The Edge

by Bill Noel

  Charles looked at me and shrugged. “I appreciate your position, Mrs. Klein. I guess we need to be going.”

  “Thanks for visiting,” she said. “Good luck finding somewhere to live.”

  Before she closed the door, she said, “Come back some day after 5:30—I’ll share a jigger of Maker’s with you.”

  We said we would and headed out.

  As soon as we reached the sand-covered parking lot, Charles turned to me, put his hat on, and said, “Did you know dear Joseph worked for the circus?”

  I slapped him with my Tilley.

  CHAPTER 34

  A cool front had lowered the temperature, but it was still in the eighties. The walkway to the beach was packed with surfers leaving the waves and college students from Charleston heading to the beach with their coolers; whiffs of suntan lotion trailed many of them. A couple of coeds carried orange boom boxes blaring the latest hits. I assumed they were the latest hits; they sounded like Cindy’s hogs being slaughtered. Thankfully, my hearing wasn’t what it used to be; but it was still better than Mrs. Klein’s.

  We had crossed Arctic Avenue and began walking up Center Street to the gallery. Coming toward us was the unmistakable wide-brimmed straw hat, with Heather Lee enjoying its shade. Instead of her bright yellow sequined blouse from the jamboree, she was wrapped in an off-white outfit that looked like a cross between medical scrubs and a karate keikogi.

  As usual, Charles took the lead. “Hey, Heather,” he said, “Great job on ‘Sweet Dreams’ the other night. Ole Patsy never did it any better.”

  Heather, who didn’t know us from the president of Peru, didn’t need a formal introduction after Charles’s comment. She beamed and took a demure curtsy. “Why, thank you, kind sir.”

  “Coming from work?” he asked.

  She was looking at my friend; her brow was wrinkled. She couldn’t place Charles but knew she must know him from somewhere. “Just got off work from Milli’s. I can give massages for only so long in one shift. I’m strong, but it takes a toll on my hands and arms. Heading to the beach to do some divining.”

  “Witch-hazel or metal rod?” asked Charles.

  “I prefer willow,” she said.

  First Harley, now Heather. Dude, come help me translate.

  “Since you’re heading to the beach,” continued Charles, “I’m guessing you’re not looking for water.”

  Heather laughed like that was the funniest thing she’d heard all day. “I started divining in front of my boardinghouse for coins in the sand. Even found a man’s ring last week.” She paused, looked around her, and whispered, “My house is haunted … umm, and I’ve followed the ghost out the side door and to the beach. He’s always making creaky noises in the house, but I think his psychic core is in the sand near the dunes.” She looked at Charles and over at me. “The ghosts are moving on, getting out while the getting’s good.”

  “It sounds like there’s more than ghosts in the house,” said Charles. “Are you scared of the killer? I’d be if I lived there.”

  “Not really,” she said. “I’m protected by crystals in the room. And there’s a cop living behind me. I’m protected. Besides, the killer’s gone.”

  “Gone?” I asked.

  “He moved the other day. Name’s Travis, Travis Green.” Her freckles moved closer together as she wrinkled her nose. “I told the Sheriff’s Department Gestapo about him. They said they’d get him—not to worry.”

  “Why do you think it’s him?” I asked.

  “Easy,” she said. “He lived across from me. His door hit mine when they opened at the same time. He called me a nutcase and said my singing gave him a headache. He did it.” She snapped her fingers. “Oh, I almost forgot, I saw a demonic apparition leaving his room Monday at three in the morning.”

  “Yeah,” said Charles, as close to speechless as I’ve seen him.

  Heather looked at the sky and then back to Charles. “Got to go; burning daylight; ghost’s psychic core is waiting.”

  “Think the ghosts are moving because of the killings?” asked Charles.

  “Maybe … maybe not,” she said and pushed the brim of her hat off her forehead. “Probably some other reason; after all, they’re already dead, aren’t they?”

  Hard to argue with that, I thought.

