A Haunting Dream (A Missing Pieces Mystery) (5 page)

As I followed the horizon with my eyes, I saw what looked like an old wooden ship. It was huge and under full sail. It looked heavy and cargo rich—a Spanish galleon, if I wasn’t mistaken.

“The
Andalusia
,” I barely breathed aloud.

It was a legend, a ghost ship that had sunk with all hands aboard and a treasure estimated by most people to be worth over twenty-five million dollars in today’s currency. The ship was destroyed in 1721, never to be seen again as a real vessel. But many people had seen it down through the years, sailing across the water. People in Duck took it as an ill omen.

I’d spent my entire life here, but I’d never seen this before. As I watched it, thrilled and terrified at the same time, I knew it couldn’t be anything other than the
Andalusia
. The ship, even though it looked heavy with cargo, wasn’t quite resting on the dark water. A light that wasn’t part of the moon glow filled it, creating an aura around it.

I’d heard people say that seeing the ghost ship had transfixed them. They’d walked for miles looking at it. Now, I felt transfixed—captivated by the sight of it. I couldn’t look away.

I started walking along the beach, trying to keep pace with the ghostly galleon. Except for the light emanating from the ship and the glow from the moon, it was very dark along the water. I stumbled into a ditch in the sand created by rain runoff from the island. The beach was still very wet from the tail end of a hurricane we’d had recently. I lost my balance and sank to my knees in the soft sand.

I put my hands out to keep myself steady. I didn’t want to look away from the
Andalusia
, but I had no choice if I wanted to get back on my feet.

I looked down at the sand and saw a face with wide-open eyes looking back at me.

Chapter 5

I
crawled out of the ditch as quickly as I could, my
heart pounding. The ghost ship was pushed from my thoughts like yesterday’s high tide. I’d almost fallen right on the person. It was hard to tell for certain in the dim light, but the face looked like Chuck Sparks.

Nothing but Banker determination made me go back to the ditch and try to decide if he was still alive. I got down close beside him. I wasn’t a doctor, but I couldn’t feel a pulse. He felt cold, and his body was stiff to the touch.

I used the light from my cell phone to look at him more carefully. It was Chuck. He was covered in sand, as though he’d been rolled in it. Had someone buried him and the tide had shifted the sand, bringing him back to the surface again?

I tried using the phone to call for help.
No signal
. At that point, it was a better flashlight than a phone. I didn’t want to leave Chuck alone, but I had no choice. There was only so much I could do by myself.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I have to go. I’ll be right back with someone who can help. Don’t worry. You’ll be fine.”

As I started to get to my feet, his hand moved, clutching at my skirt beside it. His ghastly white face turned and looked at me, as he had in the vision. “Help her.”

I jumped away with a small shriek, crawling until I was a few yards from him. Despite what some might term my “psychic” gift of being able to help people find things, I’d never experienced anything like this. Dead bodies normally didn’t speak to me. Now that it had happened, I wished it hadn’t. It was bad enough in a vision. This was so much worse.

I sat on the wet sand, shuddering, and looked up at the sky. The ghost ship was gone now, but the moon was still smiling down at me.

Did Chuck really just speak to me?

I wasn’t sure. Maybe I’d imagined it. Finding a dead body, even one that didn’t speak, could be traumatic enough to make someone hallucinate.

So I crawled back again, mindful that my dry cleaner, Mrs. Toivo, was going to have a few words with me about this. I felt safer near the ground, less lightheaded. I thought about standing—it might be easier to get away if Chuck decided to put any more moves on me. But my legs were shaking too much. That made fast crawling my best option.

I pulled out my cell phone and peered over the slight lip of the ditch. Chuck looked the same as he had when I’d first found him. I couldn’t tell if he’d
really
moved or if I’d imagined it.

This was an awful turn for my gift to take. In the future, were recently dead people—not even ghosts—going to start talking to me? That thought made me want to run away screaming.

I took a deep breath, forcing myself to calm down. I had to focus on what to do next.

Once I saw that he was the same, I moved away and pushed myself to my feet a little farther down the beach.
So much for moonlight making everything more romantic.
This experience was definitely not romantic.

