Cape Refuge

by Terri Blackstock

  Gerald got quiet. Cade turned around and saw the closed look on his face. “If you think Rick Morrison had anything to do with Thelma and Wayne’s murder, you’re wrong. He’s a decent man.”

  “You sure of that?” Cade asked.

  “I’m a good judge of character,” Gerald said. “Yeah, I’m sure of it.”

  Cade held his eyes for a moment too long. “Is he the one who stole the money?”

  Gerald looked away. “I told you I don’t know who stole the money. All I know is somebody put it back, and I can’t very well go firing people when I don’t have any evidence, especially when no real harm was done.”

  “You should have filed a police report,” Cade said. “It could happen again.”

  “I don’t think it will,” Gerald said. “Besides, like I said, I’m taking over the books. It’s about to kill me,” he said. “But I’m doing it.”

  Instead of going back to his car, Cade walked out the back door and down the deck steps. He watched Rick Morrison work on the boat for a while, then strolled along until he got near the pier and the warehouse where Thelma and Wayne had been found. A family sat fishing for crabs from the pier just outside the warehouse. He watched as a tawny-haired boy slowly pulled up his line. A crab was wrapped around the chicken neck he used for bait. He scooped the crab up with his scoop net, examined it, saw it was a female, and threw it back in, holding out for a male with more meat. The kid’s little sister laughed, her sound lilting across the wind.

  Cade stood there a moment, listening to the sound of a sandhill crane flying overhead and the gentle roar of the surf.

  He walked back up to his squad car, got in, and sat behind the wheel. He wondered if either of the two men he had behind bars at the station really had anything to do with the killings, or if Rick Dugan out there on that boat was the culprit. He wondered if Rick had, indeed, stolen the ten thousand dollars and put it back. And he wondered how Gus really knew about it.

  He started his car and pulled back onto the highway, made his way around the island back to the station. He had a lot of work to do tonight, he thought, but he was going to get answers before this day was over.

  C H A P T E R

  45

  The letter from her grandmother about her parents’ lifestyle plagued Blair into the night, and finally when she had given up on sleep, she got dressed and went next door to the library. She used her key to get in, then locked the door behind her, nervous about who might be lurking in the shadows. She kept her gun hidden in the pocket of her skirt, her hand curled around it. Then she went to the computer.

  What lifestyle was her grandmother complaining about? And did it have anything to do with the scars on Blair’s face? All she knew was that her parents had come from Charleston and that the burns had happened when she was three and Morgan was six. Her parents had never wanted to discuss it or dwell on those years. There were no pictures of that time, no fond memories, no traditions from that time etched in their family’s consciousness.

  She pulled up a file she had scanned into her computer a year or so ago, when she had ordered copies of her medical records from all the hospitals who had treated her. She read back over the list of her injuries at age three. She had been burned in a house fire, it said, and had suffered third-degree burns on twenty percent of her body. The scars were still there, despite surgery after surgery, multiple skin grafts, new scars to fix old ones.

  She checked the date of her injuries, jotted it down, then went to a database at a Charleston newspaper and pulled up its archives. If there had been a house fire in which a child had been injured, it would have likely been in the newspaper, Blair thought.

  Quickly, she did a search of the newspapers in Charleston, searching for any articles with her name. Her heart pounded as she watched the bar move across the screen, and the hourglass telling her to wait. She didn’t realize she had been holding her breath until the newspaper article loomed up on the screen. She saw the title: “THREE-YEAR-OLD INJURED IN HOUSE FIRE.” She clicked it and waited as the small article filled her screen.

  Three-year-old Blair Nicole Owens suffered multiple second- and third-degree burns in a house fire Tuesday. Officials said that the child was rescued from a second-story bedroom. Her parents, who had discovered the fire and gotten the family out earlier, were not aware that the child had run back in to rescue a pet cat. The child was transferred by helicopter to the Anderson Burn Center where she is listed in critical condition.

