Dead Low Tide (12 page)

A small one, but serious. Black, semiautomatic, maybe six inches
long, less than that tall. A little handgun, tough and smart. And my mom had it.

“Mom,” I whispered. “How did you—”

“A Beretta,” she said. “Px4 Storm subcompact.” She stopped, swallowed, and I looked from the gun to her. Still her eyes were almost closed. She wasn’t looking at me, but at the gun. “I have my concealed weapons permit,” she said. “I’ve done the training.”

Her eyes cut to me, that look cold and hard.

She whispered, “I got my first one when we still lived on Marie. After what happened out at Hungry Neck.” She paused, and I could hear my own heartbeat for the quiet. “This is my third one. I get a new one every couple years. And do the training again.”

She bowed her head a moment, like she’d given up of a sudden, but then she looked at me again. “I don’t give a damn about you and Leland golfing,” she said. “I really don’t. When Mrs. Grimball called me I thought she’d do best for us all by just dropping dead. I thought maybe I’d just ignore the whole thing and let you two come on home and I’d chew you out then. Turned on every light inside the house and out just so you’d know how mad I was whenever you two showed up back here.” She paused again, closed her eyes, bit her lips together. “But then when I hear a car out in my drive,” she whispered, “and I’m up in my bedroom and look out the window to see a black Suburban, and see him climbing up my front steps and hear the knock at the door—”

She stopped.

I looked down and away from her, as though what she was telling me was something I ought to be ashamed about hearing. Too personal. Too real.

But now I was looking at the gun, the matte finish on it, the little notched sight at the rear of it, the single blade at the barrel tip so you could line up fast what you were aiming at. A Beretta. My mom with it, and a concealed weapons permit.

A real thing. A third party to everything we were saying, like
some unimpeachable witness in the room that could testify to what all was going on tonight.

I looked up at her. I said, “I didn’t know any of this was going to happen. I didn’t know any military were going to come over here and talk to you. And we didn’t trespass. I can tell you straight out we never even set foot over there. Never. And there’s no way we could ever know there was a body involved in this whole thing. No way.”

There was more I could tell her. About the goggles, and what I’d seen looking back at me from the Weapons Station tract. And about Unc warping up the body, and her face. What had happened to the woman’s face.

Mom opened her eyes, looked straight at me. She swallowed, and it seemed maybe the quiver in her chin was starting up again.

She said, “It’s not the Navy coming here, or anybody in a uniform.” She paused, swallowed. “It’s Jamison Prendergast.” She let her eyes fall to the gun, whispered, “I never want to see Jamison Prendergast here again. Do you understand?” and her eyes came back to mine. “He’s a bad man,” she whispered. “A very bad man.” She paused. “He’s why I got the gun out.”

Now I was certain of her chin, the muscles across it contracting her mouth into a taut frown, and she reached a hand up to her eyes, wiped at first one, then the other, and took in a quick sniff.

I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to say, and thought of Prendergast, and the tightness of his smile. I thought of his kiss on Mom’s cheek, as easy as anything I’d ever seen her take, and of that nod behind him out on the porch steps, the ace card he thought he was playing by revealing Harmon had followed.

I thought of Jessup, standing there all the while, and the look Prendergast had given Harmon for the real high card of an unarmed security guard following him in without his even knowing it.

I looked back at the gun. I didn’t like Prendergast. I’d known it from the moment I’d laid eyes on him till the last words he’d given
me, that warning to Unc through me of how he’d better bring the goggles to poker night.

But this in Mom was something else. This was different, what Mom was talking about. This was something personal.

“Do you want to tell me why?” I said. I thought I sounded old enough—adult enough—that she might give me an answer, and I looked up from the gun to her, there in her white turtleneck and blue sweater. My mom.

But her eyes were past me, over my shoulder, her eyebrows together, straining to see something out the window behind me, and I turned in my chair, looked out there.

