Echoes of Evil

by Heather Graham

  “What’s that?”

  “The man can’t play a guitar to save his life.”

  * * *

  It was impossible to out and out ask Cliff what he was talking about. Colleen was there—going through a bit of a mystical thing, trying to convince them that she could “feel” Cliff.

  Neither Kody nor Kelsey agreed with her—or disagreed.

  Kody managed to glare at Cliff’s ghost, indicating that he was to follow her into the kitchen.

  The captain was there; Kody didn’t know where he’d been, but he had returned from wherever, and he nodded to Cliff.

  “Sir, you’re doing quite amazing with your appearance and your abilities,” the captain said, addressing Cliff. “It took me...well, months, at least, to materialize and, through the years, find those who knew I was there.”

  “I think I’m so angry—and, quite naturally, disturbed,” Cliff said. “Guess that makes me motivated. And I guess, too, I always had a feeling about Kody. Her mom told me once that she’d seen her grandmother. Poor Sally had been worried as hell.”

  “Well, whatever the cause, you’re doing remarkably well,” the captain said.

  “Thank you,” Cliff told him.

  “He thinks he knows who murdered him,” Kody explained, talking softly. She hadn’t closed the kitchen door entirely.

  “Oh?” the captain asked.

  “Bill Worth,” Cliff said.

  Kody was stunned. She couldn’t help but remember the strange way Brodie had behaved when he and Liam had stopped by Rosy’s table.

  “Bill?” she said.

  “He was too close to Rosy,” Cliff said.

  “You’re kidding me, right?” Kody asked. “Cliff, all of us have been doing what we can—for her!”

  “He was too close,” Cliff said.

  “It’s not right at all, and the man has quite a point. Not right that a friend should be close to a dead man’s wife, that man barely cold,” the captain said.

  “But that’s all that you’re basing it on?” Kody asked.

  “That’s not enough?” Cliff asked.

  “His head was close to hers because they were talking,” Kody told him. “Cliff, you can’t...you can’t pin a murder on a man for that. Did you follow them tonight? I’ll bet you did. I’ll bet you went to your house—and watched.”

  Cliff was silent for a minute.

  “You did!” Kody accused.

  “All right, all right, I did!” Cliff said.

  “And, sir, what happened?” the captain asked.

  “Nothing,” Cliff admitted. “Emory and Bill saw that Rosy made it safely home with Sonny. Then the two of them left together.”

  “So, you’re just angry because Bill had his head close to Rosy’s as they were talking?”

  “He still might be trying to make a move,” Cliff said.

  “And you have a young woman out there fascinated and halfway in love with you—because you come to her at night!” Kody said.

  “Really? Sir, a gentleman does not go into a lady’s room unannounced,” the captain said.

  “I tried to see Rosy. She freaks out!” Cliff protested.

  “Sir, still...”

  “I made her happy,” Cliff said softly.

  “Yes, and next week, she’s going to be buying a crystal ball and become a medium,” Kody said.

  Cliff sighed. He shook his head and turned around and walked out.

  “I’ll follow him,” the captain offered.

  They were barely gone when the half-closed kitchen door opened and Colleen came in.

  “Are you all right?” Colleen asked her anxiously. “I heard you talking to yourself.”

  “No, I was just...singing,” Kody said.

  “Oh. One of your dad’s songs?”

  “No, actually, one of Cliff’s songs,” Kody said, smiling, thinking quickly. “‘Love in the Sun.’ Well, I guess he and my dad wrote it together, but I think it’s really Cliff’s song.”

  “Oh, that’s the one you did today, at the funeral reception,” Colleen said. “That was beautiful. You made Rosy cry—I think you made everyone cry.”

  “Great,” Kody murmured.

  Kelsey popped around the corner of the kitchen door. “The guys are back.”

  “Oh, excellent,” Kody said. “Come on, let’s see...how they’re doing.”

