Low Tide (4 page)

Maggie chose not to answer. Instead, she quickly made her way over to the dining room table, mainly in the hope that this would make the bedrooms Wyatt’s problem by default.

She pulled a blue pair of Latex gloves from her jeans pocket and slid them on, then poked at a pile of both opened and unopened mail. There were quite a few credit card statements, most of them still sealed. A few pieces of junk mail. Next to the open laptop sat a legal pad with the top few pages folded under.

Maggie heard Wyatt move from the kitchen to the back of the house as she looked at the open page of the legal pad. There were notes about several flight numbers and departure times, but no destinations. The dates were all for tomorrow.

Maggie flipped the pad to the first few pages, but they were filled with doodles, mainly arrows and stars. Apparently, Gregory had been doing some thinking. She wondered if it had hurt. There was no suicide note, although several pages had been ripped off of the pad.

She pressed the power button on the laptop and looked around the room while she waited for it to boot. There was a stuffed marlin over the fireplace, but other than a few rows of liquor bottles on a sideboard, the only other attempt at décor was a picture of Gregory on a fishing boat, flanked by Bennett Boudreaux’s two sons.

Patrick Boudreaux was the Assistant State’s Attorney and his younger brother Craig made his living in criminal defense. The joke was that Boudreaux had covered all his bases when he sent his boys off to law school.

The Windows screen appeared on the laptop with a jingle, showed the user as Gregory, and politely requested the password. Maggie hit “Enter” just in case, but Windows insisted. She turned the power back off as Wyatt came back from the back of the house.

“Find a note?” he asked her.

“No, but I can’t get into the laptop,” she answered.

“We’ll take it back to the department and see what Jake can do with it,” Wyatt said, referring to the department’s computer guy.

Maggie pulled the power cord out of the wall and wound it into a loop.

“Well, the only dirty dishes in the sink are coffee cups, there’s nothing in the fridge but condiments and there are two empty bottles of Wild Turkey in the trash can,” Wyatt said.

He moved over to the dining table and poked at one of the piles of mail.

“Despite the optimism demonstrated in the three-thousand condoms I found in the nightstand, it would appear that our boy didn’t entertain anyone other than himself. At least, not here.”

Maggie swallowed a bolus of nausea as she closed the laptop and set the cord on top, then walked past Wyatt and down the short hallway to the back. She ignored the bedroom on the right and stepped into the bathroom at the end of the hall.

The bathroom was small and done in light blue tile, probably from the 1950s. A matching pedestal sink sat by the door. Maggie gingerly toed aside a discarded towel and stepped over to open the medicine cabinet.

Aside from a razor, over-the-counter allergy meds, and a tube of toothpaste, there was a half-full bottle of paroxetine hydrochloride prescribed a year ago by a doctor in Tallahassee. Maggie thought it interesting that he’d gone an hour and a half away to get his antidepressant.

She also wondered if the fact that this particular med often made it hard to orgasm was the reason why it was still half-full. Then she felt another push of nausea and wondered what Wyatt would think if she threw up in the sink.

She took the prescription bottle back with her to the living room. Wyatt was looking at the legal pad.

“Looks like our guy was thinking about going somewhere tomorrow,” he said as she came in. “Kind of odd. If it was suicide, you think he decided wherever he was going wasn’t gonna be far enough?”

Maggie pulled a baggie from her back pocket and held the bottle up before dropping it in.

“What’s that?” Wyatt asked her.

“Generic Paxil,” she answered. “A year old, from some doctor in Tallahassee. Doesn’t look like he took much of it.”

“Long way to go for some antidepressants,” Wyatt said.

Maggie nodded.

“I’ll call the doctor, see if he can tell us about that,” she said.

“We can talk to Boudreaux,” he said.

“That, too.”

Wyatt picked up the laptop.

“We done, you think?” he asked.

“Yeah, for now at least.” She wanted outside. “Grab the legal pad, too.”

Maggie headed for the door and Wyatt followed. While he locked up, she waited on the front path, grateful now for the heat and the sun.

“It’s almost one,” Wyatt said as they walked toward the driveway. “I can take this stuff back to Eastpoint if you want to grab a quick nap before your kids get home from school.”

She shook her head. “If I go to sleep now, I won’t be able to sleep tonight.”

“How about if I buy you lunch to make up for calling you in?” He set the laptop and legal pad on his roof and opened his door.

Maggie was pretty sure she’d rather lick a scorpion than put a bite of food in her mouth.

“Sure,” she answered.

“AJ’s?”

“Okay,” she told him as she got in her Jeep.

AJ’s Neighborhood Grill & Bar was on Fulton, also known as Martin Luther King. It was as nondescript a place as it could be and looked more like an old corner market than a restaurant. It was a local favorite though, much beloved for its soul food, particularly its fried chicken.