  She looked at her watch and said, “Ya’ll come to the jamboree Tuesday. I’ll sing a special song for you.”

  Heather skipped off toward her haunted home.

  We continued our walk to the gallery. “There you go,” said Charles as he looked over his shoulder toward the beach. “Case closed. A brilliant detective and cute as a button to boot.”

  I had unlocked the gallery door when Charles said, “Whoa. We need to go back.”

  “Where … why?”

  “Mrs. Klein’s. Didn’t she say there were private storage cubes for each of the renters?”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “So, after hearing her opinion of cops, think she might have forgotten to tell them about the cubes? She only told us when she shared how her dear husband deprived her of her spacious home on the beach and turned it into a pen for the indigent.”

  It didn’t matter what I thought; Charles had already started the steamy walk back. I followed at a slower pace. He stopped before crossing Arctic near the Edge. “I’ll go in alone,” he said. “I can find out what we need, and I won’t be tempted to fill out an application for us to move in.”

  Why didn’t he say that before I trekked all the way back? I told him I’d wait at the Holiday Inn. He said, “Good plan, or you could go out on the beach and help Heather divine for the ghost’s core.”

  I was lucky enough to find a seat in air-conditioned comfort in a spot overlooking the outdoor pool. It was near the end of the season, and the pool was nearly empty. The only children were preschool age and didn’t seem to have a care in the world. I briefly wondered what their world would be like when they grew up.

  CHAPTER 35

  Charles stood over me, shaking my chair. I didn’t know how long I’d been asleep. There was a large cardboard box on the floor beside him, a Bonterra Vineyards logo plastered on the side. If the box was to be believed, it had held eight bottles of Mendocino County Cabernet Sauvignon made with organically grown grapes. Charles grinned as he pulled the vacant chair near me and plopped down. He was a dedicated beer drinker, so I detected that his smile wasn’t because he had hijacked a case of wine—organically grown or not.

  “First, the bad news,” he began. His smile was still intact. “Mrs. Klein still won’t rent to us.”

  I couldn’t tell if I was relieved or wanted to grab his cane and smack him across his thick skull. Instead of doing either, I waited for the good news. And wait, I had to do. He told me two stories that Mrs. Klein had shared about her late, dear Joseph, who air-conditioned all his theaters to bring in customers year-round and invented his own “secret formula” popcorn salt. I was beginning to worry that Charles was going to go off on a tangent about what president attended a movie at one of dear Joseph’s movie houses. Heather’s ghost must have been smiling down—or up—on me; Charles got around to the wine box.

  He leaned closer, looked around the hotel to make sure no one was eavesdropping, and then, in a much lower voice, continued, “Now the good news.”

  Thank God.

  “Mrs. Klein told me that the week before Pat Rowland was killed, she had knocked on the landlord’s door and asked if she could come in.” Charles continued to look around. “Mrs. Klein was surprised since this was really the first time Pat had talked to her since moving in; or, as Mrs. Klein put it, ‘the first time she remembered Pat talking to her.’”

  “Before 5:30,” I said.

  “Must have been,” said Charles. “Anyway, Pat asked Mrs. Klein if she had somewhere she could store this.” Charle
s nodded toward the box on the floor. “Mrs. Klein told her, sure, each room has one storage bin, and she could put it there. Mrs. Klein said that Pat didn’t seem interested until she told her that the bin had a lock and only she and Pat would have the combination. That appeased Pat.

  “Did Mrs. Klein tell the police about the box?” I asked. “I assume they asked her about Pat’s room and other stuff she may have had.”

  “I asked her.” He smiled. “She told me the ‘terrible, blankity-blank, pissant new chief of police King’ pushed his way into her apartment and demanded that she open ‘poor Pat’s door,’ and that she ‘damned well better do it now!’” Charles giggled. “And I won’t tell you what she said instead of blankity-blank—I hadn’t heard one of them myself; circus lingo, maybe.”

  “She didn’t tell him about it?” I asked.