  The cause of the fire is yet unknown, but arson is suspected, according to fire department sources.

  Blair sat back hard in her chair. Arson? If it had been a simple grease fire, why would they suspect arson? And from the sound of things, it had been so much more than a small grease fire. It had been a raging house fire. Why had her parents failed to tell her that?

  Her hands trembled as she bookmarked that page. She turned off the computer and paced around the room, her shoes clicking on the wooden floor. Wouldn’t Morgan have remembered a blazing house fire and Blair going back for the cat? Why wouldn’t she have told her?

  Her heart sped with aerobic force, and she closed her hand around that gun again and headed out of the library, locking the door behind her.

  The clock on a shelf in her living room said 3:00 a.m., but time had little meaning to her now. She found Morgan sleeping deeply in Blair’s bed, just where she had left her. She flicked on the light. “Morgan, get up.”

  Morgan squinted up at her. “What is it?”

  “We have to talk. About the fire.”

  Morgan pulled her feet out of bed and sat up, squinting her eyes at the light. “What fire?”

  “The one that did this to me,” she said, pointing to her scars.

  Morgan blinked and got up, staring at her sister. “Blair, I don’t remember much about it.”

  “You were six!” Blair shouted. “You remember who your first-grade teacher was! Don’t tell me you don’t remember a fire that almost destroyed your sister. I found a newspaper article, and it said I had run back in to get the cat and that arson was the suspected cause—”

  Morgan slowly sank back onto the edge of the bed. “The dreams,” she whispered. “I have dreams at night of you running through flames . . . screaming . . . I have vague memories of you in the hospital and everybody thinking you were going to die. I remember holding your teddy bear, and Mama and Pop pacing the floor. But I just don’t remember the fire.” She stared at her sister as her mind reeled. “Why wouldn’t I remember it if I was there?”

  The look of genuine despair on Morgan’s face convinced Blair that she was telling the truth.

  “Maybe I blocked it out somehow,” Morgan said. “I do remember having a cat, though. She must have died in the fire.”

  Blair pushed off from the wall. “Why did they say it was just a grease fire? Why didn’t they tell me it was arson? Why was it they never wanted to talk about it?”

  “Could it have anything to do with the letter we found from Grandma?”

  “No,” Blair said. “That letter was dated before the fire. But there are so many secrets, Morgan. Why? And now their murders . . . and more secrets.”

  Morgan took her hand. “These things happened twenty-something years apart, Blair. I doubt if the murders had anything to do with their past, don’t you?”

  “I don’t know what anything has to do with anything,” Blair said. “All I know is that I can’t crack the code of my past, and nobody else seems to be able to either. There was only that one article that came up when I typed my name in. And it had so little information.”

  “Maybe you can talk to Cade. Maybe he has other resources.”

  She thought about that. “Maybe so. But he’s got an awful lot on his plate already.” Blair suddenly felt exhausted, as if the energy had bled out of her. But she didn’t want to sleep. “I’m going to go to Hanover House,” she said. “I want to see what else Mama and Pop have in their closet.”

  Morgan got up and grabbed the jeans
she had laid over a chair. “I’ll come with you.”

  “No, you don’t have to. You need to sleep.”

  “Then why did you wake me up?”

  Blair saw that Morgan was smiling. “I’m sorry. I was just a little upset.”

  “It’s okay. I’m awake now. Let’s go.”

  Everyone at Hanover House slept, so Morgan and Blair went in quietly and climbed the stairs. They closed themselves inside their parents’ room. Then Blair went into her parents’ closet where her teddy bear and the letters had been discovered.

  Morgan brought a chair in, and Blair stepped up onto it and looked around at the top shelf. She found three shallow boxes full of papers. Some of them were just bills that her father had kept over the years in case of an IRS audit or dispute over the donations that kept the house running. Another was a box of papers on past tenants, and she flipped through and saw that none of the more recent ones was even represented there. The other was full of Bible studies and notes taken at church and at Christian meetings, useless things as far as Blair was concerned, but Morgan grabbed hold of the box as if it was a treasure she hadn’t expected to find.

