I know you'd do the same for me,' Bill said and hung up.

Looking up, Emmett saw Holly Humphries standing at his door. In her usual fashion, Holly was wearing bright yellow leggings with pink hi-tops, a black lace skirt that almost reached her crotch, a patchwork T-shirt, too many bracelets and a huge pendant of a skull hanging at about chest level. The bleached streaks in her jet-black hair were tinted green today. Her smile made the hardware on her face sparkle.

‘Acting Sheriff,' she said.

‘Stop. It's still Emmett, Holly.'

‘OK, Emmett, here's a fax for you from Tejas County,' she said.

He took the sheet, said thanks to his civilian aid and began to peruse it. There was a list of six names, with three at the same address. The other three were two at another address and one living alone.

The sheet also told him that the deceased wife's name had been Cheryl McDaniel Hunt, and of the six names, the three at one address were Cheryl's brother David McDaniel, his wife Brittany and their daughter Emma, age twelve. The two at another address were Cheryl's sister, Lisa McDaniel Atkins, her husband Roger, and the one living alone was their twenty-year-old son, Malcolm. Lisa would have been the aunt who took in Elizabeth, Hunt's daughter. Emmett knew Dave McDaniel, the uncle, from back when he was chief of police of Longbranch. Dave had a paint and body shop and used to do the repairs on the city patrol cars. Nice enough guy, Emmett remembered.

There was a second page to the fax, with a short biography of Darby Hunt and the addresses of his family members. The biography detailed where he went to school, what jobs he'd had, and his arrest sheet. He'd been locked up twice for domestic abuse, charges dropped, and twice for drunk and disorderly, which was the dropped-down charge in both cases from assault. Seemed like nobody wanted to get on the bad side of Darby Hunt. He counted a list of seventeen family members, many of them cousins – a couple of whom had been arrested with Darby – and all of whom lived in Prophesy County.

This wasn't going to be good. Emmett did something he'd promised himself he wouldn't do. He picked up the phone and called Milt.

The entryway to the ship was in the bowels of the beast, and there was a man standing guard there in a phony-looking naval officer's uniform. I walked up to him.

‘My wife and kids already boarded,' I said.

‘Did they leave you a boarding pass?' he asked.

‘No, were they supposed to?'

‘You can't enter the ship without a boarding pass, sir,' he said.

‘So where do I get a boarding pass?' I asked.

‘Inside,' he said.

‘Huh?' I said.

‘Inside, sir,' he said.

‘Inside what?' I said, my temper beginning to flare.

‘The ship, sir,' he said.

‘Are you frigging kidding me?' I said at the top of my lungs.

Then I saw the guy's mouth begin to twitch, and Jean and the boys came out from behind him all laughing.

‘We saw you coming, Dad!' Johnny Mac shouted. ‘And Mom said we could play a trick on you!'

‘And they talked you into this?' I said, looking at the guard.

‘It was my pleasure, sir,' he said, sticking out his hand to shake. ‘You can go in now. Your wife has your passes.'

I shook my head and slipped in behind my wife and the boys. I was wrong. We weren't in the bowels of the ship. It was some sort of holding place with roped-off lines, but the big room was empty so the guard moved the ropes so that Jean wouldn't have to circumnavigate them.