“It seems like an old-fashioned term in this day and age, but yes. You could say that.”
He nodded sharply.
Undeterred, I asked, “May I look at that letter your brother sent?”
His hard gaze shifted from where he’d been studying my face to my outstretched hand. “It’s a copy. The original is at my office.”
He slapped the crumpled paper onto my open palm. I unfolded and quickly read the letter before he had a chance to change his mind.
It was exactly as he’d described it. The letter was short, which meant it was also short on details.
It must be a shock hearing from me after all this time. I decided to follow up on that business that caused our family so much pain.
“What business?” I asked.
“It’s a private matter,” Silas growled.
He reached for the letter, so I started to read faster.
As you might imagine, there are several people who won’t welcome my interest. I have followed one of them to Camellia Beach in South Carolina. As a precaution, I have directed my friend to send this letter to you, brother, if he hasn’t heard from me for three days. If you have received this letter, know that my efforts have failed and that I am dead. The guilty have murdered me in order to keep their guilt and my innocence hidden.
At the bottom it was signed, Taylor Graham, which was interesting.
“Graham? Why a different last name?” I asked him.
“It’s a long story.”
I waited to hear it.
He kept his thin lips pressed together.
“All right.” I handed him the letter. “I don’t know a Taylor Graham, but I can ask around. Can you text me his picture? I’d like to show it to some of my friends.”
“It wouldn’t be a recent picture,” he warned.
“It would be better than nothing. Can you get it for me right away?” I dug a scrap of chocolate wrapper from my pocket and jotted my cell phone number on it.
“I’ll see what my secretary can do,” he said. He then lifted the wrapper to his nose and smelled it. A ghost of a smile flickered across his tight mouth.
“I own the local chocolate shop,” I told him. “It’s been run by my mother’s side of the family for generations. The chocolate we make there is unmatched anywhere in the world. Once the town gets back on its feet, come by and I’ll let you have some samples.”
He grunted. I wasn’t sure if that was a happy grunt or if he thought I was presuming too much.
“If you find out anything, you can contact me through my secretary,” he said with a haughty sniff. “If she cannot find a photo, I’ll have her send you a text to inform you of that.”
His cold manner was probably his way of trying to hide his deep concern for his brother’s life. I often acted in the same standoffish manner whenever I felt scared or overwhelmed. Besides which, he didn’t know me. I could be a kook who wanted to sell a story to a tabloid newspaper.
“Cell service is down on the island right now. So don’t have her send it until you hear it’s been restored, okay?” I didn’t wait for him to answer. I’d gotten what I’d needed. I had hoped he had a photo of his brother tucked away in his pocket. But he didn’t.
I also knew that the police chief wouldn’t wait for me for much longer, even if I was talking to one of the most powerful men either of us would ever meet in our lives. There was a body on the beach to be dealt with. He’d come marching back out here, grab my arm, and pull me away if I didn’t join him soon.
I ran back up the steps and into the town hall where the police station was located. Byrd, as I’d expected, was heading in my direction. A dark-haired woman about my age dressed in a blue EMT’s jumpsuit was at his side. She introduced herself as Marion Olrich. She had a shovel slung over one shoulder and the strap to a large medical bag over the other.
“It’s this way.” I drew a fortifying breath. Stella yipped softly. The three of us exited the building through a side door. We then headed toward the beach and the dead body buried underneath the sand.
The wind blew the ocean’s salty air into my face. I shivered. I feared we were on the cusp of uncovering Silas Piper’s long-lost black sheep of a brother.
Chapter 5
“Wait up!” Harley jogged to catch up to us as we made our way toward the beach. Not that we were walking that fast. Marion was weighed down with her equipment and had refused my offers to help carry something. And Byrd rarely moved quickly. He once told me that a hasty police chief stirred an air of panic in the residents of the town. Above all things, he strove for calm and easy in his life.
