The Haunted Beach (Tropical Breeze Cozy Mystery Book 4) (11 page)

Taylor wasn’t smiling. “Yeah. At least they had that.”

As they walked down Santorini Drive, they saw Dan Ryder coming out of Claire Ford’s house. They were headed in the same direction, and he fell in step beside them.

“How is she?” Ed asked.

“Sleeping. I managed to get her to bed. I talked to Willa, and she’s going to check in on her later.”

“That’s good. It was good of you to take care of her,” Ed said.

Taylor gave Ed an elbow, and he reacted like he’d been programmed, saying, “This is my friend, Taylor Verone. She’s not my girlfriend. Taylor, this is my neighbor, Daniel Ryder.”

Used to Ed’s quirks, Dan just said it was nice to meet her, and they all kept moving.

When Dan parted from them and went into his own house, Taylor chortled, and Ed looked at her. “What?” he said.

“I’ll just bet he managed to get her to bed.”

“Oh, Taylor, don’t be crude. The poor woman had just found a body.”

She gave a negligent shrug, but she continued to smirk.

Ed put the paintings down in his office and went to see what Bastet was doing. He’d never had a pet. He felt a strange nervousness about it, as if he wasn’t sure he could measure up. When he started asking Taylor question after question, she told him to calm down.

“It’s easy. It’s all about having a routine. Just remember, animals like a routine.”

“But what if I forget to feed her or something?”

“Believe me, she’ll remind you.”

During all this, Bastet sat on the back of the sofa watching them, looking mildly amused.

“I don’t suppose I should let myself get too excited about it,” he finally said. “After all, she may just as quickly decide she wants to go back with you.”

“She may. Now you know how I feel. You and Bastet get comfortable. I’ll be back in about an hour.”

“Would she be all right by herself if I went out again?” He was gazing steadily into the cat’s eyes, and he seemed to be asking her permission, not Taylor’s.

“What now?”

“I thought I’d go check and see if they found Peggy. At the very least, somebody should be with Parker. He’s always writing those macho commando stories, but Peggy wears the pants in that house. At least, she’s the stronger of the two. He’d be lost by himself.”

“Don’t worry about Bastet. She’ll be fine. Go ahead and check on your neighbor, and I’ll be back before you know it. If you’re still with Parker, how do I get in?”

He gave her the code to his garage door keypad, which was
not
1-2-3-4.

It took Parker so long to answer the door that Ed nearly gave up. While he waited, he conjured up eight different scenarios depicting what a man might be doing while his wife is missing, only two of which were nefarious. When Parker answered the door, Ed was relieved to see that Scenario 4, hysterically weeping, was not the correct one. Something closer to the top of the list – worrying himself sick – seemed to be it. Even his moustache looked worried, probably because he kept chewing his upper lip.

“Ed?” he asked, unsure, as if he were looking into a black hole instead of squinting into white-hot sunshine.

“I don’t want to intrude,” Ed said quickly. “I just wanted to see how you were. Any news?”

“Come inside.” He closed the door and strode away in a businesslike manner, leaving Ed confused in the foyer. When he came back, he said, “I found this.”

He had a stack of computer paper in his hands. “Well?” he said, looking at Ed impatiently. “You can hardly read it here in the hall, can you? Come on.”

Ed followed him into the dining room where Parker dropped the stack of paper onto the table and said, “Her latest manuscript. She was only about a quarter of the way through, but you can’t miss what she was doing. I’m scared, Ed. She was writing about the Dolores-Frieda thing.”

Ed looked at the top sheet, looked at Parker, adjusted his glasses and cleared his throat. “You want me to read it now?”

“Don’t bother. I’ll tell you.” Parker abruptly sat down and gestured for Ed to do the same. “It’s set in the nineteenth century, of course, but with people like Frieda and Dolores, that just makes it all the more believable. They were straight out of the Regency period. Did you know that Frieda’s first marriage was arranged by her mother?”

Ed nodded.

“Fantastic! An arranged marriage! In this day and age. But it’s true. Damn fool drank himself to death before he could even see his child born, but that’s beside the point.” He jabbed at the pile of papers like he wanted to hurt it. “She was doing research!”

