In Cold Chocolate

by Dorothy St. James

  The Low Tide was a shack built on top of a rickety-looking dock down on the river. The rusty corrugated building was about as far outside the business district as one could get. Surrounded by wetlands on three sides, water lapped at the piers holding up the building. A dim, flickering light marked the entrance at the end of a steep gangplank.

  The inside of the bar was about as “rustic” as the outside, with its dark wood-paneled walls, yellow glass and black metal medieval-style lanterns hanging from heavy chains, and a thick haze of cigarette and cigar smoke floating in the air. The only redeeming feature was the view of the marsh and the Camellia River beyond. The oversized garage doors that served as a wall of windows in the winter had been opened up to allow the damp summer breeze to flow through the building.

  Despite the heat, I shivered as I entered the bar. The last time I’d eaten here, I’d unwittingly dined with a killer. And here I was again, on the hunt for another murderer. Despite the police chief’s assertions that his island was free from serious crime, I knew better. Even in paradise, one could always find a snake.

  Lidia Vanderhorst, I was surprised to see, was sitting at the bar next to the young surfer who’d told me all about the slap fight Fletcher Grimbal had had with Cassidy a few days before his death. The two of them were both drinking beers and laughing.

  Johnny Pane was sitting by himself on the other end of the bar. His hand moved slowly and steadily as he lifted a glass of what looked like bourbon to his lips.

  Harriett Daschle was in corner booth cozying up to a silver-haired man I’d never seen before. An easy smile formed on her lips as her hand moved up his arm to rest on his shoulder. Was that her husband, the ex-mayor?

  Even Ethel Crump was there with the same friends who had accompanied her to the Chocolate Box the day before Cassidy’s death. They were at a table in the middle of the room. A bottle of champagne sat open on their table. The three ladies had their glasses raised in a toast to what looked like some kind of victory. Ethel took a tiny sip before tilting her head back and laughed.

  Harley leaned closer to me and asked, “Where should we start?”

  I shook my head. “It’s a busy place.” I didn’t see anyone dressed in a brightly colored muumuu. “Do you know Fletcher Grimbal? Is he here?”

  “I don’t see him.” Harley put his hand on my shoulder as a small crowd hurried past. I winced. “Sorry,” he said, pulling away. “I forgot about your no touching rule.”

  “It’s not that,” I said wishing I hadn’t winced. “Your hand hit the bullet wound.”

  “Oh!” He looked even more distressed. “I’m sorry. Are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said rubbing away the pain. “It just smarts when I bump it.” I drew a quick breath and said in a burst, “I don’t have that rule anymore. The no touching rule.” I closed my eyes before bravely adding, “Not for you.”

  I wished I hadn’t closed my eyes. He didn’t say anything. And everything got real awkward real quick. I peeled open one eye—just halfway—to peek.

  Detective Gibbons was standing next to Harley with his arms crossed and a smirk on his face that told me he’d overheard me bearing my soul.

  “You called him?”I asked Harley. Both of my eyes were wide open now and staring daggers at Harley. I don’t know why everyone kept telling me I needed to work on my trust issues when those trust issues were serving me just fine, thank you very much. Whenever I let down my guard—like right now—something like this happened.

  Harley put his hand on my shoulder, the shoulder that hadn’t been injured by his ex’s bullet. “I didn’t call anybody.”

  Before I could apologize, Detective Gibbons leaned toward me and asked, “Why should he have called me?” he asked over the driving beat of the beach music.

  I bit my lower lip. “Because…” I looked around. I hated to lie. Lying made my face get all red and splotchy. It wasn’t a pretty sight. “I’m here to find out who killed Cassidy Jones.”

  Gibbons just stared at me.

  I mirrored his stance and crossed my arms over my chest. “If no one called you, what are you doing here?”

  “Cassidy’s funeral was this afternoon,” Gibbons said unhappily. “The pallbearers included me, a fellow officer, and Bailey Grassi. For someone who was purported to be popular with the ladies, I’d expected at least a few more people would turn up. But no one else was there. Not even his coworkers from the real estate office bothered to pay their respects.”

