“Then you must come over to the parsonage and meet my husband, Matthew. The reverend is our local historian. He knows simply everything about the history of Tawes, and he always keeps a fresh pot of coffee brewing.”
“That’s kind of you, but—”
“Nonsense. Matthew will be so disappointed if you rush off without coffee and a slice of my famous apple cake. Please come. It will make his day, really.”
Bailey hesitated. The offer of coffee sounded good, but she wasn’t certain she wanted to make small talk with the minister and his wife. Grace might be friendlier than the other islanders, but she seemed rather eccentric. Bailey guessed Grace to be in her mid-fifties, but her speech and mannerisms made her appear a generation older. And for all her pretense of gentility, Grace’s speech was stilted, her carefully coiffured hair a little too dark, and her rouged cheeks a little too pink to be natural. “I’m certain Pastor Catlin must—”
“Please. It’s so seldom we have guests. You’ll never have a better opportunity to learn firsthand about the island’s history.”
Against her better judgment, Bailey allowed Grace to usher her into the two-story brick Federal-style house on the far side of the cemetery.
“Matthew! We have company,” Grace called as they entered the cluttered foyer.
Somewhere in the rear of the house a dog barked. Piles of books were stacked six deep on the bottom steps of the staircase and on the seat of a spindle-back chair that stood next to a marble-topped Victorian table. “Excuse the mess, dear.” Grace stooped to pick up a squeaky dog toy shaped like a rolled-up newspaper.
Bailey hesitated. “You have a dog?” She knew it was silly, but dogs always made her uneasy.
“Just a tiny one. And he’s as sweet as can be.” She waved her hand toward the hall and adjoining rooms. “The parsonage is charming, but keeping up with a house this size when you have a pack rat for a husband is a daunting task.”
Bailey could smell the aroma of dark roast drifting from the back of the house. Coffee was one of her weaknesses, and she’d had only one cup today. “I can imagine.”
“Through here to the parlor. Everything is a mess. My last cleaning woman didn’t work out, and I haven’t had time to replace her.” The pastor’s wife led the way briskly through the living room to a formal dining room. “The house hasn’t had much done to it since we had to replace the roof after Hurricane Hazel. I’m afraid we have no air-conditioning, but there’s usually a breeze off the bay, and this side of the house is shaded by the two big oaks. Matthew, where are you?”
A small terrier dashed through the doorway and hurled itself at Grace. Bailey moved to the far side of the dining table.
Laughing, Grace scooped up the small buff-and-white animal and cradled it against her ample breasts. “This is Precious,” she said between wet, exuberant dog kisses. “I’m afraid we spoil her terribly. Matthew says I treat her like a child.”
Bailey began to wish she’d never accepted the invitation for coffee.
Grace waved toward a chair. “Perhaps I do spoil Precious. We were never blessed with children. Sit down. I’ll get the coffee. I won’t be a moment.” Still carrying the squirming animal, she hurried away.
Relieved that the dog was gone, Bailey glanced around the dining room. China figurines of gold-and-white shepherdesses and gaudy bric-a-brac covered the darkVictorian tables and the fireplace mantel. Two large windows were covered with heavy floral drapes that matched the fading wallpaper and the flowered carpet.
Bailey stifled a sneeze, thinking that the maid must have given notice quite a while ago. The room could have done with a thorough cleaning. The elaborate arrangement of plastic flowers that took up much of the table was as dusty as the multicolored crystals on the chandelier overheard.
The high-ceilinged room was large enough for the massive china cupboard and server, but four other pieces of furniture, two more side chairs, more artificial flowers, and two gaudy Gone with the Wind lamps made Bailey claustrophobic. Maybe she should abandon the dark roast and make a run for it, she thought.
Footsteps behind her registered just before a male voice proclaimed, “Welcome to Tawes, Miss Elliott.”
Bailey turned to see a tall, lean man with wire-framed glasses and a thin, graying mustache stroll through the doorway that led to the front entrance hall. “Pastor Catlin?” She half rose from her chair, but he waved her to stay put.
