Murder Hooks a Mermaid

by Christy Fifield

  Fighting the shakes, I shoved Karen toward the sliding glass doors. It was our only way out, unless we wanted to pass the two residents of the apartment on our way to the front door. Not a good idea.

  The slider was latched.

  Karen ducked inside the drapes.

  She managed to throw the latch and shove the door a few inches before it jammed against the broomstick in the track with a loud clunk.

  I reached down and grabbed the stick, pulling it out of the track.

  I wasn’t worried about making noise any longer. If the clunking sound hadn’t been covered by the heavy thump of the music, they’d heard the door and they would be coming down the hall right this second.

  Now all I wanted was to get out of the apartment without getting caught.

  I ran out the door after Karen, pulling it shut behind me. It wouldn’t slow the two men down much, but it was all I could do.

  I turned around and realized we were in a tiny enclosed courtyard, a few square feet of bare concrete and scrub grass surrounded by a six-foot tall wooden fence.

  Karen had already made an instant assessment of our predicament and decided on a course of action. She was busy prying back a loose board at one corner of the fence. The opening looked too small for a full-grown woman, but it’s amazing what you can accomplish with the proper motivation. Namely, when two men you’re sure are criminals—and who have good reason to be angry at you—are chasing you.

  Karen and I squeezed through the fence, not caring what or who was on the other side. I pushed the fence board back in place.

  From inside the fence I heard a man’s voice, one of the two we’d heard inside the apartment. “Chuck, did you leave this slider open again? Dammit, I told you to be more careful!”

  The other voice, higher pitched and more nasal, responded, “I swear, Freddy, I latched it, and I put the stick in. No way I left the place open with all our gear inside.”

  I fought back the urge to laugh out loud. Yes, he had locked the slider to the completely fenced yard, and put the broomstick in the track.

  He’d just left the front door unlocked instead.

  Karen and I started back toward the car on shaky legs. My breath came in little panting gasps, and I didn’t speak, for fear my voice would come out as a squeak rather than actual words.

  The farther we got from the apartment, the more I relaxed. My legs stopped shaking, and my breathing evened out. We had made it out of the apartment without being seen, we were almost back to the car, and Karen had taken several dozen pictures that we could scour for clues later.

  “Did you find your friends?”

  Karen froze and I nearly ran into her. On the sidewalk just a few yards from our car, a laundry basket propped on one hip, was the woman from the upstairs apartment.

  “They didn’t get back,” I said, shaking my head. “We waited around a few minutes, but I need to get home. We left them a note.”

  Karen recovered enough to join in. “Maybe when I see them I can mention the thing about the stereo.”

  The woman’s eyes widened, and she looked like she was afraid of the men. “Oh no. You don’t need to do that,” she said hastily. “I don’t want to be a bad neighbor. It’s not that big a thing. Really.”

  She hefted the laundry basket. “My sister gave me some clothes for the baby,” she explained, her words running together in a nervous rush. “Her little one outgrew them. I need to go put them away…” The rush of words trailed off as she took a wide berth around us and headed back the way we came.

  “Really, Freed?” I said, unlocking the doors of the Civic. “Did you have to say that?”

  “You saw her,” Karen glanced over her shoulder at the retreating back of the small woman. “She won’t say a word to those two, for sure.”

  “Well…” I slid into the driver’s seat and started the engine. It coughed and sputtered but reluctantly came to life. “You still scared her. It wasn’t very nice.”

  “And if she told those two about us? How nice would that be?”

  I backed out of the parking space and looked back at the woman carrying the basket. She was walking away, but she stopped to cast an apprehensive glance over her shoulder before she hurried on.

  She was probably memorizing my license plate.

  “Tell me again why we had to take my car?”

  “Hey, you’re the big investigator,” Karen said. “I’m just a reporter. Besides, Riley’s using my car to take his family to visit Bobby.”

  “His family has plenty of cars.” I turned out of the apartment complex and headed back toward Keyhole Bay. Now that we had some distance between us and Charlie and Freddy, the whole thing began to feel like a foolish juvenile prank.

