Kali’s minister, Reverend Atkinson, came to mind as a sign that Faye’s ability to suspect people knew no bounds.
Her suspicious mind even turned to Detective McDaniel himself. Wouldn’t a job as a homicide detective be a convenient one for a serial killer?
And now Faye realized that she was straying far from what she knew to be true, tiptoeing alone out onto a precarious emotional ledge. She needed stability. She needed calmness and love. She needed Joe.
She pulled her phone out of her pocket to check her notifications. It wasn’t like Joe to wait so long to answer her call.
And he hadn’t. She had turned her ringer off hours before, afraid of disturbing Chez Philippe’s intimidating silence and its intimidating diners, and she’d never turned it back on. Joe had called at bedtime, and she smiled at her mental image of him in a rocker on their front porch, reaching out to her from Joyeuse Island’s familiar trees and blue-green water. Her home grounded her. There was a reason that she rarely strayed far or stayed away long.
She could see that Joe’s call had been a video call, probably so that Amande and Michael could join in. Michael was long asleep, and Amande was in her room, either asleep or doing whatever seventeen-year-old girls liked to do on their favorite social media sites, all of which were too cool for the likes of Faye. She went to the stairwell and hit return on the video call anyway, because seeing her husband’s face would make her feel better. Or maybe seeing her husband’s face would put her in a car heading home. She wasn’t sure.
He answered on the first ring and she wasn’t surprised. While she was away, Joe always kept his phone on at night with the ringer maxed out. And she could tell by the dizzying scene on her screen that he had indeed been sleeping. She saw their bedroom walls and ceiling careen by as he pulled his phone first to his ear and then to his eyes.
“Hey, Faye. Damn, you look good.”
Her short, straight black hair was glued to her head with nervous sweat and her skin was shiny-bare, so she took this statement as evidence of love. Or sleepiness. Joe was lying flat on his back in bed, holding the phone up toward the ceiling. He probably couldn’t see much through those drowsy eyes.
“How’s the job going?” he said.
She noticed that he had not said, “Did they find out who murdered that woman?” so she joined him in avoiding the sore subject.
“Real good,” she said. “We did some training at the museum this morning, then we had some fabulous barbecue for lunch. And peach pie. Good heavens, we had some amazing peach pie. I should have gotten you the recipe. Then we moved to this fabulous motel that you see before you.”
She waved the phone around the cheery gray stairwell and Joe laughed. Neither of them mentioned the reason she had needed to move her crew.
“After that, I took Kali to The Peabody for tea.”
Danger, danger, cried the voice in her head, because mentioning Kali opened the door to talking about her mother’s murder. Joe looked too comfortable for her to disturb him with death and fear. She changed the subject and he let her.
“One of my employees—Richard—got stinking drunk at lunch. My guess is that he was nearly stinking drunk when we got there and then he took advantage of my credit card to the tune of three beers. Those three beers pushed him over the edge. I wish you’d been here to see him make an idiot of himself.”
“Did you fire him?”
“Jeremiah talked me out of it, but I have my eye on him.”
Joe grunted and she knew that he meant Damn straight. You better keep an eye on that one.
“In the end, it was pretty funny. A twenty-one-year-old man is an adult, for sure, but when you get one staggering drunk? All of a sudden, he might as well be a middle-schooler who’s been sneaking drinks out of his daddy’s liquor cabinet. It’s not a good look.”
Joe laughed, but not very loud. It wasn’t the half-hearted laugh of a man who doesn’t like other men behaving poorly around his wife. It was the laugh of a man about the change the subject, because he wasn’t going to let her get away with changing the subject.
“What about that poor woman? Have they found out who did it?”
“No, but they found out how he did it.”
“You gonna tell me?”
“Shovel. Beat her with it, then she died of the injuries.”
“God.”
“Yeah, I know.”
Silence between Joe and Faye was usually a comfortable thing, but not now, not when they both were thinking about what Frida had suffered.
“You’re going to be really careful until they catch that guy?”
“You know I always am.”
“Oh, yes, I do. I know you can do anything you set your mind to, all by your own self. You could roll back the Mississippi and walk across it, if that’s what you needed to do. Might be easier on you if you let me help you more.” He softened his words with a laugh, and it was the drowsy laugh of a man who needed to go back to sleep.
So she let him do that. She told him to sleep well and to call her soon, and then she blew him a good-night kiss. When his face was gone from her screen, the emergency lighting in the dank stairwell made it seem even danker. She sat there and wallowed in its charmlessness for a while, then she went back to her room.
Yvonna sighed and rolled over in her bed as Faye eased her body under her own covers, pulling them over her chin. It was time to sleep. She just wished she believed that sleep would actually be coming for her.
