A Death on the Island

by Blythe Baker

  “And settle the last of the divorce papers,” Blaire said, coming in with a giant mug of coffee.

  Page’s face fell instantly. She had been with Blaire’s dad for over fifteen years, and their divorce, while entirely her decision, was still hard for her to talk about. Page had always prided herself on being the one who had everything together. She had her family and her job and her stability. Now, though, after her husband’s infidelity, everything was up in the air. She’d handed over most of her savings to buy the bed and breakfast with me, and she still wasn’t convinced the business would be a success. With the murder and the rising cost of the renovations and Mrs. Harris lurking around the attic, I felt rather certain Page needed a few days away from the island almost as much as Blaire did. Still, she shook her head and rearranged her features into a mask of perfect indifference.

  “You can’t just have coffee for breakfast, Blaire,” she said. “Your body needs fuel.”

  “Caffeine is fuel,” Blaire said, walking out of the dining room and into the sitting room.

  Page looked at me for support, but I just shrugged my shoulders. I couldn’t really argue. All I’d had for breakfast was two cups of coffee and half a banana. I definitely wasn’t a very good role model.

  * * *

  After my scant breakfast, I took Jasper outside for some exercise. Despite the wind and thunder I’d heard the night before, the yard was relatively clear of debris and the ground wasn’t even wet. The sky was a bright, clear blue. Not a cloud in sight. Perhaps it had all been a dream.

  “Hello there, stranger,” a voice called over the fence.

  I saw David Summerfield’s familiar arm waving over the hedges. He was in a wheelchair, so our neighborly chats required me to go to the fence so I could look over the top at him.

  “Good morning, David. How have you been?” I asked.

  “Good, good,” he said.

  David had been putting on a brave face since the death of his previous live-in nurse, who just so happened to be a murderer, and who I just so happened to have killed when he tried to attack me. Despite all of that, though, David never brought up the subject with me. I couldn’t be sure if it was for my sake or his, but either way, I was grateful. I wanted to forget the entire thing had happened.

  “How have you been?” he asked, tilting his head to the side, his graying hair flopping over one of his eyes. It had grown a lot in the couple weeks since we had last spoken.

  “I’ve been great. Just working on all of these renovations. Trying to get the old bed and breakfast up and running again,” I said.

  “That’s wonderful. Now, I told you to mark me down as your first guest, didn’t I? I want to be the first person to support your venture,” he said.

  “That really isn’t necessary,” I said. “You live right next door.”

  He dismissed me with a wave. “I’ll do whatever I please,” he said, smiling.

  “David?” A woman stepped off of David’s front porch and headed towards him, a small smile on her face. She was thick and sturdy, reminding me of my Aunt Shari. My aunt had been a tough, but caring woman, having raised three children after the death of her husband. She had also made me eat prunes whenever I came to her house to “keep me regular.”

  I recognized the woman immediately as David’s new live-in nurse—the woman the company had sent to replace Martin Little—but I hadn’t yet met her. Rumor was that David received her at a sharp discount, which was the company’s way of ensuring David didn’t take them to court for employing a murderer.

  As she neared us, she held up a closed hand and a small glass of water. “You forgot your vitamins this morning,” she said.

  David beamed at her, his eyes going shiny and wide. “You are too good to me, Liz,” he said. “Piper, have you met Liz yet?”

  I shook my head. “I haven’t, but I’ve seen her in passing. It’s lovely to meet you, Liz.”

  Liz smiled at me, and I decided I liked the look of her already. She seemed kind, but not too kind. Not the fake type of kind. She seemed genuine.

  “Lovely to meet you, as well,” she said. Then she turned back to David. “And there is no such thing as being too good to someone. Especially when you’re a nurse.”

  David smiled up at her even more broadly if possible and swallowed his vitamins.

  The two of them said their goodbyes and left, Liz pushing David’s wheelchair through the grass while he chatted at her, and I couldn’t help but think they seemed especially fond of one another. Especially after such a short amount of time.

