Crab Outta Luck

by Ellis Quinn

  Crab Outta Luck

  A Crab Feast Cozy Mystery

  Ellis Quinn

  Copyright 2020 by Ellis Quinn

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  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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  www.ellisquinnmysteries.com

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  A Crab Feast Cozy Mystery Novel

  Crab Outta Luck

  by Ellis Quinn

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  Cover Design by Ellis Quinn

  Created with Vellum

  About the Author

  Ellis Quinn lives on a haunted goat farm in the woods surrounded by animals.

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  www.ellisquinnmysteries.com

  Also by Ellis Quinn

  THE CRAB FEAST MYSTERIES

  Crab Outta Luck

  Anchor Management

  Muddy Waters

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Afterword

  When she was nineteen and fell head over heels for Roman Waters, he swept her out of Chesapeake Cove and into that exciting but dingy young-person’s apartment in Bethesda. The early morning sun would come in from this tall, narrow, sliver of a window by the bathroom and fall on an angle across the wall at the foot of their bed. Outside that sliver of a window there was a car wash, and the car wash’s parking lot always accumulated on one lower end a sudsy pond of collected car wash runoff. A tall parallelogram of reflected golden light rippled on the peach-painted wall like they lived in a lakeside cottage.

  Roman, handsome and young Roman, would always say it looked like a marsh the way the bottom of the reflected parallelogram quivered wetly. Bette would put up her hands, lock together her thumbs and flap her fingers like wings and make a duck-like shadow fly low over their imaginary wetland while Roman made quacking sounds, blurting air from one cheek. Those were good, good days.

  Today was different. Twenty-three years on from those golden pond days she stood alone now at the sitting-room window-wall of the stately home in which she grew up, staring out at the choppy waves of sunny morning Chesapeake Bay while her phone did its friendly digital-bubbly sound letting her know a call was coming—hiding from her the nefarious nature she was sure with which that call came along.

  I know it’s you calling, Roman, and I’m not answering.

  Roman—that very same Roman with whom she’d lay in bed, two of them twenty-years old and sure they had the world figured out, laughing and making early morning shadow ducks—wanted another piece of her. A piece of her she’d never surrender.

  This home in which she was raised belonged to her grandmother. It belonged to her grandmother’s grandmother. Ten generations of Whaleys had owned this estate—including Bette, though only for the last thirteen days. And now Roman was calling for his pound of flesh.

  Bette’s grandmother, the feisty Pearl Whaley, had passed away five days following the finalization of Bette’s divorce from Roman, and though Bette’s inheritance wasn’t touchable, in light of this new development, Roman would want reassessed everything they’d settled before the arbitrator. Roman wanted to tangle his greasy fingers in Whaley’s Fortune.

  Literally “Whaley’s Fortune,” the name of the home Bette’s precious Grandma Pearl bequeathed her.

  Pearl died suddenly on a Saturday, and no one could’ve seen it coming. Roman would’ve thought old Pearl had another ten-maybe-fifteen years in her and had been so transfixed by his shiny new female obsession he figured he’d forego the luxury promised to him and Bette as a married couple by Bette’s grandmother. This home. Bette’s inheritance. Instead, Roman was with skinny-stick-legs, maybe the two of them making shadow ducks wherever they were laying their heads these days. Stick-legs was twenty-something, prime shadow-making age—too bad she had to share her bed with that forty-three-year-old heel, Roman. Poor girl (not really).

  Bette wondered: If Roman had known Bette’s grandma Pearl would pass so soon, would her loving husband have stayed loving, and, more important, stayed faithful? Was Roman’s twenty-year-old mistress worth it to him? Were there times when Roman looked in stick-legs’s eyes that he felt a measure of doubt? Truth was probably not. He’d wanted a quickie divorce so he could marry the poor young girl. Roman wanted to eat his cake and have it too. Marry his young mistress, and now push those sausage fingers into Bette’s frosting, seeing what he could get to stick before licking those fingers clean.

  “Yuck,” she groaned and shuddered as a soft whomp came from near where her phone had been laid to rest on the sunroom’s glass coffee table.

  The incessant happy chiming of her phone had annoyed another occupant of Whaley’s Fortune: a small and reckless five-year-old cat named Ripken who belonged to her son. Despite her best efforts, Ripken was reluctant to throw open his long kitty arms and embrace her as his new but temporary caretaker and guardian. Vance—the lone shining exemplar of the good that had happened between her and Roman, their one and only baby-boy, now twenty-two—was away at school. Not just at school right now, Vance was out at sea, five days on the Atlantic working on his Master’s Program and studying the fluctuating values of dissolved oxygen and diminishing nutrients.

  It was as if Ripken could also see through the traitorous charm of the phone’s friendly sounding chime and knew the rotten it concealed.

  “You show him, Ripken,” she said, amused, even chuckling, watching now as this ropy little black cat pounced, jumped and spun, batted and batted her phone till at last he’d skipped it off the stack of magazines where it lay. Plop onto the floor, face down on the woolen rug, giving one more muffled chime before finally surrendering.

  “Not today, Roman,” she said, “Not today.”

