by Mims, Lee
I went up and poked my head into his bedroom. Unmade bed, wet bathing suit on the floor in the adjoining bathroom. Like the great room below, the upstairs bedrooms on the ocean side all had glass doors that opened onto a deck running the complete width of the house, though the upper floor, and thus the deck, was cantilevered out an additional five feet. I stepped out on the deck, looked up and down the beach. Just a few late afternoon surfers. No Will.
I walked up the hall to the room I’d given Gladys only a few days ago. Here, everything was neat as a pin, the bed made, towels in the bathroom folded. A pang of anxiety made me walk to the closet to see if her suitcase was gone.
I opened the door, and that’s when a large man in a black ski mask surged out of the closet, knocking me down. I guess being flat on my back wasn’t conducive to rational thought because, like an idiot, I grabbed his sneakered foot and tripped him. Maybe it was just the instinct to protect what’s mine—or used to be mine. In any event, he went down like a felled tree.
“Umph!”
Don’t ask me what, but there was something suspiciously familiar about the man now scrambling to regain his footing.
“Robert Earle?” I said as I grabbed for the ski mask.
He dodged my hand, bounced to his feet, and jerked me to mine by my ponytail.
“Ouch! Stop that, you moron!” I kicked out with and caught him square on the shin with my field boot.
It was as if I’d poured lighter fluid on a charcoal fire. He bellowed, reached out with one hand and grabbed me by my neck with an intensity that told me he meant to kill me right then and there. With his other hand, he grabbed the waist of my jeans and lifted me off the floor. It didn’t take me long to realize he was planning to use my head like a battering ram and smash it into the sliding glass doors. I threw my hands up just in time to protect my face. My arms, shoulder and the right side of my forehead took the brunt of the blow He was grabbing me everywhere, hellbent on trying to swing me headfirst into that glass door.
But he wasn’t getting it done because I was kicking, biting, and scratching—anything to get out of his clutches. Finally, I managed to connect a knee with his crotch. Air whooshed from his lungs as he dropped me and staggered backwards. That gave me the second I needed to get out onto the deck.
I tried to hold the door closed. With ten times my strength, he rammed it open so hard, it all but busted from the track. Then, his fingers flexed like eagle talons, he began to stalk toward me. For every step he took forward, I backed up one, trying desperately to think of a way to escape this maniac. Suddenly, I felt the railing at my back. Trapped like a rat! I could always jump. Hell, no. The drop to the ground was twenty-five feet straight into a rock garden.
Before I had time to come up with a plan, the asshole charged me again. I dropped to my knees and shot between his feet like a rabbit. He lunged right over my head and into the railing.
Good old Bud and his knack for procrastination. With the sound of splintering wood, my attacker sailed right through the rotted railing and into the open air beyond.
My legs were too wobbly to stand, so I crawled to the edge of the deck. Then a creepy thought hit me. What if he wasn’t down there? What if he’d somehow landed on the deck below and was coming back up after me right now?
I leaned over the edge and peered down. Lucky break. The ski-masked Robert Earle was lying facedown in a group planting of yucca trees. And they don’t call the long, spike-tipped leaves Spanish bayonets for nothing.
I watched the prone figure for a moment. It didn’t move. I pulled out my cell, incredibly not broken. I told Bud when he answered to drop everything and get the hell over to Seahaven.
EIGHTEEN
I was outside directing the Wrightsville Beach police to where the body lay when Bud stormed onto the scene. To his credit, he stood by quietly while I explained to the cops what had happened.
“I felt his jugular for a pulse,” I told them. “Other than that, I haven’t touched him.”
In five minutes, a crew of paramedics and first responders—firemen—arrived carrying a stretcher and lots of noisy two-way radios. As they took over the scene, Bud and I retreated to a grouping of wicker furniture situated on the ground floor patio under the deck and perched on the edge of the sofa.
