“Why did they just dump them in the water like that?” Maggie demanded.
“How the hell do I know, Maggie?” he snapped, glaring at her. Then he took a breath and looked back at the road. “I don’t know,” he said more quietly. “They were supposed to bring them within a couple of nautical miles of the island. They were also supposed to have compasses and two dinghies.”
Maggie looked out her window and huffed out a breath. Scrub pines, date palms, and the occasional live oak whizzed past her window, and even at sixty or seventy miles per hour, she could hear the cicadas signaling from the woods.
They rode in silence for another fifteen or twenty minutes, passing through and around towns even smaller than Apalach, and with a lot less going for them. Here and there were huge parcels of land covered in corn, watermelons, or tobacco.
Finally, Boudreaux pulled off onto a gravel road with a metal cattle fence and a small sign announcing their arrival at Orange Blossom Farm, although no one grew oranges this far north.
They followed the road for almost a mile, and Maggie looked out at fields of tomatoes, corn, green beans, and what looked like sweet potatoes. In some of the fields, rows of vegetables were punctuated by dark-skinned people in wide-brimmed hats, picking produce and dropping it into five-gallon buckets.
Boudreaux parked in a gravel lot rimmed by an office trailer, a couple of hangar-sized warehouses, and several refrigerated trucks. Beyond the office trailer, about a hundred yards back, were several small houses.
He and Maggie got out, and they both stretched their backs a bit. The trailer door opened, and a Hispanic man of about fifty came down the metal stairs, smiling.
“¡Hola, Señor Boudreaux!” the man said as he walked toward him.
“¡Hola, Octavio!” Boudreaux answered, and Maggie followed him to meet Octavio halfway. “¿Como está todo?” Boudreaux asked as they shook hands.
“Everything is good, sir,” Octavio said, then smiled at Maggie.
“Maggie, this is Octavio Gayoso, the farm manager,” Boudreaux said. “Octavio, this is Maggie Redmond.”
“Mucho gusto,” Maggie said, and held out her hand.
“Mucho gusto,” Octavio said back, shaking her hand gently.
“How are the tomatoes coming?” Boudreaux asked.
Octavio shrugged a shoulder. “Ah, las tomates want more rain, si? But the beans are good now.”
Boudreaux started walking, and Octavio fell in step with him. Maggie followed a pace behind. “Any more problems with the Walmart guy?” Boudreaux asked.
“No, he does not seem to need to negotiate anymore,” Octavio said. “And he was much more simpático on the phone.”
“Good.” Boudreaux put a hand on the man’s shoulder. “We won’t keep you, Octavio. I’m just going to show Maggie around a little.”
“Si, está bien,” Octavio said. He smiled at Maggie. “It was good to meet you.”
“Good to meet you,” Maggie answered.
Octavio walked back toward the office trailer, and Maggie followed Boudreaux as he started on a gravel road that wound around back toward the houses. There were about a dozen of them, small cottages, really, set up on cement blocks rather than poured foundations. Beyond the houses, Maggie could see another dozen or so singlewide trailers, some of them FEMA trailers, some not.
The little houses were older, but they looked to be in decent shape. Most of them had pots or coffee cans of flowers on the front steps, and in a big patch of grass in the center were several plastic riding toys and a sandbox.
Two women in their twenties sat on overturned buckets, watching several small children play. One of the women was nursing an infant, its legs sticking out from under a woven nursing blanket. The women looked at Maggie and Boudreaux curiously. One of them raised a hand to them, and Boudreaux raised one back. Then he put his hands in his pockets as he and Maggie stopped underneath a small date palm.
“The girl on the left, and I admit I don’t remember her name, is Octavio’s daughter. That’s his first grandson,” Boudreaux said.
“Where are they from?”
“Miami,” he said.
“I meant originally,” she said flatly.
“Honduras. They’ve been in the US for twelve years.” He looked at her. “They’re naturalized.”
