Beckett's Convenient Bride

by Dixie Browning

  “Hey, Kit, you all right?” one of the fishermen hollered.

  The man who’d been nosing around her car looked from her to the fishermen and back again. Without a word, he turned and loped over to a red pickup truck with one blue fender that was parked off to one side on Waterlily Road. Climbing in, he slammed the door shut and roared off in the direction of 158.

  For several moments Kit stood and stared after him, puzzled, but not wholly alarmed. Maybe he thought she’d run out of gas. Maybe he was only trying to be helpful. But then why had he run away?

  And why had the sound of his truck struck a nerve? Almost everyone around here drove trucks, and one sounded pretty much like another, at least to her undiscriminating ears.

  Suddenly a chill coursed through her, like a cloud shadow racing across the marsh grass. It wasn’t panic, she told herself. Panic had been when she’d found that body with a bullet hole in the forehead. Since then she hadn’t had time to panic.

  Well…she might have come close a time or two.

  But it was broad daylight. No one with half a brain would try to steal a car in front of the whole town at a quarter of five in the afternoon. It was probably just someone who collected vintage VWs. She’d had several offers. Seeing it parked on the roadside, he might have thought it was for sale and was checking it over to see if he was interested. Maybe he’d been looking for a For Sale sign.

  But then, why run away?

  Because he’d recognized the Ladybug from the church parking lot and was looking for a way to silence a potential witness? Because he’d been looking for identification so that he could find out where she lived, sneak into her house late at night and smother her in her bed?

  “The curse of the writer’s mind,” Kit muttered. She could create drama from three ants in a sugar bowl.

  On the other hand, there had been a murder—she hadn’t imagined that. Fisting her hands in frustration, she wailed in the direction the truck had disappeared, “Blast you, I didn’t see anything!”

  A startled mockingbird flew from a nearby bay tree, and she expelled her breath in a frustrated sigh. What now? Hyper imagination or not, she knew better than to touch her car without having someone check it over first. She’d seen the news. She read hard-edged suspense novels. He could have tampered with her brakes or attached one of those thingees to the ignition that would make it explode as soon as she turned the key. Or maybe even when she opened the door.

  God, what a day—and she never swore. Never!

  She felt like crying, only she never cried, either, so what now? Unlock the door and risk getting herself blown up, or wait and let someone else take the risk?

  Well, that wasn’t much of an alternative.

  Maybe her policeman would know what to do. That is, if he really were a policeman. A policeman, she reminded herself, who knew not only her full name, but knew how to find her. Not even her grandparents knew where she lived. At least, she didn’t think they did.

  No, it had nothing to do with her grandparents. It was just a little too coincidental, the way he’d turned up knowing her full name on the same day she’d heard a shot and discovered a body.

  The trouble with being a fan of suspense novels was that it opened your mind to all sorts of possibilities.

  The trouble with being a writer of children’s books was that you didn’t have a clue as to how to act on those suspicions.

  Turning back toward the village, Kit forced herself to examine the situation logically. She could never remember which side of the brain controlled which function, but her logical mind—a legacy, no doubt, from a long line of legal types—was actually every bit as good as her creative mind.

  Item one: she had witnessed a murder.

  Well, she hadn’t—not really. At least she hadn’t seen who had done it. Not that it mattered if the murderer thought she could identify him.

  Item two: she had called to report the crime. Hadn’t answered any questions—hadn’t even waited to be asked, but at least she’d reported it. It was up to the sheriff to do the rest.

  Item three: there was a strange man asleep on her couch, one who might or might not be who he claimed. One who probably had no connection to what had happened this morning. The key word was probably. He’d told her his name was Beckett on the drive to her place, and he’d known her full name and known where to find her, even though she had moved three times in the past two years.

  And she’d been gullible enough to invite him into her home?

  So much for a functioning brain. Putting out leftover food for the local wildlife was one thing; taking a stranger home with her and giving him a place to sleep was something else. Obviously she’d inherited her judgment from her mother’s side of the family.

  Think, Katherine, think! Could there possibly be some connection between her Virginia grandparents and a policeman from South Carolina? The badge might or might not have been real. She had only Beckett’s word, from their conversation in the car, on who he was and where he was from. She wasn’t even sure that was his real name.

  It was just the sneaky, underhanded sort of thing her grandfather would do, sending in a Trojan horse. With the elder Dixons, control was always the issue. In her case, it was control of the money she stood to inherit. They’d briefly lost control of their son when he’d married someone outside their social circle. They hadn’t been able to control their daughter-in-law any more than they could control their granddaughter. That had to gall a man who could control a jury with the lift of a bushy eyebrow.

  Kit could have told them why, of course. In both cases, the money simply wasn’t enough. Her mother had lacked the courage to leave a hollow situation, but not Kit. She might be lacking in judgment, but she had courage.

  When she had visited her grandparents, she’d been almost amused to discover that she had her own control issues. The last few times she’d been there her grandfather had made a point of promoting his protégé, a lawyer named Elliott Saddler. Kit had met him a few times before she’d left home—he was a member of the same firm where her father had been a partner.

