Black and White

by Dawn Lee McKenna

  He shook his head. “I was trying to think fast and that’s what I got,” he said. “But I saw…I saw the way you looked before you realized, and I’m sorry for it.”

  “Don’t be,” she said, her voice smaller than she’d like.

  “I wouldn’t do something like that, to lead you on or make you think something was possible that wasn’t.”

  She nodded. “I know.”

  He opened his mouth, then seemed to change his mind, and shut it again. “I just wanted to make sure you knew that.”

  “Okay.” She desperately wanted him to leave. She desperately wanted him to stay.

  “Okay. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “See you later,” she said.

  She watched him walk down the steps. He stopped a little way down the path, and turned around.

  “Not that I don’t wish it was possible,” he said quietly. “Sometimes I do.”

  He turned back around and walked quickly to his truck. She watched him go, the sun turning his golden-brown hair into fire. He climbed into his truck, then backed out and turned around without looking back at her. She blinked a few times to ward off any tears that thought about forming.

  “It’s good that you still love him,” Grandma said behind her.

  Jennifer turned to look. Grandma was sitting on the swing in her faded blue-flowered house dress and bare feet. She was looking at the Woman’s Day magazine that was open on her lap.

  “I don’t know where you got that idea,” Jennifer said. “It sure as hell doesn’t feel good.”

  “Don’t cuss, Jennifer Marie.”

  “Sorry.”

  Grandma looked up at her. “He’s just hurting a bit, that’s all, just like he always is when you have a set-to.”

  “We haven’t had a set-to, Grandma.”

  “It’ll be just fine.”

  Grandma smiled at her, and her smile was kind and understanding, the way it had been whenever Jennifer had been lonely or hurting or sad. She could always go to Grandma, if Jonah wasn’t around.

  “I wish Jonah would talk to me the way you do,” Jennifer said sadly.

  “Well, Jonah always was kind of a quiet boy.”

  “For eighteen years, I felt him like he was inside me, and I was inside him. Now, there’s just nothing.”

  Grandma looked up at her a minute. “No, not nothing,” she said. “We are made up of all of the people we have ever loved.”

  Now Jennifer did blink away tears. She looked out at the yard where her mother had waved to the camera. Where Grandma had planted lilies and kalanchoe. Where she and Inez and Jonah had played, and where Daniel had kissed her for the first time.

  “Good,” she said.

  The End

  Please keep reading for a sneak peek, Dawn Lee’s other books, and contact info

  Thank you so much for spending your time in Dismal, Florida.

  I hope you’ve enjoyed it. An honest review would be most appreciated.

  Dawn Lee Mckenna is a Florida native, a child of the 60s and 70s, and a serial cancer-survivor. She currently lives in Tennessee, with five children, seven grandkids, and the dream of a farm.

  Read Dawn Lee McKenna’s bestselling Forgotten Coast Florida Suspense Series here.

  The Forgotten Coast books, in order

  Low Tide

  Riptide

  What Washes Up

  Landfall

  Dead Wake

  Awash

  Apparent Wind

  Lake Morality

  Squall Line

  Overboard

  Back of the Bayou, a Bennett Boudreaux/Miss Evangeline novella

  Ebb Tide, a prequel novella

  You might also like the spin-off,

  The Still Waters Suspense Series,

  co-written with Axel Blackwell

  Dead Reckoning

  Dead Center

  Dead and Gone

  You can follow Dawn Lee McKenna on Facebook or subscribe to her mailing list, to get heads-up on new releases, special events, and appearances.

  Special thanks to Colleen Sheehan of Ampersand Book Interiors, Shayne Rutherford of Wicked Good Book Covers

  Heartfelt thanks also go out to beta-reading team Meg Trigg, Mike Keevil, Linda Maxwell, Vivian Edmonston, Jill Rowland Meister and John VanVelzor.

