Gone with the Twins

by Kylie Logan

  I wasn’t about to let that break up the party. I signaled to Kate, she gave me the thumbs-up and refilled tiny wine glasses, and I strolled from group to group, joining in the casual conversations and doing my best not to gloat (well, at least not too much) when people mentioned that they saw now that the rumors they heard about the inn weren’t true and they should have known better than to even listen.

  A small, triumphant smile on my face, I came up behind the group chatting just where the corner of the garage met the small herb garden Chandra had planted for me so I could include the freshest ingredients in the breakfasts I served at the inn. Before I could say a word and let these folks know I was there, Paul Witkowski from the marina piped up, “Well, that’s what I heard, and I don’t know if it’s true or not, but it makes sense, doesn’t it?”

  Christie Norman from the bait and tackle shop nodded. “You’re right. Nobody knows anything about her background, do they? She says she came from New York. Well, that’s not telling us very much.”

  I swallowed hard and stepped farther back into the shadows. Had word gone out that I was FX O’Grady? And if so, who had spilled the beans?

  As it turned out, the possibility of being discovered as FX O’Grady was the least of my worries. I found that out when Doug McMann from the coffee shop lowered his voice. “Well, when you know what I know, you’ll see why no one wants to stay in this place. Yeah, it looks great and the food is wonderful. But Bea? My sources tell me we don’t know where she came from because it was either prison or a mental hospital.”

  “I hope everyone’s having a great time!”

  Oh yes, I had a smile on my face when I bolted into the center of that group of gossipers. “I appreciate you all stopping by this evening. And Doug . . .” When I turned to him, Doug McMann refused to meet my eyes. Too bad because he missed the wink I gave him. “Just so you know, sources aren’t always right. Prison? Mental hospital?” I laughed, as if the anger that was building inside me like lava in Etna didn’t matter at all. “I’ve got news for you . . . for all of you . . .” My smile outshone the moon overhead and I bestowed it on each of them, one at a time. “If you knew the truth, you’d see that my secret past is way more interesting than that.”

  Not one of them managed a reply. But then, what did I expect? One by one (and pretty quickly, too), the group broke up and headed for the street where they’d left their cars, and when Levi found me, I had my fists on my hips and a look on my face that must have been thunderous.

  Otherwise, he wouldn’t have taken a gander at me and stepped back.

  “Trouble?”

  I bit my lower lip. It was better than letting the words on my tongue escape. “Not if I can help it,” I said instead, and before he could ask what was up, I breezed past him and said good night to my other guests.

  It didn’t matter.

  The words pounded through my bloodstream to the furious beating of my heart.

  Stupid stories and stupid rumors didn’t matter.

  Doug McMann didn’t matter.

  I had lived on the island for more than a year and I knew that island residents were mature, sensible, logical.

  No one would believe the sort of garbage Doug spouted.

  And it didn’t matter, anyway.

  14

  As of the next day, Wednesday, I officially had a clean bill of health and the doctor’s permission to resume normal activity—and believe me, I planned to take full of advantage of it.

  The first thing I did was shoo Levi out of the house, but not before I told him how much I appreciated all he’d done for me, and not before we’d made Saturday night’s gala an official date. (There might have been a long good-bye involved, too, but I am not a girl who kisses and tells.) He would pick me up at five thirty so we’d have plenty of time to find a good vantage point to watch the band march over to Tara.

  That done, I headed out. I had some shopping to do, and while I was at it, I wanted to touch base with some of the folks who’d been at the meeting the night before. Doug McMann’s crazy stories might not matter, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to make sure the rumor hadn’t spread farther than that little knot of visitors in my garden.

  First stop, the bait and tackle shop. No, I wasn’t taking up fishing. But I knew that, like every day, Christie Norman would be behind the front counter.

  She was, and as soon as I walked in, her face paled and her eyes went wide. “I’ll be there to help you in just a minute,” she called out and disappeared into the back room of the shop.

  I didn’t wait a minute.

  I waited five.

  No sign of Christie and I left in a huff.

  One of the island gift shops was next on my list. It was the kind of place that catered to the tourist crowd with T-shirts and key chains and shot glasses but also carried an assortment of home goods aimed at the cottagers. I knew what I was looking for would be over near a display marked Just In, and I looked past beaded evening bags made to look like seashells and signs that said things like Welcome to the Beach! and Relax, You’re at the Cottage Now until I found the sparkly things I’d had in mind. I had my costume for the gala on Saturday and some jewelry to wear with it, but I wanted something for my hair, and I knew the shop carried barrettes decorated with ribbons and faux jewels like the ones on the wooden picture frames nearby. I found one I liked and would have bought it, too, if the shop owner hadn’t kept fussing over two other shoppers and pretended I was invisible.

  The same sort of thing happened at the grocery store.

  And the walk-up sandwich place where I stopped for lunch and left as hungry as ever because no one would wait on me—and really, I would have attributed the whole thing to just some crazy mojo in the air if it weren’t for the sly looks I was getting from people. And the pitying glances. And the way a couple of them backed off, just a little, when they saw me headed their way.

