Murder at Pope Investigations

by Kathi Daley

  “That’s correct.”

  “You really do live a very unpredictable and odd life.”

  I laughed. “I guess I really do. Of course, now that you are going to be working full-time for Pope Investigations, your life is probably going to become odd and unpredictable as well. You are still going to come to work for us full-time, aren’t you?”

  She nodded. “I am. I had a nice visit with Cam, and I do feel like I was able to get some closure I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t agreed to this one last visit, but I know it’s over between us. I think he knows it too. We have agreed to remain friends, but we both realize that a romantic relationship is never going to be possible as long as we live on different landmasses. He doesn’t want to leave LA, and I don’t want to live in LA, so breaking things off was really the only solution.”

  I put my hand over hers. “I’m sorry.”

  She shrugged. “It’s okay. I’m excited about my new job with Pope Investigations, and I think I’m really ready to move on.” Kekoa paused and then continued. “Any word from Luke?”

  “Not really. He still says he is going to try to make a trip to the island, but it keeps getting delayed. His mom is not dealing well with the loss of her husband, and his sister is expecting another baby. I know he is torn between two worlds, but it seems obvious his family needs him more than I do. Don’t get me wrong, I love Luke and wish things were different, but they aren’t, and I’m honestly not sure they ever will be. I’ve been thinking about it, and I think I just need to call Luke and let him off the hook. He might even be relieved if I take the initiative and officially end it.”

  “I guess if you are really sure, then ripping off the Band-Aid might be the best move. It’s really sad. The two of you were so good together, but I get it. If anyone understands what you are going through, I do. And I can say from experience, that finally making a decision, while hard, feels right.”

  “Yeah. I guess I’ll try to call him later. I’m not sure what I am going to say, so I guess I should figure that out first.” I looked at the dogs who’d been watching us chat. “I think I’m going to take the dogs down to the beach. I still can’t go in the water, but my feet are on the mend, and I can throw a ball for them.”

  “And I think I’ll unpack. Do you know when you plan to reopen Pope Investigations?”

  “Dad and I plan to be at the office tomorrow. If you are feeling up to it, you can start your full-time gig then. If you need a few days, then that is fine as well.”

  “I’ll start tomorrow. I could really use a distraction. It looks like Elva is still gone. Didn’t you tell me she was supposed to be back by now?”

  “Her friend decided to extend her stay by a day, but she is flying in this morning. Maybe the three of us can have dinner together.”

  “I’d like that.”

  I wanted to feel happy that the case was wrapped up, and Kekoa was home, but all I felt was empty. I supposed it was understandable that I might be sad about the way things were unfolding with Luke, and worried that I hadn’t heard from Shredder. I supposed I was justified in feeling angry that people had died due to the greed of others, and sad that we hadn’t managed to rescue more of the kidnapped women. But empty? I really had no explanation for empty.

  Deciding to call Luke while the dogs were playing in the surf, I dialed his number.

  “Lani? I wasn’t expecting you to call today.”

  “I know. We hadn’t discussed a call today, but I wanted to talk to you about something.”

  “Is it important? I’m sort of in the middle of something right now. I can call you back this evening.”

  “It can wait. Were you able to rebook your trip to Hawaii?”

  “No. Things are tough right now. Maybe I can arrange to be away for a few days in the fall. I really need to run, but I will call you back.”

  He hung up before I could agree or even say goodbye. Luke was a good man, and I didn’t blame him for the situation he found himself in, but at that moment as I stood at water’s edge looking at my phone, I finally understood empty. Empty was what you were left with when hope finally died. I’d clung to the hope that Luke would find his way back to me for so long that hope had become part of my life. But now… now I was finally ready to admit that Luke returning was not going to happen. Kekoa was right; a clean break was probably the best move to make. When he called later, I’d tell him that I loved him and that I wanted us always to be friends, but I’d also tell him that I was setting him free to do what we both knew he was destined to do. It would be hard, but it was time, and I finally knew that in my heart.

  “Hey, stranger.”

  I turned and smiled. “Shredder? What are you doing here? You should be in a hospital.”

  “I’m fine.” Riptide came running down the beach to greet his best friend. Shredder cringed when he leaned over to greet him. “Well, maybe not fine, but I don’t need to be in a hospital. I’m on leave for the next two months so my wounds can heal, and I decided to spend those two months here on the island. Once I made the decision, I couldn’t wait to get home, so I checked myself out.”

  “That was probably a dumb move, but I am happy to see you. I’ve been worried. I can’t believe that the people you work with checked you out of the hospital so soon after surgery.”

  “It’s the protocol for someone who knows as much as I do. I guess my superiors don’t want me talking in my sleep and giving away all their secrets.”

  “Do you talk in your sleep?”

  “Not usually, but sometimes if I am knocked out on pain meds.” Shredder turned and looked back at the condos. “I should probably sit down. Do you want to sit with me for a while? Maybe we can get whoever is around together for dinner later.”

  “Absolutely.”

