The Boathouse (A Pelican Pointe Novel Book 14)

by Vickie McKeehan

It sounded like he should lock the place down for privacy so they could have wild sex on top of his desk in the office. But all he did was send her a slight smile. “Matty’s around to watch the counter. And if there’s a stampede to buy something, he can always call on Clive to help out in the showroom.”

  “Clive?”

  “Clive Ogilvie. He’s a retired Army guy who supplements his pension by working part-time working the saw. He cuts all the pre-ordered lumber for us. The kids nicknamed him the ‘sawman.’”

  “Ah. Then it sounds like Matty and Clive are perfectly capable of watching the store for an hour or so while we grab lunch at the beach.” She tightened her grip on his arm. “Somewhere quiet, away from this mess.”

  Tucker looked back over his shoulder. He could see more cars pull to a stop, more official-looking onlookers get out and make their way down the hillside. He wondered if Tessie’s death had garnered even half as much attention. Had it been a major news story twenty-seven years ago like this would become? He made it his mission to find out.

  At noon, in the middle of the day, Tucker led her to a secluded stretch of beach on the left side of Smuggler’s Bay behind the Fanning Rescue Center. For a summer day, they had the spot to themselves. He spread a blanket out on the sand while Bodie stood back, holding an oversized, wicker picnic basket. The sky couldn’t have been more perfect. It was as blue as a robin’s egg with little billowy clouds floating eastward.

  “Let’s see what you’ve got in there.”

  She began to unload the basket and set out plastic containers of food and paper plates. “Pasta salad made with fresh cherry tomatoes and cilantro. Tortilla rollups made with spicy chicken and slathered with cream cheese. I tossed in slices of avocado because I love avocado on just about everything, and then I crumbled cheddar over the whole thing. I took a chance that you loved avocado as much as I do. Feel free to scrape it off if you don’t.”

  “No, I love avocado.” But what he loved more was watching her get excited about a picnic. She’d changed out of the yoga gear and into a white blouse and a pair of light blue shorts. There was something summery about the outfit that reminded him of magic nights spent around bonfires on this very beach. The nostalgia had him thinking about all the times he’d thrown a Frisbee here, roasted weenies, stared at all the girls in their bikinis, or fought with his best buddy over which band played the best rock.

  “Tucker?”

  He came out of his fog. “What? Sorry. My mind wandered. What were you saying?”

  “I made a few rollups for me without the chicken. Obviously.”

  “Obviously.” He picked up one and sampled it. “This is good. Tasty. The cream cheese combo and avocado give it a creamy texture.”

  “And for dessert, I made strawberry spinach salad. Ever had it?”

  “Can’t say that I have. Not for dessert anyway. But I’m willing to give it a try.”

  She brought out a bottle of champagne and started to uncork the top.

  He stilled her hand. “Whoa. What are we celebrating? Did I miss something?”

  She told him about the settlement.

  “Good for you. Way to go Kinsey. You’re pleased with the amount?”

  “It’s not called a settlement for nothing. I’m okay with it. It means I can put the last few years behind me for good. You know, I never realized how unhappy I was until I left San Jose and my ex in the dust.” She realized he seemed distracted. “Are you okay?”

  “I started my day trying to access County records, only to discover there was no death certificate on file for Tessie’s death. That’s when I went to see Brent.”

  “What do you mean there’s no record? That’s impossible. Every death gets recorded.”

  “Tell me about it. Brent claims it might be a clerical error, a mistake in spelling.”

  “I didn’t know there were that many ways to spell Teresa or Ferguson. Although…did you try spelling Ferguson with an E instead of an O, as in F-E-R-G-U-S-E-N?”

  He lifted a brow. “No. It didn’t occur to me. You think it might be that simple?”

  “I don’t know. It’s worth a try. Let’s finish up here and find a laptop.”

  “There’s no rush, Bodie. It’s waited twenty-some-odd years; it can wait until we properly celebrate your win.”

  Indifferent to it now, she raised a shoulder. “When you put it in perspective, I suppose it’s not that big a deal.”

