The Haunted Beach (Tropical Breeze Cozy Mystery Book 4) (14 page)

She came up to him with a troubled look on her face and said, “Ed, do you mind taking a walk with me? I want to talk to you about something.”

“Of course,” he said. “Let me just go home and change my shoes.”

“Why not just walk barefoot in the sand? I do. I just leave my sandals at the end of the walkover.”

Such a thing had never occurred to Ed. He was usually rigidly organized, and never went to the beach without the proper attire. “I suppose I could. Yes, I definitely could.”

But at that moment, looking over Willa’s shoulder, he saw the twins coming down the drive waving to  him wildly.

“Is that the cleaning ladies?” Willa said, turning to see what Ed was looking at. “What are they doing here on a Thursday?”

“Teddy Force is in my house. They’re fans.”

“How nice of you to invite them over. Is he here to do a show with you?”

“I did not invite the twins. They simply came. And don’t worry, Teddy will not be investigating our little problem here in Santorini. I suppose you know all about it.”

“Yes,” she said quietly. “I do. Oh, Ed, leave it alone. It’s over.”

“It isn’t. Peggy is still missing.”

Her attitude surprised him, and he would have tried to get her to talk, but the twins had arrived and were shouting.

“Mr. D-D,” Rosie yelled, “are you deaf? You’ve got to come home. There’s an emergency!”

Willa touched his arm. “It’s okay. We’ll talk another time. It wasn’t important anyway.”

He gave her a wan smile and followed the twins down to find out about the emergency.

Inside the front door, just outside his office, Purity LeStrange was looking smug.

“I distinctly remember closing the door to my office before I left,” Ed said, furious. “What are you doing in there, Teddy? Get out!”

“Listen, Ed,” Lily said, “I tried to get a hotel, but nobody will take Porter, and Teddy won’t go without him.”

“Is that what this is about?” he asked incredulously. “Mr. Force, if you please! Out of my office!”

The intrepid pursuer of ghosts had come to the door but still stood just inside the office. “Facing down the mess you’ve made. You brought her right in! Unbelievable!”

“What on earth are you talking about?”

The twins shuddered, stared all around, then glared at Ed. They were all staring at him, Lily and Porter too, and Ed stormed into his office and demanded to know what was going on. One look around the walls told him. Purity began to explain, but Ed had already figured it out.

“You brought the paintings in and hung them around the walls yourself, didn’t you, Mr. Darby-Deaver? And your office is painted Haint Blue. A color that keeps ghosts out – and also keeps them in. These are spirit paintings of Frieda Strawbridge, the entity which is haunting Santorini, are they not? Your friends Rosie and Poppy have told me all about them. Frankly, they were stunned to see them in there. We all were. You brought them in and nailed them to the wall, and now the spirit is here and she can’t get out. You have haunted your own office. Why, Mr. Darby-Deaver? I cannot convince myself that you didn’t realize,” she said, leering at him to convey that she knew very well he hadn’t, “what the result would be. But the situation is fraught with danger. She must be exorcized! I shall attend to it,” she added in a thinning voice, as if she were already going into a trance. “She must be forced out of this house before she harms you.”

“She should be laid to rest absolutely,” Teddy said, leveling an earnest look at Ed. “Really, Ed, this is nothing to play around with. Frieda’s gotta go.”

“You leave her alone,” Ed said before he could think it through. “I brought her in and I want her here, dammit.”

Stunned faces confronted him, but he couldn’t back down.

The twins had hovered in the doorway, refusing to step into the office. They consulted one another, then turned defiant faces toward Ed.

“We’re not setting foot in your office again until you have Purity do her thing,” Rosie said.

“Good! Now get out, all of you. Out!”

Looking worried, confused and defeated, they all left, until Ed was alone in his office with the cat, Bastet. Once he had slammed the door behind them, he started rooting around in his desk until he found a small key.

“From now on,” he told the cat, “that door’s going to stay locked when I’m not in here.”

Ed had forgotten that Willa had wanted to talk to him, and he wouldn’t remember until it was too late.

By Friday, the Medical Examiner had classified Dolores Brinker’s death an accidental drowning. Detective Bruno wasn’t happy about it, but he was often a disappointed man. He’d learned to live with such things. The fact that another woman was also missing left the case open, in his opinion, and he would bide his time. He couldn’t beef about the ME’s report, because the victim had no suspicious bruises or broken bones, and given her age and medical history, the idea that she had simply wandered into the ocean in the middle of the night and drowned was all too believable.

