I concentrated on the grassy dunes that separated the beach from a fence that enclosed the homeowners’ pool. It seemed doubtful the tide ever rose that high, but we had a strong storm a few nights ago, so it was possible something had washed up. Besides, I thought I saw something red stuck in the reeds.
When I pulled it out, I gasped. It was a long red ribbon, the ends tied together and fraying. Dangling from it was a gold medallion that read, “Boxbury Seafood Company 1918-2018.”
I’d be calling Evangeline and telling her I wouldn’t be coming into work today. I hadn’t taken a day off all summer, and after my stroll on the beach—once businesses began to open—I’d be heading to speak with Chief James about what I’d learned. I was going to need his help to pull this off. I only hoped he would agree.
By eight AM, I was sitting in Chief James’s office. It took me a few minutes to bring him up to speed on all of my discoveries, including the journal, the medallion, Knox Monroe’s birth certificate, and the fact that Matilda’s story didn’t check out. Vincent looked like he was struggling to keep his jaw from dropping as I revealed more and more of the evidence I’d unearthed.
“The answers lie in that memoir,” I determined. “Now, we could probably subpoena it from the publisher—” Look at me using fancy legal terms! “—but I think it would be easier to locate the copy she alludes to in her journal, the one kept in the wildflower hive. I’m sure you can figure out where the Monroe’s other property is, where she might be keeping another beehive.”
Chief James held up one finger. “I’m with you, but let’s look up a couple more things first. Speaking of birth certificates, it’s easy enough to find Carlton II’s and verify his birthdate if he was born in this state.”
“I’ve seen him in person. He’s not old enough to be Knox Monroe’s grandfather,” I protested. The image of the gray suit-clad man I’d seen meeting with Robert Summer at the marina bar a couple months ago came to mind.
“It will be simple to look it up. Just a sec.” His fingers flew over the keys, and a smug smile spread his lips when he stopped typing. “Take a look at this.” He turned the monitor to face me.
I squinted as I read the tiny print of Carlton Boxbury, Jr.’s birth certificate. Yes, he was listed as a Junior, not as the Second. And his birth year was 1962. Place of birth was listed as Moon Point.
“Wait, that can’t be right. There’s no way Carl, as they call him, is in his fifties. There’s just no way!”
Vincent propped his chin on his fist like he was deep in thought. “Maybe they’re two different people?”
“What do you mean? How could that be?”
“There’s a Carlton Boxbury III, right?”
“Yes. He was dating my friend Jada before the whole Mystery at the Marina went down earlier this summer,” I explained.
“Let’s look him up and see how his father is listed,” Chief James suggested.
Though I knew the truth of Carlton III’s paternity, I assumed Carlton II would be listed on the birth certificate. Once again, Chief James stroked the keys in rapid succession before gasping out, “Aha!”
I stared at the screen. Carlton Boxbury III’s father was listed as Bryce Carlton Boxbury.
Why did I have a feeling I knew what that meant? “Look up his birth certificate now that we have a name. He should have been born around 1978, if I’m right on the dates.”
He tried a few searches and then stopped. “I’m not finding anything for that year or name. But that might just mean he wasn’t born in this state. Or even in this country.”
“Why would he have the name Bryce if Willa didn’t have something to do with it? 1978 would have been during their affair. Matilda said her mother ran off to Europe with Carlton.” My hand flew up to my mouth. “Oh my gosh, what if she was pregnant? What if she had his baby in Europe? That could explain why you can’t find a birth certificate for him.”
“Bryce is not an uncommon first name,” he argued. “And wasn’t Willa a little old to be having a baby in 1978?”
“She would have been forty-three,” I did the math in my head. She was the same age I am now. “It’s not impossible…”
“Could that be the secret?”
“We need the memoir. That doesn’t explain what happened to Matilda’s baby. Wasn’t Carlton’s wife still alive during the affair? How did they explain the baby? And if it was Mrs. Monroe’s, how did Carlton end up raising him without Willa’s involvement?”
