Perilous Homecoming

by Sarah Varland

  Still, though, she reminded herself as they turned into the parking lot of the Brunswick Police Department, police officers were only human. There were bad cops just like there were bad teachers, bad retail workers, bad firemen. That didn’t make everyone in any profession any more prone to it than another, it just meant that all people were sinful. Besides, at least it wasn’t like they were considering one of the officers being the one who kept trying to kill her. It was likely a case of one of them covering for someone, if anything. Maybe the information had even been given innocently—without knowing the killer’s true intent. It would still be bad for the officer if it was proven that he’d given out confidential information, but a mistake was easier to forgive than deliberate action.

  “There she is.” Sawyer laughed a little. “Shiloh looks like she’s about to jump out of her own skin.”

  “Wouldn’t you be? She’s the only crime scene investigator in Treasure Point, or at least, the only one with her level of certification, and it looks like the work she does might be what solves this. That’s a lot of weight on one person’s shoulders.”

  Kelsey understood that.

  They parked the truck and climbed out, their doors slammed almost simultaneously as both of them hurried to where Shiloh was waiting right beside the building.

  They turned the truck over to her. “I’ll be about an hour,” she warned them.

  Kelsey looked at Clay. “What now?”

  “Coffee?”

  They walked in the heat until they found the nearest coffee shop, got iced coffees and then started back. Shiloh might not be finished yet, but it was worth checking.

  They found her and a few other people at the truck.

  “Nothing,” she said flatly. “Actually, there are prints all over it, but they’re all Kelsey’s, and I’m assuming yours. I’ll need a print to confirm that. Not a single fingerprint from another person.”

  “Thanks for trying.”

  Shiloh nodded, shoulders dropping even lower. “I don’t know where to look next.” She looked up at Kelsey. “Clay said you were poking into things a little?”

  Kelsey hesitated, but then answered honestly. “We are.” She braced herself for a lecture, a condemnation of some kind.

  “Good,” Shiloh said. “Something isn’t right about this case. But I don’t know what it is yet. We need as many eyes on this as we can get, and from everything I’ve heard about you, you were one of the best.”

  Kelsey’s cheeks heated a little. “Thanks, Shiloh.” She wished, not for the first time, that their tenures at the police department had overlapped instead of them just barely missing each other. Shiloh would have been fun to work with.

  Kelsey and Sawyer climbed into the truck. “Back to town?” Sawyer asked.

  Kelsey nodded. “Yes.”

  Her phone rang when they’d been driving for ten minutes or so.

  “Hello?” Kelsey said. The number was that of her office back in Savannah.

  “Miss Jackson, it’s Lacey. You asked me to look for some specific antiques in our database?”

  “Yes. Did you find any?”

  “There is a navigational tool that came from a ship around the same time period you told me to look for. I thought you might be interested in that. There’s also an old sword. It has no solid provenance, but the owners insist it was once owned by a pirate. They were both from the same seller. The owners didn’t catch his name—it was a rather informal transaction, outside of an official antiques fair they were all attending. They said they usually wouldn’t have paid any attention to someone selling outside of official channels, but the navigational tool seemed more valuable than what he was asking so they decided it was an acceptable gamble.”

  “All right, thank you, Lacey.” Kelsey’s heart pounded. Their theory that someone had looted a sunken ship looked correct so far. Now to prove it. “Did they say if there’s a ship name or anything inscribed on the navigational tools?” There wasn’t always, but Kelsey could hope...

  “It’s rubbed off.”

  There went her hope, crashing with the force of an ocean wave on the shore.

  “They can read some of the first few letters, though,” Lacey continued, obviously wanting to be helpful. “But all they can read is The Deter. I’m sorry if that doesn’t help much, but I do want you to know that I tried—”

  Lacey kept going. The Harlowe Company was notoriously hard to please, at least, Kelsey’s bosses and associates were, so she didn’t blame Lacey for tripping over herself to be helpful, but Kelsey had stopped hearing her.

  The Deter—the first few letters of The Determination.

  “Thank you, Lacey.” Kelsey kept her voice calm, a stark contrast to the wild beating of her heart. “I have go to for now.”

  “All right, Miss Jackson, I’m sorry I couldn’t help more.”

  Lacey had no idea.

  Kelsey hurried back over to where Sawyer was standing. “You’re not going to believe this,” she said, out of breath.

  “What?”

  “I called my assistant earlier, when I stepped out of that meeting with Clay, to ask her if she could look into our files for me and see if she could find any artifacts recently bought or sold that might have been from pirate shipwrecks. She came up with a long list—it’s a commonly sought-after item in this part of Georgia—but when I had her narrow it down by time period, the one she thought was most important was a navigational tool.”

  “And you think that proves our theory, that someone found those wrecks and is selling what’s in them? Can the tool be tied to one of the wrecks?”

  “The engraving is mostly deteriorated. But she can read The Deter.”

  Sawyer whistled. “I guess we have our motive.”

