Awash (The Forgotten Coast Florida Suspense Series Book 6) (15 page)

“No, go ’head,” the woman answered. “Zoe, show her where it is.”

“I’ll be right out, Daddy,” Maggie said, then she followed Zoe through the living room and down the hall. Through an open door, she could see what was obviously Zoe’s room at the end of the hall. Zoe stopped just before it, next to an open door on the right.

“Here you go, Coach.”

“Thank you,” Maggie said.

She used the restroom, and when she stepped back out into the hall, something on her right caught her eye. Zoe was sitting at the foot of her bed. Maggie walked into the room, stood in front of the girl.

“Do they know?” Zoe asked her.

“Yes,” Maggie said. “I hope that’s all right.”

“Do they know about you?”

“Yes.”

Zoe nodded, then went quiet for a minute. “I don’t feel like I belong in here anymore,” she said quietly, without looking up.

Maggie sat down beside her on the bed. “Why?” she asked gently.

Zoe swallowed hard and looked around the room. “This is a kid’s room,” she said. “None of this stuff in here is the real world.”

Maggie let out a slow breath. “That’s not true, Zoe,” she said. “Just because the bad stuff is real, that doesn’t mean the good stuff isn’t real, too.”

She looked around the room, her eyes grazing the paper flowers and the stuffed animals and the stack of poetry books. “This is all still you, Zoe,” she said. “This is who you are.”

Zoe looked at Maggie. Her beautiful eyes looked old and tired. “I can’t feel anything,” she said.

Maggie took time with her answer. She knew too well that the lack of feeling was a temporary blessing. “I think that’s God’s way of giving your body a little time to heal before you have to heal everything else.”

Zoe looked at her a moment, then looked away.

“Zoe, do you remember Gina Merritt’s son, Stuart?”

Zoe looked at her quickly. “Stuart? Yes,” she answered, a question in her voice.

“Do you think there’s a chance that he might be the one who hurt you?” Maggie asked. She watched Zoe think about that.

“I don’t think so,” the girl said.

“Did he ever say or do anything that made you uncomfortable while you were there?”

Zoe shrugged a little. “He wasn’t really around much. And Miss Gina was always with us,” she said. She thought a moment more. “He looked at me sometimes, but he never said much.”

Maggie nodded. “Okay,” she said.

“Is that the lead you were working on?”

“Yes.”

Zoe looked down at her hands, picked at a hangnail on her thumb. “I feel like I would have known if it was him.”

“Okay,” Maggie said again, though she didn’t think that ruled him out.

They were silent for a moment, then Zoe looked up at her. “I’m so tired,” she said quietly.

Maggie swallowed back tears that Zoe didn’t need, and nodded her understanding. After a moment, Zoe leaned over, cautiously, slowly, and rested her head in the crook of Maggie’s neck.

Maggie hesitated a moment, then raised a hand to the back of the girl’s head and held her. She held her for a long while. Zoe didn’t shudder, didn’t cry, but hot, slow tears crept down the side of Maggie’s face and slid into Zoe’s hair.

Maggie left Zoe curled up asleep at the foot of her bed, and helped Gray and Sky install motion lights near the windows and doors of the duplex, until her phone alarm went off, alerting her that it was time to go to Boudreaux’s.

She finished drilling the last bolt on a light over the kitchen window, then climbed down off of one of Daddy’s ladders. She found her father in the front, folding up his own ladder while Sky put his tools away. Maggie handed the drill to Sky.

“I gotta go, you guys,” Maggie said. “Sky, you’ll make sure your brother gets to school on time?”

“Yeah, I got it,” Sky said.

Gray laid the ladder in the truck bed. “Hey, Sky. Run around back and unplug the extension cord for me.

“Okay,” she said, then gave her mother a quick hug. “See you tomorrow, Mom.”

“Bye, baby.” She watched Sky walk around the corner of the house, then looked at her father. “I’ll see you later, Daddy.”

“Wyatt still upset?”

Maggie looked down at the gravel. “I guess. He’s not returning my calls.”

Gray ran a hand through his hair. “It’ll be all right, Maggie.”

Maggie nodded, then blew out a breath and hugged her father goodbye. “I’ll see you.”

Gray nodded, then watched her walk to her Jeep, pull out, and drive away.

M
aggie parked in Boudreaux’s driveway next to his black Mercedes. The trunk of the car was open. She cut the engine, then checked her phone one more time to see if she’d missed a call from Wyatt. She hadn’t. It was almost seven, and she hadn’t heard from him since they’d left each other that morning. This alone was an unusual event. The weight of his silence pressed down on her chest.

She looked up as Boudreaux came out the front door, followed by Amelia. Boudreaux carried two overnight bags and a briefcase in his hands. Maggie got out of the Jeep and met them at the Mercedes.

“Hello, Maggie,” he said.

“Mr. Boudreaux.”

Amelia nodded at her. “Mama already in the bed, watchin’ the television,” she said. “She’ll be asleep by nine, ten o’ clock.”

“Okay,” Maggie said.

Amelia nodded again, then went and climbed in the passenger side of the car. Boudreaux closed the trunk, then looked at Maggie and ran a hand through his hair as the evening wind tossed a lock into his eyes.

“The neighbors to the left and across the street know we’re going out of town overnight, and that you’re watching Miss Evangeline for me,” he said. “The neighbors to the right are in the Bahamas.”

“Okay,” Maggie said.

“I thought it best that they know I’m out of town, if they happened to see you or your car.”

Maggie gave a slight shrug. “Thank you,” she said. “It won’t help much.”

“I know.”

“I don’t really care,” she said.

