Awash (The Forgotten Coast Florida Suspense Series Book 6) (17 page)

When Maggie and Miss Evangeline pulled into Zoe’s driveway a short time later, Paulette was sitting on the front steps, drinking coffee and smoking.

Maggie told Miss Evangeline she’d just be a minute, and walked over to Paulette.

“Hey, Paulette. I just thought I’d drop in and check on Zoe.”

“She’s sleepin’,” the woman answered. “She had a rough night.”

“Is everything okay?”

The other woman drilled the cigarette into a small pail filled with cat litter. “Motion sensor went off last night,” she said. “When I went out to look, it was just a possum goin’ across the back yard.”

Maggie let out a long breath and propped her hands on her hips as Paulette lit another cigarette.

“Girl was so scared, she couldn’t even yell,” Paulette said. “Woke me up bangin’ on my wall.”

Maggie felt a tremendous sense of guilt that she knew didn’t necessarily belong to her, but she claimed it anyway. “Which light?”

“Her bedroom window,” Paulette said.

Maggie started for the side yard. “I’ll be right back.”

Maggie walked around to the back yard. The kitchen, bathroom and Zoe’s bedroom windows were all on the back wall of the duplex, Zoe’s the last one she came to.

She stopped just to the side of the window and peered at the dirt beneath it, but she and her father had both been all over that spot the day before, and it was a mess of footprints, one on top of another.

She looked at Zoe’s window, which was covered with mini-blinds, and said a silent prayer for the girl to get some decent rest. Her thoughts were interrupted by the vibration of her phone in her back pocket. She pulled it out and saw it was Wyatt, and didn’t know if she was more nervous or relieved.

“Hey,” she said when she answered.

“Hey. Where are you?”

“I’m at Zoe’s. Her aunt says one of the motion sensors went off last night, so I’m looking around. Paulette says she saw a possum, but I didn’t think it would be that sensitive.”

“What motion sensors?”

“Daddy and Sky and I put some up yesterday,” she said.

“Good,” he said.

There was a long, unusual silence and Maggie was trying to come up with something to say when Wyatt finally spoke.

“Ignoring your calls was childish, but I needed some time to stop being mad,” he said quietly.

“You don’t owe me an apology, Wyatt,” she said.

“I didn’t give you one. I have every right to be mad, but I acted like an ass,” he said. “I’m only sorry for that part.”

“Well…” Maggie didn’t know if she was supposed to apologize, accept his non-apology or just agree with him. “Are you still mad?”

“Yes, but less so,” Wyatt said. “Boudreaux and I had a beer together yesterday and traded death threats. That helped me get some of it out.”

“What?”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said.

“You don’t trade death threats with Boudreaux!” Maggie said.

“You can,” Wyatt said. “Although, mine wasn’t nearly as smooth as his.”

“Why did he threaten you?” Maggie said.

“I’m not certain, but I think it had something to do with telling him I’d kill him,” Wyatt answered.

“For what?”

“For whatever presented itself,” Wyatt said.

“Wyatt, he brought a knife to a gunfight and won,” Maggie said stupidly. It had popped into her head.

“Yeah, I know,” Wyatt said. “It’s one of the few things I actually like about him.”

“Crap,” Maggie said.

“Let’s move past that,” Wyatt said. “What have you got going on today?”

“I’m taking Stoopid to the vet,” Maggie answered. “Then I have to take Miss Evangeline to the Soda Fountain. Apparently Thursday is ice cream day. I might call the kids, see if they want to meet us after school.”

“So I’m the only one who doesn’t get ice cream,” Wyatt said. “Because I threatened the mad dog killer whose nanny you’re babysitting.”

“Would you like ice cream?”

“I would.”

“I’ll call you when I get out of the vet. What are you doing?”

“I’m running down a couple of guys in Eastpoint who have taken a liking to joint flashings, then I’m working on a line-up for Zoe. I’ll set it up for tomorrow,” he answered.

“Okay,” Maggie said.

“Okay,” Wyatt said.

“Well, I’ll see you,” Maggie said.

“See you later,” he said, then disconnected.

She was halfway across the back yard when her phone buzzed again.

“Real couples say ‘I love you’ before they hang up the phone,” Wyatt said.

“Okay,” she said.

“I love you,” he said.

“I love you, too,” she answered.

“We’ll probably get the hang of it,” he said, then hung up again.

M
iss Evangeline grimaced all the way down Maggie’s dirt road, bouncing and jerking and holding onto the door handle, even though Maggie was doing 12mph. The old lady smiled, though, if the tectonic shifting of her features was any indication, once they pulled to a stop in front of the house.

“Look here this place,” Miss Evangeline said. “Pretty.”

“Thank you,” Maggie said. “I’ll just be a second.”

She reached into the back of the Jeep and grabbed an old beach towel, then got out of the car just as Coco came running down the stairs to meet her. Maggie waited for her, then rubbed her belly as she threw herself into the grass at Maggie’s feet.

“That a Catahoula dog,” Miss Evangeline said through her window.

“Yes,” Maggie said. “Half Lab.”

“Lou’siana dog,” the old woman said.

“We got her on vacation in Grand Isle,” Maggie said, as she watched Stoopid throw himself down the deck stairs like a bag of broken chopsticks.