  Jasper was busy rooting around in the hedges for a bird or squirrel to chase out of it, so I decided to jog down the long driveway to the mailbox. When I got there, I saw the mailman, Ed Sawyer, headed down the road towards me. Though I only ever saw Ed on the rare occasion we met at the mailbox at the same time, he was always up for a good chat. There has always been the stereotype of women being gossipers, but Ed had the dirt on everyone on the island, and he loved to share it.

  “How’s it going, Ed?” I asked.

  “Big day, big day,” he said, shaking his head. “We have a newcomer to the island, and they are really stirring the waters here.”

  “Oh, really?” I asked, surprised Page, Blaire, and I had been upstaged as the newcomers so quickly. With a population as small as Sunrise Island’s, I expected we’d be big news for at least a few months.

  “Oh, yes. A wealthy businessman has been building a mansion just up the road for over a year now, and it just got finished last week. And apparently, he is throwing himself a house warming party. I’ve been delivering blue envelopes to the who’s who of the island all morning. It’s going to be quite the shindig. I didn’t get an invite, of course. I mean, being just the mailman and all, I didn’t really expect one, but you know…it would have been fun.”

  The disappointment was clear on Ed’s face, so I tried my best to comfort him.

  “I wouldn’t go to that party even if I did get an invite. It sounds like some slime ball trying to buy his way into the inner circle of the island with a big house and fancy food. Definitely not my style,” I said, rolling my eyes.

  Ed reached into his mailbag, in which I saw a large collection of blue envelopes, and pulled out a stack of white envelopes to hand to me. “Well that’s good news, because you don’t seem to have an invite in here.”

  “Oh,” I said, only slightly surprised. Though I was far from high society, I was relatively new to the island and about to be a local business owner. I would have thought that would warrant a spot on the guest list, but I supposed not. “Well great. Then I don’t have to worry about coming up with an excuse for the RSVP,” I said.

  Ed looked at me dubiously, clearly not falling for my bluff.

  As I walked back up to the house, I flipped through the mail and saw that it was mainly bills. A few of them were stamped with “OVERDUE” in red, which didn’t make any sense. I’d paid every bill we’d received. I made a mental note to call the electric company later that afternoon. As I neared the house, Page came through the front door lugging a giant suitcase with her, and I tucked the bills under my arm, not wanting to stress her out with the thought of unpaid bills right before her trip. By the time I got inside, any thought of the businessman and his party had disappeared from my mind.

  Chapter 3

  Page and Blaire had broken out in a rather large fight moments before leaving the house. Matthew hadn’t arrived to say goodbye yet, but if we didn’t leave in the next few minutes, they were certainly going to miss the ferry, and the next one wouldn’t be heading out until early evening.

  “He’s going to show up!” Blaire screamed.

  “We can’t wait any longer,” Page said in her mom voice, an ominous mixture of calm and angry.

  Eventually, after several unanswered calls, Blaire reluctantly slid into the back seat of the car and slammed the door, giving up on her beau.

  The whole thing made the drive to the ferry uncomfortable. So, I tried to break
through the tension.

  “I must have dreamt the entire storm last night,” I said. “The ground isn’t wet at all, and I would have sworn it was pouring rain.”

  Page gave a stern nod, the only sign she’d heard me at all.

  “I had another strange dream last night, too,” I said, knowing I was entering dangerous territory. Page hated hearing about other people’s dreams. She claimed there was nothing more boring in the world than listening to someone stumble through their foggy memories of a nonsensical dream they’d had. “It was at the bed and breakfast, but way back in the day. Like, right after it was originally built. And this young girl was running through the hallway calling for her parents. And she was acting as if she were being chased or something. It was all a little spooky.”

  “Fascinating,” Page said, clearly unimpressed.

  The car fell back into a stony silence.

  Then, in a very unexpected twist, Blaire spoke up. “Matthew told me a story about the house,” she said, her voice almost too quiet to hear.

