What Washes Up (8 page)

Gray Redmond answered on the second ring. “Hey, Sunshine,” he said, his voice at once soft and gravelly.

“Hey, Daddy,” Maggie said. “Are you working?”

“No, I’m home this morning.”

“Are the kids up yet?”

“I’m sure Sky will be up at the crack of dinner, but Kyle’s up,” her father answered. “We’re going to do some fishing out back. Are you at the marina?”

“Yeah.”

“You been there all night?”

“Yes.”

“It’s a horrible thing.”

“Yes,” she said again. “Can I come over and have some coffee?”

“Door’s unlocked, Sunshine.”

M
aggie’s parents lived on a stretch of Hwy 98, just a couple of miles outside town, right on the bay. They’d bought it back when such property was both available and affordable. Though that part of the road was a mixture of older, modest houses and fishing related businesses, the property today would have been way out of her parents’ reach. Her mother had been a homemaker her entire adult life, her father an oysterman.

Maggie drove down the gravel drive that ran through the deep, narrow lot, and parked in front of the pale yellow house where she had been raised. She found her parents in the kitchen at the back of the house.

“Morning, you guys,” she said.

“Morning, baby,” he Dad said.

“Oh, honey, you look wrecked,” Georgia Redmond said, and got up from the table.

Georgia was one of those women who was strikingly beautiful without doing a single thing to enhance her beauty. With thick, dark brown hair that curled around her shoulders, large green eyes, and a tiny waist, she still turned men’s heads at fifty-eight, even though she genuinely never noticed. She had been madly in love with tall, skinny, soft-spoken Gray since high school.

Maggie accepted a hug from her mother, breathing in the comforting scents of gardenia, cotton and coconut oil, then Georgia pulled out a chair.

“Sit down honey, and I’ll get you some coffee,” Georgia said. “Are you hungry?”

“No, thanks, Mom.” Maggie sat down heavily in the yellow-flowered chair that she’d occupied for nearly every meal of her youth.

“We heard what happened on the radio,” Gray said. “What’s going on down there?”

Maggie sighed. “We found a little boy. Alive. He’s the only one.”

“Oh, bless his heart,” Georgia said, setting Maggie’s cup down in front of her.

“Yeah. I wanted to ask Kyle if it was okay for me to take him some of his old clothes, maybe a toy or something.”

“He’s just in the bathroom,” Georgia said. “What’s going to happen to the boy?”

Maggie shrugged and shook her head. “I have no idea. Homeland Security is in charge of everything. I would imagine they’ll get him home, sooner or later.”

“What about his family?” Gray asked. “Were they out there, too?”

“He lost his parents and his little sister.”

They sat in silence for a moment, while Maggie stirred milk and sugar into her coffee.

“Hey, Mom.”

Maggie looked up and smiled as Kyle walked in. He was ten years old, but looked much younger. He had David’s slight build, glossy black hair, and long, thick lashes. When she looked at him these days, her heart couldn’t decide whether to wither or bloom.

“Hey, baby,” she said, as he gave her neck a quick hug. “I hear you and Granddad are going fishing.”

“Yeah, we’re gonna catch something for lunch,” Kyle said, as he grabbed some toast and bacon from a plate on the counter. “Granddad says I have to do one thing outside before I can play Minecraft.”

“We figured you’d been up all night, Maggie,” Georgia said. “So we thought we’d just keep them here for the day, let you get some rest.”

Maggie nodded and watched Kyle, her safe, privileged child, sit down at the other end of the table.

“That’s really sad about those people,” he said. “Did they have an accident?”

“We don’t know yet,” Maggie answered. “There was a little boy who survived. He’s a little younger than you. He doesn’t have anything, nothing at all. Do you mind if I give him some things of yours, maybe some things you don’t want anymore?”

Kyle thought a moment, staring into the air. “You think he likes Marvel comics?”

“I don’t know. He can’t read English.”

Kyle shrugged. “He can look at the pictures. Take him some.”

“Okay. I’m going to take him some of your old clothes that I keep meaning to take to the church,” she said.

Kyle munched on a piece of bacon. “You should take him some Transformers. Take him Bumblebee, he’s everybody’s favorite.”

“I thought you were keeping them as a collection,” Maggie said.

Kyle shrugged. “They’re just sitting there. Take him Starscream, too, so he has a bad guy.”

“Which one is Starscream?”

“Geez, Mom,” Kyle said. He softened his eye roll with a grin. “Just take him some big silver guys.”

Maggie tried to smile back, but she felt like someone had scraped her soul with sandpaper. She took a drink of her coffee and tried not to look as bad as she felt.

Kyle wrapped his bacon up in his toast and stood. “Ready, Granddad?”

“Keep your shirt on, I’m coming,” Gray answered as he stood and stretched. He kissed the top of Maggie’s head. “Go get some sleep, Sunshine.”

“I will, Daddy.”

Gray and Kyle went out the sliding door onto the back deck, and Maggie watched them grab poles, the tackle box, and a bucket, and head through the back yard to the bay.

“Honey, you want to just stay here and lie down in the guest room?” Georgia asked, frowning.