“Neither do I, except on your behalf,” he answered.

Maggie nodded again.

“Please help yourself to anything you’d like to eat or drink,” he said. “Amelia says there’s some shrimp étouffée left from dinner.”

“Thank you,” Maggie said.

Those incredible blue eyes drilled into her own, and he seemed to start to say something, then glanced around at the street and held out a hand instead. “Thank you for doing this,” he said.

Maggie took his hand. “You’re welcome.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon,” he said as he opened his door. “There’s a set of spare keys to the house in a blue bowl in the hall.”

Maggie nodded, then watched them back out of the driveway. Boudreaux had turned the corner by the time Maggie had retrieved her overnight bag and purse from the Jeep, and she turned and headed up to the front porch.

The breeze off the bay rattled through the Palmettos on either side of the front steps, and brought with it hints of brine and water grasses and mud. Maggie closed and locked the front door behind her, and stared at the entryway.

She was at loose ends. She was in a foreign place, without anyone of her own nearby. It was too quiet, and too empty, and too unfamiliar.

Her boots echoed up and down the hall as she made her way to the stairs, then went up to the second floor. Yesterday, Boudreaux had shown her the guest room he’d had Amelia make up for her. She found it again, and set her bag on the white iron bed. She was grateful for the open windows, for both the fresh air and the reassurance that the world outside was still there.

She looked around at the room, at the original wood floors, the ship’s lathe walls left a chipped and faded turquoise, the handmade quilt on the bed. There were no books, there was no TV or phone.

She walked into the bathroom. Two bright white towels hung over the side of a cast iron tub, and a small bowl of soaps and lotions sat on the antique dresser that served as a vanity. It was all very charming and understated, but she felt too out of place to think about lying naked in the tub. Instead, she turned around and went back out into the hall.

She walked opposite of the way she’d come, toward the back stairs that led down to the kitchen. The double doors of the room next to hers were open, and she couldn’t help stopping in the doorway. Boudreaux’s room, she knew.

It was spotless and spare, as she would have expected from such an immaculate man. The king-sized bed was of antique mahogany, though understated in design, and covered with a gray-blue spread. The windows of this room were open, too, and cream-colored, floor length sheers moved gently against the wood floor.

There were no toiletries or dirty laundry to make the room look lived in. The antique dresser held only a large model of a shrimp boat. Through an open doorway beside the bed, Maggie saw a bathroom that was just as bare of superfluous decoration or detritus.

She was sorely tempted to open the nightstand drawers, to poke through the bathroom vanity, to gain the knowledge and intimacy that comes from going through another’s things. She resisted that temptation by walking away.

Once downstairs in the kitchen, Maggie opened the big commercial fridge as if she might eat, but she wasn’t hungry. The strange surroundings, Zoe’s pain, and Wyatt’s uncharacteristic unavailability, however deserved, made the idea of food unappealing.

She closed the door, then checked her phone again, in the way that people do when they hope they missed a call or accidentally turned off their ringer, but know they haven’t done either. Nothing. She slipped it into the back pocket of her jeans, then opened the back door and stepped out onto the back porch.

Here, she felt more like she was on familiar ground. She’d spent quite a bit of time on this porch with Boudreaux, and she could almost hear echoes of conversations past, smell the mangos that had gone away until next summer.

Across the back yard, at the end of a brick-paved walkway, was a small cottage, lights on in every window but one. The front door was open, and as Maggie walked down the back steps and along the path, she could hear the faint sounds of television through the white, wrought-iron screen door.

It was loud once Maggie stood at the door, though she could see that the TV in the small living room was off. She knocked on the side of the door, but waited some time without an answer.

“Miss Evangeline?” she called. Again, there was no reply. Finally, she opened the door and went inside.

The main room was pleasant, in a slightly stereotypical Florida way. Furniture upholstered in tropical florals. Seascapes on the walls. This home was lived in though, with baskets of cross-stitch next to a recliner, well-read magazines on the bamboo coffee table, and a white sweater neatly folded on an ottoman.

There was an efficiency kitchen on one side of the room, and a closed door on the left wall. On the right, a small hallway, from which came the sounds of the TV.

“Miss Evangeline?” Maggie called again.

When she didn’t get any answer, she went just to the hallway, and called a bit louder. “Miss Evangeline?”

“Who it is there?” the woman called from behind a closed door.

“It’s Maggie Redmond,” Maggie called back.

“Come in the door!” the woman yelled.

Maggie opened the door to find Miss Evangeline arranged beneath a heap of covers on a wicker twin bed, an old-fashioned pink rubber hot water bottle to one side of her, a box of candy to the other. The TV blared from the top of her dresser.

“I just came to see how you are,” Maggie tried not to yell.

Miss Evangeline picked a remote up from the bed, pointed it at the TV. “Lemme slow the TV,” she barked. “I can’t hear nothin’ you say, me.”

She turned the volume down, and the Golden Girls stopped screaming at everybody.

“It’s good to see you again, Miss Evangeline,” Maggie said as she moved a little closer to the bed.

“I’m suppose be goin’ home,” Miss Evangeline huffed, “but Mr. Benny say I got to take care of you while he go.”

Maggie tried not to smile, unsure if Miss Evangeline actually believed that, or even if Boudreaux had said it. She went to stand near the bed, glanced down at the night stand at a black and white photo in a silver frame.

In the picture, a woman in a bandana and a flowered housedress sat on a small wooden stool outdoors. It was undoubtedly Miss Evangeline, but she looked to be in her forties or so. On one side of her stood a young Creole girl, tall and straight, her arms folded across her chest. On the other stood a boy who was unmistakably Bennett Boudreaux.