coming into her house right now. She’d come back to be alone with her baby and try to come to peace with Tristan’s death. “I’m sure you’re right about how it happened.”
“Anything else I can do for you, Sandy?”
“No, Baylor. Thanks.”
Sandy hung up while he was telling her to take care of herself. She rinsed her glass, then headed out to walk to Boudreau’s cabin. She took a deep breath of clean morning air and yawned again. “I’m sorry about last night, bean. I couldn’t get what Maddy said out of my head.”
She wondered if talking to her unborn baby about things that upset her was bad for him. She hoped not, because talking to Tristan’s child soothed her, and according to the latest baby books, it was good to let the baby become used to the mother’s voice.
“Did you know your daddy was an undercover agent? Wait. What am I thinking? You were there when Zach told me. Naturally I had to hear it from his oldest friend, because Tristan apparently thought I didn’t need to know that little tidbit.” She heard the bitterness in her voice. She didn’t want to sound like that when she talked about Tristan. Certainly not to her baby.
With an effort, she made her voice light and soft, the way she talked when she told him a fairy tale or quoted a poem. “He was a real-life spy, I guess. He worked for Homeland Security, catching bad guys. Until one day, one of the bad guys killed him.”
She stopped talking because she had to. She was breathing hard, mostly from trying not to cry, and she’d arrived at the dock. It was a beautiful morning. The sun glared and glistened off the water. “I should have gotten up earlier and watched the sunrise,” she said wistfully. “Although without Tristan...” Her voice trailed off and she smiled sadly at the memories of sunrises and making love and being happy.
“Okay,” she said briskly. “Let’s go. I want to talk to Boudreau.”
As she turned toward the path to Boudreau’s cabin, she noticed slide marks in the mud. Stepping closer to the wooden pier, she studied the markings. Someone had pulled a boat up there since the last rain. She shook her head. It was probably Boudreau. He used the dock all the time.
“I’ve got to be careful,” she murmured. “I’m seeing terrorists and bad guys everywhere.”
The sun was already yellow and hot when she stepped out of the tangle of vines and branches into Boudreau’s front yard. Boudreau was sitting on an old, rough-hewn bench, mending a tear in a fishing net.
“Well, now, you are moving much faster this—” he said, looking up. “What the hell you doing here?” he snapped, glaring at her.
“Boudreau, it’s Sandy. Tristan’s wife.” He’d known her for years, and the last time she’d been here was on that awful night, when she’d come to tell him Tristan was missing and feared dead. But when he talked nonsense, like just now, she wasn’t sure he remembered her.
Boudreau stood, dropping the fishing net and stalking toward her, the darning needle in one hand and his knife in the other. “I ask you a question. What you doing here? You go on now. Get out of here.” He stopped, pointing the tip of the knife back the way she’d come. “Go!”
“But I need to talk to you. I want to close the dock—”
“Get out of here, Mrs. DuChaud. Get!” Boudreau shooed her as if he were shooing a chicken, with a sweeping motion of his hands. “Get!” he yelled again.
Sandy stared at him in openmouthed disbelief. This wasn’t confusion. It was hostility. Did he think Tristan’s death was her fault?
“Boudreau, please, listen to me. This is important.”
He eyed her suspiciously. “I come down to your house one day soon. We talk then. Now you get out of here and back to your house tout de suite or I’ll sic my dog on you, I guarantee.”
She didn’t know a lot about Boudreau except what Tristan had told her and he’d never mentioned the man being violent. But he had shot that oil rig captain in cold blood, so maybe the best thing to do was to leave.
“Please, come talk to me,” she called out over her shoulder as she turned and headed back down the path she’d walked up to his shack.
“You just get gone and stay gone,” she heard him say.
By the time she got to the dock she was breathing hard again, so she stopped for a few moments. She stood on the dock and looked out over the dark, greenish-gray waters of the Gulf of Mexico. And there, diving and surfacing as the sun glared off the water with such intensity it was difficult to see anything but the splashes and waves, was the creature that she’d seen the day before yesterday, frolicking in the water. She squinted and shaded her eyes, wishing she’d brought her sunglasses with her.
Nothing helped her see any better, though. The sun was higher now and the glare was too bright. And all at once, it seemed that whatever the creature was, it had sensed that she was watching, because the splashing stopped. Sandy blinked and put both hands up to deflect the sun, but the water was glassy and smooth and the sun reflected off it like a mirror.
Whatever—or whoever—had been playing in the water just beyond the shallows was gone now.
“I’m going to have to get up early one morning, bean, and get out here so I can catch whoever or whatever that is. Maybe it’s a mermaid.” She smiled and rubbed the side of her belly. “Or a merman.”
Back at the house, she made herself some breakfast. By the time she’d finished eating, she’d convinced herself that Boudreau had shooed her away for her own protection. Maybe he knew there was a fox or a bobcat or an alligator running around that might do her harm. And he had promised to come see her. She knew from Tristan that if Boudreau said he would do something, he would.
“I guess we’ve got to wait for him, bean. He could have been nicer, though. He didn’t have to yell like that. Kind of hurt my feelings.” She drank the last of her juice and rinsed her glass and plate and set them on the drain board.
A glance at the clock told her it was just now eleven o’clock. “I still need to talk to him, though. He may have a better idea of how to keep people away from the dock,” she told the baby. “He may already be guarding it. Maybe that was him I heard last night, checking to be sure no one was using the dock.”
She yawned again. She’d been tired before she went to Boudreau’s. “We’ve got to take a nap, bean. I’m about to fall asleep standing up. Then we’ve got to drive into Houma and get some groceries and buy me a new, smaller computer. A notebook. That’ll be our big, exciting adventure for the day.” As she said the words, a faint echo of a chill ran down her spine. “I hope,” she added.
It was almost dark when Sandy got back from shopping in Houma, which was twenty-five miles north of Bonne Chance, and if she’d been tired before, she was about to collapse from exhaustion now. She had stopped and bought a chocolate milk shake on the way. It was melted now, but she could put some ice in it and rejuvenate it a bit. Even melted, it sounded better than any of the food she’d bought at the grocery store. She was too tired to cook anything. Swallowing the melted shake would probably take the last of her strength.
She
