The Haunted Beach (Tropical Breeze Cozy Mystery Book 4)

by Mary Bowers

  The tide was coming in and the water had touched his bare feet. That must have been what woke him up. There was nobody else on the beach; no dancers, no walkers, nobody. Looking around, he saw that his chair was about to be swamped. Seagulls had scattered parts of Ed’s sandwich bun across the sand, and his bag lay open about four feet away. At least the birds had left his drink alone. It stood upright in the cup holder, and he picked it up and took a swig of warm, flat beer. With a groan, he got up and stretched as another wave washed over his feet and pulled back. He’d better gather up his trash before the tide could take it out to sea.

  As he trudged through the sand carrying his things, he gazed at the dead woman’s house and wondered what still lived there. Did she truly walk among the leftovers of her life, still grasping at the treasures she’d once had?

  The sound of distant laughter came to him over the waves. Seagulls? They often made human-sounding noises. He waited.

  No. Nothing. He only heard the wash of the tide behind him. Frieda’s house loomed before him, dark and empty. He sensed nothing.

  Taylor had carried the beach chair she’d been using back to Ed’s house and left it leaning by the garage door. Even so, managing the small cooler he’d brought with extra drinks still in it, and carrying his own chair, Ed staggered along down Santorini Drive as if he’d had many more beers than he’d actually had.

  There were no street lights in their small development, but most people left their porch lights on at night. Ed had forgotten to turn his on before he left, though, and Dan Ryder never turned his on, so the end of the drive was dark.

  As he approached his house, he was startled to see a man in the street.

  “Hello?” he called, coming to a stop.

  “Is that you, Ed?”

  “Oh, Dan!” Ed said with relief. “It’s very late. Couldn’t you sleep?”

  “No, I – I couldn’t. I’ve been out for a walk. On A1A,” he added quickly. “You’ve been on the beach?”

  “I fell asleep out there, after watching the sunset. Well, good-night. I hope your walk tired you out enough so that you can sleep now.”

  “Thanks. ‘Night.”

  Ed went to the keypad beside his garage door and tapped in the code. Before he went inside, he turned and looked curiously at Dan Ryder’s house. It was still dark.

  Dan never walked on A1A. He always went to the beach. He seemed almost obsessive about it. But he could hardly claim to have come from the beach when Ed was walking back from it. Ed wasn’t sure, but he could have sworn Dan had just come out of the Peaveys’ house, or at least from between the Peaveys’ house and his own. He checked his watch and saw that it was after one a.m. Strange. He didn’t know that Parker and Dan were all that friendly.

  He came out of the garage a few feet and checked the Peavey house. It, too, was dark.

  Chapter 5

  “Howaya today, Mr. Ryder?” Rosie said as their fantasy man opened the door. He had all his clothes on.

  Dan Ryder nodded and smiled, making little crinkles at the corners of his sparkling blue eyes and setting his lips just a little lopsided, a stubble of beard tracing the line of his muscular jaw.

  “Fine, and you?” he muttered not quite audibly.

  “We’re just peachy,” Rosie gushed, just in case that was what he’d said.

  “We’ll just get to work now,” Poppy said. “Be done before you know it.”

  He nodded and disappeared into the front bedroom. Once he’d become familiar with their working routine, he had become adept at keeping out of their way, out of their sight, and avoiding their conversation. They could barely find him to say good-bye when they were done. Somehow his lack of presence made him even more tantalizing, the way a barely clothed woman is more alluring than a blatantly naked one.

  They did manage to buttonhole him on the way out, though, and assure him that Mr. D-D was “on the job.”

  “That man,” Rosie said, smiling and shaking her head. “He may look like the nutty professor, but he’s good. He even managed to get it out of us about the paintings, isn’t that right, Pops?”

  “He gave us the third degree, all right,” Poppy said. “Mr. D-D is going to get to the bottom of things. Boy, I wouldn’t want to be interrogated by him if I was a ghost!”

  “Well, that’s just fine,” Dan Ryder murmured, gently closing the door.

  “See you next week,” came through the door just before it clicked.

  “I’m afraid so,” he whispered to himself.

