“Shhh,” she said against Jeb’s shoulder. She couldn’t bring herself to say everything would be all right. Nothing would ever be right again. As she stroked his head, she squeezed her eyes shut, and her tears leaked into his shirt. She could pray John was kidnapped, but her heart told her it just wasn’t so.
Chapter 2
Middleton, South Carolina, June, Thirty-Two Months Later
CALLIE CRUMPLED the legal envelope into her purse. Damn! Gift or nightmare, she wasn’t yet certain, but the surprise offer from her parents wasn’t in her plans. Not that she had plans.
Eighteen-year-old Jeb drove them away from the Middleton subdivision with her folks, Lawton and Beverly Cantrell, three car-lengths behind. The Ford’s dash clock read noon. The June temp had already reached ninety-six degrees.
Jeb turned the five-year-old Escape onto Highway 61. “What’s in the envelope?”
“A deed.” Tension twisted her stomach. “Don’t follow so close behind that truck.”
He stared wide-eyed. “A deed to what?”
“Watch the road, Jeb.” Callie chewed the inside of her cheek and practiced slow breathing as she reconnoitered the road ahead. Kids eighteen and under comprised a large proportion of traffic accidents. “The beach house.”
“The beach house,” he mimicked in droll fashion. “Like wow. Who gets handed a freakin’ house? Come on! Act excited!” He flicked her arm. “Now you’re stuck with me on the weekends, unless you want me to commute the forty-five miles each day between Edisto and college in downtown Charleston.”
“Not when you’re driving like this, no.”
He winked. “Dang, we own a piece of the beach!”
“It’s not on the sand.”
“I know where it is. You can still hear the waves, for Pete’s sake.”
She sighed. “This was supposed to be a reflective summer, Jeb. You and I enjoying the ocean. Me deciding where to live and work.” Callie recognized her mother’s coup, anchoring them close, as permanent as she could.
Callie grinned weakly at her son, loving him so much, wanting desperately to take him up on his offer to stay home when college started in August. But he deserved a new start, a new normal.
Not that living on Edisto Beach was horrible confinement. Her childhood there held beautiful memories, and until classes started, Jeb could create some of his own. The soft breezes, pelicans, and rattling fronds of the trees supplied backdrop to shell collecting, kayaking, and making new friends while seated, kicking in tidal pools. Who couldn’t like that?
She hoped he would develop his own close relationship with her old white-headed neighbor Papa Beach, too. The man was a pure Godsend.
Papa had first called her three months ago from his place, asking her to visit Edisto. Her father might’ve prompted that first call, but the request beckoned her like cotton candy at the fair. She eagerly escaped the social rigidity of the Cantrells’ political lives to the healing voice of her childhood mentor. She’d spent hours chatting, sometimes sitting with him on the sand watching the orange and purple watercolor horizon. She went back three more times.
Now eighty years old, Henry Beechum, Papa Beach only to Callie, had once soothed her little girl fears, no matter how silly. And now he’d convinced her to stay at Edisto to heal amidst the Lowcountry nature and low-key lifestyle. He said her life decisions could be better made in a peaceful environment. Papa never dictated. He suggested. He listened. And he let her cry.
Callie tugged her sleeve down over the left forearm scar out of habit, then back up due to the heat. The surprise real estate gift from her father was noble, but panic seized Callie when he’d said the word deed. A deed made things complicated. Why couldn’t her parents let life evolve instead of forcing its hand? Why did they think she left home to start with?
She hadn’t even thanked her daddy, because that represented gratitude, not the manic fear that crawled inside her.
Callie massaged her neck. Electricity, insurance, taxes . . . in her name only.
She’d tried to remain in Boston after John’s murder, working long, exhausting hours before rushing home to stand guard over Jeb, to soothe his grief while fighting to ignore her own. Jeb’s grades had faltered, and he avoided going out at night, harboring a phobia about coming home to his mother being gone, too. They ate dinners in front of the television, watching anything but police dramas that brought reality into their living room.
