She took the prescription bottle back with her to the living room. Wyatt was looking at the legal pad.
“Looks like our guy was thinking about going somewhere tomorrow,” he said as she came in. “Kind of odd. If it was suicide, you think he decided wherever he was going wasn’t gonna be far enough?”
Maggie pulled a baggie from her back pocket and held the bottle up before dropping it in.
“What’s that?” Wyatt asked her.
“Generic Paxil,” she answered. “A year old, from some doctor in Tallahassee. Doesn’t look like he took much of it.”
“Long way to go for some antidepressants,” Wyatt said.
Maggie nodded.
“I’ll call the doctor, see if he can tell us about that,” she said.
“We can talk to Boudreaux,” he said.
“That, too.”
Wyatt picked up the laptop.
“We done, you think?” he asked.
“Yeah, for now at least.” She wanted outside. “Grab the legal pad, too.”
Maggie headed for the door and Wyatt followed. While he locked up, she waited on the front path, grateful now for the heat and the sun.
“It’s almost one,” Wyatt said as they walked toward the driveway. “I can take this stuff back to Eastpoint if you want to grab a quick nap before your kids get home from school.”
She shook her head. “If I go to sleep now, I won’t be able to sleep tonight.”
“How about if I buy you lunch to make up for calling you in?” He set the laptop and legal pad on his roof and opened his door.
Maggie was pretty sure she’d rather lick a scorpion than put a bite of food in her mouth.
“Sure,” she answered.
“AJ’s?”
“Okay,” she told him as she got in her Jeep.
AJ’s Neighborhood Grill & Bar was on Fulton, also known as Martin Luther King. It was as nondescript a place as it could be and looked more like an old corner market than a restaurant. It was a local favorite though, much beloved for its soul food, particularly its fried chicken.
Most of the lunch crowd had come and gone, so many of the booths and oak tables in the large, plain space were empty. Maggie and Wyatt both ordered sweet tea and opted to skip the buffet. Wyatt ordered a Pimp Tight basket, a fried chicken breast and wing with a side of fries and green beans. Maggie asked for a small bowl of AJ’s famous mac and cheese without actually wanting it.
They made small talk while they waited for their food, first about the weather and then about the softball team Maggie coached and on which her sixteen-year old daughter Skylar played.
“How’s David doing these days?” Wyatt asked.
Maggie looked out the window at the gravel parking lot.
“I haven’t talked to him in a few weeks,” she said.
“Has he talked to the kids?”
“No,” she said.
Wyatt nodded, then leaned back in his seat as the young black waitress brought their food.
Maggie had divorced David four years earlier. They’d gone steady since fifth grade and gotten married the weekend after Maggie had graduated from the University of Florida. They’d been married for almost ten years when the BP oil spill had changed their lives.
Against Maggie’s better judgment, David had just taken out a large loan for a new shrimp boat. It was repossessed three months after the spill. After several months of no work and no income but hers, David had announced that he had a new job with a trucking company based in Panama City. In actuality, his new job had been running pot between the growers out in Tate’s Hell Forest and the buyers in Panama City. David had also started drinking.
David had done six months for simple possession last year. She had pretended to be just as surprised as Wyatt, her friends and her neighbors. The kids, her parents, and her younger brother Mason had known the reason for the divorce. Like her, they mourned the David they’d always known.
“So, I’ll go back to the office and have Jake look at the laptop, call this doctor in Tallahassee, see what he says,” Wyatt told her. “You go home and I’ll let you know if anything interesting turns up.”
“Okay,” she said, poking her spoon around in her macaroni.
“Are you eating that or just checking it for bones?”
Maggie pushed the dish in his direction.
“I’m too tired to be hungry,” she said.
Wyatt took a bite of her mac and cheese, his impressive eyebrows coming together as he frowned at her.
“Hard thing, working and raising kids alone,” he said.
Maggie shrugged with one shoulder and looked back out the window at nothing.
