Awash (The Forgotten Coast Florida Suspense Series Book 6)

by Dawn Lee McKenna

  “Maybe a couple minutes. I was trying to find something to watch for a little bit, then I was gonna try to go to bed. Then I heard him coming up the walkway.”

  “Where were you?”

  The girl pointed at the loveseat across from them. “I was on the loveseat,” she said.

  Maggie looked. Pale yellow lace curtains rippled in the slight breeze coming through the jalousie windows. On one of the cushions was a small pile of spiral notebooks and books from the public library. Maggie could see that the book on top was a book of British poetry. She looked back at Zoe.

  “So you heard someone coming up the back walk,” Maggie said. “What did that sound like?

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, he wasn’t wearing sneakers if you heard him from here.”

  “No. No, I heard him. It was loud, hard. Like he was wearing dress shoes or something.”

  “Was he?”

  She watched Zoe think.

  “I don’t think I looked at his shoes,” Zoe finally said. “But he was wearing kind of scruffy jeans. And a tee shirt.”

  “So maybe not dress shoes, but hard soled shoes,” Maggie said.

  “Yeah.”

  “He just opened the door, or did he knock?”

  “He just opened it. I didn’t mean to leave it unlocked,” she said almost defensively.

  Maggie covered one of the girl’s hands with her own. It was cold. “Zoe. Everybody forgets sometimes. No one thinks that’s your fault.”

  Zoe swallowed, and Maggie took her hand away, afraid of imposing physical contact that might not be welcome.

  “So he opened the door and walked in,” Maggie continued. “Did he say anything?”

  “He told me not to move. Not to get up,” Zoe answered. She wasn’t looking at Maggie anymore, but at the window over the loveseat.

  “Did he use your name? Say your name?”

  Zoe thought for a moment, blinking rapidly. “No,” she said to the window.

  “Okay. He told you not to move,” Maggie said. “Then what did he do?”

  “He went in the kitchen. I could hear him rattling around. In the drawer.” Zoe took in a breath. It shook and stuttered when she released it. “Then he came out with the butter knife.”

  “He came into the living room?”

  “Yeah.” Zoe glanced over to an empty space over Maggie’s shoulder and pointed. “There.”

  “Did he say anything else?” Maggie asked.

  “He asked me if anybody else was in the house,” Zoe answered. Maggie saw her chest begin to rise and fall more rapidly, saw her breathing become shallower. “I said no.”

  She looked over at Maggie, her eyes going wider.

  “I was afraid he’d go look, but I said no.” Zoe let out a breath, then spoke more quietly. “I thought—I was scared that maybe he’d do something to her if he went in there.”

  Maggie looked over her shoulder at the aunt again. The aunt had been watching, but looked like she wanted to look away from Maggie’s gaze. Maggie didn’t know if that was guilt or something else, but she didn’t have time to analyze it at the moment.

  “You didn’t have to do nothin’ to look out for me,” the aunt said, then took a long, nervous drag on her cigarette, the end of it flaring red. She looked away then, staring at the wall between the dining area and the kitchen. Maggie turned back around.

  “He didn’t see your aunt’s car?” Maggie asked her.

  Zoe opened her mouth to answer, but Maggie heard the aunt’s husky voice behind her.

  “Don’t have no car,” the aunt said. Maggie glanced over her shoulder at the aunt.

  “What time did you go to bed, ma’am?”

  “About one, I guess,” the woman answered. “I was at some friends’. Got home ‘bout one.”

  The aunt spoke to Maggie, but stared at the wall in front of her, dragging hard on her cigarette. Maggie was trying not to dislike her, but something told her she would anyway.

  “Did you see anyone around when you came home?’ she asked her.

  The woman shook her head slowly. “No. Didn’t see anyone around.”

  Maggie turned back to Zoe. “What about you, Zoe? Did you see anyone hanging around last night, even early in the night?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Any neighbors paying attention to you, or strangers in the neighborhood that you’ve noticed?”

  Zoe shook her head.

  “Okay, so you told him no one else was in the house. Then what happened?”

  “He said to come here, and I got up. I thought I was gonna fall down. My legs were shaking.”

  Maggie nodded at her, and waited for her to continue. Zoe stared at the space where someone had reordered her world just a couple of hours earlier.

  “I went over there, and he told me to lie down on the floor. He said to get down,” Zoe said.

  Maggie saw the girl’s hands begin to tremble, though they were still folded neatly in her lap. She resisted the strong pull to take those hands.

  “So you did what he said,” Maggie prompted.

  “No!” The word was quiet, though it seemed to leap from her mouth, almost as though the answer surprised even her. She looked at Maggie. “I was—I thought we might make noise, that I would scream or something, and I was scared she’d wake up and come out and he’d do something.”

  Zoe cut her eyes nervously toward her aunt, and Maggie leaned just a hair, forced her to focus on Maggie’s face.

  “So what did you do?” she asked softly.

  “I said I didn’t want it to happen here, that I didn’t want something bad to happen in my house, and I asked him if we could go outside.”

  “Okay.”

  Zoe took a deep, shaky breath and let it out before she went on. “Um, he thought about that for a minute, then he grabbed my elbow and took me out back, out the back door.”

  Maggie watched Zoe’s left hand rub at her right elbow, though Zoe herself didn’t seem to notice.

  “So, we went out the back door, and he was looking around, then he pointed over at the woods and he told me to go on.”

  The woods. Maggie swallowed and tried not to distract herself with herself. It wasn’t the same. Yes, it was November, but it wasn’t Thanksgiving weekend. Zoe was fourteen, not fifteen. And Maggie hadn’t been taken to the woods; she’d already been there, fishing. It was uncomfortably similar, but it wasn’t the same. Maggie blinked the thoughts away and focused on the graceful curve of Zoe’s jaw.

  “Can you show me where?” she asked.

  “Show you?”

  “We don’t have to go over there,” Maggie said. “Can you just point out the back door and show me where?

  Zoe nodded. Maggie stood up and held out a hand, and Zoe took it and got up from the couch. Maggie could see her knees shaking, from fear, the aftereffects of adrenaline, or both.

  Maggie led the girl to the back door, not looking at the aunt when the woman pulled her feet out of the way.

  Once they were standing in the open doorway, Maggie waited while Zoe looked at the woods across the street. Her full lower lip began to tremble, and after a moment, she lifted a shaking hand and pointed.

  “Where that big old tree is, by the telephone pole. There’s a path there. You can’t see it right now because it’s dark, but there’s a path there. Kids go in there and smoke weed or drink beer.”

  Maggie nodded. “How far in did you go?”

  Zoe looked at her, looking paler than she had been, and thought a moment. “Not far. Like maybe ten feet? It was by a tire. There’s an old tire back there.”

  “Okay. Did he leave you there afterwards?”

  “No, he walked me back here, to the door, and told me to go inside.”

  “Did you see him leave?”

  “No, he closed the door. But I heard him go that way,” Zoe said, pointing through the back yards toward Bluff Road.

  “Okay. That’s fine for now,” Maggie said. “Let’s go sit back down.”


  On the way back into the living room, Maggie looked over at Dwight. “Would you go ask somebody to go over there and tape off a perimeter? Tell them to make it wide and stay there. I’ll be out there in a little bit.”

  Dwight nodded and went out the front door. Maggie walked Zoe back to the couch and then waited for Dwight to return before she led Zoe carefully, patiently, through the rest of the details. Dwight tapped his notes out rapidly. The aunt never said another word; the only thing Maggie heard from her was the frequent rasp of her lighter as she sparked up another cigarette.

  By the time Maggie had taken Zoe through what would be only the first run-through of the attack, the sun had risen and the neighborhood was fully awake.

  Maggie let the paramedics in to check Zoe’s vitals and other measures of wellbeing, or the lack of it, and she walked through the back door and across the street. A few people stood on their patios or in their doorways, watching her make her way to the woods. Maggie felt badly for Zoe. In a town with just over two thousand people in it, it really didn’t matter that Zoe’s name wouldn’t be released to the paper. Everyone would eventually know anyway.

  Mark Sommers had pulled his Apalach PD cruiser around to the woods, and was leaning against the driver’s side door. He stood and nodded at Maggie as she approached.

  “I’m just gonna take a look,” she said to him, her hiking boots crunching through the gravel that edged the road. “I’ll let Jake handle the scene.”

  “Gotcha,” Mark said, and Maggie hunched under the crime scene tape at the start of the footpath that led into the woods.

  Maggie walked alongside the path rather than directly on it, although there was so much gravel and sand that shoe prints were extremely unlikely. She had only gone a few yards when she reached a small clearing surrounded by crime scene tape on stakes. When she looked back toward the road, she could barely see it through the trees. This spot would have been private enough.

  An old truck tire filled with trash sat in the center of the clearing. There were soda and beer cans, bent and crumpled cigarette packs and candy wrappers in and around the tire, decorated nicely with an abundance of cigarette butts in various stages of decomposition.

  Most of the trash was faded and water-damaged enough to be identified as old, but it was clear that some of the items were of more recent vintage. This wasn’t a nightly hangout, but it was well-used. It would be hard to know what should be collected and what shouldn’t, so Maggie would have them take everything.

  Maggie continued around the perimeter to the other side of the clearing. Something metallic flashed at her from a patch of grass, and she carefully stepped over the tap to get a better look. When she bent over, she saw it was a butter knife, damp with dew.

  Zoe had said that he’d never actually threatened her with the knife, and she couldn’t remember seeing it once they’d gotten to the woods. Maggie understood very well that Zoe’s mind had been working at three times its normal velocity, trying to take in or discard so many thoughts simultaneously. Details got lost. Sometimes this was a blessing.

  When Maggie stepped out of the woods onto the road, she saw Wyatt getting ready to cross the street from Zoe’s back yard.

  Wyatt Hamilton was her boss, the Sheriff of Franklin County, for a couple more weeks, anyway. His Sheriff’s Office cap was pulled low over his brow, his brown hair peeping out around the edges. At six-four, he was more than a foot taller than Maggie; his legs reaching to her stomach.

  Wyatt was wearing a tee shirt and jeans, but had thrown on a navy department windbreaker, either to look more official on his day off, or to ward off the slight morning chill. Close to fifty, he was as lean and hard as any of the younger men in the department, and easily the best-looking man Maggie had ever met.

  As Maggie met him in the middle of the street, she got a faint, familiar whiff of Nautilus. She would have smiled, but she wasn’t feeling smiley. Apparently, neither was Wyatt; his mouth was set in a grimace beneath his thick moustache and there was no sign of his usually disarming dimples.

  He put his fists on his hips and sighed. “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey.”

  “Anything?”

  “Yeah. He left the butter knife,” she answered. “I’ll let Jake know.”

  “He’s taking elimination prints from the girl and her aunt,” Wyatt said. “The EMTs checked her out and she’s okay. As okay as we’d hope. They’re ready to run her over to Weems Memorial once Jake’s done.”

  “Okay,” Maggie said. “I’ll go with her.”

  “I figured.”

  Wyatt frowned down at her, his eyes concerned beneath his clenched brows. “Why don’t we let Terry take this?” Lt. Terry Doyle was Maggie’s counterpart. Together, they made up the entire Criminal Investigator staff.

  “No,” Maggie said sharply. “She called me.”

  “I understand that. I just think it’s got potential to be upsetting.”

  “It’s already upsetting, Wyatt,” Maggie said flatly. “It’s supposed to be upsetting.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Maggie jammed her own fists onto her hips. “In my twelve years with the Sheriff’s Office, I’ve handled nine rapes, Wyatt. And handled them well.”

  “How many were teenaged girls?”

  “Five,” she answered without having to think.

  “How many were teenaged girls assaulted in the woods in November?”

  Maggie was irritated, but not too irritated to be touched that he remembered what month she’d been attacked twenty-two years earlier. “None,” she admitted, her tone sharp anyway. “But it doesn’t make any difference.”

  “Sure it does,” he said.

  “No. The only difference is that now you know what happened to me,” Maggie said. “Stop trying to protect me, Wyatt.”

  “No,” he answered quietly.

  Maggie glared up at him. He’d been her boss for almost seven years, her closest friend for two. In the last six months, they’d moved on to something else entirely. They were still figuring out how that worked.

  “Are you taking me off this?” she asked him.

  Wyatt took off his cap, ran his hand through his thick hair, then slapped it back on and sighed. “No. But I’m advising you that you should take yourself off of it,” he said.

  “No.”

  “Well, then hell.” He rubbed at his moustache. “So how well do you know Zoe Boatwright?”

  Maggie made a conscious effort to unwind herself, took her fists off her hips and tucked them into her jacket pockets.

  “Not very well,” Maggie answered. “I coached her one summer, about seven or eight years ago. The last time I saw her was at her father’s funeral five years ago.”

  “You must have made an impression.”

  “I’m a female cop.”

  “So’s Brenda,” he countered. “Where’s her mother?”

  “She died last year. Breast cancer. I just found out.”

  “Crap. Poor kid.” Wyatt said quietly. “She doesn’t have any idea who this guy is?”

  “No. That doesn’t mean she doesn’t know him,” Maggie said. “Maybe she just doesn’t know she knows him.”

  They started back toward the house.

  “Butter knife. From her kitchen,” Wyatt said. “So maybe he thinks he knows something about Florida law, but not as much as he thinks he knows.”

  “Yeah. Not a deadly weapon, and the fact that he didn’t bring it with him means he might argue against premeditation if he ever gets to trial. But still, she’s over twelve, but she’s under eighteen. Won’t make much difference to his sentencing.”

  “In any event, tells me he’s probably not new to this,” Wyatt said. “We need to revisit the argument against castration,” he said.

  “You won’t get any argument from me,” Maggie muttered.

  “I called in a couple of our guys to help PD with the canvassing, but so far nothing.”

  “Anybody seen anyone new or out of place hanging out th
e last week or so?”

  “Not that they’ve said.”

  They stopped just short of Zoe’s back door. Wyatt turned to look at her. “You look like crap,” he said.

  “You’re awesome. I just haven’t had any coffee.”

  “Want me to grab you some, bring it to Weems?”

  “It’s Sunday. Café con Leche is closed and Apalachicola Coffee doesn’t open until eleven,” Maggie said. “There’s no place to get a real coffee.”

  “I think I read about that in Revelation,” Wyatt said. Then he opened the back door and held it for Maggie.

  Weems Memorial Hospital was smaller than most elementary schools, but it served most of Apalachicola’s needs.

  Located a few blocks outside of the Historic District, on the other side of Hwy 98 or Avenue E, it was a low-slung, one-story building that had looked quite modern when it opened in 1959. The hospital handled most of the medical needs of the small town, had a decent emergency department, and even made space for Larry Davenport to conduct his duties as coroner, but many residents were sent to Tallahassee for “big” medical procedures.

  Dwight followed Maggie in his cruiser, while Zoe sat up front in the Cherokee, and the aunt sat silently in the back. The hospital was only a few blocks from Zoe’s home, but Maggie had sensed that the aunt couldn’t wait to get out of the Jeep and light up.

  She was proven right when they’d parked, and the aunt was the first one out of the vehicle. As soon as the back door slammed, Maggie turned to Zoe.

  “You get along okay with your aunt?’ she asked quietly.

  Zoe looked at her a moment, then shrugged. “She’s okay,” Zoe answered.

  Maggie decided to accept that for now. She turned in her seat so she could face Zoe.

  “Okay, listen. Dr. Broderick is on today, and she’s very good, very nice,” Maggie said. “She’s handled sexual assault cases before.”

  “Okay,” Zoe said, but she didn’t look at Maggie, looked instead out the windshield.

  “She’s going to check you for cuts and bruises, that kind of thing, then she’ll need to do a gynecological exam. She’ll be looking for signs of assault and checking for DNA. Okay?”