Riptide (5 page)

Bennett Boudreaux drank the last few sips of his first cup of chicory coffee, then poured another cup before starting to unwrap the newspaper. Amelia, the tall, rangy, middle-aged Creole woman who cooked and cleaned for him, was cooking some bacon and eggs on the cooktop in the kitchen island, and the smell was getting to him.
 

After years of oystering before he built his businesses, the only solid food he could stomach first thing in the morning was raw oysters. But Miss Evangeline, Amelia’s ninety-something year old mother, would be along shortly and require one over-medium egg, one slice of dark toast, one slice of crisp bacon, and a cup of tea.

Miss Evangeline had been his father’s housekeeper/nanny back in Houma, LA, but he’d left her behind when they’d moved to Apalachicola. When Bennett had graduated college and gone back to Houma to expand his father’s shrimp business and build his own, he’d hired her back, and Amelia with her. When his father had died and Bennett had moved back to Apalach, he’d brought them both along, much to his wife’s displeasure, which had been part of the appeal. Now they lived out back in the guesthouse, and Amelia took care of the house while Miss Evangeline slung voodoo around and ate the mangoes Bennett grew just for her.

He opened the paper and the headline smacked him in the face. Apparently, a piece of Brandon “Sport” Wilmette had found its way into a shrimper’s net.
 

He skimmed the article quickly. They didn’t know yet who the owner of the foot was, how it had come to be in the ocean, or when, but Bennett doubted that anyone other than him had recently cut anyone’s throat, chopped him up and chucked him out into the water.
 

Sport had come to him after his nephew Gregory’s funeral last week. He’d thought he would surprise Bennett with the news that, twenty-two years ago, Gregory had raped Maggie Redmond, but Gregory had already told Bennett, the night before his body was found on the beach, declared dead from a self-inflicted gunshot to the mealy mouth.
 

What
did
surprise Bennett was Sport’s admission that he had been a witness to the rape, albeit an inactive one, and his suspicion that Maggie had actually killed Gregory and made it look like a suicide.

Less surprising was Sport’s foolhardy attempt to blackmail Bennett over the rape, to protect the family’s tenuous grip on good public relations. Bennett had cut his throat for being a blackmailer, and a sorry excuse for a gentleman besides.

He saw, as he concluded his reading of the article, that Maggie was investigating Sport’s foot. That was a bit troublesome, but nothing to get too concerned about; he could handle Maggie.

The back door opened, and Miss Evangeline’s walker banged into each door jamb with an aluminum tap before preceding her into the room.

“Mornin’, Mama,” Amelia said from the stove as she plated her mother’s breakfast.

“So it seem,” Miss Evangeline said in her raspy voice.

Bennett stood and walked to Miss Evangeline’s chair, pulled it out for her, and waited.

Miss Evangeline was not quite five feet tall and weighed less than a healthy tomcat. She’d once smacked Bennett with a wooden spoon when he was about twelve, for saying the red bandana on her head made her look like a paintbrush. She seemed to get smaller every year, and her little flowered housedresses got looser and longer.

“Good morning, Miss Evangeline,” Bennett said, kissing both of her papery brown cheeks as she reached the table. “How are you this morning?”

“One my tenny ball go flat. Now my walky-talky all crooked, gon’ dump me in the floor.”

“I’ll get you some more tennis balls,” Bennett said and scooted her chair in for her easily once she’d sat. Then he walked back to his chair and sat down, as Amelia placed her mother’s plate and tea in front of her.

“I got another can in the laundry room,” Amelia said, and walked out of the kitchen toward the back of the house.

Bennett went back to his paper, as Miss Evangeline began her protracted morning ritual of buttering very square inch of her toast.

“This toast not hot,” she said. She twisted her birdlike neck to look toward the stove, then peered across the table at Bennett.

 
“Where Amelia at?”

Bennett picked his paper back up and went back to the article.

 
“I sent her to out back to bury Lily,” he said, speaking of his beloved wife. “She was done polishing the silver.”

Miss Evangeline stared blankly at the back of Bennett’s paper, then flipped her upper plate out with her tongue and got it resituated before she spoke.

“You gon’ sass me some today, then.”

“No, I was just responding to your query,” Bennett said to the paper. “She went to get your tenny ball. I think you’re starting to go senile on me.”

“Go ’head mouth off to me some mo’. I buzz you with my buzzer.”

Bennett lowered the paper to the table. “For the last time, it’s not a ‘buzzer.’ It’s not like one of those party tricks that gives somebody a little zap. It’s a Taser. It’s for self-defense, not for smacking someone you can’t reach, and not for frying the brains out of the neighbor’s dog.”

Miss Evangeline sat up to her full three feet and made a little irritated sound in her throat. “Puppy don’t need to be runnin’ round Mr. Benny yard, poopin’ his poop all ’round. Then nobody wanna go out there get my mango.”

Bennett sighed and went back to his paper. Miss Evangeline occupied herself with the complicated maneuver of fork and knife for a moment, then looked back across the table.

“What in the paper?” she asked, nibbling a microscopic bit of egg.

Bennett spoke through the paper, while he finished reading the article. “Well, fortunately for you, something interesting for a change. Axel Blackwell found a foot in his net yesterday morning.”

“Who Axel Blackwell?”

“A shrimper.”

“Who foot?”

“They don’t know yet,” Bennett said.
 