  “She said he told her to open Pat’s door, and that’s exactly what she did. She said he had interrupted her cocktail hour. She also said that two other holier-than-thou detectives from the Sheriff’s Department also demanded that she let them into Pat’s room.” Charles paused and cocked his head in the direction of the boardinghouse. “Don’t think Mrs. Klein’s a big contributor to the police benevolent fund.”

  I looked at the box, then at the kids playing in the pool, and then back to Charles. “Instead of giving a box of possible evidence to the police, Mrs. Klein just gave it to a disheveled, allegedly gay, tenant-reject carrying a cane.”

  “Of course not,” he said in mock exasperation. “I told her how great a detective my friend was, and if I was straight, she’d be at the top of my A-list to come a courtin’. She walked over to her refrigerator, took out a tin recipe box, took out a coffee-stained note card, looked at the card, and said, ‘Down the hall, third door on the right, door’s unlocked, last box on the right, 17 right, 7 left, 4 right.’”

  During my nap, I had become a great detective, and Charles had turned gay!

  We brilliantly decided that the public area of the Folly Beach Holiday Inn wasn’t the best location to start rooting through a box owned by the late Pat Rowland and secured by means that could easily be construed as ill-achieved. Charles carried the box and I followed as we walked up Center Street to the gallery. My imagination was in high gear. I could almost see everybody we passed looking at the box like it contained a knot of vipers. Maybe it did.

  CHAPTER 36

  Pat Rowland may have been a fantastic detective; she may have done superb work for wealthy horse-farm owners and Arab sheiks; but her organizational skills were one step below sucky. After ten minutes of wading through the pile of papers from the Bonterra box, I wished it still contained the original bottles of cabernet. Unless the papers were organized by fiber content or type font, we couldn’t find any semblance of order. Most of the items were receipts from gas stations, motels, a few restaurants, and a couple of clothing stores.

  We sat at the rickety table in the office at Landrum Gallery. My preference was to take the box to the house, but Charles reminded me that we had a gallery to run and he didn’t want to deprive anxious shoppers the chance to buy photographs to adorn their walls. I said, “Whatever.”

  Charles shuffled a handful of gasoline receipts. “I thought I was disorganized. This crapola makes me look like the guy who taught Dewey how to organize his decimal system,” he said.

  “You are disorganized,” I said, “but you’re right about this.”

  The front bell gave me a welcome break from piecing together Pat’s puzzle. A vacationer from Dayton had returned from an earlier visit and bought a framed photo of Folly’s iconic Morris Island Lighthouse. I rang up the purchase, thanked the customer, and grudgingly realized that Charles had been right about giving customers a chance to spend their money.

  I returned to the office to listen to my sales manager say he told me so and to see his effort to organize Pat’s papers. Six stacks were in front of him.

  “Most of the receipts came from five cities plus Lexington,” he said and nodded to the pile closest to me. “Those are from Myrtle Beach; those from Savannah; that small group from Columbia; those from Atlanta; and this one from Charleston and Folly.” He pointed to each group as he said the name of the city.

  He still had about an inch-high pile in front of him. “And those?” I asked as I joined into the pointing game.

  “Still working on it,” he said and handed me a book from the top of the stack. “You figure this out; I’ll wade through these.” He looked back at the remaining items.

  The book was the size of a standard hardcover novel but half as thick. The faux-leather cover was blank, as were most of the pages. It reminded me of a small sketchbook found in art supply stores. My guess was that Pat used it as a ledger and time sheet to bill clients. About half the pages had names, dates, and a column of times, with hours written to be billed. At the bottom of each page, she had written dollar amounts with a date beside each—some were noted as paid with cash, but most listed a check number. The gurus in the accounting department at my former employer would have gone into cardiac arrest if I turned in records like these; but if it worked for Pat, who was I to argue.