I walked up to the first house at the edge of the beach—Mr. and Mrs. Cooley’s place. They’d recently retired and moved to Duck. He was an ex-corporate official from some mega-giant technology firm. I pounded on the door as though the dead were after me—which I prayed they weren’t.

An outside light came on at the back deck that fronted the water. “Mayor O’Donnell?” Mrs. Cooley, a nice middle-aged woman with gray-lilac tinted hair, greeted me. “Is something wrong? Do you need help?”

Her husband came to the door behind her in his red striped pajamas. “What’s wrong, Ethel?” he asked his wife. “Has she been assaulted? Should we call the police?”

“Yes!” I answered, teeth chattering, knowing they might take it the wrong way. But whatever got Chief Michaels down here worked for me. “Could I call my grandfather too? My cell phone isn’t working.”

“Really?” Mr. Cooley questioned. “We’ve always had great service here. It must be your provider.”

I handed him my phone, which was also covered in sand. He hit Gramps on speed dial and the call went right through. He shrugged and handed the phone back to me.

“Dae?” Gramps answered the phone. “Where are you? Ronnie and I have gone through two pots of coffee waiting for you. There’s some news about Chuck Sparks. Ronnie has some questions for you—and for Chuck.”

“I have some answers for the chief. Both of you need to come over to the Cooleys’ house. I’m over here. Chuck is on the beach in the drainage ditch. Dead.”

“Well, I guess we won’t be asking him those questions then,” Gramps replied and hung up the phone.

I shivered and nodded when Ethel Cooley asked me if I wanted some coffee.

Of course, the Cooleys were concerned and disturbed that there was a dead man only a few hundred yards from their home. I dropped down on a kitchen chair, hoping they didn’t mind the sand, and tried to calm their apprehension.

By that time, we could hear sirens approaching, and Mr. Cooley went to open the front door to let everyone in. It wasn’t long before Chief Michaels, Gramps and Officer Scott Randall, our other full-time Duck police officer, were there.

The emergency rescue crew was immediately behind them. As soon as they arrived, we all trooped down to the beach to retrieve Chuck’s body.

“What were you doing way down here?” Gramps asked. “I thought you were with your friends at Wild Stallions.”

“I needed some time alone,” I explained. “Then I saw the
Andalusia
.”

The chief made a scoffing sound. “You and every other flaky person in Duck.”

“I’m not a flake,” I said, defending myself and every other person who’d seen the ghost ship. “It was there. It wasn’t a real vessel. I followed it down the beach until I fell into the drainage ditch and found Chuck.”

“Let’s just see if this
body
is real then,” the chief said.

Chuck was definitely real. As soon as the paramedics checked him and agreed that he was dead, the chief put on his latex gloves. “Looks like you were right about Chuck, Mayor. In fact, I was at your house to tell you that something was off. No one has seen him in three days. His mail was piling up, and no one had fed his cat.”

“Now maybe you’ll believe me about Derek Johnson. The medallion belonged to Chuck. The only one likely to know he’d lost it would be his killer.”

“Thank you, Miss Marple. If you don’t mind, I think I’ll draw my own conclusions. You need to get out of the crime scene area, ma’am. We’ll let everyone do their jobs.”

Gramps put his arm around me. “Let’s get you home and out of these wet clothes, Dae. We’ll find out all about this by morning, I’m sure. There’s nothing else we can do here.”

I saw him nod to the chief and decided that I didn’t care. He was right. A hot bath and a good rest were long overdue. I was way past ready for this day to be done.

Gramps and I talked a little on the ride back in the golf cart. I still felt charged up from seeing the ghost ship. Not to mention having a dead Chuck Sparks talk to me.

“You didn’t even know him that well, did you?” Gramps asked. “It’s not like the two of you were friends or anything.”

“No! I haven’t even seen him since all of that stuff went down with the real estate scandal he was involved in last year.”

Chuck had almost lost his real estate license in some shady dealings. I’d expected him to leave the area—he was new to Duck—but he’d hung on. It couldn’t have been easy for him—regaining the community’s trust was no small task.

But other than the fact that his mother had been in real estate too and had lost her award medallion here when he was a kid, I knew nothing about Chuck.

