Dead Wake (The Forgotten Coast Florida #5) (5 page)

“Guy named Bradford Wilson.”

“I knew Wilson. Sort of. He was friends with my grandparents.”

“Well, he sucked at documentation.” Wyatt flipped a few pages. “Anyway, he resigned in 1990 and was succeeded by my predecessor, Martin Vanick.”

“He moved somewhere a long time ago, but he might be dead by now.”

“No, but he probably wishes he was. Carol says he moved to Panama City Beach.”

“Ew.”

“Yeah. So, he’s old, but he’s still there. Got his number.”

“Does our dead man have family? I don’t know any Crawfords.”

“No kids, but he had a wife who never remarried. She’s in a nursing home over in Port St. Joe.”

“Well, we can’t talk to her until we know for sure that our body is Crawford.” Maggie’s chin lifted just slightly. “The whole thing about Boudreaux could be irrelevant.”

“It could, but it won’t be, because that’s the kind of luck you have.”

Maggie opted out of a retort, took a sip of her coffee instead. “So tell me the interesting thing we’re going back to, about the flower shop,” she said after a moment.

“Yeah, the flower shop,” Wyatt said. “Crawford owned it, but it wasn’t part of the seafood business. He owned two or three of those spaces. They’d been empty for years. He was having them remodeled so he could put a raw bar and some shops in there.”

“They were being remodeled when he went gone?”

“Yes.”

“Huh.”

“That’s what I said.” Wyatt took a hearty swallow of his coffee. “So the building wasn’t open. It was a construction site.”

“Why was that even in the file?”

“When Crawford first went missing, they checked the site out to make sure he hadn’t gone over there and gotten injured. But the theory was whatever happened, happened to him that night at his oyster business.”

“What about this altercation between Crawford and Boudreaux?”

“In the file. Have fun.” Wyatt checked the time on his cell phone. “I have to go talk to James about some robbery over in Eastpoint last night.”

He stood, and Maggie followed suit. As she squeezed past Wyatt to get to her desk chair, she caught a faint whiff of his cologne and just a hint of laundry detergent. He looked down at her as they passed each other, and he was so close, Maggie couldn’t help but glance through her open office door to make sure no one could see them so comfortable in each other’s space.

Wyatt reflexively glanced over his shoulder, then looked back at Maggie as she sat down in her chair. “Paranoia. Nature’s aphrodisiac.”

Maggie opened the file back up as Wyatt headed for the door. “You remember when I was in the hospital and you said you weren’t speaking to me?”

“Yes.”

“I resent that you haven’t made good on that yet.”

“You’re precious,” Wyatt said as he walked out.

Maggie took a long swallow of her coffee and flipped the thick file to the beginning.

Two hours, one and a half coffees, and three restroom breaks later, Maggie closed the file and leaned back in her chair, the fax image of Bennett Boudreaux in her hand. She’d referred to it several times as she’d read the contents of the case file. Boudreaux was probably the most quietly charismatic man she’d ever meant, and she thought so in a strictly platonic way, but the image of him as a man only five years older than her daughter was almost hypnotic. The fact that she couldn’t see the brilliant aquamarine of his eyes made no difference in how piercing those eyes were.

She didn’t want Boudreaux to be involved in this case. Over the summer, she had gone from a surprising and grudging respect for the man to a genuine though reluctant liking of him. However, what they’d gone through together during Hurricane Faye had borne in her a certain sense of gratitude and responsibility. Those were bad things for a law enforcement officer to feel toward a known criminal. She knew that, and while she wasn’t helpless to change it, she was unwilling. The man had been seriously injured while saving the lives of herself and her kids.

Maggie felt that itching at the edges of her frontal lobe again, and she sat up, leaned on her desk, and started tapping a pen on the dented metal. After a moment, it came to her, and she almost wished it hadn’t.

August 14th. The day Bennett Boudreaux had saved her life.

B
ennett Boudreaux lived in the heart of Apalach’s historic district, a neighborhood that surprised many visitors with its combination of cracker cottages and gingerbread Victorians, brick colonials and Greek Revivals. Apalach was a lot more northern than most tourists expected it to be, a result of the southern migration of entrepreneurs eager to succeed in the cotton trade.

Boudreaux’s home was a white, plantation-style home with a wraparound porch, set on an unusually large corner lot. It would have commanded more than a million dollars if it was on the market, but the house was a lot like Boudreaux; modest roots dressed in understated elegance.

Boudreaux sat at the table in the kitchen, bathed in the early morning sunlight that streamed through the original twelve-pane windows. He stirred pure cane sugar into his four-dollar per can chicory coffee, which had been served in a forty-dollar Wedgewood cup, then took his first sip of the day.

At the cypress island in the middle of the kitchen, his cook and housekeeper, Amelia, stood over a cast iron skillet in which gently sizzled one perfectly round over-medium egg. One slice of maple bacon sat on a small plate next to the stove. Amelia was tall and large-boned, and her tea-colored Creole skin made it difficult to judge her age, though Boudreaux knew her to be sixty-three; just one year older than he was himself.

Amelia had worked for Boudreaux for decades. Her mother, Miss Evangeline, had been his father’s housekeeper and nanny, and the only mother-figure Boudreaux had known. Boudreaux’s father had moved to Apalach in the late sixties, when Boudreaux was still an adolescent. He’d left Boudreaux with Miss Evangeline, then fired her when Boudreaux had gone off to Tulane.

