Lowcountry Mysteries (Boxed Set #1)

by Lyla Payne

  “Because she reneged on your arrangement? Because she found out you were the one taking bribes and was going to turn you in? Because you wanted her land to get a bigger piece of the pie?” I pause as he gapes at me. “Because you’re a nut?”

  “Are you a nut? I wouldn’t kill anyone, least of all Glinda. She’s the one that set this whole thing up.”

  “She set you up to take a cut from Clete’s operation? That was your arrangement?”

  He presses his lips together and starts walking again, dragging me behind him until Merle’s house comes into view. My neck throbs where the wasp stung me, sharply enough to bring tears to my eyes, and I stumble up the sagging wooden steps and through the unlocked sliding glass door.

  Jasper flings me toward one of the folding chairs in the dining room, right through a dark spot on the carpet that totally skeeves me out. “Watch it.”

  “Shut up,” he responds, closing the door and watching the quiet woods for several moments. He continues to pace and scan the tree line but flicks a gaze my direction every couple of seconds. “That was my arrangement with Glinda, yes, and she gave me a cut of her profits, too.”

  “Why would she do that when she could have turned you in and kept the money?”

  Resignation darkens his features, and he drops into the other decrepit chair, earning cracks and pops of plastic from it. “Because she felt sorry for me. I needed the cash.”

  “But Beau said you were well-off because of the insurance settlement.” The comment on his parents’ death sticks in my throat. No one wants to talk about that, least of all me. I remember what Will said about Jasper’s younger sister or brother and feel far more sympathy toward the man holding me hostage than makes me comfortable.

  “I gambled it all away in less than two years. I was young and stupid, and thought there would always be more. Then my sister Beatrice got sick—leukemia—and the bills started to pile up. I could have sold the house, but it’s the only home she’s ever known. Glinda was in the hospital for hip surgery and met Bea in physical therapy. Once she found out the whole story and who I was, she cooked up a little plan to up my cash flow.” He shakes his head, still not looking toward me but keeping an eye on the clearing. He’s obviously expecting company, and the thought of Clete’s face has never been so inviting. “I should have said no, and if it had only been my own comfortable life at stake, I would have. But that money was for Bea, too, and I was supposed to be in charge of it until she turned eighteen. I fucked it up, so here we are.”

  “Plus, you probably figured they’re a bunch of criminals, maybe, but who do they really hurt running moonshine? That’s what I would have thought.”

  “You would have been wrong. They’ve committed murder. They’ve run people into the ground so hard they become homeless vagrants. They hunt out of season. They’re not good people.”

  It’s clear that he feels terrible about the turn his life has taken. If I’m being honest, and it was Amelia or Mel or even Will who I was supposed to take care of and couldn’t because of my own idiocy, I would do anything to make it right.

  He’s doing the wrong thing, but it’s to help his sister. I can’t be angry with him, and now that I know he didn’t kill Glinda, it’s pretty hard to think about turning him in. The best thing for everyone is for me to figure out what her ghost wants from that locked room and then walk out of these hills and never come back.

  “Look, Jasper. I came out here for Glinda, because there’s something in this house that she needs found so she can be at peace.” He gives me a strange look, and I shrug. “It’s true, what they said at the party the other night. I can see ghosts.”

  “What does she want?”

  “I don’t know, but I think it’s behind that door. It’s locked.”

  He stands up and takes the few strides to the painted door on the west side of the room, tugging on the knob the same way I did a couple of days ago. Then he takes it one step farther, pulling the gun off his hip and shooting the lock clean off with three deafening shots.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The door swings open, but nothing’s visible in the darkened room, which looks to be some kind of unfinished crawl space. I can’t hear anything, thanks to the gun reports, and glare at Jasper when he turns around and sweeps an arm toward the opening, as though he’s some kind of white knight and not a trigger-happy, bribe-taking county sheriff.

  “I think you just exploded my eardrums,” I complain, my own words muffled, stuck inside my head by invisible wads of cotton.

