by Sage Parker
THE BEACHSIDE CAFE
SALTWATER SECRETS BOOK 2
SAGE PARKER
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Copyright © 2020 by Sage Parker
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without prior written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
The book is a work of fiction. The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
Books by Sage Parker
About the Author
ONE
Jaymee Lent stood just inside the open double glass doors that led to the terrace of her café, which was enjoying its first day, a Grand Opening that was, by Jaymee’s standards, extremely successful.
The place was packed. The Saltwater Café grand opening had kicked off with a line out the door and down the street. Not too far but far enough to make an impression on people driving by. They surely saw the interest and would hopefully be back later to try out the new restaurant on the beautiful California coast.
Jaymee ran her eyes from one side to another, excited to see that several adults and children were circled around her cylindrical saltwater fish tank, which was her pride and joy. It was something she’d always wanted to add to the restaurant she’d vowed to own one day.
Now, Jaymee had her café, all arranged by her husband Doug. Thinking about Doug made Jaymee’s chest tense. Her husband had disappeared nearly two weeks ago. Jaymee and their daughter, Cheyenne, were living their lives day to day, constantly looking for him, searching through crowds for his face, listening for his voice.
Unfortunately for Jaymee, her desire to find Doug wasn’t for the same reason as her daughter’s. She had come to suspect foul play, not just because Doug had disappeared without a trace whatsoever, but also the fact that she’d been sent a video that seemed to show Doug making a blackmail request of someone named “Marty” and had found a mysterious vial of clear liquid under his dresser that turned out to be a paralyzing drug.
Jaymee had taken over all responsibility for running the café and seeing that the grand opening actually happened. She was blessed with the presence of one of the investors, Cameron Smith, who had come searching for Doug the very day he’d gone missing. He’d come for an appointment and stayed for the mystery.
She had that part of their family business covered but Doug’s business, investments in stocks and bonds, was well beyond her range of expertise. In fact, she knew very little about the business, and Cameron, though he knew some, was not anywhere near qualified enough to take over Doug’s business accounts.
As the CEO of his own company and working out of his office at home, Doug had delegated many tasks to others over the years, including getting a second-in-command, Tommy Wilkinson. It was Tommy who took over that part of the family business, including the accounting for both personal and company finances.
Jaymee’s cell phone vibrated in her pocket. She could barely hear it over the chatter in her café. She smiled at everything and everyone around her, pride filling her heart, putting the phone to her ear as she turned to go out on the terrace where it was quieter.
“Hello?”
“Mrs. Lent?”
Jaymee was beginning to dislike being called by that last name. She didn’t want it anymore. She was considering going back to her maiden name – Mason – if she decided to divorce Doug, which she was coming close to doing. She only needed one more push – just a little more proof that Doug was a blackmailing scumbag – to file the papers.
“Yes?”
“It’s Tommy Wilkinson, Mrs. Lent.”
“Please call me Jaymee,” she said hurriedly.
“Yes, of course. I… I need to speak with you. It’s rather urgent.”
“Is everything okay?” Confusion and suspicion ran through Jaymee. She had the feeling what he had to tell her was not going to sit well with her. She could hear it in his voice – that reluctant tone people used when they had bad news they didn’t want to share.
“No, I really don’t think so. I don’t want to talk about it on the phone, though. I need to show you something. Are you available to come back to the office?”
“I’m at the grand opening for my café. I can’t leave. Please come by here and we’ll talk.”
“That sounds good. I’ll grab a bite to eat, too. Contribute to your business.”
Jaymee grinned. “That sounds good. How soon do you plan to come by?”
“I’ll be there pretty soon. I just have to wrap some stuff up here and get this stuff copied to a flash drive.”
“All right. I’ll see you in twenty or so.”
“Okay.”
Jaymee pushed the end button on her phone and looked down at it. That was strange. It made her feel awkward, like something would probably happen to him before he had a chance to tell her what was going on. She wished Cameron was there to talk to about it. She wanted him to be there for the meeting.
She turned back to the inside portion of the café and walked back to the double doors. She passed over the threshold and weaved through the tables toward the front door. She would wait for him there so she would see him easily when he came in.
“Mrs. Lent? Jaymee?”
She stopped at one of the tables when an older woman she knew as Mrs. Helen Drysdale lifted one hand and waved to her with a smile on her face.
“Hello, Mrs. Drysdale,” she said pleasantly, a warm feeling passing through her from the friendly woman in front of her.
