Low Tide (10 page)

He had never asked what was wrong. He had known without her telling it that she just needed to be out on the bay with him, with no sounds but the occasional boat, the ever present gulls, the lap of a wave, and the wet thumping of a clump of oysters hitting the platform.

Sometimes Gray knew why she needed it, like the day after she’d figured out she wouldn’t be able to pay for law school, or the day before she’d asked David to leave.

Sometimes she talked to him about what was wrong, but as good and as loving as his advice always was, it was secondary to the grounding that the bay provided. She never talked to him about Gregory Boudreaux. She’d never told anyone, not even David. Especially not David.

When she’d finally managed to walk out of the woods, to climb onto her bike and ride home, every part of her body swearing it was broken, she’d told her parents that she’d fallen down a bank. They had believed her.

When the nightmares started, she’d made up a dream in which a nameless woman chased her on the beach. It was the same dream she recounted to David after they got married. He never noticed that they happened mostly in November. The anniversary month was usually her worst, but the dreams gradually lessened, and she’d rarely had them anymore. Until now.

As her father motored out into the bay that was only knee deep on a tall man, Maggie bent her head back and let the salty, damp air wind its way into her nose and mouth and throat. When they were a good way out, Daddy pointed off the port side, and they watched two dolphins dance a welcome.

Once Daddy got to one of his favorite beds, cut the motor, and dropped the sea anchor, Maggie dragged her hand through the water and lifted it to her face.

For the next hour, Maggie watched the sky go from dark to orange to gray and then blue as the sun rose over Apalach to the east. She watched her father walk up and down the sideboards, maneuvering the tongs that were almost triple his height, with two long, rectangular baskets at the bottom. He would sift and touch along the bottom until he found a good clump, then move the tongs like giant chopsticks, closing the baskets together.

He’d dump the booty on the wooden platform in the center of the boat, then go back to searching the bottom while Maggie tossed out small crabs, rocks, and seaweed. Once the pile on the platform was of a decent size, Gray sat down across from Maggie, handed her a culling iron, and the two of them went to work separating oyster from rock and oyster from oyster, throwing back the ones that were smaller than three inches.

It was still early yet for some of the oystermen, but they could see a handful of skiffs scattered among the beds in the distance. Here, though, they were alone, and the only sounds were the flat pinging of the culling irons against rock and shell. Every now and then, Daddy made a remark about a particularly nice oyster, which went in the home bucket, while the rest went in the canvas bag.

Finally, they’d swept the silt and other debris from the platform, and Daddy pulled a quart of freshly-squeezed orange juice and two lemons out of his cooler. He laid them out on an old plastic tablecloth while Maggie rinsed her hands in the bay.

Within five minutes, Gray had two dozen oysters shucked, their top shells tossed back into the water. The first oysters were always the best that they’d collected thus far, and were always eaten with a little bit of reverence. Gray cut the lemons into quarters, opened the orange juice and set it down between them, then handed Maggie her first. When he’d taken his, they both squeezed just a little lemon over them, closed their eyes, then slowly took the oysters into their mouths.

The oyster was briny at first taste, then once she bit into it, it had a sweetness that reminded her of creamed corn. She chewed slowly, savoring it before she swallowed. When she opened her eyes, Gray nodded at her.

“Yep,” he said, as he always did.

“Yes,” she answered, as she always had.

They made a little small talk as they ate the rest of their oysters and washed them down with the juice, then they headed back to the marina so that Maggie could go to work.

As she watched the water sparkle alongside the skiff, Maggie wondered if this was what it was like for farmers. She wondered if they walked out onto land that their fathers and grandfathers had farmed, scooped up a handful of black, loamy dirt and put their noses in it to remind them of what was real, of what was always. To remind themselves of who they were.

Bennett Boudreaux sat at the round table in the kitchen, reading the paper, eating a slice of wheat toast, and drinking his third cup of chicory coffee.

Amelia was frying bacon on the cooktop that was built into the island, one hand on her hip and the other holding a spatula. The sun was just coming up good, and it shone through the twelve-pane windows and burst into star showers over her head, reflecting off of the bright copper pots that hung from a huge piece of driftwood Bennett had made into a pot rack.

Bennett liked eating breakfast in the kitchen, though his wife, and, when they were still home, the boys, had always taken their breakfast at the cherry table in the dining room. Bennett preferred to eat in here, with Amelia and her mother, Miss Evangeline. It scandalized his wife within an inch of her life, which made him enjoy it all the more.

“You gon’ eat some bacon?” Amelia asked him without looking up from her skillet.

“Nope,” Bennett told his paper.

“You gon’ eat some eggs?”

“Nope.”

“She gon’ be upset, you don’t eat.”

“She’ll manage to live another ninety years anyway.”

Just then, the back door opened and Miss Evangeline’s walker preceded her into the kitchen.

“Mornin’, Mama,” Amelia said.

“Mornin’, baby,” Miss Evangeline answered, her voice like yellowed rice paper.