  What did we think we were going to accomplish?

  IT WAS GETTING DARK BY THE TIME I PARKED THE Civic behind the shop and unlocked the back door. Karen followed me into the front while I checked on Bluebeard.

  He’d been busy while we were gone. A stack of T-shirts had been knocked to the floor, and one was unfolded on top of the mess. On the front of the shirt, a treasure chest spilled its contents across a sandy ocean floor.

  “Bluebeard!”

  He stuck his colorful head out of his cage and gave me a beady-eyed stare. “Trying to #^*^&$% sleep here!”

  I crossed the room to his cage and returned the stare. “Don’t give me that baloney, Bluebeard. You tore up the shop while I was gone. Why?”

  He refused to look at me, craning his neck to look past me to where Karen was refolding the shirts and putting them back on the shelves in their proper order.

  “Sunken treasure!” Bluebeard said, as though that explained everything. “Nasty pirates!”

  “Not you, too! I know Jake didn’t want the pirate thing in the window, but it’s only for a couple weeks. You know that.”

  “Nasty pirates,” he said again, before retreating into his cage. From the dark recess I heard a muttered “Trying to #^*^&$% sleep.”

  I didn’t believe it. Bluebeard wasn’t given to commenting on my marketing choices, or my decorating skills. When he chose to leave me a clue, there was usually a more important message than disapproval of a store display.

  Besides the shirts, a row of snow globes had been shoved around and one had toppled over into a basket of shell bracelets on the shelf below, and several pockets of postcards had been emptied onto the floor.

  I picked up the snow globe and checked the dome for leaks before putting it back on the shelf. It took a minute to re-sort the rows so I could get the tiny scuba diver with a treasure chest back into his proper place.

  Now I was certain Bluebeard was trying to tell me something. I just had to figure out what.

  “I guess he knew where we’d gone,” I said to Karen, showing her the displaced globe. “That’s the one he took off the shelf.”

  She helped me pick up the postcards and sort through them, looking for an explanation to why Bluebeard had chosen those particular ones.

  There were shots of the Gulf, impossibly blue water full of beautiful yachts and tall-masted sailing ships. There was a peg-legged cartoon pirate with a parrot on his shoulder and a treasure chest at his foot. A word balloon warned the recipient to “Keep yer hands off mah treasure!”

  Nothing that I hadn’t already figured out. Pirates and underwater treasure. The exact thing I’d set up to promote Southern Treasures to the spring break crowd. It felt like there had to be more to Bluebeard’s selection, but I was suddenly mentally and physically exhausted from our near miss at the apartment complex.

  “Sorry you don’t like it,” I said as I put the merchandise back in place. “But you like your treats, and there won’t be many of them without the tourists, so too bad for you.”

  I turned out the downstairs lights, leaving the faint night-lights to keep the shop dimly lit.

  Upstairs, Karen sat at the kitchen table while I rooted around in the refrigerator for some dinner. I found leftover soup from the previous night that
I put on to reheat. There weren’t any biscuits left, so I dragged out a frying pan and started water heating for fried cornbread.

  Karen spread her gadgets out on the table and started transferring pictures from her phone to her tablet. Occasionally she would go “Hmmm,” or “Huh?” but for the most part we were quiet while we worked.

  I put shortening in the frying pan to heat and poured boiling water over self-rising cornmeal to make the cornbread. I stirred the cornmeal mixture and set it aside to cool enough to handle while I checked the soup.

  The pot was getting warm, but the soup would need a few more minutes. While I waited for various temperature-related adjustments, I put plates, bowls, and spoons on the table.

  As I did, I glanced over Karen’s shoulder to see how she was progressing. She had several folders open and was sorting through the pictures she’d taken, putting them into logical groups. At least I assumed they were logical. This was Karen, and she was approaching this the way she would a work project, so I thought it was a safe assumption.