  By the time I was just about to hop into the car and head home and I saw Luella coming back from a morning charter, I was ready to spit nails.

  She squinted at me. “You all right?”

  “Apparently I’m a leper.”

  Luella is as clearheaded as she is hardworking, but I couldn’t blame her for being confused.

  I got behind the wheel and motioned her to jump in. “I’m a pariah,” I told her.

  She lowered her silvery brows. “Because . . .”

  “Because word has gone out that I’m some kind of . . .” I was so angry, the words choked me. I turned the key to start up the SUV, then changed my mind and turned it off again. “People think I’m an ex-con. Or that I’ve got some sort of dark and dangerous past and I was in a mental institution. I heard them talking last night at my place, and now, apparently, the rumor’s all over town. Everyone’s treating me like I have the cooties.”

  It was warm and Luella was in the tan Carhartt overalls she wore on her boat. She unhooked the straps and pushed the top of the overalls down around the gray T-shirt she wore underneath. “That’s—”

  “Crazy? I’ll say it’s crazy.” To emphasize my point, I slapped the steering wheel. “I’m going to—”

  “Breathe deep, that’s what you’re going to do.” Luella put a hand on my arm. “We both know none of that nonsense is true.”

  “We know it, sure. But everyone else—”

  “Everyone else can go dunk their heads in the lake.” It was as simple as that. At least to Luella. She sat back. “But it seems really odd, don’t you think?” she asked.

  “That people think I’m crazy?” The words sputtered out of me. “It’s more than odd. It’s terrible. It’s horrible. It’s—”

  “Plenty suspicious.”

  This was one word I hadn’t thought of and, curious, I cocked my head.

  “First it was the bad reviews of your B and B and the service and the food,” Luella said. “Then it was the
bedbugs. And now this? It doesn’t take a boat captain to know fishy when she sees it.”

  She was right, and there was only one conclusion. “It is fishy. In a somebody’s-out-to-get-me sort of way.”

  “You got that right.” Luella smelled faintly like fish and water and sunshine and those red and white peppermints she liked to suck on when she was out on the lake. She crossed her arms over her chest. “What are you going to do about it, New York?”

  “Find out who’s behind the rumors.”

  She nodded. “I have no doubt you’ll do it, too, but that might take a while.”

  “Then I’ll . . .” I pressed my lips together, thinking hard, and when that didn’t work, I let out a screech of frustration. “I don’t know what I’ll do! Someone’s out to destroy my business, and from the looks of things, it just might work!”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” Like I said, when it comes to common sense, Luella is always right on the money. “If you act fast, whoever this nasty person is behind these rumors won’t have a chance to hurt your business.”

  I wrung my hands. Yes, it was incredibly dramatic, but that’s exactly how I felt, and if anyone criticized me, I could always blame my behavior on my brain injury. “Except I don’t know what to do!” I wailed.

  Except I did.

  I froze when the thought hit and I guess Luella must have known that things were finally clear to me. That would explain why she grinned.

  “I need to forget all these crazy rumors and figure out who killed Vivien Frisk once and for all,” I announced. “If I can do that, people will see that I’m not some nutcase. Or some sort of criminal.”

  “Good thinking, New York!”

  Luella hopped out of the car.

  “Aren’t you coming with me?” I asked her.

  She waved when I started up car. “I’ve got another charter in a couple hours. And you . . .” She smiled. “You’ve got a murder to solve!”

  • • •

  There wasn’t much question about where I needed to start. It was Wednesday and the traffic was light. It took me no time at all to get to Estelle’s.

  Yes, the house was locked up tight, just the way the police had left it, but that didn’t matter to me. I didn’t want to get in the house, anyway.

  Instead, I started at the far left corner of the front yard and worked my way around the house, through one rhododendron, a couple of prickly rosebushes, and a lilac bush, all the way to the back porch. There, I sat in the sun for a minute, reminding myself that I was only halfway done and that what I found—or didn’t find—might change the course of the investigation.

  Revitalized, and with more enthusiasm than I’d had for the case since I’d been whacked over the head, I did a slow, careful search around the rest of the house.

  I poked through a couple of boxwoods that needed trimming badly. I pushed through a stand of pampas grass that should have been cut back in the fall and was now brittle, its leaves as sharp as razors. By the time I got back to the right front corner of the house, I was sweaty and grumbling.

  But I wasn’t done.

  I slipped behind the rhododendron where we’d found Cody Rayburn the evening of Vivien’s murder.

  Truth be told, it wasn’t a bad hiding place. If, indeed, Cody had been hiding. It was shady there next to the house, cooler than it had been out in the afternoon sunshine, and from there, I could easily see the street—who came and who went and who drove by. The rhododendron itself was years old and huge. I had plenty of room to maneuver, and I didn’t waste any time. Sure, I could have kicked through the dirt, but heck, it was just easier to get on my hands and knees. It wasn’t like I had any guests to impress, and half the island already thought I was crazy; I would deal with the mud later.

  And mud there was.

