What Washes Up (22 page)

Maggie sighed and looked out toward the river, then back at Tomlinson. “Is he flying out of Panama City?”

“No, we’ve got a plane taking us to Tallahassee, then I’m handing him off to another agent who’ll escort him to Dallas and then on to Guatemala.”

Maggie stared at her tea a moment.

“Would you like to drive him to Regional?” Tomlinson shrugged a little as Maggie looked at him. “I could just meet you there.”

“Yes.” She swallowed something that felt like it might become tears. “Thank you.”

M
aggie passed the next day in a flurry of activity. She needed normalcy more than she needed rest, and she needed to keep busy. She, the kids, and Coco had come home, endured extensive scolding from Stoopid, and tried to settle back into their lives.

Maggie cleaned, did laundry, helped Kyle clean out the chicken coop, and yanked all of the bygone vegetables from the raised bed garden. In between, she wondered if Wyatt was awake, and what he was thinking if he was. She wondered what she would say to a little boy who didn’t know or care about her. She wondered whether she should ever return from leave.

An hour or so before sunset, she and the kids headed out to St. George Island. When they got to the empty lots next to Boudreaux’s rental, they weren’t empty anymore. Cars were parked all along the driveways that had no houses, and they lined the street as well. Maggie parked on the side of the road, and they walked over the dunes to the beach.

Maggie was surprised, and moved, by the number of people who were there. Many were locals, but some appeared to be tourists. She and the kids were handed candles by women from the Junior League, who had set up a card table, then they found Maggie’s parents down the beach.

Just after eight o’clock, William and Robert walked down the line of people standing near the shoreline, and handed small bunches of flowers to each.

At 8:37, as the sun began to set over the water, someone up the beach began to play “Amazing Grace” on the flute, and a thousand little flowers were cast into the sea.

At just after nine the next morning, Wyatt’s doctor called and let Maggie know that she could visit him. He assured her that Wyatt was doing well, but he couldn’t have answered any of the other questions Maggie had.

When she walked into the hospital room, her heart was pounding uncomfortably in her chest, and she knew her hands were shaking. She swallowed, and walked around the room divider next to Wyatt’s bed.

He was lying there looking out the second floor window at nothing much. Maggie was relieved to see that he looked a lot more like himself without the intubation tube, but he still looked pale.

He looked over at her as she rounded the divider, and she tried to smile as she stopped and put a hand on the bed rail.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey.” His voice sounded like he’d been in the desert for a month, and he cleared his throat just a little.

“How are you feeling?” she asked, thinking it was a stupid thing to say.

“Okay.” He looked out the window again. “I was just lying here thinking.” He looked back at her. “You know how, on TV, cops get shot and they grimace like somebody punched them in the arm, then they say something really witty and kill the bad guys?”

Maggie’s upper lip curled up in part of a smile. “Yeah?”

“That’s a lot of crap,” he croaked. “It hurts like hell. I was conscious there for a little bit, I think I remember the EMTs being there, and I couldn’t come up with a single quip.”

Maggie blew out a breath. “Yeah.”

“Oh, yeah, you would know. I forgot.”

They looked at each other a moment, and Maggie took a deep breath.

“Wyatt, I have to leave in just a few minutes, to take Virgilio to the airport, but I need to tell you some things.”

“They’re deporting the kid?” he asked, frowning.

“No. He wants to go home to his family,” Maggie said. Wyatt nodded, and she went on. “I’ve been thinking. A lot. About the last couple of months, and about the other night.”

“Okay,” he said.

“I don’t think I should come back from leave,” she said.

“Why?”

Maggie looked down at her fingers in the rail. “Everything. Everything that I have screwed up lately. The reasons I screwed them up.” She looked up at Wyatt. She couldn’t read his face, and it scared her. “But yesterday, I was sitting here, and I was thinking about the other night. And about Ricky Alessi.”

“Ricky Alessi was about to blow your head off, Maggie.”

“Yeah, I know. And to save my own life, I put a bullet in his chest.”

