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

  A Sweet Tea Press Publication

  First published in the United States by Sweet Tea Press

  ©2017 Dawn Lee McKenna. All rights reserved.

  Edited by Debbie Maxwell Allen

  Cover by Shayne Rutherford

  darkmoongraphics.com

  Interior Design by Colleen Sheehan

  wdrbookdesign.com

  Apparent Wind is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters are products of the author’s imagination. Any similarities to any person, living or dead, is merely coincidental.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Acknowledgements

  For Becky Jones

  My best friend, and still my favorite Plan B

  THE OLD HOTEL WAS PAINTED a shade of lavender that most places couldn’t get away with, but in the quaint little coastal town of Apalachicola, FL, it fit right in.

  Apalachicola is a tiny town of fewer than twenty-five hundred residents, nestled along the Gulf in the Florida Panhandle. The Apalachicola River Inn is perched along Scipio Creek, right where the Apalachicola River opens into the bay, and the bay seeps into the Gulf.

  It was the kind of place that old Floridians and old tourists loved; a throwback to a time before Disney. There were two stories of clean but dated rooms, all of which overlooked the water. Guests sat on their pastel Adirondack chairs and watched the gulls follow the oyster skiffs in to the docks behind Boss Oyster next door. They had a few cocktails in the laid-back bar on the second floor of the hotel, and they enjoyed a full breakfast at Caroline’s, the hotel restaurant.

  Caroline’s was in the back, overlooking Scipio Creek. Guests could sit inside, or they could eat on the screened-in porch right on the dock. This was where the ten or twelve board members of the Apalachicola Garden Club had gathered, to eat Caroline’s wonderful French toast and talk about their upcoming fundraiser for the community vegetable garden.

  There were only two other parties eating in the outdoor dining area, both of them older couples from states further north.

  Awaiting the delivery of their French toast or oyster omelets, three of the board members wandered out to the dock to have a smoke. Andrea Marshall was the head of the Garden Club, a sallow, thin woman in her fifties. She whipped out her electronic cigarette and started sucking on it like it was a steroid inhaler.

  Peter Winn, a slim red-headed man in his forties, owned a local restaurant and was one of the chief contributors to the community garden project, excited about purchasing local produce from its bounty. He lit a Newport menthol, his views on healthy eating somewhat more developed than his views on healthy living all-around.

  The third person was Robert, who, with his longtime partner William, owned the local flower shop. It was Robert and William who had begun the community garden project and sponsored the fundraising brunch. Robert was a tall, muscular, dark-haired man in his forties. He didn’t smoke, but he was in the middle of a conversation with Peter about starting a CSA from the garden, and he accompanied the other two onto the dock.

  William smoked like a chimney, but he was certain the breakfast orders would be mixed up if he left the table, so he remained on the screened porch. Robert could feel him peering through the screen, resenting the fact that Robert, who needed no nicotine, was at liberty to get a nice secondhand hit anyway.

  Peter exhaled a mouthful of smoke and grinned at Andrea. “You know, you can smoke that thing at the outside tables,” he said.

  Andrea shrugged one of her pointy shoulders. “It doesn’t feel right,” she said. “I’m used to smoking outside, anyway.”

  It was well into November. The air was dry, and the breeze off the water was a good one. It was a beautiful fall morning in northern Florida, right up until the moment that the dead woman’s head started thumping up against the old wooden piling.

  Standing back a few feet from the dock’s edge, the small group didn’t immediately see the source of the thumping, but Robert and Peter both glanced in the general direction of the edge.

  “Mullet,” Andrea said as she exhaled a plume of vapor.

  “In here?” Peter asked without much interest.

  There was a noticeable amount of slow swishing taking place in the water below the restaurant, and a couple of seagulls landed on the two nearest pilings, their feathers ruffling in the wind. There were nails tapped into the tops of the pilings to discourage the gulls from roosting there. The gulls found that amusing, and were careful where they placed their little feet upon landing. They tilted their heads and eyeballed the water beneath the restaurant.

  “Anyway,” Robert said, as though he’d never paused. “I think if we can get that spot at the end of Water Street, which is doing nothing for the community at the moment, then we’d have enough space to consider growing for a CSA.”

  “Isn’t it for sale?” Peter asked.

  “No, the one at the very end,” Robert said. “The town owns it.”

  Peter nodded, then frowned as the thumping and swishing intensified beneath his feet. “That’s gotta be a whole school of mullet,” he said with moderate interest.

  Andrea was the closest to the edge of the dock, and she leaned over as Peter and Robert stepped forward.

  Andrea’s scream wasn’t immediate; she took some time to work up to it. There were one or two great gulps of air before she let fly with an actual screech. By then, the two men were at the edge, and peered over the side.

  “Oh, crap!” Peter said, his cigarette dropping from his mouth and into the water, no more than six inches from the dead woman’s face.

  “What goes on?” William yelled from the other side of the screen.

  Robert looked over his shoulder. William was standing up from the table.

  “Nothing!” he yelled back. “Stay there!”

