Ethel Crump had returned and was telling everyone that she had sensed an evil presence on the morning wind. “Mark my words”—her voice scratched like dry leaves—“the storm may be gone, but the Gray Lady isn’t done.”
After her warning, the murmurs in the shop grew louder until the copper bell over the door chimed. Everyone fell silent as they turned toward the shop’s entrance. My customers all held themselves stiffly as if expecting the Gray Lady herself to waltz into the shop.
Killer ghosts, indeed. I snorted.
The woman who walked through the door wasn’t the Gray Lady. She was younger than a century’s old hag. Her long red hair had been pulled back into a high ponytail. She was comfortably dressed in jeans and a scoop-neck T-shirt in a faded blue hue that suited her pale complexion.
I smiled and waved to Mary Fenton. She’d come to a jolting halt just a step inside the door.
“Good morning,” I called to her. “Come in. I think there’s some coffee left in the urn.” I crossed the room to join her, and then added so only she could hear, “Your stepmother isn’t here.”
Her tense shoulders dropped. A sigh of relief relaxed her bright red lips. “Thank goodness. This is a small island, and I really don’t want to talk to her. I have nothing to say to that woman. Well, nothing polite. If you don’t mind, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention to her that I’ve been talking with you.”
The buzz in the room returned to its normal level. The ghost hunters went back to playing with their electronic equipment and the treasure hunters went back to studying maps of the island.
I poured Mary a mug of coffee. I stirred into the cup a small square of Amar chocolate that melted immediately. “It’s on the house,” I told her.
“I couldn’t accept,” she protested.
I held up my hand and insisted.
She thanked me before taking a sip. When the hot drink touched her mouth, she closed her eyes. A spread across her lips with a look of pure pleasure. It was an expression I’d experienced myself every time I tasted the rich and almost magically healing flavors of the special chocolates we made at the Chocolate Box.
“Oh, my,” she said, still smiling. “That is exactly what I needed. Thank you.”
We found seats at an empty table in the middle of the shop. She tapped the coffee mug. “This is the best thing I’ve ever tasted. You should be selling your chocolate nationally.”
Many people in the past several months had urged me to take the Amar chocolates to a national market, which was why I was well practiced with my answer. “I enjoy running a small shop. And the cacao beans we use to make the chocolate come to the Chocolate Box in extremely small batches. I honestly wouldn’t have enough for national distribution.”
She shook her head in amazement. “If you handled things correctly, you could be rich.”
“There’s more to life than money.”
“Not much that I can think of,” she grumbled.
I understood why most people might think I’d lost my mind when it came to my attitude toward money. But I grew up in a family with an excess of riches and a shortage of kindness. Living on this small island while making chocolate candies by hand gave me something that no amount of money could ever buy—happiness. I didn’t want to work as head of a factory. I didn’t want to live my life in a sterile office. “I’m comfortable with how things are,” I explained.
She shrugged. “Have you learned anything new about my father’s death? I heard he was found with a gold coin in his hand. Do you think he’d found Blackbeard’s treasure?” She sat forward in her chair. “I want to make sense of why he left Cedar’s Hill and why he died. I don’t understand anything about what’s happening. Why was he obsessed with gold anyhow? It’s all so confusing.”
I wasn’t sure what I could tell her. Should I share with her what Big Dog had told me about the embezzled money from the bank? I wasn’t even supposed to know where Big Dog was hiding. And although I truly wanted to help Mary, I didn’t know if I could trust her.
I reached across the table and gave her hand a squeeze. “I’m still asking around,” I told her. “I think in order to understand what happened here, we need to understand why your father disappeared from his old life.”
“I agree,” she said shakily. “I’ve always assumed he was running from that woman. But thinking about it now, I suspect my anger over their marriage, and what she did with my mother’s things, colored how I saw the situation. If he’d wanted to get away from her, he could have moved to another house. He didn’t have to run away from me.”
