What She Inherits

by Diane V. Mulligan

  He patted his flat stomach and shook his head sadly. “No sweets for me.”

  Casey bit her lip and willed herself not to roll her eyes. She told him what he owed her for the coffee. He put a few crisp dollar bills on the counter and told her to keep the change, but he didn’t walk away. He stood there, sipping his coffee, and taking in the little café.

  “How long have you worked here?” he asked.

  “This is my café. I don’t work here. I...” Casey considered how she might finish that sentence. She couldn’t truly say, “I own this place,” because actually Rosetta owned it. Still, it was her place.

  “No offense,” Brett said.

  Now he was looking at her tattoo, and Casey drew herself up, squaring her shoulders and setting her jaw. She didn’t need this presumptuous, annoying, soy-latte drinker judging her.

  “Really, sorry, I didn’t mean to offend. I didn’t know. You’re not, I mean, you don’t look like—”

  “Like a business owner?” Casey said, cutting him off. What exactly was his problem? He had known her for all of two minutes and had already written her off? She was wearing worn jeans and a tank top, and she had a massive tattoo, and she wore a faded bandana tied around her hair, an outfit entirely suited to baking and serving up coffee. If she had on a floppy white hat and those ugly clogs everyone wore in restaurant kitchens, would he give her a little more credit?

  He shrugged apologetically.

  “If you don’t need anything else,” Casey said, nodding toward the door.

  He looked around at the empty tables and then back at Casey and raised an eyebrow. “Would it bother you terribly if I sat down? Maybe took care of a few emails?”

  Casey pointed at a sign over her shoulder that said “No Wi-Fi. No Cell Phones” and then she crossed her arms.

  “You’re kidding me. People love to work in cafés.”

  “This is a place of relaxation and conversation, not a place for everyone to hunker down behind computer screens.”

  “I guess I’ve worn out my welcome for conversation,” he said.

  Casey sighed and turned away from him, moving things around behind the counter importantly, as if there was any reason to do so.

  “I’m going to be around for a few days here, so I’ll probably see you again tomorrow for another of these excellent lattes.”

  Great, Casey thought, her back to him.

  “I’m Brett, by the way, Brett Campbell,” he said. “And your name is?”

  Casey turned back to face him. “Casey,” she said.

  “Casey. Nice to meet you. Do you have a last name or are you like Madonna, first name only?”

  “Are you investigating me?” Casey asked, still annoyed by him but also amused by his persistence.

  “Maybe.”

  “Good luck with that. My last name is Jones.”

  He nodded, thought about it, and said, “Wait, Casey Jones, like the song?”

  “You got it,” she said, with a smile. Another great bonus of her chosen name was that people who wanted to look her up online were never going to find anything remotely useful.

  “All right, well then, Casey Jones, you have a good day,” Brett said, nodding and raising his paper coffee cup in her direction.

  He left and Casey came around the end of the counter and sat at a table near the window. The fog was still heavy, and he disappeared as soon as he was off the porch steps. Have a good day. Not likely, she thought.

  Chapter 14

  St. Nabor Island, South Carolina

  Angela and Randy arrived at the house a little before seven. Angela’s heart fluttered as she pulled into the garage and shut off the car. She felt both giddy and idiotic, as if she were drunk but completely self-aware. Was this whole thing totally ridiculous? What if Randy and his friends didn’t find anything and she was wasting their time? Or, and maybe worse, what if they did find something?

  “You okay?” Randy asked.

  Angela took a deep breath, nodded, and unlatched her seat belt. Whatever the consequences, it was too late to back out now. Randy followed her into the house and walked from room to room turning on lights.

  In the hallway at the top of the stairs, Angela felt nervous sweat on her palms. This was the place where she’d heard her mother’s insistent voice so clearly each night between the day after the funeral and the day she’d left to stay at Grace’s. Why here? She wondered. Why here and not in her mother’s room or study or the kitchen or the garden? Angela sighed and moved along, flicking on lights in every room. The lights made her feel better.

