Cape Refuge (4 page)

Still, he didn't plan to back down now. He'd made himself clear, and he intended to stick to it. If they didn't ask Gus Hampton to leave Hanover House, then Jonathan would do everything in his power to persuade Morgan to move out and find another job.

He drove around the southernmost point of the island, then up toward the dock at the mouth of Bull River. By now, Thelma and Wayne had probably made it to the meeting and laid all their cards on the table, and the council members were voting to keep Hanover House open and send engraved invitations to the inmates of every jail in Georgia. His in-laws just had that effect on people.

He heard sirens out the window and looked in his rearview mirror for the flashing lights. Some tourist probably had a fender bender. A squad car came up behind him, then whipped past him and hurried off toward the dock.

As the warehouse came into view, he saw that the police cars and fire trucks congregated in the parking lot just outside the building.

In the center of it all sat Thelma and Wayne's twenty-year-old Regal.

Something was wrong.

He started to turn into the gravel parking lot, but a horn and screeching tires made him slam on his brakes. The car passed, and he tried again, stopping his car among the squad cars and fire trucks rumbling out their impatience. Billy Caldwell, one of the rookie cops on the force, broke into a trot and headed toward the warehouse door.

“Billy!” Jonathan called, leaving his car on the street and getting out. The young man turned around.

“What's going on?” Jonathan asked.

Billy looked as if he'd been caught at something. His sunburned face went blank, and he dropped his hands helplessly to his side. His mouth moved as if he couldn't quite get his lips to form the answer.

Jonathan crossed the parking lot and reached him. “Billy, what is it?”

“It's . . . Thelma and Wayne,” he said. Jonathan stared at him for a moment, trying to make sense of Billy's simple statement. He started toward the door.

“Jonathan, you don't want to go in there,” Billy said.

But he had already opened the door and bolted into the big room.

The place had been turned from a place of worship to a crime scene. Four police officers stood taking pictures and dusting the piano and doors for prints, while others spilled out the side door onto the boardwalk that went down to the dock and Crickets.

Joe McCormick, the detective on the police force, stood at the southwest corner of the makeshift chapel. He was sweating and looked shaken. Jonathan started toward him, but Joe saw him and held out a hand to stop him. “Jonathan, this is no place for you right now. Somebody get him out of here.”

But Jonathan hurried around the pews, getting closer . . .

Between the uniformed legs that blocked his view, a body lay on the floor. He caught a glimpse of the bright yellow sleeve on the small, limp arm . . .

“Thelma!” he shouted and bolted forward.

Joe caught him and tried to hold him back. “Jonathan, you can't get any closer. This is a crime scene.”

“Let me go!” He wrestled his way out of Joe's grip and pushed someone out of his way. Then he saw them, Thelma and Wayne both, lying lifeless on the bloodstained floor.

His body went limp and he stopped fighting. Billy, the young cop with a more compassionate touch, pulled him back away from the scene and walked him out the side door. He felt dizzy, like he might pass out. His heart seemed inadequate to do its job, and his eyes stung. “How . . . how did this happen?” he asked, grabbing Billy's arm. “They were supposed to be at the meeting . . . they were on the agenda. . . .” Even as he spoke, he recognized the absurdity of his statement, as if they'd had no right to die when they'd had other commitments.

“Who did this?”
he screamed. Chess Springer, the old fisherman who had taught him most of what he knew about making a living on the sea, crossed the boardwalk and put his arm around Jonathan's shoulder.

“Come in Crickets and sit down,” Chess said in his raspy, smoke-ravaged voice. “I'll get you some water.”

Jonathan shook free. “I don't need water, Chess. I need answers!”

The old man rubbed his wizened face. “I saw their car and came over to shoot the breeze,” he said. “Found them just like that. Nobody around here heard gunshots or nothing.”

“So they were
shot?
” he asked.

“Seems so, though I didn't look too long. I ran to Crickets and called the police.”

