What Washes Up (11 page)

Maggie reached out and took the RC, and set it on her lap as Boudreaux put the gas pump away. The can of RC made her feel, stupidly, as though David were with her, and it felt silly to be comforted, but she was, all the same. Everything was turning inside out. She was sad and she was scared and Wyatt was angry with her. She swallowed as she thought how much she would like to be out on David’s shrimp boat, discussing it all with him. It would be so easy, as it had always been.

“Thank you,” she said to Boudreaux, as he got back in the car and started the engine.

“You’re welcome,” he said politely.

He put the 7-Up in the cup holder of the console, and Maggie popped her top, closed her eyes as she took a swallow of something as familiar and important to her as coffee. Then she put her can in the console as well.

They didn’t speak again until they were outside town limits.

“Do you mind if I put the windows down?” Boudreaux asked with his usual impeccable manners. “I don’t really care for air conditioning.”

“No,” she said to her window as it slid silently downward.

Thick, soupy air blew into the car as Boudreaux sped along, going just over the speed limit.

He was quiet again, and Maggie let him be. She watched him as he drove with his wrist resting lightly on the steering wheel. The sun glinted on the straight, brown hairs on his knuckles, and the hand looked far more relaxed than the owner. His lips were pressed together, making his slight overbite more pronounced, and Maggie could see his heartbeat in the artery on his neck.

Still, it struck her fresh how attractive he was physically, and how charismatic personally. If he were thirty years younger and there was no Wyatt, she realized that she could probably fall for the man, despite everything she knew, and she was glad that those circumstances didn’t exist. It was bad enough that she was voluntarily riding in a car with a man that she knew had chopped a body into pieces and thrown it into the ocean. It was bad enough that she had liked him, anyway.

“What did you tell Tomlinson?” she asked after a good forty minutes of silence.

“I told him the truth,” Boudreaux said. “But only as much of it as he needed to know.”

He sighed, and looked over at her for the first time since they’d left the gas station. “I don’t buy human beings,” he said.

“Then why were you there?”

“To receive them,” he said.

“I don’t know what that means,” Maggie said.

“They paid for someone to transport them here. I was giving them somewhere to go.”

“Who brought them?”

“I don’t know their names,” he said. “I know the name of their boat, and I gave it to Tomlinson.”

“Why did they just dump them in the water like that?” Maggie demanded.

“How the hell do I know, Maggie?” he snapped, glaring at her. Then he took a breath and looked back at the road. “I don’t know,” he said more quietly. “They were supposed to bring them within a couple of nautical miles of the island. They were also supposed to have compasses and two dinghies.”

Maggie looked out her window and huffed out a breath. Scrub pines, date palms, and the occasional live oak whizzed past her window, and even at sixty or seventy miles per hour, she could hear the cicadas signaling from the woods.

They rode in silence for another fifteen or twenty minutes, passing through and around towns even smaller than Apalach, and with a lot less going for them. Here and there were huge parcels of land covered in corn, watermelons, or tobacco.

Finally, Boudreaux pulled off onto a gravel road with a metal cattle fence and a small sign announcing their arrival at Orange Blossom Farm, although no one grew oranges this far north.

They followed the road for almost a mile, and Maggie looked out at fields of tomatoes, corn, green beans, and what looked like sweet potatoes. In some of the fields, rows of vegetables were punctuated by dark-skinned people in wide-brimmed hats, picking produce and dropping it into five-gallon buckets.

Boudreaux parked in a gravel lot rimmed by an office trailer, a couple of hangar-sized warehouses, and several refrigerated trucks. Beyond the office trailer, about a hundred yards back, were several small houses.

He and Maggie got out, and they both stretched their backs a bit. The trailer door opened, and a Hispanic man of about fifty came down the metal stairs, smiling.

“¡Hola, Señor Boudreaux!” the man said as he walked toward him.

