Killer Beach Reads

by Gemma Halliday Publishing

  Randy sneaked another look at me. "Bet I could keep the old lady happy."

  Only if he handed me a loaded gun.

  "But you seem like a nice guy," Randy added. "What're you in the market for?"

  "Something like that." Curt pointed at his watch. Eddie's watch. "Where'd you get that?" When Randy didn't answer right away, he said, "Come on, dude. I'm just a guy looking to get my girl talking to me again."

  Randy smirked. "Why?"

  I did an exaggerated sigh that probably could have been heard a block away.

  Curt took the hint. "We've got to get moving. Who hooked you up with the watch? Maybe he can hook me up with some earrings or something."

  "Okay." Randy glanced over his shoulder. Purely for effect, since there was no one within thirty yards of us. "A guy sold me this watch, over at the Clamshell Bar on Pacific."

  "What's he look like?" Curt asked. "So I know him when I see him."

  "If you see him." Another smirk. "He don't get around much. He's not hard to spot if he's there. Look for the orange sneakers."

  Curt's expression had darkened. "He got a name?"

  Randy shrugged. "If he does, I don't know it. Look, I gotta get back to work."

  "Yeah." Curt glanced around. The only nearby vehicle with wheels was a senior citizen rolling down the sidewalk on a motorized scooter. "Things are really picking up. Thanks for the information."

  Randy nodded and walked away. Curt whipped out his cell phone and snapped a quick picture before getting back in the car. "You catch that?"

  "You were pretty good," I told him. "Some guy with no name may or may not be in the Clamshell Bar. Which I'm guessing is a lot like the Sea 'n' Spray Motel ." I fastened my seat belt. "But how do we find out for sure if Randy is Sasquatch?"

  "I have a suggestion," Curt said.

  I lifted my eyebrows, waiting.

  He pointed to his phone. "We show Ernie that picture."

  "Ernie doesn't have an address," I pointed out. "We don't know how to find him."

  "He said he lives on the beach," Curt said. "All we have to do is walk past the dunes at night waving some money, and Ernie will find us."

  I considered it. "I hate the idea of giving him more money after what he did."

  "I couldn't agree more," Curt said. "He's a parasite. But he's also the only one who's seen Sasquatch. If he can ID Randy O'Brien, it's worth a try."

  As much as I hated the idea, I knew he was right. Ernie was our best chance to nail Randy O'Brien. Finding Annie's body was something I couldn't bring myself to think about yet.

  But there was something I wanted to do first. I wanted to talk to Carolyn Taney. I dug out her card and punched her number into my cell phone. She picked up on the first ring. "We're making some progress," I told her, "but I wanted to ask you about Annie's jewelry. Was it the real thing?"

  "Her jewelry?" Carolyn repeated. "What does that have to do with anything?"

  I filled her in about the pearl earrings we'd found in Randy O'Brien's room, careful to leave out Randy's name and the name of the motel. Carolyn had no more business there than we did. "I think they matched the necklace I saw in Annie's house," I said.

  "That could well be," Carolyn said slowly. "I remember Annie mentioning to me that she kept losing her good jewelry, so she started buying costume pieces. She locked the valuable ones in a—" She fell silent.

  I frowned. "Carolyn? Are you still there?"

  "Annie had a safe-deposit box," she said. "And she made me co-owner of it, again, in case something happened to her. I can't believe I didn't think of it till now. I have a key, but I've never opened the box. I never had reason to."

  "Until now," I said.

  "Until now," she agreed. "Meet me at the Bayshore Bank on Atlantic and Fifth in an hour." And she hung up.

  "What's going on?" Curt asked.

  "I think we're finally catching a break," I said.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  "She never had the crown jewels," Carolyn said as we walked into the bank. "But she had some things left to her by her grandparents and a few things that had been gifted to her over the years for college graduation and such. Things with sentimental value. She was pretty upset when the watch disappeared, but she assumed she'd lost it herself, and it was just a knockoff anyway. When the diamond earring disappeared, she knew something was wrong. Wait here."

