A Corpse at the Cove

by Blythe Baker

  “Oh, Blaire,” I said, sounding remarkably like my own mother. Bless your heart, Piper. “What’s wrong?”

  I knew what was wrong. Everything. Her boyfriend and her mother had both been suspected of murder. And even if they hadn’t been, she’d been moved away from her school and her friends to an island where three people had been murdered in as many months. If that didn’t give her a good excuse to sit around and cry, I didn’t know what would.

  “Nothing,” she said. “I’m just reading.”

  Clearly, she didn’t want to talk, and I didn’t want to push her. I tried to pretend it wasn’t obvious she’d been crying.

  “Where’s your mom?”

  “In her room,” she said. Her voice was thick with unshed tears. “Jude has been up there with her for a while.”

  She offered up the information freely and casually, but I had to wonder whether that wasn’t why she’d been crying. Her parents had been divorced for almost a year now, but that probably didn’t make seeing her mom with another man any easier. Blaire had been given the option to live with her dad, but she’d chosen to stay with her mom, even though it meant moving away to Sunrise Island. He’d cheated on Page, and Blaire couldn’t forgive him so easily. However, did she see Page and Jude’s relationship as cheating? Had she expected her mom and dad to make up eventually?

  “I’m sure they’re just talking,” I said.

  Blaire raised an eyebrow at me, but didn’t say anything. I could tell she didn’t believe me, and I wasn’t sure if I believed me, either. Page had only begun to dip her toes in the world of dating, but she seemed pretty smitten with Jude.

  Just then, Mason came into the room.

  “I thought I heard you come in. Did you find anything?” he asked, a laundry basket of towels balanced on his hip. He looked like a stay-at-home mom from a fifties sitcom.

  “What does he mean find anything?” Blaire looked from me to Mason and back again. “Where were you?”

  “Nowhere.” The word came out too quickly. Much too quickly to be believable, but Blaire hadn’t answered me about why she was crying, so I didn’t feel too bad evading her question. Besides, I didn’t want to get Blaire’s hopes up. I hadn’t found anything useful on the stretch of beach—save for a metal mermaid, which might actually just be a piece of trash—so I decided in that moment it would be best to keep the whole operation under wraps. I’d only come forward with information when I had something concrete and useful.

  Blaire rolled her eyes and closed her book with a snap, mumbling as she left the room. “I’m not a little kid.”

  “No one said you were a little kid,” I called after her. Things were always so hard with Blaire. I never knew where I should fall on the spectrum of friend to authority figure. “Where are you going?”

  “My room,” she said, stopping on the stairs to give me a ‘duh’ look.

  “I saw that Matthew closed the Marina early. Why don’t you go hang out with him?”

  I was definitely no professional when it came to doling out advice, but telling a distressed person to go hang out with friends and get some fresh air was textbook.

  Her face went pale and I saw a brief flash of pain in her eyes before she returned to her surly teenager routine. “I’ll be in my room.”

  “She’s pleasant,” Mason joked when Blaire slammed her door shut.

  I laughed, trying to brush it off, but something about her reaction struck me as more than teen angst.

  “So,” Mason said, turning to me, his voice low and conspiratorial. “What did you find?”

  I took the mermaid out of my pocket and explained it and the gouges on the dock. Unlike Shep, Mason seemed excited by the news.

  “That’s a huge lead!” he said.

  I shrugged and pursed my lips. “Maybe.”

  “Maybe? How many boats have mermaid ornaments? Not many, I’d bet. Those old men down at the Marina know every boat down there inside and out. It wouldn’t take much asking to find out who it belonged to,” he said.

  Mason was talking fast, his voice rising as he got more and more excited, and I was feeling flustered. I’d avoided telling Blaire about the mermaid because I hadn’t wanted to get her hopes up but, in a way, I’d also wanted to protect myself. Solving the last two murder cases had been a fluke more than anything else. There had been a whole lot of luck and very little skill involved. And now, Page was counting on me. Blaire was counting on me. My family’s existence rode on me solving this case, and I wasn’t certain I could do it.

