by Ninie Hammon
Still, she smelled it!
It was crazy, but the aroma was undeniable. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply. Standing silent in the kitchen, concentrating, she listened with her whole body, taut, like a bow string with the arrow ready to fly. And she could … almost … hear voices. Murmurs. Conversations in another room in the house.
She left the kitchen and slowly toured the house. Room after room was empty and dark. But not silent. In all of them, she could hear the murmurs — like passing down the hallway in a hotel and hearing a group of people talking and laughing in one of the rooms.
The aroma began to diminish, as it would if you’d made breakfast and then eaten it. She wandered the rooms of the house as the sun rose and lit them in rosy dawn light, heard the murmuring soften until it was gone altogether. Eventually, the smells were gone, too.
Traumatic brain injury?
Mental illness?
Incipient dementia?
She had avoided the studio in her tour of the house, had closed the door behind her when she had followed the three men out of it the day before and had not opened it since. Now, she stood outside the closed door, but still she couldn’t open it.
What she had smelled, what she had heard … it had the authenticity, the stamp of “this is real” to it that the cold water and the terror and the straining lungs had had yesterday, when she had painted the dying child as she lived with her death.
The smell of coffee and bacon. The voices not quite heard. They both had something to do with the painting in that room. She didn’t know how she knew that, but she did, was as sure of it as she was of anything in this world turned upside down, where nothing was what it seemed and everything was much more than it appeared.
She resolutely turned from the closed studio door and went to the kitchen, filled a teapot and put it on the stove. She had no stomach for coffee this morning. While it heated, she went into her bedroom and dressed, and was sitting at the table, her second cup of tea half drunk, toast left uneaten but for the initial bite, when her cellphone rang.
“Bailey, it’s Brice McGreggor,” said the voice when she answered.
Not Sheriff McGreggor. Brice.
“Good morning.”
“I have some information from the West Virginia State Water Patrol. They’ve given me a list of all the houseboat registrations for Whispering Mountain. That includes the two marinas here, Joe’s Hole and Baker’s Junction, and the three at Westbrook, Tucker’s Landing and Blackfoot. I already called T.J., and he said he and Dobbs would check the three small ones. How about I pick you up in say, half an hour, and we’ll head down to the two outside Shadow Rock.”
“Works for me. I’ll see you then.”
Good, she would see him alone. She hadn’t had a chance to speak to him about … he had called her Ms. Cunningham. He had clearly called her by her right name as a test, which she had successfully flunked. So now, he knew. But knew what, exactly? She had to find out.
What could a determined police officer find out, ferret out about the fictitious Bailey Donahue and the real Jessie Cunningham? Supposedly, her new identity was foolproof, had a real paper trail, a backstory that would stand up to the closest scrutiny. But scrutiny by whom? It was one thing to convince the guy at the hardware store she was who she said she was, and more importantly, that she wasn’t somebody else. But a cop? Could a cop dig past the phony records to the truth?
And what if he could? What if the sheriff had dug out her real identity?
Maybe she should just tell him about it.
No! Every alarm bell in her being went off with a screech more piercing than a smoke detector.
No, she could not tell him. She couldn’t tell anybody! No matter how innocuous, how innocent it might seem.
Bethany’s life depended upon her mother’s death.
Bailey wasn’t willing to risk that for anything!
So she would find out what he knew and go from there. She’d take his advice: one step at a time. Find out what he knew and then produce a respectable display of smoke and mirrors to keep him from figuring out what her fake identity actually meant.
Chapter Eighteen
Dobbs had given up years ago trying to understand what happened to T.J.’s mother when they were kids, what power had seized the skinny little woman, had coursed through her at will, using her as a vehicle to bring the future back into the past and display it in a painting. Dobbs had let the conundrum go decades ago because there wasn’t an explanation and never would be one.
But standing in Bailey’s studio in the Watford House yesterday, looking at the two paintings side by side on the easels had put an itch in his mind he couldn’t find a way to scratch. Why were those paintings so alike? Though the subjects of the pictures were entirely different, why did they look like they had both been painted by the same person?
And he had started to wonder … maybe they had been.
He pulled into the parking lot of the Arbor Dell Retirement Village that afternoon with a borrowed dog and a dozen roses. T.J. had gotten Sparky all spiffed up for the occasion, brushed his fur so he looked like a stuffed teddy bear — a ball of fluff with eyes, ears, a wagging tail and a personality that melted hearts everywhere he went.
And one of those hearts belonged to Miss Annabelle Lee, the undisputed authority on all things Kavanaugh County. She knew the history in minute detail back to the first settlers who rode down the Allegheny River to Pittsburgh and poled up the Monongahela to settle in the West Virginia mountains in the early 1800s. She had lost the use of her legs in a traffic accident, but at ninety-three every single synapse she ever had was still firing nicely, thank you very much.
Dobbs had built something approaching a friendship with her when he’d brought Sparky to visit his dog-loving uncle who had lived down the hall from Miss Annabelle until his death.
“You put that lilac spray stuff on Sparky today, didn’t you,” she growled when the little dog hopped up onto her bed. “You know he hates it. You should be ashamed of yourself.”
