Awash (The Forgotten Coast Florida Suspense Series Book 6)
Read Awash (The Forgotten Coast Florida Suspense Series Book 6) Online
Authors: Dawn Lee McKenna
| Awash (The Forgotten Coast Florida Suspense Series Book 6) |
| Dawn Lee McKenna |
| The Sweet Tea Press (2016) |
“Bones don’t float, no.”
In the quiet, coastal town of Apalachicola, the past is never far behind, and secrets don’t always stay buried.
When a young girl is attacked, Lt. Maggie Redmond draws on her own experience as a rape survivor to give the girl the help that she herself never got, but in the process finds herself doubting her judgement, her commitment to the law, and who she believes herself to be.
Maggie’s also increasingly confused about her feelings for town crime lord Bennet Boudreaux. If she really loves Sheriff Wyatt Hamilton, why is she so unwilling to walk away from her strange friendship with this enigmatic man with the startling blue eyes? What is the secret from the past that connects them?
The answers will turn Maggie’s world upside-down and make her question everything she thought she knew about herself and her past.
In her efforts to rescue a defenseless young girl, Maggie finds that maybe she is the one who needs rescuing.
Contents
For my fellow survivors
Touched but unbroken
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and for
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F-100 Lt. Jonathan Riley 1973-2014
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and
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F-112 Deputy Quinnaland Rhodes 1968-2012
who served Franklin County bravely and faithfully to the end
A
brisk breeze that bordered on wind blew through the leaves of the old oak trees in the yard, and passed noisily through and around the palmettos and younger oaks in the woods across the street.
The old glass jalousie windows were open, and the girl sat on the loveseat just beneath the living room window so that she could hear the leaves more clearly, feel an occasional finger of cool, dry air tickle the back of her cocoa-colored neck.
There weren’t many true autumn days in Apalachicola, FL, and perhaps this was one reason that those days were the girl’s favorites. On this night, halfway between midnight and morning, the girl could close her eyes and believe that she was in one of those places she’d seen on TV, those places where the ground was covered with golden leaves and people had bonfires and cut their own Christmas trees. People with parents and cozy houses and clean, friendly dogs.
The girl closed the fat anatomy book she’d been reading, using her spiral notebook as a bookmark, and pushed it onto the cushion beside her. Usually, she could go to bed once her aunt came home from work or the bar, once she and the cats weren’t alone in the house. But tonight, she knew that sleep wasn’t going to come. Some nights were just like that, and she would study or read or watch something on TV until the sun came up and she felt tired enough to go to bed.
Maisy, her aunt’s gray tiger cat, rubbed up against the girl’s ankle and meowed. She needed to go out. Aunt May wouldn’t have a litter box in the house, so the two cats had been trained to go out in the yard. Maisy meowed again, and then was joined by the white cat, Sophie, who sat and regarded the girl impatiently.
“Alright, hold on,” the girl said quietly.
Aunt May’s bedroom door had been shut for more than an hour and the girl knew she’d gone to bed too drunk to be awakened easily. She tried not to make much noise anyway, as she stood up and walked through the open living room, the two cats running alongside and then ahead of her.
The living room and dining area were all of one piece, with the small kitchen off to the right. The back door lined up exactly with the front. The girl turned the cheap little doorknob lock, then opened the door just wide enough for the two cats to take their time passing through it.
The girl looked out at the dark back yard, such as it was. A space that was mostly sand, with rebellious patches of stiff grass popping up here and there. Several hundred feet across the yard was the back of a brick duplex identical to the girl’s, with nothing to distinguish one yard from the other.
From where she stood, the girl could see a slice of the woods across the street to the right. There were no streetlights on the corner where her duplex sat, and the woods were just a darker mass against an already dark canvas. Streetlights were a waste of money in the public housing, she supposed. People would do what they did, dark or light, but the neighborhood really wasn’t that bad.
She closed her eyes for just a moment, breathed in the crisp air and savored the sound of the wind through the leaves. Then she closed the door quietly and went back to the loveseat to see if she could find something on TV while the cats did their business.
She was flipping through the channels, hoping for an interesting documentary or good old movie in between the late night infomercials, when she heard a new sound, one so out of place and inappropriate that it made the hair stand up on her arms.
Through the open window in the dining area, over the sound of the rustling leaves, she heard footfalls on the concrete pavers leading to the back door. It was the unlikely but unmistakable sound of hard-soled shoes, moving steadily and purposefully toward the door. The door that she suddenly realized she’d neglected to lock again.