It took a moment for Ed to process this. When he did, he took his glasses off altogether and set them aside, gaping at Parker short-sightedly. “You mean she was following Dolores at night to get material for a book?”

“The story she was working on is too much like the real thing to be a coincidence. Romance writers love ghosts,” he confided in an aside. “At first, when Poppy and Rosie started telling us about Dolores’s delusions, Peggy was as interested as I was. But this last time, when they told us they had you investigating, Peggy wasn’t happy. Something was wrong. Now I know what – she didn’t want you to catch her dancing around with Dolores, pretending to be Frieda.”

“You think that’s what she was doing?” Ed said, genuinely flabbergasted.

“Oh, lord, I don’t know. That’s the hell of being a writer. You can imagine anything.” He suddenly faced Ed directly and locked eyes with him. “You’re not a fiction writer. Does any of this seem plausible to you? In the real world, I mean.”

“Um, well, yes, I suppose so, perhaps it could be. Peggy being a writer like yourself, she could probably imagine anything too, and act on it. Any other person – say, a tax accountant – would just say ‘Dear me, what a shame,’ and do nothing about it.”

Parker weighed this, then nodded decisively. “You’re right. I have to think like Peggy. What would she do when confronted by a bizarre situation? She’d go after it. The same way I would if a rift formed in the ether over Crescent Beach and Daisy Slicers started coming out of it. I would have to go after them, whatever the danger.”

“Me too,” Ed said.

“You would? You’ve read my books?”

“No, but a rift in the ether would get my attention, professionally. Now, how does knowing what Peggy’s agenda was help us find her?” he asked pensively.

“I don’t know, but why don’t you go ahead and read this, after all. Maybe you’ll spot something I’ve missed.”

Ed left his glasses on the table, since he didn’t need them for reading, and picked up the first page.

By the time Edson finished reading, he’d gotten quite an education. He’d had no idea lady authors were capable of such things. As tame as Peggy’s love scenes were, they made him squirm, and he was very relieved when his time in Regency England was over.

Parker had gone to the kitchen to answer a phone call. Ed had paused in his reading to hear if it was the police calling, but it was just a friend checking to see if Peggy was back, so he’d kept on reading.

Parker had paced nervously from the kitchen to the living room and back, watching to see when Ed was finished, and when the last sheet was face-down on the pile, he came in and said, “Well?”

“I think you’re right. She was using a very similar situation, though she made the mother a step-mother, and had the ghost haunting both of the young lovers, not just the girl. But Dolores’s situation had definitely inspired this. I think Ben would have had something to say about this when it was published,” he added with a dire look.

“He’d never have known a thing about it. Him read a romance novel? Even Dolores wouldn’t have read it. She liked mysteries. I can see where Peggy would have been tempted to use it. I just hope it hasn’t led to anything . . . .”

“I’m sure it hasn’t,” Ed said too quickly.

The men gazed at one another a moment in silence. Then Parker said, “You’re a good man, Ed. A good friend.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I came over to see if I could do anything, but –“

“And you have! You read Peggy’s romance, which is more than I could have asked a man like Dan Ryder to do.” He grinned at that, and Ed chuckled.

“No, it’s men like Dan who inspire women to write these things,” Ed said. He’d noticed more than a passing resemblance between Dan and Lord Rafael “Rafe” Buckinghamshire, the hero of Peggy’s book. “Look, would you like to sit and discuss this for a while? Try to get a handle on it?”

But Parker was already shaking his head. “I’ve been thinking about that while I’ve been waiting for you to finish. There’s nothing to discuss. It’s obvious what was going on. I guess I’d better tell the police about this.”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Yeah. I’ll do that now.”

“Well, I think I’ll check in at home. By the way, how was Willa doing when you left her? She’s such a quiet woman, you never know what she’s thinking, but she’s bound to be taking this pretty hard. Dolores was like a sister to her.”

“Oh, don’t worry about her. I left right after you, but Rod looked like he was all set to stay for the rest of the day, and Willa seemed glad to have his company. Matter of fact, I was starting to feel like a fifth wheel,” he added with a knowing look.

“Oh,” Ed said, nodding and trying to return Parker’s smile. “Well, that’s all right then. I’ll just go on home. Suddenly I’m dead tired.”