“What the hell’s going on, Cleo? One minute I’m at Lowe’s getting some stuff I need to fix the railings and next thing, I’m getting a panicked call from you.”
“Well, let me start by saying you’re a little late on the railings.” I gave Bud a quick sketch of what happened.
“He had on a ski mask?” Bud asked incredulously. “Good god! He was a robber or—”
“No. I don’t think he was a robber,” I interrupted.
“What then?”
“I think the man in the mask is Robert Earle Walton.”
“Who?”
“Gladys Walton’s son.”
“Why on earth would Gladys’s son want to kill you? For that matter, how would he know where you were? None of this makes any sense …” Bud said. “Start over. Tell me exactly what happened.”
“Actually,” said one of the city cops, overhearing him. “There’ll be a couple of detectives here shortly to ask you some questions. Why don’t you wait until they get here? That way, you won’t have to tell your story so many times.”
Bud stood up impatiently blowing out a long breath and stepped into the guest quarters under the house. When he returned, he handed me a water and sat with his arm over my shoulder. In my world—a man’s world that few women inhabit—strong men are generally a nuisance; indeed, they’re often obstacles in my way, but sometimes … well, a good one can be a comfort.
“I’d hoped Will and Gladys would be back from their boat trip by now,” I said.
“You know how Will is. He gets out on the water and loses all track of time—”
“I don’t want Gladys to see her son like this,” I said.
“Oh my God,” he said, almost under his breath.
“What?”
“That’s my ski mask!”
I glanced quickly at the body again. “God, you’re right. I remember it from our Vail trip.” I thought for a minute. Things formally murky began to coalesce and gain some clarity. “It’s all starting to make sense now.”
“What?”
“He came here hoping to find Gladys, got surprised by me instead, so he hid in the closet. When it looked like I was going to find him, he must have seen the mask and decided to make me think I’d interrupted a robbery or something. His plan was probably just to scare the life out of me, then make a getaway and hope the whole thing blew over. Might have worked too, if I hadn’t tripped him.”
“You what?”
“I know, I should have let him hightail it out of the house, but I didn’t,” I sighed. “When I called him by name and kicked him in the shin, I guess he panicked. At any rate, from there, he flew into a rage.”
Bud patted my shoulders and gave me a reassuring hug.
“They’re here,” said one of the city cops, pointing to two detectives in khakis and shades. One was older, tall with an ex-Marine look to him. The other was about thirty and had slicked-back, dark curly hair raked behind his ears, à la Antonio Banderas.
They removed their sports jackets, pulled on latex gloves, and began their inspection of the scene. When they seemed satisfied that enough photos had been taken, they rolled the body in the yucca plants onto its back.
I thought I saw them both flinch. I stepped over for a closer look of the body right-side up. I saw what had made them flinch.
A yucca spike was sticking through the ski mask into an eye socket and had to be poking at least four inches into Robert Earle’s brain. Bud, who’d come up behind me, saw what I saw; he turned my face to his chest and held me tight.
The older detective had to pull out the
yucca spike before he could remove the mask. When this was accomplished, he said, “You can look now, Miss Cooper. Is that the man you say it is?”
“Yes,” I said and moved back to the couch where I gulped a slug of water.
“Damn,” Bud said, “I can’t believe this. Someone killed in my home.”
Tears burned behind my eyes, and I nodded in agreement then looked up to see the detectives heading my way.
Detective Terry, the older one, and the younger Saunders had a lot of questions. They were not real happy or satisfied with the facts, primarily that after a scuffle with me, my ex-husband’s house-
guest’s son had ended up dead. I pointed out that a head-long dive through rotted railing followed by a 25-foot fall and a yucca spike through the brain was what killed him, not me. The ski mask did work in my favor, though, as it pretty much proved the guy was not there for a social visit. Still, they were perplexed about the mask, so I told them it was actually Bud’s ski mask and gave them a skeleton of an explanation as to why Robert Earle wanted to see his mother and why she was hiding from him.
