“Who peed in your gumbo?” Holly asked.
“Sorry,” he mumbled as he turned to her and did a double take.
She probably looked like she’d stepped out of a Civil War time warp. The big black bell skirt swayed as she looked down at her period costume. It covered every inch of her except her head.
“Southern belle gone gothic?” he asked.
“Tour day.” She curtsied, holding the sides of her skirt with her fingertips and spreading it wider. “Ten o’clock.”
Jake rolled his neck. “That video you sent me is going to draw half the screwballs in the country to see a ghost you needed so bad you fabricated him.”
“Fabricated?” If she were going to fabricate a ghost, it wouldn’t be Burl. She looked over her shoulder. Where was her poltergeist of an ex when she needed him? She jabbed a thumb toward her laptop. “You saw the proof on YouTube.”
“I’ve seen three-headed cats on YouTube.” Jake raked through his hair as though he wanted to yank it out by the roots. “I just watched a promotion gimmick.”
“You don’t believe in ghosts.” She rolled her eyes. “Fine. What’s the big deal?”
Jake stepped closer and towered over her. “I think you and that video just made finding the smuggler one hundred times harder.”
She planted her hands on her hips and met Jake’s stare, not willing to allow his size or his opinion to intimidate her. “I think . . .” She stood a little taller. “Correction. I know that video just saved my home and my business. If I don’t pay my debts, the smuggler can buy Holly Grove from the bank after she’s repossessed.”
“Holly Grove is a house, not a person.”
“I know that.”
He leaned in closer, and his breath brushed her face. “You said she.”
“Yes, I did.” Holly broke her stare with Jake to sweep the kitchen, the heart of Holly Grove, with a glance. “This place is more than brick and wood.” She sighed and looked down at the cypress planks. “These were new and shiny one hundred fifty years ago. Now they’re etched with the patina of the lives of everyone I’ve ever loved. They all loved Holly Grove, too.” She looked back at Jake. “She keeps us together.”
“How do you feel about her moonlighting as a front for drug smuggling?”
“That’s a ridiculous question. I just told you she’s everything to me.”
“What do you want, Holly? A ghost story or a real story, as in front-page news about the end of a drug ring?”
“Is that what this is about? You’re mad because I made getting your story harder?”
“My story? I’m going to sleep like a baby when I get back to New York. Will you be able to sleep at night, knowing your very profitable B & B is a front for a drug-smuggling organization? Yeah, it’s my story, but it’s your problem, sweetheart. I’m here to help, but you don’t make it easy.”
“I never asked you for anything except free publicity, which I traded for, anyway, and I don’t need that anymore.”
“Are you suggesting I move out?” His jaw twitched as he stared her down.
She’d begged him to stay once, and she’d never do that again. “I—I didn’t say that.”
The house phone blared for the tenth time that morning, and she’d made a reservation with each call. Was Jake right? Had she sacrificed Holly Grove for money?
* * *
Jake collapsed on the sofa in Sam’s office at the Gazette. Holly drove him nuts. He’d used every ounce of restraint he could muster to keep from exploding. Why couldn’t she see how the kind of publicity she’d garnered was a problem?
She wanted Holly Grove to be successful so badly, she’d do anything. He was sure of that now. His gut told him she wasn’t involved in the smuggling, but should he trust his instincts when she was doing everything possible to make it more difficult to catch the smugglers?
Jake groaned. The only solution was to do what he was paid to do, no matter how difficult. The sooner he caught the scumbags, the sooner Holly would be cleared of any suspicion.
“What’s with the long face?” Sam barked from behind his desk as he shuffled through a stack of mail.
“Women.”
“Say no more.”
Jake rubbed the knot on the back of his head. “Toss me that bottle of aspirin you keep in your drawer.”
“She gives you a headache, huh?”
“I’ll say. Holly hit me over the head with a skillet.” Not to mention, she’d orchestrated a circus at Holly Grove, with a ghost as the ringmaster.
“You probably deserved it.” Sam pitched Jake the bottle.
“She thought she was hitting a burglar.” He popped two pills in his mouth and plopped down in the oak chair across from Sam’s desk.
