1 Lowcountry Boil (33 page)

“Oh, mmm-kay.” Deanna nodded. She sat down on the sofa. “Adam’s dead. His also-dead father just helped Merry’s ghost distract the now-dead hit man enough for me to shoot him.” She wept loudly. “I didn’t know Merry was dead.”

I sat beside her. “Merry’s fine, Deanna. Troy just thought he hurt her. I pretended to be her ghost to distract him.”

“That was smart.” Deanna smiled through her tears.

“Thanks.” I smiled back at her.

Colleen hovered behind the sofa, arms draped across her sister’s shoulders. “That’s fine, take the credit.”

“Hello, Liz.” Stuart looked at me, and then knelt on Deanna’s other side and spoke softly, looking her in the eyes. “You don’t know me. You have no reason to trust me. But I’m here to help you.”

Deanna rested her head in her hands.

Someone pounded on the front door. “Deanna?” Blake called out.

“In here,” I called out.

Stuart stood. The door slammed open. Blake, Michael and Merry dashed into the family room. They all stopped just short of stumbling over Troy and each other as the next flash of lightning revealed the body on the floor.

Merry gasped.

“What the hell?” Michael stared at his father in disbelief.

Stuart handed the gun to Blake by the barrel. “He’s dead. He left her no choice. He threatened Deanna and the girls.”

“Who are you?” Blake took the gun and stepped closer.

“I’m Stuart Devlin. My boat is docked over at the marina. I’m just in from the Virgin Islands for a few weeks. Personal business…” His voice trailed off as he looked at Michael.

Blake spoke into his handheld and called for backup, Doc Harper, and the crime scene techs. “We need more light in here,” he said.

Deanna said, “There are two Coleman lanterns on the top shelf of the pantry.”

Blake jerked his head in the direction of the kitchen. “Merry.”

Deanna looked up at Merry. “I’m so glad you’re all right.”

Merry gave me a questioning look on her way to the kitchen. “I’m glad you’re okay, too, Deanna.”

Blake looked at Deanna. “
Are
you all right?”

“Y-yes.”

“Whose gun is this?”

“It’s mine,” Deanna said.

Blake scrutinized her. “I see. And you had it handy, did you, when Troy came by for a surprise visit?”

Stuart said, “Her husband was killed only this—”

“I’d rather hear from Deanna, if you don’t mind.”

Merry stepped back into the room. She set the lanterns on opposite sides of the room. The fluorescent light added to the otherworldly ambience.

Deanna gestured towards Troy. “The alarm company called when he opened the door. I gave them the panic code. You guys got here quick.” She looked at Blake.

Blake shook his head, confused. “We never got the call. I guess the alarm company couldn’t get through. The phone lines must have gone out right after they called you. We’ve got trees down on Ocean Boulevard and Palmetto.”

“But then, why are you here?” Deanna asked.

Blake stared at me. “Something just told us you needed help.”

I said, “Where is Sam Manigault? Wasn’t he supposed to be out front?”

Blake rubbed the back of his neck and winced. “Communication failure. He’s in front of Kate Devlin’s house.”

“What took you guys so long?”

Blake gave me a look of exaggerated patience. “Like I said, trees down on Ocean and Palmetto. Live power lines are across the road in two places. We had to drive around the carnage, twice. Deanna, exactly what happened here?”

“I sh-sh-
shot h-h-h-im
.” Deanna’s face drew together. She covered it with her hands and sobbed.

Michael was still staring at his father. “Why?” he asked.

Stuart sighed. “The answer is quite complicated. Perhaps we could discuss it later.”

“Perhaps.” Michael glared at him. “And then again, maybe it really doesn’t matter why.”

Blake raised his hand in a halt motion. “Getting back to the body on the floor, just for a moment, can I get some agreement please between the parties present at the time as to how Troy Causby came to be dead?”

Deanna had stopped sobbing, but seemed to be in some sort of post-traumatic state. She stared, glassy-eyed, at thin air in front of her.

Blake cocked his head sideways, sighed, and rubbed the back of his neck.

“He broke in,” I said. “He wanted money. He was desperate, Blake. I showed up, then Stuart. Troy shot at both of us. He was coming at Deanna. He threatened to kill her—I heard him—and do worse to the girls. So she shot him. If I had my gun, I would have shot him. He fired three shots, one at Stuart and two at me. The gun is probably underneath him.”

