Awash (The Forgotten Coast Florida Suspense Series Book 6)

by Dawn Lee McKenna

  She stopped just to the side of the window and peered at the dirt beneath it, but she and her father had both been all over that spot the day before, and it was a mess of footprints, one on top of another.

  She looked at Zoe’s window, which was covered with mini-blinds, and said a silent prayer for the girl to get some decent rest. Her thoughts were interrupted by the vibration of her phone in her back pocket. She pulled it out and saw it was Wyatt, and didn’t know if she was more nervous or relieved.

  “Hey,” she said when she answered.

  “Hey. Where are you?”

  “I’m at Zoe’s. Her aunt says one of the motion sensors went off last night, so I’m looking around. Paulette says she saw a possum, but I didn’t think it would be that sensitive.”

  “What motion sensors?”

  “Daddy and Sky and I put some up yesterday,” she said.

  “Good,” he said.

  There was a long, unusual silence and Maggie was trying to come up with something to say when Wyatt finally spoke.

  “Ignoring your calls was childish, but I needed some time to stop being mad,” he said quietly.

  “You don’t owe me an apology, Wyatt,” she said.

  “I didn’t give you one. I have every right to be mad, but I acted like an ass,” he said. “I’m only sorry for that part.”

  “Well…” Maggie didn’t know if she was supposed to apologize, accept his non-apology or just agree with him. “Are you still mad?”

  “Yes, but less so,” Wyatt said. “Boudreaux and I had a beer together yesterday and traded death threats. That helped me get some of it out.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said.

  “You don’t trade death threats with Boudreaux!” Maggie said.

  “You can,” Wyatt said. “Although, mine wasn’t nearly as smooth as his.”

  “Why did he threaten you?” Maggie said.

  “I’m not certain, but I think it had something to do with telling him I’d kill him,” Wyatt answered.

  “For what?”

  “For whatever presented itself,” Wyatt said.

  “Wyatt, he brought a knife to a gunfight and won,” Maggie said stupidly. It had popped into her head.

  “Yeah, I know,” Wyatt said. “It’s one of the few things I actually like about him.”

  “Crap,” Maggie said.

  “Let’s move past that,” Wyatt said. “What have you got going on today?”

  “I’m taking Stoopid to the vet,” Maggie answered. “Then I have to take Miss Evangeline to the Soda Fountain. Apparently Thursday is ice cream day. I might call the kids, see if they want to meet us after school.”

  “So I’m the only one who doesn’t get ice cream,” Wyatt said. “Because I threatened the mad dog killer whose nanny you’re babysitting.”

  “Would you like ice cream?”

  “I would.”

  “I’ll call you when I get out of the vet. What are you doing?”

  “I’m running down a couple of guys in Eastpoint who have taken a liking to joint flashings, then I’m working on a line-up for Zoe. I’ll set it up for tomorrow,” he answered.

  “Okay,” Maggie said.

  “Okay,” Wyatt said.

  “Well, I’ll see you,” Maggie said.

  “See you later,” he said, then disconnected.

  She was halfway across the back yard when her phone buzzed again.

  “Real couples say ‘I love you’ before they hang up the phone,” Wyatt said.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “I love you,” he said.

  “I love you, too,” she answered.

  “We’ll probably get the hang of it,” he said, then hung up again.

  Miss Evangeline grimaced all the way down Maggie’s dirt road, bouncing and jerking and holding onto the door handle, even though Maggie was doing 12mph. The old lady smiled, though, if the tectonic shifting of her features was any indication, once they pulled to a stop in front of the house.

  “Look here this place,” Miss Evangeline said. “Pretty.”

  “Thank you,” Maggie said. “I’ll just be a second.”

  She reached into the back of the Jeep and grabbed an old beach towel, then got out of the car just as Coco came running down the stairs to meet her. Maggie waited for her, then rubbed her belly as she threw herself into the grass at Maggie’s feet.

  “That a Catahoula dog,” Miss Evangeline said through her window.

  “Yes,” Maggie said. “Half Lab.”

  “Lou’siana dog,” the old woman said.

  “We got her on vacation in Grand Isle,” Maggie said, as she watched Stoopid throw himself down the deck stairs like a bag of broken chopsticks.

