What Washes Up Read online

  “Yeah, I’ll be there.”

  “Okay,” Maggie said, feeling uncomfortable with the way he was looking at her. “Well.”

  “If you get shot this time, I’m not coming over there anymore.”

  Maggie let out a nervous laugh and headed for the door. “I’ll try to avoid it.”

  Lafayette Park was located on the bay, in a residential neighborhood just off the Historic District. Wyatt’s cottage was just a few blocks away and, as Maggie passed it, she wondered if she’d be as welcome there after tonight.

  She parked in the small parking area on 13th Street and turned off the Jeep, took a deep breath. She could see a couple of children playing in the big white gazebo in the center of the park, where local couples liked to have their wedding photos taken. Two young mothers stood nearby, and through her open window, Maggie could just hear one of them call to one or more of the kids. The wind had picked up considerably since earlier in the day, and a sheet of dark, gray clouds looked low enough to touch.

  Maggie rolled up her window and got out of the car. She could see Boudreaux, sitting on a bench that looked out toward the bay. Her hiking boots thumped dully on the brick-paver path that led there.

  Boudreaux looked over his shoulder as she got nearer, then stood up and waited for her as she walked over to the bench. The wind ruffled his hair, and he ran a hand through it to get it out of his eyes.

  “Hello, Maggie,” he said.

  “Hello, Mr. Boudreaux.”

  As she always was, Maggie was struck by how attractive he was. It had partly to do with his features, especially those intense blue eyes, but it had as much to do with his combination of roughness and casual elegance.

  His light blue linen shirt and cream-colored slacks cost more than Maggie’s entire wardrobe, and she could probably take a decent vacation if she pawned his watch, but his deeply tanned skin was that of a man who had spent his life on the water, and his hands were those of an oysterman, with calloused palms and fingers that bore small white scars from rock and shell.

  “There’s no one out on the pier. I thought we might walk out there,” he said.

  Maggie nodded, and he held a hand out toward the long pier that extended into the bay. He fell into step with her as they walked across the back of the park toward the pier.

  “I appreciate you meeting me,” he said politely.

  “Actually, I was planning on calling you,” Maggie said.

  “Is that right?’ he asked, looking over at her with those inquisitive eyes. “Well, serendipity.”

  The young mothers were herding their children toward Avenue B at the front of the park, leaving Maggie and Boudreaux alone. Maggie got the faint taste of wet metal in her mouth as she breathed, and thunder rumbled quietly in the distance, over the sea.

  “My timing may not have been perfect,” Boudreaux said. “I apologize. I’m afraid I don’t have an umbrella.”

  “I don’t actually own one,” Maggie said.

  “Neither do I,” he said, and looked at her with a small smile. “That’s right. You like the storms as much as I do.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  They stepped onto the thousand foot long pier, which had been badly damaged by Hurricane Dennis in 2005, then rebuilt in 2008. It was a popular place for locals to fish, but not today. Their feet thumped softly on the wood as they walked, accompanied by the sound of the sea oats and tall grass on either side as they rustled in the wind.

  “How’s your arm, by the way?”

  “Much better, thank you,” Maggie answered.

  They walked in silence for a moment before Boudreaux spoke again. “I was very upset to hear what happened, Maggie,” he said.

  Maggie wasn’t sure what she wanted to say to that, so she said nothing.

  “This man that shot you. I understand he was from Eastpoint?”

  “Yes, at least, recently. He was originally from Fort Lauderdale.”

  “And have you tracked him back to Rupert Fain?”

  “Like I said earlier, Mr. Boudreaux, it’s not my case,” Maggie said. “I’m actually not privy to all that much. But no, we haven’t exactly connected him to Fain.”

  Boudreaux looked over at her, then looked out at the water. “I find that troubling.”

  Maggie wondered if it bothered him for the same reason it bothered her.

  “So do I,” she finally said.

  She’d spent so much time wondering whether to confront Boudreaux about the man that shot her that the idea of walking away from this conversation without doing it made her feel tired.