Two boats were coming down the creek, I could see from here. Maybe a hundred yards off and to my left, just motoring along that silver arc toward our dock, and though there was this light from inside reflecting off the window, I could see now it was a Boston Whaler towing a jon boat, and I could see two people standing side by side at the console about halfway back on the Whaler, two shadows coming up the creek.

“Here they come,” I said. “Looks like Major Tyler’s towing Unc in.”

“Who?” Mom said behind me. “Who else?”

“Alton Tyler,” I said. “A DNR guy. Showed up right after the Navy—”

Mom’s chair pushed back fast, and I turned around at the sound.

She was already at the sink, reached to the strainer and pulled out the coffeepot, flipped the water on and started filling it. She took in two or three quick breaths, still gathering herself, wiped once more at her eyes with her free hand.

The gun was gone from the table.

Mom stood sideways to me, and I tried to see if she’d tucked it back behind her again, underneath the blue sweater. But I couldn’t tell. It was only my mom standing there at the sink, filling a coffeepot.

“Unc knows him,” I said. “I don’t.” And then, because they were
the words that came to me and because I think I knew already, I said, “You know this guy too?”

“Yes,” she said, and turned off the water, stepped to the maker to her right and emptied the pot into it. “Yes, I do.” She slipped the pot into the maker, popped open the coffee canister and scooped beans into the grinder at the top of it, closed the lid, pushed the canister back to where it always stood beneath the cupboard. She reached to turn on the coffeemaker, the grinder about to fill the whole house with its burring wail. The reason Unc and I always made instant in a thermos at two in the morning.

But before she turned it on, she stopped, turned to me, said, “How do I look?”

For a second I said nothing. A moment ago she’d been calling down a curse on the man she was sipping coffee with for as long as it’d taken me to get here, no matter how many people I was leading in. But now here she was: my mom, thinking about a man.

I said, “You look like a mom packing heat.”

“You can’t see that, can you?” she said, and reached a hand behind her again, touched back there. “I didn’t have time to put on the pancake holster I bought for it. But you still shouldn’t be able to see that,” she said. “Can you see it?” and she turned sideways to me again.

“Mom,” I said. Then, “Mom.”

She stopped, turned to me. She looked down a second, took in a long slow breath, let it out. “We all went to high school together, and then he worked with Leland.”

“With Unc?” I said. “He’s known Unc that long?”

She quick looked up. “Yes,” she said. “And he knew Parker, too.” She paused, screwed up her mouth a little, tried at a smile. “Your father. Those three were all good friends of mine. We were all good friends.”

Parker Dillard. The man I’d thought until I was fifteen was my father. The one who’d left Mom and me when I was seven and we were still living out to the trailer at Hungry Neck. The man who’d taken off
only a few months after Unc’s wife had killed herself, Unc living with us in that trailer, getting better, and getting used to having no eyes.

She never talked about him, never brought him into any conversation. But now here he was: a kid in high school, good friends with Alton Tyler.

“Oh,” I said, and turned in my chair, looked out the window to where Major Tyler, the old family friend I never knew I had, was slowing down for the dock, and now, off to the right, far and away to the east, I could see the very beginning of the next day we’d have to walk through: a thin thin band of violet, hanging over the Cooper River, and all this marsh.

“I’m sorry,” Mom said behind me, but I didn’t turn to her this time, only watched the shadow that was Tyler step off the hull of the Whaler, kneel on the dock out there to cleat off the bow line.

Then I saw Unc, a shadow all his own, make carefully for the stern, stand on the gunwale a second, take his own step off, kneel there and do the same with the stern line. From here, you’d never know he was blind.

I turned from the window. Mom was still standing there, her arms crossed now, her head down.

I said, “You look fine, Mom. You look good.” And I meant it.

She looked up at me. She smiled, turned on the coffeemaker, and here came that machine wail, dark and solid and loud.

I touched the toe of my boot to the book bag there at my feet beneath the table. As if it had a mind to take off on me.