  Miss Evangeline cooed at Coco in what Maggie assumed was French, and Coco wagged over to the Jeep and sat, smiling up at the old lady. Maggie waited for Stoopid, the towel in her hands. He stopped within a few feet of her, flapped a few times, coughed out one of his crows, then commenced to peck at his chest. Maggie crept toward him, and he circled around her before returning his attention to his feathers.

  “Somethin’ wrong the boy chicken,” Miss Evangeline piped up.

  “I know,” Maggie said quietly, slipping toward him again. “He’s going to the vet.”

  She dropped the towel down onto Stoopid, who flapped and clucked and coughed as she folded his legs underneath him and wrapped him like a burrito. Once he was snugly wrapped, with nothing but his head sticking out, he calmed down.

  Maggie told Coco to go upstairs, then she got back into the Jeep and looked at Miss Evangeline. “Can you hold him?”

  Miss Evangeline looked at her like she’d asked her to hold a bomb, then reached out and took the bundle, laid it on her lap. Maggie started the Jeep.

  “Back where I come from, chicken broke, he don’t go the doctor,” she said. “He go the soup pot.”

  Maggie sighed, turned the Jeep around and headed back to the road.

  They spent almost two hours in the waiting room, during which time Miss Evangeline diagnosed all of the animals and Stoopid had seven nervous breakdowns. In the end, they only spent ten minutes in the exam room, where Stoopid was found to have mites, mostly likely because he wouldn’t leave the house long enough to take a dirt bath. It was also posited that he was a little high-strung, even for a rooster. Maggie was sent home with some mite spray and Stoopid was sent home wearing a miniature cone of shame. He seemed so demoralized by it that Maggie felt like she should have been given one, too.

  She and Miss Evangeline made it to the Soda Fountain on Market Street just after school got out, and were shortly met by Sky and Kyle, who seemed somewhat charmed by Miss Evangeline. Maggie couldn’t tell for sure, but she thought maybe it was mutual.

  They took their ice cream cones outside so that Maggie could be within crowing distance of Stoopid. It was cool enough outdoors for him to be in the car a few minutes with the window cracked, but she’d let him out of the towel, and she imagined all manner of damage to her interior if he thought he’d been trapped and abandoned.

  When Wyatt called to say he was on his way over the bridge, Maggie went inside to order his ice cream.

  Market Street was fairly busy for a Thursday, owing mostly to out-of-towners who had come for the seafood festival, which started tomorrow. Passerby weaved around the small picnic table on the sidewalk where the kids and Miss Evangeline ate their ice cream, and Stoopid kept one eyeball glued to the window, ever alert for interlopers.

  The two boys who approached from Tamara’s on the corner were in their early twenties. Their demeanor, all swagger and snicker, suggested they were at least of beer-drinking age. They were nearly abreast of both the picnic table and the Jeep when Stoopid hacked out something that could have been a greeting or an alarm.

  “Crap, dude, check it out,” one of the boys said, and they veered off the sidewalk and over to the passenger side of the Jeep.

  The other boy, all over-styled hair and
arrogant grin, laughed and tapped on the window. “Dude, free lunch,” he said to his friend, as Stoopid tossed out a barrage of either news or insults.

  “Hey!” Sky called over to them. “Leave him alone.”

  The kid at the window just grinned over at her, but his friend gave Sky an appreciative smile that wasn’t appreciated. “Well, hey there,” he said.

  Sky got up as the other boy stuck his fingers through the cracked window, clucking at the rooster. “Back off,” she said, walking between the two boys.

  “Forget the chicken, man,” the second boy said. “Check out the chick.”

  The first boy looked over at Sky and did a double take. “Hey, girl,” he said, smiling.

  Sky glared at him. “Get away from my mom’s car, dude.”

  “If I do, will you come with me?” he asked, grinning.

  Kyle stood up, and Miss Evangeline stood with him. “Stay put, little boy,” she said. Then she yelled over at the two young men. “Go on, fool!”

  The second of the two boys smiled over at Miss Evangeline, then back at Sky. “That your mom?” he asked.

  “Get lost,” Sky said, then turned around as the first boy tugged on her ponytail. “Don’t touch me.”