“No wonder. From what I understand, you were up all night with Ben.”

“Yes. Yes, I’m very tired. I think I’ll go home now.”

As he walked from his next-door neighbor’s house to his own, he saw Rod and Willa coming down Santorini Drive together in Willa’s little blue car. They stopped beside him.

“We’re going out for dinner,” Willa told him from the passenger seat. “Want to come? We’re just going down to The Oasis.”

“No, you two go ahead,” Ed said automatically.

They really didn’t seem to mind.

“After all,” he said to himself as he watched them drive away, “three’s a crowd.”

He walked very slowly up to his own front door.

“Slow down.”

Teddy ignored her.

Teddy Force’s car was a 1967 Austin-Healy 3000 (British Racing Green), and he loved it enough to take it to bed with him. Actually, it would have fit, since he had a king-size bed and the car was barely big enough to contain two human beings. But he didn’t think of his vehicle as a warm, living thing; it was a work of art. Something to be prayed over and gazed at in reverent silence. Also, you could drive it, a purely unnecessary side-benefit that was so awesome it made Teddy’s mind go blank.

But Teddy was not driving that car, which made him snippy. He was driving Lily’s late-model Santa Fe
(boring!)
, and only the fact that it had dark-tinted windows that nobody could see through would get him into the driver’s seat.
The
Teddy Force, driving a kids-in-the-backseat car? He never told her directly that it was uncool, but a stink hung in the air between them whenever he was at the wheel of it, (he never let her drive, even though it was her car).

He had lost many arguments before he got into the fully-adjustable, air-bagged driver’s seat of the Santa Fe: (1) There was no room for luggage in the Austin-Healy. Not
real
luggage. (2) Porter . . . ? (3) Very few gas stations had the Austin-Healy’s preferred type of fuel. And the most compelling reason of all, (4) The Austin-Healy was under a tarp at Cadbury House in Tropical Breeze, Florida while Teddy roamed the country, a knight errant, tilting at ghosts.

Even the fact that the Santa Fe was a really hot red didn’t make him feel any better. No, the only thing Teddy felt good about was that Porter couldn’t drool or throw up in the Austin-Healy from the back of the Santa Fe.

“I’m keeping up with traffic,” Teddy snapped when Lily told him to slow down again.

They were rocketing down I-95 toward St. Augustine, passing box trucks, minivans and semis, but managing to keep up with a guy on a motorcycle who liked to bank himself almost down to the pavement as he slalomed through traffic.

“Teddy, SLOW DOWN!”

He turned his head and stared at her long enough to almost drive into the backseat of a sedately-driven Plymouth with its original owner peeping over the steering wheel.

“That’s it, Teddy. Either slow down or pull over and let me drive.”

From the backseat, Porter barked happily. The dog was only popping out happy noises because he was enjoying the ride, but Teddy interpreted it as agreement with Lily and did, in fact, slow down.

Another ten minutes down the road, Teddy broke the heavy silence by asking, “Did the girls give you a phone number?”

“What girls?”

“You know, the twins. The ones that e-mailed me.”

“They gave me everything but their panty and bra sizes,” Lily said, still steaming.

Teddy smiled. He was never one to stay angry for long. He was pretty much always on the smooth ride of a well-oiled ego, and the thought of a pair of unknown twin women breathlessly e-mailing him for help was titillating. He wondered if they were Swedish.

Lily watched the smile bloom on his face and easily read his mind. She was used to being engaged to a paranormal rock star, and what went on in his imagination didn’t bother her. Since they worked together, she was able to keep him from doing anything really stupid with the fans, and that’s all she cared about.

She dug around in her huge hobo bag and came out with the e-mail. “Cell phone numbers for both of them, home address (they live together), and an invitation to stay with them, if desired, which you won’t be doing,” she added, watching the smile grow evil.

“Nice to know we have a fall-back position if Ed gets scrappy and throws us out.”

“We already have a fall-back position. Your father is still at Cadbury House with Taylor and Michael, isn’t he? We’ll just fall back there if we have to.”

Teddy teased her with a pout, cracked a real smile, and said, “Call them.”

“Call the twins?”