  “Mr. Boudreaux, do you remember a few days after I was shot, I asked you if you had tried to hurt me?”

  He looked her in the eye. “Yes, I do. And I assured you that I hadn’t. Why do you mention it?”

  Maggie didn’t think the way she felt was too typical of someone confronting someone about whether or not they had tried to kill her. Instead, it felt more like fear of disappointment.

  “The man that shot me. Charlie Harper. After he shot me, he walked over to finish me off. He said something to me.”

  “What was that?” Boudreaux asked.

  Maggie stopped walking and turned to face him. He stopped as well and waited.

  Maggie took a deep breath through her nose, trying to look like she wasn’t. “He said ‘I’m tired of cleaning up Boudreaux’s messes.’”

  The change in Boudreaux’s expression wasn’t significant, but it was noticeable. His eyes narrowed just fractionally, and Maggie saw a vein in his neck pop, as though he were clenching his teeth. She watched him as he took a long, slow breath and let it out just as slowly.

  “I didn’t send him to hurt you, Maggie,” he said quietly. “You are asking again, are you not?”

  “I guess I am,” she answered.

  He started walking again, and she followed. They didn’t speak again until they reached the covered area at the end of the dock. The wind was stronger there, and whipped at Maggie’s hair, pulling strands of it from its clip and lashing her face with them. She ignored it and watched Boudreaux as he put his hands on the wooden rail and looked out at the bay.

  She and Boudreaux had been playing some kind of verbal hide and seek for weeks, ever since she’d been called to the beach over on the island, to investigate the suicide of his nephew, Gregory. She’d lived her entire life in Apalach and talked to Boudreaux maybe ten times in all those years, and never anything beyond “hello.” She’d never even worked a case involving him, though there had been several.

  Suddenly, they were conversing over oysters on the deck at Boss Oyster, playing some sort of cat and mouse with the truth about her and Gregory. He’d let her know, without coming out and saying it, that he knew Gregory had raped her when she was a teen. She’d always felt that he suspected she may have killed him. She’d also worried about how he felt about that. He was known for being a vengeful enemy and fiercely protective of family.

  But, for reasons she really didn’t want to look at too closely, she had a certain respect for Boudreaux. She even liked him, when she had the guts to admit that to herself. Even more troubling, she wanted his apparent approval of her to be genuine. She could handle someone wanting to kill her; she just didn’t want it to be Boudreaux.

  Boudreaux turned around and leaned back against the rail, looked at her again.

  “I think we have arrived at the point I predicted we would sooner or later,” he said.

  “Which point is that?”

  “Well, if I ask you what reason you think I have for wanting to hurt you, your answer is inevitably going to bring us to other questions you have in your head, but haven’t asked.”

  “Would you answer them if I did?” she asked, but she already knew that he would. She’d always known that he was waiting for her to ask.

  “Yes.”

  Maggie’s heart started beating a little harder in her chest, and there seemed to be less oxygen in the air. She got as much of it as she could before speaking again.<
br />
  “You know that Gregory raped me, don’t you?” The words felt like a foreign language. She’d never even said it out loud to herself.

  Boudreaux’s left eye twitched almost imperceptibly. “Yes,” he said quietly.

  No one knew what had happened when she was fifteen, except for a psychologist she had visited three times in her twenties. Therefore, no one she knew had ever looked at her with that knowledge in their eyes, and it struck her as surreal that this man would be the first to do so. Not her parents, not her ex-husband, but Bennett Boudreaux, Apalach’s own alleged crime lord, and a man she hadn’t even known until last month.

  “Have you always known?” she asked.

  “No,” he answered. “I knew nothing about it until the night before he died.”

  Maggie looked out at the water a moment, trying to gather her thoughts, to marshal her questions now that she was asking them. “He told you?”

  Boudreaux sighed. “He asked me to go over there because he wanted money. To go to South America. You were one of the reasons why. Apparently, seeing you around town, when he was here, made him feel a lot of guilt. Something he wasn’t very comfortable with.”