Detective Terry, who had the most remarkable eyes, intense gray and like laser-beams, listened intently, then said, “I can buy that Mr. Walton put on the ski mask to make you think he was just an intruder, but suffice it to say, you’d probably benefit if Mr. Walton was permanently kept away from his mother.” I felt Bud stiffen at my side. I pushed away from the back of the sofa, sat up straight and said, “It wouldn’t have made a difference to me one way or another. I have an iron-clad legal contract with Mrs. Walton. She made it clear to me that she didn’t want to see him. I was just accommodating her.”
The two detectives huddled a moment, then Saunders said, “So, just for the record, you think Mr. Walton was just trying to scare you, not actually kill you, and that basically this was just an accident?”
“I think so,” I said.
“Only he knows the answer to that, and he isn’t talking anymore,” Bud added.
“You gentlemen might want to have a talk with Sheriff Evans over in Onslow County, the Waltons’ home county. He has information I’m sure you’d be interested in. I’d like to go into more detail myself, but right now, I’m concerned about my son and Mrs. Walton not being here and would like to go find them.”
Terry turned the laser beams on me again, then said, “I need contact numbers for both of you.”
The mob finally pulled out almost two hours later, including the ambulance carrying Robert Earle’s remains. Bud and I went upstairs to the kitchen. “I’ve got to get word to Sheriff Evans about Robert Earle, let him know to expect a call from those two detectives. Then I have to go look for Gladys and Will. They’ve been gone far too long.”
Bud was leaning over the sink, looking out the window past the expanse of dunes to the marina across the street. “Huh. Some of those policemen stopped in at Captain Eddie’s—getting drinks, I guess—and I think those detectives are with them. At least that black sedan looks like a detective car.”
I moved beside him and peered out just in time to see Will come out the marina door.
“Oh, thank goodness,” I said, turning from the sink. “At least Will and Gladys are back from their boat trip.”
Bud headed for the liquor cabinet. “I’ll fix up some drinks. I know I could use one.”
He was adding a lime twist to Gladys’s Grey Goose and tonic when Will burst into the room, “Are you guys alright? The police said there was an accident over here, that Gladys’s son fell through a railing. What the hell?”
“Yes, we’re fine,” I said as I pulled the door back open and looked down the stairs to the grounds below. “Where’s Gladys?”
“She took your Jeep and left,” Will said, opening the fridge.
Bud and I stared at his protruding backside. Then, said in unison, “Left?”
Will’s head popped up. “Yeah. Gladys and I were heading over here—cutting through the tackle shop at Eddie’s—when, out the front window, we saw an ambulance and a bunch of cop cars leaving the house. We panicked,” he said, his eyes still wide as he cracked open a Bud Light. “But before we could make it to the front door, a couple of policemen came in. Gladys hustled over and asked them what was going on. That’s when these two guys—they said they were detectives—asked us who we were, then told us what happened. I can’t believe it!”
“Take it easy,” I said. “You’re going to hyperventilate.”
Will took a gulp of beer. “I could tell Gladys was really shocked. I mean, I was so shocked, I couldn’t speak. Then, all the sudden Gladys got real calm. She asked the detectives where they were taking her son, then told me to tell you she was borrowing the Jeep. The keys were already in it. She jumped in and took off after the ambulance so fast there wasn’t much I could do, but I figured it was okay, it being her son and all … ”
I slammed my hand on the kitchen counter. “Jesus H. Christ, Will! What in the hell were you thinking?”
“What do you mean?” Will asked aghast.
“Seriously, son, you really have to start using your head for something besides a beer funnel! The woman’s in shock, for God’s sake. She’s just lost her firstborn child and you let her drive off all by herself?”
“Stop yelling at him,” Bud said. “I’d have done the same thing. What was he supposed to do? Try and tell a grown woman what to do? Good luck with that!”
Lord, deliver me from a world of boorish men.