“Oh, darling, you have done an amazing job with this place!” the woman gushed, grabbing Jaymee’s wrist and squeezing lightly. “You know, I used to come here in the late 70’s when the building was first put up. It was a disco back then, you know. A small one but very popular! I love what you’ve done and the fish tank is absolutely lovely.”
“Oh, thank you so much.” Jaymee felt tears misting over her eyes. Her smile was so big it hurt her cheeks. She patted the older woman’s hand on her wrist just before Mrs. Drysdale let go.
“I’ll just have you know Charles and I are going to come here all the time. And we’re going to bring friends. And the next time our relatives are in town, we will bring them all here.”
“That is so wonderful of you, thank you so much. My father always said word of mouth is the best kind of advertisement.”
“Your father was a wise man, my dear. A wise man.”
Jaymee looked at the front door just as Cameron came walking through. A tingle ran through her that she tried to deny. Her eyes flipped back down to Mrs. Drysdale.
“I see someone I must talk to. Thank you again for the compliment and I do hope you and all of your relatives enjoy my place. You are always welcome here!”
>
“Thank you, dear. We’ll be back. Wonderful grand opening!”
Jaymee thanked her again before hurrying toward Cameron, who saw her coming and smiled wide.
“There she is!” Cameron said loudly. “The hostess with the mostest.”
Jaymee laughed, a feeling of pleasant delight slipping into her chest and settling there like a warm blanket. “Why, thank you, kind sir,” she said. “Have you any news?”
“I might. We need to sit down. Do you have time?”
“I’ll make time,” Jaymee said, turning to head toward the booth she and Cameron usually sat in. It was free so that’s where she chose. She spoke over her shoulder. “Tommy Wilkinson is on his way here to speak to me, too. He called just a few minutes ago. He’ll be here in about ten minutes probably.”
“What does he want?”
They slid into the seats facing each other and Jaymee looked directly in Cameron’s blue eyes, silently admiring how handsome he was. “He says there’s something he needs to show me. It didn’t sound good. In fact, I think it’s so bad he doesn’t even want to tell me about it.”
“That really doesn’t sound good at all.”
“That’s what I thought, too. I want you to sit in on the meeting if you will.”
“Of course, I will. No problem.”
She gave him a warm smile. “Thanks, Cameron. I knew I could depend on you.”
TWO
Tommy arrived just fifteen minutes after his call.
Jaymee spotted him and stood up with one finger up in the air. He walked toward the table, his narrow eyes moving between Jaymee and Cameron. He looked incredibly nervous.
“Mrs. Le… Jaymee. I thought… we might want to speak in private. This is… very sensitive information.”
Jaymee nodded, moving to the other side of the bench to sit next to Cameron. She gestured to the side of the booth she’d been sitting in. “Please. This is a good friend and someone who is helping me with this whole situation. We can speak freely in front of him. In fact, he should probably hear about it first-hand from you so it doesn’t go through me. You know how that game goes, Telephone, where someone tells someone something and by the time it gets to the end of the line, it’s something completely different?”
Tommy slid into the seat, setting his large, thin briefcase on the table nearest to the wall. “Your call, Ma’am. This isn’t good news, I’m afraid. I found… some things on Doug’s computer that he was obviously trying to hide. A hidden folder titled Cheyenne protected by a series of numbers, a password I just happened to find in the back of one of the drawers on a piece of sticky note paper.”
Jaymee sucked in a sharp breath. “I saw that!” she said, turning to Cameron. “Didn’t I show you that sticky note? I meant to. Do you remember it?”
Cameron looked contemplative and then shook his head. “Not that I remember.”
“Either way, I’m glad I left it there,” Jaymee said, returning her attention to Tommy. “What’s in this hidden folder?”
“It contains a lot of… information… well, here, you can see it for yourself. I brought my laptop and saved everything on the folder to a zip drive and then put it on this flash drive. That’s for safety, in case something happens to his computer. Which…” Tommy looked around him as if someone might be listening in and they might be in danger. “I have to say, with him missing and no one knowing where he is… I figure there’s at least a chance something might happen to that thing.”
Cameron narrowed his eyes and spoke in a voice that made Jaymee’s skin light up with tingles. She turned her head abruptly to look at him. “Are you saying he might have disappeared on his own and is hiding out?”
Tommy had pulled his laptop out and set the briefcase on the booth seat next to him. He opened it and pushed the flash drive in the side. Then he spun the laptop around and pointed with his finger at the keyboard, his eyes on Jaymee.
“You know what you’re looking at. You pull open that file and see why I think he might have disappeared on purpose.”
