Apparent Wind (The Forgotten Coast Florida Suspense Series Book 7)

by Dawn Lee McKenna

  Maggie’s eyes narrowed. “And why is that?”

  “Because I haven’t made your coffee yet, and you don’t know how to operate the sexy machine.” He grabbed a small stainless carafe and placed it on the counter. “One coffee or two?”

  “Three,” she answered.

  “Why?”

  Maggie could feel her fingers twitching. “One of them is for someone else,” she said.

  He looked over her shoulder, out the plate glass window. “Him?”

  Maggie looked over her shoulder. Axel was sitting in the driver’s seat of the Jeep, talking on the phone. She looked back at Kirk, the apparent guardian of the caffeine galaxy. “Yeah,” she said.

  “One with an extra shot, kid temperature, no cardboard, for now,” he said flatly. “One regular temperature, with cardboard, for later. What about his?”

  Maggie’s eyes narrowed again. “Regular temperature, regular shots, regular cardboard,” she answered.

  A few minutes later, a young couple held the door for Maggie as she left the shop carrying the three cups. Axel was leaning against the Jeep, and met her on the sidewalk.

  “Which one’s mine?” he asked.

  “This one,” she answered, pointing with her chin.

  He took one of the cups from her. “Are you drinking both of those?”

  “Yes,” she said, a little defensively. She thought about asking him if he knew George had sold the place, but Axel drank Maxwell House from a beige Mr. Coffee. She opened her door and set her extra cup in the cup holder, then stood by Axel and took a sip of her coffee as he fired up a cigarette. He inhaled deeply, then blew out a thick plume of smoke.

  “Thanks, Maggie,” he said.

  “For what?”

  He shrugged and shook his head. “The coffee.”

  “Did you talk to the kids?” Maggie asked him.

  He nodded and took another drag of his cigarette. “You remember the time we camped out on the bay?”

  Maggie smiled. “Yeah.”

  The three of them had been sixteen. They’d taken Axel’s father’s old Chris Craft and anchored off of Dog Island for the weekend. It had been October, and the weather had been cool and clear. They’d eaten Fig Newtons and cold Spaghetti-Os and slept on a pallet on deck. Maggie slept in the middle because Axel thought sleeping next to David would impinge on his manliness. He’d always needed a seat between them at the movies, too.

  “I couldn’t sleep that first night, and I sat up smoking for a while,” Axel said, staring off at the street or the distant past. “I remember watching you and David, and thinking you’d probably have four kids by the time you were thirty, and I’d probably never even get married.”

  Maggie felt a dull pain somewhere in her chest. “Well, nobody ever said you were psychic,” she said.

  He gave her half a smile. “Nope. I can’t stop getting married, and I have just as many kids as you do.”

  “They’re good kids, Axel.”

  He glanced at her as he exhaled another cloud of smoke, twisting his mouth to point it away from her. “Yeah, I can’t imagine how that happened.”

  “Don’t give me that crap, Axel. You might try to come off as a complete jerk, but you’re a good guy.”

  Axel looked over at her, and his eyes seemed to have lost some of their color, like the bay will when the cloud cover is low and heavy.

  “I love you, Maggie,” he said quietly. “But we both know there isn’t one thing I do right on land.”

  Axel’s truck was right where he’d left it, parked two spots down from Maggie’s usual space. She pulled in, then walked with him to his truck. She leaned up against the side as he unlocked his door.

  “Axel, can you think of anything else Marisol told you about her boyfriend?” she asked.

  “The only times Mari ever talked much about her guys was when she felt like rubbing it in,” he said. “This wasn’t one of those times. She just wanted to get together, spend time.”

  “Did she say his name?”

  Axel thought a minute, staring over the roof of his truck at the overgrown acreage behind the Sheriff’s Office and county jail. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Did she mention the name Toby?”

  Axel shook his head slowly. “No.” He looked at her. “She did say something about him being a classy guy, but we didn’t talk too much about our lives this time around. She seemed like maybe she just wanted to relax a little, get away from things.”

  “Was she tense? Scared?”

