Mangrove Bayou Read Online Free PDF

the office. June motioned for her to sit in one of the chairs. The woman sat and looked down at her shoes. She wore a shapeless polyester dress, blue with white polka dots, and cheap white tennis shoes.
    “This is Wanda Frister,” June said. “She says she’s being stalked.”
    “Is that so?” Troy said.
    Wanda nodded. She looked even harder at her sneakers. “Sorry to bother you,” she told her sneakers. “I know it’s not important. But I’m scared.”
    “My name is Troy. May I call you Wanda?”
    “Yes sir.”
    “Troy.”
    “Troy,” Wanda said.
    “Well, Wanda, you are important to me. Tell me about this.” He picked up the fountain pen and pulled a yellow legal pad in front of him. “Who is the stalker?” Troy knew that most people, even if a stalker was secretive, knew who it was. The trick was deciding if, in fact, any law had been broken and then proving anything.
    “My ex-boyfriend. I stopped seeing him.”
    “What’s his name?”
    “Billy…William Poteet. He lives on Snake Key, same as me. He works a crab boat, has a string of traps. Helps in the boatyard too. He’s mean.”
    “I see. Why did you dump him?” A better question would have been, Why did you take up with him in the first place if he’s mean, but Troy had long since given up on understanding why women fell in love with bad men, or vice-versa.
    Wanda burst into tears. June sat in the other chair beside Wanda and glared at Troy. “You might try a little fucking compassion.”
    Troy nodded. “Got the compassion. Not showing it too well, I guess.” He opened a drawer and took out a small box of tissues and pushed that across. Wanda took one and blew her nose. She looked up at Troy for the first time. She had wide-spaced dark blue eyes. “He kept hitting me. Now he’s bothering me.”
    “How so?”
    Wanda stared at Troy. A line from an Edwin Markham poem came to him. Whose breath blew out the light within this brain? He rephrased. “What does he do that bothers you?”
    “Calls me. Lots. Thirty times yesterday.” Wanda felt in a pocket of the dress and produced a crumpled sheet torn from a small spiral notebook and handed that to Troy.
    He smoothed it out on his desk. “Each mark here is a phone call?”
    “Yes sir. I was at work but that’s how many calls he left on my voicemail. And some later, when I was at home. I don’t answer when he calls. Does this most every day.”
    “What does he say?”
    “Most times just nothing. Sometimes he swears at me. Calls me names. After a minute or so he hangs up.”
    “Did you happen to get the number? Do you have caller I.D.?”
    “Yes sir. But it wasn’t his home number. And he ain’t got no cell phone. Me neither.”
    “So how do you know it was Billy?”
    “Who else would it be, right after we broke up?”
    “Good point.”
    “’Sides, I know his voice. When he does talk.”
    “Of course. What kind of car does Billy drive?”
    “He’s got an old red F-150 pickup truck. Usually the back’s fulla crab traps.”
    “Where does Billy live?”
    “Other side of Snake Key.” Wanda recited an address and Troy wrote that down.
    “Good. Anyone else in your life right now?”
    Wanda stared.
    “Do you have a new boyfriend, anyone else after Billy?”
    “Oh. No sir.”
    “Got any family local? Anyone you could stay with if you needed to?”
    “No sir.”
    “Do you live alone?”
    “Yes sir. Got me a single-wide out on Snake Key.”
    “May I have the address? And your phone number.” He handed Wanda the legal pad and a ballpoint pen from his desk drawer and she wrote those down. He had learned not to hand his fountain pen to people who didn’t know how to use one. Replacement platinum nibs were too expensive. “Good. Now, where do you work?”
    “At the yacht club. I wait tables there.”
    “Pretty good tips there?”
    Wanda smiled. “Sometimes.”
    “You have a pretty smile, Wanda. You’re having a bad patch in life right now. Let’s see if we can work