“And a good day to you, too, Miss Annabelle. Yes, I’m doing fine. Thanks for asking.”
Sitting up in a “bed jacket” made of fine yellow silk with lace all around the collar, she gave Dobbs a baleful look.
“What do you want?”
“Want? I—”
“The Raymond Dobsons of this world don’t bring flowers to old ladies unless there’s something in it for them. I don’t care how much money you made out there in the world that you think nobody knows about — don’t try to unload a pile of horse hockey on me. What did you come here for?”
“Busted.” He didn’t have to fake the sheepish look. “I was wondering what you could tell me about the Watford House,” he said, laying the flowers on the dresser and his cards on the table.
“And you’re interested the Watford House because…?”
“T.J. Hamilton’s mother worked there as a maid when he was a little boy. Did you know that?”
“And that has caused a burning curiosity in your soul about the building half a century later. You think I believe that?”
“There’s a young woman renting it now. Her name is Bailey Donahue. She’s the one curious about the place, but she didn’t want to bother you, a stranger and all.”
“Wise choice on her part.”
“I don’t want to bother you either. If you don’t know—”
“Of course I know. Don’t be ridiculous, Raymond. Sit down.”
And for the next hour, the old woman told Dobbs way more than anybody would care to know about the building and its occupants. He suffered through the last forty-five minutes in silence, hearing the escapades of the people who’d occupied the house during the seventies and eighties. He’d found out everything he needed to know when she’d described the original owners, and told him a story he’d heard in bits and pieces all his life — the strange tale of Sophia Watford.
“The house was built by Alexander Foster Watford, of the Charleston Watfords
, a family who made a fortune around the turn of the century in textile manufacturing. Alexander was a young man bitten by wanderlust who traveled all over the world — to places nobody went in the 1890s! And to his family’s great dismay, he brought home a bride from one of his trips.”
Miss Annabelle pursed her lips.
“I was always quite curious about her and did some digging. But there aren’t any records that have much to say about the woman. I was able to find some old letters Alexander’s sisters wrote to their cousins in Atlanta in the archives of the historical society, but I don’t know how much of what they said is to be believed. It’s quite strange, you know.”
“Strange how?”
“It’s not clear exactly where Alexander met her, what her nationality was. But she was quite lovely, exotic … and mysterious. One letter described her as,” — Miss Annabelle then quoted verbatim from a letter she’d read once probably thirty years ago — “a stunning beauty with hair as black as the coal buried under the mountains, alabaster skin, pouty red lips and eyes the color of sapphires.”
“When one woman describes another woman in those terms, there’s always a but.”
“True. And the ‘but’ was that Sophia did not fit in well with Charleston society.” She made a humph sound in her throat. “Big surprise, that. She wasn’t cut from exactly the same pattern and cloth as they were, so, of course, they didn’t accept her. It wasn’t long before rumors began to circulate about her, that she was,” — big pause — “a gypsy.” She made another dismissive sound. “In 1893 … Alexander might as well have brought home a pigmy cannibal.”
Sophia had accompanied Alexander to a black-tie event at the governor’s mansion and something happened there, Miss Annabelle mused. Sophia did something, or people thought and said she did. It was hushed up immediately, but after that she was an outcast, not acceptable in polite society regardless of her husband’s money.
“That’s probably why he built a lake house for her in Shadow Rock, a town so small she’d have been at the top of the societal food chain even if she had been a pigmy cannibal. The house was complete in the summer of 1895 and Sophia planned an elegant party to christen the structure. But a couple of weeks before the grand ball, Sophia was found on the kitchen floor beside an overturned chair, dead. It was assumed, but never established, that she had climbed onto the chair to get some crystal out of a high cabinet, fell off and hit her head.”
Miss Annabelle actually sighed.
“Alexander was devastated, immediately sold the house and moved back to Charleston. It’s had half a dozen owners since then, but it remains ‘the Watford House.’”
Dobbs practically had to pry Sparky out of Miss Annabelle’s arms to escape her rambling narrative long after he’d found out what he’d come to learn. He’d made his last question casual.
“Is it possible … was Sophia Watford an artist?”
“Why, yes. Now that you mention it, I believe she was.”
The Joe’s Hole Marina was shaped like a wagon wheel. It stretched out into the clear waters of Whispering Mountain Lake at the bottom of the rise like a city on the water with streets, intersections and a center island for shopping. No, not so much like a city as like a gigantic mobile home park, which in essence was what it was, only the “mobile homes” there had no wheels, just huge inboard/outboard motors to transport them to any spot on the twenty-five-thousand-acre lake, with all the amenities of home taken along for the ride.
Shaped like mobile homes, the houseboats were parked one each to slips that branched out from the spokes of the wheel, at the center of which was a grocery store/restaurant, a bait shop, and a general store. Without leaving the lake, you could buy a can of live crickets, a bikini, sunscreen, a gallon of milk and floaties for the little ones.
