I dug around in my purse until I found her card. Without remembering that she’d written the number for her cell phone on the back of the card, I dialed the number for the car dealership. Instead of ringing, the line beeped and an automated voice announced that the number had been disconnected.
Wait. Disconnected?
Mary had said that she worked at her father’s old car dealership.
Poor Mary. Her father’s leaving town had not only severed their relationship, it had also wrecked her career.
I had dialed the number for her cell phone when it hit me. Her father had left Cedar’s Hill eight years ago. If he was the glue that held together the dealership, and losing him was the reason it had closed, why was Mary carrying around that business card? I flipped over to my phone’s search engine and typed in Cedar’s Hill Imports.
Perhaps it had only recently closed.
After scrolling past several websites that had nothing to do with the dealership in question, I found what I was looking for—an article in the local newspaper announcing the surprise closing of Cedar’s Hill Imports. The article was dated eight years ago.
Curious about what Mary had been up to in the ensuing years, I typed her name into the search engine. She might have taken a break from work to have had kids or started work at a retail shop that didn’t provide their employees with business cards. The fact that she still held onto old, useless business cards only underscored the trauma she must have suffered at her father’s abandonment.
The first item to pop up from my search was a photo from a high school reunion. It featured a picture of three women who were clearly friends, including Mary with blonde hair instead of red. She had her arm around another woman whose hair was as red as Mary’s was now. Before I had a chance to click on the page to read the caption, someone knocked sharply on the counter immediately under my nose. I jerked my head up.
“Yes? What can I do for you?” I asked Detective Prioleau. “Are you interested in a pumpkin seed truffle? They’re new.”
“I suppose it’s packed full of pumpkin spice,” he said and made a gagging sound.
Customer service, I silently reminded myself.
“Perhaps something else?” I suggested. “Our wholesale supplies have been delayed because of the hurricane, but we do have—”
“What I want is for you to understand that I’m not going to play games with you.” He raised his voice and added, “With any of you.” He lowered his voice again. “The next time you find a vital piece of evidence, you don’t tamper with it. And you don’t call Gibbons, you call me. I’m the detective in charge of this investigation. I’m the only person you should be talking to. I’m the only person you should be worried about because I’m looking into your involvement in this and other crimes.”
I took several deep breaths before trusting myself to react. “I see.”
Should I say more? He was standing there looking at me as if he expected me to say more.
Finally, he relented. “My instincts tell me that you’re at the center of the troubles here on Camellia and have been ever since you arrived.”
“That’s not your instincts, that’s Chief Byrd talking. He and I have never rubbed together well.”
Prioleau coughed. “Well, my instincts agree with him.” He tapped the counter with his finger. “And my instincts have never been wrong. I’ll be watching you.”
I held my breath, not sure what I should say to that. Telling him he was wrong would be a waste of my time. We stared at each other for at least a minute.
“Okay, then.” I took another deep breath before saying, quite calmly, “Let me fix you a small box of chocolates to take with you.” It’s what I would have done for Gibbons.
Prioleau’s posture grew even straighter. His gaze hardened. “Ms. Penn, I don’t take bribes.”
Chapter 27
“If he’s meeting with Fletcher and throwing threats in your direction, it’s a pretty good indication that he has no leads. He’s floundering,” Harley assured me over the phone a few hours later. He was picking up his son from his ex-wife’s house. “Don’t worry about him.”
“But he didn’t accept my chocolate.”
“Maybe he doesn’t like chocolate,” Harley suggested. He started to say something else, but abruptly cut himself off. “Oh,” he groaned. “Jody’s coming out with Gavin. And she looks angry about something. I need to go.”
It was just as well, a group of three shaggy-haired men wearing black hats with white stitching spelling Palmetto Ghost Hunters came into the shop, talking loudly. I brought up the picture of Brett Handleson that had run with his obituary onto my phone’s screen and, after taking their orders, asked them if they’d seen him around.
“That’s Brett,” one of them said while slowly shaking his head. “He’d love to be here. Always said he wanted to catch sight of the Gray Lady. He had a picture on his wall of the Gray Man that he took himself. But the Gray Lady? She’s an elusive one.”
“No one has ever snapped a picture of her,” another said.
“She don’t like the camera,” the third man chimed in. “But if anyone were to get a picture, Brett would have been the one to have gotten it. He had luck and then some when it came to ghost huntin’.”
“Didn’t he show you?” I asked. “Just a few days ago he showed me a smudgy picture of what he claimed was the Gray Lady.”
The men paled a bit as they exchanged glances.
“That’s not who you saw,” the tallest man snapped.
“Yes, it is. He was in here in this shop.” I pointed to the picture of him on the screen. “I’m good with faces. And I know this is the man I saw.”
The three of them took several steps away from me. “Don’t know what you playing at, girly,” the third man drawled. “Our hats say ghost hunter not stupid. You show us a picture from an obituary and expect us to jump around like we have rocks for brains believing you conversed with a ghost?”
“I—” I was taken aback by his anger. “I don’t think he was a ghost.”
“We’re not going to do it,” the tall man said.
