Booty Bones: A Sarah Booth Delaney Mystery

by Carolyn Haines

  He looked around. “I have no idea. Last I remember, I was at Angela’s cottage. I went to warn her.”

  “About what?”

  The boat lurched hard, and both Tinkie and I lost our footing. The lantern swung dangerously, and I heard a thump that sounded like flesh and bone meeting solid resistance.

  When we’d righted ourselves again, we found Chavis in a corner of the cabin beneath several books and a large sailing trophy. Randy was again unconscious, and the trophy was etched with blood. This time, the lawman was bleeding from a knock on the side of his head.

  “Dammit it all to hell.” I wanted to scream. “He was about to tell us something important.”

  “Help! Please help me!” Angela’s voice was small and faraway sounding.

  “She’s on deck,” I said.

  The boat lurched again and sent me and Tinkie reeling out the door and toward the stairs leading to the deck. Despite her cultured upbringing, Tinkie went up the ladder like a monkey, and I was right behind her.

  We emerged into driving rain, gale-force winds, and the sight of Angela clinging to one of the ropes that tied the Miss Adventure to the pier. The line was inching out of her hands as the sailboat began to swing broadside into the waves. If that happened, we would be swamped and sink.

  “Holy shit,” I jumped forward to help her.

  “How did the boat come untied?” I yelled at Angela. I’d been there when Arley tied it off. The knot had been solid.

  The first wave washed over the side of the Miss Adventure, all but knocking me and Angela off our feet.

  “Tinkie!” I dropped the rope and grabbed my partner’s arm just as the water tried to suck her over the side.

  “If we can’t get the boat turned into the waves, she’s going to founder and sink.” Angela was eerily calm. “We have to bring Randy from below deck. We can’t leave him there. If the boat goes down, he’ll be trapped.”

  “He came to, but then a trophy hit him in the head.” I had to fight to spit the words out loud enough for them to hear. “Tinkie, do you think you can revive him?”

  “You need me up here.” We were all holding the rope. When the boat shifted a little into the wind, we tightened the rope and fought to hold the small ground we’d gained. Tinkie was right. It would take all three of us to merely hang on.

  “We can’t hold her through the whole storm.” Angela looked around frantically. “How did this happen? The ropes were tight.”

  The singing sound of rope against wood made us look at the second tie-line. It was slipping from the post on the dock.

  “This can’t be.” Angela fought disbelief. “Those lines were properly tied. I knotted that one myself. And Arley knows how to secure a boat. Someone had to loosen them while I was below deck.”

  She was right, but it didn’t stop the rope from slipping another few inches.

  Tinkie hauled on the rope with all her weight. If we lost the center tie-line, we’d have only the one on the bow. We were holding the stern line, which had also been untied. The waves and wind would swing us around and smash us into the pier. While the boat would definitely be destroyed, it was also likely we would drown. Thrown into the water with the boat battering against the pilings, we’d probably be crushed.

  The low and mournful cry of my hound made me look at the pier. Sweetie Pie and Pluto stood in the rain watching. I don’t know how they’d managed to open the car door and escape, but there they were. Neither made an effort to seek shelter. They knew we were in grave danger.

  “Get Arley!” I tried to shout at Sweetie and urge her to get help, but the wind and rain drowned my efforts.

  “Grab the rope, Sweetie!” Tinkie had a more practical plan, but her words were lost in the storm’s vortex.

  “She can’t hear us.” My voice cracked as I yelled at Sweetie. “Get in the car!”

  Debris was flying everywhere in the wind. Shingles from the marina roof ripped past my face, missing my nose by an inch. A plastic bag slammed into Tinkie, wrapping around her face as if it intended to suffocate her.

  Sweetie gave a yelp as something struck her. “Go back to the car!” I wanted to tell her how much I loved her and that she would be fine. Harold Erkwell, a friend who’d taken the devilishly evil bearded dog Roscoe, would take her in. It had all been arranged. Another friend would take the three horses. And Pluto could go back to his owner, the eccentric Marjorie Littlefield, if Graf didn’t take him to Los Angeles.