That made sense.
“Now that you’re seeing what happened six years ago in a new light, can you think of any new reason why he might have left?”
She shook her head. “No, I keep thinking about it and thinking about it. I can’t imagine what he could possibly be doing living here. He left a nice house and a stable job to live in a tiny shack of a house that he rented. Why?”
I thrummed my fingers against the table and decided to give her a breadcrumb from what Big Dog had told me. “Did your father know Sammy Duncan?”
Her face paled at my mentioning his name. “Mr. Duncan? His daughter was my age. Kylie and I were cheerleaders together in high school. That was years ago. Didn’t he get in trouble with the police about something?”
“I believe he did,” I said. “Did your father know him?”
She shrugged. “I suppose they might have talked at the cheerleading competitions. My parents would come to watch. Kylie’s parents came too. So did most of the parents of the cheerleaders for that matter.”
“There was no special connection between your father and Sammy, though?”
“Not that I knew of.” She leaned closer toward me. “Why?”
“I’m trying to figure out why your father abruptly left Cedar’s Hill. Does his leaving have anything to do with his obsession with Blackbeard’s treasure? Or did he leave because of something that had happened in Cedar’s Hill? Was he running away or running toward something?”
“I don’t know,” she said softly. She jotted two phone numbers on the back of her business card. “If you find out anything, you can reach me either on my cell phone or at my friend’s house where I’m staying in downtown Charleston. I expect to be in town for a few more days. Even though that woman is making all the funeral arrangements, I don’t want to leave before the police release Dad’s body.”
It wasn’t until she left that I turned the card over and saw where she worked. Just like her father, she sold cars at Cedar’s Hill Imports.
~~
“You saw her,” one of the ghost hunters accused. He’d sauntered up to me a few minutes after Mary had left. He appeared to be about my age—mid-thirties—lanky, with dark stubble covering the lower part of his face. His nose bent to the right and then to the left, looking as if it’d been broken more than once and had healed poorly each time. He was dressed all in black, which really wasn’t a great clothing choice for working at the beach. The putty-colored sand dusting him, and his clothes, stood out in stark contrast.
“You mean, Mary?” I gestured toward the door.
“No, not that woman.” He shook a grainy, shades-of-gray photograph of the beach and what appeared to be someone’s smudged fingerprint in one corner at me. “Her.”
I frowned at the photograph. “Is that supposed to be the Gray Lady?”
“Yeah. She’s right there, as real as anything.”
As real as nothing.
He wasn’t the first ghost hunter to come up to me, wanting to hear the story about what I’d seen on the beach. I told him what I’d been telling everyone. “I saw Joe talking to a woman several hundred feet away from where I was standing. He claimed he’d spoken with a ghost. I’m not so sure.” I pointed to his photograph. “What I saw wasn’t that.”
He sniffed, and then carefully slid his photograph into a protective plastic sleeve. “They say everyone who sees the Gray Lady experiences destruction. Joe talke
d with her and died. Your friend lost her shop.” He tilted his head to one side. “What happened to you?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all, because it’s nonsense.” I tried to walk away from him. I needed to get back to the display case and front counter. After all, I had a shop to run.
“Nonsense?” He stroked his stubbly chin as he stubbornly followed along beside me. “You’re one of those, are you?”
“One of what?”
“A nonbeliever.” He made it sound like an egregious sin.
“I suppose you could call me that. I don’t believe in the Gray Lady. Joe didn’t want to tell us who he met on the beach, but it was clearly someone who’d upset him. Ghosts don’t exist.” I then remembered how arguing with the customer wasn’t good for encouraging return visits. “I mean, I understand that you disagree with me on that. I don’t mean any disrespect.”
He laughed. “Honey, everyone in these parts knows you’re not a believer…in anything. I’m Brett Handleson.” He stuck out his hand for me to shake. He had a firm, but sandy, grip. “I also heard that you aim to get to the bottom of things with regard to Joe’s untimely death.”
