Read Dead Low Tide for Free Online Page B

me.
    But Hungry Neck was where I did my therapy, me sitting in my truck and looking out onto the wide cold blue of the Ashepoo, and the spartina and cordgrass and salt-marsh hay, the all of it a green I couldn’t name, mixed down in it reds and browns and a color like bone.
    I got through it. I’m not going to lie: I could have done a better, maybe quicker job of it if I’d listened to everyone who had an opinion about how I was supposed to deal with killing someone. Eventually I stopped sitting bolt upright in my bed four and five nights a week to see the ceiling fan turning above me, me screaming about how it was a shovel coming down hard for my throat. I got over it.
    But here it was again, all of it coming right back at me: another body. Me barking at people and angry for it, and this pressure in my chest and on it at the same time—what I had no choice but to understand was flat-out plain old cold and ugly fear. Fear here one more time, like a piece of shit I thought I’d scraped off the heel of my shoe, only to climb in the cab of my truck and still smell it, find the heel of the other covered with even more, and ground into the floorboard.
    W e waited. The nurse’s shrieks had died down now, Jessup in there with her and probably talking to her. There was still no sign of ol’ Dupont anywhere, and the thought occurred to me he might’ve gone on and had a heart attack and died himself, what with all that screaming going on inside his house.
    And still no sign of Mom.
    Mrs. Q had come out of her faint only a few seconds after she’d fallen, sat up with the help of both Cuthberts, her looking quick from one to the other like she’d never seen them before. Then she shivered,looked straight out at me standing here in the boat, and struggled up, stood. She didn’t say a word as the Cuthberts touched her, talked to her, tried to coax her to let Priscilla walk her on back home—Grange wouldn’t be leaving this adventure, no way—but it was obvious she wasn’t budging, this violation of the sacred ground of Landgrave Hall so egregious, and Unc and me the agents of its debasement. She wasn’t going anywhere.
    And still we waited, no one talking at all out here, not Unc to me, or the Cuthberts to Mrs. Q or each other. The only sound was the creep of the tide on its way, filling in the marsh inch by inch with its quiet wet clicks and pops, the calm of it a kind of empty reverence suddenly upon us: here was a dead body, and here was the natural world without a pause over it.
    Maybe Mom wouldn’t even come out here, I was thinking. Maybe—lucky for her—this would be the night she’d finally given us up to ourselves, and the stupidity of Unc’s big idea to learn how to golf.
    Then, slowly, Unc took hold of the gunwales with both hands, sat up straight, and stood, all of it before I’d even heard the pop of a single pebble under the tires of whatever vehicle it was pulling up out front of the Dupont house. And now, even from here on the water, pushed off the edge of the world and out onto this finger creek, I could hear the crunch of gravel from the drive that Unc’d already taken in, the sound sudden and quiet, followed by the slam shut of one door, then another.
    Unc turned from me to face the house, as though he’d be able to make out who it was coming up out of the dark, and I caught the jittered-up shards of a flashlight beam in the trees and on the ground, closer now and closer, until finally the Cuthberts turned and Mrs. Q too, stepped aside like a curtain parting, as though whatever first responders it was coming up on this all—Hanahan Police, County Sheriff, maybe even those Department of Natural Resources boys already—were the stars of some screwed-up game show.
    But just before that flashlight beam made it around the corner of the house and blew full bore into my eyes—because that’s what happened—Unc whispered, “I don’t know who this is,” the words astonished at themselves, pinned down