Late in the afternoon, Gray came out into the little dining area near the front door, where Maggie sat with an uneaten sandwich and a cold cup of tea. Georgia was in Sky’s room, helping the kids fold some laundry she’d found to do. Maggie looked up as Gray sat down across the cypress table his father had built.
“Sweetheart, the kids want to come back to the house with us,” he said quietly. “There’s just too much of David here right now. But they don’t want to leave you here.”
“I know I should go with them, Daddy,” she said. “It’s not fair to ask them to stay, and it’s selfish to be away from them. I’m just so afraid that I’m finally going to come apart, and I can’t stand for them to see it.”
Gray nodded. “Why don’t you call Wyatt, Maggie?”
Maggie shook her head. “No.” She blinked back a sudden heat in her eyes. “Being with Wyatt didn’t feel like cheating before, but it does now.”
Gray took a deep breath, then sighed and grabbed both of her hands up in his.
“Let me tell you something you’re not ready to believe right now,” he said. “But I want you to remember it for when you are ready to believe it. David loved you and he wanted you to be happy. If that meant you being with Wyatt, well, he might not have liked it, but he wanted it for you. You do him a disservice if you ignore that.”
Maggie blinked again and looked away, out the living room window.
“I know you’re in pain, Maggie,” he said firmly. “But I know you hear me, too.”
He stood up, then came around and placed a hand on her shoulder, kissed the top of her head. She squeezed his hand.
“We’ll get some things together for the kids,” Gray said. “Your Mama left a pot of soup on the stove for you.”
A short time after her parents and children left, Wyatt called Maggie’s phone for the third time in an hour. She felt horrible for ignoring it, but she did anyway. A moment later, he texted her.
Pulling in with David’s truck.
Her chest tightened as she set down the phone, and she had just slipped into her flip-flops by the door when Coco started whining and leaping. By the time she got the door open, Maggie could hear the familiar, slightly hollow hum of David’s old Toyota pickup.
Coco nearly fell down the deck stairs as the truck pulled into the parking area in front of the house, a Sheriff’s cruiser behind it.
“Coco!” Maggie called, thinking she could warn her poor dog somehow, but Coco was beyond hearing. Stoopid flew out from under the house, but Coco’s excitement was too much for his nerves, so he veered off into the flower garden.
Maggie was at the bottom of the stairs when Wyatt opened the door. It took a second for Coco to process that the wrong man had climbed from the truck, but she liked Wyatt, and tried to look happy, even though her body wagged much more slowly.
Wyatt reached down and rubbed Coco’s head, then walked around to the front of the truck, where Maggie stood.
“I’m sorry. I know you don’t want to talk to anybody right now. Or me.” Wyatt put his hands on his hips. “But I couldn’t just pull up in David’s truck without warning you.”
Maggie swallowed hard and nodded. She found it hard to look him in the eye. On the one hand, she wanted to run to him. On the other, she wanted to insist that he shouldn’t be here, where she and David had conceived their children.
She peered around the truck and saw Dwight at the wheel of the idling cruiser. She finally looked up at Wyatt. “I keep calling the fire department, but they keep telling me they don’t have any news. Do you know what happened yet?”
Wyatt looked down at Coco, who was sitting at Maggie’s feet.
“Not yet,” he answered. He took off his hat and ran a hand through his hair, the way he did, then he looked at her. “Do you want me to stay for a while? I can get a ride back later.”
She was going to just say no, but he looked so concerned, she felt he at least deserved some honesty. “I do, but I don’t,” she said, and tried not to let it be hurtful. “I just need to be alone for a bit.”
He nodded, looked beyond her at the yard for a minute before looking her in the eye. “You know that I care. And you know where I am. When you need me,” he added.
Maggie nodded and wrapped her arms around herself, like she could hold herself back from just walking into his chest and hiding there. He looked at her for another moment, then put his hat back on and walked to the cruiser and got in.
