Death by the Sea

by Kathleen Bridge

  They took the scenic route via A1A to the northern tip of the barrier island, turned left at Patrick Air Force Base, and headed west. Silhouetted against a startling blue ocean sky was the barrier island’s black-and-white Cape Canaveral Lighthouse, its working light having been a beacon to sailors for a hundred and fifty years. Once over the Indian River Lagoon, they turned right onto Highway 1.

  Halfway to Cocoa Beach, Kate stopped at their first garage sale. Liz realized they needed a book as a decoy for their covert mission. While Kate was filling the back of her van with boxes of UFOs, unidentified found objects, and Aunt Amelia was looking through a stack of old movie-star magazines, Liz spied a vintage Dick and Jane children’s book that she quickly paid for. She stuffed the book in the front waistband of her long, gauzy cotton skirt and untucked her blouse to cover it. At the thought of the word “gauze,” Liz was reminded of the Ace bandage used to strangle Regina, a strange weapon to use when you were already carrying a knife. As Liz pondered these dark thoughts, a single cloud in the bright blue sky smothered the sun.

  Two yard sales later, they entered historic Cocoa Village. Quaint Main Street was lined with palm trees and awninged storefronts. There were all of the typical shops found in most small Florida towns built in the late 1800s, including a quilt and fabric shop that Liz knew Francie frequented. Could Francie really be considered a murder suspect? Liz couldn’t picture Francie strangling Regina and then stealing the necklace and earrings as subterfuge to stop the demolition of Castlemara. Francie had been upset at the plans for tearing down the mansion, but upset enough to kill?

  As they passed I Dream of Jeannie Lane, Aunt Amelia said, “I can picture astronaut Tony Nelson walking down Main Street looking for his mischievous genie. Did I ever tell you about when I was—”

  Kate interrupted. “Yes. Great episode of I Dream of Jeannie. When onlookers think Tony pushed Jeannie overboard, but really she’d blinked her way back to her bottle in Cocoa Beach.”

  “I played Young Woman Number One. All I said was, ‘Look!’ and then pointed.”

  Kate added, “And you did it perfectly, in your bubble gum–pink lipstick and platinum-blond hair.”

  “A wig, of course. I think I still have it somewhere.”

  Liz laughed. “It’s probably in my trunk of dress-up clothes in the hotel’s luggage room.”

  At the end of Main Street, Kate turned left. The map server on Kate’s phone directed them to the return address on the envelope Liz had pilfered from Iris’s bedroom. They turned onto a small shaded street on the water side of town. The phone broadcasted, “You have arrived,” as Kate pulled into a gravel drive.

  Liz said, “Don’t forget the reason you’re here.” She handed Kate the Dick and Jane book titled Guess Who, the irony of which wasn’t lost on Liz.

  Kate looked down at the book. “Wow! This is a classic. Worth at least sixty bucks.”

  “Kate, you act like you’ve never seen it before?” Aunt Amelia said.

  “You know Kate and her books, Auntie,” Liz said. “She hates to give them up.”

  Aunt Amelia took the book from Kate’s hand and said, “I remember Fenton reading Dick and Jane books in elementary school, but the ones he read had the word ‘New’ next to the title. I hope the woman buys it. I feel bad we had to close the emporium shops today and you’re losing out on sales. If she doesn’t buy it from you, I will.”

  “Don’t worry, Aunt Amelia,” Kate said. “If she doesn’t purchase it, I’ll find the perfect home—it’s what I live for. Plus, if the shops weren’t closed, I wouldn’t have gotten those two boxes of treasure I rescued at that first yard sale, or the sailboat weather vane from the second sale.”

  The musty odor from Kate’s treasure boxes filled the back of the van. A few minutes earlier they’d set off a series of sneezes from Liz that almost caused the van’s windows to explode. Kate’s prized sailboat weather vane was missing its east-west indicator—not much help during one of the barrier island’s frequent gales.

  Aunt Amelia handed over the book. Kate left the engine running, got out, and scurried up the chipped and potholed walkway toward the small brick house. The yard was overgrown with the typical, spiky Florida grass that caused you to yelp if you walked barefoot on it. That was one thing Liz missed about Manhattan. Central Park in the summer, lying on a blanket with a book or your boyfr—She let the image fade.