Having been a Strawbridge, her obituary was a long one. Most subscribers to
The Record
in St. Augustine and
The Beach Buzz
in Tropical Breeze had never heard of her, and those that did remember her were surprised she’d still been alive.

Ben Brinker and Willa Garden planned a small memorial service a week after the drowning, but as for the interment, that was going to be in New York, and even Ben wasn’t going to attend.

“She’s being hijacked,” he told Ed furiously. “I may have been allowed the pleasure of her company while she was alive, but her body goes back to the family now, like I was just renting her or something.”

Ed looked at Willa, but she was in the last pew of the chapel with her head bent.

Ed had arrived at the memorial service early, and the three of them were alone in a small side chapel at St. Anastasia’s. The Strawbridge family had been Presbyterian, but in a petty act of defiance, Ben was holding the service at a Catholic church. Then, in an even greater act of defiance, he was holding an informal dinner at a pizza joint, on the pretext that it had been Dolores’s favorite take-out place. Ed refrained from speculation: Ben had made his choices for sentimental reasons, and that was that. For the moment.

“You were her husband,” Ed pointed out. “That makes you next-of-kin, legally. You can bury her here if you want to.”

“It’s what Dolores wanted herself. She wanted me there, too, someday, but dammit, I’m not going. Just to prove a point, I went out and bought my own cemetery plot a while back, over on the mainland. I guess I’ll have to rest in peace all by my lonesome.”

“So where is she going to be buried?”

“She’s being
interred
in the Strawbridge family mausoleum on Clarence Strawbridge’s estate in upstate New York. Glory hallelujah and a chorus of angels, no doubt. It’s being run by a foundation now, but the family reserved the legal right to have interments there until this generation died out. She’s going to be laid to rest next to her mother. So Frieda wins in the end.”

By then, their other neighbors were beginning to arrive, and Willa stood up and went forward with Ben to greet them.

Parker Peavey came in by himself, looking lost. Ed went to him.

“How are you holding up, Parker?”

He looked into Ed’s eyes like he couldn’t quite focus. “I guess I’d better take notes,” he said. “I may be doing this myself soon.”

“Don’t think about that now, if you can help it,” Ed said gently.

“You’re right. One death at a time, even if they happened the same night.”

“We don’t know that Peggy is dead.”

“What’s the alternative?” Parker said, his voice rising. Dan and Ben looked over and then looked away again quickly. “The only other possibility is that she’s left me, and she hasn’t. I know that much. It’s just this waiting . . . .”

Ed groped desperately for something to say, caught Willa’s wide eyes, and was relieved when the priest came in and asked Ben if he could begin.

“I think this would be a good time,” Ben said.

They filed into the first two pews. Ed counted ten people in all. The twins had come, dressed in identical black, and Taylor had come from Tropical Breeze. Besides Ben, Willa, Ed and Parker, the only people who had shown up were the other residents of Santorini: Claire, Rod and Dan. Teddy and Lily had stayed back at Ed’s house; they’d never met Dolores.

Even the tiny chapel seemed too big, with only ten people present. The priest’s voice seemed to echo against the marble walls and make everything more lonely and sad.

Ed couldn’t make himself block out what Parker had said: another memorial service was in their future, unless Peggy somehow turned up alive. He found himself vaguely hoping that her fame as an author would turn her memorial into a bigger event than this pathetic little coda to a long life.

He raised his eyes to the lectern where the priest was talking and felt a flash of anger at Frieda. She had borne Dolores, but she hadn’t let her live her own life. No friends allowed but Willa, who amounted to a paid companion. No contact with her extended family – Frieda had cut herself off from them when Dolores was just a baby, and most of them had died off by now anyway. And no marriage, except one that had happened by accident, and Frieda had quickly taken control of that situation by trapping them in a gilded cage where Dolores would still be under her thumb.

The priest was wrapping it up, and Ed realized he hadn’t heard a word. The man hadn’t known Dolores anyway; he was just parroting whatever Willa and Ben had told him earlier in the day. As Ben shook the priest’s hand, Ed gazed at him and realized how he’d aged in the last week. From a slightly dapper silver-haired man he’d degenerated into a sad sack who was doing his own laundry for the first time in a long time, and doing it badly. He was a mess.

But he had been Dolores’s mad romance, and Ed was glad for that.

He lined up behind Taylor to speak to Ben and Willa before leaving. When it was Taylor’s turn to shake Ben’s hand, Ed heard her say, “Sorry for your loss,” in a frigid way, and frowned at the back of her neck.

When he got outside he found Taylor waiting for him.

“He killed her,” she said. “I
know
it. He married her for her money, and once her mother was dead and couldn’t make a stink about it, he killed her.”