“And why would she think that?” Sam asked as he settled back in his chair.
“I was milling around in the dark. My fault.” Sam didn’t need to know everything.
Jake’s phone buzzed with an e-mail alert. He fished his phone out of his pocket. ICE had sent the fingerprint results. He sat up straight to read the fingerprint report. “Burl’s prints were on the bags.”
“No surprise there.”
“Holly’s prints matched the third set of prints on the bags.”
“Not to say, ‘I told you so,’ but I told you so, son.”
“I’d expected that. Since then, I’ve watched her hand plastic bags to Nelda to bag her pralines. Burl could have asked for a few plastic bags, and she would have put her prints on any empty bags she gave him.”
“Will ICE buy that?”
“If I do my job, they will.”
He continued reading the report. The other print, the one with the scar across the thumb, matched Mackie’s thumbprint from a DUI arrest twenty years ago. The coffee in Jake’s stomach felt like acid. How did Mackie’s print get on that bag if Burl left the dope there before he died? How did Mackie know it was there?
“Well?” Sam said, peering over his glasses. “What about the other prints?”
Jake blew out a sigh. “Any idea how Mackie’s prints got on the bags?”
“That old fool. I don’t have a clue why he’d be fingering that stuff. Why wouldn’t he just call me and tell me where it was?”
Jake grunted. “Whiskey makes a man do strange things.”
He read on to find Mackie’s military records. Jake’s throat tightened as he flipped through page after page of commendations, including a Purple Heart. Mackie had been a Navy SEAL in Vietnam, and he’d never mentioned any of this. Jake had assumed Mackie had been a grunt in the army and had done just enough to get by. A loser. That was how Jake had known his dad.
Jake told Sam about what he’d learned about Mackie, then asked, “Did you know about this?”
Sam scratched his head like that’d make the facts sink in. “He never said a word about it. If he had, I’d have put it in the paper.”
The guy Jake had struggled with last night hadn’t fought back. Even a sixty-eight-year-old former Navy SEAL would remember how to pack a punch, but he hadn’t thrown one.
CHAPTER 23
“Looking for something?” Jake asked, standing in the doorway of his room.
Holly jumped, whirled around, and faced him with her mouth open and her hand at her neck. She wore jeans and a T-shirt with DOMESTIC DIVA printed in pink across the front and stood in front of the open armoire in his room. “No.”
“Jumpy much?” He had no doubt she was looking for something. With her nose for trouble, that wasn’t a good thing. He strode across the room to her.
“I—I came in to clean.” She glanced around the room. “But it looks like Nelda beat me to it.”
“I told Nelda not to clean my room.”
“Housekeeping is part of our deal.” She plucked a feather duster from her cleaning basket on the floor and waved it in the air. “It comes with the room.”
“You both have enough to do.”
She pointed to his bag. “You didn’t unpack.”
“Nope.�
� Luckily, he’d taken his gun with him when he left. “And you were snooping.”
“But you’ll be here all month.” She stared at the bag, zipped tight and ready to go. Just like Jake liked it.
He shrugged. “It never occurred to me to unpack.”
“Of course, it wouldn’t. . . .” She picked up her cleaning basket and hooked it over her arm. “And you don’t want us to clean your room, because you don’t want us snooping around. Is that true?”
“Nope. Nothing to hide. You saw everything because you snooped, right?”
“Fine. Clean your own room, and while you’re at it, clean up your attitude. I got enough of that this morning.”
He blew out a heavy breath. “About this morning . . . I was having a bad day.”
More like a bad month. It’d been too long since he’d lived as himself in his own skin. He didn’t like lying to Holly. It turned him inside out.
“I know what you mean. I’ve had a few of those.” Holly gave a halfhearted grin. “Or maybe a hundred.”
“I shouldn’t have taken my history with Mackie out on you. I went back to his trailer. It didn’t look like he’d been there. The keys to Holly Grove weren’t there, either.”
“His place was a mess. Maybe you just couldn’t find them.”