  “But Bailey was there?” That was odd. I’d gotten the impression the chef barely knew Cassidy.

  “He said he felt guilty since he’d left on his porch lights that night,” Gibbons explained. “He told me that if he’d turned out those lights, Cassidy would still be alive.”

  That was probably true. And it was decent of Bailey to show up to the funeral for a stranger.

  “So why are you here tonight?” I asked Gibbons.

  He gestured to the bar. “Clearly the wake is being held here. There’s Ethel Crump, Johnny Pane, Lidia Vanderhorst, and Paul and Harriett Daschle…” He continued for quite a while naming people I’d never even heard about. Mostly women. Mostly women with “Mrs.” in front of their names.

  I looked around the bar with a new understanding. The drinking. The laughing. The toasting. No wonder they hadn’t attended the funeral. The people here tonight weren’t celebrating Cassidy’s life (which was generally the purpose of a funeral). They were celebrating his death.

  “Fletcher Grimbal isn’t here,” I said.

  Gibbons, who clearly knew the name and, I suspected, knew why I would mention him, squinted as he looked around. “He isn’t.”

  “I wonder why.” I tapped my chin. Fletcher made a perfect suspect. He was angry, and perhaps he wouldn’t want to return to the Low Tide after the humiliation he’d endured at Cassidy’s hands within these smoke-stained walls. “Florence Corners isn’t here either.”

  “Should she be?” Had I surprised him with some new information?

  “Florence had been seen visiting Cassidy at his home several times in the weeks leading up to his death.” I knew I shouldn’t take pleasure in telling him this, but perversely, I did.

  “Florence, as in your…?” He let the question hang in the air.

  I nodded.

  Gibbons shook his head. “I think you’re looking too hard for someone to take Jody’s place.”

  “The screaming woman at the crime scene, the woman who was dressed in that colorful muumuu isn’t here either,” I said. While I suspected she was another one of the married women Cassidy had dallied with, I had no proof. I knew nothing about her other than that she’d been present at his death and she’d been traumatized by it. “Any luck finding her?” I asked Gibbons.

  He tilted his head and looked at me as if I’d just asked him if he thought aliens had come down and shot Cassidy through the heart. “You know I can’t discuss the case.”

  “I do appreciate that you are conducting a thorough investigation,” I said. “And I do hope you can find her soon. I suspect she can shed new light on the events that happened that night. Harriett knows who she is. But she won’t tell me her name. Now if you’ll excuse us, we have quite a few people to talk to.”

  “We do have a busy night in front of us,” Harley agreed. Like a true Southern gentleman, he hooked my arm through his. “And since Penn has to be up early to open her shop, we need to get started.”

  Gibbons grabbed my other arm to stop us from walking away. “None of these people mourned over his grave today. Why do you think that is?” He didn’t give either Harley or me a chance to answer. “It’s because he dated married women. It’s because he poked is nose into everyone’s business and caused trouble for everyone else. No one wants to connect themselves to Cassidy.”

  “I think we’ve got that,” Harley said, his gaze had hardened as he glared at the detective’s hand gripping my arm.

  “I don’t think you do understand the situation. A woman in such a positio
n might run away from a crime scene, even though doing so is a crime. A woman or man in such a position might even steal an entire tray of chocolate turtles as a way to stop someone from asking too many reckless questions. That’s not a person you want to keep pushing, Penn.”

  “You heard about the theft?” I wondered if I’d ever get used to living in a small town. In small towns everyone talked. Everyone knew everyone else’s business.

  “Byrd called me,” Gibbons admitted. “Told me the theft smelled fishy, especially considering your reputation for causing trouble. I agree with him.”

  “You’re not changing my mind. There’s a little boy—Harley’s boy—depending on me to find out what really happened the night Cassidy was killed.”