“What’s going on?” Harley asked. His clothes were streaked with mud and wet sand. The cuff of his shorts had ripped since I’d last seen him.
“Are you OK?” I blurted, suddenly more concerned about what had happened to him than some dead body on the beach that wasn’t going anywhere. “Are you hurt? How’s the office?”
“Um…I’m fine. There was…some damage to the office. It’s going to have to be completely redecorated. Luckily all the files had been digitized and uploaded to an offsite server. So I suppose I didn’t lose anything important.”
I eyed him closely, trying to decide if he was more shaken up about his office than he was letting on. He’d taken over his father’s law practice after his father had passed away. The only change Harley had made to his father’s office, with its old wood paneled walls and furniture the color of faded avocados from the early nineteen sixties, was to purchase a computer. While money constraints might have kept him from updating and making the office his own, I suspected he’d treated the office like it was one of downtown Charleston’s famous historic sites—not changing a blasted thing—as a way of keeping his father’s memory alive.
I wanted to say something comforting. I wanted to let him know that he could count on me for any emotional support he might need. But when I opened my mouth none of that came out. Instead, I said, “The carpeting in there was older than the both of us combined.” And then I wanted to kick myself for sounding so uncaring.
Harley only chuckled. “It was a classic pattern. Don’t know I’ll be able to find anything quite that shade of brown with brown highlights to replace it.” His entire face brightened as he shook his head. So perhaps I’d said the right thing after all. “But enough about my office, what’s going on?”
“Dead body on the beach,” Byrd answered for me. “Your girlfriend found it.”
Harley tripped over his own feet. “Penn, really?”
I nodded.
“We haven’t been back in town for more than”—he checked his watch—“two hours, and you’re already stumbling across dead bodies?”
“It wasn’t on purpose. Besides, it wasn’t me. Stella found it.”
“You’re blaming the dog?” He scrubbed his hand over his face. “Whatever you do, don’t let Fletcher hear about it. He’ll declare it was a murder.”
“He won’t hear about it from me, but this is Camellia Beach. If he’s returned, there’s a good chance someone has already told him,” I said.
Fletcher was my newest employee. He had this unnatural interest in playing amateur detective. It was an interest that had nearly gotten him killed a few months ago.
Harley groaned. “That boy is looking for murders. He was wearing a Sherlock Holmes deerstalker hat the last time we saw him, for goodness sake.”
“It might be a murder,” I mumbled. Not quietly enough, apparently.
Harley paled.
I felt for him. He was likely remembering the last murder on the island. He’d helped me track down the killer. Things had turned downright dangerous at the end. Matters between Harley and me had also turned steamy right before we’d confronted someone who had no moral qualms against killing anyone who had gotten in their way.
Like Fletcher, we’d also been lucky to escape with our lives.
“Don’t misunderstand me,” I said. “I hope it’s nothing. I hope I’m seeing dead bodies where none
exist. But Silas Piper was at the police station just now.”
Harley mouthed the name and whistled.
“He was the one who brought up the idea of murder, not me.” I told him about Silas’ black sheep brother and the letter Silas had received.
Harley’s tan returned. “The hurricane has knocked out all communications in the area. I’m sure it’s a case of bad timing and nothing else.”
“That’s what I’m thinking,” Byrd said. “If there’s a body on the beach, I’d bet good money that it belongs to some brainless lack-wit who thought riding out a hurricane on a barrier island would be a hoot.”
“I asked him to get me a picture of his brother, you know, just in case,” I said, not able to shake the nagging feeling that something dreadful had happened on Camellia Beach after we’d evacuated, something that had nothing to do with Hurricane Avery.
We arrived where I’d found the suspicious-looking shirt. Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps that stinky lump in the sand wasn’t a dead body. I grabbed Harley’s hand and held it tightly as both Byrd and Marion donned plastic gloves.
Marion produced a little whisk brush from her medical bag—not something I was expecting she’d have in there and then squatted next to the suspicious lump. With fast, efficient swipes she removed the top layer of sand from a small area. A moment later, Byrd cursed.
