What Washes Up Read Online Free PDF Page A

was that?” Boudreaux asked.
    Maggie stopped walking and turned to face him. He stopped as well and waited.
    Maggie took a deep breath through her nose, trying to look like she wasn’t. “He said ‘I’m tired of cleaning up Boudreaux’s messes.’”
    The change in Boudreaux’s expression wasn’t significant, but it was noticeable. His eyes narrowed just fractionally, and Maggie saw a vein in his neck pop, as though he were clenching his teeth. She watched him as he took a long, slow breath and let it out just as slowly.
    “I didn’t send him to hurt you, Maggie,” he said quietly. “You are asking again, are you not?”
    “I guess I am,” she answered.
    He started walking again, and she followed. They didn’t speak again until they reached the covered area at the end of the dock. The wind was stronger there, and whipped at Maggie’s hair, pulling strands of it from its clip and lashing her face with them. She ignored it and watched Boudreaux as he put his hands on the wooden rail and looked out at the bay.
    She and Boudreaux had been playing some kind of verbal hide and seek for weeks, ever since she’d been called to the beach over on the island, to investigate the suicide of his nephew, Gregory. She’d lived her entire life in Apalach and talked to Boudreaux maybe ten times in all those years, and never anything beyond “hello.” She’d never even worked a case involving him, though there had been several.
    Suddenly, they were conversing over oysters on the deck at Boss Oyster, playing some sort of cat and mouse with the truth about her and Gregory. He’d let her know, without coming out and saying it, that he knew Gregory had raped her when she was a teen. She’d always felt that he suspected she may have killed him. She’d also worried about how he felt about that. He was known for being a vengeful enemy and fiercely protective of family.
    But, for reasons she really didn’t want to look at too closely, she had a certain respect for Boudreaux. She even liked him, when she had the guts to admit that to herself. Even more troubling, she wanted his apparent approval of her to be genuine. She could handle someone wanting to kill her; she just didn’t want it to be Boudreaux.
    Boudreaux turned around and leaned back against the rail, looked at her again.
    “I think we have arrived at the point I predicted we would sooner or later,” he said.
    “Which point is that?”
    “Well, if I ask you what reason you think I have for wanting to hurt you, your answer is inevitably going to bring us to other questions you have in your head, but haven’t asked.”
    “Would you answer them if I did?” she asked, but she already knew that he would. She’d always known that he was waiting for her to ask.
    “Yes.”
    Maggie’s heart started beating a little harder in her chest, and there seemed to be less oxygen in the air. She got as much of it as she could before speaking again.
    “You know that Gregory raped me, don’t you?” The words felt like a foreign language. She’d never even said it out loud to herself.
    Boudreaux’s left eye twitched almost imperceptibly. “Yes,” he said quietly.
    No one knew what had happened when she was fifteen, except for a psychologist she had visited three times in her twenties. Therefore, no one she knew had ever looked at her with that knowledge in their eyes, and it struck her as surreal that this man would be the first to do so. Not her parents, not her ex-husband, but Bennett Boudreaux, Apalach’s own alleged crime lord, and a man she hadn’t even known until last month.
    “Have you always known?” she asked.
    “No,” he answered. “I knew nothing about it until the night before he died.”
    Maggie looked out at the water a moment, trying to gather her thoughts, to marshal her questions now that she was asking them. “He told you?”
    Boudreaux sighed. “He asked me to go over there because he wanted money. To go to South America. You were one of the