Lowcountry Mysteries (Boxed Set #1)

by Lyla Payne

  Thirty more minutes. Then I can go home where nothing will be better, exactly, because I’m still going to have to tell my cousin and my boyfriend about tonight’s shenanigans, but really, neither of them will be all that surprised.

  Beau, though … he’s not going to like one single thing about this story. Then again, if he answered his goddamn phone maybe he’d be a little bit higher on the need-to-know list.

  “Dad, geez. Again?”

  The new voice, strangely familiar, makes me lift my chin up off my chest. It takes me a moment to place the face peering through the bars at the man in the suit, but only because he doesn’t fit here—he belongs in the dark Charleston streets, telling stories about ghosts.

  “Ryan?” I ask before I can stop myself.

  His gaze slides from the older man, who hasn’t responded but has lurched to his feet, to me. He squints for a moment, trying to figure out how he knows me. It takes him longer than it did me, but I only have one tour guide and he has forty-plus tourists a night.

  “It’s Brian.” My identity hits him finally, and he snaps his fingers. “Smarty-pants librarian girl with a hard-on for Henry Woodward.”

  “Charming.” I lift my chin higher. “And I’m an archivist.”

  “Right, right.” He looks around, indicating the cell. “An archivist who gets arrested on weekends?”

  “On occasion. I like to keep things exciting.” I glance toward the man who’s now shifting foot to foot in front of the bars. I can’t tell if he’s impatient or if he’s been waiting to pee until someone springs him. “Friend of yours?”

  “Every family has one,” he comments, pushing his glasses up on his nose.

  “Every family has a miserable fucking failure, too, but you’ve got that job sewn up.” The man in the suit blows out the hateful statement on a mouthful of breath so potent I feel tipsy.

  The force of his contempt makes me wince, but it hits Brian even harder. I watch him absorb it, accept it, maybe agree with it—then pack it away.

  He ignores the man, keeping an eye on me. “I’m guessing you’re the one in your family. Troublemaker, not miserable failure. Although there’s no saying you can’t be both.”

  “It’s a dubious honor.” Part of me, the part that feels sorry for anyone who gets spoken to that way, wants to ask what more he knows about the Whistling Doctor to distract him, but maybe a jail cell isn’t the best place to display my interest.

  The memory of his proprietary attitude and his remarks on getting credit for anything I publish ring in my ears and I keep my mouth shut.

  “What are you in for?” Brian asks me, narrowing his eyes. “Drunk and disorderly? Stealing research? Correcting a tour guide?”

  A voice in the back of my mind whispers to step carefully. I take a couple of moments before answering, summoning a slight smile that I hope isn’t mocking.

  “You’re hilarious. Are you sure there’s not a stand-up comedy dream lurking in the back of your mind?” He doesn’t answer. It’s a silly thing to say—the guy is painfully awkward. Regardless, there’s no way I’m telling him why I’m here. It’s a dead giveaway that I’m interested in Dr. Ladd and not Henry, which isn’t exactly true. I’m interested in both of them but not for the reason Brian seems to think.

  A cop, not Dunleavy, wanders up with a heavy ring of keys jangling from his belt. “Brian.”

  “Hey, Walt.”

  “Sorry to have to call you down here again. Bad fight this time. Other guy’s in the hospital. You might want to call that lawyer of yours.”

  Brian’s eyes close for one second, then another, and when they open he’s composed. “Thanks.” He tips his head my direction. “What’d she do?”

  “Breaking and entering over at the Thomas Rose House.”

  “Hey!” I shoot to my feet. “You can’t just tell people that. It’s against the law!”

  Walt—Officer Franklin, according to his name badge—snorts, rolling his eyes. He looks like a pig and now he sounds like one, too. I bite back every single joke I know about cops and donuts, not needing to supply any reasons for them to keep me here longer.

  “This is my precinct, kiddo. I do what I want, and it’s your word against mine. So pipe down.” He unlocks the cell and grabs Brian’s father by the arm, tugging him forward. “I’ll get him processed out. Five minutes.”