  In the hallway, Liam slipped an arm around Kelsey, then looked at Kody. “I’m so sorry we had to head out like that.”

  “You’ve had a lot going on this week,” Kody said.

  He nodded. “See you in the morning?” he asked Brodie.

  “Whenever you’re ready,” Brodie told him.

  “Seven too early?”

  “Seven is fine.”

  Liam turned to Colleen. “Should we get you home?”

  “Yes, how nice of you.”

  “Colleen, you can stay longer if you wish,” Kody told her.

  But Colleen shook her head. “It’s been a long day,” she said. “And I’ll be opening the museum right on time.”

  “I’ll be there tomorrow,” Kody told her.

  “Great. It is a lot more fun when there are two of us,” she said cheerfully. Then she added anxiously, “But if you need to be somewhere else—”

  “I need to be at the museum. I have to see how I’m going to rearrange the Civil War Era room and then the Artist’s Corner,” Kody said. “It will be wonderful if we have a chance to work at it together.”

  “Right. Well, then, I can’t wait to get home,” Colleen said. “I mean, I’m so tired!”

  Kelsey and Liam bid them good-night; Colleen did the same.

  “Oh! That Cliff! I’d smack him if I could!” Kody said when the door closed on the trio.

  “And why is that?”

  “He came in announcing that Bill Worth was his murderer—and do you know why?”

  “Why?” Brodie asked, frowning as he looked at her.

  “Because his head was too close to Rosy’s when they were talking,” Kody told him.

  There was something odd in his expression.

  “What?”

  “Nothing, really. Nothing yet,” he added.

  “That means something. Damn it, Brodie, tell me.”

  “Angela Hawkins was doing some research for me at Krewe headquarters...”

  “I thought your brothers were in the academy—not you.”

  “I know a lot of them...naturally. Especially Adam Harrison and Jackson...and therefore Angela, his wife. She traced every name I could give her that had to do with the Victoria Elizabeth.”

  “Oh?”

  “Bill Worth is a descendant of one of the men with whom Mauricio Ferrer was corresponding—one of the men for whom he was buying the slaves.”

  “And—he killed the diver and Cliff Bullard because of something an ancestor did?” Kody asked, incredulous.

  “Kody, some people wouldn’t want to be associated with something that negative from the past.”

  “I’m telling you—that would be ridiculous. Besides, Bill was involved in our festival. On the Saturday night when the diver was killed, Bill Worth was at our event. We did a dinner-show thing. The artists worked on our little ‘sets,’ the musicians played for it, the actors performed it—and Bill Worth and a few other men wrote it.”

  “And what time did your dinner show end?” Brodie asked her.

  “I don’t know—late.”

  “Midnight?”

  She let out a breath. “A little before.”

  “And then...”

  “People hung around, talking to one another.”

  “And you saw Bill all the time?”

  “No, but I’m sure others did. He wouldn’t have headed back to his own house until very, very late.” She nar
rowed her eyes, looking at him. “Was that the only name that came up in Angela’s research?”

  He hesitated—just slightly.

  “No. She did research on every man involved with Sea Life—including Ewan. And she found that Ewan’s boat was out all night—out near the Victoria Elizabeth.”

  Kody threw her hands up. “There you go! Hey, I like Ewan, too. We had a great working relationship going over the discovery of the ship and how it would be displayed at the museum. But he is a phenomenal diver. He knows that ship now better than anyone else.”

  “He has an alibi, too.”

  She stared at him. “But...”

  “But what?”

  “Why would he have killed Cliff Bullard? They weren’t that close at all.”

  “Mr. Ferrer was a guitarist, a musician—a good one,” Brodie said.

  “So it isn’t likely, though, that Ewan, who doesn’t play a guitar and whose life is the water, would kill Cliff. None of it makes sense. And now...we have a drowning victim. The woman on the beach they found this morning,” Kody said.

  She turned around and headed up the stairs.

  He followed her. She was upset; she thought that he was upset.

