What Washes Up (13 page)

A
brick pathway led from Boudreaux’s back patio to the guest cottage in which Amelia and Miss Evangeline resided.

Boudreaux’s loafers made little sound as he followed the walkway, walking between various colors of hibiscus and hydrangea. The breeze had picked up, and rattled through the trees like someone was hitting the leaves with sticks.

A rectangular shaft of light from the open screen door cut into the darkness of the back yard, and Boudreaux could hear the tinny sounds of the television floating through the open windows.

Boudreaux stepped onto the patio. He could see Miss Evangeline, clad in a fluffy yellow robe, sitting in her cushioned rocker in the living area. He tapped at the screen door, and she looked over at the door, the lamplight making her eyeglass lenses appear to be solid white.

“Amelia, open the door Mr. Benny,” she called. There was no answer. “Amelia!”

When there was still no answer, Miss Evangeline made as though to struggle out of her chair.

“It’s not locked. You want me to just come in?” Boudreaux asked.

She waved at him and settled back down, though she hadn’t made appreciable progress in rising, anyway. Boudreaux opened the screen door and stepped inside.

The cottage was small and cozy, in a Florida vacation sort of way, with wicker furniture and lots of plants and bright, tropical prints. There was a small kitchenette in one corner of the living area, and there was one bedroom off of each side of the main room.

“I don’t know where that girl at,” Miss Evangeline said.

Boudreaux pointed toward Amelia’s room. “The shower’s running,” he said.

“What?” she barked.

“The shower, she’s in the shower,” he said.

“What you doin’, Mr. Benny?” she asked.

“I’m just getting back,” he said. “I wanted to talk to you about something.”

“Move my basket, sit down there,” she said.

Boudreaux picked up a small basket of crochet projects, set it on the coffee table, and took a seat on the wicker loveseat. A nature documentary was on the TV. “Do you mind if I turn this down?” he asked.

“Turn what down?” she asked.

He picked up the remote and lowered the volume, then rested his elbows on his knees and looked at her. “I have a problem.”

“You got more than one,” she said matter-of-factly.

“That’s true. But I’m talking about Patrick,” he said.

Miss Evangeline made that little clicking sound with her tongue that she made when she was irritated. “That boy a fool,” she said.

Boudreaux nodded. “Yes. But he’s become a dangerous fool.”

“That boy a danger nobody but his own self,” she said.

“Do you remember the man they found in the burning boat? In the newspaper?”

Miss Evangeline looked over at him, her eyes squinting behind her thick lenses as she thought. “The drug dealer man. I say good riddance, me.”

“Yes. But I think he also tried to kill Maggie,” he said quietly.

Miss Evangeline stared at him a moment, and he looked away from her gaze, focused on the TV Guide on the coffee table.

“What he do it for?”

“It’s a long story,” he answered. “He’s trying to cover his tracks.”

“You don’t kill him already?” she asked.

“He’s been in Tallahassee since then, at some legal symposium,” Boudreaux said. “I haven’t seen him.”

“He ain’t all stupid, then,” she answered after a moment. “I be in Cuba, me, I done this. I don’t be around nowhere.”

“I think he’s losing it,” Boudreaux said.

“He losing what?”

Bennett tapped at one of his temples.

“That boy broke when you got him, Mr. Benny,” she said. “He already broke.”

“I’ve been thinking a lot lately about nature versus nurture,” he said.

“I don’t know what it mean,” she said.

“It means—”

“I don’t say I
need
to know what it mean,” she interrupted. “Don’t matter. That armadillo-lookin’ woman, she ruin them boy long ’fore you marry her. T’ree year old, he already ruin, think the moon rise out between his butt cheeks, him.”

“Craig’s not so bad,” Boudreaux said of his younger stepson, though he wondered if that was because Craig was barely part of the family anymore.

“That only ’cause he got no spine,” Miss Evangeline said. “She yank the spine right out
that
one early.”

Boudreaux sighed and looked over at her. “I’m obliged to fix this in some way.”

“What you do?” she asked.

“I don’t know. That’s why I’m back here talking to you,” Boudreaux said. “I want you to give me some advice, but not based on the fact that you don’t like him.”

“Like, don’t like, don’t matter, no,” she said. “What I always tell you?”

“Family,” he answered quietly. “Everything is for family.”

“For true,” she said. “You do what you got to do for your family, you.”

“It’s partly my fault.”

“Ain’t nothin’ Mr. Benny fault,” she snapped. “Boy do what he do. You fix it ’cause you got to.”

Boudreaux nodded, as Miss Evangeline squinted at the TV.

“Why these people talk so low?” she said. “I can’t understand nothin’ what they say.”

Boudreaux stared at the coffee table. “Pray for me,” he said quietly.

“I all the time pray for you,” she answered, looking at the TV. “Lord wore out from hearin’ ’bout Mr. Benny. These people talk like they don’t want me know what they say.”

Boudreaux picked up the remote and turned up the volume, then put it in her hands, kissed her temple, and headed for the door.