  She hadn’t been fooled, not for a single minute. Not that Elliott was anything like the judge, but Kit knew how her grandfather’s mind worked. She was twenty-five years old. Legally there was no way he could pull her strings, but if she were to marry someone like Elliott, who thought the judge walked on water, the old despot would have her right where he wanted her. Right where he kept his wife and where he’d tried to keep his daughter-in-law: under his cast-iron thumb.

  Kit glanced at her watch as she stepped up onto the old wooden wharf and hurried to the restaurant on the far end. Twelve minutes to go before she was supposed to report for work. “Jeff, is the soup ready? I’ve got a houseguest, and he really needs an infusion of your chicken soup. I think he has the flu or something.”

  The tall restaurateur grinned, and then frowned, looking her over. “You don’t look so good. Don’t you come down with nothin’, y’hear?” He handed over a quart jar in a brown paper bag. “I’m counting on you for the breakfast shift startin’ next week. We’re getting more layovers every day.”

  Kit and Bambi regularly traded shifts, which enabled Kit to use mornings for scouting out locations and working on her drawing, evenings for writing and finishing up her watercolors. The tips at the Crab House were nowhere near as good as the ones at the beach, but living was cheaper, she liked the place, liked the people and the flexible schedule suited her fine.

  It had been the scheduling that had prompted her to move away from Nags Head once the season had ended last year. The work was grueling and by the time she finished her shift, there was never any energy left for her real occupation.

  “See you in a few minutes. I’ll pay you then,” she called over her shoulder.

  Trotting along the wharf with the jar of soup clutched to her bosom, she greeted the few fishermen mopping down their boats and readying their equipment for the next day.

  “You got car trouble?” one of
them asked.

  She shook her head. “I went to bring Ladybug back home, but forgot my keys.” It was a lie—not even a plausible lie, but she wasn’t about to explain.

  The young fisherman grinned and shook his head as if to say, Just like a woman.

  Kit jumped off the end of the wharf onto a well-worn path that wound its way past several ancient live oaks, a deserted house nestled in an overgrown yard and a cedar grove before reaching her unpainted rental. It had once been painted white, and the gingerbread trim was still mostly intact. One of these days she might use it as a location for a haunted-house story.

  The soup was piping hot. Kit knew in advance that Jeff wasn’t going to want to take her money. She had a feeling that with the least bit of encouragement, he would try moving their relationship to another level, but it wasn’t going to happen. He was one of the nicest men she knew, but Kit wasn’t up for anything even hinting at romance.

  The late afternoon sun had already turned her tall windows to stained glass by the time she reached her front porch. As worried as she was about her car, she decided to let her guest sleep as long as he wanted to, leaving a note to let him know where to find the soup and a pot to heat it. If he was gone when she got back from work, so much the better.

  If he was still here, then he’d better be ready to answer a few questions, she thought grimly, changing into her work uniform of white jeans and a Crab House T-shirt. She braided her hair neatly—or as neatly as possible, considering that her hair had a mind of its own.

  On the way out she glanced in at her stranger.

  Mercy, he was something. Kit didn’t tempt easy—in fact, she could have sworn she was immune to temptation of the masculine variety. But this man was something else, with those incredibly blue eyes, that thick black hair and the kind of body—lean in all the right places and muscular in all the rest—that could make a grown woman weak in the knees.

  She didn’t need another event in her day, she really, really didn’t. Uneventful suited her just fine.

  Four

  It was dark when Carson awoke. His first thought was that his back was broken. His second thought was that he needed to locate the men’s room. But then he took in his surroundings and it all came rushing back. After stops in Manteo and Nags Head, he’d ended up at one of those waterway stopovers that was so small it wasn’t even on the charts, chasing an elusive woman with an obvious homicidal bent. A woman who drove an orange car painted to resemble an insect and who spoke in some code known only to the initiated. A woman with the face of a homemade angel, who might be missing a few gray cells up under that mass of curly auburn hair.

  He sat up and rolled his shoulders experimentally, taking stock of his surroundings. Using the eerie glow of a security light down on the waterfront that came in through the windows, he located a lamp and switched it on. Then, after flexing his bad knee experimentally, he stood and took a couple of test steps.

  So far, so good. A few of his hinges might need oiling, but he was able to function. At least his head was no longer being attacked by a swarm of tiny demons armed with pickaxes. A smart man would find the john, leave the money and get the hell out.

  Okay, so he wasn’t too smart. He intended to hang around long enough to make sure all the loose ends were tied up before he left, because this was it, as far as he was concerned. Debt cancelled.

  He limped carefully toward the room at the end of the hallway, half expecting his hostess to pop out from behind one of the closed doors. Had she said something about going to work? He couldn’t remember.

  Eying the claw-footed, iron-stained bathtub, he thought wistfully of a long, hot soak, accompanied by a couple of fingers of Jack Daniel’s, with maybe a Don Williams CD in the background, or a pre-season ballgame on WSB radio.

  Uh-uh, better not risk it, he told himself. It would take a block and tackle to get him out of the tub once the whiskey and hot water went to work on him.

  Besides, the lady might misread his intentions.

