Nicky snorted. Was there any wonder? Within the last two hours or so since she’d arrived on the island, she had seen Tara Mitchell’s ghost and heard something that sounded like the Hound of the Baskervilles howl. And she could almost feel the presence of evil.
Good God, she thought, appalled, as the words took on shape and substance in her mind—she was starting to sound like her mother.
That notion was so mind-boggling that she barely noticed that the Maxima was crunching up the pea-gravel driveway to Twybee Cottage until she swung around the garage and into the parking area and her headlights caught her mother, clad in loose black slacks and a short-sleeved floral blouse, upswept red hair gleaming brightly as the beams caught it, and her sister, wearing tight pink cropped pants and a pink-and-white gingham tent with her blond hair swinging loose around her face, leaning together into the open driver’s-side door of a big black Mercedes-Benz sedan that was parked alongside Livvy’s silver Jaguar. Since they both seemed to be looking at something in the Mercedes’s front seat, all she saw of them at first was their backsides. But as the headlights hit them, their heads came out of the Mercedes faster than corks out of a champagne bottle. Almost in perfect unison, they swung around to face the oncoming car, looking like deer caught in the headlights, their eyes and mouths identically big and round as sand dollars.
Nicky frowned. Sliding the transmission into park and killing the engine and lights, she got out. She’d seen her mother and sister in all their moods, and this one she recognized easily: extreme guilt.
“So, what’s up?” she called. The front end of the Maxima was between her and them as she walked toward them, which meant that she could see them only from about the hipbones up.
“Oh, Nicky, thank God it’s you.” Leonora sagged against the open car door behind her.
“You scared the daylights out of us,” Livvy added, throwing her sister a disgusted look before turning and thrusting her head back inside the car.
“Look what they’ve got me doing. Just look at this.” The tone was one of bitter complaint. The voice was Uncle John’s, and it came from somewhere on high. Glancing up, Nicky’s mouth dropped open. Framed by the glossy green leaves of the big magnolia by the porch, he was a good twenty feet off the ground, inching his way out along one of the arm-thick branches, one hand clamped around the smaller branch over his head, the other grasping a silver-bladed hacksaw that gleamed faintly in the yellow porch light. A metal ladder leaned against the trunk of the tree, mute evidence of his method of ascension.
“It’ll be a miracle if I don’t break my neck,” he added.
“Here’s the ice.” Uncle Ham banged out through the screen door, then checked on the porch for an instant as he first saw the Maxima, and then Nicky. “Nicky! Sweetie! Welcome home!”
“It’s not my fault.” Livvy said. She no longer had her head inside the Mercedes, and was instead leaning against the closed back door, one hand pressed to her swollen belly. Only Leonora’s backside now protruded from the car. Livvy looked appealingly at Nicky. “He called me Shamu.”
Uh-oh. Did somebody have a death wish, or what?
Uncle Ham was moving again, running down the back steps, bulbous white dishcloth presumably filled with ice clutched in one hand. Uncle John was moving, too, creeping farther out along the branch and asking plaintively if they thought that was far enough. Leonora had withdrawn from the Mercedes again and was shaking her head at Livvy, whose lower lip quivered ominously.
Nicky registered these things only peripherally because, as she rounded the hood of her car and got a full view of her mother and sister and the driver’s side of the Mercedes, her attention was instantly riveted by something else. A man’s feet in medium-sized black dress shoes were planted side by side in the pea gravel. His legs, in pin-striped black dress pants, rose from the feet to bend at the knee and then, at about mid-thigh height, disappeared inside the car. The interior light was on, and there was no mistaking what she saw, but still Nicky stared for a few seconds, dumbfounded. Then it hit her that there was indeed a man lying motionless on his back across the Mercedes’s front seats. It also hit her that she knew that car: She’d last seen it at Christmas, when her sister and her sister’s husband had arrived in it.
The supine man could only be her soon-to-be-ex-brother-in-law. And he had called Livvy Shamu.