  “It was partially buried in the sand,” I said, trying to temper Mason’s enthusiasm. “It could have been there for months or years for all we know.”

  Mason turned the mermaid over in his hands and shook his head. “No, this looks new. Recently polished. We’d notice a lot more tarnish if it had been lying in the sand for months.”

  I knew he was right, but I still didn’t want to allow myself to fully believe it. I decided to change the subject. “What we really need to focus on is how the wallet got into the bed and breakfast. That is the only physical tie between Page and Theodore. If we can sever that, Shep doesn’t have a case.”

  “You still don’t think it could have been Mr. and Mrs. Smith?” Mason asked.

  I’d briefly filled him in on the purses and wallets I’d found in Mr. Smith’s top drawer before I’d left for the Marina, and he confirmed what a great cover the elderly couple had. I’d had to assure him three times that I was, in fact, not joking, and he still wasn’t sure he believed me.

  I shook my head. “It doesn’t make any sense. You don’t steal that many wallets by being an idiot, and it would be idiotic for them to throw Theodore’s wallet across the hall. They could have wiped it and dumped it in the ocean or buried it in the sand near where the body was found. Heck, they could have dumped it in the bottom of any random dumpster on the island and it likely never would have been seen again.”

  “So, what’s our theory?” Mason asked.

  Although it was nice to have someone to bounce ideas off of, I could feel the weight of Mason’s expectations, as well. He expected me to know what came next, to have a lead to follow, and I didn’t.

  “Well,” I said, pausing to try and give myself time to come up with something more clever to say than ‘Page didn’t do it.’

  “Somebody must have planted the wallet under her bed,” I finally said, looking at him out of the corner of my eye, hoping he wasn’t disappointed.

  He nodded. “Okay. So, it had to be someone who had access to the house.”

  “That narrows down the list,” I said, getting excited. I hadn’t expected my theory to lead to anything more than an awkward silence, but Mason was right. Whoever dropped off the wallet couldn’t have just thrown it through an open window. It was placed under Page’s bed, which meant someone had to have been inside the house to plant it.

  “And it seems important that the wallet was inside Page’s room.”

  I nodded again, my brain working overtime. He was right. I hadn’t really considered it, but if someone had simply wanted to ditch the wallet, they could have left it anywhere—in a bush, on the porch. Why would someone risk sneaking into Page’s room to hide it there?

  A lightbulb went off in the back of my mind. “They framed her. Someone wanted to frame her.”

  “You think someone specifically targeted her?” he asked.

  “Think about it. Shep said that there were witnesses to her fight with Theodore that day. Whoever killed him must have known that he’d argued with Page earlier in the day, making her a likely suspect. Somebody used that fight to frame her. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

  “Okay, so who knew about the fight and had access to the bed and breakfast?” he asked.

  My hopes, which were soaring moments ago, come crashing down to the ground in a fiery heap. “Every single guest who was checked in,” I said, defeated.

  Then, two puzzle pieces clicked together in the back of my mind, and I reached out an
d grabbed Mason’s forearm, my fingers squeezing while I thought. Blaire’s bad attitude, Matthew’s weirdness back at the Marina. Who was the only person, aside from Mr. and Mrs. Smith, with access to the bed and breakfast and a penchant for stealing?

  A smile broke across my face. Perhaps I did have a knack for solving these cases.

  “I need to call Shep.”

  CHAPTER 15

  My initial excitement over having a new lead turned to dread as the phone rang. Matthew was Blaire’s boyfriend. Her first boyfriend, as far as I knew. The night he was in the interrogation room, she’d spent the whole evening crying for him. I didn’t want to be the person who caused her pain. However, I also couldn’t let a murderer walk free.

  My theory was still pretty thin, but it made sense. It made sense even when I really didn’t want it to. Even when I searched for any crack or flaw in the idea. At first, I thought perhaps my desperation to save Page was clouding my judgment. I wanted her name cleared so badly that I would implicate almost anyone. Mason assured me, however, that I wasn’t being biased. Matthew truly seemed like he could be the guy.