The sound was so unexpected that she froze there on the loveseat, her widening eyes fastened firmly on the flimsy little doorknob lock, the one that was pointing the wrong way to be useful.
In six seconds, everything she knew, everything she was, would be changed forever. She could do nothing for those six seconds but hold her breath and wait for them to pass.
Maggie kicked violently at the covers until her legs were free, then sat straight up in bed.
She closed her eyes as she took several deep, calming breaths. She felt a weight fall upon the mattress, heard the jangling of Coco’s collar tags, and the rustling of the leaves outside her window. She’d left it open for the cool breeze and the fresh air, and she felt a chill as that breeze landed upon the skin of her neck, slightly damp from the terror of her dream.
Until last summer, she’d gone a few years without having her memories invade her sleep. She’d been free again for the last couple of months, and those months of peaceful slumber made tonight’s nightmare freshly frightening.
She gave Coco a quick rub on the snout to reassure her, then slid her legs over the side of the bed. She put her elbows on her knees and her face in her hands, willing her heartbeat to slow, her breathing to be less shallow. She listened to the dry rustling of the leaves outside and realized it was fall. Overnight, it had become November. That must be why she’d had the dream.
From force of habit, she reached over and picked up her cell phone and her Glock from the nightstand, and stood up on the cool hardwood floor. It was only four a.m., but she knew she wouldn’t be going back to bed.
She padded out to the living room, Coco tapping along behind her. Half-Lab and half-Catahoula Parish Leopard hound, Coco passed Maggie and ambled to the front door, then sat down and waited expectantly. Maggie unlocked and opened the door for her, watched as she made her way down the deck stairs, then closed and locked the door. She never failed to lock the door.
She walked into the small kitchen off of the living room, got a glass of water from the kitchen tap. There was a rustling noise outside the window and Maggie’s lungs had already closed up by the time she saw the silhouette of her rooster, Stoopid, as he clumsily landed on the outside sill of the window above the sink. He hacked and coughed through the screen.
Maggie squashed the impulse to shoot him right off the sill for frightening her. Instead, she yanked out the sprayer and shot some cold water through the screen. He half fell, half flounced from his perch, and Maggie leaned against the counter, took another deep breath, and finished her water.
She was setting the glass in the sink when her cell phone rang. She snatched it up from the counter. She recognized Deputy Dwight Shultz’s phone number.
“Hey, Dwight,” she said.
“Hey, uh, Maggie,” Dwight with his perpetual hesitance. “Sorry to wake you up.”
“I was awake,” she answered. “What’s up?”
“Uh, well, Apalach PD called us out on a sexual assault over here on 12th Street,” Dwight answered. Maggie could hear several male voices in the background. “The victim’s aunt called PD, but the girl is asking for you.”
Maggie felt a slight twinge of nausea in her stomach, and thought for a moment that she might still be dreaming.
“Who’s the victim?” Maggie asked.
“Zoe Boatwright.”
“I know that name,” she said, thumbing through a mental Rolodex.
“African-American girl, fourteen years old,” Dwight offered.
“Zoe Boatwright,” Maggie repeated. “She was a shortstop when I coached the Angels.”
“Okay.”
“I haven’t seen her in years,” Maggie said. “She was in first or second grade then.”
“Well, she’s asking for you,” Dwight said. The background noise faded somewhat. Dwight must have been moving away from the scene.
Maggie got a blurry vision of a skinny little girl with almond-shaped eyes and a gap in her big smile. The heat of rage warmed Maggie’s insides and she pushed it down. An angry cop could be very effective; an enraged one was useless or worse.
“PD wants us to take it?” she asked.
“They were thinking that anyway,” Dwight answered. “They’re kind of covered up.”
“You’ll have to run it through Wyatt,” Maggie said, meaning their boss, Sheriff Wyatt Hamilton.
“I, uh,” Dwight started quietly, “I don’t suppose he’s handy?”
“Well, I don’t know if he’s handy or not,” Maggie said a little sharply. “But I assume he’s at home in bed.”
“Uh, yeah. Sorry,” Dwight said, and Maggie felt bad for snapping. But it bothered her that those who knew about her and Wyatt assumed they were sleeping together.
“Forget it, Dwight,” she said. “I’m sorry. Do me a favor and give him a call. I’ll get dressed and be over there in about twenty minutes, okay?”
“Okay, sure thing.”
“What’s the address?”
“Public housing. 202 12th Street, right on the corner of 2nd Avenue,” Dwight answered.
“Okay. See you.”
Maggie thumbed the disconnect icon, dropped the phone to the counter and blew out a breath.
