The Haunted Beach (Tropical Breeze Cozy Mystery Book 4)

by Mary Bowers

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  For my brother, Tom. You’re a rock.

  As always, special thanks to my husband, Dale, and cousin Kiki.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, names, places and events are products of the author’s imagination. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  The Haunted Beach

  Copyright © 2015 by Moebooks

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any way without the express written permission of the author.

  Cover designed by Revelle Design, Inc. www.RevelleDesign.com

  Chapter 1

  Edson Darby-Deaver was a frustrated man.

  Though the weather was fine on this balmy morning in June, and he’d just signed a contract renewal that would dump a truckload of money into his bank account – more than he’d earned at his other endeavors during his entire 55 years put together – he was frustrated. After all, money wasn’t everything. His needs were simple, he lived alone, and he was usually oblivious to the weather. He just wanted his life back.

  No, despite the fact that Edson was one of the stars of a hit reality show, he was less happy this year than he’d been the year before, when nobody had ever heard of him. Before Haunt or Hoax? had struck gold.

  He had two co-stars on the show. First, there was Teddy Force, a strapping, handsome, devil-may-care man who was a veteran of paranormal reality shows. He was the king of the ghost hunters and he knew it.

  And then there was Porter. Porter was a dog. Who doesn’t love dogs?

  Porter was an English bulldog: a rolling mass of solid muscle guided by a mind that was instantly distracted by anything (or nothing), perpetually charging around in a happy state of mania. His buggedy eyes were always in motion, his tongue was always bouncing around outside his mouth, and his respiratory system was always cranking, so that every ghost hunt was accompanied by a raspy huff-and-puff and an occasional hot, wet kiss. He seemed to be able to throw his tongue across the room like a frog, and there Edson would be, slimed again.

  On the show, Porter was known as the Ghost-Sniffing Dog, since Teddy believed he was psychic. Every time Edson heard that appellation, he wanted to crawl away and curl up in a ball. Once he had had principles. Once he had had standards. Once he, Edson Darby-Deaver, a scientist, had conducted serious research. Now he ran around reputedly haunted houses tripping over Porter and arguing with Teddy. It was degrading.

  Ed had been brought onto the show as the straight man. He was there to pontificate, to be wrong when Teddy was right, to look like a dry stick. Only it hadn’t worked out that way. Ed turned out to be a hoot.

  He simply was – an eccentric, fussy, neatly put together little fellow in a pleasingly compact package, topped by a shock of white hair. He was always fiddling with his glasses and lecturing. You could laugh at him without feeling mean. America loved him. Grandmothers were naming kittens after him.

  For Ed was a paranormal investigator with a twist: he was skeptical. He sought proof – real proof – of the survival of the consciousness outside of the flesh, and when Teddy would blithely charge around in the dark claiming someone was calling his name, Ed would follow behind with a voice recorder, EMF meter and infrared camera and tell him it was just a short in the electrical wiring going zzzzz. Then Porter would trip him.

  The show was on hiatus, and Ed was resting his shattered nerves at home in Florida. To distract himself, he had taken on a private investigation, but as it turned out, that had only made things worse. The lady from New Smyrna Beach, was worrying him. She claimed that ghosts were driving her out of her condo, and she didn’t want to go.

  What to do, what to do? The lady was almost certainly being hoaxed, but would she believe Ed when he told her that her devoted brother was scamming her? Women’s reactions were always problematic. You’d think a lady would be grateful to know she was the target of a flim-flam, and that she had a champion to protect her. But no, Ed knew from past experience that such a lady was often inclined to kill the messenger.

  In the privacy of his home office in St. Augustine, he had composed a hard-hitting e-mail laying it all out for his client. Then, when he had it perfect and had run it through the spell-checker twice, he sat at his desk with his right hand hovering over the mouse and couldn’t make his finger take the plunge. The arrow on the screen was aimed at the “Send” button, and with one click, just one little twitch of his finger, his report would fly away into cyberspace and he could never get it back again. It was worse than a cherry bomb in a mailbox, because cyberspace was full of holes and they were all sucking up information all over the world at every moment of the day and night. It boggled the mind.

  If this thing got forwarded to members of the paranormal community, there would be no end to the blow-back. He was already known as “Darby-Deaver, the Unbeliever,” and since the reality show had hit the big-time, the jealous backbiting at conventions had once driven him into a stall in the Men’s room, a quivering wreck. He had no recollection whatsoever of the keynote address he’d given afterwards. His only clear memory of that day consisted of the phone number of a lady named Chanelle which had been written on the partition, and he didn’t want to call her.

  So the banging on his office window as he sat before the computer screen nearly sent him off bodily into cyberspace. Fortunately his index finger had held firm as the rest of him flailed, and the smoking hot e-mail to the lady from New Smyrna Beach was still for his eyes only.

  He looked up to see where the battering was coming from and saw a pair of popping blue eyes under extremely red hair. Pinned to the woman’s shirt was a nametag that said, “No, I’m Poppy.” Invisible to him on the front step was her identical twin sister, whose tag said, “No, I’m Rosie.”

