Beckett's Convenient Bride

by Dixie Browning

  According to her, she’d had two books published, for cripes sake. Outside his mother’s church circle and their fund-raising cookbook, he didn’t know anyone else who had actually written a book and had it published. And this was no homemade job. Even he had recognized the name of the publisher.

  He had offered to set an alarm clock, but she’d told him not to bother. “I never need an alarm, not even when I’m on early shift.”

  “Your call,” he’d told her, being none too fond of the things, himself. The last twenty-four hours had been a real rat race. Napping through the late afternoon and waking up after dark had only screwed up his internal clock. Now, at barely 11:00 p.m., he was wiped out, but too wide-awake to fall asleep.

  Switching on the radio, he searched for a news station. If she had a TV it must be in her bedroom. He’d seen no sign of one anywhere else. Personally, he could think of better things to do in a bedroom—especially hers—than watch TV.

  Country music, preaching, and some nasal jerk selling an herbal cure-all. Stuff evidently worked on everything from jock itch to hiatal hernia. After a few minutes he gave up, dug his cell phone out of his jacket pocket and punched in Margaret’s number. For reasons he didn’t care to examine too closely, he needed grounding in reality.

  After nine rings he gave up. He didn’t know if she was a heavy sleeper or not, they didn’t have that kind of relationship. If the guys knew he was about to marry a woman he’d never even slept with, he’d never hear the last of it. He was considered something of a connoisseur when it came to women, but they were rarely the kind of woman a man took home to meet his family. And he’d mostly quit that stuff since making up his mind to marry Margaret.

  It occurred to him that it might be a good idea to invite Margaret to move in with him for a few weeks before they made it permanent. As well as he knew her—hell, they’d grown up next door—there were still a few things he didn’t know about her. A lot of things, come to think of it.

  He considered trying her number again on the off chance he’d woken her up with the first call, but decided against it. She was probably out of town. The decorating business involved a lot of traveling. Buying trips, trade shows, out-of-town clients.

  Carson had never been particularly interested in her work, because in his family, decorators weren’t needed. Furniture and paintings and such were handed down from generation to generation, a system that suited him just fine. When he’d moved out on his own, he’d taken whatever he needed from the attic. His Aunt Becky and Uncle Coley had filled in the empty spots from their attic. It was a continuity thing, passing on what was no longer needed to other family members who could make use of them. That way, nobody had to feel guilty over paying less than proper respect for the past.

  He fell asleep picturing Kit, minus the purple shirt, white jeans or tie-dyed tights, sprawled across the ugly old sleigh bed he’d hauled down out of his folk’s attic, that with a new mattress, suited him just fine.

  Oh, yeah…

  The unearthly cry came out of a dream. Carson sat up, taking only a split second to assay his surroundings. Situation awareness could save a man’s life.

  The penetrating cry came again, and this time he recognized it for what it was. A damned cat. If he could have located the boots he’d kicked off last night he’d have thrown both of them at the damned thing, yowling its lungs out under the front window.

  Instead, he limped to the front door and let him in. “How the hell did you know where I was sleeping?” he growled as the ragged-ear tomcat wrapped himself around his bare leg.

  “He knows, even when the windows are all closed. If you don’t let him in he’ll climb up on the roof and hang over the eaves and sing to you.” Kit wandered in, rubbing her eyes.

  “You call that singing?”

  Instead of answering, she tipped a container of dry food into a bowl on the front porch, then poured canned milk in another bowl. “He’s not my cat, he just visits occasionally. You ready for whatever?”

  His eyes widened. If “whatever” included tumbling back into bed with a dewy-faced temptress wearing an oversize T-shirt he was more than ready. Early mornings were tricky for a man, especially one who’d been through a long dry spell.

  “Breakfast,” she said dryly. Her expression implied that she knew exactly where his mind had been. “You said last night you’d eat whatever. You can have your choice of dry cereal, leftover crab cakes from the restaurant—they’re a couple of days old, so maybe you’d better not. Let’s see, there’s…hmm…” She stared in the open refrigerator. “Chicken soup?”

