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?”
“Right.”
Lana sat beside her granddaughter and squinted across the water, searching out places a man could get trapped. The Rhoads ranch was over there. And the land trust property beyond it. “Could he get stuck, and then break loose again?”
“I guess,” Jack said. “Yeah. In twenty-four hours he’d hit multiple high and low tides. But it would have to be somewhere people wouldn’t see. A creek or a drainage ditch. There’s hundreds of those. He could travel down a creek at high tide, get stuck at low, and then get moving again.”