Well, well. Benazepril was an ACE inhibitor used to treat high blood pressure.
I took a photo of the plain caplets and sent it to Pill ID. After analyzing for maybe twenty seconds, the screen displayed the message “unable to identify.”
I sat back in my chair and took another long drink of Cheerwine. Merry stared at me with a less-than-patient look.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Just let me get this put away.” With the pencil, I scraped the pills back into the bottle.
“What’s with the pills?”
“That’s what I’d like to know.”
“You’re not going to tell me, are you?”
“Not until I know if they’re important.” I returned both bottles to the evidence bag, and locked it in my desk.
“Fine.” Merry sipped her drink. “Where should we start looking for evidence of the man in the locket?”
“Well, whatever this relationship was, it was a secret. We won’t find pictures of him in her albums or on the wall in the sunroom. So I guess we start in her room.”
We finished our drinks and started up the stairs. I didn’t tell Merry I’d already searched most of Gram’s room. There was a chance I’d missed something. Two sets of eyes and all that. “I’ll take the closet.”
“I’ll take the dresser.” Merry spoke in a near whisper.
“This the first time you’ve been in here?”
She nodded.
I hugged her and rubbed her arms. Then we went to work.
We searched in silence, each alone with our own memories. The closet was a large walk-in affair, roughly the size of a studio apartment. There were built-in drawers and shelves, along with several hanging bars of various heights and lengths. I started at the front left, and was halfway down that side, examining every bag, box, basket and drawer for anything that might provide a clue when I noticed several hatboxes on the top shelf, pushed to the back. I used a small stepstool and climbed up to examine them. The first two had, of all things, hats. The third proved much more interesting.
I carried the box back into the bedroom and settled into one of the comfortable chairs in front of the fireplace. “Come check this out.”
“What did you find?”
“Letters.”
Merry abandoned the dressing table. “From who?” She sat down in the matching chair across from me and reached into the hatbox to see for herself.
I had been scanning the first letter I pulled out. I gasped and lowered the letter to meet Merry’s gaze. “Stuart Devlin.”
FORTY-FIVE
I swung open the door to The Cracked Pot with more than customary urgency, sending the doorbells into a fierce clanging. Both Moon Unit and Alma Glendawn nearly jumped a foot straight up from their perches on opposite sides of the counter.
“Hey, y’all—” Moon Unit started towards us.
“Hey, Moon Unit, Alma. Listen, we’d just like to look at your pictures for a minute if that’s okay.” I eased past them to the photo collage. Merry smiled, waved, and followed.
“Well, sure. You looking for anybody in particular?” Moon Unit asked. She and her mamma followed us to the back wall.
“Stuart Devlin. The most recent picture you have.”
“Well, honey, that would be close to twenty-five years old. You remember Stuart passed on a while back?” Moon Unit looked at me like maybe I was Not Quite Right.
“I was only six at the time, so I don’t remember what he looked like. Do you have a picture of him up here?” I asked.
“Oh, my yes. Several.” Moon Unit studied the floor-to-ceiling photo array of decades of island life. “I guess this is probably the last one taken of him.” She pointed to a picture of three men and three women dressed in evening attire, and posing for the picture in front of what appeared to be the Devlin home. “That was taken the night of the Rose Ball in 1986. I was too young to remember it, of course, but I believe this was only a week or two before he died, right, Mamma?”
Alma looked at the photograph that Moon Unit was pointing to. She smiled wistfully. “We danced until after one in the morning. The Rose Ball is one of Charleston’s most ritzy annual charity events.”
She stepped closer to the picture, and touched the Plexiglas. “We rode back to the island in Stuart’s speedboat, flying across the moonlit water, laughing as the salt spray hit us in our faces. That night we felt like teenagers again. Afterward we walked up the beach to The Pirates’ Den. John opened the kitchen and fixed breakfast for us in his tuxedo. It was one of the happiest times of my life.
“We all looked quite spiffy, didn’t we?” For a moment she was lost in the memory, and no one disturbed her reverie. Smiling through the unshed tears, she continued. “That’s Stuart,” she pointed to the tall dark-haired man on the far left of the picture, “and Kate, of course, and Ben and Emma Rae, and that’s John and me. Two weeks later, Stuart was dead.”
“Do you think that’s him?” Merry asked.
I studied the picture carefully. “Yes, I’m almost positive. Can we borrow this for a little while?” I asked Moon Unit.
“Well, sure, I guess, but what in the world…” Moon Unit opened the hinged Plexiglas panel that helped preserve her pictorial island history and removed the picture.
“I’ll explain it to you later. Right now we’ve got to find Blake.”
“He’s over at the station,” Alma offered. “He was walking in over there with Michael Devlin when I passed by on my way here.”
“Thank you so much, both of you.” I smiled at them as I moved towards the door. Merry was already three steps in front of me.
Distant thunder rolled across the sky.
FORTY-SIX
Colleen waited for us in the backseat of the Escape. When I climbed into the driver’s seat, she put her hand on my shoulder. I couldn’t exactly feel it, but I saw her through the corner of my eye, and I was becoming more in tune to her presence. Merry slid in on the passenger side.