  Interrogated my ass. Silly women. Fix them with a level stare and they’d tell you everything they knew, none of which mattered to anybody. Then he frowned. Their gossiping could make trouble, and now they’d gotten Ed involved. He liked Ed, in a distant, disinterested way, and hadn’t been particularly interested in Ed’s career, as described by the Double Quick Maids. Ed himself had never mentioned it to him. As for the reality show, Dan didn’t have a TV.

  But now that he thought about it, he wondered what it would mean to have Ed “on the job.” Up until now, he hadn’t paid much attention to the twins’ chatter about the neighbors. They never had much to say about the one and only neighbor who actually interested him. Everything else was just barnyard noise to him.

  But maybe he’d better start paying more attention. They could cause a lot of trouble with their snooping.

  And maybe he’d better make an effort to keep track of Ed and see what he was doing. Have a beer with him. Get him talking.

  Dan was good at letting other people talk.

  “Mr. Renter” was next. He was the nondescript, plain-vanilla man renting the Greenes’ house while they sailed their yacht to the Bahamas. Or was it the Virgin Islands? The twins had never been to either place, and for all they knew they were the same place, out there in a balmy ocean with a lot of vacationers scrambling around to see everything before they were due back at the cruise ship, except the Greenes were way above cruise ships. No, they were probably at some yacht club, bragging about their seamanship, drinking hard liquor and dining on teeny little appetizers made of raw fish.

  At least that’s how the twins imagined it, when they weren’t imagining a pirate apocalypse where the Greenes were thrown overboard screaming.

  “This won’t take long,” Poppy commented as they went up the driveway. “It never does.”

  “Bachelors are easy,” Rosie agreed.

  Though he was “Mr. Renter” in their private talks, his name was actually Rod Johnson, and they greeted him professionally with, “Good morning, Mr. Johnson,” when he opened the door.

  “Ladies, come in, come in,” he said with the kind of friendliness they would’ve enjoyed more from Dan Ryder. From Rod Johnson, it somehow didn’t interest them, and they went in with automatic smiles on their faces, assessing the job ahead of them and forgetting him immediately.

  “You’re looking identical today,” he commented.

  The joke nearly got past them, but they caught it after a beat and gave him the laugh he so obviously wanted.

  “He is nice,” Poppy’s eyes communicated to Rosie silently.

  “Let’s be kinder to him,” Rosie’s eyes said back.

  “I bet you’ve heard that one a thousand times,” he said pleasantly, closing the door and regarding them with warm brown eyes.

  He wasn’t bad looking, really, the twins thought. Just boring. Near sixty, with salt-and-pepper hair and a slight paunch, he wasn’t aging particularly well, though he must have been handsome when he was younger. His features were regular enough. His teeth were nice. He always dressed well, and behaved like a gentleman, although he had the irritating habit of laughing too loudly at his own jokes. In the twins’ experience, people who laughed loudly at their own jokes were trying to signal that they had, in fact, just told a joke. There was something desperate about it.

  “Actually,” Poppy said, glancing at Rosie, “I don’t think I have heard that one before.”

  “Nope,” Rosie confirmed.

  Th
ey each held up a hand for high fives, and Rod Johnson patted their upraised palms a little awkwardly. The timing was off, but he beamed at them.

  With generous smiles, they moved on to their jobs.

  “So what’s going on around the neighborhood today?” Rod said, following Rosie in a lost-puppy way.

  “Well . . .” She glanced at her sister for permission and received it. “The Missus across the street is getting worse, we think.”

  “Gosh, I’m sorry to hear that. In what way? Is she getting more confused? Still seeing things?”

  “Oh, I don’t think she’s confused at all,” Rosie said. “She knows exactly what she’s seeing, and we believe that there’s somebody there. I mean, really there. In fact, we’ve got Mr. Darby-Deaver on the job.”

  “Ed?” Rod asked with obvious surprise. “What’s he got to do with it?”

  “He’s a professional ghost hunter,” Rosie said loftily. “Haven’t you ever seen his show? He’s on TV. He’ll get to the bottom of it.”

