Blood and Sand Read online

  Blood and Sand

  A John Jordan Mystery Thriller Book 23

  Michael Lister

  Pulpwood Press

  Contents

  Thank you!

  Blood and Sand

  Day 3

  Chapter 1

  Day 5

  Chapter 2

  Day 11

  Chapter 3

  Day 13

  Chapter 4

  Day 14

  Day 15

  Chapter 5

  Day 21

  Chapter 6

  Day 30

  Chapter 7

  Day 32

  Chapter 8

  Day 37

  Chapter 9

  Day 43

  Chapter 10

  Day 48

  Chapter 11

  Day 51

  Chapter 12

  Day 55

  Chapter 13

  Day 61

  Chapter 14

  Day 67

  Chapter 15

  Day 69

  Chapter 16

  Day 72

  Chapter 17

  Day 75

  Chapter 18

  Day 93

  Chapter 19

  Day 95

  Chapter 20

  Day 104

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Day 173

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Day 191

  Chapter 36

  Day 205

  Chapter 37

  Day 210

  Chapter 38

  Day 214

  Chapter 39

  Day 219

  Chapter 40

  Day 225

  Chapter 41

  Day 232

  Chapter 42

  Day 237

  Chapter 43

  Day 245

  Chapter 44

  Day 250

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Day 328

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Get A John Jordan Christmas now

  Also by Michael Lister

  Copyright © 2019 by Michael Lister

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  * * *

  Hardback ISBN: 978-1-947606-52-4

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1-947606-51-7

  * * *

  Books by Michael Lister

  * * *

  (John Jordan Novels)

  Power in the Blood

  Blood of the Lamb

  Flesh and Blood

  (Special Introduction by Margaret Coel)

  The Body and the Blood

  Double Exposure

  Blood Sacrifice

  Rivers to Blood

  Burnt Offerings

  Innocent Blood

  (Special Introduction by Michael Connelly)

  Separation Anxiety

  Blood Money

  Blood Moon

  Thunder Beach

  Blood Cries

  A Certain Retribution

  Blood Oath

  Blood Work

  Cold Blood

  Blood Betrayal

  Blood Shot

  Blood Ties

  Blood Stone

  Blood Trail

  Bloodshed

  Blue Blood

  And the Sea Became Blood

  The Blood-Dimmed Tide

  Blood and Sand

  A John Jordan Christmas

  * * *

  (Jimmy Riley Novels)

  The Girl Who Said Goodbye

  The Girl in the Grave

  The Girl at the End of the Long Dark Night

  The Girl Who Cried Blood Tears

  The Girl Who Blew Up the World

  * * *

  (Merrick McKnight / Reggie Summers Novels)

  Thunder Beach

  A Certain Retribution

  Blood Oath

  Blood Shot

  (Remington James Novels)

  Double Exposure

  (includes intro by Michael Connelly)

  Separation Anxiety

  Blood Shot

  * * *

  (Sam Michaels / Daniel Davis Novels)

  Burnt Offerings

  Blood Oath

  Cold Blood

  Blood Shot

  (Love Stories)

  Carrie’s Gift

  (Short Story Collections)

  North Florida Noir

  Florida Heat Wave

  Delta Blues

  Another Quiet Night in Desperation

  (The Meaning Series)

  Meaning Every Moment

  The Meaning of Life in Movies

  For all the children who don’t come home and the parents still waiting for them.

  Thank you!

  Dawn Lister, Aaron Bearden, Jill Mueller, Tim Flanagan, and Dr, D.P. Lyle.

  * * *

  Thanks for all your invaluable contributions!

  Blood and Sand

  Day 3

  Day 3

  My little Magdalene has been missing for three days. Every second that ticks by, it becomes less and less likely that we’ll ever get her back.

  My friend Henrique, a retired journalist who runs our little newspaper here, suggested I start a journal. He knows I’m losing my mind and thinks writing down some of my thoughts and feelings will be therapeutic. Maybe it will be. He says writing about things has always helped him, though I doubt he’s ever had to write about anything like this.