  This side of the house was shady, and thanks to that brief rainstorm a couple nights before and a nearby gutter that still drip, drip, dripped in a lazy sort of way, the ground was as mushy as a marsh. This was bad news, because within a few minutes, the knees of my jeans were soaked through and my fingers were caked with mud.

  But it was good news, too.

  See, all that rain dribbling in one spot had churned up the soil, and the churned-up soil revealed its secrets in just a few minutes.

  I saw the glint of metal in the mud and poked my fingers in the dirt to scoop the ring up in my hand.

  It was a gold band with a silver skull in the center of it, and I knew right away what I’d found—the present Cody’s pregnant old lady had given him for Christmas.

  • • •

  “He was telling the truth.”

  To Hank’s everlasting credit, he didn’t cringe (at least not too much) when I walked into his office looking like I’d just gone a couple rounds in a mud-wrestling bout. But then, he was pretty busy sitting up and aiming a look at the ring I put on his desk.

  His lips pursed and his eyes narrowed, he looked from the ring to me.

  “At Estelle’s?” he asked.

  “Under the rhododendron, right where Cody said he was looking for it the night Vivien was killed.”

  “Which doesn’t mean he isn’t our killer.”

  “Not for certain, no. But it does mean at least part of his story has merit.”

  His nod was curt, begrudging. “It does.” Hank drummed his fingers against his gray metal desk. “Dang, I sure wanted Cody to be our man.”

  “You and me both.” I hadn’t been invited to, but I sat down in the chair across from Hank’s desk. It was old and uncomfortable: gray metal that matched his desk, with a gray plastic seat that had seen better days. Then again, I imagined that being face-to-face with the island police chief was never meant to be a pleasant experience. “We’ve still got Alex,” I reminded him.

  The way Hank shook his head spoke volumes. “His story checks out. He was with his boyfriend, John, all right. One of the neighbors saw them together early on the morning Vivien was killed and then later in the day. Alex isn’t our man.”

  Did I groan? I didn’t mean to, but heck, it was the only appropriate response. “Alex didn’t do it. Cody didn’t do it. That leaves Zane Donahue.”

  “And Chandra.”

  “You can’t think—” But of course, he did, and in all honesty, I couldn’t blame him. I slapped the arms of the metal chair (and yes, I did leave a little mud behind) and stood. “I’m going to talk to Chandra,” I told Hank in no uncertain terms. “It’s about time we set the record straight.”

  He didn’t even try to argue. Or maybe he did and I just didn’t wait long enough to hear it. The island police station is in the basement of the town hall building, and I climbed the steps and was outside in the parking lot in minutes.

  In just a few more minutes, I was back home.

  Deep breaths and firm resolve and a quick washup and a change of jeans, and I headed right over to Chandra’s.

  And really, after the way she’d been acting, I was surprised and ridiculously relieved when she answered the door.

  She stepped back to let me inside, and instantly, I was enveloped in the scent of patchouli.

  Chandra’s home is pretty basic, though her decorating scheme is anything but. Just inside the front door was a small entryway and against the wall there was a skinny table where a stick of incense smoked in a burner. There were candles on either side of the incense burner, flickering in multicolored glass holders.

  To our left was a doorway that led into the living room, where the walls were painted a shade of purple that matched the pillows on the orange couch. One of those little electric fountains gurgled on the table in front of the window, its babble far more soothing than the furious beat of my pulse.

  Since I had stepped into the living room uninvited, I had to turn to see Chandra, who was still standing out in the entryway.

  “You’re not going t
o turn your lights off and hide?” I asked her.

  Her chin rose a fraction of an inch. “Why would I do something like that?”

  I was in no mood for games. “You’ve been dodging me for days. Ever since—”

  “You told me I might have killed Vivien.”

  “You know no one believes that. Not really.”

  “Well, I really don’t appreciate it when my friends think I’m a murderer.”

  Try as I might, I couldn’t control my screech of frustration. “Don’t you get it, Chandra? You’re the reason I keep digging into this thing further and further. Not to prove that you killed Vivien, but to prove that you didn’t. But I can’t do that without your help.”

  Her bottom lip quivered, but I had to give Chandra credit. In true Scarlett O’Hara style, her shoulders shot back and her jaw tensed. “Would you like some tea? I’m brewing peppermint and lemon balm. It’s good for the nerves.”

  My nerves needed it.

  I let Chandra lead the way through the living room and into the dining room, but when she ducked into the kitchen, I stayed put. Then again, it was hard not to be fascinated by the display on the antique buffet (painted a yellow that reminded me of bananas, just in case there is any question about Chandra’s appreciation of old furniture).

  Candles, dozens of them, were scattered over the top of the buffet, winking in the early afternoon light. They were placed around pictures—I counted quickly and came up with fifteen—in frames. Pictures of a smiling man with a rugged face and a woman who was certainly Chandra twenty years before.

  Her hair was dark then, and long enough to brush her shoulders, but there was no mistaking the panache. In one picture, she stood at the man’s side dressed in an orange and green muumuu. In another, she was wearing an eighties-style party dress with puffed sleeves and a sweetheart neckline.

  In each and every one of those pictures, she had a grin on her face wide enough to light up the world.