  Not only did Matthew have access to the house—including the second floor, because I’d caught him scaling the trellis under Blaire’s window on more than one occasion—but Blaire would have certainly told him about the fight Page and Theodore had. That argument, no matter how small it may seem to the average person, was more excitement than we’d seen around the bed and breakfast since Nathaniel Sharp’s body had turned up on the beach, and Blaire wouldn’t have been able to keep it to herself for long. Plus, as much as Matthew had tried to minimize his actions, he’d stolen from people. I’d seen a stash of wallets in his grungy backseat for myself.

  The next portion of the theory, though, was even hard for me to swallow. Making the leap from wallet thief to murderer was extreme, and I couldn’t quite imagine the quiet, lanky boy who’d sold me a bike my first week on the island as a murderer. That was the one piece that didn’t quite fit.

  After several long rings, Shep finally picked up the phone. After everything that had happened the last few days, I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d decided to ignore me.

  “Piper,” he said, his voice a warning I did not intend to heed.

  “Shep.” Two could play at that game.

  He sighed, his exhale making the phone go staticky for a few seconds. “What’s up?”

  “You have to talk to Matthew Pelkey again,” I said.

  There was a long pause. “You want me to talk to Matthew Pelkey?”

  “Yes.”

  He let out a bark of laughter that made me jump. “You’re joking, right? You have to be joking.”

  “I think Matthew may have—”

  “This is so rich,” Shep said, talking over me. “The other day I was the biggest buffoon on the face of the earth for suspecting a young kid, and now that I’ve moved on, you want to tell me you agree?”

  I knew it looked bad. I’d insisted I wanted nothing to do with the investigation and then belittled Shep’s detective work. Now that my sister was in trouble, though, I was suddenly agreeing with Shep and tracking down leads. I’d be suspicious if I were him, too, but that didn’t change the fact that I had changed my mind about Matthew.

  “I know I asked for your help, Piper,” Shep continued, “but that doesn’t mean I’m not capable of conducting my own investigation and that doesn’t mean that I will default to your opinions.”

  Shep and I disagreed on a few points—mainly his ability to conduct an investigation—but now was not the time to bring that up. In fact, it would never be time to bring that up. I needed Shep’s help, and people weren’t normally willing to offer you assistance after you told them they were incapable of doing their job.

  “I know, Shep,” I said, imbuing each word with as much humility as I could muster. “And I was hasty to dismiss your concerns about Matthew early on because he is dating my niece and he is just a young kid, but I’ve come around to your way of thinking. It makes sense.”

  There was a long pause. “How so?”

  Despite what Shep had said, he was eager to hear my theory, probably to determine whether he’d missed anything important. Part of me wanted to focus on this and do a little “I told you so” dance, but I played it cool.

  “First, Theodore was missing his wallet, and Matthew is a confirmed thief. Second, Matthew knew Page and Theodore had been in a fight earlier that day. Third—”

  “Wait,” Shep said. “Matthew wasn’t the one who told me about the argument between your sister and the deceased. He wasn’t even a witness to the event.”

  “He’s dating my niece, though, who was a witness,” I said.

  Shep didn’t say anything right away, and I gave him a minute to catch up. Finally, he made a humming noise in the back of his throat.

  I continued. “Third, Matthew had access to our house. He is upstairs near the bedrooms often, and it would not have been difficult to slip into Page’s room and leave the wallet under her bed. Plus, he also works very near where the body was discovered. It would have been easy for him to take one of the rental boats out to the cave and deposit the body without anyone noticing.”

  A slight shiver ran down my spine as I wondered whether Matthew had used the same boat he’d rented out to me earlier that afternoon to deposit Theodore’s body on the beach. Had he found some kind of perverse pleasure in watching me motor away in the boat he’d used to dispose of a body? Surely not. Suspected murderer or not, I couldn’t imagine Matthew being quite that callous.

