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A fugitive hiding out among the marsh-nourished trees of a murky swamp.
The botanicalessenceof enigma.
Meagin March had identified with the ghost orchid. Maybe because she’d seen it.
As a child, subjected to terror and cruelty, seizing upon the flower and the stories surrounding it as inspiration. Like most victims, yearning to disappear. And she’d finally succeeded. But she’d never been comfortable laying down roots.
Playing by the rules was out of the question. The rules had failed her when she needed them most.
Nothing counted but survival.
By the age of forty-one, she’d figured she finally had things under control.
Then…
Thinking about the way she’d died—along with a man driven by his own issues—made my eyes ache.
I sighed. Letting loose a barely audible outflow of air but Robin stirred.
The person who loved me as no one else ever had. Finely tuned to my emotions. To the world.
It had taken me this long to reach the empathy Robin had achieved within seconds of solving an anagram.
What that said about the difference between us was something I didn’t feel like thinking about.
So I did what I always do when introspection looms: focus on a task that drew upon what I’d gone to school for.
A fifteen-year-old boy no one wanted. What would that do to a kid? How should I approach him? What should I refrain from asking?
Would I have anything to offer?
No satisfaction, there, so I switched back to a girl living near a swamp. Maybe no older than the unwanted boy.
Her problem: being wantedtoomuch.
I pictured her, lying in the dark, shivering, as she anticipated a hideous, chronic ordeal.
Withering in the aftermath.
Imagining herself an exquisite parasite, a fragile beauty that had survived for millennia because it had learned to subsist on nothing.
The more I thought about it, the more certain I was that the ordeal of the woman who’d come to call herself Meagin March had begun in southwest Florida. Milo’s probing had been limited to checking out missing persons databases. But that had been doomed to failure because public scrutiny was the last thing an abusive family would want.
Careful not to wake Robin, I rolled out of bed, opened and shut the door gently, and padded on bare feet cramped by tension up a silent, dark hallway.
CHAPTER
38
I settled at my desk, using my Robin and Blanche screensaver as the sole lighting and smiling at it for a few seconds. Then, onward.
Meagin March—I had no other way to think of her—had died at forty-one. If her personal papers could be believed. Even if they couldn’t, the age seemed reasonable, so I began with a five-year spread in either direction.
Assuming she’d been abused and that it had taken place when she was a minor, I set twenty to twenty-five years ago as my target range and began searching for crime stories related to the Fakahatchee Strand Preserve. Starting with Copeland, the town listed as the park’s home base.
The Copeland of today was rated more violent than ninety-five percent of comparably populated U.S. communities but back then, things had been a lot quieter.
The closest thing to criminal violence in or near the former logging outpost had taken place twenty-two years ago, miles away at sea, when a commercial grouper fisherman had been stabbed to death by a deckhand. Other than that, published offenses were limited to vandalism, theft, and trespassing, the only other notable corpse that of aFlorida panther. Cause of death of the rare creature undetermined because most of the body had been consumed by alligators.