Stuart nodded. “It was as she said.”

“The girls are at Kate’s house,” Blake said.

“Troy didn’t know that,” I said. “And what would have stopped him from going there next? Bottom line, Deanna killed him in self-defense.”

Blake asked, “Any idea why Troy picked your house, Deanna, to break into and demand money? Every law enforcement officer in the country is looking for him. You’d think he’d be trying to get as far away from here as possible. Why did he come
here
asking for money?”

Deanna breathed deep. “He had some crazy idea—”

“Can’t you shut her up?” Colleen demanded.

I kicked Deanna. “He knew Adam had money in the house, remember? Adam had hired him?”

Blake stared at Deanna for a long moment. “I need this crime scene cleared,
now
. It’s going to take a while to get the forensic team over here. Why don’t you spend the night at your mother’s house? You can come in tomorrow and I’ll take your statement then. It seems to me you might want to sleep on what you have to say.” He glanced from Deanna, to Stuart, then to me and shook his head.

Deanna nodded. “Mmm-kay.”

Blake turned to me. “Liz, will you and Merry help Deanna get some things together for the night?”

Michael looked at me, but spoke to Blake. “I’ll take Deanna to her mom’s. Then I can drop Liz and Merry off.”

I had a strong suspicion he didn’t plan to drop me off at all. Something told me his plan involved spending the night. With a jolt, I remembered Nate should already be there.

Merry picked up the message Michael was sending me and decided to be helpful. “I’ll drive Deanna’s car and take her to her mom’s house. We’ll figure the rest out.” She stood and gently urged Deanna up.

Blake raked a hand through his hair. “Fine. Michael, would you mind taking Stuart back to the marina? I’ll catch a ride with Clay when we’re finished here.”

A look passed between Blake and Michael that I couldn’t decipher. Blake addressed Stuart. “I’ll need your statement in the morning, too. Nine o’clock work?”

Stuart nodded. “I’ll be there.” He turned to Michael. “I can walk back to the dock. That’s how I got here.”

Michael sighed. “There’s a monsoon roaring out there. I’ll drop you off.”

We stepped out onto the porch. Michael dashed through the pounding rain to open the front passenger door for me. Stuart followed and slid into the backseat. I asked him to hand me my purse, which I’d left on the seat earlier. I slipped my phone out of its compartment and glanced at the screen. I had five missed calls and two voicemails from Nate.

Michael climbed into the driver’s seat and slammed the door.

I dashed off a quick text to Nate: Where R U?

He replied: On your front porch.

Relief and something else I couldn’t name washed through me. I texted back: Home soon.

Michael gave me a questioning look, but said nothing. He, Stuart and I sat in silence for a moment, listening to the rain hammer the car.

After a moment, Stuart spoke. “If it’s answers you want, you’d better stop by the house. Some of them I can give you, but some of them will have to come from your mother.”

FIFTY-TWO

Either power had been restored, or the outage had been limited to only part of the island. From the street, it looked like every light in Kate Devlin’s house was on. We dashed through the gentled rain: the long-lost father, the angry son, and me, the past and perhaps future girlfriend. Nautical lanterns glowed on either side of the front door. It was as if we’d been expected on that rain-soaked, wind-battered night. Michael unlocked the door, pushed it open, and motioned me inside.

“Michael…” I gave him a pleading look. I didn’t belong there.

“If I took you home now, I’d only have to repeat everything later. What’s the point?”

“Mamma?” he called out. “Grace?”

“In here, Michael,” Kate answered from the kitchen.

Michael led the way towards the back of the house. He stopped, turned, and spoke softly to Stuart. “Wait here. Let me talk to her first. She’s fragile. She’s had heart problems lately. Seeing you is going to be a shock.”

Stuart snorted. “Fragile my eye. If there’s one thing Katherine Sullivan Devlin is not, it’s fragile.” He pushed past Michael and me and into the big warm kitchen. We followed.

She sat on the sofa in front of a roaring fire, with her back to us as we entered the room. “Grace went home before the storm—” Kate stopped talking midsentence, either hearing, or perhaps sensing Michael was not alone. She turned and looked over her shoulder. Her eyes narrowed, the expression on her face pure hatred.

