Landfall (16 page)

He was disoriented and in an unfamiliar place, and he would have had no idea where the river was in relation to him if it weren’t for the flow of the flood waters. The sun was nowhere to be found, and the sky was an unbroken sheet of titanium gray that offered no clue to his current place in the world.

He was entirely unaccustomed to this lack of control over his present and future, but he supposed on reflection that he had been ceding at least some control for months now. Ever since the night that Gregory had told him what he’d done, thinking it would spur Boudreaux to throw money at him and make him go away.

He had now spent the last two months carefully cultivating a relationship with Maggie, slowly building her interest and her trust, delicately revealing himself to her at an annoyingly but entirely necessary slow pace, and now it was likely to all be for naught.

He was going to bleed to death out here in somebody’s back yard, and all of that planning and all of that patience would amount to nothing in the end. He shouldn’t have wasted the last few weeks, but he hadn’t known what to say to her after she’d shot Patrick, so he’d just avoided her altogether.

What should he have said?
I’m terribly sorry that my nephew raped you twenty years ago and that my stepson had your husband killed last month, but I’m very sincere in my desire to continue building this relationship between us
?

He’d spent the last two weeks trying to decide the best way to approach Maggie again, to get past Gregory and Patrick and finally introduce her to the truth in a way that would put her niggling suspicions to rest and yet wouldn’t make her loathe him.

He should have thought a little faster and made a decision a little sooner, because it looked like the last two months were shortly to become moot.

He looked down and gently fingered his torn midsection, which was still releasing blood into the water in artful little feathers, then he dropped his head back against the pallet.

He supposed that, in the end, it was just as well. She already had a father, one she loved deeply, and Boudreaux had to admit that Gray had done a better job of raising another man’s child than he himself had.

G
ray Redmond drummed his fingers on the table as he watched the TV that hung over the bar. With nowhere really to go, he and Georgia had dragged their small suitcases from the port to the nearest chain hotel, where the desk clerk had been kind enough to stow them in back until they figured out if they needed a room. People in the more urban parts of Florida weren’t always the most pleasant, but most people tended to become more helpful during a hurricane, even if the storm wasn’t local.

Gray watched the same footage of the same scenes that the news had been showing for the last couple of hours, and the obligatory live shots of excited reporters in windbreakers, tilting against the wind and rain as they marveled over the gusts, the damage, the surges. The weather people were always so happy when a good storm hit; it could be a real career-maker.

According to the latest news, Faye seemed to have decided not to make landfall after all. After twenty-four hours of beating the coastline from Cedar Key on up to Pensacola, she was turning northwest and looking to make her way over to Louisiana. The experts predicted she’d hit somewhere between Biloxi and Baton Rouge sometime early in the evening. Meanwhile, the southernmost bands of wind and rain were still giving the Panhandle grief, but in smaller quantities.

Gray watched as they ran footage from early that morning, of the storm surge on Saint George Island and near downtown Apalach. There had been no film of the flooding further inland, caused by the incredible amount of rain that had been dumped into the river and the many creeks that threaded through the area. But Gray didn’t need to see it to know that Maggie and the kids were in a bad spot if they were still at home.

“If you were still oystering full time, I think I’d lay down and cry right now,” Georgia said quietly.

Gray looked over at her and noted the way worry was tugging at the skin beneath her beautiful eyes. “It’s bad. But we’ve been through worse,” he said.

The strength of the storm itself had done its own damage, but the incredible amount of rain being dumped into the bay would have its own effect. Part of the reason Apalachicola oysters were among the best in the world was the delicate balance of fresh to salt water found where the river opened into the Gulf.

One of the threats to the oysters in recent years had been Atlanta’s insistence on taking water from the river to fill its swimming pools, creating an increase in the bay’s salinity. But too much fresh water created the same problem from the other direction. The last time they’d had a really good storm, it had taken almost three years for the oysters to bounce back.

“I just hate to see it,” Georgia said. “The oystermen can never get a good break for very long.”

Gray nodded, understanding that focusing on the plight of the oystermen and their families was a lot easier for her than focusing on the whereabouts and well-being of her daughter and grandchildren. Georgia was not weak by any means, but sometimes she found strength in distraction. Gray lacked that skill.

He dialed Boudreaux’s number for the seventh time since they’d spoken, and again it went straight to voice mail. He didn’t bother leaving another one. He slapped the phone shut and ran a hand through his slightly long, light brown hair. Then he stretched out one long, lanky leg and stood up from the stool.

“Let’s go, Georgia,” he said.

She looked up at him. “Go where?” she asked.

“Home.”

He tossed a few bills down on the bar to pay for their tea, and shoved his cell phone in his shirt pocket. “We’ll walk back to the port and rent a car.”

