Not Quite Fixed

by Lyla Payne

  Maybe Officer Raynard isn’t the Raynard I should be going to see today, but I’d rather help Harlan than mess around with whatever shenanigans Clete’s up to out in the boonies.

  If I even decide to go. I need to figure out what my mother meant by telling me to stay away. Maybe it’s too much to hope that she’ll show up and clarify, but short of that, perhaps Daria could be coerced into helping.

  The drive out to Folly Beach is pleasant. The day is chilly, sure, but the sun sparkles on the harbor as I make the drive out to the Charleston suburb. My GPS leads me to the front door of the police station a little too efficiently. I would have preferred to have more time to prepare myself to meet another Raynard. Provided he’s still serving.

  Harlan didn’t die that long ago, I guess, but if the cop’s from the older generation—say, Clete’s dad or uncle—he could be pushing eighty.

  No point in delaying the inevitable, Graciela. If you go in now, you can bring Amelia dinner as a thank you.

  I listen to the voice in my head, since it’s talking sense for once, and climb out into the brisk wind. A deep breath steadies my nerves on the way into the building, and a smile gets me past the desk sergeant and into a waiting room.

  When a uniformed officer walks in, his resemblance to Clete hits me like a ton of bricks. For some reason, I assumed all this time that the cop would have been an older Raynard, but this one is younger than Clete. Not by a lot, maybe, but enough.

  “Miss Harper?” His greeting is careful, and so are his beady, dark eyes.

  “Yes.”

  I say a quick, fervent prayer that the area police departments don’t share information about local whackadoos who spend way too much time playing detective. Because if so, Officer Dunleavy at Charleston and Travis at Heron Creek have definitely started a file on me.

  But Officer Raynard doesn’t seem affected by my name. For once, paranoia loses.

  “I’m Officer Raynard. How can I help you?”

  “You’re…” I trail off, deciding that bringing up an errant relative might not be the best way to ingratiate myself to a cop. “I was hoping to talk to the person who investigated the death of Harlan Boone two-plus years ago.”

  “That was me. Do you mind if I ask what your interest is?”

  I lick my lips and send a silent apology to the Draytons. “I work for the family’s law firm and we’re still trying to close out the estate. I was hoping you could clear up a couple of things to help us accomplish that.”

  He looks me over. I probably should have dressed the part, instead of showing up in a pair of jeans, a sweater, and boots. To be fair, my outfit is cute and clean, not sloppy. Business casual?

  “Such as…?”

  At least he’s not kicking me out right away.

  “Our records state that an autopsy was done, but there’s no copy of the report other than a summary that states it was ruled an accident. Is there any more information you can provide me?”

  “It was the first dead body I ever saw, so I’ll never forget it. I could give you more details than you could possibly want.” He looks a little green about the gills, squeamish at the mere memory of something that probably wouldn’t have blipped Clete’s radar.

  And my curiosity as to how they’re related grows.

  “But there wasn’t much more to it than that. He had a heart attack, a massive one. He had a blunt force trauma to the head, sure, but there was blood on the rocks gathered at the edge of the pond. Pretty uncomplicated, really.”

  Wow. A heart attack, slipped and fell. How can Darla Boone continue to blame poor Leo?

  “Is there a chance that he’d be alive if someone were there?”

  He stops and thinks a minute on that, but then shakes his head with a certainty that’s convincing enough. “No. If I remember correctly, the coroner said he was dead before he slipped under the water. Nothing in his lungs.”

  My brain gets stuck on the horrid image and falters. Tears threaten.

  “Anything else?” he prods after a couple of minutes of silence.

  I taste blood and realize I’ve been chewing on my bottom lip harder than usual. It just doesn’t make sense that Darla Boone would cause this kind of rift in her family over an accident, even if Leo had been standing right there beside his father, which he hadn’t been. Hell, the same sort of accident could have happened even if Harlan had never left Heron Creek Heating and Cooling.

  Maybe not so gruesome, but he’d still be dead.