“Trust me, they’re not there.” And worse, he couldn’t tell her ICE had found Mackie’s prints on the goods. “Did you find Burl’s keys?”
“Yes, and I don’t think anyone could have used them. The hangar was locked. His office was locked, and the desk drawer where I found the keys was locked. Oh, and I had to disable the alarm to get into the hangar. Evidently, a man smuggling drugs needs serious security.”
“So no one used Burl’s keys”—Jake cocked a brow—“unless Burl made copies and gave them to someone.”
She shook her head. “They haven’t made the master key for the historic lock I have here for nearly a hundred years. I couldn’t get a copy if I wanted one without removing the lock and sending it away to an antique lock specialist.”
That left Mackie’s keys. Great. “Okay, that means the guy I pinned last night has Mackie’s keys.” Jake replayed the struggle over and over in his mind, hoping for a glimpse of the guy. Nothing. The only thing that stood out was the smuggler’s lack of aggression. It had to be Mackie.
“Do you think Mackie could have used the keys last night?” she asked, as though she’d read his thoughts.
“The only way to find out is to find dear old Dad.”
“So you don’t think he’s just off on a drunk anymore?”
“I wouldn’t count that out, but I’ve already been to every bar within a thirty-mile radius.”
“Have you checked the hospitals?”
Jake nodded. “The morgue, too. The sheriff has a missing persons bulletin out on him, and every woman in Delta Ridge in need of a handyman is looking for him.”
Holly sighed. “If the Deltas can’t find him, he’s not in St. Agnes Parish.”
“I’ll put a full-page ad in the next Gazette, offering a reward for finding him. Someone has to know something.”
“The last time I saw him, he’d cleaned out Burl’s hangar and storage container. He looked better than usual.”
“You mean sober.”
“No, but—”
“How long ago was this?”
“A month. Maybe less. I can check my calendar. Mackie cleaned the hangar a few days before I posted an online ad to lease the place.”
“You may have been the last person to see him. I’d like to take a look around Burl’s hangar. There may be a connection between Burl and Mackie there.”
“Sure. I’ve got to meet guests at the airstrip at four. You can look around then.” Holly nibbled on her bottom lip and eyed Jake. “I still can’t help but wonder if someone came to his trailer and got him. What if something really bad happened to him?”
“Not Mackie. He’s too tough,” Jake said with bravado, because he couldn’t go there. “He doesn’t want to be found, and I want to know why.”
* * *
According to Burl, the drug drop had to be in October, and there were only a couple of weeks left in the month. Holly punched in the security code, 1001, to enter the side door of the hangar so Jake could look around.
“Pretty easy code for a drug smuggler’s lair,” Jake said as he brushed the small of her back.
“Ten-oh-one, October first.” She slid the key in the lock and opened the door. “It was our anniversary. Burl forgot it one year, so I set the code as a reminder.”
Jake winced. “That had to hurt.”
Holly forced a self-conscious laugh to hide the sting of the memory. “Just history. He still forgot my birthday.”
Jake followed her into the massive metal building. “August twelfth.” His voice echoed off the vacant walls like a blast from the past.
Holly caught her lip between her teeth. “I can’t believe you remember my birthday.”
Jake tapped his temple and grinned. “Steel trap, sweetheart.” His footsteps sounded through the empty room. “Wow. This place is big enough for a couple of birds.”
“Yeah. I wish I could rent it. I’ve had only two bites. The environmental guys from New Orleans never called back, but the sheriff may lease it if he can get the parish to spring for a helicopter.” Holly plopped her purse down on a counter. “I’m not holding my breath.”
“Do you have the name of the environmental company?”
“Yeah. I have a card somewhere.” She dug through her purse. “What if they were shopping the hangar for smuggling? I do have a nice airstrip and lots of storage.”
“Don’t get carried away. They didn’t rent the hangar.”
Holly handed him the card. “Yet.”
“I’ll check them out. If you hear from them, let me know.”
“If they’re not smugglers, the hangar is still for rent.” She pushed a button on the wall in the cavernous space, and chains rattled as the huge hangar door cranked open.