“Which is what you needed to do. Nobody’s ever questioned that. We were all there.”

“I know. But I shot him one time. I put three rounds into Patrick Boudreaux. Three.” Maggie took a breath and let it out slowly. “I was scared, for you, and for me. But more than being scared, I was enraged. I was covered in it, filled with it. I put three rounds into that bastard when I only needed one. I can’t help but wonder if, subconsciously, it was one for David, one for you, and one for me.”

“Maggie, you didn’t do anything outside the lines the other night.”

“
I’m
outside the lines, Wyatt.” She sighed, and looked down at his wrist band for a moment to gather her thoughts. “There’s something else, though.”

“What?”

“I need you to just listen and then I’m going to go, okay? I don’t really want you to respond.”

“Can I say okay right now?”

Maggie sighed. “Wyatt.” She looked him in the eye. “I know there’s distance between us right now. I know I’ve done some things, and we’ve—we’re not where we were a week ago. And what you said about David and I—”

“I was out of line.”

“No. No, you really weren’t that far off. The truth is, I don’t remember ever actually being in the act of falling in love with David. I just loved him. But I always had.”

She swallowed and made herself hold his gaze. “I never got nervous around him or stayed awake thinking about him or felt like I was turning inside out when he looked at me.”

She chewed her lip and had to look down at his chin for a moment, because it was so much easier than looking him in the eye. “The thing is, if at some point you decide that I’m not too damaged, or that this isn’t completely wrecked, I’d like to be able to just be with you. I don’t want to worry about our jobs or being caught or being sneaky.”

She cleared her throat and hiked her purse up onto her shoulder.

“Are you leaving?” he asked her.

She couldn’t look him in the face. “I need to go get Virgilio.”

She stalked out of the room before he could say anything, and was standing at the elevator when her cell vibrated in her pocket. She pulled it out, didn’t recognize the number.

“Hello?”

“It wouldn’t kill either one of us if you were to run downstairs to the vending machine and get me a Mountain Dew,” Wyatt said.

“What?”

“I asked Nurse Ratchet to bring me one, but she wouldn’t,” he said. “I tried the eyebrow wiggle and everything. She might be a lesbian.”

Three minutes later, Maggie walked back into Wyatt’s room with a bottle of Mountain Dew. She unscrewed the cap and held it out to him.

“Can you just set it down?”

Maggie put it on the tray table next to his bed, and Wyatt reached up and grabbed her other hand, tugged her down to him, and kissed her gently on the mouth.

“Bring me a grown-up size when you come back from the airport,” he said, and reached for his remote.

Maggie stood at the rope gate in the terminal, and watched as Tomlinson stopped to speak to the flight attendant for the commuter jet.

Virgilio stood patiently beside him, Kyle’s backpack at his feet. He was looking away from Maggie, watching another plane taxi to a stop outside the window.

Maggie hadn’t said much to him on the way there. She couldn’t think of anything that wasn’t a platitude or a way to just make herself feel better. So she stuck to talking to him about flying in a plane for the first time, and pretended she was saying something meaningful. She
hoped that he knew that she wished she could.

Tomlinson turned around and raised a hand at Maggie as he picked up the backpack, and she raised one back. Virgilio glanced over his shoulder at her, then he followed Tomlinson to the gangway, Mickey Mouse in hand, looking like a little boy who had just been on a visit to Disney World, and was now going home to tell his friends.

She watched him disappear from sight, then turned and walked away.

READ ON FOR A SNEAK PEEK AT

Landfall

BOOK 4 IN

THE FORGOTTEN COAST

FLORIDA SUSPENSE SERIES

Available August, 2015

(Find All of Dawn Lee McKenna’s Books at Amazon!)

August 12th

3:36pm

Hurricane Nora 27.0N 83.4W

M
aggie laid on the table for two pounding heartbeats, then slid off and onto her feet, and scrambled over to Sky’s chair.

“Mom, what just happened?” Sky asked, her voice near hysterical.

“I don’t know,” Maggie said, squatting behind Sky’s chair and furiously working the ropes that bound her wrists.