Chills lit up Jaymee’s skin as she stared at the laptop screen. Her finger hovered over the mouse pad before she touched it, sliding the cursor to the flash drive and clicking on it.
The folder that opened up revealed six internal folders of their own. They were labeled with a first name and last name initial. Jaymee glanced at Cameron, who was leaning over to see the laptop screen. He turned his eyes to her, looking apprehensive.
Jaymee moved the cursor to the first folder, which was titled Martin G. She clicked on it and a new box popped up with varying documents, all very small icons with the name of the document next to it.
Clicking on the first document of the four that were there, she brought up on the screen a list of numbers in a word document. One column appeared to be dates. Another was a series of numbers with dollar signs in front of them.
After that, there were several columns with what appeared to be a code as it was random numbers and letters that made no sense to Jaymee.
“Ugh,” Cameron said. “That doesn’t look good.”
Jaymee looked up at Tommy over the laptop. “What do you make of this?”
Tommy shook his head. “If you went into the first folder first like I did and brought up that first document, I’m here to tell you I have an idea what that looks like to me.”
“It looks like payments of some kind,” Cameron said. “Was he doing business with this man?”
“Not that I knew of,” Tommy said. “But then again, I know most of his business associates through last name, not first name. This seems more intimate than that.”
Cameron looked thoughtful. “And by intimate you mean…”
Tommy looked from one to the other and said in a low voice, “I think it was something else… something personal. Like blackmail.”
Jaymee felt a thud in her chest. This was the nail in the coffin. If Tommy could suggest such a thing about the man he’d been working with for nearly the last decade, it was all the proof she needed to make her decision. She wasn’t pursuing Doug to put their family back together now. She was pursuing him to put him behind bars.
She wondered how deep he was in the criminal world. She wondered if he was guilty of crimes much worse than blackmail.
It gave her chills to think about it. He was a very wealthy man. He could do almost anything he wanted. Maybe he had a life she didn’t know anything about.
Her thoughts became overwhelming. She couldn’t believe she had been so stupid. She clicked on other documents and looked at pictures of people in labs and close-ups of vials that looked similar to the one she’d found under the dresser. None of it made sense to her.
The other five folders were labeled
Brian O
Dylan L
Amanda D
Carmine R
Daniel C
Cameron looked at her. “Any of these names sound familiar to you?”
Jaymee thought about it for a moment, trying to remember if she’d been introduced to anyone by these names but she eventually shook her head. “No. If I was ever introduced to someone he worked with, I wasn’t given their first names. He just wasn’t a close man who would reference people by their first names. Everything was formal and upper class.”
Cameron nodded.
For some reason, Jaymee felt ashamed. What kind of man had she married? How could she have been so blind?
She pulled in a deep breath and kept clicking, taking in all the folders, all the documents and videos and pictures. The only thing that was missing from each folder was an actual picture, address or contact information for the person whose name was the folder label.
“We’re going to have to find these people on our own. But how?” She gave Cameron a desperate look.
“What are you planning?” Tommy asked, putting out one hand to take the laptop back. Jaymee kept her hands on the sides.
“I think we’ll be keeping this, Tommy. Cameron and I are going to sort through whatever this is.
We’ll find out what’s going on.”
Tommy nodded. “I understand why you’d want to do that. I would, too.”
His drink came and Tommy thanked the waitress. He looked down at it in surprise and then up at Jaymee. “I didn’t order a drink. Is this on the house?”
Jaymee nodded. “It’s the grand opening special. A tasty tropical drink made with fruit juices. Everyone gets one for free today. Just one. As long as they sit down and enjoy the atmosphere.”
“Well, that’s very nice of you.”
Jaymee wasn’t feeling very complimentary at that moment. Her heart was heavy when she looked at the folders and the pictures, not understanding any of it.
What was Doug into? What kind of drugs were being manufactured in the labs on those videos? Who was Doug blackmailing?
The questions just kept running through her mind. She dropped her head to her hand, pressing her thumb and index finger against her forehead. A headache was forming. “Oh, I just can’t believe this,” she whispered. “I can’t believe it. This is a nightmare.”
She looked up at Tommy. “I’m sorry. Please excuse me. Enjoy the drink. Order if you like.”
She slid out of the booth and went across the lobby to the terrace. She needed some fresh air. She felt a little faint.
Jaymee went to the railing at the end of the terrace. It was her favorite spot to be. There was always a gentle breeze blowing through the mountains that flanked the ocean as it stretched out in front of her. They were in the distance but somehow created a tunnel like effect that she absolutely loved.
THREE
Cameron was by her side moments later. She was grateful for his company.