The Haunted Beach (Tropical Breeze Cozy Mystery Book 4)

by Mary Bowers

  “We weren’t talking about you,” Taylor said.

  “I don’t want to know.”

  “I was just looking through your notes on the case,” Teddy said.

  “You went into my office? You read my notes?”

  “Edson, calm down,” Taylor said. “Eat.”

  Teddy slipped a large bite of crust to Porter, who hit it like a shark. “How am I going to help you if I don’t know what’s going on, little buddy?”

  “Nobody asked you for help,” Ed said.

  As if he hadn’t spoken, Teddy went on. “I’ve always respected you as a researcher, but I must say that I’m disappointed in you, Eddie.”

  “I haven’t had time to transcribe my notes –“

  “Your voice recorder has something on it, but I didn’t have time to sit down and listen to it. Taylor says you let the police waltz off with your camera, and there’s nothing in your case file but that first interview with the twins – Mopsy and Flora –“

  “Rosie and Poppy,” Lily said.

  “Whatever.”

  “I haven’t had time to transcribe my notes –“

  “It seems to me you need my help, little buddy.”

  “If you call me that one more time –“

  “So I’ve called in Purity.”

  “What?” Nonplussed, Ed sat back and stared. “And did you just call me ‘Eddie?’”

  “You remember Purity,” Taylor said. “She did the séance with us last year.”

  “Of course I know who Purity is,” Ed said hotly. “She just came out of left field, that’s all.”

  “No, she comes from Spuds,” Teddy said. They burst out laughing, and Ed waited morosely for them to stop acting like children.

  Ed had last worked with Purity LeStrange, a spirit medium operating out of the city of Spuds, Florida, the year before. He hadn’t made his mind up about her, but she seemed to be useful in her own area of expertise. Naturally, given her profession, she came with a palette of quirks and affectations, but unlike some of her sister mediums, she was not quite certifiable. Still, the quiet, discreet investigation Ed had intended to conduct was beginning to feel like a frat party.

  “Now, I know you haven’t had time to transcribe everything,” Teddy said, “but Taylor, here, has been filling in the blanks. By the way, who is Winnie?”

  In the midst of his outrage, the out-of-the-blue question threw Ed into confusion again. “What? Winnie? What are you talking about now?”

  “Taylor says that when she was in Frieda’s bedroom last night, she remembers somebody talking about Winnie.”

  “She was talking about Winnie,” Ed shouted. “Why don’t you tell us who Winnie is, Taylor?”

  Taylor’s face fell, and she put down the pizza slice she’d been eating. “I talked about somebody named Winnie?”

  As soon as he’d said it, Ed was sorry. Taylor had mentioned the name Winnie while she was in a fugue state in front of the portrait of Frieda. He had assumed it had been a possession, in the classic sense, and he didn’t want to discuss it in front of Teddy before he could explore it himself. He took an enormous bite of pizza so he couldn’t talk for a while, but something had been triggered in Taylor. She had an odd, blank look on her face, and she began to talk in a monotone.

  The cat, Bastet, materialized, levitated to the buffet table against the wall, and observed.

  “Her brother,” Taylor said. “Frieda had a brother. Winston Strawbridge, scion of the family and Clarence Harlowe Strawbridge’s great hope for the future of his dynasty. But Winston was a playboy. He got kicked out of college in a cheating scandal, and for somebody with a surname like Strawbridge, that was beyond the pale. Old Clarence was a strict Presbyterian; a brutal businessman, but an honest one, according to his religious beliefs. The scandal nearly finished him, but it didn’t seem to concern Winnie much. Then Winnie died when he was twenty-four. With his death, Clarence Strawbridge seemed to give up. He had a brilliant daughter, but what he wanted was a brilliant son. Frieda was given an education and then forced into an arranged marriage.”

  “How do you know all this?” Lily asked.

  Taylor widened her eyes and looked at her. “Oh! I’d forgotten myself. Ed and I interviewed her when we were investigating that haunting at Cadbury House last year. She told us her family history then. I think she told us about her brother then, didn’t she, Ed?”

