An empty Edisto Beach PD vehicle sat in the drive. A woman’s voice drifted from inside the house, distraught but not over-the-top crazy.
Someone in the crowd spoke up. “Anybody else get murdered?”
Callie shook her head at the public’s thirst for calamity, then recognizing the ranks she’d fallen into, she took another step back.
A truck slowed, the driver studying the commotion. Sophie went to him. They conversed and then he drove on. She returned to Callie. “What’re you doing standing back here?”
“Staying out of the way.” Callie glanced around, then whispered, “Find out anything?”
“Yeah, that was Jackson Peters in the truck. He’s the handyman around here and was working across the street, and honey, he don’t miss a trick. Somebody broke into the house while the Rosewoods shopped in Charleston. Sometime between eleven and one. They barely missed him.” She hugged herself. “What if they’d been home? Like Mr. Beechum.” Her aqua eyes widened as her voice hitched an octave. “Could’ve been another murder, you know?”
“The Rosewoods live here year round?” Callie asked.
“Yes,” Sophie exclaimed. “Does that mean something?” She gasped. “And both cases have been on our street! What if they’re targeting everyone on this road?”
“It was just a question, Sophie.”
A dead body one day and a burglary the next. How did anyone not overthink this?
Another Edisto blue and white pulled up. Seabrook’s long legs stepped out as the door opened. He headed toward the stairs, the locals shouting, calling him by name as if he were a celebrity walking the red carpet at the Oscars. He stopped when he saw Callie and Sophie. Speaking into his radio, he veered in their direction.
“Ladies,” he said, then peered at Callie. “Can we talk?”
Sophie winked and returned to the small throng of the rumor machine. Heat warmed Callie’s cheeks at the unspoken insinuation.
Seabrook nodded in greeting. “Mind if I run some of this by you?”
Callie straightened, welcoming the overture to express her professional opinion. “What you got?”
“No body this time,” he said.
“Always good,” she replied.
He glanced for eavesdroppers. Callie stepped closer, his sandalwood aftershave striking her nose.
“The burglar stole money kept in a dresser drawer,” he said. “Left the jewelry. Sounds like a kid or a tweeker, right?”
She shrugged.
He took his voice even lower. “But then he poured himself a Jack and Coke over ice and had a drink. Barely a ring left on the table.”
“Doesn’t sound like a kid or a drug addict.” She scanned the crowd. “A bragger with something to prove, and he needs an audience to do it.”
Seabrook nodded. “Yeah, but what he did next connects him to the Beechum murder.”
She focused on him instead of who was listening. “How?”
“This guy deposited a 1903 antique silver dollar on the table. Like he was leaving a tip.”
A calling card. A warning went off in her head, the way it used to on a fresh case with all its clues scattered around for the gathering. “One of Papa Beach’s coins?” she asked. A 1903 would be one of the Morgan dollars. Worth a hundred or so, per Papa.
“We think so. We’d like you to look at it, if you don’t mind.”
“Sure. You know where to find me. In the meantime, check out a man named Jackson Peters. He was supposedly working across the street at the time and may have seen something.”
Seabrook winked. “Thanks. I’ll do that.”
“And has anyone called Pauley Beechum?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I notified him about his father’s death late last night.”
“How’d he take it?”
“He seemed distraught, but due to his father’s age, wasn’t surprised,” Seabrook said.
“Was he at home, or did you call him on his cell?”
“Cell,” he said, forehead knotting. “Why?”
Seabrook’s puzzlement showed he hadn’t considered the son in this crime at all. Callie, however, hadn’t ruled him out. Family always served as the first, and best, suspects. Pauley’s whereabouts needed confirmation. Then she told herself to tone it down. She wasn’t lead investigator here. She wasn’t any kind of investigator anywhere. “He and Papa weren’t close, is all. I’d want to know where he was when Papa died.”
“Okay, um, thanks. But what do you think about the coin thing?”
She shook her head. “Don’t know, but I’m sure you’ll figure it out.”
Her head played all the options thus far. She couldn’t help it. It’d been over a year since she’d worked a case, but her instincts still kicked in.
Ordinarily, she’d have considered these two crimes unrelated, but the coin changed things. This criminal left his mark. Chances were he would leave it again. This was a personality who’d tasted getting away with murder and wanted to let the island know he enjoyed it.
And unless she was premature in her logic, he enjoyed playing the game with the permanent residents.
He knew these people along with their daily itineraries. He might strike again . . . and take more chances. Getting away with murder empowered some people to raise the bar. And heaven help her, a part of her wished she could be there when it happened.
Chapter 6
AS CALLIE CONTINUED to chat with Officer Seabrook, Sophie stared over her shoulder from the herd of snoopy onlookers in the Rosewood yard. The afternoon blazed with heat, the sea breezes lazier than usual, but the weather didn’t deter the curious from the burglary scene.
“What about SLED, the state boys?” Callie asked. “Don’t little towns get that sort of assistance? Especially with a murder.”
“Those guys came and went like a rain shower,” he replied. “They reckon Beechum was a robbery turned homicide by a local kid. A call-us-if-you-need-us thing. Guess they’re slammed, too.”