“¡Hola, Octavio!” Boudreaux answered, and Maggie followed him to meet Octavio halfway. “¿Como está todo?” Boudreaux asked as they shook hands.

“Everything is good, sir,” Octavio said, then smiled at Maggie.

“Maggie, this is Octavio Gayoso, the farm manager,” Boudreaux said. “Octavio, this is Maggie Redmond.”

“Mucho gusto,” Maggie said, and held out her hand.

“Mucho gusto,” Octavio said back, shaking her hand gently.

“How are the tomatoes coming?” Boudreaux asked.

Octavio shrugged a shoulder. “Ah,
las tomates
want more rain,
si
? But the beans are good now.”

Boudreaux started walking, and Octavio fell in step with him. Maggie followed a pace behind. “Any more problems with the Walmart guy?” Boudreaux asked.

“No, he does not seem to need to negotiate anymore,” Octavio said. “And he was much more
simpático
on the phone.”

“Good.” Boudreaux put a hand on the man’s shoulder. “We won’t keep you, Octavio. I’m just going to show Maggie around a little.”

“Si, está bien,” Octavio said. He smiled at Maggie. “It was good to meet you.”

“Good to meet you,” Maggie answered.

Octavio walked back toward the office trailer, and Maggie followed Boudreaux as he started on a gravel road that wound around back toward the houses. There were about a dozen of them, small cottages, really, set up on cement blocks rather than poured foundations. Beyond the houses, Maggie could see another dozen or so singlewide trailers, some of them FEMA trailers, some not.

The little houses were older, but they looked to be in decent shape. Most of them had pots or coffee cans of flowers on the front steps, and in a big patch of grass in the center were several plastic riding toys and a sandbox.

Two women in their twenties sat on overturned buckets, watching several small children play. One of the women was nursing an infant, its legs sticking out from under a woven nursing blanket. The women looked at Maggie and Boudreaux curiously. One of them raised a hand to them, and Boudreaux raised one back. Then he put his hands in his pockets as he and Maggie stopped underneath a small date palm.

“The girl on the left, and I admit I don’t remember her name, is Octavio’s daughter. That’s his first grandson,” Boudreaux said.

“Where are they from?”

“Miami,” he said.

“I meant originally,” she said flatly.

“Honduras. They’ve been in the US for twelve years.” He looked at her. “They’re naturalized.”

Maggie watched him as he looked around the little residential area. “It’s not fancy by any means, but there are no rats, and there’s plumbing and air conditioning and water.” He looked over at her. “You’d be surprised how unusual that actually is.”

“Does everyone who works here live here?”

“No, but most of them do. It’s cheaper. They pay a flat rate for rent and utilities and the rent’s about half what they’d pay in town. I only charge what I need to cover the utilities. It’s the only way I can afford to pay them.”

He looked over at Maggie. “I won’t pretend they have it made here, but they have it better than at most farms,” he said. “Most places pay less than minimum wage, under the table. They set quotas that are almost impossible to meet, then dock wages when the quotas aren’t met.”

He watched as two little girls wandered over to the sandbox and started pushing little cars through the sand. “I pay minimum wage and give small bonuses for exceeding quota. It’s not perfect, but it’s the best I can do. Agriculture doesn’t pay farms enough to pay the wages workers ought to be earning,” he said. “Some farms underpay to a disgusting degree and some outright steal from their workers. A lot of the people who work here came from farms where they actually owed their employers money.”

Maggie turned her gaze from the little girls and looked at him. “Did any of them come from Guatemala?”

“Yes,” he said, still watching the girls.

“Is that something you do regularly?”

He looked at her, his eyes almost challenging. “I’ve done it before, yes. I’ll likely do it again, and I won’t apologize for it.”

Maggie looked back at the young women.

“Have you ever been to Guatemala, Maggie?”

“No.”