“I am, yes, I am.” He fumbled with the knot on his crooked tie. “At least, I was this morning.” Chuckling at his own joke, he tucked a pipe into his pants pocket and extended a bony hand. “Call me Matthew. Everyone but Grace does. When I hear anyone address me as Pastor Catlin, I think they’re speaking to my father. He was pastor here for nearly sixty years.”
Bailey nodded. “I see.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” he said. “A real pleasure. I hope Grace has been treating you well.”
“Well, well,” his wife echoed as she swept in from the kitchen, carrying a silver tray with steaming cups of coffee and a plate of what Bailey guessed must be the promised apple cake. “Matthew, dear?”
The pastor withdrew his hand before Bailey could shake it, and took the tray from his wife. “This is heavy. You should have called me.”
“I did. Several times.” Grace sniffed. “Is that pipe tobacco I smell, Matthew? You know it sets a bad example for your congregation.”
“The church is for sinners. What use is a pastor parishioners can’t feel superior to?” He handed Bailey a cup and saucer. “Cream?”
“Pay no attention to him.” Grace sat across from Bailey. “Matthew fancies himself a comedian. Sugar? I’m afraid I have none of the pink stuff left. I took what I had to the committee meeting this afternoon.”
Bailey shook her head, stirred cream into her coffee, and took a sip. “This is delicious. Thank you.”
“Our guest was wandering through the graveyard. She says she’s interested in the history of the island,” Grace said. “I told her that you knew all there was to know about Tawes.”
“Not everything,” he corrected. “A little. This was a wild and woolly place in the early days. Pirates. Deserters from one army or another. Indians. Fascinating stuff. You know, Southerners are devoted to their ancestors, and it seems that the more wicked they were, the more interesting they are. I’ve always had a passion for history, and growing up here . . .”
“Don’t be modest, dear. You have all those photographs and maps. And the church records go back, oh, as far as Reverend Thomas. You’ve heard of him, haven’t you? The parson of the islands? An ancestor of Matthew’s, and quite a legend in these parts. The Chesapeake was a sinful place before Reverend Thomas.”
“I understand that there was some mix-up about your appointment with Forest McCready.” Matthew reached for a slice of apple cake.
“One slice only, dear,” Grace chided. “I don’t want to have to send your trousers out for alterations again.”
Bailey wondered how the news had traveled so fast, but she didn’t attempt an answer. And as she suspected, Grace took up the slack.
“Probably Ida’s fault. She’s always messing up Forest’s schedules. Why he keeps her on, I’ll never know.” She pursed her lips and mimicked sipping from a bottle. “Ida’s worked for him twenty years, but she’s not dependable, if you catch my meaning.”
“That’s unkind, Grace. We don’t know that Ida did anything wrong. There isn’t a lot of legal work here on Tawes, and it may have slipped Forest’s mind. I’m certain it will be all cleared up tomorrow.”
Two hours later, after escaping from the parsonage and walking back to the B and B, Bailey sat across from Emma at an oilcloth-covered, round oak table and told her about her meeting with Grace in the cemetery.
“More coffee?” Emma didn’t wait for an answer, but refilled Bailey’s white china mug to the brim.
She nodded. Emma’s coffee was strong enough to dissolve a spoon, but it was good and hot, and Bailey savored every drop. Despite the
apple cake she’d eaten earlier, she’d just taken a bite of homemade blueberry pie, a dessert that completed one of the best meals she’d enjoyed in months.
“They’re a pair of odd ducks, those two,” Emma said. “Did Matthew talk your ears off? He’s all right, as ministers go. His sermons are short enough, but that Grace . . . Don’t tell her anything you don’t want spread all over Tawes in ten minutes.”
“Grace insisted that I borrow her bicycle while I’m on Tawes. I tried to refuse, but—”
“But it was easier to take the damn bike than argue with her.” Emma added a heaping spoonful of sugar to her coffee. “Grace has that way about her. She just wears you down. Don’t worry about it. You won’t put her out any. She rarely rides the thing. I think Matthew bought it for her two Christmases ago. Either she walks when she wants to go someplace or she takes her boat.”