  “It’s not solid and provable beyond a shadow of a doubt yet,” Kelsey said, to remind herself as much as him. “But compared to what we had? This is huge.”

  “Do you want to look for more wrecks now? Head back out in my boat?”

  “I don’t know. I’m happy this confirmed our suspicions, but now...”

  “What about the library? I promised you a look at those books, and while I don’t know exactly how they could help us, there are some that deal with the history of that time period. Is it worth the time it would take to investigate it or is it a dead end?”

  Kelsey seemed to consider his question. “I think...that’s a good idea. Are they in the study we were in earlier?”

  “Some of them. But most of the ones I think have the most promise are in boxes in my parents’ attic.”

  “Let’s go unpack them.”

  * * *

  The attic was one of the few parts of the house that didn’t have his mother’s stamp of overdone Southern decor on it. When he’d been younger, he’d loved spending time exploring up there, partly because it was like his own enormous private hideout that his mom wouldn’t come into. Too many spiders, she’d say, although Sawyer didn’t think he’d seen one spider brave the terrain.

  Unlike typical Georgia attics that were used mostly for non-climate-controlled storage, this attic was more like the upper floor of the house, but with slightly lower ceilings and no windows. The walls and rafters were all painted white, though the color had yellowed slightly overtime. Boxes were stacked neatly against the walls and the floor was clean, obviously swept. Someone had been up here lately. Most likely the housekeeper his mother pretended she didn’t have.

  “They should be in these boxes.” Sawyer tugged one away from the wall, opened it up. Old yearbooks. “Okay, not this one.”

  “What’s that?” Kelsey came up behind him. “Yearbooks?”

  She pulled the first one off the stack, the one from their senior year of high school. “Lots of signatures in here from girls who were half in love with you, I’d imagine.”

 
; “Not hardly.”

  Kelsey scanned over the pages. “‘Have a good summer.’ Oh, very creative. ‘I’d love to hang out sometime.’ And...oh.”

  She got silent. Sawyer looked at the page she’d read.

  There was Kelsey’s signature. How had he not noticed before? Sawyer blamed the hustle and bustle of yearbook-signing days, the frantic excited countdown to graduation. But apparently Kelsey Jackson had signed her name in his yearbook.

  Right underneath the words “Have fun at college.” They sounded innocent. But now that he knew...he could hear the bitterness in them.

  She looked up at him. “I’m sorry. I should have handled things better.”

  “You were seventeen and I stole your scholarship.”

  “You didn’t. You earned it. I know that now.” Kelsey looked around the room. “I also know that wishing you had someone else’s life...well, it’s not really practical, because no one’s life is perfect.”

  “You wished you had my life?” Underneath everything he found out about this woman, there was always another layer waiting to be discovered, wasn’t there?

  “I mean, not exactly. But to someone whose family never seemed to have any extra money, whose dreams were limited by that, who felt like the world depended on how much money you made...yeah, I envied your lifestyle a little. I always wondered what it must be like to be one of you guys. To not have money factor into any worries at all.”

  Sawyer didn’t comment. Money muddled things in his mind. He’d wished more than once that his family’s wealth would disappear—maybe not the best thing to wish for, but it seemed to him that money only complicated their relationships, provided another thing for people to fight about. Something else to put distance between them.

  “I’m sorry. I misjudged you, and we could have been friends.”

  “It’s not too late, you know.” Sawyer pulled the yearbook from her hands and closed it. “We’re friends now.”

  “Yes, that’s true. But if I could go back...”

  “No one gets to go back, Kelsey. We are who we are because of our pasts, and I wouldn’t change a single thing about you.”

  Maybe his parents’ attic was an odd place to finally put a name to the feelings he’d started to develop for Kelsey, but as he met her eyes, certainty settled on his heart. It was more than just admiration for her investigative skills, the way he admired how she stayed tough and persevered. There were so many things he liked and appreciated about her. High on the list was the way he couldn’t quite seem to get wanting to kiss her out of his mind.

  And as he looked at her now, moved slightly closer, he wasn’t sure she wasn’t thinking of that, too.

  His gaze went to her lips.

  She lifted her chin.

  And then he wrapped her in his arms and kissed her, long and slow, like the past didn’t matter and the future stretched before them with all sorts of possibilities.

  The kiss ended unhurriedly. As he pulled away, he looked into Kelsey’s eyes.

  “You kissed me,” she said.

  “I did.”

  “But we...”

  “What?”

  “We can’t...”

  He picked up one of her hands and held it. “We’re adults, Kelsey. We’re past all of that stuff from high school, we’re not our parents, we’re not that different. Any more arguments?”

  “My job.”

  “We can work it out later. But we’re a good team, Kelsey. Whatever that looks like, I think it’s worth figuring out how to make it work.”

  Kelsey took a deep breath. “For today, let’s focus on the case. One thing at a time, okay?”

  It sounded like a brush-off, but the way she smiled at him as she said it softened the words. She felt it, too, she knew that that kiss was more than just a regular kiss. It was the start of something. Even if right now it felt like part of her was still pushing him away.