  My tour guide friend nods, his lips pulled down into a frown when he turns back to me. “The Thomas Rose House? What the dickens are you up to? Trying to steal a few things for your paltry small-town archives, make a name for yourself?”

  “It’s none of your business. I know you give your little tours, but you don’t actually own these stories, you know.” Indignant anger kicks up in my blood, but regret hustles hot on its heels. This guy knows his way around this town, and if he’s been a tour guide for as long as his knowledge indicates, there’s a chance he knows things that aren’t on the Internet.

  A lot of people don’t think things like that exist anymore. They do.

  I stand up and move toward him, trying to figure out how to placate the rage blotting crimson spots on his cheeks. He waits on the other side of the bars holding me hostage. The clench of his hands into fists doesn’t fit with the curiosity plain in the light in his brown eyes.

  He’s pissed, but for some reason he’s trying to act like he’s not. To find out what he thinks I know? To learn what might be worth stealing in the Thomas Rose House?

  Maybe the answer is to tell him the truth—just not one he’ll believe.

  The look I give him is my best attempt at conspiratorial, and I lean in close before forcing my question out in a whisper. “Do you believe in ghosts, Brian?”

  He pulls back as though I slapped him, embarrassment hitching his rage higher. “What? Is that supposed to be a joke?”

  Confusion raises my voice. This was not the reaction I expected. “No, I’m literally asking if you really believe in ghosts or if you just do the tours because you like the history or the city or the money.”

  “I like all those things because I am a human being and also a PhD in history.” He pauses, watching me like a dog that’s wondering if it’s going to get stroked or kicked. “But no. I don’t think I do.”

  “You don’t think?”

  “Well, it’s hard to be sure. Never seen one. Never seen any real evidence, despite the interesting intersection of people’s stories.”

  “You talk like a scientist.”

  “I’m an academic.”

  “So am I,” I say, lowering my voice to a whisper again. “But I believe in ghosts.”

  “Good for you.” His eyebrows pull toward his nose. “What’s the point of this conversation?”

  “I went to the Thomas Rose House because I think there’s something there. Something Dr. Joseph Ladd left behind.”

  That catches his interest, but he tries quickly to hide the spark in his gaze and the way his shoulders jerk upright. “People have been in and out of that house, over and over it, for years. There’s no way he left anything that hasn’t been found.”

  “Trust me on this, Brian. People hide all kinds of things you wouldn’t expect to stay hidden as long as they do.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “I thought maybe you’d know more about him than what you told us on the tour. Or that you might be able to get me into that house.”

  “There’s nothing more to know—I’ve looked and looked. If I did know something not in the books or on record, I wouldn’t tell you.” He pins me with a stare that makes me cold. “And as far as the house goes, you can wait until it opens again like everyone else.”

  Something about the eagerness on Brian’s face, the way he’s drinking in my expression like it holds the keys to the kingdom, makes me swallow hard before deciding what to say next. I’m regretting saying what I’ve said, figuring now there’s no way he’s not going to talk himself into that house and snoop from top to bottom.

  Those odd floorboards aren�
��t that hard to find. Maybe no one’s thought to look underneath them until now, but Brian? He’s motivated. He smells like desperation—sour and cheap.

  “Okay, well, you do what you want,” I tell him, retreating to the back of the cell. “I’m just saying that we should be working together. Because I know something you don’t.”

  The sound of Mel’s tinkling, sweet voice carries from the front of the station and relief pops in my blood like champagne bubbles.

  “What were you looking for at the Thomas Rose House?”

  “I wasn’t in the house. Just in the shed. I needed some tools.” The lie rolls off my tongue nicely, well-practiced, but he doesn’t believe me. That’s okay, because I don’t believe him, either. Not about not having his own suspicions about the doctor and not about not believing in ghosts. And definitely not about caring most for the money.

  “You’re a liar.” His hands curl around the bars, squeezing tight before the sound of Melanie’s footsteps, accompanied by boots and jangling keys, inspires him to let go.

