The Haunted Beach (Tropical Breeze Cozy Mystery Book 4)

by Mary Bowers

  Following Dan into his house, Ed took a step back when Dan came out of a back room checking a handgun, then securing it in a shoulder holster he’d put on over his tee shirt.

  “May I ask what you’re doing?” Ed said as lightly as he could.

  “Call the police,” Dan growled as he brushed past Ed on his way out the door again.

  Ed looked at Parker wide-eyed and said, “What should I do?”

  “Do as he says,” Parker told him, and he turned to follow Dan.

  Ed ran down Santorini drive to catch up with them, holding his cell phone to his ear and trying to keep his voice steady as he ran.

  “Yes, this is Edson Darby-Deaver, citizen of St. Augustine Beach. May I please speak to Detective Burton Bruno? Yes, I know 911 is the emergency line. This is indeed an emergency. Would you please connect me with the detective? Quickly, please.”

  He listened, first blinking, then frowning, then saying, “Madam, there is no need to take that tone with me. As I told you, this is, in fact, an emergency. What kind of emergency? As to that, I’m not quite sure yet . . . really, madam, I see that I’m going to have to take direct action myself. Thank you for your help,” he said perfunctorily, though she’d been no help at all. “Good night.”

  She was still talking when he hung up.

  He stopped in the driveway and scrolled down his Contacts to the number from Detective Bruno’s card, which he had entered into his phone, for the sake of completeness, as he did all things.

  “Ah, detective,” he said, walking again, “this is Edson Darby-Deaver speaking. You probably don’t remember me. It’s been a few weeks.”

  He had reached the entry to Willa’s house, and the other two men were standing there waiting for him. He stopped, holding up a hand for patience. As he watched, Dan inspected the door and found it not only unlocked, but slightly open. He pushed the door until it was open a few inches and inclined his head, listening.

  “Oh, I remember you, Mr. Deaver,” Bruno said with a touch of irony. “What can I do for you?”

  “We have a dangerous situation here at Santorini. I’m afraid there may be violence tonight. Could you come over here immediately, please?”

  “Violence? Why is that?”

  As briefly as he could, Ed explained. After he stopped, there was a long silence at the other end of the line. “Detective? Are you there?”

  “Still here. Where did you get this information?”

  “Oh, the internet, you know,” he said vaguely. “And of course, I’ve been bruiting it about with the neighbors. Two of them are here with me now. The point is, I think we’ve reached the crisis stage here, and considering some of the unstable personalities involved, I’d like your assistance.”

  “Well, I appreciate you coming to me with this information,” Bruno said in a changed, more brisk tone of voice. “I’ll check it out. Are you available tomorrow morning? Say ten o’clock?”

  Ed was nonplussed. “Are you giving me the brush-off?”

  At the other end of the line, Detective Bruno’s voice became weary. ”Mr. Deaver, I’m going to have to ask you to stay out of this. We’ll take it from here. Now I want you to come to my office tomorrow morning at ten o’clock, and in the meantime, I don’t want you to talk to anybody about this, am I making myself clear? I don’t want to have to charge you with obstruction.”

  “You don’t understand,” Ed said, getting desperate. “I’ve found the ghost.”

  Gathering what little patience he had left, the detective kept his voice level. “Ten o’clock tomorrow morning. My office. And remember what I said: do not discuss this with anyone. Thank you so much, Mr. Deaver.”

  He hung up, leaving Ed staring at the phone. “He wants us to stand down,” he told Dan.

  “He doesn’t know all the facts.”

  “I just told him I found the ghost. What more does he need to know?”

  “That Claire Ford is in love with me, and I today I asked her to marry me.”

  “Oh,” Ed said. “Well, that changes everything.”

  “Shut up,” Dan said. He leaned closer to the open door.

  Ed blinked.

  “You hear that?” Dan was straining.

  Suddenly, Ed and Parker did hear – raised voices on the main floor upstairs. A violent argument was escalating, and Ed recognized Willa’s voice rising, going up into a register of terror until it ended in a scream and a gunshot. Another shot followed, and Dan burst through the door and pelted up the stairs with Parker and Ed close behind him.