A plane buzzed in the distance. Jake jacked a thumb skyward. “Your guests?”
Holly tilted her head upward. “Our suspects.”
“Two of thousands.”
“Okay. I got carried away, but these folks had reservations before the ‘Ghost in the Grove’ video hit the Web.”
“And who else had pre-ghost-mania reservations?”
“Very funny.” Holly folded her arms over her chest. “A couple honeymooning and a guy by the name of Dunbar. I only have six rooms to rent, so three may have been attracted to the ghost, but that’s a good thing.”
“How do you figure?”
“We can eliminate them.”
“But you can’t be sure.”
“Well, no, but it hasn’t been that hard to figure out who’s on the up-and-up.” She shrugged. “I mean really. Did you think the group in for their sixty-year class reunion was here to pick up drugs?”
Jake chuckled. “Painkillers, maybe. I see your point, but it’s not going to be as easy as you think.”
“We’ll see.” She handed Jake a set of keys. “These will open anything around here.”
“I’ll lock up and walk back to Holly Grove to meet the suspects.” He winked at Holly.
“Good luck.”
When Holly stepped out of the hangar, Dog growled. She jumped, even though she knew Jake had tied her to a fence post on the side of the building. “Jeez, Dog. I’m not the bad guy.”
A small plane banked overhead as it positioned for landing. She shielded her eyes from the sun and watched the plane touch down on the far end of the runway, then taxi toward her.
Heart drumming with anticipation, she walked across the field to stand beside her Tahoe. If she were running a drug-smuggling ring, she’d use a plane. Lord knows, organized crime could afford a plane. The reservations were under the names Toni Bolla and Duke Fontana. Mob names, if she’d ever heard them.
The plane rolled to a stop as the engines throttled down. The propel
lers spun in a blur before slowing to a clip, revealing a red ring of paint on each blade. The plane wasn’t new but had been pimped out with black and red pinstripes and a logo that would look at home on Hugh Hefner’s plane. Perched on the plane’s tail fin, the black silhouette of a well-endowed woman with her hair perpetually caught in the wind caught Holly’s eye. Under the silhouette was the plane’s name, Fly Baby.
Mercy, could it get any sleazier?
A woman with a head full of Bergdorf blond hair and wearing four-inch pink stilettos stepped out of the plane. She looked about twenty-five, wore skintight jeans, and had legs that stretched nearly up to her armpits. Miss Legs carried a purple alligator purse and a pink train case, filled with make-up, no doubt.
As soon as her heels hit the concrete, she pulled a long pencil-thin cigarette from her purse. “Oh, my God. You can’t smoke anywhere anymore.”
“Toni?” Holly said, guessing.
“Toni Bolla.” She extended a hand with pink, sparkly nails. “I hope I can smoke at Holly Grove.”
“Outside, on the balcony.”
Toni flicked a silver lighter over the tip of the cigarette, then blew a funnel cloud of smoke. “That’s okay. Duke won’t let me smoke in the room, anyway. Doc made him quit.” She thumped an ash. “Now he hates it.”
A guy at least twice Toni’s age stooped as he exited the plane. Man fur curled around the collar of his extra-large Hawaiian shirt. He held a bottle of champagne in each hand. “You want I should bring some bubbly, fly baby?”
Fly baby? Oh, my. Was Toni the logo model?
“We can drink in the room, right?” she said to Holly.
“Sure,” Holly said.
Duke tucked a bottle under his arm and shook Holly’s hand. “Are you the lady I talked to on the phone?”
“Holly Davis. Welcome to Holly Grove.” She knew she was blabbering, but that was what she did when she didn’t know what to say. What could she say? Do you have a suitcase of money on board? Dope? Or are you just a sleazy kind of guy?
“Glad you’ve got a truck. Fly baby can’t pack light.” He eyed Toni.
Holly called over her shoulder as she headed to her Tahoe, “I’ll back up to the luggage compartment.”
The Tahoe shook as Duke loaded it down with suitcases. Holly got out and walked around to the back of the Tahoe to help load the luggage.
Better Dead Page 16
