Carson finished the soup, considered seconds and decided there was no point in asking for trouble. Whatever bug Mac had handed off apparently affected different people in different ways. Headache, fever, congestion and muscular aches he could handle. Nausea was another thing altogether. As much as he loved fishing, if he’d ever been seasick a single time, he would have been a bank fisherman for the rest of his days. Lucky for him, he had an industrial grade stomach lining.
It occurred to him that this would be the perfect time to leave the cashier’s check and the stock, and disappear. A receipt would have been nice, but a cashed check would be all the proof he needed if repayment ever became an issue.
So why not just do it and leave, Beckett?
The answer was a little too elusive for his foggy brain to wrestle with at the moment. For starters, the lady intrigued him, and he wasn’t easily intrigued. She was a looker, if you liked wild hair, colorful, freewheeling clothes and earrings that looked more like fishing lures than jewelry.
Picturing Margaret’s discreet silver studs and his mother’s screw-back pearls that she called earbobs, he shook his head. He knew very well his own family was no gauge of today’s fashions. The Beckett women were typical of their social class maybe fifty years earlier. Housedresses and straw hats for working in the flower garden, flowered dresses and flowered hats for afternoon affairs; dark crepe with pearls for more formal affairs. His mama still wore white gloves and a hat to church, although some of the younger ladies of the congregation wore slacks and none of them wore hats.
He tried and failed to imagine his mother’s reaction to Katherine Dixon. Fortunately, the two women would never have occasion to meet.
Reheating the coffee that was left in the pot, he turned over in his mind what he remembered of their initial contact. The woman had been ranting some wild gibberish after she’d tried and nearly succeeded in running over him. Something about not seeing something or other. And cemeteries? Gunshots?
Whatever it was, it obviously held meaning for her. She’d sounded frightened and angry, and so far as he could recall, he’d done nothing to frighten or anger her. Okay, so he’d approached her car—he hadn’t come closer than ten feet. Not close enough to cause her to feel threatened.
All evidence pointed to the lady’s being a certified flake. Granted, her looks and the gracefully awkward way she moved, like a foal just getting the feel of his legs, were enough to capture the attention of any man with a viable hormone in his body, but once she opened her mouth, all bets were off.
Yeah, so why didn’t he stop thinking about her and get on with what he’d come here for?
He rinsed his bowl and cup, poured the rest of the soup back in the container and put it in the refrigerator, then ran water in the pot. Dish-soaking was one of the first laborsaving devices he’d acquired after leaving the police academy, buying a house and setting up housekeeping. No self-respecting cop still lived with his parents, and he didn’t like renting. Needed his own space, no matter how humble.
He was headed out to the car to bring in the briefcase containing the check and stock certificates when he caught sight of a figure jogging up the path, silhouetted against the pink security lights.
Too late, he thought, not even wondering why he wasn’t more disappointed.
“Oh, good, you’re awake! I was afraid you’d be gone—by the time—I got off from work,” she panted. “I need to know—how can you tell if a car’s been rigged to blow up? I mean, where do you look and what does a car bomb look like? Is it that plastic goop or does it have wires? I’ve read about it—well, you know—on shoes and things—but I don’t know what it looks like.”
Wacko. Batty as a cave.
She came to a halt a few feet away. He could smell the not-unpleasant essence of fried onions and something fruity and sweet. “Uh…you are a policeman, aren’t you?” she asked hesitantly.
She was wearing red sneakers, a pair of plain white jeans, a T-shirt advertising Jeff’s Crab House and a pair of earrings that would make any largemouth salivate. If there was a single flaw on that long, lean figure, it was well hidden. Her hair had been confined—more or less—in one long braid.
Carson found the total package fascinating, tempting and uncomfortably young. He felt ancient in comparison.
“Well? Are you?”
Am I what, dazzled? Oh, yeah. Tempted? Ditto. Susceptible? At any other time, and under any other circumstances—like a few years added onto your age and a few subtracted from mine—that would definitely be an affirmative.