“Ohmigod.” Nicky clapped a hand over her mouth as she hurried forward to survey the damage. It was Ben, all right. With her mother and Livvy blocking access to the car door, she couldn’t see much, but she got a glimpse of a (now pale as white bread) strong-featured male profile and meticulously groomed dark blond hair. His eyes were closed. His mouth was slack. His body was limp. Her horrified gaze encountered her sister’s. Her hand dropped away from her mouth. “Liv, what did you do?”
“Coldcocked him with a candlestick,” Uncle Ham said, not without a certain amount of satisfaction as he pushed past Nicky to hand the makeshift ice bag to Leonora. “I always knew she had the James temper in there somewhere.”
“I didn’t mean to really hurt him,” Livvy said in a small voice. “It’s just—I was upset. I was at our house, getting some of my things, and he came home and said I couldn’t take anything and then I went ahead and jumped in my car—it was pretty full by then—and took off, and he followed me all the way home. And then he started yelling about how immature I am and how Alison”—Alison being, as they all knew, the homewrecking bimbo—“is what he needs, and then he called me Sh-Shamu.”
Listening to Livvy’s voice quaver, Nicky would have given her brother-in-law a sharp kick in the kneecap if he’d been aware enough to feel it.
“And then she beaned him. We were having supper, and we all saw it through the window,” Uncle Ham said with relish.
“I was carrying Grandma’s candlesticks in from the car,” Livvy said to Nicky. “You know the ones.”
Nicky did indeed. A pair of pre-Civil War sterling-silver candelabra, they had held pride of place with a matching epergne on Livvy’s dining-room table since she’d married. They were about two and a half feet tall, and had to weigh at least fifteen pounds each.
Nicky stared at her sister, then looked at the motionless legs.
“Is he—?” “Dead” was what Nicky was going to say, but the sound of tires crunching up the driveway coupled with the sweep of headlights across the parking area made her jump and whirl around to face them. Everybody in the group—with the exception of Ben, of course, who was incapacitated, and Uncle John, who was up in the tree—followed suit with a collective in-drawing of breath.
“It’s Joe,” Nicky said, having just then remembered that he was behind her. “Joe Franconi. He followed me home.”
“The police chief?” Leonora pressed a hand to her bosom.
“Look out below!” A magnolia branch as long as Nicky’s leg crashed down right in front of the open Mercedes door, making them all jump again.
“We’re going to tell Ben that a branch broke off the magnolia and hit him in the head. I don’t think he saw the candlestick coming,” Uncle Ham told Nicky hurriedly. “If he ever wakes up, that is.” Then, glancing skyward, he hissed, “Dammit, John, be quiet up there. Can’t you see what just pulled up the driveway?”
“Oh, shit.”
The cruiser had them all pinned in its lights now as it pulled up beside Nicky’s Maxima and stopped. She could only imagine the tableau they must present, with her, Livvy, Leonora, and Ham frozen in place beside the Mercedes and, in her case at least, staring bug-eyed in the newcomer’s direction. Guilt had to be written all over all of them. And that was before Joe got around to spotting Uncle John in the tree—or Ben’s legs sticking out of the car door, for that matter.
“I won’t have to go to jail, will I?” Livvy sounded petrified. “He called me Shamu.”
It occurred to Nicky then that what Livvy had done could probably be considered assault, the Shamu comment notwithstanding—unless, of course, Ben was dead.
“
Hush,” Leonora hissed at her older daughter. “You’re not going to jail.” Then, giving Nicky a little push in the center of her back as the cruiser’s headlights went out and its door opened, she added under her breath, “Get rid of him. Now.”
Okay. Nicky started to move as her mind went into semi-hysterical overdrive. Once more into the breach . . .
“Evening, folks.” Joe was out of the car now, slamming the door behind him as he walked toward them. His tall form was in deep shadow. Nicky realized with a thrill of horror that they were in the light.
“Hi, Joe,” her family chorused. A lightning glance over her shoulder told Nicky that they were all clustered in front of the telltale legs now, forming what amounted to a human wall that unfortunately failed to hide Ben’s feet. Uncle Ham smiled; Leonora smiled. And Livvy—white as flour, round as the Great Pumpkin, eyes as big as Toll House cookies, and grinning like she had rigor mortis—Livvy leaned against Leonora’s shoulder and gave a little three-fingered wave.
