Southern Storm

by Terri Blackstock

  His chair sat empty—a comfortable executive chair that he’d gotten when the city council had allocated thousands of dollars for themselves rather than fixing the potholes on Ocean Boulevard. Cade was probably the only one who really deserved it.

  On his wall hung a matted and framed copy of a newspaper article that had come out about him when he’d solved her parents’ murder. Melba Jefferson had given the framed account to him as a gift. Ordinarily, Cade would not have been vain or insensitive enough to put it up, but Melba had brought a hammer and hung it herself. He’d explained it to Blair with sincere apologies, and she’d understood why he’d left it hanging.

  His desk held several stacks of files and papers, with a couple of gaudy paperweights on top, which had probably been passed through several of his predecessors.

  “Picture’s here,” Joe said from behind her. “I made you a copy.”

  She took it and looked down at the image of Ann Clark. Her hair in the picture was just the way she’d worn it today—blonde, thin, and shoulder-length. “I’ll take it to show Jonathan.”

  “I’ll take it to Creflo King and the others who saw her,” Joe said. “Let me know what Jonathan says.”

  She hurried over to Hanover House, hoping Jonathan had made it home already. She found him in the kitchen on his back under the sink, working on fixing a leak. He smelled of sweat, saltwater, and fish. He had just come in and hadn’t had time to shower or change yet before Morgan had hit him up with the leak.

  Blair knelt beside him and thrust the picture at him. “Jonathan, look at this picture. Could this be the woman Cade was with the other day?”

  He slid out from under the cabinet and studied the picture. “Well, no. The woman had brown hair, kind of big and frizzy.”

  “Okay, picture this woman with that hair. It could have been a wig or something.”

  He looked up at her. “Who is she?”

  “She’s the wife of the man Cade ran over.”

  “No kidding?” He got to his feet and leaned back against the counter. “Cade was talking to the wife of the man he killed?”

  “I’m asking you,” she said. “It may not be her at all. But look at her face, her eyes.”

  “She had on sunglasses,” Jonathan said. “But she did look really pale. I hadn’t really thought about it until now, but yeah, it could have been her. You think she had something to do with Cade’s disappearance?”

  She sighed. “I really don’t know. But yes, it’s possible.” She went to the phone on the kitchen wall and dialed the police station. Alex answered again. “Let me speak to Joe McCormick, please.” She waited as Joe picked up.

  “McCormick.”

  “Yeah, Joe? Jonathan says she could be the same woman, only with different hair. What did you find from Creflo?”

  “He’s here right now,” he said. “He remembers her being real pale. Says she had on sunglasses, so he didn’t get a good look at her face.”

  “Sounds like a disguise, like she might not want to be identified later,” Blair said. “But could all that crying back at her house have been an act? Could she have known all along about her husband?”

  “Maybe. I’m checking rental car places in Savannah, trying to see if any of them has a Cruiser and whether it was rented out yesterday. If she came here with evil intentions against Cade and went to all the trouble of a disguise, then she probably wouldn’t have wanted to be seen in her own car. And Creflo mentioned a Hertz sticker.”

  Blair sat down, clutching the phone. “Evil intentions?”

  “Hey, I don’t know what happened to Cade, but he’s still not here. She’s the last person he was seen with.”

  Morgan came into the room, and Blair looked up at her, then at Jonathan. “I think Cade is in danger, don’t you, Joe?” she said into the phone.

  “Could be.”

  “Go search her house. See if there’s any clue.”

  “I was thinking the same thing,” he said. “Only I have to convince a judge to give me a search warrant, and there’s no clear evidence of a crime being committed.”

  “Explain to them that the chief of police of Cape Refuge has disappeared. Don’t you guys have a brotherhood or something? When a cop is shot, the whole force goes after the perpetrator. Shouldn’t it be the same thing for one who’s vanished?”

  “We’ll see,” Joe said.

  Frustrated, Blair hung up, and she turned to her sister and brother-in-law, who stood staring at her.

  “He thinks it was her?” Jonathan asked.