“Taylor, keep your voice down,” Ed said. “Something else is going on here. I can’t quite get it sorted out yet, but why would he have killed Peggy, too?”

“For the obvious reason: she was a witness.”

“Then he could have waited for another night when there was no witness.”

Taylor begrudgingly said, “I guess so,” but obviously wasn’t satisfied.

He hadn’t told anybody about Peggy’s manuscript, and as he thought about telling Taylor, Parker walked by and Ed snapped his mouth shut.

The others were already driving away. Taylor started walking toward her SUV, but then she turned around and said, “Wake up, Ed. You always make everything too complicated. I’ll see you at the restaurant. And that’s another thing,” she said, coming back three steps and confronting him. “A
pizza joint?
He killed her, Ed. He’s not even bothering to be decent about all this.”

When she walked away, Ed got into his little green Geo Metro, started it up, waited the usual ten seconds for the clanking to stop, and drove away.

Clever Purity LeStrange came up with a ghost for Teddy. Since Ed wouldn’t allow her to cleanse his office or participate in the Santorini investigation, she needed something to keep Teddy coming to her place, and as Lily had expected, Purity had a ghost in her back pocket. Something about weird noises in an abandoned warehouse. Let them exorcize away, as long as they did it out in Spuds, Ed thought. He didn’t want to be there. With Teddy Force present, Purity would let herself go in a way that would give Ed nightmares for years.

On Monday, when the twins came to clean, they brought more baked goods. With the exception of the office, the entire house was burnished to a happy glow.

As the twins worked in the rest of the house, Ed sat in his office with the door shut, busy and happy behind a desk he had dusted himself.

After that first frisson of superstitious fear, Ed found he could live with the spirit paintings very well. In fact, as the days went by, he even began to find them comforting. That might have been because the cat, Bastet, had gotten into the habit of coming into the office and spending the day curled up on a windowsill, watching him. The cat never seemed nervous about the paintings.

He decided he could get along very well with a ghost in his office.

It was almost as if she were helping him.

A week after the memorial service, Willa Garden stood uncertainly in front of Claire Ford’s door.

After that first dinner party, where she’d made such a fool of herself going on and on about her boring little life, Claire had avoided her. Willa didn’t blame her. She knew she wasn’t very interesting. But now that Dolores was gone, she had no other woman to talk to, and she needed a friend.

Claire opened the door, saw who it was and widened her pale green eyes. Willa nearly apologized and left, but the sound of a car turning into Santorini Drive was like a poke in the ribs. She didn’t want anybody to see her hovering on the doorstep like this.

“I hope I’m not intruding, but I need somebody to talk to, and I think you’re going through the same thing I am just now, aren’t you? I didn’t mean to spy on you, but our houses line up so exactly, don’t they? And everything was so awful, we were all keeping a look-out for one another, and I couldn’t help but notice – you and Dan – you’re in love, too, aren’t you?”

The beautiful eyes, exactly the color of limeade, narrowed, then softened. Willa felt a rush of relief. Claire wasn’t angry that she knew her secret.

“Come in, Willa. It’s early, but I think we’ll have some champagne. Somehow I think we both deserve it.”

They talked for two hours straight. As the champagne glasses emptied, the talk became more and more animated.

“It’s just the
guilt
,” Willa said, getting to the bottom of her confused feelings at last. “I don’t want to be happy now. Dolores . . . I feel so . . . .”

“Disloyal,” Claire said, looking away and setting her wine flute on the coffee table.

“How did you know? Oh! How stupid of me! Of course . . . your husband.”

“We spent so many hours dreaming and planning, looking forward to the future,” Claire said in a soft voice. “But it wasn’t to be.” Her voice became stronger. “And it’s not my fault.”

“Of course it isn’t! If he were still alive, he’d be here with you and everything would be wonderful. It’s not your fault he passed away so suddenly and left you all alone here.”

A ripple of pain passed over Claire’s face and she picked up her wineglass again. She looked Willa in the eyes and addressed her as a sister-in-arms. “And it’s not your fault that Dolores is dead. She was confused, unhappy. But whatever the truth is, it wasn’t your fault. And you’ve been unhappy for a long time, haven’t you?”

Wine and sympathy were two things Willa wasn’t used to. She began to cry. “Everything in my life, from the moment I was born, was controlled by somebody else. I thought when Frieda – passed on – I’d be free. But I wasn’t, any more than Dolores was. But now, just when I’d given up on ever having any happiness, now he’s here, and I don’t know what to do. I’ve been hiding my feelings for so long, I’m not sure I know how to feel anything.”

