What Washes Up Read Online Free PDF

reasons why. Apparently, seeing you around town, when he was here, made him feel a lot of guilt. Something he wasn’t very comfortable with.”
    Maggie restrained herself from mentioning that she’d never been very happy seeing Gregory around town, either.
    He looked out at the water for a moment, then looked back at her. “He showed me the letter he wrote you.”
    The letter. An apology from Gregory, which had arrived in her mail the day of his funeral. Getting it had messed with her head. When she’d found out that Sport Wilmette, the owner of the foot, was an old friend of Gregory’s, she’d assumed that he’d sent the letter.
    “Did you send me that letter?” she asked.
    “Yes.”
    “Why, dammit?” she snapped.
    He looked surprised. Surprised and angry. “Because he owed you a damned apology,” he said evenly.
    “Do you know what it was like to get it after he was dead?” she asked. “It would have been a shock when he was alive, but the day of his funeral?”
    “I’m sorry. I really didn’t consider that.”
    Maggie watched a gull dive into the water near the grass, watched it take off again a moment later. She needed a break from Boudreaux’s gaze. When she was ready she looked back at him.
    “Do you think I killed Gregory?” she asked.
    “No, I don’t. He shot himself.”
    Maggie let out a deep sigh. She’d had that question weighing so heavily on her mind for so long that she felt almost weightless without it. Not relieved, just suddenly unburdened.
    “There was someone else there that day. In the woods. I never saw him,” she said. “It was Wilmette, wasn’t it?” Boudreaux had hinted as much during her investigation, but she wanted to hear it.
    “Yes,” he said flatly.
    “You said he asked you for money, to invest in some business. Was he trying to blackmail you?”
    “I’m sure he thought of it as something else.”
    “He wasn’t in much of a position to tell anyone.”
    “I don’t think he thought it through,” Boudreaux said. “I told you. He was dumber than hell.”
    Maggie was a little surprised that her next question was harder to ask than the previous one. She knew it was because she wanted him to answer “no,” but he would probably say “yes,” and she didn’t know what she would have to with that.
    “Did you kill him for it?”
    Boudreaux had freely admitted that Wilmette had been at his seafood business, Sea-Fair, the night before he’d gone missing. The place where he’d just built a fish processing room, complete with knives and stainless steel tables, and hoses for washing blood down the drains in the floor. And, a few nights after Wilmette had last been seen, she’d run into Boudreaux at Boss Oyster. He’d been on his way out to do some “night fishing.” A few days after that, poor Axel Blackwell dragged Wilmette’s foot up in his shrimp net.
    She watched Boudreaux now, as he watched her. Then he scratched gently at his left eyebrow, something she’d come to know he did when he was thinking about what to say. She waited.
    “I’m going to answer your question in a way that’s meant to protect you more than it is me,” he said. “Hypothetically, if I had killed him, it wouldn’t have been because of some ridiculous attempt to blackmail me with public embarrassment. I manage my public reputation fairly well, given what many people already know about me.”
    “What would the reason have been? If you had killed him?”
    “It would have been because the pathetic excuse for a man stood by and watched a fifteen year old girl get brutalized.”
    Maggie smelled moldy oak leaves and damp soil, heard the disgusting rhythm of Gregory Boudreaux’s breathing, and couldn’t stop her head from twitching just a little toward her shoulder. She swallowed a faint sense of nausea and had to look away for a moment.
    “And you think the penalty for rape should be death?” she asked him finally.
    “Don’t you?” he asked gently.
    She didn’t know how to