  The phone rang, and I picked it up, carrying the handset back into the kitchen with me to keep an eye on the food.

  “Hi,” Jake’s voice was warm and friendly. “I saw the light on a few minutes ago and thought I’d check in and see how you’re doing.”

  “Uh, fine,” I answered. After the day I’d had with Karen, I wasn’t sure, but it didn’t seem like the time to go into it. “Are you still at the store?”

  He laughed. “Guilty as charged. Just finished doing the orders for next week and getting ready to head out. Have you had dinner yet?”

  The question slipped into the conversation so casually, I didn’t think before I responded. “I was just heating up some leftovers, actually. There’s a ton of soup left from last night. You want some?”

  “Sure.”

  At the same time I heard Jake’s quick response, Karen yelped at me from the table. I shrugged and waved my hand at her in a gesture that said “What was I supposed to do?”

  “Karen’s here,” I said into the phone. “I should have warned you before you said yes.” I made a face at her.

  “Are you sure it’s okay?” Jake asked. “I mean, I don’t want to intrude if you two are busy with something.”

  He had no clue how right he was, but I wasn’t about to admit it. “No, nothing important,” I lied. “Just come on over when you’re through. One of us will come down and let you in.”

  As soon as I disconnected, Karen pounced. “He’s coming for dinner?”

  “Yes.” I started forming the cornbread dough into flattened balls for frying. “I’m sorry if that bothers you. Really, I am. I just said it without thinking about what we were doing—”

  My apology was interrupted by Karen’s ringing laughter. “You are so busted! This is, what? Three nights in a row? Let me see.” She started counting on her fingers. “There was dinner on Friday, before you met with me and Riley, then he was here with the remodeling crew last night and was the last person to leave, and now again tonight?”

  She shook her finger at me. “I’d say that definitely qualifies Jake as being in the boyfriend category.”

  I turned back to the stove and checked the temperature of the oil in the frying pan. It was hot. I put the first batch of cornbread in the pan, listening to the sizzle as hot oil met wet cornmeal. I watched the edges begin to crisp and turn light gold before I turned the discs over in the oil.

  “I don’t know what it is,” I said. I knew I sounded defensive, but I was still so unsure of where I stood with Jake. It certainly felt like boyfriend territory to me, but what did I have to judge by? Maybe we were just friends with potential.

  I had emptied the frying pan and put in another batch of cornbread when the bell rang downstairs. I looked over at Karen, who waved me back to my cooking. “I’ll go let your boyfriend in,” she said.

  “Not my boyfriend,” I muttered, turning the second batch of cornbread. But even I wasn’t convinced by my argument.

  Karen returned in a couple minutes with Jake.

  “Bluebeard had to cuss us out.” Jake laughed as he came in the kitchen. He slipped his arm around my shoulders and gave me a quick squeeze.

  “Anything I can do to help?” He filched a hot piece of cornbread from the plate next to the stove and blew on it before taking a careful bite.

  “You could stop stealing the food before I can get it on the table,” I answered. I avoided the temptation to rap his knuckles my spatula.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Karen, in the meantime, had put another place setting on the table. She slid her work to one end and set three places for us at the other end.

  A few minutes later we all sat down with steaming bowls of Ernie’s soup and a plate heaped with small golden rounds of fried cornbread.

  My stomach growled loudly, and I realized I’d been running all day on the maple bar I’d had at the crack of dawn, a couple pots of black coffee, and an apple I’d shared with Bluebeard early in the afternoon.

  “I did interrupt something, didn’t I?” Jake said, looking at the stack of Karen’s gear. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Karen said. She turned to me. “You might as well tell him, Martine. You will eventually.”

  I opened my mouth to protest, but she silenced me with a look. “You know you will.”

  Jake looked at me and back to Karen, a question in his eyes. He knew he’d stepped into the middle of something.

  “Are you sure?” I asked Karen.

  She shrugged. “He’s heard all the rest, hasn’t he? And after the message from Bluebeard tonight…”

  Jake’s eyes narrowed. “Message from Bluebeard? What did he say this time?”

