Detour

by Lorena McCourtney

  “I wonder what she intends to do with it,” Mac said.

  “Good question. She owns a few rental properties around town.” But this was obviously no rental property. What he quickly said, however, was, “We have other listings near the ocean that might interest you.”

  “No. Thanks anyway. Say, could you give us the name of a good restaurant here in town? Some place kind of special.” Mac looked at me and winked. “We have a little something to celebrate.”

  Hey, we did. How could I forget? Today was our one-month anniversary! The man gave us a name, the Hideout, and directions. At the door, Mac turned back to ask a question.

  “Renée Echol works for an agency called LeHigh Realty, doesn’t she? Could you tell us where it’s located?”

  We knew the name of the agency because of my earlier nosiness checking out the website, but I hadn’t noted the address then.

  With hand motions to demonstrate the instructions, Delmer Johnson told us how to find LeHigh Realty. Then he surprised me by adding, after a pause, “Actually, until a few months ago, Renée worked here with our agency.”

  My first thought, of course, especially because that little pause seemed somehow meaningful, was to wonder if Renée’s departure had anything to do with Sheila’s noisy accusations about Renée’s handling of her friend’s property. However, whether from business ethics or maybe just because he was a gentleman, Delmer Johnson didn’t add further information. “Renée’s a real go-getter,” was all he said.

  Which could mean anything, of course, from a compliment about her talents as a real-estate saleslady to a comment on her go-getter abilities involving someone else’s husband.

  ***

  We found the Hideaway, a rustic log building with wagon wheel chandeliers and log booths, and I forgot about Renée Echol and the cove property as we ate Caesar salad and oh-so-good crab cakes. The friendly, middle-aged waitress, when she learned we were celebrating our one-month anniversary, even brought us a miniature chocolate cake adorned with a single candle. Mac does have his romantic moments, and we made a sweet celebration of sharing a kiss and dipping our forks into the cake together, complete with a selfie using Mac’s phone.

  It wasn’t the greatest picture. How do people get those flattering selfies I’m always seeing on the internet? We looked oddly egg-headed in ours. But it memorialized the occasion. We looked like happy eggheads.

  Afterward Mac suggested that we contact Renée Echol and see if she intended to resell the cove property. I hesitated. I still felt squeamish about getting involved with her in any way. But seeing her about buying a specific property wasn’t the same as inventing an interest in properties just to snoop on her relationship with Brian Morrison.

  At LeHigh Realty, a middle-aged woman came out of a back office to greet us. She had an impressive upswept blond hairdo and equally impressive blue fingernails decorated with sparkly silver stars. Mac told her we’d like to see Renée Echol.

  “She hasn’t been in for a couple of days, but her SUV is out in the parking lot. Maybe she went to breakfast or lunch with a friend.” Without actually saying so, the woman managed to make not being in the office sound like a flaw in Renée’s work ethics. I also detected a hint of disapproval in her emphasis on friend. Maybe she knew about Brian? “But I’ll be glad to help you with whatever you’re looking for. I’m Donna Feldman.” She held out her hand, apparently eager to snatch business out from under Renée if she could.

  We both shook hands with her, but Mac said, “Thanks, but we need to talk to Renée herself.” He paused, and I wondered if he was going to say anything about the property at the cove, but this was Renée’s private option deal, not an agency listing, and he didn’t mention it. “Will she be in later?”

  “She should be in now, so I really can’t say. I can give you her card with her cell phone number if you’d like.” Said with all the enthusiasm of introducing a boyfriend to the hottest girl in town.

  “Thanks,” Mac said. “We’d appreciate that.”

  She disappeared into the back hallway and returned with a card in hand. I thanked her, took the card, and saw the same perky face I’d seen on the website. In the pickup, I read the number off to Mac and he tried calling her but only got voice mail. He left a message with his name and number and asked her to call.