  She waved a pudgy hand and called through the glass, “Wakey wakey, Mr. D-D. Double Quick Maids!”

  He stared at her. “Is it Monday again?”

  She broke into wild laughter, making him jump. His glasses nearly fell off his nose.

  “Oh, you scientist types,” she said. Then she turned stage left, where her sister (invisible to Ed) was standing and said, “He doesn’t even know what day it is.”

  The invisible Rosie called out loud enough for Ed to hear it through the concrete construction of his house: “Come on and open the door now, Mr. D-D. You’re first, as usual, and you don’t want to get us behind schedule for the whole day, do you? It’s –“

  “Time to come clean,” they sang in unison.

  Edson let out a groan. They were going to keep it up until he let them in, so he heaved himself out of his chair and went to the front door, muttering darkly.

  “Don’t touch the desk,” he said, knowing it was hopeless.

  “Just a quick dust,” Poppy said, advancing upon the desk with a kind of hunger. S
he was always making lofty disclaimers of any interest in his work, then snooping all over his desk like a human Hoover.

  Poppy Tays and Rosie Carter enjoyed being identical twins. They had always enjoyed it, from their school days, when they had switched identities from time to time, to that one time (and only one time) when they had traded dates without telling the boyfriends. That had been a mistake, but usually looking exactly alike was a lot of fun, and they always dressed and did their hair alike to make sure heads would turn when they walked down the street together.

  They were five foot three, muscular, and had the forward momentum of Sherman tanks. They had deep blue eyes and curly red hair, which was redder than ever now that it needed dyeing. They worked together, owned an oceanfront condo together (husbands divorced; kids off to college), finished one another’s sentences and thought with one brain, so to speak.

  Just looking at them made Edson tired.

  After admitting the twins and their bundles of paraphernalia, Ed had quickly dodged back into the office, hit the “Save for Later” button and shut the computer down. The twins were not malicious, but they were clumsy, and he needed time, time to think. With one flick of the duster, they were capable of somehow hitting the “Send All” button and splattering his whole world with it. Ed didn’t really think this was possible, but the twins would find a way. That e-mail was dynamite.

  “Don’t touch that!” Ed cried, moving to rescue his file on the New Smyrna Beach Hoax (he was already calling it that) which was about to spill from Poppy’s hand.

  “My, my, you are all strung up today,” she said. “I wasn’t going to read it. No offence, Mr. D-D, but you couldn’t pay me to read that stuff.”

  Again with the laughter.

  He thought about firing the twins the entire time they were in his house, every time they were in his house, but he would never have actually done it. They were nice enough, in a harebrained way, and on a good day, when he was in the mood, they were amusing. And they did a good job. And they were quick. But most of all, they had a contract with his small gated beach community, and everybody else liked them. They did the four houses on the north side of Santorini Drive on Mondays and the four houses on the south side of it on Tuesdays. Only sometimes it seemed like every other day to Ed. He lived alone and liked a quiet house, where nobody was touching his stuff. You can’t clean without touching stuff. And Ed liked things to be clean. And around and around it went.

  Rosie came into the office with the vacuum. “Okay, Mr. D-D, time to get loud.” She fired up the vac like a maniac with a chainsaw, and Ed took whatever folders were lying on the desk and bolted.

  Once the “loud” was done and they were alone in the office, Rosie said, “He looks worse than usual today.”

  “He always looks worse than usual. That’s his usual. You’d think being a big TV star would cheer him up, but he looks more depressed than ever. More skittish, too.”

  “You’re right about that. But I know something that would perk him up.” She glanced at her sister slyly from the corner of her eye.

  Poppy stood upright and stared across the room. “Don’t you dare!”

  Rosie put her duster down on the desk and faced her sister. “I’ve been thinking, Pops. Maybe it’d be for the best. After all, it’s what the man does. And here he’s got a situation right at the end of his own block and with him being out of town all the time with that show of his, he probably doesn’t even know about it. Lord knows what we’ll find when we get down to the Brinker house today, but every time we come, The Mister is looking more and more worried, and The Missus is looking more and more like – like she’s not there at all. Only she is.”

  “If Mr. D-D knew that much about this stuff, he’d already have noticed the situation. By clairvoyance or something.”

  “Oh, stop. He never claimed he was clairvoyant. Not as far as I know, and I watch his show every week, just like you do. They’d say so if he was. And those people need help. Maybe Mr. D-D could help, but who’s going to tell him? All the neighbors are wrapped up in their own little worlds, and The Mister doesn’t want anybody to know his wife is losing it, so who’s going to ask Mr. D-D to get involved, when he’s probably the only person who can help?”

  Poppy frowned, thinking hard. “I don’t know, Rosie. It’s really none of our business.”

  “These folks are our business! If things go sideways in this neighborhood, there goes about half our business. And we care about these people – at least I do!”