  “He knows what he’s doing,” Poppy added. “He’s been at it for years.”

  “Oh, ghosts, is it? He’s on TV? I didn’t know. Caught a lot of ghosts, has he?” Rod asked, trying to hang in there.

  Rosie looked into his eyes and saw no irony and no condescension, so she told him.

  “He hasn’t caught any ghosts at all, as far as we know. That’s not his job on the show. He’s the one who explains how it’s not a ghost.”

  Rod blinked, gave his head a little shake and tried to process what she was saying.

  Rosie went gaily on, oblivious to the fact that Rod had no idea what she was talking about. “But Poppy and I know that Miss Frieda is there. We’ve felt her. Yes, there’s something for Mr. D-D to find this time, and we’re sure he’s going to find it. Then he’ll put it on TV.”

  “Well that’s just fine,” Rod said lamely.

  “And get rid of it,” Poppy added pointedly just before entering the front bedroom and starting up the vacuum.

  Rod said something to Rosie, but over the noise of the vac, she didn’t catch it.

  “What?”

  “I said, how’s Willa these days?”

  “Dunno,” Rosie said. “Haven’t seen her yet. She’s next.”

  “Oh,” Rod Johnson said. “That’s right.”

  “Poor man, he’s got it bad,” Rosie said as they walked down the drive toward the next house.

  Willa Garden’s house, like Claire Ford’s, had a second floor, but wouldn’t take much longer than the ranch houses. Neither Claire nor Willa had ever had any guests, and the ground floor rooms only needed a flick of the dust rag and a hard stare, which is exactly what they got.

  “He sure does,” Poppy agreed, “though what anybody sees in Willa Garden I can’t figure out. She might’ve been pretty once, but she’s all faded out now. You know what? I think Mr. D-D’s got a thing for her too.”

  “Get out!”

  “No, really.”

  Rosie pondered. “You know,” she said at last, “you may be right. Willa Garden, femme fatale.”

  They were still laughing when they heard a sound that was crowned with a chorus of angels in their quivering ears: The light rhythm of a jogger coming up behind them. It could only be him.

  Looking back they gave him their very best wishes for a wonderful run on the beach on this fine summer day, wasn’t it just lovely out and just look at that sky, all blue and sunny, right, Mr. Ryder? He silently lifted a hand as he passed them heading for the walkover. They clawed over his backside with their eyes, greedily taking in every detail.

  “He’s early today,” Poppy said.

  “Oh, no,” Rosie said, “he’s just in time. Maybe if we get through at Miss Willa’s quick enough, we’ll be able to see him on the beach. You know. From the third floor.”

  “Yeah,” Poppy said. “That would help, wouldn’t it?”

  “Like holy water on a vampire.”

  Neither one laughed. They never laughed about the third floor.

  Dan Ryder’s muscular form disappeared a moment after he bounded up the steps of the walkover.

  After he passed them, they had drifted to a halt. Now Poppy re-hoisted her workbasket and they went on. Just at the base of Willa Garden’s driveway, Rosie whispered, “Don’t look now, but Claire Ford came out on her balcony to enjoy the view too. Maybe she’s not so dead to the world after all.”

  “Don’t look either, but Miss Willa did the same thing. Maybe she’s not such an airhead after all.”

  Just before Rosie punched the doorbell, she turned to her sister and said, “Nah. She’s still an airhead.”

  They were still giggling when Willa called for them to come in, the door was open.

  Chapter 6

  Claire Ford heard the jogger’s footsteps coming down Santorini Drive. She sat up in her balcony chair, suddenly tense. She wasn’t going to look at him. Still, wondering the whole time why she was torturing herself like this, she went to stand at the balcony railing.

  At first, she didn’t look down, but as he mounted the wooden steps of the walkover her eyes disobeyed and she gazed at the man below her. The sun was touching her skin with gentle heat; the seagulls were crying; somewhere out on the beach a volleyball game got exciting and loud; the sea breeze brushed her hair back and fluttered her eyelashes. None of these things registered with Claire.