  Pat wasn’t around to explain her system, so I made assumptions. The last six pages began with the name Stewart Barlow. The name was underlined three times. Her organizational skills were lacking, but her penmanship was excellent. Of course, compared to mine, the writing of a dyslexic chimp would be excellent. The script was tiny but legible. The pages were unlined, but the writing was meticulous. Beside Barlow’s name was two addresses in Lexington; one was on Main Street, so I guessed it was a business. Three phone numbers were next, followed by a date from last December. After the date, Pat had penned, “Missing: $30,000, 2 paintings, SS and passport. Timothy Bussy, Peter Loy, Lawrence Craft.”

  I turned to Charles. “When do the receipts from the five cities begin?”

  “Aha,” he said, “I knew that was coming.” He had a sly grin on his face and pointed to the pile from Atlanta. “January 3.”

  “Are all the receipts from Atlanta from about the same time?” I asked.

  “Yep,” he nodded. “Hotels, gas, restaurants, two from pawnshops; all January.”

  In her ledger she had written “$20,000 (cash!) retainer” after Barlow’s phone numbers and immediately under it she had “$9,000 exp./150 hrs. at $60.” To the right of that, she had a double line with “11,000 bal.”

  “So?” Charles asked.

  I explained that it would appear that Mr. Barlow had hired Pat and paid her a significant retainer and she had used almost half of it in Atlanta.

  “Shee,” he said. “We need to raise our C&C Detective Agency rates and find suckers like Barlow.”

  I ignored his comment about our—his—imaginary detective agency. “Where was she the first two weeks in February?”

  Charles looked at me like how would you know that, but he didn’t ask and began looking for dates in the next four piles. “Savannah,” he said.

  I told him that she used another five thousand of Barlow’s dollars during that period. The bills from her Savannah trip were similar to those from Atlanta.

  It took us another hour to piece together that Pat had been to each of the five cities on business for Barlow. She had depleted the retainer in Columbia, and he had wired an additional fifteen thousand. Her trek to other cities had ended in March, when she arrived on Folly Beach, but her expenses escalated. Barlow had wired money each month to cover her fee at sixty dollars per hour. Her Holiday Inn bill alone for the five months she stayed exceeded thirty thousand dollars.

  “No wonder she moved in with Mrs. Klein,” said Charles.

  I had always hated doing paperwork and Charles had never done any, so after spending an absolutely gorgeous afternoon plodding through Pat’s box-o-stuff, we decided a gathering of friends was in order. Besides, we had no clue as to what s
he was looking for in the collection of receipts and ledger notes. Amber had to spend time with Jason on homework, so I knew she wasn’t available. I agreed to call Larry, and Charles asked if he could invite Cal, if he could find him. The more the merrier, we agreed. Neither of us suggested inviting Acting Chief King or anyone from the Charleston County Sheriff’s Department.

  CHAPTER 37

  Folly Beach had often been saddled with the difference-between-night-and-day comparison to its nearby neighbor, Charleston. Compared to the stately mansions in Charleston, my house was a dump. But I’ll take Folly anytime.

  My backyard was small by most standards—a true blessing. Yard work was right up there with cooking, exercise, and sumo wrestling on my to-don’t list. The fewer blades of grass, the better. There was room for a wooden, mildewed picnic table that came with the house and two black, plastic lounge chairs I bought on sale from Larry. My neighbor’s yard sported a stately, although wind-worn, pine that graciously blocked the late afternoon sun from the yard.

  During my few years on Folly Beach, I had learned, with apologies to Las Vegas, “What happened in the backyard, stayed in the backyard.” Regardless of how illegal, illicit, or downright salacious, unless the neighbor’s activities spilled into your yard, they were overlooked by most everyone, including Folly’s finest. I had never had a gathering that would qualify under any of those categories, but it was comforting knowing the possibility existed.

  Larry and Charles walked around the house together and said they had met in the front yard. Charles had found Cal, who told him he would join us in a half hour or so, unless he got a call from Carrie Underwood asking him to join her in concert. But, he had confessed to Charles, the chance of that was “on the underside of zero.”