“Of course you do,” Claire said, putting her little hand on Willa’s arm.

It felt so good that Willa began to cry harder.

“He’s been here for months, and I never paid any attention to him. When he rented the Greene house, he seemed nice, but, kind of boring.”

“So it’s Rod, is it? I wondered. Edson is in love with you, too, you know.”

Willa laughed. “Edson is in love with his ghosts. Rod is in love with
me
. Isn’t it incredible? He says he’s been in love with me from the very beginning. Me! A nobody, always living on charity, a rich lady’s drudge. He loves me!”

“And
he
loves
me
,” Claire said with a gentle wonder. “Dan Ryder. Isn’t it ironic? A tragedy has brought both of us so much happiness, and if it hadn’t been for Dolores’s accident, we might have all wasted months, years, not letting ourselves be happy.”

Willa set her glass on the table and tried to compose herself. She wiped away the tears. She turned shining eyes onto the pale, mermaid-like woman beside her. “He wants to marry me.”

“Already?”

“He says he’s known since the first time he saw me, but he didn’t know how to get close to me. He said I was like Sleeping Beauty, wandering around in a trance. And you know, that’s exactly what I’ve felt like all my life. Not that I’m a beauty, but I’ve always lived in a trance. Like a ghost walking alone among the living. He loves me, and he wants to marry me,” she repeated, counting over the words like precious stones. “He says we’ve wasted enough of our lives being alone and unhappy. That we shouldn’t waste another moment. He says he’s got money, and he wants to be my sugar daddy,” she added with an embarrassed laugh. “Sugar daddy! To an old frump like me.”

“Never let me hear you talk like that again! Come here, silly!” Claire put her arms around Willa and gave her a hug. Then she topped up the flutes and lifted hers. “To love.”

“To love,” Willa said. “And to happy endings.”

They touched glasses and drank.

“Are you going to do it? Are you going to marry him?”

“That’s why I needed another woman to talk to. What do you think? Should we wait? He wants to take me to Las Vegas this weekend and go to one of those chapels, but I don’t know what to do. All my life, other people have made all my decisions for me. I’m just not used to making up my own mind. What would you do if Dan suddenly asked you to marry him? Would you run away with him if he wanted you to?”

“Yes,” Claire said immediately, before she could even think. Then she sat back and quietly thought it over. “Yes, I would. I’d marry him today. But he hasn’t asked me.”

“He will. I know he will. And if he doesn’t,” Willa added madly, “you just go ahead and live with him. Just go ahead and do it.”

“Why, Willa Garden, what would people say? What would they think?”

They gazed at one another a moment, then burst out laughing.

“Who the hell cares?” Willa said. “Oh!” She covered her mouth. “Did I just say hell?”

“You did, you bad girl. And I don’t give a shit.”

They bubbled over with tipsy laughter, and then they began to reel off all the forbidden words they knew, the ones that dignified ladies never even thought, much less said aloud.

When they had stopped laughing, Claire became suddenly serious and asked, “How long have you known about me and Dan?”

“Since the day you went to the beach and found Dolores. He took you home after. It was then that you both knew, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. I was hysterical when he found me. He caught me in his arms and called 911, holding me the whole time. He was so strong, so protective. He took care of everything, and when the police wanted to go on and on questioning me, he put a stop to it and took me home.”

“I know. I saw.”

Claire was pensive for a moment. Then she made up her mind. “Listen, Willa, I have to ask a favor of you. Have you told anybody about Dan and me?”

“No. I felt kind of ashamed that I’d seen you two. I didn’t want my neighbors to think I was a Peeping Tom.”

“Do me a favor and don’t tell anybody just yet. It’s awful to have to admit it, but I never got along with Jerry’s family.”

“Jerry?”

“My husband. His sister is suing me, and if she wins, I could lose this house. It’s all nonsense. We sold our house up in Minnesota, and now she claims Jerry promised half the proceeds to her. He owned that house outright when I married him, but now she claims she gave him the down payment and made a lot of the mortgage payments in the first few years. We never made any wills, but the house was in his name, and I inherited it. We used that money to buy this house for cash. I can’t give her that much money, and anyway, she hasn’t got any proof. Jerry certainly never mentioned it to me. But she’s getting documentation together, and other family members are backing her up. I think she’s hired an investigator, trying to get dirt on me. Jerry hasn’t been gone that long, and it would look bad if they found out about me and Dan. I had a hard time with it myself. It seemed too soon, but I couldn’t help loving Dan. Has anybody been around asking you questions about me?”

“No!” Willa was horrified.