I shook my head. There was no way the state police had put any of this together. I doubted the man they were holding was completely innocent, but I had a feeling he was innocent of Mrs. Monroe’s murder. Now we just had to prove who the real murderer was.
Sixteen
Bees buzzed from flower to flower as Vincent James and I stood in a vast field at the edge of a dense forest. The Monroe property stretched from the city limits of Moon Point north into the county where Bryce Beach was the county seat. We’d had to consult some old deeds filed away at the courthouse, and one or two paper maps, but we’d managed to GPS our way out here in my car. Vincent didn’t want to use his police cruiser so as not to attract attention. I couldn’t blame him there. This was a delicate operation, and the last thing we needed was for nosy folks to go blabbing around town that Sunshine Baker and Chief James were traipsing about the countryside together.
Um, not because of…you know, anything being improper. Just that we were trying to solve a case. One that was high profile. One in which the outcome was of utmost importance to the citizens of Bryce Beach. We needed to be stealth about it.
“So, where’s the hive?” I turned in a circle, trying to spot anything looking remotely hive-like rising above the tall blossoms bobbing in the gentle morning breeze.
Chief James closed his eyes for a moment and breathed in the scent of the late summer flowers. I spotted a bee landing on a black-eyed Susan, then it flew off toward the tree line. When my eyes followed the bee, I discovered a wooden structure at the edge of the forest. It was surely the hive.
When Vincent opened his eyes, he seemed to know instinctually which way to head. I followed him as his long legs blazed a trail through the thick growth toward the wood building.
“How are we going to get the journal if it’s actually inside the hive?” I wondered out loud, but also, it was a rather valid question. I didn’t plan on being attacked by bees today. Heck, I was still wearing my swimsuit under a long, loose-fitting tank dress. I wasn’t exactly dressed for trekking through the weeds and fighting off a swarm of bees while searching for the break we needed in the case, but here I was.
“I’m hoping there’ll be some equipment out here.” He turned back to look at me and shrugged.
That would be our luck, to come all the way out here and not be able to get the manuscript because the bees were guarding it. Genius on Mrs. Monroe’s part, though, so props to her. I could only assume she had hired someone to take care of her bees and the honey. She wasn’t coming all the way out here with her cane to collect it; that was for sure. Hopefully the hired beekeepers kept some gear out here for when they came to tend to the hive.
The wooden structure we spotted from the other end of the field was a shed, and it had some protective equipment in it. Bees buzzed past me, making goosebumps prickle on my arms. I didn’t think I should mention to Vincent that I had a sort of irrational fear of bee stings, even though I had only been stung once when I was eight years old. That was most likely why I had the irrational fear, I supposed.
Bees are God’s creatures, I told myself. God made the bees. He loves the bees. Bees are essential workers. Without bees, we’d all die because we’d have no food to eat. Save the bees! I gave myself a little pep talk as we stepped inside the ramshackle shed.
“How do we know it’s not in here?” I guessed, looking around using the flashlight on my phone to illuminate the dark corners of the shed.
Chief James whipped out his bigger, brighter flashlight and did the job much better t
han me, running the wide beam over every shelf. “I don’t see anything.”
“I don’t know anything about bee hives, do you?” We stepped back outside. “I don’t know where you would hide a book in this thing.” I pointed to what I assumed was the hive. It looked like a stack of wooden boxes.
“Maybe it’s not a physical book?” He donned the beekeeper’s bonnet that had been hung on a hook in the shed and slid on the thick gloves that had been left on the workbench. I decided to stand back and watch. You know, in case he has any trouble, then I can… Well, I wasn’t sure how I would help exactly, but I would be here if he needed me.