“Not by myself,” I said. “There’s a group of us who’ve decided to ask around about it. We’re concerned residents, that’s all.”
“But you’re the driving force.”
I shrugged. “We’re working as a team.”
He leaned forward and whispered, “Even when it comes to the treasure?”
I jerked back.
“They say Joe found the gold, and that’s why he ignored the Gray Lady’s warning to leave the island before the hurricane. That’s why he was killed.”
“It’s a popular opinion around here,” I said without agreeing or disagreeing. It wasn’t my place to argue that ghosts were bunk to people who clearly devoted their lives to finding proof that they existed.
“Does that mean you are looking for the gold?” he leaned toward me and whispered.
“I’m looking for answers. Where the search takes me”—I spread my hands—“is anyone’s guess.”
“You saw the Gray Lady. Your date with disaster might still be waiting for you. You’d better watch yourself.” With a nod toward his friends who were still sitting in a far corner, he left the shop.
“The kooks are thick in here,” Ethel hobbled up to me to say. “I think they’re hoping Stevie McWilson is going to come back.”
“Is that why you’re here this morning?”
She rarely came into the shop on Mondays, the day she went to the hairdresser, which for some reason was a full-day event for her and her friends. They said it was a Southern thing. I wasn’t so sure it was true.
“I heard Stevie McWilson is hoping to interview more people who saw the Gray Lady. They’re going to do an exposé that might get picked up nationally. Can you imagine that? Little ol’ Camellia Beach being featured on the national news, that would be quite the boon for us.”
“It would,” I had to agree, even though I didn’t like it. I’d much rather a reporter did a story on the plight of the sea turtles or how the town managed to preserve its maritime forest or even about the small, locally owned businesses that survived despite sharp economic downturns. But ghosts? What was next? Fairies and goblins? I shuddered to think how the business association would try to spin it.
Would my shop always be crowded with ghost hunters? Was this my new normal? I guessed if it was, I couldn’t be too upset. They seemed to be a hungry bunch.
Ethel hobbled back to sit with her friends. After clearing another table, I managed to return to the front counter. Ethel’s friends were all dressed in their best dresses, wearing more makeup than usual, and keeping a close eye on the door. Ethel had caught the interest of a couple of the ghost hunters. One of them was waving a handheld electronic device as if he were scanning her. It made all sorts of odd beeps and tweets that seemed to please the rest of the ghost hunters.
I heard several of them whispering that they’d found the Gray Lady. And she was drinking her coffee black.
I stood at the counter, watching this while I sipped my coffee (with plenty of cream.) My thoughts kept going back to the gold coin we’d found clutched in Joe’s hand. Why was he holding it when he’d died? Why hadn’t he put the coin in a pocket?
We’d also found a similar gold coin in Althea’s shop. Were they pieces of Blackbeard’s missing treasure? Oh, I wished Althea could help me with this end of things. In addition to being an expert on things that went bump in the night on the island, she also possessed an encyclopedic knowledge about the island history and lore. I supposed history stories and ghost stories did go hand-in-hand.
Joe’s obsession with Blackbeard’s treasure confounded me. If Joe had—as Big Dog had suggested—taken the embezzled millions and run off with it, why would he be so obsessed about searching for gold coins that he’d risked his life for them? If treasure hunting had simply been a hobby, he wouldn’t have stayed on the island during a hurricane to look for the coins. Especially not after the Gray Lady had warned him to leave.
Fudge, had I really just included the Gray Lady in my list of clues?
Ghosts? Bah.
Someone had upset Joe. Someone he didn’t want us to know about. And instead of telling Althea and me who he was talking to on that fateful morning on the beach, he’d lied and claimed he saw the Gray Lady.
But who was he talking to?
It was a woman. That much was clear.
Oh dear, the circumstances surrounding Joe’s death didn’t add up. There had to be something missing from this story. Or someone.
