Dead Wake (The Forgotten Coast Florida #5) (15 page)

He brushed it back out of his eyes and into place as he stopped about midway down the pier and nodded at Gray Redmond, who leaned back against the rail, his hands gripping the wood on either side of him.

“Good afternoon, Gray,” Boudreaux said.

“Afternoon,” Gray said, nodding slightly.

“What can I do for you?”

Gray looked down at the floor of the pier for a moment before answering. He looked Boudreaux in the eye when he did.

“This Holden Crawford thing,” Gray said. “It’s presenting problems.”

“For whom?”

“For all of us, wouldn’t you say?” Gray answered.

Boudreaux studied the other man for a moment. He had a good deal of respect for Gray. Gray had done something most eighteen year-old men couldn’t do, and he’d done it well. He’d also done an admirable job of keeping it to himself.

“I’ll admit it’s inconvenient,” Boudreaux said. “Particularly given the fact that Maggie is the one investigating the case. But it would have been inconvenient with anyone looking into it. It doesn’t really change anything.”

“It does if they’re mainly looking at you,” Gray answered.

“There’s no evidence that I had anything at all to do with what happened to Crawford,” Boudreaux said.

“You’re still the main suspect, according to Maggie.”

Boudreaux gently tapped at his left eyebrow for a moment as he studied Redmond’s face.

“Maggie doesn’t think I did it,” he said finally. He saw Gray swallow, saw his eyes narrow just slightly.

“It doesn’t matter what Maggie thinks, though, does it?” Gray asked. “She’s not the only one working this case.”

“I assume you’re speaking of Sheriff Hamilton,” Boudreaux said. Gray nodded just once. “Of course, he’d love nothing more than to see me convicted of something, but he’s a straight arrow. He’ll look for actual evidence, which he won’t find.”

“Right now, he’s looking at your lack of an alibi,” Gray said. “I should think it would serve your interests, legal and otherwise, to give it to him.”

“I disagree. I don’t think it would be in anyone’s best interest,” Boudreaux said. “We agreed, together, how we would handle this situation.”

“That was thirty-eight years ago,” Gray said.

Boudreaux could feel himself becoming frustrated. He didn’t like it when done things came undone, and he preferred to never make decisions based on urgency.

“Maggie’s bothered by this alibi thing,” Gray said. “She’s looking into it, whether she thinks you’re involved or not.”

“She won’t find anything,” Boudreaux said calmly.

“And why is that?”

“It’s not there,” Boudreaux answered. “Sheriff Bradford never put it on record.”

“Why do you know that?” Gray asked.

Bellows had been an investigator for the Sheriff’s Office for many years. It was widely suspected—accurately so—that he was also on Boudreaux’s payroll. He was now comfortably settled in Vero Beach, retired on monies he’d earned from his sideline.

“I asked Gordon get rid of anything about it in Crawford’s file,” Boudreaux said. “The year Maggie joined the Sheriff’s Office, actually. I thought it prudent. There was nothing there.”

Gray stared past Boudreaux without expression. Boudreaux knew he was probably working that out in his head. It shouldn’t take long.

Gray heaved a frustrated sigh and looked out at the end of the pier, where a pelican sat waiting for providence. After a moment, he looked back at Boudreaux.

“There’s an ethical issue here,” he said. “Regardless of what we agreed on back then, I could never in good conscience just stand by while you were arrested for something you didn’t do.”

He stopped and squinted out at the water, and Boudreaux saw the muscles of his jaw tighten and release.

“Regardless of how I feel about it, she wouldn’t want it, either,” Gray said to the bay.

“There’s no reason to do anything we’ll probably regret,” Boudreaux said.

Gray looked back at him. “The truth is going to come out sooner or later,” he said.

“Not until one of us tells it,” Boudreaux said.

Maggie turned left from Maple Street onto Avenue B and gently braked as she waited for a squirrel to make up its mind about which side of the street it needed to be on. It was warm in the Jeep, and she rolled down her front windows before she moved on.

As Lafayette Park came up on her right, Maggie glanced over and saw her father’s old Chevy pickup. Lafayette Pier was one of her father’s favorite places to fish; he and Maggie had fished here many times while she was growing up, and now he often brought her kids here as well.

She parked next to the truck and got out. She had a little bit before she was due at Mrs. Burwell’s, and maybe Daddy had something she could fix for dinner after.

She walked across the grass and onto the brick pathway that led to and around the gazebo, and then to the pier. She had just reached the near side of the gazebo when she looked out at the pier and saw her father.

Maggie stopped and stared.

She’d seen her father and Bennett Boudreaux together many times in her life. All of them had been at Sea-Fair, all of them had been as her father was getting paid for his day’s harvest. Seeing the two of them out there on the pier, standing close together and obviously deep in conversation, was completely foreign to Maggie, and it took a moment for her to be sure she was actually seeing it.

Daddy wasn’t wearing fishing clothes, nor was he holding a pole. Boudreaux didn’t appear to be engaged in fishing, either. They appeared to be very engaged with each other.

Just that summer, Maggie had met Boudreaux on this same pier, at his request. Had he asked her father to do the same? She couldn’t think of a single reason why he should. Her father didn’t even sell his oysters to Sea-Fair anymore; he only worked part-time, and he sold small quantities at the farmer’s market and sometimes directly to friends and neighbors.