  Curt and I stood to the side while she talked with a bank official, signed her name as required, and waited while the official checked her signature. Finally, she gave us a nod, and we followed the two of them back to the safe deposit boxes, waiting again while they used their respective keys to open Annie's box. Then the bank official led us to a private room and discreetly exited, leaving us alone.

  "You said a few minutes ago that a diamond earring disappeared," I said before Carolyn opened the box. "Just one?"

  "That's what was so odd," she said, her fingers hovering over the box. "It was just the one. Maybe someone wanted her to think she was losing things for some reason." She gave a small smile. "That really does sound Movie of the Week, doesn't it? Anyway, that's when she decided to get this." She tapped the box. "She said she put the remaining diamond earring in here. She always hoped she'd find its mate one day."

  She opened the box and sucked in a sharp breath.

  It was filled with cash. Stacks of it, piled nearly to the top. It appeared to be all hundreds. Annie had been good with her money, all right. It was a mesmerizing sight to see that much cash in one place.

  "I didn't know she…" Carolyn trailed off, staring at the box in disbelief. "I didn't expect this," she said finally, her voice faint.

  Curt removed the cash and piled it on the table. "Do you have any idea where this came from?"

  Carolyn shook her head. "I know she got some kind of inheritance from her grandparents, and of course there was Eddie's life insurance. I don't know how much of each, though."

  A lot, if the stacks on the table were any indication. I didn't want to be gauche and count it. Well, I did, but I managed to restrain myself. "This is certainly safer than stuffing cash in her mattress," I said. "At least she knew this wasn't going to disappear."

  A disturbing thought occurred to me. What if Annie had planned to disappear? Maybe the contents of the safe deposit box had been intended to fund her escape. But from what? I couldn't help but wonder if Randy O'Brien had been harassing her again. Carolyn had said the security alarm at Annie's house had been installed after her husband had died, to help her feel safer. Maybe Randy was the reason she'd felt unsafe. I'd assumed he'd broken into her home after Annie was dead. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe he'd been sneaking into her house all along, pilfering her things little by little, as a way to terrorize her.

  My anger surged again at the possibility. Annie had endured the typical teenaged meanness throughout high school, but she'd managed to succeed enough to graduate college and grow comfortably into her life. Now it seemed the meanness had found her again in the form of Randy O'Brien, and this time she hadn't been able to escape it. The unfairness of it was infuriating.

  Curt took some papers from the box and spread them on the table. Annie's deed and mortgage papers. Her will. I picked that up and flipped through it. Pretty standard stuff. I noticed it was dated in early 2015, after her husband's death, so either his passing had got her thinking about her own mortality, leading her to draft a will, or she'd had an existing will redrafted to remove her husband as beneficiary. The bulk of her estate was to be split between her family and a few charities benefiting children, with a small bequest for Carolyn herself. I didn't recognize the name of the attorney who'd prepared it, but I knew he would have kept a copy as well and given Annie the original. I wondered why he hadn't told her not to lock it in her safe deposit box. She must have had a reason why she didn't want the original at her house, someone she didn't want to read it. Maybe that was another reason why she'd made Carolyn co-owner of the box, so the will could be accessed in the event of her death.

>   "Did she have a safe in her home?" I asked anyway. "Somewhere she could have kept important papers like these?"

  "Nothing like these," Carolyn said. "Only insurance policies and such, replaceable documents." To her credit, she did not read the will. Instead she reached for the last item in the safe deposit box, a small black velvet case that seemed like a jewelry case, and it was. It held a pearl necklace and matching pearl earrings that even I could see were the real thing, along with a diamond tennis bracelet, a gorgeous Movado wristwatch, and a single diamond earring. It was more jewelry than I would have imagined Annie owning, and probably more than the Annie I'd known would have worn, but I was happy she'd owned it nonetheless. I could only hope it had given her pleasure to have it.

  My eyes lingered on the single diamond earring and a swell of sadness rose in my chest. It wasn't hard to imagine Randy O'Brien walking around with its stolen mate in his ear. Especially now that I was pretty sure the pearl earrings in his motel room belonged to Annie. If we ever saw Randy O'Brien again, I was going to personally pierce a less traditional part of his anatomy.