Maggie looked at her mother and sighed. “I can’t. I need to take care of Coco and the chickens. And take this little boy some stuff.”

“Do you promise you’ll go home and go to bed afterwards?”

“Yeah, I will.”

“You look so sad.”

Maggie gave her mother half a smile, then looked down into her coffee. “Mom, you remember when you told me that you and Daddy almost didn’t get married, but you got a second chance?”

Georgia blinked a couple of times, then took a sip of her coffee. “Sure.”

“I think I might have blown it with Wyatt,” Maggie said softly.

Georgia put her coffee mug down. “With Wyatt? Aw, no, sweetie, I doubt that. Why?”

“I kept something from him. Something important, but please don’t ask me what.”

“And now you’ve told him?”

Maggie nodded, and Georgia ran a finger around the edge of her cup. “Well, I’ve found that it’s a lot easier for a man to recover from the truth than it is for him to feel lied to. Wyatt’s a strong man, Maggie. Whatever it is, just give him some time.”

“I’m afraid that I killed something before it really got started, Mom.”

Georgia looked at Maggie for a moment. “Honey, I just don’t think Wyatt scares that easily. You’re probably still going to have to deal with falling in love with him.”

Maggie gave a nervous laugh. “Mom, I’m not in love with him.”

Georgia put a hand on top of her daughter’s. “You will be,” she said simply.

Maggie got out of the Jeep, and could hear Coco going insane inside. The poor dog had been in all night, and Maggie hoped there weren’t any surprises waiting for her. As she headed for the stairs, Stoopid, delighted that Coco wasn’t available to impede his progress, pell-melled over from behind a hibiscus.

Maggie raised a hand to the rooster. “I already heard,” she said, and he seemed to deflate a little He stumbled to a stop a few feet away, let her have one of his unimpressive crows, then ruffled his neck feathers and headed over to the chicken yard.

Once inside, Maggie rubbed away Coco’s impending cardiac arrest, apologized several times, then let the dog out and headed for Kyle’s room. She stopped by the foot of Kyle’s bed and looked around her, really looking for the first time in a while.

They had never had a lot. David had worked like a dog as a shrimper, and she had worked her way up in the Sheriff’s Office, but they’d never made more than they’d needed. Vacations were cheap and close by, sneakers were serviceable rather than celebrity-endorsed, and the kids worked hard to earn their modest allowances.

But Kyle had so much, when Maggie looked at his situation through the lens of the last several hours. His Xbox had been a Christmas gift from her parents, but he had one. There were three shelves of books, and more action figures, board games, and videos than she could count. She wasn’t sure what was there, but she knew there was food in the fridge. Kyle had gone through tragedy, but he had never been hungry and he had never been alone.

Maggie pulled Kyle’s backpack from last year out of his closet, and put in the Bumblebee action figure and a couple of big silver guys she hoped were villains. She added some comic books from the bottom of Kyle’s stack, then rummaged through his desk drawer and gathered a pack of markers and a pad of paper. On her way out of the room, she grabbed an unopened pack of underwear that she’d bought on sale for the coming school year. She wasn’t sure they’d fit, but they were better than nothing.

After putting together a few changes of clothes that Kyle had outgrown, and feeding the chickens and Coco, Maggie wandered around the house, finding a few other odd things to take to the little boy, then she climbed back into the Jeep, blinked her scratchy eyes a few times against the full morning sun, and headed back into town.

The Homeland Security team had opted to stay at the Bayview hotel rather than run back and forth to Tallahassee. The hotel was a two-story brick building right on Scipio Creek, the channel of the Apalachicola River that eventually opened into the bay. The rooms were accessed by an outdoor hallway right over the marina, and Maggie kept her eyes averted from it as she knocked on the door to room 212. David’s shrimp boat had been blown up just a short way down the creek, and Maggie had yet to be able to look at it without feeling like someone was scooping out her insides with a spoon.

The female agent from earlier opened the door. She was about Maggie’s height, but only in her late twenties, with an efficiently short cut to her blond hair and no sign of makeup.

“Lieutenant Redmond?” she asked quietly.

“Yes.”

“He’s sleeping, but come on in,” the agent said, stepping back.

Maggie stepped inside, Kyle’s Star Wars backpack in one hand, two grocery bags of clothes in the other.

The agent closed the door quietly. “I’m Gerri Winters.”

Maggie nodded at her and looked toward the back of the room. The front of the room held a small sitting area and a kitchenette. Beyond it, separated by a curtain that had been left open, was a sleeping area with two full-sized beds. There was a very small lump in one of them.

“I brought him some clothes and things, a few toys,” Maggie said softly. “I wasn’t sure what you’d have time to grab for him, so there’s a toothbrush and a pack of toothpaste in here, too.”

“Thanks. One of us was going to run out later, but this is helpful.”

“How’s he doing?”

The agent shrugged. “We talked to him for a little bit, then just let him go to bed. He was asleep before he put his head down.”

Maggie nodded. “Should I just put these things in there?”

Gerri nodded. “Yeah, just put them on top of the dresser.”

Maggie walked back to the sleeping area, gently set the grocery bags on top of a cheap oak dresser next to the bed where Virgilio was sleeping, then propped the backpack on the floor next to it.