“Sure. Let’s stop and interview them before we see Ed. That way if he starts holding out on us, we’ll know.”

Hoping the twins would turn out to be pimple-faced goofballs with braces, Lily got out her cell phone and dialed.

“Is this Rosie Tays?” she said when the call was answered. “This is Teddy Force’s production assistant, Lily Parsons.” She paused. “Ms. Tays? Are you there?”

The answer came through loud enough for Teddy to hear, and he leaned closer, grinning.

“Oh, my gracious yes! I’m here. Are you really Teddy’s – you know – whatever?”

Lily grinned. “I am definitely his whatever, Ms. Tays. Teddy has received your e-mail and is very concerned. In fact, we’re on our way to St. Augustine right now. We think we need to confer with Edson about this. But first, if you and your sister are available, we thought we’d stop by and interview both of you. Are you free this afternoon?” She checked the GPS. “We should be there around 2:00. Oh, okay, I’ll wait.”

Over the phone, she told Teddy, “They’re working, but she thinks they can get away. She’s asking her sister.” She went back to the phone and listened. “She’s
telling
her sister: they’re taking the afternoon off. Mr. Willard, whoever he is, is just going to have to wait until Friday afternoon to come clean. . . . Sister agrees.”

She put the phone back by her mouth. “Are you sure? We don’t want to get you in trouble with your boss.”

She listened, nodding, as Ms. Tays gabbled away too fast for Teddy to make it out.

“Oh, that’s excellent! Thank you so much, Ms. Tays. Oh, thank you. Rosie, then. Thank you so much, Rosie. We’ll look forward to seeing you and your sister in an hour or so. If it’s more convenient, we could meet you at a coffee shop. No? Then we’ll be at your condo on the island around two. See you then.”

Turning to Teddy, she said, “They’re cleaning ladies. That’s the thing they ‘do’ for Ed, as referenced in their e-mail.”

“I knew he was too boring to hire twins to do anything else,” he said, as Lily punched his arm and Porter barked again.

Teddy’s dreams of long-legged blonds in French maid costumes exploded with a bang, as two tough-looking redheads came rolling out of the building at them. Even Porter reared back. They could only stand their ground on the hot tarmac of the parking lot of the Sand Castle Condominium complex and hope they weren’t about to be hugged. Individually, the twins looked like they could crush rib cages; as a tag team they could probably pop heads off.

“Omigod, it’s
Porter!”
they said with one voice. They went for the dog like they had once gone for Rick Springfield at an airport, and they were down on the asphalt letting him lick their faces before they even took a good look at Teddy.

When they stood up they quickly introduced themselves. After shaking hands vigorously and inviting Teddy and Lily into their “humble abode,” the twins led them up to the building. Their humble abode turned out to be a third-floor condominium overlooking a radiantly sparkling ocean from a pristine living room full of very large furniture.

“No, no, you two keep your shoes on,” said whichever twin it was, as they shed their flip flops. “We’re used to running around barefoot.”

“We went by the Publix on the way home and got some coffee cake,” the other one said, “but if you’re hungry, we’re pretty good cooks.”

“No thanks,” Lily said, beginning to like the twins very much. “We hit the Chick-fil-A before I called you.”

Whatever the twins imagined about the lives of TV personalities, it didn’t include fast food joints. When Lily saw the looks on their faces, she said, “We couldn’t leave Porter in a hot car while we ate, so we did the drive-through.”

The twins smiled.

“Well then, sit down you two, sit down. Sweet or unsweet? Or maybe something stronger?”

“Iced tea is fine,” Lily said, catching onto the southern way of referring to it. “Unsweet, thanks.”

“Me too,” Teddy said.

Shy glances told Lily that the twins’ fussing over Porter didn’t mean Teddy wasn’t the main attraction.

The one on the left went into the kitchen and took down an expensive pasta bowl, filled it with water, then set it on the floor for Porter. He bounced over and stuck his face in the bowl, drinking, blowing bubbles, washing his snout and drenching the floor all at the same time. Then he lifted his streaming face and shook his head. The twins were delighted.

“Porter!” Lily said. “I’m so sorry, um, Rosie, he’s a little messy.”