“I have. Thirty years of civil war and they still have nothing. Almost nobody owns their own land, and those that do can’t get a decent price for what they manage to grow out of dirt that’s almost too poor to grow anything.” He looked back at the kids playing in the grass. “The government’s corrupt as hell and hates its own people. Almost every family has at least one relative in prison.”

Maggie looked over at him. “What were you doing in Guatemala?”

“Catholic missions trips,” he said, and Maggie would have laughed if anyone else had said it. She knew he took his Catholicism very seriously, however he managed that.

“Let’s go,” he said, and turned back toward the parking area. Maggie followed, running a couple of steps to catch up.

“That’s it? We drove an hour to spend three minutes here?” she asked him.

“You want to look at the books? Inspect one of the houses?” he asked her. “You’ve seen what I brought you here to see, but if you want to wait until everyone comes in from the fields so you can interview them, we can. But it doesn’t get dark til 8:30.”

They walked in silence back to the car and got in. Boudreaux stared out the windshield a moment, and Maggie watched him.

“Why did you bring me here?” she asked him.

He continued to stare out the windshield just long enough for her to start thinking he wasn’t going to answer. Then he looked over at her. “You might find this ironic, but I don’t like being suspected of something I wouldn’t do.”

“Why do you care what I think?”

He looked at her for a long time, and she thought she saw several different answers pass across his eyes. “I respect you. I’d like that respect to be mutual, on some level.”

He put on his seat belt, and she did the same, then he started the car and turned it around in the lot. Maggie looked back out her window as they pulled back onto the road and headed south again.

B
oudreaux and Maggie rode in silence for several minutes, each wrapped up in their own thoughts.

Maggie was having trouble keeping hers straight. She’d been angry with Boudreaux on the way out to Chipley, and deeply disappointed, as much as that troubled her. Now she wasn’t sure what to think. Her gut said that he was being honest with her about his involvement with the poor Guatemalans, but she was experiencing some distrust of her gut these days.

Half an hour into their drive back, Maggie’s cell buzzed at her and she pulled it out of her back pocket. It was Sky.

“Hey, baby,” Maggie answered. It felt surreal to be talking to her child in Boudreaux’s car.

“Hey, Mom,” Sky said. “We just got back to Grandma and Granddad’s and I wanted to know if I could go spend the night with Bella. She’s got a couple of Redbox movies.”

“What about Kyle?”

“He wants to stay here with Granddad. They’re gonna play corn hole out back.”

“Well, I guess that’s okay,” Maggie said, simultaneously relieved and disappointed. She felt separated from her family, and she had looked forward to being home and re-grounding herself. “How’d it go today?”

“Dude. Have you even been outside?” Sky asked. “The oysters were cooked already when we pulled ‘em up. But we got a full bag, plus our bucket. We’re having them for dinner.”

“That sounds nice,” Maggie said.

“Where are you?”

“I’m on my way back to town. I’m working on a case.”

“The people from Guatemala?” Sky asked, sounding a little more subdued.

“Yeah.”

“Did that little boy like the stuff you took him?”

“I don’t know. He was asleep,” Maggie answered.

“Poor kid. That whole thing totally sucks.”

“Yeah, it does.”

“All right, so it’s okay if I go?”

“Yeah, it’s okay. Tell Kyle to call me before he goes to bed,” Maggie said.

“You don’t want me to call you before I go to bed?” Sky said, teasing in her voice.

“You’ll be going to bed at 3 a.m. If you call me, you’re grounded.”

“Okay. Later, dude.”

“Later, dude,” Maggie said.

She disconnected the call and set the phone in her lap. When she looked over at Boudreaux, he was looking at her.

“You’re a good mother,” he said.

The compliment embarrassed her, and she shrugged. “On my good days.”

“Was David a good father?”

Maggie felt a clenching in her chest. “Yes. Very good.”

“Even though he started running pot?” Boudreaux said it without judgment in his voice.

“Yes.”

“But you couldn’t stay married to him.”