  She lifted her chin and closed her eyes. Jerry would’ve loved living in this house. He’d always wanted to live in St. Augustine, ever since he was a child and was allowed to drink from the Fountain of Youth. He’d told her about it a thousand times. It had been years ago, but it had still been fresh in his memory. He’d been an excited little boy, reaching for the small cup of the magic water and swallowing it eagerly, feeling it all the way down. Feeling immortal.

  That’s why they had reacted so quickly when they had learned about this house. And now she was living in it alone.

  She shook her head. She couldn’t think about Jerry now. She just couldn’t. She gripped the railing and the coastal breeze rose up around her.

  “All those years I was a good wife to him, through thick and thin. Do I have to go on feeling like this forever? Is it a sin to want to be happy again? Please help me to know what to do.”

  She whispered this little prayer, then opened her eyes.

  Dan Ryder had become an indistinguishable dot on the beach, traveling south at an easy jog over the hard-packed sand of Crescent Beach.

  She realized she’d been holding her breath and exhaled before turning around and going back inside.

  Directly across the street, Willa saw what Claire hadn’t: her across-the-street neighbor gazing tensely at Dan Ryder.

  So, it really was like that with her. At first Willa had thought she’d only imagined it; with Claire, you couldn’t always tell. But the way she was looking at Dan, there was no mistaking it. Claire was attracted to him. Who was Willa kidding? Every woman was attracted to Dan Ryder. Oh, God, she thought, even me. The thought made her laugh.

  Never a confident woman, Willa felt a lowering of her soul at the sight of the lovely blond on the other balcony. Claire was younger, more attractive, and she had a grace and calm that naturally drew men to her. Next to her, Willa always felt like a basket of dirty laundry.

  She had thought her life would change when she’d been released from Frieda’s bondage. Instead, everything was just the same, only strangely, now she missed Frieda. The daily trips to the old woman’s house to feed and clean her, sort her prescriptions and keep patience as Frieda scolded her, had at least given her life a purpose. Losing that overpowering purpose should have been a relief, but instead it had cut Willa loose in a world in which she had nothing to do.

  And now she was afraid of the house itself; afraid of what she saw and felt there. She still had a key to Frieda’s house, like Dolores, but she never went in alone, and tried hard not to go in at all. Was it guilt? Was it her imagination? Or was it real after all? That beautiful, be
autiful house, empty, useless. She’d always dreamed of having the place to herself. Now that she could go there any time and have the place to herself, she was afraid.

  “I won’t think about this,” she said out loud softly.

  Turning her head, she realized she’d lost sight of Dan. He’d headed south today, and Willa had stepped out on her north balcony when she’d heard the twins coming down the drive. She’d meant to call to them to come in, but the sight of Dan Ryder jogging along had taken the voice from her throat.

  She looked back at Claire’s balcony to give a friendly wave, but the other woman had gone back into her house without noticing her. Of course she had. People never noticed Willa.

  She remembered how she and Dolores had agonized over Claire’s situation when she’d moved in a few weeks ago. They’d made a habit of having a welcome-neighbor party for newcomers. They had designed an e-mail especially for such occasions, the “Santorini Martini Party” e-mail. Graphics and everything. But what if the newcomer had just been widowed? In the end, they had decided to invite Claire for a simple dinner party at the Brinker house, with Willa being the only other guest. They made up their minds they’d shepherd Claire up and down the block and get her introduced, and then somehow the idea had petered out.

  Claire had been so nice that evening. After dinner, while they had coffee on the balcony and Ben had counted off the shrimp boats on the horizon, Claire had been almost chummy with Willa, drawing her out about herself and the other neighbors. She remembered telling Claire about the mysterious single man living down the block, and laughing when she realized Claire thought she was talking about Ed. No, she’d told her, not the ghost hunter. She’d given her a thumbnail sketch of Ed and his little quirks, then switched back to the other man. His name was Dan. Dan Ryder. Across the street from Ed. Claire probably hadn’t seen him yet; he kept to himself, but he liked to run on the beach.

  And so it had gone. Girl talk. Fun talk. Talking about herself, a little self-conscious about her boring life, but feeling flattered that Claire was so interested.