  We drove back up the coast to the motorhome. It was a windy afternoon, not really conducive to outside activity, and I caught up on housekeeping. Sheila offered her laundry room so I could do a couple of loads of washing. Mac tried calling Renée late that afternoon and again that evening. By the third call he didn’t bother leaving another message. Apparently, she didn’t want to talk to us. Had Brian warned her to stay away from these people?

  In the morning, with windblown rain pounding the windows, I tried the number once more. Still the same voice mail recording. We discussed just heading off for Arizona immediately. Mac’s work was done here, so there was no real reason to hang around. The weather was not an encouragement to stay. We could be on the road in twenty minutes.

  I had to wonder, if we actually settled down somewhere, would I miss that freedom to just pick up and go?

  But before Mac got the pickup hooked onto the motorhome, I suggested we drive out and look at the property once more, this time paying special attention to it as a possible homesite. Even if Renée did want to sell, the property was probably far out of our price range, but we’d never have another chance to look at it if we didn’t do it now. If it looked like a real possibility for a home, we’d wait to talk to Renée Echol; if not, we’d head down the road. We left BoBandy and Koop curled up together in his doggie bed.

  When we drove by the dinosaur park, I noted that the blue pickup was back at Duke’s trailer. I wondered what had prompted him to drive somewhere himself, since he apparently hadn’t done so for a considerable time. Looking for a new girlfriend? More likely he and Sheila had gone off together to do something, and he’d just asserted his manly driving rights.

  At the cove, we parked under the same windblown tree as we had before. It wasn’t raining hard now, but drizzle and fog blotted out everything beyond the ridge of sea-foam edging the sandy beach of the cove, the end of the dock lost in mist. Unseen surf roared beyond the cove. Even the scent was wild and raw, like something God had left unfinished.

  Not an ideal day for inspecting property to buy. And the place felt somehow different today, as if something had changed. Definitely higher on the creep scale.

  “So, what do you think? The place doesn’t look very appealing at the moment, but if we don’t look at it now, we’ll never have another chance,” Mac said, echoing my earlier thought.

  I had to agree with the “non-appealing” statement. At the moment, the place looked almost sinister.

  But he was right. This would be our only chance.

  I pulled the hood of my jacket up over my head, and we wandered through the remains of what had been the main building. In spite of the blackened skeletons of old timbers, the fire had been too long ago for any odor of burn to remain. Now the scent was just soggy earth and wet vegetation, as if anything built here might mold before the last nail was driven.

  The eight cottages had been irregularly spaced, giving each one some privacy, although close enough together that fire had jumped from one to another. From the layout of the foundations, they appeared to alternate between one- and two-bedroom cabins, each with a small kitchen/living room area. Soggy old mounds of half-burned mattresses and sofas remained, and in one cabin the smashed and half-burned remnants of a crib lay in one corner.

  Now I felt a real dismay about the site. No one had mentioned deaths, but had there been victims here, mothers and fathers and even children who’d lost their lives in the fire?

  I suddenly felt uneasy prowling here, even a little squeamish. A blackberry vine snagged my pants leg, and I stepped on an old can that clamped around my foot like some hungry metal predator. On a practical note, although no
Keep Out signs were posted, and cans and broken bottles and old fast-food burger wrappers suggested many people had wandered here before us, this was private property. Property on which Renée Echol had an option to buy.

  By the time we got to the last cabin, I had almost decided the drawbacks of the site outweighed the good points. Because, in addition to all the bulldozer work needed to clean up the place, there was something unsettling here that went beyond remnants of the old fire, wet weeds, and thorny vines, something I could neither see nor smell nor hear.

  But something that sent a spidery shiver up my back and wakened an unpleasant prickle in my nerves. Something that made me peer into the oversized ferns behind the cabins and hunch my shoulders against something unseen. Something that made my ears strain to catch some sound just beyond my hearing. I tried to scoff at the uncomfortable feeling, but it clung like cat hair to black pants.

