Low Country Dreams

by Lee Tobin McClain

  “It’s one of those little SUVs, a Ford,” Ramirez said. “White, late-model. But that’s not the big news.”

  Something in his chief’s voice made Liam turn away from the child and the house and walk out toward the street. “What’s the big news?”

  “When they pulled out the car,” Ramirez said, “they found a body in it.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  SOMETHING WAS WRONG. Something that trumped her own horribly mixed feelings about renting her garage apartment to Liam, about having him around a lot more of the time.

  Yasmin watched Liam click out of his phone call and carefully pocket his phone. His shoulders were a hard square, his jaw tight, the muscles in his face defined.

  “What happened?” She stepped outside and closed the door behind her to block Rocky or Josiah from hearing anything.

  Liam looked at her, his face unreadable. “They found a body in a car that was submerged in the bayou.”

  Yasmin’s heart gave a great thump and then settled into heavy, continuous pounding. Dizziness had her feeling for the porch railing as she stared at him. “They found... Who is it? Do they know?” The idea of someone dying, just a few blocks away, made her stomach cramp up tight. If it were a friend...

  He shook his head. “Male, Caucasian, they’re guessing fortysomething. Weird thing is, he had no ID on him. Even the plates on the car were removed.”

  “Wow. Whew.” With difficulty, she drew in one breath, then another. “Was it...a tourist? Someone drunk, who didn’t know where he was going?” Awful to hope for that, except it seemed like the best-case scenario. But it didn’t really make sense. “Why would he have removed his own plates?”

  “He was dead before he hit the water,” Liam said. “Blunt trauma to the head.”

  “He was murdered?” She stared at him. That didn’t compute. Safe Haven was safe. “That’s not what you meant, is it?”

  “That’s what I meant,” he said grimly. “The lack of ID makes it seem like someone was covering it up.”

  Cold fingers of fear seemed to creep up her spine, making her so shaky she had to sit down on the top step of the porch. She tried to push aside the thought that rushed instantly into her mind.

  Josiah can be violent, her mother had said.

  No way, no way was her gentle brother capable of a crime like that.

  And yet he’d been so nervous and guilty-acting the night it had happened.

  Liam sat down beside her and gripped her shoulder, his touch warm and familiar. “Hey. You’re upset.”

  But she couldn’t reveal why, or not all of it. Not to a cop who was looking for a suspect. “I can’t believe something like that would happen here in Safe Haven.” She wrapped her arms across her stomach.

  Rio came over and nudged at Liam’s hand, and he moved over to make room for the dog on the step beside him. He sat at the top of the stairs with one leg tilted down, one pulled up to his chest, head tipped back against the pillar.

  She wanted to touch him, to seek comfort in physical closeness. It was only natural, the same impulse that made puppies heap up together. But she didn’t have that right, not after what she’d done. To stop herself, she picked up the watering can, ran water into it and started attending to the plants in her flower boxes. Between giving shots of moisture to her plants, already dry and thirsty in the heat, she studied Liam.

  Why was he just sitting there, and why was he looking so discouraged? “Do they...do you...know anything more about it? Who’s going to investigate?”

  “For now, they’re keeping it in the department. All signs point local.” He frowned. “They’re pretty sure it happened last night, down at the docks.” His forehead wrinkled with thought. “When Josiah and Rocky came to the center last night, isn’t that where they were coming from?” He nodded toward the kitchen. “Do you think he knows anything about it?”

  “No! No, I don’t.” Too late, she realized Liam had probably meant Rocky, not Josiah.

  Liam cocked his head and looked at her quizzically.

  “I mean,” she said, “if he’d seen something that awful, I don’t think he’d have slept like a log last night and eaten like a horse today.” And that was true of Josiah, too, wasn’t it?

  Only Josiah hadn’t slept well. She’d heard him up and wandering around when she’d awakened at three.

  That wasn’t unusual for Josiah. But then again...