I’d been so excited to discover who Elvis’s phantom, my prowler, and Gram’s beau actually was, that at first, it hadn’t hit me what that meant. I sat there behind the wheel thinking about Michael.
Merry tapped the dash with her palm. “Liz? Let’s go talk to Blake. What are you waiting for?”
“You heard what Alma said. Michael’s with him.”
Merry started to say something, then bit back whatever it was. “Oh.” She sat back in her seat. “Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“I need to think about how to handle this. The bottom line is, who killed Gram? I don’t want to cause unnecessary pain. Stuart seems like a great guy. Elvis said he was praying at Gram’s grave. Either he’s a complete psychopath or he’s completely innocent. Then, there’s Kate and Michael to consider. They just lost Adam. They’ve thought Stuart was dead for twenty-five years. I don’t know what the story is there, but unless it connects to Gram’s death, we’ve got no business meddling in it.”
“What a hot mess.”
It was indeed that. And it reminded me of another touchy area I wasn’t sure I should wade into. Merry’s name on Gram’s list. I looked down at my hands. “Merry?”
“What?”
“Don’t take this wrong, okay?”
“O-kaaaay.”
“Remember last night, when we were talking about how Adam would need leverage with at least four town council members after they found out about the resort?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Can you think of anything they could have used against Daddy?”
Merry turned to stare out the passenger window. After a moment, she said, “I can think of something they might have tried to blackmail him with.”
“Something I don’t know about?” I’d been so sure Merry and I didn’t have any secrets from each other.<
br />
“Some things you don’t talk about over the phone. Or bring up when you only have a few hours together.”
I waited.
“Six months ago, one of my kids got into trouble. Serious trouble. His name was Jeremy. He was a sad case, been from one foster home to another most of his life. Abused, neglected. But such a sweet kid, you know? And smart. One day his latest foster mother ties up one of the younger kids, a seven-year-old girl, and puts her in a closet. The little girl cries. The bitch stuffs a rag in her mouth and shoves her back in the closet. She’s afraid of the dark.” Tears rolled down Merry’s cheeks. “Jeremy was twelve. He’d been in that closet before. When he tried to let her out, the foster mother starts beating him with a cane. Jeremy snapped. He fought back, took the cane away from her. She ended up dead from a crushed larynx. Jeremy caught a ride over to Isle of Palms, took the ferry and came to me. The police were looking for him everywhere. It was all over the news. You probably heard about it.”
“I did, but I had no idea he was one of your kids.”
“I couldn’t turn him in. He’d been in trouble before. They were talking about trying him as an adult. He hid out at my place for three days. I was harboring a fugitive. Probably could be charged with aiding and abetting and who knows what all.”
“But he turned himself in, right? I read about it in the paper.”
“I was desperate. I went to Daddy and asked him for the money to hire Jeremy a lawyer—a good one. A public defender would’ve talked him into pleading out.”
“And?”
“Daddy made a donation to Teen Council for Jeremy’s defense.” Merry turned to look at me. “Then Daddy hid Jeremy under a tarp in the back of his pickup and drove him back to Charleston and dropped him off at the lawyer’s. They arranged for Jeremy to turn himself in.”
“Has he gone to trial?”
“No.” Merry smiled. “Those lawyers earned their fee. They raised all hell with DSS. By the time they were through, the District Attorney’s Office looked like they were abusing kids, too. All charges were dropped. Jeremy’s in a good home now, and so are the four other kids that were living with that monster. But Adam could have threatened to go to the authorities and tell them Jeremy was with me for three days. I could’ve been in real trouble.”
“How would he have known?”
“Kristen.” Both of us spoke at the same time.
“She acted cool about it at the time,” Merry said. “I never told her Jeremy was the kid in the news, just that he was one of my kids. But his picture was everywhere.”
“Did Gram know about this?” She must have—that would explain Merry’s name on Gram’s list.
“Daddy might have told her. I didn’t.”
“Interesting.”
“What?”
“Adam wanted to pursue blackmailing Daddy, but Scott vetoed it.”
“Huh. Scott knows Daddy well enough to know he’d never be blackmailed.”
“I guess. But he must have had four other votes wrapped up if he had a card he could choose not to play.”
Merry sucked in a deep breath and blew it out, making her lips vibrate in a pflubbbbb noise. “I need a drink and a bubble bath.”
Colleen patted my arm. “You need to go soak a while, too. Take some aspirin, and that nap you never got around to this morning. That was a nasty fall you took out of that tree.”
FORTY-SEVEN
I took Colleen’s advice: bubble bath, nap, and aspirin. Then I accepted Michael’s dinner invitation. In the wake of his brother’s death and the preceding adultery-related blow-up between the two of them, Michael needed a friend. One he wouldn’t have to explain things to. I suspected he had other things on his mind as well. My emotions were a jumble, and I didn’t have the luxury of time to sort them out just then. But I had questions for Michael.
We were at The Pirates’ Den, tucked away in a corner table with a great view of the ocean. It was a hard question to ask the man you’ve been in love with your whole adult life, especially given our recent history, but it had to be asked. “Do you think it’s possible your father’s alive?”