“Police detective Carson Beckett, at your service.” He thought he remembered introducing himself earlier, but he might have forgotten. And hers probably wasn’t a retentive mind. “The soup was great, by the way. I left the dishes to soak.”
“Oh, good. Not the dishes, I mean—well, I’m glad you liked the soup, but I mean about being a real policeman. Did you say a detective? That’s even better. Come on back inside, this time of year it gets cool once the sun goes down, and I don’t think anyone will bother it for the next few minutes.” It was probably in the low sixties. Cool was the last thing he felt.
But she wasn’t through. “It’s been there all this time— I hated to leave it, but I didn’t know what else to do. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with it. Sometimes I tend to dramatize things.”
That, he could believe. “You didn’t think anyone would bother what?”
“The Ladybug. Do you drink coffee at night? Do you feel up to talking, or would you rather go back to bed? Well, to couch, at least.”
Carson had a feeling that a third party refereeing their conversation would shake his head and walk off the field. He knew he made perfect sense. She probably thought she did, too, but they might as well be speaking two different languages.
“I left it there at the intersection—my car, I mean. Well, I had to get to work—there’s only one of us working a shift since Jane left to get married. I was pretty sure no one would bother it, but—”
She whirled around and plopped down onto one of the room’s two chairs. “Oh, Lawdy, there’s so much I don’t know,” she moaned, shucking off her sneakers to massage her bare toes.
Tell me about it, Carson thought wryly. “You want to start at the beginning?”
“Oh. That was this morning. You see, I do my sketches when I’m working the evening shifts, and then wait and add watercolor when I’m working mornings, because the light’s just right. In the evening. For this book, I mean. All the illustrations for Gretchen’s Ghost are set when the sun’s just gone down and there are shadows, and—well, you’re not interested in all that.”
Interested? Carson was fascinated. Genuine oddities always captured his imagination, and he had yet to make sense of a single thing the woman had said—unless it was about the chicken soup. And she was speaking English.
“You see, it all started when I heard these two men arguing.”
“Which two men?”
She flung out her hands. He’d noticed that about her, too—she used her hands when she talked, as if words alone couldn’t convey the full message. “Well, if I knew that, then I could have told the sheriff and none of this would have happened. I mean, not the murder, of course—that had already happened, but my car. I need to know if it could be rigged to explode, only I haven’t had time to find out. I couldn’t leave Jeff without someone to cover for me, and like I said, Jane’s married, and besides, the nearest garage is—”
Carson held up a hand. “Whoa. Back up.”
She frowned. On her, a frown was roughly the equivalent of a megawatt smile on any other woman. He could almost see the wheels spinning. “My illustrations, you mean? Oh. You mean the murder.”
And so she proceeded in her own unique style to relate the happenings of the past few hours. “See, first I heard these two men arguing, only I didn’t see anything because I was on the other side of the church in the cemetery and there’s this big grove of cedars, but then I heard this shot. I thought it was a b
ackfire—at least I did at first when I heard someone drive away. I thought the engine backfired. It had a funny sound, like it might be groaning.”
“The gunshot?”
“The engine. Sort of a zoom, zoom, and then a low whining noise like a jet plane flying really far away.”
Right. Muffler pack. Carson listened without further interruption, having gradually concluded that at least a portion of what she said made sense when taken in context.
“Only when I got to the parking lot, there was my car and this—this dead body. So I came home and called the sheriff. At least I called nine-one-one and…well, that’s about all, really. Except for seeing a man messing around my car.”
He jumped on the simplest part of her statement. He did know she had a car—knew she’d left it out on the road. “You didn’t retrieve your car yet?”
She shook her head. Now that she had decided to open up, she had that childlike expression of trust that gave him all sorts of misgivings.
“But it’s locked and everybody here knows it belongs to me, so I was pretty sure no one would bother it.”