“It was nice of her. I would like to see something of the island while I’m here, but I’d hoped to finish my business with—”
“Forest,” Emma supplied. She rose and gathered the dirty dishes. “Well, he’s not as young as he used to be, but he’s as shrewd as they come. Forest is a crackerjack lawyer. If he’d left Tawes and concentrated on his practice in Annapolis, he’d probably be a millionaire, but he’s like the rest of us. We like the way we do things here—the way we’ve done them for hundreds of years.”
“Your other guest, Daniel? Isn’t his last name Catlin? Are he and the pastor related?”
“Honey, everybody on Tawes is related.”
“Other than the color of their eyes, they don’t look much alike, but—”
Emma scraped scraps off the plates into a pot. “For my chickens,” she explained. “I can’t abide a store egg. Thin shells and no color to the yolk at all.”
“You keep chickens, too?”
“Sure do. Believe in doin’ as much for myself as I can. Always have a few dozen eggs to sell at Doris’s. Those ones she brings over from the mainland are storage age, old, no taste.”
“Mmm, I suppose,” Bailey agreed, amused. “Did you know Elizabeth Somers? Grace said that some people were unhappy that Elizabeth left me an inheritance. I was wondering if—”
“Lots of folks get their dander up about stuff that ain’t none of their business.” She placed a dishpan in the sink and turned on the water. “What did you think of my crab cakes?”
“Delicious,” Bailey said. “And the pie was fabulous.” She rose. “Let me help you with those dishes.”
“Fair enough.” Emma stepped back from the sink. “You can wash and I’ll dry.”
Later, when Bailey retired to her cozy bedroom, she realized that although she and Emma had chatted for an hour, the older woman had answered none of her questions. In fact, the entire day had been pretty much a loss, and she was beginning to feel like Alice down the rabbit hole. She’d never gotten enough signal on her cell to call Elliott; Emma’s house phone still wasn’t working; and she had been unable to get in contact with Forest McCready. The only thing she had done was to stuff herself with Emma’s cooking. She’d be surprised if she could pour her butt into her new jeans in the morning.
She showered, pulled on a soft T-shirt and a pair of athletic shorts, and tried to read another chapter of the historical romance she’d brought with her. The story was a good one, but her eyes wouldn’t cooperate. They kept drifting shut. Finally she gave up, yawned, switched out the light, and lay in the dark listening to the waves lapping against the shore, the rustle of leaves, and the occasional hoot of an owl.
Bailey dropped off to sleep almost immediately, waking sometime in the night wondering where she was. The sheets were clean and soft; the mattress was comfortable; she didn’t need to use the bathroom; and she wasn’t thirsty. What had roused her? She rarely had problems with insomnia, even when she traveled. So why . . . ?
The sound of whistling came from outside, a nursery rhyme that she hadn’t heard in years. Bailey’s mouth went dry as she slipped from the crisp sheets and went to the window without bothering to turn on a light. Wisps of fog enveloped the house, making it impossible to tell the exact source of the tune.
Her windows, she remembered, faced the bay, but there were trees between the house and the beach. The water was so black as to be almost Stygian; the trees were smudges of dark against a darker background, but patches of sand along the shore glowed with a dull iridescence in the night.
Goose bumps rose on her bare arms. She was on the second floor, her door securely locked with a dead bolt. Whoever it was outside—probably some kid or a drunk trying to find his way home—she was in no possible danger. So why did the old refrain unnerve her so?
The whistler was definitely there in the yard, between the lapping waves and the porch. He must be. If she looked hard enough, Bailey could almost fancy she saw his outline in the shadows of the walnut tree. She shut the window and locked it, but still the sound filtered through the glass into her room. Unbidden, the words of the old refrain rose in her mind.
Papa’s gonna buy you a diamond ring,
And if that diamond ring don’t shine,
Papa’s going to buy you a coach and nine,
And if that coach and nine won’t pull,
Papa’s going to buy you . . .
What? What was the rest of the song? Why did she care? Annoyed, she climbed back into bed and buried her head under a pillow. If she didn’t get a decent night’s sleep, she’d look like hell for her meeting with McCready in the morning. And she would locate him tomorrow. It was ridiculous to think otherwise. She’d sign whatever papers she had to sign, inspect her inheritance, and take the first boat back to civilization.