  Liz watched as Kate peered into the front picture window. The blinds were closed, but there were gaps where numerous slats were missing. Kate rang the doorbell. After a few minutes, she banged on the door. Then she looked back at the van and shrugged her shoulders.

  “Kate might need help,” Liz said. “Stay here, I’ll be right back.”

  Aunt Amelia didn’t hear her—she was too busy reading an article from one of the vintage magazines she’d bought at the second garage sale entitled, Tattletales from Television.

  When Liz caught up with Kate, she said, “I’ll go check the back. You look in the windows to see whether there’s furniture and maybe grab some mail from the mailbox. On second thought, you’d better not. Stealing mail is a felony.” She knew better—she’d just dared Kate.

  “It’s only a crime if you steal mail, not take a picture of it and place it back.” She opened the mailbox and clicked her tongue. “Doesn’t matter. There’s only a coupon flyer for Space Coast Pizza addressed to ‘Current Resident’.”

  “Darn,” Liz said. “I have to report back to Detective Betty. Failure is not an option.”

  “Excuse me, young ladies, can I help you?” A man came toward them from the house next door, brandishing a hand rake. His yard looked like the Garden of Eden compared to the unkempt property on which they were now standing.

  They walked toward him.

  “We’re looking for Greta Kimball or her daughter, Iris,” Liz said. “Will they be home soon?”

  He chivalrously took off his Atlanta Braves baseball cap and looked them over. “You’re not selling anything, are you? We don’t allow door-to-door salesmen or saleswomen around here.”

  “We aren’t selling anything,” Kate said. “We’ve lost touch with the Kimballs. We’re down here on vacay and wanted to look them up for old times’ sake.”

  Liz quickly waved the envelope in front of him. “We got a Christmas card last year and we wanted to stop by and catch up.” She strategically placed her hand over Iris’s name.

  The man ran the fingers of his free hand through his thick mane of white hair, making furrows ready to seed.

  “I love your sausages,” Kate said.

  Liz whipped her head around to face Kate, then she followed Kate’s gaze, which was aimed at the man’s front yard. Sure enough, there was a tree sprouting two-foot-long sausages.

  He said, “Ain’t she a beaut! Kigelia Africana. Saw one in the Africa section at Walt Disney World’s Animal Kingdom and discovered that our local nursery sells them. Two years later, I have sausages up the kazoo. The sausages are the fruit. Have you ever seen the flowers up close?”

  “No,” Kate said. “I’d love to see them. Come on, Liz, let’s go check out his sausage…” Liz held her breath. After a two-second pause, Kate finished her sentence, “…tree.”

  They walked into the yard and saw, among the sausages, bell-shaped magenta flowers that, instead of hanging vertically, hung horizontally. After Liz and Kate oohed and aahed, the man smiled, and the gates opened to any misgivings he had about sharing the whereabouts of whom he called “poor Greta Kimball.”

  After getting everything they needed and more from Pete Foster, former semipro golfer and wicked shrimp-boil maker, they got back in the van. Aunt Amelia was engrossed in another vintage movie-star magazine. Liz leaned forward from the back seat and saw a full-page head shot of the actress Anne Francis, with a caption, “Private Detective—Honey West.”

  Kate looked over at the open pages. �
�I have a pulp fiction copy of the first Honey West book, This Girl for Hire, by G.G. Fickling. Honey West was one of the first female private eyes in fiction. G.G. Fickling was a pseudonym for a husband-wife writing team. The wife was a fashion editor for Look magazine and Women’s Wear Daily, and the husband a former U.S. Marine. Aunt Amelia, I’ll give you my copy of the book, if you want it?”

  “Oh, sweetie, I appreciate it, but I’m more of a visual person, always have been. I love watching faces and gestures—a window to the soul, I always say.”

  Liz couldn’t help but ask, “What kind of soul did Regina Harrington-Worth have?”

  “We aren’t our outward appearances, Liz. You know that better than most. For all we know, Mrs. Worth could have been a scared and lonely child, hiding behind a façade of anger and entitlement.”

  Liz didn’t think so, but she let her great-aunt believe what she wished. “Then I wonder what the soul of the person who killed her looked like?”