Jonathan turned back to the scene, his mouth open with the silent wail of gut-wrenching anguish. “My wife. How will I tell my wife?” He brought both hands to his head. “I fought with them this morning! I said things . . .”

Horror too deep to voice muted him. Who could have murdered the two kindest people on the island of Cape Refuge? Was it someone they had taken in, a soul so twisted that he would kill the very people who gave him a place to sleep and food to eat, helped him find work, and offered him a reason to live? How many people had they helped over the years? How many lives had they changed? How many hearts had been saved? How much hope had they offered?

And now someone had come in here and murdered them? Cruelly, brutally, cold-bloodedly . . .
murdered
them? It didn't make sense.

He stood on the pier, gaping through that door, wondering when they would stop taking pictures and get Thelma and Wayne off the floor. He couldn't let Morgan know until they did. He couldn't let her see them like this.

He heard a new siren coming and the squad car's wheels on the gravel parking lot. He wished they'd turn the noise off before a crowd formed, before Morgan heard it from City Hall.

He wanted to be the one to tell his wife. Just as soon as he could breathe. . . .

But it was too late.

Through the door, he saw Morgan burst through the front entrance of the warehouse. It was clear from her face that she'd already been told. Two cops tried to hold her back, but she was determined to get to Thelma and Wayne.

“No!” she screamed as she saw the policemen clustered near the front of the makeshift sanctuary. “Aw, no!”

Jonathan bolted back into the warehouse, pulled her into his arms, and tried to hold her.

“They can't be dead!” The torment ripped from her chest, shook her body, emptied her. She fell against him, weak and unsteady, just as he'd been moments before. But her need gave him back his strength, and he concentrated that strength on trying to hold her together.

 

B
lair didn't have enough information to accept the deaths as fact. She sat in the front seat of Cade's squad car, staring at a chip on his windshield. He was saying something about the time of death, the murder weapon, the lack of witnesses.

They would know more, he said, when they finished doing the perimeter search for evidence and could examine the bodies.

The thought of her parents lying murdered on the floor of that warehouse short-circuited her mind, and she found herself looking out at the schooners docked at slips nearby, with their masts tall and bare, and scant activity on board some of them. The smell of salt water fish drifted on the warm breeze.

She didn't move, but inside her, emotional troops lined up for battle.

“You okay?” he asked.

The words came soft and unhurried, and she thought of telling Cade that he didn't have to baby-sit her. She just needed to sit here for a minute. Just needed to get her brain working again.

“You're shaking,” he said, and took her hand. “You can't go in the warehouse . . . but I can take you around to the boardwalk. Or you can just sit here, or I can take you home. Whatever you want.”

Her mouth was dry, and she found it hard to swallow. His hand was big and warm over the ice cold of hers. “I don't know how to do this,” she whispered finally.

He didn't ask her what she didn't know how to do. “None of us does, Blair.”

She wished she had her computer with her, that she could pound on the keys and do a quick search of the Internet and come up with answers. . . . But she wouldn't even know the questions until she got out of this car.

She reached for the door handle, and Cade let her hand go and got out. He came around before she got the door open, and opened it for her.

She thought of some unnamed killer walking across this parking lot, going into that building, killing her parents . . . and rage like a nuclear bomb exploded inside her.

“Cade, why aren't you hunting him down? Why haven't you caught him?”

“We're trying, Blair. I need to be in there right now, working the scene.”

“Then go,” she said through her teeth. “Stop worrying about me and go. Find him, Cade, before he gets away.”

“I'll find him, Blair. You can count on it.”

He started into the building but stopped when he saw that she was following. “Blair, you can't come in here.”

She trudged forward until she was face-to-face with him, and a slow, defiant, desperate agony rose in her chest like a scream. “Get out of my way, Cade.”

He caught her arm. “Blair, you can't. For your own good. You can see them later, when they've been cleaned up. But right now—”

She jerked past him and went into the building. An odd thought struck her: she'd never been here when they weren't here too. It was as if the building was an extension of them, a floor built beneath them, walls built around, a roof covering them.