  “It is. Like you said, you’re able to move on now, get past these horrible two years.”

  She lifted her plastic cup. “Okay. Here’s to moving on and finding new beginnings.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” he said as he tapped his plastic to hers.

  They were gone longer than an hour. By the time they arrived back at the store, Matty had brought in Clive to help out with a large lumber order where precise measurements had mattered.

  “Sawman grumbled about it the entire time you were gone,” Matty pointed out.

  “That’s because I’m ready to go back to my saw and start filling orders. You know, working. It’s what I do around here,” the older man protested.

  Matty shook his head. “He’s not good with customers.”

  “I never claimed to be,” Clive barked. “What took you guys so long?”

  “It’s my fault,” Bodie stated in apology. “I dragged him away from the store to help me celebrate a small victory. On the beach. A picnic.”

  Clive’s weathered face softened. His blue eyes glistened. “Hey, it’s not every day a pretty girl wants to hang out at the beach. Not every day you have something come along to celebrate. It’s no big deal. I helped a few people, more than Matty, got the register to work this time too, not like before when I couldn’t get it unstuck.”

  Standing to the side, Matty threw up his hands. “Next time you leave for lunch, I’ll call in Owen. At least he listens and doesn’t have a problem with the register.”

  “That register is not anybody’s fault,” Tucker said, trying to calm the waters. “That thing is older than I am and needs replacing. It’s only about fifty years old.” Tucker slapped the older man on the back. “You go back to whatever you were doing before. I appreciate you both covering for me in a pinch.”

  “No problem,” Clive returned in an easy tone before sending them a wave and trudging out the back door.

  “Clive took one look at you and went to mush,” Tucker charged, a grin spreading across his face. “Have you ever seen that happen before, Matty?”

  Matty grinned. “Nope. Not ever.”

  “He did not turn to mush. He was…polite.”

  “He did,” Matty said in agreement. “Turned into a great, big marshmallow.”

  Tucker bobbed his head. “If you don’t believe me, listen to Matty. Clive’s a great worker and all, but not what you’d call warm and fuzzy. You changed him into a pussycat.”

  “I did not.” Changing the subject, she looked around the store. “Where’s your laptop?”

  “In the office. Come on, let’s crack this.”

  He sounded so hopeful, Bodie thought as she followed him into a small, cramped ten by ten room with a metal desk and matching file cabinets lining one wall.

  Tucker took a seat in front of the computer and caught her staring at the mess. “I know how bad it looks, but trust me, this is an improvement over what it looked like when I took over.”

  “You’re kidding? How did you sort it all out?”

  “By going through every single piece of paper, one file at a time. Why do you think I hired the three kids? I needed them to watch the store while I tackled the bookkeeping. My dad’s records were a nightmare.”

  “That must’ve taken weeks.”

  “More like a year. I had to create a database to keep it all straight, who we owed, who owed us. And nail down exactly why people were upset.”

  “Your father told you none of this?”

  “Nope. Nothing.”

  As soon as the laptop booted up, Tucker keyed in the pas
sword and headed to the Vital Records website. Tapping the keys in rapid strokes, he typed in variations of the Ferguson name without success.

  “Okay, what about trying a variation on Teresa with an H? If that doesn’t work, put in both misspellings together. Teresa with an H and Ferguson with an E.”

  He typed that combination in and was shocked to see a record start to form on the screen. “Bingo. That worked. Who knew the search engine would require the exact name.”

  “The exact name of a five-year-old girl spelled wrong. What a lousy system.”

  “Yeah. Someone at the medical examiner’s office must’ve entered both first and last names wrong. What are the odds of that happening? Not only getting Teresa wrong, but they complicated the situation by misspelling the last name, too. Good catch, Bodie. I would’ve never thought of this.”

  From over his shoulder, she studied the onscreen replication of the death certificate. “What’s the cause of death?”

  Tucker’s blood turned icy cold. “Holy crap. Look at section one-oh-seven. It says asphyxiation. Doesn’t that mean strangled?”

  “I think so. But I’m by no means an expert. Brent would know. This is odd, Tucker. Very odd. Think back. You’re certain your parents said Tessie died by drowning?”