There was a brick on top of the multi-layered hive, and bees began to buzz around Vincent’s netted hat as soon as he approached. I’d seen beekeepers use smoke when working around the hive—and I seemed to remember it helped calm the bees so the honey could be retrieved. We should probably have smoke, I realized as Vincent went to lift the brick off the hive.
Jesus, please keep him from being attacked by bees! I fervently prayed. See? I was contributing after all!
I watched him examine the brick, turning it over in his hand. The netting obscured his face, but I was pretty sure I saw a smile erupt as he pulled something out of the brick and waved it in the air.
It was a thumb drive.
We decided to go back to my house to look at the files on the thumb drive because me hanging out at the station would attract too much attention and speculation about what was going on. I wasn’t sure my nosy neighbors would be any better than a building full of cops, but it was worth a shot.
Chief James drove to my house like he’d been there a hundred times before, but I assumed he knew where a lot of people in our town lived. “Park here on the street?”
“Yeah, that’s fine. I hope you aren’t allergic to cats,” I told him as he turned off the ignition.
“I’m not allergic, but I’m not a big fan,” he confessed. “They, however, seem to have an affinity for me.”
“Oh, okay.” I laughed, thinking Paige would probably hide, and Bond would most likely camp out in the middle of the floor and lick his butthole while we tried to read the manuscript. “Are you sure you don’t want me to just read it and report my findings?”
“Sunshine, you’ve dragged me into this now. I’m pretty invested in the outcome at this point.” He waited for me to lead the way up the steps to my porch.
I unlocked the door, a momentary panic setting in as I pushed it open and entered my house. I hadn’t had a man in my home other than my dad or brother in, well, ever. It was surreal seeing Chief James’s large frame fill up my doorway as he made his way inside.
“Nice place.” He gave me a sincere smile and came to a stop, his hands behind his back like he was at parade rest. It took about two seconds for Bond to start rubbing himself against the chief’s uniform pants.
Well, he said cats loved him—but the feeling wasn’t mutual. “Please, have a seat.” I gestured toward the sofa. “Do you want something to drink? Water? Coffee?” We skipped lunch, and it’s nearing noon, so I should probably offer him something to eat too, I realized.
“Water would be great. I’m feeling a bit parched.” He emphasized all the consonants as he took a seat on the couch and tried his best to ignore my rather persistent cat, who was still rubbing up against him.
I filled two glasses with ice and water and even garnished them with lemon wedges. If there was one thing my mother taught me, it was how to be a good hostess.
A long sigh slipped out of my mouth as I settled myself on the sofa and inserted the thumb drive into my computer. “Here goes nothing…”
Chief James almost looked nervous as his dark eyes pinned me in place. My computer made a grinding noise as it opened the files on the flash drive, then a Word document popped up on the screen. I tore my gaze away from his, looking down to catch my first glimpse at the book.
“The Honey Convention,” I read, “The Memoirs of Willa Bryce Monroe.”
“Weren’t you saying something about a honey convention a few days ago in my office?” he questioned.
“Yes, I heard her kids talking about it. I found out from Matilda that it was what the family called the food expo Mrs. Monroe went to, the place where she met Carlton Boxbury. They were both there looking for vendors to sell their products and found each other instead. So when her kids said they would take care of ‘the honey convention,’ I bet they meant this book, not the actual expo.”
“That makes sense, except, what did they mean by ‘take care of it’?”
“Good question. According to her journal, it’s with her publisher now. They are supposed to be announcing a release date this fall,” I explained. “So were her kids going to take care of fulfilling the contract on their mother’s behalf—or cancel it?”
My question hung in the air as he leaned toward me to get a better look at the screen. A whiff of his cologne wafted into my nose, an earthy, musky scent. I was surprised a man like Chief James wore cologne, to be honest, or maybe it was just the scent of honey and wildflowers that rubbed off on him during our adventure to the Monroe property. If so, he managed to make it smell surprisingly virile and masculine.
“How long is the document? Do we need to read the whole thing?”