  “Wow, that is some desk,” Randy said, as they entered the study.

  “I’ll give you twenty bucks if you can open it.”

  “What do you mean?” Randy crossed the room and ran his hand along the roll-top.

  “It’s stuck or locked or something. I can’t get any of the drawers open.”

  Randy slid the top up and bent forward to study the small upper drawers.

  “Success!” he said, triumphantly after a few minutes. He turned to Angela holding out a small key.

  Angela looked at it dumbly. She could not believe the key had been there all along. How had she missed it? And when did her mother start locking the desk, anyway? It had always been off-limits to Angela, but she had distinct memories of opening and shutting all the drawers, playing at the desk and pretending she was a bank teller. Why she had thought playing bank teller was fun was anyone’s guess. Those little drawers had been irresistible. She always thought they must hold some wonderful secrets—love letters, keepsakes, maybe money. She had been bold enough to open the drawers, but not so bold as to riffle through them. All she’d ever seen were documents and boxes of checks and things like that. She’d never moved any of the contents, never so much as picked up a box of checks to see if there was something more interesting beneath. Her mother was so particular that she would undoubtedly have known if Angela so much as slid a piece of paper out of a drawer.

  Sitting at the desk, she considered the idea that her mother had become paranoid about identity theft. She was always sending Angela newspaper clippings about the importance of cyber-security and monitoring one’s credit reports. Maybe she wanted to make sure that if anyone broke into the house, they wouldn’t have access to any important documents.

  “It was taped under the inside of the center drawer,” Randy explained.

  Angela took the key and turned it over in her hand. She’d never seen it before. “It works?” she asked.

  Randy moved aside and let Angela try the key in the lock. It didn’t fit. She turned it around and tried again. No luck. It wasn’t the right key.

  Angela dropped the key onto the blotter and pushed her chair back in frustration. She was no closer to opening the desk, and now she had another mystery: What did the key unlock?

  “Damn.” Randy crossed the room and picked up they key again, examining it closely. “I guess this could be for a PO box or a safe deposit box,” he said.

  Her mother got mail at the house and she didn’t think there was a safe deposit box, but she wasn’t totally certain. If she could get into the bank statements in the desk, she could find out. She reached out her hand and Randy put the key in it. Angela unhooked the clasp of her necklace, threaded the key onto the chain, and closed it again. She knew she was being paranoid, but her mother had hidden that key, and if she didn’t keep it on her body, she was convinced it would go missing again.

  They went back to the kitchen, and they stood awkwardly at the island. To quell her nerves, Angela fussed in the kitchen, making a pot of coffee, and digging through the cabinets for snacks, suddenly the hostess of a paranormal party.

  Randy asked her questions about the house, mostly about the extent to which her mother had used certain rooms, so he could determine where to set up command center. Angela answered his questions distractedly. She couldn’t shake the feeling that something wasn’t right. Even if her mother was worried about identity theft, why had she hidden the key?
Or, at least, why hide it in such a hard to find place? She could have stashed it in any of a dozen equally unlikely places that would have been easier for her to access but no easier for a thief to find. Maybe her mother had been losing it a little. Maybe, like her husband, she’d been developing Alzheimer’s and becoming delusional. But she hadn’t seemed delusional all summer. She’d seemed fine.

  Angela was pulled from her thoughts by the doorbell—more team members arriving. By 8:30, they were all assembled. Rick, probably in his mid-forties, wore a Grateful Dead t-shirt with a dancing bear in the middle of a swirl of faded tie-dye, his gray hair pulled into a long ponytail. When he spoke, he had a soothing, sonorous voice. Bill was younger, a hipster nerd who, Randy explained, was a fellow computer programmer. He would monitor everything from command center.