  I still can’t believe my little Magdalene is gone. I keep expecting to wake up and realize that she’s here and that the whole thing was a nightmare. Or I think one of the searchers will walk in with her at any moment and tell us everything’s okay, that she had just gotten lost. But I know neither one of those scenarios is possible. She didn’t just wander off somehow. She couldn’t even get out of our house on her own. And a three-year-old can’t survive on her own for three days. I know this is all real. All too real.

  I keep thinking about that perfect day we had just a few weeks ago—just me, Keith, and Magdalene on an empty beach in the late afternoon. Seems like a dream now, like something that I observed instead of experienced. But it’s so vivid, so detailed in every way. I can still feel the sun on my face, hear the wind in my ears—the wind and Magdalene’s squeals and shrieks and laughter. I can see her sun-kissed hair waving in the breeze and that contented, happy look on her sweet little face.

  What was the last thing I said to her? I can’t remember now. What must she be thinking? Going through? How must she feel? Terrified. Confused. Is she wondering why we don’t come get her? Does she think we abandoned her? Does she know how loved she is? Is she even still alive to be able to have such thoughts and feelings?

  I don’t know many of the details about how difficult her life was before she went into foster care, but whatever situation she’s in
now has to be far worse than anything she’s ever experienced before. It doubly breaks my heart and makes me want to kill myself when I think of some of the darker possibilities of what might be happening to her.

  I just want to hold her. I just want to hug her. I just want to read her a story. I just want to tell her how much I love her again and again and again and again and again and again and again. I just want her with me. I never want her to leave my side again, not for the rest of her life.

  I’ve read enough true crime and watched enough crime shows to know that every hour that passes means it’s less likely that we will ever find her. For three days to have already passed fills me with such hopelessness I’m finding it hard to function.

  I can’t understand why the whole world won’t just stop and help us find her. How can people go on with their lives like everything is okay?

  Someone just reminded me it’s Christmas. Would’ve been our first Christmas together, but instead all my little girl’s gifts are unopened under the tree.

  1

  The mid-morning sun is high and bright, its warmth present in the sand beneath our bare feet and seen in the shimmer on the calm surface of the Gulf of Mexico’s green waters.

  Though Taylor’s little white dress comes to just below her knees and my suit pants are rolled up, tiny particles of the sun-heated sand still cling to our clothes.

  It’s a Sunday morning in early November, a little less than a month removed from the destruction and devastation of Hurricane Michael, the category 5 superstorm that ripped through the region where our roots are still firmly planted.

  The only noticeable nod to autumn is the decreased humidity in the currents of coastal air swirling around us.

  We are in the little, unincorporated master-planned community of Sandcastle on 30A—one of many high-end vacation destinations for wealthy families lining the scenic route that runs parallel to Highway 98 between Panama City Beach and Destin. Of the many beach-chic master-planned communities located here—Rosemary, Alys, WaterColor, Grayton—by far the most popular and famous is Seaside, not only because it was one of the first in the country to be designed using the principles of new urbanism, but because Peter Weir’s The Truman Show was filmed here.

  Before us the Gulf looks like green glass, beneath us the sand is like sugar, behind us the quaint little town appears to be a pastel postcard. The weather is perfect. The beach is pristine. The town is picturesque. This idyllic setting makes it nearly impossible to imagine that a three-year-old little girl could vanish from here and never be seen again. It also makes it difficult to fathom that less than sixty miles away, my part of the panhandle is a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

  Just thinking about the condition I left it in floods my mind with dread and fills my heart with guilt.

  The New Florida communities along 30A have always seemed a world apart from their rural and impoverished Old Florida neighbors of Wewahitchka, Panama City, and Pottersville, but Hurricane Michael has elevated that to an unimaginable new extreme.

  We are here because I’ve been invited to give a series of talks in the town’s nonsectarian chapel this week—for which we are getting a family vacation we couldn’t otherwise afford.

  When I had originally accepted the invitation to give the lecture series and stay here with my family, I did so in hopes of looking into the disappearance of Magdalene Dacosta, but that was before the hurricane and my wrongful death trial—and Anna’s strange behavior, including her ongoing insistence that I stop my extracurricular investigations.

  My first talk begins in just a few minutes, but when we arrived a few minutes ago and Taylor asked if we could take a quick walk on the beach, I couldn’t say no.