I struggled to concentrate on the manuscript, my eyes darting down to the bottom left to see the number of pages. “Five hundred? Oh boy!”
“She’s verbose.” He shrugged.
“Let’s do some searches.” I typed in “Carlton” and got over a hundred hits. “Well, that’s not helpful. Let me try a few others.” I typed in “Matilda,” and got nearly as many. My confidence that we could easily find the information we needed was waning.
“Try ‘Europe,’” he suggested. “See if she mentioned her time there or being pregnant.”
We spent the next few hours doing searches and taking notes on what we found. It was slow-going, and we were having a really hard time piecing things together without an overarching timeline. There weren’t timestamps on the chapters like there were in the journal.
“We need more computers. More eyes,” he said.
A lightbulb illuminated in my head. “I have an idea!”
An hour later, after Chief James and I took a much-needed break for sustenance, the remainder of my crew arrived: Molly, Evangeline, and Jada. All five of us were now armed with a laptop and a copy of the manuscript file, which I’d loaded on each of the devices.
“Here’s the plan,” I said like a general commanding troops before going into battle. “Chief James, you’re going to take the first one hundred pages to scan and look for clues. Molly, you’ll take the next hundred. Evangeline, you take pages 200-299. Jada, you take 300-399. And I’ll take the final hundred and thirteen pages. We’ll reconvene shortly. Take good notes, everyone, and treat this like the most important book report you’ve ever written!”
I dug into the final chapters of Mrs. Monroe’s memoir, trying to keep my jaw from dropping open in shock. The attention to detail, the convoluted drama—a soap opera producer would kill to get his hands on this.
Wait, we didn’t have any suspects who were soap opera producers, did we? I knew Matilda had been on a soap opera back in the late eighties/early nineties, but—
No, I was pretty sure I knew who was behind Mrs. Monroe’s murder, and it wasn’t one of Marco Callaghini’s henchmen, and it wasn’t a soap opera producer. My discovery down at 725 Shore Drive had pretty much sealed the deal.
I finished early and spent the rest of my time researching the medallion I’d found in the shore grasses near the beach this morning. It was a limited edition commemorative coin produced to celebrate the one hundred year anniversary of Boxbury Seafood. I had originally thought the first Carlton Boxbury was the founder of the company, but it turned out, it was his father, Rufus Boxbury, who had started the company in 1918. According to the Boxbury Seafood Wikipedia page, only fifty of the gold coins were manufactured, and only those in upper and midd
le management had received them.
The volume of chatter in my living room continued to grow as my colleagues finished their assignments. Molly was still working, cross-referencing her notes with the document a few times before she was fully satisfied. Finally, she appeared ready to go.
“Well, are we ready for our reports?” I stood between the sofa and loveseat, surveying the looks on everyone’s faces. There was a bit of a shell-shocked quality in each expression, but everyone nodded.
“Chief James, you had the first section. Go ahead.”
All eyes turned to Vincent as he lifted his large frame from the sofa. Paige went springing off the cushion, flying across the room to one of her many hiding spots. I hadn’t even realized she was curled up beside the chief while he completed his assignment. Awww!
Vincent had scrawled a few notes on his small yellow legal pad. “Willa was born in 1935, the daughter of Nathaniel Matthew Bryce and Penelope Estelle Grayson Bryce. She had a privileged childhood and was sent to boarding school in her late teens. When she returned, her parents had arranged a marriage to Piers Allen Monroe. They were wed in 1955, and their children were born in 1960 and 1963, respectively.”
I think we were all yawning by the time he finished. His delivery could use a little work. After a few moments of silence, I realized there wasn’t any more info coming. “That’s it? That’s all the info in the first hundred pages?”
“Unless you want me to expound on the excruciating detail she used to describe giving birth to her children…” He let out a little snort. “And I chose the word ‘excruciating’ for a reason.”
Dangerous Curves Boxed Set 1: 3 Cozy Christian Mysteries Page 46