  “No doubt in my mind. I was seven, not stupid. Besides, no kid would ever switch up that kind of detail hearing it for the first time. They told me Tessie drowned. Period.”

  “There’s something fishy somewhere. It’s beginning to look like your parents fed you a pack of lies. But why?”

  “That’s a good question.” He hit the order button and requested three copies of Tessie’s death certificate just in case he needed them. He gave the site his credit card information and then hit the pay button.

  She laid a hand on his shoulder. “Before we jump to conclusions, maybe they wanted to protect you. If, and this is a very big if, Tessie died from an assault, maybe they wanted to protect you from knowing the awful truth. That’s a lot for a kid to handle.”

  Tucker leaned back in the chair to consider that scenario. But after a long sixty seconds, he shook his head. “I don’t think I buy that. Here’s why. Both of my parents made a big production about the drowning part, going so far as to caution me about playing at the creek bed. After about a week, they came down hard on the treehouse. I was no longer allowed there either. At all.”

  “And why do you think they did that? If someone had assaulted Tessie right behind the house, they’d want to keep their other child safe from that. Wouldn’t they?”

  “I see your point. So you think they made up the drowning as a cover so I wouldn’t worry about Tessie’s murder?”

  “You were young. Your parents didn’t know how you’d react. The question for me is something else. Lying to you is one thing, but why didn’t they follow through, pursue getting it solved? Why wasn’t Tessie’s killer ever caught?”

  “That’s the heart of the matter now, isn’t it? And why am I just now learning the truth after twenty-seven years believing a lie? My mom could’ve told me once I reached a certain age. She didn’t bother with the truth.”

  Tucker heard the bell above the door jingle, signaling that a customer had come into the store. It prompted him to get to his feet. “I’ll call Brent and tell him I found the death certificate, ask him about the asphyxiation part. Is there any way we could continue this discussion tonight over dinner?”

  “Sure. Come to my house. I don’t feel like going out anyway. I’ll cook again.”

  “What time?”

  “Whenever you can get away.” She leaned in, touched her lips to his. “See you tonight.”

  She seemed to give off a warmth he’d either never felt before or had forgotten existed. There was a moment where he had a hard time letting go of that feeling, that connection. “Thanks for the picnic.”

  She smiled and patted his chest. “Go help your customer, Mr. Ferguson. Give Matty his lunch break. But save your strength for tonight because you might need it.”

  Seven

  Oliver Tremaine had a problem. As he sat on the pier watching a slew of men and women in hazmat suits mill around the boathouse trying to figure out how to extract bodies from a busted-up bunch of concrete, he tried to figure out a solution.

  He needed to make fifty bucks fast and get his uncle off his back. Every day it was the same question. “Did you find a job yet?”

  He didn’t exactly have a circle of friends that he could hit up to help him out. Since his parents died when he was eight, he’d pretty much been a loner, except for his uncle. Kris was okay but worked too much.

  Oliver was used to being on his own, fixing his own supper, spending time by himself. He played video games on his Xbox, watched lame TV until Kris got home from work and yelled at him to go to bed. It was summertime. A guy deserved to kick back and enjoy himself if he didn’t have to get up the next day and go to school.

  But now, he’d gone and done something dumb, dumber than almost anything else. The hardware store deal had been his uncle’s breaking point, the final straw. Now he had to come up with fifty bucks or face the law. And he didn’t have a clue how to find a job.

  It was true what Kris had said. No one would trust him to babysit. No one trusted him to do much of anything except screw up.

  Screwing up, he could handle. He always seemed to be in trouble with his teachers or the principal. Sometimes he got fed up with getting singled out, yelled at, and having his classmates treat him like he had the plague. Some of them even took off in the other direction when they saw him coming.

  But bitching about it didn’t solve his problem now. He still had to pay off fixing the stupid door he’d broken. With no prospects in sight, he decided he might have to get creative.

  Oliver had an ace up his sleeve.