  “No, I don’t think so,” I mutter, realizing I still never answered his question.

  His eyebrows, which had been knitted together, spring apart. I can see him dismiss me, erase this whole meaningless encounter from his memory bank, and relief rolls through me. The last thing I need is Birdie Drayton on my ass for making her firm look bad, or for it to turn out this cop is in cahoots with Clete and tip him off to…whatever.

  “Oh, one more question…” I bite my lip again, wincing when I hit the sore spot. I’m probably going to regret bringing it up, but I just can’t leave without knowing. “Are you related to Clete Raynard?”

  He closes his eyes, and the color drains from his face. His body goes rigid, displaying toned muscles beneath his police blues. When he looks at me, he’s under control. Too much control. “He’s my half-brother. But we’ve never met. If and when we do come face-to-face for the first time, it will be with a pair of handcuffs in my hand.”

  “Fair enough.” I force a smile. “Thanks for your time.”

  “Why do you ask?”

  The question stops me with one hand on the door. I think about lying but decide there’s no point. Even if Officer Raynard—Earl, according to his nametag—hasn’t talked to the Heron Creek PD before now, if I give him some vague answer, it’s a sure bet he’ll make some calls after I leave.

  I turn halfway, enough to meet his eye. “I know him from Heron Creek, that’s all. We’ve run into each other on some previous cases. He’s missing now, though. Cops can’t find him. No one can, from what I hear.”

  Earl Raynard could be caught off-guard. He could be concerned by the idea that his flesh and blood, no matter how at odds with the law and their family, has disappeared. He could be happy to never have to make that call.

  But I have no idea if any or all of those are true, because his face is blank. For a minute, I think he’s going to leave without saying a word, but then he folds his arms over his chest and makes eye contact.

  “Little girl, if you knew my half-brother, you’d surely realize that the whole world would be a safer place if no one finds him again, not ever.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  I decide to use more of my free day to try to put an end to this Harlan Boone mystery once and for all. Officer Raynard’s parting words have verified that my decision to stay away from the Nantahala National Forest until I make sure my mother isn’t trying to warn me away, at least, is a good one.

  There’s some relief in having that decided. It’s short-lived, because now that I’m sitting in the driveway at the house where Leo, Lindsay, and their brothers grew up, it’s hard not to feel as if I have zero right to go in there and demand answers from a woman who lost her husband and, it seems, is still grieving.

  Then the ghost of Harlan Boone shows up in my passenger seat, a little damp and infecting me with nerves and sorrow in quick succession. I raise my eyebrow at him after recovering from the initial shock.

  “Well? Are you here because I’m on the right track or because you want me to leave your wife alone?”

  He holds up a finger, but not to point. Like the number one.

  “The first one?” It’s confirmation that coming to talk to Darla is the right move, which should give me the boost I need to get out of the car. But since his ghost has not yet adiosed, I stay. This is the most face time I’ve gotten with him. “You know, I was starting to think you’d lost confidence in me, disappearing like that.”

  He makes a face that should accompany a scoff, but it doesn’t
. I can never hear the dead talk, so our communication is limited to non-verbal cues. Then he reaches over and fake punches me in the arm, the way an older brother or a father would to a daughter who’s being particularly insecure for no reason.

  “I know, I know. I’m obviously the best ghost-whisperer in all of Heron Creek.” I laugh at my own joke and he smiles. I knew he would like that. “Seriously, though…is it just your family, Harlan? Are you here because you want them to put all of this ugliness behind them?”

  He puts a finger on his nose, but I would have known it was a correct guess anyway. Intense sorrow pours into me, filling me up all the way to my head. For the second time that day, in the presence of a second Boone, tears course down my cheeks.

  I wish I could put a hand over his without feeling as if I’m going to break from the cold. Instead, I nod and smile. “I’ll do my best. You know that Leo doesn’t deserve the way they’ve treated him.”

  His expression turns reproachful. He gestures toward the modest house where he brought up his kids, then presses a hand to his heart.