Maggie watched him as he looked around the little residential area. “It’s not fancy by any means, but there are no rats, and there’s plumbing and air conditioning and water.” He looked over at her. “You’d be surprised how unusual that actually is.”
“Does everyone who works here live here?”
“No, but most of them do. It’s cheaper. They pay a flat rate for rent and utilities and the rent’s about half what they’d pay in town. I only charge what I need to cover the utilities. It’s the only way I can afford to pay them.”
He looked over at Maggie. “I won’t pretend they have it made here, but they have it better than at most farms,” he said. “Most places pay less than minimum wage, under the table. They set quotas that are almost impossible to meet, then dock wages when the quotas aren’t met.”
He watched as two little girls wandered over to the sandbox and started pushing little cars through the sand. “I pay minimum wage and give small bonuses for exceeding quota. It’s not perfect, but it’s the best I can do. Agriculture doesn’t pay farms enough to pay the wages workers ought to be earning,” he said. “Some farms underpay to a disgusting degree and some outright steal from their workers. A lot of the people who work here came from farms where they actually owed their employers money.”
Maggie turned her gaze from the little girls and looked at him. “Did any of them come from Guatemala?”
“Yes,” he said, still watching the girls.
“Is that something you do regularly?”
He looked at her, his eyes almost challenging. “I’ve done it before, yes. I’ll likely do it again, and I won’t apologize for it.”
Maggie looked back at the young women.
“Have you ever been to Guatemala, Maggie?”
“No.”
“I have. Thirty years of civil war and they still have nothing. Almost nobody owns their own land, and those that do can’t get a decent price for what they manage to grow out of dirt that’s almost too poor to grow anything.” He looked back at the kids playing in the grass. “The government’s corrupt as hell and hates its own people. Almost every family has at least one relative in prison.”
Maggie looked over at him. “What were you doing in Guatemala?”
“Catholic missions trips,” he said, and Maggie would have laughed if anyone else had said it. She knew he took his Catholicism very seriously, however he managed that.
“Let’s go,” he said, and turned back toward the parking area. Maggie followed, running a couple of steps to catch up.
“That’s it? We drove an hour to spend three minutes here?” she asked him.
“You want to look at the books? Inspect one of the houses?” he asked her. “You’ve seen what I brought you here to see, but if you want to wait until everyone comes in from the fields so you can interview them, we can. But it doesn’t get dark til 8:30.”
They walked in silence back to the car and got in. Boudreaux stared out the windshield a moment, and Maggie watched him.
“Why did you bring me here?” she asked him.
He continued to stare out the windshield just long enough for her to start thinking he wasn’t going to answer. Then he looked over at her. “You might find this ironic, but I don’t like being suspected of something I wouldn’t do.”
“Why do you care what I think?”
He looked at her for a long time, and she thought she saw several different answers pass across his eyes. “I respect you. I’d like that respect to be mutual, on some level.”
He put on his seat belt, and she did the same, then he started the car and turned it around in the lot. Maggie looked back out her window as they pulled back onto the road and headed
south again.
Boudreaux and Maggie rode in silence for several minutes, each wrapped up in their own thoughts.
Maggie was having trouble keeping hers straight. She’d been angry with Boudreaux on the way out to Chipley, and deeply disappointed, as much as that troubled her. Now she wasn’t sure what to think. Her gut said that he was being honest with her about his involvement with the poor Guatemalans, but she was experiencing some distrust of her gut these days.
Half an hour into their drive back, Maggie’s cell buzzed at her and she pulled it out of her back pocket. It was Sky.
“Hey, baby,” Maggie answered. It felt surreal to be talking to her child in Boudreaux’s car.
“Hey, Mom,” Sky said. “We just got back to Grandma and Granddad’s and I wanted to know if I could go spend the night with Bella. She’s got a couple of Redbox movies.”
“What about Kyle?”
“He wants to stay here with Granddad. They’re gonna play corn hole out back.”
