by Mary Bowers
“Somebody told me about how well-liked your family was,” I said. “Always throwing parties, and having your friends come for sleepovers.”
“We had a lot of fun. Everything is so relaxed here, I enjoyed the freedom from nannies and school. There were quite a few kids our age in town at that time, and they were all very friendly, and very curious about this house. I found it gave me a certain prestige, being brave enough to live in the haunted house.”
“Did you ever feel it was haunted?”
“By the Whitbys? No. It was never spooky here. Everything is so bright and beautiful, how could it be spooky?”
Jasper made a rumbling noise and had another pastry.
“My grandmother loved the place especially,” Rita went on. “Violet. I always called her by her first name. I thought her real name was so much prettier than ‘Granny.’ She loved this house. By the time she passed away, my sister and I were too old to take our summer vacations with our parents anymore, so they sold the house. I really hated to see it go out of the family. We had so many great memories here. I guess I think of it the way most people think of their grandmother’s house. The woman who ran the B&B really gussied it up, but I like it. It suits the place, somehow. She managed to modernize it a bit from when my family used to come here, but I still need to do a few things. For some reason I can’t seem to get the Wi-Fi to reach every room of the house, and I don’t know why. It’s really been a nuisance. One of the dead zones is the master bedroom. I’m afraid I’m getting a little superstitious about why I can’t get electronics to work up there. It was the bedroom of the original owner of the house. You know – the one who committed suicide.”
Jasper crossed himself. “Well, gotta go,” he said abruptly.
“No, wait, Jasper,” Rita said. “I haven’t paid you for the yard clean-up yet.”
“Oh, let Orphans do that,” I said. “After all, it was our event that made the mess in the first place.”
Jasper held up a hand. “No payment necessary, either one o’you. Volunteer work. For the kitties and doggies. You be sure and tell ‘em,” he added, leering at me.
“I’ll make an announcement in the kennel as soon as I get back home,” I said.
We thanked him and told him good-bye.
“Where does he put it all?” I asked, more to myself than Rita. Jasper weighed about 130 lbs., and he’d eaten at least three sweet rolls.
“He works very hard. Then he spends his time off wandering up and down the beach, singing.”
“What exactly does he call himself? A handyman?”
She smiled. “He likes to call himself a Jack of all trades and a master of song.”
“Uh huh. I’ve heard him sing.”
“Don’t let that crazy-old-man act fool you. Jasper’s pretty sharp. He just doesn’t like people to know it. That’s why I asked him to go over this house with me and let me know what he thought. He found a few little problems that the home inspector had missed. But he’ll never admit he really knows what he’s doing. When I asked him what kind of condition the house was in, he said, ‘Prissy.’ He didn’t like the B&B makeover. You know why he got here so early this morning, don’t you?”
“He told me the sun came up early to accommodate his work schedule.”
“Typical. No. He has this personal code. He doesn’t like to let a lady do any kind of manual labor. He knew you’d come and dig in and start doing heavy work, so he got it done before you could get here.”
I had to smile. “As ladies go, I’m pretty strong. You should see me hauling 50 lb. bags of dog food.”
“Just so long as Jasper doesn’t see you doing it. Listen, I meant to ask you if you’ve got any suggestions about my Wi-Fi problems. You must have had somebody hook you up when you moved your shelter onto the Cadbury estate.”
“Actually, I didn’t. The Huntingtons had already taken care of that. They’d been living out there for quite a while by then, you know.”
“Well, I’m about to give up tinkering with it myself. Do you know any computer geeks in town who’ll take a look at it for me?”
“I heard something about a new guy setting up business in town. One of my volunteers was talking about him. Apparently he’s a hunk, which was what the conversation was really about, but I think he runs an information technologies business of some kind. A guy named Victor Smith. He put an ad in The Beach Buzz this week. I don’t know a lot about these things myself, but he might be able to help you. Is that this week’s edition?”