Maggie watched them go, then stood and stared at the truck that David had bought while they were still married. She slowly, almost fearfully, walked to the driver’s side and looked through the open window. A photo keychain hung from the rear view mirror, the kids in it three years younger.
She jumped when she heard a trilling, then reached into her back pocket and answered the phone.
“Hello?”
“Maggie, it’s Larry,” said the old medical examiner.
Maggie swallowed hard. “Hello, Larry.”
“I wanted you to know, because I know you,” he started. “David died from severe concussive trauma to the brain. There was no water in his lungs. I hoped that this would bring you some comfort.”
Maggie closed her eyes.
“You couldn’t have saved him, even if you’d found him as soon as he hit the water. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Maggie said, and didn’t recognize the small voice. “Thank you.”
“I’m so very sorry, my friend. I truly am.”
Maggie blinked several times before speaking. “Do you know when—when he’ll be released?”
“I have most of what I need. Whatever arrangements you’ve made, he can be picked up as early as tomorrow afternoon.”
“Thank you. Larry.”
She hung up the phone and closed her eyes again. Coco jumped up and laid her paws on the door, could just get her snout to the window. Maggie saw her nose twitch, and she knew Coco picked up much more than she did; which was the faint scent of Jovan musk.
Maggie’s chest clenched, and she turned away from the window, slid down the door and sat in the dirt. Coco dropped to all fours and whined, nuzzled Maggie’s hand. Maggie put her arms around the dog’s shoulders and buried her face in Coco’s neck.
“Oh, Coco,” she said into her fur. “Daddy went away.”
Less than an hour later, Wyatt’s cruiser pulled into the driveway next to David’s truck.
Maggie was sitting on the deck. Beside her was David’s old guitar, the one he’d given to Sky and Kyle when Maggie had bought him a new one a few years back. Maggie had dragged it out of the corner of the living room and held it on her lap for a long time. She had heard Waterbound playing from it, heard David’s soft voice singing the words, as he had hundreds of times, at her request. It had always been her favorite. She’d heard it in her head, and wished that she had recorded him just once. She was suddenly afraid that she would forget how it had sounded.
Coco barreled down the stairs, and Maggie walked to the front deck. She watched Wyatt get out and walk to the bottom of the stairs.
“I’m sorry. I lied to you,” he said.
“About what?”
“Can I come up?”
“Yes,” she said, and she noticed that her hands were trembling on the rail. “Do you want some coffee?” she asked when he got there.
“If you have it made.”
“Yeah. Do you want to come in?”
“Okay.”
Coco followed the two of them into the kitchen, which suddenly seemed very small with Wyatt in it. He leaned up against the small butcher block island while Maggie got two cups down from the cupboard. By some kind of unspoken agreement, neither of them spoke until she had poured the coffee, added milk and two sugars to hers, milk and three sugars to his, and set it in front of him.
“Thank you,” he said without looking at her. She watched him take a sip, then put the mug down.
He finally looked at her, and she tried not to breathe too noticeably. “The fire de
partment found a piece of a device in David’s bilge.”
Maggie felt something that had been warm and vulnerable inside her suddenly frost over. “What kind of a device?” she asked quietly.
“Some kind of a battery, hooked up to a cell phone. I’m not really sure. ATF has it right now.”
Maggie wrapped her hands around her mug to keep them from shaking. She stared at them as she took a deep breath.
“Do you know who he was working for before he quit?” Wyatt asked her.
“No,” she said to her mug. “We had a…we had an understanding. I didn’t ask, he didn’t tell, and I didn’t have to withhold.”
“Who do I start asking?”
Maggie thought, then shook her head slightly. “I don’t know. None of his friends were involved and he didn’t hang out with people who were. He kept it…he kept it separate.”
“What about his cousin?” Wyatt asked. Maggie looked up quickly. “I know about his cousin. Would he know?”
Maggie blew out a breath. “I don’t know. But let me go out there and ask him.”
