Low Tide (5 page)

A small flatboat and her grandfather’s old oyster skiff were tied at the dock, and she and the kids often took one of them out to the river to fish. They’d catch striped or sunshine bass, bream or trout, then dress and grill them on the deck. Like Maggie, Sky and Kyle had never eaten a fish that had been dead for more than a few hours.

Maggie pulled the screen door open and unlocked the front door, which opened directly into their small dining area. The house got a lot of natural light and was almost always cooled by a breeze from the river. She and David had added several windows when they’d moved in; both of them preferred replacing storm-shattered windows to living without light and air.

Maggie dumped her purse and keys on the table and walked down the short hallway between the main room and the kitchen. The two kids’ rooms were on the right, her room on the left, and a small bath at the end of the hall.

Maggie took off her holster and placed it in her nightstand, kicked off her shoes and walked down to the bathroom.

She splashed a few handfuls of cool water onto her face. On the third handful, she had a flash of Gregory Boudreaux’s broken and bloody mouth and she jerked upright and stared at herself in the mirror. She looked like hell. There were dark shadows under her wide-set eyes and the little crevices on either side of her lips seemed deeper. She pulled her ponytail up into a messy bun to get the damp hairs off of her and closed her eyes as a faint breeze from the bathroom window brushed her neck.

Tell me you love me!

The words, little more than an angry whisper, came from just behind her right ear. Her head jerked toward her right shoulder reflexively and her eyes shot open. That didn’t happen much anymore, but exhaustion and the events of the day had taken their toll. She shut off the water and decided not to look in the mirror anymore.

An hour later, Maggie had picked a backache’s worth of squash, zucchini, and tomatoes, and was waiting at the end of their road for the school bus. Coco had come along, as was her habit, and was saving Maggie’s life repeatedly by swallowing all of the bees that hung out at the mailbox.

Maggie sipped her sweet tea and wiped the sweat from the back of her neck, dreaming of a shower and what passed for autumn in northern Florida.

The school bus wheezed and banged to a stop just before Maggie slipped into heat stroke, and she smiled as first Kyle jumped out and then Skylar followed less exuberantly.

Kyle looked like his father, with a slight build for his ten years, eyelashes long enough to make noise, and shiny, black hair. Skylar favored her mother more, with hair just a shade lighter and the same green eyes and strong chin. At sixteen, she knew everything and knew it before Maggie did, but she was also witty and strong and fiercely protective of her brother.

Maggie wrapped her arms around Kyle, glad that he was still willing to hug and be hugged in view of his friends. She buried her face in his hair, took a deep whiff of her child and forgot about her day.

Sky would never deign to be hugged in public, but she did give Maggie a smile and some sort of hand signal that Maggie took to be positive in nature. Maggie waved at the bus driver as the bus made a U-turn and headed back the way it had come, then she and the kids headed for the house.

“I feel like I haven’t seen you guys in weeks,” Maggie said.

“You haven’t.” Sky lifted her ponytail off of her neck. “Can we go somewhere for dinner, you know, to celebrate that school’s out?”

“Oh, baby, I’m so tired,” Maggie answered. “I ended up working today.”

“I thought you were off,” Kyle said.

“I was, but something came up.”

“Are you still off tomorrow?” Sky asked.

“I am.”

Maggie handed her daughter her tea and Sky took a long, grateful drink and passed it to Kyle.

“Can we do something tomorrow then?” Sky asked.

“Well, I’ve gotta take some stuff to Battery Park in the morning,” Maggie said. “But I thought maybe we could go to the pool after.”

“Yeah!” Kyle yelled.

“Do you want to go to the park with me in the morning?”

Kyle just shrugged but Sky’s eyes rolled all the way back to her neck.

“Is that supposed to be funny?” she asked. “I’m sleeping in. I’ll help you pick the vegetables, though, after I get something to drink.”

“I got them, but thanks.”

“Regan wants me to spend the night tomorrow night,” Sky said.

“I guess it’s okay,” Maggie said.

“Mommy-son date, then,” Kyle said, throwing a rock up the road. “Can we get a movie?”

“Sure, buddy.” Maggie brushed a lock of damp hair from her son’s eyes. “Don’t forget we’ve got a softball game tomorrow night, Sky.”

“I know. She wants me to ride home with her after.”

Sky was starting to lose interest in softball, but hung in there because she knew how much her mother loved coaching the team. It was also a decent shot at some scholarship money and they needed that.

Kyle was still enthusiastic about baseball, but less of a player than his sister. He played for fun and he played for his Dad, who had been the high school baseball star in a high school that took baseball very seriously. David had been offered scholarships, but chose fishing shrimp and oysters over an education, just as his father and grandfather had done. Now he didn’t have that, either.

They got back to the house and Kyle ran up the stairs, less oppressed by the sticky heat than were his mother and sister, who followed at their own pace. Once they got inside, Maggie turned up the ceiling fans and got some more ice for her tea.