  Krissy and Jen appeared to be on better terms today than they had at the meeting. Jen’s hair was dyed blue now instead of purple, and up close Angela could see that she had a small stud in her nose and a thin hoop through one eyebrow. Krissy, despite her silver hair, had a smooth, young-looking face, and wore a velvety moon-and-stars scarf and a long, flowing, old-fashioned dress. Angela wondered if she always dressed like that or if she’d gotten dolled up for the occasion.

  Angela led the group around the first floor, pointing out places her mother had most often used, but noting that nothing strange had ever happened to her down there. Then they paraded upstairs, and with a shaking voice, Angela described what she’d heard and felt in the hallway, her face burning red with embarrassment to speak of the improbable sensations.

  She should have listened to Molly and Nicole, she thought, as she heard the ridiculous tale spilling from her mouth. She was clearly being driven mad by grief. But no one laughed at her. No one raised a skeptical eyebrow.

  When she had finished, they went into her mother’s study where the hulking desk sat, and Angela felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise. She didn’t know what it was, but something was not right.

  She said, “There’s something up with the desk, too. I don’t know. I just get a feeling.”

  Randy told her they would pay special attention to it and they went to see the bedrooms. When the tour was over, the team conferred and settled on the dining room as command center. Angela watched the flurry of activity as laptops were arranged, and microphones, cameras, and other mysterious devices were produced from bags and taken to various locations around the house. Angela couldn’t begin to imagine what it all was for. Either the strange thing that had happened to her before would happen again and they would all witness it, or it wouldn’t. She was watching in a daze, half-seeing, when Randy said, “Y’all have a garage, right?”

  Angela looked at him, confused, so lost in her thoughts that she didn’t seem to understand the question. He asked again.

  “That’s where she died,” Angela said after a moment. Right there. Alone. On the cold concrete floor. She had been on her way to her car, her purse over her shoulder, going to visit her husband in the nursing home. She’d been at the top of the four steps down to the garage when she had fallen. She had had a massive stroke. What symptoms she may have been having before she fell Angela would never know, only that her mother hadn’t understood them, had ignored them, had told herself she was fine, and had gone on with her routine, only to collapse mid-stride. But it probably wasn’t the stroke that killed her. It was more likely the fall. Or it was a combination. If she’d been able to reach her phone, she could have called for help, but when her head hit the concrete, it knocked her out cold.

  The dining room fell silent. Angela saw Jen and Krissy exchange glances, and she knew exactly what they were thinking. There was no point in investigating this house without including the garage. After all, there was no basement or attic, those usual hideouts for ghosts. But the site of death, that was something.

  “Jen, can you set up the infrared camera in the hallway upstairs?” Randy asked, breaking the silence. Then he took Angela by the arm and gently led her from the room. He sat her down on the couch in the den and knelt in front of her.

  “You never said she died here.”

  Angela nodded.

  “Look, that’s pretty important. I really think we should monitor the garage.”

  “Nothing’s ever happened out there. It’s all been upstairs.”

  “I know that’s how it seems, but it could really help us.”

  “I just—” Angela didn’t know how to put into words how she felt. This had all been her idea. She wanted to know what was going on. And yet, looking around for her mother’s ghost on the spot where she died felt so intrusive.

  “What if we set up a camera and a microphone in there and let it record and the team looks at it later. We won’t have them up as live feeds so you won’t have to see them.”

  This was a mistake, Angela thought. Tampering with her mother’s spirit. It was so childish and wrong, like playing with a Ouija board. “I feel like we’re bothering her or dishonoring her,” she said.

  “Whatever has been happening in this house, someone or something is trying to communicate with you. You aren’t bothering them. They want you to listen,” Randy said.

  “No, they want me to go away and leave it all alone. The voice, it always said, ‘Go back to sleep, Angela.’ It doesn’t want to talk to me. It wants me gone.”

  “It’s disturbing you, not the other way around. Let’s find out why.”