  “Oh, yeah?” I asked, glancing at her in the rearview mirror.

  “Apparently a lot of people believe Mrs. Harris murdered her parents when she was barely twenty-years-old and buried them on the property.”

  Page scoffed. “That’s ridiculous.”

  I could see Blaire roll her eyes in the rear-view mirror and turn to glare out the window, and I wanted to hit Page. Blaire was clearly trying to move on from the fight, but Page had a hard time letting things go, even with her own daughter.

  “That sounds like a rumor,” I said. “Something the locals spread around to scare kids.”

  Blaire nodded in agreement. “I know. It just reminded me a lot of your dream is all. I wasn’t saying I believed it.”

  “Good,” Page said from the front seat. “Because it’s obnoxious. I’ll be the first to admit Mrs. Harris is creepy, but she didn’t murder anyone.”

  There was a long pause, and then Blaire spoke again, this time I could hear the defiance in her voice. “But I don’t know, Aunt Piper. Maybe the house was trying to share a memory with you. You solved the last unsolved murder mystery. Maybe the ghosts Mrs. Harris is always going on about want you to solve this one, too.”

  “That’s enough, Blaire,” Page said, saving me from having to respond.

  That was great, because I wasn’t sure what to say. I wanted to dismiss it as nonsensical and cruel gossip, but I remembered Mrs. Harris’ blank eyes in the hallway the night before, the scared look of the girl in my dream. Could they have been the same person? Could I have stepped back into a memory? Not to mention the storm I’d been positive I’d heard. Was it all a dream or was there a tinge of credibility to Blaire’s theory?

  Suddenly, I found myself even more reluctant to let Page and Blaire leave. Sleeping in the big house with no one but Jasper and Mrs. Harris to keep me company wasn’t an appealing thought.

  I shook my head, burying my irrational fears. Mrs. Harris was a confused old woman, not a murderer. If she’d murdered someone, she wouldn’t have been running around free for all these years. My subconscious brought up Martin Little going years without being caught for Maggie Summerfield’s murder, but I buried that, as well. Everything would be fine. No one had been murdered. No one would be murdered.

  * * *

  “Do you two have everything?” I asked, knowing that it didn’t matter now whether they did or didn’t. There wasn’t enough time to go back to the house before the ferry would leave.

  “Yes, mom,” Page said, rolling her eyes at me, but suppressing a smile. “We’ll only be gone a week.”

  “I know, I know,” I said.

  As they unloaded their luggage from the car, I saw a woman coming off the ferry, having just crossed over from the mainland. She was average looking, almost drab. She wore black trousers and a slightly too big white button up shirt tucked in, and her light brown hair hung in straight, flat sheets around her thin face. Despite all of this, though, she stuck out from the crowd. Where everyone else departing were clearly tourists there to enjoy a day at the beach, the woman looked serious, businesslike. Plus, she was carrying around a large carrying case that looked very similar to the one my mom used to keep her old typewriter in—the one she’d used in college. And the way the woman seemed to be struggling with it, I tended to believe it was an old typewriter. They were quite heavy back in the day.

  “I suppose you won’t miss us much after all,” Page said, waving a hand in front of my face.

  “What?” I asked, jumping with surprise.

  “I said we’re leaving.”

  “Oh, right. Sorry,” I said, wrapping each of them in a quick hug. “Have fun. Call me if you need anything.”

  “Same with you,” Page said. “If anything goes wrong with the renovations or anything like that, give me a call.”

  “Nothing is going to go wrong,” I said.

  Page raised her eyebrows at me. “But you’ll call if it does?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Yes, mom,” I said, mimicking her voice from earlier.

  As they rolled their luggage up to the ferry boarding ramp, I glanced around quickly looking for the woman with the typewriter, though I couldn’t be sure why. However, she was nowhere to be seen.