I leaned forward to see what had upset him.
A mistake.
What I saw wasn’t something I’d wanted to see. I quickly pressed my face to Harley’s chest, sandwiching Stella between me and her arch nemesis. She wiggled and growled low in her throat.
“I didn’t want to be right,” I choked as I tried to soothe my angry little dog. “Truly, I didn’t.”
“I know, Penn.” Harley rubbed his hand up and down my back.
Marion had uncovered from the sandy grave what was clearly a man’s hand. The action of her brush had dislodged something disc-shaped from his fingers.
“Is that a gold coin?” Harley asked.
“Looks like it,” Marion answered as she continued to clear away the sand.
“It’s evidence and not to be discussed,” Byrd snapped. He jumped up from his crouch with surprising speed. “Back up, now. Let the experts work. Ah, here are your colleagues now, Ms. Olrich.”
One of the National Guard trucks with its giant tires rolled onto the beach. Two men and a woman dressed in the same blue jumpsuits that Marion was wearing jumped down from the cab. The men went around to the rear of the truck and retrieved a stretcher.
“Go on, get out of here,” Byrd made shooing motions toward Harley and me with his hands.
“You’ll let us know who it is?” I asked, not moving.
He tilted his head and grimaced. “What do you think? I’m not the news service. This is a police investigation. And last time I looked, you weren’t a member of the police force. Now get going.”
“But—” I protested. Stella started barking.
“Come on.” Harley moved away to give Marion’s team room to do their work. Because I still had my arms wrapped around him, it was easy for him to lead me along with him. “Even though communications are down, this is still a small island,” he reminded me. “We’ll know who it is before nightfall.”
He was right. And I really didn’t want to stand and watch as they uncovered a body that had been buried in the sand for close to a week. Still, my feet felt like lead weights. Something told me I needed to be there, I needed to see the clues they were uncovering.
“It’s an accidental death,” Harley whispered in my ear. “Someone stayed during the storm who shouldn’t have stayed. It’s tragic, but far more common than you might think.”
“I hope you’re right.” It didn’t feel like he was right.
The gold coin that had fallen from the dead man’s hand nagged at me.
“I’m right,” Harley said, but he sounded worried.
The letter Silas’ brother had sent, claiming he’d been murdered bothered me.
“We have enough on our plates with the storm damage. We can’t go borrowing trouble,” he said with an emphatic nod.
“The stranger with the tweed hat,” I said. “The one who was looking for Joe Davies. I wonder if he was Silas Piper’s brother.”
“Even if he was,” Harley said, “there’s no reason to believe his showing up in Camellia Beach hours before the hurricane has anything to do with an accidental drowning. No reason at all.”
“I’m sure you’re right. I just have a really bad—”
“Hank, do you recognize this man?” I heard Marion ask. She must have uncovered the poor dead man’s face.
“It’s kind of hard to tell,” Byrd said. “He looks kind of familiar.”
I was glad we weren’t standing close enough to see for ourselves.
One of the men on Marion’s team swore an oath. “Look at the shock of red hair. That there is Joe Davies.”
“Joe Davies?” the other man cried. “The Gray Lady did him in!”
The police chief swore viciously.
I felt like swearing too.
Chapter 6
One week later.
“Joe Davies brought this on himself, you know.” Ethel Crump, Camellia Beach’s head gossip, leaned over her mug of coffee. She let her gaze shift from person to person before whispering, “Hank said it was an accidental death. But we all know this was no accident. When Joe set out to find Blackbeard’s treasure he might well have been looking to dig up a grave, for all the ill that it caused him. The unsettled ghosts around here don’t cotton to anyone poking into their secrets. If Blackbeard buried his treasure on our island, it’s his and anyone who dares to touch it risks otherworldly retribution, as Joe found out.”
The residents crowded around her table all nodded in agreement.
I rolled my eyes.