“That doesn’t seem like much of a connection for him to reach out to you from the grave,” Gramps said.

“Not even the grave yet,” I reminded him. “In the vision, he wasn’t even dead yet. At least I don’t think so. But it was like he could see me. No one has ever acted like they could see me in a vision. And he said the same thing both times—
Help her
.”

“Maybe he was talking about his cat,” Gramps suggested. “They took a cat out of his house. People get very attached to their pets.”

“Maybe. I guess we’ll find out.”

When I got home, I soaked in a hot bath, but I was too disturbed by the night’s events to really relax. I wasn’t sure if I’d done something different to make my gift behave in this new way or if Chuck himself was the reason for the change. Of course, as with all aspects of the gifts life had given me, there was no guidebook I could consult. No way of knowing what to do next.

Since Kevin’s arrival in Duck, I’d grown accustomed to talking things like this over with him. He had experience in the FBI dealing with paranormal elements. Ann was a powerful psychic, according to Kevin. Her abilities had increased after she’d been shot during a case. She couldn’t handle what she saw anymore.

Having Kevin as a confidant, someone with whom I could discuss things that many other people didn’t understand, had been wonderful. He’d experienced so much more than I ever had. When my own abilities had grown, he’d been there for me.

But now, I didn’t feel like I could just call him or go over and drink coffee with him while we talked. I was going to have to find another way of dealing with what was happening to me.

That left me with my friend Shayla. Shayla was a true medium who could readily talk to ghosts. She was from New Orleans, where her relatives were witches and other interesting occupations.

She knew a lot about the spirit world. We’d met because I’d wanted to contact my mother’s ghost and find a way to put things right between us. That hadn’t happened, but my friendship with Shayla had developed as a result of those efforts.

Sometimes, I was uncomfortable talking to her about my gifts. She freely scoffed at things that I found amazing. I suspected that she’d already seen so many supernatural happenings in her life, she didn’t think mine were all that interesting. She never gave me the warm, fuzzy feeling the way Kevin did. I had to get over that too.

I finally climbed in bed after midnight. A wind had begun blowing from the Atlantic side of the island. I lay there for a long time listening to it, wondering where it had come from and what other places it had been.

I don’t know when I fell asleep, but I was dreaming about the burgundy Lincoln again, the one I’d seen Chuck with at Harris Teeter the night he was killed.

A little girl was sitting on the hood of the car. She had a round face with chubby pink cheeks and big blue eyes. Her brown hair was in curls that looked as though they’d been mussed by the wind I’d heard before I fell asleep.

“Hello. Who are you?” she asked me.

This was obviously going to become a habit. It scared me a little when I considered all the places I’d been in my dreams and visions. If everyone could see me, that made it more personal. Maybe more dangerous.

“I’m Dae,” I said finally, not sure if she could hear me.

She nodded and smiled. “I’m Betsy Sparks. I’m waiting for my daddy to come and get me.”

Betsy Sparks? Chuck had a daughter?

“Where is your daddy?”

“I don’t know.” She shrugged, her tiny shoulders pitiful under the extra-large brown sweater she wore. “I thought he’d be here by now. Can you find him? You’re the finder lady, aren’t you?”

I wasn’t sure what to tell her. I wasn’t sure if this was real or my imagination. I’d convinced myself that what had happened at the beach with Chuck turning his head and talking to me wasn’t real. I didn’t know what to think about this little girl.

“What’s your daddy’s name?” I decided to test her.

“His name is Charlie, but most people call him Chuck. Like that little girl with Charlie Brown, you know?”

“I know.” I was confused. I didn’t know Chuck well, but it seemed like I would know if he had a child. If nothing else, local gossip would’ve been lamenting his involvement in the real estate scandal because he had a daughter who needed him.

The only other possibility came to me slowly. In my defense, I was dreaming. “Did you just move to Duck to live with your daddy?”

“Yes. My mommy—”

Betsy suddenly held up her arms and began kicking at something, or someone. She pounded at it and screamed. She looked as though she were being lifted up and moved from the car by some unseen force. She fought as hard as she could, but she could not free herself from whatever gripped her. She called to her father over and over.