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    Blood and Sand


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      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.

     


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