  At what remained of the last cabin, Mac said he was going a little farther to see if an old shed vaguely visible in the drizzle and fog was the pump house for a well. He plunged into the brush, and I stepped into the shelter of a still-standing corner of the burned cabin. A layer of matted leaves covered the uneven floor, areas where fire had burned through the flooring now sunken booby traps, the scent musty in spite of the fresh rain. A pile of old beer cans filled one corner. Momentarily, the impression of a vanished civilization, the where-have-all-the-people-gone feeling that I’d had when we came here before, surrounded me.

  And then I heard a sound that was very much current civilization.

  Music. Music? Yes, something a little rowdy but not unpleasant. Upbeat. Kind of a Let’s dance! sound, totally at odds with the gloomy day.

  But how—? Who—?

  Then I recognized what it was. The ringtone of a cell phone.

  Not mine. All mine had was a phone-sounding tinkle.

  My cell phone was also, I realized as I felt in my pockets, back in the pickup. I’m not as welded to the phone as a lot of people are, and it often gets left behind.

  I threw back the hood on my jacket and peered around cautiously, eyes trying to dart in all directions at once. Was someone in the wreckage of the burned-out cabin with me? Someone furtively hiding from my view?

  Someone hiding with nefarious intentions directed at me? I cautiously turned a full circle without moving in any direction, feet shuffling in the matted leaves, skin prickling.

  A movement there by a burned cabinet? Malevolent eyes peering in from outside?

  No. No movement, no watching eyes. Just that incongruous upbeat tune on a phone.

  I cautiously crunched over broken glass to circle a sodden, burned lump that had once been a sofa. Nothing there. The phone still played its dancy beat, something vaguely otherworldly about it. I turned and edged toward an oblong of burned two-by-fours that had once framed a doorway to a bedroom.

  She lay sprawled faceup on the far side of a sodden mound of old mattress, her body sunk into the soggy remains. A petite woman, small boned. Slim and dark haired. I recognized her from the perky photo on the business card and website. The phone went silent.

  She didn’t look perky now, not with rain pounding her half-open eyes and slack mouth, plastering her hair to her head and puddling in her upturned palms.

  She just looked dead.

  Chapter 8

  IVY

  She wore skinny-legged jeans, gold hoop earrings, and a black leather jacket open to reveal a red turtleneck.

  And a dark hole in her chest.

  An irrelevant but stomach-twisting thought hit me. The music from the phone had stopped, but those calls we’d made to Renée—the cheerful Let’s dance! music—had danced against a dead woman’s body. While we grumbled about her not answering.

  I screamed. Well, I thought I screamed, but only a squeak came out. I swallowed and backed away. There was no need to check for a heartbeat. Renée was so not living. I made it to the warped bedroom doorway I’d come through.

  “Mac?” My voice had gone hoarse as well as squeaky. I tried again, hoarse-squeaking louder. “Mac?”

  No answer. All I could hear was the lonely shriek of an unseen gull and the roar of surf. I stumbled to the outside doorway and held onto the burned framework for support. All I could see beyond a few feet of ragged ferns and blackberry bushes was a world of mist and drizzle. Everything familiar was gone. Mac was gone.

  I took a deep breath and called again, this time a full-fledged blast the dinosaurs back at the park could have heard. “Mac!”

  He crashed out of the brush. “What? What’s wrong?”

  Husband from the Black Lagoon. Mud from hair to toes. Mud on shoes and legs, mud on hands and arms and chest, mud in beard and ears and eyebrows.

  “What happened to you?”

  “I fell in some kind of swamp or marsh back there. It’s covered with reeds or something, and everything was so foggy I didn’t even realize they were growing in water until I was all tangled up in them. They tried to eat me alive! The mud must be ten feet deep!”

  No doubt a bit of exaggeration there, although he did look as if he may have been floundering in ten feet of mud. Broken reeds clung to his hair, strands of swamp scum draped his arms, and blackberry thorns stuck to his shirt and legs of his pants. Rain hit his muddy hair and dripped off his muddy beard. Why hadn’t he been wearing his hooded jacket, or at least a cap?

  “Are you okay?” I tried to pick a strand of slimy stuff off his arm.