“Do what?” I asked.
“Lie for you so you can get more free publicity for your shop. Brett didn’t come back from the dead. Has no reason to.”
“Didn’t they say he died in a boat accident?” I asked.
“Yeah. So?” the tall man stepped forward again.
“Was his body recovered from the water?” I asked as gently as I knew how. These men were obviously Brett’s friends. “Is it possible that he somehow faked his death?”
“Girly!” the third man shouted. “I saw his bloated body in the casket. We. All. Did.” He clapped his hands as he spoke each word. “There was no mistaking who it was.”
The second man, who hadn’t said much up until now, quietly added, “I was with him on that boat. I was the one who dragged his lifeless body from the water.”
“I’m sorry.” I truly was. “Did he have a brother or a cousin who resembled him?”
The men glanced at each other before shaking their heads.
Not sure what to say, I bit my lower lip. There was no question in my mind. The man I’d met had looked identical to the man in the obituary.
“You say the person you spoke with claimed to be Brett Handleson?” the tall man asked as if he still couldn’t believe it.
“Yes. He showed me a picture of the Gray Lady, not that it was a good picture. He then told me to watch out for the treasure hunters.”
The tall man frowned. “What did he say exactly?”
I started to repeat what I’d just said about watching out for treasure hunters, but that wasn’t what Brett had said to me, not exactly. I closed my eyes and tried to recall his exact words. With my eyes still closed, I said slowly, “He asked if I planned to search for the pirate gold. I told him I would if that was where my investigation took me. To that, he said that the Gray Lady might have something to say about that.”
I opened my eyes to
see that the three ghost hunters now appeared paler than the plastic Halloween ghost decorations that had been popping up in the island’s shop window displays.
“What?” I asked. “What did I say wrong?”
The men exchanged glances as if they were having a conversation with their eyes. Finally the third man nodded and then said to me, “Girly, you’d best heed that warning because that wasn’t Brett you were talking to, that was the Gray Lady.”
~~
“It’s frustrating,” I told Althea as I flipped open my notebook to my crumbling suspect list.
After closing the shop later that afternoon, I had headed straight to her crystal shop where I found her finishing up the installation of a door to her shop’s newly rebuilt back office.
She used a rubber mallet to hammer in the pins for the door hinges before turning toward me.
“What’s frustrating?” she asked.
“That all my suspects keep ending up dead.”
“To be fair, that Brett fellow didn’t end up dead. He started out that way,” she said as she tested the swing of the office door.
“I didn’t talk to a ghost.” Why was I telling her this? What did I want her to say to me? “I was thinking that Brett had somehow faked his death, and that he was sneaking around, pretending to be his own ghost. But one of those ghost hunters was with him when he died.”
She nodded.
“I didn’t talk to a ghost.” I reiterated. She was smart enough not to say anything. After several tense moments of me waiting for her to tell me that I had, indeed, had a conversation with a specter from beyond, I asked her, “Can I help you with something?”
“I could use a hand putting away the tools and cleaning up.”
We worked side by side in silence. “Why are you doing the work? Where are the workers your mother had hired to fix everything?”
Althea groaned. “They didn’t show up this morning. And I hate to see things sitting around not getting done. Have you heard from Gibbons about our box of gold?”
“No. But Detective Happy stopped by to talk with Fletcher and growl at me. He didn’t like that we peeked inside the box and that we didn’t call him.”
“Do you think Fletcher knows where Delilah is hiding?” she asked.
“No, and he was grumpy as a bear about it.” I picked up one of the thick iron pipes that were scattered on the floor. “What do you want me to do with these? They’re heavy. What are they?”
“They’re the old water pipes. When the wall came down, they did too. The workers replaced them with PVC piping. You can stack them up over there.” She pointed to a back wall. “I need to find where I can take them to be recycled.”
While we continued to work, Althea speculated about the man who’d called himself Brett and whether he was a ghost or not. She tried to convince me that there were cosmic forces at work on the island and that we all needed to be wary. She gave several examples from ghost lore of how ghosts had ruined lives in the Lowcountry.
“These aren’t just stories to the people who lived them,” she argued, even though I hadn’t said anything. “Some of the people I mentioned have documented proof that their lives were turned upside down by something they couldn’t control.”
I was only half listening to her. My mind kept going back to something I saw in that picture of Mary and her friend. Something that nagged at me. I tried to remember what Mary had said about the relationship between her father and Sammy Duncan and her relationship with her stepmother. I gathered up some more pipes. There was something about what Mary had said to me that no longer rang true. Or perhaps it was something Delilah had said to me that reeked of lies—the deadly variety.
“I hate it when people lie to me,” I snapped.
Apparently, Althea thought I was referring to the lie she’d told me and the rift it had created between us. She dropped her tools into the toolbox with a loud clatter and turned toward me. Something inside her had snapped.