Nicky couldn’t see Uncle John in the tree. Hopefully, Joe couldn’t see him, either.
But those of her relatives that she could see looked about as relaxed and natural as American Gothic.
Horribly conscious that as soon as Joe rounded the hood of his car he would be able to see Ben’s feet, Nicky moved faster.
“Everybody okay?” Joe asked. He was close enough now that Nicky could see that he was frowning a little. Presumably something about her relatives’ posture was starting to pique his interest.
“Just fine.”
“Sure thing.”
“Absolutely.”
The responses came in an almost simultaneous chorus—and sounded false as hell to Nicky.
Joe had almost reached the edge of his front bumper.
She rounded the hood of his car and stopped dead in his path, successfully blocking his forward progress.
Yes.
He looked down at her, and his expression changed. His eyes took on a dangerous glint, and his lips compressed. He looked, in fact, like a man in a snit. With her.
Well, good. Come to think of it, she was in a snit with him, too, and, moreover, she was going to beat him to the punch.
“We need to talk.” She glared up at him with all the ferocity she could muster.
“You’re damned right we do.” He kept his voice down, so that his response went no farther than her ears.
“Great.” Then, having just had another one of her patented eureka moments, she added, “In private.”
“Honey, you read my mind.”
She was ticked off at him, scared of ghosts and killers, and worried that her temporarily psychotic sister might be headed for either the loony bin or the pokey, whichever got to her first, but still, something about him calling her “honey” in that sexy Yankee voice of his sent a little thrill curling through her stomach—or somewhere thereabouts.
“We’re going for a walk on the beach,” she called over her shoulder without looking around. Then, with her mother’s falsely cheery “Y’all have fun” echoing in her ears, she caught Joe’s hand and dragged him away from the scene of the crime, toward the front of the house and the rickety wooden walkway that led over the dunes and down to the beach.
13
BEING DRAGGED OFF into the dark by a gorgeous, sexy woman he was developing a considerable jones for wasn’t the worst thing to ever happen to him, Joe reflected as Nicky towed him along like a dog owner with a recalcitrant mutt, but under the circumstances, it was damned suspicious.
“So, what was going on back there?” he asked as they left the shelter of the house behind and started down the rickety wooden walkway that connected Twybee Cottage to the beach. A considerable number of the old houses that fronted the ocean had private boardwalks rising over the constantly shifting dunes and tall drifts of sea oats that separated the houses from the beach, making access to the ocean easier. Like the houses, most were in the “arrogantly shabby” mode of the island, and some were wobblier than others. This particular one was pretty wobbly, creaking underfoot, its supports as cockeyed and insubstantial-looking as a smashed spider’s legs.
“Nothing out of the ordinary,” she said, then she seemed to realize that she was literally pulling him along, and she slowed down and dropped his hand.
Joe was surprised at how keenly he felt the loss of those warm, silky-skinned fingers.
“Just a typical Friday night at home, hmm?”
Her mouth twisted a bit as she glanced up at him. “For my family? Oh, yeah.”
For a moment, the issue hung in the balance. Then, because her voice carried the ring of truth, and because he’d much rather be heading down toward the ocean with her than be back there sorting out her family anyway, he let the matter go.
“I don’t quite get the setup,” he said, feeling some of the tension start to leave his shoulders and neck as the night enveloped them like a whisper-soft blanket. For one of the few times in the past week, he was enjoying something. And what he was enjoying was, quite simply, her company. “Do they all live there together?”
Nicky made a face. “Not usually. But we’re having sort of a . . . family crisis, and everybody’s kind of circling the wagons right now.”
They were walking side by side now, and he was loath to ruin the companionable mood so soon by launching into the argument that he knew he was going to have to have with her. Besides, he was curious. “What kind of crisis?”
“You mean you haven’t heard? I thought everybody on the island knew.”
He shrugged. “I’m a newcomer. I’m out of the loop.”