  “Get away the girl, boy!” Miss Evangeline called. Kyle made to move forward, and Miss Evangeline put a hand on his shoulder.

  “You wanna come hang out with us, sweetie?” the first boy asked Sky. “Party a little bit?”

  “I got your party right here,” the second boy said, resting a hand on the crotch of his jeans.

  Sky looked down at his hand then back at his grin. “That looks like the kind of party a girl has to bring her own entertainment to,” she said.

  The boy’s smile left his face as his friend laughed, and he tucked a finger under Sky’s chin. “You think you’re pretty funny, don’t you?” he asked.

  Kyle tossed his ice cream to the sidewalk as Sky slapped the boy’s hand away, but Miss Evangeline grabbed him by the shirt and yanked him back, then reached into the pocket of her house dress.

  Maggie walked out of the Soda Fountain just in time to register that two men were talking to her daughter, then watch one of them drop out of sight. She ran past her son and Miss Evangeline and around the Jeep to see the young man flat on his face on the asphalt, the two probes of a Taser attached to the space between his shoulder blades.

  “What the hell is going on?” Maggie demanded.

  The other man, a boy really, just gaped at her.

  “Crap,” Sky said, a look of wonder on her face.

  Maggie was about to restate her question when Wyatt’s cruiser stopped suddenly behind Maggie’s Jeep.

  Wyatt got out of his cruiser and stalked around the back end. Some kid was laid out at Sky and Maggie’s feet with two probes stuck to him. Maggie was standing there staring, Sky was taking a picture with her phone, and E.T. was standing on the sidewalk with an ice cream cone in one hand and a yellow Taser in the other. He was about to ask what the hell happened when Stoopid popped up in the Jeep window with a little plastic cone around his neck, and Wyatt found himself with too many questions and not enough words.

  “What happened, Sky?” Maggie asked.

  “He put his hands on me,” Sky said.

  “Boy run his dirty mouth all over the chile,” Miss Evangeline piped up. “I buzz him with my buzzer, me!”

  The boy tried to roll over onto his back, and Wyatt yanked the probes from his shirt, then helped him over with a nudge of his foot.

  “Call the police,” the kid said weakly.

  Wyatt bent over him and poked at the emblem on his polo. “We are the police, moron,” he said. “Did you touch this girl?

  “We didn’t do nothin’, man,” the other boy said.

  Maggie looked at Sky. “Sky?”

  “He was bothering Stoopid and I told him to stop, then they started harassing me,” her daughter answered.

  “How old are you, kid?” Wyatt asked the boy on the ground, who appeared to be thinking about sitting up. “Smells like you might have had a few beers.”

  “Twenty-one,” he said weakly. “Old enough to have a beer.”

  “Too old to be hitting on a seventeen-year-old girl, though,” Wyatt answered. “You wanna call us? Press charges against Methuselah’s wife over there for zapping the crap out of you?”

  The kid looked sullenly over toward Miss Evangeline, trying to look meaner than he was. Then he shook his head.

  “Good,” Wyatt said. He held out a hand, and the kid took it. Wyatt yanked him to his feet, but the kids knees buckled and he more or less dangled from Wyatt’s grip. Wyatt looked at his friend. “Why don’t you take your spider monkey home?”

  They all watched as the kid led his friend away back the way they’d come.

  Wyatt turned back to look at Maggie. “My week is a cartoon,” he said.

  “Wyatt, you should have seen it!” Kyle called excitedly.

  “I think I’ve seen all I can take at this point,” Wyatt answered. He looked at Maggie, standing there with her hands full of ice cream. “Is that my Rocky Road?”

  “Yeah,” she said, and handed it to him. Her own pineapple sherbet was half melted, and she walked over to the sidewalk and tossed it into the trash. “Let’s go, Kyle,” she said. “Come on, Clint Eastwood.”

  Kyle hovered near Miss Evangeline until she’d managed to navigate herself and her walker off of the sidewalk.

  “Boy, go get my slinkies for me” she said, pointing at her probes still lying on the ground.

  Maggie looked at Sky. “Go home,” she said, sighing.

  “I didn’t do anything,” Sky said.