  "That's it," Carolyn said, and I could tell by her voice she was experiencing the same sadness. I had to give her credit for holding it together. I'd only lost the memory of someone I'd once known. Carolyn had lost a real friend. "Did it help you to see this?" she asked.

  Curt and I exchanged glances. "I think it did," I said. "I think we have a better sense of who might have done this. Now we have to find him."

  "Can't you just call the police?" she asked. "Give them his name? Maybe they already know of him."

  Curt shook his head. "They don't believe there's been a murder. We can't exactly run to them accusing anyone when there's no body."

  Carolyn considered it for a moment while she stared at the contents of Annie's box strewn across the table. As she did, her face changed. The sadness melted into an icy hardness that was a little scary. Like the angel in white had gone over to the dark side.

  "So," she said slowly, giving us the full-on winter blue stare, "vigilante justice, then. I don't want to know anything except when it's done." She didn't even blink. "And then I want to know everything," she said. "We have to bring Annie home."

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  By the time night fell, the temperature had dropped into the 70s, with the added chilling effect of an east wind coming off the ocean. On the plus side, it chased almost everyone away from the beach. On the down side, it chased almost everyone away from the beach. I hated the thought of actually looking for Ernie, but we needed him. We needed to know for sure if Randy O'Brien was Sasquatch.

  Curt barbecued some chicken breasts and baked potatoes for dinner on Howard's ginormous grill by the pool, and we ate on the master bedroom deck, watching the sun start to sink. After we'd finished, I washed the dishes while Curt cleaned the grill. We didn't do much talking.

  At ten o'clock, I changed into jeans and a sweatshirt and went downstairs to find him ready to go in head-to-toe black. He looked dangerous and delicious all at once. Maybe there'd still be time left to put our vacation to good use when this business was done and over with.

  We weren't sure which direction to go after we hit the beach, so we flipped a coin and started walking. Slowly and arm in arm, keeping an eye out for unusual movement in the dunes. The moon was high, lining the surface of the restless water with gold. The wind was cutting, pushing ghost clouds across the sky. Except for the temperature, it felt like Halloween had come early—especially since we were looking for a ghoul.

  "I see something," I said in a low voice. I tipped my head in the direction of the grassy dunes ahead to our left. The grass was rustling, and I thought I caught a glimpse of white.

  Curt focused on the spot like a laser. A second later he shook his head. "It's just a couple of teenagers."

  I sighed. "Maybe he's not here anymore. Or maybe he doesn't come till one or two in the morning, after everyone's gone home."

  We kept walking for a few more minutes. No sign of Ernie.

  "Change of plans," Curt said finally. "We look for Ernie's little rat's nest."

  I suppressed a shudder. Not sure I wanted to see that. "What good will that do if he's not there?"

  "We'll leave him a note; ask him to come back to the house." Curt looked over the dunes. His eyes narrowed against the wind. "Tell him we need to show him something, and we'll pay him for his time. That should do it."

  "I don't want him back at the house," I said. "Can't we just come back tomorrow night?"

  "No." Curt bit off the word. "We do this tonight. For Annie."

  Right. Annie. Annie deserved justice.

  Curt put an arm around my shoulders and pulled me against him. "I want to get him in a controlled environment, so I can get a straight answer out of him. You don't have to be there if you don't want to be."

  "Let's find his nest," I said.

  Curt grinned. "I think we're already there." He took my hand to pull me toward the dunes. At first it looked like just a bundle of rags in the sand, but as we got closer, the rags morphed into worn and tattered men's clothing. I saw beer bottles and cans and a few crumpled paper bags and sandwich wrappings and Styrofoam fast food containers mixed in. A large sheet of cardboard was laid out beneath it all, probably serving as Ernie's bed with the clothes as both pillow and blanket. It was sad and disgusting at the same time, and I resisted the urge to kick sand over everything as we stood there looking down on it.

  "Got any paper?" Curt asked.

  I shook my head. "I didn't bring my handbag." I scrounged around in my pockets. "I have this." I pulled out one of Howard's business cards. The card I was supposed to be using to wallpaper Ocean Beach.