I was reaching for the newspaper lying on the kitchen counter. The Beach Buzz comes out on Fridays, and this was Sunday. I hadn’t had time to look at my copy until this morning, over my first cup of coffee.
The Beach Buzz is mostly ads, and before I could find the right one, Jasper was back.
“Don’t you call that man,” he said, startling us. He seemed to pop out of the wall exactly the way the mummy had popped out of the casket.
We stared at him.
“Why not?” I said.
“He’s new in town. Don’t know nothing about him. He comes from up north,” he added darkly.
“So do I,” I reminded him.
“Three-quarters of the population does,” Rita said.
Jasper clamped his mouth shut like a pit bull and glared at us.
“Have you heard something bad about him?” Rita asked.
He thought about it, then countered with, “Haven’t heard anything good about him.”
“Have you heard anything at all about him?” I asked.
Rather than admit he hadn’t, he glared some more. “Man’s too much of a smoothie to be honest. When I look at him, I see right through him, like there’s blank windows where his eyes should be. Take my advice or leave it. I’m just sayin’.” He gathered himself up and left.
“Think he’s really gone this time?” I asked as we heard the front door close behind him.
“Oh, don’t pay any attention to him. He just doesn’t trust anybody new, and he probably just wants to be able to say ‘I told you so’ if this guy turns out to be no good. That’s Jasper.”
I was still holding The Beach Buzz, and I went through the pages until I found the ad I’d told her about.
“Is Jasper going to hold it against you if you go ahead and call this guy?”
“He might, but that won’t bother me. He never holds a grudge for long. Besides, I like helping out small, local businesses.”
I looked doubtfully at the bakery box that the awful sweet rolls had come in.
“Let me make a few calls, check the guy out first,” I said.
“Okay.”
The volunteer that had told me about Victor was Eden O’Sullivan, my late-arriving fortune teller. But I wasn’t going to ask Eden about him directly. Eden was a flake. A much better judge of character would be her sister, Chrissie Brown. Chrissie had taken enough blows from life to be cynical. As for Eden, if Victor was really that good-looking, she would do nothing but gush about him even if he was a serial killer.
Chrissie was four years older than Eden, and at one time, they must have looked very much alike. They had the same coloring and pretty features, but Chrissie was aging much faster than her little sister. She never thought of dyeing her blond hair any color at all, much less blue. Eden seemed to skip along through life, blowing bubbles and living on promises she never meant to keep. Chrissie had married very young, quickly had a child and quickly become a widow. Her husband had been in a drunk-driving accident (he was the drunk), and was killed, along with the woman in the car with him. The responsibility of single motherhood had put Chrissie’s carefree days behind her before she was even twenty. Sometimes she seemed more like Eden’s mother than her sister.
Eden had had her big adventure in Atlanta, then come back to Tropical Breeze broke, with pretty much nothing but the clothes on her back. Then she had gone straight to her sister’s tiny house and had been living with her for about a month. While Chrissie worked for minimum wages at the local coff
ee shop, Perks, Eden spent her days on the beach, flirting with every male in sight, hanging out with her friends, and refusing to so much as load the dishwasher at home. I wasn’t sure how long the arrangement was going to last. Eden wasn’t even looking for a job. She’d only volunteered at the shelter when she found out we were planning a Halloween event. It sounded like fun, and she wanted to play fortune teller. Knowing she contributed nothing but aggravation to her sister’s household, I expected the blow-up to come any day. Then Eden would find somebody else to crash with, and go on partying. Somehow, the Edens of this world always seemed to get by.
I went over to Perks to see if Chrissie was working that morning. I didn’t really want more coffee, but after making myself eat that dried-up sweet roll, I needed something decent to eat, and if this Victor guy turned out to be some kind of a flake, like Eden, I wanted to warn Rita before she called him.