  “Do I look okay?”

  Well, no, he didn’t look okay. He didn’t smell okay either. The scum left a green streak when I wiped my hand on my pants leg.

  “I don’t think this is a good place for a home.” Mac, master of the understatement. He scraped mud off his face and flung it aside. “No telling what other booby traps or ambushes are hidden out there.”

  He didn’t yet know the biggest reason this was not a good spot for a home, a reason that turned my nerves to icicles and removed this place from any list of places we might ever settle down and live.

  “Let’s go back to the motorhome so I can get this stuff washed off.” Mac stomped his feet and flapped his elbows.

  I ducked to avoid flying mud. “We have to do something first. Do you have your phone?”

  “If I do, it’s probably full of mud,” he growled. Then he planted his muddy hands on his muddy hips and gave me an exasperated look. “You want to make a phone call now?”

  “We have to call nine-one-one. There’s a dead body in there.” I motioned toward the skeleton of burned cabin.

  “A dead body?” His mouth gaped open. I think he intended to say something about this being no time to kid around, but he closed it without saying anything. Maybe because he realized I wouldn’t joke about a dead body. Maybe because rain and mud tend to dribble into a mouth gaping open.

  I grabbed his muddy hand, and we stumbled through the burned framework where the door had once been. I led him past the soggy sofa to the bedroom doorway. If I’d hoped I was somehow mistaken about a dead body, I was wrong. She still lay there, body still sunk into the sodden mattress, still dead.

  “I-I think that’s a bullet hole in her chest.”

  Mac shook his head as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. I think he mumbled something about not again, or maybe that’s what I was thinking.

  “You recognize her, don’t you?” I reached in the back pocket of my jeans and pulled out the card I’d stuck there after trying to call Renée that morning. I handed it to him. I saw now that one of her shoes had fallen to the leaf-matted floor. Not a stiletto, but the black leather with a chunky heel and lots of silver studs still looked a little upscale for tromping around in a place such as this. When I leaned forward I could see the name printed on the inner sole, and I was startled. Jimmy Choo. Could Renée afford shoes in that price range? Well, she had an option to buy this property, so maybe she could.

  Mac looked back and forth between the card and the face on t
he body sprawled on the misshapen mattress, then searched his clothing for a phone. Unfortunately, all he found was mud-filled pockets. Or maybe fortunately, because mud probably means quick death to a cell phone. His phone must be at the pickup, same as mine.

  I hesitated a moment before starting back to the pickup. I didn’t like leaving her like this, soggy mattress beneath her, a crumpled beer can beside her foot, rainwater drizzling on her pale skin and half-open eyes through the nonexistent roof. She was dead, but she still looked so . . . vulnerable and lonely and abandoned.

  But there was nothing we could do for her, nothing to cover her with, and we surely shouldn’t touch anything anyway, so we just slogged back to the pickup. Once there, I dug my phone out of my purse. I had some concerns about the value of a 911 call since we’d never been in this area before. Maybe it would go to some 911 location back in Montana. Or Missouri. Or outer space. But the call went exactly where it should, the local 911 site. Something about 911 calls and nearby cell phone towers, Mac said.

  I told the woman who responded who and where we were and what we’d found. The woman was efficient but not impersonal. I told her I didn’t think we were in any danger, but she said we should stay in our vehicle until help arrived. “Be careful, okay?” So, after I found an old T-shirt of Mac’s behind the pickup seat and wiped mud off his hair and face, we climbed in our vehicle and waited.

  We spoke a few words, but we didn’t have a real conversation as we sat there. We were both a little dazed as well as cold and wet. One of us was also sitting in mud. It oozed around him and dripped to the floorboard. He started the engine to run the heater, though that didn’t seem to help much.

  “I wonder if she was killed here or killed somewhere else and brought here.” I kept myself from saying dumped here. “She didn’t drive here in her SUV because it was in the real estate agency’s parking lot.”

  A few minutes later Mac said, “I wonder how long she’s been dead.”