“Savannah told me what happened,” she said. “I was just coming to get you guys. She wants to move the little bed from our spare room into your living room after lunch, Jesse.”
The three of us went inside. Savannah had the table set and was at the stove, heating up small chunks of lobster tail left over from the previous night to add to a big salad bowl of greens and tomatoes.
“We don’t have to take Jimmy and Naomi’s spare bed,” I told her. “We can pull one of the bunks out of the bunkhouse. It’s time to turn it into something else anyway.”
“It’s easier to get to,” she replied, hurriedly dumping the lobster bites into a strainer, “and it doesn’t have to come apart. We can move it after lunch.”
“Slow down,” I told her, taking the strainer from her hand as it dripped coconut oil on the deck. “We have a couple of days, at least.”
When she turned to face me, I could see that her eyes were red and rimmed with tears. “We can’t let them send that boy back to his parents.”
There’d been signs over the last nine months since Flo’d gone off to college—signs I should have paid better attention to. Savannah had been nervous at times, worried. She and our daughter had been inseparable for eighteen years, living on a boat, moving from port to anchorage, just the two of them. She was a fantastic mother; of that I had no doubt.
Was she experiencing withdrawal over not having a child to look after and care for?
I moved her to the table and sat her down in a chair, then knelt in front of her. “He’s still at Fishermen’s,” I said. “We can bring him up here as soon as the doc says he’s okay enough. But legally, if his parents want him back, there isn’t much the police can do.”
“There has to be, Jesse. That little boy has been starved and abused all his life.”
“We don’t know that,” I said. “Yes, he suffered a beating. But the malnourishment could have just been in the last year or two. It might not even have been his parents who did it. Remember how frail Cobie looked when we brought her home?”
She nodded and started to say something, but I put a finger to her lips this time. “We don’t have to rush,” I told her, moving my hand to her cheek, and cupping it. “Jimmy and I will go to the bunkhouse and take one of the bunks apart. Maybe all of them. We can have one of the uppers here before nightfall.”
She leaned into my hand and the tears started as she fell into my arms. “I just can’t get the thought out of my head of what he might have had to endure.”
Naomi moved beside us and put an arm around Savannah. “Or he can just stay with me and Jimmy and have his own room.”
Savannah nodded, wiping her eyes with my shirt. Then she looked up at me. “Yeah, I know you’re right. I don’t know what came over me.”
“I do,” I said. “Flo hasn’t been home in over a month.”
“Let’s eat,” she said, nodding and going back to the little kitchen area.
The four of us sat down and ate quickly. There was always something to do on the island, and adding another chore was just something we took in stride.
Later, as Jimmy and I were taking one of the bunkbeds apart in what for twenty years had been a “bunkhouse for fishermen,” he stopped and looked out the window.
“Is something wrong with Savannah?” he asked.
I shrugged, though he had his back to me. “Women sometimes have anxiety after giving birth—postpartum depression, they call it. Maybe it’s some sort of separation anxiety from Flo going off to school in Gainesville.”
He turned and started taking the slats out of the bed. “Empty nest? Yeah, man, that makes sense. She seems to have lost her direction lately. Like a boat without a rudder.”
Together, we lifted the frame of the upper bunk off the lower one and set it down.
“You noticed it too?” I asked, leaning against the frame. “For years, she’s had the double stress of raising a child alone and living on a boat. After long periods in a high-stress environment, I think people get used to it some, adapt, and then, when the pressure’s gone, they go into a slump. I’m just not real sure what to do about it.”
“Dude, you fix things when they break,” Jimmy said. “It’s what you do. Hell, it’s what most men do. But she ain’t broke, man. So, you can’t fix her.”
“What’s that leave?” I wondered out loud.
“Maybe she just needs a project,” he said. “Something to give her direction.”
I shook my head. “I hope bringing the kid here doesn’t make things worse.”
“Think we can get the frame through the door without taking it apart?” Jimmy asked.
“Should be able to,” I said, pushing off the frame. “We’ll need to turn it sideways and keep it level as I go down the steps backward.”
Who would beat up a little kid after starving them? I wondered, as we lifted the frame and maneuvered it to the door.
The cops didn’t have much to go on. The boy couldn’t tell them anything. All they knew was that there’d been a tarp on the boat that was made in a shop in my hometown. I decided that I’d give a friend a call who lived near there and see if he knew about any missing kids.
My phone vibrated in my pocket. “Hang on, Jimmy. Set it down a sec. I have a phone call.”
“I remember a time when you didn’t even know where your phone was,” Jimmy said, as we set the frame down. “I remember finding it once in the cockpit fridge on the Revenge.”
I fished my phone out and looked down at the screen. “The times, they are a changin’.”
“Dude, you can’t quote Dylan when talking about a cell