Mom went out the door onto the back deck and to the dock, and I watched them talk a minute or so out there, the coffee bubbling through behind me. Then she turned, walked Unc and Tyler back to the deck and into the kitchen, and I stood from the table.

Tyler seemed even taller now he was inside, and I could see he had light brown eyes, salt-and-pepper hair. He took his hat off once he was inside—he had a tan line on his forehead where the ball cap sat—then shrugged off his windbreaker, though Mom had to coax him some to do it. He had on his olive green DNR uniform, the gold badge above his right shirt pocket, his metal name tag above the left, and wore a thick leather duty belt with three or four pouches, a radio, and a holster for the service revolver he was carrying.

And of course I could only think about Mom, carrying her own gun.

Unc closed the door behind him, took a couple steps to his right,
leaned a little until he just touched his walking stick there in the corner of the breakfast area, right where he’d left it. The move was his own little tic: he needed to know where that stick was at any given moment, as though it were some magnetic north. He turned from the stick, took off his
MtPPD
windbreaker and tossed it on the counter a few feet away in the kitchen proper, then traced his hand along the edge of the table to his usual seat looking out on the marsh, that Braves ball cap of his never coming off.

Unc and I sat down while Tyler hung his windbreaker on the back of the chair across from me. Mom was at the counter and pouring out coffee, but just before she got to the fourth cup she stopped, turned to Tyler and said, “Still just black?” and Tyler nodded, said, “Still just black.”

He stood waiting while Mom brought the cups to the table, then sat down herself before he took his seat, and I glanced at Mom, saw the quick look she gave me and Unc both: we weren’t the gentleman Tyler was.

But I didn’t care about any assessment Mom was making right then of manners and bearing. Even if it was somebody here who seemed some weird mix of old family friend and law enforcement agent. I figured he was here to ask me questions. I figured he was here to find out what I knew about a dead woman being tended to at this very moment.

But once we were all sitting down with coffee cups in front of us, Unc and Mom set right in on small talk about the old days, Tyler quiet and just sort of smiling all the while. Now and again he let out a small laugh, shook his head at what Mom and Unc threw at him of days gone by—Mom talked of when they’d all gone shark tooth hunting out on Drum Island in Charleston Harbor once, Unc and Sarah, Tyler and a woman named Jenny, Mom and my father—she’d had to pause before she’d said the word “Parker,” a tiny stutter to it but there all the same—and how they’d gotten so carried away with looking for teeth they’d missed the fact the tide had up and gone, their boat sitting
in pluff mud. They’d had no choice but to bake out in the sun for four hours until the tide came in enough to get the boat free.

Unc told of the time he’d gotten a brand-new boat, a twenty-foot Sea Ray Amberjack, and wouldn’t let anyone help him trailer it at the boat ramp down at Remley’s Point after my father, Tyler, and somebody named Mitch had spent all morning fishing with him at the jetties outside the harbor. Unc’d backed his truck and trailer down the ramp, the others only watching because Unc had to do this himself, he had to do it himself. He got the trailer down into the water, waded in, climbed aboard the boat and motored it onto the trailer, settled it perfectly. No need even to use the winch line for how faultless he’d eased it in. He’d climbed off the boat and walked around the whole thing, proud of the job he’d done centering it in the cradle of the trailer, then got into his truck, gave it the gas and got up on the ramp, only to have the whole boat slide off, smack on the concrete. He’d forgotten to hook the winch line in and the safety strap at the bow.

“There’s a picture of that somewheres,” Unc said, and laughed. “My brand-new boat sitting high and dry on the ramp at Remley’s. Don’t know if I ever been more embarrassed in my life.” He shook his head, both hands around the coffee cup on the table in front of him. “Mitch took a photo with a little Instamatic he had with him, and soon as he gets the prints back he’s over to the house and showing them off to Sarah like it was a picture of a twelve-point buck he’d shot.”