  Axel pulled his pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket, slid a cigarette out, and lit it. Then he squinted into his first exhalation before speaking. “Mari never felt one way at a time,” he said. “She was trying hard to have fun.” He looked over at her. “It seemed like maybe she was trying too hard, you know what I mean?”

  “Yeah, maybe,” Maggie said. Over Axel’s shoulder, she saw Wyatt walking toward them across the parking lot. She looked back at Axel. “You want to come over and have some dinner or something?”

  He shook his head. “No. Thanks. I’m gonna run over to Carrabelle, stop by and see the kids for a minute.”

  “Hey, Axel,” Wyatt said as he approached.

  “Hey, man,” Axel said. “How’s it going?”

  Wyatt shook Axel’s hand. “Okay. How are you doing?”

  Axel gave him something between a nod and a shrug.

  “I’m sorry about your ex-wife,” Wyatt said quietly.

  “Thanks.” Axel swung himself into the driver’s seat of his truck. “I’m heading out.” He looked at Maggie. “I’ll call you tomorrow, see how it’s going, okay?”

  She nodded at him. “Okay.”

  She and Wyatt watched him drive off, then Wyatt frowned down at her. “So, your dad called me. Twice,” he said.

  Maggie sighed. “Okay. And?”

  “You need to go talk to him,” Wyatt answered. “He said if you don’t, he’s coming by the house.”

  “I don’t want to talk to him about this with the kids around,” she said, irritated.

  “I think that’s the point,” Wyatt said.

  Maggie chewed at the corner of her lip. “We’re supposed to have dinner, remember?”

  “I have to cancel,” Wyatt said as he turned to walk away.

  “Why?” Maggie asked his back.

  “Because he said so,” Wyatt said. He lifted a hand, though he didn’t look back. “Come by after, if you feel like it.”

  Maggie’s parents lived on Hwy 98, just outside the city limits. The area was a mixture of commercial and residential property and was certainly nothing fancy, but it had been affordable bayfront property back when Maggie was a kid; affordable enough that her folks had recently paid off their mortgage.

  Maggie pulled onto the property and slowly drove down the long, oyster shell driveway that led to the house, a neat, clapboard cottage that was painted a soft gray and featured a wide porch in front and a brand new deck in back. As the drive curved around a tall palm, Maggie could just see that her father was sitting on the dock out back.

  The house was in the middle of the two-acre parcel, which made it far enough back from the busy road, but also gave her parents a large back yard that ended at their weathered dock. Maggie parked out front next to her dad’s old pickup. Her mother’s car was in the open garage.

  Maggie had been loved here, and she tried to remember that, as she listened to her engine ticking.

  Finally, she got out of the Cherokee and headed around the house. There was a good, dry breeze, calmed just a bit with the setting sun, and the water out on the bay was just slightly choppy. The breeze carried the smells of brine and silt and sea grasses to Maggie, and she closed her eyes a moment to allow them to calm her.

  Gray was sitting at the end of the dock, his long legs hanging over the edge. He had a Stella Artois sitting beside him. It was half full. His old oyster skiff bumped gently against its fenders beside him, the color of its chipped and peeling turquoise paint just a bit deeper
in the twilight.

  As Maggie walked through the back yard, she watched the sun set Daddy’s sandy hair to sparkling, saw the breeze shove it over his eyes, watched him reach up to shove it back. Her father was a few inches shorter than Wyatt and about fifty pounds lighter but, as lanky as he was, decades of hard work had made him strong and fit.

  When Maggie’s hiking boots clomped onto the wooden planks, Gray looked over his shoulder at her, then looked back out to the bay. Maggie stopped just behind him.

  “I’m still not ready to talk to you about this, Daddy,” she said.

  Gray sighed out at the bay. “Well, Margaret Anne, get yourself good and ready, because now is when we’re going to talk about it.”

  Maggie stood there a moment, her hands curled into fists in the pockets of her sweater.

  “Sit down, Sunshine,” Daddy said quietly.