  I felt that empty space in my soul fill with a tiny ray of light. Maybe hope wasn’t gone. Shredder was back, Kekoa was back, Elva would be back soon, and Sean and Kevin would be home in a few days. I had a job I loved, working with a man I respected above all others, and Jason was finally starting to treat me like an equal. Maybe my life wasn’t empty. Maybe it was actually pretty full, and with that realization, my world began to feel whole once again.

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  Rain poured down from the inky black sky as I watched Deputy Colt Wilder leverage his shovel into the saturated earth. In hindsight, it might have been a good idea to wait until after the storm had passed to check out the theory I’d been mulling around in my mind since I’d learned of Wesley Hamilton’s disappearance. The heir to the Holiday Bay Community Bank had last been seen heading toward his car in the lot behind the bank ten days ago. In the days since his disappearance, no one had been able to figure out what had become of the man, and even now, all I really had to explain the fact that he seemed to have vanished into thin air, was an idea born in my imagination. An idea, I reminded myself, which was most likely nothing more than a meaningless whim based on a fantasy I’d cooked up while writing my latest novel.

  “Have you found anything?” I called into the darkness, straining to be heard over the roar of the wind, rain, and occasional clap of thunder off in the distance.

  “Not yet.”

  “Maybe we should come back another time,” I suggested, as a gust of wind whipped my wet hair across my eyes.

  Colt futilely wiped the rain pouring from the brim of his hat away from his face. “You wanted to check out the gravesite, so we are checking out the gravesite. Besides, we’re already soaking wet, so there is no use going back before we find what we came for.”

  At the time I’d made the decision to call Colt and suggest this excursion, it had seemed like a good idea. Sure, it had been raining at that point, and I knew that following through with my intuition was going to mean getting wet, but I’d lived my life in a town where it often rained, so no one could say that Abby Sullivan was afraid of a little precipitation. Of course, I’d suggested this partic
ular course of action before the wind had blown in from the sea, causing what had seemed like a good idea at the time to end up as an act of insanity.

  “I really think we should go,” I tried again. “I can hear thunder off in the distance, and you are holding a metal shovel.” I turned slightly to steady myself in the gale force wind.

  “Hang on a minute. I might have found something.”

  I nodded in spite of the fact there was no way that Colt, who was standing in the hole he’d dug, would be able to see me. My breath caught as I watched Colt remove several more shovels of wet earth and set them aside.

  “Well, I’ll be!” He exclaimed in his deep baritone voice.

  “Did you find him?”

  Colt grinned in my direction. “Who would have thought that a man who had been missing for ten days would finally be found buried in his own grave.”

  I had to admit I was as shocked as Colt was. Sure, it was my idea to dig up the grave in the first place, but I can’t say that I actually believed we’d find the guy. My suggestion that Wesley Hamilton might be buried in the gravesite reserved for him by his father before he died was really no more than a hunch. A hunch it turned out, that apparently was based in reality.

  “So, what now?” I asked.

  “I’m going to call in the crime scene guys before I do anything else. I need to stay here until they arrive so I won’t be able to leave to take you home. Maybe Georgia can come and pick you up.”

  I was sure that Georgia Carter, my business partner, roommate, and best friend would be happy to come for me but I felt bad about leaving Colt standing alone in the rain, so I offered to stay. He thanked me but indicated that it might be best if I wasn’t found in the immediate area when the crime scene unit arrived. I supposed he might be right so I called Georgia and then went out to the street to wait.

  Georgia arrived in her beat up old truck with a travel mug of hot coffee and a warm blanket. Leave it to Georgia to think of the small touches that really did make all the difference. One of the reasons she made such a good manager for the inn we ran was because of her caring nature and attention to detail. “You look like a drowned rat,” She said, after handing me the blanket. “The coffee is hot, so be careful, but a few sips should warm you right up.”

  “Thank you, Georgia, and thanks for coming to get me. It looks like Colt is going to be awhile.”

  “I can’t believe Wesley Hamilton was actually buried in his own gravesite. When you suggested as much, I found the idea interesting, but I really wasn’t expecting that you’d find him.”

  “Honestly, I am as surprised as anyone.” I took a sip of the coffee. “I’m glad he has been found, but my heart is breaking for Kendall and Patrice.”

  Kendall Jared was Wesley’s fiancée, and Patrice Hamilton was his mother. Kendall was to marry Wesley at Christmas and had been working on their wedding plans for over a year, and Patrice had recently lost her husband and was just starting to get over that loss. Losing a fiancé would be tough, but losing a son was unbearable. I should know, I’d lost mine. Sure, Johnathan had only been an infant when he was ripped out of my life by a drunk driver who had killed my husband, Ben, as well, while Wesley was well into his twenties or possibly even his early thirties, but I knew in my heart that to lose a child whatever their age could bring on the most unimaginable pain possible.

  “I know this will be hard on both women,” Georgia agreed, “but it seems to me that the past ten days of not knowing has to have been worse.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “I wonder who did it.” Georgia turned onto the road that led to the country inn we ran together. “It seems a bold move to actually bury the guy right there in the family plot the way they did.”