  “If it’s nothing, why should I stay here?” William called back.

  By this time, Andrea had backed away from the edge of the dock, and she bolted for the main building, a hand over her mouth.

  “Robert! What have you done?” William called.

  “Be quiet, William!” Robert yelled over his shoulder. Despite the coolness of the day, beads of sweat had materialized on his forehead. He looked behind him again to see the other diners beginning to stand up from their chairs. He looked back down at the water and willed the woman to float back under the building before everyone saw her.

  “It’s a body!” Peter yelled out as he pulled his phone from his pants pocket.

  “A what?” William yelled angrily. Several of the other men and women gasped or echoed William’s words.

  Just then, the swishing noise recommenced, and Robert’s mouth fell open as the woman’s head emerged full
y from beneath the dock, followed immediately by the rest of her upper body. At first, Robert thought she’d only looked dead, but was actually doing the backstroke. But then her torso came into view, as did the head of the six or seven-foot gator that was carrying the woman in its jaws.

  “Gator!” Robert yelled without meaning to.

  Peter leaned over the edge again, though not nearly as far as he had the first time. “Hello, police?” he asked, almost frantically. “There’s a gator under Caroline’s, with a woman in its mouth!”

  “A what!?” William yelled.

  Robert looked over at him. He was still standing at the table. “Just stay there,” Robert said. “Everybody stay there!”

  “No, she’s dead already,” Peter was saying into his phone.

  Robert grimaced as William threw his cloth napkin down on the table. “I told you we should have gone to The Owl!” he said.

  SHERIFF’S OFFICE INVESTIGATOR Lt. Maggie Redmond parked her black, ten-year-old Cherokee in the small gravel parking lot in front of The Apalachicola River Inn. She’d been out on the bay in the runabout when she’d gotten the call, and it had taken her a good half hour to get to the scene. She saw that two Sheriff’s Office cruisers, one Apalach PD cruiser, the crime scene techs’ van and medical examiner Larry Davenport had all beaten her there.

  Maggie climbed out of the Jeep and fished around in her jeans pocket for a ponytail holder as the wind blew her long, dark brown hair all over her face. She found one, and pulled her hair into something approximating a bun as she surveyed the parking area. There were quite a few people collected across the street, watching the hotel. Another handful, some of them hotel employees, were gathered by the outside staircase, talking to Deputy Dwight Shultz and Mike Rumford from Apalach PD.

  Maggie shut her door and headed over to Dwight. He saw her coming, and met her halfway.

  “Hey, Maggie,” Dwight said. Dwight was twenty-seven, ten years Maggie’s junior, but they had known each other far longer than Dwight had been with the Sheriff’s Office. He was a slim man, with close-cropped blond hair, a prominent Adam’s apple, and a perpetually hesitant demeanor. He usually wore the khaki uniform of an SO deputy, but today he was in khaki pants and a navy polo just like Maggie’s. He was carrying a department-issued tablet.

  “Hey, Dwight,” Maggie said when she reached him. “I see I’m the last one here.”

  “Well, uh, not exactly,” Dwight said. “I think our new boss is headed in this direction, and Wyatt’s on his way, too.”

  Wyatt Hamilton was the former Franklin County Sheriff, just recently moved to the position of Public Information Officer, at his request. He was also Maggie’s best friend and the man she intended to marry.

  “Why’s Wyatt coming?” she asked. The IO didn’t normally attend crime scenes.

  “Uh, yeah. On account of somebody Tweeted and then somebody else Facebooked, and now Channel 5’s on their way over from Panama City.”

  “Oh, that’s wonderful,” Maggie said.

  “Yeah, I thought you’d appreciate that,” Dwight said. “So, Wyatt’s on his way to try to make this look better than it is.”

  “So, what is it?” Maggie asked.

  “It’s a dead lady that got herself carried around by a gator for a little while,” Dwight answered.

  Maggie frowned up at him. Maggie was only five-three, and tended to frown up at pretty much everybody. “Huh. Have we, uh, retrieved her?”

  “Oh yeah. I think the gator got kindly aggravated by all the screaming and whatnot,” Dwight said. “He dropped her, and we fished her up onto the dock.”

  “Do we know who she is?”

  “Not yet. We figured we’d better let you and Dr. Davenport have your look-sees before we checked to see if anyone here knows who she is. I don’t recognize her, though, and she’s kind of distinctive. You know, besides the dead thing and the gator thing. I don’t think she’s local.”

  In addition to the twenty-five hundred or so residents of Apalachicola, there were a few thousand more in Eastpoint across the bridge, and just a handful of permanent residents on St. George Island. If the woman was local, chances were decent that Dwight would know her.

  “All right, so give me a quick summary of what you know,” Maggie said.

  “Okay. So, some locals having brunch at Caroline’s found her. She was under the dock. Dead already. Dr. Davenport says she looked like she might have been strangled. The gator might have just found her, I don’t know, but he really hadn’t touched her. You know, much.”