  “Sure does.”

  “What could this woman have done to him?” Jonathan asked. “She’s what, five-foot-two, a hundred pounds? It’s not like she could overpower him.”

  Blair felt sick. “Depends on what kind of weapon she had.”

  “Well, did Joe question her?”

  “Not really.” Her eyes ached with tears. “It was kind of a touchy thing, you know. I mean, how do you interrogate a woman who’s just been told she’s a widow?”

  “But if she’s a suspect in Cade’s disappearance,” Morgan said, “wouldn’t it be appropriate to question her?”

  “Well, sure, but we still don’t know for sure she is the same woman. Different hair, different car . . .”

  Jonathan pushed off from the counter and started toward the stairs. “I’m going to shower and head for the police station.”

  “What for?” Blair asked.

  “I don’t know,” Jonathan said. “I just want to talk to Joe. Make sure he understands the urgency. Cade’s time might be running out.”

  Blair watched him leave, and Morgan came up behind her and began massaging her shoulders. “Your shoulder muscles are like bricks, Sis.”

  Blair wasn’t listening. “If she lied to us, what could it mean?”

  “I hate to think,” Morgan whispered.

  Blair turned around and looked at her sister. “If anything happens to him . . .” The statement trailed off. If anything happened . . . what? Would she die? Destroy something? Implode?

  She thought of that city of refuge passage he’d been reading in his Bible. It was her last clue about where his head had been before he disappeared. What did it mean?

  She needed more information.

  “Morgan, I need to borrow a Bible.”

  The delight on Morgan’s face almost made her angry. “A Bible? Sure.”

  “Don’t get excited. I just want to do some research on the passage Cade was reading before he vanished. And I need to borrow a concordance.”

  Morgan quickly led her into the office, as if she feared she would change her mind if she lingered. “Here,” she said, thrusting a Bible at her. “It’s Pop’s Bible. It has his notes.”

  Blair’s throat tightened as she looked down at it.

  “And here’s the concordance.” She dropped it on top of the Bible. “And here, take these commentaries.” She pulled three dictionary-sized books out of the shelves and dropped them on the stack.

  “We might be getting a little carried away here,” Blair said.

  Morgan turned around, still a little too happy at the request. “I just want to make sure you have everything you need. You know what you always say, about knowledge being power.”

  “You’re getting your hopes up, Morgan. You think my research is going to lead me to some dramatic conversion. It won’t. I just want to get inside Cade’s head.”

  “I know. Just information. That’s fine.”

  But as Morgan pulled out more books, Blair began to wish she’d never asked.

  CHAPTER 11

  Blair curled up on her couch that night with her father’s Bible and read the passage that Cade had been reading the morning he disappeared. Though she’d spent most of her childhood in church and had endured endless hours of Bible teaching from both parents, she couldn’t remember ever hearing about the cities of refuge until today.

  One would think that it would have been incorporated into some of the town’s celebrations, or at least explained i
n Cape Refuge’s written history, since someone who had a part in naming the island clearly had known about Numbers 35. But this wasn’t the case.

  She tried to imagine what Cade had been thinking when he’d turned to that passage. Had he considered himself guilty of manslaughter, even though the man might have died, anyway, from the gunshot? Was he thinking he had bloodguilt on his hands? That he needed refuge from some unseen Avenger?

  She began to read about the Levitical cities and how six were to be set apart.

  Then the LORD said to Moses: “Speak to the Israelites and say to them: ‘When you cross the Jordan into Canaan, select some towns to be your cities of refuge, to which a person who has killed someone accidentally may flee. They will be places of refuge from the avenger, so that a person accused of murder may not die before he stands trial before the assembly. These six towns you give will be your cities of refuge. Give three on the side of the Jordan and three in Canaan as cities of refuge. These six towns will be a place of refuge for Israelites, aliens and any other people living among them, so that anyone who has killed another accidentally can flee there.”

  It was interesting, she thought, but had no application to Cade’s life today. Even Cape Refuge wasn’t a shelter from the legal system. People came there, specifically to Hanover House, to take refuge from their own trials.