But the look on the twin’s face (it was Poppy) said Porter could do no wrong, and after gazing at him adoringly, she came away to the dining room table and sat down while Rosie brought the iced tea.

“Well, Rosie, Poppy, your e-mail is pretty detailed,” Lily began, as the twins continued to shyly avoid looking at Teddy. “But would you mind starting at the top and telling us everything you can think of anyway?”

“Not at all,” the one on the left said.

In a perfectly-timed cross-talk session, where Teddy and Lily turned their heads every few seconds and the twins rattled along like relay racers, weaving the story without ever once talking over one another, they told them the whole story as they knew it.

“And the only odd thing I can think of that Mr. D-D doesn’t know about yet is the way Mrs. P took it. After that experience on the third floor, we forgot to mention it to him. Mrs. P definitely didn’t like the idea of having Mr. D-D on the job. Did you notice it too, Poppy?”

“I sure did. She didn’t like it one little bit.”

“And nobody’s happy about The Missus and old Miss Frieda.”

“But everybody likes to talk about it,” Lily said.

“We’re all concerned,” Rosie said. “You can’t say it’s none of our business. It is our business, them being our customers and all.”

“We look out for our customers. Some of them would be dead now,” she added, without explaining. Teddy did a double-take, but was beyond asking questions.

The twins finally wound to a stop and looked at their audience, who were against the backs of their chairs, exhausted.

“I’m sure you look upon your customers as personal friends,” Teddy said warmly. “You two are just like that, aren’t you?”

Lily watched, bemused, as Teddy’s charm turned the beefy pair of twins into a couple of blushing little girls. And nobody blushes like a redhead.

Porter had long since fallen asleep with his soaking chin resting on Poppy’s bare foot. She had been deeply honored, and though her leg had fallen asleep, she wouldn’t move it.

Taylor’s SUV had been in the driveway when Ed came out of Parker’s house, so she was inside with Bastet doing whatever people do with cats. It was time for his cat lesson, and he steeled himself.

But before he could open the door, he heard a voice behind him.

“How’s Parker?” Dan Ryder asked, coming across the street toward him.

“He’s all right.”

“Have they found Peggy?”

“Not yet.”

Dan gazed toward the beach with his thousand-yard stare. “They’ve got the Coast Guard out, and the cops are going to all the beachfront houses along here, asking if anybody saw anything. Where she could be beats me. She’s not one of those people who are always walking on the beach.”

“No.” He thought about Peggy’s manuscript and decided not to mention it.

Dan shifted his shoulders uneasily beneath his plain white tee shirt. “Bad day to be alone. I’m antsy. Want to take a walk on the beach with me?”

Ed glanced at his house, thought for a moment, and finally said, “Sure.”

“Do you think Parker would like to come?”

“He won’t leave the house. He gave Detective Bruno his land-line number without thinking. He left a message for him, giving him his cell phone number, but he won’t leave until he’s sure Bruno got it. He’s waiting to see if he’ll call. Before we go, I just have to check in with my cat sitter.”

“You have a cat?”

“I think so.”

He walked away quickly as Dan studied him from behind, thinking he sure was an odd little guy.

They strode the walkover in a state of silence that was natural for Dan, but very uncomfortable for Ed. Once they were on the beach, near the waterline, they headed north. Desperate to break the silence, Ed felt like he was getting to the bursting point when Dan quietly said, “You want to tell me what this is all about?”

After saying, “I wish I knew,” Ed proceeded to give Dan a comprehensive brief of his investigation so far, with the exclusion of Peggy’s book.

After listening to Ed’s convoluted story, Dan was satisfied that his squirrely neighbor didn’t really know anything.

Lily and Teddy stayed at the twins’ condo much longer than they had intended to, and gradually the twins relaxed and were able to look into Teddy’s hypnotic eyes without keeling over. Some cunning instinct led Rosie to suggest that Porter might want to take a walk on the beach, rather than directly asking if Lily or Teddy did.

Porter didn’t know what Rosie was suggesting, precisely, but it had included the word “walk.” He was always ready for a walk. When he popped up onto his paws, wiggled all over and barked a shrill one, Teddy decided that Porter did, indeed, want to see the beach, possibly to further the investigation. He was, after all, The Ghost-Sniffing Dog. That was all it took.