  Morgan placed it on the middle of the bed and climbed up next to it. She pulled out her father’s notes on the book of Romans, his extensive study on the book of Revelation, his Experiencing God book, several Precept courses—

  Blair sorted through the papers, her eyes scanning her father’s handwritten notes. She picked up one of the books and flipped through, and saw his notes jotted on every page. In a section on forgiveness, her father had written extensive notes on a chart entitled “Things He Forgave Me For.” She looked down at the list, curious at the sins that had plagued her father.

  Number one knocked the breath out of her.

  “Morgan, look at this.”

  Morgan scooted across the bed and looked at the chart. “ ‘Causing Blair’s burns’?” She brought her astonished eyes up to Blair’s. “How did he cause them? It was a house fire. You ran in to get the cat.”

  “There’s more,” Blair said. “He wrote, ‘Because of my own choices, my little girl will suffer with scars for the rest of her life. She almost died. But even as she lives, each time I look at her face I realize what a wretch I was, how selfish and self-centered, how greedy. And even though Christ has forgiven me, I don’t think I’ll ever forgive myself. Her burns stand as a constant reminder of the enormity of the debt that was paid for me when Christ died on the cross. And knowing the cost of that, how could I ever deny anyone else forgiveness? I only hope that if Blair ever finds out, she’ll forgive me too.’ “

  Blair set the book down as if it had burned her, and locked her gaze on her sister.

  “How could it be his fault?” Morgan asked. “What could he have done?”

  “I don’t know,” Blair said. “Do you think he started the fire? Maybe he was smoking in bed or something.”

  “Pop never smoked.”

  “But it had to be something. Maybe this story about me running back in for the cat wasn’t true. Maybe he didn’t really rescue me.”

  “He would never have forgotten you,” Morgan said. “You know better than that. Pop loved us. I remember every time you had a surgery, he’d stay at the hospital with you around the clock, pacing the room and making sure the nurses didn’t come in and disturb you when you finally slept, making sure your medicine was given on time, that you didn’t have any unnecessary pain. He doted on you, Blair. I was even jealous a few times.”

  “Then how could he blame himself for this?”

  “I don’t know,” Morgan said, “but maybe that’s why he kept it secret. Maybe he didn’t want you to know his part in it.”

  When they had exhausted the possibilities, they both crawled up in their parents’ bed. Morgan fell off to sleep, but Blair only lay there, breathing in the scent of her father, resting in the sweet memory of his love for her and wondering how in the world he had almost killed her.

  C H A P T E R

  46

  The stolen money at the Boat Shop plagued Cade all night, and he couldn’t help thinking that, somehow, it tied in to the murders of Thelma and Wayne Owens. The night had not been a good one for Cade. He had lain awake trying to put together Jonathan’s part in the killings, Gus’s, or even Rick’s. He went to the police station before the sun had even risen and sat behind his desk trying to figure out what he had missed, whether he should let Jonathan and Gus go, whether he should bring Rick in for questioning.

  But he didn’t have to wonder any more, when Rick Dugan showed up to talk to him.

  “I heard you were at the Boat Shop yesterday asking about me,” Rick said, taking a seat across from Cade’s desk. “I thought maybe you’d like to ask me those questions face-to-face.”

  Cade rubbed his jaw wearily. “Tell the truth, I was about to come question you.”

  “Then I saved you a trip,” Rick said. “Is it about the murders?”

  Cade didn’t know if he wanted to go that far just yet. He leaned on his desk. “It was actually about some money that was stolen from the Boat Shop a couple of weeks ago. You know anything about that?”

  Rick’s eyes shot to the side, a sure sign of guilt in Cade’s book. “Yeah, I remember. Gerald told us that the money was missing and that he was going to report it to the police. But before he did, a deposit for that exact amount showed up in his account. So he never reported it.”