  Ed answered her slowly, doubtfully. “I think so. I could check my notes.”

  “Don’t bother,” Taylor said quickly. “I’m sure of it now. She told us all about her brother during the second interview. How he’d died in a racing accident, and how he’d never have been able to run the family business anyway. He didn’t have the brains for it.”

  “Uh huh,” Ed agreed, although he didn’t remember Frieda going into those details. She hadn’t mentioned the family’s religion, and she’d barely mentioned her brother at all. She’d mainly talked about herself.

  It troubled him, when as a paranormal investigator, it should have excited him. He had lost his appetite, and he was concerned about his notes. Teddy had been pawing through them, and Teddy was cavalier about everything in the world except his television show and his vintage car.

  Ed stood up, startling everybody.

  “I am going to transcribe my notes from last night. It should never have been left for so long, but I’ve been very distracted. I am not to be disturbed.”

  He took himself off to his office as Teddy, Lily, Taylor and Porter stared at him. Bastet jumped down and followed him into the office.

  Ed locked the door, looked at the cat, looked at the mess Teddy had made of his desk, assumed an expression of grim determination, and walked across the room.

  Two hours later, he removed his glasses and twirled them by an earpiece. Bastet, who had curled up on the credenza and fallen asleep, opened her brilliant eyes and looked at him.

  It had taken him some time to put his desk back in order, and after that he had gone through his archives from the year before. After reading his notes on the interviews with Frieda Strawbridge, he sat back and quietly gloated. His suspicions had been correct.

  “Frieda never mentioned how her brother died,” he told the cat. “She mentioned his age at death, the fact that he’d been thrown out of school, her father’s dashed hopes, it’s all here. But nothing about the family religion. And she never called her brother Winnie. She called him Winston. Odd.”

  In the time he’d been locked in his office, he had heard Taylor leave and the house had become silent. His guests were asleep. He gazed at Bastet, lifted an eyebrow, then slowly smiled.

  “I think it’s time I hung these paintings up,” he said. “I’ll just go to the garage and get some nails, and a nice, big hammer.”

  The cat stared at him, blinked once and went back to sleep.

  Chapter 16

  The twins pulled in front of Ed’s house at an indecently early hour. After they got out of the van, they argued quietly on the front step, consulted their watches, argued again, then decided to knock on the door rather than ringing the bell. These showbiz people probably kept late hours, and it was only ten o’clock in the morning. The doorbell might wake them up. Better to knock. Then, if nobody answered, they would tiptoe quietly back to their van and drive away.

  They had gotten up at five in the morning and made their trademark cinnamon-pecan yeast rolls from scratch, working at it for almost four hours, letting the dough rise twice for an hour each time. The rolls were beautiful, as big as softballs and dripping with butter. The smell alone could drive a man wild.

  They had dressed in matching printed cotton shifts, and had considerately worn their nametags.

  Rosie, the bolder one, gave a backward glance at Mr. Daniel Ryder’s house. He was an early riser. Until Teddy Force had come to town, the man they would have most liked to do some home baking for was him.

  But no! These little treasures were for Teddy Force. They would be his, Rosie thought, even if they had
to bring them back later, which would be a darned shame, but her mind was made up. She held the foil-covered fancy plate in her hands and could still feel a faint warmth from the rolls. While she was considering ways to accidentally-on-purpose make enough noise to wake them all up, Edson Darby-Deaver suddenly opened the door and stared at them.

  He had obviously fallen asleep on his desk again. His office was just inside the front door to the right, so he’d heard them pull up. Peeking around Ed’s bleary face, Rosie could see that the others were up too, and that was all she needed to know. She nearly mowed her employer down getting past him and went boldly into the house to offer her very best baking to Teddy Force.

  “Morning, Mr. D-D,” Poppy said as she dived around him.

  “Is it Monday?” he asked.

  When nobody answered, he lifted his wrist as if it were heavy and looked at his watch. It had a little day/date window. “It’s Thursday!” he said indignantly. “I don’t want the house cleaned today. Really, ladies, this is too much. Don’t you have other clients to service today?”