  “You know I do too. We’re in their houses every week, seeing what they’re doing, looking at their stuff, seeing how they are. Aren’t we the first ones that noticed something was wrong with Mr. Watson? And what if we hadn’t gotten involved and didn’t tell his pals at The Elks? Nobody would’ve been with him when he had that stroke and he would’ve died and there would’ve been a hole in the schedule on Thursday mornings, not that I care about that – oh, heck, you know what I mean. But this thing with The Missus is different.”

  “No it’s not.”

  “Oh, Rosie, it’s all so vague. I just feel like it’d make us look like a couple of busybodies.”

  “You are a couple of busybodies,” Edson Darby-Deaver said from the doorway.

  They snapped around and stared at him as he rested against the doorframe, looking composed for once in his life.

  “Now, ladies, what’s this all about?”

  Chapter 2

  “And yet you two are usually so talkative,” Edson murmured as he sat in his desk chair, arms crossed on his chest, swiveling gently.

  Standing on the other side of the desk, Poppy and Rosie glanced at one another.

  “Now you’ve got nothing to say? If Ben and Dolores Brinker are in trouble – I assume they’re the Mister and Missus you keep talking about – then ladies, I want to know. I want to help. And you seem to think I can help, so let’s have it.” He stopped swiveling and regarded them, waiting. They would break. They always did. Edson had a lot of experience with this kind of thing – dealing with people who wanted to talk, but thought they shouldn’t. The wanting always overcame the shouldn’t in the end.

  “It’s Miss Frieda,” Rosie blurted at last.

  “What about her?” Edson asked.

  “She’s back.”

  “Back from the dead,” Poppy added sepulchrally. “She’s after The Missus. Haunting her. Driving her insane.”

  Ed took a moment to digest this. His head lifted in an informed way, and his expression became professorial. He pondered.

  “Well?” Rosie demanded. “You don’t look surprised.”

  “I’m not. In fact, I could have predicted this. If I hadn’t been distracted by that blasted show, I would have. Frieda Strawbridge was not the type to simply rest in peace. The fact that she is now haunting her only child is only too believable. She had too strong a hold on things – and people – in this world to go quietly on to the next. Please. Sit down, ladies.”

  The twins eyed one another. “Well, maybe just for a minute,” Poppy said. They sat down reluctantly. “We don’t want to get behind schedule.”

  “You’re always behind schedule. And you do the first three houses, break for lunch, finish with the big house at the end by two or three in the afternoon, then take the rest of the day off.”

  “How did you know that?” Poppy asked, genuinely startled.

  “Because you’ve told me yourself nearly every time you’ve been here. Besides,” he added, gazing at each in turn and slowing down his speech, “you need to get this off your minds. It’s troubling you. You want to help, but you don’t know how. I do. You know I do. If it turns out to be nothing, it will go no further. Now, I assume this haunting is going on in the Brinker house itself –“

  “Oh, no,” Rosie said, rising to the bait. “It’s at the house across the street. Her house. Miss Frieda’s house. It’s still sitting there empty, and we figure –“

  “—that the reason The Missus won’t sell it is because her moth
er is still in there. In the house.”

  “And on the beach,” Rosie added.

  “The beach?” Edson sat up. He had never investigated a beach haunting.

  “They dance together. On the beach.”

  “Really?!” He had never investigated a ghost who danced, either. Then he frowned. “They never danced together on the beach when Frieda was alive, did they?”

  “Not lately, they didn’t, but back in the old days they did. Anyway, that’s what The Missus said. Miss Frieda was too crippled to even leave her bedroom toward the end, but back in the day, when she first built her house, they spent a lot of time on the beach. Miss Frieda was a young woman then.”

  Edson nodded. They waited for him to comment, occasionally glancing at one another, but several minutes went by as he became lost in thought.

  Poppy leaned close to Rosie’s ear and whispered, “This is a mistake.”

  Rosie leaned close to Poppy and whispered, “Maybe he’ll bring Teddy Force in to help.”

  Poppy sat back and snapped her mouth shut.

  “Maybe they’ll even do a show on it,” Rosie added out of the side of her mouth.

  Suddenly, Poppy was on board.

  Edson, a man capable of absolute concentration, had missed the exchange. His sharp brown eyes had lost their focus as he took his glasses off and laid them on the desk, gazing past the twins into the Haint Blue paint on the wall. There was a legend that that particular shade of light blue formed a barrier against spirits, much as water did, haint being a corruption of haunt. Ed was amused at the idea that a color of paint could keep ghosts away, but it was a pretty blue and he found it soothing, so he used it on his office walls. Superstition had nothing to do with it.

  When he finally spoke, his voice was distant.

  “Frieda Strawbridge West. A daughter of the Gilded Age. The only one in her generation left to inherit. A brief marriage, then tragedy. Her husband dies a month before their first child is born. Hence the baby girl’s name: Dolores: sorrows. Not that Frieda is saddened by her husband’s death; he was a drunk and an abuser, and she never remarries. She resumes her more famous maiden name and goes on with her life, having acquired a docile daughter.