  She read on, about the distinction between manslaughter and murder. If the killing was proven to be intentional homicide, the avenger—someone from the dead person’s family—would have the responsibility of putting him to death.

  No death row. No government executioner. Up-close-and-personal revenge. That was what was called for.

  But if it was an accident, then the congregation was to let him live in the city of refuge until the death of the high priest.

  No complete acquittal. His life was altered for years. She wondered if he had to leave his family, his friends, or if they came with him. Did he have to stay in that place alone, eking out a living among priests and other manslayers?

  And what did the high priest’s death have to do with anything?

  She read further.

  “Do not pollute the land where you are. Bloodshed pollutes the land, and atonement cannot be made for the land on which blood has been shed, except by the blood of the one who shed it. Do not defile the land where you live and where I dwell, for I, the LORD, dwell among the Israelites.”

  Did Cade think he had somehow defiled the land? Or had he already gotten that call before he turned to that passage?

  Could it be that he’d heard from Ann Clark and wondered why she wanted to meet with him? Maybe he sensed revenge in her voice.

  The passage gave Blair no peace—just more questions that kept her from sleeping.

  She rose feeling achy and frustrated the next morning. She headed over to Cricket’s and saw that Cade’s truck was still there.

  Wearily, she went into the place and took a table where someone had left a copy of the Savannah Morning News. She picked it up as Charlie brought her a cup of coffee.

  “Thanks, Charlie,” she said, taking a sip.

  He nodded. “Terrible about Cade, ain’t it?”

  She looked up at him. “What do you mean?”

  “The article in the paper,” he said. “Don’t look good.”

  She looked down at the front page, and gasped. Her coffee sloshed and spilled.

  CAPE REFUGE POLICE CHIEF UNDER SUSPICION.

  Charlie grabbed a napkin and blotted up the coffee as Blair began to read.

  The disappearance of Cape Refuge’s Police Chief Matthew Cade, after running down a pedestrian on Monday, has cast him under a cloud of suspicion, sources said Monday. The dead man, who had been shot before walking into the street, was identified as William Clark yesterday. Chief Cade disappeared after being seen having breakfast with Ann Clark, the wife of the dead man.

  Blair almost choked. How could they have put this in the paper? They weren’t even sure it was her, and here it was in print for everyone to see?

  Creflo King, who breakfasts each morning at a small island diner called Cricket’s, said he saw Cade there getting into the car with Clark’s wife the morning after he killed Clark. “I didn’t know who she was then,” King said, “but later the police showed me a picture of her and said that was who she was. Her hair was different, but it was the same woman I saw, all right.”

  Chief Cade has not been seen or heard from since. Savannah Morning News tried to contact Ann Clark, but she did not return our calls.

  “Makes you wonder if William Clark’s death was an accident, after all,” King said. “Sure makes you wonder if this ain’t something staged just so they could be together.”

  Blair screamed and flung the paper across the room. “How could he say that?”

  She saw Creflo King sitting at the bar, looking back at her over his shoulder.

  “How dare you!” she screamed across the crowd. Everyone got silent, and all eyes turned to her as she erupted out of her seat. “Creflo King, how dare you say those things about Cade!”

  Creflo shrugged. “Just told the truth.”

  She picked up the paper she had thrown and waved it in the air. “It was your fifteen minutes of fame, wasn’t it? You must feel like a big man now.”

  Creflo got up. “All I did was answer the questions, Blair.”

  “You’ve ruined Cade’s reputation,” she shouted. “You’ve made people think he was an adulterer and a murderer! How could you do that to him?”

  She started toward him across the wooden floor, and Charlie stepped into her way. “Come on, Blair. Calm down.”

  “I will not calm down!” She looked around at the astonished faces, most of whom she knew well. “Everybody in this place knows that Cade is a decent, upstanding Christian man. If any of you knew him at all, you’d know how upset he was over the accident that happened the other day. He was beating himself up over it. There’s no way he did that on purpose!”