  Maggie sat down beside him. Her legs hung over the side, her feet only reaching halfway down her daddy’s legs.

  They were silent for some time, both of them looking out at the water that had always given them solace and a solid footing.

  “That was a wild thing you did, with Boudreaux,” Gray said.

  Maggie glanced over at her father’s profile, then back out at the bay. “I didn’t know what else to do,” she said. “Nobody was talking.”

  “We’ve been talking about talking about it,” Gray said. “For some time.”

  Maggie felt the anger curling up from somewhere around her gut, and she kept her mouth shut. Gray didn’t look at her when he spoke again.

  “I think you scared him pretty good,” he said.

  “He had that coming,” Maggie said tightly. “He had no business starting some kind of friendship with me, without me knowing.”

  Gray looked over at her finally. The sun-carved lines around his mouth seemed deeper than they had just a month ago. “We agreed a long time ago, the three of us, that he would have no part in your life,” he said. “He kept to that agreement, until you started working his nephew’s suicide. You know it bothered me a great deal, when you two started talking, spending time together, but it wasn’t really in my hands.”

  “He should have just told me,” she said.

  “Apparently that was his intention, back in the summer,” Gray said.

  “Let me guess. Mom didn’t want to,” Maggie said, and wasn’t especially successful at keeping the bitterness out of her tone.

  Gray looked over at her. He had that look he’d always gotten when she’d overstepped herself as a teenager. “Actually, Maggie, it was me that wasn’t ready.”

  Maggie swallowed and stared at her father. He looked back out at the bay.

  “One of the great joys of my life has been that you are such a daddy’s girl,” he said quietly. “To some extent, I suppose I encouraged it as a way to get back at your mama a little, even though I forgave her long before you were born.” He looked over at her. “She took it gracefully, I think. I could see that it hurt her sometimes, the way you’d spend all your time with me. But it didn’t bother me enough to change it. She took it as her due, I think.”

  “All my life, Daddy, I have held you guys up as my ideal, the perfect marriage, the marriage I wanted,” she said.

  He looked over at her. “You’d be fortunate indeed, Sunshine,” he said. “I love her more than I did last month or ten years ago, more than when we were teenagers.”

  “How?”

  “Maggie, do you realize that we were only a couple of years older than Sky at that time? Do you understand when Sky makes a mistake born of immaturity?”

  “Daddy, she cheated on you,” Maggie said.

  “Listen to me. It was one night. One time. The night Holden Crawford went missing.”

  Maggie swallowed hard. “Mom was Boudreaux’s alibi for that night,” she said.

  “Yes. She told your grandfather, and he told Sheriff Wilson,” her father answered. “A few days later, Boudreaux went back to Louisiana and we didn’t hear anything about him again, or see him, until a he came back a few months later. Of course, by then we knew your mama was expecting, and for reasons I don’t care to discuss, we knew you were his.”

  Maggie stared at his profile for a moment. His jaw tightened and released just perceptibly. “She lost her virginity with Boudreaux?” she asked tightly.

  “That’s not going to be part of our conversation, girl,” he said quietly. He sighed and took a drink of his beer, then looked back at her. “We did what we thought was best for everybody, especially you. We made the best decision we could at the time.”

  “I wish you had told me this when I started getting to know him,” Maggie said.

  “I wish I had, too. Maggie, you know I don’t think that much of Boudreaux,” Gray said. “And I didn’t want you to get involved with him. But, he kept his word. He stayed out of your life and out of our way. I respect him for that.”

  Maggie opened her mouth to say something smart, then changed her mind. She looked out at the water and wished she was on it.

  “I also think he’s come to genuinely care for you,” her father added. “And I respect him for that, too.”

  Maggie swallowed hard, stared out at the water, and wished she could stop the one tear from coursing down her cheek. She blinked a few times to prevent it, but it fled anyway. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw her father staring at her.

  “You care for him,” he said simply.

  Maggie didn’t have an answer that she actually wanted to give him, so she said nothing.

  “I don’t think being with him can be good for you, even if you weren’t a police officer. But it’s your right, Maggie,” he said, then sighed. “I suppose it’s his right, too.”