“Yes, you would be. Well . . .” Her voice trailed off as they reached the peak of the walkway, and the sea, dark and wild in the light of the rising moon, came into view. The tide was coming in, and waves thundered toward shore like rows of galloping black horses with tossing white manes. The roar was hypnotic. The wind—it was too strong to be called a breeze—hit Joe in the face. It smelled and tasted briny, like oysters. It caught his tie and sent it flapping off to the side.
Nicky’s glorious hair blew all over the place, whipping around her face, getting in her mouth, and she paused to deal with it. Joe watched with some pleasure as she pulled a strand away from her lips, then caught the top section of it up and held it back with one hand. Etched by pale moonlight, her profile was as fine and delicate as a cameo’s, except no cameo he had ever seen in his life had possessed such long lashes—or such full, seductive lips.
Watching them part, he felt his body tighten and wrenched his eyes away.
“Livvy—my sister—is getting a divorce.”
It took him a second to get his mind back in gear again so that he was actually able to make sense of her words.
“And she’s pregnant,” she continued, “and her husband’s being a real prick, and she’s having a really hard time dealing with everything. So she moved back in with my mother and Harry. Harry’s pretty much horrified by the whole situation, and does his best to stay out of the way, but Uncle Ham and Uncle John have been really supportive. They actually live in Savannah, but they’ve been spending a lot of time at Twybee Cottage lately to help with Livvy—and because Uncle Ham’s going to be opening a restaurant here. He owns Hamilton House in Savannah, you know.”
There was an unmistakable touch of pride in her voice as she said that last sentence.
“I heard.” Hamilton House was one of the best-known restaurants in the region, as Joe had learned while having everyone who’d been present at the Old Taylor Place on the night of Karen Wise’s murder checked out. Hamilton James had been described to him variously as a highly respected businessman, a temperamental artiste of the kitchen, and a Southern aristocrat to his fingertips. His partner in life, John, was also his partner in the restaurant business, as well as being his accountant and, by all accounts, a much less combustible type.
“Plus, my mother’s having a small crisis of her own, because she thinks she’s suffering from psychic’s block, as she calls it.
She hasn’t been able to get through to the Other Side properly for a while now, and it’s making her slightly nuts.”
Joe thought about that for a second.
“So if the psychic hotline’s down, as it were, how was she able to talk to Tara Mitchell’s ghost on your TV show the other night?” He did his best to keep the whole “got ya” vibe out of his voice.
Apparently, he didn’t entirely succeed, because she gave him a sharp look.
“You know what? Since I’m not psychic myself, I don’t understand precisely how it works all the time, either. But if my mother said she saw Tara Mitchell, she saw Tara Mitchell. My mother is many things, but she is not a liar.”
Combustibility must run in the James family genes, Joe thought, with a wry glance down at his now-bristling companion. Wasn’t there some saying about fiery hair equaling a fiery heart (which, for his money, wasn’t necessarily a bad thing)?
The thing about playing with fire, though, was that it was way too easy to end up getting burned. . . .
Which, he reminded himself firmly, was why he was opting not to play.
“Hold on. You’re putting words in my mouth here. I never said she was. I only asked the same question any other reasonable human being would.”
That earned him another sharp look.
“Just because you don’t believe in ghosts doesn’t mean they don’t exist, you know.”
Joe thought of Brian, who was, fortunately, nowhere in evidence at the moment. “Believing in ghosts is a pretty big stretch for a guy like me. What can I say? I need proof.”
They reached the end of the boardwalk then, and the white beach stretched before them like a pale highway. The moon hung just above the horizon, big and round as a hubcap and the color of milk in an inky sky. Its reflection shimmered on top of the waves like the squiggle of icing on a snack cake. A sprinkling of stars peeped through a layer of shredded gray clouds.
“Careful.” Joe paused to let Nicky proceed down the steps. She hesitated at the top, one hand on the rail, the other still holding back her hair as she glanced cautiously up and down the beach. It wasn’t quite empty. He could see, in the distance, outlined by moonlight, a couple walking shoulder to shoulder, and a woman jogging while her dog—something big, a Lab, maybe—raced in and out of the surf.
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