  You are so deeply appreciated

  If you haven’t read the bestselling Forgotten Coast, Florida Suspense series yet, here’s a sneak peek at the first book, Low Tide

  The seagulls bounced around him, lighting just long enough to snatch up the pieces of bread, then hovering in the air, wings whipping, to wait for more.

  Gulls were mercenary and self-absorbed, but he liked them. They were honest about their selfishness, unafraid of disapproval. At the same time, they were beautiful and graceful and they were the sight and sound of home.

  He’d spent his entire life in Apalachicola and on St. George Island, just a few miles from the coast across the causeway. To his mind, it was one of the few places left that actually felt like Florida, with its century-old brick and clapboard shops and houses, the marina filled with shrimp and oyster boats and people who couldn’t care less about Disney World.

  Every time he’d left the Panhandle, for college or just to escape, he’d always felt slightly lost. Cities and nightlife and people with unfamiliar last names quickly lost their luster. Whenever he’d arrived home, after a few weeks or a few years, he’d felt his lungs open up to the salt and the heat and he’d known that he hadn’t really breathed since he’d left.

  Always, he came here first, to this virtually undisturbed, unblemished part of the island that was now a state park. Here, he could be the only sign of humanity among the white dunes and the sea grasses and the gulls and crabs that lived among them. Looking out to the ocean, he felt at once humbled and comforted by his own unimportance.

  This was his sanctuary, his place of respite and refreshment. Here, there were no problems; there were no decisions or responsibilities or agendas. He could come here and empty his mind. He could fill his lungs with great, hungry breaths of salty air and be renewed, then go back to the mainland stronger, calmer, more ready to deal with his life and the people in it.

  A gust of early-summer wind snatched at the plastic bag of bread, winding it around his wrist and causing the hovering seagulls to reverse themselves in the air, putting a few feet of distance between them and him. He unwrapped the almost-empty bag from his wrist and the gulls moved back in as he tossed out a few more pieces of crust.

  He often felt like this group of gulls was the same group that he’d fed every time he’d ever come, the same birds he’d fed when he was ten or twenty. He felt like they remembered him, knew him and waited here for him when he was gone. They were his friends, really, or so he felt. They made him happy, with their flapping and grabbing and screeching.

  He tossed out the last of the bread and the gulls landed in perfect synchronicity, like one being. He stuffed the bag in the left pocket of his khakis so that it wouldn’t be a danger to the sea creatures, then pulled the gun from his waistband and slowly sat down on the sand.

  A few minutes later, the explosion from the gun sent the gulls screeching into the air, then gradually, tentatively, they all came back to the sand. The ones with blood splattered on their gray and white bodies seemed especially agitated, even for seagulls.

  Maggie Redmond pulled the coverlet over her head as her cell phone bleated from the nightstand.

  “No,” she grumbled from under the covers, but the bleating continued and the coverlet did little to block the late morning sun.

  She snaked a hand out from under the covers and pulled the cell phone in, thumbing the answer button.

  “I just went to bed. If this isn’t life threatening, hang up.”

  “No,�
�� she heard Wyatt Hamilton rumble back. Wyatt was the Sheriff of Franklin County and her boss. “I need you to come over to St. George Island. Got a guy that shot himself on the beach.”

  “So? How badly is he hurt?”

  “I don’t know how bad it hurt, but it sure as hell killed him,” Wyatt said.

  “Ugh. Did you tell him it was my first day off in two weeks?”

  “I mentioned it,” he answered. “We’re at the first pull-off before you get to the state park.”

  “Do I have time to take a shower?”

  “Well, he’s awfully close to the shoreline and the seagulls keep making off with chunks of his childhood memories, but you’re the investigator, so it’s your call.”

  “Alright. Stop it,” Maggie said, throwing her legs over the side of the bed. “Give me thirty minutes.”

  “Okay,” Wyatt told her. “I know you’re gonna stop at Café Con Leche. Bring me one.”

  “Do you have an ID?” Maggie asked as she stood up and pinched at her eyes.

  “Yeah. Gregory Boudreaux,” Wyatt answered, then hung up.