  “When it comes to this, we’re a team,” Harley said, which got my heart jumping around like a cheerleader after her team scored a goal.

  “Mark my words, detective. I’m going to get Gavin’s mother back to him before school starts on Thursday.”

  Gibbons shook his head. “You’re more stubborn than a rabid raccoon. And potentially more dangerous.”

  “You’re probably right.” While I didn’t agree with him and I had no intention of stopping my search for the real killer, I did appreciate his concern for my safety. He wasn’t holding onto my arm so tightly because he was worried I might actually learn something that would make him look bad. It wasn’t an ego thing with him. He was scolding me as if he was scolding his own daughter because he cared about me. I pulled out of his grasp and put my hand on his cheek, prickly from a five o’clock shadow. “And thank you,” I said.

  “For what?” He jerked away from my touch. “Nothing I’ve said is going to change your mind about what you plan to do. And I can’t stop you. Not legally. I suspect I’d get a better result if I’d simply banged my head against that wall over there.”

  “I suspect that’s true. Still, I hear what you’re saying. And I”—It took me a moment to come up with the right word—“appreciate your concern.”

  “We both do,” Harley said. “And you don’t have to worry about Penn. She’s not in this alone.”

  “That’s right. I don’t go down dark alleyways by myself at night. And I haven’t been going around accusing anyone of murder. See? That’s growth on my part. And don’t forget I grew up on the mean streets of Chicago.” That last point was an exaggeration. While I grew up in Chicago, my family lived in the exclusive Oak Park neighborhood. No one in my household ever saw a mean street.

  “And I’m with her,” Harley’s deep voice rumbled.

  “I won’t get hurt,” I repeated.

  “See that you don’t,” Gibbons said. He wandered off to chat with someone sitting at a nearby table.

  “He’s doing his job,” Harley said. “He could be home, celebrating Jody’s arrest. But he’s not.”

  “He’s one of the good guys, one of the best,” I agreed. “But he still needs to be convinced that your ex is innocent.”

  A pained look suddenly appeared on Harley’s face. “Yeah, I fear we all need to be convinced.”

  “Gavin loves her,” I said.

  “She’s his mother,” was his quick reply.

  “It has to be more than that. There has to be something good in her that makes him so devoted to her.” My feelings toward Florence were complicated at best, and none of them involved love. “Despite her taking you to court all of the time, she is a good mother to him, isn’t she?”

  “She is,” he admitted. “She puts Gavin first in nearly everything she does. Sometimes I fear she spends too much time doting on him. He’s at an age where he’s trying to find his own way, where he wants to spend time with his friends and not have a parent constantly by his side. As much as it kills me to do it, I try to let him go off when he’s with me. And Jody, she’s slowly coming around and giving him some freedom to do the same. While she sometimes is a little too overprotective of him, I do believe she wants the best for Gavin.”

  “If she cares about Gavin that much, don’t you think that she’d think about what her actions might do to her son before she squeezed the trigger and killed a man?”

  He shook his head with real distress. “I don’t know what to believe anymore. One moment she seems stable, and then she goes off and rages like she has no self-control. She’s so filled with anger. For as long as I’ve known her, she’s always had that anger simmering just below the surface just looking for a reason to come out.”

  That worried me. “But she doesn’t take out her anger on Gavin?”

  “No, never, thank God.”

  “That’s good to know because I believe in her innocence. And I aim to prove it.” I patted his arm. Touching Harley felt so natural. And yet, at the back of my mind Lidia’s admonition that I let fear rule my life reminded me that whenever I took one step forward in a relationship, I would find other ways to pull back. Perhaps Stella came into my life to teach me how to change that pattern. I sure hoped I could change things, because I was tired of running from my life.

  But first, I needed to change things for Gavin so he wouldn’t have to overcome many of the struggles I still battled thanks to my motherless childhood. With my arm still hooked through Harley’s, we made our way to the bar. We started chatting with Lidia and her surfer friend. Harley, being a surfer himself, knew the young man and had surfed with him in several regional competitions.

