Michaela Thompson - Florida Panhandle 01 - Hurricane Season Read Online Free PDF Page B

legs. Now anyone who saw him would know he was in a hurry.
    Jumping from clump to clump of marsh grass, half the time landing on spongy wet ground in between, Josh gradually made his way around the meadow. Past it, on high ground again at last and breathing heavily, he moved at a jog-trot through the foliage, making remarkably little noise. Not much farther on, he turned toward the ocean. The waves became more audible, and blue water sparkled through the trees. He reached the last stand of forest before dunes rolled down to an enclosed bay. Gasping, he leaned against a pine, resin fragrant and sticky against his arm.
    In an inlet, floating with the calm unreality of a dream, white in the recently risen sun, were two cabin cruisers. Josh squinted, shading his eyes with his forearm. One of the boats, he knew, was Murphy’s. He heard the roar of an engine, and the one that wasn’t Murphy’s began to turn toward the gap in the palmettos that was the mouth of the inlet. Josh’s eyes narrowed further against sun and glare. As the boat turned, he caught a jumble of letters that somehow reconstituted themselves. Southern Star. The boat picked up speed and, in a moment, vanished through the gap, leaving its wake to lap the shore and toss Murphy’s boat like a toy in a tub.
    Without hesitation, Josh turned back. This time, he gave the meadow a wider berth. The sand caked on his shoes and pants brushed off as they dried. The walk back took twice as long as the trip out.
    Josh could smell coffee before he arrived at the camp. When he entered the clearing, Larry, the bristly-haired man, was stirring grits, and the blond, Amos, was sitting on a fallen log, sipping from one of the tin mugs.
    “Be damned if it ain’t the fisherman,” called Larry. “Should I heat up the frying pan?”
    Josh made a gesture of disgust. Amos eyed him. “You catch anything?”
    Josh set down the bait can and leaned his rod and reel against a tree. “They weren’t biting this morning,” he said. “What about a fresh cup of coffee?”
    Larry brought it to him, and he sank down on the end of the log and closed his eyes.

Wesley Pays A Visit
    Sun-bleached pulverized oyster shells crunched under Lily Trulock’s shoes as she walked down her driveway at eight in the morning. The Trulocks’ house, a weathered frame cottage with a screened porch around three sides, was set at the edge of the woods under a live oak hung with Spanish moss. If you went far enough back in the woods behind the house you came to Brewster’s Slough, a tributary of the Big Cypress River. Brewster’s Slough was thickly grown with tupelo, and on its banks Lily’s husband Aubrey had his apiary, a cluster of white hives in a clearing. He spent most of his days there, wearing his bee veil and puffing at the hives with his smoker, a metal instrument that resembled a watering can.
    He had gone off to the apiary this morning without a word. He seemed to care about nothing but those bees. Certainly not the store. Certainly—Lily looked both ways and crossed the road—certainly not his wife.
    Worrying about Aubrey was a recent and unaccustomed emotion for Lily. Having reached the age of fifty-five, she had worried about many other things—money, her daughter, Wanda, late deliveries of merchandise, fewer customers as the ferry made fewer runs. She had worried about the war in Europe, the atom bomb, the Flying Enterprise, Alger Hiss, the polio epidemic, and Korea. But Aubrey, until his heart attack, was just there, just Aubrey, something to be taken into account the way you’d take the tides into account before going out on the bay. As long as you followed what you knew, there was no problem. Now, there was a problem, and Lily wasn’t sure what to do.
    In the mornings before she opened the store, Lily often walked out on the ferry slip. She pretended she wanted to check the weather, but in truth the morning didn’t feel right until she had greeted the bay and the dark line of St.