  I frown. “I know, I know. Be nice to Darla. She’s had a rough time, too.”

  He nods again. Looks hopeful. I do not want to be the person to let him down, not now that I’ve figured this out, so I do my best to rearrange my attitude. To forget for a moment that Darla has spent years basically torturing one of the best guys I know and put myself in her shoes.

  She lost her husband. He went to work one morning and never came home. They didn’t get to say goodbye, not for real. Maybe they fought and she’s stuck in that awful stage of grief where you obsess over everything you wish you could have done differently. The point, Harlan seems to be reminding me, is that we never really know what’s going on in a person’s head unless we ask.

  So that’s exactly what I intend to do.

  “Okay, Harlan.” My voice is soft now, and he raises his eyes to my face. Whatever he sees causes him to relax, smile, and then to point into the house again. I chuckle. “I’m going. But I can’t promise any of this is going to fix the problem between Leo and Lindsay and the rest of the family.”

  The ghost nods, trying and failing to toy with the gear shift in Amelia’s car. All at once, I realize that he never really explained how he came across the garnet he gave me, and this might be the last time I see him.

  “Hey, why did you give me that garnet? Did someone tell you to?”

  I’m thinking it was my mother, and maybe even that Harlan is the second presence Daria sensed with her spirit. But I don’t know how this stuff works, not really.

  He frowns. Looks out the window and then back toward me, frustration tightening the skin over his cheekbones. In his Boone-blue eyes swirls a mixture of impotence and regret, with maybe a bit of apology thrown in for good measure.

  He doesn’t nod. Doesn’t shake his head no. With one last, long look, he just disappears.

  “Well, that was weird,” I say aloud to the now-empty car. Having a ghost in my car is not that strange for me anymore, but if I read him correctly, Harlan wanted to answer me and couldn’t. Why?

  I wish more than ever that I had Daria’s set of skills and could hear the ghosts speak. Or that she was here so she could do it for me. Some of the ghosts have been able to show me images of the past to help me decipher their intent, but Harlan hadn’t done that, either.

  My guess is that he doesn’t know how. He was a no-nonsense type in life. All this haphazard haunting is probably killing him. Again.

  Harlan Boone loves his family, but I’d bet good money that once he sees they’re living harmoniously without him—or that he’s done everything he can to make that happen—none of us are going to see or hear from him again.

  The curtains move on the front of the house, pulling open a couple of inches before falling back into place. I’ve been spotted. No going back now.

  The gravel driveway is muddy, slipping under my boots as I make my way up to the porch. The front door swings open before I can knock, revealing Darla Boone. Her hair isn’t washed and her bathrobe hangs open over a pair of paint-stained yoga pants and a ratty sweatshirt that’s at least two sizes too big. Harlan’s.

  The sight of her makes my promise to Harlan’s ghost easier to keep. She’s clearly struggling, even after all this time, and it wouldn’t be fair of me to barge in here accusing her of telling the lies that estranged her son and daughter from the rest of the family. The hard set of her jaw and the flash of defiance in her eyes says it also wouldn’t be effective.

  The Boone children got their eyes and their big hearts from their father, but there’s never been a single doubt in my mind that their miles-wide stubborn streaks come from the diminutive woman standing in front of me.

  “What do you want, Graciela Harper?”

  “Can I come in?”

  She watches me for several more seconds, her arms folded over her chest. “Maybe. Answer my question first.”

  If I wasn’t freezing my tits off, I would be amused by how much she looks like Lindsay when she goes into Leo-protective mode.

  “I want to talk to you about Harlan’s autopsy.”

  A flicker dashes through her gaze, almost too quick to catch. Fear.

  She backs away from the door, leaving it open in what I take to be a silent invitation. I step over the threshold and close it behind me, thankful that the living room feels warm on my cheeks and fingers.

