Beth raised an eyebrow. “Go back to sleep, Ma.”
Lana pulled herself up out of the couch and staggered over. The toxins never hit Lana smack on the day of chemotherapy—Beth knew the steroids kept her wired for at least a couple more days—but it still looked like an ordeal for her to shuffle over to the table.
Jack looked from her mother to her grandmother. “She told me I’m not a suspect anymore. I got downgraded, I guess.”
Hope surged in Beth’s throat. “What do you mean?”
Lana rewarded her with a wink. “See, Beth? I told you Jack didn’t need a lawyer.”
There was no way Beth was going to get sucked into that argument again. “What made them change their mind about your innocence?”
“I think it had nothing to do with me. It turns out Ricardo Cruz died on Friday, before my tours ever happened.”
“Friday?” Lana asked. “Do they know when?”
“During the day. And then he was in the water twenty-four to forty hours before I found him.”
“If he died in the daytime, and you found him midday on Sunday . . . isn’t that more like forty-eight hours? In which case—”
“Jack, this is fantastic,” Beth said. She pulled Jack in for another hug, a big one this time. She didn’t need to know how many hours Ricardo Cruz had been in the water. Her daughter was cleared, and that was all that mattered. “Now we can just put this whole thing behind us.”
Lana was still muttering to herself. “Maybe he was killed, and then put in the water later. Or maybe . . .”
Beth watched, annoyed, as Jack broke off their hug and looked at Lana.
“What is it, Prima?”
“Did she tell you anything else? Do anything detectivey?”
“Ma, Jack’s out of the woods. We’re safe. I don’t think—”
“There was one weird thing,” Jack said. “She made us unpack the first aid kits, and she took all the Maglites. Paul was pretty ticked off about that. She said they might be evidence.”
“Hold on.” Lana walked to the couch and returned with her legal pad and a pen in hand. “Tell me about the Maglites.”
Beth stared at her mother scrawling furiously across the yellow notebook. This was supposed to be a happy moment. A peaceful moment. But Lana wasn’t going to give her that.
Beth turned to her daughter. “Jack, you don’t have to . . .”
“I want to know too, Mom. The slough’s important to me. I want it to be safe. For everyone.”
Beth sighed. Then she got up from the table and started banging plates from the dishwasher to the cupboard.
*
“So. Maglites?” Lana asked. She was exhausted, and just taking notes felt like an ordeal, but she’d felt a flare of panic when Beth had proclaimed the problem solved. Like something had been taken from her, like she was in danger of losing the only source of energy she had. She wasn’t ready to give up her investigation, her small flicker of agency. Not yet.
“Every guide boat has a first aid kit in it,” Jack said. “Basic stuff, like Band-Aids and drinking water, and a big honking flashlight. In case we get stuck out late. The only time I used it was when someone lost their ring in the water.”
“Did you find it?”
“No. The lady wanted to dive in and look for it, but then she saw a jellyfish and changed her mind. She said she’d get her boyfriend to buy her a better one.”
“What do the Maglites look like?”
“Like normal flashlights, but beefy. They take like six of the big-size batteries. And they have an American flag design all over them. Paul got them on sale at Army Surplus.”
“Detective Ramirez took all of them?”
“I think so.”
“What do you mean?”
“We have six guide boats, so six first aid kits. But only five of them had flashlights in them. Paul said the other one got lost a while ago. It’s probably true. I don’t check inventory on the first aid kits.” Jack frowned. “I probably should.”
Lana looked down at her notes. Maybe the missing Maglite was the murder weapon. If Paul had killed Ricardo with it, he might have dumped the flashlight or hidden it somewhere. Or he really had lost it. Which wouldn’t surprise her either.
Beth walked by, lugging the old vacuum from the hall closet to her bedroom. She slammed the door and they heard what sounded like a small airplane taking off.
Lana ripped out a page from her pad and made a note to buy a new vacuum. “Was there anything else the detective asked about?”
Jack told her grandmother about the tides and the timing of it all. Lana narrowed her eyes, trying to follow Jack’s explanation about the water and the moon and Ricardo Cruz floating in the slough.
“Twenty-four to forty hours,” Lana said. “So he was killed Friday, and then, at some point that night, or on Saturday, he went into the water. Which means he probably didn’t die where you found him.”
Jack nodded. “I should have realized it sooner. It would be super weird for anyone to get in a fight in those mud flats or get hurt right there. Half the time they’re flooded, and the other half they’re too shallow for a boat to approach. And if he was there all day Saturday, someone would have seen him.”
“If he floated to that spot from somewhere else . . .” Lana started scribbling. “Where? How far could he have come?”
“Depends if he was traveling through open water or along a side creek.”
Lana pushed herself back from the table. “Can you show me?”
“Like on a map?”
“No.” Lana headed to the back door. “Outside.”
Jack and Lana stood at the top of the hill that led down to the slough from the back of the house. Lana looked around, surprised she hadn’t been out here before. They were standing right under the bedside window Lana looked out of every day, but it felt different without a pane of glass in the way. There was a rock garden out there, a maze of stones weaving in and out of each other in mesmerizing swirls.
“Did you make this?” Lana asked.
“Mom did. She started working on it a couple weeks ago. Says it’s healing. She was out here this morning when I got up.”
“Huh.”
Lana wasn’t sure how to square this delicate labyrinth with the Beth who’d shoved her out of the car at the chemo clinic earlier. She wrapped her robe tight across her chest against the chill. The slough felt more alive out here, more demanding. The smell of overripe marsh rose up the steep embankment. Hawks ripped sharp lines across the sky. Lana could see little switchbacks in the hillside dug in from all the times Jack took her paddleboard down to the water.
Lana clenched her freezing toes in her slippers and looked out to the slough. “If I dropped a leaf or a paddleboard in the water right here, where would it go?”
“When the tide is coming in, it would go east, upriver, to Kirby Park. When the tide goes out, it might just swirl around or maybe go west to the marina. It could float for miles, maybe, all the way out to open ocean.”
“Could it cross over to the other side of the slough? Like, from where we are here to Bird Island?” Lana pointed at the shit-splattered rock on the northern bank of the slough where a group of pelicans was holding court.
Jack considered it. “I doubt it. The water moves fastest in the middle, west to east, ocean to farmland. When the wind comes up, kayakers hug the banks so they don’t have to fight the current as much. It would have to be totally stagnant or swirling weird for something to cut across in either direction.”
Lana watched a pelican choke down a fish, anchovy probably, shaking silver in the dusky light.
“And besides, if there was a body floating right in the middle of the slough, someone would see it before twenty-four hours had passed,” Jack said. She sat down on the concrete pad that pretended to be a back porch. “Ricardo must have gotten stuck in a creek, or snagged on something. He had a life jacket, but he was wearing shoes, and jeans, which would weigh him down. He could have gotten caught underwater, on a rock or one of those old shark-hunting blinds, and spun around.”
“Especially at low tide? When the water is lower in the channels, right?”