  Back at the house, I decided to forget Blaire’s creepy warnings about ghost subliminal messages, and instead throw myself into some work. Page would love it if I finished painting the upstairs hallway and the dining room before they got back, and some of the empty bedrooms were in desperate need of dusting and airing out. Especially since we were getting relatively close to being open for business.

  The renovations had only been going on for a month, and despite the rising costs, we had come out rather lucky. I’d bought the place sight unseen, and miraculously, it had turned out to be a great investment. The foundation was solid, the plumbing and electrical were in good shape, and aside from a few mice and the Texas-sized roaches that infested every home regardless of cleanliness, the house was free of pests or termites. The porch had just been finished within the last week and they had started laying down sod. Plus, Page and I had decided on a sky-blue color for the outside with white trim, and it had given the place a complete face lift. The house looked almost brand new, but with a good dose of old world charm. Even if I didn’t already live in the house, I’d drive by it and wish that I did. Hopefully, our guests would have the same idea.

  After dusting the entire second floor, walls included, I was priming the walls and daydreaming about our future breakfast menu—banana pancakes, chocolate chip scones, blueberry muffins, cinnamon brown sugar oatmeal—when the doorbell rang.

  For a second, I forgot Page and Blaire had left and I waited for one of them to get the door, but after it rang a second time, I remembered I was alone and hurried to put my roller in the paint pan and run down the stairs. Even though I’d only painted a few feet of wall, I had white drips of primer running down my forearms and splattered on my gray t-shirt. I silently thanked the heavens Page wasn’t there to nag me about the mess.

  When I pulled the door open, I took a step back, wondering if I was actually seeing what I thought I was seeing. It was the woman from the ferry. I looked her up and down, noting the same clothes I’d seen before, the same worn typewriter case, a black duffel bag over her shoulder.

  “Hi,” she said, her eyes wide, looking at me as though I might be having a fit or something.

  I then realized how long I’d actually been staring at her without ever saying hello.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said, shaking my head and gesturing to my body. “Must be the paint fumes. Hi, how can I help you?”

  She laughed. “No worries. I’m Holly Belden.”

  She didn’t say anymore, as if her name was enough for me to understand what she was doing on my front porch.

  “Okay,” I said. “And?”

  “I booked a room here.”

  I shook my head immediately. “No, I’m afraid you didn’t. We aren’t eve
n open yet.”

  Holly Belden unzipped her duffel and dug around for a second before retrieving an ancient pamphlet and handing it to me. “I sent in my reservation to the address listed on this brochure.”

  I held it up, pointing to the water stains and aged, yellow corners of the pamphlet. “This is from years ago. The previous owners abandoned the property, and I just recently bought it and am in the middle of remodeling.”

  “It doesn’t seem like you’re in the middle of remodeling,” she said, stepping back to look around at the fresh coat of paint on the outside and the new porch.

  Annoyed by her persistence, I crossed my arms over my chest, aware I was only serving to smear more primer across my t-shirt. “Looks can be deceiving. We aren’t open. I’m really sorry.”

  Holly just looked at me, her face expressionless, so I apologized again and moved to shut the door. However, before I could, her shiny black shoe wedged itself between the door and the frame.

  Chapter 4

  “Please,” she said from the other side of the door, her toes still squashed in the door frame.

  I pulled the door open and stared at her, my head cocked to the side. Who did this woman think she was? She was quite literally trying to force her way into my home.

  “I’m sorry,” I said for the third time. “We aren’t open.”

  “I can pay,” she said. “I have plenty of cash, and it would only be for a couple nights.”

  “The rooms aren’t ready. We don’t have a fully stocked kitchen. At this point, we do not have the bed or the breakfast required to operate as a bed and breakfast,” I said. “I can’t help you.”

  “Have you seen the motel in town?” she asked, her face pulled up in disgust.

  In fact, I had seen the motel. I’d broken into a dead man’s room there only a few weeks prior in search of clues about his death. Of course, I wouldn’t be telling Holly this.

  I nodded. “I have.”