  They all remained quiet after Liz’s comment.

  Chapter 24

  When they were about twenty miles from the Indialantic, Liz called out, “Wait. Kate, stop the car! I need to visit someone at the Sundowner. An old friend from school works there, and I promised to give her my new contact number.”

  Kate pulled the van into the parking lot.

  “Don’t tell me someone you know works in this joke of a ‘retirement home’,” Aunt Amelia said. “Millicent was here until I rescued her and made her move into the caretaker’s cottage. I supposed it could have changed from when she was a resident, but from the looks of the outside, I doubt it. I’ll never forget the horrible smell when I first came to visit her. At the end of my days, I’d rather walk out into the ocean than stay at a place like that.”

  “Auntie, Dad and I would never put you anywhere but right by our side.”

  “Some people don’t have a choice, if it’s all that their retirement benefits will pay for. Tell your friend, I can give her the name of a wonderful place to work, right on our island.”

  “Will do,” Liz said. “Be right back.”

  Liz got out of the van, avoiding the potholes on the blacktop as she made her way up the driveway. She walked into the dingy lobby and was immediately hit with an awful odor. It was so bad she put her nose to her sleeve to inhale the scent of fabric softener on her blouse. In a small TV room to her right, four elderly people sat in wheelchairs. Each wheelchair was positioned to match the four directions of a compass. North, South, East, and West were slumped over, chins on chest, not cognizant of the television or anything else going on around them. Liz thought it was a sad state of affairs to be reduced to living in these conditions after a life of vibrancy and autonomy.

  Security was pretty lax at the Sundowner. Liz wasn’t asked for ID or whether or not she was a family member. They probably wondered who would want to steal one of the residents anyway? But Liz knew someone who would love to—Aunt Amelia.

  The sleepy-eyed woman at the registration desk told Liz that, indeed, Greta Kimball was a guest at the Sundowner. Then she pointed at the person in the wheelchair Liz had designated as North. Liz walked up to Iris’s mother. When Liz put her hand on Greta’s soft, wrinkled hand, her head shot up and her eyes opened wide. Greta didn’t have the filmy, highly medicated gaze Liz would have thought; instead her hazel eyes were sharp and alert. Her long white hair looked unwashed. Her face had few wrinkles; with a good haircut she would be an attractive woman.

  “Yes? Can I help you?” Greta said. “If you are trying to get me to take a sedative, I told you I refuse. If you have a pill for the pain in my hip, I will also tell you nay. If you need to talk to my daughter, Iris, I will give you her number. She’s my designated advocate. So there!”

  “Oh, I am sorry. I have the wrong patient.”

  Greta Kimball replied, “We are not patients, we are residents. As soon as my daughter gets enough money for my operation, I’m out of this dump.”

  “Again. I apologize.”

  “Let me give you some advice. Lean down.”

  Liz crouched next to her.

  “Whatever resident you are here to see, get them out as soon as possible. This place stinks. The food is the best of it, if that tells you anything.”

  “Thanks for the advice,” Liz said as she stood up. “I hope your daughter comes through for you real soon.”

  Greta smiled and gave Liz a thumbs-up, hope shining bright in her eyes.

  Liz hurried out of the Sundowner.

  When she got back in the van, Aunt Amelia asked, “How was it?”

  “Just as you said.”

  “Did you tell your friend what I said about finding another place to work?”

  Liz didn’t want to lie, so she said, “My friend wasn’t there.”

  “Good. Maybe she found a better place of employment.”

  Traffic was light on the way back to Melbourne Beach, people hunkering down for the forecasted storm scheduled to hit after midnight. Kate dropped Aunt Amelia at the Indialantic and Liz at the beach house. Liz made a quick dinner of sautéed shrimp in mango chutney and a green salad, then went to her office and turned on her laptop. It was only the second time since she’d been home that she’d turned it on. The first was to type out the synopsis her publisher had requested for her supposed next novel. Once she’d pushed the button and sent the synopsis off into cyberspace, she’d never thought of it again. She started a new document with the simple headline of Notes, filling the page with everything she’d learned from Ryan yesterday and ending with what she’d discovered today. Liz printed it out, stuck it in her pocket, and took off for the hotel, wanting to fill Betty in on the day’s events.

