She peered at him through the lashes of lowered eyelids, then she pecked around on the tablet a little more. “I could get you something out of Mobile, but it would take just as long, with the drive time and all.”
“The woman your mother found? She was buried alive. I need to be there now. I mean right now this minute.”
Silent, Amande tapped out a few more keystrokes and hit the enter key. After a moment’s reflection, she typed a while longer, then pounded the enter key like someone who was done with passive research and was ready for action.
“It’s a nine-hour drive from the marina in Panacea to Memphis. Add in time to throw some clothes in a bag and take the boat to the marina, plus a few minutes to stop at the Sheriff and Magda’s house, and I’d say we can be in Memphis by lunchtime, easy. Wait! We’ll gain an hour with the time change. If we ignore the speed limits, we can have a late breakfast down the street from Elvis’ house.”
Joe felt control of the conversation slipping away from him and he did his best to stop it. “I like the idea of driving, but you can just quit saying ‘we.’ Who’ll take care of Michael?”
“Why do you think we’re stopping to see the Sheriff and Magda? Because we miss them? Well, I do miss them, but that’s not why.”
“No. I’m serious. I’m going to Memphis because it scares me that your mother is there. What makes you think I would take you?”
“Dad. You haven’t slept and now you’re talking about driving the rest of the night and into the morning. You’ll die in a flaming car if I let you do that.”
Joe said, “No, I won’t,” but she was still talking and she showed no signs of taking a breath.
“Plus, I’m sorry to say this out loud, but it’s true. We both know you drive like an old man. I can drive it in nine hours or less, but it’ll take you ten. Or more. And also, I wish you’d let me show you how to use your GPS again. You could find your way out of a Panamanian rain forest without a compass, but you’re useless on the highway. I don’t want to answer my phone and hear you saying that you’re not sure how you wound up in Dallas.”
Joe was, for the first time in his life, beginning to like the idea of corporal punishment.
“We’ll swap off driving so we can both get some sleep. I’ll drive the legs that go through Montgomery and Birmingham.” She squinted at him. “And Tallahassee. You’ll be fine on the straight stretches. As long as you don’t have to deal with any city traffic. Let me check the traffic reports.” She lowered her head and went back to tapping on her tablet.
“We’re not talking about the driving. We’re talking about me going someplace dangerous. Like, murder-level dangerous. Without you.”
“I just want to get you to Mom fast, and I want you to get there alive. Once we get to Memphis, you can…I don’t know…get us a motel room far away from the murdering spot and you can warehouse me there. You’ll have the car, so I can’t go anywhere you don’t want me to go. I’ll have cable TV, which I’d like to remind you that we don’t have here, and I’ll have the Internet. Wait. Hang on. Let me find us a place with free Internet. And free parking.”
Joe felt himself crumbling under the barrage of words that, if he were to be honest, did make a lot of sense. “Your mother said she’d moved her crew to a motel that was pretty far from the scene of the crime. It would be simpler if we got a room there. You know she wouldn’t have picked a place that charged for Internet. Parking, neither.”
“Then why aren’t we packing our bags?”
Joe didn’t have a good answer for that, so he said, “You be ready in ten minutes or I’m going without you.”
Amande was instantly on her feet. He watched her head for her room with the high-stepping lope of a victorious running back enjoying his moment in the end zone, and he knew that Faye was going to kill him for bringing their daughter to a place so dangerous that a young woman had ended up dead. But then, she was already going to kill him just for coming to her and she couldn’t kill him twice.
Chapter Twenty-nine
The phone was loud, really loud. Faye was floating in a dreamless place, a place without fear or pain, and she hadn’t been there long. She wished the phone would shut up, because she didn’t want to be awake in the bed where she had tossed and turned the night away.
The phone rang again. Yvonna groaned as she threw her sheets over her head, and Faye returned fully to reality. She reached for the phone and her bad shoulder yelled at her for disturbing it.
Detective McDaniel’s voice sounded remarkably alert. “I hope I didn’t wake you, but I wanted to tell you this while it was still early enough for you to do something about it. It’s good news.”
She still wasn’t fully conscious, but she was awake enough to respond to the promise of good news. “You found the killer.”
“I wish. No, my news isn’t that exciting, but you should like it. My forensics people say they’ve done all they can do. They did all they’d planned to do yesterday, but they wanted to do one more walk-over today. Unfortunately, there was a terrible storm early this morning. There’s just no point. The odds that there’s still any physical evidence that didn’t get washed away are zero. They told me to go ahead and release the site to you.”
“There was a storm?”
“You’re a hard sleeper. Yes, there was a storm. Thunder. Lightning. Wind. Hail. Will the wet ground make it