  Maggie restrained herself from mentioning that she’d never been very happy seeing Gregory around town, either.

  He looked out at the water for a moment, then looked back at her. “He showed me the letter he wrote you.”

  The letter. An apology from Gregory, which had arrived in her mail the day of his funeral. Getting it had messed with her head. When she’d found out that Sport Wilmette, the owner of the foot, was an old friend of Gregory’s, she’d assumed that he’d sent the letter.

  “Did you send me that letter?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Why, dammit?” she snapped.

  He looked surprised. Surprised and angry. “Because he owed you a damned apology,” he said evenly.

  “Do you know what it was like to get it after he was dead?” she asked. “It would have been a shock when he was alive, but the day of his funeral?”

  “I’m sorry. I really didn’t consider that.”

  Maggie watched a gull dive into the water near the grass, watched it take off again a moment later. She needed a break from Boudreaux’s gaze. When she was ready she looked back at him.

  “Do you think I killed Gregory?” she asked.

  “No, I don’t. He shot himself.”

  Maggie let out a deep sigh. She’d had that question weighing so heavily on her mind for so long that she felt almost weightless without it. Not relieved, just suddenly unburdened.

  “There was someone else there that day. In the woods. I never saw him,” she said. “It was Wilmette, wasn’t it?” Boudreaux had hinted as much during her investigation, but she wanted to hear it.

  “Yes,” he said flatly.

  “You said he asked you for money, to invest in some business. Was he trying to blackmail you?”

  “I’m sure he thought of it as something else.”

  “He wasn’t in much of a position to tell anyone.”

  “I don’t think he thought it through,” Boudreaux said. “I told you. He was dumber than hell.”

  Maggie was a little surprised that her next question was harder to ask than the previous one. She knew it was because she wanted him to answer “no,” but he would probably say “yes,” and she didn’t know what she would have to with that.

  “Did you kill him for it?”

  Boudreaux had freely admitted that Wilmette had been at his seafood business, Sea-Fair, the night before he’d gone missing. The place where he’d just built a fish processing room, complete with knives and stainless steel tables, and hoses for washing blood down the drains in the floor. And, a few nights after Wilmette had last been seen, she’d run into Boudreaux at Boss Oyster. He’d been on his way out to do some “night fishing.” A few days after that, poor Axel Blackwell dragged Wilmette’s foot up in his shrimp net.

  She watched Boudreaux now, as he watched her. Then he scratched gently at his left eyebrow, something she’d come to know he did when he was thinking about what to say. She waited.

  “I’m going to answer your question in a way that’s meant to protect you more than it is me,” he said. “Hypothetically, if I had killed him, it wouldn’t have been because of some ridiculous attempt to blackmail me with public embarrassment. I manage my public reputation fairly well, given what many people already know about me.”

  “What would the reason have been? If you had killed him?”

  “It would have been because the pathetic excuse for a man stood by and watched a fifteen year old girl get brutalized.”

  Maggie smelled moldy oak leaves and damp soil, heard the disgusting rhythm of Gregory Boudreaux’s breathing, and couldn’t stop her head from twitching just a little toward her shoulder. She swallowed a faint sense of nausea and had to look away for a moment.

  “And you think the penalty for rape should be death?” she asked him finally.

  “Don’t you?” he asked gently.

  She didn’t know how to answer that. She wasn’t sorry that either man was dead. She folded her arms across her chest. She didn’t want to talk anymore about the subject. She was unused to it, and its foreignness left her feeling cold and unprotected.

  “Did you kill Fain?”

  “Did I kill Fain?” he asked, surprised. “Am I now under suspicion for every homicide that takes place?”

  She didn’t answer him. He sighed and almost smiled.

  “To be honest, I asked you to meet me because I thought maybe you had,” he said.

  “Me?”

  “It crossed my mind, yes.”

