“It’s very bad for business,” Robert said. “Yours is good, ours is bad.”
“I’m sorry,” Maggie said.
“Who wants to come down on vacation if they have to worry about being chopped into pieces or burned at the stake?” William said, almost whispering.
“Well, he wasn’t exactly—”
“Not to be impolite, but whatever,” William said. “Some guy was out on the Bay doing his Joan of Arc impression and the tourists are going to be taken aback for sure.”
“They’re gonna rethink,” Robert said.
“Those talentless hacks in Destin—” He looked at Robert. “Who are those people?”
Robert gave him a dismissive wave. “Bountiful Buds.”
William looked back at Maggie with a pinched mouth. “Sounds like they’re selling beer. Anyway, the tourists will be in Destin, getting all their bouquets from those hussies, and we’ll be on the longest smoke break in florist history.”
“I’m sure Sheriff Hamilton and the rest of the department will be bringing the case to a quick close,” Maggie said. “And I doubt too many people outside of Apalach are reading our paper this morning.”
“Oh, you don’t know,” Robert said. “Those vacation rental people, they read it online, check the weather and whatnot.”
“They look for shark reports and early bird coupons,” William explained.
Maggie took another swallow of her coffee and picked up her keys, hoping to look like she really needed to be off. “Listen, you guys, I’m really sorry, but it’ll be okay,” she started.
“And what about the foot, anyway?” Robert asked. “We’re still waiting for the other shoe to drop on that one.”
William slapped at Robert’s wrist.
“No, really,” Robert said. “We keep expecting more pieces to wash up on the beach or something.”
“Or for some pelican to yak up an elbow in front of The Soda Fountain,” said William.
“Guys, the rest of that body is long gone,” Maggie said, and jingled her keys to signify her being needed somewhere that wasn’t there. “We’re not going to find anything else.”
She stood up and pulled her purse onto her shoulder.
“I’ll tell you what. I’ll go straight to the office right now and see what we’ve learned about the man in the boat, okay?”
William and Robert stood up. “Oh, good,” William said. “And let me tell you something, we will give you free weekly arrangements for life if you people would just keep any subsequent serial killer activity quiet.”
“Nice arrangements,” Robert said.
“These cases have nothing to do with each other,” Maggie said. “There’s no serial killer.”
“Three whacked out murders in like three weeks—” William started, then gasped as Robert slapped him on the shoulder.
Maggie swallowed and tried to smile.
“I’m so sorry,” William said in a pained whisper.
Maggie started away from the table. “It’s okay,” she said. “But I really need to go.”
As she opened the front door, she heard Robert back by the table.
“Why are you retarded?” he asked William rhetorically.
A few blocks across town, in the Historic District, Bennett Boudreaux sat in the sunny kitchen of his Low Country Plantation-style home. He stirred some milk and sugar into his second cup of chicory coffee, as Amelia, the lanky, middle-aged Creole woman he’d brought with him from Louisiana, stood at the island, watching over the one slice of bacon in her skillet.
Boudreaux was a strikingly handsome man, even in his early sixties, with a thick head of brown hair just lightly touched with silver above his ears. Though he was just a little over five-seven, his trim physique and commanding presence made him seem like a larger, younger man. For most people, though, it was Boudreaux’s eyes that caught attention. They were piercing and magnetic, and an incredible shade of blue.
Though he was well-educated and impeccably-mannered, there was a darkness and a blue-collar foundation to Boudreaux that intimidated most people, even the ones who didn’t know who he was.
Boudreaux took a sip of his coffee, then started eating his dry toast.
“I appreciate you don’t start with her this mornin’,” Amelia said.
“I never start with her,” Boudreaux said quietly.
“Who are you tellin’?” Amelia carefully flipped the bacon with a pair of tongs. “She was up half the night, trying to find Johnny Carson on the TV.”
“He’s dead.”
“Don’t say nothin’ to her about that. I already argued myself to death with her.”