  Georgia was right. It was bold. And actually, pretty dumb. The fact that the killer had buried Wesley in the plot reserved for him by his father indicated that he or she was someone known to Wesley and/or the Hamilton family. It didn’t seem that some random tourist would even know that the Hamilton family had donated the land for the local cemetery. And it definitely didn’t seem as if that same random tourist would realize that Jasper Hamilton had reserved a small corner of the land for his own family members. I bet that fact alone would narrow Colt’s suspect list considerably.

  “Of course,” Georgia continued, bobbing her head of blond hair as she spoke, “it does seem as if Wesley had managed to make a lot of enemies during his short tenure as the bank’s president. Even his own mother was pretty fed up with the way he’d been running things. The list of local businesses shut down, and families run out of their homes must be considerable by this point. I suspect it is from that list that Colt will find the killer.”

  “I imagine you might be right. Emotions do seem to be running high when it comes to the publics’ general satisfaction with the bank. I even heard that the board of trustees had threatened to replace Wesley as president if he didn’t harness his Scrooge-like tendencies just a bit.”

  “Could they do that? Replace Wesley? His father established the bank, and he did leave it to his only son.”

  “I don’t know the specifics, but the bank does have stockholders, and even though Wesley owned a majority share, the bank also has a board of trustees that seems to weld a certain amount of power. The rumor circulating around town about the board threatening to replace Wesley may be nothing more than a rumor, but in my mind, the very idea of having anyone other than a Hamilton at the helm seems to indicate just how unhappy everyone is.”

  “I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to start a list of those residents we know of who have been negatively impacted by the bank’s new policies,” Georgia commented, as she parked in front of our seaside cottage.

  Once we arrived home, I headed inside to take a hot shower while Georgia made a pot of tea. Since the inn had opened, we’d settled into the routine of sharing a pot of tea and discussing the comings and goings at the inn at the end of each day. Georgia was in charge of the day-to-day operations, but I owned the place and wanted to stay in the loop, so the routine had developed naturally.

  As I shampooed my hair, I thought about the body in the cemetery. The idea to check out Wesley’s gravesite had come about as a result of the thriller I was currently working on. In my fictional story featuring an agent from the FBI who’d teamed up with a psychic to find a serial killer, the body of one of the victims had eventually been found in a cemetery. As I wrote this passage, the idea of checking our cemetery for Wesley’s remains took hold. The fact that he actually had been buried there was surprising even to me.

  “I have pumpkin cookies to go with the tea,” Georgia informed me after I’d emerged from my bedroom wearing my pajamas and a warm robe.

  “Tea and cookies sound perfect.” I curled up on the sofa after setting my teacup on the table in front of me. Georgia’s dog, Ramos, and my dog, Molly, were curled up in front of the fire, but my cat, Rufus, jumped up onto the sofa and curled up in my lap. “So who checked in and who checked out, and what do we know about the new arrivals?”

  “The Osgood’s checked out of suite one today,” Georgia started. While we’d named all the suites, we’d also numbered them for simplicities sake with one being the suite on the first floor, two and three on the second, four and five on the third, and leaving the attic suite as six. “We don’t have anyone arriving for that suite until the Goodmans check in on Thursday. A woman named Dixie Highlander checked in today with her daughter, Holly. They are occupying suites two and three. They plan to be here for two weeks.”

  “I’m assuming Holly is an adult daughter?”

  “She is. I would say that Holly is probably in her mid-twenties, and Dixie is probably around fifty. Maybe fifty-five. It’s hard to tell. The women seem very nice, and they actually have an interesting reason for being here.”

  I took a sip of my tea, allowing the warmth to glide slowly down my throat. “Oh, and what’s that?”

  Georgia crossed her legs under her body and leaned forward slightly. “Dixie w
as put up for adoption when she was four years old. She told me that she didn’t remember much about her birth parents and never spent much time thinking about them once she had gone onto her new home. In fact, according to Dixie, by the time she was an adult, she couldn’t even remember their names or what they’d looked like. But a few months ago, she received a small package in the mail. The package contained a handwritten letter from a woman who identified herself only as R and a leather-bound journal. R stated in her letter than she’d been a friend of Dixie’s birth mother, and that she wanted to both inform Dixie of her mother’s death and to send along the only thing she had of hers, which apparently was an old journal that her mother had kept at around the time Dixie was born. She didn’t know if Dixie was interested or if she had questions about her birth and eventual adoption, but she indicated in the letter that, if she did, the journal should help with that.”

  “I wonder how the friend got the journal in the first place,” I said. “Actually, I’m even more interested in how the friend knew how to get ahold of Dixie if she had been given up for adoption all those years ago.”

  “I don’t know. Dixie didn’t know, but she was curious, so she read the journal. As it turns out, Dixie is one of four children. She was the oldest, and if the journal is accurate, she had three sisters: twins, Hannah and Heather, who’d been two when their mother surrendered custody, and an infant named Lily.”

  “Wow. That’s some story. Is Dixie here to try to find her sisters?”

  “She is, although she has very little to go on. The person who sent the journal didn’t include a mailing address, but the postmark on the package is from the post office here in Holiday Bay, so she, along with her daughter, decided to visit the area and see what they could dig up.”

  “If Dixie was four when her mother gave up custody of her children, she must remember something.”