  Lost in my thoughts, I didn’t hear the crack of the figurehead against one of the pilings. I didn’t see the chunk of wood that flew through the air and smacked my head. My knees folded, and I felt myself going down on the rolling deck, but I still couldn’t comprehend what had happened to me.

  I was simply sucked into a whirling black hole, and I didn’t even fight against it.

  * * *

  I came to my senses with a burst of pain in my head, and a tunnel of bright, luminescent light. At the end of the tunnel, a trim woman in a black dress stood perfectly still. The skirt of her dress belled out around her ankles. When she realized I was awake, she approached. A great dread took hold of me. Her widow’s weeds rustled, the taffeta in her skirt an indication of the time period.

  Another Civil War–era visitation.

  But this wasn’t Jitty. This was a woman thinned by sorrow and loss. Was it my great-great-great-grandmother Alice?

  Was I dead?

  The series of Jitty’s warnings came to mind—widows all, both real and fictional. Had she been trying to prepare me for the ultimate good-bye? But I wasn’t ready to die. Not yet. I had much to accomplish.

  The image of Graf and Marion Silber, together on the beach, filled my mind’s eye in crisp detail. Had she been sent to help him after I was gone? The universe stepping up to the plate to be sure he wasn’t left alone and injured? Instead of the woman who broke up my relationship, was she going to be the woman who saved the man I loved from desperate depression?

  I wanted to weep, but my body failed to respond to any emotion or command. I floated on a cloud of white as the past whipped by me.

  I held my father’s hand as we walked down the driveway at Dahlia House. He sang an old western song about a horse, “Old Faithful.” And I sang with him at the chorus. “When your roundup days are over, there’ll be pastures white with clover, for you, old faithful pal of mine.”

  Dusk settled over us and bathed Dahlia House in a golden glow that made me think of heaven. The bright-green spring leaves of the sycamore trees that lined the drive shimmied like naughty dancing girls. “Why did you leave me?” I asked. “I needed you. I was just a kid.”

  “It’s okay,” Daddy told me. “We’re with you, Sarah Booth. You will never be alone.”

  He was gone, replaced with another scene. I played in the dirt beneath a grove of old oaks behind Dahlia House. My mother sat on an oak branch that dipped low to the ground. It was the perfect seat, and she read a novel.

  Wind ruffled the leaves, and the tall grass with golden tassels whispered to me, teasing me with promises of fairies. My mother had told me that the oaks were magical and that anything could happen in the shade of the trees if only I believed. Sometimes I caught a glimpse of the fairies and elves as they played in the shade.

  Mama lowered her book and motioned me to her. I abandoned my Meyers horse collection and ran into her arms. My face pressed to her shoulder, I inhaled the lemony scent of magnolias. “I love you.” I pressed the words into her skin.

  “Love can never be broken or destroyed,” she said. “Remember that always, Sarah Booth. Love replenishes itself once given, so never hold back.”

  She stood up.

  “Don’t go!” She was leaving. I knew it. The light that had surrounded us both was dimming, and a cold mist pushed in from the horizon.

  “You can’t stay here in memories. We’re a nice place to visit, but not to linger. You know this is true. Jitty will tell you.”

  “I don’t want to leave. I want to stay. W
ith you. I won’t go back.”

  Her hand brushed the tears from my cheeks. “No, that’s not really what you want. You want to live and love.”

  “No. No, I don’t.”

  “You have much to accomplish.”

  “I don’t want any of it. Please.” Her touch had grown cooler, and she was fading.

  “You have to return, Sarah Booth. You’ve visited here too long as it is.”

  “Please. Stay with me.” I couldn’t face the future without her and Daddy. It wasn’t a fair thing to ask. I’d been without them most of my life. Now that I had them back, I couldn’t let go. Not again. This place was childhood, safe, filled with love. I would not go back to the present, a place of loss and struggle.

  “Your mother is right. Go on, shoo!” Lawrence Ambrose, a wonderful writer whose murder I’d helped solve, stepped out of the shadows. I’d always felt he was a magical man, a writer whose wit and humanity had left a hole in my life when he was murdered. “Now vamoose!” He flicked his fingers at me.