  But the minute they were in her bedroom, he pulled her into his arms.

  And she folded into him willingly.

  It had been the kind of day when emotions had come to a pinnacle, and somehow it made making love more important. More urgent. More necessary.

  And even more passionate.

  She wondered how she could live if she believed that she would never feel that touch of his kiss upon her naked flesh again...

  Know the way he looked at her when he moved over her, came into her...

  They didn’t speak more that night—except for urgent little whispers.

  And so, it wasn’t until the morning—long after Kody had rolled over to say goodbye for the day, receiving Brodie’s assurance that he would keep in touch—that she rose, stretching, and noted the picture of her and her father she kept on her dresser.

  It had moved.

  She was certain, absolutely certain, that it had moved. For a moment, she was in a panic in her own home.

  Who the hell had been in there? Was she going crazy? Had Brodie looked at it, picked it up, put it back down in not quite the right spot?

  She threw open the door to her bedroom, almost ready to run out of the house, wrapped in a sheet.

  “Captain!” she called.

  She met him at the foot of the stairs. “Kody—Oh, dear, Kody, what’s wrong?”

  “The house!” she whispered. “There was someone in the house!”

  “No,” he told her, shaking his head. “I go through the entire house every time I return home. There’s no one here.”

  “You’re certain?”

  “Absolutely certain.”

  She swallowed hard. “Dakota McCoy, I swear to you, on my honor. There is no one in this house.”

  “Oh...okay. Thank you. I’m going to take a shower. Get dressed, head to work.”

  He looked at her with concern. “Kody, I will not leave today. I will watch. And if anyone comes near this house, you will know immediately.”

  “Thank you,” she told him.

  She still showered and dressed faster than she had ever done in her life.

  And when she left the house, she was afraid.

  Even when she walked down the street, she was afraid. Very afraid that someone was watching her, haunting her...

  Someone who was not dead, but who might very well have caused the death of others.

  * * *

  They reached the morgue very early, but the autopsy of Mathilda Sumner was well underway, Dr. Sheila Green—the ME they’d met at the beach—presiding.

  They suited up; Dr. Green was already on the stomach contents.

  “Welcome, Detective, Mr. McFadden,” she said, nodding to them both as they came into the room. “I believe I’m glad to tell you that, while death is a tragedy in one yet to see her golden years, the cause of death was definitely drowning. I’m assuming accidental.”

  “Assuming?”

  “I can only work with what I see. There are no bruises on her anywhere, suggesting that she might have been held down.”

  “No bruises, no defense wounds,” Liam said.

  They were both close to the corpse. Brodie, his hands gloved, said to the doctor, “May I?”

  She nodded.

  He lifted the victim’s hands, making a pretense of looking at her hands, fingers and fingernails.

  The ghost of the woman did not pop into the autopsy room.

  But as he had with Arnold Ferrer, he had a feeling that Mathilda Sumner was not completely gone. She hadn’t managed to stay with an instant talent for haunting, like Cliff. Yet he wondered if there hadn’t been some type of shadow about her...something that whispered in the wind or compelled one with a flash of light, bringing them to the body.

  Murdered, needing to be discovered.

  “As you can see, there’s no reason not to believe this was an accident.”

  “Except, of course, we have to find out how a woman from Marathon managed to die on a beach down in Key West—no clothing, towel, or anything else left on the beach, no ID of any kind.”

  “Perhaps she fell off a friend’s boat,” Dr. Green said.

  “Perhaps. But usually, if you fall off a friend’s boat, they fish you back up—or, at least report what has happened,” Brodie said quietly.

  The doctor paused and looked at them. “You want me not to say that this was an accidental drowning?”

  “Not as yet. Give us some time,” Liam said.

  “Okay...well, I guess I can wait. But from what I see here...no one forced her under.”

  “But she might have grown tired out at sea, unable to see the shore, perhaps. Once you’re out there, the waves—even when they’re mild—can be something to fight,” Liam said.