  “I was with Wyatt and Deputy Dwight Shultz when that boat was set on fire.”

  “But it was set on fire,” he said.

  “What’s your point?” she asked.

  “If you want a shoot a drug dealer, you do it and be done with it,” he said. “You don’t bother with symbolism.”

  “Well, I didn’t do it.”

  “Clearly,” he said. “But it seems to me that someone tried to make it look like you might have, someone who didn’t know you’d have such a good alibi. I could amend that by saying someone tried to make it look like one of us might have done it.”

  “Why would someone think that you would be a likely suspect?”

  “You suspected me.”

  “That’s because…” Maggie trailed off, shaking her head.

  “Because of what?”

  “Because of this…weird relationship we have going on,” she said, not finding the words that felt more accurate.

  “Well, but we’re not the only people who know about that, are we?” he asked mildly. “People have seen us at Boss, they saw you dance with me at the festival. They might not know the nature of our relationship, but there are quite a few theories going around.”

  Maggie nodded slightly and then shook her head.

  “What’s Wyatt’s theory? I’m sure he has one.”

  “That you want me on your payroll,” she answered.

  “Well, you and I have already cleared that up.”

  “What is your interest, Mr. Boudreaux?” Maggie asked tiredly.

  “It started because you were wronged, horribly, by someone in my family,” he answered. “Now I just like you.”

  He held up a hand, though she hadn’t been ready to say anything. “It’s nothing romantic, I assure you, although that theory’s been bandied about as well.”

  It had never actually occurred to Maggie that his interest would be sexual, and if the rest of their conversation wasn’t so upsetting, she would have laughed.

  “Did you know Charlie Harper, Mr. Boudreaux?”

  “No. I’d never heard of him until I saw his name in the paper.”

  “Why would he mention your name?”

  “I don’t know the answer to that question, Maggie. But I didn’t send him.”

  Maggie didn’t know if she really believed him, or if she ju
st felt like she did because she wanted to.

  “I can’t keep all this from Wyatt anymore,” she said. “I can’t keep working the Wilmette case. I never should have handled your nephew’s case. I’m going to have to tell Wyatt about my connection with them.”

  “Do you need to do that for professional reasons or personal ones?”

  “Both.”

  “You care for him. Wyatt.”

  Denial was on the tip of her tongue, but who was he going to tell? “Yes,” she said simply.

  Boudreaux nodded. “Good.”

  They looked at each other a moment, then he broke the silence. “Do what you need to do, Maggie. We’ll let the chips fall where they may. I’m a lot more careful than old Sport was.”

  For just a moment, Maggie felt a flash of protectiveness for Boudreaux. It confused and upset her, and she needed time and space. Space that he wasn’t in.

  “I need to go,” she said shortly. “I’m sorry. Goodnight, Mr. Boudreaux.”

  “Goodnight, Maggie.”

  Maggie turned and walked back the way they’d come. After a few steps, though, she stopped and turned around. He was still leaning against the rail, watching her.

  “For the record, I want it to be true,” she said.

  “For what to be true?” he asked.

  “That you didn’t try to hurt me.”

  Boudreaux smiled, almost sadly. “I like that you want that.”

  Maggie didn’t know why she’d felt the urge to tell him that. And she was tired to death of wondering why she felt and did and said too many things concerning Boudreaux. She headed for the park again. Halfway up the pier, fat drops of rain began to fall, thunking against the wood in accompaniment to her footsteps.

  She didn’t find the rain as comforting as she usually did.

  Maggie turned onto the dirt drive that served her property, stopped the Jeep long enough to get out and grab the mail from the mailbox, then headed for the house.

  Maggie’s dirt road was at the end of a road that ran north out of town for a few miles, angling toward the Apalachicola River, then stopped dead for no apparent reason. Her nearest neighbors were half a mile through the woods, and her little stilt house, built by her grandfather of cypress as strong as stone, sat on a promontory at the back of her five acres, which meant she could see the river from both her side and her back decks.