Most of the lunch crowd had come and gone, so many of the booths and oak tables in the large, plain space were empty. Maggie and Wyatt both ordered sweet tea and opted to skip the buffet. Wyatt ordered a Pimp Tight basket, a fried chicken breast and wing with a side of fries and green beans. Maggie asked for a small bowl of AJ’s famous mac and cheese without actually wanting it.

They made small talk while they waited for their food, first about the weather and then about the softball team Maggie coached and on which her sixteen-year old daughter Skylar played.

“How’s David doing these days?” Wyatt asked.

Maggie looked out the window at the gravel parking lot.

“I haven’t talked to him in a few weeks,” she said.

“Has he talked to the kids?”

“No,” she said.

Wyatt nodded, then leaned back in his seat as the young black waitress brought their food.

Maggie had divorced David four years earlier. They’d gone steady since fifth grade and gotten married the weekend after Maggie had graduated from the University of Florida. They’d been married for almost ten years when the BP oil spill had changed their lives.

Against Maggie’s better judgment, David had just taken out a large loan for a new shrimp boat. It was repossessed three months after the spill. After several months of no work and no income but hers, David had announced that he had a new job with a trucking company based in Panama City. In actuality, his new job had been running pot between the growers out in Tate’s Hell Forest and the buyers in Panama City. David had also started drinking.

David had done six months for simple possession last year. She had pretended to be just as surprised as Wyatt, her friends and her neighbors. The kids, her parents, and her younger brother Mason had known the reason for the divorce. Like her, they mourned the David they’d always known.

“So, I’ll go back to the office and have Jake look at the laptop, call this doctor in Tallahassee, see what he says,” Wyatt told her. “You go home and I’ll let you know if anything interesting turns up.”

“Okay,” she said, poking her spoon around in her macaroni.

“Are you eating that or just checking it for bones?”

Maggie pushed the dish in his direction.

“I’m too tired to be hungry,” she said.

Wyatt took a bite of her mac and cheese, his impressive eyebrows coming together as he frowned at her.

“Hard thing, working and raising kids alone,” he said.

Maggie shrugged with one shoulder and looked back out the window at nothing.

“But you’re a good woman and halfway decent-looking,” he said. “Maybe one day you’ll get married again.”

Maggie looked at him, but he was newly focused on his green beans. Looking at Wyatt usually made her smile. Sometimes, lately, it sent a warmth through her stomach, curling like smoke from the end of a cigarette. Today, it just made her sad.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I’m supposed to be alone.”

“I’d hold off betting on that,” he said to his beans.

M
aggie lived about five miles northwest of downtown Apalach, on the last gravel road that turned off Bluff Road before Bluff Road itself dead-ended in gravel. It was isolated and silent, save for the crickets, cicadas, and frogs.

The two acres on which Maggie’s house sat was shaped like a slice of pie, with the narrow tip ending in a dock right on the Apalachicola River. Across the river and on either side of Maggie were nothing but woods of slash pine, live oak and Tupelo.

Maggie parked the Jeep, got out, and stretched her back as Coco, her five-year old Catahoula Parish Leopard Hound, came bounding out from the back of the house. Her one rooster, Stoopid, was running close behind.

Stoopid veered off and headed toward the chicken coop while Coco did her full body wag and licked Maggie’s outstretched hands.

“Hey, baby,” Maggie said. “How’s my girl?”

She knelt down and buried her nose in Coco’s neck, breathing deeply of the soothing scents of dirt and brine and fur, then she stood and walked over to the raised beds that ran along one side of the chicken coop.

She’d spent the last two weeks on a murder case that had ended with a confession from the ex-husband, a nearly toothless old man with nicotine stained fingers and an inability to adjust to being alone. The garden showed her neglect. Sky and Kyle had tried to keep up, but Sky had final exams to study for. Now that it was the last day of school, maybe Maggie and the kids could get caught up, with the garden and with each other.

She pulled a few wizened pickling cucumbers from their vines and walked over to the small chicken yard, a shady area dominated by a little stilt chicken coop with a green tin roof, a replica of the family house that David and the kids had built six years ago, when everything was the way it was.

The hens, a conglomeration of White Silkies, Buff Orpingtons and Rhode Island Reds, all gathered at the fence while Maggie broke up the cukes and tossed them in. Stoopid, so named for his inability to tell time, flew up to the fence and then hopped in and joined his women.

“Come on, Coco,” Maggie said and she and her dog headed for the house.

Maggie’s grandfather on her daddy’s side had built the cypress house on stilts in the 1950s. Her parents had chosen to live in town, close to the marina, when they’d married and the house had eventually been given to Maggie and David when they’d wed. Its slightly ramshackle appearance belied the fact that it had withstood many a storm in its lifetime and was as solid as the day it was built.

Maggie walked up the flight of wooden stairs to the porch, Coco’s toenails and dog tags tapping behind her. The porch wrapped around the house and was screened in in back, off of the kitchen. It was Maggie’s favorite part of the house and she often sat back there in the evening, watching the sun set over her river.