  She tucked the phone into the pocket of her cotton pants, hefted Ripken up to hold him face-to-face. He was a feisty and independent male cat. Loved to the dickens her son Vance. Bette he tolerated. His eyes move side to side, avoiding direct gaze with her, making her laugh at his strange defiance.

  “Oh, you’re a little mister,” she said. “I’ll tell you what, Ripken, I’m going to put you on your favorite throne. Today is not the day to wallow. I’m going for a walk. Will you look after the place for me, hmm? . . .”

  Ripken had no answer, but did enjoy being hoisted above her head to be planted in a wicker basket sitting atop a polished antique highboy. The guy spent so much time up there spying birds, she’d cleared off the knickknacks to avoid any of them being knocked off, and gave him what she called his throne: a deep wicker basket and a soft cushion printed with little sailboats. It had been made with Vance’s bedsheet from when Vance was a little boy, and she hoped Ripken would appreciate the attention to detail. He seemed to, padding and circling around four times before plopping down on the fifth, eyes steady on the outdoor hunting grounds.

  “You watch over the place for me—would you do that?”

  Ripken, though aloof, brightened her spirit somewhat, and she slid open the sunroom doors and stepped down onto the brick patio, a square patch that edged the huge lawn leading to a barrier of trees framing the beach and the Bay and a colonnade that led to the jetty
beyond. Shoes off now, she strolled from the brick onto the grass, loving the feel of the blades between her toes. It’d been a long time since she’d been at Whaley’s Fortune in bare feet, and it instantly brought back memories of growing up here. She and Mom and Pearl, three generations of women living in the big house together.

  Memories came of cartwheels on this very lawn, and a dog they had back then, a big lovable shaggy brown thing they called Buster. She turned and regarded the Fortune. This was what Roman wanted. Had no right to it. Had signed the paperwork for the divorce himself.

  Whaley’s Fortune was a Federal style home built in sturdy red brick. Rebuilt after a fire claimed the original home in 1779, the brick one was put together by real live Whaleys in the five years following the fire. Four windows up front, two dormers set in the sloping black slate roof. Sixty years later someone had doubled the size of the original home, building a wood-sided addition in the same architectural style. Grandma Pearl’d called it a Sea Captain’s house. Prim, upright and proper, devoid of fancy; it was a sturdy waterman’s home, but a fine one, well-built, well-cared for—one with lots of land and with access to two waterways, the Chesapeake Bay and the Nucksee River. A long, gray-board jetty extended from the back lawn about twenty yards into the sandy shallows.

  It was always known the Fortune would one day be hers, and if they were still married, that meant it would have been Roman’s, too. Roman couldn’t wait for Pearl to die, and somewhere along the way maybe the estate just didn’t matter to him anymore. So he’d made his bed and now he’d have to lay in it.

  But it wouldn’t be so easy with Roman. That’s why she didn’t want to talk to him. It brought anxiety, leaving her only to wonder: what would Roman do? Her inheritance was untouchable. Just as it would be if Roman were to inherit his father’s property, she wouldn’t be able to touch it. But Roman would have arguments. Oh, Roman was good at arguments. Fist-pounding ones, self-righteous ones. His life was built on the knowledge that Whaley’s Fortune would one day be his—this he would say gravely before a new arbitrator, a judge possibly—and he’d made sacrifices in his life and Bette’s inheritance bore the promised fruit of his endeavors. Only the law said he couldn’t touch it. So what would Roman do?—contest the arbitration. Roman knew she had money now, too. He would throw up so many obstacles, bring in lawyers; they’d have Whaley’s Fortune held in check, put into a trust until years of legal wrangling sorted out this nightmare. And every month or so, he’d give her a little wink and say, “You know you can always buy your way out of this, Babs.” Hint, hint. “Write me a check and I go away.” And how much would Roman want?

  By the time she’d circled around the north shore of Whaley’s Fortune, she was gritting her teeth. The hands stuffed in her pockets had turned to fists. No wonder she couldn’t answer the phone. She was a frazzled ball of anxiety.

  At the grassy river shore, she paused, putting her feet in the soggy earth, watching the water flow along the edge on the far side, concentrating on deep breaths. In through the nose, expand the belly. Exhale . . .

  About a dozen feet from her toes, four bullet-nosed polyvinyl buoys bobbed up and down and lolled with the lazy Nucksee current. Four bullet-nosed buoys with scalloped cups in their points. On her property. In her water. And those bullet-nose buoys . . . Everyone knew who used the bullet noses. Twenty years out of the Cove and she still remembered. The man whose crab boat wore a massive twelve-point buck rack out front. His proudest kill. A 350-pound white-tail deer he took down in the Blackwater Refuge. At least that’s what the man claimed, but anybody would tell you that it was actually 150 yards to the north, the deer was shot past dusk and standing in water, he only wounded the deer and it fled to private property where it was then illegally tracked and harvested. The man had broken about five hunting laws, but everyone was too afraid to speak up. Old Man Royce. Royce Murdoch.

  “You son of a bean bag.”