  “I know. Just go home. I’ll be there as soon as I can hand her off to her keepers.”

  She opened the passenger door of the Jeep, dropped the towel back onto Stoopid, wrapped him up, and handed him to Kyle. “Here.”

  “Is he in custody for something?” Wyatt asked.

  “Mites,” Maggie said shortly.

  “Sure,” Wyatt said.

  Kyle handed Miss Evangeline her probes, then took Stoopid in his arms and followed Sky to her truck. Maggie looked up at Wyatt, who was licking his ice cream like he was at a parade.

  “Bye,” she said tiredly.

  “Bye,” he answered.

  She walked around to her side of the Jeep and got in. “Come on, Miss Evangeline,” she called.

  Miss Evangeline tucked her Taser back into her pocket and headed for the Jeep at the speed of plant. “Boy a fool. Touch that chile and don’t even know who she is,” she muttered. “Bones don’t float, no.”

  Wyatt chewed a piece of walnut thoughtfully as he watched her fold her walker and get in, then he shut the door and walked to his cruiser. He pulled up far enough to let them out, then watched in his rear view as Maggie headed toward the Historic District.

  Maggie waited on Boudreaux’s back porch while he took his overnight bag upstairs and changed his clothes, then carried Amelia’s bag out to the cottage.

  Maggie watched him as he retraced his steps along the path from the cottage to the back porch. He had changed from his black suit into gray trousers and a white linen button-down shirt. Even when casually dressed for home, he was more elegant than Maggie had been at her own wedding.

  He came up the back steps and smiled at Maggie. “Apparently, you’ve made an impression on Miss Evangeline. Again,” he said.

  “Oh, I’m sure I have,” she said, watching him walk over to the small bamboo bar near the kitchen door.

  “You ladies didn’t have a set-to, did you?” he asked.

  “Every conversation with her is a set-to,” she said.

  Boudreaux nodded his agreement. “And yet, she likes you,” he said.

  “I like her, too.”

  “Would you like a cocktail?” he asked her.

  “I think I would,” Maggie answered.

  “I can make you a mojito if you like,” he said. “I’m just having a Cape Cod.”

&nb
sp; “What is that?”

  “Vodka and cranberry juice.”

  “That sounds fine,” Maggie said. “Thank you.”

  He took some small cans of cranberry juice out of the mini-fridge and began making the drinks. Maggie rested her head against the back of the white Adirondack chair she was sitting in, closed her eyes a moment, and enjoyed the evening breeze, which was just shy of chilly.

  “So how did it go?” Boudreaux asked as he mixed their drinks.

  “Well, I can’t fry an egg or cook a slice of bacon properly,” Maggie said, her eyes still closed.

  “Who can, really?” Boudreaux said.

  “But I should cook my rooster,” she added, opening her eyes. Boudreaux started across the porch with their drinks. “It went pretty well, until she Tasered somebody on Market Street.”

  Boudreaux handed her her cocktail, took a swallow of his, and pinched at the bridge of his nose before he hit her with those eyes. “What was she doing on Market Street?”

  “Thursday is ice cream day.” Maggie took a swallow of her drink.

  “No, Saturday was ice cream day. Twenty years ago,” Boudreaux said. “She’s too senile, ornery, and armed to go anywhere now.”

  Boudreaux sat down in the chair next to her.

  “You didn’t tell me she was a con artist,” Maggie said.

  “She’s so many things,” he said. “Who did she Taser?”

  “Some jerk that needed it,” Maggie said. “It was overkill, but not completely uncalled for.”

  “Are they pressing charges?”

  “No.”

  Boudreaux looked at her a moment, frowning. “Did someone do something to you?”

  “No, it was just some guys from out of town, harassing Sky,” she said. “She could have dealt with it.” Boudreaux took another sip of his drink. Maggie looked over at him. “How was Louisiana?”

  “It was fine,” he said. “Funeral notwithstanding.”

  Maggie took a drink as she watched him. “Did you see your wife?”

  “I must look like hell for you to ask me that,” he said.

  “You look fine,” she replied.

  “No. We have spoken on the phone once or twice, when absolutely necessary,” Boudreaux said. “But I haven’t seen her since July.”