  Forcefully removing his gaze from the shapely backside visible through the thin cotton knit—oh, wow, he could see the shape of everything!—Carson said gruffly, “Coffee’s fine. I’d better take a look at your car before any kids start messing around with it.”

  She straightened up and sighed, shoving her hair away from her eyes. It obviously hadn’t seen a brush recently. On the other hand, it was the kind of hair that looked pretty much the same, brushed or unbrushed.

  They decided to hold off on breakfast and walk down the road instead of driving his car. That way, he figured, although he didn’t voice the thought, whatever happened, they would still have one good vehicle.

  “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” Kit asked when they were halfway across the front yard. She was wearing the tent-sized purple shirt and red sneakers again, completing the visual assault this time with a pair of lime green tights. Subtle, the woman was not.

  “We’ll soon see, won’t we?”

  She grabbed his arm, jerking him to a halt. “Look, if you have any doubts, let’s call the sheriff. He’s trained, he’ll know what to do. I don’t want you getting hurt on my account.”

  If he’d been feeling up to par he could have either laughed or taken offense. He might even have played on her fears just a little bit, ignoring for the moment his personal honor code. But he wasn’t, and so he didn’t. “Let me check out a few things before we call in the experts, okay.”

  Experts, he thought wryly, who’d probably had neither the training nor the experience that he’d had. He appreciated her concern, however. That hand-on-the-arm stuff was pretty heady.

  After a walk of no more than five minutes they reached the intersection where she’d left her car. “Stand back,” he said when she handed over the keys.

  “Aren’t you going to look first?”

  “With binoculars, you mean?” he teased. “Hey, I’m looking.”

  Moving like a ninety-year-old man, he knelt on the dusty marl, rolled onto his back and flashed a light up underneath the chassis. Everything there checked out. After taking a moment to catch his breath, he rolled up onto his knees and pulled himself to a standing position. Wanted to tell her to turn around, to quit watching him with that look in her eyes, but he didn’t.

  “Next place,” he muttered half to himself, “driver’s side door.”

  Instead, he unlocked the passenger door and leaned across, searching for traces of plastic or anything the slightest bit out of alignment. He wasn’t going to find anything because in the first place, she was probably paranoid, and in the second place, the guy hadn’t had time to do much in plain sight of anyone who happened to be working on the waterfront a few thousand feet away.

  He’d probably been checking out an abandoned car, one that might even be a collector’s item. Perfectly normal reaction.

  On the other hand, he’d run away when she had called out. If he’d been interested in her car, wouldn’t he have hung around to ask questions?

  With Kit hovering anxiously in the background, Carson went over the vintage Beetle carefully, up and down, in and out, sniffing and testing and double checking in case he’d missed something the first time around. Wiping his hands on the seat of his khakis, it occurred to him that he was becoming entirely too familiar with the dirt around this particular intersection.

  “She’s okay. I’ll drive her home for you,” he said. “You can ri
de or walk, your call. We’ll take my car to the sheriff’s office.”

  “Do we have to?”

  “To what, take my car?”

  “Talk to the sheriff. I mean there’s nothing wrong with Ladybug, so we don’t really have anything more to report. The man already thinks I’m a nutcase.”

  She had a point. Funny thing, though—after knowing her for less than twenty-four hours, Carson was pretty sure she’d seen something. “Then let’s drive out to this church of yours first. You can show me where you were when you heard the argument, when you heard the shot, and where the body was lying when you saw it.”

  She looked at him as if she were about to burst into tears. “You do believe me, then.” It was a statement, not a question.

  Something inside him twisted almost painfully. It had nothing to do with the state of his health. He held the door and she slid onto the passenger’s seat. Wedging his six-foot-two frame under the steering wheel, he turned and looked at her pale profile. Funny, the way certain faces could draw a man’s gaze like a magnet. “I believe you saw something,” was all he was willing to admit at that point.