“Hello, Stuart,” she said coldly. She turned back around to face the fire as casually as if she’d last seen her husband that morning.

What the hell? I felt like I’d stepped into an alternate reality show.

“Katherine,” he nodded to her back. “Michael wants answers. I’ve agreed to give him the ones I have. You’ll have to fill in the rest.”

“What the devil are you doing here to begin with? If you’d stayed away, he could have lived the rest of his life in peace believing you were dead. Just like me.” She curled her feet underneath her and pulled her quilt tighter. “I’ve told people you were dead for so long I’d forgotten it was a lie. You’ve ruined everything.”

Michael stared at her in total shock.

The icy, controlled rage came from a stranger, not Kate Devlin. And one thing stood in stark reality: Stuart had spoken the truth. There was nothing remotely fragile about the creature that inhabited her body. She was fresh out of Southern gentility.

I took a step back. My instincts screamed,
Run.

Michael grabbed my hand and tugged me forward. I balked. He reached back, put his arm around me, and pulled me farther into the room.

Kate sighed. “All of you are soaking wet. You’ll drip water everywhere. Michael, get some towels.”

Mechanically, Michael did as he was told. He returned with a stack of towels, took one for himself, and offered them to Stuart and me.

“Why don’t we all sit down?” Stuart made himself comfortable, spreading a towel on the easy chair next to the fireplace. He blotted his face and hair with another towel and warmed himself by the fire.

Michael took a place on the loveseat and drew me down beside him. Kate arched an eyebrow in my direction, and then tilted her head at Michael.

“She stays,” Michael said. He didn’t raise his voice to his mother, but his tone was layered with steel. She didn’t challenge him.

Colleen faded in, on the floor at my feet.

Michael stared at his mother. “You knew he was alive?”

“Of course I knew it,” she snapped. “Your father and I came to an agreement—”

“Hold on there,” Stuart said. “If we’re going to tell this story, we’re going to tell it honestly.”

The fire crackled. Thunder, more distant now, rumbled low and long. “Why don’t I start?” Stuart’s eyes dared Kate to object.

She stared him down for a moment, and then averted her haughty gaze to the fire.

Stuart spoke to Michael. “The sad truth is I married your mother on the rebound, forty-six years ago last spring.” A range of emotions struggled on his face. “I was desperately in love with someone else. We were young and foolish. I made some bad choices. She married someone else. Life went on.”

I slid closer to Michael. Stuart could be telling our story. How had I not known Gram had made the same mistakes I did?

For a few moments, the only sound in the room was the crackling fire.

Stuart leaned forward in his chair. “After college I came home and tried to rebuild my life. I threw myself into work and efforts to protect this island. Your mother and I became friends.” He stared at Kate hard. “She was very different then. Perhaps she was adept at playing a role.”

Kate sniffed.

“Maybe I fooled myself into believing I loved her. Not the passionate, all-consuming kind of love I’d let slip through my hands, but a companionship. A partnership. I thought it would be enough.”

Kate radiated hatred, but remained silent.

“We went about the business of building a family. We were happy enough, or so I thought. We shared our love of our beautiful children. We both loved this place, this island. It could have been enough for a lifetime of contentment.”

Were these the kinds of things Michael had told himself after he married Marci the Schemer?

Restless now, Stuart stood to pace. “But it ate at you, didn’t it, Kate, that I had loved someone else? I never deceived you. But you just couldn’t stand it, could you?”

“I loved you, you sonofabitch,” she lashed back at him, her voice dripping venom. “I loved you the way you loved her,” Kate said. “I thought you would grow to love me the same way. I deserved that. I picked up the pieces of your broken heart. I gave you sons. Me, not her. But it meant nothing to you.
I
meant nothing to you.” Kate glanced at me with loathing, as if I were my grandmother’s proxy.

I snuggled up to Michael. Colleen wrapped her arms around my legs. I could almost feel the embrace.

Kate ranted on. “And she was right here. Always right here. Always a part of our lives. It was too much.” Kate’s anger had built to a crescendo. Abruptly she fell silent and sat back on the sofa, as if the wind had gone out of her. She averted her eyes and seemed to withdraw inside herself.