  “Those are compelling points,” Shep said.

  Finally, I felt like I could see the light at the end of this tunnel. I didn’t know what could have made Matthew hurt a man he didn’t know—perhaps a burglary gone wrong—but my goal was not to determine motive. It was to save my sister, and I’d done that.

  “Unfortunately,” Shep said, letting out a long breath. “Matthew has an alibi.”

  My heart sank. The long tunnel I’d been walking down turned pitch black, not even a tiny pinprick of light visible in the distance. I was standing in darkness and I couldn’t even tell which way was up.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, hoping that somehow ‘alibi’ didn’t mean what I thought it meant. Hoping that I’d misunderstood Shep.

  “He closed the Marina early that day and went out on a date,” Shep said, and suddenly I could hear the smugness in his voice. He was relishing this. Relishing the fact that he had more information than I did, that he’d solved a part of the case that I was still hung up on. Shep loved that I had been wrong. He loved it enough that he had let me spill the entire theory to him while he just sat and listened, knowing it was pointless. If I could have reached through the phone and slapped him, I would have.

  As my anger ebbed and then flowed, a thought flickered in the back of my mind. As I fanned it, the thought flared to life and suddenly everything was illuminated. “That’s wrong,” I said. “Matthew wasn’t on a date that night. Blaire was home all night. I remember.”

  Shep sighed. “All I can tell you is that he gave me an alibi and I interviewed the girl and she confirmed it.”

  The girl? Why was he talking about Blaire like that? He knew her. Why wasn’t he using her name?

  Then, a sick feeling settled in my stomach. My mouth went slack, and Mason, who had been standing next to me trying to decipher how the conversation was going, was staring at me with confusion on his face.

  What’s wrong? he mouthed.

  “The girl wasn’t Blaire?” I asked.

  “The girl was not Blaire,” Shep said slowly, and this time, there was no smugness in his voice. I could tell he felt sorry, and I was grateful to him for that.

  “Thanks, Shep,” I said.

  “Of course,” he said.

  We hung up, and I felt nauseous. How was I supposed to tell Blaire that her first boyfriend had cheated on her?

  “What happened?” Mason asked, eager to understand why my face was voll
eying between tense anger and sadness.

  I looked at him, my fist clenching at my side. “I’m going to kill Matthew Pelkey.”

  CHAPTER 16

  Blaire’s door was opened just a crack. I could see the corner of her bed, her foot with black-polished toes hanging off the end. When I knocked, she stiffened.

  “I’m busy.”

  “I just want to talk to you for a minute,” I said, pushing the door open.

  She rolled over on her back, her gaze focused on the ceiling. “I’d tell you to go away, but I know you wouldn’t listen.”

  “Got that right, kid,” I said, flopping down next to her on the bed.

  She smiled slightly, but moved quickly to bite it down. We lay there for a minute, a heavy, expectant silence stretching between us.

  “Talk,” Blaire commanded, rolling over onto her side so she was propped up on her elbow. “You’re freaking me out. Is this about mom?”

  I shook my head, and then thought better of it. “Well, a little.”

  She raised her eyebrows at me, clearly impatient.

  I twisted my nervous fingers in her bedspread, a fraying quilt Page and my mom had made for her when she was born. They’d spent months working on it while Page was pregnant, arguing over every square and stitch. But when they finally finished it the week before Blaire was born, they were so pleased with themselves, they forgot all about the fighting.

  “I’ve been working on the murder investigation to try and clear your mom, right?”

  Blaire nodded, her eyes wide and nervous. She put up a tough front, but she had the biggest heart of anyone I’d ever known. I hated that I was going to be the one to break it.

  “Well, I started working on the theory that someone planted the wallet in your mom’s room, which narrowed down the suspect list to anyone who had access to the house.” I hesitated, wishing that Blaire could somehow read my mind so I wouldn’t have to say the words aloud. “That list included Matthew.”