Her daddy had coaxed her back to South Carolina after that long painful year in Boston. Seven times mayor of Middleton, he’d been elected under the delicate yet crafty oversight of his wife with a poli-sci major from Columbia College—in South Carolina, not New York. What Beverly didn’t have in sheepskin prestige she made up for in a dynamic crusade to keep Lawton Cantrell in power. The woman held a master’s degree in manipulation.
One month turned into two as Jeb acclimated and regained his fun-loving self after Callie’s extended leave of absence. At that point, Callie hadn’t the heart to drag him back to Massachusetts, so she enrolled him in high school. After six months of watching him thrive, she resigned from the Boston PD. Jeb was healing.
She was not.
Callie’s head slumped against her palm. She wanted to remain untethered. Scholarships and a childhood college fund established by her parents covered Jeb’s tuition. John’s insurance money and pension investment would cover them for a few years, but eventually she had to consider a job. But not yet. Just not yet.
She ought to feel lucky with a house dropped in her lap. So why didn’t she?
An hour later, Jeb pulled the SUV off Jungle Road, the Cantrells easing up in the BMW behind him. He parked in the drive and opened the car door. “How awesome is this?”
Callie stared at the house that hadn’t changed a nail in the thirty years she’d known it. Raised fourteen feet off the ground by pilings embedded ten feet deep to protect against hundred-year floods and hurricanes, the three-bedroom house welcomed visitors with teal shutters and beige-painted stairs set against creamy siding. Not huge, but tasteful, with simple class.
Her fingernails bit into the seat, as she conceded that the house was probably the best logical choice for her at the moment. Damn you, Mother.
“Mom?”
She feigned a smile at Jeb and whispered, “Give me a minute.”
He studied her like a textbook. “You need something?”
Callie shook her head. Then she quit rubbing the scar on her forearm and gripped the door handle as she looked up at the porch. The wind caught the teal and peach sign hanging atop the entrance’s twenty steps. It swung on tiny chains without a care in the world, like the beach child she used to be.
Her mother had named the cottage Chelsea Morning, after the Neil Diamond song. Callie knew every word to every one of the singer’s tunes, songs that had served as her lullabies and the background music to her adolescence. Slow, cleansing breaths. She played Holly Holy in her head.
Then she heard it: the gentle call of the surf, a distant rush and draw as rollers churned against the shore only to be sucked back into an immense ocean that never slept. A rogue seagull hovered over her head, calling once, then as he flew away on the salty current, she inhaled.
Three blocks from the water, the place held just enough privacy to deter heavy seasonal car traffic, but sat close enough for salt to devour the paintwork. The view out back, however, would later see a tired sun sink all haze-hot and liquid orange into the marsh, setting the tips of the reeds on fire before darkness swallowed the day.
Fire.
Sunsets, dusk . . . fire. The time of day John died. The sun’s last rays dancing with licks of flame that shot her husband’s ashes into the New England air.
Callie shut down the thought before the nightmare of Boston surged back.
Jeb knocked on her window, his bro
ws raised. He cut a glance over his shoulder at his grandmother, who waited with a suitcase in one hand and a blue orchid in the other.
Callie exhaled and exited the car.
Her father appeared with a box in one arm, offered the support of his other, and escorted her up the steps. Jeb bounded inside. Beverly strutted behind him as if waltzing into the Ritz Carlton in a white mink wrap, a poodle with its snout high at the end of a jewel-studded leash. “Let’s get you two settled in,” she said.
The woman disappeared into the master bedroom, still talking. “You haven’t met the neighbor to the left. She’s into yoga, and not just the exercises. Incense, bells, candles, mindless stuff. She’ll try to convert you into a meditating New Age fanatic.”