  “Our Thursday morning is in the hospital,” Rosie said.

  Ed stopped and tilted his head inquisitively. “Oh. You mean the person you usually clean house for on Thursday mornings is sick?”

  They didn’t answer. He walked slowly into his own house feeling as if it had been commandeered by a roving army. The twins had cornered their hero in the breakfast nook, and Ed once again had to endure the sight of Teddy preening himself in front of palpitating females.

  He was about to assert himself when he stopped, blinked and inhaled deeply. “What’s that smell?” he said.

  “Homemade cinnamon-pecan rolls,” Poppy announced as her sister unveiled their masterpiece. “Fresh baked this morning.”

  “Have some coffee, Ed,” Lily said, materializing beside him with a mug.

  The combined fragrances of the rolls and the coffee defeated him. The twins could stay.

  “Well played, ladies,” he murmured. “Well played.”

  They continued to ignore him.

  He accepted a cinnamon roll on one of his own best plates and went to the breakfast bar to eat while standing up, alone.

  Lily passed behind close enough to brush against him and murmured, “You’re easy.”

  He murmured back, to her intense amusement. “At least they brought goodies. All you brought was a problem child and a psychotic dog.”

  “That’s ‘psychic.’ Meet me on the lanai in five minutes. Be subtle. Mum’s the word.”

  Ed sighed and took another bite of the warm, pillowy-soft yeast roll as Lily slid away like a spy in the fog.

  He laughed to himself, quietly and bitterly. “Be subtle,” she had said. He could walk into the kitchen and start break-dancing on the cooking island and nobody would notice.

  He immersed himself in enjoying the cinnamon roll as long as he could, then he set the plate down by the sink, glared at the nauseating scene in the breakfast nook and walked away. With the twins riveted on Teddy, Porter riveted on the cinnamon rolls and Teddy riveted on himself, nobody cared what Ed did.

  “Okay, what?” he said, sliding the patio door closed behind him.

  Bastet was lounging on his glass-topped patio table, looking like she was resting in a pool of heavenly light. Lily had been idly tickling the cat’s chin, and when Ed opened the door, Bastet looked at him with bored green eyes.

  “My, aren’t we testy today?” Lily said.

  When Ed gathered himself for an outburst, she held up a hand and said, “I am sincerely mortified at the way Teddy’s treating you, and I apologize abjectly. I am sincerely mortified at Teddy most of the time. I’m more to be pitied than punished, Ed. And I’m not one of those dingbats who think they’re going to marry a guy and then change him. He is what he is, and he’s always going to be what he is because he likes being what he is. I know it. I’m going to marry him anyway.”

  “Why?”

  “I love him. Half the world loves him, haven’t you noticed? The female half, anyway. Did you see the way Rosie and Poppy were acting? It’s just something he does to women. I should know; he did it to me. But I’ve got my eyes wide open, and I know he has his faults. I’m not going to let him drive you crazy. You’re already a basket case. I’ll make sure he keeps himself busy with the psychic from Spuds while we look into this Frieda-the-Ghost thing.”

  Momentarily speechless, he gazed into the tawny eyes and peachy complexion of the trim young woman. As a specimen of womanhood, she was perfect, right down to her complete lack of logic. Ed had no idea what she saw in Teddy, but he accepted that it was hopeless.

  With a half-hearted, “You could do better,” he let it go.

  Then he addressed the main points as he saw them. “(A) Who told you you could join my investigation of the Santorini haunting, and (B) aren’t you worried about Purity snaffling your boyfriend, not that she wouldn’t be doing you a favor? She’s infatuated with him, you know.”

  She laughed merrily. “Teddy and Purity? I’ve seen her website; you’ve seen her in person. Do you really see Teddy getting frisky with a chubby, middle-aged Scarlett O’Hara?”

  “If you’re going to be here with me, and Teddy is going to be in Spuds with her, what do you think is going to happen? You know him better than I do, but he strikes me as the kind of hound who’ll tackle a table leg if it will stand still long enough. Are you really going to trust him out of your eyesight? And as for Frieda, it’s personal. If you need new material for the show, go trump up something in Spuds with Purity.”