  Back at the house, while he was waiting for Kit to do whatever she had to do to get ready, Carson ate one of the crab cakes. She was probably keeping them to feed to her critters, but he was running on empty and crab cakes were among his favorite foods.

  As was just about everything else except maybe liver and strawberries. Last night’s chicken soup had evidently cured what ailed him, but it lacked any real staying power.

  “I’m ready,” Kit said. She’d braided her hair, which made her look younger than ever. Carson told himself he ought to be ashamed of the lecherous thoughts that kept sneaking into his mind. Hell, he was practically a married man. Besides, he was old enough to be her…uncle.

  She snagged a straw hat and a pair of oversized, orange-framed sunglasses. His mother would have loved the hat. Both the crown and half the brim were covered with big, frowsy fake flowers.

  “If I’d known it was going to be formal, I’d have brought along a tie,” he quipped, ushering her out the door.

  Unassisted, she climbed up into the four-wheel drive vehicle without comment. Margaret always made an issue of his choice of wheels, claiming it was a juvenile hold-over from his days playing at being a NASCAR driver.

  She was probably right, but he liked to think it was more a practical choice than a matter of testosterone. He lived in the sticks, after all. Some of his favorite fishing spots weren’t exactly on the beaten track.

  “Wow, I really like this thing,” Kit commented, wriggling her shapely behind on the bucket seat. She twisted around to look over the spacious cargo area. “It would hold practically every thing I own, Ladybug included.”

  “Comes in handy. I live out in the country.” Something else Margaret held against him. They still had a few issues to settle before they tied the knot. “You want to point me in the right direction?”

  She leaned forward and turned on the radio, touching first one button, then another. “My mother drove a Mercedes. That is, she lost her license, but we still had it when…” She cut her eyes at him, those rain-soft, laser-sharp gray eyes that seemed to see right through him. “This is a lot more practical, though. You probably won’t believe me, but I’m actually extremely practical.”

  Yeah, right. A woman who drove a thirty-five-year-old car that held roughly the same amount of cargo as a road bike. “You want to clue me in on where we’re going?”

  And while you’re at it, stop wriggling around on my front seat, smelling like sugar and spice and everything nice. I don’t need the distraction, he added silently.

  She faced forward, all business. “Go past the wharf and take a left. It’s not paved, but it’s usually passable unless we’ve had lots of rain or the wind’s blown the water up the creeks.” After a while she said, “Jeff says the village used to be a lot bigger than it is now. His family’s been here forever. Now, though, about the only thing left out in this area we’re going to is the church, the cemetery, a few old ruined houses and some sunken boats.” She twisted around and flashed that guileless grin that made her look too damned young. That and the freckles and the braid. “That’s what makes it so perfect for Gretchen’s Ghost,” she said ingenuously.

  “Uh-huh.”

  In the ten minutes or so it took to get there, she told him about the work in progress and about Claire the Loon, which had been optioned for TV, but probably wouldn’t make the cut. Carson found himself intrigued by the way the woman’s mind worked. He told her she could probably look at a rock and make up a story about it.

  She looked thoughtful for a moment, but didn’t deny it.

  And then they were at the old church. Boarded-up windows, leaning steeple, weeds growing up through the graveled parking lot. Off to one side stood several makeshift tables in various stages of disrepair, used in bygone days, no doubt, for dinner-on-the-ground meetings.

  He deliberately parked off the road near the entrance to the parking lot in case there were any tracks worth examining. If a deputy had checked out the scene, that meant there’d be at least one more set of tracks obliterating the evidence. As for anything else, he didn’t hold out a lot of hope. Usually in a case where a body went missing, a certain level of professionalism was indicated.

  Which made Kit’s situation all the more precarious, he reminded himself, one hand on the door as he scanned the peaceful scene. Anyone who took the time to remove the body was unlikely to allow a potential witness to go free.

