Grace took a step and he pointed at her with his free hand.
“Uh-uh,” he said, almost musically. “Don’t you move.”
Grace stopped, but it felt like her heart kept moving toward the table, like a bird fluttering to a branch, as she saw Ricky rock the carrier closer to the edge of the table. Poor Rose was just hiccupping now, gasping for air like her mama had done.
“You got something to say, Gracie?” Ricky said.
Grace tore her eyes from the carrier and looked him in the eye and the terror came up her throat and out of her mouth.
“I’ve had it!” she almost screamed. “I’ve had it with you blamin’ this on me!”
He stopped rocking the carrier, just as it reached the edge of the table, but his smile was gone instantly.
“What’d you say?”
“You’re so tweaked out you can’t even think!” she yelled, one part of her mind wondering at the fact that pure animal fear sounded just like righteous anger. “What am I supposed to do if you’re in jail? I don’t have a job, I can’t even get a job that’d pay for day care! How am I supposed to feed these kids if you’re in prison? You think I’m stupid? You’re stupid!”
For a moment, there was no sound in the room but that of the baby wheezing and coughing. Ricky went very still, and his eyes, boring into Grace’s, were filled with violence.
Then his cell phone came to life in his shirt pocket. It was the Metallica ringtone that he used for Joey Truman.
Ricky pulled it out and stared at it a moment, then answered the call without speaking. After a moment, Grace could hear Joey speaking rapidly, his voice tinny through the phone.
“Where you at?” Ricky asked, looking confused. He listened as Joey spoke again, but Grace couldn’t make out the words. “What do you mean they let you go?
Ricky listened for a minute as Joey talked, and then Grace heard Joey laughing. Ricky wasn’t laughing.
“I’m not goin’ to no bar. Just come over here,” Ricky said. Grace heard Joey say something. “Walk. You got legs.”
He disconnected the call and looked at Grace for a moment, then headed for the kitchen door behind her. As he came abreast of her, his hand shot out and he slapped the side of her head hard enough to make her neck hurt.
“Don’t you ever call me stupid again,” he said, and walked out to the living room.
Kyle was out of the Jeep first and ran toward the house, his baseball bag in hand. He patted Coco as she deteriorated at his feet, sidestepped Stoopid, who was running some kind of figure eight between him and the Jeep, and ran up the stairs.
Maggie reached back into the Jeep and grabbed the mail off the console, then slammed the door.
“Hey, baby,” she said to Coco, and scratched her neck before heading for the house. “Shoo, Stoopid! Go to bed.”
The rooster ran toward the chicken yard and Maggie walked up the stairs, Coco on her heels. Maggie flipped through the mail and stopped at the top step. Coco bumped into her, then went around her, as Maggie looked at the envelope.
There was no return address, just her name and address printed in the center. It had a local postmark. Maggie flipped it over, ripped it open with her thumb, and pulled out the single, folded sheet of paper.
It was just one paragraph, and looked like it was printed from a computer.
Maggie,
I wanted to write you and tell you that I’m sorry for what happened back then. I was young and I was messed up. Maybe I’m still messed up. You won’t have to see me around town anymore, but I wanted to tell you I was sorry before I go.
Gregory Boudreaux
Maggie swallowed a sudden nausea as she stared at the letter. Then she flipped the envelope over again. It had been postmarked yesterday. She looked back at the letter, even though she wanted to throw it far away.
The letter was printed, not handwritten. It could have been written by Gregory Boudreaux, or it could have been written by someone else. But Gregory wasn’t the one that mailed it. He’d been at his funeral.
Maggie looked toward the living room window as she heard Kyle moving around inside, and her hands shook as she stuffed the letter back into the envelope. She didn’t want to take it inside, didn’t want it tainting her home.
She dropped her purse on the deck and hurried back to the Jeep, opened the door and leaned in. She shoved the envelope inside the glove compartment. She had to slam it three times to make it shut. Then she locked the Jeep and made herself walk, not run, back up the stairs.