“You can’t.”
“I can help, I know—”
“You can’t, dammit,” Wyatt snapped.
“Why not?’ she snapped back.
Wyatt held up a palm. “I need you to stop thinking like a grieving widow for a moment—”
“Is that a dig?” Maggie asked, incredulous, and hurt.
“Of course not! You’re in pain, Maggie! But I need you to think like Maggie the cop. Aside from it being a bad idea on several different levels, anything you learned would be problematic when it comes to evidence. Anything you touched or did would be tainted. Think about it. If we arrest somebody, do you want to see them walk out of court smiling when their case is dismissed?”
Maggie chewed on the corner of her lip for a moment. “No.”
“Even if it was okay, I wouldn’t let you anywhere near this case.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not stupid.”
Maggie looked out the kitchen window, felt her insides begin to calm, felt the adrenalin soothe her the way it energized others.
“Who’s the cousin?” Wyatt asked.
“Mark Kennedy. On Avenue D.” Maggie looked back at Wyatt. “Listen to me, though. Mark’s not a bad person. He came back from Iraq with one less arm and proceeded to get screwed over by every agency that could help him, including and particularly the VA. He was twenty years old, with no skills other than driving.”
Wyatt held up a hand and started to say something, but Maggie interrupted.
“Wyatt. He has a baby girl and a sweet wife. He grows maybe fifty pounds of pot in a year. David hasn’t run it for him for at least four years.”
Maggie suddenly realized, with a wave of shame and guilt, that she was defending David’s cousin, but had divorced David. She knew that if she allowed herself to think about that, she’d never be able to climb back out from under it, so she pushed it away.
“All I mean is that he’s not worth pursuing,” she said.
“Maggie, I’m not interested in this guy,” Wyatt said kindly. “But David said he got him on with some bigger guys and I need to start from there.”
Maggie nodded. “Okay.”
Wyatt was leaning back against the counter across from Maggie, and she wanted to go back two, three days, when she could have walked over there and leaned in and it would have felt okay. Two, three days, to when she wouldn’t have needed to so badly.
“Wait,” she said. “David told you that?”
“Yes.” Wyatt sighed, suddenly looking exhausted, and looked out her kitchen window. “On our damn date,” he said, so quietly she almost didn’t understand it.
Maggie felt snakes slithering through her upper intestines. Small, slow-moving snakes.
“I don’t understand about this battery. In the bilge?”
“Mack has a theory,” Wyatt said. Mack was Mack Jennings, the captain of the Fire Department. “He thinks someone called the cell phone once the bilge was likely to have a decent amount of diesel in it. The cell sparked the battery, and…”
Maggie nodded as he trailed off. She went to the kitchen sink and dumped her coffee, just to have a reason to turn her back. She closed her eyes as she saw David smile and wave. Heard the first muffled boom.
Jump!
Maggie stared at the water running over her hands. “So, does that mean that whoever did this had to be at Riverfront Park?”
“Yes.”
She held her hands palm down under the faucet, rinsed away emotions that did not, would not serve her now. That would not serve David or her kids. Then she turned off the water with a jerk and turned around, leaned against the sink.
“Stevenson’s is picking up David’s body tomorrow afternoon,” she said. “His ashes will be ready for me to pick up on Saturday.”
“Mike’s cousin Frank didn’t make it,” Wyatt said, and Maggie hated herself for forgetting that anyone else had been on the boat. She put a hand up to her mouth, then coughed to hide her shame.
“What about Mike?”
“He’s got a shattered leg and a lot of 2nd and 3rd degree burns,” Wyatt said. “They flew him to Tallahassee. He’s from Jax originally. I understand they’re going to ship the cousin back there.”
Maggie nodded. She and Wyatt were silent for what seemed like several minutes.
Maggie met his gaze until she grew uncomfortable. “I’m okay, Wyatt,” she said.
“No, you’re really not,” he answered. “Your mother says you haven’t slept.”