“She seemed fine to me, Mom. And I did give her a hug. Oh, yeah—that’s when she told me to tell you she’d leave your Jeep at the Morning Glory Inn.”
“Why didn’t you say that in the first place?” At least I knew now where she would go after she followed Robert Earle’s body. I looked at Bud expectantly.
“Yes,” he said, “I’ll take you there, but first, chill out before you pop a bolt. Besides, you need to eat something. We all do. It’s too late to mess with frogmore stew. I’ll cook some burgers on the grill.”
I agreed to wait awhile but called the Morning Glory several times during dinner and got no answer. Finally, after we finished eating, I connected with Betsy, the innkeeper, and asked if she had checked in a nice older woman named Gladys Walton this evening.
“No, I didn’t check her in,” Betsy said. “But she did drop off your Jeep. I told her to put it in the garden parking lot just below your room. She asked me to call her a cab and I did.”
Rats! “Did she say where she was going?”
“Sorry, she didn’t.”
I clicked off, found the card with the sheriff’s cell number on it, and called him. I was sent straight to his voicemail. I left him a message to expect a call from Wrightsville Beach detectives regarding Robert Earle Walton and asked him to call me back.
I was barely aware of what Bud was saying on the way to the Morning Glory Inn. Snippets of his dialogue, like an uninteresting book on tape, played just outside my conscious thought. Then a pause in the tape caused me to turn and face him. “Uh, sorry?”
He frowned “Relax. Everything’s going to be fine. You’ll see. Gladys will call you when she’s ready. You’re going to bring your project in and before you know it, you’ll be rich and all this will be behind you.”
“I guess,” I mumbled.
Despite my best efforts to keep my business with Gladys and the project a simple, uncomplicated option to test and purchase from day one, one force had acted against me: unmitigated greed in the form of the Walton siblings. Did Robert Earle’s death prove my instincts had been correct? What would the sheriff say when he found out about Robert Earle? Was Shirley involved? Was the whole project dead?
Like a compulsive gambler I told myself to keep playing. Don’t fold yet, girl. Just hold on until the last of the test results come in and the bank grants the loan. Then I’d pay Gladys. The land and mining rights would be mine and any and all reasons f
or this chaos would be gone, just like Bud said. Right?
I looked at Bud, driving and still talking. I smiled as if I were paying attention and worried about Gladys. Wherever she was, she was probably wishing she’d never agreed to stay at Seahaven. Now, because of me, there would always be a stigma attached to Seahaven. Someone had been killed there. Gloom and depression settled over me with the weight of a lead x-ray vest.
I laid my hand on Bud’s arm. “You know, I wish I could turn back time. I wish I had hid Gladys somewhere else. I wish … a thousand things … ”
Now Bud had nothing to say.
“I hope you’ll accept my apology for bringing such a nightmare to Seahaven. And that, over time, you can forget all the horror that happened there today.”
He sighed. “We need to get something straight, Cleo. It’s me who owes you an apology. Not the other way around. This whole mess is, in fact, my fault.”
“How in the hell do you figure that?”
“Because if I’d listened to you in the first place, if I hadn’t blown you off that night over at your house right after you found that body, none of this would have happened. You told me then you thought Gladys’s kids could be a danger to her. I thought you were overreacting and well, I was way too busy trying to get into your pants that night to take anything you said seriously.”
“Thanks for trying to make me feel better, but I know whose fault—” I stopped. I could feel my voice getting all shaky. I hate when that happens. Fortunately, Sheriff Evans returned my call just at that time.
“Could’ve been worse,” the sheriff said at the news about Robert Earle.
“How’s that?” I asked.
“Could’ve been you with a Spanish bayonet through your brain.”
“I see your point. Um, no pun intended.”
“Where’s Gladys now?” the sheriff asked brusquely.
“I’m not exactly sure but I would think she went wherever the ambulance took Robert Earle. I do know she dropped my car at the Morning Glory and took a cab from there.”