Less than five minutes later, she was standing in the shower, her face pointed into the spray.
She thought of Bennett Boudreaux. She knew he knew what Gregory had done. But somehow, she could see Boudreaux as a criminal, but she couldn’t quite picture him being cruel. Then she thought about her dream the other night. She thought about someone else, there in the woods.
She turned around and grabbed the soap and her scrubby and began washing herself. She went over every inch of her body at least three times, even after the water had turned ice cold.
Layered somewhere above or beneath the scent of coconut and Kukui was the faint odor of molding leaves.
Back in town, Bennett Boudreaux sat at his desk in his office at the Sea-Fair plant.
He preferred to work in the evenings these days; the place was quiet and he could think. The older he got, the fewer people he liked, and the less he liked even them. Working at night was also an excellent way to absent himself from his wife’s incessant dinner or cocktail parties, all of which featured a lot of discussion on topics that held no interest for him. He could write a check to save the Web-footed, Ass-faced Crane without having to know what he was saving it from.
At a few minutes before seven, there was a knock on the metal back door, and Boudreaux went out to the hall and opened it. Sport stood there, looking agitated and nervous.
“Sport,” Boudreaux said, stepping back.
Sport stepped in. “Mr. Boudreaux. Thank you for seeing me, sir.”
“No trouble, son,” Boudreaux said. He closed and locked the door, then held out a hand. “Let’s walk back to my office, alright?”
He followed Sport down the short hallway and indicated he should sit in the old vinyl armchair in front of his desk. Boudreaux had a fancier office out front, but that was for impressing people he cared to impress.
Once Sport was seated and bouncing a foot on his knee, Boudreaux sat back down behind the metal desk, and leaned back in his chair.
“So, what’s on your mind, Sport?”
“Well, it’s about Gregory, sir.”
“So you said.”
Sport studied the pictures on the wall behind Boudreaux, then the paperweight on his desk, before finally looking back at him. “Are you real sure he killed himself?”
Boudreaux looked at him for a moment before answering. “That’s what the medical examiner decided.”
“What do you think?”
“Why?”
“Well, you know, like a week before he died, he called me up and said he was planning on leaving,” Sport said. “He said he was thinking about Costa Rica or someplace like that.”
“Gregory came and went on a regular basis, son. It didn’t seem to do much good. Maybe he figured it wouldn’t help this time, either. He wasn’t doing very well lately, even for him.”
“Maybe.” Sport watched his bouncing foot like someone else was bouncing it.
“Spit it out, Sport,” Boudreaux said quietly.
“Well, sir. It’s—that cop, the one that investigated the case. I saw it in the paper.”
“Maggie Redmond.”
“Yeah.” Sport seemed to gather his wits about him, if that were possible. “The thing is, they had a history. Long time ago.”
He waited for Boudreaux to ask, but Boudreaux didn’t.
“He raped her.”
Boudreaux scratched at his left eyebrow with one finger. “I know that.”
“You know? How?”
“He
told me. The night before he shot himself.”
Sport seemed to be trying to reorganize his thoughts. Boudreaux wished him Godspeed.
“My question, Sport, is how do you know?”
Sport swallowed and worked hard at looking Boudreaux in the eye. “Well…I was there.”
Boudreaux hadn’t expected that at all. He took a slow breath and let it out just as slowly, never taking his eyes from Sport’s. “I see.” He took his time choosing his words. “And did you take part?”
“No! No, I didn’t want anything to do with it.”
“But you didn’t try to stop it, either.”
“Well, no. I don’t even think she knew I was there.” He waited for Boudreaux to respond, but Boudreaux just watched him calmly. “We were high, you know? It was fall break of our freshman year at Tulane, we were all jacked up on coke. I don’t do that anymore, but we…you know, we got high then.”
Boudreaux knew Sport wanted him to say something, but he didn’t care to make it that easy.