Don’t trust me, he wanted to say. Trust implied involvement, and involvement was something he didn’t have time for. Under other circumstances he might have enjoyed indulging in a little meaningless sex—he’d been through a long dry spell where sex was concerned, and as reluctant as he was to admit it, there was something about the lady. As long as you didn’t try to make sense of what she was saying.
After a night of inventive, uninhibited sex, he could hand over the check and walk away. Limp away. Crawl away.
Only you didn’t do that to someone who trusted you. At least, Carson didn’t.
Back to the issue at hand. “In other words, you can vouch for the locals. What about strangers?”
“We don’t get many of those, not this time of year. Boat traffic, mostly, but people who tie up to refuel and eat at one of the restaurants don’t go any farther than the waterfront. Not that there’s that much more to see, just miles and miles of wetlands with a few wooded knolls. We don’t even have a gift shop. Jeff sells T-shirts and souvenir mugs and things like that, but most people stop farther south where there are better facilities and more to see.”
Carson had an idea that these small, hidden stops along the waterway served another purpose, but there was no point in bringing that up. Reluctantly, he gave up on the sex and set aside his reason for being there. It had waited a hundred years; it could wait another day. “Where’s your phone book? First thing we need to do is make a few calls.”
Rotary dial. Why wasn’t he surprised? This whole place was an anachronism. While he waited for the call to go through, Kit paced. She’d told him to call her Kit. It suited her, he thought, watching as she moved around the room, pausing now and then to glance out the window. Foxy lady.
“Dad? How’s Mom?” A long pause, and then, “Yeah, I found her.” Another pause while his father asked if he was doing his exercises and had he known about the epidemic that had laid out half of Charleston’s finest. He assured his father that he’d avoided that particular bug. And he had, for the most part, other than a few minor symptoms. His dad didn’t need anything else to worry about.
“Look, I might be a day or so late getting home. How about calling the post office and—sure, that’ll be fine. Thanks.”
He hung up after accepting the usual parental admonishments. He was thirty-seven years old, for cripes sake. His mama was still calling to remind him of his dental checkup. At least she had been until she’d all but forgotten he was her son.
Oh boy.
Riffling through the phone book he found the number for the sheriff’s office and dialed. Kit’s wide, rainwater gray eyes watched his every move, full of curiosity and something else he put down to wariness. After identifying himself, he said, “About the body found out on—” He cocked an eyebrow toward Kit.
“Cypress Mill Road,” she supplied.
“Cypress Mill Road,” he repeated, “I’d like to come in and—” He frowned. “What d’you mean, what body? You didn’t get a call about a murder victim earlier today?”
Kit moved closer, her breath feathering his neck. As much as he liked the attention, he needed to concentrate, and she wasn’t helping.
“It wasn’t a prank, dammit, it was a—”
Glaring at Kit, he listened while the jerk on the other end read him the riot act, the gist of it being that no body had been found, and manpower had been wasted checking out a prank phone call.
Kit grabbed his arm the instant he hung up the phone. “What?” she demanded.
“They say no body was found. Are you, uh, sure you saw something? You said yourself you thought it might have been a shadow.”
Releasing his arm, she started pacing again, gesturing with her hands as if she were speaking aloud. He watched, fascinated, until she spun and glared at him as if he were somehow responsible for her predicament. “I know what shadows look like—they’re a balance of alizarin crimson and thalo green.”
He didn’t say a word. The Martians had landed and his translator was AWOL.
“This was no blasted shadow, I’m telling you! That’s what I thought at first, too, but it wasn’t all that late, and besides, shadows don’t have holes in their forehead. Shadows don’t—” She shuddered. “Shadows don’t bleed from the nose. Darn it, I know what I saw!”