  “You’re probably right about Rocky,” Liam said. “Although he did head for the waterfront this morning, when he ran away.”

  “Right, and he was looking for his mom.” She blew out a breath. “Thank heavens it wasn’t her they found. But if she and Rocky were down there...”

  “Maybe they saw something. Or maybe Josiah did. Didn’t you say he and Rocky came to the center together?”

  “Yeah.” She squatted near the spigot at the side of the porch and refilled her watering can, trying to think. She should probably tell Liam what Joe had said when he’d come in, how he’d insisted that they had to hide.

  But if Josiah were somehow involved and the law came down on him, it would be like throwing a lamb to the wolves. She couldn’t let that happen. Setting the watering can at the top of the steps, she looked at Liam. “What am I thinking? You’ll be going in to work. I’ll get you some coffee.”

  “No need for that,” he said, his voice dull. “They put Mulligan on the case.”

  “Oh. Wow.” She picked up the watering can and tipped too much water onto the big flowerpot beside the door, flooding it until the water ran out the bottom and across the porch.

  Buck Mulligan. He wasn’t anywhere near the cop that Liam was, so it was odd the chief would put him in charge of a murder investigation.

  She’d speculate about that with Liam, except that she didn’t want to open a painful wound.

  Her connection with Buck came from a period of her life she’d just as soon forget. Yes, she’d needed to find a way to pull back from Liam, and telling him she didn’t want to be in a serious relationship hadn’t been enough to convince him. Dating his enemy had been cruel, but effective. Even now, Buck’s name floated in the air between them, chilling it.

  He stood abruptly and banged a fist into the porch pillar. “I know you like him, but I could do a better job.”

  The frustration on his face mirrored the look he’d had all the way back in fifth grade, when he’d been held back, the bigger, older kid no one wanted to be around. The one whispered about by all the overprotective mothers in town.

  Not Yasmin’s mother, of course, but that was another story.

  “I know you could,” she murmured, slipping past him to take her watering duties down to the pots that lined one side of the steps. Seeing his pain, reading that he still thought he was a no-good lowlife, made longing bloom in her chest. If only she had the right to comfort him.

  If only she didn’t have all these fears about her brother. About herself.

  Josiah came around from the side of the house, then, carrying his portable chess set. He must be going out to play chess with Rip Martin or another of his friends. Or was he coming in? And either way, had he heard what they were talking about?

  “I didn’t know you were out here,” she said, uneasy.

  He didn’t respond; he just set his chessboard up on the small table on the porch.

  “Did you hear what we were talking about, Josiah?” Liam asked. “About last night?”

  “What happened?” He looked from her to Liam and back again.

  Liam hesitated and glanced at her, then back at Josiah. “They found a body in a submerged car. They think it went down last night.”

  Josiah made a little sound, kind of a yelp, but his facial expression didn’t change. That was the disease; it made him look impassive.

  But his hands, toying restlessly with the chess pieces, told another tale.
/>   “Did you see anything?” Liam asked. “You’re out walking a lot. Any strangers in town?” Then he shook his head. “What am I doing? This isn’t my case.”

  Josiah tilted his head, his eyes far away, and Yasmin could tell he was hearing his voices. Her heart ached.

  In fact, it ached for both men: Josiah, whose demons were too loud for him to have peace within his own mind; and Liam, who wasn’t being allowed to do what he did best—protect the peace.

  She heard a sound above her and looked up. Rocky’s frowning face was pressed against the window.

  Three men, three sets of problems, and not a thing she could do about any of them.

  Except, maybe, to let Liam rent her apartment. The idea of a murder in Safe Haven shook her terribly, made her long for the safety Liam represented.

  Not only that, but there was the old saying: keep your friends close and your enemies closer. If Josiah had had anything to do with what had happened down at the docks, Yasmin wanted to keep track of what Liam was finding out about it.

  So maybe she would rent her garage apartment to him. It would be torture, a sweet kind of torture, to herself, but it might help her keep Rocky and her brother safe.