Miss Evangeline cooed at Coco in what Maggie assumed was French, and Coco wagged over to the Jeep and sat, smiling up at the old lady. Maggie waited for Stoopid, the towel in her hands. He stopped within a few feet of her, flapped a few times, coughed out one of his crows, then commenced to peck at his chest. Maggie crept toward him, and he circled around her before returning his attention to his feathers.

“Somethin’ wrong the boy chicken,” Miss Evangeline piped up.

“I know,” Maggie said quietly, slipping toward him again. “He’s going to the vet.”

She dropped the towel down onto Stoopid, who flapped and clucked and coughed as she folded his legs underneath him and wrapped him like a burrito. Once he was snugly wrapped, with nothing but his head sticking out, he calmed down.

Maggie told Coco to go upstairs, then she got back into the Jeep and looked at Miss Evangeline. “Can you hold him?”

Miss Evangeline looked at her like she’d asked her to hold a bomb, then reached out and took the bundle, laid it on her lap. Maggie started the Jeep.

“Back where I come from, chicken broke, he don’t go the doctor,” she said. “He go the soup pot.”

Maggie sighed, turned the Jeep around and headed back to the road.

They spent almost two hours in the waiting room, during which time Miss Evangeline diagnosed all of the animals and Stoopid had seven nervous breakdowns. In the end, they only spent ten minutes in the exam room, where Stoopid was found to have mites, mostly likely because he wouldn’t leave the house long enough to take a dirt bath. It was also posited that he was a little high-strung, even for a rooster. Maggie was sent home with some mite spray and Stoopid was sent home wearing a miniature cone of shame. He seemed so demoralized by it that Maggie felt like she should have been given one, too.

She and Miss Evangeline made it to the Soda Fountain on Market Street just after school got out, and were shortly met by Sky and Kyle, who seemed somewhat charmed by Miss Evangeline. Maggie couldn’t tell for sure, but she thought maybe it was mutual.

They took their ice cream cones outside so that Maggie could be within crowing distance of Stoopid. It was cool enough outdoors for him to be in the car a few minutes with the window cracked, but she’d let him out of the towel, and she imagined all manner of damage to her interior if he thought he’d been trapped and abandoned.

When Wyatt called to say he was on his way over the bridge, Maggie went inside to order his ice cream.

Market Street was fairly busy for a Thursday, owing mostly to out-of-towners who had come for the seafood festival, which started tomorrow. Passerby weaved around the small picnic table on the sidewalk where the kids and Miss Evangeline ate their ice cream, and Stoopid kept one eyeball glued to the window, ever alert for interlopers.

The two boys who approached from Tamara’s on the corner were in their early twenties. Their demeanor, all swagger and snicker, suggested they were at least of beer-drinking age. They were nearly abreast of both the picnic table and the Jeep when Stoopid hacked out something that could have been a greeting or an alarm.

“Crap, dude, check it out,” one of the boys said, and they veered off the sidewalk and over to the passenger side of the Jeep.

The other boy, all over-styled hair and arrogant grin, laughed and tapped on the window. “Dude, free lunch,” he said to his friend, as Stoopid tossed out a barrage of either news or insults.

“Hey!” Sky called over to them. “Leave him alone.”

The kid at the window just grinned over at her, but his friend gave Sky an appreciative smile that wasn’t appreciated. “Well, hey there,” he said.

Sky got up as the other boy stuck his fingers through the cracked window, clucking at the rooster. “Back off,” she said, walking between the two boys.

“Forget the chicken, man,” the second boy said. “Check out the chick.”

The first boy looked over at Sky and did a double take. “Hey, girl,” he said, smiling.

Sky glared at him. “Get away from my mom’s car, dude.”

“If I do, will you come with me?” he asked, grinning.

Kyle stood up, and Miss Evangeline stood with him. “Stay put, little boy,” she said. Then she yelled over at the two young men. “Go on, fool!”

The second of the two boys smiled over at Miss Evangeline, then back at Sky. “That your mom?” he asked.

“Get lost,” Sky said, then turned around as the first boy tugged on her ponytail. “Don’t touch me.”

“Get away the girl, boy!” Miss Evangeline called. Kyle made to move forward, and Miss Evangeline put a hand on his shoulder.

“You wanna come hang out with us, sweetie?” the first boy asked Sky. “Party a little bit?”

“I got your party right here,” the second boy said, resting a hand on the crotch of his jeans.

Sky looked down at his hand then back at his grin. “That looks like the kind of party a girl has to bring her own entertainment to,” she said.

The boy’s smile left his face as his friend laughed, and he tucked a finger under Sky’s chin. “You think you’re pretty funny, don’t you?” he asked.

Kyle tossed his ice cream to the sidewalk as Sky slapped the boy’s hand away, but Miss Evangeline grabbed him by the shirt and yanked him back, then reached into the pocket of her house dress.

Maggie walked out of the Soda Fountain just in time to register that two men were talking to her daughter, then watch one of them drop out of sight. She ran past her son and Miss Evangeline and around the Jeep to see the young man flat on his face on the asphalt, the two probes of a Taser attached to the space between his shoulder blades.

“What the hell is going on?” Maggie demanded.

The other man, a boy really, just gaped at her.

“Crap,” Sky said, a look of wonder on her face.

Maggie was about to restate her question when Wyatt’s cruiser stopped suddenly behind Maggie’s Jeep.