  “She killed him,” Claire said, looking at the gun in her hand with horror. “I heard the shot and came in. She just looked at me and told me he was a con man, that he knew about her money all along, and that was all he wanted. He never loved her. She’d shot him. Then she looked me in the eye and shot herself. They’re both dead.”

  Rod Johnson lay face-up on the floor with blood spreading out quickly from a black hole in his white shirt. There was a sharp smell in the air from the gunfire. Willa lay crumpled beside Rod, face-down. Ed stared at her in horror, trying to see signs of life. He thought he saw her move once, but he couldn’t be sure.

  “It’s all right, Claire,” Dan said. “Put the gun down. It’s over.”

  Looking disoriented, she swung around to directly face the three men, still holding the gun. Dan stopped walking toward her and started to talk in a low, even voice.

  At that moment, Ed saw Willa take a ragged breath, and he went toward the gun that was still aimed in his direction. While Claire was distracted, Dan covered the distance between himself and the shocked woman and took the gun from her hand, cradling her in his arms.

  “How could you?” he said against her smooth, pale hair. “Why did you kill them?”

  She pulled away and stared at him.

  Ed was on the floor by Willa, and Parker was close behind Dan, listening to everything he and Claire were saying.

  “What do you mean?” Claire said. “I told you, Willa did it. I was walking back from the beach and heard the shot. I came in to see what was going on, and she just looked at me and shot herself. I don’t know why I picked up the gun. I just did.”

  “You haven’t had time to think through your story yet, have you?” Dan said, almost tenderly. “You couldn’t have come up here after the first gunshot, and then watched Willa commit suicide. We were standing downstairs just outside the door and heard both shots, one right after the other. You would have had to run right through us.”

  She took a smooth step back from him, holding the gun from his holster and aiming it at his chest.

  Dan indicated the dead man on the floor at their feet. “That’s your husband, isn’t it? Why did you kill him? You could have just left him. I wouldn’t have cared about your past.”

  “He wasn’t going to let me go,” she spat. “He would have tracked us down. He was good at things like that. Things have been rocky, but I always stayed true to him. We were a good team. But he didn’t think we could fool the Strawbridge lawyers. Once we found out she was going to inherit big-time, he figured they’d investigate and find out who he was. Who we were. He wanted to take what we could and pull out, and I wasn’t going anywhere with him anymore. I was tired. I wanted out. And I wanted you.”

  “I want you, too.”

  “Do you? You said you loved me. Will you still come away with me?” She looked around uneasily; there were so many of them. They’d have to kill them all.

  Dan still had the gun he’d taken away from Claire, and she still had the gun she’d taken from Dan’s holster as he held her. They talked intimately to one another, all the time holding guns on one another.

  “Can I trust you?” she said, her voice wavering. The gun began to tremble. “Put your gun down.”

  “You could have trusted me,” Dan said softly. “I would have gone anywhere with you. But this . . . .”

  As they stared at one another, Willa groaned.

  Claire whipped around and aimed the gun at Willa, as Ed t
hrew himself between the woman on the floor and the gun.

  A shot rang out, and Ed knew he was going to die. But it was all right. He was going to die beside Willa. A worthy death.

  He waited for the pain, but it didn’t come. He looked down at his shirt, and it remained crisp and clean.

  When he heard Claire fall, he looked up and couldn’t believe his eyes.

  Dan was standing over her in a daze, still holding the gun.

  In the silence that followed, a silvery voice said, “Are they dead? They are, aren’t they? Both of them. I’m glad.”

  They all turned and saw a pretty blond girl of about twenty, standing at the top of the stairs. She looked uncannily like Claire.

  Parker Peavey, who was closest to her, said, “Who are you?”

  She smiled impishly and said, “I’m the ghost of Frieda Strawbridge.”

  “Ah,” Ed said quietly. “Youth Dew.”

  “You what?” she asked.

  “Youth Dew. Frieda’s perfume.”

  She looked puzzled. “I never used Frieda’s perfume. What are you talking about? Oh! You’re that guy. Mommy told us not to worry about you. You’re crazy.”