  “Okay. Today, the case.” Sawyer put the yearbook box back, pulled out another. “Maybe it’s this one.” He worked on catching his breath.

  “A Picture History of Treasure Point. Yes, this one is it.”

  “Ooh, I’ve heard of that book but haven’t seen it. May I?” Kelsey reached out a hand eagerly, looking like a kid in a candy store. While Sawyer could see what a good law enforcement officer she’d been in the way she worked this case and tackled it head-on, he could also see how she was good with antiques, the way she valued history.

  She flipped through the pages. “This is amazing. It talks about the first families here. The Hamiltons were here before anyone. Decades before, although this doesn’t explain where they came from. After that were some more families who came over with Oglethorpe, or on other similar expeditions not long after.”

  “Any other families whose names we know?”

  “Ellis, Burton, Burns, Smith, Daniel...”

  “None that I recognize.”

  “Me, neither.” Kelsey kept flipping through the book. “This is really interesting stuff, even if it doesn’t have much to do with our case. I’d love to borrow it sometime.”

  “Of course.”

  She set it down and picked up the next book. “Debtors Down South.” She raised her eyebrows. “Creative title. And this one is not old.” She laughed at the overdone cover with eighties’ graphics.

  “Yeah, I think that one was done by a cousin somewhere along the line who fancied himself a historian. Clearly he might have been a bit overly ambitious.”

  “Hey, there could be good stuff in here.” She picked it up and began to flip through it. “It talks about how the state was settled largely by debtors and criminals. Some of them were good people and just needed a fresh start, but it says that some turned to piracy.”

  “Well, the coast provided for it, and it was already a rough area, pirate-wise.” He wasn’t the history buff that Kelsey was, but even he knew that about the area.

  “True.”

  She set that book down with another small laugh. “You have to give the guy credit for making an effort.”

  “If you say so.”

  There was one book with just Hamilton family history. Flipping through that made Sawyer a little more thankful for his family heritage. Mostly the Hamiltons had been hardworking people who took their position in the town seriously but who treated others well. It was really only his parents who had turned their reputation into something it never should have become—more of a status symbol than an obligation to take care of the town well.

  The last book in that box was Pirates of Georgia. Sawyer opened that up, read the first page and then the second.

  “You look like you’re into that book. Which one is it?” Kelsey scooted closer, looked over his shoulder. “Oh, nice. Does it say anything about any wrecks that went down in the area the map detailed?”

  “I’m not sure yet.” But it did seem like it might provide a good link. “It mentions The Determination. Also a few other ships. The Starflight and The Fortune.”

  Kelsey laughed at the last name. “Really?”

  “This mentions one of those families you said earlier. The Burns family?”

  “Right. I remember that name.”

  “Well, apparently they’re one of those families who didn’t exactly turn into model citizens when they arrived in the Georgia colony.”

  “Pirates?”

  “Yes. Much later than Blackbeard, toward the late 1700s. It appears that half of the family settled down nicely and the other half took to piracy and formed their own terrifying circle in the vacuum of power left after Blackbeard and some other prominent pirates died.”

  “Burns. Burns...”

  Kelsey picked up the history of Treasure Point book again. “Here are the names. Andrew Burns, Ezekiel Burns, Sarah Burns, Hannah Burns. So which ones of them
were pirates?”

  “Ezekiel and Hannah.”

  “Husband and wife?”

  He shook his head. “Siblings.”

  “Interesting! So...where does this fit?”

  “I don’t know, but it seems like it would fit somewhere. They’re tied to at least three shipwrecks that sunk in the approximate area the map detailed.”

  “Their ships?”

  Sawyer read a little further. “One was theirs. Another was one they took over, but it sank soon after. And another they sank themselves after they got the treasure out of it.”

  “They were pirate pirates. They profited off other profiteers.”

  “It looks like it.”

  “So they’re connected to the wrecks.” Kelsey stood and began to pace the attic. “But how does this fit with what we already know? We have a motive for the murder, which we assume was to cover up someone stealing from shipwrecks and selling it.”

  “And that seems to be supported by what your assistant told you.”

  Kelsey continued. “That ship has been underwater for over three hundred years. Nothing from the wreck could have ended up on the market if someone hadn’t stolen it.”

  “Not even if the pirates sold it themselves hundreds of years ago?”

  “It’s a stretch. Their navigational tools? Though they were valuable, they were also tools. They wouldn’t have gotten rid of useful tools when they still had the ship. And anyway, if the tools had been sold years ago, there would be records for them dating back through the centuries. This navigational tool only popped up recently.” Kelsey was thankful for her history classes, for the foundation she had to understand how some of this would have worked. Who would have thought it would ever tie into an investigation she was working on?

  “We also have an old Treasure Point family who was connected to piracy,” Kelsey continued.

  “Right, but we don’t know how that ties in,” Sawyer pointed out. “We need to find a link for that. The library? The cemetery?” Sawyer tossed up every idea he had. “Where else would have old records?”