Why would someone want to kill a rather feeble old man?
Embezzlement.
Pirate treasure.
Ghosts.
“Penny for your thoughts,” Detective Frank Gibbons said.
It startled me to find him standing on the other side of the counter. I’d been so wrapped up in the puzzle surrounding Joe’s death that I’d totally missed him coming into the shop. I hadn’t even heard the bell ring. He wore a warm smile. Instead of his everyday work suit, he was dressed in khaki pants and a light blue polo shirt.
“Are any of the golf courses around here even open again yet?” I mused aloud.
He nodded. “A few.”
“I never pictured you as a golfer. Actually, I never really pictured you doing anything other than your job and going to church.” He and Bertie sang in the same church choir.
He chuckled. “I do have a life, although Connie might disagree with me on that.” His wife had once complained to me that she didn’t appreciate the midnight calls I’d sometimes made to him. “I have a rich life outside of work.”
“And part of that life is golfing? Really?” I’d never seen the allure of the sport. My father golfed every free moment he had. Of course, living in Chicago limited the months where he could golf locally. Here in the Charleston area, golfers could get out on a course twelve months a year. “I’m not buying it, especially considering that your polo shirt is so new it still smells like a department store. As you can tell, I’m running low on chocolate. Do you want a coffee?”
“Actually, I’m here for another reason.” He sighed as he gazed lovingly into the glass case. “Am I reading that sign correctly? Are you selling pumpkin seed bonbons?”
“I am.” I reached in and pulled out the last one for him to eat. “Here. They’re good.”
He bit into it and moaned with pure pleasure. “Good is an understatement, Penn. I’ve never tasted anything like this. It’s like a peanut butter cup, but one hundred times better.”
I beamed like a proud parent. “It’s the honey and the pumpkin seed. They’re a match made in chocolate heaven.”
“Text me when you get more in stock. I need these in my life.”
“I do too,” I agreed. “They are addictive, which is probably why I can’t keep them in stock. I keep eating them.” I drew a long breath. “If it’s not my chocolate that has you visiting me, what’s going on?�
�
He scanned the room. It was something he did often. I figured that it came with the I’m-a-cop territory. But there was something in his action today that made me uneasy.
“Do we need to talk privately?” I asked.
He sighed. “It might be best.”
“Ethel? Can you watch the front for me? I’ll be back in a minute.” Bertie was running errands and Fletcher had asked for some time off, which was why I was on my own this morning.
“Sure thing, honey. Got some detecting to do?” Her eyes twinkled with amusement.
“No,” Gibbons barked the same time I sang, “May-be.”
I led the way down the narrow hallway and to the back door that opened onto my stone patio. As soon as we’d stepped outside, I regretted bringing him out here. How could I have forgotten? Harley was harboring Big Dog upstairs. Well, not illegally harboring him, but still…I hated lying. If Gibbons asked me directly if I knew where to find the flighty surfer, I had no idea what I’d tell him.
Before he could ask me anything, I held up my hand. “Let me try my hand at this detecting business. And you tell me how I’m doing.”
“I don’t know—” he started to protest. But because he also looked amused by my idea, I didn’t give him the opportunity to talk himself out of playing along.
“You’ve been golfing with Silas Piper. He didn’t invite you to walk the links with him for fun. You were there to provide him with a progress report.”
“I shouldn’t encourage you,” he grumbled.
“Am I right?”
“You’re right. But that’s not what I’m here about.”
I glanced up at the porch above us before asking, “Okay, shoot. What’s going on?”
“I heard from Hank that you’re convinced Joe Davies was murdered, and that you’re investigating.”
“I wish the police chief would stop tattling on me. I’m an adult. And I’m not breaking any laws or even interfering with an investigation since no one in town or the county is investigating Joe’s death,” I complained.
“Penn, how many times do we have to go through this? How many times are you going to risk your neck before you realize the danger isn’t worth it?”
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