  Brian leaves without another word, and my mind tries to make sense of his odd competitiveness. There’s no doubt the man has issues, and not knowing how deep they might run sends the slightest chill down the back of my neck.

  The drive home from Charleston is going to take forever. Will and Mel want me to leave my car, but I need the car-trouble cover story I concocted, so I insist that it be towed back to Heron Creek. I’ll have to read up on how to break something in the engine so that I can have it fixed tomorrow morning.

  At most, I’ll get a fine, maybe community service, if I’m guilty of nothing but the bad judgment to “borrow” a tool instead of calling a mechanic.

  They refuse to leave me alone after what they seem to have agreed to refer to as “my ordeal,” though, so Will takes the keys to my Honda and insists on waiting for the tow-truck driver.

  I climb into the passenger seat of their ten-year-old minivan next to Mel. We don’t even make it to Meeting Street before she snaps off the radio and tightens her slim fingers on the wheel.

  “Okay, Gracie, what happened? And don’t give me any bull honky about needing some doohickey to fix your car, because you and I were both there when you almost blew yourself up trying to jump-start Will’s jeep in tenth grade.”

  Whoa. Mel just came close to cursing. This is serious.

  All I can think is how good it’s going to feel to get all this off my chest, to have someone to bounce ideas off who, if nothing else, has always 100 percent told me the truth.

  I suck in a deep breath, then blow it out. “I’m going to start at the beginning, so it might take a minute to get to the breaking and entering. I’m telling you now because patience isn’t your strong suit.”

  “Like you’re one to talk.”

  “I am not the one who can’t even watch a tennis match without looking up who won before we start.”

  “Fine. Start talking.”

  “I’ve got another ghost.”

  “You mean besides the mystery man Amelia identified?”

  I should have guessed the two of them had been having secret meetings of the knocked-up club, but her knowledge startles the words right out of my head for a breath or two. Then I nod. It doesn’t matter if Millie’s been talking to Mel about Henry Woodward. There are more immediate problems, and anyway, the three of us—four of us—never had secrets.

  I am a little surprised Will didn’t tell her about Joseph Ladd, though. Best to keep my mouth shut about that.

  “Yeah. Picked a man named Dr. Ladd up on a ghost tour a week or so ago and he’s been bugging me to get my butt to the Thomas Rose House. Except it’s closed for renovations and so, you know …”

  “You thought that meant it was only closed for people other than you?”

  I shrug, giving her a half smile and finishing the story about the floorboards and needing something to pry them up with. She shakes her head, but she’s smiling by the end of it. Despite her prim and proper exterior, Melanie has never been the scaredy-cat prude her husband is.

  “Is that all that’s been going on? Will said you were asking some weird questions at Pete’s the other night about government liquor distribution contracts.”

  It kicks me right in the gut all over again, the position I’ve put Will in with all this lying-to-criminals business. With everything that’s been going on I’ve nearly forgotten Clete’s role in my tangled web. Now, sitting in a car that smells like spoiled milk and crushed animal crackers next to Will’s pregnant wife, I know I can’t do this alone. If there’s anyone in the world who won’t hate me, who might understand, it will be Mel.

  After she gets her mama-bear instincts under control.

  “Well, Clete was asking me about them—you know, the moonshiner?” She nods, biting her bottom lip as though she knows she isn’t going to like what’s coming. “And he showed up the other night telling me he had information about Beau’s case that could prove Beau is innocent.”

  The car swerves slightly. “What?”

  “Yeah. He said there are rumors that the prosecutor’s office in Charleston County is friendly to certain criminals, but that the attorney’s name being flung around in connection to the crime family isn’t Beau’s.” I stare at my fingernails, ragged around the cuticles. “He said if I could help him push through his application to sell his moonshine legally, then he would tell me who to look at instead of Beau.”