  Darla wanders forward and into the kitchen, disappearing from sight without a word. I look around, acclimating, then bend down to slip out of my damp, muddy boots. Once that’s done, I stand there all awkward and unsure because my grandmother raised me to have Southern manners and there’s been no official invitation further into the house. Here, on the small tile square that counts as an entryway, no actual intrusion has been made.

  “If we’re going to do this, I need a drink,” Darla drawls. “Come on into the kitchen, and stop lurking in the doorway like a criminal.”

  I roll my eyes. This whole lurking in doorways thing must be a thing with the older crowd.

  The light in the kitchen is low. Darla’s at the table, a steaming mug of coffee in front of her, another in front of the chair opposite, and a bottle of Bailey’s in between them. It’s barely lunch time, but this doesn’t look like her first drink. As someone who has a little experience with using booze to cope with emotions, the signs are worrying. Has this been going on for the past three years? Compassion trumps my initial reaction to learning that Darla has allowed Leo to be ostracized despite knowing he wasn’t responsible for Harlan’s death.

  I sit and pull the cup of coffee toward me, wrapping my cold fingers around the mug. “No thanks,” I say when she pushes the bottle of Bailey’s my direction.

  She shrugs and dumps more in her own cup, then takes a long drink. “The autopsy results weren’t public.”

  “They aren’t. I haven’t seen it, but you’re not the only one who knows it exists. And the gist of it—” I wait until she looks at me. “—is that Harlan had a heart attack before he fell in the pond. The cops even told his old boss that much.”

  She sighs and drops her gaze. Her shoulders are slumped and the folded-in posture tugs at my heartstrings. Darla Boone looks sad and defeated and not at all like the adversary I had prepared myself to confront on the forty-minute drive from the police station in Folly Beach.

  “Darla…” I prod when she doesn’t respond.

  “I know it’s not Leo’s fault,” she whispers. “But he should have been there. Harlan shouldn’t have been…he shouldn’t have been alone.”

  “You were mad about him quitting his job to strike out with Leo,” I supply.

  She nods. “We were so close to finally getting our heads above water, with all of the kids out of the house. We were going to take a vacation, just the two of us. Maybe even to Paris.”

  “But.”

  “But then he gave up his steady paycheck and invested our vacation money in the business with Leo. They were so excite
d but I knew it was a mistake. Just knew it.”

  Her voice is tight and scratchy and horrible to listen to. The weight and sorrow in it brings back a flood of my own grief over the loss of Grams and then Gramps and, if I’m totally honest about it, even Felicia. The pain is not raw like it was, and the grief no longer sits near enough to lunge out for a bite at the most unexpected moments, but watching her—listening to her—makes it impossible to not feel it all over again.

  And part of what she said at first, before she started to rail, sticks out like a sore thumb.

  “It’s awful that he was alone. Awful.” The thought of Gramps not having us there, of Grams being alone in her last moments, rolls my stomach into a ball. “But it’s not fair that you’re letting the other kids punish Leo. That you’re leaving him alone, too.”

  “I know.”

  “They think he could have had something to do with it,” I remind her, my own throat thick. “His guilt is so massive it’s taken over his life in some ways. I think he believes he could have changed things, but we both know better.”

  “I know.”

  “If you know, how are you okay with letting this go on?” My anger is coming back now, full force. Harlan’s hangdog face edges into my thoughts, reminding me of his wishes, of the reason I’m here to begin with, and I suck in a deep breath. Count to ten. Then do it again.

  Darla regards me with her chin jutted out. “They’re grown. I don’t tell them what to think.”

  “Maybe not, but you also didn’t tell them about the autopsy.”

  She toys with her mug. “I think it was easier since we weren’t talking before it happened. Leo was already on the outside looking in, and I don’t know…I guess I blamed him for Harlan being there that day. For a while, it helped me make sense of the randomness of him being taken away from me.”

  “And now?”

  “I don’t know how to say I’m sorry for something so horrible, not even to my own boy. Lindsay doesn’t even want me to see my granddaughter, and little Marcella is missing out on a whole family full of cousins who would love to know her.”