The tall, soft-spoken man carried a genteel way about him, a quiescence that maintained itself amidst everyone else’s agitation. Not the usual beat cop nature. She liked it.
“Seems we have a sophisticated crime spree,” Seabrook said. “Without a police chief, we can use the help of a professional.” He dipped his chin and regarded her. “You showed up just in time to assist, Detective.”
The offer blindsided her. Tempting, yet frightening. That way of life represented the highest peak and lowest valley of her life, and she was afraid of riding that roller coaster again. Still . . .
“I left the badge in Boston,” Callie said, the words painful in so many ways.
“Badges are a dime a dozen,” he said. “What we lack is experience. I doubt you left your instincts back there.”
She diverted the subject. “So your ill-tempered Deputy Raysor is here because you’re short of uniforms?”
Seabrook scrunched his face and shook his head. “Colleton County always shares a deputy or two with us. Our old chief got offered a job in North Carolina—bigger beach. I’m the interim honcho for now, leaving us with six uniforms. No replacement yet.”
“Budget?” she asked.
His mouth gave her a halfhearted upturn. “Town council tends to think the lure of the beach will offset salary expectations.”
She got that. She’d only shopped big city departments out of college for that very reason—salary. “Hope you get the job.”
Walking away, he spoke over his shoulder. “Not applying for it.”
She watched him stroll away into a crowd that seemed to settle down with his presence. He took two stairs at a time up to the residence.
She’d have smiled at the dime a dozen comment if the situation weren’t so dire. People came to this secluded piece of the world for solitud
e, where the community allowed little commercialism, no franchises, and no motels except for the Wyndham at the tip of the island that housed the more urbanite souls. Eighty percent of the housing properties were rentals. The seven hundred long-term residents usually harbored a backstory—pre-Edisto. This skinny stretch of land between ocean and marsh was about living in the moment with the tide. Anyone could walk in your front door or share a drink on your porch.
Unfortunately, now a criminal seemed keen to join in, too. Six cops weren’t nearly enough to cope if this guy got weird. However, her doors would stay locked, her Glock and .38 handy, and the Sophies of the island could continue to knock to be let in.
Callie walked the two short lots home, glad for her sunglasses. The three o’clock sun was fierce. Sophie caught up, her beads and bangles rattling like a New Orleans parade. “You leaving?”
“Nothing to see.” She could easily bid the woman goodbye. However, something about this Tinkerbell breached Callie’s steel wall of trust. John had been her last close friend. Besides Stan, of course.
Sophie took her arm. Callie stiffened mildly at the unexpected intimacy.
“Love to know what Mike Seabrook said to you all private-like back there,” Sophie said.
Callie exaggerated a Southern drawl. “Sugar, he was just asking about you.”
Sophie sucked in. “Really?”
Wow, this woman was too easy to mess with. “No, he asked me if I remembered anything more about the Papa Beach incident, that’s all.”
“Humph. Seemed more than that to me.”
“Not interested, Sophie. He’s all yours.”
They climbed Callie’s porch steps. Sophie rolled her eyes and clicked her tongue at the sign of keys. Callie swung open the door and surveyed the immediate rooms. “Think of it as locking in the sage for safekeeping.”
The AC kicked on as they entered the kitchen.
“What’s your man-story anyway?” Sophie reached for a napkin from a shell holder in the middle of the kitchen table and wiped away the condensation puddled under her now-warm glass. She grabbed more ice from the fridge, as if the kitchen was her own.
Callie dumped the warm contents of her melted drink down the sink and refilled with water. “No man-story. I used to be married to a great guy. Now he’s gone.”
“Oh,” Sophie said. “Dead or divorced?”
The glass halted inches from her lips, then lowered. “You would ask that? Seriously?” Callie didn’t talk about John with strangers. Or anyone, for that matter.
“I could ask your mother,” Sophie said, trying to tease.
Callie gulped her water, reminding herself Sophie was riding the crest from the metaphysical energy of the crowd down the street. “If she intended to tell you, you’d already know, wouldn’t you?”
Sophie’s face softened. “I just sensed something there, Callie.”
Callie went to the refrigerator. “You want cheese with that drink? I’ve got grapes and can slice an apple. Hopefully my paring knife won’t slip in your direction.”
“Go ahead. Keep to yourself, sweetie, but I’m telling you, it’s not good for you.”
Callie washed an apple, then rubbed it dry with flourish. She ripped the stem off. “You’re naïve as hell, you know that?”
“Maybe, maybe not.”
The knife sank into the pulp, banging as it hit the cutting board, splitting the fruit cleanly in two. “Drop the topic, Sophie.”
AN HOUR LATER, Sophie left for home two gins looser than when she arrived. A daydreamer, Callie deduced, crimping a blind to watch her neighbor take the steps, but Callie had to admit Sophie had rolled with all of Callie’s punches. She tried to guess how children named Zeus and Sprite would turn out under the parental influence of such an ethereal spirit.
Nowhere near the likes of Beverly.