Chrissie was behind the bakery case, and the owner, Ronnie Hart, was working the controls of the steampunk creation that gathers itself up so majestically, only to dribble out a little stream of espresso. The place was busy. I got in line, ordered oatmeal with nuts and raisins, and stood aside to wait as Chrissie prepared it. As I paid, I asked Chrissie if she was taking her break anytime soon.
She glanced up at the clock and said, “I caught the early shift today. I’m off in about half an hour.”
“I’ll be done with my oatmeal by then. Mind if we talk?”
“No problem. You can walk me home.”
“Hey, Taylor,” Ronnie called over her shoulder, keeping an eye on the espresso cup.
“Hey, Ronnie.”
“Great shindig last night.”
“Thanks.”
I found a seat along the wall between two other tables, one with a young woman reading a textbook, the other with three guys squeezed into a table for two, talking too loudly and making lame jokes, trying to get the girl to notice them. They didn’t seem pleased with me for getting between them and the sweet young thing, but I figured she’d taken the table farther away from them because she wasn’t interested.
“You can walk me home,” Chrissie had said. Her house was a bit of a walk from Perks, but like many of us, I figured she was saving on gas.
As I waited, I gazed around the room. There was a Goth-looking teenage girl sitting with a small group, and I wondered why kids did that to themselves. Then I remembered hip-hugger bell-bottoms, beehive hairdos and mood rings, and told myself to hush up.
Trying to ignore the goofballs who were throwing flirts over my head at the pretty girl, I ate my oatmeal and gazed around at the works of local artists. Ronnie hangs them in her coffee shop and sells them for the artists if she can. We have more than our share of painters and musicians in the area, and sometimes it seems like every small business is also an art gallery. A deliriously fanciful fish collage caught my eye, and I sat there idly gazing at it and thinking about the rest of my day. I really needed to get back to Cadbury House and take inventory. I should have done it before coming into town, so I could pick up whatever we needed, but I just hadn’t had time. As long as I was there, though, I toyed with the idea of running back to Palmetto Street and dropping in on Bernie Horning. She’d be writing up the Halloween event for next week’s Beach Buzz, which would come out the day before Halloween, and I wanted to see what she had so far.
I had outlasted the wolf pack by the time Chrissie was closing out the register for the next shift, and the girl with the textbook gave me a grateful look as she packed up and left.
When Chrissie came out from behind the counter, I got up and threw out the oatmeal container.
As soon as we got outside, she said, “So where did my sister crash last night?”
It took a moment to register. I had a brief vision of a car crash, but Eden didn’t have a car. She was always cadging rides, and when she’d first come back to town I’d even seen her hitchhiking on State Route A1A. I’d given her a ride and a lecture, and the next week, I’d seen her doing it again. But that wasn’t what Chrissie had been talking about, I realized. “You mean, where did she spend the night?”
Chrissie gave me a sideways look. “She never came home last night after the Halloween thing. By the way, I’m sorry I couldn’t come to the festival, but I was in St. Augustine all day, with my daughter. So how did Eden do last night? She’s got her fortune teller act down pat. Was everybody impressed?”
“Yes,” I said, slowing my pace. “She did show up late.”
“What a surprise.”
I came to a dead stop in front of The Bookery and stared blindly at the display window. Then I turned to Chrissie. “Have you tried calling her?”
“Of course. Straight to voicemail. Here, let me check. Ronnie makes us leave our cell phones in our purses while we’re on the counter. Maybe she texted me while I was working.” She poked at her cell phone screen a few times. “Uh, no. Nothing. Another surprise.”
Chrissie put the phone away and said, “She’ll show up this afternoon and not even apologize. It never occurs to her that I might actually worry about her. To tell you the truth, I’ve stopped worrying. She’s 32 years old, even though she acts about twelve. She’s a grown woman. I give her room and board, and beyond that, she can take care of herself.”
We walked on for half a block or so, window-shopping and making little comments on the displays. But I was getting more and more pensive, and when we stopped at the corner of 6th Street to let a car go by, I touched Chrissie’s arm. “Do you have a phone tracker on her?”
