Riptide Read Free

right, rather than a left.  
    Apalachicola wasn’t like other places on either of Florida’s coasts. It didn’t have any suburbs or McDonalds or even a Walmart, something of which the residents were quite proud. There was no sprawl; there was just downtown and not downtown. What Apalach lacked in square miles, it made up for with historic ambience. What it lacked in big commerce, it made up for with an actual soda shop and more than its fair share of good raw bars, in a per capita sort of way.
    It was only a few blocks from the traffic light to the Apalachicola City Cemetery.
    Maggie drove in, parked her Jeep, and walked between the graves and the palms and the live oaks. The sun was already blistering and its light was so harsh and so white that it faded what color there was in the old cemetery. Green became gray, gray became white and white just disappeared.  
    Although rare for the end of June, there was no rain in the forecast other than the usual summer shower, which arrived somewhere around three in the afternoon every day and evaporated by three-thirty. Maggie sucked a hot lungful of the morning air and wished for a tropical depression.
    Maggie looked at the small, simple headstone, which said only Grace Carpenter , and below that 1996-2015 . Maggie and her parents had paid for the headstone, and Maggie had wanted it to say something more. Maybe to say that she was a good mother. But Grace had had her newborn taken away, as well as the two little children belonging to her now dead boyfriend, meth dealer Richard Alessi, because she’d been foolish and lonely and plain enough to fall in with a man like Ricky.  
    It hadn’t mattered that Grace, bony and small and brave, had, of her own volition, put herself in danger by trying to help Maggie to arrest Alessi. It hadn’t mattered that she’d done it to give her child, and his children, a better life.  
    Grace had known she wouldn’t get her kids back, even though Maggie had promised to find help. Grace had known the workings of Children’s Services better than Maggie did, and she’d driven to the bridge. It just didn’t seem right to Maggie to mention on the headstone that she’d loved her children.
    But the guys from the Sheriff’s office and the Apalachicola PD had known, and they’d all chipped in to pay for the plot. It had been a small service, just Maggie and Wyatt and a few of the officers who had worked the Alessi case. Maggie had gotten her ex-husband, David, to come, and they’d stood under a tin-colored sky while he played Wayfaring Stranger on his guitar. Then they’d all walked away and left her as alone as she’d been most of her short life.
    Oddly, the casket had been paid for by Bennett Boudreaux.  
    Boudreaux was Apalachicola’s version of a crime boss or head of a Mafia family, though he’d never been convicted of a crime and was Cajun by birth rather than Italian. He owned several seafood-related businesses in town and several in his home state of Louisiana. He sponsored community events, had his picture taken with local politicians, and his son Patrick was the Assistant State’s Attorney for Franklin County. It was all very cozy and polite, but a lot of people were afraid of Boudreaux and most of them had a reason to be.
    But Boudreaux had actually tried to use his influence to help Grace, at Maggie’s request. It just hadn’t come through in time.
    Maggie squinted up at the sun and sighed. Then she kissed a finger, touched it to the headstone, and turned and walked away.

    Wyatt walked into the old brick warehouse downtown that now housed Apalach’s weekly newspaper, The Apalachicola Press , and smiled back at Maureen Dailey, the elderly lady who had been the receptionist/secretary/everything at the paper since the headlines had been about Vietnam.
    “Why, how are you, Sheriff Hamilton?” she said over her computer monitor.
    Wyatt walked up to her desk and took off his sunglasses. “I’m fine, Mrs. Dailey, how are