  “Sorry. It’ll wear off. I guess I figured you were bright enough to cover your ears when you saw a gun being drawn.”

  “You might not believe this,” I drawl, getting to my feet and going to inspect the now open room, “but not everyone is familiar with what to do when firearms are discharged randomly and without warning.”

  He shrugs, then goes back to staring out the double sliders and into the backyard. If the moonshiners didn’t know we were in Merle’s before, I’m guessing they do now. Which means there’s a time limit—probably a short one—on being able to check this place out on my own.

  I pull my phone out of my pocket, noticing the voice recorder is still running. I leave it that way. It might be that my sympathy for Jasper Patton and his situation has been piqued, at least for now, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to take my word and let me walk out of here with no consequences for discovering his little money-making scheme.

  My text went to Amelia at some point, so there’s a good chance the cavalry is on its way. Not that this place is going to be easy to find for anyone who doesn’t have a guide in the form of a ghost. Or Big Ern.

  My phone’s flashlight app does a good job of lighting the suffocatingly hot extra room. The floor is nothing but dirt, the walls unpainted sheet rock. Exposed beams form the roof, which is only a few feet above my head, and by the looks of things the whole space is empty.

  Then I get an idea—or rather, stop being an idiot—and close the door behind me, blocking stupid Jasper and his stupid sob story from sight. “Glinda,” I hiss, then raise my voice. “Glinda!”

  I hold my breath and sweep the light around the room, wishing again for the simple bossiness of Anne Bonny’s spirit. That woman knew how to get things done, even if she did tend to leave me in a bit of a lurch in the process.

  Glinda’s white, almost-glowing form appears in the far corner of the space, toward what would be the front of the house on the exterior. I step gingerly across the packed dirt, trying not to think about the critters and bugs that are surely crunching beneath my sandals, until I’m close enough to watch her transparent expression light with excitement.

  For once her finger doesn’t point at me. It points down, right at my feet.

  “More digging. You have got to be kidding me.” Glinda gives me a look that says she doesn’t understand my comment and that she doesn’t really give a shit how I feel about it, to boot. It makes me smile, even now, because it’s so Glinda.

  Someday, when I can slow down long enough to assess how I really feel about my newfound ability and all of the implications that go along with it, maybe it will make me glad to know that people don’t lose who they are on the other side of this life.

  Even if it would make mine a little easier if they did.

  “Okay, let’s dig. At least Anne let me use a stick.” The ghost makes an impatient digging motion with her hands. “I get the picture, Glinda. You’re lucky I’m not one of those girls who cares about her nails.”

  I drop to my hands and knees, cringing the whole time, and look up to the ghost for confirmation of the correct spot. She motions me a little to the right, then a few inches toward her, where I find a worn coin of some sort half buried in the soggy earth. The excitement radiating from her spirit suggests this is the spot, and even though it’s not as kitschy or obvious as Anne’s, the coin works as well as the X made of white stones. I’m going to have to remember going forward that people like to bury important thing
s.

  Glinda’s treasure isn’t as deep down as Anne’s, or as old, and only a couple of inches worth of dirt lay scattered on the surface next to the shallow hole when my fingers pry loose the prize—another beat-up coffee can like the one the moonshiners use to leave money for Jasper.

  “This it?”

  She nods, her eyes soft and almost wet looking. The gratitude on her face makes me scramble to my feet, the can clutched between my dirt-caked, filthy fingers. Sorrow and acceptance, a strange combination, soak the edges of the ghost, making her muted and somehow less substantial than she had been a moment ago, and when Glinda disappears this time I know it’s not because someone else is in danger of glimpsing her otherworldly form.

  She’s gone. I found the coffee can, and she has confidence in my ability to close out her earthly business with its contents.

  Unfortunately, I’m going to have to go into the other room to check it out because, while the light from my flashlight is strong, it takes more coordination than I posses to hold it and open the can to examine the interior.

