Fool Me Once

“And your favors come with strings, Shane?”

That stung him into silence, as she had known it would. She moved the topic back to Caroline.

“You said something interesting about Caroline being under stress,” Maya said.

Shane waited.

“She didn’t just talk about Joe. She talked about her other brother.”

“Neil?”

Maya shook her head. “Andrew.”

Shane made a face. “Wait, the one who fell off the boat?”

“He didn’t fall.”

“What do you mean?”

Finally. Something she felt safe confiding in him. “Joe was there. On the boat with him.”

“Right, so?”

“So Joe told me it wasn’t an accident. He said Andrew committed suicide.”

Shane fell back in the chair. “Yowza.”

“Yeah.”

“Does the family know?”

Maya shrugged. “I don’t think so. They all claim it was an accident.”

“And Caroline raised this yesterday?”

“Yep.”

“Why?” Shane asked. “Andrew Burkett died, what, nearly twenty years ago, right?”

“In a way I think it was natural,” Maya said.

“How so?”

“Two brothers. Supposedly very close. Both dying young and tragically.”

Shane nodded, seeing it now. “More reason why her imagination might get the better of her.”

“And she never saw Joe’s body.”

“Come again?”

“Caroline. She never saw Joe’s body. Or Andrew’s. She wanted that. For closure. So Andrew dies at sea. She never sees his corpse. Joe gets murdered. She never sees his either.”

“I don’t get it,” Shane said. “Why didn’t she see Joe’s?”

“The family wouldn’t let her or something, I don’t know. But look at it from her viewpoint. Two dead brothers. And no dead bodies. Caroline never saw either one of them in a casket.”

They fell into silence, but Shane saw it now. Caroline had hit a nerve when she talked to Maya about the need for a body. Maya and Shane had seen it time and time again during their time overseas. When a soldier died in battle, his family often couldn’t accept the death until they saw definitive proof.

The dead body.

Maybe Caroline was right. Maybe that was the real origin of why soldiers make sure to bring everyone, even the dead, home.

Shane broke the silence. “So Caroline is having trouble accepting Joe’s death.”

“She’s having trouble accepting both deaths,” Maya said.

“And she thinks the man who is investigating Joe’s murder is being paid off by her family.”

That was when it hit Maya so hard she almost fell over. “Oh no…”

“What?”

Maya swallowed. She tried to think it through, tried to organize her thoughts. The boat. The captain’s wheel. The fishing trophies…

“Semper paratus,” she said.

“What?”

Maya met Shane’s eye. “Semper paratus.”

“It’s Latin,” Shane said. “It means ‘Always ready.’”

“You know it?”

The boat. The fishing trophies. The captain’s wheel and life preservers. But mostly the crossed anchors. Maya had assumed the crossed anchors meant the Navy. They often do. But someone else used crossed anchors to award their boatswain’s mates.

Shane nodded. “It’s the motto of the Coast Guard.”

The Coast Guard.

The branch of the Armed Forces with jurisdiction in both international and domestic waters. The Coast Guard could claim jurisdiction in any death on the high seas…

“Maya?”

She turned to him. “I need another favor, Shane.”

He said nothing.

“I need you to find out who the lead investigator was in the maritime death of Andrew Burkett,” she said. “I need you to see if it was a Coast Guard officer named Tom Douglass.”

Chapter 17

Putting Lily to sleep was usually a routine task. Maya had heard all the horror stories about little kids who made bedtime a nightmare. Not Lily. It was as though she’d had enough of the day and was ready to just put it behind her. Her head hit the pillow without argument and, poof, sleep. But tonight, after Maya tucked her into bed, Lily said, “Story.”

Maya was exhausted, but wasn’t this one of the joys of motherhood? “Sure, sweetie, what would you like to read?”

Lily pointed to a Debi Gliori book. Maya read it to her, hoping it would work like hypnosis or a boring coworker and Lily’s eyes would get droopy before closing for the night. But the book was having the opposite of the intended effect-Maya was the one drifting off while Lily poked her to stay awake. Maya managed to finish the story. She closed the book, started to rise, and Lily said, “Again, again.”

“I think it’s time to go to sleep, sweetie.”

Lily started crying. “Scared.”

Maya knew that you weren’t supposed to let your child stay in your room during moments like this, but what those parental instructional manuals forget is that all human beings, even parents, will take the easier way out when exhausted. This little girl had lost her father. She was too young to get that, of course, but there still had to be something there, some subconscious pang, some primitive knowledge that all was not right.

Maya scooped Lily up. “Come on. You can sleep with me.”