“But you’re a good woman and halfway decent-looking,” he said. “Maybe one day you’ll get married again.”
Maggie looked at him, but he was newly focused on his green beans. Looking at Wyatt usually made her smile. Sometimes, lately, it sent a warmth through her stomach, curling like smoke from the end of a cigarette. Today, it just made her sad.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I’m supposed to be alone.”
“I’d hold off betting on that,” he said to his beans.
Maggie lived about five miles northwest of downtown Apalach, on the last gravel road that turned off Bluff Road before Bluff Road itself dead-ended in gravel. It was isolated and silent, save for the crickets, cicadas, and frogs.
The two acres on which Maggie’s house sat was shaped like a slice of pie, with the narrow tip ending in a dock right on the Apalachicola River. Across the river and on either side of Maggie were nothing but woods of slash pine, live oak and Tupelo.
Maggie parked the Jeep, got out, and stretched her back as Coco, her five-year old Catahoula Parish Leopard Hound, came bounding out from the back of the house. Her one rooster, Stoopid, was running close behind.
Stoopid veered off and headed toward the chicken coop while Coco did her full body wag and licked Maggie’s outstretched hands.
“Hey, baby,” Maggie said. “How’s my girl?”
She knelt down and buried her nose in Coco’s neck, breathing deeply of the soothing scents of dirt and brine and fur, then she stood and walked over to the raised beds that ran along one side of the chicken coop.
She’d spent the last two weeks on a murder case that had ended with a confession from the ex-husband, a nearly toothless old man with nicotine stained fingers and an inability to adjust to being alone. The garden showed her neglect. Sky and Kyle had tried to keep up, but Sky had final exams to study for. Now that it was the last day of school, maybe Maggie and the kids could get caught up, with the garden and with each other.
She pulled a few wizened pickling cucumbers from their vines and walked over to the small chicken yard, a shady area dominated by a little stilt chicken coop with a green tin roof, a replica of the family house that David and the kids had built six years ago, when everything was the way it was.
The hens, a conglomeration of White Silkies, Buff Orpingtons and Rhode Island Reds, all gathered at the fence while Maggie broke up the cukes and tossed them in. Stoopid, so named for his inability to tell time, flew up to the fence and then hopped in and joined his women.
“Come on, Coco,” Maggie said and she and her dog headed for the house.
Maggie’s grandfather on her daddy’s side had built the cypress house on stilts in the 1950s. Her parents had chosen to live in town, close to the marina, when they’d married and the house had eventually been given to Maggie and David when they’d wed. Its slightly ramshackle appearance belied the fact that it had withstood many a storm in its lifetime and was as solid as the day it was built.
Maggie walked up the flight of wooden stairs to the porch, Coco’s toenails and dog tags tapping behind her. The porch wrapped around the house and was screened in in back, off of the kitchen. It was Maggie’s favorite part of the house and she often sat back there in the evening, watching the sun set over her river.
A small flatboat and her grandfather’s old oyster sk
iff were tied at the dock, and she and the kids often took one of them out to the river to fish. They’d catch striped or sunshine bass, bream or trout, then dress and grill them on the deck. Like Maggie, Sky and Kyle had never eaten a fish that had been dead for more than a few hours.
Maggie pulled the screen door open and unlocked the front door, which opened directly into their small dining area. The house got a lot of natural light and was almost always cooled by a breeze from the river. She and David had added several windows when they’d moved in; both of them preferred replacing storm-shattered windows to living without light and air.
Maggie dumped her purse and keys on the table and walked down the short hallway between the main room and the kitchen. The two kids’ rooms were on the right, her room on the left, and a small bath at the end of the hall.
Maggie took off her holster and placed it in her nightstand, kicked off her shoes and walked down to the bathroom.