“But Wyatt said we should stay here,” she said, though she stood.

“Maggie’s not coming here, baby, and I’m not going to sit here pretending she might,” Gray said quietly. “I’m going to go home and find out what’s going on with our girl.”

Maggie had fully expected the truck to crush her, and it took a moment for it to register in her mind that the truck had rolled over her, but not onto her.

She lifted her head from the water and got her feet under her, but when she tried to stand, she banged her head on the truck bed. The water was about four feet deep, and she only had about six inches of clearance above it.

It took her a moment to get oriented. There was little light, but by moving her palms around the truck bed she discovered that the truck was still on a slant. The other side of the bed was completely under water.

She moved back over to the other side and stayed in her semi-squat for a moment, breathing deeply of the air there and trying to focus. Then she moved back to the tailgate, to the side that was above the water. She felt around with her left boot, and could feel the small slope of ground that the truck was leaning against. She then tried to gauge how much space there was for her to swim out, but what her foot told her didn’t seem to enlighten her much. She took a breath and squatted down.

The way the truck was leaning against the slope, she had a wedge-shaped opening to get through. It looked like it would be tight, but it was definitely large enough. She straightened up a bit and took a couple of breaths, then went back under and straightened her legs out behind her.

Her upper half cleared the wedge-shaped opening just fine, but as she passed through, she felt a jerk at her waist and was stopped cold. She got a foot under her and tried to push through, but she was hung up.

She reached around behind her and found that one of the belt loops on the back of her shorts was caught on something at the corner of the tailgate. She tugged at it, but wasn’t able to tear it free, and she felt panic starting to assert itself in her chest. She wasn’t close enough to the surface of the water to be able to curve upward and get a breath of air, and when she tried to back up under the truck bed, she couldn’t do that, either.

Her animal instinct wanted to thrash around and tear at the shorts, but she forced herself to move more deliberately, reserving oxygen in her muscles and avoiding full on panic. She reached around back one more time to try to work her shorts free, but quickly saw that she was wasting time by trying to free something she couldn’t see.

She grabbed at her belt buckle and quickly undid it, then started to pull herself out of her shorts. She got far enough to break the surface of the water and take a gulp of air, then gasped as one of her boots refused to clear the leg of her shorts. She kicked and pushed at it with her free boot, but finally had to curl up back underneath the water and push the hiking boot off of her foot.

She surfaced again, reached overhead to slap the boot up on the underside of the truck, then submerged again and wrested her shorts from the corner of the tailgate and pushed herself back up to the surface. She grabbed onto the truck and stood, and when she did she saw the body.

It was Dewitt Alessi, with one arm bending in entirely the wrong direction and wrapped around the front axle. He was on his back, more or less. A gaping, almost bloodless slice from one side of his neck to the other looked like some kind of macabre smile but, judging by the expression on his face, he hadn’t been very cheerful at the end.

Maggie made herself turn away. Boot in one hand and shorts in the other, she scrambled over the two foot incline and pushed herself over to a large holly bush.

She looped an arm around one of its thicker branches and went through a laborious process of turning her sodden shorts right side out while she gripped her boot between her knees, then pulling her shorts back on, and sliding her boot back onto her foot one-handed.

The boots were common sense; the last thing she needed was to slice up her feet on some kind of debris. The shorts…well, dead or alive, she wasn’t going to be found in her freaking underwear.

The task was surprisingly wearying, owing much to the fact that she was waist-deep in moving water, and she hung onto the holly bush for a few minutes afterward, getting her breath and her bearings.

She had a rough idea where she was, judging herself to be in the woods at the back of the Grahams’ property, just downriver from her own. The easiest thing to do, physically, would be to go with the flow of the water and hope that she came out somewhere near their dock, where she knew they kept a small aluminum flat-bottom. But that was a big hope. She could come out even just five feet down river of the dock and be screwed. Or, she could hit the dock head on and find out the boat was gone.

She looked back at the woods and sighed wearily. She was going to have to fight the water all the way back to the house. If she was right about her general location, it meant a good quarter of a mile. Nothing to it on dry land, but a bit of a trek as things were. On the positive side, the rain had let up noticeably and the flow of the water seemed to have slowed.

Maggie took a few deep breaths to gather her resolve, and started wading against the current in what she assumed was the general direction of her house.

Wyatt coasted to a stop in front of the yellow traffic barriers that had been lined up across 98, a good fifty yards before the bridge. Two National Guard trucks sat on the side of the road, and a few Guardsmen in military-issue rain ponchos stood on the swale. One of them approached Wyatt’s rental car, and Wyatt rolled down his window.