  Jasper turns around when I emerge, his gaze falling to my little discovery and sparking with the slightest bit of interest. He seems distracted, and not just by the fact that Clete hasn’t shown up to cause trouble yet. I sit at the folding table, ignoring him and popping loose the plastic lid on the blue Maxwell House can.

  There are brittle, rolled-up papers inside, three separate groups, all tied in a rubber band. I lay them on the table side by side, trying to smooth them enough that they’ll lie flat. My success rate doesn’t look good, so I pick one and hold it open, peering at the tiny print.

  It looks to be the last will of Merle Davis, which leaves everything to his estranged wife, Glinda Davis, blah blah blah. Behind it is Glinda’s will, which proves to be far more interesting.

  The cabin and lands in Berkeley County are to go to Jasper Patton.

  “Um, Sheriff Patton, you might want to come look at this.”

  He leaves his sentry at the windows and marches to my side, reminding me of an obedient puppy for some reason, then peers over my shoulder. “What is it?”

  “It’s Glinda’s will. She’s leaving this house and property to you.”

  “What? It says that?” He snatches up the pages, years and lines falling away from his face, washed away by pure, undiluted relief.

  As much time as I’ve devoted to seeing him as a suspect, to steeling myself against Beau’s requests to stop due to their friendship, it feels good to watch him freed from the arrangement that’s killing him.

  Then again, part of me kind of assumes he’s going to end up moonshining himself. But maybe not. Maybe he’ll just sell the place to Clete or Cooter and never look back.

  “I can’t believe she did this,” he breathes, sinking down into a chair and rereading the paper, as though it’s going to take more than half a dozen passes to sink in. “I thought she hated me.”

  I snort. “Surest way to know you’ve found your way into one of Glinda’s soft spots is if she acts like she hates you. She didn’t despise anything more than emotions.”

  He manages a dazed smile, eyes still roving the pages. They widen again, and he makes a surprised face. “Did you know she owns a big tract of land in Heron Creek?”

  “What? Where?”

  “Riverfront Park, it says. Her great-grandaddy originally donated the land to the town for public use, but the deed never actually changed hands.”

  I snatch up the other bundles of paper on the table in front of me. The first is the deed to this house and acreage, and I pass it to Jasper. The second is the deed to the land in Heron Creek that, according to her will, encompasses Riverfront Park.

  “That’s crazy. No wonder she thought she had a say in whether or not those renovations went through as planned. But if her great-grandaddy wanted the town to have a nice public park, I wonder why Glinda would be so against the council sprucing it up a little?”

  “Because half the town sits on mineral deposits that have never been tapped,” a familiar, angry voice interrupts.

  Jasper and I have been so wrapped up in Glinda’s legacy that we didn’t hear anyone come in the house, but now we look up to find Randy Wideman in the doorway, still wearing a suit and tie.

  He’s added something to his ensemble since I left him at Town Hall, though. A black revolver, pointed at the two of us with a steady hand.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  I freeze and so does Jasper, both of us looking slack-jawed at the portly, sweating, angry guy lurking just inside the glass doors that lead to the porch. It takes a few seconds for his words to penetrate past my panic, but even after they do, it takes even longer for them to make sense.

  “Mr. Wideman? What the hell?” I’m totally aghast at his appearance, so out of context and out of the realm of anything I expected to see. “Did you follow me?”

  “I’m afraid so, Miss Harper. You’re not all that bright, as it turns out, and you also don’t pay enough attention to that clunker of yours. It’s been hauling around a tracking device for the better part of two weeks.” He turns to the sheriff and motions with the muzzle of his small gun.

  Big enough to put a hole through my brains, though.

  “Just take your gun belt off nice and slow, Sheriff Patton.”

  Jasper complies, looking red in the face over the situation. It’s hard to tell whether he’s embarrassed that a portly councilman got the drop on us or panicky that we’re about to be shot and tossed in the river. I’m feeling a little bit of both, but underneath is an undercurrent of curiosity. I’ve come this far. It won’t do to die without knowing the answers to all of my questions.