  In that surreal moment, as they all stared, Ed said, “Um, yes, everybody, I believe this is the daughter of Rod and Claire, or as they are known to law enforcement, Jerry and Elvira Stancel. If I’m not mistaken, your name is Sylvie Stancel?”

  “That’s right. But you can call me Frieda. I like that better.” She strolled past a dazed Parker, and looked down at the bodies of her parents dispassionately. “So they killed that lady after all. She turned out to be rich, did you know that? But Daddy said we had to split, because we’d never get away with it. Mommy told him to just stay here and live the life. He’d won the lottery, she said. He’d be rich, and Mommy wanted to be free. But Daddy wouldn’t let her go,” she added wistfully.

  “Willa is not dead,” Ed announced.

  Immediately, Dan went to the floor and began rescue measures. Claire’s body lay beside him, and he only looked at it once.

  “And will somebody please call 911 now?” Ed said, standing up and looking down helplessly. “I’d do it myself, but they never pay any attention to me.”

  Chapter 27

  “They couldn’t keep Sylvie out of Frieda’s house,” Ed said. “The girl has always been unstable, and when Claire came to Santorini, she had to bring her along. She needed to keep an eye on her. They were in the habit of keeping her hidden because she was useful for alibis, since she looked so much like her mother. Besides, Claire never knew what Sylvie would say to people. I’ll use the names we’ve always known them by, I think, instead of calling them Jerry and Elvira.”

  They were spread out along Ben’s kitchen counter and breakfast nook. On the high-boy chairs at the counter were Parker, Dan and Ben. At the breakfast table were Lily, Teddy and Taylor, who had unaccountably been waiting in Ed’s driveway at one in the morning when Detective Bruno had shown up. Taylor said she had “had a feeling,” and Lily, trusting the vibes, had dragged Teddy out of bed to go along. When Porter had lunged at the door, Taylor had looked down at him and firmly said, “Stay.” He usually ignored that word, but something in her tone of voice got through to him for once. He sat down and glared as they left.

  After the paramedics had arrived at Willa’s house, Detective Bruno had driven up, gotten out of his car and looked around calmly. In the glare of vehicle lights and the organized chaos of Emergency Services, Santorini Drive was as confused as a druggy dance party from the 1980s, and was similarly lit by swirling lights.

  When Bruno noticed the clutch of neighbors standing together like a Greek chorus, he ordered them into Ben’s house, which was closest and largest, and where he’d notice if anybody tried to sneak out. Then he checked with the professionals and got sequential, straight answers: three gunshot victims, two dead, one hanging on by a thread.

  His partner, Miles Carver, materialized out of the gloom with an ethereal young lady, introduced her as Sylvie Stancel, and quietly allowed her to babble out her entire life story. Bruno already knew who she was, of course. After Ed’s phone call, he had gotten onto the National Crime Information Center database and read her parents’ entries, but he listened carefully anyway. Then she had been passed off to a police officer, who happened to be young and handsome. She transferred her iridescent smile to him and went away happily.

  Looking up at Ben Brinker’s house with resignation, Bruno and Carver then went in and debriefed the neighbors, calmly enduring the digressions, rising and falling emotions and acting out of the players involved.

  Ed finished the cross-talk session by addressing Detective Bruno. “I may have been somewhat vague earlier on the telephone, but I was doing the best I could under the circumstances.” He refrained from pointing out that his, Ed’s, taxes paid his, Bruno’s, salary, since he had gotten poor results with that line in the past. But there was no mistaking the fact that he was nettled about having to face the crisis without police backup.

  “Yes,” Bruno said placidly, “I probably should have listened better. Having met you in person, I should have realized that what you said would need some sorting out, but might actually be important. We’ll leave that for another time. Maybe we’ll also discuss how you knew those two characters were convicted felons.”

  Ed remained silent.

  “Anyway,” Bruno went on, “I guess we should be grateful. We were looking in another direction entirely.”

  Ben made a snorting noise, but said nothing.