  The sight of those four bobbing bullet noses launched her blood pressure into the red zone. This was an insult. An absolute affront. It brought tears to rim her eyes. In its own way, it was a thumbing off to Pearl Whaley. Glad to see you’re gone, old Pearl, don’t mind if I rob your waters now. Nobody to say boo. Those were Royce’s crab floats, and he was crabbing where he shouldn’t be.

  Stomping in bare feet through grass didn’t bring quite the same pleasure as strolling. None of that pleasurable toe tickling. It did cushion the angry jarring jolts going in straight lines from her heels up through her shoulders and into her tensely furrowed brow. Didn’t even go inside. Went to the sunroom door, leaned a hand on the glass, not even caring that she would have to wipe the smudge clean later. Ripken stared at her lazily from his sailboat cushion bed, oblivious to her current turmoil.

  She said through the glass to the cat: “I’m going to be back in twenty minutes,” shoved her damp, grassy feet into her loafers, then hiked a beeline around to the front of the manse and over to the carriage house that had been converted into a two-car garage. She rolled up in one quick tug the shutter door, bypassing her sensible citified electric Leaf, instead swiping from the key hook on the carriage house’s wall the keys to Pearl’s ancient vehicle. Same one Pearl’d driven every day Bette’d known her grandmother. An ancient 1976 Ford Bronco Explorer in butternut cream with gold stripes and sporting almost brand new off-road tires that could handle most of Chesapeake Cove’s worst weather-rutted roads. She was going to go and deliver a message, and she wasn’t doing it alone. In one way or another, her feisty Grandma Pearl was coming with her.

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  It was a six-minute drive from Whaley’s Fortune into the town of Chesapeake Cove (and, yeah, she ended up getting mixed up doing the roundabout where the statue of Isaac Crockett was, but they’d changed it since she moved away, so she went around like three times), but by the time she rolled between the old post office, and the Marine Museum, heading down into the low parking area at the wharf, she was still as mad as when she discovered Royce’s crab floats.

  Almost noon, and on a day like today she figured where to find old Man Royce. With a guy like him, things probably hadn’t changed even though she’d been away from Chesapeake Cove for twenty years.

  She chirped Pearl’s old Bronco to a stop, gave the parking brake a good old yank, liking the feel of flexing her grip on it and the pull of her muscles; it refocused her anger as she then slammed the door closed and marched down to the boardwalk.

  On the right-hand side was the marina, commercial and private, jetties and piers with bobbing sails, and looming close to shore a towering two-story ferryboat. And on the left-hand side was the greatest attraction Chesapeake Cove had: the Cracked Crab.

  What at one time about seventy-five years ago had been a shucking house was now converted into one of the best crab shacks anywhere in Chesapeake. She didn’t go in. Marched the boardwalk, cut across the gardens, eyes focused on the Crab’s patio, and past the patio where a narrower boardwalk ran below the waterside face of the Cracked Crab. That was where the old-timers congregated mid-day after they’d crabbed all morning. The water men. The crabbers. It wasn’t like they weren’t welcome at the Cracked Crab, they just didn’t want to associate with the tourist folks and all the hoity-toities happy to spend twenty-five bucks on a lager and some crab. They were just here for the lager and to brag to each other.

  Sure enough, stomping down the weathered boardwalk, she could see congregated at the farthest picnic table, four men underneath an umbrella, laughing and cackling in their gruff smoke-wheezy voices. They’d picked the last picnic table down at the end so they could smoke and get away with it.

  The scowl on her face attracted attention. There was a level of patio just above her shoulders, and diners were turning from their fried shrimp and prawns and oyster plates with ice, and their two cups of potato salad and frosty lagers to see what the heck was going on. From her body language, they must have known there was going to be a confrontation.

  And there was.

&nbs
p; At that final picnic table, there were four men in their late sixties. Maurice Dureault, Bucky Snead, and Jerome Miller, and facing her, watching her coming, smirking already, was Royce Murdoch, a hulking, rotten, tree trunk of a man.

  Right up to the table, she stopped an arm’s length away, looking right at Royce with fire in her eyes. “You remember me—you know who I am?” Her head jabbed each syllable.

  Royce eased back, said, “Course I know who you are, you’re a Whaley. You’re Scarlet’s girl.”

  “Three guesses why I’m here,” she said.

  Jerome said, “Is it the prawns?”

  Maurice said, “I bet you it’s the potato salad.”

  All of them wheezed and chuckled it up, their bodies shaking with immense laughter, making fun of her.

  “You know why I’m here,” she said, focused on Royce, jaw clenched.

  Royce patted his huge crabber hand on the picnic bench next to him, saying, “Come on, set it down, come have a lager wi’ us, tell us your sorrows. We each of us take our turns.” He nodded to his men friends, smug-smiling.

  She disregarded his menacing blue collar charm, hating his mean and beady eyes, his unshaved face, his leathery tan. She said, “Your floats are on my water. I own those water rights. You can’t put your traps there. Ever. And you know it.” She grimaced, shook clawed hands, seething. “That’s the part that’s making me crazy. Everybody knows you’re a shoddy crabber, everybody knows you’re a cheat—I’m not mad at you because you’re no good, it’s the audacity, the timing of it, Royce. That’s the worst part. It’s the disrespect.”