  It took Maggie a minute to put the phone down on the bed. It also took her a minute to remember to exhale. She walked into the bathroom and turned on the cold water tap. She splashed a couple of handfuls of water onto her face and stood and looked in the mirror.

  Then she leaned over and threw up into the toilet.

  Getting to St. George Island by car involved taking US 98, a five-mile or so causeway across East Bay to Eastpoint, then taking 300, another causeway that seemed to run four miles out into the Gulf of Mexico and stop, but which actually ended at St. George.

  There were days like today, when cloud cover was low, that Maggie got the impression she was driving out to some distant point on the horizon, leaving the mainland behind her for good. Off to her left was Dog Island, a state preserve with more egrets and gators than people. To her right was Cape St. George Island State Preserve, just a few yards of ocean from St. George itself.

  Maggie rolled her window down and breathed deeply of the thick, salty air. She was driving straight into the morning sun and it scalded her eyes, already dry and tender from lack of sleep. She’d left her sunglasses at home, so she blinked several times to soothe her eyes and pulled the visor down.

  Arriving on St. George, Maggie continued on 300, which turned into a main drag of sorts, running parallel to the beach and attended to on either side by streams of vacation rentals in various pastels. St. George Island was about 28-miles long and around half a mile wide in most places. The southern eight miles of the island made up the State Park.

  After just a couple of miles, she passed through Vacationland and into the stretch of road leading to the 2,000-acre State Park. After half a mile, she came to the pull-off, a spot of asphalt with five or six parking spaces, all of them occupied.

  Today, the spots weren’t filled with trucks belonging to men doing a little shore fishing. There was Wyatt’s cruiser, another car from the Sheriff’s department, the Medical Examiner’s van, and an apparently unnecessary EMT truck.

  Finally, there was a blue Saab that Maggie knew belonged to Gregory Boudreaux, who was reportedly losing his mind on the beach.

  Wyatt was leaning against his cruiser when Maggie pulled in. He headed over to Maggie’s ten-year old Cherokee as she parked and got out. He was easily six-foot four and, though he was closer to fifty than he was forty, walked toward Maggie’s Jeep with the lanky, relaxed gait of a man half his age.

  Wyatt had come to Apalachicola from Cocoa Beach a little over six years ago, following his wife’s death from breast cancer. Between his widower status, the tinge of gray in his light brown hair and mustache, and his bright blue eyes, he’d quickly become the unconcerned darling of the women of Franklin County. His combination of goofy, self-deprecating humor and movie star looks made him equally popular with men and women.

  Maggie knew that, his laid-back approach notwithstanding, Wyatt was smart as a whip and actually took his job pretty seriously, despite the fact that Apalachicola’s crime rate made Cocoa Beach look like Detroit.

  She grabbed Wyatt’s coffee and handed it to him as the wind whipped her long, dark brown hair around her head.

  “So, what’s the story?” she asked as she yanked her hair into a ponytail.

  Wyatt took an appreciative swallow of his coffee before answering.

  “Vacationite by the name of Richard Drummond found the body at 8:15 while he was walking his dog. A Golden Retriever mix of some kind. Might be a little Lab in there.”

  Maggie grabbed her coffee out of the console, handed it to Wyatt and slammed her door before heading to the back of the Jeep.

  “When did Larry get here?” she asked, referring to the medical examiner.

  She opened the gate and pulled out her crime scene kit.

  “About ten minutes ago,” Wyatt answered. “He’s talking to the deceased now.”

  “Who got here first?” she asked him, squinting over at the other cruiser.

  “Dwight got the call from dispatch, got here at 8:25,” Wyatt said. “He called me on the way and I got here a little after 8:30.”

  He took another swallow of his coffee and held hers out to her.

  “No one else has happened on the scene and Dwight’s got it taped off. I took lots of pretty pictures for you.”

  Maggie reclaimed her coffee and took a long swallow before they started walking the twenty or so yards along the path through the sea oats. Wyatt was more than a foot taller than Maggie and she took two steps to his one.

