Dead Low Tide (6 page)

“Leland Osborne Dillard and Huger Simpson Dillard, you were observed trespassing on property owned by the United States Navy. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and—”

“What in the hell!” Unc roared out. “We got the body of a dead girl here in this godforsaken muck and you come over here and treat us like we’re a couple terrorists just busted out the Navy brig—”

“Trespassing?” I said out loud, me too stunned at the all of this—how’d they know who we were, us a half mile away across marsh when they’d seen us, and us in the backyard of someone else’s house?—to even understand what he was talking about. All I’d done was see them over there in the tract, me with my own night-vision goggles on. How was that trespassing?

“If you want these—” I started, and bent down, reached for the
book bag at my feet. If it was the goggles they were after—these things some commander had sweated over losing at poker, and that nobody anywhere was supposed to have, goggles valuable enough and unlawful enough to dispatch sailors with guns to get them back—then they could have them, because there was a body here, a dead woman who needed to get out of here and be taken wherever she was going to be taken.

It was the woman I was thinking of. Just give them the goggles and maybe they’d let go this stupid idea that even looking over there was trespassing.

I bent to the bag, but before I’d even touched it or started in to finish my sentence—
then take the damned things!—
I heard “Freeze!” boom out even deeper.

I looked up, saw Stanhope with his gun out of the holster and on me, that M4 barrel staring right at me, the second sailor’s head cocked to the sight on it.

“Ahms up, hands behind your head,” Stanhope said. “Both of you. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be held against you. You have the right to an attorney—”

And heard from behind me, out on the creek and just a few yards off, a voice: “Major Tyler, Department of Natural Resources here. Y’all need to calm down a little bit.”

The words were even and solid, a deep surprise inside all this surprise of trespassing and guns drawn, and before I could turn around two things happened at once: first came a sudden and huge sweep of bright light—the searchlight this Major Tyler must’ve had on his boat—across the back of a white stucco cottage, and across camo BDUs of sailors with their guns up, and across Grange and Priscilla Cuthbert kneeling now to the once-more-fainted Mrs. Q, the whole crew squinting for that light; and next came the cold hard ratchet of a shotgun pumped: Major Tyler geared up and ready to go.

“Let’s all of us,” the major said, his words somehow even calmer now, “just put our toys away and square up what’s going on here.”

“Snuck up on me, Alton,” Unc said, him turned back toward me but still standing, Tyler’s flood full on his face and those sunglasses. “You DNR boys going to have fun with this one.”

“What’s this I heard about a body?” the major said, and I made to turn and see who this man was Unc seemed to know, and how he’d pulled in so quiet even Unc hadn’t caught it. Of course he’d have switched to an electric outboard before he ever entered the creek for how shallow it was, but he had to be crowded in for how narrow it was back here.

But before I even made it around to him, I saw her.

She was right here next to our boat, a pale gray sheen just beneath the surface, like some ghost moored beside us. The pluff mud we’d roiled up had settled for how long we’d been waiting, the water between her and the surface clear, the mud on her washed away even more, her lit like all the rest of us with the floodlight from this DNR boat behind us.

I could see the cleft between her legs, and her breasts. I could see those two points of her shoulders, her arms and legs anchored, fading off beneath her.

And I could see now her face, unaided by the goggles: a grimace of teeth, raw pink flesh, the smeared place where her eyes should have been. All of it only a couple inches beneath the surface.

From somewhere off to my left and a thousand miles away, Stanhope called out “Stand down!” like he was on the bow of a battleship, the whole U.S. Navy waiting for word only from him. Somewhere to my right and just as far away I heard Major Alton Tyler break open the shotgun, then the smallest scratch of sound: him drawing out the two shells in the barrel.

Then, like a further curse on whoever this woman had been, here came up her shoulder and onto her neck a big blue crab, right there under the water. It paused a moment just below her chin before it reached a tentative claw up, delicately snipped at the ragged flesh of her jaw, and snipped again.

“Well now,” the major said off to my left, the words quiet. “Well, well, well.”

I closed my eyes, sat down on the seat here at the transom of the jon boat. Then the push pole, still leaned against the gunwale, gave way, and I heard it slide slowly down the length of the boat, drop into the water.

And for a moment I wished somehow I could be just like Unc: blind, disburdened of the visible world.

Major Tyler got on his radio, and I heard that solid voice call in an officer in boat, another in vehicle. He paused, then told the dispatcher to get hold of the dive team.

The single word “Rescue?” cracked out of the speaker.

He was quiet a second, said, “No. Recovery.”

I still had my eyes closed.

“We’re here on a trespassing charge,” Stanhope called out. “If there’s a body involved, we need to get my commanding officer to—”

“Your jurisdiction as regards civilians not on U.S. Navy property don’t even exist, comrade,” Tyler said. I heard him step forward on his boat, move toward us, felt the smallest rock of the jon boat for that movement in his own.

“Well put, Alton!” Unc said loud, on the words a kind of tight glee. “And we wasn’t over on the base. Period.”

“You were observed,” Stanhope started up, and Unc cut in, “We never set foot—”

And in the midst of the bitchfest the two of them started up, I heard suddenly down closer than I’d imagined he might be, me still here at the transom and still with my eyes closed, Tyler’s voice yet again, quiet and calm: “Huger, you going to be all right. But you need to move so I can help.”

I’d never met him before. I’d seen these Department of Natural Resources men out on the water most all my life, one time got written up out on the Combahee, the river edge of Hungry Neck, for having no life jacket in the old jon boat I used to mess around in down there, another time stopped in the channel back behind Capers Island by some overweight geezer in a nineteen-foot Action Craft flats boat complete with a ten-foot tower rigged with all the radar you could want, only to check my fishing license.