“Well, I guess that’s okay,” Maggie said, simultaneously relieved and disappointed. She felt separated from her family, and she had looked forward to being home and re-grounding herself. “How’d it go today?”
“Dude. Have you even been outside?” Sky asked. “The oysters were cooked already when we pulled ‘em up. But we got a full bag, plus our bucket. We’re having them for dinner.”
“That sounds nice,” Maggie said.
“Where are you?”
“I’m on my way back to town. I’m working on a case.”
“The people from Guatemala?” Sky asked, sounding a little more subdued.
“Yeah.”
“Did that little boy like the stuff you took him?”
“I don’t know. He was asleep,” Maggie answered.
“Poor kid. That whole thing totally sucks.”
“Yeah, it does.”
“All right, so it’s okay if I go?”
“Yeah, it’s okay. Tell Kyle to call me before he goes to bed,” Maggie said.
“You don’t want me to call you before I go to bed?” Sky said, teasing in her voice.
“You’ll be going to bed at 3 a.m. If you call me, you’re grounded.”
“Okay. Later, dude.”
“Later, dude,” Maggie said.
She disconnected the call and set the phone in her lap. When she looked over at Boudreaux, he was looking at her.
“You’re a good mother,” he said.
The compliment embarrassed her, and she shrugged. “On my good days.”
“Was David a good father?”
Maggie felt a clenching in her chest. “Yes. Very good.”
“Even though he started running pot?” Boudreaux said it without judgment in his voice.
“Yes.”
“But you couldn’t stay married to him.”
It took Maggie a moment to answer, to admit to something she’d like to take back. “No.”
Boudreaux was quiet for a moment, watched the road. “I hope he was able to redeem himself somewhat in your eyes,” he said quietly.
Maggie looked down at the warm can of RC in the console. “Yes. He was.”
“Redemption is elusive,” he said.
Maggie started to say something, but her phone buzzed again. It was Wyatt. She took a deep breath and answered.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey. Where are you?”
“I’m, uh, on my way back to town.”
“From where?”
“Chipley.”
“Never heard of it,” Wyatt answered.
“Neither have most of the people who live there,” she said.
“What were you doing in Chipley?”
“Checking out Boudreaux’s farm,” she said.
“Huh,” Wyatt said after a moment. “I’m wondering how you’re traveling, because your Jeep is here at Boss. I’d appreciate it if you said by spaceship.”
“No.” Maggie bit the corner of her lip. “I’m with Boudreaux.”
There was a long pause on the line and Maggie grew more nervous as she waited.
“Well then,” Wyatt finally said. “That’s just Jim damn Dandy.”
Maggie looked at her phone and saw that he had indeed hung up on her. She dropped it back onto her lap and sighed.
“That didn’t sound like it went over too well,” Boudreaux said.
“No.” Maggie looked out of her window at the unrelenting miles of tall, skinny scrub pines. “But he was already upset with me.”
“I guess you told him about Gregory and Sport.”
“Yes.”
“And me.” Boudreaux said it matter-of-factly.
“Yes.” Maggie sighed. “Wyatt wasn’t exactly happy about me keeping so many things to myself.”
“We men aren’t that fond of finding out that we don’t know as much as we believe we know.”
“Professionally, he had every right to know.”
“I agree. But I’m willing to bet that he’s more upset personally than professionally.”
“I don’t know,” Maggie said. “Secrecy’s kind of a new thing for me. With that one exception.”
She was afraid that would lead to more discussion of Gregory. Or of David, and she didn’t have the heart for either topic. She looked over at Boudreaux. “What about you? Do you keep secrets from your wife?”
“No,” he said smoothly, watching the road. “She knows that I can’t stand her.”
They got back to the parking lot at Boss Oyster a little before six, and Boudreaux pulled in next to Maggie’s Jeep. She got out, and looked at Boudreaux through the open window.
“Thank you for coming with me,” he said, sounding tired.
Maggie nodded, then glanced over at a local couple coming out of the raw bar. They looked over at her, and Maggie felt her career and her reputation taking their last breaths. She was almost too drained to care.