“Are you kidding? I suggested it when she first moved in with me, so we could always see where the other one was. Or at least, where the other one’s cell phone was,” she added. “She’s always leaving it somewhere, then conning somebody into buying her another one. But she went off on a rant about being a grown woman and not needing a babysitter, and I said if you’re so grown up, how about helping me pay the mortgage, and it all went to hell from there.”
We had crossed the street, and a strip of ocean was coming into view a few blocks ahead, across A1A, but I had reached the point that I had to stop.
“Chrissie, I know I said Eden was late last night, but with all the activity and how dark it was getting, and with that costume and headpiece . . . .” I stopped.
“What are you saying?” she asked, seeming concerned instead of irritated for the first time.
“Now that I think about it – oh, Chrissie – I’m not sure that was Eden at all. Does Eden have a mark of some kind on her left hand? A birthmark, or a tattoo?”
“Her tattoo is on her back. She’s got wings across the shoulders, and she has a rose on her right thigh. She had a big strawberry there, and she wanted to cover it up.”
“She had a strawberry – oh! A strawberry mark. Like that one,” I said, pointing at Chrissie’s forearm, where she had a bright red splotch near the inside of the elbow.
“Right.”
“Anything on her left hand?”
“No.” My urgency had communicated itself to her, and she stared at me. “What’s this all about, Taylor?”
I was looking down at my own right hand, remembering the cover-up make-up smeared on it, seeing the fleshy color wash down the drain with the soap bubbles, orange against my white sink basin, and in the gloom of the tent, a mark beginning to show beneath the make-up.
“I think the woman who was in the fortune teller tent last night wasn’t Eden at all. I think that woman had a tattoo on her left hand. When she held my right hand, I looked down at it and noticed something, but I didn’t think anything of it at the time. If I’m right, and that was a tattoo that she was trying to cover up, then that wasn’t Eden.”
Chrissie stared at me, nonplussed. I could see she wanted to downplay it, but really, she couldn’t. She had already admitted she didn’t know where her sister was.
“Chrissie, I’ve got a bad feeling about this. I’m going to call the Sheriff.”
“You don’t know my sister,” she said in a tired
voice. “This is typical. She probably got one of her friends to do the gig for her. She’s good at using people.”
“But if she’s missing . . . .”
“She’s not missing. She’s probably making scrambled eggs for a bunch of guys at some apartment she’s never been in before. Please don’t make a big fuss. If she’s just messing around with some new man, she won’t thank you for turning it into a federal case.”
I frowned at her for a moment, trying to figure out what to do. She was right. She knew Eden much better than I did, and she didn’t appear to be worried. But I didn’t feel like I could just let it go.
“I think I know what to do,” I said at last.
“What?”
“Bernie. I’ll run it by her. She’s got pretty good instincts, and she’s known Eden all her life, right?”
Chrissie nodded doubtfully. “Is Bernie still dating the County Sheriff?”
That had been exactly the reason I’d decided to run it by Bernie, but I hadn’t wanted to mention it. “They’re just friends,” I said. “I think he just gets a kick out of her. He’s about thirty years younger than her, and he likes to look after her. I don’t think he trusts her to look after herself. She’s pretty rambunctious for her age.”
“Well, like you say, she knows Eden. But don’t call out the SWAT team, please. On second thought, Eden would probably enjoy stirring up a big drama. I’m the one who would hate it.”
“Don’t you want to come too?”
“I’m beat. I was up at the crack of dawn, and I’ve got to go home and get a nap in before I take the late shift at the Dollar Store. Believe me, Taylor, even if that wasn’t Eden at the festival last night, she’s not in any trouble. She always manages to find a party somewhere.”
“All right, but call me if she comes back, will you? Here’s my number.” I handed her a business card from Orphans of the Storm. She recited her own number, and I added it to my Contacts in my phone.