  “But you don’t have the power to do that.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  Melanie calmly puts on her blinker and pulls over to the shoulder of the highway. The blinking hazard lights illuminate her freckled skin, making it oddly pale, and her brown eyes are huge, full of horror and accusations as she stares me down.

  “What did you do, Gracie?”

  “I might have insinuated that Will would bring the application up for approval at the next board meeting.”

  “You what? Gracie, this man is a criminal! A killer! We have children! He could come after us!”

  “I wasn’t thinking that far ahead,” I blurt, sorrow pushing my words out too close together. They trip and snarl, and I take a deep breath, struggling for control. “I only thought if I could help Beau with this whole thing, then I should do it. He’s innocent and someone’s setting him up to take the fall. I didn’t know how else to get the information, and we still have time.” I reach out but she snatches her hand back, chest heaving as she stares out the windshield at nothing instead of looking at me. “If it comes down to it, I’ll tell Clete I lied, that Will never had anything to do with it. I would never put you guys in danger, and I would never ask—or expect—Will to sacrifice his integrity like that. I just needed the name.”

  “And you got it?” she asks, her voice level.

  “Yes. I haven’t been able to find out much else at this point.”

  “Of course you haven’t.” Her gaze, fiery and plain pissed, swivels back to me. “This isn’t your job. You’re a stinking archivist, and Amelia’s never worked. Will’s a surveyor, and I’m still a full-time mom. We’re not a crack team of private eyes! We don’t deal with criminals. We don’t go after, what? Drug cartels? Mob families? What are you thinking, trying to do this alone?”

  “I don’t know who’s going to help me,” I snap, frustration oozing out of me like sweat. “Everyone—including you—just assumes Beau’s guilty when he’s not!”

  That seems to strike a chord with her, however brief. She sits back in her seat, fingers pinching her lower lip as she stares out the windshield. After a long moment, she faces me. “We’re going to need help.”

  “We?”

  “I just said you can’t do this alone, Gracie. I don’t want Beau to go to prison or lose everything he’s worked for if he’s not responsible for doing this to Lindsay, but I also don’t want my husband to end up at the bottom of the Ashley River tied to some rocks.”

  The imagery makes her wince and gives my heart a twist.

  “You know I don’
t want that, either.”

  “Well, you should have thought about that before you went lying to a bunch of killers. I swear, it’s like you have a death wish sometimes. You’ve always been that way, but it never stops scarin’ the daylights out of me.” She pauses, her expression softening. “Out of all of us.”

  “I’m sorry,” I whisper. Maybe it’s time to grow up, to start thinking longer term than the next five minutes, but I don’t know how to do that. What if I’m just not built that way?

  “It’s done now. No sense bawlin’ about it. Now, have you talked to Beau about any of this?”

  I shake my head. “I didn’t want to get his hopes up.”

  “You mean you didn’t want to listen to him tell you to stay out of it and then ignore him.”

  “Maybe.” There’s comfort and annoyance in people knowing you so well.

  “You have to talk to him. Could be he knows a legal way to push Clete’s application to the top of the pile, so at least we’ll have one less thing to worry about. And who’s going to know better about the guys that worked for him back then? No one.” Mel gives me her trademark stern-Melanie stare. “I know you want to save the day, but he’s going to have to get behind this, too.”

  My stomach sinks, because she’s right. And that conversation is going to go even worse than this one.

  The thought of Clete snapping at our heels like a rabid dog, waiting around the corner with a more tangible—probably loaded—threat than Mrs. LaBadie and her maybe-killer dreams, makes it obvious that Mel’s not wrong. I reach out and snag her hand, giving it a squeeze, and this time she lets me.

  “Thanks,” I say as she pulls back out onto the highway.

  “For what?”

  “For saying ‘we.’”

  “It’s always we, Gracie. Until the end, right?”

  “Until the end.”

  We both sound grimmer than we should, far more so than when we came up with that creed for our little band of terrorizing preteens back in the day. I guess because with the way things are going, or maybe just because we’re older, that hazy end becomes a little bit clearer—and closer—every day.