  “Even a good swimmer can drown,” Brodie added.

  Dr. Green paused again, staring at the two of them. “You know you’re probably chasing a mystery where there is none.”

  “Well, let me chase it,” Liam told her. “And thank you.”

  “You can see Misty Cahill—she should be out in reception by now. She’s the one who recognized Miss Sumner when she came in.”

  “Thank you,” Liam told her.

  “Oh, and I know Dr. Bethany—who did the autopsy on your friend, Cliff Bullard—has sent you the reports on the stomach contents.”

  “I don’t have the reports yet,” Liam said.

  “He just completed them after receiving the results from the lab. You can ask Misty for a printed copy.”

  Again, they thanked her.

  And left her working over the body of Mathilda Sumner.

  “Misty?” Brodie asked at the reception desk. “Brodie McFadden, PI, and Detective Beckett. We’re here about Mathilda Sumner.”

  The woman was young—probably right out of college. Brodie remembered that she’d been back working in a filing room when they’d been at the morgue before.

  “Hello,” she said, looking at them solemnly. “Are you going to find out what happened with Mathilda?”

  “We’re going to try,” Liam said. “We won’t just forget her as a sad accident,” he promised.

  “How well did you know her?” Brodie asked.

  “Not that well—or well enough, I guess. I saw her at the grocery store. And she was so sweet. I’d hear her play at the bar sometimes. Friends came with me. We all enjoyed her. She liked to joke, her voice was kind of throaty—and she could really play the guitar.”

  “So, you wouldn’t have any idea how she wound up dead on a beach in Key West?” Liam asked.

  “Well, I’m assuming she went down there wit
h some friends. Or...maybe she just wanted to go down to the beach.”

  “She didn’t get there on her own. The local police found her car up here,” Brodie said.

  “She drove down with someone else? You might ask at the grocery store where she worked—or at the bar where she played. I liked her—very much. She was friendly, and so kind to the elderly at the store, to anyone who needed extra help in any way. She should have been a professional musician—I mean, she was the kind of good where she shouldn’t have had to bag groceries to make ends meet. She could really play!”

  “One more thing, Dr. Bethany just finished a report,” Liam said.

  “Yes,” she said, looking at them.

  “Could you get us a hard copy, please?” Brodie asked.

  “Oh, sure!”

  They waited while she printed up the report. She started to hand it to Brodie; he stepped back. Liam was still the detective down here. Liam read them first.

  “Almond milk?” Brodie asked. “Easily exchanged with cream in a White Russian or other cream drink.”

  Liam looked up at him. “Yep. He must have taken in just enough...right at the end.”

  “He had that drink with him when he was at the table with us,” Brodie said.

  Liam nodded.

  They thanked Misty and headed on out.

  “Definitely a murder, I’d say. Somehow, I think death had to be the intent,” Brodie said dryly.

  “Okay, so...and now Mathilda Sumner. How the hell could these deaths possibly connect? Maybe they just don’t.”

  “Guitars. Somehow, I can’t help but believe, it all has to do with music.”

  When they reached the car, Liam checked notes on his phone and then looked up at Brodie. “We’re meeting up with Detective Lacy, from the sheriff’s department. He’s the one who put the search out for Miss Sumner’s car and did the bit of research on her. We’ll meet him at the grocery.” He paused a moment. “Anything?” he asked. “I mean, back in there, in the morgue, with Mathilda?”

  And Brodie knew what he was talking about.

  And he understood why Liam, minus his partner, had been so accepting of Brodie heading out with him as an interim coworker.

  They’d both been looking for something a bit different, touching the body of the dead woman.

  “Something, but I don’t know what,” Brodie told him. “It was strange. My brothers and I might be late bloomers in this thing. I hadn’t begun to see a ghost—until my parents died, and they came in full blown, just as dramatic in death as they’d been in life. But when I was down in that ship, there was some kind of a dark shadow in the water—it led me right to the corpse.”