  “I’m not a chicken. You can’t chase me away.”

  He swept a bow so low his shock of white hair almost touched the ground. “Touché, Sarah Booth. You are not a chicken. So jump back into life. This is no place for the living. You’ve been granted a wonderful gift. A moment of time with the people who love you. Take it back to the land of the living.”

  His clear gray eyes held another message. One of peace and contentment.

  “I want to stay with y’all.”

  “A trifle on the stubborn side, aren’t you?” He executed a spin and slide. “We’re always here. Your time will be up before you know it. But not today.”

  He was simply gone. In his place the widow had returned. She came toward me, and I knew she meant to take me back. I tried to run, but my legs refused all of my orders.

  Her hair was marcelled in waves, parted in the center and held in a bun at the nape of her neck. Her eyes were sad—and empty.

  “They killed him, you know. One last train robbery. That’s what he said. Then he’d be with me and the children and lead an ordinary life. He wasn’t a bad man. Not in the way of some men. He didn’t beat me or the children. But he could be brutal. He could. They said he killed men when he robbed the trains.”

  She wandered around me, talking to herself.

  “He called me Zee. I share my name with his mother. Peculiar, isn’t it? Like we were destined to be together. But not so peculiar when you realize his mother was my aunt. We were first cousins, but we fell in love. Our engagement lasted nine years.”

  “Who are you?” I couldn’t place her. I’d guessed her time period as post–Civil War. That was as definite as I could get.

  “He rode with the James-Younger Gang for a while. For a man who robbed trains, he never had a lot of money for his family. I couldn’t figure that. Whatever he stole never made it in our front door.”

  “Mrs. James?”

  She faced me. “You can call me Zerelda. Or Zee. There was no cause for the Ford brothers to kill him, you know. Just for fame. And a ten-thousand-dollar reward. But it never did them a lick of good. Not a lick. That Bob Ford shot Jesse in the head, and they were supposed to be friends. They put Jesse’s body on ice and exhibited it. Our son never even knew who his daddy was until Jesse was murdered. Then he had to face the truth. It broke me.”

  “Jitty!” I couldn’t take any more of this sad, sad woman. “Jitty! Drop the act. We need to talk.”

  Slowly the woman morphed into the mocha shades of my beautiful haint. “I thought the widow of Jesse James was a brilliant choice.” She sighed. “After her husband’s death, she spent the rest of her life in a debilitating depression. Not exactly the place I’d choose to hang out. Thanks for calling on me.”

  “You never appear when I call you.”

  She shrugged and moved on. “You know you’ve been on the border of death. I thought for a little while you were goin’ to check out without leavin’ a Delaney heir behind.”

  “What are you saying?” She was talking gibberish.

  She tapped her skull. “Whacked in the head by a piece of flying debris. Under other circumstances, you might have died. And if you don’t get up off your ass and help your friends, you gonna be deader than a flitter.”

  “What debris? How was I injured?” She wasn’t making any more sense in her natural state than she had as Mrs. James.

  “Think, Sarah Booth, but be quick about it. You’re ’bout to join the dead in Davy Jones’s locker if you don’t wake up and help your partner. Things are going to hell in a handbasket fast!”

  I couldn’t deny her sense of urgency, but I hadn’t a clue what she was talking about. “What’s the message from Zee James?”

  “You can’t let loss break you.” She tapped her foot. “Is that clear enough? Wake up, Sarah Booth. You’re hidin’ out. Tinkie and Angela are in real trouble. Wake up, stand up, and stop wallowin’ in loss.”

  Jitty was enigmatic but never harsh. “What bee buzzed your bonnet?”

  “Wake up!”

  I drew back from the ferocity of her command and felt wet wood beneath my face. I opened my eyes and saw Tinkie’s deck shoes slipping on the rain-soaked deck of a boat. It took a few seconds for reality to return, but when it did, I sat up.

  “Sarah Booth, thank God!” Tinkie burst into tears. “I thought you were dying. That piece of wood struck you right in the forehead. Frontal lobe damage and all that.” She crouched down and grasped my chin. “You haven’t been lobotomized, have you?”