Each houseboat slip had four-foot-wide walkways on both sides separating it from the slip next door. Some of the houseboats were so large they barely fit between the walkways, huge double-deckers with two full floors of living area and huge decks fore, aft and on top of the craft. Most had slides, winding down from the sundecks on the top of the boat to the water. Most also had smaller crafts, ski boats or jet skis tied up behind them.
Out beyond the marina itself were row upon row of boats of all sizes, tied up to lines in the water attached to buoys. Apparently, that was the low-rent district, since access to them required using one of the marina’s small-boat ferries. A sign announced ferry service to and from line boats cost five dollars each way.
“I had no idea…” was all Bailey could summon the wherewithal to say when she saw how massive it was.
“This is the biggest marina and Shadow Rock is the major resort area servicing the lake. There’s a taxi service to and from an airport that can accommodate Lear Jets or you can rent a car there. You’re standing at Ground Zero of the tourist trade on the lake. Access to the other marinas is by small, two-lane roads. The two that T.J. and Dobbs are checking are about half this size.
“At even half this size … how many houseboats are there here?”
The sheriff looked down at a sheaf of papers in his hand, ran his finger down to the bottom.
“About two hundred.”
“And any one of them could … talk about looking for a needle in a haystack.”
“No, that part comes later, after we’ve checked out the ones that are here at the dock.”
She didn’t ask what he meant by that. She was already overwhelmed.
The sheriff had picked her up in his cruiser, dressed in a summer uniform — brown, short-sleeved shirt and starched, cuffed pants. She was sure you could have sliced bread with the crease in them. But he did forgo the hat and she was glad of that. No amount of self-confidence could grant dignity to the ridiculous flat-brimmed hat, and without it, he had a bit of a boyish quality she found easier to be with than his official side.
He must have seen her eyeing his uniform.
“The West Virginia Water Patrol officers get to wear shorts, but the Shadow Rock City Council, in its infinite wisdom, has chosen to require me and my deputies to remain in full uniform anytime we’re on duty.” He gave her a rueful smile. “So let it be written, so let it be done.”
She almost mentioned to him the strange phenomena of smelling bacon and coffee that morning, and the voices. But she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Hearing voices in your head, are you? Reeeeally…?
He parked the cruiser in the no-parking zone in the parking lot near the stairs-and-ramp combination that serviced the marina, calling it “payback for the long pants.”
The marina below them dozed in the morning sun.
Leading down to the dock, whose height varied according to the fluctuating water level of the lake, was an elaborate system of switchback ramps — for tourists carrying supplies down to the lake on the wheeled carts provided for that purpose — and stairs with frequent landings for those not similarly loaded down with gear.
In a large area near the top of the steps, local merchants had set up booths where they sold everything from life jackets and slalom skis, to handmade earrings and Amish chocolate. There was a festive, holiday atmosphere to the place even now, on a weekday morning. Little kids stood in line to have their faces painted and Bailey even spotted a woman with an easel set up, doing caricatures for five dollars each.
She shivered at the sight.
There were Adirondack chairs for sale in two different booths, hand made from wood sawn and milled in the nearby mountains.
Kavanaugh County’s economy was based on tourism. The variety of activities advertised and the quantity of junk for sale testified to that here at the marina. They had passed a “lawn chair theatre” on their way down the winding road to the marina, reminiscent of the drive-in movie theaters of the fifties and sixties, where couples sat in cars munching popcorn and hot dogs — or making out in the back seat — as they watched a movie on a huge screen with the sound provided by metal speakers with extension cords that sat on a pole between the cars
. The lawn chair theatre featured nothing more than the screen and a grassy area in front of it. Bailey didn’t know where the sound came from, probably from some kind of app you could put on your phone.
At the bottom of the steps, they stood center stage in the phalanx of shops that occupied the area where the wheel of long boat docks connected. Bailey watched the beehive of activity as watercraft of every size and shape maneuvered into the slots on the side of the dock beside the gas pumps.
“How much gas can a houseboat hold?” Bailey asked, pointing to the young man in a Joe’s Hole Marina shirt pumping liquid from one of the seven pumps into a boat with a sign on the front proclaiming it to be “Mama’s Mink Coat.”
“Varies. Average is one-hundred-fifty gallons.”
He nodded, picking up her thought. “Yeah, that much fuel could create quite an explosion. Not to mention that most houseboats also have propane tanks to power stoves and grills and the generators that make electricity.”
He must have seen her wince.
“Hey, it’s not like they’re floating bombs. They’re no more likely to blow up than the engine on a car.”
“But one of them is going to,” she said under her breath and shivered at the thought. The sheriff didn’t appear to hear.
“Boats don’t get very good mileage — eight or nine miles to the gallon. Charlie Turner makes a killing, charging twenty-five cents a gallon more than gas stations in Shadow Rock. But when you’re the only game in town…”
He shaded his eyes from the glare off the water and got down to business.
“You take the three docks on this side, I’ll take the three on that side. All the slips are numbered. Use the list app on your phone and jot down the number of any empty slip, and the name of any boat where you see Adirondack chairs.”
Bailey headed down the planked dock between the double rows of houseboats. They were all named.