  I couldn’t say no, but Anna, my wife and Taylor’s mom, could, which is why she is waiting for us in protest in the car. She had used the excuse of wanting to hear the end of a public radio report we had been listening to on the drive over—one about a new barter economy in certain developing nations where illegally harvested organs and even kidnapped children are being traded for medical treatment by Americans with means. But we both know the real reason she refused to join us.

  It’s one of many out-of-character actions she’s taken recently that have me concerned both for her and our relationship.

  Perhaps it’s a result of the residual effects from the hurricane, the lingering, often subconscious trauma of the unprecedented storm and its unmooring aftermath, or maybe it’s the added stress of having to defend me in a wrongful death case, or perhaps it’s the fatigue of being a working wife and mother of small children, or maybe it really is just me. Whatever it is—a combination of some or all of these or something that hasn’t even occurred to me yet—my wife and closest confidant has changed, at least in how she relates to me. And so far I have yet to be able to figure out the exact reasons for it or what I might be able to do about it.

  None of our family or friends have noticed any of this. The ever-so-slight change in Anna is so subtle as to be nearly imperceptible. She has said very little and nothing directly, and when I ask her about her behavior, even press her on it, she acts as if she doesn’t know what I’m talking about. But it’s there—mostly in the form of a faint formality, a nearly indiscernible distance, a vagueness and indeterminate distraction.

  I’m hoping that this much-needed week of rest and relaxation and time away from our stressful and depressing post-storm reality will address at least two of her most often expressed complaints—that I work too much and that I don’t have the relationship she wants me to with Taylor. Her expressions of these grievances are most often nonverbal and easily deniable—a momentary altering of her breathing or a flicker of a facial expression or an almost imperceptible pulling back of her presence.

  One week at the beach isn’t going to fix anything, but it should at least create some opportunities for us to actually discuss whatever’s going on and for me to begin to make adjustments, for us to take the first steps toward an ongoing repairing and reprogramming. It could be where we hit reset and restart.

  Anna’s actual dissatisfaction isn’t that I work too much and that I don’t have the relationship she wants me to with Taylor, but that I never stop working, never put my mind in neutral, and that I don’t have the relationship with Taylor that I have with my daughter Johanna.

  But there’s more to it than just that, because here we are on vacation and here I am spending time with Taylor doing what Taylor wants to do—and Anna still appears dissatisfied and seems ever so slightly distant.

  “I need to go over to the chapel now,” I say to Taylor. “It’s almost time for my talk.”

  She nods but the disappointment shows on her four-year-old face.

  “We’ll come back this afternoon,” I say. “And we’ll be here all week, so we can play on the beach every day.”

  She nods again and lifts her small hand up for me to take so I can help her negotiate the softer sand between us and the car.

  “Wish Mama would’a come down with us,” she says, her face down to ensure she doesn’t step on the sharp edge of a shell or a sea or sand critter of some kind.

  “Me too. Maybe this afternoon. And Johanna will be here in a few days.”

  “Yay,” she says in the way only an adoring little sister can.

  As Taylor and I walk hand in hand toward Anna, who is now out of and leaning against the parked car, I have a momentary flash of something familiar that feels like an instant of déjà vu.

  I recall a recurring dream I’ve had over the years.

  * * *

  The last of the setting sun streaks the blue horizon with neon pink and splatters the emerald green waters of the Gulf with giant orange splotches like scoops of sherbet in an art deco bowl.

  A fitting finale for a perfect Florida day.

  My son, who looks to be around four, though it’s hard to tell since in dreams we all seem ageless—runs up from the water’s edge, his face red with sun and heat, his hands sticky with wet sand, and asks me
to join him for one last swim.

  He looks up at me with his mother’s brown eyes, as open and honest as possible, and smiles his sweetest smile as he begins to beg.

  “Please, Daddy,” he says. “Please.”

  “We need to go,” I say. “It’ll be dark soon. And I’m supposed to take your mom out on a date tonight.”

  “Please, Daddy,” he repeats as if I have not spoken, and now he takes the edge of my swimming trunks in his tiny, sandy hand and tugs.

  I look down at him, moved by his openness, purity, and beauty.