Cade took her arm again. “Blair, please. Don't do this.”

“I have to see them,” she said, feeling a throbbing beginning in her temple, on the side where the flesh was coarse and scarred.

She heard her sister wailing on the boardwalk outside the door, heard Joe McCormick urging Cade to keep Blair out. But she walked toward them, intent on seeing what some maniac had done to her parents.

Cade took her arm gently, no longer trying to hold her back. His voice broke as he said, “Blair, if you see this, it will be stamped on your mind for the rest of your life. Let me take you outside.”

She suddenly went weak, and Cade turned her and walked her to the side door, where Jonathan and Morgan clung together. The room seemed to tip, and shadows shifted on the walls. She was going to faint, she thought. Like some prissy little thing who couldn't stand the sight of blood. . . .

As Cade got her onto the pier and lowered her to a bench, she heard her sister wailing with gut-emptying anguish. She thought of her mother lying on the floor there, with people gawking and probing her. Thelma had a thing about clean clothes. She hated for anyone to see her with a stain. There was bound to be a lot of blood, which meant stains on her mother's clothes and skin. . . . “Their clothes,” Blair said to no one in particular. “I have to get them a change of clothes.”

She started off the pier and back toward the parking lot, wondering what her mother would want her to bring. “She'll need a dry pair of slacks and a blouse, maybe the pink one, and some clean socks and another pair of shoes . . . underwear too. And a hairbrush . . .”

Someone touched her arm, and she turned. She hadn't known Cade was still with her, but there he was, looking down at her with worried eyes as his hands gripped her shoulders. “Blair, you sure you're all right?”

“I'll be back as soon as I get them, Cade,” she whispered.

“Blair.”

She swallowed back the panic rising in her throat. “I have to hurry,” she said, moving away from him and only then realizing that she had left her car at City Hall.

“They don't need clothes, Blair.” His voice was gentle, patient, pulling her back to reality.

She stopped in the parking lot and looked helplessly around. A van with the words WSAV-TV pulled in, and a crew jumped out. The familiar anchor, dressed in a white shirt and tie, with sweat rings under his arms, was trying to hook up his microphone as he headed toward her.

“You can't go in there,” Cade said. “It's a crime scene.”

“Can you tell us what happened?”

“Not at this time,” Cade said, turning Blair back toward the pier.

But Blair resisted. “Don't you take their pictures,” she told a man emerging from the truck with a television camera. “Don't you dare. You get back in that van and you leave. Cade, tell them—”

“
Chief
Cade?” the anchor asked. “Chief, could you please confirm the names of the victims? We heard on the scanner that it was Thelma and Wayne Owens.”

“Excuse me,” he said and firmly escorted Blair away from them.

“Stop them, Cade,” she said. “Don't let them put my parents on the news. Not like that.”

Cade left her at the bench where she had sat moments before, but she couldn't stay put; she followed him, a few steps behind, as he went through the side door of the warehouse again. Her eyes swept the room—the pews she had squirmed on as a child, writing notes to her sister, then swearing to her father that they were notes on his sermons. Her gaze locked on the piano on which their mother had taught Morgan and her to play. Blair had hated to practice, and eventually Thelma had given up and let her quit. But Morgan, always the dutiful daughter, had become almost as good at the keyboard as their mother.

Blair wished now that she hadn't quit playing. It had meant so much to her mother for her to learn. She looked at the keys—and at the bare rectangle at the center of the piano above the keys, where an old mirror had once hung, for who knows what reason. Her mother had taken it off when Blair had started to play, because the sight of her own reflection was too distracting to Blair. Mirrors had never been her friends, and her mother had helped her avoid them.

The front door opened, and the Chatham County medical examiner came into the room. She watched as he walked toward the crowd of officers across the room. They stepped away from the body as the man stooped next to them . . .

. . . and as she caught the first glimpse of their lifeless bodies, her stomach lurched. She stumbled to the edge of the boardwalk and threw up into the water.