“The Clark woman? Just trying to be clear,” Ed asked. Brows bunched.
Patti Love said, “I don’t know her name. Or even if she has one. People do call her the Marsh Girl. You know, she sold mussels to Jumpin’ for years.”
“Right. We’re talking about the same person. Go ahead.”
“Well, I was shocked when the coroner said Chase didn’t have on the necklace. And then it occurred to me that she’s the only one who’d have any interest in taking it. Chase had broken off their relationship and married Pearl. She couldn’t have him, so maybe she killed him and took the necklace from his neck.”
Patti Love trembled slightly, then caught her breath.
“I see. Well, this is very important, Patti Love, and worth pursuing. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Ed said. “You’re sure she gave it to him?”
“Yes, I’m sure. I know because Chase didn’t want to tell me, but he finally did.”
“Do you know anything else about the necklace or their relationship?”
“Not much at all. I don’t even know for sure how long they saw each other. Probably nobody does. He was very sneaky about it. Like I said, he didn’t tell me for months. Then after he told me, I never knew whether he was going out in his boat with his other friends or with her.”
“Well, we’ll look into it. I promise you that.”
“Thank you. I’m sure this is a clue.” She rose to leave, and Ed opened the door for her.
“Come back anytime you want to talk, Patti Love.”
“Bye, Ed, Joe.”
AFTER CLOSING THE DOOR, Ed sat again, and Joe asked, “Well, what d’ya think?”
“If somebody took the necklace off Chase at the tower, that would at least put them at the scene, and I can see somebody from the marsh being involved in this thing. They got their own laws. But I just don’t know if a woman could’ve pushed a big guy like Chase through that hole.”
“She coulda lured him up there, opened the grate before he got there, then when he came toward her in the dark, she coulda pushed him in before he even saw her,” Joe said.
“Seems possible. Not easy, but possible. It’s not much of a lead. The absence of a shell necklace,” the sheriff said.
“At this point it’s our only lead. ’Cept for the absence of prints and some mysterious red fibers.”
“Right.”
“But what I can’t figure,” Joe said, “is why she’d bother to take the necklace off him? Okay, as the woman wronged, she was hell-bent on killin’ him. Even that’s a stretch for motive, but why take the necklace when it could connect her smack-dab to the crime?”
“You know how it is. Seems like there’s something in every murder case that doesn’t make sense. People mess up. Maybe she was shocked and furious that he still wore the necklace, and after committing murder, it didn’t seem like a big deal to snatch it off his neck. She wouldn’t have known anybody could link the necklace to her. Your sources said Chase had something going on out there. Maybe, like you said earlier, it wasn’t drugs at all, but a woman. This woman.”
Joe said, “’Nother kind of drug.”
“And marsh folks know how to cover prints because they snare, track, trap, and such. Well, it won’t hurt to go out there and have a talk with her. Ask her where she was that night. We can question her about the necklace and see if it shakes her up a bit.”
Joe asked, “You know how ta get ta her place?”
“Not sure by boat, but I think I can find it in the truck. Down that real windy road that goes way past a long chain of lagoons. A while back, I had to make house calls to see her father a few times. Nasty piece of work, that one.”
“When we going?”
“Crack of day, see if we can get there before she takes off. Tomorrow. But first, we better go out to the tower and search really good for that necklace. Maybe it’s been there all along.”
“I don’t see how. We’ve searched all over that place, looking for tracks, treads, clues.”
“Still, we gotta do it. Let’s go.”
Later, after combing through the muck under the tower with rakes and fingers, they declared no shell necklace present.
PALE LIGHT SEEPED UNDER a low, heavy dawn as Ed and Joe drove down the marsh track, hoping to get to the Marsh Girl’s place before she boated off somewhere. They took several wrong turns and ended up at dead ends or at some ramshackle dwelling. At one shack somebody yelled, “Sheriff!” and mostly naked bodies took off in all directions, charging through brambles. “Damn potheads,” the sheriff said. “At least the moonshiners kept their clothes on.”
But finally they came to the long lane that led to Kya’s shack. “This is it,” Ed said.