“Morning, Miss Evangeline,” Boudreaux said.

“So you say,” she said back.

Bennett stood and pulled back the chair across from his place, watched her make her way to the table.

Miss Evangeline was more than ninety years old and she looked every hour of it. She stood just under five feet tall, and her light-colored skin grasped her bones with no apparent flesh between the two. She wore her usual flowered house dress and straw slippers, and her shoes made sounds like sandpaper on wood as she slowly made her way to the table.

Miss Evangeline had been his father’s housekeeper, but she might as well have been Bennett’s nanny. His mother had been “delicate” and died when he was seven. His father had been too busy raising a business to raise a son. His father had left Miss Evangeline behind when he’d moved to Apalach, but when Bennett had finished college and started his business in Houma, he’d hired both her and Amelia. Now they were all here.

Amelia’s job was to cook and clean and take care of her mother. Miss Evangeline’s job didn’t exist anymore, but she did it anyway.

Once she was abreast of him, Boudreaux leaned down and kissed both of her papery cheeks, then walked back to his seat.

Miss Evangeline slowly made what added up to a seven-point landing in her chair, and Boudreaux sat back down.

Amelia stepped away from her stove long enough to bring her mother a cup of tea. Boudreaux went back to his paper. Once settled, Miss Evangeline gingerly took a sip of the tea and then peered across the table, her eyes magnified behind her glasses.

“What in the papers today?” she asked.

Boudreaux looked at her over the top of the paper, then turned the page.

“Tropical Storm Claudette’s not coming, Save the River’s having a pancake fundraiser, and we’re thanking everybody for their condolences on the halfwit.”

“You don’t keep talking ill of the dead. It’s bad juju.” Her hand trembled as she put the cup back in its saucer.

“Juju doesn’t get Roman Catholics, Miss Evangeline; karma does.”

She pointed a bent finger at him, the nail long and yellowed.

“Juju gets what it gets.”

Boudreaux winked at her over the paper. “You keep trying to scare me with your voodoo and I’m gonna yank those tennis balls off your walker.”

“Go on sass me, Mr. Benny. Sass me some more and I pass you a slap.”

Amelia brought a plate of eggs and bacon to the table and set it down in front of her mother. The old woman looked at the plate, then looked over at the kitchen island.

“Where his food is?”

“He said he don’t want anything,” Amelia said, taking the skillet to the sink.

Miss Evangeline turned her gaze back to Boudreaux. She sat there a good minute, glaring at the newspaper in front of his face.

“Stop staring at me,” he said pleasantly.

“Man ’sposed to eat.”

“I eat.”

“Mama, go on eat your breakfast,” Amelia said from the sink. “I got to pass the mop before herself come down.”

“Don’t worry about her, Amelia,” Boudreaux said. “She’ll be down late. She’s got several new black ensembles to try on before she decides what she’s wearing to the funeral.”

“I laid out your suit,” Amelia said.

“Thank you. I saw that it was appropriately mournful.”

Amelia grunted, then headed out of the kitchen.

Miss Evangeline put a morsel of scrambled egg into her mouth and chewed it as best she could while she stared across the table. After a minute, Boudreaux put the paper down.

“What?” he asked.

“Juju.”

“Juju’s what got Gregory, Miss Evangeline, and I’d say it was about time.”

“Watch your mouth,” she said, pointing her fork at him.

“He didn’t become a better person because he’s dead, old woman. We’re not going to pretend he was a saint now.”

“All the same, you got to hold your tongue.”

“I did, Miss Evangeline,” Boudreaux said. “As you well know. Now let’s get the little piece of garbage into the ground and be done with it.”

“I gon’ pray for you, then I gon’ come over there and snatch you up.”

Boudreaux drank the last of his coffee, put the cup down, and smiled.

“I’ll be at the office by the time you make it over here.”

“
S
o what do we know?” Wyatt asked.

He was sitting in the metal chair in Maggie’s office, resting one foot on the opposite knee and tapping a pen against the legal pad in his lap. Maggie was sitting on the edge of her desk and Lt. James Caulfield, from the Narcotics Division, sat at the other desk a few feet away.

“Not much, yet,” said Maggie. “All Grace knows is that this deal is supposed to involve more product than he usually handles.”

“Well, Joey Truman is strictly small time,” James said. “He’s Alessi’s lap dog and he’s never done anything without him. Barone, he’s a different fish. He’s from Gainesville. Two priors for aggravated assault and he got busted in 2002 for possession with intent. No indictment. Search and seizure issues.”

“What did we bust Alessi with in ’07?” Wyatt asked.

James flipped through a file on the desk in front of him.

“A little over two kilos,” Maggie answered. “Nothing since he got out in 2012.”

“What we need is the cooking facility and we just can’t get it,” James said. “Aside from the fact that they move those things around all the time, as far as we know, Alessi never goes there. We surveilled him for a while last year, but came up empty. We know he’s setting things up with his cronies and one of the cronies is going back and forth to the lab, but we don’t have the manpower to tail every of one his associates.”