  A strange sense of calm flows through my limbs, making its way through my heart and lungs and finally to my head. I don’t know if it’s one of those looking-death-in-the-face moments. Maybe. When Mel and I had been trapped in the library by Mrs. Labadie, I’d managed to be pretty cool under pressure. A girl learns plenty about herself in hairy situations, as it turns out.

  I could have gone a lifetime without knowing some of the things I’ve learned about myself in the past several months, but glass half full and all that.

  “How do you know the land the park is on is worth anything, anyway?”

  “I spent years in the employ of a rather corrupt state congressman before his activities were discovered and I fell from grace along with him. One of his side projects was hiring surveyors to seek out private lands rich in mineral deposits and offer to buy them. He had been working on getting Glinda to sell out for years when she died.” He moves away from the doors, his gun hand never wavering. “I took over when I moved to town, even initiated the renovation project, thinking that she would donate the land to the city and then I’d be in charge of the windfall when the deposits were discovered. But she was one stubborn bitch.”

  “There was no way Glinda knew the grounds were worth anything,” I mutter aloud, trying to force reason into my mind, anything to take it off the fact that a crazy person is pointing a freaking gun at my chest, and that we’re in the middle of nowhere, and while help might be on the way, there’s no counting on it arriving before he decides to do us both in.

  “She didn’t. She knew I wanted them, though, and that I wasn’t the first one. She was a lot of things but stupid wasn’t one of them.”

  Amen to that.

  “What exactly is your plan with that there gun, sir?” Jasper asks, eyeing the weapon with more than a little nervousness.

  Randy doesn’t seem like the type to have much experience with firearms, except perhaps a day or two a month at the range so he can talk a good game about protecting his property or whatever. Which doesn’t mean he’s going to miss us both from less than five feet away.

  “Beyond that, what exactly is your plan for getting your hands on any of the money to be made from the land under Riverfront Park? The deed’s right here, and Glinda’s will says it belongs to her granddaughter.”

  “Well, you two are the o
nly folks aside from me who’ve seen that will, and no one else in Heron Creek’s going to think to look for it out here. I’ll figure out a way for us to find the deed with her things, and I’m sure I can come up with a forgery expert willing to create an addendum that states it should be donated to the town in the eventuality of her death.”

  “And that helps you how?” I wonder.

  “Don’t you worry your pretty head about that.” Randy sneers. “From what I understand, you’re not so good with real-world things, like how someone in charge of finances can keep a little for himself. And you won’t be around to learn about it, anyway.”

  The threat makes my mouth go completely dry. My legs and arms tingle with unspent energy, throbbing with the need to do something—anything—to derail the current course of action.

  Jasper has the same idea, apparently, and lunges toward Randy without warning. The gun goes off twice as they struggle, the report ringing in my ears, my hearing still dull from the earlier shots. Sticking around to find out who got shot or how bad it is might be the responsible thing to do, but neither of these guys would do it for me and freedom’s a glass door and race through the woods away.

  Randy moved from the doors before Jasper lunged, and the two of them are on the floor in the center of the dining room area when I jump past. A hand snakes out and snatches my ankle, sending my flying right onto my face. I land half in, half out of the house, my nose connecting with the rotted floorboards of the deck in an explosion of pain.

  “Fuck me running,” I groan, pulling my knees up under me.

  Stars dance in front of my eyes, but I scramble to my feet. There will hopefully be time to nurse my scrapes and bruises later. If I’m not dead.

  I make it to the edge of the deck before hands tangle in my hair, yanking me backward and off my feet. My scalp screams, and my spine smashes into hard metal—the butt of a gun, my mind registers in a flash.

  Every self-defense seminar I’ve taken comes back in a rush, and I struggle, remembering the statistics about running versus biding my time, and the grunts and gushes of air from Randy promise my knees and elbows are connecting.