  Old man Jackdaw who owned the junkyard east of Main Street, had posted a message on the bulletin board at Murphy’s Market. Jackdaw needed help clearing space to bring in more scrap metal. He’d posted the job before school let out. So far, no one had shown any interest. The job was hard because you had to move a bunch of crap into big dumpsters to be hauled off later to the landfill.

  As prospects went, it was pretty sad. But it was the only option Oliver could see. He’d run it by Kris first, but he already knew his uncle would more than likely rubber-stamp the work in a heartbeat.

  Which meant his life had come to this. Depressing as it was, Oliver could see no other way to get the money.

  The teen squinted into the late afternoon sun, still watching the scene play out at the boathouse. He wondered what kind of person would dump a couple of bodies into the concrete like that. Were they still alive when it happened? And what had they done to deserve dying like that?

  It was a sobering thought, Oliver decided.

  Since everyone already thought he was such a bad dude, he wondered if he could end up like that someday, end up dead in a stupid block of cement. He’d seen stuff like that on TV but never in a million years thought he would ever see it in real life. Maybe there was something to all that stuff Kris had been telling him. Maybe he needed to buckle down and make some changes before it was too late.

  Eight

  For the rest of the afternoon, Bodie tried to put grim details out of her mind. But that proved almost impossible. Tessie’s cause of death nagged at her. She’d looked it up on the Internet. Asphyxiation meant smothering or strangling, depriving the person of air. How could anyone do that to a child?

  She understood Tucker’s anger and confusion. Just when she thought she had a handle on it, the grim scene at the boathouse would pop into her head. She knew crime could happen anywhere. Small towns were not immune to it. After all, she hailed from one of the most dangerous cities in Arizona. Tucson. Even San Jose’s crime rate was a whopping twelve percent higher than the national average. Given that, it still sent her reeling that a small child could die at the hands of an assailant, and the killer was still out there somewhere.

 
; Unnerved at that revelation, she forced herself to focus on doing a few necessary chores around the house. She took inventory of the pantry, then ordered groceries, all the stuff she needed to make dinner, and paid for delivery.

  She examined the thirty-five or so plants she owned both inside and outside and realized most of them needed a drink. As she took the watering can around, she got rid of yellow leaves on several of her spider plants hanging in baskets off the porch. Deadheading as she went, she wiped off dusty leaves and repotted a fishbone cactus cutting that had become rootbound. Using Neem oil, she spritzed the soil as a cautionary tactic to discourage pests and then wrapped up the watering.

  She stripped the bed and put on fresh sheets. There was also laundry to toss in the washer, counters to clean, shelves to dust. By the time the boy from Murphy’s Market rapped on the door with her groceries, it was almost four o’clock.

  As she put away the food, she felt an air of nervousness about getting the meal right. She didn’t think the issue was vegetarian versus carnivore. No, Alex had been a meat lover, and she’d never felt this jumpy about making him a meal. Maybe at the root, she’d felt Alex pulling away long before he’d ever snuck out of the loft that day. She’d seen the man become a jerk when he wanted to make a point.

  Her angst was more from wanting to get this right. Not the meal so much, but the relationship.

  She relaxed her shoulders and started prepping the food, slicing and dicing carrots and potatoes for a casserole. Taking steak, she cubed it into bite-sized pieces that worked for a stew, searing the edges to a deep, golden brown.

  The decision to bake them into the same dish was the tough part. She liked the gravy the beef produced but didn’t like the meat itself. But she could handle picking out the potatoes and carrots. She’d done it before at family gatherings. That decided, she dumped the veggies into the cast iron pot with the intent to serve all of it over tender broad egg noodles.

  After throwing the casserole together, she shoved it in the oven at three hundred and twenty-five degrees to finish cooking. Next, she needed a shower. She fiddled with her hair and finally decided to leave it down. Choosing what to wear was easy. She didn’t have that many outfits. But for tonight, she wanted to look…exceptional, which is why she picked out the red and black flowered sleeveless dress with the sexy scoop neckline. She chose loop earrings in gold to accessorize and a matching charm necklace that set off her skin tone. After slipping on a pair of sandals with spicy-colored leather straps, she checked her makeup one last time.