Last Chance Harbor

by Vickie McKeehan

  “But they didn’t.”

  “She contacted me whenever she needed money. She lives in Savannah, Georgia, or she did the last time I talked to her about a year ago.”

  “Your aunt and uncle have no idea whatsoever?”

  “Not a clue.”

  “What about Caleb and Drea?”

  “They don’t know either. As far as I know, they slept right through it all that night. They’ve never questioned me about the night Dad left. Even after Landon and Shelby adopted us, I laid awake at night listening while Drea cried for her daddy. It tormented me. The only traumatic event for them was about four months later when Eleanor rowed us out in the middle of the harbor and jumped into the water. To this day, I can still hear those kids bawling their eyes out. ‘Mama, mama, come back. Don’t go. Mama, mama.’”

  “You have to tell your story to Brent Cody, Cooper.” When he stared at her with blank eyes, Julianne insisted, “You have to tell him and get it all behind you, once and for all. He’s the police chief now. You were nine years old. None of this was your fault.”

  “But I knew what she’d done and never said a word. I knew where my father was buried all this time and said nothing. Look around you. Does it look like I’d fit in at The Plant Habitat? It was never for me. I left when I was eighteen and I won’t go back. There’s nothing there for me.”

  “Not even for your father’s proper burial?” Ryder wanted to know.

  “That’s a low blow.”

  But Julianne took another route. “You’re wrong, you know. There’s a lot back there for you. Your grandfather’s store is available. I understand from Drea you loved that place as a boy, loved spending time there. I’m looking around the room, Cooper. You have all your dad’s old trains here and I’d be willing to bet you have even more in a storage facility somewhere. You could have a life back in Pelican Pointe if you wanted it. You could breathe life back into that store to honor your father, be part of the community where he played with his kids. You know your brother and sister would love nothing better than to have you back in their lives, close by.”

  “I’m well aware now that I’ve opened my mouth, I’ll have to tell someone officially.”

  “Then throw some of your stuff in a bag and come back with us.”

  It took another hour to convince the photographer to get his things together. While Ryder helped him, Julianne put in a call to Brent. But she had to hold the phone away from her ear.

  “If you’ll let me get a word in, I’ll explain,” Julianne yelled back. “There’s no point in shouting at me. It’s done already. In fact, it’s over. We’re bringing Cooper back. He has a story to tell you. And a surprise or two along the way.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  It was growing late when Brent sat inside his new office at the Pelican Pointe police station. He looked over the desk at an adult Cooper Jennings who’d gone over the heart-wrenching story of what happened when he was nine.

  Four days ago Coop had taken him to the spot where he’d helped bury two people—his own father and Brooke Caldwell—at the direction of his mother. It had taken county forensics several hours of digging to go down far enough to locate the remains.

  “I know it’s been a tough couple days for you and it’s still raw. But you did the right thing.”

  “After twenty years,” Cooper charged. “She was mentally and physically abusive to my dad. I saw it myself. She treated him like crap. I guess that’s why she thought it’d be funny to bury him under the compost heap.”

  “You were a kid,” Brent said as a reminder.

  “Doesn’t matter. Tell that to my psyche, the one plagued by nightmares every night I don’t seem to be able to shake. I’ve only come to realize this over the last decade, but my mother had no feelings for anyone but herself. She took off months after she killed two people and left a little boy to deal with what she’d done. Then she takes the easy way out by disappearing. Do I need to list how many ways she screwed me over?”

  “Not tonight unless you really want to.” When the man said nothing, Brent sat back in his chair. “If not, then there are a few painful facts we still need to get out of the way. For roughly ten years from the time you were nine to eighteen you believed right along with your brother and sister that your mother had jumped into the bay and committed suicide, correct?”

  “That’s right.”

  “The first contact she made telling you otherwise, you sent her money because she threatened to tell your secret.” At the nod of Coop’s head, Brent asked the other part. “The second time, how do you suppose she found out where you were living in Seattle?”

  “She sent a letter to my old address and my roommate at the time forwarded it to me. I kept on the move hoping she would lose interest but since she refuses to work, she’s always in need of money and where money’s concerned, my mother is relentless. Money means more to her than anything else.”

  “Okay. How much do you normally send her?”

  “Since my photography took off five years back, a couple thousand about four times a year.”

  “I used the last known address you had for her to track her down. She’s still in Savannah, goes by the name of Loretta Eikenberry. I obtained a warrant for her arrest. Murder one. You’ll be glad to know the Georgia Bureau of Investigation has already picked her up. She was shocked to say the least and offered no resistance. I’m headed there first thing in the morning to take her into custody, bring her back to Santa Cruz County.” Brent met Cooper’s frantic eyes. “Don’t worry. She won’t be coming back to Pelican Pointe. As soon as she steps off the plane she’ll go directly to a jail cell at county lockup until trial. I promise you she won’t make bail.”

  “How can you guarantee something like that? Women often get lighter sentences for murder.”