Bennett continued reading while Miss Evangeline undertook the task of raising her teacup to her mouth and putting it back down.

“Juju got somebody,” she said.

“Clearly,” Bennett answered.
 

He was tempted to tell her that he had been the only agent of juju where Sport Wilmette was concerned, but he refrained.
 

She was awfully attached to her voodoo, and it would be embarrassing for the town gangster to get buzzed to hell and back by his two hundred year old nanny.

Maggie spent most of that day fielding calls from locals who saw the foot in the paper and had questions, complaints or vaguely-related suspicions or reports. Nothing came of any of it. Some of the calls came from vacationers out on the island, though not as many as locals seemed to fear. Most of them just wanted to know what to do with any miscellaneous parts that might wash up on the beach while they were grilling their hamburgers.

By the end of the day, Maggie was entirely weary of assuring people that there was no shark involved, and it took some effort not to mention that if they did find a shark who could use an ax or a knife, Apalach would have a whole different niche in the tourist industry.

She rolled her head to loosen up her neck, and was just about to go rummage through the break room fridge for a soda when her desk phone rang again. She sighed and picked it up.

“Franklin County Sheriff’s Office, this is Lt. Redmond.”

“Maggie?” a woman’s voice asked.

“Yes, this is Maggie Redmond.”

“It’s Claire West from the Bayview.”

The Bayview Inn was a hotel and restaurant on Water Street overlooking the marina. Maggie knew Claire only slightly; her son played on Kyle’s softball team.

“Hi, Claire, what can I do for you?”

“Well, listen. I just got back from a little vacation down in Miami with my sister, and I just saw the paper.”

“Okay.”

“Well, I’m wondering if it might have anything to do with a guest that up and disappeared on us last week.”

Maggie sat up a little straighter and forgot the crick in her neck.

“When last week?”

“I looked it up on the register. We went to clean his room last Wednesday morning and his stuff was there, but he was gone. It was just an overnight bag and I thought he might have just forgotten it, but he didn’t pay for his last night, either.”

“What’s this guest’s name?”

“It’s right here. Brandon Wilmette, from Atlanta.”

“Where are his things?”

“Luanne brought them to me last week and I just put them in the lost and found, in case he called or came back. I mean, it could be a misunderstanding. Or he may have had an emergency or something.”

“Do you have a phone number for him?” Maggie asked, grabbing a pen and paper.

“Yes, it’s 404-976-2339. Do you want me to call it?”

“No, I’ll call it. Thanks, Claire. I’ll call you or stop by if I need anything else, okay?”

“Okay, Maggie.” Clair sighed. “Gee, I hope it’s not him. That would just be creepy.”

Maggie disconnected the call, then dialed the number Claire had given her. It went straight to voice mail.

“Hey, this is Sport. I’m doing something more interesting than answering the phone, so leave me a number and I’ll probably call you back,” a man’s voice said snidely.

Maggie left her name and number and asked Brandon Wilmette to call her back, then hung up the phone and walked down the hallway to Wyatt’s open door.

Wyatt was at his desk, using two fingers to peck at his keyboard.

“Hey,” Maggie said. Wyatt looked up. “The Bayview Hotel just called. A guy named Wilmette never checked out last week, and never came back to get his stuff.”

“You have a number for him?”

“Straight to voice mail. I’m gonna drive over there and take a look at his belongings, maybe get another number for him.”

“I’ll come with you,” Wyatt said, looking at his watch. “It’s time to leave anyway.”

“Okay.”

Wyatt got up and headed toward the door. “No gossiping, though. I have steaks to marinate.”

M
aggie and Wyatt found Claire polishing the silverware in the dining room of the hotel, one of many riverside warehouses and buildings left over from the years that Apalach had been one of the biggest cotton ports on the Gulf.

Claire hadn’t remembered much about Brandon Wilmette, just that she knew she’d checked him in and hadn’t seen him much the couple of days he’d been there. She had a vague recollection that he might have been around forty, that he didn’t say much, and that he smoked.

She took them into the linen room that also served as a lost and found, and left them there to look through Wilmette’s overnight bag, an expensive but worn brown leather case.

Wyatt unzipped the main compartment and pulled a ball of clothing out onto the small table. Maggie pulled the case closer to her and started going through the smaller compartments.

“Snazzy dresser,” Wyatt said, holding up a wrinkled teal blazer that was made out of a too-shiny material. He started going through the pockets.

Maggie pulled out a small handful of papers. A boarding pass from Delta, flight 880, which brought him to Panama City at 11:14 a.m. Saturday before last. Wednesday morning he was gone.

“He flew into Northwest on Saturday the 20th,” Maggie said. “I wonder if someone drove him down here or he rented a car.”

“We’ll have to ask Claire.” Wyatt held up a crumpled receipt. “He went to Caroline’s on Sunday. Twenty-six dollar tab and he left a two dollar tip.”

“Nice.” Maggie pulled another receipt out of the handful of papers. It was from the flower shop on Commerce Street, from Monday the 23
^rd
. “He spent eighty-eight on flowers at The Blooming Idiot. Maybe he was willing to spend for the right reasons.”

“Maybe a woman.”

“Yeah.” Maggie pulled out her phone and called the number on the receipt. She got the answering machine and hung up. “They’re already closed. I’ll stop by there on my way to work in the morning.”

“I got nothing else,” Wyatt said, running his hand along the bottom of the main compartment. “You don’t have a rental car agreement in there or anything?”