Callie stopped outside her childhood room, tuning out her mother. Her favorite quilt rested on her old double bed. She lowered the packing box onto it and sank into the mattress. She ran her palms gently across the stitched image of a gold starfish, her favorite sea creature. Beverly had remembered. This was the comforter pulled out of the closet each time they shifted Chelsea Morning from a rental to their short-term retreat. Bless her mother’s rare journey into sentimentality. Maybe there was hope for her—for them—yet.
Bending until her cheek touched the ruffled cotton pillow sham, Callie inhaled, taking in the aroma of lilac fabric softener. She ached to crawl under the quilt’s protection—to escape to a time when her life was one amazing ride after another, and her heart wasn’t so bruised.
Over two years later, and she still couldn’t call herself a widow.
Beverly labeled Callie’s emotional concerns as spells. Jeb babied her, when it should be the other way around. But deep in the recesses of her soul, her panic attacks and fear-ridden dreams stemmed from the fact she’d always consider the Zubov family a threat to her family’s well-being. Leo had died, but there were dozens of them still breathing. She didn’t know how to get over that.
Leo had given the order to kill everyone in her house that night. She was as sure of it as the barnacles clinging to the beach piers. John just happened to be the only one there. Zubov meant to send a strong message.
She’d gotten the point then, and every day and night since.
Then the bastard had died before witness protection could whisk him away. Stroke. The Russian mafia martyred him as they did all their dead. The fact that Leo’s obese body and lavish lifestyle exacerbated his demise meant nothing. To his family, the people who cuffed him became the focus for revenge.
Her mother’s voice lifted in singsong fashion from the other room, her Carolina drawl thick. “Callie? Would you like me to sort your hanging clothes in any order? I have my closet color coordinated, but—”
“No.” Callie cleared her throat, regretting her harsh reply. “Just hang them. I’ll sort everything later.”
This room had so many little girl memories. What she’d be when she grew up. How to kiss a boy. When to wear make-up. Crying herself to sleep over acne ruining her life. She smiled.
Callie dragged herself up and left the bedroom, hefting a box containing framed pictures and her small jewelry collection onto the dresser in the other bedroom. Her parents’ dresser. Hers was in the room with seahorses and starfish, and she bet she’d still find grains of sand in the recesses of the white rattan. After her folks left, she might switch rooms.
“I’m sorry, dear, but I went ahead and sorted your clothes.” Beverly’s muffled announcement radiated from the closet. “I think you’ll like what I’ve done.”
Callie shook her head at the woman’s remarkable gift to turn a deaf ear. Yeah. She would definitely switch rooms.
Callie lifted a family picture of Jeb, John, and herself on Jeb’s fourteenth birthday, spent on a Boston shore, tiny Bonnie in her arms. Callie brushed her finger across the glass. “I only intended to visit Edisto for the summer, you know.”
Beverly ventured out of the closet. “Did I hear you right, dear?” She spread her arms wide. “We just gave you all this, so I—”
“Don’t get it.” Callie set down the picture and faced her mother. “You’ve never gotten it.” A tear threatened, not what she intended, but she held her composure. Who got mad over a new house?
Her lithe, prim mother with a magazine-perfect bob of white waves and celery capris shifted her feet, but left her gaze on her daughter.
An overwhelming year of biting her tongue, stifled under the same roof with her parents’ overbearance, spilled over. “Where I went to school, my choice of husband.” She mimicked her mother’s voice. “Massachusetts is a long way from good people, dear.” Callie inhaled, regretted the overreaction, and waited for her mother’s next blow.
Instead, her mother sighed. “I know you feel you must lash out, dear, but it’s been over two years since John left.”
“And Bonnie.”
“Yes,” her mother said. “But they left some time ago, don’t you think—”
Callie’s jaw tightened. “For God’s sake, Mother, they’re dead, not on vacation.” And buried in Boston, a thousand miles away.
“I understand that,” Beverly replied, seating herself on an ottoman. “Like it or not, the house is yours. Sell it if you wish, but we wanted to give you a place of your own.” She cocked her head like a petulant headmistress. “It’s time for Jeb to have a home, too.”