He turned his outsized pickup onto the track and cruised quietly toward the dwelling, easing to a stop fifty feet from the door. Both men got out without a sound. Ed knocked on the wooden frame of the screen door. “Hello! Anybody home?” Silence followed, so he tried again. They waited two to three minutes. “Let’s have a look ’round back, see if her boat’s there.”
“Nope. Looks like that log’s where she ties up. She’s a’ready gone. Dag-nabit,” Joe said.
“Yep, heard us coming. She can probably hear a rabbit sleeping.”
The next time they went before dawn, parked way down the road, and found her boat tied to its log. Still no one answered the door.
Joe whispered, “I get this feelin’ she’s right here watchin’ us. Don’t you? She’s squattin’ right here in the damn palmettos. Purt’ near. I just know it.” His head swung, eyes scanning the brambles.
“Well, this isn’t going to work. If we come up with anything else we can get a warrant. Let’s get outta here.”
26.
The Boat Ashore
1965
The first week they were together, Chase pulled into Kya’s lagoon almost every day after his work at the Western Auto, and they explored remote oak-lined channels. On Saturday morning, he took her on an expedition far up the coast to a place she’d never been because it was too far for her little boat. Here—instead of the estuaries and enormous sweeps of grass as in her marsh—clear water flowed as far as she could see through a bright and open cypress forest. Brilliant white herons and storks stood among water lilies and floating plants so green they seemed to glow. Hunched up on cypress knees as large as easy chairs, they ate pimento-cheese sandwiches and potato chips, grinning as geese glided just below their toes.
Like most people, Chase knew the marsh as a thing to be used, to boat and fish, or drain for farming, so Kya’s knowledge of its critters, currents, and cattails intrigued him. But he scoffed at her soft touch, cruising at slow speeds, drifting silently past deer, whispering near birds’ nests. He had no interest in learning the shells or feathers himself and questioned her when she scribbled notes in her journal or collected specimens.
“Why’re you painting grass?” he asked one day in her kitchen.
“I’m painting their flowers.”
He laughed. “Grass doesn’t have flowers.”
“Of course they do. See these blossoms. They’re tiny, but beautiful. Each grass species has a different flower or inflorescence.”
“What’re ya gonna do with all this stuff anyway?”
“I’m keeping records so I can learn about the marsh.”
“All ya need to know is when and where the fish bite, and I can tell ya that,” he said.
She laughed for his sake, something she’d never done. Giving away another piece of herself just to have someone else.
THAT AFTERNOON, after Chase left, Kya motored into the marsh alone. But did not feel alone. She accelerated slightly faster than usual, her long hair trailing in the wind, a slight smile brushed on her lips. Just knowing she would see him again soon, be with someone, lifted her to a new place.
Then, rounding a bend of tall grass, up ahead she saw Tate. He was quite far, maybe forty yards, and had not heard her boat. Instantly, she dropped throttle and killed the engine. Grabbed the oar and rowed backward into the grass.
“Home from college, I guess,” she whispered. She’d seen him a few times over the years, but never this close. But now there he was, his untamed hair struggling with another red cap. Tanned face.
Tate wore high-top waders and strode through a lagoon, scooping up water samples in tiny vials. Not old jelly jars as when they were barefoot kids but petite tubes clinking in a special carrying rack. Professorial. Out of her league.
She didn’t row away, but watched him awhile, thinking that every girl probably remembers her first love. She let out a long breath, then rowed back the way she came.
THE NEXT DAY, as Chase and Kya cruised north along the coast, four porpoises moved into their wake and followed them. It was a gray-sky day, and fingers of fog flirted with the waves. Chase switched off the engine, and as the boat drifted, he took out his harmonica and played the old song “Michael Row the Boat Ashore,” a yearning and melodic tune sung by slaves in the 1860s as they rowed boats to the mainland from the Sea Islands of South Carolina. Ma used to sing it while scrubbing, and Kya sort of remembered the words. As if inspired by the music, the porpoises swam closer and circled the boat, their keen eyes fixing on Kya’s. Then, two of them eased up against the hull, and she bowed her face only inches from theirs, and sang softly: