Awash (The Forgotten Coast Florida Suspense Series Book 6)

by Dawn Lee McKenna

  She ran hot water into the left side of the sink, squirted in some dish soap, and watched as the steam floated up, then was gently scattered by the breeze coming through the screen. The air coming into the kitchen tasted of brine and mulch and mud. It was full dark outside, and the woods were loud. The cicadas had given way to the crickets and frogs, and the leaves of the old growth oaks rattled and rustled along with them.

  Maggie heard the screen door scrape open and slap shut as she slid the plates into the soapy water. She looked over her shoulder as Wyatt and Kyle walked into the kitchen.

  “Your henfolk are in their coop for the night,” Wyatt said.

  “Did you get Stoopid to go in there?” Maggie asked.

  “Please,” Kyle said, grabbing a bottle of water from the fridge.

  “He walked out there with us,” Wyatt answered as he came to stand beside her at the sink. Maggie’s kitchen was already fairly small, but it always shrank whenever Wyatt entered.

  “Where is he?”

  “Waiting for somebody to turn on the TV,” Kyle said.

  Maggie sighed and dropped a clean plate into the other side of the sink. “We might have to eat him,” she said.

  “That’s convincing,” Wyatt said.

  Kyle came up behind Maggie and gave her a one-armed hug. “Night, Mom,” he said.

  Maggie dropped the plate she was washing back into the water, wiped her hands on her jeans, and turned to wrap her arms around his shoulders. “Night, buddy,” she said, then kissed the top of his head, taking a moment to inhale his scent of Herbal Essence, sun, and boy. “See you in the morning.”

  “Night, Wyatt,” Kyle said as he headed out of the kitchen.

  “See ya, Kyle.”

  Wyatt pulled a dish towel from its hook and started drying one of the clean plates. Maggie looked up at his profile for a moment, at the deep dimples alongside his mouth, the strong chin, the eyebrows pulled together in thought.

  “Do I have a booger?” he asked her without looking up.

  Maggie smiled. “Can’t I just stare at you?”

  “I’m kinda getting to you, huh?” he asked, trying not to smile.

  “Always,” Maggie said.

  He finished drying the plate and set it in the open cupboard that was a stretch for Maggie but barely above his eye level. He picked up another plate.

  “I am tantalizing,” he said. “But what’s on your mind?”

  Maggie sighed, then starting washing again. “You could change your mind,” she said. “About stepping down.”

  It was a moment before Wyatt answered. “I probably couldn’t,” he said. “But I wouldn’t anyway.”

  “You love being the sheriff. And you’re the best one we’ve had in years. I just want it to be good enough for you,” she said. “You know, the reason that you’re doing it.”

  “It will be,” Wyatt said. “We’ve been friends, good friends, long enough to know what bugs us about each other, and what we depend on.” He looked at her as he held out a hand for another plate. “It doesn’t have to be perfect to be worth it, Maggie. It won’t be perfect.”

  Maggie tried for a laugh, but didn’t quite bring it to pass. “No, it won’t be that.”

  “We have some things to work through, but we’ll do that.”

  Maggie finished washing the plate in her hands, distracting herself with the heat of the water.

  “Boudreaux,” she said quietly.

  “That,” he said.

  They worked in silence for a moment.

  “I know it’s hard for you to get,” she said finally.

  After a moment, he put another plate on the shelf, then put the dish towel down and turned to look at her.

  “It’s really not,” he said. “I’m a guy, and even I can see the appeal. He’s smooth as satin, he’s better looking than most men half his age, he’s downright courtly, for crying out loud, and he saved your damn life. What’s not to like?”

  “It’s not sexual, Wyatt,” Maggie said with some urgency.

  “If I thought it was, I’d be drying somebody else’s dishes, Maggie.”

  She turned to look at him, a pinprick of panic in her chest.

  “Let me clarify that,” Wyatt said. “I believe it’s not sexual for you.”

  “Or him,” she said.

  “I think you might be wrong about that, but we’ve hashed over that before,” Wyatt said. “Look, it doesn’t even matter why he’s become so…involved with you. It’s about who he is. Yeah, he killed a guy, and almost got killed, saving your life. If I had been the one to come through your door at that moment, Alessi would be just as dead. I don’t fault Boudreaux for that. But don’t forget that he also chopped a guy up and threw him in the Gulf just for watching you get raped twenty years ago. It takes a certain kind of guy to chop a person up, Maggie.”

  Maggie had stopped even pretending to wash the plate in front of her. She stared into the sink as little bubbles of dish soap burst on the surface of the water. The way Boudreaux had disposed of Sport Wilmette still got to her. When she allowed herself to think about it, it bothered her less and less. And that bothered her more and more.

  She looked up at Wyatt. “Wyatt, I’ll be honest with you,” she said. “Everything that happened during that hurricane, what he did for me, the way we got through it together…it stays with me. It all started out as some kind of fascination, even with all of the suspicions and…concerns…but that day really just—dammit, I don’t know what I want to say. It’s not gratitude or debt.”

  “A bond,” Wyatt said, surprising her. “A connection.”

  “Yeah,” Maggie said quietly.

  “Look,” Wyatt said. “I get the life-and-death bonding thing. You know that. As a cop, and as a Marine. But like you said, this thing with you and Boudreaux started months before that.”

  Maggie nodded at him.

  “Do you want to hear my theory about that?”

  “I probably don’t, but tell me anyway,” Maggie said.

  “I think that part of the reason people like us are cops is that we’re attracted to the darkness in the world, in other people,” Wyatt said. “We try to pretend that we get close to it because we need to understand it in order to do our jobs, but I think in some ways it fascinates us, and that scares us, so we try to stomp it out.”

  Maggie looked at him for a moment, grew uncomfortable with the frankness in Wyatt’s eyes. “Yes, I think that’s probably true to some extent,” she said.

  “The problem is that very few people have no redeeming qualities, no attractive characteristics at all,” Wyatt said. “So, the danger in getting that close to somebody like that, especially somebody as charming as Boudreaux, is that you’re close enough long enough to find too much to like about them. Then you’re not just close to the dark, you’re right there in it.”

  Maggie swallowed and stared at a chip in the porcelain sink. It took a long moment for her to answer. “Are you telling me that I have to choose?” she asked quietly.

  Wyatt didn’t look at her, but chose to focus on drying an already dry bowl. “My dad told me once never to issue an ultimatum to someone you love unless you’re ready for them to take it.”

  Maggie stared at him. She could tell by the set of his shoulders, by the tightness in his jaw, that he felt it. He didn’t look at her when he finally spoke.

  “If I’d known I was going to say that, I would have made a big dramatic deal out of it,” he said quietly. After a moment, he tossed the towel down, put a hand on the counter and let out a sigh. “But it’s not like we didn’t know that already, right?” he asked.

  “We’re not very dramatic people, anyway,” Maggie said softly.

  “We’re really not,” he agreed.

  Maggie swallowed. “I love you, too, Wyatt,” she said.

  “I know you do,” he said.

  He held out an arm, and she walked into him, wrapped her arms around his waist. The small of his back was warm beneath her wet hands, and she could feel
his heartbeat against her cheek. They stayed that way for some time, with nothing but the crickets and the frogs and his breath in her ear to break the silence. Then he patted her on the top of her head.

  “We’re going to look so silly dancing at our wedding,” he said quietly.

  Maggie pulled back a little. “Are you proposing to me?”

  “No, little buddy, I am not,” he said, releasing her. “You’re going to have to propose to me. And as a gentleman, I’ll have to accept.”

  “Me? Why?”

  “Because then we’ll both know you’re ready, goof.”

  Maggie sat on the top step of the deck beside Coco as they watched Wyatt’s taillights disappear down the dirt road. Once the sound of his engine had faded, there was nothing but the frogs and the breeze. All around her, the thinner branches of the Live Oaks and pines and oak trees waved like a crowd of well-wishers seeing someone off on the train. Their leaves sounded like a million pieces of paper being thrown up into the air.

  The leaves bothered Maggie. He had left Zoe full of leaves, and that was something she had never encountered before. She knew it had meaning, at least to him, but she’d need help figuring out what that meaning was.