  After splashing his face and washing his hands with her scented soap, he felt slightly more human. Then, catching his reflection in the mirror, he grimaced. No wonder she’d been spooked. The face that stared back at him was not particularly reassuring.

  On the other hand, he wasn’t running for office. He was a cop. At the moment he wasn’t even that, he was merely a guy on a personal mission, acting as an emissary from past generations of Becketts. Once he’d accomplished his goal he’d be on his way home, stiff knee and all, ready to tackle his second objective.

  Marrying Margaret.

  Funny thing, though—now that he thought about it, he didn’t recall feeling this reluctant a few days ago when he’d decided to put off setting a date until he’d wound up this reparations business for PawPaw.

  Must be the flu bug. It sure as hell wasn’t the love bug that had bitten him. To be perfectly honest—and at the moment, his brain wasn’t up to being anything else—the last thing he felt like doing was tying himself down to a lifetime of city living, business entertaining, weekly golf and the occasional cruise.

  Carson had his own ideas when it came to business entertainment. Beer and barbecue in the backyard with Mac and his wife and kids a couple of times a year suited him just fine. As for golf with his country club buddies, he didn’t have any, didn’t want any. His favorite sports were baseball and fishing, with NASCAR running a close third. As for any cruises he took, he would prefer a bass boat on Lake Moultrie.

  On the other hand, his mother was counting down the days. Now and then she might lose count, but the gleam was still visible in her eyes whenever Margaret dropped in while he happened to be there. Kate—his mother—spent hours each day cutting pictures from bridal magazines, sticking them in an album and carefully decorating each page with hand-drawn orange blossoms. She still knew him most of the time, but the companion they’d hired for her had told the family that sooner or later she might need to be moved to a facility that specialized in Alzheimer’s patients.

  God, he felt like crying, just thinking about it. It had crept up so silently with no warning at all. The odd paranoia, the sudden lapses of memory, the pauses in the middle of a conversation when she would smile as if she’d lost her train of thought. Which, of course, was precisely what had happened. And was continuing to happen with more and more frequency.

  Your mission, should you choose to accept it, he told himself mimicking the format of an old TV show called Mission Impossible, is to marry Margaret as quickly as possible, have hundreds of photographs taken and give your mother the task of arranging them all in one of her albums.

  It might be the last thing he could do for her that would give her real pleasure. And he couldn’t put it off much longer.

  Sighing, Carson switched off the bathroom light and headed for the kitchen. The first thing he spotted was the note on the table, weighted down by a chunk of clam-shaped marl. Following his hostess’s instructions, he located a pot and set about reheating the chicken soup he found in the refrigerator. Ten minutes later he was back on the couch, his feet on a newspaper on the scarred coffee table, a bowl of the best chicken soup he’d ever tasted on a tray in his lap. He’d match it against his Aunt Becky’s cooking any day, and Rebecca Beckett, Lance’s mother, had been winning awards for her cooking ever since she’d mixed up her first batch of oyster fritters.

  Relaxing in the shabby, surprisingly comfortable living room, Carson wondered what Margaret would make of Kit’s decorating skills. The blue Mason jar of Carolina jasmine was a nice touch, although half the blossoms had fallen off. He even liked the basket of dried weeds in the corner. The unframed pictures on the wall lent a whimsical touch, although he doubted if Martha Stewart, let alone Margaret’s fancy decorator friend from New York, would approve of kid art thumbtacked to unpainted walls, minus so much as a mat.

  Still, he kind of liked the place—maybe because he was feeling considerably better. Bare wooden walls, bare wooden floors. At least there were no clothes piled on t
op of beer-can tables like the Nags Head duplex.

  His gaze moved back to the plank-and-cinderblock bookshelf. Evidently the lady was a reader. Suspense, nature guides, murder mysteries, art books and…

  Children’s books?

  Hmm. Matlock at the seafood place hadn’t mentioned any kids. But then, he’d been more interested in her car. Maybe she had a kid, and said kid was staying with Daddy, as Mommy obviously had a few problems to work out.

  In his line of work he saw too many such cases. In most of them, there was no good answer. Usually, though, if a family functioned at all, it was better to leave a kid in the home than to remove him and turn him over to an overworked, understaffed system. Some kids didn’t take to fostering. He’d seen bad results from either decision, including a few that just plain ripped his heart right out of his chest.

  When it came to family relations, he’d been spoiled, and was smart enough to know it. There weren’t many Becketts left, but the few that remained were close, getting together for holidays, birthdays and anniversaries. Lance and Liza would be adding to the roster most any time now.

  It was those close family ties that kept him sane on his worst days as a cop. They also kept him humble, because he knew too well that not everyone was so fortunate.

  At any rate, whether or not Ms. Chandler had any off-spring, it shouldn’t affect the reparations. His generation was repaying hers. Once it was done, if she wanted to pass it on, that was her decision. Ten grand wasn’t much in today’s world, but judging from the way she was living, it might provide a small cushion to fall back on. He might even suggest ways of investing it. PawPaw would have approved. He’d been a big-time investment banker in his day.

  On the other hand, he thought, grimly amused, better not. This whole bizarre situation had started when a Chandler had handed over some money and asked a Beckett to invest it for him.