Finally, Sport broke the silence himself. “And now, she’s the one that investigated his death?”
Boudreaux continued to stare at the fool for a moment before he finally spoke. “I see what you’re getting at, Sport. But it’s not that easy to fake a suicide by gunshot, you know.”
“I bet it’s a lot easier if you’re a cop. And why would she stay quiet all these years, especially after she became a cop, unless she wanted to get revenge herself or something?”
“You say that because you’re not a woman.”
“How do you mean?”
“If you were violated by a hopped-up college kid, you probably wouldn’t talk about it much, either.”
Sport swallowed again. “Well, I’m just saying, I think it looks funny. Her being on the case and everything. I mean, haven’t you even considered it, since, you know…you know?”
“I consider everything,” Boudreaux said. “And I’m taking care of Maggie Redmond.”
“I mean, I’m glad she never said anything, obviously. I mean, not just for Gregory, but it would have looked really bad for you, too. It would look bad now.” Sport picked nervously at a thumbnail. “For the family’s reputation.”
Boudreaux put his elbows on his desk and put his chin on his folded hands. “You’ve spent a great deal of time in my home over the years, Sport. You’re practically family. You know as well as anyone that family comes first for me, at all cost.”
“That’s true, sir. I know that to be true.”
“You also know that I like to cut to any chase that might be involved in a given conversation, so I’d like you to go on and get to the rest of your reason for being here.”
Sport’s foot stopped bouncing. Boudreaux was pretty sure it was an act of extraordinary will.
“Well, sir, you know, I’d been talking to Gregory about going in with me on this new venture I’ve had in mind, a pop-up gourmet deal back in Atlanta,” Sport said. “I think it has real potential. But without Gregory’s help with start-up, well, I’m kind of at loose ends. And to be honest, I’m flat broke.”
“I see.” Boudreaux put his hands on his desk. “So, you’re hoping that I might help you out financially.”
“Well, funding. I thought you might see that it could be a good investment. I wouldn’t straight up ask you to just hand me some money. That would seem too much like I was asking you to pay me for something and that’s not what I mean to say at all. I’m not stupid.”
“No, son. You’re not stupid.” What Boudreaux meant was that Sport would actually have to apply himself to achieve stupidity, but he saw no point in being clear.
“Thank you, sir.”
Boudreaux couldn’t help smiling. “Here’s the thing, Sport. You know me well enough to know that I don’t hand anybody anything. Even if I did, that would make all this seem uncomfortably like something that you just said it isn’t, am I right?”
Sport seemed to let that ping around in his head for a second before he understood it. “Well, sure.”
“At the same time, my first priority is to do what I need to do for the good of the family. For all of us.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Additionally, Gregory’s ill-timed passing has left me with a vacancy here at the plant.”
“Sir?”
Boudreaux stood up slowly and came around the desk. “Come take a walk with me, Sport.”
Sport stood up uncertainly, then followed Boudreaux out of the office.
“You see, we’re just about done with our expansion here at Sea-Fair,” Boudreaux said as he led Sport down the hall. “Gregory was going to move over here from the other office and oversee our new fish division. Oysters and shrimp just aren’t cutting it these days, as you probably know.”
“Sure,” Sport said.
Boudreaux opened a steel door and flipped on a wall switch. “We’re not operational yet, we’ve got an electrical inspection coming up next week and we haven’t hired a crew yet, but I’m pretty proud of what we’ve done here.”
The room was huge and everything in it brand new. It smelled of paint and sheetrock and sawdust. There were a dozen stainless steel tables in three rows of four, each with built-in drawers and overhead lights that were just now blinking to life.
Thick, industrial hoses with sprayer nozzles hung from the ceiling over each table, and there were floor drains spaced evenly around the room in the concrete floor.
Boudreaux swept a hand toward one wall. “Over here, we have three top of the line walk in freezers.” He pointed his hand to the far wall, where a set of wooden steps led up to an office with plate glass windows. “Up there is what would have been Gregory’s office.”