It was Sunday morning, which was the time when the island’s nosiest residents gathered at the Chocolate Box to catch up on gossip. Ethel Crump, rumored to be as old as the town’s ancient oak trees, twined her crooked fingers together and leaned back in her chair. The woman was in her glory as she spoke of ghosts and death.
Things on Camellia Beach were slowly returning to normal. The shop had only opened for business two days ago. We’d all had to wait several days for the power and cell phone service to be restored to the island and the National Guard to clear the sand from the roads.
But even though there was a feeling of normalcy inside the shop, there were many reminders that the hurricane was still disrupting life outside. Bright blue tarps covered roofs that the wind had torn apart. The sharp rat-a-tat-tat of nail guns and the hum of electric saws could be heard throughout the daylight hours as homes and businesses were repaired. And much of the island’s brightly colored wildflowers had been lost under the thick swaths of sand that covered everything.
The needs list and volunteer sheet I’d posted on the shop’s front window had quickly filled up. Many of the elderly residents who used the Pink Pelican Inn as a low-cost retirement home had returned only to find they were now homeless. The inn’s first floor had been flooded by the hurricane’s storm surge. The ocean had literally washed across much of the small island. And the inn’s second story rooms had sustained rain damage when sections of the metal roof had lifted off. The Pink Pelican was getting a complete makeover, which it had desperately needed anyhow. But in the meantime, we’d needed to find places for sixteen of our most vulnerable members of our community while the place was closed.
It warmed my heart to see how everyone was stepping up to help. Bertie and I had opened our small apartment to two elderly sisters, Trixie and Barbie Baker. I’d given them my bed and had taken to sleeping on the sofa.
I stretched my aching back, before clearing coffee mugs and plates off a table.
Fletcher Grimbal returned from the shop’s kitchen. He carried a large tray of peanut butter bonbons that he slid into the glass display case. He was wearing his Sherlock Holmes deer hunter hat. His ent
ire face came alive when he heard Ethel mention Joe’s name. His cheeks bloomed red.
“It-it’s as if s-s-someone was t-trying to wipe him off the f-f-face of the earth,” Fletcher stammered. He had a speech impediment that worsened whenever he was nervous or excited. He drew a long breath and then sang, “It’s quite the mystery.”
“No mystery,” Ethel countered, her voice sounded like the scraping of a tree limb against a window. “The Gray Lady took him. He’s trapped in her domain now. Before long, we’ll see signs that he’s joined with the other unsettled spirits haunting our beach.”
Fletcher glanced at me and raised his eyebrows.
The corner of my mouth twitched. I didn’t want to say anything, but I agreed with Fletcher’s look of disbelief. The Gray Lady was a myth, a story. Myths didn’t kill people. The islanders had clearly lost their collective minds if they believed some pretend ghost had anything to do with Joe’s passing.
Just yesterday Chief Byrd had told the local newspaper, The Camellia Current, that Joe’s death had been declared accidental. According to the official report, Joe had bumped his head and then drowned in the hurricane’s storm surge. Perhaps he’d been running from his house after it’d caught fire. Perhaps he’d died before the fire. The coroner couldn’t tell.
What I didn’t understand was why Joe had ignored all the warnings to leave the island. He’d told us that he was leaving right away. Had he stayed in order to search for more of Blackbeard’s gold? He’d died with that gold coin in his hand. Not that his holding the coin made any sense. Why was it in his hand and not in his pocket?
I glanced in Fletcher’s direction again. His nose was twitching like a rabbit’s. That could only mean one thing—he suspected foul play, which would also explain why he’d taken to wearing that silly Sherlock Holmes cap all the time.
The bell above the shop door tinkled sweetly. I looked up, expecting Harley.
It wasn’t.
A woman in a crisply pressed baby-blue suit with matching stiletto heels entered. Her short hair curled around her face like a golden frame. She stopped just a foot inside the door and stroked her pearls as she scanned the room.
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