  “It’s nice, isn’t it? I mean other than…you know.” He could hear the brittle edge in her voice. She had obviously tried hard to convince herself that she’d been mistaken, but it hadn’t worked. The lady had definitely heard something she wasn’t meant to hear and seen something she wasn’t meant to see, and as he was the only one who believed her at the moment, it was up to him to protect her.

  Carson was half tempted to bring up the reason he had tracked her down just to get it out of the way. Knowing something of what his cousin Lance had gone through trying to convince Liza that he wasn’t trying to pull a con when he’d offered her ten Gs and a chunk of worthless certificates, he was tempted to rush through the spiel while Kit was still too distracted to argue.

  He’d already wasted what—two days? Three? By the time he’d reached North Carolina he’d been too damned miserable to track time with any degree of accuracy. The fact that he had yet to mention the yellowed, bug-eaten, all-but-illegible stock certificates and the check with her name on it said a lot about his inability to focus.

  She could obviously use the money. Hell, she didn’t even own a TV. So why not just hand off, head south and get on with the next thing on his agenda? He still had a few more days on disability, plus a lot of unused leave. He could stretch it a few more days if he had to, but sooner or later he needed to get on with his own life.

  Kit slid out of the car and he moved around to stand beside her. “Right over there,” she said, pointing to a general area near the center of a weedy, poorly graveled surface designed to hold maybe a dozen cars. “That’s where the body was. I thought at first it was a deer or a big dog.” She shuddered. Without thinking, he put his arm around her. She was stiff at first, but he sensed a yielding. A reluctant yielding, as if she didn’t want to give in to her own worst fears.

  They stood like that for a couple of minutes while he studied the alleged crime scene, filing away the details for later evaluation. Not that there was much to see. No yellow tape, that was for damned sure. Some low scrub, mostly groundsel, yaupon and wax myrtle. Thanks to his mother, he knew his shrubbery, cultivated and otherwise. Beyond that was the usual wetland growth, mostly bulrushes, with the invasive phragmites starting to move in and a creek winding in from the nearby Currituck Sound.

  Kit started to move out onto the parking lot, but he caught her arm and pulled her back, not wanting her to compromise any possible evidence. Somehow, her back ended up pressed against his che
st, her bottom against his groin. For a moment neither of them moved, but he didn’t miss the sharp intake of her breath. Carson told himself he was holding her back only because he didn’t want her trampling any possible evidence.

  Speaking of evidence, there was no way she could miss the evidence of his body’s involuntary reaction, which could be described as enthusiastic, inappropriate, unwanted and damned embarrassing.

  “Do you see what I see?” In an effort to distract her, he pointed toward the center of the area in question. “Look it over—tell me what strikes you as odd.” He stepped back, giving her time to recover—giving them both time.

  “Well…some of the weeds are bent over,” she said thoughtfully. “Like they’d been raked or something,” she added after a moment.

  “But just in one narrow area.”

  “Like something was dragged across,” she said, picking up on his line of thought.

  “Right. To just about where we’re standing now.”

  Kit glanced down at her feet, then looked at him over her shoulder. “Are we messing up evidence?”

  “I doubt it. Tracks of at least two cars have been here recently.”

  “Mine?”

  He shook his head. They were standing side by side now, a safe few feet apart, facing the old Primitive Baptist church with its leaning steeple. Kit’s hands were on her hips, her feet spread in a take-no-prisoners stance. Her braid was already relinquishing control of her curly auburn hair.

  Dammit, he didn’t need this kind of a distraction, not now.

  Not ever, a dutiful conscience reminded him.

  “Since yours. One was a standard-size sedan.” A patrol car, he figured. “You said the sheriff had driven out to investigate?”

  “Someone from the department did. I guess that’s why they were so angry. They didn’t find anything.”

  “I figure the other vehicle for a pickup truck, which narrows it down to maybe a hundred or so possibilities just in the immediate vicinity. With no leads, there’s no way of narrowing it down further.”