Maggie lay on the bed, the quilt thrown back and nothing but a sheet covering her. She listened to the steady
swish
of Coco’s breathing beside her, and the crickets and frogs competing for audience outside her open windows. Every now and then, something would make them go quiet, and she would hold her breath and listen for a creaking of wood that shouldn’t be there, or the snap of a twig. It was an old habit, and one she didn’t anticipate breaking.

She never heard anything out of place as she lay there, at least nothing more disturbing than her own thoughts.

For a woman of fairly strong thoughts and opinions, she’d had very little to say that night to Wyatt. She couldn’t justify driving off with Boudreaux. She couldn’t reconcile her actions of recent weeks with the woman and mother and cop she’d always thought she’d been. And while she’d been hurt and then angered by what Wyatt had said about her and David, once left alone, she had thought about that most of all.

It was like someone had taken the tarp off of something and shown her that she hadn’t really known what was underneath, like she’d thought it was a car and Wyatt had said that it was a boat. First she’d denied, because she knew better than anyone what her marriage was. But some slow moving tentacle had started swirling and undulating inside her until she’d realized, with a sharp intake of breath, that Wyatt hadn’t really been that far off.

She’d loved David, deeply, and still did. He occupied some place in almost all of her memories. But when she sifted through them, lying there in the bed that they had shared, she could not remember ever actually falling in love with him.

E
arly the next morning, Wyatt sat at his desk, a cold cup of coffee beside him.

He pecked at the keyboard of his computer, clicking from one page to the next, asking the computer to print out each page as he went. He’d have gotten to it the morning after Maggie had told him what Charlie Harper had said to her, if it hadn’t been for the Guatemalans.

When the printer finally stopped humming, he had a sheaf of papers in his hands. He divided them up by name.

The niggling thought had come to him when Maggie had told him. He’d remembered being frustrated that they’d not been able to find a connection between Rupert Fain, of recent burning boat fame, and Charlie Harper, the man who had tried to kill Maggie, and presumably succeeded with David.

It had reminded him of something poking at his mind from when he’d been in Gainesville, trying to find Fain after he’d melted his middleman, Myron Graham, into a pile of bones and patchwork leather. It was Myron Graham that had been niggling at him for the last few days.

He organized the printouts by name, dividing them into three small stacks. Rupert Fain, Myron Graham, Charlie Harper.

As far as anyone knew, Rupert Fain had never lived in Franklin County. But Charlie Harper had lived in Eastpoint right up until the moment that Wyatt had put a .40 caliber round in his chest. Myron Graham had lived in Eastpoint until 2009, then moved on to Gainesville, where he was hired by Rupert Fain and got on the path to a career as a chicken fried steak.

They had all done time, but not in the same facility or at the same time. There was a connection between Graham and Fain. But there was no known connection between Graham and Harper, or Harper and Fain.

Wyatt pulled the truncated, one-page arrest and conviction report from each stack and laid them in a neat row, then looked at each one. After a few minutes, he sighed.

There was a very simple reason why they couldn’t find a connection between Fain and Harper or Harper and Graham. There wasn’t one.

Wyatt stood up, grabbed his SO ball cap and Harper’s info sheet, and stalked out of the office.

Maggie tapped on the hotel room door, and Tomlinson opened it a moment later, smelling of hotel soap and with still-damp hair.

“Morning, Lieutenant,” he said as he stood back to let her in.

“Good morning, Agent Tomlinson,” she answered. She glanced over at the bedroom area, where Virgilio was sitting on the end of one of the made beds, wearing an outfit that Kyle had worn to her birthday dinner last year, when everything was normal. He was drinking a small carton of orange juice and watching Dora the Explorer, which Maggie found almost funny.

The blond female agent wasn’t there, but a young, prematurely balding man with glasses was sitting in an armchair near the front door.

“Do you mind if I say hello?” Maggie asked Tomlinson.

“No, not at all,” he said. “Go ahead.”

Maggie walked to the back of the suite and stopped by the bed. Virgilio glanced up at her, then looked back at the TV. “¡Hola, Virgilio!” Maggie said.

He looked back up at her. “¡Hola, señora!” he answered in a small voice.

“Me llama Maggie,” she said. “¿Te acuerdas?”
Do you remember?

The little boy shook his head slowly, and Maggie struggled for something to say now that she was there. I’m sorry? I care? She was a stranger; he didn’t care about either.

“¿Necesitas algo?”
Do you need anything?

“No,” he said politely.

Maggie nodded and watched Dora dancing with her irritating monkey for a moment while she tried to think of something else to say. She came up empty.

“Okay, está bien,” she said finally. “Nos vemos.”
See you later.

Virgilio looked up at her, but didn’t reply, and Maggie walked back over to Tomlinson. He was sitting at the small round table near the window, and she sat down in the other chair.

“So, here’s where we are,” he said. “We got people in Guatemala in contact with the kid’s grandparents. His father’s people,” he added. “We don’t have a single ID for anyone else on that boat besides Virgilio’s family.”