Maggie’s first instinct was to walk on out there and ask them what the hell they were doing, but the incongruity of it held her back. She couldn’t think of one good reason for them to be there. She couldn’t think of any bad ones, either, but given her father’s feelings toward Boudreaux she couldn’t help sensing that there was one.

She hesitated for a moment longer, then turned around and quickly walked back the way she’d come. She told herself it was because she should ask her father in private, and brushed away the thought that she just couldn’t think of an answer she’d want to hear.

Lana Burwell lived in a small pink cottage in the center of the almost too quaint little town of Carrabelle, half an hour east of Apalach.

The small front yard was filled with flowering plants and cutesy yard accessories; garden plaques, gnomes, tiny windmills and deer frozen mid-step were everywhere. Maggie wasn’t sure how Mrs. Burwell managed to make it around her yard to maintain all of her plants, but they looked robust enough.

Mrs. Burwell was fairly robust herself. She looked younger than Maggie knew she was, in that way that heavy people often do, and her voice was surprisingly high and dainty.

She invited Maggie inside, offered her coffee, which Maggie politely declined, then led her to a back room that looked to be part sewing room and part storage closet. The small sewing table was surrounded by boxes and totes that rose to the ceiling in places.

“After we talked, I went through a bunch of stuff, looking for payroll records and whatnot,” the woman said as they picked their way through the room. “I’m afraid I didn’t find any.”

Maggie sidestepped a small pile of papers. “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said.

“Well, it was so long ago, of course,” Mrs. Burwell said. “Everything was paper then, not on computers like it is now. You run out of room, you throw stuff out.”

“I don’t suppose there’s any chance you remember anyone who was working for you in 1977?” Maggie asked.

“Oh, goodness no. I don’t remember what I did day before yesterday,” Mrs. Burwell said. “And I wasn’t too involved in the business, anyway. I was home raising four kids.”

She stopped at one of several open boxes and tapped at the pile of yellowed manila folders and dark green hanging files on top. “I did find some tax returns, but they don’t have employee names on them or anything, so not much help to you there. However, I did come across a bunch of awards and things we used to have hanging in the office, you know, licenses and civic awards and things, and that was when I remembered the Neighborhood League.”

Mrs. Burwell was looking at Maggie happily, as though Maggie would understand the significance. She didn’t.

“The Neighborhood League?”

“Yes! It doesn’t exist anymore, of course, but we were very involved,” Mrs. Burwell answered.

“What was it?”

“It was kind of a historic preservation thing,” the woman said. “There were a few businesses involved. Like Goodwin’s Hardware. They donated a lot of lumber and paint and things. We usually talked most of our guys into donating some labor.”

Mrs. Burwell squeezed her way past a few more boxes to get to her sewing table. “Anyway, we always had a barbecue or picnic or something of that sort when that year’s project was finished, and we had pictures from every single year hanging up in the front office. Good public relations, you know.”

She put a hand on an open cardboard box on the sewing table. “Anyhoo, I was just starting to go through this when you knocked,” she said.

Maggie stepped a bit closer and rose up on her toes as the older woman opened the flaps of the box. It was filled with pictures in cheap black frames. There was a stack of frames already on the sewing table, all of them coated with a thin veil of dust.

Mrs. Burwell started flipping through the pictures still inside the box. “I wish we’d boxed these up in some kind of order, but who knew we’d actually need to find one?” she said. “This is eighty-two. Here’s eighty-seven. I don’t even remember what the project was in seventy-seven. That may have been the year we worked on The Soda Shoppe. Nope, here it is!”

She pulled a frame out of the stack and held it up proudly. “It was the Fennimore House. They made it a bed and breakfast for a while.”

Maggie was too far away to see much. She could make out the caption under the photo: “Fennimore House Restoration – 1977.” The picture itself was a faded black and white of a group of men sitting at a picnic table on the grass. Beyond them was the front of an imposing white Victorian home.

Maggie made her way closer as the woman wiped at the picture with one sleeve of her flowered blouse and peered at it.

“Of course, this won’t have everyone who worked with us that year,” she said. “We always had a lot of shrimpers and oystermen working with us on and off, too. But most of the guys will be here.”

Maggie looked over the woman’s shoulder as she tapped a bright pink nail on one or another face. “This is Frank Grasso. He passed away some years ago, poor guy. I don’t know who this is. Here’s the Swift boy…Chris or Craig, something like that. Very sweet.”

Maggie maneuvered herself so that she could get a better look at the picture. There were more than a dozen men at the table, some looking at the camera, some not.

“I don’t know him. Or him. This is my husband, of course.” Mrs. Burwell let out a surprisingly delicate sneeze. “Goodness. Oh, this is Sam Richards, we actually became very good friends with him and his wife over the years. They live in Costa Rica now.”

Maggie knew some of the surnames, but not all. She also recognized Harry Fox before Mrs. Burwell named him. Harry had been David’s baseball coach in junior high.

“Oh, this is Paul McNamara,” Mrs. Burwell said. “I forgot all about him.”

She moved her finger, and Maggie suddenly felt weightless. She stopped breathing, and the sound of Mrs. Burwell’s fingernail tapping on the lean, young face was the only sound in the room for a moment.

“Hm,” the woman said. “Sorry, I don’t know who that is.”

Maggie did. It was her father.