  “A couple reasons. For one, the fact she faked her own death. Judges frown on that. Second, she’s been evading law enforcement for twenty years and blackmailing her own son. Judges take a pissy attitude toward mothers like that. Third, she committed a double homicide, took a father away from his children. As far as Brooke is concerned, Eleanor took a sister away from a brother and a daughter away from her parents. Add it all up and judges in this county usually fixate on those kinds of details. The district attorney will make sure the judge has all these facts. He’ll file a motion to deny bail.”

  “But…”

  Brent shook his head. “No buts. She won’t get out so don’t spend a lot of time worrying about that. With your testimony on the table, her attorney will more than likely talk her into taking a plea deal to avoid the death penalty anyway. We may not use it very much in this state, but it’s a powerful tool to make sure she stays locked up for the rest of her life.”

  Brent took off his ball cap, ran a hand through his long, dark hair. “The thing is, Cooper, I’m sorry the authorities didn’t raise more questions back in the day, didn’t do a more thorough investigation into your father’s disappearance and that of Brooke Caldwell. For what it’s worth, I’ve talked to a great many people around town since this case surfaced. They all said the same thing. Your father would never have left you no matter how much he loved Brooke. He would never have left you with your mother. Not ever. Eleanor had him convinced she would hurt you kids and he couldn’t risk that. No matter how much she was just blowing smoke up his ass, your father believed her threats.”

  “I already knew that. I lived in the same house, remember? Despite what adults think, kids aren’t stupid.”

  “No, they aren’t. There’s one more thing you need to know. Medical examiner went over the autopsy results with me earlier on both sets of remains. It’s your choice whether or not you want to hear them.”

  Cooper wiped his palms on his jeans. “Might as well get it over with.”

  “First, Brooke Caldwell died of a gunshot to the middle of the back. I’d hazard a guess that Eleanor more than likely shot your father first because the bullet went through his heart which meant he was facing
Eleanor. Brooke saw it happen and more than likely tried to take off running to get away. But Eleanor aimed and fired, hitting her in the back.”

  “Jesus.”

  “On the other hand, your father would’ve probably died anyway within the year. His future, unfortunately for him, was entirely in Eleanor’s hands, had been for a long time.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “The medical examiner found arsenic in his hair and bones. Long before your mother took out the .38 that night, she’d been slowly poisoning him over time. Coroner says it had been going on for about six months prior to his death.”

  “That’s why he was so sick.”

  “He was sick?” Brent picked up his pen, jotted down that detail.

  Cooper nodded. “Sick at his stomach, dizzy, night sweats, joint pain. There were days he had trouble getting out of bed, a hard time making it to work.”

  “Before that he’d been in relatively good health?”

  “Absolutely. He’d ride bikes with us, take us to the beach. That sort of thing.”

  “If you hang around town for long you’re probably gonna hear a few rumblings you hadn’t heard before about your mother.”

  “They can’t say anything I haven’t already heard. People have been talking about her ever since I can remember.”

  “This is different. It goes back to when Eleanor was seventeen. Back then her father took a rifle and killed himself in the barn. I’ll tell you straight out. There’s speculation she’s the one who killed him. I’m opening an inquest just to cover all the bases. Again, there was no real investigation done into it. I’m sorry for that, too. I mention it because your family hopes like hell you’re coming back here for good, that you plan to stay. If you do, I don’t want you hearing such things out of the blue one day when you least expect it without giving you an advance warning. They’re just rumors.”

  “Yeah, but the thing is, God knows, my mother was crazy enough to do it,” Cooper said, closing his eyes against the pain, the knowledge, the depth of what he came from. “Do Drea and Caleb know what I did? Do they know our mother’s alive?”

  “They do. I took care of that when I shut down the garden center so forensics could… Do their job. Cooper, your brother and sister both know what she was like. They lived in that house the same as you did, Caleb less so maybe because he was so young. But even a boy of four remembers the night she jumped into the bay. Clearly. Neither one of them blames you. Nor do your aunt and uncle. Having grown up with her, Landon knows fully well the way his sister was even as a kid.”

  “I’m sorry I lied to you about the boxes belonging to me. Try to understand. When I was a kid, I wanted someone to find the pieces of shirt without me having to actually wave them under someone’s nose and say look what I did. I didn’t know what else to do. By the time I hid those boxes throughout the school, the place had been abandoned. I just didn’t think it would take twenty years for them to surface or that anyone would care when they did.”

  Brent grinned. “Those boxes hidden the way they were in the school drove Julianne nuts. I guess we both have her to thank for her persistence in running down the clues you left. I’m thinking of trying to persuade her to give up her job as principal and come to work for me.”

  For the first time since entering the room, Cooper gave him a wry smile. “I certainly didn’t appreciate seeing Julianne standing outside my gate. But tonight, I feel like twenty tons have been lifted off my shoulders. Now I have to find a way to tell Landon I want to change my name back to Richmond.”

  “Cooper Richmond has a nice ring to it. If changing it is the first step you take to forgiving yourself, I think you should do it. Now get out of here. Your family’s on the other side of that door waiting for you. They’re in the other room, worried sick about you. Go home with them, Coop. And do me a favor. Stop beating yourself up for something you had no control over.”

  Julianne and Ryder sat with the family outside Brent’s office. When Cooper emerged, they watched as his family surrounded the man they’d practically dragged back to town. She leaned into Ryder and whispered, “Look at that, I think we did the right thing.”