  “I wonder if it was the same gator that used to hang out under there from time to time,” Maggie said distractedly.

  “Don’t know. Six-footer, not real big,” Dwight said. “It moved up to the marina. Fish and Wildlife’s up there babysitting it.”

  “Okay. Anything else?”

  “That’s kinda it so far,” Dwight said. “I’ve just been trying to keep those folks over there outa the way.”

  “Are they the people that found her?”

  “No, those folks are back there by the restaurant,” Dwight said. “Mitchell and Drummond from PD are talking to ’em.”

  “Okay. Well, let’s go see what’s up,” Maggie said. She started for the wooden walkway that led to Caroline’s and the rooms at the back of the hotel.

  Dwight fell into step with her. “You want me to stay with these folks, or you want me to come with you?”

  “With me,” Maggie said. “The more time you spend with me, the faster you’ll get promoted.”

  Dwight was in the process of transitioning from Deputy to Investigator. Once he was promoted, the Sheriff’s Office would have a whopping three such officers. Maggie and Terry Coyle were going to appreciate that quite a bit. Dwight also deserved it. He was the first male in his family to do something other than shrimping, and he had served the SO well over the last five years.

  Mike Rumford looked up as Maggie and Dwight stepped up on the wooden deck by the stairs.

  “Hey, Mike,” Maggie said.

  “Hey, Maggie,” he answered.

  “Would you keep these folks back here, please? Dwight’s coming with me.”

  “Sure thing,” Mike said.

  “Hey, Maggie.”

  Maggie looked past Mike to two women in maid’s tunics, both of them clearly upset. The woman who had spoken was Brenda Cummings. She was a scrawny woman in her early sixties, with leathery skin and short red hair. Her husband Frank was an oysterman, and had been a friend of her daddy’s for years.

  “Hey, Brenda,” Maggie said. “Sorry about all this.”

  Brenda shrugged in an effort to look like she was taking it better than she was. “I hate to say it, but I’m just glad I didn’t find her in her room.”

  Maggie nodded. “That’s understandable.”

  Maggie and Dwight continued along the wooden walkway that ran between the hotel proper and Caroline’s. There was a group of about twenty people standing in front of the door to the restaurant. Two were Apalach PD, a handful were employees of Caroline’s, and the rest were civilians.

  When Maggie saw the group, she sighed. “Aw, crap.”

  “What?”

  “William and Robert,” she said under her breath.

  “The florists?”

  “This is going to be my fault somehow,” Maggie said.

  Back in October, William and Robert had found a forty-year old body in the wall of their shop during renovations. Maggie hadn’t even been born when he’d been put there, but William seemed to hold her responsible for every crime or dead body that threatened the tourist trade.

  William saw Maggie coming and perked up, and she briefly considered turning around and going the long way around the hotel. Robert tried to hold him back, but William shook off his hand. “I want a word with the little sheriff,” he said.

  Robert reluctantly followed his partner. Maggie and Dwight met them halfway.

  “We are smack dab in the middle of a fundraising breakfast here,” William s
aid. “Nobody wants to eat their oysters and grits when they just saw a prehistoric reptile gnawing on a dead woman.”

  “It was unsightly,” Robert said.

  “Now we’re all going to go out of business because alligators are eating the tourists willy-nilly,” William said with a huff.

  “He wasn’t eating her,” Maggie said wearily. “And apparently, she was already dead. He just happened to find her.”

  “Oh, well, that’s okay then,” William said. “As long as the alligators are only eating the previously murdered tourists.”

  “I didn’t say she was murdered, William,” Maggie said. “Just that she was dead. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go do my job.”

  As Maggie headed down the wooden steps to the dock, she heard William behind her. “Robert, go start the car. Nobody’s going to want to finish the meeting when there are gators about.”

  “There’s always gators around,” she heard Robert say quietly.

  “Not during brunch!”

  On the deck beside Caroline’s outdoor dining room, Larry Davenport was squatting next to a body covered with a yellow tarp. A couple of crime scene techs stood by, along with the responders that would be carting the body to Larry’s morgue at Weems Memorial.

  Larry was in his seventies, a tall, white-haired Ichabod Crane. He’d been a general practitioner in Apalach for almost forty years, and had even been Maggie’s family doctor for a time. He’d been almost everyone’s family doctor.

  He looked up from his clipboard as Maggie and Dwight arrived on the dock.

  “Well, hello, Maggie dear,” Larry said.

  “Hey, Larry,” Maggie said.

  She went around to stand beside Larry on the far side of the body, so she could take a look beneath the tarp without displaying the woman for the gaggle of onlookers.

  “So, what do you know so far?” she asked Larry.

  “Well, judging by body temp, factoring in the temperature of the water, I’d say she’s been deceased since late last night or very, very early this morning. Let’s say between midnight Wednesday and four this morning.”

  “Okay,” Maggie said.

  “I believe her to have been killed prior to entering the water,” Larry continued. “Owing primarily to the marks on her neck and the petechiae visible underneath her eyelids.”