  "Are you kidding me?" Curt asked. "That'll just freak him out."

  "Sorry." I shoved the card back in my pocket. After a moment of thought, I pulled it back out and tossed it into the wind. There. Now I could honestly tell Howard I'd put his card to good use.

  Curt sighed. "I can use one of those paper bags. Maybe he's got a pen somewhere in there."

  "You can look for it," I said. "I'm not touching a thing."

  He blew out an exasperated sigh. "You can be such a girl sometimes."

  "But a girl without any communicable diseases," I said. "Hurry up. I'm getting cold."

  Curt waded into Ernie's debris and squatted down to see what he could find while I stood there looking in every direction at once, shivering against the ocean wind, trying not to imagine Randy O'Brien sneaking up behind me with his arms outstretched, reaching for—

  "Done," Curt said from just behind my left shoulder.

  I'd never been a sprinter, but I was back at the house before he even made it off the beach.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I wasn't much of a night person, but I couldn't have slept if I'd tucked myself into Egyptian cotton sheets after a full body massage. Curt was downstairs watching the Phillies play the Dodgers. He'd put a midnight call time on his note, and it was getting close. Part of me hoped he wouldn't show. But if he did, I wanted to be there, for Curt and for Annie.

  At 11:45, I went downstairs and sat beside him. He put an arm around my shoulders, and I leaned into him. We watched the game in silence until the doorbell rang ten minutes later.

  He shut off the television and stood. "Why don't you go back upstairs."

  I stared at him. "What are you talking about? I want to hear what he has to say."

  He ran a hand over his face and sighed. "I knew that. It was just a suggestion." He picked up his cell phone from the coffee table and slipped it into his breast pocket. "Let's do this."

  We went to the door. Ernie stood there with his hands stuffed in his pockets. He'd buttoned his shirt. He looked ready for a police lineup.

  Curt stepped aside without a word and Ernie came in clutching a torn piece of brown paper bag. "I got your note. You said there'd be money in it for me, so here I am." His lips were on the thin side and chapped from spending so much time outdoors, so his force
d grin looked painful. I hoped it was.

  "Here you are." Curt stepped around him to close the front door. He looked like he was in full predator mode. Scary. "I want you to take a look at something for me." He held out the picture of Randy O'Brien on his cell phone. "You never gave us a description of Sasquatch. Is this him?"

  "I didn't see him," Ernie said quickly. "Not really. It was dark. His back was to me."

  "Like it is here," Curt said, holding the cell phone closer. "Right?"

  "Yeah. I guess." Ernie glanced at it and looked away.

  "Let me give you a description," Curt said. His tone was amiable. "Does he have a shaved head and two different colored eyes?"

  "I didn't see his eyes," Ernie said, too quickly. "Like I said, it was dark."

  "How about his head?" Curt asked. "Did you see his head?"

  "He might maybe have been bald," Ernie said. "I can't say for sure one way or the other. I wasn't on top of him, you know." He held out his hand. "Look, I don't want no trouble. Just give me the money, and I'll be on my way."

  I noticed Curt stayed between Ernie and the door.

  "I'm surprised you don't recognize one of your buddies," Curt said.

  "What…?" I began.

  Curt's arms were crossed. He lifted a couple of fingers in my direction, and I stopped talking. I didn't know what to say anyway.

  Ernie managed to blanch despite his overdone tan. "Look, man, I did what I could here."

  "I think you did more than that," Curt said. "Right, Eddie?"

  I could actually feel my face grow pale. "Eddie?" I whispered. "Eddie Lanergan?"

  "Who's Eddie Lanergan?" Ernie glanced back and forth between us. "What're you talking about, mister? I told you, my name's Ernie."

  "Sure it is." Curt looked at me. "Check out the sneakers."

  I looked at a pair of violently orange sneakers, the same sneakers Ernie had been wearing when he'd first shown up at the front door. The ones worn by the man who'd sold Randy O'Brien the watch and probably the earrings and necklace, too. Curt must have noticed them before too, and remembered them afterward.