She splashed a few handfuls of cool water onto her face. On the third handful, she had a flash of Gregory Boudreaux’s broken and bloody mouth and she jerked upright and stared at herself in the mirror. She looked like hell. There were dark shadows under her wide-set eyes and the little crevices on either side of her lips seemed deeper. She pulled her ponytail up into a messy bun to get the damp hairs off of her and closed her eyes as a faint breeze from the bathroom window brushed her neck.
Tell me you love me!
The words, little more than an angry whisper, came from just behind her right ear. Her head jerked toward her right shoulder reflexively and her eyes shot open. That didn’t happen much anymore, but exhaustion and the events of the day had taken their toll. She shut off the water and decided not to look in the mirror anymore.
An hour later, Maggie had picked a backache’s worth of squash, zucchini, and tomatoes, and was waiting at the end of their road for the school bus. Coco had come along, as was her habit, and was saving Maggie’s life repeatedly by swallowing all of the bees that hung out at the mailbox.
Maggie sipped her sweet tea and wiped the sweat from the back of her neck, dreaming of a shower and what passed for autumn in northern Florida.
The school bus wheezed and banged to a stop just before Maggie slipped into heat stroke, and she smiled as first Kyle jumped out and then Skylar followed less exuberantly.
Kyle looked like his father, with a slight build for his ten years, eyelashes long enough to make noise, and shiny, black hair. Skylar favored her mother more, with hair just a shade lighter and the same green eyes and strong chin. At sixteen, she knew everything and knew it before Maggie did, but she was also witty and strong and fiercely protective of her brother.
Maggie wrapped her arms around Kyle, glad that he was still willing to hug and be hugged in view of his friends. She buried her face in his hair, took a deep whiff of her child and forgot about her day.
Sky would never deign to be hugged in public, but she did give Maggie a smile and some sort of hand signal that Maggie took to be positive in nature. Maggie waved at the bus driver as the bus made a U-turn and headed back the way it had come, then she and the kids headed for the house.
“I feel like I haven’t seen you guys in weeks,” Maggie said.
“You haven’t.” Sky lifted her ponytail off of her neck. “Can we go somewhere for dinner, you know, to celebrate that school’s out?”
“Oh, baby, I’m so tired,” Maggie answered. “I ended up working today.”
“I thought you were off,” Kyle said.
“I was, but something came up.”
“Are you still off tomorrow?” Sky asked.
“I am.”
Maggie handed her daughter her tea and Sky took a long, grateful drink and passed it to Kyle.
“Can we do something tomorrow then?” Sky asked.
“Well, I’ve gotta take some stuff to Battery Park in the morning,” Maggie said. “But I thought maybe we could go to the pool after.”
“Yeah!” Kyle yelled.
“Do you want to go to the park with me in the morning?”
Kyle just shrugged but Sky’s eyes rolled all the way back to her neck.
“Is that supposed to be funny?” she asked. “I’m sleeping in. I’ll help you pick the vegetables, though, after I get something to drink.”
“I got them, but thanks.”
“Regan wants me to spend the night tomorrow night,” Sky said.
“I guess it’s okay,” Maggie said.
“Mommy-son date, then,” Kyle said, throwing a rock up the road. “Can we get a movie?”
“Sure, buddy.” Maggie brushed a lock of damp hair from her son’s eyes. “Don’t forget we’ve got a softball game tomorrow night, Sky.”
“I know. She wants me to ride home with her after.”
Sky was starting to lose interest in softball, but hung in there because she knew how much her mother loved coaching the team. It was also a decent shot at some scholarship money and they needed that.
Kyle was still enthusiastic about baseball, but less of a player than his sister. He played for fun and he played for his Dad, who had been the high school baseball star in a high school that took baseball very seriously. David had been offered scholarships, but chose fishing shrimp and oysters over an education, just as his father and grandfather had done. Now he didn’t have that, either.
They got back to the house and Kyle ran up the stairs, less oppressed by the sticky heat than were his mother and sister, who followed at their own pace. Once they got inside, Maggie turned up the ceiling fans and got some more ice for her tea.