“Maybe we need to start slipping something into her chamomile tea,” Boudreaux said. “To help her sleep.”
“Maybe you need to start slippin’ somethin’ into mine,” Amelia said. “She don’t sleep, I don’t sleep.”
Boudreaux looked over at Amelia. She looked younger than she actually was, but her shoulders were beginning to slump and there were grayish circles beneath her eyes. “Maybe it’s time to hire someone else to come in here and cook and clean. You just take care of her.”
Amelia put a hand on her hip and looked at him. “Ain’t nobody comin’ in here, takin’ my job.”
“You’d still have a job. Taking care of your mother.”
“Who gonna fix your food? You think you gonna find someone ’round here makes étouffée? You’d starve to death, then she’d cut my throat.”
Boudreaux sighed. “Why do the two of you make everything difficult? Hire somebody to clean and cook for Lily, and you can still cook for the three of us. Disaster averted.”
Amelia picked up the slice of bacon and laid it on a small plate on which sat one over-medium egg and one slice of wheat toast. “Herself still be runnin’ me all ‘round, playin’ Steppin Fetchit.”
“You don’t work for Lily, you work for me,” Boudreaux said. He unwrapped the weekly Apalachicola Times that sat beside his plate.
“She gon’ complain ’bout somebody new.”
“Then shoot her,” he said mildly.
“I do it, me.”
“I’d give you a raise,” he said.
He opened the paper and the picture below the front page headline took his attention away from the conversation at hand. It was a small oyster skiff, mostly burned, being towed by a Coast Guard cutter. His first thought was that one of the oystermen had had an accident, but then he started reading.
He got far enough to find out that the boat had been found burning in the middle of the bay the night before, with a man’s body lashed to the cabin. Then the back door opened, and Miss Evangeline’s aluminum walker clattered through, Miss Evangeline not quite hot on its heels.
Miss Evangeline was well over ninety and well under five feet tall. While Amelia was tall and large-boned, her mother was tiny and had the bones of a sparrow. She wore a red bandana wrapped around her head, and a red-checked housedress that had started out too big for her, then grown enormous as she shrank. Her eyes, magnified a hundred times behind her thick glasses, were the largest thing about her.
Boudreaux stood up, walked around the table, and pulled out Miss Evangeline’s chair.
“Mornin’, Mama,” Amelia said.
“Mornin’, baby,” Miss Evangeline said, her voice like two pieces of paper being rubbed together.
Boudreaux waited by her chair while Miss Evangeline undertook to reach it, her walker thumping along softly on its tennis balls. Miss Evangeline had been Boudreaux’s nanny when he was a child in Louisiana, then become his housekeeper and cook when he was grown. In her mind, she’d never stopped being his nanny. It would be embarrassing, if people were privy to their relationship, given his status as the town crime lord.
“Good morning, Miss Evangeline,” he said as she reached the table. He kissed her on both cheeks, then held her chair as she sat.
“I don’ know yet, me,” she said.
Boudreaux went back to his chair and sat down, then pour
ed his third cup of coffee from the fancy flowered pot. Amelia set her mother’s plate and a cup of tea in front of her, then went back to the island to start cleaning up.
Miss Evangeline stared across the table at Boudreaux as he added milk to his coffee.
“I need you change the batt’ry on my buzzer,” she said. “He dead again.”
Boudreaux reached for his paper. “It’s not the batteries, it’s you,” he said. “It may surprise you to learn that normal people use a newspaper to kill Palmetto bugs, not a Taser.”
Amelia let out a heavy sigh over by the sink, as Miss Evangeline stopped stirring her tea and stared at Boudreaux, the sunlight flashing off her thick lenses. She poked her tongue around in her mouth for a moment before she spoke.
“You in the mood to sass me today, then,” she said.
“No, I’m just advising you that your aim’s not good enough to keep those batteries alive for more than a day,” he said mildly as he read.