She never wanted to be Beverly to Jeb. Like any teen, he chomped at the bit to be free of oversight, but not like she’d been with her mother. He bent over backwards to tend to Callie, being the strong arm on days she found tough to endure. She wanted him to attend college with its social exposure and independence, like any kid his age, and not have to worry about her.
She’d envisioned this time with John, the two of them teary-eyed as they helped Jeb carry his belongings to a dorm room, Bonnie darting around their legs asking a hundred questions.
Callie poured the gin and tonic she denied herself in front of Sophie. A tall one in an iced tea glass, suiting her thirst. She’d abstained long enough. As she headed to the porch on the screened and shaded side of the house, the turntable snared her attention, along with its assorted array of seventies-and sixties-era music. Most of the LPs were her mother’s Neil Diamond vinyls. Twenty of them. Placing her drink on the mantle, she stacked the player with three of them, marveling the record changer still worked, not the least surprised her mother hadn’t replaced this music on CD.
She blew dust off the needle like Beverly had taught her as a child. She tapped it with her index finger to check the speakers. A smile crossed her face at remembering the routine. She turned the player on. As the arm lifted and the album dropped, she retrieved her gin. At the opening bars of Cracklin’ Rosie, she flopped into a deeply cushioned Adirondack chair out on the porch and laid her head back, singing the words softly to herself, waggling her right foot to the beat.
Beverly should have named her Rosie, considering the million times she’d played this song. It hit the music stores a few years before Callie was born. She knew when most of Diamond’s songs came out, having listened to her mother prattle on about the genius of the music. Each song sank Callie deeper into the cushion.
At the end of each album, she emerged to refill her glass.
As a jogger passed her home, she remembered she hadn’t run. She’d force herself back to that routine in the morning. She wasn’t old enough to go soft yet.
She sipped her drink, light-headed.
Callie hadn’t come here to solve cases, but the taste of the island’s crime spree had whetted her appetite. But she didn’t do that anymore. So, what the hell was she supposed to do?
A question she hadn’t wanted to face.
Her deep exhale barreled out from an imprisoned frustration she couldn’t pin a label to, and she was grateful to have no one around to question why she seemed down. Just birdsong and distant murmuring waves. Low tide from the sound of it.
The turntable’s arm lifted, whirred, and clicked off. That final click comforted her in an odd way. Silence pervaded the night, her porch, her thoughts. Just me alone in this place. Just like it’ll be in the fall.
Her unsteady gaze settled on the knickknacks of coral and aqua hanging around the screened porch. Faded yellows and baby blues accented decorative buoys hung on white rope; a miniature sailboat floated on a rattan end table next to coasters made of shells and glued sand.
The first place of her own. Residing the past year in her mother’s Middleton shadow had stunk, often yanking her back into an old attitude she thought she’d outgrown. Two weeks after her graduation from the University of South Carolina criminal justice school, she’d moved out of her parents’ home and hadn’t told them where she was headed until she packed her car. Beverly assumed her dramatic I’m-so-hurt role, her father puffing up all protective of his wife, as if Callie had betrayed them. Maybe she had, but years later, nothing seemed to have changed.
An ice cube slid into her mouth, and she crunched it after sucking the alcohol off.
So why the hell had she run home this time, knowing exactly how the age-old scenario would play out? Was it the logistics of the Southern family? A culture she couldn’t escape? Had Beverly trained her as a child to think of home as the ultimate sanctuary, the only proper place to go when life turned to shit? How ironic. She only felt like shit when she came home.
Her ears rang. She would get up and put on another album, but her legs weighed heavy and cumbersome. The instant she used them, the room would spin, and she wasn’t sure she’d make it inside, much less aim her mother’s precious record player needle on one of her oh-so-priceless albums. Besides, the music still played in her head.
“I’m home, Mom.” Abruptly she sat up. She’d never realized how much Jeb sounded like John.
His feet slapped the floor in his flip-flops. Finally, he poked his head out the door. “Mom?”
She held up her empty glass. “Right here, pretty boy.”
He stepped out holding an empty gin bottle and regarded her with a mixture of surprise and disappointment. “How long have you been out here?”
“Have no clue. How long you been gone?” she slurred, then winked.
“Ms. Morgan?” Officer Seabrook walked out of the darkness behind Jeb. “Er . . . I came to show you the coin.”
“Damn,” Callie whispered, and then giggled. “Busted!”
“Geez, Mom.” Jeb squatted in front of her. “How many did you have?”
Callie threw her head back and closed her eyes. She held out her arms, still holding the glass. “Here I am, drinking at home. I’m not driving, not wandering the street. Yet”—and she pointed a finger—“I’m judged.”
Jeb’s face took on a pained, red-hued expression.
Seabrook laid a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “I’ll come back tomorrow, son.”
Jeb flinched and reacted in a raised voice, as if having to save face in front of the tall cop. “Mom, what’s the deal? I thought you quit doing this sort of thing.”
Callie laid her head back. “No big deal, Jeb. I needed something to ease off to sleep.”
Murder on Edisto (The Edisto Island Mysteries) Page 6