  They were silent for a moment. Maggie resisted the urge to drop her head onto her father’s shoulder.

  “Daddy, I don’t even know who to be,” she said finally.

  Gray looked down at her, his eyes kind, but pained. “Maggie, none of this changes who we are…who you are.”

  “But that’s not true, really, is it?” Maggie asked. “Every single day, I realize something else. I don’t live in my grandfather’s house, I just live in the house your father built. I’m not—we’ve gone to the Highlands Festival every year since I can remember, and I can even speak a little Scots Gaelic, but I’m not Scottish! I don’t even know what I am!”

  “You’re my daughter,” Gray said quietly. “Our daughter. And your grandparents are still your grandparents.”

  “Daddy, I have one bloodline that isn’t even mine, and another one that I know nothing about,” Maggie said wearily.

  Gray nodded. “I know. And I don’t know anything about all that,” he said. “You’ll have to talk to him about that.”

  Maggie felt the heat of anger and humiliation and resentment in the center of her being.

  “I don’t want to talk to him about it,” she said.

  “I expect you will, eventually,” he said.

  Maggie chewed at the corner of her lip, working hard at not saying anything flip. “I need to go, Daddy.” She stood up, and Gray stood with her.

  He pulled her to him and she let him, but she had to step back more quickly than she normally would. She despised losing control of her emotions, and there were few things that made her more emotional than her father’s embrace.

  Gray frowned down at her. “Maggie, I’m sorry. I didn’t want you to figure it out; I wanted to be man enough to tell you myself. I just wasn’t.”

  Maggie nodded, but she couldn’t think of one thing to say.

  “Bye, Daddy,” she said, and turned to go. “I’m going to stop inside and use the bathroom.”

  “Maggie? There’s only one person on this earth that I love as much as I do you,” Gray said gently. “If you go in that house, you need to mind how you speak to my wife. Do you understand?”

  Maggie looked at him a moment, then nodded and walked away. She stopped about ten feet shy of the deck steps, and looked at the house. Then she c
hanged direction and headed for the driveway. She would use her own bathroom.

  THE NEXT MORNING, Maggie was at her desk, calling the people on Marisol’s contacts list, when Dwight stuck his head through her door.

  “Hey, Maggie? Uh, that guy Toby Mann is here to see you.”

  Maggie stared at him a moment, then disconnected the call she hadn’t finished dialing. “Here?”

  “Yeah,” Dwight answered. “He just walked in here and said he wanted to talk to you. Said he saw the thing on the news.”

  “Well then,” she said, mostly to herself.

  “Yeah. You want me to bring him back here?”

  “No, take him to one of the interview rooms,” Maggie answered. “I’ll be right there.”

  “Okeedoke,” he said. “When we’re done with him, I’ve got Larry’s report on Marisol’s autopsy.”

  “Was she strangled?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Anything else interesting?” she asked.

  “Maybe a couple things, yeah,” he said.

  “Okay, I’ll be right there,” Maggie said.

  Dwight disappeared from her doorway, and Maggie fished around in her desk drawer for a fresh pen. She couldn’t handle ball points, which was all the office bought, and preferred to bring in her own roller balls. She found one, then grabbed her planner-size notebook and her coffee and headed out.

  Mann was sitting in Room 2. Maggie took a moment to look at him through the small window in the door as he talked to Dwight. He was slim, maybe about thirty-five, with stylishly cut dark brown hair. Though he was seated, Maggie figured he was about five ten or eleven. He was handsome, though a little too South Beach for her taste.

  She opened the door, and Dwight stopped in the middle of whatever he was saying. Mann stood up when she entered. She closed the door quietly, then walked over to the table.

  “Mr. Mann? I’m Lt. Redmond,” she said. She was glad her hands were full, which kept him from holding out a hand, should he be so inclined.

  “Yes,” he said. His voice, like the one on his voice mail message, was smooth, though not especially deep. “I’m sorry I didn’t return your calls. I just found out yesterday, and I’ve been kind of out of it.”