“Big cockroach slap themself all over my window screens all night, come in my house run ’round like they my housecats. I buzz they eyeballs out, me.”
“Well, then don’t gripe about your dead batteries,” Boudreaux said distractedly as he read the article. Miss Evangeline set about painstakingly cutting her egg into hundredths.
When he turned to the second page, Boudreaux read that Rupert Fain was the man found in the burning boat.
He needed to give that some thought. Then he needed to talk to Maggie Redmond.
He’d told Maggie that Rupert Fain was the most likely candidate for her ex-husband’s murder, and he’d believed it to be true. He’d known Fain had been robbed of the last shipment of pot that David had delivered to Fain’s middleman, Myron Graham, because his stepson, Patrick had told him. Patrick had known, because he liked to use his power as the Assistant State’s Attorney to finagle “commissions” out of people like Myron.
It wasn’t until later that Patrick had almost proudly admitted that he’d been the one who stole Fain’s pot, and that he’d actually been the one to kill Myron in the process. Then he’d let Maggie’s ex-husband take the fall for it.
Boudreaux might kill someone who needed killing, but he didn’t kill over money and he didn’t let other people die on his behalf, either. He’d liked and respected David, and he’d been happy for him when he’d gotten out of running pot and gotten himself a new boat. Patrick had intentionally let David take the fall for something he himself had done, and Boudreaux despised it.
But Patrick was still his stepson. Boudreaux and Lily had married back in Louisiana, purely for business and social reasons, when Patrick was four and Craig was barely a year old. Lily got the financial security she wanted and Boudreaux got her family’s social and political connections, something not often afforded the son of an oysterman, even one who had built a multi-million dollar business.
Boudreaux sighed and stared at words he was no longer reading. This was messy. He didn’t like messes.
“What that burnin’ in the paper?” Miss Evangeline asked, peering across the table at the front page.
“Trouble,” Boudreaux answered.
“Who trouble?”
“I’m not sure yet.”
He stirred coffee that didn’t need stirring and the kitchen was silent for a moment, save for Amelia’s loading of the dishwasher and Miss Evangeline’s dentures clicking together as she nibbled at her egg. Boudreaux picked the paper back up and tried to think.
“I need you get me another television set,” she said.
Boudreaux lowered the paper and looked at her. “What did you do to the television?”
“I didn’t do nothin’, me. It broke. Don’t have Johnny Carson channel no more.”
Boudreaux glanced over at Amelia as she clanged some pots together at the sink, then he looked back at Miss Evangeline. “Are you thinking they just took NBC right off the TV?”
“Don’t know what they do, but I don’t have no Johnny Carson.”
Boudreaux lifted his paper back up. His heart wasn’t really in it, but he couldn’t just let it go.
“Maybe Walter Cronkite will say something about it on the news tonight,” he said mildly.
The Sheriff’s Office was in Eastpoint, an even smaller town than Apalach, located across the causeway that traversed Scipio Creek and the mouth of the bay.
When Maggie got there, she poked her head into Wyatt’s office. He looked like he’d been there a while.
“Hey,” she said.
He looked up from his computer monitor and sighed. “Hey back,” he said.
“How’s it going?”
“It’s going,” he answered. “Between us, Terry and I have amassed quite a collection of people who would love to see Fain dead. It’s just that none of them are here.”
“Sure they are,” Maggie said. “Every shrimper and oysterman in Franklin County. Everybody loved David.”
“Good point.”
“I’m not offering that as a viable lead, I’m just saying.”
“I know.” He took off his SO ball cap and ran a hand through his hair, then pointed at her arm. “You got your arm back.”
“Yeah.” She looked down at her arm and shrugged. “I was kind of a baby about it. Embarrassing.”
“So what are you working on today?” he asked her, slapping his cap back on.
“Not a lot. I have a lot of paperwork to catch up on, and I need to close the case file on the Kleins. Then, you know, the foot.”