  A young possum, his silver fur glinting in the moonlight, skittered down a skinny pine to Maggie’s left, then trundled off toward the creek.

  Maggie both loved and hated these woods. She loved them because they were her home, but sometimes, especially on nights like this, they reminded her too much. She and Zoe had both lain on their backs in the woods, had looked up through the branches at the same sky, and been taught that everyone was vulnerable and that terrible things didn’t just happen to other people.

  She picked up the cell phone that sat at her feet and looked at the time. Close to eleven. She dialed anyway.

  “Hello?” Zoe asked in a hushed voice.

  “Hi, Zoe. It’s Maggie.”

  “Hey, Coach.”

  “Did I wake you up?” Maggie asked.

  “No,” the girl answered. “I can’t sleep,”

  “Your aunt is there, right?” Maggie asked, almost afraid Zoe would say she wasn’t.

  “Yes. She’s asleep.”

  “Why don’t you try taking a nice, hot shower,” Maggie said.

  “I’ve had three already,” Zoe said quietly.

  Maggie’s chest constricted, and she allowed her silence to speak on her behalf.

  “I can’t get him off me,” Zoe said finally, her voice almost a whisper.

  Maggie had a sudden vision of a tiny girl in pigtails and an oversized Braves tee shirt, softball pants cinched at the waist, lying in the dirt next to the old tire in the woods. She blinked it away.

  “Maybe you should take the pill the doctor gave you,” she said.

  “I just did. I’m reciting ‘Christabel’ in my head while I’m waiting for it to start working.”

  “Are you lying down? You’re supposed to lie down once you take it.”

  “Well, I’m in bed.”

  “What’s ‘Christabel’?”

  “It’s a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge,” Zoe said.

  “Is this for school?”

  “Not officially. My online English class is a bunch of stupid stuff,” Zoe answered. “But I’m studying 18th century English poetry. Coleridge is my favorite.”

  “Really,” Maggie said. She remembered looking at the spines of Zoe’s library books when the girl had unloaded her backpack at the hotel. She’d wondered at the fact that this fourteen-year-old girl was studying astronomy and the Russian Revolution on her own time. “When did you take the sleeping pill?”

  “About ten minutes ago,” Zoe said.

  “Well, why don’t you lie down and tell it to me?”

  “It’s long,” Zoe said, with a little bit of surprise—and maybe gratitude—in her voice.

  “That’s okay.”

  Maggie heard the soft rustling of Zoe’s bedcovers, then Zoe’s delicate voice began to speak in a quiet, gentle rhythm. Maggie sat stone-still on the step, the breeze and the rattling leaves all around her, and Zoe’s voice in her ears. After Zoe recited the first stanza, there were no leaves or old tires. There was just the sound of a child reciting by memory a poem Maggie hadn’t even known existed.

  Is the night chilly and dark?

  The night is chilly, but not dark.

  The thin gray cloud is spread on high,

  It covers but not hides the sky.

  The moon is behind, and at the full;

  And yet she looks both small and dull.

  The night is chill, the cloud is gray:

  ‘Tis a month before the month of May,

  And the Spring comes slowly up this way.

  The early morning sunlight streamed through the large, twelve-pane windows of Bennett Boudreaux’s kitchen. Boudreaux sat at the small, round kitchen table, drinking his third cup of chicory coffee and perusing the newspaper.

  Though he was sixty-two, Boudreaux could probably have passed for fifty, with his slim physique and full head of golden -brown hair, accented here and there with a bit of silver. His face had its share of lines, but starting with such a handsome base, those lines only made him look like a matured James Dean, had Dean had the opportunity to mature.

  Boudreaux’s Creole housekeeper and cook, Amelia, stood at the kitchen island, watching over a skillet that contained one gently sizzling egg. She and Boudreaux both looked up when the back door swung open with some velocity and an aluminum walker clattered through it, followed with lesser velocity by Miss Evangeline.

  Miss Evangeline was in the neighborhood of a hundred, but didn’t look a day over one hundred and twenty. Her skin was a mass of wrinkles and the color of strong tea, accented by a scattering of dark freckles and age spots. At four foot ten and less than ninety pounds, she was deceptively cute. The Coke bottle glasses, bright red bandana, and little flowered house dress only added to the illusion that she was a sweet little old lady.

  Amelia set her skillet aside and crossed the room to close the door behind her mother.

  “Morning, Mama,” she said.

  “Ain’t, no,” Miss Evangeline answered, making for the table.

  Boudreaux stood up and pulled out Miss Evangeline’s chair. “Good morning, Miss Evangeline.”

  “Lie to me again,” she snapped. “I got the squish lizard on one my tenny ball. I tol’ you long time to rid us them lizard, runnin’ out in front of people like deers in the road.”

  Outsiders often had a hard time unraveling Miss Evangeline’s odd patois, which was frequently difficult even for other Creoles back home, but after fifty-seven years with the woman Boudreaux had no such trouble.

  He peered at the bottom of the walker, outfitted with bright green tennis balls. “What lizard?”

  Miss Evangeline lifted up the feet of the walker, but only barely. “Him that’s squish,” she said, pointed to a small brown lizard, freshly flattened.

  Boudreaux rolled his eyes as Miss Evangeline went through the protracted process of seating herself. Amelia brought a small plate over and set it at Miss Evangeline’s place.

  “I get you some new tennis balls, Mama,” Amelia said. “You eat. Meanwhile,” she said to Boudreaux, “I gon’ be grateful you don’t start nothin’ with her this morning.’ I got too much to do, me.”

  Boudreaux waved her off, and she walked out of the kitchen as Boudreaux took his seat. Miss Evangeline glared across the table at him as he topped off his coffee.

  “What?” he asked her after he’d taken a sip.

  “Them lizard,” she said.

  “The lizards eat the mosquitoes you asked me to get rid of,” he said smoothly.

  “Now you need get me some housecat for eat the lizard,” she said.

  “You don’t like cats,” he said.

  “Cat don’t kill himself all over my tenny ball,” she said by way of rejoinder.

  Boudreaux thought perhaps it might, once properly motivated by life with Miss Evangeline, bu
t he declined to voice that opinion. He was relieved when she changed her focus to her breakfast, picking up her knife and fork and commencing to slice her egg into minute pieces.

  He picked up his newspaper and had a moment of peace before she piped up again.

  “Tell ’melia don’t forget she pack my medicines,” she said.

  Boudreaux lowered the paper. “She doesn’t need to pack your medicine,” he said. “I told you, you’re staying here.”

  “No, I don’t, me,” she said. “I go home with you.”

  “We went over this last night,” he said. “You don’t fly.”

  “We don’t go the aeroplane,” she said. “We go Mr. Benny Mercedes-Benz.”

  Boudreaux put the paper down and sighed. “No, we do not ‘go Mr. Benny Mercedes-Benz’,’” he said. “We don’t have time to drive to Louisiana and back, and one of us would die on the way.”

  Miss Evangeline’s mouth pinched up, and he could see her arranging her lower plate with her tongue. “You in the mood to run your mouth to me today, then,” she said.

  “We discussed this last night,” he said a bit impatiently. “You’re staying here. I’ll speak with Maggie later today.”

  “I done already tol’ you leave that girl alone,” she said. “It ain’t good for her nor you, y’all go like you do.”

  “And I’ve told you that we’re going to have to disagree on that,” Boudreaux said. “Now eat your breakfast.”

  He picked the paper back up, and heard the gentle scrape of Miss Evangeline’s cutlery for a moment, then it stopped.

  “Who the man on the paper?” she asked.

  Boudreaux turned the paper around to see the front page, though he already knew what was on it. “Sheriff Hamilton,” he answered, before straightening his paper.

  “What he do?”

  “He’s resigning his job, taking some other job in the Sheriff’s Office,” he said.

  “Why he quit the job?”

  “According to the paper, it’s because he got shot a few months ago,” Boudreaux said. “But it’s because he loves Maggie.”

  She was silent for a moment.

  “Look like ever’body got the same problem,” she finally said.