“Jeb’s home is my decision to make! Where I live is my choice.” Callie tucked trembling hands in her jeans, unable to mark that one point in time that caused the chasm between her and her mother. To identify what to fix—and fix it.
“I hurt, too, you know,” Beverly said, slipping easily into her feel-sorry-for-me voice. “I never got to see my granddaughter.”
There it was. Callie clenched her teeth at Beverly’s well-worn trump card.
“Your daughter lived,” Callie replied. “Anyway, you never came to Boston to visit.”
“My dear, you never asked me to.”
Callie moved the box of photographs to the floor with a thud. She’d decided years ago that to become a self-assured police officer, she couldn’t afford the emotional bombardment of her mother’s judgment. “Don’t you see why I moved so far away? To get away from your control. John, Jeb, and the Boston PD completed me, and Bonnie . . .” She drew in sharply. “Bonnie became the cherry on top.”
Her mother folded her hands slowly, which she always did when she wanted to cement a point. “Law enforcement changed you, dear.”
Callie’s eyes narrowed. “Law enforcement defined me, Mother.” Her clenched fist struck her chest. “It led me to John and gave you grandchildren. All achieved without your input.”
“That’s enough,” said her father from the doorway.
Jeb peered uneasily over Lawton’s shoulder.
Callie’s heart sank at her father’s mask of disappointment. These thrusts of iron will dug under Callie’s skin. Here she stood, caught between the guilt of being an ingrate and her need to be a grown woman with a mind of her own.
“Wish you wouldn’t fight,” Jeb said softly, the pain clear in his eyes.
Beverly wouldn’t think such a comment was directed at her, so Callie stopped arguing. Just like she always did.
“We’re fine, dear,” Beverly said, the timbre of her voice now oh-so-damn level.
If Callie heard dear one more friggin’ time.
She approached her father, the parent who could display affection, and employed the nickname that melted his bones—given to him the first time he let her drive the boat when she was only eight. “Captain?”
Lawton yanked an initialed handkerchief from his pocket, the cloth a traditional stocking stuffer from Beverly each Christmas. “What, Callie Scallywag?” Her father’s cheeks and neck flushed red from the heat as he wiped his forehead with the handkerchief.
“Jeb and I don’t
need help unpacking,” she said, rubbing his sweaty sleeve. “We’d like to enjoy the peace. Walk the beach maybe.”
“The beach sounds great,” Jeb said, a huge smile returning to his face.
Lawton studied his daughter.
“Nonsense.” Beverly strode past toward the kitchen, drawing them behind her into the living room. “I can throw together a snack for us to eat on the porch.”
Lawton winked at Callie and pushed his handkerchief back into his pocket. “Bev, sweetheart, don’t I have some sort of breakfast meeting tomorrow morning?”
“Yes,” Beverly said, peeking around the refrigerator door. “You’re due at the Rotarians’ breakfast at seven.”
Lawton ran an arm around Jeb’s shoulders. Both men were six foot, the long noses and chins obviously alike. He squeezed Jeb once then faked a punch to the boy’s gut, raising a flinch then a grin from Jeb. “I haven’t even thought about preparing what to say,” Lawton said.
Beverly appeared with cheese and condiments. “You don’t ever prepare.”
Lawton walked to the kitchen, lifted the items from his wife, and returned them to the refrigerator. “Let’s go.”
“But—”
He took her arm gently. “They need time to themselves.”
As her mother walked off to get her purse, Callie ran to her father and threw her arms around his neck. “Thanks for the house, Daddy,” she whispered.
“You’re welcome,” he whispered back. “I’ll tell your mother.”
TENSION DRAINED away as Callie’s gaze followed her parents’ white BMW on its way toward Highway 174, back to their Middleton kingdom. From his duffel bag in the hallway, Jeb dug out swimming shorts, flip-flops, and sunglasses before bolting toward the door.
“Got your phone?” Callie hollered.
Murder on Edisto (The Edisto Island Mysteries) Page 2