  * * *

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER, Liam was still pacing on the sidewalk in front of Yasmin’s house, watching her putter in the window boxes. How she could find so much to do in a tiny yard was beyond him. Except that her yard was the prettiest in a block of well-kept ones. Obviously, all those flowers needed a lot of care, especially in the August heat.

  He called the station and got put through to Mulligan. His stomach roiled with the crow he had to eat. “Heard Chief put you on the case,” he said. “I wanted to—”

  “Since it all happened on your watch and you missed it, yeah.” Mulligan’s tone was rich-boy sarcastic.

  Liam pulled in a slow breath. Throwing the phone across the street would do nothing except cause him a big expense. “Listen, I wanted to offer my help. I know a couple of people who were out last night. I could talk to them for you.”

  “No, thank you. I’ll do mah own interviewing.” Mulligan’s Southern accent had thickened.

  Which usually happened when he was upset. What did he have to be upset about? He was the one who’d as good as stolen Yasmin from Liam, and stolen this case, too.

  “Later,” Mulligan said, and ended the call.

  What an idiot Mulligan was. Turning down a fellow officer’s offer of help. That just showed what a poor candidate for chief Mulligan was. Those in authority had to be collaborative, not trying to keep glory for themselves.

  Unless the chief had told him to; unless that cut about Liam letting it go down on his watch was coming from above.

  He blew out a breath, tapping the fence post by the gate with restless fingers, thinking.

  He hated that this had happened when he was on duty. Intellectually, he knew you couldn’t be everywhere at once, couldn’t prevent every crime from happening. His main activity before getting called to the women’s center last night had been checking into a broken window at old Elmer Jackson’s house on the other side of town, a type of crime common in small-town police work.

  He’d had no way of knowing that, on the other side of Safe Haven, a murder was being committed. He itched to find out who had done such a heinous thing on a summer night in an otherwise peaceful town.

  It was more than frustrating that he couldn’t investigate. He was within speaking distance of a trio of people who’d been up and nearby when the murder had gone down, but unless the officer in charge of the case asked for his help, his hands were tied.

  Two little neighbor girls, blonde look-alike sisters about six or seven, ran over to the fence and called out for Yasmin. That figured. She was great with kids, had wanted to be an elementary schoolteacher at one point, although that seemed to be on the back burner for now.

  She’d be a great mother.

  Yeah, to Buck Mulligan’s kids.

  Rio ran over to greet the girls, paws up on the picket fence, trampling the flowers that lined it.

  “Rio!” Liam headed back into the yard and snapped his fingers. The dog turned to look at him, then back toward the little girls, giving each face one slurp of his giant tongue, making them giggle. “Rio, down.”

  The dog finally obeyed, doing a clumsy shuffle that ended up trampling more flowers.

  Yasmin gave her garden a quick, regretful glance and then shrugged.

  “Can we come in and play with him?” one of the little blondes asked.

  “Only after you ask your mom and dad,” Yasmin said. “And tell them the truth, that he’s a big dog with muddy paws.”

  The sisters glanced at each other and Liam could guarantee no such message would make it to their parents’ ears.

  “I’ll fix the flowers as best I can,” Liam offered, “and do some weeding. We can keep Rio tied up.”

  Yasmin sank into a squat in front of Rio, kissed his nose and rubbed his velvety ears. “We can’t tie this big boy up,” she said, “can we? Can we?”

  Rio reached for her with an enormous paw.

  She blocked it, laughing. “Oh, no you don’t. You’re too muddy.” She stood gracefully. “It would be good if he learned some manners, though.”

  “I’ve been negligent.” How was he ever going to raise kids of his own if he couldn’t even teach a dog to behave?

  He knelt to study the damage Rio had done to the spiky purple flowers that lined the bottom of the fence. Pink roses climbed the top in a haphazard pattern, but fortunately none of them had been trampled.