  She got to Creflo and grabbed his red plaid collar. Through gritted teeth, she said, “You call that paper right now, and you take back what you said.”

  “I can’t, Blair,” he told her. “I told them the truth. I did see him leaving with that woman. Joe told me hisself that it might be William Clark’s wife. And he ain’t turned up since, so you tell me, where is he?”

  “I don’t know where he is,” she said, “but I can guarantee you he’s not in some lover’s arms, snickering about how he got her husband out of the way.” She shoved him, and he stumbled back against the counter. “You make me sick, you know that? We don’t even know for sure if that was Ann Clark, but if it was, she has time to hide all the evidence before the police can search her place. But you got your stinking name in the paper! I could just kill you.”

  “You hear that, everybody?” Creflo yelled. “Blair Owens just threatened me right in front of God and everybody.”

  She knew her scar was flaming just the way she hated it, and she slapped her hair back from her face and pointed at him.

  “Don’t doubt me for a minute, Creflo,” she said. “If you open your mouth and even speak the name of Matthew Cade, I will personally come back and deliver on my threat.” With that, she stormed out of Cricket’s, leaving the gossip and speculation to go on behind her.

  CHAPTER 12

  Joe McCormick cut through the squad room at the Third Precinct in Savannah. The officer at the front desk had pointed him to the offices in the back, Sergeant Tim Hull’s domain. Joe had worked with the detective on a number of overlapping cases in the past and figured he wouldn’t have any trouble getting his help now.

  But Hull wasn’t in his office. Joe stood in the doorway, surveying the clutter of weeks-old coffee cups and empty Diet Coke cans, wadded fast-food bags and ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts. From the looks of things, one would have thought the occupant of this office was a stuffy old Lou Grant type, but that wasn’t true. Hull looked more like Don Johnson from old Miami Vice reruns, with his san
dy hair and darkly tanned skin, his two-day growth of stubble, his neutral-colored blazers, and his sockless ankles.

  He would have fit right in on Cape Refuge, though he looked more like one of the lifeguards on the police department payroll than the cops who protected the island.

  Joe looked toward what Hull often called “the war room” and saw the detective standing over a fax machine with a cigarette hanging from his mouth. “Hull!” he called, and the man turned.

  Taking the cigarette out and stubbing it in a nearby ashtray, Hull blew out smoke and grinned at his island counterpart. “Well, if it isn’t the big man from the small town.” He reached out to shake.

  “I need to talk to you,” Joe said. “It’s about our police chief.”

  Hull pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and lit another one. “Can’t talk now. I’m on my way to the hospital. Another stolen baby, this time right here in Savannah. It hasn’t been missing more than an hour. I’ve got to get over there if this fax machine will hurry up and print out what I need.”

  Joe regarded the paper rolling through the machine at its own pace, and finally Hull jerked it out. He took his cigarette out and studied the page for a moment. Then he seemed to remember Joe was there. “Walk with me. I’m in a hurry.”

  Joe matched his step. “I’m trying to get a warrant to question a woman and search a house over at Washington Square. Since it’s on your turf, I thought you might want to be involved.”

  Hull took his cigarette out again and squinted at him through the smoke. “What for?”

  “The wife of the pedestrian Cade ran over the other day lives there.”

  Hull shook his head. “I heard about his disappearance. Is this a lead on where he is?”

  Joe nodded. “We think she was the last one seen with Cade the morning he disappeared. And if so, then her weird behavior might implicate her in her husband’s shooting. I need to question her and search the house and see if there are any clues as to where Cade might be.”

  They burst out the front doors of the precinct, and Hull dropped his cigarette and stepped on it. “Good luck trying to convince a judge to give you a warrant to search a bereaved woman’s house, when you can’t even be sure a crime has been committed.” He reached his car and unlocked it. “Your chief could have gone fishing, for all you know. There’s no evidence of foul play, if the papers are right, and he hasn’t been gone that long. That’s a hard sell to a judge. And you say she may have been the last one seen with him? You don’t know for sure?”