Kyle, predictably, tossed his backpack onto the bench by the door and jumped onto the couch to play Minecraft. Sky followed her Mom into the kitchen and got a glass from the cupboard.

Sky held her glass out to Maggie, who dropped some ice into it, then poured her some tea. Then Sky watched Maggie walk over to the sink and look out the window.

“Are you okay, Mom?”

Maggie turned to look at Sky, who was leaning against the fridge, eyeing her over her tea.

“Sure, sweetie,” Maggie answered. “I’m just tired.”

“You’re lying,” Sky said simply.

“Shut up. I don’t lie to you guys.”

“You do if you think it’s ‘best’,” Sky said with a smirk.

Maggie raised an eyebrow at her daughter.

“So why’d you get called in to work?”

“A body on St. George,” Maggie said. “Suicide, probably.”

“Serious? Who?”

“I don’t want to talk about it, Sky. I’m off duty.”

“It’ll be in the paper anyway,” Sky said.

“Then read it. Now move out of my way. I’m gonna see what we have for dinner.”

Maggie was at Battery Park by 7:30 the next morning and added their vegetables to the folding tables, upended crates, and tailgates full of produce from other locals.

The gardeners of Apalach had been growing and donating extra produce since the last oil spill, and it was just one more thing that Maggie loved about her hometown and the people in it. When the job started getting to her, she reminded herself of people like old Mrs. Jarrett, who was about nine hundred years old and still managed to bring a hundred pounds of tomatoes and cucumbers and beans every week.

Everyone tried to organize the produce a bit to make it easier on the people who came to choose it as though they were shopping at a farmer’s market. Everyone piled their tomatoes with everyone else’s tomatoes, their beans with everyone else’s beans. It not only made shopping easier for the oystering families, it also kept them from having to know exactly whose cucumbers they were putting in their Publix bags.

Maggie spotted her parents talking with some people across the parking lot and started over there to say “hello.” About halfway there, she stopped at an unmarked, white refrigerated truck. Two Hispanic men she didn’t know were in the back of the truck, handing cases of cantaloupe out to a couple of local men. On the ground in front of the truck were dozens of watermelons.

Maggie watched the local guys carry a case of melon over to a nearby table, then she looked up at one of the men in the truck.

“These are beautiful,” she said. “Where are they from?”

One of the men looked at his friend, then looked back at Maggie and shook his head.

“¿De dónde viene esto?’ Maggie asked again.

“No sey,” the man said, shaking his head again.

“You brought them here, but you don’t know. Okay,” Maggie said, shrugging.

As she turned to walk away, she almost ran into one of the local men who were helping unload. She knew his face but couldn’t remember his name.

“They’re from Boudreaux,” he said. “But he asked us not to say anything.”

“Bennett Boudreaux?”

“Yeah. From his farm over in Live Oak. He said they were going to go to waste.”

“Huh,” was all Maggie said, then she headed for her parents.

Gray Redmond was everybody’s friend. Though a quiet man, he was universally liked. He was fairly tall and had always been what Maggie’s Grandma called “a long drink of water,” but he’d become even thinner a few years back when he’d had part of his left lung removed.

The recovery and the chemo that followed it had cost him precious weight and ended his oystering career a bit early, but he was one of the very few people his doctor had ever known to be diagnosed with lung cancer at Stage 1. He was expected to live many more years, and he and his family considered the lost weight and early retirement to be a fair trade.

While Maggie got her love of books and the sea from her daddy, she got her looks from her mother. At fifty-seven, Georgia Redmond still turned heads, though Maggie doubted that she ever noticed. She rarely wore anything more than lip balm and she’d been irretrievably in love with Maggie’s father since high school. Her pregnancy with Maggie had rushed their wedding, but it would have happened eventually anyway.

Gray looked up as Maggie approached and stuck out an arm.

“Hey, Sunshine,” he said.

“Hey, Daddy.” Maggie accepted his hug, then leaned over and kissed her mother’s cheek. “Hi, Mom.”

“Hi, honey. Do you finally have a day off?”

“I do. Just the one.” Maggie smiled and nodded at Jim Fairbanks, who worked for the State Park, and his wife, whose name she couldn’t remember. They nodded back.

Georgia lowered her voice and leaned towards Maggie.

“Honey, Jim was just saying that they found Gregory Boudreaux’s body on the beach out on St. George.”

Maggie glanced over at Jim, who didn’t bother looking sheepish. It didn’t really matter. The paper didn’t come out until Monday, but probably most everyone had heard.

“Yeah, that’s right,” Maggie said.

“That’s a shame,” her father said, looking down at the ground.

“He was so young,” Jim’s wife said, shaking her head but still managing to look titillated.

“He was about your age, wasn’t he, Maggie?” Georgia asked. “Did you go to school with him?”

Maggie stared at the space beside her mother’s head and wished she was somewhere else.

“No, he was a few years older than me,” she said. “I didn’t know him.”

“Well, I wish he’d done it somewheres else,” Jim said quietly. “Tourists don’t like it when people shoot themselves all over the beach.”