Claire smiled. “Welcome to the world of in-laws. When you marry Rod, you just may find out.”

“He doesn’t have any relatives living. He had a daughter once, but she died young. She ran out in front of a car and was killed. He saw it happen, and his wife blamed him, even though it was an accident. It ruined his marriage, and it almost ruined his life. He told me he thought about killing himself after his marriage ended. He’s been alone for a long time now, and that’s what makes it so wonderful that he’s finally found me. He thought his life was over. I could hardly bear it when he told me.”

“Awful. What a sad story. So he’s all alone in the world?”

“Yes. We were talking about it after Dolores’s memorial service – how he always thought when he died nobody would be there for his funeral. His parents are dead, and he no longer has any contact with his ex-wife. So it’s going to be just me and Rod. There won’t be any in-laws, on either side.”

“Well, I wasn’t so lucky,” Claire said wryly. “Until this lawsuit is settled, I need to live like a nun. I don’t want to give her any ammunition. Don’t mention it to anybody for a while, will you? And if anybody comes snooping around –“

“Don’t worry. I won’t say anything to anybody.”

“Not even your husband?” Claire teased.

“Not if you don’t want me to.”

“You’re a real friend, Willa. I’m so glad we’ve had this talk.”

“Me too.”

Noticing that Willa was feeling shy now, Claire changed the subject. “By the way, have you heard anything about Peggy?”

“No. She still hasn’t – you know – turned up.”

“Hmm. I’m beginning to think she left Parker, and Dolores drowning on the same night was just a coincidence. Parker and Peggy always seemed happy together, but you never know what goes on between a husband and a wife.”

“No, you sure don’t. I’m afraid I think that Peggy drowned too, though. We may never know. That would be horrible, never knowing. Oh, Claire, I feel so bad about being so happy! With what Parker and Ben are both going through, it seems indecent.”

“Being miserable won’t make them any happier. You haven’t had any chance for a life of your own before. Don’t blow it. Go ahead, marry him. Grab all the happiness you can with both hands, and never look back.”

Willa gazed at Claire gratefully. “You’re right. I have to tell Ben, though. If I just suddenly take off, he won’t know what to think. Dolores was the closest thing I’ve ever had to a sister. I guess you could say he’s almost a brother-in-law to me. I can’t give him something else to worry about. I can’t just up and leave without a word.”

“All right, but don’t let him talk you out of it, and don’t give him a lot of time to think about it before you and Rod elope. He has no right to stop you.”

“Elope.”
Willa said, wondering at the word. “That’s something kids do. Look at me – 63 years old and about to elope.”

“Be happy, Willa. Just go for it and be happy. I intend to. Nothing is going to stand between me and my man. Now that I know Dan loves me, I won’t let anything come between us.”

Willa sat back and said, “Mrs. Wilhelmina Johnson. Willa Johnson. You know, Garden was never my name anyway. At least, it was my mother’s name. I never knew my father.” She looked Claire in the eye. “I was a bastard. That’s why I’ve always been treated like I was second-class. My mother was one of the Strawbridge’s maids, back in New York. The family hushed it up and sent her away. Dolores was just a baby then, and Frieda was already a widow. She took my mother in, probably just to spite her own family. Nobody in Frieda’s new household knew my mother, and Frieda hired her as a companion and told everybody she was a widow.”

“How Victorian.”

“Yes. Stupid to still be keeping a secret like that in this day and age, isn’t it? You can’t help it if your parents weren’t married. But Frieda thought it should be a dead secret. She thought I should be ashamed.”

“Of course she did. It gave her more control over you.”

“Well, she’s not controlling me anymore. And when I’m married, I’m going to have my own real name, just like any other married lady. I’ll be Mrs. Rodney Johnson.”

“Oh, Willa, I’m so happy for you.”

“You’re going to marry
who?”

Since his wife had died, Ben Brinker had had trouble wrapping his mind around any information at all, and a gawd-help-us like Willa Garden announcing she was running away with her lover would have had him reeling even on a good day.

“Rod Johnson. He’s renting the Greene’s house, across the street.”

“Who is this guy? How long have you known him?”

“How long did you know Dolores before you married her?” she countered.

He gave her a long, hard stare. “Long enough. Well, goddamn, Willa, if this isn’t good news in the middle of a long trip straight to hell. Come here and give me a hug.”

“You’re not upset that I’m so happy, when . . . ? I’m only telling you because we’re going to Las Vegas, and I didn’t want you to wonder where I was. But if you want me to stay, I will. Oh, Ben, you must wonder how I can do this to you at a time like this! I’ll tell Rod we have to wait.”