  “Yeah, now we just have to convince Brent.”

  Julianne got up, peered around the corner to see Brent settled behind his desk. “Are you speaking to us yet?” she asked. “You’ve been pretty busy up to now. This is the first chance we’ve had to talk to you.”

  Brent’s head popped up. “I’m still busy… Thanks to you. And you,” he added as soon as he caught sight of Ryder.

  “I wanted to explain why we did what we did.”

  “Just so you know I had this handled. Three days ago I swabbed Caleb’s cheeks, took his DNA to compare it to the pieces of shirt. Caleb’s results came back as partially matching up. He was either the child or the parent of the person wearing that shirt in the box. Since I didn’t think parent was an option, I went with the child.”

  “Brent…”

  “Have you gotten used to how pushy she can be yet?” Brent said to Ryder.

  “I just chalk it up to her schoolteacher persona.”

  “Hello? Excuse me, I’m standing right here,” Julianne demanded.

  “Then let me finish. With the familial DNA, not quite a match but close, the next logical conclusion meant it had to belong to Layne. But thanks to you persuading Coop to come back here, we were able to put the questions to him. I called Brooke’s brother today and gave them the news. Ryan was devastated but at least now he knows what happened to his sister. I’m not mad. How can I be when you two were instrumental in this whole thing?”

  “I found Bethany, or rather Dawn,” Ryder blurted out.

  “I know you did. Some detective called me because my name showed up in the database when they ran her name. Glad you can both put that behind you and move forward.”

  “Now can I say what I came in here to say?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “It wasn’t because we didn’t have faith in your abilities that we went to talk to Cooper on our own.”

  “You could’ve fooled me.”

  “Oh, you go ahead and deal with him,” Julianne said to Ryder, dropping into the chair Cooper had just vacated. “It’s better come from you anyway.”

  Ryder stared at Brent. “I don’t know if you believe in ghosts, but…”

  “Scott told you to go find Cooper?”

  “Ah. So you not only believe in the dark and evil aura you mentioned a couple months back, but you’ve seen Scott and believe in him as well?”

  “A time or two,” Brent admitted. “Need I remind you I’m Native? All manner of spiritwalkers exist, are common place among my people.”

  “Then try to understand. Scott was the one who told us we needed to act because Cooper was in distress.”

  “I see. Scott may have been right. After talking to him, Cooper, not Scott, I got the sense he was approaching his breaking point. After so many years of guilt, laced with a good dose of rage, Cooper is a very troubled man.”

  “Can you blame him?” Julianne rose again, paced in front of Brent’s desk. “It’s horrible enough that Eleanor committed a double homicide, robbing her own children of a father. But for a mother to involve her nine-year-old son in a cover-up is unconscionable. Having him help her dig the grave, she scarred that child for life. He may never rid himself of the things he saw that night along with the demons she put in his head.”

  Ryder thought that was apt. “I’d love to get a look at this woman. When do you pick her up?”

  Brent swiveled in his chair, snagged a piece of paper off the fax machine. “This is what the GBI sent me about two hours ago. This is what she looked like at booking.”

  Julianne and Ryder huddled over the photos—a side shot and a front-on view—of a fifty-four-year old woman with dark hair and streaks of gray running through it. Her face lined with the beginnings of a few wrinkles at her mouth and crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes.

  “Not what I expected.
She looks like a typical middle-aged woman.”

  “Yeah,” Brent agreed. “It’s a shame those sociopathic tendencies rarely show up in a photo.”

  Ryder waited another week for things to settle down. He stayed busy because work on the school had gone into overdrive and had to progress at breakneck speed in order to meet the deadline. Everyone was in a rush—Julianne to fill her last teaching slot—Logan to complete the dolphin sculpture he hadn’t wanted to do in the first place.

  The day the sculptor hauled his artistic endeavor in front of the school, a crowd gathered to watch six men unload the heavy statue and wrestle it into place on a circular piece of concrete. They would later bolt the bronze sculpture into its base. For now, when they untied the tarp it revealed a mother dolphin that stood seven-feet high from nose to slightly curved tail. She splashed up and out of the water, jumping into the air in whimsical play, surrounded by her two babies.

  Ryder could have chosen that venue. But in the end he decided it was too public. For what he had in mind he needed ambiance. He’d never considered himself a romantic. That’s why it would take planning on his part.

  His opening came after dinner one evening. After going through what had become their ordinary routine—eating supper and then doing the dishes together—he’d thrown the towel on the counter and taken Julianne by the hand.

  “Take a walk with me.”

  “It is a nice night for it.”

  Ryder laced his fingers with hers and tugged her down the front steps. In the August heat they crossed the street, leaving behind Sandcastle Cottage. A slight breeze stirred the air as they made their way past houses and greeted neighbors watching the sun go down from their front porches.

  Once they reached the beach, the calm waters in the bay, made him realize this was a chance to show her what could be. With each step he took his nerves slid away.

  He was so quiet tonight, so thoughtful, Julianne decided. She was sure something was bothering him. Maybe it was the pressure of beginning the business venture.