“We’re going to talk about that again, are we? You’re not exactly the easiest person to be friends with, you know? You act like you’re doing us some grand favor when you offer an occasional kind word. And let me tell you, those kind words are occasional. As in, hardly ever. But I laugh it off because I know that you’re not really a bad person. I understand you sometimes can’t help it. But heaven help me, all this drama is tiring me out. And I’m Southern. We eat drama for breakfast.” She fisted her hands on her hips. Fire flashed in her brown eyes. “I guess what I’m saying is knock it off. If you want to walk away from one of the few friends you’re ever going to have, do it now. If not, get over yourself. We all make mistakes. I’m not perfect. You’re not perfect. It’s high time you start practicing a little forgiveness.”
I opened my mouth then shut it again.
It felt as if she’d punched me in the stomach. No, a punch to the stomach would not have hurt this much. Althea was right. Knowing it only sharpened the sting.
“Well?” she said. “Aren’t you going to tell me how everyone is always out to get you? Aren’t you going to tell me that anyone who professes to believe in”—she feigned a shocked gasp—“ghosts is a con looking for a sucker?”
I wanted to tell her that I wasn’t thinking anything of the sort. The heavy lump in my throat caught the words that should have made everything better and held them hostage.
She drew a deep breath. “Aren’t you going to tell me that I’m not good enough to be your friend?”
I swallowed hard. The lump refused to go anywhere. The best I could manage was a quick shake of my head. A denial. A silent one. An inadequate one.
Tears filled my eyes. I spun away from her. I hoped I’d moved fast enough that Althea hadn’t seen them. I detested tears. They revealed weakness. They opened me up to getting hurt.
“Oh, no you don’t. You don’t get to run away without offering me…something.” She grabbed my arm and spun me back around.
I cried out. Not from pain. Althea’s slender fingers had a feather-light touch. It was her will that was steely. And like a dam breaking, tears burst from my eyes.
“Crap. You’re crying.” She tried to pull me into her arms.
I danced away from her.
“Y-you’re right.” I struggled for a smooth breath. “I am a terrible friend. I’ve always been a terrible friend.”
She made a shushing noise and pulled me close for a hug.
“No,” I said. Every muscle in my body stiffened. I tried to wiggle from her embrace. “No. Stop hugging me.”
“I won’t.” Althea tightened her arms around me. “Not until you realize.”
“You don’t understand. I’ve suddenly realized everything.”
“Everything?” Althea asked.
“We can finish this later,” I said as I wiggled loose from her embrace. “But right now, I need to go find Byrd. Or Gibbons. But Chief Byrd would be faster.”
“Hank? Why?” Althea frowned at me.
“Because, thanks to you, I know who killed Joe Davies.”
Chapter 28
Chief Byrd was out of the office. I left a message for him to call me. Gibbons answered his cell phone on the first ring. I explained how I’d figured everything out about Joe’s and Sammy’s deaths. He was silent for a long time before telling me two things. First, all the information I had was conjecture. And then, he reminded me that he wasn’t working the murder investigation.
“Then do you think I should call Detective Prioleau?” I asked. Please say no. Please say no.
“No.” He hadn’t even had to think about it. “He won’t want to listen to your hunches any more than I do.”
“But—” I started to argue that my information was so much more than a hunch.
“Keep away from Prioleau,” Gibbons snapped. “The man doesn’t trust you. And he’s under pressure to close this case quickly.”
“Pressure? From whom?” I asked. “Not Big Dog’s brother, I hope.”
Gibbons groaned at the mention of Si
las Piper. “You didn’t hear it from me, but Piper is concerned his half-brother is responsible for Sammy Duncan’s death. He wants both his brother found and the murder case wrapped up quickly and quietly. He’s making the sheriff miserable with all his haranguing phone calls, which in turn is making the rest of us miserable.”
“Tell Piper you know who killed Sammy Duncan. Tell him that this will soon be over,” I said. “Tell Piper that.”
Gibbons sucked in a sharp breath. “If you know where Piper’s brother is hiding, you’d better tell me now.”
“I wish I knew where he’s holed up.” I did feel bad I couldn’t help Gibbons more. The strain he was feeling was evident in his voice. “If you’d just listen to what I’m telling you, I’m sure this case would be closed in no time.”
“I can’t follow hunches, especially when they’re not even related to my investigation.”
“It’s not a hunch.” Why couldn’t he see that? My voice grew louder. “When you look at all of the pieces of the puzzle, this is what I see—what anyone with any sense would see.”
The silence on his side of the line stretched for so long that I wondered if he’d hung up. Finally, a tired, much subdued voice said, “Promise me, Penn, you won’t do anything rash.”
“Of course, I won’t,” I promised. But that didn’t mean I planned to sit on the sofa and watch classic TV with Trixie and Barbie. The steps I took to prove what Gibbons had dismissed as a hunch would be well thought out, not only by me but also by my friends.
As soon as I’d disconnected the call with Gibbons, I dialed Fletcher’s number.
“We need to work together,” I told him. When he scoffed, I added, “Believe it or not, a ghost is my main suspect right now. I need your help in figuring this all out.”
“I w-w-won’t help you fr-frame Delilah,” he snapped.
“You care for her. You’re trying to help her.” Just like I was trying to help Mary. “I would never ask you to do anything to hurt her. All I’m asking is for you to help expose a murderer.”
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