As soon as Boudreaux had started becoming successful at his own seafood business, he’d hired them both back, and when his father died in 1982, he’d taken over his father’s business and brought the two women with him. He’d suggested many times over the last few years that Amelia might want to join her mother in retiring, but Amelia had refused rather indignantly. It was unspoken, but understood, that she and her mother would always have their cottage in the back yard, but Amelia thought there should only be ‘one useless color woman to the house.’

Boudreaux opened up the newspaper and saw that the lead story, accompanied by a picture larger than his head, was about something going on at the florist downtown. The photograph showed a paramedic truck pulling out of the alley behind the shop.

Boudreaux scanned the first couple of paragraphs, then laid the paper back down on the table for a moment and slowly took a sip of his coffee. He let the slightly bitter liquid slide down his throat, then took a deep breath and let it out silently.

Maggie was handling this case. Of course she was. It was God’s continuing reminder that his past was always part of his present. He wondered if his estimable influence with the city and county was enough to talk them into getting a third investigator on at the Sheriff’s Office. They only had the two, and he would have appreciated it if Maggie would stop pulling cases that involved him.

He had just picked the paper back up when the back door opened and Miss Evangeline toddled through it, tailgating an aluminum walker fitted with bright green tennis balls.

His former nanny was close to one hundred years old, and her skin had the appearance of a papyrus on which someone had long ago spilled a cup of rich coffee. She stood less than five feet tall and weighed less than a sturdy fourth-grader, but she managed to be imposing nonetheless. She barked rather than spoke, and her sharp eyes, magnified behind comically thick glasses, could pin a person to a wall.

Boudreaux set the paper aside once more and rose from his seat. He walked around the table and pulled out Miss Evangeline’s chair as she scooted her walker along the hardwood floor.

“Mornin’, Mama,” Amelia said. She slid the egg onto a small plate and pulled a slice of bread from the toaster.

“Mornin’, baby,” Miss Evangeline answered, her voice like footsteps on autumn leaves.

“Good morning, Miss Evangeline,” Boudreaux said.

“Ain’t gon’ take your word,” she answered.

Boudreaux kissed her on the cheek once she reached him, held her chair for her as she delicately maneuvered her person onto it. Then he easily slid her chair in and walked back to his own seat.

Amelia brought the plate and a cup of tea to the table and set them in front of her mother, then went back to the island to clean up. Miss Evangeline carefully took a sip of her tea, then proceeded to painstakingly cut her egg into fractions. She took one tiny bite and carefully chewed it before swallowing.

“Amelia, I need you go back the store and get me some new underwears,” she said as she began to scrape some butter onto her toast.

“I just got you some the other day,” Amelia said.

“Ain’t no good. They too big,” Miss Evangeline replied. “I fell right out them underwears yesterday.”

Boudreaux tried not to smile as he poured another cup of coffee.

“That’s ’cause you losin’ too much weight, you,” Amelia said. “I almost can’t get you none smaller.”

“I ain’t lose nothin’, me. You got the wrong size.”

“I got the right size, Mama.”

Boudreaux couldn’t keep the corners of his mouth from turning up just a bit, so he hid behind a sip of coffee before he spoke. “Perhaps Amelia could get you some underthings from the girls’ department,” he said smoothly. “Something cheerful, like Cinderella or Hello Kitty.”

Amelia groaned from the kitchen sink. Miss Evangeline stopped buttering her well-buttered toast and peered across the table at Boudreaux. He pretended not to notice as he set his cup back down on its saucer.

“What you say?” Miss Evangeline snapped.

“I said something from the girl’s department might fit you more snugly. And start your day off with a smile.”

“Chil’ren underwears,” she said flatly.

Boudreaux gave her the slightest of shrugs as he picked his paper back up. Miss Evangeline put down her toast and sucked at a bit of egg on her upper denture before speaking.

“You woke up the mouthy side your bed, then,” she said.

“Not at all,” Boudreaux said smoothly. “I’m just trying to be helpful.”

“Help me some more, Mr. Benny. I help you out that chair by your nose hairs, me.”

Boudreaux turned to the third page of the paper, where the story continued, and scanned it quickly. The idiot editor, Dumont, had tried to sound anecdotal rather than speculative when he mentioned in the last paragraph that the building had once been owned by Holden Crawford, who had disappeared almost forty years prior.

The implication was clear, but pointless. Of course the “unidentified remains” would be Holden Crawford.

“Who go the ambulance in the paper?” Miss Evangeline barked across the table.

“Unidentified remains from inside a wall in the flower shop,” Boudreaux answered distractedly.

“Who remain?”

“Somebody who died a long time ago.”

“Why they find him now, then?”

“I guess he was just waiting for precisely the worst moment to turn up,” Boudreaux said.

Miss Evangeline poked her Coke bottle glasses back toward her plate and took another bite of egg. “Dead folk don’t ha’ no regard, no. Do what they please.”

“Yes.”

Boudreaux had finished the article, such as it was, but he continued to stare at the print as he got caught up in his own thoughts. Of any case that Maggie could have gotten, Boudreaux would have asked that it not be this one.

“Even so,” he heard Miss Evangeline say. “You put a dead body in the wall, he s’posed to stay put. Ain’t no call to be runnin’ round bein’ dead everyplace, scarin’ folk.”

Boudreaux lowered the paper and looked across the table, his brows pressing together above his startling blue eyes.

“Have you taken your medication?”