  A few minutes later, Liz was sitting on Betty’s sofa, holding a cup of chamomile tea.

  “We can’t rule out Iris completely,” Betty said. “She does need money for her mother’s operation. However, I would put her at the end of the list because, as she has been telling Amelia, she does have an ailing mother. I did a little research on my own, let my fingers do the walking. Iris was honorably discharged from the navy ten years ago. She’d been a navy diving specialist, which explains the wet suit.”

  “And the water depth chart Iris took from Captain Netherton’s room. It still points to her as being a thief, though.”

  “Perhaps. But not a murderer. Time for assignment number two. Namely, David Worth.”

  “How could David be his wife’s killer? Are you saying he stabbed himself?”

  “Crimes of passion by family members are one of the top reasons for homicides. And many people have been known to stab or shoot themselves as a way of creating an alibi. You will have to wait to hear from the police—they’ll be able to tell whether it was self-inflicted.”

  “Let’s hope Agent Pearson shares things with Dad. I don’t think she and I will be getting any girl-bonding mani-pedis in the near future.”

  “If that’s the case, you might want to bring Ryan Stone into the loop. He most likely has ties to the NYPD and their databases.”

  “Ick.”

  “Is that a good ‘ick,’ or a bad ‘ick’?” Betty asked.

  Liz wasn’t sure.

  Chapter 25

  Monday dawned dark and brooding, reminiscent of Ryan’s face the previous evening when Liz had spotted him coming out of the caretaker’s cottage. He either didn’t see Liz, Aunt Amelia, and Killer, or he pretended not to. He walked with his head down, toward the emporium’s parking lot.

  Liz had awakened at 6 a.m. from a restless night with Killer snoring next to her on the “man side” of her bed. The ever-gallant Captain Netherton had loaned the Great Dane to Liz and Aunt Amelia for the purpose of protection. The idea of Killer as a guard dog was humorous; he rarely barked and the only way he could stop someone from breaking into the beach house would be to lick them to death.

  One of the reasons for Liz�
�s restless night had to do with the eerie Twilight Zone episode Aunt Amelia had picked for them to watch, “Jess-Belle.” Her great-aunt chose it because it starred Anne Francis in a part completely opposite her glamourous Honey West role. In the episode, a poor mountain girl had a local witch put a curse on the rich girl who was dating the man whom Jess-Belle was obsessed with. Things didn’t turn out well, which was not unusual in the Twilight Zone.

  As they were watching, Aunt Amelia had remarked that Anne Francis’s and Tina Louise’s moles made them look so distinctive. “Liz Taylor had one, too, but it was farther back on her jawline. Moles, or ‘beauty marks,’ were all the rage back then, kind of like puffy lips are today. Maybe I’ll add one for my next performance at the Melbourne Civic Theatre. I’m going to try for the part of Cat in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” Aunt Amelia never got the ingénue parts anymore, but that didn’t stop her from trying. Whatever part she won, she always made it distinctively her own, and usually to much applause from the audience. Aunt Amelia had fallen asleep five minutes into “Jess-Belle.” If she’d had a cameo in the episode, she would have stayed awake until the credits rolled. When Liz was young, she never got scared from any part her great-aunt played, no matter how gory. She knew it was all make-believe. Now, as an adult, she took stock in the adage: True life is stranger than fiction.

  At eight, Aunt Amelia left to have breakfast at the Indialantic; then she was going to the emporium to open the main doors, praying there would still be customers after the news of Regina’s death.

  Liz sat in a chair next to the French doors, looking out at layers of gray: sand, ocean, and sky. Every morning, except in foul weather like today, Liz followed the same routine. She would take her mug of coffee, sit on the bottom step leading to the beach, and thank the universe for another day of living in paradise, then plan the day’s activities while staring out at the fathomless sea. Today’s weather would be considered most foul: The surf was high, along with the tide. Tornado and gale warnings had been issued for Brevard County. Luckily, no hurricanes were on the horizon this time of year, but the rain came from all directions, bringing with it grains of sand that sounded against the panes of glass like pellets shot from a BB gun. The wind chimes hanging outside the kitchen window clanged against each other in an earsplitting cacophony.