Low Tide

A Sweet Tea Press Publication

First published in the United States by Sweet Tea Press

©2015 Dawn Lee McKenna. All rights reserved.

Edited by Tammi Labrecque

larksandkatydids.com

Cover by Shayne Rutherford

darkmoongraphics.com

Interior Design by Colleen Sheehan

wdrbookdesign.com

Low Tide
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.

For Mom

Who generously waters late bloomers

T
he seagulls bounced around him, lighting just long enough to snatch up the pieces of bread, then hovering in the air, wings whipping, to wait for more.

Gulls were mercenary and self-absorbed, but he liked them. They were honest about their selfishness, unafraid of disapproval. At the same time, they were beautiful and graceful and they were the sight and sound of home.

He’d spent his entire life in Apalachicola and on St. George Island, just a few miles from the coast across the causeway. To his mind, it was one of the few places left that actually felt like Florida, with its century-old brick and clapboard shops and houses, the marina filled with shrimp and oyster boats and people who couldn’t care less about Disney World.

Every time he’d left the Panhandle, for college or just to escape, he’d always felt slightly lost. Cities and nightlife and people with unfamiliar last names quickly lost their luster. Whenever he’d arrived home, after a few weeks or a few years, he’d felt his lungs open up to the salt and the heat and he’d known that he hadn’t really breathed since he’d left.

Always, he came here first, to this virtually undisturbed, unblemished part of the island that was now a state park. Here, he could be the only sign of humanity among the white dunes and the sea grasses and the gulls and crabs that lived among them. Looking out to the ocean, he felt at once humbled and comforted by his own unimportance.

This was his sanctuary, his place of respite and refreshment. Here, there were no problems; there were no decisions or responsibilities or agendas. He could come here and empty his mind. He could fill his lungs with great, hungry breaths of salty air and be renewed, then go back to the mainland stronger, calmer, more ready to deal with his life and the people in it.

A gust of early-summer wind snatched at the plastic bag of bread, winding it around his wrist and causing the hovering seagulls to reverse themselves in the air, putting a few feet of distance between them and him. He unwrapped the almost-empty bag from his wrist and the gulls moved back in as he tossed out a few more pieces of crust.

He often felt like this group of gulls was the same group that he’d fed every time he’d ever come, the same birds he’d fed when he was ten or twenty. He felt like they remembered him, knew him and waited here for him when he was gone. They were his friends, really, or so he felt. They made him happy, with their flapping and grabbing and screeching.

He tossed out the last of the bread and the gulls landed in perfect synchronicity, like one being. He stuffed the bag in the left pocket of his khakis so that it wouldn’t be a danger to the sea creatures, then pulled the gun from his waistband and slowly sat down on the sand.

A few minutes later, the explosion from the gun sent the gulls screeching into the air, then gradually, tentatively, they all came back to the sand. The ones with blood splattered on their gray and white bodies seemed especially agitated, even for seagulls.

Maggie Redmond pulled the coverlet over her head as her cell phone bleated from the nightstand.

“No,” she grumbled from under the covers, but the bleating continued and the coverlet did little to block the late morning sun.

She snaked a hand out from under the covers and pulled the cell phone in, thumbing the
answer
button.

“I just went to bed. If this isn’t life threatening, hang up.”

“No,” she heard Wyatt Hamilton rumble back. Wyatt was the Sheriff of Franklin County and her boss. “I need you to come over to St. George Island. Got a guy that shot himself on the beach.”

“So? How badly is he hurt?”

“I don’t know how bad it hurt, but it sure as hell killed him,” Wyatt said.

“Ugh. Did you tell him it was my first day off in two weeks?”

“I mentioned it,” he answered. “We’re at the first pull-off before you get to the state park.”

“Do I have time to take a shower?”

“Well, he’s awfully close to the shoreline and the seagulls keep making off with chunks of his childhood memories, but you’re the investigator, so it’s your call.”

“Alright. Stop it,” Maggie said, throwing her legs over the side of the bed. “Give me thirty minutes.”

“Okay,” Wyatt told her. “I know you’re gonna stop at Café Con Leche. Bring me one.”

“Do you have an ID?” Maggie asked as she stood up and pinched at her eyes.

“Yeah. Gregory Boudreaux,” Wyatt answered, then hung up.

It took Maggie a minute to put the phone down on the bed. It also took her a minute to remember to exhale. She walked into the bathroom and turned on the cold water tap. She splashed a couple of handfuls of water onto her face and stood and looked in the mirror.

Then she leaned over and threw up into the toilet.

Getting to St. George Island by car involved taking US 98, a five-mile or so causeway across East Bay to Eastpoint, then taking 300, another causeway that seemed to run four miles out into the Gulf of Mexico and stop, but which actually ended at St. George.

There were days like today, when cloud cover was low, that Maggie got the impression she was driving out to some distant point on the horizon, leaving the mainland behind her for good. Off to her left was Dog Island, a state preserve with more egrets and gators than people. To her right was Cape St. George Island State Preserve, just a few yards of ocean from St. George itself.

Maggie rolled her window down and breathed deeply of the thick, salty air. She was driving straight into the morning sun and it scalded her eyes, already dry and tender from lack of sleep. She’d left her sunglasses at home, so she blinked several times to soothe her eyes and pulled the visor down.

Arriving on St. George, Maggie continued on 300, which turned into a main drag of sorts, running parallel to the beach and attended to on either side by streams of vacation rentals in various pastels. St. George Island was about 28-miles long and around half a mile wide in most places. The southern eight miles of the island made up the State Park.

After just a couple of miles, she passed through Vacationland and into the stretch of road leading to the 2,000-acre State Park. After half a mile, she came to the pull-off, a spot of asphalt with five or six parking spaces, all of them occupied.

Today, the spots weren’t filled with trucks belonging to men doing a little shore fishing. There was Wyatt’s cruiser, another car from the Sheriff’s department, the Medical Examiner’s van, and an apparently unnecessary EMT truck.

Finally, there was a blue Saab that Maggie knew belonged to Gregory Boudreaux, who was reportedly losing his mind on the beach.

Wyatt was leaning against his cruiser when Maggie pulled in. He headed over to Maggie’s ten-year old Cherokee as she parked and got out. He was easily six-foot four and, though he was closer to fifty than he was forty, walked toward Maggie’s Jeep with the lanky, relaxed gait of a man half his age.