I didn’t know this Major Alton Tyler. And Unc’d never mentioned him.

Yet I believed him, right then, enough to open my eyes, to see what next I had to do here, and I turned, looked up at him.

He was squatted there at the bow of his Boston Whaler, the boats most all the DNR drove, its hull almost overhanging the stern of the jon boat. He’d worked some kind of magic getting it in here, the hull pressed into the cordgrass all around, and Unc not hearing or feeling a thing. The searchlight, mounted back at the steering console, made him a silhouette to me, and I could see he had on the ball cap they all wore, and the holster at his hip, the pistol there. He had his elbows on his knees, but beyond that I couldn’t see his face for the light behind him, and for a second I thought of Unc against the night sky before all this had come down, the stars scattered behind him, before us nothing but the dumb idea of golf.

“Let’s go,” Tyler said, and reached down, touched my shoulder.

And as though I had no choice but to believe him, I stood up and
moved past Unc in the boat, knelt at the bow, pulled on that ratty nylon rope tied to the cinder block onshore until the boat hit bottom. Unc’d stood tall the whole time, still carrying on with Stanhope—“You come on out to private civilian property,” Unc was yelling, “and try and pass it off like it’s military business, so let’s just see what the courts have to say,” while Stanhope seethed out, “If you continue to disregard our authority, I will have no choice but to further charge you with resisting arrest”—and I hauled out that plank yet again, dropped it and walked back on across, then moved right past Stanhope and his silent partner.

Stanhope turned from Unc then, said to me as I passed, “You will not leave the premises, Mr. Dillard, until my commanding officer notifies me of the status of our situation.”

But I just moved on up the lawn at the back of the Dupont house and onto their patio. I pulled one of the wrought-iron chairs from the wrought-iron table, scraped it across the brick pavers out here loud as I could, and sat down, my back to the house so I could watch it all.

Unc and Stanhope kept on over who was where when, never a word out of either about any night-vision goggles anybody’d seen, nor about this body. Eventually Unc strode on across the plank without so much as a wobble, came in close to Stanhope, the bills of their caps almost touching while they still yelled, and I knew Stanhope had no idea Unc was blind for how the two kept right on. Still nothing came out of the black sailor with Stanhope, the M4 down, trigger hand flat against the stock, his head turning now and again to scan the grounds.

Once in a while he looked at me, held his eyes on me long enough to let me know he was watching.

Mrs. Q came around again, and once she’d made clear to the Cuthberts she wasn’t going home, they ushered her over to the table, sat her in one of the chairs. Priscilla in her jogging suit and snarled hair hovered around her as though she might take the old lady’s pulse
any second to see if she was still alive, while Mrs. Q sat stone still, hands locked in her lap, eyes out to the creek and the logjam of a jon boat and a Boston Whaler.

“The idea,” the old bag whispered right there next to me, unable even to look at me for how close I was and the mange she must’ve figured she’d get if she were even to glimpse my way. “The idea,” she whispered, “the idea.”

Grange Cuthbert took a seat across from me at the table, flipped the chair around so his back was to me, him just watching and shaking his head now and again. “A body,” he said once. “What in the hell is a body doing out here?”

It was then Jessup stepped into my line of sight on my right, his back to me too as he made his way across the patio and the ten yards or so down the lawn to Stanhope and Unc and the other sailor.

I’d forgotten about him for the big stinky pile of all this going down out here, forgotten for these few minutes about him going into Judge Dupont’s house to get that screaming nurse to quiet down, and I glanced behind me to the French doors to see if she was back out here, maybe cooled enough now to watch.

But just as I turned, I saw over my shoulder the door close from inside, heard the slide of a dead bolt into place.

Didn’t matter if she thought she could lock herself away from a dead body, I thought, and turned back to face the melee. The authorities’d get hold of her soon enough. She’d end up questioned, just like the rest of us.

Jessup stopped next to the sailor with the M4. They looked at each other, nodded. Jessup put his hands on his hips, then crossed his arms, like he was waiting his turn. The sailor didn’t say anything to him, didn’t ask for his name or what he wanted. He only gave him that nod, then went back to scanning, hand still flat on the stock of his gun.

And though he had to be able to see Jessup maybe a couple feet away from him, Stanhope, still toe to toe with Unc, didn’t move his
eyes from Unc for a second. It was like Jessup wasn’t even there, this man dressed in a black windbreaker and cap and pants who’d come from inside the house everything was all happening at.

Maybe they knew him, I thought. Or maybe they’d spotted him for being security: he still had his two-way in one hand.

And beyond them, still a silhouette for the searchlight, was Tyler, tending to the only thing really mattered out here: the body. He was kneeling way up on the hull and leaning over the edge, a big Maglite LED in his hand and pointed down to the water, its beam sharp as a Star Wars lightsaber. Slowly he moved it back and forth, looking at the woman. Now and again he put his radio up to his mouth, said something I couldn’t hear.

Then here was the Hanahan police, two dudes who looked no older than me coming like the rest of the world around the side of the house and into the light from that flood on Tyler’s boat. They had on their black wool sweaters, badges on their chests, hands on their holsters, and sort of nodded at us here at the table as they made their way down to Unc and Stanhope and the sailor, Jessup still without a word.

“Mr. Dillard,” they both said at the same time, the words solemn and quick. Unc turned his head to them, let out “Boys,” and nodded, then went on again with Stanhope, and maybe a few seconds later here came around the side of the house a deputy from the sheriff’s office, brown windbreaker and Smokey Bear hat on. “Leland,” he called out, then, quieter, said, “Poston, Danford,” to the two cops, and stepped up to the congregation.