  Chapter 15

  Devil’s Back Island, Maine

  Brett picked his way along the gravel path back to the inn, wondering as he went what sort of place this island really was. Rosetta, for all her eagerness on the phone, had had no time for him when he arrived, and now he’d practically been ejected from the only café this side of a boat ride back to Portland. He couldn’t scope out the island in this fog—he’d probably fall off a cliff or something—and he could not handle the idea of being stuck in his hotel room all day.

  He had meetings the next day with an engineer to work on the environmental impact of development and to determine the carrying capacity of the resort for his prefeasibility analysis report, and he also had meetings in the works with three design-build construction companies, each eager to make a pitch for the project. Eager until they set foot on the island, he thought. The challenges of getting equipment and materials here were obvious and overwhelming, something he hadn’t fully understood when researching from afar. He could already see all the objections Charlie was going to have to this location. Everything about his trip had thus far proven inauspicious. Maybe he should leave, tell Charlie the lead hadn’t panned out, and ask to be put back on the Cancun team. He could tell Ashley he’d come to his senses and they could work things out.

  Reluctantly he went back up to his room, what Rosetta had called a “kitchenette suite,” a description that was generous at best. It was a hotel room with a microfridge, a two-burner range, and a two-seat table in the corner. Supposedly it had water views, but he wouldn’t be able to verify that until the weather changed.

  Unsure what else to do—until he got more input from the engineers, his work was done—he flopped down onto the bed, flicking on the TV. The island didn’t have cable, but Rosetta had had satellite installed for the hotel, a smart move, surely, in a place with so few entertainment options. Brett thought he’d lose his mind if he couldn’t at least watch some TV. He turned to the History Channel and zoned out for a while. Eventually his restlessness got the best of him, though, and he picked up his laptop and typed Beach Plum Café, Devil’s Back Island into his search browser.

  He had learned as much about Devil’s Back from the Internet as he could to prepare his pitch for Charlie. There hadn’t been much. It was named for the humped shape of the island and a rock formation at one end that looked like horns. It had once been a refuge of Quakers fleeing persecution in Massachusetts. Historically its inhabitants were fishermen and lobstermen. On a tourism bureau site, he learned that there were currently two restaurants (a fine
dining establishment and a lobster shack that also served pizza), a café/coffee bar, an ice cream stand, a local crafts gallery, and one hotel. Visitors could take scenic boat rides ranging from dolphin cruises and whale watches to sunset spinnaker tours. Kayaks and stand-up paddle boards were available for rental.

  There was also a story about the island’s “famous ghosts,” which he found particularly amusing. The page boasted that Devil’s Back was “America’s Most Haunted Island.” Apparently its author was unaware that Alcatraz was an island. The island’s supposed ghosts were clearly an attempt to lure ghost hunters to the island for visits, and the stories seemed ludicrous at best. The wailing woman at Lover’s Leap, where the widow of a lobsterman threw herself from a cliff when she learned his boat had been destroyed in a storm. The salty old sea captain whose ghost roamed the second floor of the White Sails Tavern, the oldest surviving building on the island and former home of said sea captain, who lost his wife and children to a flu epidemic while he was out chasing whales. The invisible walker at Rum Runner’s Cove, presumed to be the ghost of a prohibition-era booze smuggler who was shot there when a rival gang intercepted his shipment. They were the most overplayed, stereotypical ghosts Brett had ever heard of. He sincerely doubted this information had made ghost enthusiasts do anything but laugh.

  He couldn’t recall seeing a website for the café when he was doing his research, and as the search results popped up, he saw why. It didn’t have a website. Aside from the listing on the Tourism Bureau website, the other results were Yelp reviews and Facebook “check-ins.” It didn’t even have an official Facebook page. The reviews were all glowing. If Casey leveraged them, she could build a much more robust business. He skimmed through the results for a few minutes, but it wasn’t the café he was interested in. It was Casey. He’d been curious the minute he saw her, but when she gave such an obviously bogus name, his interest was fully piqued. He’d hoped searching for the café would lead him to information on her, since the name Casey Jones was clearly a red herring.