  Lily gave him a moment to calm down. She knew Ed pretty well by now, and while he was often fussy, he was never hard to handle.

  He was gazing at the cat with troubled eyes.

  When she decided he was calm enough, she said, “This is Taylor Verone’s cat, isn’t it? Bastet? What’s she doing here?”

  The cat turned her head and looked directly at Lily for the first time.

  Ed spoke softly but clearly, apparently addressing the cat. “She has decided to stay with me. That’s what worries me. She has a history of scenting trouble. I could believe that Dolores was having delusions. I could believe she accidentally drowned. If given enough proof, I’d even believe that her husband drowned her. But the fact that she believed that her mother was haunting her and now another woman is missing changes everything. With all that going on, I consider it significant that Bastet has chosen to stay here.”

  “And you think you’re the skeptical one,” Lily said, grinning.

  “I am skeptical. You’ve been to the paranormal conventions. I’m always the most rational one in the room. But I also believe it is wise to pay attention to unusual phenomena, and this cat has pointed the way more than once before. It may be coincidence. It may mean that something is going on that might be dismissed and forgotten if I don’t investigate.”

  “Right,” Lily said, getting up and putting her hands on her hips. “So we investigate.”

  “My dear young woman, haven’t I just explained --?”

  “Did you hear that?” she said, looking toward the patio doors. “I think Purity is here. Come on.”

  She got up and rubbed his short, white hair the wrong way as she went past him.

  As soon as Ed stepped into the house he heard a burst of girlish laughter. He stood still, closed his eyes and felt within himself for calm. Then he heard a rippling little female voice engaging in baby-talk and gave up.

  Purity had indeed arrived. Whatever their sins, the twins never did baby-talk.

  “. . . and I said to my Guide that it was impossible this morning, what with the alignment of Mars and all the other wanderers passing in retrograde, but she simply insisted. I knew that you needed me much more urgently than you realized, and so I am here. Your doppelganger calls, even if you do not.”

  “Oh, we called,” Lily said, walking toward the breakfast nook in her role of bimbo bouncer. “At least I did, but we were planning on conducting business at your place, Purity,
dear.”

  Purity LeStrange, the psychic from Spuds, turned and batted her eyelashes. She was a professional: fortunes told for $100 flat, auras read for $50, combination discounts available. Walk-ins welcome.

  In their previous joint investigation, Ed had found her competent, though disconcertingly like an animated kewpie doll. But Taylor had called her a fraud. Taylor was not a professional, in the sense that Ed and Teddy – and even Purity – were, so he was keeping an open mind. Ed had never met a psychic who had the gravity of a Supreme Court Justice, and he’d met a lot of them.

  “Ed, you’ve made a mistake,” she burbled. “I’m sure it was why I was called.” She fixed him with dewy blue eyes and said, “I was called because somehow you have disturbed the psychic texture of your home. I feel the presence of an angry spirit. I felt it all the way out to Spuds.”

  “The house was new construction when I bought it,” he said tersely. “I’m the first inhabitant, nobody has died in this house, and it’s not built on an ancient Indian burial ground. No ghosts.”

  “One has arrived,” she said placidly. “You need my help.”

  He stared at her. Her long, blond hair fell straight down her back into disconcerting curls, and her bangs nearly covered her eyes, making it hard to fully connect with the woman. She wore a floaty, gauzy hand-painted batik thing that seemed to move even when she didn’t, and a complicated necklace hung all the way down into her lap, making tinkly little noises whenever she gestured with her hands, which was all the time.

  “I do not,” he said.

  “My dear friend, you do.”

  Ed clutched his forehead, pivoted and marched toward the front door.

  “Where are you going?” Lily asked. She was the only one to follow him. He went into his office and stood in the middle of the room, vibrating visibly.

  “I need to get out of here for a while,” he said, apparently to one of the “Frieda” paintings. “I’m going to the beach. I need to clear my head. Lily,” he said, coming closer and lowering his voice, “I can’t take much more. Could you two find a hotel or something?”