“I don’t understand, Mr. Boudreaux.”
“Well, son. You, too, have an opportunity to be overpaid, underworked, and largely ignored. All you have to do is make sure people work, that they get paid, and that nobody slices off a thumb while they’re fileting a grouper. This also makes our arrangement a little more palatable for me and profitable for you.”
“You’re offering me a job?”
“That’s correct.”
Sport took a few steps past Boudreaux and looked around. “But I don’t really know anything about fish.”
“Neither did Gregory.” Boudreaux came up behind Sport and slapped a hand down on his shoulder. “I think this is the perfect place for you.”
Maggie went into work an hour early the next morning. This wasn’t unusual for her, so no one questioned it, but at that early an hour, she was able to work in their small, on-site lab without interference.
Three of the prints on the letter were smudged by something that didn’t leave fingerprints of its own, and she knew those smudges could likely have been made by someone wearing gloves.
She got a total of six full and clear prints from the letter and several more from the envelope. Once they were transferred and scanned, she took the sheets back to her desk, fired up her computer and signed on to the fingerprint database.
It only took a few minutes to determine that the prints on the envelope belonged to three different postal workers and herself. None were unaccounted for and none belonged to Gregory Boudreaux, but she was unsurprised.
The letter itself contained her prints and Gregory’s. No one else’s.
She stared at the prints on the screen, prints Wyatt had taken from Gregory’s fingers to compare with those on the gun, and then she stared down at the letter and the fingerprints she’d taken from it.
She felt like snakes were crawling through her intestines. The idea that Gregory had even thought of her made her sick.
“Gee, you’re early.”
Maggie felt her skin try to leave her bones, and she looked up to see Wyatt standing in the doorway. She slid the fingerprint sheet and letter under some other papers on her desk as he made his way over to her, two cups from Café Con Leche in his hands. It was too late to clear her screen without being obvious, so she hit Print.
Wyatt s
topped beside her chair and looked at the screen as the printer whirred across the room.
“I figured you’d be done with your first cup by the time you got here, so I was extremely chivalrous and brought you one.”
Maggie turned her chair around to face him and smiled, took the cup from him.
“Actually, I didn’t stop this morning, so thanks.”
She took a swallow as she felt him looking at the computer screen.
“Whatcha doing?”
“Oh, I’m trying to clean up a bunch of little stuff. I forgot to print Boudreaux’s fingerprint report for his file.”
“I did it, remember?”
“Oh. Okay, well, never mind.”
Wyatt leaned up against her desk and she tried not to look away from him as he studied her face.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Yeah. Just tired. I didn’t sleep too well last night.”
Wyatt nodded. “She’ll be alright.”
Maggie scratched at her cup with her thumbnail. “Yeah.”
She got up and stepped back just a bit so that she wouldn’t be on top of Wyatt, then she stretched her back.
“Are you going to the Cajun festival tonight?” Wyatt asked.
“Yeah, I love it,” she said. “And I could use a little mental break.”
“I was hoping to go, but now I have to go over to Gainesville this afternoon. I’m just going to stay there tonight and come back first thing.”
Maggie looked at him. He was almost eye-to-eye with her, which didn’t happen often, and he was so close.
“That’s too bad.”
“Yes, it is.”
“We could have pretended we were going to have a dance.”
Wyatt looked out toward the hall, which was empty, then spoke more quietly.
“Yeah, and I could have contented myself with watching you.”
“I usually just dance with my Dad,” she said, shrugging almost shyly.
“I’ve seen you. That’s okay, I would have enjoyed watching him, too. He’s actually kinda hot once he gets going.”
Maggie almost smiled.
“I’ll have to tell him you said so.”
“That oughta solidify our relationship.”
For the first time, Maggie wondered what it would be like if she didn’t work for the Sheriff’s Office, if she could have just asked Wyatt for a dance.
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