  “No.” I snatched my chin away.

  “Then get up and help us.”

  With the boat thrashing, I had no choice. Jitty had put it before me, in no uncertain terms. It was fight and survive or give up and die. Not a Delaney born had ever been a quitter. I would analyze Jitty’s appearance as Zerelda Mimms James, wife of the notorious outlaw, when I had some quiet time alone.

  24

  For the next half hour, Angela, Tinkie, and I fought the rising winds. We’d gain several inches on the rope, and then the wind would shift and pull harder against us. Ultimately, we were losing ground.

  When Randy Chavis stumbled up from below deck, I was actually glad to see him.

  “What the hell?” He shielded his face with his arm, covering a big gash on his left forehead that matched a smaller wound on the right side. The rain washed the blood from his face and chest. “What happened?”

  “You were brained by a trophy,” Tinkie said, not wasting any words on niceties. “You and Sarah Booth have matching noggins.”

  I rubbed the goose egg on my forehead. “Thanks.”

  Randy took in our predicament and grabbed an extra coil of rope. Tying them together, he was able to use the main mast as leverage. The four of us pulling with everything we had in us were able to stabilize the Miss Adventure.

  “If the water gets any rougher, she’ll break free,” he said. “Why is she still berthed here?”

  “Let’s go below deck,” Angela said. “We need some answers.”

  With the boat securely tied, at least for the moment, we trooped below. Getting out of the rain and wind was an immense relief. My body felt as if it had been battered all over by tiny fists. I slumped into a chair, and Angela tilted my face up to examine my damaged forehead.

  “You need to see a doctor.”

  No doubt. If I told her about Zee James’s visitation and my haint Jitty, she’d think I needed more than an M.D. More like a psychiatric facility.

  Tinkie shifted her attention to Chavis. “You should have stitches.”

  “Pull out a needle and thread. We aren’t going to find a doctor for the next twenty-four hours.” Chavis wasn’t kidding.

  “I’ll try taping it,” Tinkie said. She was a lot better with wounds than I was, but sewing a forehead was more than she could take on. She turned his head so she could examine his neck. “Bring that lantern.”

  We all moved in close to look at the clear puncture wound in his neck. When w
e were done with him, we went to Angela, who had an identical mark on her neck.

  “So what happened?” Tinkie demanded. “The two of you were in Angela’s cottage and something obviously went down.”

  “I’d come to warn her,” Randy said. His eyes widened. “Shit, I forgot about this in all the furor of securing the boat.”

  “What?” We were a Greek chorus.

  “Someone in the sheriff’s department is out to get you, Angela. And”—he frowned and looked down at his feet—“and I think you’re right about Larry Wofford. I think he’s innocent. I was duped.”

  His stunning confession froze us for the space of a few seconds. “What changed your mind?” I had to know. Call me cynical, but I considered the possibility that Randy’s abrupt about-face was calculated to lull us into trusting him.

  “It was what the museum owner, Prevatt, said to me when I called to update him about the stolen telescope.”

  “What did he say?” Angela put her hands on her hips.

  “Something about how he’d been double-crossed for the last time by men in uniform.”

  Tinkie was puzzled. “And how does that clear Wofford?”

  “It’s the context of the comment.” Chavis spoke directly to Angela. “I told Prevatt we’d searched the cottage the private investigators were renting and we’d searched your place and the ship and come up with nothing. No trace of the missing spyglass. He said he wouldn’t trust Mobile County deputies as far as he could throw them, that he knew how they could change evidence to convict an innocent man.”

  “Did he mention Wofford by name?” I asked.

  “No.” Randy looked less certain. “I’m sure that’s who he meant, though. And he seemed to think I was involved in framing Wofford. When I asked him what evidence, he changed the subject quickly. Like he realized he’d made a mistake.”

  “What evidence might that be?” Angela asked.

  I knew. “The security cameras.” I’d never understood why the cameras failed that night.

  Randy looked miserable. “I took the CDs from the recorder into the station, but it was the next day before I looked at them. They were blank.”