Michael choked on his margarita. “What would make you ask that?”
Thunder, no longer distant, rolled from south to north and back.
“I think I had coffee with him this morning.”
“And where exactly did you and Dad have coffee?”
“On his sailboat.”
“His sailboat.” Michael dipped his chin and looked at me from under raised brows. “Are you seeing ghosts now?”
Oh boy. We weren’t going there. “I went for a walk, early this morning, before breakfast. I walked past the marina and he was out on his boat, stretching. Something about him was so familiar.” I squelched an impulse to reach for Michael’s hand. “It’s obvious to me now why. You have his eyes and his build.”
“Liz, this is crazy. Why would he pretend to be dead for twenty-five years and show up the same day Adam is killed? Do you know how insane that sounds?”
“I don’t have any idea why, but Gram knew he was alive.”
“How do you know that?”
Before I could answer, Blake pulled up a chair. “Mind if I join you?” Blake raised his hand to our waitress. She made her way across the room. “Another glass and a pitcher of margaritas, please, Casey.”
Blake leaned back in his chair and sighed. “Long day.” He nodded at me. “Coop radioed me the minute he discovered you and Merry snuck out on him. What did you do, drive through the backyard?”
“I was careful of Mamma’s flowers.”
He shook his head.
“Hey,” I said. “Did you ever talk to the mayor and the council members?”
“Some of them.” He nodded. “As you mentioned, the mayor’s wife never did study art history at Converse College. Mildred got her degree in exotic dancing. Mayor would’ve done about anything to keep that quiet. And I gave him my word that I would.”
Michael took a long drink from his glass.
“And,” Blake said, “Mackie in fact has some gambling-related financial problems that most likely would’ve been used to convince him to fill Grace’s seat and vote any way Adam wanted. But we’ll never know for sure.”
John Glendawn delivered the margaritas himself. He placed the large pitcher in the middle of the table and set a glass down in front of Blake. A few seconds later, John was back with a large platter of chilled shrimp. “This’ll hold you for a while.” We smiled tired, grateful smiles and handed around plates.
“I got several interesting emails this afternoon,” Blake said quietly.
“All the evidence you need should be there.”
“I’m not sure how admissible it will be. You were obviously breaking and entering into his hotel room,” Blake said.
Out of nowhere, Merry dropped into a chair and popped a shrimp into her mouth. “We were not. Alicia gave us the key.”
“But you were uninvited.”
“No we weren’t,” I said. “He specifically invited me.” As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I regretted them.
Michael tensed beside me.
I looked directly at him, but spoke to the table. “Everyone here knows how much I detest Scott Andrews. We were there to look for evidence, which we found. As a legal point, however, he gave me an open invitation. And, he hasn’t changed the password on his computer. He is well aware I know it.”
“You should have seen how she got us out of there—” Merry laughed.
I kicked her under the table. I didn’t know yet what the future held for Michael and me. But I didn’t want him believing I’d been cavorting with my ex-husband, a man Michael despised.
Blake said, “Michael and I did some research this afternoon. Get this. The board of directors for the New L
ife Foundation of South Carolina consists of Scott, Adam, and Marci. The majority stock holder is New Life Resorts, which is a whole different animal.”
Michael said, “It’s a chain. They do luxury resorts, with a twist. All of their properties are in remote areas, and they are into that New Age stuff. I think Shirley McClain might’ve done some of their ads. They sell this back-to-nature, cure-what-ails-you, and talk-to-your-dead-relatives kind of package to the enlightened wealthy set.”
Blake said, “Adam was apparently willing to do about anything to bring one of their properties to Stella Maris.”
John pulled up a chair and piled some shrimp on a plate for himself. “I can vouch for that.”
Four versions of surprised look stared at him.
“What do you mean?” Blake asked.
“He tried to blackmail me to vote for the damned fool idea,” John said.
“How?” I asked. “With what?” I couldn’t fathom what would make John Glendawn vulnerable to blackmail. It couldn’t be something that happened when he was a kid.
John snorted. “He seemed to be sufferin’ under the notion that because of that trouble Stuart and me got into three lifetimes ago with Hayden Causby that he could threaten to hide some drugs here, and then phone in an anonymous tip and have me busted. Seemed to think folks would believe I was running drugs out of the restaurant. I never intended go along, but I’m sure he thought I would.”
“Why didn’t you say something?” I asked.
John shrugged. “I figured if he tried that stunt, I’d just tell the truth and let Blake here sort it out. I’m an old man. It just seemed too farfetched anyone would take me for a drug dealer. Now maybe that was risky, but that’s the way I was gonna play it.”
“Looks like he thought he had a lock on several votes.” Blake gave me a sideways glance. “But they didn’t count on Liz moving home.”
I shook my head. “I’m not sure they ever counted on the Simmons vote. For sure, that’s the way Marci wanted things to go down, and it would have benefitted Adam, given him more leverage. But I’m not convinced that was ever part of the plan. Scott was too unconcerned about me being here, taking the seat.”
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