  Detective Bruno gave him a broad, sidewise look, but didn’t apologize. Instead, he went on smoothly. “Without you poking around where you didn’t belong,” (here he gave Ed a look that sent shivers down his spine), “that shooting would have been written off as a murder-suicide, until it was too late to catch Elvira Stancel, a/k/a Claire Ford. She would have taken off to a nice, remote, tropical island in another country and lived happily ever after.”

  Ed straightened up and very formally said, “You’re welcome.”

  Bruno grinned. “Don’t press your luck.”

  Now the neighbors were huddled together without any cops around. Nobody had wanted to go home and be alone, so Taylor had put on a pot of coffee and they had drifted to seats around the kitchen area.

  Ed, leaning against the cooking island and facing them all, continued his somewhat circular explanation of what had just happened.

  “So Claire was here to pull off a real estate swindle. Simple. The house where Claire was living had been empty since the elderly widow living there had died, and her few relatives were living in Hawaii and not paying much attention to it. Rod was notified by a co-conspirator at a title company that there was a valuable property here that was ripe for the picking. They’d pulled this kind of a scam before, fraudulently getting title to the house, then selling it and moving on before anybody noticed something was fishy. He was busy with something up in Georgia, so he sent Claire.

  “She presented herself as a widow; it would get her sympathy, people wouldn’t ask too many questions, and nobody would question it if she immediately put it up for sale again. Their real estate swindles had worked so well in the past, they were getting complacent. This was a much more beautiful house than they usually targeted, and Claire wanted to live there while she waited for Rod to finish up yet another sweetheart scam in Dalton. They figured she’d only be here a couple of weeks, at the most, but this time, things were different. At the neighborhood party, Claire discovered Willa, who screamed to be another of Rod’s victims. He’d marry a woman, take everything she had, take out a mortgage on her house, run up debts in her name, then disappear. Their contact at the title company let them know that Willa had clear title to her house.

  “So Claire brought him in. He rented the Greene’s house as a disinterested stranger, and they ended up being here longer than they had planned: long enough for Sylvie to start causing trouble, and for Claire to fall in love.

  “While they were
here, they tried to keep Sylvie hidden. They had to trade her off to keep her away from the cleaning ladies, and at first, she behaved herself. But when things went on longer than usual, Sylvie got bored. She started slipping out, dancing on the beach at night, playing games with Dolores, and of course, exploring that wonderful, empty mansion at the end of the block. She figured out the garage code, and once inside, she found a duplicate house key. She used the key from then on, coming and going through the back door as she pleased, while we were using the garage.”

  “But why did they have to kill my wife?” Ben asked.

  “One night Rod went into Frieda’s house looking for Sylvie and saw the portrait that Dolores had done of Frieda’s ghost, hanging on the wall. It looked exactly like his daughter, who looked very much like Claire. He knew he had to act. It was only a matter of time before somebody realized Dolores wasn’t seeing things after all. If they started looking for Frieda’s impersonator, they would probably suspect Claire, which would have been a nuisance, or they might even catch Sylvie, which would have been fatal. He knew that if they caught his daughter, she would tell them everything, just as she blurted it all out to the police tonight.

  “Rod took the painting from Frieda’s house and destroyed it, not knowing that there were many more in Dolores’s studio. He already realized he couldn’t control his daughter, so he decided he had to kill Dolores. It was about that time, remember, that the blasted twins recruited me to investigate. I’m a skeptic. I might have discovered that ‘Frieda’ was real, not a ghost. I was also going to watch the beach at night. I might have found Sylvie. But nobody would have been surprised if Dolores had drowned one night. End of problem.

  “Here’s what I think must have happened: Rod decided on murder, and decided how and when he was going to do it. Unfortunately, he didn’t know that Peggy Peavey had been snooping around, and she was there on the beach that night. Peggy was a blond, and about the same size as Sylvie. Rod must have assumed she was Sylvie when he came out to commit the murder. He ignored her and pulled Dolores into the water. When Peggy realized what was happening, she tried to run, or tried to help Dolores, and he realized his mistake. It wasn’t his daughter, it was one of the neighbors, and now he had a witness on his hands. He had to kill her, too.”