“In time,” Stuart said, “it became obvious we were never going to be anything but miserable. The envy ate at your mother. Day by day, she hated me more. It was corrosive. As you boys grew older, it became harder to keep up the façade. Divorce was inevitable.”

Stuart stopped pacing. “But I was certain she was devoted to you children. I couldn’t conceive of taking you away from her, even if that had been an option in those days.”

He took a deep breath, and looked at Michael, beseeching him to understand what would come next. “I decided to take some time alone to sort things through, figure out how to proceed. I was going to spend a few weeks on the sailboat. It turned into six. I called home and she told me what she’d done.”

A satisfied smile crept up Kate’s mouth.

Stuart’s voice grew ragged. “She told everyone I’d gone out for an afternoon sail and never returned, that I was missing at sea. After the Coast Guard searched for several days in the wrong direction, I was presumed dead. She told me you boys thought I was dead. Had adjusted to it, she said. What’s more, she’d already filed a life insurance claim. I was worth more to all of you dead than alive. God help me, I let her convince me to leave it alone. I just never came back. I have regretted that decision every day for the past twenty-five years. Whether or not you can ever believe me or forgive me, I love you very much, and I loved your brother.”

Kate turned bright red and appeared to be literally seething. “All you ever cared about was that two-faced whore Emma Rae.”

I jerked back, as if slapped.

“
Mamma,
” Michael said.

“I did my best to raise these boys by myself. Perhaps you should have been here to help. Perhaps Adam would have been a better man if he’d had a father.”

“You didn’t give me that choice now did you?”

“You should have loved me. I earned that.”

Stuart looked at her sadly, and not unkindly. “Love isn’t something you earn, Kate. It’s something you feel.”

“I once loved you as much as I hate you right now.”

Stuart shook his head. “After the children came, you became indifferent to me. Children require a lot of attention, I know. But you were obsessed with them, to the exclusion of everything else. You pushed me away.”

“You were too hard on them. You expected too much.”

Stuart turned red and raised his voice for the first time. “That’s what was wrong with Adam, don’t you see that? You never expected enough. You gave him everything. He never worked for anything his entire life. And what did he turn into?”

“Don’t you dare sit here in this house after all these years and attack my son. He isn’t even buried yet.
Our son is dead
.” She approached a screech.

“I knew the minute I read the account of Emma’s death in the paper that Adam had a hand in it. As much as he was given, it was never enough. Always scheming, always trying to make that big pile of money he thought would make him happy.”

The smug look on Kate’s face struck me as odd.

“Now, hold on just a minute,” Michael said. “How do you know anything about us?”

“That was the one condition I gave your mother, the cost of my absence. She wrote me weekly, for twenty-five years. I still have every letter. I know about every touchdown you ever made. And every time she bought Adam’s way out of trouble.”

Kate sat mute, her gaze averted.

Stuart sat back down. “And then Emma discovered my secret, quite by accident. Or perhaps providence. It was through Emma I knew Adam was trying to wrestle the family land away from you.”

“That Jezebel,” Kate spat. “How dare she criticize my son? It’s her fault he grew up fatherless.”

Colleen sensed my growing anger. “Keep quiet,” she said. “Let her talk.”

And then I knew.

Stuart said, “You can’t lay that one at Emma’s feet, Katherine. That was your choice and yours alone.”

“I guess you’re completely innocent, aren’t you?” Kate asked. “That’s just like you. You abandon your children and make it my fault.”

He met her gaze. “Well, I could have come home, I guess. But if I had, my children would have grown up without a mother instead of without a father, because you, my dear, would have gone to jail for insurance fraud.”

Kate glared at him defiantly. “If you had wanted to come home badly enough, you would have found a way.”

“Perhaps.” Stuart looked at her for a moment. “Lord knows my hands aren’t clean. If Adam had been raised differently, he might still be alive. He didn’t understand actions have consequences, he never had to face any. His obsession with the almighty dollar led directly to his death, to the death of the finest woman I’ve ever known, and to that of two of his co-conspirators.”

“Do you know who killed Adam?” Michael asked. “What makes you think he killed Emma Rae?”

“When I arrived home shortly after Emma’s death, I started investigating. I wanted to verify my suspicions. I felt honor-bound to stop Adam from doing what he seemed determined to do, destroy the quality of life on this island.