  Scraping the displaced mulch back into the narrow garden beneath the fence, he mused on fatherhood, his dreams of it and the doubtfulness of it ever happening in reality. It wasn’t like he’d had a great role model in his biological dad, but his foster dad had been a tough-love kind of guy, and it had mostly helped.

  He tried standing up the crushed stems, shoring them up with dirt and mulch, but Yasmin leaned close and shook her head. “You’d better let me handle that,” she said. “You go weed.” She indicated a bed in front of the porch.

  He was glad to have an understandable task. Weeding was a chore he’d been assigned as a teenager, often in punishment for some infraction of polite society’s rules. He’d liked ripping out the ugly and leaving a garden looking neat.

  The truth was, he was a domestic, home-focused guy. Almost twenty years ago, he’d arrived at his new foster family’s place ready to break furniture and throw plates, until he’d caught his first glimpse of the bedroom that would be his. He’d never had a room to himself before, and certainly not one this bright and clean. The neatly made single bed, the poster of a University of South Carolina football player, the colorful rug over a shiny wood floor—all of it had washed over him, a wave of rest and peace. Oh, he’d done plenty of breaking and throwing after that, had plenty of anger to work out, but he’d fallen in love with the sensation of a peaceful, orderly home.

  Once, he’d thought of making a home with Yasmin. She’d just bought her little cottage when they’d started dating. He’d chew nails before admitting it to his brothers, but he’d enjoyed going with her to pick out lamps and armchairs and a fancy bed.

  A bed for Buck Mulligan to enjoy with her, as it turned out. Heat rose from his belly and swept through his head and hands, but he wasn’t an angry teenager anymore. He breathed and loosened his fists and stole glances at Yasmin as he worked. She tilted her head as she coaxed the broken stems back upright, looking happy and in her element. He liked her looking like that.

  He liked way too much about Yasmin, and that reality was coming home to him now that he was planning to live here, where he’d see her every day, where it was natural to be in the small yard together.

  Once again, he wondered whether this living situation was a huge mistake.

  Josiah was sitting in one o
f the rocking chairs on the porch, staring off into the street in some kind of a reverie. Rocky came outside and knelt next to him. “What’s going on?” he asked in a whisper. “What were they all talking about?”

  Obviously, Rocky hadn’t seen that Liam was close enough to hear. He’d like to eavesdrop, see what he could find out, but instead he stood, intent on sharing the news in a gentle way. More than likely, Rocky had seen a lot in his life. That made news of violence extra stressful.

  “Someone’s dead,” Josiah said before Liam could figure out a better way to phrase it.

  “Is it my mom?” Rocky’s tone was forced-casual, every muscle in his body stiff with tension.

  “No,” Liam said quickly. “It’s a man.”

  Rocky and Josiah glanced at each other.

  “Middle-aged white man,” Josiah said in that flat, emotionless voice of his.

  Rocky bit his lip. His eyes shifted from Josiah to Yasmin to Liam without resting on anyone.

  The kid knew something. And Liam wanted to follow up, but Mulligan had nixed that idea.

  Still, what could it hurt for Liam to talk with Rocky about it? If Liam learned anything important, he’d take it right to Mulligan, who could hardly turn down actual evidence. “Come help me with this,” he suggested, gesturing toward the weedy flower bed. Though in truth, it wasn’t that weedy and there was barely enough of a job for one person for ten minutes.

  No matter. People talked more working side by side than being interviewed face-to-face. And if some information came out while they were working together, well, that wasn’t his fault, was it? He wasn’t interfering with the investigation.

  “I’m not doin’ that.” Rocky lifted his chin and glared at Liam.

  Yasmin shot Liam a quick glance, like she was worried he’d overreact to Rocky’s attitude. “He’s had a hard time.”

  “I get it.” And he did. He’d gone through a long defiant stage himself, after losing his mom. Hearing about deaths or drownings in the area had shattered him for years.