“Yeah, the foot.” Wyatt leaned back in his leather chair. “What’s going on with it?”
Maggie looked at him for a few seconds, then shrugged. “I’m working on something. I’ll get back to you.”
He took a long drink of the gigantic bottle of Mountain Dew on his desk, watching her as he did.
“You do that,” he said quietly.
Maggie felt something skitter along like a spider inside her chest. Keeping secrets was bad enough; the idea that Wyatt might know something was amiss was even more upsetting.
“I will,” she said. “I’ll let you get back to it.”
“Okay,” he said.
Maggie walked down the hall to her office, wondering if the way she felt was anything like the way criminals felt when they knew she was watching them.
Maggie spent most of the day on paperwork that had piled up over the last few weeks, between investigating the case of Sport Wilmette’s foot, what happened with David, and her injury. Once she got caught up, she busied herself with cleaning her desk while she thought about whether and how to come clean with Wyatt about her connection to Gregory Boudreaux and Sport Wilmette, and her theory about what had happened to Sport.
During the course of her day, she either picked up or reached for her phone several times, to call Bennett Boudreaux. For whatever reason, and she chose not to consider it too carefully, she never made the call.
It was with some surprise, then, that she saw Boudreaux’s number on her screen when her cell phone rang late in the afternoon.
“Hello?” she answered.
“Hello, Maggie,” Boudreaux said.
“Hello, Mr. Boudreaux.”
“I need to speak with you,” he said politely. “I was wondering if you could meet me.”
“When?”
“Today.”
“What’s it about?” she asked.
“The front page of the paper.”
“That’s not my case,” Maggie answered. “He either killed David or had David killed. I can’t have anything to do with it.”
“I’m sure that’s true… professionally.”
Maggie wasn’t sure what to say to that. She wanted to talk to him, too, and some of what she needed to discuss involved Fain. But, the idea that he wanted to speak with her about it kind of threw her.
“Maggie, I would appreciate it very much if you would come talk with me,” he said quietly.
“Okay, Mr. Boudreaux,” she said. “Now?”
“That would be nice,”
he said.
“Where would you like me to meet you?”
A few minutes later, Maggie leaned on Wyatt’s door jamb and waited while he finished up a conversation with one of the deputies. Once the deputy had left, Maggie walked into the office, pulling her purse up on her shoulder.
“Hey,” Wyatt said. “You heading out?”
“Yeah.” Maggie glanced into the hallway before going on. “Hey, I was wondering if I could talk to you about something.”
Wyatt tilted his head just a bit. “Sure. What’s up?”
Maggie looked back toward the door. “It’s kind of private.”
“Work private?”
“Mostly.”
“Stop skulking by the door. Come over here.”
Maggie walked over to stand near Wyatt’s desk, as he tossed an empty Mountain Dew into the trash and grabbed another one out of the mini-fridge behind him.
“You know, those things have flame retardant in them.”
“I know. That’s why I’ve never spontaneously combusted,” he said, cracking it open. “And I have a factoid for you, too. If you try any harder to look like we’re not talking about anything, people are going to start wondering why we’re not talking about anything.”
Maggie sighed. “I’m just trying to be careful,” she said quietly. “And it is private.”
“Okay.” Wyatt lowered his voice, despite what he’d just said. “You wanna come by the house later?”
When Maggie thought of Wyatt’s house, she thought of sitting on his dock on their first date, or of falling asleep in his arms on the couch after she’d finally let herself feel David’s death. If Wyatt was going to be upset with her, she didn’t want it to be there.
“Actually, can you come out to mine?”
“Sure. What about the kids?” he asked.
“They’re going over to my parents’ to spend the night,” she said.
Maggie expected one of Wyatt’s eyebrow dances and a smart remark. She didn’t get one. Instead, his eyes narrowed just a little.
“Okay.”
“I need to follow up on something with the foot first,” Maggie said. “About seven okay?”
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