“Right.” God, Martian or not, he was tempted to hold her—forget the sex—he just wanted to hold her and tell her everything was going to be just fine, not to sweat it. Funny thing was, he was beginning to think she might really have seen something. Otherwise, why would she have called the sheriff in the first place? Whatever else she was, Kit Dixon struck him as the kind of woman who didn’t like getting involved in anything rough.
Trouble was, she was already involved right up to her pretty pink ears. Something had happened, because she was obviously scared, and he’d lay odds she didn’t scare easy.
Which meant that they were both involved. Temporarily involved, he stipulated silently. He could hardly hand over the check and take off, not until he was sure she’d be all right. Because he was a cop, sworn to protect and defend the innocent. Or maybe because he was a Beckett, and the men of his family believed in that old-fashioned thing called a code of honor.
Pain in the arse, is what it was. “So here’s what we’ll do then,” he said, mentally laying out a plan as he spoke. “First thing tomorrow we’ll check out your car—that is, if you’re sure no one will bother it tonight.” He wasn’t about to go snooping around with a flashlight if there was the least possibility of a bomb.
Not that he thought there was—there hadn’t been time. But if this turned out to be what he was beginning to suspect, it would pay to be cautious. Sooner or later the DEA would probably be involved, but it wasn’t his call to make.
Her face was a shade or two paler than it had been a few minutes earlier. A handful of freckles stood out across her nose, making her look younger than he knew she was. According to the genealogist’s chart she was twenty-five.
Too young for you to be thinking what you’re thinking, good buddy.
He cleared his throat, which was still on the raw side. “When do you have to work tomorrow?”
“Same shift. Five to nine. I usually go in a few minutes early and stay after to set up for the morning trade.”
“Good. First we’ll check out your car and then we’ll drive out to this church of yours and look around. After that, we might drop by the sheriff’s office. And if you don’t mind, I’ll borrow your couch again tonight. Six a.m. suit you? It ought to be light enough by then, but a flashlight would come in handy.”
She nodded, a dazed look on her peaked, not-really-pretty-but-beautiful face. “I feel like I’m on a runaway escalator. Sooner or later I’ll either have to get off or crash. Trouble is, there’s no getting-off place.”
Carson wanted to touch her, to reassure her. He lifted a hand and let it drop. Don’t go there
, Beckett.
Hell, he was probably contagious, anyway. The last thing she needed was what ailed him.
The moment passed. “What do you eat for breakfast?” she asked.
“Cold pizza. Barring that, coffee and whatever.”
“Yeah, well, it’ll probably be whatever,” she muttered as she shrugged and headed down the hall. “Turn off the light before you go to bed, okay? I don’t like to waste electricity.”
Five
Long after she had cleared the bathroom and closed her bedroom door, Carson lingered in the kitchen, washing the few dishes he’d left in the sink, which she had ignored. Then he rummaged around until he located a box of baking soda, mixed some in a glass of water, and used it to swallow a few more aspirin. His mama’s favorite cure-all. Had something to do with the pH factor, not that Kate had ever put it in those terms, bless her sweet soul.
He wished to God it would help her now, but there wasn’t enough aspirin and soda in the world to bring back a woman who was slipping a little farther away each day.
He yawned and went out to retrieve his overnight bag. He needed to get out of here, like yesterday. Yawning again a few minutes later, he switched out the lamp and reminded himself that this wasn’t his case. He had more on his agenda than delivering a long overdue payment for a debt that wasn’t even his own. But the lady needed a hand, and he happened to be on the scene. As a man, as a Beckett and as a cop, he owed her whatever assistance he could provide.
His body cried out for sleep, but his brain was still too wired to surrender, and so he lay awake thinking over the things she’d said, slotting them into the things he’d observed. Which wasn’t a whole lot, in either case.
Still, whatever else she was, the woman was not quite the flake he’d first thought her. Taken in context, most of what she’d said even made sense. But what the devil was a woman like Katherine Dixon doing in a place like this, waiting tables at a restaurant that probably would see no more than a couple dozen customers on a good day? Maybe not even that many.
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