“I will.”
“She also says that, as far as she knows, you haven’t even let yourself cry.”
“You’ll feel better if I fall apart?” she asked quietly.
“I’ll feel better when you get some of it out, yes.”
“It’s not what I do.”
“Why is that?”
“I have to take care of the kids,” she said, and it was partly true.
“Then you better let somebody take care of you,” he said.
Maggie needed to not think about that too much.
“The kids wanted to go to my folks’. I was going to stay here, but now…I’m going to go over there, but I want my parents to take the kids out of town. We were supposed to take David’s ashes out Sunday, but it can wait. Until this is cleared up.”
“That’s probably not necessary, but I’m not going to say it’s a bad idea, either. Do you have any thoughts?”
“No, not really. But somebody just made an example of their father.”
Half an hour later, Maggie had taken a fast shower, put on some clean jeans and a tee shirt, and shaken out her wet hair while she packed a few items of clothing. Then she grabbed her service weapon from the nightstand, a Glock 23, and tucked it into the holster at the small of her back.
She carried her overnight bag down the hall, stopped and opened the closet. It took every bit of stretch she had to reach the Mossberg 500 on the top shelf, which is why it was there, although she’d taught both of her kids how to handle firearms, and not to.
She held it in the crook of her arm and reached behind the packages of toilet paper on the second shelf, grabbed the box of Hornady Low Recoil double-aught rounds. She popped the action lock button, activated the safety, and loaded two rounds. Then she locked the action again and stuffed the Mossberg and the box of ammo into a duffel she kept in the bottom of the closet.
She carried the two bags into the kitchen, stepped up onto the stool by the fridge, and pulled her Grandpa’s .38 revolver out of the top cupboard, grabbed a box of ammo out of a cookie tin, and dropped them both in her duffle.
She was pulling her cell phone charger out of the wall in the kitchen when she and Coco both heard a vehicle coming up the drive. Maggie zipped the duffel shut, slid it onto a low shelf in the island, and then went to look out of the window by the front door.
Bennett Boudreaux’s black Mercedes sedan pulled into the gravel parking area n
ext to Maggie’s Jeep, and Boudreaux climbed out. If it had been any other time, Maggie would have appreciated the dramatic effect of the low, rumbling thunder in the distance as he shut his door.
Coco stood at attention next to her as she opened the door. They watched Boudreaux walk to the stairs, stop and look up.
“Hello, Maggie,” he said.
“Hello, Mr. Boudreaux.”
“I’m sorry for coming to your home uninvited and unannounced, but you didn’t answer my calls.”
“I haven’t been answering many calls at all.”
Boudreaux nodded, then looked at Coco. “Is that a Catahoula?”
“Yes. She is.”
“The state dog of Louisiana, you know,” he said.
“Yes.” Maggie felt a light pressure on her chest. “We got her in Grand Isle seven years ago, when we were on vacation.”
“Near my home,” he said quietly. A brisk bit of wind came up, and ruffled his thick brown hair as he looked over at the river beyond the trees.
Maggie reached back and pulled out the back of her tee shirt, dropped it over her holster. Then she reached around and casually untucked the front. It occurred to her that she was looking at a man who might like her, but who might just as likely want to do her harm, even kill her. It then occurred to her, with some wonder, how much it would hurt her feelings if he did.
He looked up at her. “This is beautiful. This place.”
“Thank you. It was my grandparents’.”
He had one foot resting on the bottom step, his hands on either rail. He looked down at his foot for a moment.
Maggie bit the corner of her lip. “I’m sorry,” she said.
He looked up at her and frowned. “For what?”
“For hitting you.”
He regarded her with something like curiosity. “You think I’m angry because you punched me in the face?”
She shrugged one shoulder. “It’s not something people do. Not to you.”
“I stopped having to prove anything to anybody a long time ago,” he said. “You didn’t embarrass me.”
“Well. I apologize,” she said.
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