  “Are we sure it’s suicide?”

  “’course not,” Wyatt answered. “That’s why you’re here.”

  “Couldn’t you get Terry to handle it?”

  “He’s over in Eastpoint working that robbery,” Wyatt said. “That’s what happens when you’re fifty percent of the Criminal Investigation Division, Maggie. You want guaranteed days off, move to Tallahassee.”

  They reached the beach and Maggie saw the scene about ten feet further east. Larry Wainwright, a hundred years old if he was a day, was perched gingerly in the sand and leaning over the body. Sgt. Dwight Shultz, also known as Dudley Do-right, was keeping the seagulls out of the way by tossing them potato chips a few yards down the beach. The two EMTs stood nearby, with nothing really to do but wait to be dismissed.

  Maggie and Wyatt stepped over the yellow crime scene tape and stopped near Gregory Boudreaux’s splayed and loafered feet.

  “Morning, Maggie,” Larry said over his shoulder.

  “Morning, Larry,” she answered. “So what do we know so far?”

  “Well, rigor’s set in the face. It is now 9:20,” Larry answered, checking his watch. “Between that and body temperature, I’d say time of death was between 6:00a.m.and 6:30.”

  Maggie finished pulling on her Latex gloves and crouched on the other side of the body with a few baggies in her hand.

  A .38 revolver lay next to Gregory Boudreaux’s right hand, his thumb still stuck in the trigger guard. She glanced over at Larry.

  “Wounds seem consistent with a .38?”

  “They do,” Larry answered, and gently placed a gloved finger on the chin to turn the face toward him. “As you can see, we have quite the exit wound, which we’d expect from something of that caliber.”

  “So it appears to be self-inflicted then?”

  “I’d say so at this point. I don’t see anything at this juncture to argue against it,” Larry told her. “As you can see, there’s quite a bit of blowback on both hands, as well as residue.”

  “Kind of unusual, it being so close to the body,” Wyatt mentioned noncommittally.

  “True, true,” said Larry. “The kickback will usually send it flying. But I’d say it stays nearby or even in the decedent’s hands about twenty percent of the time.”

  “You
know Gregory Boudreaux, Maggie?” Wyatt asked her.

  “Some,” she said.

  “Can you think of any reason he might want to blow his brains out?”

  “I can’t really think of any reason why he shouldn’t,” she said evenly, focusing on Gregory’s lifeless right hand. There was a good bit of blood splatter.

  “Well, then,” Wyatt said. “Can you sugarcoat that more specifically?”

  Maggie took a slow breath and removed Boudreaux’s thumb from the trigger guard and placed the revolver in an evidence bag. She breathed out only after she’d sealed the bag.

  “Not really,” she answered finally. “He was just your average Boudreaux, entitled and self-absorbed.”

  The medical examiner struggled to rise and Wyatt hurried over to give him a hand.

  “I’ve got what I need in the immediate,” Larry told them. “I’ll take one of those responder boys back to the van to get the body bag. Once we get him up, you’ll find most of the rest of the skull fragments are underneath his shoulders. Indicates to me he was seated when the gun was fired. I’ll know more in a couple of days.”

  Larry called for one of the EMTs to come get a body bag, and Maggie watched the old man make his way back toward the parking area before she squinted up at Wyatt.

  “Where’s the guy that found him?”

  “I told him he could go on back to his rental,” Wyatt answered. “I took his initial statement. He and the dog left the rental for their walk about 8:00, according to the Today show. He didn’t hear anything unusual prior to that, no gunshot or anything. You want to talk to him when you’re done?”

  “How long is he here for?”

  “He checks out of the rental on Monday.”

  “I’ll wait. So far, it looks like a straight suicide. I don’t see any reason – was there a note?”

  “Not so far. Checked his car, but I didn’t check his pockets.”

  Maggie looked down at the body and sighed.

  “Getting squeamish in your old age?” Wyatt asked her with a quick smile. She’d only just turned thirty-seven.