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me.”
    Boudreaux smiled, almost sadly. “I like that you want that.”
    Maggie didn’t know why she’d felt the urge to tell him that. And she was tired to death of wondering why she felt and did and said too many things concerning Boudreaux. She headed for the park again. Halfway up the pier, fat drops of rain began to fall, thunking against the wood in accompaniment to her footsteps.
    She didn’t find the rain as comforting as she usually did.

M aggie turned onto the dirt drive that served her property, stopped the Jeep long enough to get out and grab the mail from the mailbox, then headed for the house.
    Maggie’s dirt road was at the end of a road that ran north out of town for a few miles, angling toward the Apalachicola River, then stopped dead for no apparent reason. Her nearest neighbors were half a mile through the woods, and her little stilt house, built by her grandfather of cypress as strong as stone, sat on a promontory at the back of her five acres, which meant she could see the river from both her side and her back decks.
    It was a secluded place, with a dozen chickens, a big raised bed garden, and an old dock where she kept her Grandpa’s oyster skiff and a small aluminum bass boat. It was simple, but Maggie’s father had been raised there and now she was raising her kids there and she didn’t want to be anywhere else.
    Maggie pulled into the gravel turnaround in front of the house and parked. By the time she climbed out of the Jeep, her Catahoula Parish Leopard hound, Coco, was already coming down the deck stairs at a speed that looked more like suicide than descent. She wasn’t even halfway down when Stoopid appeared from somewhere under the house.
    Stoopid was an Ameraucana rooster of diminutive size, but always seemed to have a great weight on his shoulders. He managed not to be trampled by Coco as he ran at Maggie, wings and neck feathers in full deployment, to advise her that it was getting dark, or that he had spotted her, or that it was raining. His messages usually tended to be vague, but urgent.
    Coco arrived at Maggie first and commenced disassembling herself at Maggie’s feet, and Stoopid, who had a nervous condition, veered off at the last minute, giving Maggie one of his knock-off crows as he flung himself toward the chicken yard.
    “Hey, baby,” Maggie said, as she rubbed Coco’s belly, then she headed up the stairs, Coco jingling and grinning behind her.
    Maggie set her purse and the mail down on the old cypress dining table just inside the front door. The dining area and living area were one open room, which the storm clouds had made darker than it usually was at this hour in the summer, but the kids had left one lamp burning on the side table.
    Maggie and Coco walked down the short hallway off of the living room, and Maggie quickly peeled off her clothes and climbed into the shower. Her conversation with Boudreaux had made a shower seem even more necessary than it usually did at the end of the day.
    Once she’d run the hot water empty, Maggie changed into clean khaki shorts and a white tee shirt, and poured herself a glass of Muscadine wine. She took a decent swallow of it before carrying it through the living room and the sliding glass door out to the deck. Coco, tags clinking, settled down beside Maggie as she sat down at the small round table.
    Maggie had begun to calm halfway through her shower, and she’d managed to quiet her mind to the point that she could think.
    She’d always been good, sometimes too good, at compartmentalizing her feelings. Though affectionate and warm by nature, it was very easy for her to put away feelings that overwhelmed her, be they fear or anxiety or anger.
    It was an aftereffect of the rape that she considered some small recompense for the occasional flashback or nightmare. Some people would consider it a symptom; she considered it a tool.
    Maggie couldn’t help believing in her gut that Boudreaux had been honest with her about Charlie