  As I had suspected, Fletcher hadn’t shown his face at the Low Tide since the night of the slap fight.

  “I think I know where we can find him,” Lidia told me. “Meet me at the pier Monday afternoon. We can do a training session with Stella while we look for him.”

  I hoped I would have Jody free from jail before Monday, but since I still needed help with Stella’s training I readily agreed.

  After leaving Lidia laughing with her surfer friend at the bar, Harley led me through the place, introducing me to anyone I didn’t know. By the end of the night, we’d talked with nearly everyone there about Cassidy. We heard stories about how he stole his neighbors’ newspapers, how he never left tips at restaurants, and how he seemed to be constantly watching what everyone around him was doing. None of that helped me at all.

  My feet ached. My head throbbed slightly. I sank down into a chair at the closest available table. Harley left me there. He returned a few minutes later with two frosty beers.

  I looked up at him and suddenly got a crazy idea about how I could accomplish something that night. I smiled and gave him my best come-hither look.

  He slid into the chair next to mine. With a look of intense interest that had my heart slamming against my chest, he leaned toward me. “Is there something wrong with your eyes?”

  “No. No. There’s nothing wrong,” I grumbled, frustrated he couldn’t recognize my valiant attempt at flirting. I straightened in my chair and then stood. “Let’s go home.”

  Like the famous Scarlett O’Hara, whom islanders revered as if she were a real person, I declared that tomorrow was another day. Tomorrow, I would find Cassidy’s killer. Tomorrow, I would work on acting more confident with Stella and with everyone else in my life. Tomorrow, I would tell Harley straight out how I felt about him.

  Out of those three things I had planned for the tomorrow, chasing down a killer felt like the safest. And easiest.

  Chapter Fifteen

  KEEP YOUR POINTY NOSE TO YOURSELF. OR ELSE.

  Someone had carefully written that on a yellow sticky note and had taped it to the Chocolate Box’s glass door. I’d found it when preparing to open up the shop the next morning. Since Bertie attended church services on Sunday mornings, I was handling the shop’s opening alone.

  I was glad no one else had seen the note. Bertie would insist I call Detective Gibbons. And Harley or Althea might insist I make a public declaration stating I’d given up on the investigation.

  Obviously, my questions last night had made someone uncomfortable. I stood a few steps outside the shop, looking for clues to who might have put the note
on my door. The Drop In Surf Shop, the other store in the old building, was closed on Sundays. The porch area in front of their entrance looked dark and quiet.

  The neighbor to the right of the building was a real estate office that wouldn’t open until one o’clock that afternoon. Cassidy Jones had been one of the company’s top brokers. On the other side of the building was a vacation rental house. The latest renters in the house wouldn’t be up until at least noon. I knew this because the large group of friends who’d moved in the previous day had stayed up half the night drinking and talking loudly on the house’s second-story deck.

  Across the street from the shop was a heavily treed vacant lot. I stared into the shadows and immediately spotted movement.

  Something weaved through the vine-tangled underbrush with impressive grace. With the note clutched in my hands, I took a step toward the road. Maybe I could get a better look at the figure stalking me.

  The shadowy figure must have noticed that its cover had been blown. For as soon as I moved, it ran. It darted deeper into the woody lot. No matter how hard I looked, I could no longer see it. I crushed the note I held tightly in my fist and remained standing there in the middle of the road.

  “Did you see that?” Gavin ran up as he pointed toward the vacant lot. “There’s a coyote running around.”

  “A coyote?” I parroted back at him.

  Gavin nodded. He nodded so hard I thought he might be trying to launch himself straight into the stratosphere. He was holding a surfboard under his arm and was dripping wet in his board shorts and bright blue rash guard shirt. “It was grayish black.” His voice was quick and charged with excitement. “I keep hearing people talking about how the coyotes have moved onto the island. But I’ve never seen one before today. Never. Did you see it?”

  “Maybe.” Had I been watching a coyote moving through the brush and not a stalker?