Kyle, predictably, tossed his backpack onto the bench by the door and jumped onto the couch to play Minecraft. Sky followed her Mom into the kitchen and got a glass from the cupboard.
Sky held her glass out to Maggie, who dropped some ice into it, then poured her some tea. Then Sky watched Maggie walk over to the sink and look out the window.
“Are you okay, Mom?”
Maggie turned to look at Sky, who was leaning against the fridge, eyeing her over her tea.
“Sure, sweetie,” Maggie answered. “I’m just tired.”
“You’re lying,” Sky said simply.
“Shut up. I don’t lie to you guys.”
“You do if you think it’s ‘best’,” Sky said with a smirk.
Maggie raised an eyebrow at her daughter.
“So why’d you get called in to work?”
“A body on St. George,” Maggie said. “Suicide, probably.”
“Serious? Who?”
“I don’t want to talk about it, Sky. I’m off duty.”
“It’ll be in the paper anyway,” Sky said.
“Then read it. Now move out of my way. I’m gonna see what we have for dinner.”
Maggie was at Battery Park by 7:30 the next morning and added their vegetables to the folding tables, upended crates, and tailgates full of produce from other locals.
The gardeners of Apalach had been growing and donating extra produce since the last oil spill, and it was just one more thing that Maggie loved about her hometown and the people in it. When the job started getting to her, she reminded herself of people like old Mrs. Jarrett, who was about nine hundred years old and still managed to bring a hundred pounds of tomatoes and cucumbers and beans every week.
Everyone tried to organize the produce a bit to make it easier on the people who came to choose it as though they were shopping at a farmer’s market. Everyone piled their tomatoes with everyone else’s tomatoes, their beans with everyone else’s beans. It not only made shopping easier for the oystering families, it also kept them from having to know exactly whose cucumbers they were putting in their Publix bags.
Maggie spotted her parents talking with some people across the parking lot and started over there to say “hello.” About halfway there, she stopped at an unmarked, white refrigerated truck. Two Hispanic men she didn’t know were in the back of the truck, handing cases of cantaloupe out to a couple of local men. On the ground in front of th
e truck were dozens of watermelons.
Maggie watched the local guys carry a case of melon over to a nearby table, then she looked up at one of the men in the truck.
“These are beautiful,” she said. “Where are they from?”
One of the men looked at his friend, then looked back at Maggie and shook his head.
“¿De dónde viene esto?’ Maggie asked again.
“No sey,” the man said, shaking his head again.
“You brought them here, but you don’t know. Okay,” Maggie said, shrugging.
As she turned to walk away, she almost ran into one of the local men who were helping unload. She knew his face but couldn’t remember his name.
“They’re from Boudreaux,” he said. “But he asked us not to say anything.”
“Bennett Boudreaux?”
“Yeah. From his farm over in Live Oak. He said they were going to go to waste.”
“Huh,” was all Maggie said, then she headed for her parents.
Gray Redmond was everybody’s friend. Though a quiet man, he was universally liked. He was fairly tall and had always been what Maggie’s Grandma called “a long drink of water,” but he’d become even thinner a few years back when he’d had part of his left lung removed.
The recovery and the chemo that followed it had cost him precious weight and ended his oystering career a bit early, but he was one of the very few people his doctor had ever known to be diagnosed with lung cancer at Stage 1. He was expected to live many more years, and he and his family considered the lost weight and early retirement to be a fair trade.
While Maggie got her love of books and the sea from her daddy, she got her looks from her mother. At fifty-seven, Georgia Redmond still turned heads, though Maggie doubted that she ever noticed. She rarely wore anything more than lip balm and she’d been irretrievably in love with Maggie’s father since high school. Her pregnancy with Maggie had rushed their wedding, but it would have happened eventually anyway.
Gray looked up as Maggie approached and stuck out an arm.
“Hey, Sunshine,” he said.
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