  “Besides ‘Trying to #^*^&$% sleep,’ you mean?”

  He helped himself to another piece of cornbread and nodded at me to continue.

  “Actually, I think it’s your fault,” I said. “He said something about ‘sunken treasure’ and ‘nasty pirates.’ He seemed to be upset about something to do with pirates and treasure. You haven’t been talking to him about the front window display, have you?”

  “No. I don’t make a habit of talking to Bluebeard.” He broke the cornbread into small pieces on his plate, avoiding my gaze. “But you don’t really believe it’s about the window, do you? There’s more to this story.”

  I took a spoonful of soup, stalling my confession. But Jake could outwait me, as I was discovering. I swallowed my soup and started talking.

  I told Jake about visiting the docks before daylight, about talking to Barton Grover and Tim Carpenter at the Dive Center. He listened carefully, a quick grin appearing when I confirmed our suspicions that the divers had tried to recruit other boats.

  “So they caught up with Bobby at Mermaid’s Grotto and roped him in by talking to him in front of a girl he was trying to impress,” Jake said when I told him what Carpenter had mentioned about everybody at The Tank turning them down.

  “That,” Karen said, “and the chance to pocket a wad of cash. And, I have to admit, Bobby likes to feel like he’s helping someone out. If he thought he could get all three at once, he was a perfect target.”

  We ate in silence for a couple minutes as Jake digested what we’d told him. He cleaned his bowl and nibbled at the crumbs of his cornbread. Finally, he looked up at me and caught me watching him.

  “So,” he said, watching me closely, “what’s the rest of the story?”

  Chapter 20

  I SIGHED AND LOOKED AT KAREN. “CAN I PLEAD THE Fifth on this one?”

  “You could,” she said. “But I don’t think it will do you much good.”

  “You do know I’m sitting right here?” Jake said. There was a hint of amusement in his voice. “I just want to point out that I can hear every word you say, which has two results: first, it tells me that there is something more to this story, and second, it makes me even more curious.”

  His voice sobered, and he went on. “But if there is seriously someth
ing you don’t want to tell me, I can respect that. You’ll tell me when you’re ready.”

  Karen used one of Bluebeard’s favorite words and reached for her tablet. “Just remember we gave you the chance not to know this part,” she said. She was only half joking.

  She powered up the tablet and started opening folders of photographs.

  It was the first time I had seen the pictures. Jake and I both moved around the table and sat on either side of Karen as she slowly displayed each of the shots she had taken.

  There were several from our early morning foray to the waterfront, including something I guessed was purely accidental—a view of the docks with Ocean Breeze’s empty slip on the right edge of the photo. It was a reminder of why we were doing this.

  Karen closed the folder and moved to another one. There were pictures she’d taken in the Dive Center, and I was impressed. She got pictures of the shop without me being aware of what she was doing, and I’d bet Tim Carpenter hadn’t noticed either, since he likely would have objected if he had.

  There wasn’t anything of significance in those photos, and she quickly closed the folder. But they might be useful later.

  She had a group of folders for the pictures inside Chuck and Freddy’s apartment, but before we started through the photos, we had to explain to Jake how we got them. As Karen and I took turns telling him about our adventures, he went from amused to horrified to disbelieving. “You took a board off the fence?” he asked.

  “We didn’t take it all the way off,” Karen said. “We just pried it up a little more so we could squeeze through the opening.”

  “We put it back,” I added.

  Resigned, Jake looked back at the pictures on the screen. “Looks like a lovely place,” he said drily. “I can see why you wanted to get in there.”

  I was tempted to describe the smell, but it wouldn’t have helped the situation, so I kept quiet.

  “Did you find out anything useful?” he asked. I wasn’t sure we were forgiven, but I welcomed the change of topic.

  Karen began with the pictures of the scuba gear. The tags on the tanks identified them as rentals belonging to a shop in Jacksonville and listed an address and phone number for their return if found.