“Goodnight, Mr. Boudreaux,” she said.
“Goodnight, Maggie.”
Maggie got in her Jeep and watched Boudreaux back out, then she looked around at the parking lot. She had almost hoped that Wyatt’s car would be there, but it wasn’t.
She sat for a minute, gathering her nerve, then pulled out her cell and dialed Wyatt’s number. He answered on the first ring.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” Maggie said. “I know you’re angry with me and you probably don’t feel like talking to me right now, but we could we please? Anyway?”
“We need to do that, yes,” he answered.
“Thank you,” she said. “What are you doing right now?”
She heard Wyatt sigh.
“I’m sitting on the steps with Stoopid,” he answered.
When Maggie pulled up in front of her house ten minutes later, Stoopid had apparently become bored with Wyatt. Coco had not. She was standing near his feet, smiling, until Maggie parked the car, then she barreled over, eyes wide and tongue lolling, and collapsed at Maggie’s feet as she got out of the Jeep.
Stoopid flailed over from near the chicken yard, apprised Maggie of the fact that Wyatt was present, then ran back from whence he’d come, neck feathers at half-mast.
Wyatt sat on the third step, a six pack of Yuengling on the step beside him. He was drinking one of them. He stood up as Maggie walked toward the house with Coco on her heels.
“Hey,” Maggie said.
“Hey,” he said back.
They looked at each other a moment, then he picked up the six-pack and stepped aside as she came up the stairs. She stopped a couple of steps up from him, looked him eye to eye. He looked tired and closed off from her, and she was surprised that she could feel that in a physical way.
“I just need to take a quick shower, okay? Five minutes?” she asked.
He nodded at her. “You want a beer?”
“No, thanks,” she said, as they started up the stairs again. “I don’t actually like beer. I just drink it if there’s nothing else.”
“You need to f
ix these stairs,” Wyatt said behind her.
“I know.”
She opened the front door and stood aside for Wyatt.
“I’ll just sit on the deck,” he said.
Maggie faltered for a moment, then nodded. “Okay. I’ll be right out.”
Coco followed her inside, and Maggie quickly got out of her sticky clothes and into the shower. She tended to linger in the shower until the hot water was gone, but this time she was out in less than five minutes. She’d spent the entire time dreading the upcoming conversation and trying to come up with justifications for her actions, but she wasn’t so far gone that she could find any.
She threw on some khaki shorts and a white tee shirt, poured a glass of Muscadine wine, and walked out to the living room. Coco was sitting at the sliding glass door, vibrating at Wyatt, who was sitting at the small round table outside.
He looked up when she walked out onto the deck, and she had an urge to curl up on his lap. She remembered what that had felt like. It had felt safe, and it had felt right.
Instead, she sat down in the chair across from him. Coco sat in the middle, but it was Wyatt she was smiling at. Wyatt wasn’t smiling. Maggie was glad she got a good swallow of wine before he spoke.
“Did I ever tell you about when Lily told me she had cancer?”
That threw Maggie. “No.”
He sighed. “It was three weeks after she decided to have a lumpectomy instead of a mastectomy,” he said. “She told me two days before she went in for the surgery.”
Maggie had no idea what to say to that. He looked up at her. “I realize it was her body and it was her cancer, but it was our lives, and I had no idea. No idea at all, until it was too late for me to have any say in it.”
“I’m not sure what to say,” Maggie said. “I’m sorry.”
Wyatt took a long pull of his beer, then banged the bottle down on the table, making both Maggie and Coco jump just a little.
“I don’t want you to be sorry,” he said. “I want you to trust me enough to be honest.”
“I get what you’re—” she started.
“No, you probably don’t,” he said. He stood up and took a couple of paces, then stood with his hands on his hips. “I understand why you didn’t tell me about the rape, and I understand why you felt like you couldn’t tell me about Gregory Boudreaux. But Wilmette? And Boudreaux, freaking Boudreaux!”
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