Elliott had been right. He’d never been particularly sympathetic about her desire to know more about her birth family, but he’d always said that if she had to know, the thing to do was to hire a professional to investigate. Maybe this attorney, Forest McCready. If he lived here, he must know something about her birth mother. Or he would be able to find someone who did.
The cost of a private detective had always been out of the question on a teacher’s salary, especially with Elliott’s credit card debts, which she’d had to make good on. But perhaps if she got some money out of the property her great aunt Elizabeth had left her, she could hire this McCready to find answers to the questions that had troubled her for so long. And if she was lucky, she might even have enough left to pay off the loan on her car. She smiled, imagining what it would be like to be debt free. “Just dreams,” she murmured, and giggled aloud. She’d probably end up with a fallen-down house that no one would want, and she’d have to pay to have it bulldozed before she could place the lot with a Realtor. Could you refuse a bequest? That was one more question to add to her growing list.
This time she lay awake for what seemed like hours, and when she finally drifted off, it was to disturbing dreams of being trapped in a spooky graveyard of crumbling tombstones made of crab cakes, and ringing cell phones that she was never able to reach before the caller hung up.
CHAPTER THREE
“Somebody whistling, you say?” Emma slid a plate of scrambled eggs, home fries, sausage, and toast in front of Bailey. Although it was just the two of them for breakfast, the kitchen table seemed crowded with a crockery bowl of fresh strawberries, another of hot muffins, a plate of pancakes, a pitcher of orange juice, as well as smaller containers of syrup, various kinds of jam, honey, cream, and sugar.
“Please, I can’t eat all this,” Bailey protested.
“Nonsense. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. I’m used to cooking for Daniel. Let me tell you, that man can stow away the vittles.” She slid into the chair across from Bailey, slipped hotcakes onto her already loaded plate, and slathered the pancakes with butter and strawberry jam. “Daniel’s a tea drinker, though. Not much for coffee. Said he picked up the habit and can’t shake it.”
“I thought I saw someone under the trees last night.”
Emma averted her gaze, took a sip of her c
offee, grimaced, and made a show of adding several spoonfuls of sugar. “He likes his tea with clover honey.”
“You didn’t hear anything?”
The older woman thoughtfully chewed her mouthful of pancakes before saying, “Can’t say as I did. But your aunt, Elizabeth Somers, was born a Tawes. Old-time people used to say that the Tawes family had a lot of Injun blood. Claimed they had the ‘sight.’ ”
“The sight?”
“Most folks got hearing, smell, taste, sight, touch. The Tawes women, they said, could see things and hear things other people didn’t.”
“What kind of things, exactly?”
Emma wiped her wide mouth with a napkin and lowered her voice to a whisper. “Ghosts.”
“Ghosts?” Bailey couldn’t suppress a chuckle. “You’re serious?”
Emma’s faded blue eyes narrowed. “Didn’t say they did see ghosts. Just telling you what old-time people claimed. Probably just superstitious nonsense.”
“You don’t believe it, do you?”
“Can’t say what I believe. I’m a Parks. So far as I know, no Parks ever heard the whistler, no, nor saw him neither. But I like to keep an open mind. You’re the one with the Tawes blood, if Elizabeth was right about that. So you could have the Tawes sight.”
Bailey shook her head. “What I heard was real. It could have been a radio or—”
“Or it could have been Benjamin Ridgely. He’s been said to wander around this house on a foggy night.”
“And where does he live—this Benjamin Ridgely?”
The homely face crinkled into a mischievous grin. “Somewhere between heaven and hell, I suppose. Benjamin died of the cholera at Fort Delaware during the War Between the States. His body was laid in a common pit. Neither his mother nor his intended ever saw him again—not alive, anyway. But some say he comes to this house still, whistling for his sweetheart to come out and walk with him, like he did before he got caught up in the foolishness and marched away to fight for Robert E. Lee.”
Bailey pushed back her coffee cup. “It’s a good story, Emma, but I don’t believe a word of it. I told you, I don’t believe in ghosts. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll walk back to Mr. McCready’s and see if—”
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