  “Don’t you find that odd?” Cade asked. “I mean that somebody who apparently worked for him would have stolen money and then returned it?”

  “Well, if it was returned, then the person turned out not to be dishonest, after all. I guess he figures there’s no point.”

  “Apparently that’s exactly what he feels,” Cade said. He watched the man try to get comfortable in his seat, and he thought of Blair sitting outside talking to him that night so quietly and intimately. A surge of resentment had washed through him at the sight of it. He hadn’t trusted Rick Dugan since.

  “Look,” Rick said. “I know that every little thing matters when you’re investigating a homicide. But it’s not the theft of Gerald Madison’s money or my name change that really bothers you. You want to know if I killed Thelma and Wayne, and I’ve told you that I didn’t. I could never do that. I was at work until four that afternoon,” he said. “The whole crew saw me.”

  “So somebody was with you every minute?”

  He shrugged. “Well, I can’t promise that. Sometimes we get to working on a section of the boat by ourselves. I mean, we don’t work right on top of each other, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Then it’s possible that your every moment wasn’t accounted for?”

  “It was accounted for,” he said. “And for all I know, somebody did see me every minute. I’m just telling you that I don’t always work side by side with somebody else. I’m not on a chain gang. And after work, I started to go home, but then I decided to go by the Owens’s boathouse and take the boat out. I fished until about six.”

  The same boathouse he’d found Gus in hours later, Cade thought.

  “Thelma and Wayne Owens were the most decent people I’ve ever met in my life,” Rick went on. “I don’t know what I would have done without them. When I brought the boat back that day, I stopped by Crickets to get a bite, and I heard about the murders there.” His voice broke and his eyes filled. “If I ever get my hands on the pitiful soul that killed them, I might just commit the first violent act of my life.”

  He drew in a breath and went on. “I went by Cricket’s for lunch too that day. Got a hot dog. I don’t remember seeing anybody at the warehouse when I passed. No cars, nothing. I keep thinking that I should have gone home or stopped by the warehouse instead of going to the boathouse. Maybe I could have stopped the killer. Maybe I could have changed things somehow.”

  When he had finished questioning him, Cade walked him out to his car and leaned in the window. He glanced around at the contents inside and saw a Delta Airlines envelope stuc
k in the visor pocket.

  “Look, I’m more than willing to answer any questions you have,” Rick said. “I’m in enough trouble for the name thing. I have to go to court about that next month. That’s why I came by here today. I don’t want anymore secrets, and I don’t want to worry if you’re going to come break my door down in the middle of the night and arrest me like you did Gus and Jonathan.”

  “I didn’t break anybody’s door down,” Cade said.

  “I’m just saying I’ll answer whatever you want to know.”

  “Then tell me about that airline ticket.”

  Rick looked up at the ticket in his visor pocket, slipped it out, and handed it to Cade.

  “I’ve been planning a visit to see my mother. She’s in a nursing home in Atlanta,” he said. “She has advanced Alzheimer’s. She doesn’t know whether I’m there or not, but I feel like I need to go see her. And while I was there, I was going to pay off some debts to clear the slate.” He looked down at the steering wheel. “I’ve also been struggling with how to forgive the guy that killed my wife and child. Thelma and Wayne kept telling me that until I forgave, I was never going to heal. They were the ones who encouraged me to go back.”

  “Well, I’d rather you didn’t leave town right now,” Cade said. “I might want to question you again.”

  “Fine,” he said. “Look at the tickets. They don’t even have a date on them. They’re open-ended. Thelma and Wayne bought them for me.”

  “Thelma and Wayne?”

  “Yeah. They also provided the money to pay off the debts. You can look in their bank account. They wrote the check right to me.”

  Cade frowned. “For how much?”

  Rick looked reluctant to tell him the amount, but finally the words came out. “Ten thousand dollars.”

  That familiar alarm blared in Cade’s head. “Thelma and Wayne gave you ten thousand dollars?”

  Rick’s eyes misted over, and he swallowed. “They were good people.”